Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  ALSO BY SELINA HASTINGS

  Nancy Mitford

  Evelyn Waugh

  Rosamond Lehmann

  The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham

  The Red Earl

  Aldous Huxley, Sybille Bedford (center), and Eva Hermann on the beach, Sanary-sur-Mer, ca. 1931

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2020 by Selina Hastings

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Vintage, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd, London, in 2020.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hastings, Selina, author.

  Title: Sybille Bedford : a life / Selina Hastings.

  Description: London ; New York : Chatto & Windus, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020019903 (print) | LCCN 2020019904 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101947913 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101947920 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Bedford, Sybille, 1911–2006. | Authors, English—20th century—Biography. | Women authors, English—20th century—Biography.

  Classification: LCC PR6052.E3112 Z68 2020 (print) | LCC PR6052.E3112 (ebook) | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020019903

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020019904

  Ebook ISBN 9781101947920

  Cover photograph by Lord Snowdon / Trunk Archive

  Cover design by Chip Kidd

  ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  To Julie Kavanagh

  with gratitude and love

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  ONE Lisa and “le beau max”

  TWO Baronin Billi

  THREE From icy England to the warmth of the Mediterranean

  FOUR The delights and dangers of Sanary-sur-Mer

  FIVE Sailing into the unknown

  SIX “A new exotic opulent world”

  SEVEN The loveliness of Rome

  EIGHT “That ogre, the snail novel”

  NINE “Heaven bless you, Mrs. Bedford”

  TEN “The tremendous trials of our time”

  ELEVEN “Food is part of the love of life”

  TWELVE “Novels among other things are galleries of mirrors”

  THIRTEEN “Getting old & weak is horrible”

  Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  List of Illustrations

  Notes

  PREFACE

  “I wish I’d written more books and spent less time being in love,” Sybille Bedford said once in an interview. “It’s very difficult doing both at the same time.” Certainly, from adolescence until well into old age, there was rarely a period when Sybille was not in love, some of her relationships long-lasting and profound, others little more than temporary infatuations. With one exception her affairs were with women, her remarkable talent for friendship ensuring that she always remained on good terms with her lovers, as is clear from the enormous volume of correspondence which fortunately still survives. Over many decades Sybille wrote hundreds of letters detailing not only her affairs but also her travels, her domestic life, her passion for good food and wine, the people she knew, the houses she lived in, and—crucially—the enervating struggles she experienced with her work. For her ambition had always been to write.

  In her twenties, and under the influence of her friend and mentor Aldous Huxley, whose fiction in those early days she uncritically admired, she completed three novels, none of which was ever published. “I think as far as writing was concerned,” she was later to say, Aldous “was rather a hindrance because I admired him as a writer…and I wanted to write like him, which of course didn’t work at all.” Indeed it was not until 1956, when Sybille was in her forties, that a novel of hers first appeared. A Legacy was widely acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic—Evelyn Waugh was among many who enthusiastically praised it—and from then on her position as a distinguished member of the literary profession was established.

  Sybille grew up in Germany during the early years of the twentieth century, her childhood both intellectually inspirational and at the same time emotionally deprived. The most influential figure in her life was her mother, who while regarding her with benign indifference also provided much of the motivation for Sybille’s later career as a writer. Elisabeth (“Lisa”) Bernhardt, clever, beautiful and irrepressibly self-centred, was widely read in English, French and German; convinced that she was possessed of a remarkable literary talent, she intended one day to produce a work that would win her acclaim throughout the cultural salons of Europe. Although such a masterpiece never materialised, nonetheless it was Lisa who from Sybille’s earliest years encouraged her to read, and inspired in her the immutable desire to become a writer. Years later, Sybille said of her, “My mother wanted to be a writer. Like me she suffered from sloth and distractions…but I grew up in such an atmosphere of books and writers that it was like a vocation.”

  Throughout Sybille’s long life there were indeed numerous distractions, her often turbulent private life, her acute interest in so many aspects of the world around her, frequently preventing her from concentrating on her work. From earliest childhood into old age she was constantly on the move, uprooting over the years from one location to another, from Germany to France, England, Italy and the United States. Restless and energetic, she was full of curiosity and loved to explore, writing articles about her travels in Portugal and Switzerland, Denmark and Yugoslavia, Italy and France, as well as an enchantingly idiosyncratic book about the months she spent in Mexico immediately after the war. In her early years, she was adventurous and brave, enjoying long journeys driving alone across Europe, but as time passed and the insecurities implanted in childhood began to surface, she grew increasingly apprehensive and afraid. In later life Sybille made sure she never travelled without a companion, habitually suffering from acute anxiety, terrified that the train would be late, the taxi fail to arrive, the plane fall from the sky.

  In both Europe and America, Sybille was to become part of an extensive network of writers and intellectuals, most of them women, many lesbian like herself, who decade after decade recorded in their copious correspondence the details of their daily lives, their affairs with each other, the jealous scenes, betrayals and passionate infatuations. Many, like Sybille, were married, and although on the whole discreet when in the wider world, unlike their male counterparts they had little reason to conceal their predilections. While in Britain for most of the twentieth century male homosexual practice was illegal, women were free to do as they pleased, and despite the occasional moral outburst—Edgar Wallace in the Daily Mail referring to lesbianism as “a vicious cult,” the Sunday Express demanding the suppression of Radclyffe Hall’s novel, The Well of Loneliness—the subject attracted little interest in society as a whole.

  Sybille, nonetheless, had a strong desire for discretion, a profound reluctance, except when with her inner circle, to reveal the nature of her private life. When at one point she was offered an introduction to a distinguished literary agent in Paris, a woman who lived with an English girlfriend, she instantly turned it down. “I will not choose a Lesbian agent. I can’t bear this girlery and cliquerie. One’s t
astes are private. It’s bad enough (in some ways) to be oneself.” When in her seventies she was asked to address the Oxford University Gay Society, a large “NO” was scrawled across the invitation. Interestingly, although she had numerous infatuations and affairs, the first as a young girl, the last when in her nineties, in only one of her novels does she write of a physical relationship between women.

  Writing, her identity as a writer, was always of supreme importance to Sybille, although she constantly berated herself for not working harder, for failing to produce more. “[I’m] always putting off everything…wanting to write, and then, for long, long wasted periods, not writing,” she complained. A gifted linguist, fluent in three languages, Sybille decided early on to write in English: “the English language is one of most marvellous instruments there is,” as she stated more than once. Yet part of the powerful attraction of her prose comes from a profoundly European sensibility, the worlds she creates elusive yet concise, familiar yet intriguingly different. Her range was wide. Over time she produced two books and several articles on legal process, a subject that had always fascinated her, covering some of the most famous cases of the era, among them the trial of Bodkin Adams, of Jack Ruby, the Lady Chatterley trial, and also the Auschwitz trial, during which twenty-two former guards at the camp faced accusations of murder. As well as her book on Mexico, A Visit to Don Otavio, she wrote vivid and highly personal accounts of her travels in Europe; she undertook one biography, of her friend, Aldous Huxley; and at the very end of her life completed a personal memoir, Quicksands.

  Yet the most widely read and admired of Sybille’s works have always been two of her four novels, the first, A Legacy, published in 1956, and the last, Jigsaw, which appeared over three decades later, in 1989. Both narratives are deeply rooted in her family history and in her own early years, drawing on the extraordinary and often harrowing events of her peripatetic childhood and youth, memories which were to remain embedded deeply within her and to provide her with inspiration for the rest of her life.

  one

  LISA AND “LE BEAU MAX”

  Although Sybille Bedford wrote always in English, in fact she was German. Born in Berlin on 16 March 1911, Sybille was the child of a hopelessly incompatible couple. Her father was an eccentric Bavarian baron, passive and remote, who much preferred the company of animals to people, while her mother, daughter of a wealthy merchant from Hamburg, was energetic, fiercely intelligent and very beautiful, always avid for masculine attention. Maximilian von Schoenebeck and Elisabeth (“Lisa”) Bernhardt met in Berlin; Schoenebeck, recently widowed and in search of a new wife, proposed, and Lisa, recovering from a failed affair, unwisely accepted. They were married in April 1910, and less than a year later their only child was born. For both parents Sybille’s arrival was regarded as a serious disappointment, for Maximilian because he had hoped for a son, and for Lisa because it barred the way out from a marriage she was by now desperate to escape.

  Sybille’s memories of her early childhood were of an almost idyllic period, living with her parents in a fine country house with garden and orchard, days spent playing in a sunny nursery or outside romping with a large pack of good-natured dogs. It was not long, however, before she began to sense the tensions that existed between her parents, and over time to learn of the dramas, and in her father’s case, the scandals and tragedies of his earlier life. The age difference between her parents was considerable, Maximilian forty-six when he married, Lisa twenty years younger, and although Lisa knew something of her husband’s history there were certain episodes of which he never spoke, one scandal in particular only discovered by his horrified daughter in her extreme old age.

  The Schoenebecks, Roman Catholic and members of the minor aristocracy, were originally from Westphalia, but since the early nineteenth century had been settled at Neuburg am Rhein, close to the border with France in what was then the Kingdom of Bavaria. A family of local bureaucrats and officials, they had been ennobled in 1825, granted the title of Freiherr, or baron. By inclination the family had looked always towards France, and when among themselves preferred to speak French rather than German. As the century progressed they did their best to ignore the increasing power of Prussia, which they regarded as a barbarous menace, appalled when in 1871, after the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War, the unification of Germany was ratified at Versailles and Wilhelm I of Prussia declared the German emperor.

  Sybille’s father was the second of five boys. His father, Daniel August von Schoenebeck, was a district judge in the city of Karlsruhe, only a few kilometres from the family’s small estate at Neuburg. His mother, Ida Johanna Himbsel, was the daughter of a famous engineer, Ulrich Himbsel, who built one of the earliest railways, from Munich to Starnberg, and established the first steamship service on the Starnberger See.

  Maximilian was born on 22 July 1863. His was by all accounts a happy childhood. At Neuburg the family inhabited a pleasant manor house set in a sheltered valley and surrounded by farmland. Max’s boyhood memories were of a rural idyll, of apricots ripening on the wall, of dogs and ducks and horses, “and the smell of seasons…of winter honey, walnuts and March wool, of the pig killed at Michaelmas and Easter, and the hams baked whole inside a loaf of bread.” Daniel August, Max’s father, was good-natured, easy-going and allowed his sons to do very much as they pleased. He was also a notable gourmet, author of a slim brochure entitled Quelques Remarques sur la Théorie du Braisage des Mets (“Some Remarks on the Theory of Braising”), dedicated to the great French chef Carême. As might be expected, the family cuisine was of an unusually high standard, with plentiful supplies of fruit and vegetables, mutton and beef from the home farm, freshwater fish, and during the shooting season generous supplies of game.

  Maximilian was a handsome boy, tall and dark-haired, with a gentle, dreamy nature. He and his four brothers were tutored at home before being sent for a short period to a Jesuit seminary. Uninterested in either books or music, Max preferred his own company to that of others; he loved animals, and kept not only dogs and cats but geese and a tame raven. As a very young man he discovered a passion for antique furniture and objets d’art, and true to family tradition he developed a profound love for France and in particular for French wines and cuisine. Under his father’s tutelage he learned how to cook, creating exquisite little dishes over a small spirit lamp purchased for the purpose. As he grew older and began to travel Max indulged in a rather less harmless pursuit, gambling, a hobby extensively pursued in the casinos of Paris and Monte Carlo. Although he had few close men friends, Max had a weakness for beautiful women, whom he effortlessly beguiled with his elegance, good looks and courteous manner; when in their company he appeared happy and animated, and during his twenties and thirties he had many liaisons, which he conducted with refinement and politesse, frequently infatuated, never in love.

  Solitary by nature, indifferent to current affairs and lacking in any kind of professional ambition, Max was nonetheless obliged to earn his living. His father’s estate was not large, there were five sons to support, and thus as a young man Max found himself following two of his brothers into the army. By temperament wholly unsuited to such a career, he nonetheless remained with the military until well into middle age, during which time he was severely damaged by two appalling experiences. One escalated into a notorious scandal, widely reported both in Germany and abroad, while the other remained almost completely buried until many years after his death.

  Despite the Schoenebecks’ entrenched hostility to Prussia, it was a Prussian cavalry regiment, the 9th Hannover Dragoon Guards, that Max aged twenty joined as a second lieutenant in 1883. At the period when Max enlisted, the Hannover Dragoons were stationed at Metz on the French border, and a photograph taken at this period shows Max standing very upright, immaculate in his uniform, yet despite the gold braid and bristling, bushy moustache, he has a look of apprehension in his eyes, the expression of a man who is lost.

 
Unlike his brothers, Max had no wish to make the army a full-time career, electing instead to join the reserves. In peacetime, reserve officers were required to spend only twelve months with their regiment every three years, and later every four or five years. After his service with the Dragoon Guards, Max transferred to the 10th Magdeburg Hussars, then to the 3rd Baden Dragoons, from which he finally retired in 1909 at the age of forty-six with an army pension and the rank of major.

  The long intervals between periods of military duty Max spent mainly abroad. In 1886, when he was twenty-three, his father died, leaving him a modest legacy, which at first appeared sufficient to support his somewhat aimless peregrinations. This rather withdrawn young man, given to periods of depression, “an innocent eccentric,” as his daughter later described him, spent months at a time in Spain, lived for a while on Corsica, and rented remote villas in unfashionable parts of the Côte d’Azur. He soon assembled a menagerie that included a lemur and a family of chimpanzees which he treated almost as his children. He loved to draw and to paint, and indulged his long-standing passion for collecting porcelain and antique furniture, spending hours wandering through antiques shops in little towns, talking to dealers and buying quantities of ancient bric-a-brac. By now a sophisticated gourmet, he took pleasure in exploring the local markets, examining with great concentration the displays of fruit and vegetables, fresh fish, game and country cheeses. Unfortunately, however, this agreeable existence was not to last. Impractical and naive, wholly ignorant of the value of money, Max soon found he had spent almost his entire inheritance, leaving him with no choice but to find a rich wife.