Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  Galvanised by Allanah’s prodding and ashamed of her constant procrastination, Sybille once more resolved to start writing. “Very well,” she replied. “I will do the book to the best of my ability, and I will do it immediately. But please do not underrate the expense of guts and discipline it will need…I have not done any serious work for a long time. I lead the kind of life I am least suited to (loneliness, irregularity, lack of domesticity)…I know it is going to be damned difficult…[but] the book is a promise…If one is going to be a failure as a writer, it will have to be for lack of talent or originality, but it mustn’t be because one didn’t have the guts to try. So there.”

  Fortunately Sybille had recently made a new friend, who over a period of years was to provide her with much of the help and encouragement she so badly needed. Martha Gellhorn had made her professional reputation as a war correspondent, reporting on the Civil War in Spain, on the rise of Hitler, on the war both in Europe and the Far East; she had been the only woman accompanying the Normandy landings on D-Day, and had reported on the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. Martha, very much a man’s woman, had had a number of lovers, and in 1940 had married Ernest Hemingway, but the couple had divorced five years later. Now living on her own in Mexico, Martha was on a visit to Italy, where she hoped to adopt a child.

  Sybille first met Martha over dinner with friends, immediately struck by this handsome, slender, tough-talking American. “Meeting Martha,” Sybille wrote later, “was like being exposed to a fifteen-hundred-watt chandelier: she radiated vitality, certainty, total courage. Add to this the voltage of her talk—galloping, relentlessly slangy, wry, dry, self-deprecatory, often funny. Add to this her looks. The honey-coloured hair, shoulder-length, the intense large blue eyes, the fine-cut features, the bronzed skin, the graceful, stalwart stance.” In a letter to Allanah, Sybille defined Martha’s character as “proud, solitary, faintly snobbish…She may appear very hard-boiled; I don’t think she is. She is very intelligent; very disciplined; very sad and devastatingly disillusioned. I like her immensely.”

  At this juncture Martha was on the point of departing for Capri, to conduct a series of interviews for an American magazine, and needed someone to drive her car from Rome down to Naples. For this Sybille eagerly volunteered, excited at the prospect of the drive almost as much as the prospect of spending time with Martha on the island.

  The night before she left, Sybille had stayed up late at a party, leaving Rome at dawn after no sleep at all, reciting poetry to keep herself awake as hour after hour she drove south. “By full morning I had to fight drowsiness…[but] in the end I got there.” In Naples she left the car in a garage before lunching with friends, among them Constantine and Theodora FitzGibbon, who were then based on Capri. Afterwards, in the company of the FitzGibbons, Sybille boarded the island ferry. Once disembarked, she was thrilled to see among the crowd Martha waiting to welcome her; the two of them walked up the steep hill to the main piazza, then on to the pensione where Martha had taken a couple of rooms.

  Sybille had first visited Capri the year before, when she had spent several weeks there with Esther. Although enchanted by the island’s beauty she had been repelled by some of its expatriate community. “The island is full of the old and titled from out of every rat hole in Europe…Italian princesses…Russian princesses…German princesses who saved nothing but their family trees…German barons who try to be house agents; gaggles of countesses perched in rocky hermitages knitting socks…Most are pathetic, some are rogues, and all are bores.” Fortunately there had been other, more sympathetic figures in whose company she had delighted, among them the FitzGibbons, and also a friend from her time in New York, Kenneth Macpherson.

  After the war Kenneth had left the States to return to Europe, eventually settling on Capri, where he lived with a handsome English boyfriend. Kenneth’s property, the Villa Tuoro, was an airy, white-painted house with a beautiful garden, its flower-laden terraces looking out over the famous rocks, the Faraglioni, rising high up out of the sea. Kenneth had built the villa not only for himself but to provide a home for his old friend, the distinguished writer Norman Douglas. For many years Douglas, now in his eighties, had relied on the financial support of others, among them Kenneth and his ex-wife, Bryher. Admired as a writer, particularly for his novel South Wind, Douglas had also been notorious as an unregenerate paedophile—“I left England under a cloud no bigger than a boy’s hand,” he used to quip. In his old age, however, he had come to be regarded with awe, enjoying the homage paid to him as a literary celebrity. It was to write a biography of Douglas that Constantine FitzGibbon had come to Capri, and it was with the FitzGibbons as well as with Kenneth that Sybille and Esther on a number of occasions had found themselves in Douglas’s somewhat daunting company.

  Now on Sybille’s first evening on the island, she and Martha decided to dine at the Savoia, a small trattoria near the main piazza. The moment they entered they saw Douglas, white-haired and rosy-faced, sitting at a table by himself, his customary paraphernalia of pipe, snuffbox and tobacco tin set out before him; he waved to Sybille, beckoning her over to join him. Sybille immediately felt apprehensive: Martha had read none of Douglas’s works, and, puritan by nature, disapproved of homosexuals, “sissies” and “lizzies” in her vocabulary, while it was soon clear that Douglas for his part had failed to recognise in Martha the famous and formidable war correspondent. Fortunately, however, the misunderstandings on both sides resulted in a cosy and enjoyable evening—“The talk, as I remember, was chiefly about fish”—with Douglas, “bubbling and bawdy, and kind,” playfully addressing Martha as “my poppet,” while she saw in the pederastic Norman simply a charming and courteous old gentleman.

  After dinner the two women returned to their pensione. It was a warm evening and the shuttered windows were high up near the ceiling. To reach them they stood on a pair of stools, and there for some while they remained, elbows on the windowsill, breathing in the scented evening air, Sybille listening fascinated as Martha talked far into the night, about her war experiences, her love for her mother, her miserable marriage to Hemingway. “I felt privileged. I was captivated,” Sybille recalled. At its start this new friendship seemed made of solid gold, with Martha “the brightest, most honourable and virtuous being one had ever met.” In time their relationship would lose its shine, painfully descending, from Sybille’s perspective, from one of awed respect to bitter disillusion. In the immediate future, however, and indeed for some time to come, Martha was to prove a loyal friend to Sybille and in professional terms both an exemplar and supportive ally. “I owe her a good deal in one way and another,” Sybille wrote later, “and it may well have been that it was her dazzlingly robust verbal style which provided the final kick that set my writing free.”

  At the end of June Sybille left Capri, returning for a couple of weeks to Rome before departing again, this time for Ischia, accompanied by Esther. For Sybille the purpose of the expedition was to provide the time and seclusion necessary for her to write. Constantly nagged by Allanah and now bracingly encouraged by Martha, she knew she must make a beginning or the whole of her Mexican experience might fade, the compulsion to write about it evaporate, and the work never materialise. While on a previous expedition to Ischia she had been offered the chance of somewhere to stay, with no domestic duties, where she could devote herself to her writing.

  This fortuitous opportunity had materialised when she and Martha were on Capri and had decided to visit Ischia for the day. While strolling up from the port, Martha soignée and elegant, Sybille in shirt and shorts, with a faded blue baseball cap shading her eyes, they suddenly came to a stop. “By golly!” Martha exclaimed. “Don’t look round—there’s the baronessa…the Kraut who was in with Ciano and Franco and all…I can’t believe it, how dare she show her face? She must be one of the wickedest women in Europe.” Describing the incident afterwards, Sybille wrote, “My God, I thought, it can’t be! But it
was…She walked up to us, made straight for me and said, ‘Billi.’ ”

  The bad baronessa was Maria Ursula (“Mursel”) von Stohrer (née Gunther), whom Sybille remembered as a close friend of her mother, a frequent visitor to the schloss at Feldkirch. Although Mursel was nearly twenty years younger than Lisa, the two women had much in common, both sophisticated, highly intelligent and well read. Sybille as a young child had loved and admired Mursel, and thus it had come as a shock when she learned later of Mursel’s marriage to Baron Eberhard von Stohrer, a high-ranking diplomat, who during the war had served for a time as German ambassador in Madrid. Appalled by this association with the Nazi regime, Sybille had resolved, should the occasion arise, to avoid any further contact with Mursel.

  Now for the first time in nearly twenty years Sybille had come face-to-face with the villainess herself. But in place of loathing and hostility, she found herself fascinated, seduced by the older woman’s charm, impressed by her blonde beauty, her elegance, if not wholly at ease with her slightly sardonic manner. Mursel “gave me an affectionate if a tinge ironic smile. ‘Billi,’ she said, ‘what are you doing here?’ She took me in with one amused glance. ‘You look a bit shabby,’ she said. Another mocking smile. ‘I suppose that comes from having been on the winning side.’ ” The Stohrers owned a luxurious hotel and spa on the north coast of the island, and it was here that Mursel suggested Sybille should stay for a while; she would be offered a special rate, and with everything provided would be able to concentrate on her writing.

  A few weeks later when Sybille returned to the island with Esther, she found herself in a grand if somewhat eccentric environment. At the Villa Castiglione the two women were shown to a separate guest house, an arrangement which turned out to be less than ideal. Their accommodation, Sybille told Martha, “though charming and comfortable for ONE, consists of two rooms, one above and one below connected by an outer staircase…The upper room is the bedroom, and I am sharing it with E…In the sitting room, I work and try not to share it with E. Actually, she could not be nicer about it. But you can imagine what it’s like: driving somebody out to sit in a bedroom immediately after breakfast, hearing them pace overhead.” Sybille did everything she could to persuade Esther to go out on her own, for instance to call on her old acquaintance, W. H. Auden, who was staying with his boyfriend, Chester Kallman, in the town of Forio, but Esther’s inertia was too deeply embedded. “Nothing will induce her to take the bus to the Forio sissies by herself. She agreed to walk into Porto d’Ischia the other day because I promised I’d bicycle down after seven and take her back. I found her, hours later, on a milestone halfway, ‘My sandal’s broken, I can’t move.’ (It was not broken, only undone.)”

  Every evening the two women joined the hotel’s other guests for dinner on the terrace. Here they were placed at a separate table, “set out with gleaming linen, silver, china…polished candelabras…coroneted napkins, silver dishes, trembling peasant boys decked out in the grey and scarlet livery of the German Embassy at Madrid.” Sybille, nervously self-conscious, would begin making conversation, watching with dread as Esther grew increasingly intoxicated, talking about “the most unsuitable topics in a loud, public voice.”

  Despite her uneasiness over the Stohrers’ past, Sybille could not help but enjoy their company. “One cannot think much, oddly enough, of the political angle once one is under their roof.” As before in childhood she was bewitched by Mursel herself and fascinated by her stories. “The baronessa tells them extremely well,” she reported to Martha, “devastating anecdotes about Franco, Goebbels, Eva Braun…She seems to have made a lot of valuable connections in Spain, and is hand in glove with the Vatican.” As for her husband, “I find him a fountain of joy…without a ray of imagination or humour; longing to talk. It all comes out, one is convinced, exactly as it happened. The Führer at Hendaye, Ribbentrop…When she isn’t about, he forgets to say Adolf and says der Führer…I am not so sure whether their teeth are really drawn…[but] they are not Nazis, and honestly don’t consider themselves Nazis.”

  Meanwhile, Sybille was determined to make a start on the Mexican story, the idea of which had first come to her over three years ago, “one warm night, on the terrace of a hacienda, lying on a deckchair under the subtropical sky.” When Esther had arrived from France before their departure for Ischia she had brought with her the letters Sybille had written to Allanah describing her Mexican experience. Since Sybille had kept no diary nor taken any notes, these letters were invaluable, long extracts eventually appearing almost unaltered throughout the book. She intended to present it as a kind of travel diary, she told Allanah, “an extremely subjective book that relies entirely for its coming off on being well written and on the quality of the author’s mind and sensibility…But amusing in parts, even burlesque, with perhaps bits of narratives about the stranger and more eccentric characters there; but with always the sense of what a remote, strange (the incredible Otherness of Mexico) place it is.”

  Sybille found the beginning unexpectedly difficult. “I haven’t written for much too long. It’s as though a muscle were gone…I feel exhausted, discouraged and depressed…Buckling down is much harder than I thought.” In a notebook kept at this period the entries read: “July 20th No work—no excuse. 21st Thinking Fiddling—Dawdling…25th Thinking—Dawdling—Dreaming—Fiddling…22nd Aug Hungover.” Eventually, however, she began to gather momentum, and “now it’s a bit better, as one has forced oneself into a routine…There have even been a few of those moments of sheer joy when one thinks one has caught it.” The highs and lows continued, but Sybille was determined to persevere, often taking stimulants, up to three Dexedrine a day, to keep herself going. “I’ve been wrestling all afternoon with getting myself off the High Plateau of Northern Mexico where I am stuck,” she reported to Allanah at the end of the first month. “It took me three weeks to cross the U.S., and I’m only just across the border…Constant descriptions of the countryside are wearing me out.”

  Inevitably there were distractions, chief among them her feeling of guilt about Esther, the constant awareness of Esther’s solitary presence in the room overhead. Nonetheless, Sybille soon found herself working for up to six hours at a time, and before long she came to realise that her discipline and determination were proving productive. “What mattered was that the book was moving and with it the discovery that I was writing in a voice unlike the one I had assumed before. My inner ear no longer echoed the cadences of Aldous Huxley.”

  In September, Sybille with Esther returned to France for the first time in over a year. Here she found that much had changed, the sexual carousel once more in full swing. Esther, who had planned to visit Ireland with her lover Joan Black, now discovered to her astonishment that Joan was about to marry. Her English fiancé, Peter, Viscount Churchill, was regarded with suspicion by Joan’s friends, his reputation that of “a worn-out international fairy…who could not be trusted around the corner.” Luckily, however, the shock of Joan’s defection instantly cured Esther of her infatuation. “My whole feeling about her has vanished so completely,” she told Sybille, “that I am honestly amazed by my own indifference to the whole thing.” Then Eda Lord, who two years earlier had left Joan for Allanah, had suddenly gone to live in Wales with Hilary Williams, a woman with whom she had had a brief affair at the beginning of the war. The two were “madly in love,” according to Allanah, who had been devastated by Eda’s departure. Allanah’s husband continued to be supportive, “and could not be sweeter or nicer to me,” she told Sybille. “But I miss Eda so terribly and am so utterly heartbroken and miserable without her…I feel I cannot get through the days and nights.”

  Fortunately, Allanah was engaged in a new project which was to help take her mind off her unhappiness. Recently she had bought a house in the south of France, at La Roquette-sur-Siagne, a tiny village in the back country, just over six miles north of Cannes. Here Sybille soon after her return came to join her, imme
diately entranced not only by the house but by its location deep in the heart of her beloved Provence, “to me one of the most heavenly countrysides in the world.” At Les Bastides she found herself in an “abode of permanent peace…We look out into a Virgillian valley, silver with olives, flanked by exquisite hills…It is still fine; but there is an autumn coolness in the evening air, and the warm summer scent of thyme and pines is already mixed with woodsmoke where they burn the leaves. The grapes are still on the vines…[the house is] simple, whitewashed, large square rooms, built-in lights and built-in bookcases, and books and books. It sort of exhales peace and order.” During the next few weeks Allanah, her husband Robert and Sybille spent their days swimming and taking long walks in the country, in the evenings after dinner playing cards, reading and listening to music on the gramophone.

  For Sybille it was a time of peace and enchantment, Les Bastides providing a precious haven from the stresses of the world—and so it would remain for the next nearly forty years of her life.

  Arriving back in Paris, Sybille’s intention was to return to Rome as soon as possible and continue work on her book. It was now, however, that she was faced with a serious obstacle, a deterioration in her eyesight affecting her ability to read and write. Familiar with Aldous’s lifelong problems with his eyes, she had read with interest his recent account of the dramatic improvement to his vision resulting from following the Bates Method, a process of “visual re-education.” Today almost wholly discredited, the Bates Method at the time was heralded by many as a revolutionary development, its popularity significantly boosted by Aldous’s book on the subject, The Art of Seeing. Sybille was determined to try it for herself, first consulting Maria Huxley’s sister, Jeanne Neveux, who was a Bates practitioner in Paris. After her appointment, however, Sybille came away unimpressed by what she described as “the Bates Sorcery Chamber—blackboards, cut-outs, beads, balls, cardboard fans,” disappointed to find the exercises made no difference at all.*1