Herself Remembered

Marinated in whiskey and cured in cigarette smoke, Beryl Bainbridge’s ravaged, masklike visage—the most memorable since Auden’s—was familiar to every literate Briton. Over there, she was a personality, holding court in her ramshackle London home, recounting her misadventures, lamenting and excoriating the changes—architectural and otherwise—that had made her native Liverpool unrecognizable (not to mention the changes in the Roman Catholic Church after Vatican II), reviewing theater for The Oldie, and repeatedly landing on the Booker shortlist without ever winning the prize. Not so on this side of the Atlantic.

Beryl Bainbridge

Credit: Penny Tweedie / Corbis

When she died on July 2, at the age of 77, Bainbridge was largely out of print in the United States. She rarely shows up on undergraduate or grad school reading lists; her novels don’t fit any of the competing agendas driving the curriculum these days. But maybe that’s a blessing: no motive for reading her at all beyond the promise of instruction and delight.

She liked to say that, no matter what the ostensible subject of the novel at hand, she was always writing about her own experience, especially her childhood in a fractious household. This was but one of many deceptive bromides she served up to interviewers. (Before she was a writer, she was an actress.) It would be truer to say that, whether she was writing about a weekend with Claude or the sinking of the Titanic, a bottle factory outing (she worked for a short time putting labels on wine bottles) or the Crimean War, a narcissistic womanizer or Robert Scott’s fatal expedition to the Antarctic, Bainbridge maintained a detachment, an aesthetic distance, that unsettled many readers.

She wasn’t Oprah material.