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.

Kidd becomes Yeats’s unsuccessful rival for Maud Gonne. He finds the dead body of the Swinburne-quoting Brian Binks on Acton Green and is suspected of the murder but ends up buying the victim’s house. He sees gutter life and the glitterati with Harris, meeting Oscar Wilde in the Café Royal. Harris turns up on his doorstep with ‘Fordie’ (Ford Hermann Hueffer, the later Ford Madox Ford). He walks around a spiritualist festival with Harris, Ford and Joseph Conrad. (Those feet in ancient time did indeed walk upon Turnham Green.) He sees the end of the marathon at the London Olympic Games and a movie at the Bishopsgate Bioscope. He finds out the identity of Binks’s murderer. He sails home to America to a destiny we are aware of but he is not. (How trite the bare bones of even the best fictions are.)