This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Paul Bailey’s first invention was himself. The English author of a dozen exquisite novels, who died in October at the age of 87, was born Peter Harry Bailey. In childhood he invented a twin brother for himself “who spoke in a different voice although he had my face and wore my clothes”, called Paul. “It was fun being someone else, escaping from the Peter that I was into the Paul of my imagination.” In his late teens, as an actor, he found there was already a Peter Bailey registered with Equity, and Peter formally became Paul.
A life in fiction, then, in more ways than one. And, quite aside from any thoughts of paying tribute, few literary activities could give any sensitive reader as much delight as reading or re-reading Bailey’s novels now. These are quick-witted, sure-footed exercises in comedy and tragedy as the two sides of the coin of life, delivered with structural variety and an all-encompassing empathy.
Though it may seem spurious to say it of a novelist who was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, who counted Beryl Bainbridge amongst his friends (they used to watch Coronation Street and compare notes over the phone afterwards), and at least half of whose novels are still in print, that spavined term of faint praise “overlooked” seemed to me to apply to him in the last couple of decades of his career. Time to make the case for Bailey’s greatness and permanence.
Perhaps his underappreciated status is because Bailey came from the generation before the 1980s boom boys — the Amises, McEwans and Rushdies — being born a decade before them. Before those fat years of literary fiction in Britain, he could be shortlisted for the Booker (Peter Smart’s Confessions, 1977) and not even have the novel released in paperback until 23 years later.
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Three things informed Bailey’s approach in his precociously good early novels. First, his time on the stage gave him both a feel for sparky dialogue as the driver of a story, and for characters big enough to see from the gods. Second, as the child of older parents for the time (his mother was in her forties and his father in his fifties when Bailey was born), he was surrounded by elderly relatives which gave him a clear-eyed view of ageing. (“Old age is a fact of life and should not be isolated from it,” he has written. “More sentimental rubbish has been written about ‘the plight of the elderly’ than I can bear to contemplate.”) Third, the towering figure of his mother, the inspiration — conscious or otherwise — for the monstrous parents that populate his books.
These elements combined in his first novel At the Jerusalem (1967, dedicated “To my mother”), a novel of great empathy for those at the far end of life from an author so young. Set in an old people’s home, it follows a recent entrant, Faith Gadny, as she navigates her new life. A place where caring is a secondary concern to mindlessly filling time (“Why aren’t you ladies watching television?”), it is presided over by coldly efficient management. “The matron smiled, shut the smile off quickly.”
Bailey tells the story almost exclusively in dialogue, his ear as sharp as Alan Bennett’s: one gossipy resident speculates that another has been sneaking “a man” into her room. “I wouldn’t put it past her. These la-di-da ones, you know, are usually the first to offer their crumpets.” We see into Faith’s mind — “Mrs Gadny” in the book’s adopted impersonal tone — only when she writes letters to an old friend who may not even be alive any longer. When At the Jerusalem was reissued a decade ago, the critic Leo Robson — no pushover — said “I would struggle to name a novel by a living English writer more worthy of republication.” I agree.
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With the possible exception of 1973’s A Distant Likeness (a challenging anomaly and the only book of his never to have been reprinted), the run of five novels that followed sealed his reputation. All are dialogue-heavy tragicomic jewels of how the past is hard to escape, especially in a family context. And although Bailey once said he “let out a wail” when advised to “write from experience”, there are elements here from his life: acting, homosexuality, and the recognition that if it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.
Trespasses (1970) adopts an experimental structure — short sections that gradually expand and fill in our understanding — but to highly entertaining ends. It is the story of Ralph Hicks, whose attempts to recover from his wife’s suicide lead him into his own childhood. As always, the gloom is leavened with wit, as Ralph’s landlady kicks him out. “People who dispose of themselves are as inconsiderate as they are wicked. All that blood in my bathroom. I shan’t ask you to foot the bill for decoration, but I shall ask you to leave.”
But it’s in Trespasses that we see the first of Bailey’s great grotesques, in the character of Bernard Proctor — he prefers “Auntie Bernard” — whose sustained monologue revels in camp wit (“mind your head on the chandelier — it hangs low, like all the best things”) as he tells us how his mother was unfazed by his coming out (“Who wants to be normal anyway?”) and was concerned only that the man he was dating was lower-class.
Bailey’s 1977 novel Peter Smart’s Confessions took elements of Trespasses and ran with them. But the word-by-word care he takes over his writing — Bailey once said “a good paragraph is a day’s work” — never comes out as density. It’s his lightness of touch that makes this book in some ways seem like the ur-Bailey text: the comic exchanges, the virago of a mother, the extravagantly distorted personal experience (Peter Smart, like Peter/Paul Bailey, is an actor-turned-writer) and the parade of low freaks. It narrowly missed a Booker gong when Philip Larkin, one of that year’s judges, threatened to jump out of a window if his favoured entrant (Paul Scott’s Staying On) didn’t win.
Indeed, with his next novel Old Soldiers (1980), it was to one of the freaks that Bailey turned his empathetic skills. The book’s secondary character, Hal Standing, lights up every page he appears on with his vulgarity and licentiousness. The compact storytelling — the stamina an author needs, to trust the reader enough not to say too much — means the book is just over 100 pages long, with the emotional heft of a triple-decker.
Gabriel’s Lament, Bailey’s 1986 novel and second Booker shortlistee, could be considered his masterpiece were his other achievements not so various. It is a novel of Dickensian amplitude, portraying London and its most eccentric denizens from the 1940s to the late 1960s, in the service of the story of Gabriel Harvey. Gabriel’s mother disappears and he becomes his father’s son — but his father is a comically snobbish ogre. (Bailey’s own father died when he was 11: “I imagined the father I never had.”)
And yet, however Bailey punishes the father — he loses both his legs along the way — his compassion for his characters wins through, and we find out in the end how the ugliness toward his son was displaced suffering. Still, as in At the Jerusalem and Old Soldiers, to be old here is not to be decrepit, but to be an intensified version of oneself. “In my rogering days, I wouldn’t have given her a glance,” Gabriel’s father declares of his live-in carer. Bailey declared that writing Gabriel’s Lament “drained me. It took everything out of me”, but by the principle of conservation of energy, it only invigorates the reader.
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To focus on these early titles does not diminish Bailey’s later achievements. After Gabriel’s Lament, a loose sequel, Sugar Cane (1993), followed; and then a number of novels — Kitty and Virgil (1998), Uncle Rudolf (2002), The Prince’s Boy (2014) — with Romanian protagonists.
Bailey first visited Romania in the 1980s and fell in love with it, later learning the language. Although the country initially struck Bailey as “mad to the point of insanity” — an apt origin for one of his characters — the Romania novels, perhaps like late work generally, are more sober than his early books. They are restrained in their effects, which allows their sparks to shine all the brighter.
Yet the book of Bailey’s which might be his most irresistible read of all, against stiff competition, is the first of his two memoirs, An Immaculate Mistake (1990). It constitutes his origin story as a novelist, capturing his mother, a literary creation worthy of any of his fictions. She is a magnificently contrary figure, a sharp verbal sparring partner for her son, never praising when she can bring him down a peg, though he nonetheless sees the best in her as well as the worst. When she tells him, her youngest child, that “You were our mistake. You ought not to be here, by rights”, he believes that the possessive — “our mistake”, not “a mistake” — means “she had chosen the word with care, with affection”.
We see, too, Bailey’s origins as an actor, and — never with self-pity — how both his desired career and his homosexuality faced family challenge. An uncle told him, “I’ve made a study of theatricals, and they’re all tarred with the same filthy brush.”
Late in the book he tells the story of a terminally ill young man who rejects visitors to hospital but spends his time reading classic novels, “to live, for a short while, amongst the undying”. And in his last novel The Prince’s Boy (2014), Bailey’s narrator rejects the idea of a writer as a “genius who could afford to be neglected until posterity claimed [him]”. Bailey should have been safe from such a fate.
