LOVE LETTERS

 

Love letters straight from the past …

Just reading a couple makes me feel odd; the sentiments expressed here, written ten years before I was born, are the reason I exist.

My Darling Robert …

And so I say to a friend, ‘Here’s the thing. Someone is interested in writing a biography of my father and I found these love letters before my parents were married, nothing salacious just rather sweet. Should I …?’

She cuts me short, ‘Oh yes, I found some of those between my parents and I spoke to my brother about it. He said they’ve got nothing to do with us, so I threw them away.’

[My hands come to my cheeks, my mouth opens; too late I realize that, right in front of her, I am enacting Munch’s scream.]

On one, my mother has sketched her wedding dress

My father’s to her are wrapped in blue ribbon

A month or so later, in other company, I say, ‘Here’s the thing …’ and then another friend leans forward and bellows, ‘Of course you should.’ He’s practically shouting at me, ‘… because you want the biographer to know the TRUTH …’ and then, as if speaking to a child, he spells the word out: ‘T-R-U-T-H.’

Oh, that, I think, that slippery old eel.

I want to smother you with kisses.

Dad?

Is that really you?

BERYL BAINBRIDGE: A BIOGRAPHY

How much does the life of a writer you love interest you? This is what I’ve been wondering as I’ve read the biography of Beryl Bainbridge, Love by All Sorts of Means, by Brendan King. In my case it turns out a great deal. I love her writing and I worked for her publisher Gerald Duckworth for a while. In fact I was working in the warehouse when her book on Scott’s doomed expedition to Antarctica Birthday Boys came in. It was the most copies of one title that I ever packed up and sent out to the bookshops and I particularly liked the photo on the cover of the men wearing  their  big furry mittens.

Brendan King worked for Bainbridge for many years but this is no hagiography. What he delivers here is a measured and psychologically astute  assessment of her and along the way he displays considerable sensitivity to her children, especially with regard to the effects of her drinking and her affairs, those known about and those kept secret (until relatively recently).

Bainbridge was a publicist’s dream. There was the stuffed buffalo in the hall and the hole in the ceiling from when her mother-in-law, Nora, tried to shoot her. There was the shop dummy called Neville that she placed in the window to make people think there was a man in the house. The expression one-off is overused but it seems a more than usually apt description of Bainbridge. She was a genuine eccentric and eccentricity makes good copy. And she was also a fantastic, original writer and the fact that she never won the Booker, despite being nominated five times, seems more and more of a disgrace as each year passes.

If you’re interested to know who the sweet William in  Sweet William was or who the character of Scurra in Every Man For Himself was based on you will find it all here. Along with what made her publisher Colin Haycraft kick the draft of Watson’s Apology across the floor. Interestingly, King suggests that one of the reasons Bainbridge turned to historical fiction and away from writing which mined her own life, was because the complexities of her private life were such that she did not feel she could use that as material in her fiction any more.

In his excellent introduction King is very good on the subject of memory especially when it comes to fiction writers:

“Her interviews and her written memoirs are always brilliant, full of memorable quotes and anecdotes, but that was partly because she was never hampered by the feeling that she had to be literally accurate about the facts when recounting them.”

A polite way of stating that she had no compunction in making things up!

“All memory is fiction, which is why autobiographical accounts and historical ones, for that matter are notoriously inaccurate. We censor memories by recalling only those fragments we wish to remember.”

King’s job as her biographer is sorting the fibs from the facts and he does a very thorough job of it.

There is a lot here which is amusing including an assessment of her by the psychotherapist Charles Rycroft as being, ‘a hysteric with psychopathic tendencies.’

There is also hope for novelists who have been on the receiving end of bad reviews:

“No amount of mannered writing – and there is quite a lot of it – can conceal that Miss Bainbridge hasn’t much to say.” SUNDAY TELEGRAPH on A WEEKEND WITH CLAUDE

To The Hampstead and Highgate Express she stated:

“I’ve got some really terrible reviews, so I’ve just given up reading them.”

And yet she survived and thrived.

After reading this biography I was left with the impression that it is probably best never to trust what comes out of a writer’s mouth about themselves. If you want the truth you’re more likely to get it from their fiction.The act of  writing is exposure enough. When confronted with the perils of publicity what writer isn’t going to reach for the invisibility cloak and puff a bit of smoke in the air or hide behind their stuffed buffalo while pointing at a bullet hole.

Nowadays one wonders if someone like Beryl would have broken through. You can’t imagine her synopsis and three chapters would have made it out of any agent’s slush pile, not with her spelling. King suggests she was probably dyslexic.

Here is one of my favourite examples, a note typed to a friend when she was a bit pissed after a row with one of her lovers.

“I have had a violent argument. Surprise – he takes off his bliddy galoshes and lies down. Alright if he’s paying the bills, but wot a romantic set up, if he is my sooter. I have sed his hair cut is losey . . . andd I will neffer wash his underdrawers, not if he is paralised. He ses I have holes in my jumpers. But I sed I am an orther, and they have holes.”

This book comes highly recommended. It’s well written,  emotionally intelligent and fair minded in dealing with her highly complex private life. I should imagine that it’s going to appear on a great many of the lists suggesting books to buy as presents at Christmas. An extraordinary woman and a magnificent writer, Bainbridge has been well served by this sensitive and entertaining biography. Any writer out there wondering who might write their biography should give King a call. Now I’m off to buy a buffalo.

How about you? Are you interested in the lives of the authors you admire or do you find it an irrelevant and irritating distraction?

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD

Biography by Adam Sisman

I’ve been reading and very much enjoying Adam Sisman’s biography of John le Carré. It’s excellent, highly readable and formidably long. It also has as subtle a piece of writing in the foreword as you could wish for about the difficulties of writing the  biography of someone who is still alive. He states there that he intends to update the book when le Carré has died so it’ll be interesting to see what gets added. Incidentally le Carré is due to publish The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from my Life in September 2016 and presumably he must have held some things back from his biographer to put in his autobiography.

I particularly enjoyed reading about The Spy Who came in from the Cold one of my all time favourites, especially when feeling a bit disillusioned with life. So here are a few facts:

• it was originally going to be titled The Carcass of the Lion but Victor Gollancz, the publisher, decided SWCIFTC would be better; it comes from a piece of dialogue in the beginning of the book between ‘C’ and Leamas depicted in the clip below
• Gollancz had the idea of publishing the book under the name of Alec Leamas the name of the main character in the book who dies at the end. Le Carré sent a telegram stating RELUCTANT PUBLISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY DEAD SPY
• the initial advance offered was £150, later increased to £175; the advance he got for his next book The Looking-Glass War was £145,000
• the original suggestion for the actor to play Leamas in the film was Burt Lancaster; Richard Burton was eventually cast
• the character of Leamas was based on a Peter Finch-like man le Carré  sat next to in a London airport bar who slammed down a handful of change from many different countries and ordered a large Scotch. He looked much travelled, exhausted and down on his luck. Le Carré and the barman sorted through the change to find the correct sum in the correct currency
• the disillusionment in the novel comes partly from le Carré’s disillusionment with his own marriage. In fact he cut large parts of the original draft which were concerned with Leamas’s failed marriage
• Le Carré was working for MI6 at the time in Germany but the book was OK’d by them partly because the FO knew that the book was not based on le Carré’s actual experience. Maybe they also didn’t believe that the public would think they behaved in such a cynical manner. Of course the opposite happened. Everyone thought this is exactly what had happened to the writer and how the secret services did behave. The book was lauded as being a believable spy thriller in comparison to the James Bond books
• Le Carré was to describe the success of the book as like ‘being in a car crash’
• He had written two books before – one (A Murder of Quality) featured the character Mundt who figures so prominently in SWCIFTC
• There were problems with the casting of Claire Bloom as Leamas’s girlfriend because she and Burton had history. They had become lovers 15 years earlier acting opposite each other in The Lady’s not for Burning. A decade later their affair resumed during filming of Look Back in Anger. Burton was now married to Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor did not approve and turned up in Dublin where some of the film was shot with an entourage of 17 to keep an eye on them.
• Other scenes depicting the area around the Berlin wall were filmed in London docklands, at that time an industrial wasteland
• The name of the character Bloom played  had to be changed from Liz Gold (in the book) to Nan Perry in the film to spare Elizabeth Taylor’s sensibilities!

If you haven’t seen the film or read the book I highly recommend both of them, perfect for the end of January, especially if you’re feeling a little cynical about life. Richard Burton is at his best in the film. Claire Bloom and Oskar Werner are pretty good as well.

Here’s the clip of dialogue from which the title is taken. A nimble piece of acting by that wily old fox Cyril Cusack.

What do you think of book and film?