2 weeks Ago By The Telegraph
Paul Bailey, the novelist, who has died aged 87, wrote understated, mysterious, quietly beautiful stories of English life, his characters enduring grief, love, loss or pain with restrained dignity. Amiable and witty, Bailey was a much-loved denizen of the book world, once described by Philip Hensher as “probably the best cook in literary London”. But although he was a fixture of the literary scene – an inevitable presence at book launches, and a prolific reviewer – he never quite won the reputation that was his due.
As AN Wilson noted in The Daily Telegraph in 2001, “Paul Bailey, known to us all as Pearl Barley, who is, or was, a brilliant novelist...
has never had the success he deserved.” Bailey’s best-known novel, Gabriel’s Lament, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1986, was the funny-sad coming-of age story of Gabriel Harvey, a misfit turned successful writer whose search for self-knowledge is complicated by his upbringing by a racist homophobe of a father and a mother he loved passionately but who abandoned them. As with most of his novels, the prose was austere; Bailey himself described it as “a long and seemingly rambling book, but written sharply and elegantly”.
Its power derived partly from its mining of his own experience of loss – a theme that united much of his work . He was born Peter Harry Bailey in south London on February 16 1937. His father, Arthur Bailey, was a dustman who died when he was a boy; the author later observed that in writing Gabriel’s Lament, “I imagined the father I’d never had.
I got lots of letters from readers saying, ‘You’ve put my father on the page! How did you know?’ The thing is: I completely made him up. When I was writing I thought: ‘How much more awful can I make him?’ ” He was brought up principally by his domineering mother Helen (née Burgess), who worked as a waitress. “She lived to be 90,” he said.
“She was kept alive because she was so sarcastic. She was constantly critical of everybody, and that gives you wonderful energy.” Bailey would publish an engaging childhood memoir, An Immaculate Mistake (1990), which told of growing up working-class, clever and (as he discovered early on) gay during and after the war.
His family called him “the Professor”. He was educated at Sir Walter St John’s Grammar School For Boys in Battersea and as a rather puny specimen was let off National Service even before he informed the authorities of his homosexuality. Just as shamingly for his mother he decided to become an actor and won a scholarship to the Central School of Speech and Drama.
Taking Paul as his stage name, he worked as an actor between 1956 and 1964, appearing often at the Royal Court. He played Lovell to ’s Richard III at Stratford-upon-Avon; one night he came on stage and was unable to recall the line he was supposed to deliver: “Here is the head of that ignoble traitor, the dangerous and unsuspected Hastings.” Plummer “stared at me for what seemed like 10 minutes and then said: ‘Is that the head of that ignoble traitor, the dangerous and unsuspected Hastings?’ and I said, ‘Yes’.
” He turned to writing when he found he was spending more time working behind the counter at Harrods than on stage. His first novel, At the Jerusalem (1967), was a caustic comedy set in an old people’s home and was highly acclaimed, winning a Somerset Maugham Award and an Arts Council Writers’ Award. Next came Trespasses (1970), about a man’s struggle to come to terms with the suicide of his wife and his own homosexuality, then A Distant Likeness (1973), a well-wrought portrait of a policeman’s plunge into the past of a murderer and, by analogy, of himself.
Both were fragmentary, experimental works which won him further critical praise but less interest from the public. More crowd-pleasing was Peter Smart’s Confessions (1977), the life story of a failed actor: it was Bailey’s most autobiographical novel and the one he liked least, although it made the Booker shortlist. The portrait of Peter’s mother, aghast at her little boy’s intellectual curiosity – whenever he begins a sentence with “Why” or “What”, she interrupts with “Y is the 25th letter of the alphabet”, or “Watt invented the steam engine” – drew heavily on Mrs Bailey.
Bailey wasted several years on researching a biography of the novelist Henry Green, which he eventually abandoned in the face of opposition from Green’s family. But in 1982 he had success with An English Madam, a superb biography of , the Streatham brothel-keeper with a heart of gold famed for lining up her clients with tickets to take their turn and giving them Luncheon Vouchers. It was filmed, with Julie Walters, as Personal Services (1987).
“I think I saw that prostitution was as much about theatre as about sex,” Bailey observed. “Certain roles are being played all the time.” He explored the theme further in Sugar Cane (1993), a novel about rent-boys that was inspired by a remark Angus Wilson had made to him: “He said that if Dickens were alive today, he would make Fagin an old queen.
” From the 1980s Bailey frequently travelled as a literary ambassador for the British Council – above all to Romania, a country for which he developed a deep affection. “I thought it was at one and the same time the most depressing and riveting place I’d ever seen,” he recalled. “What really intrigued me was the beauty of the language and the extraordinary sense of comic defeat that people seemed to have.
” He went on to learn the language and the country soon superseded the south London of his youth as the chief focus of his imagination. Romania was the setting for his novels Kitty and Virgil (1998) – praised by one critic for capturing “the hell of Ceausescu’s Romania” – and Uncle Rudolf (2002), while The Prince’s Boy (2014) was about Romanian refugees in 1920s Paris. Bailey regarded his 2011 novel Chapman’s Odyssey, about a seriously ill man reviewing his life in morphine-induced delirium, as being “as good as anything I’ve done since Gabriel’s Lament”.
Many reviewers agreed, Roger Lewis describing it in the Sunday Express as a “bright opiate jewel”, a “celestial deathbed symphony” which deserved to win the Booker. It was not even nominated; indeed, in a sign of the more philistine times Bailey had survived into, he had struggled for more than a year to find it a publisher, and had to be kept from penury by the Royal Literary Fund. Bailey was the editor of The Oxford Book of London (1995) and The Stately Homo (2000), a celebration of Quentin Crisp.
His other non-fiction works included Three Queer Lives (2001), a study of Fred Barnes, Naomi Jacob And Arthur Marshall, and A Dog’s Life (2003), in which he reflected on his 16-year relationship with his mongrel Circe, who had been christened by his long-term partner David Healy, a Royal Opera House costumier, shortly before he died of cirrhosis of the liver. Like his fiction, that book was preoccupied with loss and grief, in their comic as well as tragic aspects. It recorded several of his own near-death experiences, including being tripped up by a nun when they were running to catch the same taxi in Rome, and the occasion at a conference in Budapest when the punk Russian novelist Edward Limonov accused him of being a “f*****g Western liberal” and knocked him out with a champagne bottle when he suggested Limonov might be a closet transvestite.
Bailey was the theatre critic of The Oldie from 2010 to 2019, and in his final years began to publish poetry for the first time; The Guardian acclaimed Inheritance (2019) as “a collection to engage everyone who appreciates elegant craft, shapely storytelling and delicate love lyrics, with a touch of acerbic mischief to offset melancholy and no ‘poetic’ pretentiousness whatever”. Bailey was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999. He named his recreations in Who’s Who as watching tennis and reading Schopenhauer.
His pots of home-made jam were adorned with a portrait of himself by his friend Maggi Hambling. In 2016 Paul Bailey entered a civil partnership with the publisher Jeremy Trevathan, who survives him..
