Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  After much planning and anxiety, Sybille and Esther finally left New York on 30 June 1946. Booked onto the St. Louis Express, they boarded the train at Grand Central Station, seen off by Esther’s husband, Chester, and by Annie, who provided a modest picnic of wine, cold chicken, pumpernickel and cheese. For the first part of the journey they had an air-conditioned compartment to themselves. Time passed slowly, Esther spending much of the day drinking in the club car, Sybille lying on her bunk reading and playing patience. At St. Louis they changed trains, spending the night with other passengers in the curtained sleeping car as they slowly made their way south towards the Texas border. Here at Laredo all passengers were submitted to the “malevolent rigmarole” of a lengthy customs inspection, before finally boarding another train which arrived a day and a half later in Mexico City. “I am delighted to be here,” Sybille wrote at once to Allanah, “delighted NOT TO BE in the USA.”

  From the very first day of what was to become a nearly eight-month sojourn, Sybille was determined to experience as much as she could of this unknown country. Once settled into their hotel, an old colonial palace with a peeling pink facade, Sybille, impatient to begin exploring, at once set off into the noisy, crowded streets, fascinated and bewildered by the sheer foreignness of what surrounded her. “As one picks one’s way over mangoes and avocado pears one is tumbled into the gutter by a water-carrier, avoids a Buick saloon and a basin of live charcoal, skips up again scaring a tethered chicken, shies from an exposed deformity and bumps into a Red Indian gentleman in a tight black suit.” Over the next few days, as they gradually became acclimatised, she and Esther visited many of the sights of the capital, churches and palaces, galleries and museums, as well as the murals of Diego Rivera in the Palacio Nacional.

  If a matter of indifference to Esther, for Sybille an important priority, after years of the bland, boring fare of America, was to sample Mexican cuisine. Recalling one of their first meals, luncheon in a small restaurant near their hotel, she described in fascinated detail the long succession of courses placed before them: two kinds of soup, then an omelette, followed by “two spiny fishes covered in tomato sauce…Two thin beefsteaks like the soles of children’s shoes…two platefuls of bird bones, lean drumstick and pointed wing smeared with some brown substance. Two platefuls of mashed black beans…Everything tastes good, nearly everything is good.” The local wine, by contrast, was deplorable. “I sniff before tasting, so the shock when it comes is not as devastating as it might have been. I yell into the darkness to have the bottle removed…Cheap ink dosed with prune juice and industrial alcohol, as harsh on the tongue as a carrot-grater…It begins to dawn on me, Mexico is not a wine country.”

  After a few days the two women left the city, as Sybille was eager to explore the dramatic beauty of the countryside, the prairies and forests, lakes and volcanoes. Their first destination was by Lake Chapala in the state of Jalisco, about 250 miles north-west of the capital. The Villa Montecarlo, part of a small family estate on the edge of the lake, had recently been converted into a hotel, the new arrivals lodged in a comfortable hacienda a little way from the main house. Sybille was overwhelmed by the beauty surrounding her: “a sun-splashed loggia above a garden white and red with the blooms of camellia, jasmine and oleander and the fruits of pomegranate, against a shaped luxuriance of dense, dark, waxed, leaves; and below the garden lay the lake.” Entranced by her surroundings, she was equally enchanted by the hotel’s owner, Don Guillermo González Hermosillo Brizuela, a gentleman of exquisite courtesy, elegant if somewhat effeminate in manner and appearance. “The place belonged to the governor of Jalisco,” Sybille explained to Allanah, “and now after the revolution, his son, that rare thing a Spanish sissy, has turned it into a hotel.”

  So charmed were they by the villa and its owner that the two women decided to stay on for some time. The climate was temperate, the hacienda, with its view of the lake, clean and very comfortable, the food was delicious, and there were large numbers of servants to do absolutely everything. Sybille and Esther, familiar figures by now, the small boyish blonde with her tall, gaunt companion, lunched and dined almost every day with Don Guillermo and his many friends, Mexican, English, German, American. After dinner, while Esther smoked, drank and lectured the company on seventeenth-century France or the Truman presidency, Sybille and her host sat quietly together playing piquet. Don Guillermo’s conversation, his friends and acquaintances, the feasts provided, the expeditions arranged were like nothing else, baroque and bizarre, and, as it turned out, an almost miraculous inspiration for Sybille.

  Contented although she was at the Villa Montecarlo, eventually Sybille grew restive, anxious to investigate as much as possible of the rest of the country. There was no question of her going alone, but Esther, the “born anti-traveller,” proved difficult to dislodge. Esther “hated to travel—God, she hated to travel,” Sybille recalled. “I laugh when I think of her in Mexico…this tall Don Quixote figure, with a head like Jefferson, bowing to everybody and saying, ‘Viva Mexico,’ with an American accent. It’s the only Spanish she learned.” Eternally good-natured, Esther soon submitted, and the two women set off on their hazardous road trip from one coast to the other, moving erratically across country, to Cuernavaca, Morelia, to Mazatlán, Acapulco and Veracruz, none of it of much interest to Esther. Together they covered hundreds of miles, cooped up on rackety trains that were always late, in taxis driven at hair-raising speed, on crowded buses stuffed to the gills with turkeys and pigs, Esther with her height jammed under a low roof in a seat that was much too small. Yet despite the discomfort Esther remained calm, uninterested in the passing landscape, rarely looking up from her volume of Trollope or Jane Austen. “I am more and more enchanted with Mexico,” Sybille told Allanah, “but Esther does not like to move, and stalks past colonial palaces and Aztec pyramids much as Doctor Johnson must have stalked through the Hebrides.”

  Inevitably over the course of their journey there were many delays and frustrations, even the threat of danger. During a stop for dinner one evening their bus was plundered by bandits. While the passengers watched helplessly from the roadside, “three or four men in fine hats and bandanas tied over their faces” helped themselves to the luggage piled on the bus’s roof, including a suitcase containing all Esther’s clothes and notes for her biography as well as the recipes for a planned cookery book of Sybille’s. An unpleasant experience of a different kind was that of a bullfight in Guadalajara. While living in France Sybille had attended occasional bullfights in Arles and Nîmes, but now for the first time she was appalled by the cruelty. “The actual fight sickened and depressed me beyond belief,” she told Allanah. “What horrified me perhaps most was that I had once enjoyed or professed to enjoy the spectacle of an animal being slowly slaughtered…I really owe it to you that I have now again a feeling for animals, that was blotted out for years through selfishness, opposition to my animal-mad family and intellectual silliness. I should say that I owe it to you and to Poodly.”

  Fascinated as she was by the country, Sybille remained largely unimpressed by most of the people she encountered. With the exception of Don Guillermo and his extended family, she despised the Mexicans. The indigenous population she found “dirty and illiterate…A people so naturally unintellectual is unfathomable to a person like myself. As to the middle class…they seem dishonest, mindless, dumbly and lecherously Latin…The men with their small moustaches and enormous conceits are soft and sneery…The womenfolk are just womenfolk. Such members of the upper class as I have met seem desiccated.” There was little to be said, either, for the expatriate society. “Old Virginian ladies who call the natives niggers…the dreadful middlebrow arty Anglo-American colony of Ajijic and San Antonio…Then there are some fantastic wandervogel Germans who smell of Nazi three miles off, who walk about with guitars and talk about good German blood.”

  Long an admirer of D. H. Lawrence—it was while reading his Mornings in Mexico that she fir
st became interested in the country—Sybille was intrigued to meet Lawrence’s old friend, Witter Bynner, but he, too, turned out to be a disappointment, drunk and talking unstoppably to a small group of admirers with the “spinsterish primadonnaism of a trout among the minnow intellectuals.” Even less to her taste was the American writer Neill James, author of a series of travel books in which Neill herself starred as “the Petticoat Vagabond” (“if that doesn’t make your flesh creep,” as Sybille caustically remarked). She and Esther were taken to meet Neill at her house near Lake Chapala, where a furious row broke out on the subject of Huxley’s mysticism, the visit ending abruptly when Neill in a rage told her visitors they were “rude as Yankee peddlers,” hurling a large lacquered plate after them as they hastily made for the door.

  Eventually, towards the end of the year, Sybille began to long for departure. She had been away for nearly six months, and while recognising how much she had benefited from her Mexican experience she was now looking forward to a more settled way of life. “Mexico has made all the difference to me,” she told Allanah. “I feel much younger and infinitely more contented having no longer the sense of having wasted all these years in America. The reanimation, of travelling, of seeing one’s surroundings in a fresh way, have sloughed off years of stagnation.” It had been good for Esther, too. “You would not recognise her, sitting almost silent before her heaped plate and eating it, vegetables and all, like an ordinary human being. I should never have thought that Esther could live without alcohol, but she does here…Of course it won’t last.” Sybille’s plan was to leave for Europe as soon as possible; she wanted to write about her Mexican experience, a short book to be completed in a few months, for which she was sure Allanah would find a publisher. Allanah’s response, however, was dispiriting: in Europe at the moment there was no point in thinking of books and publishing: “everyone is too concerned over daily living, getting enough coffee or wine, fearing communism or war, to think about anything else.”

  Meanwhile all plans for departure were delayed, first by Sybille falling ill with a painful sinus infection, confined to bed at the Villa Montecarlo for several weeks, then by a crisis over money. Esther, who for years had lived off her share in the family business, now discovered that the Mark Cross Company was in trouble and her income consequently diminished. To make matters worse, her husband, Chester, who had run through his own considerable fortune, was demanding money from his wife. Alarmed by his threats and reluctant to start proceedings for an inevitably contentious divorce, Esther feared she would have to remain in the States, a prospect which appalled Sybille, divided between her love for Esther, which would require her to stay, and what she described as an “almost frantic need to return to Europe.” For a while the two women were stranded, but then Esther, realising she must act, wrote “a few firm letters” and the immediate problems were solved.

  With Sybille fully recovered, the two women returned to Mexico City to prepare for the journey home. Allanah, critical of what she regarded as her friend’s dowdy attire, had sent her money to be spent on new clothes. “I got a good black suit,” Sybille gratefully reported, “a grey and blue large check worsted suit, and a gay green herringbone jacket with an olive grey flannel skirt and trousers…I also had some warm trousers made, dark blue corduroys…and a canary yellow pair with a waistcoat; and a scarlet corduroy coat; and some cheap but rather gay Mexican cotton shirts…I feel so ashamed fitting myself out on Bull’s money.”

  On 13 March 1947, Sybille and Esther left Mexico City by air for New York. Sybille felt overcome by gloom when she found herself again in what she now saw as “the bogus city…the galvanised grave.” However, she was pleased to see her old friends, including Annie, who on Sybille’s birthday, 16 March, gave a small party for her. Yet while grateful for Annie’s kindness, Sybille was too anxious to enjoy the occasion. With the war over, it seemed everyone was on the move, and passage by sea still almost impossible to obtain. Eventually, however, a couple of places were secured on a recently converted troop ship, six to twelve people sharing a cabin, “the last word in discomfort.” At Allanah’s request, Sybille amassed quantities of supplies. “I can bring a thousand cigarettes…a great deal of tea, 50 or 60 pounds of the best green coffee…Also rice, black pepper, curry powder, candles, pease pudding and 20 pounds of sugar…a few jars of marmalade and jam…”

  Finally on 9 June, Sybille and Esther sailed from New York, reaching Cherbourg ten days later, where they found Allanah on the quayside to meet them. Happy and intensely relieved to be once more in France, Sybille looked forward to a period of settled contentment. In this she could hardly have been more wrong. “After a universal cataclysm, return into a previous world is apt to be convulsive,” she wrote later. “And in my case it was…One might describe what followed…as a kind of disordered game of chess…I did not come out of it well.”

  Skip Notes

  *1 Little survives of Sybille’s correspondence with the Huxleys as all their papers were destroyed in a house fire in California in 1961.

  *2 The article appeared in the magazine’s final issue, January–February 1942.

  *3 This was a habit adopted by nearly all Sybille’s lovers in their correspondence. In their letters to each other Sybille and Allanah were “Rabbit” (or “Bun”) and “Bull,” while among later members of the epistolary menagerie were Horse, Rat, Turtle, Tortoise, Beast, Goat, Bear.

  *4 According to the writer and critic Edmund Wilson, “For Esther, to have married the grandson of Arthur means almost what it would have meant for Proust to have made an alliance with the Guermantes.” The Fifties, Edmund Wilson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986), p. 252.

  seven

  THE LOVELINESS OF ROME

  After an absence of seven years, Sybille was overjoyed to find herself once again in Europe. Now thirty-six, she was anxious to settle, to live in France, where she could concentrate on writing the book whose inspiration had come to her during her first weeks in Mexico. She had before her, or so she believed, a rewarding period of peace and stability, in the company of her two most loved companions, Esther and Allanah. It was not long, however, before Sybille’s excitement, her happiness at her future prospects, were to be tempered by a series of complex situations unfolding around her.

  During her long absence, all Sybille’s hopes had been focused on a return to the south, to the Mediterranean, on living again in Provence. Allanah, however, had no desire to move: she loved Normandy, loved her little house at Gadencourt, the green fields and wooded hills of the Eure valley. “I cannot tell you what joy it is being in France again in my own village,” she had written. “How agreeable it is to live amongst the French…despite their amorality, one is charmed by their spontaneous gaiety, their livingness [sic] and their right feeling for wine and food.” Another significant advantage was that Gadencourt was within easy reach of Paris, where Allanah’s husband, Robert, lived during the week, visiting his wife at weekends, when he enjoyed working in the garden, mowing the lawn, sawing wood for the fires.

  While Sybille looked forward to reunion with friends she had not seen since the beginning of the war, their reception was in some instances distinctly chilly. For those who had remained to survive the Occupation it was difficult not to resent the escapees. As Allanah’s one-time lover, Poppy Kirk, had expressed it, “If one has been through the bombing, one has little in common with people who went off to America; we have changed, life can never be the same again.” Joan Black and Eda Lord, too, were clearly resentful of the new arrivals. Their experience had been particularly harrowing: at the time of the German invasion they had fled to Aix-en-Provence, a terrifying journey on roads jammed with thousands of fellow refugees, in cars, on bicycles, on foot, frequently strafed by German aircraft. Shortly after arriving in Aix they were arrested and transported to Paris to be interned as enemy aliens, later taken back to the south and confined to house arrest under Gestapo surveillance. When
after the Liberation they eventually returned to Normandy, it was clear both had been marked by the trials they had undergone.

  On Allanah’s arrival from the States, she had been treated with reserve by Joan and Eda, but the three of them had eventually resumed an amicable relationship. Allanah had sent detailed reports to Sybille in Mexico of her visits to Vernon that were sharply critical of Joan, with whom, inexplicably in Allanah’s view, Sybille had once been so infatuated. “Nice as she is, it amazes me how you could have thought her so wonderful,” she wrote. “She is completely inartistic, and has no fantasy or imagination, and were she not an L[esbian], you would think her a nice middle-class woman with the most conventional ideas.” Describing the balance of power between the couple, she saw Joan as stupid and overbearing, while Eda, who did all the shopping and cooking, was treated as her slave. Joan took centre stage, venting her loathing for the Germans, Russians, Americans, French, while Eda remained quietly in the background. “Eda as usual does not express an opinion, only says yes, or no in a gentle voice.” Allanah’s hostility towards Joan was further intensified when she found herself falling “madly in love” with Eda.

  By the time she reached France, Sybille had been well informed by Allanah of her new-found passion. Joan predictably had been furious when she discovered what was going on, while Robert on the contrary had quickly come to accept his wife’s extramarital affair: he “has been wonderful about it. He says he would never tolerate a man, but he likes Eda, only fears she is a morbid type. But of course he does not think I will ever leave him, that he says he could not bear.”

  It had been arranged that Sybille should remain with Allanah at Gadencourt, while Esther would stay with her American sister-in-law, Noël Murphy, who lived a short distance away at Orgeval. (“I could have Esther here of course,” Allanah had said, “but would she not object to the outside lavatory?”) Noël Murphy, a tall, blonde beauty, was the widow of Esther’s elder brother, Fred, with whom Noël had lived in France until his early death in 1924. Subsequently she had bought a small farm at Orgeval, soon becoming part of the cultured expatriate society that was to flourish in the region both before and after the war. For Sybille such company was highly rewarding, and she came to relish lunching and dining with visitors such as the novelist Malcolm Lowry, Natalie Barney, as well as with Nancy Cunard, who owned a house in the neighbourhood, and with the distinguished New Yorker columnist Janet Flanner. Janet, who was to become a good friend of Sybille’s, was based in Paris but came to Orgeval most weekends to stay with Noël, the two of them having been lovers in the early 1930s.