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.