Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (133 page)

Over the years she transformed the house in Camden into a
Wunderkammer
and it supplies the background to innumerable publicity pictures of her ‘clever-monkey’
face. Eric the stuffed water buffalo in the hall was as well known to her readers as London Zoo’s Brumas the Polar Bear. Well known too, by report, was the bullet hole in the ceiling and the story behind it. Her mother-in-law had appeared at the front door, long after the marriage with Austin was over, enquiring as to some photographs. Bainbridge went to look for them and: ‘When I came out of the room she was standing one flight down, a little matronly figure digging something out of her handbag. Just in time I realised she was taking out a gun and, used to playing soldiers when I was younger, I jumped forward, jerked her elbow and ducked as a shot was fired at the ceiling. A shower of newly applied plaster fell on us like snow. She then hurried out of the house. Not wanting to be late for work, I dusted myself down and ran towards the factory; there was no sign of my mother-in-law.’ The factory in Camden resurfaces in the early work,
The Bottle Factory Outing
(1974), a novel which won the
Guardian
fiction prize. A. N. Wilson, a close friend of Bainbridge in her later years, reflects: ‘Did the incident ever take place? I am not saying that Beryl was a liar, because I do not think she was. But she was a novelist, and the crafted versions of events always came to have more substance than mere facts.’

She completed her first novel in the late 1950s. It was based on the New Zealand Parker-Hulme murder case in which two young girls murdered one of their mothers. The same episode inspired a number of writers and film-makers – most famously Peter Jackson’s
Heavenly Creatures
(1994). The British reading public was not, British publishers decreed, ready for Bainbridge’s version in 1958.
Harriet Said
(1972) was not published until she hooked up with Duckworth, with whom, from the 1970s on, she published a novel a year or so. The relationship with the Haycrafts, man and wife, who ran the firm became the subject of angry disagreement after Bainbridge’s death. A. N. Wilson, among others, went so far as to say that ‘the Haycrafts, were both, in their different ways, monsters’. Wilson’s less aggressive point was that Duckworth did not, as publishers, value fiction – even though Bainbridge became, over the years, a valuable property. The physical quality of the packaging they gave Bainbridge’s books was abysmal. Michael Holroyd elsewhere pointed out the unusual contract arrangement by which the more she sold, the lower the royalty payment. This may partly account for the rapidity and brevity of her novels.

Bainbridge claimed not to have read anything from Graham Greene onwards. Strong storylines, tinged with black
coups de théâtre
were her way of doing fiction. Her career, she always said, took a leap forward when Karl Miller wrote a piece in the
New York Review of Books
in 1974, hailing her as ‘possibly the least known of the contemporary English novelists who are worth knowing’. Miller dearly wanted
The Dressmaker
(1973), her Liverpool novel, to win the Booker, but was outvoted on the
1973 panel. He was still upset at the injustice a quarter of a century later. The novel stands out for at least a couple of reasons. It opens in a wartime Liverpool home, occupied entirely by women. ‘Nellie had her hair net on and her teeth out,’ opens an early scene and the novel recreates, with uncanny solidity, a house in which the inhabitants have their night-time ‘cat’s lick’ in a washer-repaired tin bowl in the scullery before sharing beds ‘for warmth’. The crux of the narrative concerns the young Rita’s love for an American serviceman – suggestive of young Beryl’s involvement with Franz.

Her fiction output falls into two distinct parts. The first half of her career was devoted to what A. N. Wilson calls ‘deftly distorted autobiography’ – narratives which drew on her own life, more or less closely. In the second half of her career she moved into historical fiction of a quirky and speculative kind. No historical novelist has less of what Scott called ‘Dryasdust and Smellfungus’ about her. She kicked off in this new style with
Young Adolf
(1978), which speculates a possible visit by Hitler to his Irish sister-in-law, Bridget Hitler, in Liverpool in 1912. It is a series of comical misadventures and ends with him returning to Austria, vowing revenge, and the resolve ‘to grow a moustache’. Subsequent subjects included the sinking of the
Titanic, Every Man for Himself
(1996) which had the good luck to coincide with James Cameron’s 1997 Oscar-winning movie; Dr Johnson as seen through the jaundiced eye of Mrs Thrale’s daughter,
According to Queeney
(2001);
Master Georgie
(1998), a Crimean war novel; and
The Birthday Boys
(1991), about Scott of the Antarctic’s failed last expedition. These novels scooped up prizes and brought in steady cash rewards for her and Duckworths. She was awarded a DBE in 2000 and a consolatory Booker (second-class) in 2011.

I can’t – to pick up Lynn Barber’s epigraph – say I knew her, but Bainbridge used to cut through the Camden lane where I live on her way back from Sainsbury’s. A couple of times I helped her with her bags. Sometimes her lungs, weakened by sixty years of smoking, gave out and she would slump on a doorstep and exchange a few words with a local tramp, Tom. Apparently Yeats’s poetry was a favourite topic of conversation.

The British provinces had been swallowing me like an eiderdown.

Bradbury was born in Sheffield, the son of an LNER railway executive. He was shunted around in his childhood, partly thanks to the Luftwaffe, partly to chronic ill-health, and partly to his father’s cross-country job. He grew up in Nottingham, and was one of the very first grammar-school boys to benefit from the new Butler Education Act. Had he been born a year earlier, English literature might well have lost a distinguished novelist. He describes his adolescence with an irony just this side of self-contempt – a familiar flavour in his work: ‘in addition to haunting the coffee bars of Nottingham, shouting about Sartre and nibbling the ears of leggy girls named Ernestine, I had spent three years being a student at a certain nameless English provincial university. A strange youth, who wore pink intellectual shirts and clip-on bow ties that kept falling off suddenly into cups of black coffee, and spent most of those three years writing a novel, about, of course, an English provincial university.’ The nameless place of learning was the University College of Leicester. It was, as he says, horribly unfashionable: a dimness made no brighter by Kingsley Amis’s using the College (a converted lunatic asylum, opposite the municipal graveyard) as Jim Dixon’s detested place of employment. Lucky for some.

It was, as it turned out, lucky for Bradbury. Leicester was where – across the way from the English department – British sociology was happening. The embryo of anti-heroic Howard Kirk, Bradbury’s most famous character, was formed over his three years there. He was already, while still an undergraduate, having his comic papers published in
Punch
. Most importantly, Leicester bequeathed him the raw material for his first novel,
Eating People is Wrong
(1959). Unlike his comrade-in-fiction, David Lodge, Bradbury would go on to be the most wandering of scholars. Having picked up his first at Leicester, he did an MA at Queen Mary College, London. Then came a spell in America which, as he recalled, liberated him forever from the cultural fug of the British provinces. That ‘forever’ might, he knew, be quite short: from earliest childhood Bradbury had been sickly and it was expected that he would never live to any age. But an innovative heart operation in 1958 was deemed to be successful and promised a longer, if not a lengthy, span of life. One wonders whether the extraordinary hurry of his career originated with the sense of a ticking enemy in his breast – like Ransome in Conrad’s story,
The Shadow-Line
.

Bradbury married in 1959, the year that
Eating People
was published. But the critical year in his view of the world was 1956 – the year of Suez and the Hungarian Uprising. It was in this year that ‘barbarism’ won. The old ‘gentle’ (as Orwell called it)
English liberalism went under for ever. Forster’s wych-elm was felled. Bradbury’s title picks up a line in a Flanders and Swann song. After 1956, ‘eating people’ is OK (it’s what Howard Kirk does). The hero of
Eating People
, Professor Treece (based on the academic who, as it happened, taught me as well as Bradbury) is a liberal who – young as he is by professorial standards – has outlived his moral age. He is historically irrelevant. The Professor Kirks will eat him alive – and do.

After a brief stopover at the University of Hull, Bradbury moved on to Birmingham as a lecturer in American literature (the Americans, with money distantly supplied by the United States Information Service, were encouraging the setting up of the subject in the UK. The CIA was behind it all with the worthy aim of wresting the intellectual high ground from the Communists). There he found himself the only lecturer under forty, alongside David Lodge. As Lodge recalls: ‘Edith Wharton, writing in her memoirs of her friendship with Henry James, says, “the real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humour or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances at any subject cross like interarching searchlights”. I often had that experience with Malcolm.’

In 1965 Bradbury went on to the gleamingly ‘new’ University of East Anglia, at Norwich, one of the campuses created by the Robbins expansion. Building new institutions of higher learning was gruelling work and his early novels came out at long intervals.
Stepping Westward
(1965) revolved around his life-expanding visit to America. His major novel was his third,
The History Man
(1975), set in the new university of ‘Watermouth’. The ‘man’ of the title is Professor Howard Kirk, sociologist: amoral, brilliant, destructive, unstoppable, the man of the future – God help us all. Bradbury is fascinated, as a rabbit by a stoat, at what Kirk and his kind represent. He offers a Treecian vignette of himself in the novel:

The door of a room adjoining opens a little; a dark, tousled-haired head, with a sad visage, peers through, looks at Howard for a little, and then retreats … this depressed-looking figure is a lecturer in the English department, a man who, ten years earlier, had produced two tolerably well-known and acceptably reviewed novels, filled, as novels then were, with moral scruple and concern.

Since then there has been silence.

Bradbury stayed on at Norwich, now writing more fluently, but never with quite the impact of his earlier campus fiction. With Angus Wilson he set up a pioneering creative writing course at UEA (Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Rose Tremain are distinguished alumni) and did effective, and lucrative, TV work.
The History Man
, starring Anthony Sher, was a high point in 1980s small-screen drama. He toured, indefatigably, for the British Council and produced a good novel on the subject,
Rates
of Exchange
(1983). He was a loved teacher, a distinguished scholar, a valued mentor of young novelists and, one is told, a self-sacrificingly good parent. His weak heart finally caught up with him at the age of sixty-eight – years later than his doctors had earlier predicted. He was knighted in the year of his death: he would have made a good comic novel out of that.

Everything of value about me is in my books.

Considerable stir was caused in 2008 by Patrick French’s
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul
. That loaded word ‘Authorized’ usually translates in biographer-speak as ‘flattering’, but that was spectacularly not the case here: there were so many warts in Patrick French’s portrait one could barely see the face. Why, people wondered, did Naipaul collaborate in a biography which he must have known would raise howls of execration against him? ‘Frank’ – that is, amazingly indiscreet – interviews were granted his Boswell and French enjoyed wholly unhindered access to the archive – some of which (his dead wife’s diaries, for example) not even Naipaul had ever cared to look at. Moreover, no injunction was laid on the finished text. It is like Dorian Gray allowing his picture to go on display at the National Portrait Gallery – and then attending the private view. It’s a relevant analogy. Like Oscar Wilde, Naipaul – for his own obscure motives – always sets out to scandalise, and he manoeuvred his biographer as, notoriously, he manoeuvred his would-be acolyte, Paul Theroux, author of the mortally wounded memoir,
Sir Vidia’s Shadow
(1998). Naipaul loves to cast a dark shadow of himself over all who come into his orbit. Biographers, on their part, labour to cast light on their subject. Naipaul wins this particular battle. At the end of years’ research French found himself, as the world has found itself, struggling, baffled, in the shadow of this majestic, but impenetrably enigmatic writer.

Few writers have trudged a harder road to the Nobellist’s podium. Born the descendant of ‘indentured’ (i.e. enslaved) workers, in an alien island in the Caribbean, Naipaul won a scholarship to Oxford, driven to excel by his journalist father. He encountered racism every inch of the way. ‘Where are you from?’ asked the don
examining his thesis – before failing it. Vidia was only middlingly successful at university, and later at the BBC, but careers were irrelevant. He wrote all the time, so intensely that he would routinely wear out the nibs of his Parker 51 pens. Eventually the quality of that writing shone through. The breakthrough came with what is still his most-read work,
A House for Mr Biswas
(1961).