Beryl Bainbridge: Love By All Sorts of Means
By Brendan King, Bloomsbury Continuum, 576 pages, $40
Beryl Bainbridge liked to claim that her unsettling novels were autobiographical: “The only reason I wrote was to make sense of what went on in my past.” Many of her books revolve around her Liverpool childhood, the quarrels of her parents or her complicated adventures as a young woman. Even the later historical tales — on Scott’s final expedition to the Antarctic, the loss of the Titanic, the life of Samuel Johnson — draw on personal material. Brendan King’s vivid biography reveals the interplay between remembering and inventing in her work. The flamboyant stories she told about her life were often inaccurate, despite her belief that she had “total recall”. She fused memories of her own experiences with the necessary fabrications of fiction. Her writing brilliantly negotiates the boundary between fact and fantasy.
Ambiguities marked her life from the first. She was born in Liverpool in 1932 (not, as she claimed, in 1934, a fib which has caused much confusion among literary historians). Though the city was bustling, and had a culturally ambitious middle class, its prosperity was fading. The family business had collapsed into bankruptcy before Beryl’s birth, and her father had become a freelance commercial agent.
Her mother, Winnie, had expected something better. Winnie’s girlhood, which had culminated in a finishing school in Belgium, was a preparation for comfortable affluence: the constrained circumstances of her life after the failure of Bainbridge & Co were a disappointment.
Beryl and her brother were not, however, brought up in poverty. There was a car, a telephone and regular holidays. The children were expensively educated, and Beryl attended Merchant Taylors’ School. It became clear that she did not share her brother’s academic prowess (her spelling was erratic throughout her life), and she found the life of the classroom tiresome (“Oh school how I hate you”). But she loved her schoolgirl experiences of drama, and soon began to excel as an actor. She was awarded a gold medal from the London Academy of Music, Drama and Art at the age of 12, and the Liverpool Echo proudly recorded this precocious success: “a noted recruit to the ranks of dramatic art”.
At 15 she attended, not altogether happily, a boarding school for young ladies preparing to work as professional performers, the Arts Educational School in Tring. Her view of this establishment was characteristically forthright (“bleeding fools”). At 16, her formal education over, she started work at the Liverpool Playhouse.
This was a family project, not a teenage rebellion. Her mother had high hopes for Beryl, and worried that her involvement with what a friend termed “communist tripe” might get in the way of future triumphs: “Your whole career could be ruined through your beliefs ... you could ruin all our plans for you ... So please be sensible.”
But Bainbridge was never inclined to be sensible, and leftwing politics continued to interest her. Winnie might have been still more anxious about her daughter’s love life, which was already impressively active. Her first serious boyfriend was a Bavarian prisoner of war called Harry. She never forgot the intensities of this romance. An affair with a German was still riskier than a flirtation with communism, and she lived in “dread of being discovered”.
Harry was the first of many men to fall in love with her. In 1949, she compiled a meticulous list of her boyfriends to date, arriving at a total of 17 names. Reckless, and hungry for affection, Bainbridge added to this list throughout most of her life. Her turbulent attachments led to a great deal of suffering, her own and that of her lovers. But it was also what shaped her writing. Though she was a proficient actor, and won some early recognition for her work on the stage, other people’s dramas were less absorbing than those she made from her own experiences.
King, who worked as Bainbridge’s assistant throughout the last 23 years of her life, weaves a gripping narrative from the ups and downs of her entanglements with men. Compassionate and authoritative, but not uncritical, he gives due weight to her impulsive susceptibility without losing sight of the corresponding needs, and delinquencies, of her many partners.
She had an openness that exposed her to damage. In 1952, when she was 19, she took a fancy to a man she met coming out of the cinema (“such a beautifully modulated voice, and small white hands”), and went back to his flat, where he raped her. The attack was violent (she lost a tooth) and its effects long-lasting. For years afterwards she found it hard to believe in her own worth (“I despised myself”). Her insecurities were already deeply embedded, but there is no doubt the rape made them worse.
Her marriage to Austin Davies, an artist who was always in two minds about the distracting demands of domesticity, was unstable and short-lived. But her stormy years with Davies confirmed her aspiration to make her own name, and also gave her a lively interest in painting, which she pursued to the end of her life.
She had already begun to write before moving permanently to London, and the gradual transition from drama to fiction as her preferred medium was accelerated by her bohemian life in the capital. This was partly because it was easier to fit writing around her responsibilities as the mother of three children, for her wildness never extended to any neglect of their welfare.
In practice, her accomplishments as an actor and writer were not unconnected. Her experiences on the stage meant that she understood the rhythms of the spoken word. She would read her compositions aloud in the process of revision, a habit that helped her to refine and polish her prose. She saw her work as a version of theatrical performance, characterised by the recalcitrant strangeness that lay beneath her life and her writing.
Her first novel, “Harriet Said...”, describes two terrifyingly ruthless young girls, reflecting Bainbridge’s sense of the cruelty of adolescence. “We’ve passed the best bit now,” Harriet says, contemplating her approaching womanhood. Editors were affronted, one publisher’s reader calling the central characters “repulsive almost beyond belief”.
Two novels followed, earning mixed critical notice, but little money. Her writing grew in confidence as she found a measure of stability, establishing something approaching a routine in the house in Camden Town that she made her own, “firmly in the soot of Albert Street”.
A turning point came in 1972, after the manuscript of “Harriet Said...” was discovered by Anna Haycraft, whose husband, Colin, ran an idiosyncratic publishing house, Gerald Duckworth & Co. Its publication began a long, mutually productive partnership that formed and sustained both publisher and writer.
Though neither spoke of it publicly, Haycraft and Bainbridge had encountered each other nearly 20 years earlier. Anna Lindholm, as she was then called, had fallen pregnant by Davies and had undergone a traumatic abortion. She never wholly recovered from her guilt and misery, and had converted to Catholicism as a result. A further complication arose when Bainbridge began a long and difficult affair with Colin. Under such circumstances, it was remarkable that the two women maintained a close, if guarded, friendship over many years.
Despite the ill feeling that came to shadow the relationship, caused, in part, by a jumble of financial misunderstandings (thoughtfully clarified in King’s account), Bainbridge owed her publishers a great deal. The rigorous editorial standards imposed by the Haycrafts, together with the creative freedom they allowed, gave her what she needed. With their support, her career flourished.
“The Dressmaker”, another uncompromisingly dark book, was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1973. Though it did not win (she was to be shortlisted five times, but was never the winner), it raised the profile and the profits of her work. “I’ve earned a lot of money on the book ... first money I’ve ever had.”
At 40, she had become financially independent, with a solidly established and widely admired voice as a novelist. This did not mean that she had lost her taste for mischief. Before the troubled attachment to Colin took over, she started “going out proper” with a married friend.
Her waywardness did not interfere with the continuing development of the novels. Among the thought-provoking connections to emerge from this rewarding biography is the association between Bainbridge’s self-dramatisation and the steady discipline of her creativity. Her wilful eccentricity would sometimes disrupt her writing, but it was also central to its distinction. Fiction provided the means to translate her theatrical peculiarities into a larger sympathy: “my life’s all in the novels”.
Though she was contemptuous of convention, she knew how to work with focused attention, and did so day after day. Tense, intelligent and original, her novels rank among the major achievements of English fiction.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
