A Writer's Dreams of Darkest Antarctica
The Antarctica of Beryl Bainbridge's novel The Birthday Boys is a land of “ice not really blue at all but shot through with spangled points of rosy light,” a land of cold so intense it can shatter a man's teeth into crumbs.
In fact, Ms. Bainbridge's novel about Robert Falcon Scott's doomed 1910 expedition to the South Pole is so convincingly icy, you might think she packed her parka and went there herself. But she confined her polar explorations to London.
“I did think of spending one night in Regent's Park, but I never got around to it,” the 59-year-old British novelist confides in her low, scratchy voice on a recent visit here. “I don't like the cold.”
So she just imagined it. The Birthday Boys weaves fiction around the facts of Scott's expedition, doomed almost from the start: The motorized sledges Scott lugged to Antarctica broke down, his ponies collapsed, and he didn't bring enough dogs. Scott and his four-man party did make it to the South Pole—only to freeze to death after discovering that they had been beaten there by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen.
Drawing on her reading of their letters and journals, Ms. Bainbridge delves into the minds of those five men: from Scott, a driven and emotional leader who writes off his blunders as bad luck, to the heroically chipper Birdie Bowers, who risks death for a ludicrous mission to collect penguin eggs, because “there was something splendid, sublime even, in pitting oneself against the odds.” In the process, she captures the doomed idealism of a British empire on the verge of dissolution, whistling in the dark of an antarctic blizzard.
It's one of Ms. Bainbridge's best novels yet. Curiously, The Birthday Boys is also the one that has taken her farthest from her factual and fictional home turf: Liverpool, where many of her 13 novels are set. She was born there in 1934, the daughter of a traveling salesman and his slightly better-born wife. Her early childhood was shaped by World War II and the hail of bombs that fell on Liverpool.
“One went into shelters every night,” recalls Ms. Bainbridge, a birdlike woman in a brown suit who smokes cigarette after cigarette from her mother's old monogrammed case. “Then I got double pneumonia and my parents put me under the dining-room table instead.”
The blitz from above was echoed in the turmoil in the Bainbridge house. Her father went bankrupt, a secret so shameful it was kept from young Beryl and her brother. That secret poisoned an already turbulent family life. Her parents “loathed each other,” she says. Her father alternated between explosive fits of rage and periods of moody withdrawal. (After one blowup, 15-year-old Beryl tried to rent rooms for her mother and herself at a local hotel—not knowing it doubled as the local brothel.) It was to make sense of her home life that she began writing at the age of eight or nine.
“I had a huge book on the travels of Dr. Livingston and Stanley in the jungle, beautifully cut like a huge old Bible,” she remembers. “I used to get an exercise page from my schoolbooks and make paste from flour and water and stick that over the marvelous prints, and write about my mother and father. The only thing is that in time the flour and water swelled, so the book wouldn't close. There was no privacy in that house, and I was terrified of them ever seeing it. So I...
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burnt it.”
From then on, she only wrote “sub-Treasure Island and Dickens.” Such literary aspirations notwithstanding, she was expelled from her upscale grammar school at the age of 14 for illustrating a naughty rhyme by one of her classmates. “Since I was quite good at showing off,” her parents sent her to ballet school instead.
She had proven her talent at showing off by the age of 11, when in answer to a newspaper ad she began acting in BBC radio plays. But after nine months at the ballet school, Ms. Bainbridge left—never to return to school of any kind again. Instead, at 15 she got a job at a local playhouse as stage manager, bit player and general dogsbody: an experience she drew on for her 1989 novel, An Awfully Big Adventure. Her acting career continued until her first marriage, and included small parts in a few London productions and in the popular British TV series Coronation Street.
Although Ms. Bainbridge had written a few children's stories for radio, her writing career didn't begin in earnest until her marriage ended (she has three children). She moved to London and has remained there ever since. But the novels she began to write were all set in Liverpool of her youth, their characters figures from her past. In some cases, she didn't even bother to change the names: Nellie and Margo, the eccentric aunts of her 1973 novel, The Dressmaker (published here as The Secret Glass)—a darkly funny story about a young girl's ill-fated crush on an American soldier—are based on her own very real aunts.
“The first six or seven books were based on my childhood,” she says. “After a while, I used it all up and had to go elsewhere.”
But “elsewhere” often took her back to her own doorstep. Ms. Bainbridge's 1978 novel, Young Adolf, is based on Hitler's actual stay of several months in Liverpool with his half-brother in 1912. “Adolf was my father,” she declares. Both men were born in 1889, and for a brief time lived in the same city. Young Hitler—like her father—“had no friends, no money and no future.” Her 1984 novel, Watson's Apology, was inspired by the story of a real-life Victorian schoolteacher who bludgeoned his wife to death. Ms. Bainbridge drew on Watson's actual letters, but the character she created “was half my dad and half Dr. Johnson”—the curmudgeonly 18th-century literary critic.
Like those novels, The Birthday Boys is closer to home than one might think. Asked how she went about creating the British navy Capt. Scott, the writer answers: “I tried to imagine my father as upper class and naval.”
She also hung expedition members' photographs on her study walls, and even did paintings of them. Chance phrases gleaned from their letters and diaries helped bring them to life, such as the comment by one party member that “Scott was a dreadful man for blubbing” (Britspeak for crying).
“You act them in your head,” she says. “I mean, I'd walk around going, ‘Put up the mainsail,’ that sort of thing.”
Those men are still in her mind. Even now, she is haunted by the thought of them, lying in the shroud of their collapsed tent somewhere beneath the snow in that land of luminous ice.
“They're still there … perfectly preserved. They're on an ice shelf that moves terribly slowly. They won't tip into the sea for a long while yet,” she murmurs. “They're the lost boys.”
