Bedford Park, by Bryan Appleyard – review

Nothing in Bryan Appleyard’s Bedford Park betrays the fact that it is his first period novel: not its deft characterisations, its virtuoso dialogue, its dry and economical wit, or its choice of a narrator and material quite outside the author’s own experience.

The 19th century is closing and the 20th is opening in a London seething with foreign sedition and the antics of its own wayward men of genius. The enchanted suburb of Bedford Park, a baroque gem created in 1875 as part of an architectural counter-revolution and renewal, houses W.B. Yeats and the novel’s narrator, Calhoun Kidd.  Kidd has fled Chicago and his domineering father. However, he enters London salon- society through the notorious Frank Harris, whom he knew as a hotel hop in America. I can actually still quote Harris by heart: a dog-eared copy of My Life and Loves did the rounds of the Remove at my prep school exactly 50 years ago.