Marvellous Therapy

I first met Beryl Bainbridge in 1982, when I went to interview her friend and editor Anna Haycraft for Books & Bookmen. I was later to discover that Beryl practically lived at the Haycrafts’ house in Gloucester Crescent, North London. I remember her wandering into the kitchen and, without preamble, pouring herself a glass of red wine from a two-litre bottle of Valpolicella.

Anna (who wrote novels under the nom de plume of Alice Thomas Ellis) and I were discussing Catholicism and its role in her imagination. Beryl sat at the kitchen table, chin tilted on one hand, and suddenly said: ‘You’re a Catholic, aren’t you? I can tell.’ I admitted that I was indeed brought up in the faith, although sadly . . . ‘How did your parents meet?’ she asked, in a fine non sequitur. I explained that they’d met on a pilgrimage to Rome in the Holy Year of 1950, and that my mother had beguiled my father by sharing a Thermos flask of Martini Bianco at the back of the coach. Beryl tapped a fresh Marlboro Red on the wooden table. ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘tell me everything.’ It occurred to me in hindsight that my parents must have sounded, for a moment, like characters from a Bainbridge novel: a bit lost, tentative, keen to connect with each other but uncertain how to do it (although with the prospect of drink and sex close by). Beryl was, as it were, welcoming them into her world of eccentricity, awkwardness and stories drawn from real life. I always loved her delight in gossip, anecdote and tall tales. Her novels are much more than stories, though. They’re devastating tales of family dysfunction. The characters find themselves puzzled by the chaos of their lives; they try to make sense of them but invariably fail. There’s hardly a single novel of Beryl’s that doesn’t end in tragedy. But the books are driven by sharp digs of black humour at the characters’ predicament. Her fiction falls into two halves: the later, bestselling historical works in which her characters are caught up in real-life cataclysms; and the quirky, blackly humorous early novels, which occupy a more limited, claustrophobic territory in which relationships fracture under strain and end in death. The latter came to the world’s attention after Karl Miller reviewed four of them in the New York Review of Books in 1974 and called her ‘possibly the least known of the contemporary English novelists who are worth knowing’. In her first published novel, A Weekend with Claude (1967), four characters offer their versions of the weekend in which one of them, Lily, pregnant and abandoned by her boyfriend, plans to sleep with the hapless Edward and persuade him that he’s the father of the baby. Harriet Said . . . (1972) is the first of several works in which two women fall into a bully-and-victim double-act; it was inspired by the Parker-Hulme murder case in New Zealand which was also the theme of Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures. In it, the unnamed teenage narrator and her friend Harriet hang out one summer in the late 1940s with a group of lonely middle-aged men in Formby, near Liverpool, and cause the death of one of them. The Dressmaker (1973), set in Second World War Lancashire, features two middle-aged sisters, Nellie and Margo, who worry about their 17-year-old niece’s relationship with a soldier and finally take action to stop it. The key novel of her early career, however, was The Bottle Factory Outing (1974), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize, was shortlisted for the Booker and drew praise from Graham Greene (‘an outrageously funny and horrifying novel’). It tells the story of two women, Freda and Brenda, who share a London bedsit, and a bed, with a bolster and books down the middle. Brenda, 32, is posh and public schooled, but had married a Yorkshire farmer who dumped her. Thin-faced and fretful, she has an ‘extraordinary capacity for remaining passive while put upon’. Men take liberties with her, and Freda bullies her. Freda, 26, is all vivid theatricality, Cossack boots and raging attitude. A 16-stone former actress of uncertain temper, she is politically radicalized and determined to change the world. The women work at a wine-bottling plant in Camden, whose staff are almost entirely Italian men. Rossi, the manager, invites Brenda downstairs and gropes her (he discovers pages of newspapers, stuffed up her jumper to keep out the cold). Freda nurses a crush on handsome Vittorio. The men speak in Bolognese dialect, work hard for Signor Paganotti, admire le donne Inglesi and expect nothing of their lives. So when Freda organizes a Sunday outing to a stately home, it’s hard to imagine that anything could go wrong. The day starts badly and progresses through fits and starts of success and failure, connection and rejection, food and football. As though in a dream, jungle creatures and troops of handsome riders pass by. By the end, one of the girls lies dead. Her death has to be concealed from the police, so her body is sealed up in a brandy cask and shipped abroad. Three things invigorate the novel. First, the bittersweet prose, always balancing cold reality with romanticism (‘A lot of the time he spoke to her harshly, but she took it as a good sign, as love was very close to hate . . . ’). Second, her sense of farce: there’s a scene in which the police arrive at the bedsit to find Brenda’s mother-in-law brandishing an airgun, and an Irish driver standing naked except for a lady’s dressing-gown. And third, she is brilliant at suggesting several levels of dysfunctionality and miscommunication in the characters’ lives; their intentions and emotions remain opaque to one another. Beryl Bainbridge wrote her early novels, she said, to make sense of her upbringing. She was born in Liverpool in 1932. Her father was a businessman who went bankrupt. Afterwards family life became a war zone, with shouting and arguments and slammed doors always audible to the children upstairs. Her brother had a nervous breakdown at 18. From an early age Beryl established a carapace of clowning and acting that defined her later persona as a rather helpless, vulnerable figure, terrified of confrontation. Her early novels were ways of externalizing her disarray. ‘If it had not been for writing, I’d have ended up a total neurotic,’ she told Lynn Barber in 2001. ‘I only wrote to get out this business about my mum and dad. Once I’d written it down, all those neuroses were gone – it was marvellous therapy.’ The family arguments are explored most tellingly in A Quiet Life (1976) but autobiographical nuances show up all over the place. The anxious old ladies in The Dressmaker are based on two of her aunts; their concern about their niece’s German beau echoes the period when, as a 15-year-old drama student, Beryl fell in love with a German prisoner-of-war, who was repatriated irretrievably. And she did, for a while, work at a bottling plant – and her mother-in-law did once take a potshot at her. When she was expelled from school for being caught with a rude limerick in her pocket, her father found her work at the Liverpool Playhouse, an experience documented in An Awfully Big Adventure (1989). She took elocution lessons, and appeared on Northern Children’s Hour with Judith Chalmers and Billie Whitelaw. For a few heady weeks she was in Coronation Street, playing one of Ken Barlow’s girlfriends, a Ban-the-Bomb protestor. In 1953 she married Austin Davies, an artist who painted scenery at the Playhouse. They had two children before they broke up. Beryl and the children moved to London, where Davies bought them a house in Camden Town. Four years later she had a third child with Alan Sharp, a writer and serial philanderer (memorably brought to feckless, bike-riding life in her 1975 novel Sweet William) who, so the story goes, told her one day that he was going downstairs to get a book from the car, and never returned. He resurfaced later in America, where he was a successful screenwriter. Over the years, I met Beryl at a hundred literary parties. She loved going to evening launches, where she’d spend hours drinking red wine, chain-smoking and chatting in her curiously insistent and theatrical little-girl voice. Visitors to her Camden home found themselves obliged to squeeze past a stuffed water buffalo in the hallway – and, if they found their way upstairs, discovered a shop mannequin with a Hitler moustache in her bedroom. She was a central figure in the Duckworth gang along with Anna Haycraft, Caroline Blackwood and Patrice Chaplin. They all wrote slim, elegant, bittersweet books, edited by Anna, and were all published by Duckworth, which was owned and run by Colin Haycraft. Colin was a piece of work. A raffish and chuckling old-school publisher with knitted ties and startled eyebrows, he made outrageous pronouncements (‘Only women can write novels,’ he used to say, ‘only women and queers’) and threw fabulous parties in the garden of the family home. There he would regale his guests with champagne cocktails (actually cheap Spanish brandy and Asti Spumante) while outlying members of the Duckworth gang – Angela Carter, Georgina Hammick, Bernice Rubens – would gather in search of misbehaviour. Beryl was Colin’s star performer, but he didn’t treat her entirely honestly. Michael Holroyd told me he’d seen a contract Haycraft had drawn up for one of Beryl’s novels. It seemed to stipulate that, contrary to normal rules, the more copies Beryl sold, the lower became her royalty percentage. It was rumoured that Colin held Beryl in thrall or that they’d had a brief affair. I don’t believe it: Beryl, Anna and Colin were a family, with Beryl cast as the sulky, chain-smoking, why-am-I-still-at-home daughter to Colin and Anna’s grouchy but indulgent parents. I never saw Beryl in any sexual context except once, at Duckworth HQ in Camden’s Old Piano Factory, where Oliver Sacks, the British-born neuroscientist, was launching a book about, among other things, Tourette’s Syndrome. Sacks had brought with him a young Tourette’s sufferer called Jerry, a handsome teenager in jeans and bomber jacket. Guests stood around the Professor’s protégé, unsure of what to say. Beryl pitched straight in. She asked him where he’d been on the publication tour, where he’d stayed, whether he was eating enough – and then she came out with it: ‘You poor boy,’ she said, ‘to be shown off like this, like a prize pig.’ Jerry looked at the figure before him, in her habitual get-up of white blouse and school tie, and registered her look of feminine, almost motherly concern. Uncontrollably, his arm shot out and he clamped his hand on Beryl’s left breast. Someone must have alerted Professor Sacks, who spun round and shouted, ‘Jerry! Stop that at once!’ ‘Leave him alone,’ breathed Beryl. ‘He seems a perfectly nice young man to me.’ Beryl was shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times but never won it. By the end of her life, however (she died in 2010 aged 77), she had been made a Dame of the British Empire, received an honorary degree from the Open University and been awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement. And nobody who ever met her will forget that slender, gamine, black-haired figure with the permanent air of sweet confusion and a cigarette forever on the go.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 43 © John Walsh 2014