Not all novelists lead a public life. Those who do, however, tend to make a bit of a performance out of it. Beryl Bainbridge’s life, even before she started publishing novels, was an act, and during her period of fame she was famous for presenting herself in a certain way. It was an effective strategy for dealing with life, and because of it Beryl was one of the most widely loved figures of London life. I didn’t know her at all well, but always found her a total delight when she surfaced at literary parties; she had a knack of making you feel that you were going to enjoy looking after her for the next ten minutes. She often cadged a fag off me; once, when her doctor had had a stern word, she begged me to smoke next to her outside a Hatchard’s party so that she could gulp down the smoke. All in that little-girl voice: she was still irresistible then, but the performance in her heyday must have been overwhelming.
It extended to the novels, which are often enchantingly flippant and cruelly penetrating at the same time. They rarely tell the reader when to care, and our emotions are hardly ever awoken by the scenes of conventional drama. Murders are carried out without anyone being blamed for them in The Dressmaker and The Bottle Factory Outing; and in Sweet William, a man walks out on the unmarried mother of his child shortly after she has given birth. We are expected to be amused by these apparent crises, and Beryl’s account, in conversation, of the real-life exit of the father of her third child was played for laughs. Moments of feeling occur elsewhere, unpredictably.
She had been an actress in rep, and knew how easily the mind wanders during deathbed scenes.
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