Saucy but sad
CRESSIDA CONNOLLY Beryl Bainbridge: Love By All Sorts of Means by Brendan King Bloomsbury £25
When an elderly John Betjeman was asked if he had any regrets about his life, he famously replied: ‘Yes, I haven’t had enough sex.’ On the evidence of Brendan King’s doorstep of a biography, Beryl Bainbridge would not have been able to say the same. As its title proposes, this book is very much about Bainbridge and her boyfriends or, as she was to call them, her ‘gentleman callers’. There were certainly plenty of them. She herself made a list covering only the years 1944 to 1949: there are seventeen names on it. Considering she was only twelve in 1944, this is pretty good going.
There was the German soldier with whom the teenage Beryl lay swooning under the pines in the dunes at Formby. Later there was the rascally antiques dealer – a married father of six – who flew into jealous rages when she saw other men. There was the aptly named Alan Sharp, who was more or less a trigamist. There was an American she always referred to as Washington Harold and a hot-headed art teacher called Don and the biographer Michael Holroyd and the brother of the actor Dirk Bogarde and plenty more besides. Her last attachment was a secret affair with her publisher, Colin Haycraft, whose wife Anna (also known as the writer Alice Thomas Ellis) was among Beryl’s dearest friends.
Oddly enough, there was only one husband, a long-suffering bearded Liverpool art teacher (John Lennon was a pupil) who became the father of her two older children and adopted the third, a daughter she had by Alan Sharp. The husband seems to have been a fairly constant presence even after they broke up: he’d come round to do carpentry and other odd jobs and they all went on holidays together, sometimes with their various new partners. We are not told what Beryl felt when he eventually emigrated to New Zealand. I don’t imagine she was much good at DIY.
Beryl Bainbridge is marvellous, so it would be nice to report that this was all
jolly good fun. Slap and tickle, a roll in the hay: a Carry On film way of carrying on that brought her great happiness. In fact, it was all rather a muddle. She was beset by the classic problem of falling for shits and rejecting kindly doters. She very often found herself in triangles: there’d be a new lover in a leather jacket waiting in the wings with a whisky bottle while an old one in tweed was kept on as insurance and because she hated to say no. The men were often married or about to be married or both. No one stuck. She was lonely in old age, and drunk.
What would she have made of this book? She seems to have been very good-natured and accepting, so perhaps she’d have been amused to see a lifetime of shenanigans thus documented. As Stella, the character based on her young self in An Awfully Big Adventure, says: ‘I don’t mind being personal. I don’t think anything else is all that interesting.’ The picture which emerges of Beryl is of someone wholly original, funny and with tremendous pluck. And yet there’s a nagging suspicion that this is not quite what Brendan King intends.
King worked for Beryl at the end of her life and it was he who put together the final, unfinished book, The Girl in the
Polka Dot Dress (2011). This gives him the great advantage of having known her well, but also gives him the disadvantage, perhaps, of having found her foibles exasperating and her way of life more chaotic than charmingly eccentric. From the opening pages it is clear that her lifelong habit of exaggeration and embellishment irks him. He goes in for quite a bit of tutting. On one page alone he tells us that her attitude to the facts was ‘shocking’, ‘problematic’, ‘untenable’ and ‘bizarre’. Of course she preferred a good story to the plain facts. This may have made her unreliable, but it also made her the terrific writer that we know and love.
It is lucky that there are plenty of photographs because King never says what Beryl wore or what is was like to sit in her kitchen. I’d have liked a room-byroom description of the London house she lived in for so many years, to set the scene. Was it cold? What did it smell like? What kind of cigarettes did she smoke? Did she ever empty the ashtray? A biography of such length ought to say all this, but after 500 pages I still didn’t feel I’d met her. He is reticent, too, about what her children made of her; presumably they did not give this book their blessing, since none of them seem to have been interviewed.
King is better on the thing that most matters: the books. He adheres strictly to the actual chronology of the life, so the novels only arrive three-quarters of the way through. But he is scrupulous in recording how the ideas for her plots came to her and how she developed them and who was based on whom. This is comprehensive rather than inspired. But if reading about her saucy but ultimately rather sad life sends readers back to the fiction of Beryl Bainbridge, he will have done her a great service. Hatchards price: £22.50
where she drove across the border into Germany – where, thanks to a sudden gust of wind, she spotted a vast array of hessian-covered tanks pointing in the direction of Poland. She phoned her findings through to Greene, and the next day the Telegraph’s headline read ‘1,000 tanks massed on Polish border’, adding that ‘Ten divisions reported ready for swift stroke’. Three days later, on 1st September, the Germans invaded, and once again Hollingworth was the first to break the news, holding the phone out of the window to catch the sound of bombing when reporting the news to a sceptical friend at the British Embassy in Warsaw.
Born in 1911 – she recently notched up her 105th birthday – Hollingworth grew up in Leicester; her father, who was in the boot and shoe business, liked to visit nearby battlefields, and her precocious interest in warfare was further inflamed by the sight of a Zeppelin droning overhead on a bombing raid. She left school at fifteen, and briefly enrolled on a domestic science course: but pastrymaking soon gave way to travel, international politics and helping Czech refugees.
Hollingworth’s adventures in Poland after the German invasion have all the excitement of a fast-moving thriller, involving near-encounters with the enemy, running out of petrol at a critical moment, sharing a bed with the immensely tall Greene (she was a mere 5ft 2in), carrying a pearl-handled revolver, and finally escaping over the border into Rumania as Russian tanks loomed up. The time she spent in the Rumania of Antonescu and the Iron Guard is equally riveting. From there she covered Mussolini’s assault on Greece and correctly forecast Bulgaria’s joining the war on Hitler’s side: but after she left Rumania in early 1941, both her subsequent career and her greatnephew’s biography seem curiously anti-climactic – including the four years she then spent in Egypt, writing colour pieces about Cairo life rather than reporting from the front line. (‘I’ll have no women correspondents with my army,’ Monty barked, after learning that she had wangled a flight to Tripoli soon after it had been taken by the Eighth Army. ‘Get rid of her!’)
After the war, and for the next forty-plus years, she reported from Aden, Algeria, the Indo-pakistan War and Vietnam; she was twice married, was made the Manchester Guardian’s defence correspondent and reported for the Telegraph from China for three years before finally settling in Hong Kong. Patrick Garrett labours long and hard on her behalf, but the excitement of the early chapters only briefly revives when, in 1963, she reported that Philby had most probably defected to the Soviet Union; but even that proved anti-climactic, in that Alastair Hetherington, the editor of the Guardian, was so worried about being sued for libel that he sat on the story for two months, by which time it had been overtaken by events.
Hatchards price: £11.69 Woman of the world CHARLES KEEN Ariel: A Literary Life of Jan Morris by Derek Johns Faber £14.99
Jan Morris, writer of more than forty books and countless essays and articles, is probably best known for two things: one, her sex change in 1972, and the other her sympathetic writings about the British Empire. Derek Johns has widened our horizons by writing a ‘literary biography’.
Arguably, that is the best way to celebrate the life of a living person, and he has done it very well; but it does leave one without a clear impression of the character and characteristics of the subject of the study. Jan seems to me a little more clearly defined than James, her former self, and that may be appropriate, since she was born, as she says, with ‘the wrong body’. On the question of identity, she says: ‘The main cause of my disquiet was that I had none.’ She is as much in the dark about herself as we are.
This literary biography is a companion guide to a miscellany of quotes from Morris’s writings, grouped around the different phases and subjects of her life and work. As Johns says in his preface, there are nearly as many of her words in the book as her biographer’s. They admirably reflect her style of writing, which Johns describes as ‘elegant, fastidious, supple, and sometimes gloriously gaudy’.
The excerpts tell the story, but Johns allows us glimpses of his assessment of her character. The ‘self-centred … charm’ which Morris finds in A W Kinglake’s writing could, he says, be ‘a succinct description’ of Morris herself. ‘Authoritativeness, attention to detail, optimism’ characterise her writing and herself, he says. One’s impression is of a companionable loner, a feminine but not effeminate sort of man, an adventurer with a love of the spectacular.
Her taste for the spectacular is focused primarily on cities. ‘I’ve visited all the chief cities of the world’, she boasts from Beijing in 1983, concluding her essays on cities. A cranky ambition, you might say, but it led to some excellent writing. Oxford, Venice, New York and Sydney rate a complete book each.
A brother officer of the 9th Lancers, Otto, drove with James across the desert in the back of a truck. ‘ “G-G-GOD,” Otto said, “I w-w-wish you were a woman.” ’
‘Reply came there none,’ recalled Jan in her memoir, ‘but, dear God, I would answer him now.’ Perhaps we may add sense of humour to Jan’s other elusive qualities.
The Empire trilogy must be the most serious of Morris’s written works, in terms of philosophy and history. Johns takes us through this trilogy, making sure that we understand the influences on a man of Morris’s time: born and brought up in imperial Britain, an officer of the 9th Lancers, serving in the post-war Middle East Protectorate. He saw British rule then as the ‘wisest and most trustworthy force in world affairs, a Power beneath whose cantankerous exterior beat a liberal heart’.
But, as Johns says, Morris is not a historian, more a story teller. She, when still a he, writes with ‘sensual sympathy’ (her expression) of the pageantry of Empire at its height, the red coats, the flashing sabres, the spectacular glory. That may have been an overstatement of the glamour, but she stressed too the Victorians’ commitment to civilise and improve the lives of subject peoples. As a she, she later closes the story of Empire, with, as she says, ‘mingled sensations of admiration, dislike, amusement, pity, pride, envy and astonishment’ – inscrutable as ever. ‘It was time the Empire went, but it was sad to see it go,’ she concludes.
It’s the story of a life that any man might be proud of. Morris was the first Englishman to cross the Oman desert; he covered and scooped the conquest of Everest; he scooped the Suez
debacle. If that was a man’s life, it was written up from a woman’s point of view, and with the skill of an artist.
The biography makes you want to read more Morris writings. You don’t feel you quite know her, but would very much like to know her better. And, in particular, you would like to know her loyal wife, Elizabeth, who was divorced following the operation but stayed in place and was remarried in 2008 under the new dispensation for same-sex couples. Together they have kept their children on side: G-g-goodness! Hatchards price: £13.49
Funny and stoical CONSTANCE WATSON Lucky Lupin by Charlie Mortimer Constable £20
Charlie Mortimer is the son of Roger Mortimer and instigator of the phenomenally successful compilation of letters Dear Lupin: Letters to a
Wayward Son (2012). Lucky Lupin gives ‘Lupin’ his own voice in these memoirs ‘loosely based around the board game “Snakes and Ladders” – otherwise known as life.’
Written over three decades after Charlie was diagnosed with Aids (‘social suicide’) and given only a few years to live, Lucky Lupin focuses less on the troubles that one might expect from the Wayward Son to dwell on, instead gently cavorting through the life of someone who happens to have a terminal disease with a vast and incredibly social supporting cast. Charlie is a compendium of illness: hepatitis B, brain damage, temporal lobe epilepsy (caused by liver failure), just for starters. It’s a wonder that he is still standing. At times, he discusses the inconveniences of having Aids – needing to pee twelve times in the night, the necessity of always carrying a picnic hamper stuffed with medication – and he he also writes about his diagnosis and its reception (‘a close friend wouldn’t even speak to me on the telephone as he thought he might get Aids down the phone line’), but always undercuts the bleak prognosis with humour: ‘There was a feeling of ... liberation to be told that I might, if I was lucky, have a mere two or three years left ... on the plus side, getting an overdue career going and a mortgage was off the cards.’
Charlie’s ‘career’ is varied and entertaining. He works as the following: a mechanic, a band manager, a sales representative for an aerosol manufacturer, an estate agent, on the North Sea oil rigs, HGV driving, running a boxer-shorts company (‘I now have sufficient samples stored in my attic to last me several lifetimes’), a farm labourer and as a law student – to name just a few. This extended and noncommittal employment history explains the ‘wayward’ image that readers of Dear Lupin will recognise.
Lucky Lupin is quite simply a reflection on life and on living, with its joys (‘I’ve found one of the really great things about being on this planet is that if, for some reason, you suddenly can’t smell the roses, then there is plenty of other terrific stuff in the garden to get a kick out of’), its challenges – the thought of suicide, he says, is a ‘comfort blanket of sorts’ – and its miseries: ‘Clinical depression is akin to being personally abused by God.’
Refreshingly, Charlie speaks surprisingly little of familial relations, instead taking the reader on his adventures. Through his energetic romps, with repeat appearances from various bystanders including Rothschilds, Knight Bruces, BrudenellBruces, Flemings, Jay Jopling, Grayson Perry, Elton John and more, one shares his irrepressible sense that it is good to be alive.
Charlie’s story is humorous, his voice is stoical and his account feels very honest: ‘I have few complaints. I consider myself very lucky at least to have had a life and I only have myself to blame for my health and other problems, which are entirely a consequence of my somewhat disorderly conduct.’ The wayward son turns out to be somebody one would like to meet, to know and to befriend. Hatchards price: £18