Farewell, Beryl Bainbridge
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
Beryl Bainbridge was a long-term friend of the Lynn Fiction Festival. She would be on the programme most years, either reading from another sparkling new novel or just getting involved in group discussions, where her down-to-earth views were always refreshing. But best of all, she was unfailingly herself – open, friendly, genuinely interested in everyone, as happy to talk about our families as about her books, ‘one of us’; the complete antithesis of a fearsome grande dame of Literature.
Her novels are full of a dark humour - death lurks somewhere in the background (she was first moved to write as a girl by seeing news footage of Nazi concentration camps). But in person, her humour was gentler. This is more a personal memory than a piece of ‘lit crit’, so I shall concentrate on the latter… At one festival, in one of those discussions about favourite writers which often degenerate into a competition to produce the most obscure Bulgarian post-structuralist, she trumped everyone with Rhoda F Comstock, whose ‘Like Flies to Wanton Boys’ is masterpiece of dark rural fiction. Or would be, if it actually existed. A friend of hers, the novelist Paul Bailey, was on hand to keep the joke running, and everyone (except a few people who didn’t ‘get it’) had a wonderful time. Apparently, there was a rather snotty article in the Daily Mail a few days later, saying how these devious highbrow authors had tricked an audience of good honest country folk…
Another time, Beryl admitted that as a drama critic she had ‘only once’ made up a play to fill her weekly column… Incidentally it was typical of Beryl to go on to say that she was very rarely rude about a production, as she knew as a former professional actress how much effort would have gone into producing even a turkey. A subtle hint that an evening could be better spent elsewhere was enough for her.
But now she is gone. The festival will never be quite the same.
A number of her friends from Lynn brushed the straw out of our hair and came down to London for her funeral. I’m not sure what Beryl would have thought of the cameramen waiting outside the church – an unnecessary fuss, I expect. Inside, there was plenty of fuss – but fuss of the right sort, in the form of a beautiful sung mass, in Latin. Alongside her capacity for friendliness towards anyone, however inept or flawed, Beryl had a strong sense of what was correct in procedures, manners and generally ‘how to do things’. She once got herself in trouble with the liberal establishment for saying people from deprived areas ought to have elocution lessons.
We sang two hymns. ‘Dear Lord and father of mankind / Forgive our foolish ways’ is both childlike and deeply wise, two apparent opposites that Beryl managed to combine herself. ‘Jerusalem’ reflected Beryl’s traditionalist side again – though the hymn is also a call to renewal. Both hymns have tunes that are simply beautiful.
The priest gave a brief eulogy, centred on the Beryl he knew, a kind, approachable woman who was fond of babies and was greatly liked in the local community, by all sorts of people who had no idea she was ‘famous’ or a Dame of the British Empire.
After the service, a hired bus took us to Highgate cemetery – via Camden: in a moment of comedy Beryl would have appreciated, the bus turned the wrong way into Kentish Town Road and had to take a lengthy detour to make up for it. Finally we got there, and walked slowly up a winding tree-lined path past long-dead Victorians – Elsie, Albert, Jeremiah (and a family called Greatorex: why aren’t there names like that any longer?) – to her final resting place. There, as one does at funerals, we sang Rolf Harris’ ‘Two Little Boys’. We threw earth onto her coffin and muttered thanks for all she had done and meant. It began to rain…
Funerals are times for reflection, for celebrating lives as whole things rather than just public achievements, for remembering ‘what really matters’. In a piece in The Independent published that morning, Beryl wrote of her love of certain writers: Dickens, Shakespeare, JM Barrie, Dr Johnson. She wrote about her love for her family: her parents, her children and grandchildren, even an ex-husband who hardly seems to have deserved it. She concluded: “We should remind ourselves to the last breath that what mattered was tolerance, patience, regard and a love of a neighbour…”
We’re going to miss her a lot.
Beryl’s final piece in The Independent
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/beryl-bainbridge-on-the-art-of-facing-death-2024233.html
More on the indomitable Rhoda F Comstock at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/mar/24/fiction.berylbainbridge
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Art and Magic
Sunday, July 4th, 2010
There can be few less original lines of argument than a middle-aged person saying that things were in some way better in their youth. Still, here goes…
Yesterday I went round the RA Summer Exhibition, something I used to do every year when I was in my ‘young man about town’ phase, but haven’t done these last 25 years. And I really did feel the art wasn’t as good as it was in the old days. Some old big names – Gillian Ayers, John Hoyland – still delighted, but very little else held and captivated me. In the old days, most of the art was representational or abstract.
Now, a lot more of the art seems to be concept-driven, in the sense of having a clever idea at their heart. The ultimate expression of this was perhaps a Tracy Emin, who’d written some words on a canvas – and was asking £125,000 for it.
At work, I am looking at ways in which the unconscious mind controls the conscious. Conscious thinking, it is turning out, is a much less powerful force than we like to believe. In decision-making, for example, the mind ‘decides’ – MRI scans show bits of the brain lighting up, as if in a debate, then one special area lights up, a few seconds after which our conscious mind says “I’ve decided.” In a gambling experiment, people learnt instinctively to avoid a duff pack of cards, long before they could verbalize this learning, and even longer before they could rationalize it.
Art, oddly, seems to have proceeded in the opposite direction. The paintings I remember from the old RA shows – the landscapes of Spencer Gore, Ken Howard’s quiet studios (the latter is still exhibiting: we’re not talking a totally lost art!) – moved by appealing to the unconscious. “Wow, that’s beautiful!” I thought, and just wanted to stand in front of it. Why? It didn’t matter why. Why was a silly question. It was beautiful, and that beauty was transfixing and transformative.
When I visit an art gallery, that is the experience I am looking for. I want to be captivated, to be drawn to something by a mysterious force. The experience of that force is a healing, enhancing thing: it makes me aware of something in myself that I do not usually notice or live by (something, incidentally, that I share with both the artist and other people who also find the painting captivating). I become bigger and nobler, and I have a new link with my fellow human beings, too. I feel lifted, fresh-spirited, delighted in a new way; I come away more alert to the beauty of the world and prouder of my capacity recognize this.
It is the skill of the artist to make this happen, and none of it has to do with conceptual cleverness or the intellect. I’m not saying that the intellect cannot deliver great things – I get a delight from a well-constructed argument. And I’m not saying that the two should never meet: architecture in particular seems to be a fertile meeting ground for the intellectual, conscious consideration of requirements, knowledge of materials (etc.) and the irrational, unconscious creation of beauty (actually, the most beautiful exhibit in the exhibition was a design for a bank in Kuwait).
To me, all art is ultimately magic. That doesn’t mean it can never deliver a social message, simply that if it does so, it still must be magical. In books, it is that ‘I can’t put it down’ experience. This isn’t necessarily the easy pull of a thriller. I’m currently reading David Copperfield, and can’t be dragged away from the perpetual magic that emanates from its pages. In music, some stuff just compels me to listen.
Cleverness is no substitute for magic.
Having said this, I enjoyed my visit to the exhibition, and will definitely be going back to the Summer show next year. My daughter enjoyed it too, which is great. I’m not sure I agree with her judgement that the finest exhibit was the picture of a cat in a cowboy hat – but another great thing about art is that different pieces have different magic for different people.
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Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Rules for writing
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
I’m a little cagey about putting other people’s work on my site, not because I don’t like the stuff, but because of an old-fashioned concern about copyright. But I need to overcome this, so here goes…
There are loads of rules for writing, but my favourite set comes from Kurt Vonnegut, whose ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ is dark but also funny – a mixture much needed in modern publishing, where humour seems to be out of fashion and pure misery in.
Vonnegut’s Eight Rules are:
1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things; reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
I particularly like rules 1, 3 and 4. Number 8 is one I have problems with – I rather like suspense, and think it drives action. And a good twist and the end of a story is always powerful. The last few lines of ‘An Awfully Big Adventure’ for example. Or any ‘whodunnit’, of course. Rules are, of course, made to be broken – but maybe only by people who have first followed and understood them.
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What sort of writer do you want to be?
Saturday, January 30th, 2010
What sort of writer do you want to be? The modern market seems to feature three types.
First is the ‘star’. JK Rowling is the obvious choice. This writer is ‘one of a kind’ and world famous. She can command any amount of money she asks. She has the enthusiastic support of marketing departments, who can try out new and imaginative initiatives.
If you want to be one of these, you either have to be an original voice (JK, Alexander McCall Smith – or of course JD Salinger, who died this week), often writing in direct opposition to prevailing ideologies (school stories, humorous crime novels, monologues…) or work your way up through the ranks of existing genres (Ian Rankin, Henning Mankell).
Great originals, it strikes me, found genres (Helen Fielding is a recent example).
Then there is the ‘solid pro’. I can’t think of a better metaphor – the professional who writes carefully within the rules of a genre, not venturing out beyond that and not really wanting to (or desperately wanting to, but aware, perhaps, how rare it is to be able to make a good living out of writing.)
For the marketing people, there’s a pretty standard formula for selling these writers and their books, which is determined by the genres in which they work.
For the writer who wants to become one of these, the trick is to pick a genre – ideally one that you like – master its conventions, and stick to them. A little pushing at the edges of the envelope is fine, but not too much.
Much so-called literary writing seems to me to be in genres, too, albeit of a more elevated type. Think ‘magical realism’, ‘Indian booker novel’ or ‘reading group book’. All of these seem to have pretty tight rules. Saying this horrifies some people, but Shakespeare was happy to write genres – tragedy, romantic comedy, history, sonnets, plus a few oddities like The Tempest.
Thirdly, there is the ‘niche player’, who writes for a small group of loyal fans. This is arguably the place for the true artist – but not if he or she wants to make a living. I learnt this the hard way with my Chinese detective series: some people loved them, but not enough to coax more than the measliest advances out of publishers, and it became economically impossible to carry on with the series. (To be fair to myself, I also wanted to write other things: If all I’d ever wanted to do was write Chinese detective stories, then I’d have found a way of carrying on doing them.)
Marketing departments have no budget for these writers. Many aspiring writers feel that a niche player is all they want to be – but the problem for them is getting anyone to notice them. The economics of publishing aren’t exactly favourable to this kind of writing venture. The way to sell it to a publisher is that you are a potential star – as was JK, when the first volume of Harry Potter landed on the desk of her editor at Bloomsbury. But as everyone is doing that, it’s not exactly an easy trick to pull off.
The other route for someone who wants to stay out of the genre trap is to self-publish. But this is something of a graveyard for fiction writers – self-publishing is best for non-fiction writers (who have a ready ‘market’ of enthusiasts for whatever they write about) or, at a pinch, novelists with a strong local feel.
Maybe it’s best to slot into a genre and try and expand the edges a bit. I guess that’s what I’ve ended up trying to do with The Enlightenment Club, which is essentially a comedy, but with some dark bits in it. Time will tell if this strategy has proven a good one for me.
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The value of adversity
Sunday, December 27th, 2009
Adversity. What do you do with it?
Option one is to run away from it. Try and avoid it at all costs. ‘Anything for a quiet life.’
Option two is to suffer in silence (quietly thinking victim-thoughts). ‘Bloody typical. Just my luck…’
Option three? Fall apart (an exaggerated version of ‘2’ above)
But there is a fourth option: treat it as an opportunity to grow. See adversity as an opportunity to learn about oneself, life and people close to you (as in the old adage, ‘now you’ll really find out who your friends are…’) It’s an opportunity to change, to become stronger, wiser, better at standing up for oneself, more compassionate to others…
I’ve spent a lot of my life doing 1 and 2. I’ve usually avoided 3, thank God, though I sometimes flirt with it in my mind. 4? That’s new and exciting.
Often I look back on my life and squirm with embarrassment at things I did wrong. But why not just think: ‘That was actually rather comical. And what did I learn?’. I used to think my lack of worldly success and excess of inner turmoil was due to having made too many mistakes in life. But supposing these are actually due to not having made enough mistakes? Not having tested enough beliefs and theories, not having found out what enough people really thought and felt, not having understood that ‘fortune favours the brave’? (Instead, I had a maxim: ‘Fortune’s a bitch, so keep out of her way.’)
Past mistakes are only crosses to bear if we see them as such.
In the past, I was afraid of adversity. I thought it was a judgement on me, by some kind of God: if I was finding things difficult, that was because I was a bad person. If I could avoid adversity, I would not have to face damnation. (And actually, it was worse than this. I secretly felt I was damned anyway, so the trick became avoiding any kind of test that would reveal this.)
More generally, I was afraid of making changes and decisions, as I thought they were ‘all or nothing’ things. My biggest project this year has been ghosting Robbie Steinhouse’s decision book, and it has taught me a huge amount about these processes, especially that they are slow things, to be brought about ‘artfully’, flexibly and elegantly.
Do the thoughts above apply everywhere?
There are a tiny handful of past deeds I am still appalled by. But even here, there are positive and negative ways of looking at these. Positive: use them as ‘reference experiences’ – I will never, never, never, never, never make that mistake again. Negative is 2 or 3 above.
Also, some adversity may be so crushing that calls for positive responses sound tinny. But there still remains the question – what’s the alternative? Take time to mourn terrible loss – but in the end, you either give in to the forces of negativity or beat them. There is no alternative.
How do we see life? In one sentence… Right now, my best shot is that life is a series of challenges. We have to meet them: they won’t go away. And they never stop. We overcome one, then another comes along (the retirement so many people crave is actually a whole new set of challenges: how to best use your time; how to spend time 24/7 with your partner; how to deal with advancing age; in the end, how to face death…)
I used to think this was a kind of terrible burden, like that of Sisyphus, forever pushing a rock up a hill, which then rolled all the way down again. Oblivion (to which there are many routes) was the only way out. But now I see that the myth is incorrect. We sometimes get the rock to the top of the hill, or we get it as far as we need to. And it’s always a different rock and a different hill. And anyway, even if the rock rolls back quite a lot of the time, this is what we’re built to do. We need ways to express our life-energy. It’s through meeting challenges that we grow (and all the other nice things outlined in ‘4’ above). We meet and bond with people through tackling challenges, not through sitting at the bottom of the hill moaning or hiding.
OK, sometimes we fail, but even then, the rock rolls down to a different place than the one from which we started. And that is in itself a challenge – dealing with failure.
Going back to last week’s post, the philosophy of Nietzsche helped my understand this great truth. But so has my work on the decision book – such is the benefit of ghosting; you get to work with some very inspirational people.
Anyway, this has put me in a very positive mood for the new decade. There’s a lot to do, but I can get out there and do it. May all readers of these blogs face the 2010s with similar energy and determination. Good luck to us all!
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