Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  From their first encounter, Sybille had been fascinated by this exotic individual, despite his frequently deplorable conduct. At this period Brian’s boyfriend was a young German, Toni Altmann, blond, stupid and exceptionally handsome, always referred to by Sybille as “the oaf.” Night after night the two men would drink themselves into near insanity, with Brian beginning the evening witty and engaging before descending into violent argument and frequently angry brawls. After one particularly raucous evening at La Juliette with Eddy Gathorne-Hardy, Brian sent Sybille and Eva an apology:

  With humble gratitude and lowered eyes,

  Aware of folly, swearing to be wise,

  No longer tipsy, ribald or inept—

  The beastliest men in England, we accept.

  Eddie his lusts, Brian his tongue shall calm,

  No oaths shall mar, no grossness shall alarm

  Our twin Egerias’ board! Yes, we will show

  How high they sometimes fly, who

  Sometimes fall so low.

  Far worse, however, was the fracas that was to follow a few weeks later.

  On most evenings Sybille, Brian, Toni Altmann and a group of friends met for dinner in a restaurant in Sanary, Sybille ferrying them there in her newly acquired convertible, an ancient eight-seater De Dion-Bouton recently found for her by Pierre Mimerel. After dinner the group often went on to a favourite bar in Bandol, “where one could dance, ambisexually, on a small floor-lit square,” before ending the night in some seedy boîte; from there in the small hours, not entirely sober herself, Sybille would drive them all home. On one occasion, after a lengthy drinking session at a local bistro, where Klaus Mann and Eddy Gathorne-Hardy were also present, a row erupted near midnight with a small contingent at a nearby table. One of the group addressed a remark to Toni Altmann which Brian considered offensive. “Within seconds a general fight had broken out. The table overturned, carafes of red wine flowing forth, plates of spaghetti pomodori sliding on to our clothes and the floor…all the men seemed to be fighting each other, with fists and kicks.” The result a few days later was a formal summons from the Mairie: “We, Brian, Eddy, myself, were arraigned for the fracas at the bistro…and of course were sent to pay, not very much—for the broken cutlery and glass.”

  A more decorous event, organised by Brian, was a theatrical performance one evening in the garden at La Juliette. The stage was the long terrace outside the house, and below it on the lawn sat an audience of nearly a hundred, the Kislings, the Mimerels, the “German haute culture.” First was a one-act piece, Le Cheval Arabe by Julien Luchaire, followed by The Secret of Mayerling, Brian’s mischievous retelling of the double suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria and his mistress, Marie Vetsera. In this version the object of Prince Rudolf’s passion was not Vetsera but a handsome young huntsman, played, appropriately enough, by Toni Altmann. Brian in black satin breeches was the crown prince, Eddy Gathorne-Hardy, magnificent in court dress, wig and cardboard crown, impersonated Empress Elisabeth, while Sybille herself was “the Secret,” a rent boy “in a tight drainpipe trouser suit, shaking with stage fright.” The play, performed in English, was received with such rapture that the cast, intoxicated by their success, gave it twice more, ad-libbing first in German, then in French.

  In between the summers in Sanary, Sybille spent most of her time in Paris with Eva. The two women shared a studio flat with a tiny garden off the avenue Victor Hugo, and it was here that Sybille hoped to finish her second novel. She was also acting as cover for Eva, deeply immersed in her affair with Lion Feuchtwanger. “The little Lion,” as Sybille called him, came up from the south at regular intervals and often took the two women to lunch or dinner, sometimes dining alone with Sybille when Eva was engaged elsewhere. In June Eva underwent another abortion, and again it was Sybille who supported her, keeping in touch by telephone with an anxious Lion in Sanary. With the novel finally completed, Sybille was full of hope that now she would find acceptance, but this second work (which has yet to come to light) was rejected as firmly as the first. Eva, while sympathetic, was not uncritical, saying that in her view the book was overloaded with information, that Sybille was too “anxious to show how much you know.”

  One spring evening in Paris, on 10 March 1938, Sybille was sitting in the Café de Flore with a group of friends, among them Brian, Klaus Mann, Brian’s old friend Jimmy Stern, and the exotic, left-wing activist Nancy Cunard. The intense discussion focused on the threatening situation in Germany, where Hitler’s troops were gathered on the Austrian border ready to invade. Klaus, taut and febrile, was arguing for the probability of some form of compromise, while Brian and Jimmy Stern were predicting war. The atmosphere was charged; indeed Brian, who since the early 1930s had courageously spoken out about the dangers of Nazism, was in such an agitated state that he suddenly turned on his neighbour, Nancy Cunard, and snapped, “It makes me rather nervous, my dear, to watch you eat this horrible welsh rarebit, while our friends in Vienna…This means war, my dear!” Two days later came the Anschluss. As Klaus remarked, “Brian was wrong. It was not yet the hour…The fall of Austria meant bloodshed, but it did not mean war…”

  Soon after this Sybille returned to Sanary, living at the Villa Huley. “[Je veux] que la maison serve d’abri au plus de gens possible” (“[I want] the house to act as a refuge for as many people as possible”), Maria Huxley had written to her sister Jeanne, and over the next few months, as well as Jeanne and her French playwright husband, Georges Neveux, a number of friends moved in, with Sybille appointed as housekeeper. “You probably know that La Gorguette is going to be a sort of camp all summer,” Maria told Eddy Sackville-West, “with Sybille at the head of it and feeling important. I have good letters from Sybille. She seems to be getting along somehow and a little more tidily than in the past.” During this period Eddy himself came to stay, as did Eva for a while, and also Katzi, who arrived from Paris after a brief period of internment as a suspected spy. Fortunately, she seemed unmarked by the experience, as cheerful and sociable as ever, currently conducting an affair with Pierre Gaillard, one of her ex-husband’s French agents.

  In September events took a more sinister turn, as Nazi troops massed on the Czech border, but the tension was briefly alleviated at the end of the month by the signing of the Munich Agreement, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, famously returning to London from a meeting with Hitler triumphantly declaring “peace in our time.” At this same period Sybille was in Paris, working on a new novel, giving lessons in English, and undertaking “volunteer work for a group of hard-up, left-wing refugees.” Despite Munich, the international situation was growing increasingly threatening, and Sybille was alarmed by the hostility shown to foreigners, especially Jews, living in France: recently Brian and Eva had been spat at and threatened while walking along the quayside in Sanary. Now Sybille anxiously began to focus on the possibility of escape, writing to Maria to ask if she could arrange passage for her to the States; Maria, however, had been dubious. “Je vais parler à des amis avant de lui répondre,” Maria told her sister. “Tout devient de plus en plus difficile ici pour les Allemands” (“I’m going to talk to friends before replying to her. Everything here is becoming more difficult for the Germans”).

  Fortunately, however, the situation was not yet entirely grim, and it was now that Sybille was to embark on one of the most enduring and important relationships of her life. Allanah Harper, a handsome, forceful young Englishwoman in her early thirties, had been living in Paris for the past decade. The only child of a wealthy and well-travelled family—her father, a successful engineer, had built the first railway through the Andes—she had been educated in England, presented at court, and during the 1920s had become one of the leading members of the “Bright Young Things,” with such friends as Cecil Beaton, Stephen Tennant, the Jungman sisters, and Brian Howard. At the age of twenty-five, Allanah, “well read and amusing wit
hout being brilliant,” according to Beaton, had moved to Paris, and in 1930 launched a literary journal, Echanges, which published both French and English writers, among them W. H. Auden, Edith Sitwell, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Paul Éluard, Henri Michaux and André Gide. For this she had had the backing of three wealthy sponsors, Princess Pauline Terry, the half-English daughter of Maharajah Duleep Singh; Princesse Edmonde de Polignac, the Singer sewing-machine heiress; and the Aga Khan, to whom for a brief period Allanah had been engaged. (There is a photograph of Allanah with the Aga Khan at a fancy-dress ball, Allanah in costume as a white rabbit with a pair of towering white ears.)

  Echanges did not last long, but Allanah continued to live mainly in Paris, “hurrying about in a large, handsome English way” between the worlds of bookshops, literary salons and a wealthy international society that migrated between the capital and the Côte d’Azur. It was in Paris on 2 January 1939 that Sybille and Allanah first met, over cocktails in the company of Princess Pauline, Joan Black, with whom Sybille had for a while been deeply infatuated, and Joan’s partner, Eda Lord. Allanah, tall, handsome, with dark brown shingled hair, was about to leave for the theatre with Pauline, and during this brief encounter she and Sybille took little interest in each other. The following week they met again, at a dinner party of Pauline’s, and everything changed.

  Over the next half-century Allanah was to remain one of the most crucial figures in Sybille’s life, first as her lover, then as friend and generous provider—as well as a sometimes scathingly stern critic. Tough, determined and extremely energetic, Allanah always knew what she wanted, and unlike Sybille rarely suffered from doubt or depression. Now during the months after their first meeting the two were constantly together, in Paris, at Gadencourt in Normandy, a tiny village in the Eure where Allanah owned a share in a small house, and in Sanary, staying with Princess Pauline, who had rented a villa for the summer. Allanah gave Sybille a gold ring as a token of their commitment to each other.

  During this period Allanah left the south for a few weeks to visit her mother in England, and during her absence Sybille became very taken with a young woman currently staying in Sanary. Poppy Kirk, of American-Italian descent, married to a minor British diplomat much older than herself, was strikingly beautiful if not particularly intelligent; for several years she and Allanah had been lovers, and when their affair came to an end Poppy had started a relationship with Princess Pauline; it was in the company of Pauline that she first encountered Sybille. For obvious reasons it was essential this new relationship be kept undercover, Sybille renting a box at the Sanary post office so she could discreetly slip in “at some quiescent hour” to collect Poppy’s letters. Inevitably on Allanah’s return the affair was discovered; Allanah in a fury pulled her ring from Sybille’s finger and swore she would throw it into the sea. Mortified, Sybille begged for forgiveness, and after a brief glacial period the two became reconciled; Allanah returned the ring, swore that she loved Sybille and would look after her for ever.

  After this painful debacle, the two women stayed in Sanary. When in the New Year Princess Pauline left for Switzerland, the couple, together with Allanah’s large brown poodle, moved into the Villa Huley. As before Sybille was responsible for running the household, if not always entirely to Maria’s satisfaction. Sybille, “très grasse mais contente” (“very fat but happy”), had by now developed a somewhat entitled attitude, not bothering to thank Maria for the previous year’s Christmas cheque, it appeared, nor had she yet paid her share of the electricity bill. “Je suis vraiment plutôt découragée par l’attitude de Sybille,” Maria wrote crossly to her sister. “Je me demande pourquoi on les aide car il y en a beaucoup d’autres qui ont besoin d’aide et qui l’apprécierait” (“I’m really rather discouraged by Sybille’s attitude…I ask myself why one helps them when there are many others needing help and who would appreciate it”).

  During the summer of 1939, as the crisis in Europe intensified, the freedom of foreigners in France became increasingly restricted, with curfews imposed, permits required for travel over even the shortest distance. With the signing of the Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact on 23 August, the atmosphere darkened: all at once soldiers were everywhere, crowds of civilians on the move, holidaymakers rushing to return home, roads jammed with traffic as heavily laden cars and trucks full of troops heading north met hordes of refugees fleeing south. On 1 September the Germans invaded Poland, and two days later war was declared by Britain and France. In Sanary an order was immediately issued for all German males between the ages of seventeen and sixty-six to be interned, including, among many others, Eva’s lover, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Brian Howard’s boyfriend, Toni Altmann. Toni was driven by Sybille and Eva to the designated camp, Les Milles, a former tile factory near Aix-en-Provence. For the first few days the two women were allowed to visit the camp, bringing with them fruit, cheese, wine and cigarettes as well as rugs and pillows; but then on 15 September such rights were withdrawn.

  The following month Eva left for New York, and a few weeks later Sybille and Allanah with her dog, Poodly, drove to Normandy, where they spent several weeks at Gadencourt. Here over Christmas they were joined by Joan Black and Eda Lord, all four of them struggling with food shortages and the intense cold. “We had deep snow then 14 below zero,” Eda wrote to a friend. “Scarcely any cars dared try the roads which were ice by that time. We didn’t move…for ten days.”

  By now Sybille’s anxiety had become almost overwhelming. Despite her British passport, she was well aware that her German origins placed her in danger with the French as did her Jewishness with the Germans—later she discovered her name had been on the Gestapo’s list of suspects to be arrested. Desperately she wrote again to Maria imploring her somehow to arrange passage for her, but with the enormous numbers queueing to cross the Atlantic this seemed improbable: as Maria told her sister, Sybille “aimerait venir ici mais étant Allemande cela est presque impossible. Le quota est rempli” (“would like to come here but being German it is nearly impossible. The quota is full”).

  On 2 January 1940, Sybille and Allanah left Gadencourt to return to the south. With strict petrol rationing in force, Sybille knew they would be unable to drive there and so, reluctantly, gave her beloved De Dion-Bouton to Mme. Guérinier, the femme de ménage. The two women made their way first to Paris, then Cannes, where Allanah’s mother had been on holiday, Allanah succeeding with some difficulty in securing her mother’s return to England.

  In Sanary, they found the whole coast in a state of upheaval, the chaos intensified after the start of the German invasion of France on 10 May. Fortunately by now Sybille had heard from Maria that she had at last managed to obtain two tickets for the following month on an American ship leaving Genoa for New York. In the middle of May, Sybille and Allanah, with Allanah’s poodle and nineteen suitcases, made their way across the border to Genoa, reporting immediately to the United States consulate, as the British consul had already departed. Here they were warned that Italy was about to enter the war, at which point they would be instantly arrested and interned as enemy aliens; the town was full of spies, the consul told them, and it was vital they not give themselves away by speaking English. The next few days were spent in a state of extreme apprehension, until finally on 20 May they were informed that their ship, SS Exeter, had docked and they must board as quickly as possible. Yet when they arrived on the quayside, their luggage piled up on a pushcart, they were appalled to see what appeared to be a vast crowd making their way up the gangplank, American diplomats and their families and staff, a group of Polish refugees, all given precedence over the two young women.

  Eventually, however, they were allowed on board, shortly before the ship set sail. It was only afterwards they learned that Exeter, carrying in her hold half of Italy’s gold reserves, was the last passenger ship to leave the port of Genoa for the duration of the war. They were gone just in time: the next week Mussolini declared war on France an
d Britain, followed four days later by the German occupation of Paris. Genoa, as Sybille wrote later, was “where Allanah and I sailed from in June 1940 out of the maw of war seven years into the unknown.”

  six

  “A NEW EXOTIC OPULENT WORLD”

  After seventeen days at sea, Exeter docked in New York on 6 June 1940. For Sybille and Allanah it was a moment of intense relief finally to arrive after nearly two and a half weeks of overcrowding and discomfort on board and constant anxiety about the future. When at last they emerged from the grey gloom of the customs sheds they found themselves in a seemingly enchanted environment: midtown Manhattan on a perfect summer’s day, “the streets sunlit, glittering with bright awnings where tall doormen lifted hats to smiling men and well-dressed women. A new exotic opulent world.” To Sybille’s surprise and joy, Maria Huxley was there to meet them, by chance in New York on a brief visit from California, where the Huxleys were now living. With the luggage crammed into a couple of taxis, the three women were driven to the Bedford Hotel on 40th Street between Lexington and Park, where Maria had arranged for them to stay. Owned by a German couple, the Bedford, comfortable and expensive, had long been established as a centre for Jewish émigrés from Europe. As Sybille waited at the reception desk, she felt someone touch her elbow, turned round, and to her delight found Klaus Mann standing behind her.