Review: Beryl Bainbridge: Love By All Sorts of Means

Bloomsbury, £25

Reviewed by Alan Taylor

EVERYONE who met Beryl Bainbridge has a story to tell: here’s mine. The occasion was a Booker Prize dinner at Guildhall in London. We were seated at the same table. Midway through the interminable evening, when a glass or two had been taken, Beryl – as Brendan King, her former secretary and biographer, refers to her from the get-go – dropped a fork, seemingly by accident, and ducked under the table to retrieve it. Seconds later a suave fellow sitting opposite her gave a squeak which combined shock with delight. When Beryl emerged she gave him a conspiratorial wink which I took as evidence that she had been up to no good. In fact, she had taken the opportunity to indulge in an act of casual molestation. Whether she was previously acquainted with her happy victim I could not possibly say.

Men were drawn to Beryl like stag parties to Ryanair. She, as King amply attests, was no less attracted to them. Many, too many, of the pages of this book are given over to detailing her affairs – mostly disastrous, invariably unsatisfactory, frequently embarrassing – with the kind of men who in another age might be classified as cads. Like London buses several of them seemed to arrive at once, one lover overlapping with another and yet another. Beryl was indiscriminate with whom she fell in love and lust: much older men, young men, married men, dangerous men, dull men, prisoners-of-war, and men – such as the pathologically promiscuous Scottish novelist and screenwriter Alan Sharp – she ought not to have touched with surgical gloves.

Her judgement of character was woeful. One particularly explosive affair was with Colin Haycraft, her publisher, which probably did her career as a novelist more harm than good. Haycraft’s wife, Anna, wrote under the pseudonym Alice Thomas Ellis. Before she and Colin had married she’d had a relationship with Austin Davies, Beryl’s then fiancé, and had got pregnant. Though she was a devout Catholic, Anna consented to an illegal abortion, the guilt of which she carried throughout her life. Later, in the most ironical of twists, she became Beryl’s editor. King suggests that one reason why Beryl became entangled with her husband was revenge. He may well be right.

Beryl’s life reads like a fever chart. Born in Liverpool in 1932, though she always maintained she was two years younger, she was brought up in a family that, while never wealthy, somehow found the wherewithal to send her to a fee-paying school. There, at 14, ever rebellious, she wrote a smutty poem and was expelled. Her first ambition was to be an actress and King’s evocative account of her spell in the provincial repertory theatre is reminiscent of JB Priestley’s depiction of that milieu in The Good Companions. Thereafter, in an early episode of Coronation Street, she played one of Ken Barlow’s pouting girlfriends.

Stardom on television, however, did not beckon. Instead, Beryl embraced motherhood and tried to cope with her dithering artist of a husband who behaved as if he were Paul Gauguin. "What on earth, I told myself, am I doing here, in an antique shop with a man with a beard and four children,” she wrote in her diary. She twice tried to kill herself, her mother called her a prostitute, her mother-in-law tried to shoot her, and she was raped after she was picked up by a man in a pub and agreed to go back to his place. Often King throws so many names at his readers that it’s easy to forget what their connection was with his subject. One sentence, however, rather sums it all up: “It was not exactly a conventional situation.”

We must read 270 pages of this Sturm und Drang before we reach Beryl Bainbridge the novelist. It was a job to which she – a fantasist for whom fact was an inconvenience – was ideally suited. How she managed to produce 20 novels, five of which were shortlisted for the Booker, in the midst of all this turmoil, King does not fully explain in this unbalanced and unsatisfactory biography. Beryl, we discover, couldn’t spell for toffee – probably couldn’t spell toffee – and her grasp of grammar was idiosyncratic. But what she did have was the ability to tell a compelling story in a manner that reflected her own devil-may-care personality. Nor, drawing on her own experience, did she want for material, which she embroidered with relish. Like Camus, like all novelists worthy of the title, she subscribed to the belief that fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.