Where to start with: Paul Bailey | Paul Bailey

pOle Bailey, who died last October at the age of 87, was famous as a novelist with comic wit, wide-ranging empathy – even for his worst characters – and an intelligence that was never clinical. His novels were often preoccupied with the impact of memories on our lives, usually driven largely by sharp, syncopated dialogue. But he was also a memoirist, poet, and more—so here’s a guide to the legacy of books he left behind.

People who accompany you

Billy was a sociable creature, a great conversationalist and a lover of “frivolous chit-chat,” as one of his characters put it. Billy and his friend Beryl Bainbridge used to watch Coronation Street and then compare notes over the phone. This penchant for gossipy conversations appears in his novels The Transgressions (1970) and The Confessions of Peter Smart (1977). Both feature a man surrounded by funny, crazy, and exaggerated characters, who are usually so closely attached to him that he cannot escape the allure of their nonsense. “Who wants to be normal anyway?” Ralph’s mother asks in “Transgressions” when he tells her he is gay. Like spending an evening with your smartest, and sometimes trickiest, friend.

The ones that make you laugh and cry at the same time

Bailey wrote brilliantly about aging, at both ends of his career. His first novel, In Jerusalem (1967), follows Faith Gadney’s experiences as she tries to settle into life in a retirement home, where the other residents provide the warmth lacking by the staff, whose idea of ​​caring for the residents is to ask: “Why don’t you watch TV?” In Bailey’s penultimate novel, Chapman’s Odyssey (2011), an elderly man in a hospital slips between conflict with doctors (“I only drink fine wine,” he assures them when they chide him over liver test results) and is bombarded by memories of his mother, his lovers, and classic literary figures, from Dickens’s “Pip” to Austen’s “Emma.” Both books are full of funny exchanges but marked by shades of the inevitable ending. Always in Billy’s novels, smiles cannot be trusted. In “In Jerusalem” “The lady smiled, but the smile was quickly extinguished”; Mrs. Gadney laughs nervously when her behavior is challenged. In Chapman’s saga, Harry warns the doctors that “my smiles are not what they seem.” But the reader’s smiles are real enough.

If you want to know the facts behind the fiction

In addition to his novels, Bailey was a brilliant memoirist, having published two volumes of autobiography. Tahir’s Mistake (1990) is a memorial masterpiece, its title taken from his mother telling him, to her third child, “You were our fault. You shouldn’t be here, for real.” “She’s old now,” he adds, “and she’s giving up her secrets. She knew that this person would be of special importance to me.”) In this book we see where all those misguided, loving but angry parents in his novels come from. But it’s also a beautiful portrait of a young man growing up gay in the 1940s and 1950s, when homosexual acts were illegal and his family thought it suspicious for a boy to buy his mother flowers; And an aspiring actor (Billy was on the stage before he turned to the page) memorized Hamlet at the age of fifteen. His second memoir, A Dog’s Life (2004), focuses on life with his mongrel pup Circe and his former partner David, his love of Romania – which inspired his later novels Kitty and Virgil, Uncle Rudolph and the Prince’s Boy – and of course plenty of gossip, including a fascinating account. At a literary event with Iris Murdoch, where she described an audience member as a “stupid cow”.

If you are pressed for time

Most of Bailey’s novels are short anyway – the phenomenal Old Soldiers (1980) is barely 100 pages long – but if you want something a little more concise, try the poetry he turned to late in his career. The two volumes, Inheritance (2019) and Joie de Vivre (2022), bring out the best of Billy’s intelligence, empathy, and precision in capsule form. They are poems full of death and life. Two love themes recur: for his mother (“I’m closer to you now – / I want to tell you – / than I ever was in my life”) and for his civil partner Jeremy Trevathan. In his book Astonishment, he writes of the pleasure of “watching a stupid TV entertainment” together, concluding: “It is a wonderful thing, in itself, the act of eating cheese / And drinking wine, while the world goes on in the dark.”

If you only read one

Undoubtedly Bailey’s most ambitious and wide-ranging novel is Gabriel’s Elegy, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1986. (He was also judged for the prize in 1982, an experience he hated.) This was the book Billy was most proud of, even though—or perhaps because—“it drained me. It took everything out of me.” It tells the story of Gabriel Harvey, whose mother disappears and whose father becomes insufferable after falling into a pile of money – and the two events may be connected. It is a portrait of twentieth-century London, an account of mental breakdown, and is at once as funny and sad as anything Billy has written. If you want more, it inspired a sequel, Sugar Cane (1993), which Billy researched when he became a “regular visitor to a brothel” – as a spectator.