In 1965, soon after the novelist Beryl Bainbridge had given birth to their new daughter, her husband Alan Sharp went downstairs to get a book out of the car. He never came back.
For a writer, nothing is wasted, and the wandering Sharp was later immortalised by Bainbridge in her 1975 novel Sweet William, as a lothario with a woman in every cul-de-sac. (“What did you think when I first met you?” he asks one lover. “I thought I had flu,” she replies.)
But then Bainbridge drew on her life more than most authors in her funny, dark books. “All I ever wanted to do was to make sense of what happened to me in my childhood,” she told BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 1986. She went further than that, fictionalising as many elements of her past as she could, before she had “used up” her own experiences, and turned to other people’s instead.
This month, she enjoys the beginning of a well-deserved renaissance, as two of her best novels are republished by Daunt Books, with 11 others to follow. Both the initial titles – 1974’s The Bottle Factory Outing and 1989’s An Awfully Big Adventure – were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, an award which has a guest role in Bainbridge’s story.
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By the time of her death in 2010, Bainbridge had a unique dual status in British literary life. She was at once highly acclaimed – beloved, even – and deemed overlooked, because of her status as a perennial “Booker bridesmaid”, who was shortlisted five times for the prize but never won. (Margaret Atwood in her memoir Book of Lives tells how she and Bainbridge used to have a long-running wager “as to which of us could get nominated for the Booker Prize the most times without actually winning”. Atwood lost that bet, but won the Booker, in 2000.)
Both The Bottle Factory Outing and An Awfully Big Adventure came from Bainbridge’s life too: her job in a bottling factory, and her time, before she turned to writing, as an actress and stage manager in theatre. She appeared in the eighth episode of Coronation Street in 1961 as a ban-the-bomb protester, and in later years used to watch the show and afterwards phone her friend – and equally overlooked novelist – Paul Bailey to discuss it.
The Bottle Factory Outing is a good novel for the newcomer to begin with. It throws you straight into Bainbridge’s weird world without explanation or excuse. If you don’t like it, you probably don’t like Beryl Bainbridge at all.
It’s a black comedy – black because it has death at both ends, opening with a funeral and closing with a body being disposed of in a brandy barrel. And it’s comedy not just because of the jokes, though there are plenty of those: one character discusses why the horses that pull carriages for dead princes and dukes are geldings. “You can’t have stallions at a state funeral. They’re too fruity. They might go wild and stampede down the Mall dragging the coffin at breakneck speed.” It’s also a comedy because it presents life as an absurd, tragicomic spectacle. The central characters are two constitutionally incompatible women, colleagues at the bottle factory: Freda “longed to be flung into the midst of chaos”, while Brenda wears a coat in bed – a bed they share at night, with a bolster and a row of books separating them.
Freda and Brenda battle their own hopes and disappointments, as well as their amorous Italian colleagues at the factory, one of whom arranges a quintessentially English picnic which, naturally, goes horribly wrong. Freda sips wine with a man named Vittorio, while upstairs the closest Brenda gets to love is having a shirtless man fix the toilet cistern.
It’s a world where people have dreams but remain down-at-heel, a characteristic of Bainbridge’s work. In her previous novel The Dressmaker (1973) blowsy Marge is “a big blaze that died down through lack of fuel”, a comic figure again but one whose past is a low-key tragedy, with her first experience of sex excruciating. “She didn’t know what to do, and neither did he. Never been talked to, never read any books, never known what it was to take off her clothes without turning away.”
In An Awfully Big Adventure, the other book reissued this month and the last novel Bainbridge wrote from her own experiences, the setting is a grubby Liverpool theatre in 1950. The central character, and Bainbridge avatar, is 16-year-old Stella, who gets a job as an assistant stage manager for a new production of Peter Pan. (The title, another example of Bainbridge’s horror-humour, is Peter Pan’s description of death.)
Stella falls in love with the mildly sinister director Meredith, who tells his cast, “I don’t want any truck with symbolic interpretations”. And interpreting Bainbridge’s own work is a delightful, invigorating, sometimes disorienting experience. You need to keep your wits about you. “I love narrative bumps and shocks,” she told The New York Times. And she only told the reader what was absolutely necessary. “I cut all the time,” she said, though “cut” hardly sums the maniacal fury of her editing process. In one interview, she observed that all her books were about the same length – “158 pages” – and “to get that I write anything up to 1,500 pages”.
This concentrated style gave her a great gift in one-liners, summing up characters in a pithy phrase. In Sweet William, “the swimming coach was covered in a rash. He’d be so busy scratching, he’d never notice somebody going down for the third time”. In The Dressmaker, has-been Marge, who sees herself as the glamorous Margo, is captured thus. “It was the glitter that drew them at the start that drove them away in the end. They couldn’t stand her at the end. She wished she was Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, languidly sitting in a long dress, calling them darling, sipping her cocktail, loyal and loving always – but cool like a snake, telling them to go before they told her.”
Bainbridge always knew she wanted to be a writer – she wrote her first novel, Filthy Lucre, at the age of 13 (and had the chutzpah to publish it later, in 1986). Her “terrifying” childhood gave her plenty to draw on. “However much I joke about it, there were some very dark strains to it,” including a rape in late adolescence. And her parents fought so bitterly that, as she told The Paris Review, “in order to keep my parents apart, my brother slept in one bedroom with my father and I slept in the other bedroom with my mother”.
Her best books draw on that febrile youth. The best are set in Liverpool around and after the second World War, and Bainbridge said she “was heavily influenced toward tragedy and perhaps horror, owing to being taken as a schoolgirl to see documentary footage of the Belsen concentration camp”. There’s a sense throughout her work of the war as a rupture in English society that would never heal.
The Dressmaker, another of her best works, is a fictionalised account of two of Bainbridge’s aunts, as well as her own adolescent affair with an American GI during the war. And like many of Bainbridge’s early novels, the autobiographical elements are spliced in with a murder plot – her books have a more reliable body count than some TV detective shows.
When she moved away from her usual setting, the results were less successful. The Soviet-set Winter Garden (1981), inspired by her exchange visit to Russia with other British writers, starts off well but lacks the qualities of her best work.
But after Bainbridge had exhausted the inspiration of her own life, she had a second wave, and just as much acclaim, from the 1990s onward for a series of historical novels, covering public events from Scott’s expedition to the Antarctic (The Birthday Boys, 1991) to the sinking of the Titanic (Every Man for Himself, 1996) and the Crimean war (Master Georgie, 1998).
The results were mixed. The Birthday Boys, where Captain Robert Scott and the four men who accompanied him to the South Pole each tells his story to the reader, is as good as anything Bainbridge wrote. “We did our business in our breeches and shook out the turds when they froze,” we’re told. But even icy torture and imminent death cannot usurp the underlying force of the English class system, where each man knows his place.
Less successful for this reader was her Titanic novel, Every Man for Himself, which, perhaps constrained by the need to be faithful to her sources, lacks the fluidity of Bainbridge’s best work, and where her characters are overwhelmed by the imminent disaster that – unlike Scott and his men – they have no direct responsibility for. Nonetheless, the book earned Bainbridge another Booker shortlisting, and sold well when the paperback was released in the same year as James Cameron’s epic Titanic. “They probably thought it was the book of the film,” reflected Bainbridge drily.
Bainbridge was as eccentric in life as she was on the page. A lifelong smoker, who towards the end cut down to “only thirty a day or so,” she lived for most of her adult life in a terrace in Camden, clotted with bizarre bric-a-brac including a buffalo’s head in the hallway and a lifesize dummy of Neville Chamberlain (which started out as Adolf Hitler, but was later repurposed as, to Bainbridge, he looked more like Chamberlain). After she completed each novel, she painted a corresponding picture: the one for Every Man for Himself depicts a Titanic with famous passengers: Sigmund Freud on the upper deck alongside Mickey Rooney.
The praise and the prize shortlistings for these books were welcome but the end result of a long slog. The first book she wrote, Harriet Said, was rejected by publishers, who said that “even in these enlightened times, no printer would print it, it was so filthy”. She put it aside and wrote two others: the first, she said, “I think I got £25, and the second one, I owed them at the end of it”.
It wasn’t about the money, anyway, but about exorcising her childhood experiences – experiences which indirectly give shivers of pleasure to readers, and which will continue to for decades to come. “Every time I wrote a novel, little bits of that angst flew out the window,” she told Desert Island Discs. “I think writing, and a bit of money, is the quickest cure for neurosis one knows of.”
