Beryl’s many lovers, welcomed by her husband over a G&T

Beryl Bainbridge lied as a child and it was a habit that stuck. Exasperated by the writer’s constant verbal fudging over her shenanigans with married men, one friend wrote to her: ‘Oh, you never tell the truth. You’re dreadfully dishonest’ — six years went by before the friendship was healed.

Bainbridge’s biographer, Brendan King, was her editorial assistant for 23 years and has set himself the task to be a detective — sifting through her letters and journals to try to distinguish between fabrication and reality. An approximate relationship with the truth is no impediment, of course, to being a great fiction writer.

But it wasn’t until Beryl hooked up with the Duckworth publisher Colin Haycraft (who with his editor wife Anna — aka the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis — launched and nurtured Beryl’s writing career) that she had a hit book, the first two having sunk without trace.

The major theme of this biography is made clear from the outset. Its subtitle is Love By All Sorts Of Means, and is underlined in the frontispiece with a quote from one of Bainbridge’s letters to a long-standing female friend, Judith Shackleton, in 1963: ‘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…’

There are so many love affairs, starting with her secret meetings with a German prisoner-of-war, Harry, when she was 14.

Her feverishly passionate nature is revealed in an overwrought letter she wrote, at 15, from boarding school to her mother, Winifred: ‘Mummy darling you don’t know how much I love you… Its [sic] very hard being young, and aching to be old and wonderful… [there is] a great love within my heart swelling and hurting, because I love you… all my love is pouring at your feet… I want to be more famous and more wonderful than you have ever dreamed…’

The big or most constant love of her life was Austin Davies, whom Beryl met when she was an actress in the early Fifties at the Liverpool Playhouse. He was an art student who had been employed to help with the sets for Bernard Shaw’s Caesar And Cleopatra, and she was instantly smitten.

They do eventually get together, after lots of to-ing and fro-ing — the reader is not spared much of the detail (‘I am beginning to be rather weary of my indecisive nature,’ writes Austin; he’s not the only one) — and heartbreak on Beryl’s side.

During the rough course of their love affair, on one of their many separations, Austin (known to Beryl as Aussie) makes one girlfriend pregnant — a devout Catholic who begs him to marry her to prevent her committing the cardinal sin of abortion.

The girlfriend he marries is Beryl; the girlfriend who ends up having the abortion (and suffering terrible guilt — it is her lifelong secret) is Anna Haycraft, then known as Anne Lindholm. In later life, Beryl — almost inevitably, one feels, reading this biography — has a long covert affair with Anna’s husband, Colin. On her death-bed, Anna refuses to see Beryl.

The first 300 pages of the book are dominated by her love life. Time and again, she is involved in a love triangle with two men — usually, but not always, with her husband, Aussie, also father of her first two children, Aaron and Jo-Jo, and another man.

(She had a third child, another daughter, Rudi, with the writer Alan Sharp.)

On more than one occasion, she returns to the home Aussie has bought to house his family (in Albert Street, Camden Town) to find that her husband and her lover have had a civilised drink together while working out the terms on which Beryl will be handed over to her new man.

If it is true that you should never meet your heroes, after struggling to finish this book the same should be said for reading their biographies.

For those of us who have loved Bainbridge’s spare, singular, dark (and often darkly comic) novels — from Harriet Said and Sweet William to the wonderful historical backdrop later books: The Birthday Boys (Captain Scott’s fateful expedition), Master Georgie (the Crimean War), Every Man For Himself (the Titanic) and According To Queeney (the curious relationship between Samuel Johnson and Mrs Thrale) — it is lowering to have her rendered as a vapid, self-obsessed, neurotic drunk.

The authorial tone borders on the unfriendly at times, and makes one wonder about the nature of their working relationship, which can’t have been all that bad since it endured for more than two decades.+2

BERYL BAINBRIDGE by Brendan King

To give one example, there are many mentions of her being a terrible cook — without her being given any credit for making the effort to prepare home-cooked meals every day for her family, despite her lack of interest in food.

The book ticks all the boxes — her parents, her flirtation with communism and Roman Catholicism, her rape, abortion, suicide attempts, acting, painting, Damehood, friendships and love affairs — but there is something terribly inert about it all.

I longed for a writer who could convey what it felt like to be in Bainbridge’s presence — how she dressed, smelt, the way she walked, her personal tics.

Some key characters in her life are represented only by emails, and I was curious about how they had aged and wanted some atmosphere and physical context to their words. In short, I feel Bainbridge deserved a biographer who was closer to being her equal as a writer.

A s it happens, I was fortunate enough to meet her in her Albert Street home, complete with Eric, her smelly stuffed water-buffalo that almost blocked the hall, and was not disappointed at all. She was kind and clear-headed with strong, contrarian views on rape.

It was piercing, as I wrote then, to hear her say: ‘I’m quite pleased about the books but they don’t mean anything, not really… all I ever wanted to do was to be married and have children.’

She died eight years later in 2010 of cancer at the age of 77 and was awarded the Booker Prize — for which she had been shortlisted no fewer than five times — posthumously and voted for by the public, for Master Georgie.

My favourite line in the biography is from her GP to her consultant, towards the end of her life, describing his long-term patient thus: ‘A completely uncomplaining woman who only accesses help when she is very much in need.’

Daily Mail