Paul Bailey, who was twice shortlisted for the Booker prize but, to his manifest regret, never won it, was one of the half-dozen most admired novelists of his generation. He was also a fearless literary critic whose acerbic mockery bruised the self-esteem of many an established writer, and precisely the sort of diplomat — sociable, entertaining, never at a loss for an opinion or a word — to be an ideal choice as a British Council lecturer or as a guest at literary festivals abroad. His adaptation of JR Ackerley’s novel We Think the World of You for television in 1980 was so effective it can only be regretted that he so rarely worked in that medium.
As he records in his touching and amusing childhood memoir An Immaculate Mistake (1990), Bailey was born in 1937 in Battersea, south London, then a working-class neighbourhood. His father, Arthur, a roadsweeper, was 57 and his mother, Helen, a domestic help, 41. Later, as an old woman, his mother told him: “You took me by surprise, and your poor father, too. That was typical of you — determined to be different even before you were born.”
It was in Battersea that he spent his childhood and adolescence. Such an environment — in which taking his mother flowers was regarded as “not natural” — was not easy for an adolescent increasingly aware that his homosexuality made him irreconcilably “different”. But he was already showing the resilience that enabled him to adapt when, in 1953, a London county council scholarship took him from the Sir Walter St John’s School to the totally different world of the Central School of Speech and Drama. At the age of 16, he was the youngest among students including Vanessa Redgrave, Judi Dench and Jeremy Brett.
Bailey’s career in the theatre lasted until 1964. His first appearance was at the age of 15 at the Leatherhead Rep in a Christmas show, Buckie’s Bears, “written” by the 12-year-old son of Marie Stopes, who acted as his amanuensis.
After the publication of his debut, At the Jerusalem, Bailey was acclaimed as a gifted new talent
His break came in 1958, when he appeared at the London Royal Court theatre first in Ann Jellicoe’s The Sport of My Mad Mother, and then as the tax inspector in John Osborne’s and Anthony Creighton’s Epitaph for George Dillon. He spent the whole of 1961 at what was still called the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, in one-line, walk-on or understudy roles. The last time he acted was when he was cast, all too obviously against type, as a Liverpool thug in Z Cars for BBC TV.
When “resting” from the theatre and for a few years subsequently, Bailey was intermittently employed in the book department of Harrods. One of his most entertaining anecdotes related how he had shown more than usual deference to a portly customer in a tweed suit and trilby hat whom he had taken to be JB Priestley. After the departure of this figure, Bailey learnt that “he” was in fact the prolific and then hugely popular novelist Naomi (“Mick” to her friends) Jacob. Many years later, Jacob was to be the subject of one of the trio of biographical essays that made up Bailey’s Three Queer Lives (2001). Her companions in that volume were the handsome and recklessly flamboyant Music Hall star Fred Barnes, and “everyone’s favourite maiden aunt” Arthur Marshall.
It was largely because of dissatisfaction with his slow progress in the theatre that Bailey took to writing, for which he had immeasurably more aptitude. His first publication, At the Jerusalem (1967), originated as a TV play, which he then turned into a short novel. Set in an old people’s home, the Jerusalem of the title, it deals with the deprivations, disappointments, humiliations and occasional consolations of old age with so much vividness and poignancy that its author was at once acclaimed as a gifted new talent. It went on to win the Somerset Maugham award and an Arts Council award. Later came the EM Forster award (1974) and the George Orwell Memorial prize (1978) for an essay, The Limitations of Despair, first published in The Listener.
Bailey often complained of writer’s block, but even a glance at his bibliography demonstrates his industry and perseverance. Financial considerations often obliged him, as they oblige most writers, to take on more reviewing, lecturing and broadcasting than he would have wished. In addition, he held a bicentennial fellowship of the University of North Dakota in 1976. But despite all this, he averaged a publication every two to three years.
Gabriel’s Lament was a study of the relationship between a religious scholar and his father
Many — perhaps most — of his readers would agree that, next to At the Jerusalem, the best of his books was the ambitious and multifaceted Gabriel’s Lament (1986). This study of the relationship between the Gabriel of the title, religious scholar and writer, and his father, who deteriorates from being a domineering but not unlikeable eccentric into an intolerant vulgarian, is crammed with comic, touching and tragic incidents in a manner that caused more than one reviewer to describe it, inevitably, as Dickensian. Bailey subsequently revealed that his inspiration for the novel had come from the father-son relationship described by JR Ackerley in his My Father and Myself.
The same imaginative energy also went into the earlier, often grimly farcical Peter Smart’s Confessions (1977). The eponymous hero, an actor obsessed with the more grotesque aspects of mortality, is clearly, in some part at least, a self-portrait. Far shorter and less ambitious was Uncle Rudolf (2002). A perfectly cut gem of a book, it shows Bailey at his most moving. Bailey’s incomparable strength in all his fiction lay in his use of dialogue to define a character or to move his story forward. No doubt this derived, in part, from his work in the theatre.
For a period in the Nineties, Bailey suffered financial worries. He had misguidedly accepted an enviably large advance for a life of the painter Francis Bacon, for which the chief thing that qualified him was a shared homosexuality. Eventually, he decided to abandon the project. But the advance, which he was obliged to return, had already been spent. Some obvious potboilers — two anthologies and the perkily written but lazily researched Three Queer Lives — and the editing of a volume of essays The Stately Homo: A Celebration of the Life of Quentin Crisp (2000), were manifestly a response to financial stringency.
In company, Bailey was always buzzing with joie de vivre. He was, in consequence, equally accomplished as a host and as a guest. A cook of professional skill, he would give large dinner parties at which a heterogeneous collection of people would be dined and wined sumptuously. At one time the protagonist of his acclaimed An English Madam: The Life and Work of Cynthia Payne (1982) could be met at his table. Her sole topic of conversation — her experience of running a south London brothel — eventually wore thin and she vanished from the guest list.
After being asked by the Jonathan Cape publisher Tom Maschler to take on the biography of Britain’s most notorious madam, who in 1980 had been sentenced to 18 months in prison for “keeping a disorderly house”, Bailey mined the full comic potential of “red-arsed vicars”, luncheon vouchers being a euphemism for sex parties, and the bank manager who was smothered with baby oil and then covered with dust from emptying hoover bags. Yet he also touchingly told a story of the survival of a woman who had concluded that “there wasn’t a single man in the whole wide bloody world I could rely on to look after me”.
Bailey told The Guardian in 2017: “I was intrigued by her relationship with her father, and the way in which they were reconciled when he began coming to her sex parties. She’s also so jolly and homely, and she has such a good sense of humour.”
Payne recalled: “Once Paul and me got going we were like a couple of kids. Ooh, we had such laughs. He’s on the sensitive side, and I’m rather the pushy sort. But he’s a bit of a naughty little boy on the quiet.”
Bailey collected gossip with the single-minded avidity with which other people collect postage stamps. That there was usually some gleeful malice in his subsequent retelling of what he had discovered, heard or overheard, only made it more amusing. This approach extended to his reviewing. If a writer seemed to him worthless or even mediocre, he at once made that brutally plain. Oddly, though he paid no heed to the feelings of his victims, he himself would be affronted if, in the course of an otherwise adulatory review of one of his books, he came on even the mildest of criticisms.
Retaining an impish eagerness for any new experience far into his later years, Bailey was totally open about his homosexuality. From 1964 until 1986 he lived, often tempestuously but nonetheless happily, with the theatrical costumier David Healy. This ended only because of Healy’s early death.
Subsequently he shared a more conventional and intellectual life with the publisher and editor Jeremy Trevathan, and the two entered into a civil partnership in 2016.
With an uncharacteristic portentousness, and an imperviousness to a double entendre that he would certainly have derided in any other writer, Bailey once declared: “It was Isaac Babel who said, ‘No steel can pierce the human heart so chillingly as a period at the right moment’. I hope one or two of my full stops have done, and will do, just that.” Whether his full stops did indeed pierce the human heart, his readers will decide. But the best of his books, so humorous, so poignant and so compassionate despite their desolate vision of human existence, certainly did so, and are likely to continue to do so.
Paul Bailey, author, was on 16 February, 1937. He died on October 27 2024, aged 87