Truth about a liar
BERNICE RUBENS, in life and on the page, believed in plain speaking; she didn’t do discretion. In this memoir, completed shortly before she died, she comments: ‘ My mother said I was over-imaginative, but I was simply a liar by nature . . . I was happily at home with mendacity. It was less boring than the truth. My natural home lay in fiction.’
Unsurprisingly, she made her name as a novelist, with several of her 25 books turned into movies. She won the Booker Prize. But her memoir reveals that Bernice never placed great value on her writing achievements: what she wanted to be when she grew up was a musician, like her siblings.
She played the cello, and they made music together. Her two brothers, her sister and Hugo, the Kindertransport boy her parents took in to save him from the Nazis, all moved into the musical world.
Bernice’s professional path after university involved some false starts: teaching and a stint playing Wilde’s Salomé on stage, when she struggled with an intransigent seventh veil. Later, as a documentary film-maker, she travelled the world. Like her friend Beryl Bainbridge, who contributes an affectionate introduction, Bernice never discussed her writing; it was just something she did.
One of the funniest chapters is on ‘whoring’, her word for the bizarre and sometimes humiliating business of promotional literary tours and book signings.
The memoir spans her life: the wartime childhood in Splott, ‘the unmentionable and indisputable armpit of Cardiff’, sheltering one night in the cellar of the brothel next door alongside kimono- clad tarts and their abashed young servicemen clients; the early years in London and her marriage, its hopefilled beginnings, and its failure described with clear- eyed bleakness.
Her Jewishness was central to her life, as was her family: parents, grandparents, aunts, siblings, daughters and grandsons are dwelt on in loving, perhaps excessive, detail. The book would have gained from more stringent editing.
Bernice became a notable literary figure. She knew everyone and was a valued friend to many. But to those who were not intimates she could be acerbic, even fierce.
The late Elias Canetti, who won the Nobel prize, meddled in her marriage and earned her hatred.
She saw him crossing the road once, ‘ deep in filthy thought’, and contemplated running him down. ‘It was not a pedestrian crossing, and I could, quite legally, have killed him on the spot.’
The pages of photographs are poignant. They show a demure, delicately boned girl gradually taking on the lineaments of the mature woman: bold, opinionated, a natural street fighter and a great talker. An old friend who spoke at Bernice’s memorial described visiting her in hospital very near the end. Following a stroke, she was unable to speak. It was, he said, a strange experience to have a conversation with Bernice and not hear her voice.
Friends and admirers of her work can hear her voice again on these pages: sad, funny, indiscreet, wondering to the end what she would become when she grew up.