Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  On 16 March 1911, Lisa gave birth to a girl. When Max, waiting for news, was informed he had fathered not a son but another daughter he immediately left the room, slamming the door behind him. The first member of the family to see the baby, barely an hour old, was Lisa’s mother, Anna Bernhardt, who had recently arrived from Hamburg. “Sie sicht so schlau aus” (“She looks so clever”), said the doctor who delivered the child, before returning his attention to Lisa, whom he was reviving with injections and cups of strong coffee. Several days later the baby was christened Sybilla (always known as “Sybille”) Aleid Elsa, and for the next few weeks, while Lisa recovered her strength, the Schoenebecks remained in Berlin, Max courteously concealing as best he could his impatience to leave the city.

  The plan was not to return to Spain but to stay in Germany, to settle in the south-west of the country, not far from the region where Max had spent his childhood, and as near as possible to his beloved France. To this end, and by means of Lisa’s substantial income, a property had been purchased at Feldkirch, a small village in the grand duchy of Baden. It was in Feldkirch that the Schoenebecks were to settle, and Feldkirch that was to provide Sybille with one of the most fertile sources of inspiration for her fiction.

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  BARONIN BILLI

  The property on which the Schoenebecks now settled was in the Breisach, in the south-west of the country. A gentle, rural region of fertile fields, orchards and low vine-clad hills, studded with small farms and villages, it is situated close to the edge of the Black Forest. Feldkirch is a small village in the midst of an area of rich arable land, with the ancient cathedral city of Freiburg lying fifteen kilometres to the east, while to the west, within easy walking distance, is the Rhine and the border with France. The climate is inclined to extremes, with bitterly cold winters, during which the region for months lies deep in snow, while the summers are hot, the high temperatures occasionally relieved by a cooling “haar,” a sea mist blown in from the Mediterranean.

  The schloss, purchased in 1911 with Lisa’s money, stood on the edge of the village, a handsome three-storey manor house, with large shuttered windows and a steeply pitched tiled roof, surmounted by an ornamental clock tower. Originally built in the mid-sixteenth century by a Catholic family, the Wessenbergs, it had been almost completely destroyed during the Thirty Years’ War, and reconstructed from its foundations during the 1680s. A massive, heavily carved front door faced the sandy road leading through the village. At the back was a walled garden, shaded by lofty chestnut trees; at the far end was an area of rough grass referred to as “the park,” and beyond it a view of pasture and distant hills; there were stables, a well-tended vegetable garden, beehives, and an orchard planted with apple and plum trees. Near the front entrance was an old tithe barn which stood beside the broad main street of the village, a long, curved road lined on either side by a row of small but solid houses with steeply sloping roofs. There was also a smithy, a post office, a schoolhouse and shop, as well as a fine Romanesque church, St. Martin’s, and an inn, the Gasthaus zum Kreuz, much frequented by the local farmers.

  Although not large, the schloss was airy and full of light. On the ground floor was a baronial hall, and on the first floor, up a broad stone staircase, were a couple of spacious drawing rooms, heated by glazed china stoves and furnished with Lisa’s collection of paintings and pretty French furniture. On the second floor were Max’s bedroom and dressing room, Lisa’s large, balconied Louis XV bedroom, one only slightly smaller for Katzi, and Sybille’s day and night nurseries; the maids’ rooms were under the roof on the top floor. The library and smoking room contained Max’s substantial collection, much of which overflowed into the rest of the house: a dense conglomeration of ancient pewter, silver and bronze, of keys and candlesticks, porcelain and faience, of altar vessels and religious statuary, of tables and chairs, desks and commodes, sofas, a sedan chair, looking-glasses, medieval chests, fragments of tapestry and stained glass. “We lived inside a museum,” Sybille wrote, “one that no one came to see.” The house was efficiently run by a team of domestic servants: as well as Sybille’s English nanny, there was Katzi’s French governess, a femme de chambre for Lisa, a French butler, a cook, two maids from the village, a coachman, a stable boy, gardener, and an Italian odd-job man who looked after the electrical plant.

  For Sybille, these early years at Feldkirch were in many respects an Arcadia, inspiring her imagination and remaining forever embedded in her memory. Throughout her life she was to look back fondly on this period. “What was best about it for me,” she later recalled, “were the stables, the vista of lawn and old trees, the grapevine on the south wall…from which we vinified a small barrel each year…the apple orchard with a score of varieties for eating and strong cider, the kitchen garden growing strawberries and asparagus on sandy soil, sent off in the early morning to the markets of Breisach, Freiburg and Basel.”

  Sybille, known in her early days as “Billi,” was an appealing little girl, not dark, like her parents, but blonde with blue eyes, in colouring resembling Anna Bernhardt, her maternal grandmother. “We are the only two blue-eyed blondes in all the family!!” as Anna told her with satisfaction. “We both look so utterly Nordish.” Sybille had a large nursery plentifully supplied with toys, including a train set which she loved, but most of all she enjoyed spending time outside, organising her own little wooden house in the garden, trotting round the lawn on a small pony, romping with her father’s large, good-natured dogs, her mother’s spaniels, Katzi’s fox terrier. It was Katzi, her half-sister, now in her teens, who was her favourite companion, and who, Sybille recalled, “gave me love and the fundamental early disciplines—‘Don’t tell lies,’ ‘Have you washed your hands?,’ ‘No, you can’t have it.’ ”

  Yet although in many respects an idyllic existence, beneath the surface there was profound unease. When still very small Sybille was told by her mother that she had not been wanted: her arrival, Lisa explained, had been considered a disaster by both parents, by her father who had hoped for a son, while Lisa herself had felt trapped by the birth, obliged to stay in a marriage she was impatient to leave. In the course of time Max was to grow fond of his daughter, if never capable of demonstrating much affection, while Lisa remained wholly lacking in maternal instinct. “I never had any maternal love,” Sybille recalled. “My mother was not interested in children, not at all. She once said to me: ‘You were very sweet as a baby, but you’re going to be very, very dull for a very long time—perhaps ten or fifteen years. We’ll speak then, when you’ve made yourself a mind.’ Of course I thought that was quite normal.”

  No less distressing was the growing estrangement between Sybille’s parents. To the few neighbours whom they occasionally entertained—Count Kaagenegg, Baron Neveux, the Gleichensteins, the Landenbergs—the couple gave an impression of unity: Maximilian always exquisitely dressed, so calm and courteous, while Lisa animated the occasion with her charm and high spirits, laughing and talking her way through dinner indoors or in summer sitting at tea under one of the big trees in the garden. But in truth husband and wife had little in common. “My father could not stand clever women,” Sybille wrote. “My mother had been too beautiful for him to notice that she was one and when he did notice it was too late.” Lisa had been equally misled, believing Max’s “cover of eccentricity” to be the mark of an interesting and intellectual mind.

  The reality was different. Max was content to spend hours a day sitting smoking in his library, reading saleroom catalogues while listening to popular operatic arias hissing from an ancient gramophone with a giant horn. When in company he appeared calm and in control, yet inwardly was prey to countless fears and insecurities, his calm “the immobility of someone asleep and yet at bay.” Lisa, on the other hand, sociable by nature, was restless and longed to escape. She had never been popular in the region, seen as an unwelcome outsider by the villagers, and offending the neighbours by her outspoken opinions and
obvious disdain for rural society. Lisa craved male admiration and intelligent company; she was hungry for stimulating discussion, eager to talk about new novels and writers, impatient to see the latest plays and exhibitions. Like her mother she was an art lover, and had lately discovered the French impressionists, a genre far removed from Max’s rusty medievalism; recently one of her admirers had given her a painting by Paul Klee, which immediately became her most treasured possession, travelling with her wherever she went. Frustrated by her husband’s passivity, she was growing increasingly dissatisfied with the agrarian backwater in which her marriage had landed her.

  One of the few enthusiasms the couple shared was for good food, but even here they failed to find much common ground. Max, brought up on the cuisine of the great French chefs, was a true connoisseur, a dedicated perfectionist, his sensitive palate alert to every nuance of texture and flavour. Lisa, in her husband’s view, clung too closely to a more robust Germanic tradition. She liked her meat—venison, partridge, hare—plainly roasted, and relished the local home-cured bacon, sausage, loin of pork, as well as the coarse rye bread and plum and cherry tarts. At Feldkirch, the cook, “female and north German…was on the mistress’s side,” Sybille recalled, “and so food, the one thing my parents had counted on for pleasant daily safety, turned out to be what they quarrelled about tenaciously and often. I can still hear the altercations about my mother’s having ordered cauliflower covered in white sauce.”

  It was not long before Lisa, bored and frustrated, began spending long periods away from Feldkirch, sometimes, when obliged by circumstances, taking her daughter with her. On one occasion, when Sybille was not yet three, she and her nanny accompanied her mother on a visit to Copenhagen, where they stayed in a hotel. The purpose of the expedition was for Lisa to keep an assignation with her current lover, the distinguished writer Peter Nansen. Known as the Danish Maupassant, Nansen, then in his fifties, was a notorious womaniser, with Lisa only one in a long sequence of mistresses; she, however, convinced herself their affair had been important to both, and for many years kept his photograph always by her. One day, during the nanny’s afternoon off, Lisa had been obliged to take her daughter with her when visiting Nansen, parking the pram in the entrance hall of his apartment. As Sybille remembered it, “I was in some kind of a narrow space and my mother wearing an enormous hat and veil was bending over me…‘Please be good, please keep quiet, he hates to have a baby in the hall. Please just go to sleep.’ I did. For the whole blessed afternoon.”

  In August 1914, only a couple of years after the family had settled in Baden, their peaceful existence was disrupted by the outbreak of war. Both the Schoenebecks were passionately opposed to war. Max, who despite, or perhaps because of, having served in the Prussian army, had always loathed the Kaiser and his flamboyant militarism; the present hostilities, he was convinced, were “a dangerous folly bringing ruin to all concerned and best not to be thought about.” Lisa, as a committed pacifist, took a more universal view, believing that no war could be justified, that fighting led to nothing but cruelty, hatred and a brutal waste of life. To her small daughter she took trouble to explain in the simplest terms that war was barbaric, that it meant killing and maiming, and that no nation should ever declare war on another, however just the cause.

  Max, worried by the nearness of Feldkirch to the French border, wanted to leave immediately. His plan was to go to Berlin and take refuge with the Herzes, a scheme instantly dismissed by Lisa, who insisted they would be much better off where they were. And for a while life in the village continued much as before, with few shortages or signs of disruption. Inevitably, however, the atmosphere began to change: convoys of wounded were seen returning from the front to be cared for in field hospitals in Freiburg, and as increasing numbers of men were called up, a spirit of defiant patriotism became the norm. It was soon clear that the village no longer maintained the attitude of unquestioning respect towards the family at the schloss, and before long hostile comment began to spread about the Schoenebecks’ pacifism; it was considered unpatriotic, too, that among themselves they continued to speak in French and English, the two enemy languages. “One day,” Sybille recalled, “a stone was flung over the park wall when nanny and my half-sister and I were playing. It hit me on the forehead, just a gash but there was a lot of blood and I howled. I still have the scar, a small one, under an eyebrow.”

  In the spring of 1915, the decision was made to close the schloss and leave Feldkirch. Max had recently been recalled to the army, and was put in charge of the officers’ prison camp at Karlsruhe—where he was delighted to find himself in the company of French- and Englishmen—while his wife and daughters set off for Berlin. Sybille was barely four years old, and yet for the rest of her life she remembered that long, slow journey from west to east. With most available forms of transport requisitioned for the movement of troops, it was difficult for civilians to travel, but eventually tickets were bought, books and clothing packed into trunks and the house closed for the duration. Beginning at Freiburg, the journey was to take several days, at times seeming almost interminable as they moved haltingly across the country in a series of overcrowded trains, sometimes stopping for hours to refuel in gloomy, steel-vaulted stations. For months there had been fierce fighting on both fronts, in France and Belgium in the west, Galicia and Poland in the east, resulting in the daily conveyance of thousands of wounded throughout the country. It was the sight of this battered army that made such an impression on Sybille: “soldiers on the platforms, in the corridors, looking in through windows, soldiers being helped into the compartment—soldiers on crutches, soldiers with head bandages, soldiers with great casts about their chests.” Finally the Schoenebecks arrived in Berlin and made their way to the Herz mansion on Voss Strasse.

  Interestingly, Sybille in her writing says nothing about the harsh conditions suffered by Berliners throughout the war. And yet by the time she and her mother arrived in the capital the evidence was unavoidable: the streets full of uniformed soldiers, many wounded and begging; there were rigorous restrictions on lighting and heating, a scarcity of fuel, and most serious of all, severe food shortages, largely due to the lethal efficacy of the British naval blockade, which had been in place since August 1914. Bread and flour rationing had been introduced within months, both fruit and vegetables quickly grew scarce and a law was passed forbidding the consumption of meat on certain days of the week. Inevitably, such restrictions were hardest on the poor, but for those, like the Herzes, who could afford to pay there was a well-organised black market in which, for up to four and five times the pre-war prices, meat, fish, eggs, sugar, butter, milk and cheese continued to be available.

  The house on Voss Strasse and its inhabitants provided the inspiration for some of the most memorable passages in A Legacy. Sybille and her mother were to spend many months in that suffocating, opulent environment, where the routine was rigid and unchanging, with little connection to the world outside. The members of that “Judaeo-Agnostic household,” as Sybille described it, “sunk in upholstery and their own corpulence…lived contentedly in a luxurious cocoon, an existence that was wholly centred on their own domestic comfort…[They] never went to the theatre, looked at pictures or listened to music; they cared nothing for books…They took no exercise and practised no sport…They did not go to shops. Things were sent to them on approval, and people came to them for fittings.” The household was ruled by Frau Herz, Katzi’s grandmother, a stout old lady who spent most of the day contentedly sunk into a large armchair. Elaborately dressed, she was “swaddled in stuffs and folds and flesh, stuck with brooches of rather grey diamonds, topped by an arrangement of rough grey hair…She wore a dog collar of pearls, a watch on a ribbon from her neck and a bunch of keys at her waist.” Almost her sole duty was the planning of menus, and for this the cook came upstairs to see her for half an hour every morning.

  At Voss Strasse, despite stringent rationing, the meals continued much as bef
ore, lengthy, substantial and very, very rich. Every morning there was a big cooked breakfast, served to the ladies in their bedrooms, to the gentlemen downstairs; and so that no one should suffer pangs of hunger while waiting for luncheon, a second breakfast was provided mid-morning, with cold venison, potted meats, foie gras, eggs in cream, chicken and pressed tongue, all accompanied by glasses of sherry and port. Occasionally, if there were an odd number at table, Sybille was brought down to sit next to her step-grandmother, where, raised up on a couple of cushions, she watched with fascination as course succeeded course: cream of chicken, crayfish in aspic, vol-au-vents, calf’s tongue in Madeira, chartreuse of pigeon, mousseline of artichokes, Nesselrode pudding full of chestnuts and cream. “Everyone spoke freely in his or her own way and so I imbibed quite a deal of German-Jewish family life.”

  Sybille was cared for by a nanny while in Berlin, with an elderly tutor arriving twice a week to give her lessons. During this period she saw even less of her parents than she had at Feldkirch. Her father appeared only occasionally, amiable but remote, soon retreating into his customary state of languid indolence, exquisitely polite but inwardly detached from his surroundings. For Max the Herz opulence was vulgar, and while staying in Voss Strasse, “he held himself aloof like a prisoner of honour at the victor’s banquet.” Lisa, too, found the environment distasteful, and spent most of the day either away from the house, pursuing projects of her own, or else reading in her room upstairs, appearing only for dinner in the evening. Eventually, claiming she needed her independence, she rented a large flat in Hohenzollern Strasse belonging to Theo von Brockhusen, an artist and a former member of the expressionist group known as “die Brücke.” It was here in 1917 that Brockhusen painted a portrait of Sybille at six years old, but it disappeared, assumed lost during the war.