29 October 2024

Remembering Paul Bailey

The novelist and New Statesman contributor, who has died aged 87, was one of the pre-eminent English writers.

Writing about English landscape painting in the New Statesman in 1975, the novelist, biographer, memoirist, poet and critic Paul Bailey, who has died aged 87, alighted on Geoffrey Grigson’s category of “freaks.” These were the artists, not much noted in conventional histories, who established their vision, discovered it was against the market, and “stuck to it never the less.” In Bailey’s own experience, there was no moment of ‘discovery’. He knew that he was swimming against the tide: it was his chosen direction of travel. Starting with his phenomenal debut At the Jerusalem (1967), a lucid but strange account of an old woman’s experience in a care home, he had set out to challenge what he saw as the solipsism and self-pity and easy effusiveness of contemporary English and American writing. Otherwise, he perfectly fits Grigson’s description – which clearly caught his eye – of “the little masters.”

But while Bailey wasn’t a major novelist as conventionally recognised, this is also true of writers who enjoyed more consistent, or longer-lasting, acclaim. If he was hardly ignored – he won prizes and appeared on bestseller lists – his current reputation doesn’t reflect his record of achievement. For almost a quarter of a century, from At the Jerusalem to his memoir An Immaculate Boyhood, via the comic picaresques Peter Smart’s Confessions and Gabriel’s Lament (both of which made the Booker shortlist), his portrait of the South London madam Cynthia Payne (adapted as the film Personal Services) and a terrifying amount of journalism for newspapers, magazines, and the BBC, he was a candidate the title of pre-eminent English writer, as well as, more narrowly, the heir to V S Pritchett’s throne as the leading metropolitan – London-born, London-saturated – all-round man of letters. Yet he merits only a couple of references in D J Taylor’s history of modern literary life The Prose Factory (2016) and none at all in Peter Kemp’s survey of English-language fiction since 1970 Retroland (2023), though Kemp was his regular companion on the Sunday Times books pages and even wrote about him there.

There are various reasons why Bailey’s name may not come more instantly to mind. He carried few associations other than his own busy brilliance. He had no contemporaries. Raised in a working-class south London household, he plumped for drama school instead of university. He was gay but was never a gay writer. His London was neither neo-Gothic nor a picture of squalor nor a site of anti-Thatcher satire. He was too old to qualify for Granta’s Best of Young Novelists list in 1983 (he had his doubts about Amis and Barnes and though he greatly admired Ishiguro, he thought the whole exercise was undermined by the exclusion of Timothy Mo). He used experimental devices – notably in his 1970 novel A Distant Likeness, a sort of upended police procedural – but was not part of the avant-garde of B S Johnson and Ann Quin, nor later the postmodernism of the Granta writers, developments which exhibited qualities he disdained. (He got very fed up with Philip Roth’s auto-fictional fiddling.)

Bailey’s oppositional sensibility, the basis of his own work and evident in his copious reviewing, was outlined in a 1977 polemic, “The Limitations of Despair,” a Radio 3 talk which received the George Orwell memorial prize. His targets included the painting of Francis Bacon, criticism of Dickens and Shakespeare, the popular reputation – though certainly not the poems – of John Clare, and the “cult” and poems of Sylvia Plath, which, as he argued elsewhere of some of Beckett’s work, don’t go beyond themselves. Despair in this connection was really veiled sunniness; the idea was that art will come to the rescue. Bailey equally disliked whingeing and fantasies of escape, and identified both in prevailing cultural attitudes. (I knew Bailey a little in his later years, a relationship that began inauspiciously, with him calling me an “arsehole” for a grudging review of his penultimate novel Chapman’s Odyssey, and improved when he wrote me a fan letter, in response to an even more grudging review of a writer he didn’t much like.)

The cure was curiosity – about previous generations, as displayed in At the Jerusalem and Old Soldiers (1980), and other cultures, especially in his case Italy and later Romania. He once pointed out that ‘homophobia’ was a misnomer, a duff contraction – the problem obviously wasn’t fear of the same (homos), but fear of difference. Though he wasn’t opposed to self-scrutiny – he had just written a book with “confessions” in the title – he believed that first-person writing worked, as in Proust and Great Expectations and The Conscience of Zeno, the poems of Montale, Herbert, and Elizabeth Bishop or the memoirs of Primo Levi, the subject of an important 1971 New Statesman essay, when it “looks about” – an “I,” he said, that was also an eye. Writing about Geoffrey Grigson, he italicised the description of Constable’s “subjective view of the objective.” Bailey was going for something closer to the opposite, or a balance of the two, a belief in the value of personal experience tempered by a proper consideration of other factors, divergent experiences. The most important virtue was “imaginative empathy” – the same phrase which Philip Hensher used when At the Jerusalem was republished in 2019.