Beryl Bainbridge was a true eccentric with gifts for humour and history, writes Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent
IT TAKES a true eccentric to bring eccentricity to life and the British writer Beryl Bainbridge was all of that and so much more.
She had real presence – a small woman with a trademark dark fringe cut straight over direct, slightly surprised eyes, Bainbridge was warm and witty and always slightly theatrical.
Favouring dark clothes and fishnet tights, she was slightly risqué and her mournful, orphan’s face lit up when she smiled, which was often, out of a mouth which invariably had a cigarette stuck in the side of it.
British literary circles will mourn her loss, as well as the acting fraternity. She had become an actor on conceding that she might not make it as a ballet dancer.
Born in Liverpool in 1934, she performed at the Playhouse and had many romances and struck up even more friendships. You had to like her; everyone did.
The first time I met her was at a Booker Prize dinner. She was holding court on the way to the ladies’ rest room and offered me a cigarette. When I said I didn’t smoke, she smiled her big-eyed smile and said: “But my dear, why ever not?”
Her conversation had a performance quality, she knew how to tell a story and above all, how to hold an audience.
As her acting career drew to a close, she got a job in a publisher’s office and began to write. Comic timing, lightness of touch and a feel for the absurd would make her a writer.
Her first novel, A Weekend with Claude, appeared in 1967. She soon developed a distinctive, comic voice in novels such as The Dressmaker(1973) and won the Guardian Fiction Prize with The Bottle Factory Outingin 1974. Injury Timefollowed in 1977.
In An Awfully Big Adventure(1989) Bainbridge drew on her acting experience in a narrative which includes a Liverpool repertory company's production of Peter Pan. The novel was later made into a film, which was shot in Dublin. During the shoot Bainbridge was often out walking. I remember meeting her and she was so openly thrilled by movie-making in general and particularly by the experience of seeing one of her novels become one.
The humour remained but she was increasingly drawn to historical themes. Every Man For Himself(1996) retold the story of the four days leading up to the sinking of the Titanic. The narrator, Morgan, is a nephew of the owner of the shipping line. It is a fine novel and one which asks many questions as to how the tragedy was allowed to happen.
Master Georgie(1998) is set during the Crimean War. The mysterious eponymous character shapes the lives of three other characters and all of this, written with such precision and insight, explores human nature with a subtle wisdom. It may well emerge as her finest book.
At the Cuirt Festival in Galway in 2001, Bainbridge shared the stage with the formidable US writer Annie Proulx in a reading in which every seat was sold out. Bainbridge, small and frail, looked like a doll, and read from a novel, According to Queeny, that at the time was yet to be published.
“This is all about Samuel Johnson,” she said, and added, “he’s not all that well when the book begins.” Written from the point of view of the daughter of Johnson’s secret lover, a society wife named Hester Thrale, the narrative evokes Georgian London.
Hester Thrale and her daughter had been painted by Joshua Reynolds and the daughter tells the story through a child’s eyes. Bainbridge read with the assurance of a trained actress and left the audience wanting the entire book there and then.
Always a great reader of other writers and a generous critic, Beryl Bainbridge, playful and good-natured, loved life and the notion of story.
She believed in the power of books. Her novels engage a reader as a listener. She always wrote well within herself, and never forced her work.
Loud will be the lamentation at her passing, and when one says that the world will be emptier and that bit bleaker without her, it’s because it will be.