Love By All Sorts of Means

Brendan King

Bloomsbury, £10.99

Review by Alastair Mabbott

ALTHOUGH five-time Booker nominee and Dame Commander of the British Empire Beryl Bainbridge felt like a part of Britain’s literary furniture for many years, it was only in later life that her books started selling in sizeable quantities, which might explain why she was never the subject of any full-length biographies in her lifetime. But now comes Love By All Sorts Of Means, written by the man who was her assistant for 23 years and has an unparalleled knowledge of her working methods and home life.

Bainbridge’s reputation was built on her early novels, for which her own life provided raw material. It’s also the case that she manipulated and fabricated her biographical details as and when it suited her, not just when writing fiction. Brendan King has spotted countless occasions when she altered or embellished the facts of her life to fit the needs of the moment, and he has made the most of his access to diaries, letters and a host of interviewees, cross-checking her claims against theatre programmes, school itineraries and no doubt railway timetables too in his attempts to separate facts from the narratives Bainbridge wove them into.

King evokes in vivid detail the emotional rollercoaster she lived on and the turbulent scenarios that inspired her early novels. He makes much of her childhood fear of abandonment, her worries about her parents’ relationship and her longing for the “maternal security” of her mother, a feeling of love and safety which nothing in adulthood could quite match. “In reaction to what she saw as the antagonism between her parents she formed an overly idealised conception of romantic love,” he writes. Her intense but unresolved relationship with a German PoW when she was 15 “served to keep the illusion of an idyllic love alive in Beryl’s mind”, leaving her with unrealistic expectations and priming her for continual disappointment.

Idealised notions of love, low self-esteem (she had, she later claimed, the idea it was impolite to say no if a man was interested), a masochistic streak, a pathological fear of rejection – on some level, she seemed aware of all of this. But she was nevertheless at the mercy of powerful emotional currents, marrying the cold, self-absorbed artist Austin Davies despite all the signs that it was a bad idea and embarking on a tangled web of casual flings and affairs, usually with unsuitable or philandering married men.

King’s attention to affairs of the heart means that other matters get sidelined. He could, and perhaps should, have included more detail and analysis of his subject’s published works. But I for one don’t feel shortchanged, and neither does the focus on her painful search for love seem misplaced. Written by someone who was well placed to see her at her best and at her worst, Love By All Sorts Of Means aims at the heart of who Beryl Bainbridge was, what drove her and how she saw the world. It’s a big book, but Bainbridge’s personality radiates from its pages, bigger still.