The novelist Beryl Bainbridge has died, aged 75. Born in Liverpool, she published her first novel, A Weekend with Claude, in 1967. During her career she was nominated for the Booker Prize five times and won the Whitbread Novel Award twice. The biographer Michael Holroyd paid tribute to her in the Guardian this morning:
Beryl had an absolutely original voice: she was a serious comedian, all of whose novels ended tragically . . . She presented herself sometimes as a clown, an entertainer, but behind that mask was a committed novelist. She was unique.
Bainbridge also had a long-standing association with the New Statesman, and contributed to our pages many times over the years. Here’s an excerpt from a Diary column written in 2004:
For those over 50, the past is often more exciting than the present, in that it can rear up like a frightened horse and cause one’s memory to bolt.
It happened to me a fortnight ago when I received a letter from a previously unknown member of my husband’s family. Her dad, elder brother to my ex-husband, was dead, and she wanted to know about his brothers and sisters, and indeed, her grandparents, Nora and Harold.
There exists a famous photograph of the last named, entitled Afternoon in Avignon, in a museum in Liverpool, a city in which Harold was a notable architect. Harold fell off a mountain – he was facing bankruptcy – and Nora, then aged 70, after coming round and attempting to shoot me, threw herself under a train.
I didn’t press charges because in between the gun and the railway line she knitted her grandson a woolly vest striped blue and green.
You can read more of Bainbridge’s writing for the NS here.
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