I have just read and enjoyed immensely King’s biography.
This book is interesting even in its genesis. Written by the man who edited for
publication the substantial remnants of her last novel, he became assistant to
Bainbridge during the time of her late celebrity.
Bainbridge is, I think, a huge fact in modern literary fiction
that has yet to be understood and located in its contexts, although this book
helps. The nearer to truth it gets, our picture of Bainbridge will be ever more
riven by the contradictions that marked her life. Massive self-doubt vied with
even more massive self-confidence. Having worked on Hitler, Scott, and the
Titanic disaster, her last complete novel was on Samuel Johnson.
She was relieved it seems, despite her huge but ambivalent
love for him, that Colin Haycraft – her publisher at Duckworth and with whom
she was having a complex affair – had died tragically and could not tell her
how misconceived was a project on Johnson, on which, as he knew, she knew very
little. And witness this excerpt from Beryl’s account to her agent of a dramatization
of that book: ‘But for James Boswell etc who would have heard of Samuel Johnson’
(cited 464).
Besides being probably the crassest assessment of Johnson’s
place in British culture, this is interesting because it rests entirely on an
uncertain value base - that of a reading public and of Bainbridge herself. There
is a chance that she saw Johnson as interest solely because of his
relationships, but what does that say of her own interest in artistic survival
and – of course – of the self-conscious choice of her own Boswell – Brendan King.
This question will pursue my memories of this book – Bainbridge
played with self-exposure while treading back from it while she lived. Her
tortured sense of the importance of relationships veered on the edge of an
inability to assess relationships at all because of her own stifling sense of almost
universal alienated rejection, which even seemed to play out in her
relationships with her children and God. Suicide attempts – using methods that
endangered many people – were frequent, despite the proximity to them of claims
to live for her children.
Her attraction to dangerous men seemed to play on myths of
her father’s rejection of her – such that he often became the model of very
vile men – Hitler for instance. There is no doubt that the men in Beryl’s life
were not what she needed but her persistence in returning to them is odd as
well. Whilst I was, a few years back,
reading through her novels (having ignored them for so long) I was so struck by
this quotation that I wrote it down without recording from whence it came – but
it still seems important, even out of any context.
“Don’t you just hate women?” she
asked me, as though she was something quite other.
Feminism took a hold on literary studies during the period
of Bainbridge’s eminence, but she never became its flagbearer either by choice
or imposition. Everyone who knows her work, knows it as full of the kind of
ambivalence that it cannot be read as about the condition of any closely
defined group of people, although it inevitably records the incidents of class
and gendered oppression. One issue of immense importance though is that of
emotional ambivalence itself – that sense of life that hovers between seeing it
as confinement by security and a retreat from security into absolute and exposed
danger. At 13 or so, she had possibly sexual affairs with at least 2 German
prisoners-of-war on the wooded dunes outside Liverpool. Older powerful men
attracted her and, if they failed to take on a fully ‘masculine’ role eventually
bored her. Her fear of any suggestion of
lesbian attachment seems to partake of the same values.
She felt a need to be alone and feared isolation. She
desired men who openly claimed to want a life selfishly reserved for their art,
whilst seeing that need as a fundamental rejection of herself. And, out of
that, comes art riven with painful contradiction but so funny – that from a
reader who finds humour in fiction less than easy on his sensibility. Surely The Bottle Factory Outing should become
to be seen as a very great novel born out of those contradictions about gender,
class, community and isolation. A full reading of that novel would read as
relevant the reasons why the models for the Freda – Brenda relationship are
themselves photographed – they are Beryl and her bold but tragic friend,
Pauline, with whom she once worked in a bottle factory - looking into the book
from its cover.
How are we to read this very funny and very brilliant
passage about the bed shared by Freda and Brenda (Brenda is based on Beryl):
Brenda had fashioned a bolster to
put down the middle of the bed and a row of books that they lay less intimately
at night. Freda complained that the books were uncomfortable – but then she had
never been married (p. 12 1st ed).
Go on read the whole passage. It is clearly brilliant, it is
clearly puzzling. It is comprehensively too full of potential for the reader to
ignore and in its centre: ‘She felt it was unwise to see things as other than
they were.’ Brilliant: truly brilliant!
But, of course, read King's book. It is honest and quotes freely from wonderful letters.
All the best
Steve
