Beryl Bainbridge Read online

  BERYL BAINBRIDGE

  BERYL

  BAINBRIDGE

  Love by All Sorts of Means

  A Biography

  BRENDAN KING

  ‘I go on making messy relationships, fail, and fling myself into a fresh one. I seem to have an intense craving for narcissistic gratification. I have to get love by all sorts of means . . .’

  Beryl Bainbridge, letter to Judith Shackleton, October 1963

  CONTENTS

  Note on the Text

  Introduction

  1 Winnie and Dick

  2 Mummy and Daddy

  3 Education

  4 Us Versus Them

  5 Harry

  6 Tring

  7 The Playhouse

  8 Austin

  9 London

  10 Dundee

  11 Engagement

  12 Break

  13 Paris

  14 Married Life

  15 The Summer of the Tsar

  16 Separation

  17 I’m Not Criticising . . . I’m Remembering

  18 The Return of the Wild Colonial Boy

  19 A Knight in Tarnished Armour

  20 Basher’s Progress

  21 Albert Street

  22 America

  23 Eaves Farm

  24 Bottle Factory

  25 Harriet Said

  26 Success

  27 The Writing Life

  28 Fact and Friction

  29 Goodbye Mr Chips

  30 Celebrity

  31 Illness

  Afterword

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  NOTE ON THE TEXT

  Beryl was a notoriously erratic speller and her unique and idiosyncratic orthography contributed to the way her correspondents perceived and interacted with her. In quoting from her diaries, journals and letters I have therefore left her original spelling for the most part unchanged, correcting only instances where the sense was difficult to follow. Minor slips in punctuation, such as forgetting to close quotation marks, have also been corrected.

  INTRODUCTION

  I first started working for Beryl Bainbridge in 1987. Initially, I went round to her house in Camden Town once a week to help her deal with the increasing volume of letters and phone calls she had been receiving in the wake of two television series for the BBC, English Journey (1984) and Forever England (1986), and her weekly column for the Evening Standard. My job, insofar as it had a description, was to sort out anything that got in the way of her real work – that of being a novelist. Over the course of the next twenty-three years, until her death in 2010, we established a working relationship that functioned surprisingly well given the difference in age and background. This was especially the case after 1992, as with the departure of her regular typist at Duckworth I took over the task of preparing the manuscripts of her novels, a process that included frequent telephone calls to query her over issues of style, grammar, form and structure – and writers, like most creative artists, often find criticism of their work difficult to take.

  Sometimes, when she was bogged down with writer’s block or struggling to come up with an idea for a novel, I would suggest that she write her autobiography, as it seemed to me that over the years she had told me many things about herself she’d never made use of in her writing. But she always declined, saying that it was too difficult, that she couldn’t remember things well enough, that she didn’t have the energy. Instead, it became a kind of in-joke that I was her ‘biographer in waiting’. Then, over time, it turned into a settled notion.

  After Beryl’s death the question of a biography inevitably arose. With her family’s permission I began searching through the massive archive of material she had kept and stored in various filing cabinets and trunks in her work room at the top of the house – ‘the laboratory’ as she called it – and the sizeable collection of manuscripts and other literary material she had sold to the British Library in 2005.

  Many of the circumstances and events of Beryl’s life were already familiar to me: not only had she told me about them herself, she had written about them in pieces of journalism, spoken about them in interviews, and famously used them as the basis of her novels. But I soon began to notice a considerable difference between the story revealed by her private diaries, journals and correspondence, and the version of her life she had published, whether in fictional or non-fictional form. And the more I researched the more discrepancies I found, until it began to seem as if everything that had been published about her was either misleading or riddled with factual errors. Yet the source of much of this information had been Beryl herself. Surely, if anyone knew the facts of their own life, it would be the person who actually lived it?

  There is, of course, a simple reason why the published accounts of Beryl’s life don’t always match the private record. Whether in interviews or in the articles and books she was writing, she tended to rely on her memory for the details of the stories she was telling. Beryl was very proud of her memory. In an interview in 1973 she claimed to have ‘what’s called total recall’,1 and a few years later she told another journalist, ‘I can actually think myself back into a day 30 years ago, and recall it in exact detail.’2

  But she did not have total recall and her memory was as prone to inaccuracy as anyone else’s. Memory is a notoriously unreliable instrument – the notion that it is a kind of permanent storage device, faithfully recording human experience, fixing it once and for all in the mind so that it can be recalled again and again in exactly the same form, is no longer one accepted by psychologists. Memories are more dynamic, more unstable, than we would like to believe; our recollections alter and adapt over time, they are shaped, consciously or unconsciously, by emotions, by new experiences, by changes in circumstance. It’s not just that we forget certain things or emphasize others; we condense events in our mind, confuse one thing with another.

  To give just a few examples. In Forever England, Beryl recalled that as a thirteen-year-old she went to see the great Polish pianist, Ignacy Paderewski, at the Floral Hall in Southport. After the performance she was taken backstage, dressed in her mother’s best fox fur, to meet the musical legend. As Beryl described it: ‘He was a small man with a lot of mad white hair and he said he thought I had some kind of specialness – I remember the exact word – but it was only because I was looking at him in a very intense way, out of politeness. My mother never got over it, me shaking hands with a famous pianist, though she too didn’t know him from Adam.’3

  Despite the seemingly unforgettable nature of this experience, and the precise detail with which it is recalled, there is a problem: Paderewski died in 1941, when Beryl was nine years old, and there is no record of him performing in Southport. It is still possible she saw him play, though his last recital in Lancashire was at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in October 1938, when Beryl was almost six. Or it may be that she has simply mistaken some other distinguished white-haired pianist for Paderewski. Either way, the anecdote loses much of its value as an autobiographical memoir given its essential unreliability.

  A second example shows that this kind of inconsistency is not an exception. Beryl mentioned as a key early experience in her theatrical career a week-long stint at a theatre in Bulwell, in which she and a schoolfriend performed a series of variety acts after having won a talent contest.4 Again a memorable event, one which Beryl herself said she had never forgotten. She duly records that prior to ending her turn with a recited monologue, the two girls performed the umbrella dance from Singin’ in the Rain. The problem here is that the film wasn’t released until 1952, three years after she remembered dancing the routine for which it became so famous.

  Our confidence in the reliability of suc
h memories is shaken still further when we find that the talent contest in Bulwell was covered quite extensively in the local newspaper at the time, from which it becomes apparent that every verifiable detail Beryl recounts is wrong, including the name of the theatre and that of the other acts that performed alongside her. In fact the two girls did not win the talent contest, they were simply taking part in it, and they did not get to perform for a week, but only for two shows on the same evening, one at 6.15 and another at 8.00, as the rules of the contest required.

  Perhaps the most striking, and in some ways the most troubling, example of this tendency of the memory to play tricks, is Beryl’s recollection of being taken, along with the whole of her school, to the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool to see ‘the unexpurgated version of the film taken by British troops entering Bergen-Belsen’.5 Beryl described the experience many times in later life, adducing a huge significance to it in terms of the effect it had on her psychologically and on the kind of novelist she would become. Yet no visit under the auspices of Merchant Taylors’ School was ever made to see the newsreel footage, which in any case would have been the standard edited footage presented by Pathé – there were no unexpurgated versions floating around. Despite Beryl’s vivid memory that ‘the entire school, from the ages of 7 to the 6th form’ were marched in file to see the film, there is no record of any such visit, and not a single pupil or alumni of the school remembers the event.

  One explanation is that the memory is a conflation of two very different experiences. Merchant Taylors’ did have a close connection with the Philharmonic Hall: it was where concerts and the annual prize-giving ceremony were held, and on such occasions the whole school would attend. On 30 April 1945 – as it happens the same day the Bergen-Belsen newsreels were first shown in cinemas6 – the whole school did go to the Philharmonic Hall, but it was to see a concert conducted by Herbert Bardgett. This visit seems to have become fused in Beryl’s mind with a memory of having seen the newsreel in the course of her regular film-going. Although some theatres and cinemas posted warnings about the material contained in the newsreels, for the most part they were shown – as all the other Pathé and Gaumont newsreels were – before the main feature and would have been seen by everyone, young and old alike.

  Significantly, Beryl’s first public reference to having seen the footage was only in 1978, during a round of publicity interviews for the launch of her novel Young Adolf. Perhaps of equal significance was the fact that she had visited Israel on a literary tour the year before and been taken to see the Holocaust Museum at Yad Vashem. No doubt the experience of Yad Vashem forcefully brought back to mind all the Holocaust and concentration camp material she had seen over the years and in retrospect emphasized its importance. She may indeed have found the sight of the newsreels disturbing as a child, but there is nothing in her diaries to suggest that such images shaped her adolescent imagination or her creative impulses.7

  But aside from the inconsistencies caused by slips of memory, there is another, more complex, reason why the published version of Beryl’s life differs so radically from the unpublished one: she wanted it that way. Beryl was someone Janet Malcolm described as an ‘auto-fictionalizer’, someone with an instinct, or perhaps even a psychological need, to turn herself into a character in the drama of her own life. Beryl wasn’t interested in giving the facts of a situation per se, only with the narrative or dramatic form in which the elements of her life could be presented. Ordinarily, when people talk to us in a confessional voice using the ‘I’ pronoun, we tend to take it for granted that what is being said is true, and that the person saying it knows it to be true. But for Beryl the truth, mere fact, was not the point. Her interviews and her written memoirs are always brilliant, full of memorable quotes and anecdotes, but that was partly because she was never hampered by the feeling that she had to be literally accurate about the facts when recounting them. If it sounded better, more dramatically satisfying, to say she had become a successful writer after leaving school at fourteen, then that was the story she told. Even though she knew that she actually left school at sixteen and a half, no earlier than many other girls her age. This subtle manipulation of the facts was not accidental, it was a way of representing in dramatic form what she felt to be true: she believed she’d had an incomplete education, so she literally gave herself one.

  The most obvious example of this massaging of fact was in relation to her age. Beryl repeatedly gave 1934 as the year she was born, rather than 1932, the date that figures on her birth certificate. Of course Beryl knew exactly which year she was born in, but she had long been in the habit of knocking a couple of years off, even when she was only in her early twenties. This is perfectly understandable: a little vanity is excusable in anyone, and telling lies about one’s age is the most socially acceptable of untruths. But after she became a public figure, amending the date of her birth had the effect of heightening the dramatic events of her youth whenever she recounted them. Predicated as they now were on her having been born in 1934, Beryl presented her experiences as a young adult as happening to her as an adolescent, and portrayed herself as having to deal with traumatic or emotional events at a younger, more formative age than she had in reality been. Beryl was fourteen and a half when she began her secret assignations with a German prisoner of war in the Formby pine woods, not eleven or twelve as she frequently claimed; she began working in her junior position at the Liverpool Playhouse when she was two months short of her seventeenth birthday, not when she was fifteen; she was nineteen when she left home for London, not sixteen.

  On occasion, Beryl did consult her diaries and her youthful autobiographical reflections. But even here, when she published extracts from them, she was careful to change the details to suit the story she wanted to tell, embroidering what she had originally written or altering dates and inventing new ‘facts’ to give her narrative a more satisfying shape. In an article on her childhood written in 1999, she transformed an innocuous and pithy comment about international events recorded in her diary – ‘17 February 1944: A great fight in Stalin-grand. Marshall Stalin worried not a bit’8 – in order to present an image of herself as a young child with a problematic relationship with her father:

  Nov. 26. 1942. Siege of Stalingrad begun. It’s cruchal.

  27th Nov. 1942. Stalin worried not a bit. I hate my Dad.9

  The words ‘I hate my Dad’ appear nowhere in any of Beryl’s diaries or letters,10 and indeed an entry for 23 January 1946 – ‘I do love Mummy and Daddy’11 – suggests the opposite, though such conventional sentiments make for poor copy. Beryl’s indifference to factual accuracy can be gauged by the fact that in another article written five years later, she used the same entry from her 1944 diary but changed the words yet again, this time to read:

  September 2 1942. The Germans kill 50,000 Jews in Warsaw ghetto. Daddy upset.

  September 18. Battle of Stalingrad. Uncle Joe worried not a bit.12

  The way Beryl manipulated these entries reveals something about her habitual method when it came to presenting an image of herself. The earlier piece was nominally about childhood, so she tweaked it to provide a ‘proof’ of her confrontational relationship with her father. By contrast, the later article was about attitudes to the Iraq war, and here the entry is altered to reflect the view of herself as a writer moulded by Nazi atrocities against the Jews in the Second World War. It goes without saying that there are no references to the Warsaw ghetto, to Jews, or to Jewish persecution in her 1944 or 1946 diaries.13

  In order to present herself as a child with a precocious fascination with death, she wrote that her diary for 1945 had only one, wordless entry for the date of 28 April: a pasted-in ‘photograph of Mussolini, Il Duce, chest exposed, bullet-holed and hanging upside-down beside his mistress on the facade of a petrol station in Milan’.14 But in reality she hadn’t kept a diary for 1945, nor is there a photograph of Mussolini, dead or alive, in either of her other two diaries from the period. In any case, the information about
Mussolini was garnered from a copy of Chronicle of the 20th Century, an invaluable source-book for the details and dates she frequently used in her journalism, as is evidenced by the fact that the last part of her description of the photograph is copied word for word from the book.15

  Such embellishments were systematic and designed to produce a particular public image, to contribute to the myth of herself as a writer steeped in, and shaped by, the effects of violent death and family dysfunction. The ‘extracts’ she reproduced from her 1953 diary would recount how as an out-of-work actress in London she had been so hungry she had stolen a jar of pickles, and that she had taken her mother to Hanbury Street in Whitechapel to show her ‘where Jack the Ripper once wielded his knife’.16 But the diary makes no mention of stolen pickles or Jack the Ripper, and in fact reveals that Beryl spent her time with her mother looking at religious pictures in the National Gallery and having tea and sandwiches in the Regent Palace Hotel.17 Although the diary contains many more genuinely revealing insights into Beryl’s emotional life than the ones she chose to fabricate – she was not only engaged, unengaged and re-engaged to the man who would become her husband during this period, she was also proposed to by three different men, all of whom she was emotionally involved with to a varying degree – she passes over them in silence.

  The extent to which this resistance to literal truth-telling became an ingrained habit can be seen in an article she wrote for The Times in 1981, about the revised Duckworth edition of her first published novel, A Weekend with Claud. To justify the decision to publish a new version, she reproduced a passage from the original 1967 edition to show how ‘bad’ it was. But she didn’t quote the text of the novel as it was actually printed, instead she amended it in order to make it seem more ludicrous and more opaque than it really was, presumably thinking that no one would bother to check the original.18

  The point here is not to pick Beryl up on every inaccuracy or inconsistency, but to show the extent to which she self-consciously manipulated her image, even if it meant fabricating incidents or recollections, or altering the accounts she had kept at the time. This cavalier attitude to the notion of truth and what constituted lying was formed at an early age: ‘I remember going to my first school. I was about five and I can remember sitting there and pretending that I’d hurt myself, so as to draw attention. I was a terrible liar, lying about things that had happened. Making things up. For no reason at all I’d create some story about something happening on the train home, or something I’d seen from the window and it wouldn’t be true at all, but I’d go into great detail about it. Because people listened. You got some attention that way.’19