2010 On this day, as the authors of this book put their heads together to write their preface (traditionally the last thing to be written), Beryl Bainbridge died. She was well on in years and was known to be frail. The obituaries were all in stock and up to date. They appeared, some of them, the same day – virtually before the novelist’s body had cooled.
Bainbridge was much loved – one of the ‘national teddy-bear’ authors, along with her NW1 neighbour, Alan Bennett. The other image that attached to her was that of perpetual bridesmaid. She was forever being shortlisted, or touted, for the Booker Prize, the UK’s major award in fiction, but never quite won it. The British love a good loser, and none was a more gracious loser than Beryl.
The anecdotes about her were, many of them, chestnuts, but still relished because she was so liked. She was expelled from school at fourteen as a ‘corrupting influence’, having lost her virginity to a German POW called Franz the year before. Her subsequent life, which included a walk-on part in Coronation Street, was rackety. As the Guardian obituarist, Janet Watts, records:
One day her elderly former mother-in-law appeared at the front door, took a loaded gun from her handbag and fired. Beryl foiled that attack, and the episode appears in The Bottle Factory Outing, which won the Guardian fiction prize.
One of us – John Sutherland – also lives in Camden, where Bainbridge, now a ‘dame’, used to take a shortcut in front of where he lives. Her lungs were ruined by years of smoking and she would often take a minute or two’s wheezing rest on a doorstep with a street drunk called Tom, with whom, she said, she discussed such things as W.B. Yeats’s late poetry.
It was a remarkable life. But – prepared as the world was for it – no one knew precisely when it would end. Her death was a wholly random event. She herself confidently expected to die in her 71st year (the age her mother and grandmother passed away) and made a touching TV programme, Beryl’s Last Year, a kind of Ignatian meditation on her own end. She was, as it happened, wrong – surviving, as she did, three more years.
Life (and death) are – unless you are facing execution like Gary Gilmore (see our entry for 17 January) – random events. Literature itself comprises nothing but a mass of randomness. If a novel, or poem, is rejected early on, a major writer may never happen. Any author’s life is full of accidents, tosses of the coin that can fall either way up – one leading to literary creation, the other to silence. What if Dickens had been killed in the Staplehurst crash (see our entry for 9 June)?
For our convenience we package literature into syllabuses, curricula, canons, genres, Dewey Decimal Sectors. But literature is vast, growing (ever faster) and inherently miscellaneous. This book, using a calendrical frame, is a tribute to that miscellaneity. Anything can happen anywhere anytime. As can ‘nothing’, as Philip Larkin sagely reminds us.
The authors have between them a hundred years of scholarship, teaching and conversing about literature (often between themselves). What they know is like two crammed attics – full of interesting junk. But that junk is worth having. The world of books, they believe, is something forever to be explored, never comprehensively mapped. As you read this book, diurnal entry by diurnal entry, stop and try to predict (without peeking) what is going to happen on the next day. Chances are you won’t be anywhere close.
Stephen Fender, a pioneer of American Studies in the UK (and an expatriate American) is responsible for many, but not all, of the New World entries. John Sutherland, a Victorianist by speciality, is responsible for many, but not all, in that period.