Beryl’s “public persona created an unusual sense of intimacy between her and her readers”
Last autumn, when literary friends were still grieving Beryl Bainbridge’s passing, AN Wilson claimed that she was “toweringly the best novelist of her age” and a better writer than Virginia Woolf. Such enthusiasm reminds us that Beryl long ago achieved a cult status for some. For others less comfortable with the kind of comparisons that Beryl herself never made, it remains safe to say that the characters she created were unique.
There is much of Beryl in her characters. Famously, she once tipsily mistook the Queen for Vera Lynn and Prince Philip for a waiter who could hail her a cab. This public persona created an unusual sense of intimacy between her and her readers, who felt protective of her as they were drawn in by her quirkiness, pathos and charm.
By the time she died, Beryl had almost completed another novel. Prepared by her longtime assistant Brendan King from Beryl’s notes and deathbed instructions, it will be published under its working title, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, on 2nd June. Drawn to write about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Beryl started her research for the book at the now-demolished Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, which is where the novel’s final scenes are set.
The hotel suited Beryl’s fascination with glory headed for demise. It’s a topic that can be traced through her work, from the novels set in the Liverpool of her youth (Harriet Said, The Dressmaker) to those of neo-Dickensian 1970s London (The Bottle Factory Outing, Injury Time). The theme recurred in her books set in the Edwardian era, with the sinking Titanic in Every Man for Himself and Scott of the Antarctic in The Birthday Boys. The macabre suburbs in Watson’s Apology and the Crimean disaster in Master Georgie cover the Victorians and an ailing Dr Johnson features in According to Queeney.
The historical novels of Beryl’s later years are no less free of her autobiographical tendency. All their locales were familiar to her from childhood reading and vicarious transit. Beryl’s fictional characters were often remarkably like those who strode colossally through her life as a writer, not least the literary couple Colin and Anna Haycraft.
AN Wilson has written about the supposed predatory nature of this pair, claiming that Colin tried to persuade Beryl to help Duckworth Books out of its financial troubles by signing over her own house. This is simply not true. Those who lament the Haycrafts’ alleged exploitation of their sole bankable author should remember that she would not have become beloved Dame Beryl without them.
Beryl had known Anna in Liverpool, where Anna had been a student of (and got pregnant by) Beryl’s soon-to-be husband, Austin Davies. Later, in London, Anna would become Beryl’s editor and eventual rival as author of novels under the pseudonym Alice Thomas Ellis. Colin was their publisher at Duckworth and, despite his argumentative but doting marriage to Anna, Beryl’s lover for 15 years.
Beryl’s early novels show the moral and stylistic influence of Anna. Later works, from Watson’s Apology to the three novels published after Colin’s death (culminating in a homage to his hero Dr Johnson), show notable connections to him. Colin’s fatal stroke in 1994 preceded Beryl’s last great blast of creativity. As his ghost passed and writer’s block descended in the middle of According to Queeney, Beryl would say, “I don’t know who I’m writing for anymore. He was always there.”
Anna’s retreat to north Wales led to estrangement. Public exposure of her husband’s affair moved Anna, shortly before her death from cancer in 2005, to write a letter to Beryl claiming that “Colin never really liked you.” Darts from the old friend and rival and her own incipient cancer sapped what remained of Beryl’s will for the fight. It is in this condition that ideas for her last novel were nurtured.
Wilson and others have enjoyed recycling Beryl’s story that while she was pregnant with her younger daughter, her errant second husband—on whom Sweet William (1975) is based—went out to his car to find a book and never returned. The real-life William, Alan Sharp, published his first novel in the year of their child’s birth, won a Scottish Arts Council prize, wrote a sequel and moved to Los Angeles. There, he became one of the most sought-after British screenwriters in Hollywood, working with, among others, Gene Hackman, Burt Lancaster and Sam Peckinpah. He also had more children by other partners. His success stimulated Beryl on her own writer’s path, first via crossness, then I’ll-show-you rivalry.
In the mid-1990s, when the Haycrafts world was falling away from her, Sharp began to reappear in Beryl’s life. Their daughter and her children began to visit his home in LA, and though exchanges between them were brief, Sharp’s interests and milieu again found their way into Beryl’s imagination.
Her final novel was tortuous to write—beyond writer’s block, illness, no ciggies and diminished confidence, lay a firm wish not to be seen as a wise old owl writing from the periphery of age. Her heroine is young; Beryl was now into her seventies.
Work carried on for years. The 40th anniversary of RFK’s death—an ideal opportunity to publish the novel—came and went. Beryl would ask herself why she was writing the book. She would come up with no compelling answer.
At first, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress seems unusually straightforward. Sentences are short and lack the twisting ventriloquisms of Beryl’s previous books. But history here is recent and American—a kind of air-conditioned nightmare, relieved by gorgeous landscapes that are mostly unnoticed by the main character Rose, who prefers to pay attention to what goes on in her head. Her interior monologues often intrude into the narrative, which seems appropriate for a naive young Englishwoman trying to make sense of a vast and violent country.
In general there is much traditional Beryl material: overlapping conversations, tetchy misconstruals, minute ebbs and flows of affection, unexpected small acts of charity, God walking in. What is remarkable and new is her treatment of the events leading up to the assassination. She toys with cock-up, conspiracy and multiple plot: the possible hypnotising of the assassin Sirhan Sirhan and/or the involvement of the CIA, Cubans, Israelis, elusive Brits.
But missing from the novel is the ending Beryl projected: that the girl in the polka-dot dress should deflect the hand of her companion Washington Harold as he prepares to shoot the mysterious Dr Wheeler, who has attached himself to the Kennedy entourage. Both have been seeking this character: Harold to avenge the suicide of his wife which he believes Wheeler provoked, Rose out of fixation on a man who set her on a sinister path.
In Beryl’s plan this deflection would cause a bullet to miss its target and strike Kennedy. That the scene is not in the “finished” text leaves much to ponder. The last page reproduces a newspaper article about a girl fleeing the scene, saying “We shot him.” The omission of the shooting itself may be intended and is a technique Beryl sometimes used to mix mystery with high emotion, or it may be simply due to the fact that she was never able to compose the scene as she wished. Beryl’s assistant King may have an answer. If so, the publication does not give it to us.
Nonetheless, the book is compulsive and brave, and a departure in her oeuvre—a kind of triumph. Authors deserve to be measured by their best work. In my view Injury Time and Every Man for Himself are Beryl’s. The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress is among several runners-up: rudiments of her greatest characters are there, in the naïve protagonist and the demonic figure who allures. Binny in Injury Time and Scurra in Every Man for Himself are the most fully realised of these but Rose and the elusive Dr Wheeler, whom we never meet, provide a powerful reprise. No other writer will fashion characters quite like them.
Last autumn, when literary friends were still grieving Beryl Bainbridge’s passing, AN Wilson claimed that she was “toweringly the best novelist of her age” and a better writer than Virginia Woolf. Such enthusiasm reminds us that Beryl long ago achieved a cult status for some. For others less comfortable with the kind of comparisons that Beryl herself never made, it remains safe to say that the characters she created were unique.
There is much of Beryl in her characters. Famously, she once tipsily mistook the Queen for Vera Lynn and Prince Philip for a waiter who could hail her a cab. This public persona created an unusual sense of intimacy between her and her readers, who felt protective of her as they were drawn in by her quirkiness, pathos and charm.
By the time she died, Beryl had almost completed another novel. Prepared by her longtime assistant Brendan King from Beryl’s notes and deathbed instructions, it will be published under its working title, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, on 2nd June. Drawn to write about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Beryl started her research for the book at the now-demolished Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, which is where the novel’s final scenes are set.
The hotel suited Beryl’s fascination with glory headed for demise. It’s a topic that can be traced through her work, from the novels set in the Liverpool of her youth (Harriet Said, The Dressmaker) to those of neo-Dickensian 1970s London (The Bottle Factory Outing, Injury Time). The theme recurred in her books set in the Edwardian era, with the sinking Titanic in Every Man for Himself and Scott of the Antarctic in The Birthday Boys. The macabre suburbs in Watson’s Apology and the Crimean disaster in Master Georgie cover the Victorians and an ailing Dr Johnson features in According to Queeney.
The historical novels of Beryl’s later years are no less free of her autobiographical tendency. All their locales were familiar to her from childhood reading and vicarious transit. Beryl’s fictional characters were often remarkably like those who strode colossally through her life as a writer, not least the literary couple Colin and Anna Haycraft.
AN Wilson has written about the supposed predatory nature of this pair, claiming that Colin tried to persuade Beryl to help Duckworth Books out of its financial troubles by signing over her own house. This is simply not true. Those who lament the Haycrafts’ alleged exploitation of their sole bankable author should remember that she would not have become beloved Dame Beryl without them.
Beryl had known Anna in Liverpool, where Anna had been a student of (and got pregnant by) Beryl’s soon-to-be husband, Austin Davies. Later, in London, Anna would become Beryl’s editor and eventual rival as author of novels under the pseudonym Alice Thomas Ellis. Colin was their publisher at Duckworth and, despite his argumentative but doting marriage to Anna, Beryl’s lover for 15 years.
Beryl’s early novels show the moral and stylistic influence of Anna. Later works, from Watson’s Apology to the three novels published after Colin’s death (culminating in a homage to his hero Dr Johnson), show notable connections to him. Colin’s fatal stroke in 1994 preceded Beryl’s last great blast of creativity. As his ghost passed and writer’s block descended in the middle of According to Queeney, Beryl would say, “I don’t know who I’m writing for anymore. He was always there.”
Anna’s retreat to north Wales led to estrangement. Public exposure of her husband’s affair moved Anna, shortly before her death from cancer in 2005, to write a letter to Beryl claiming that “Colin never really liked you.” Darts from the old friend and rival and her own incipient cancer sapped what remained of Beryl’s will for the fight. It is in this condition that ideas for her last novel were nurtured.
Wilson and others have enjoyed recycling Beryl’s story that while she was pregnant with her younger daughter, her errant second husband—on whom Sweet William (1975) is based—went out to his car to find a book and never returned. The real-life William, Alan Sharp, published his first novel in the year of their child’s birth, won a Scottish Arts Council prize, wrote a sequel and moved to Los Angeles. There, he became one of the most sought-after British screenwriters in Hollywood, working with, among others, Gene Hackman, Burt Lancaster and Sam Peckinpah. He also had more children by other partners. His success stimulated Beryl on her own writer’s path, first via crossness, then I’ll-show-you rivalry.
In the mid-1990s, when the Haycrafts world was falling away from her, Sharp began to reappear in Beryl’s life. Their daughter and her children began to visit his home in LA, and though exchanges between them were brief, Sharp’s interests and milieu again found their way into Beryl’s imagination.
Her final novel was tortuous to write—beyond writer’s block, illness, no ciggies and diminished confidence, lay a firm wish not to be seen as a wise old owl writing from the periphery of age. Her heroine is young; Beryl was now into her seventies.
Work carried on for years. The 40th anniversary of RFK’s death—an ideal opportunity to publish the novel—came and went. Beryl would ask herself why she was writing the book. She would come up with no compelling answer.
At first, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress seems unusually straightforward. Sentences are short and lack the twisting ventriloquisms of Beryl’s previous books. But history here is recent and American—a kind of air-conditioned nightmare, relieved by gorgeous landscapes that are mostly unnoticed by the main character Rose, who prefers to pay attention to what goes on in her head. Her interior monologues often intrude into the narrative, which seems appropriate for a naive young Englishwoman trying to make sense of a vast and violent country.
In general there is much traditional Beryl material: overlapping conversations, tetchy misconstruals, minute ebbs and flows of affection, unexpected small acts of charity, God walking in. What is remarkable and new is her treatment of the events leading up to the assassination. She toys with cock-up, conspiracy and multiple plot: the possible hypnotising of the assassin Sirhan Sirhan and/or the involvement of the CIA, Cubans, Israelis, elusive Brits.
But missing from the novel is the ending Beryl projected: that the girl in the polka-dot dress should deflect the hand of her companion Washington Harold as he prepares to shoot the mysterious Dr Wheeler, who has attached himself to the Kennedy entourage. Both have been seeking this character: Harold to avenge the suicide of his wife which he believes Wheeler provoked, Rose out of fixation on a man who set her on a sinister path.
In Beryl’s plan this deflection would cause a bullet to miss its target and strike Kennedy. That the scene is not in the “finished” text leaves much to ponder. The last page reproduces a newspaper article about a girl fleeing the scene, saying “We shot him.” The omission of the shooting itself may be intended and is a technique Beryl sometimes used to mix mystery with high emotion, or it may be simply due to the fact that she was never able to compose the scene as she wished. Beryl’s assistant King may have an answer. If so, the publication does not give it to us.
Nonetheless, the book is compulsive and brave, and a departure in her oeuvre—a kind of triumph. Authors deserve to be measured by their best work. In my view Injury Time and Every Man for Himself are Beryl’s. The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress is among several runners-up: rudiments of her greatest characters are there, in the naïve protagonist and the demonic figure who allures. Binny in Injury Time and Scurra in Every Man for Himself are the most fully realised of these but Rose and the elusive Dr Wheeler, whom we never meet, provide a powerful reprise. No other writer will fashion characters quite like them.
