Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  Klaus, who for the past four years had spent much of his time in the States, tirelessly touring the country lecturing on the dangers of the Nazi regime, was now settled in New York, a permanent resident at the Bedford. Soon afterwards Erika, too, appeared, greeting Sybille with dramatic expressions of enthusiasm; she was shortly to leave for London, she told her, where she was to work as a correspondent for the German Service of the BBC. Although Erika appeared unchanged, Klaus, nervously chain-smoking, had visibly aged, paler, with the beginnings of a paunch and a small bald patch on the crown of his head. At once he began excitedly to describe his current project, the launching of a literary magazine, Decision, “on a much larger scale and infinitely more exciting than Die Sammlung.” He already had promise of financial backing and a distinguished list of contributors, among them his father and his uncle Heinrich, as well as Brecht, Auden, Cocteau and the American novelist Sherwood Anderson. He hoped that Sybille, too, would write for the magazine.

  Meanwhile Sybille and Allanah needed to decide on their immediate future. Soon after meeting them, Maria had left to return to California, where the two women intended to join her as soon as possible. Yet both were short of money: strict regulations had limited them to taking not more than £50 out of Europe; the Bedford was well above their means, as was the long train journey to Los Angeles. Fortunately a solution was quickly presented: two days after their arrival Erika took them to see her father, who was on a brief visit to New York. As formal and elegant as ever, Thomas Mann greeted them graciously before telling them of his plans. For the past couple of years he had been living and lecturing in Princeton, but the summer months he and Katia preferred to spend in California, where they were soon intending to settle. They would be leaving for Los Angeles in a few days’ time, he explained, travelling by train, while their two servants, John and Lucie Long, would follow by car. If Sybille and Allanah cared to accompany the Longs they would be most welcome.

  Delighted, the two women accepted gratefully, and a few days later left New York early in the morning for Princeton, where they found Mann, immaculately groomed, poised outside his handsome house waiting to receive them. “The Master was standing on the doorstep, hands raised high in greeting with impersonal Olympian benevolence: ‘Wilkommen.’ ” After breakfast the Manns left for the station, while Sybille and Allanah set off with the Longs, a mountain of luggage and two large poodles, Allanah’s Poodly and Mann’s adored Nico, John driving the Manns’ large, luxurious Lincoln while Lucie followed in her own car.

  It was a long and arduous journey, the heat growing more intense with every passing hour. John, it soon became clear, was an incompetent driver, and Sybille took over the wheel for most of the journey, steering day after day along “the endless flat roads, on and on through the corn plains of the Middle West…[stopping for] the ice-cold Coca-Cola at the gas stations, laced from the quart of rum I carried.” While Allanah did what she could to keep Poodly cool, Sybille looked after “the sweating hot-furred” Nico: “I comforted him in the air-thin altitudes of New Mexico; when we crossed the desert, I laid ice packs on his curly head.” But their main difficulty arose at night. The Longs were both black, and as most motels refused to take either blacks or dogs it was extremely hard to find a place to stay. “You can’t appreciate the South,” Sybille said later, “until you’ve tried travelling through it with a Negro. Everything was segregated in those days. The only place we all stayed together was in an undertakers’ establishment in Texas where they woke us up in the middle of the night and asked, ‘Where is your loved one?’ ”

  The exhausted little convoy finally arrived at the Manns’ house in the Brentwood district of Los Angeles on 1 July. As Sybille walked into the drawing room with Nico, the dog “went straight to his master, sat down by his side, head in air. When presently I came up to say goodbye to him, he ignored me. Slightly turned his head away.”

  On leaving the Manns, Sybille and Allanah went on to the Huxleys in Pacific Palisades. The moment of reunion with Aldous and Maria, after more than three years since they had set sail from Southampton, was intensely emotional. And yet although overjoyed to be in their company once more, it was not long before Sybille began to realise how much they had changed, and how little she was to find sympathetic in her new environment.

  Pacific Palisades, or “Weimar by the Sea,” as it was known in reference to the number of German writers and artists who had settled there, was an idyllic residential neighbourhood overlooking the ocean. Many of the exiles had been attracted to the area not only for its warm climate but also for its almost Mediterranean scenery, its wide beaches, palm-lined streets and lush gardens of lavender and bougainvillea, magnolia, sycamore and eucalyptus. Among the more recent arrivals were several expatriates known to Sybille from Sanary, including her beloved friend, Eva Herrmann, who had arrived in the States the year before and was now living in a large, luxurious house in Brentwood. Eva had been suffering agonies of anxiety over the fate of her lover, Lion Feuchtwanger, who at the time of Sybille’s arrival was still in France. Fortunately, however, the Feuchtwangers were soon to reach California; as part of a small group including Heinrich Mann and Klaus’s brother, Golo, they escaped by making a perilous night-time journey on foot across the Pyrenees into Spain, and thence by sea from Lisbon.

  Within a short time of arriving Sybille and Allanah had found a property to rent on Iliff Street off Sunset Boulevard, a modest little dwelling, like “a dentist’s suburban villa,” as Allanah dismissively described it. The two women were delighted, nonetheless, to have a place of their own, where they could be alone together. Their deep love for each other, their strong emotional bond, was to remain intact for the rest of their lives, and if their friendship was sometimes stormy, their mutual devotion remained unchanged. While the sexual side of their relationship faded over time, each continued to depend on the other for encouragement and support, with Sybille especially looking to Allanah for practical advice, not only in her daily life but with her writing career. Inevitably, too, she relied on her for financial help. When after the war Allanah came into money left to her by her father, providing her with a more than adequate income, she immediately made over a portion of this to Sybille, hoping it would help enable her to launch a career of her own.

  Iliff Street was within easy walking distance of Aldous and Maria, and Sybille looked forward to spending much of her time with them. The Huxleys had been settled in California for nearly three years, and were living in a small house on South Amalfi Drive, hideously furnished and dimly lit, Aldous working as industriously as ever, both as a screenwriter for MGM and on projects of his own. Disdaining the brash society of most of the Hollywood film world, they led a relatively quiet life, seeing only a small group of friends, among them Charlie Chaplin, Anita Loos and the astronomer Edwin Hubble. Although happy to be reunited, Sybille was disturbed to realise how much her old friends had changed: Maria, thinner than ever, was no longer the gaily exuberant figure she had been in Sanary but appeared tense, anxious and permanently exhausted, while Aldous looked grey and drawn, “like a man with a great burden of unhappiness severely locked away.”

  To Sybille’s dismay both Huxleys were now strict vegetarians, Maria insisting on dining every evening at the distressingly early hour of 7 p.m. The tension during mealtimes was often palpable, with Maria desperately worried about the hardships and dangers to which her family in Belgium were constantly exposed. Aldous talked entertainingly about his work at the film studios, and yet if the conversation turned towards the war his mood darkened instantly: war was a forbidden topic. This veto shocked Sybille profoundly, as did the reason for Aldous’s adamant refusal even to have the subject mentioned in front of him: he was too sensitive, it appeared, it distressed him too much. To Sybille such an attitude was incomprehensible: the terrifying reality of the war in Europe overshadowed everything, and now to look away and attempt to ignore it seemed to her a devastating moral failure. �
�It was of course a deeply unhappy time for most of us, but it seemed to me that the Huxleys were almost deliberately, if not consciously, putting themselves under the greatest possible strain, submitting themselves to some rigorous process of repression.” One evening Sybille managed to manoeuvre Allanah into introducing the forbidden subject. “Aldous, don’t you want England to win?” Allanah asked him. “ ‘Wouldn’t it be better if England won?’ Aldous remained mute for a second, then he said in a colourless voice, ‘There won’t be any England as we knew it.’ ”

  Within a short time both Sybille and Allanah had settled into their new routine. To earn some money, Sybille occasionally cooked at local dinner parties, but mostly she concentrated on her writing and on spending time with old friends, among them Eva Herrmann, the Feuchtwangers, and on his occasional visits from New York, Klaus Mann. Klaus, who in his diary referred to Sybille and Allanah as “deux curieuses bonnes femmes” (“two curious good women”), was currently engaged in producing his new journal, Decision, to which Sybille had promised to contribute. At the moment, however, she was concentrating on revising a novel completed shortly before she left Europe.

  “What Can We Ever Do?” focuses on a group of young English people in Paris. The time is 1938, shortly after the Anschluss, and all are deeply apprehensive about the threat of war, anxiously discussed during long sessions at the Café de Flore. Most passionately involved are Eleanor and her friend Desmond, the latter, clever and outrageously camp, an instantly recognisable portrait of Brian Howard, while Eleanor, plump, blonde, blue-eyed, with a passion for good food and wine, bears a striking similarity to her creator. Eleanor’s brother, Basil, is infatuated with Rolande, a world-weary beauty married to John Fontenham, a successful English businessman. Unfortunately for Eleanor it is John with whom she falls unrequitedly in love, her misery eventually driving her to retreat to London, where she takes refuge with another brother, the rascally Jockie, in his set in Albany. Returning to Paris after some months, she rejoins her friends, who are now focused more intently than ever on the political situation—Hitler, Roosevelt, Chamberlain, the Munich Agreement; she meets John again, but by this time is able to part from him amicably. “ ‘Dear John,’ said Eleanor. ‘Silly little thing,’ said John, smiling. Eleanor felt more light-hearted than she had for months.” The novel ends with Eleanor and Desmond walking through the forest at Fontainebleau, the last line of the book Eleanor’s statement, “I shall never get John Fontenham and there’ll probably be a war.”

  The Parisian setting, complete with nightclubs, parties and fashionable maisons de couture, is well drawn and a number of scenes are perceptively realised; as in Sybille’s previous fiction, however, the main characters are mostly two-dimensional and the narrative heavily weighed down with lengthy quotations from favourite authors, among them Huxley, Isherwood and E. M. Forster. The major flaw, however, lies in the ponderous and interminable speeches, from Eleanor, from Desmond, from Basil—several over ten pages long—on the subject of European history, current politics and the threat of war, all delivered in the style of a school essay.

  With the novel finished, Sybille left its promotion to Allanah, who sent copies of the text to two literary agents, both of whom turned it down. One, the Roginia Agency in New York, enclosed a detailed report. The work was not wholly unenjoyable, in the reader’s judgement, but “it is so overloaded with literary references…nothing much happens…history obtrudes itself too much…it is the work of somebody who, whatever else she may be, is certainly not a professional writer and certainly not a novelist; though the book has wit it is not particularly interesting as writing.” So crushed was Sybille by this dismissive judgement that it was nearly a decade before she regained the confidence to begin another book. “I had reached the age of twenty-nine when typescript number three was turned down,” she recalled, “and this, except for a little journalism, brought me to a stop for—I must face it—many years.”

  By the time the novel was completed both Sybille and Allanah had had enough of California, Allanah missing the kind of bookish society she had known in London and Paris, while Sybille found much of the West Coast distastefully vulgar, appalled by the garish architecture, the screaming billboards and neon signs. As in Sanary, she was made uncomfortable by the numbers of German refugees who for the past couple of years had been pouring into Los Angeles, many behaving as if they owned the place, leading the locals to refer to them as the “bei-unskis,” as their every conversation seemed to begin with a self-centred “bei-uns” (“with us,” i.e. “in our view”).

  “Sybille is a silly little snob about it,” Maria complained. “[She and Allanah] are not happy here…They are very very English with super English accents and as they have little money and an expensive dog they won’t part with, life in America is not to their liking; they like the East better.” Sybille’s closeness to Maria remained unchanged—Sybille was “probablement ma meilleure amie” (“probably my best friend”), Maria told her sister, Jeanne—but Sybille’s feelings for Aldous had altered. Aldous’s determination to seal himself off from the appalling events taking place in Europe had upset her profoundly; and she was disturbed, too, by his recent change from rational intellectual to religious mystic, by a fascination with psychic powers and Hindu philosophy, his “yogi-bogey,” as his friend Christopher Isherwood described it. Looking back, she defined her friendship with the Huxleys at this period as “a difficult time: of branching interests, emancipation; there was much friction then.”

  Eventually in January 1941 Sybille and Allanah, with Poodly, left Los Angeles for New York, again by car, driven across the country in a luxurious limousine owned by a wealthy neighbour. When they arrived in New York Sybille stayed at the Great Northern Hotel on West 65th, and Allanah nearby in a room rented by Prince Sergei Youriévitch, the father of an old friend of hers. A French sculptor of Russian birth, Youriévitch had arrived in the States the year before with almost no money at all, camping out in a shabby studio which he shared with his beautiful daughter, Princess Hélène, whom Allanah had known since before the war. The studio was filled with the prince’s work, a bust of Mrs. Roosevelt, a statue of Pavlova, some dead frogs hung on a washing line, and, in one corner, a couple of mattresses for Allanah and Hélène. Sybille was responsible for finding more permanent accommodation; she started her search early in the morning, stopping for a quick lunch of coffee and a couple of hot dogs at Nedick’s, in the evening joining the others to cook dinner over the prince’s single gas ring. “In those New York years the Youriévitches were so hard up that we used to collect the chicken bones off our plates and cooked them up for next day’s soup for Papa and Hélène.”

  It was after dinner that the partying began. The ringleader of their little group was Jean Connolly (née Bakewell), wife of Cyril Connolly, whom Sybille had last encountered some years earlier with the Huxleys in Sanary. Jean, now separated from Cyril, was voluptuously beautiful, hard-drinking, wealthy and sybaritic. Together with her younger sister, Annie, Jean was part of a highly cultured group mainly composed of writers and painters dedicated to leading an existence as hedonistic as possible. “In those American years,” Sybille recalled, “Jean led, and induced some of her friends including me to lead, an apparently frivolous life. Parties given and gone to, orange blossoms (the cocktail) in the morning, improvisation of haute cuisine…dancing to old records into the small hours…Jean was re-enacting the early happy irresponsible years with Cyril, I was trying to live the youth I did not have under the benevolent, restrictive shade of the Huxleys; if Aldous had added ten years to Cyril’s life, the Connolly spirit took ten years off mine.”

  Two of the most notable figures in this exotic milieu were the art critic Clement Greenberg, and the millionaire collector and socialite Peggy Guggenheim. Sybille first met Peggy, or “Guggers,” as she referred to her, while staying at the Great Northern Hotel, where Peggy for a time had been installed with her soon-to-be second husband, th
e German painter Max Ernst. On leaving the hotel the couple had moved into an elegant town house, where Peggy immediately resumed her role as hostess, throwing lavish and flamboyant parties in which Sybille was often included. Many of the guests were painters and writers, and it was here that Sybille found herself in the company of Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, the English photographer Olivia Wyndham, as well as friends such as the Bakewell sisters and Clem Greenberg.

  It was Greenberg of whom Sybille became particularly fond. A regular contributor to the radically left-wing Partisan Review, Clem was also the highly respected art critic of the Nation. A friend of the Youriévitches, Clem was often present at the simple suppers cooked by Sybille, accompanying them afterwards to that evening’s party. Then in his thirties, Clem, a dedicated womaniser, was tall and bald-headed, his hooked nose and blubbery lips giving him the appearance, according to one observer, of “a Yiddish bulldog.” Yet although Sybille and Allanah regarded him as “ghastly physically,” they both admired his intellect and found him most sympathetic as a friend. At the time Clem was attempting to extricate himself from a somewhat stormy affair with Jean Bakewell’s sister, Annie, who was in the process of divorcing her husband. Annie’s erratic behaviour, her constantly blowing hot and cold, Clem found both mystifying and enraging—until suddenly he realised what the problem was: “lesbianism.”

  Before long Sybille was able to leave the Great Northern, having found a suitable apartment at 56 West 58th, only a block away from Central Park. Here she and Allanah moved in, together with Jean, Annie, and Allanah’s dog, Poodly, adored by his mistress, regarded by almost everyone else as excessively tiresome and “monstrously untrained.” As Sybille was unable to contribute much towards the rent almost—her only source of income a monthly cheque of $25 from Eva Herrmann—it was she who took on most of the cooking and shopping, a job she enjoyed, especially the morning outings to the Italian fruit and vegetable markets on 2nd Avenue. Now and then she gave English lessons to German and French refugees, and occasionally undertook translation and secretarial work for Clem. For Sybille it was a period of great contentment, remarkably free of stress, surrounded by a group of interesting intellectuals, her relationship with Allanah, if physically less intense, as close and loving as ever.