BERYL THE BETRAYER
Raped when she was just 19. A string of nameless lovers. And affairs with BOTH partners of the woman who made her a literary lioness... the scandalous truth about Beryl Bainbridge in the biography of the year
SIX months after she had split up with her lover Austin Davies, Beryl Bainbridge sent him a sealed letter she said he was not to open. It was March 1952. Ignoring her injunction, Austin read it straight away and was shocked: Beryl, then a 19-year-old actress at the Liverpool Playhouse, had allowed herself to be picked up by a man and taken back to his flat, where he raped her. The letter read: ‘I screamed and he tore my clothes off and hit me in the eye with his elbow, and jammed his knee into my mouth. And still I thought I could talk him out of it. I shouted and shouted and he told me to carry on as no one could hear.’
Afterwards, he kept repeating: ‘Now I haven’t harmed you, darling – you came of your own free will.’
The violence was considerable. His blow had dislodged one of Beryl’s teeth, and for the next year or so she would be plagued with toothache and a bleeding gum.
She would eventually get a dental plate made and a false tooth to replace the one that had been knocked out.
Beryl was rarely shy of discussing her own past – even if her accounts did not always match the truth – yet about this episode she remained silent. Only now, after years of research in the papers of her own massive archive and the collection she sold to the British Library, has this assault and its damaging consequences been uncovered.
The scars were not just physical. She told Austin that in the wake of the attack she went through a period when she no longer cared who she got involved with and had ‘slept with many men, seven or eight perhaps… because it didn’t mean anything. I didn’t even know the names of some of them, I didn’t care whether I died.’
In later life Beryl would claim she had often given in to men’s sexual advances out of a perverse sense of politeness. In the 1970s, she admitted: ‘For years and years, though not perhaps recently, I despised myself… I’ve never yet had a relationship with a man where I thought anything a man did to me… was out of the ordinary. I used to be a terrible masochist. I used to make men treat me badly.’
Haunted by fear of rejection, she already had a propensity to form chaotic, not to say disastrous, relationships with men. As Beryl would herself say: ‘I go on making messy relationships, fail, and fling myself into a fresh one. I seem to have an intense craving for narcissistic gratification. I have to get love by all sorts of means.’
Even, as it was to prove, if that meant betraying not only one of her closest friends but the woman who would do so much to build Beryl’s own career and reputation – the literary editor Anna Haycraft, also known as the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis. IN EARLY 1971, Beryl’s son Aaron was playing upstairs at home in Camden, North London, with his friend William when the phone rang. It was William’s mother, Anna Haycraft, wondering what time her son would be home. The two women began to talk and, after a moment, Anna asked: ‘I recognise your voice. What’s your name?’
When Beryl told her that her maiden name was Bainbridge, Anna replied: ‘I’ve read your two books; they are pretty awful. Have you got anything else?’
She then told Beryl she was the fiction editor of Gerald Duckworth Ltd, a publishing house run by her husband Colin Haycraft. That at least was the public version of events, as recounted by Beryl many years later.
Yet something important was missing from this version: that she and Anna’s paths had first crossed nearly 20 years earlier when both fell in love with the same man. Anna Lindholm, as she then was, had become messily entangled with Austin Davies shortly after the collapse of Beryl’s own relationship with him.
Nor did Beryl say that she had later embarked on a 15-year affair with another man in Anna’s life – her husband and the father of her children – an extraordinary double love triangle of the sort that would recur so many times in Beryl’s life and in her fiction.
Beryl had been a gamine 18-yearold when she fell head-over-heels in love with Austin, an artist drafted in to help with the backdrops on a Liverpool Playhouse production of Bernard Shaw’s Caesar And Cleopatra in early 1951.
Tall, handsome and bearded, Davies looked every inch the bohemian in his chunky sweater and black duffel coat. He lectured at Liverpool College of Art, where he went on to teach John Lennon.
It is difficult to overstate his impact on Beryl, who seemed to have no middle gear once her emotions were engaged; it was all or nothing.
He was her first experience of a committed sexual relationship, and of the crushing humiliation that comes from rejection.
Davies ended the affair that autumn, a trauma Beryl never truly got over. She was ill for months. His rejection set the pattern for her subsequent relationships.
‘It’s rejection that gets one down,’ she wrote towards the end of her life. ‘I felt that happened an awful lot to me… Always rejected by men.’
Davies went on to date Anna, who discovered she was pregnant by him in the autumn of 1952.
Anna agonised over her baby, but in the end had little choice but to have a ‘backstreet’ abortion paid for by Austin. She was traumatised, suffering what she later admitted was a nervous breakdown. The affair with Austin had been disastrous on so many levels and the abortion was something she never came to terms with emotionally. She gave up her art course, became a devout Catholic and, for a period, a postulant nun.
She never forgave herself for what became her dark secret: a web of deceit, humiliation and lies playing on her mind until the end of her life.
It did, however force Austin to consider his treatment of Beryl.
Barely a month later, he proposed and Beryl accepted. Even though the marriage lasted only five years, Austin’s financial support would allow her to become a writer. He bought a house in Camden Town for her and their two children. Austin had the basement flat below. This was the house where Beryl was living when Anna, now Anna Haycraft, called.
‘It happened a lot... always rejected by men’
DESPITE their shared past, the two women became friends. More than that, Anna served as Beryl’s mentor at Duckworth, providing muchneeded encouragement while her husband Colin edited Beryl’s prose.
The Haycrafts published Beryl’s breakthrough novel Harriet Said... in 1972 and nurtured her career until Beryl became one of Britain’s most critically acclaimed novelists, a writer shortlisted five times for the Booker Prize.
The most influential independent publisher of the 1970s, and certainly the most flamboyant and contrarian, Colin Haycraft had the complexion and waist measurement of a seasoned claret drinker. He sported a bow tie, thick-rimmed glasses, and the kind of tweed jacket that denoted a desk-bound literary man, although in earlier life he had been an accomplished sportsman.
He met and married Anna Lindholm in 1956, and now they lived with their family in a rambling house in Gloucester Crescent, Camden, where they hosted book launches and literary parties: writer Alan Bennett lived next door, while Jonathan Miller, artist David Gentleman and poet Ursula Vaughan Williams had homes nearby.
The impact Colin and Anna had on Beryl’s career is obvious, but the impact that Beryl and her success had on Duckworth’s fortunes should not be overlooked. She had an effect on Anna, too, who made her own debut as a novelist in 1977 under the pseudonym Alice Thomas Ellis.
For most people, friendships are founded on a sense of openness and mutual trust. With Beryl and Anna, the situation was almost entirely the opposite. From the very start, it was a friendship at the centre of which was a kind of mutual, unspoken pact: that both would never reveal the traumatic event that had linked their destinies. It was never openly spoken about between them, and each expected the other to keep quiet in public. So deeply ingrained was this feeling of secrecy that Beryl did not allude to the abortion even under the guise of fiction, and only referred to it in public once, several years after Anna’s death.
That unspoken secret inevitably skewed the relationship, and their friendship was conducted almost entirely on Anna’s terms.
It was always Beryl who would go to the Haycrafts’ house: Anna would have found it unthinkable to go to Bainbridge’s home, where there was a possibility of a chance encounter with Austin. BERYL became a prominent figure in London literary life. She also gained a reputation for heavy drinking, embarrassing scenes and flirtatiousness. There were innumerable relationships with married men.
By the late 1970s, having once again come off second best in an unsuitable romantic encounter, one might have assumed that Beryl would be more wary. Prudence and emotional restraint were not in her nature, however, and she allowed herself to become emotionally entangled with Colin. It was an affair that would have a profound effect on her personal and professional life, not to mention on her children and the Haycraft family.
On one level it is easy to see how Colin’s affair with Beryl started. He felt he had been spurned by Anna – he slept on a small bed in his booklined study and she spent most of her time in the kitchen and was often in bed by 9pm. There were the quantities of drink consumed whenever Beryl was around and the fact that Beryl’s house was only ten minutes away. It was natural that Colin should walk her home.
But the roots of the affair went back much further. Beryl had been captivated by Colin’s wit and erudition from outset. As early as 1973 she had confided to her next-door neighbour Penny that she had feelings for him – a dangerous desire even in a semi-playful fashion, especially as, with drink inside her, the normal boundaries dissolved.
Untangling such a complicated emotional web is not easy. Beryl’s view was that Colin and Anna’s marriage had broken down well before the start of her affair and Anna’s own public pronouncements about love and marriage – ‘The marriage was unimportant to me because the children were everything’ – were hard to reconcile with a happy union.
To prevent her children finding out, Beryl rented a room on Parkway in Camden Town, nominally as a place to work but actually as a place to enjoy trysts.
Colin’s feelings for Beryl cannot be truly known. That it was something deeper than a purely physical relationship seems clear given its duration and the number of trying circumstances it survived. At the very least it allowed them a degree of companionship and affection otherwise lacking.
But there were other factors. In 1978 Colin and Anna’s second son, Joshua, fell through the roof of a railway shed and died after nine months in a coma. Anna found it impossible to come to terms with the loss: ‘The death of a child is like the end of your life,’ she wrote. ‘The family fragmented, everyone retreating into their own bit; you can’t share grief.’
The affair between Colin and Beryl can also be seen at least at a subconscious level as Beryl’s revenge for Anna ‘stealing’ Austin years earlier.
Certainly Beryl found Anna’s attitude unsettling. She was unsure how much Anna knew or was colluding in it, and suspected she harboured lofty feelings of contempt for her.
Anna never hinted at the affair in public, nor let it affect her attitude to Beryl until much later, though it resurfaced in her own novels, in which infidelity is a recurring motif. IN 1993 Colin suffered a serious stroke. According to Beryl’s diary, their final meeting, marked by a large asterisk, was on September 20 1994. The following day she received a call to say Colin had died.
Beryl found it hard to grieve in secret and saw Colin’s death as marking the end of her eventful sexual life. When the affair began she had been in her 40s. Now, at 62, she would close down any discussion of romance with a brusque ‘Oh, I’m too old for all that now’.
A year after his death, in a collection of reminiscences in his honour, Beryl described her early days at the Crescent, sitting cross-legged at his feet, and how he had served as her mentor in language and literature. Her tribute ended with an unequivocal declaration: ‘I loved him.’
Anna died in 2005. When Beryl enquired about coming to see her in her last days, she was told Anna didn’t want her to visit. Beryl had been the cause of two irreparable humiliations in her life: unintentionally in Austin’s case, deliberately in the affair with Colin. To have Beryl look down on her now, on her deathbed, was too much. It was a final renunciation of their friendship.
©Brendan King 2016 Beryl Bainbridge: Love By All Sorts Of Means: A Biography, by Brendan King, is published by Bloomsbury on September 8 at £25. Offer price £18.75 (25 per cent discount) until September 4. Order at mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640; p&p is free on orders over £15.
‘Prudence and restraint were not in her nature’ ‘Beryl was captivated by his wit from the outset’