Beryl Bainbridge: Love by All Sorts of Means

by Brendan King

Dame Beryl Bainbridge was one of the best loved and most recognisable English novelists of her generation. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times and her critically acclaimed novels The Dressmaker (1973),The Bottle Factory Outing (1974), An Awfully Big Adventure (1990), Every Man For Himself (1996) and Master Georgie (1998) confirmed her status as one of the major literary figures of the last fifty years.

A unique voice in fiction, and unforgettable in person, Beryl Bainbridge was famous for her gregarious drinking habits and her unconventional lifestyle. Yet underneath the public image of a quirky eccentric lay a complex and sometimes traumatic private life that she rarely talked about and which was often only hinted at in her novels.

In this first full-length biography, Brendan King draws on a mass of unpublished letters and diaries to reveal the real woman behind the popular image. He explores Bainbridge's difficult childhood in Formby, her career as a young actress at the Liverpool Playhouse, and her life as a single mother and writer in Camden Town. Along the way he tackles her complex private life: her failed marriage to the painter Austin Davies, her affairs, and her longstanding relationship with her publisher, Colin Haycraft.

This frank portrait of Beryl Bainbridge tells the story of a life that is every bit as dramatic and compelling as one of her own perfectly-crafted novels.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, British Literature, 20th Century, Biography Memoir

576 pages, Paperback

First published April 26, 2016

Reviews

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

BOTW

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07sy32z

Description:A biography of the novelist who denied that she ever wrote fiction, maintaining that her books were based on her experiences. "What is more peculiar, more riveting, devious and horrific than real life?" she said. But while her own life was the primary source for her books, she was never afraid of adding a little colour.

The author Brendan King is a freelance translator, editor and reviewer, with a special interest in late nineteenth century French literature. He completed his PhD on Joris-Karl Huysmans' life and work at Birkbeck College, London, in 2004. Between 1987 and 2010, King worked for Beryl Bainbridge, and helped prepare a number of the novels she wrote during this period for publication, including the book she was working on at the time of her death, The Girl in the Polka-dot Dress, which was published posthumously.

Readers:
Narrator....................James Fleet
Beryl Bainbridge........Samantha Bond

Episode 1: The early years at Formby.

Episode 2: Swept up by the stage

Episode 3: Life with Austin.

Episode 4: When Beryl met Alan.

Episode 5: An accidental meeting sets Beryl on the path to success.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

From BBC radio 4 - Book of the Week:
A biography of the novelist who denied that she ever wrote fiction, maintaining that her books were based on her experiences. "What is more peculiar, more riveting, devious and horrific than real life?" she said.

But while her own life was the primary source for her books, she was never afraid of adding a little colour.

Episode 1: The early years at Formby.

Episode 2: Swept up by the stage.

Episode 3: Life with Austin.

Episode 4: When Beryl met Alan.

Episode 5: An accidental meeting sets Beryl on the path to success.

The author Brendan King is a freelance translator, editor and reviewer, with a special interest in late nineteenth century French literature. He completed his PhD on Joris-Karl Huysmans' life and work at Birkbeck College, London, in 2004.

Between 1987 and 2010, King worked for Beryl Bainbridge, and helped prepare a number of the novels she wrote during this period for publication, including the book she was working on at the time of her death, The Girl in the Polka-dot Dress, which was published posthumously.

Readers:
Narrator....................James Fleet
Beryl Bainbridge........Samantha Bond

Author: Brendan King
Abridger: Pete Nichols
Producer: Karen Rose

A Sweet Talk production for BBC Radio 4.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07sy32z

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was late coming to Beryl Bainbridge. I wasn't aware of her until the publication of her 9th novel, Young Adolf, in 1978. Still, I didn't read her until the 1991 novel The Birthday Boys. Today I think of Bainbridge as a writer I admire and am always tempted to read more of, yet I've read only one other of her novels, According to Queeney. I guess you might say that my interest in her biographical details means she leaves an impression.

So the Brendan King biography of her quickly caught my eye upon its publication. It didn't disappoint, either. I don't particularly like biographies which take too long in getting their subjects grown up. Just cover basic highlights and influences which will figure later in their work and quickly get them to the heart of the story we know them for and want to read about. But King lingers almost lovingly while Bainbridge grows up and portrays her as an appealing girl and young woman. I was surprised at how receptive I was to reading about her early years. They were years in which writing appeared not to be in her future. She was an actress for many years and only turned to writing when she saw the rich veins of material her relationships and family offered. I suspect she was a better writer than actress, but she had some successes, and her work in theater gave experience she later used well in television.

When she did turn to fiction, she was prolific. This isn't a critical biography and therefore little analysis of her novels is provided other than ways they revealed herself and her own life. In fact, she said late in life, "I can't write fiction, my life's in all my novels." The relatively scant gloss on her work leaves room for what King emphasizes in his subtitle "Love by All Sorts of Means". Bainbridge gave up on marriage fairly early on, but there was always at least one man in her life, always lots of alcohol, and always art and artists filling a life hard-lived. And out of it came the well-regarded fiction she's famous for. Brendan King, who worked for her from 1987 till her death in 2010, is familiar with the complete Bainbridge and tells her well.

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have very much enjoyed reading this biography. I only quite recently read my first Beryl Bainbridge novels (with thanks to Mark Knopfler for his song Beryl on his album Tracker. I might never have learned of Beryl Bainbridge’s existence if it hadn’t been for that song) and instantly fell in love with her writing. After having watched the BBC documentary made by her grandson Charlie back in 2003 this summer on Youtube, I wanted to find out more about this author and her writing and this biography is absolutely perfect. It is very well documented with lots of excerpts from letters and diaries the author kept throughout her life. It gives a good sense of who Beryl Bainbridge was, both as a private person and as a writer. It also gives lots of information about the whole writing and publishing process, which I found very interesting. I also liked that it is a quite intimate portrait of the author that feels very honest and does not embellish things too much. The book is quite long, but it never really feels like that because it keeps you interested all the way through. It sometimes made me want to cry and sometimes made me want to laugh and that is exactly how I feel when reading Bainbridge’s books as well. In my opinion, this book really captures the spirit of a remarkable author and draws a portrait of a great creative mind and a troubled soul. If anything, it has got me even more interested in Beryl Bainbridge’s writing. I can’t wait to read more of her books in the (probably very near) future and dip in and out of this biography as I go along. Highly recommend this!

[Luci · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a detailed biography of Beryl Bainbridge from her childhood, early acting career and complicated relationship with her boyfriend, then husband, Austin Davies, through her subsequent marriages and relationships (including an affair with her publisher, Colin Haycraft (Duckworth), and a complicated on-off friendship with Haycraft's wife, Anna Haycraft, who also wrote novels as Alice Thomas Ellis - the two women had known each other since their teens). The author, Brendan King, became a kind of personal assistant for a few years at the end of her life.

Brendan King tries to tease out the relationship between her writings and her actual life. Many of her contemporary novels draw on her experiences and include portrayals which may be based on real people but they are not memoir, and they are developed into fiction. Also, Bainbridge's diaries, letters and the stories she told about herself often included substantial changes in details. For example, she claimed some of her experiences had happened at a significantly younger age than was really the case.

This is quite a long book, nearly 500 pages of the main text with 60 pages of carefully referenced endnotes. There are 16 pages of black and white photographs of Beryl Bainbridge, various men in her life and friends.

I found it an interesting read and it makes me want to pick up her novels at some point, but I also found the subject of this book quite frustrating - some of the men in her life sound quite unpleasant and some of her choices in her life appear to have been quite self-destructive. It is quite a "gossipy" warts and all memoir though in a carefully researched literary style.

[Trebledb · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best biographies I have ever read about someone I knew nothing about. Now I am looking forward to reading her books.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Without making it an overt objective of his biography, King does a masterful job in recounting with great detail and in a clear narrative the way Beryl Bainbridge used the messy emotional materials of her life, transmuting and refining them, to produce her scintillating, understated works of art. Bainbridge lived to be loved, and she returned that affection with eccentric charm and wit, but circumstances made it difficult to sustain relationships, and there was throughout the first fifty years of her life a constant ebb and flow of affairs beginning, ongoing, and ending.

I have been in awe of Bainbridge’s writing since I first came to it, admittedly late (2015) and from the ass end. Starting with The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, I immediately sensed a writer so in control of her effects that I was not put off by the seeming irresolution of this novel. I then read According to Queeney, and have over the intervening five years read a dozen of her novels. The order in which I read them made me think her a wizard at transporting me to different times and places, and I never sensed a biographical detail except when I came to Sweet William and Harriet Said…, and even then the settings and effects were so different. With An Awfully Big Adventure, my little knowledge of Bainbridge’s time in the theatre was sufficient to make me suspect that aspects of that novel probably drew on autobiographical detail.

Bainbridge had more than once claimed her life could be pieced together from the content of her novels. Maybe… Bainbridge was hardly interested in the literal truth in recounting her life, and Brendan King had much ado sorting out the fact and fiction even in the biographical details she shared in interviews and newspaper features. There are correlates to events and people in many of her novels, but King makes clear that her novels could never be considered romans a clef.

King’s thoroughness in accounting for the incidents and the people behind Bainbridge’s fiction serves to enhance how brilliantly Bainbridge exercised her imaginative powers, how she could so nimbly reconfigure the elements in her life to imbue the historical novels about Antarctic exploration, the Titanic sinking, the Crimean War, etc., with insights and perceptions seemingly so outside her ken. King recounts how the many romantic affairs in which Bainbridge entangled herself throughout her life were for her a necessity. Bainbridge was emotionally volatile in a way that made her life messy and unpredictable, and yet these fraught and confusing entanglements were for her vitally necessary, her lifeblood, not just the springboards to her acting, painting, and fiction.

[Stephen Curran · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Ken had no idea that Beryl was flirting with the idea of an affair with Hugh or with George; George was in the dark about Hugh; Austin had been unaware of Beryl’s crush on Kevin Stoney in Dundee and didn’t know about her feelings for Robert or George ... three days after her return from Paris, Robert Lawson had asked her to marry him - and the situation with Ronnie Harris was beginning to get out of hand.”

This, from chapter 13 of LOVE BY ALL SORTS OF MEANS, gives a idea of the chaotic nature of Beryl Bainbridge’s romantic life and perhaps explains why so much of this biography is given over to it: there’s simply so much to say. Inevitably, everything gets a bit jumbled and repetitive but this isn’t the biographer’s fault. The Booker bridesmaid lived the life she lived. I would have liked, though, a bit more focus of the work (EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF, one of her most popular and successful novels, gets only three entries in the index). This is a matter of personal preference more than anything else. It’s an impressive and unsentimental summary of the author’s life but simply not quite the book I was looking for.

[eLwYcKe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having a complicated, messy and occasionally disturbing love life might make for absorbing reading in fiction, i.e. 'Sweet William', but in real life....
I read the first few chapters of this autobiography with a mixture of disbelief, exasperation and bemusement. What an unforgettable character she was!
Once we get to the actual writing of the novels there seems a point to it all and I really rather loved being in her world for a little while. I bloody love Beryl Bainbridge.

[Ruth Brumby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost excessively well researched, with many quotes from letters and diaries. As the title suggests, the focus is on relationships. Beryl Bainbridge had many relationships with men, based on motivations and expectations I couldn't really understand.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Doesn’t exactly fizz, but this is a competent, sturdy book about an author I’ve heard of but never read.

Where to start with the Booker bridesmaid?

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author does a good job of sifting out the truth from the fiction of Beryl Bainbridge's life but this comes at a cost since the rather stark, unadorned truth stands in stark contrast to her wonderful, witty writing style. On the other hand I did feel the writer remained touchingly respectful of Beryl and he came across as someone who genuinely wanted to portray her fairly. He doesn't push himself into the book unnecessarily by trying to play up his importance in her life yet there is a sense that he was one of many people who supported and stayed loyal to her despite her often erratic and unpredictable behaviour. Made me want to read her novels again.

[Juliet Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting biography- makes you think about biography/ autobiography/ fiction and memory. Good on life in Formby in the forties and fifties, bohemian literary north London, how a publishing house operated... but I just couldn't remember many of the men's names or distinguish them from each other ....,a list of doomed relationships, entered into kamikaze style, again and again...

[Mari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Audiobook, read by Simon Shepherd

[Poppy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting read into a relative of mine, fascinating to get to know my Grandmother's cousin better