posted on 28 Sep 2018

Sweet William by Beryl Bainbridge

Beryl Bainbridge seems to be a writer’s writer. I say this because so many novelists acknowledge Bainbridge’s influence and her talent but her public profile with readers always seems rather muted. She famously never won the Booker Prize in her lifetime despite being nominated on several occasions and in a rather embarrassed acknowledgement of culpability she was posthumously awarded a ‘special’ prize by the Booker Committee in 2011.

Bainbridge was a great stylist – economical, darkly humorous and pithy. Her books are rarely much over a couple of hundred pages and all of them are layered, textured and need more than one reading. I’ve tended to find that Sweet William, published in 1975, is one that gets comparatively little critical attention but is, I think, classic Bainbridge.

It’s the story of Ann Walton, a young woman who has recently left home to live in a flat in London and work at a minor level within the BBC. Her mother is a hostile, smothering monster who constantly undermines her independence and confidence, she’s tentatively engaged to an academic who is off to spend study time alone in the USA and she has few friends, although her rather bohemian landlady – Mrs Kershaw - acts as something of a confidant. When the book opens, Ann is expecting a visit from a cousin she doesn’t much like, Pamela, who it turns out is pregnant and trying to procure an abortion and, on top of this, the ever accommodating Ann  has agreed to go to a school play on behalf of Mrs Kershaw to watch the landlady’s children perform.

This good deed turns out to be a critical turning point in Ann’s life because here she meets William – a striking, charismatic Scottish playwright who immediately invades her life – physically and emotionally. William, it turns out is something of a Don Juan who busily sets about seducing every woman he comes into contact with while insisting on his undying love for Ann. He’s been married at least once before, has lived with other women, has children by his first wife – he’s the living embodiment of the brilliant, unconventional artist who refuses to live by society’s rules.

Ann finds herself completely in thrall to him despite slowly uncovering the web of deceit he weaves. Inevitably she becomes pregnant and has to try and come to terms with how she deals with this relationship – as it seems do all the women William comes into contact with. In the end Ann comes to realise that she can’t live with him but she also can’t live without him.

I’ve read a couple of reviews that take the brilliant, charismatic, untameable man trope at face value and even one review that suggests the novel will infuriate feminists. I think it would be hard to get the assessment more wrong. Bainbridge is certainly playing with that overused trope but she’s brilliantly subverting it by spinning off clues that should alert us to the fact that this is a portrait of male emotional abuse. What William is engaged in are classic forms of emotional domestic violence – he’s controlling, he confines Ann, he lies, he cheats, he steals and uses ‘love’ as a brutal weapon. Once William has captured a woman in his web, he sets about making her both dependent and miserable and disguises that as care and attention. Classically he also uses money (he has plenty) to try and set things right – until his next transgression.

Like so many women trapped in physical and emotional domestic violence, Ann can’t escape – he chose her to be a victim and she finds herself playing that part well because the emotional violence perpetrated on her by her mother has made an ideal target for someone like William. Not unlike Thomas Hardy's infuriatingly passive women-victims, Ann makes the reader want to sit her down and give her a good talking to. 

But, of course, that's the whole point and it’s not Bainbridge’s style to produce something directly preachy or didactic - the reader has to be alert to the clues that accumulate through the novel and spell out the nature of William’s abusive character. Along the way she has some fun with the reader by making many of her characters so much larger than life – William wouldn’t be out of place in a J.P. Donleavy novel and Ann’s mother comes from a dark, mutant alternative dimension where Alan Bennett is best friends with the Devil.

I like what Katha Pollitt has to say about Ann and William in her review for The New York Times:

“There are thousands of women like Ann, though, lost somewhere between rage and daydreams, and Bainbridge treats her with a perceptivity that is devastating. Ann, she states flatly, in the sort of epigrammatic character assassination 19th-century writers used to delight in, "possessed in equal quantities, the reticence of her father, the vampire instincts of her mother." Her genteel passivity, we are made to see, serves the same purpose as William's melodramatic deceptions: both mask the fact that behind them lies no real self at all.”

You will find the novel still in print under the Virago Classics label and you should be able to order a copy easily enough from your local book store.

 

Terry Potter

September 2018