Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  Fortunately Allanah decided to take the matter in hand. In London she booked appointments for Sybille with three different specialists: the first two were unhelpful, but from the third some simple instructions were to prove invaluable: “Write on green paper, not white: less glare. Never read or copy looking down on a flat surface: hold the page or book at an angle. Never stare.” After the two women returned to Paris, Allanah for good measure insisted on one final consultation, which at last seemed to offer a correct analysis. “The occulist,” Sybille reported, was “quite first rate…[and] I’m convinced his diagnosis is right (increasing sensitiveness to light due to congenital lack of pigmentation; you see I was very fair as a child; brought out by advancing age and aggravated by astigmatism)…One can alleviate it (drops, ointments for lids, dark glasses, wearing a shield)…Writing is the last kind of profession for me, he said. But my eyes are good, and sight too. It is a relief that nothing is basically wrong.”

  For the first three months of 1950, Sybille remained in France, commuting between Gadencourt and Paris, where she stayed with Esther at the Hôtel Saints-Pères. It was often with Esther that Sybille went out in the evenings, on several occasions dining with old friends such as Janet Flanner and Noël Murphy, and also Poppy Kirk. Poppy, in Sybille’s view “still one of the liveliest and aesthetically most pleasing people alive,” was now ensconced with a new lover, the flamboyant Mercedes de Acosta, adored by Poppy, despised by many others, Sybille, Esther and Allanah among them. While living in California, Mercedes, a glamorous Spanish-American, nicknamed “Countess Dracula” for her vampire-like costume—black cloaks and trousers, white face powder, blood-red lipstick—had been famous for her affairs with, among others, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Sybille had met her first with the Huxleys in Los Angeles, when she had found her “unbelievably tiresome.” Now in Paris her opinion of this “Lord Byron of the Ladies” was unchanged. “Smart, celebrity hunting, deadly dull, and not nice. She’s been called Countess Dracula, but I believe the only thing she minds is being called Old Merc.”

  One of Esther’s regular haunts was the literary salon of Natalie Barney, whom Esther had known since the early 1930s. Among the many distinguished guests now frequenting the rue Jacob were Alice B. Toklas, Jean Cocteau, Colette, Virgil Thomson, Janet Flanner and Nancy Cunard. Despite Natalie Barney’s formidable reputation both as literary hostess and promiscuous lesbian, Sybille remained unimpressed. “Quick change and off to Miss Barney rue Jacob with E very dull indeed—Alice B. Toklas creeping about,” she reported. Sybille disliked the stuffy, darkly lit drawing room and was repelled by what she considered as Miss Barney’s solipsistic showing off.

  Feeling under obligation to return Natalie’s hospitality, however, Sybille gave a small tea party for her at the Hôtel Saints-Pères. The atmosphere was uncomfortably formal, Natalie not bothering to conceal her boredom, until suddenly there was a knock on the door and a little girl appeared holding a telegram for one of the guests. “Suddenly,” Sybille recalled, “Natalie snapped awake, her eyes sparkled and she began to praise the child—‘quelle jolie fille’—salivating over her and stroking her arm the way an old man would drool over and pinch the bottom of a chorus girl…She is a monster,” Sybille concluded, “entirely selfish…with no moral compass…The entertaining, brittle world of Paris, it makes me sick.”

  Rather more congenial were the evenings Sybille spent with Allanah in the company of a group of hard-drinking Americans, all writers, gathered at a small hotel in the rue de l’Université, among them Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, and the very eccentric Jane Bowles. “Allanah and I shared many of their views if not their habits,” Sybille recalled, “were captivated by their writings, deplored their drinking…Allanah on principle, I for the delay of dinner.” Some of the group they had met while in the States during the war, most often the talented, unpredictable Jane Bowles, described by Sybille as “an angelic, witty, suicidal imp.” Jane had recently written her first play, which was about to go into production, and thus she was planning to return shortly to New York. It was unfortunate, therefore, that now, during her brief stay in Paris, she and Allanah should have fallen passionately in love.

  Sybille was sympathetic to her friend’s new affair, on several occasions dining with Allanah and Jane, yet all the while she remained restless with longing to return to Italy. Then at the end of March Pierre and Simone Mimerel arrived in town and to Sybille’s joy offered to drive her to Rome.

  Within a few days of arrival Sybille had found somewhere to live, at 54 Piazza di Spagna, only a short walk away from the d’Inghilterra. The apartment was minute, a tiny bungalow built onto the roof of a five-storey building, but the location was ideal and the views spectacular, of the Spanish Steps, the Trinità dei Monti, and the magnificent gardens of the Villa Borghese. Before leaving for Capri, the FitzGibbons had lived there, and had loved the little dwelling, the single room lined with bookshelves, the terrace covered with flowering plants. To begin with, however, Sybille was less than enchanted, describing it as “a horrid Dog Kennel: dilapidated, with every stick of scarce furniture fit to be burned.” The accommodation was limited, one bed-sitting room, a small kitchen and a tiny bathroom with a large marble bath, but after spending a week washing and scrubbing, she began to see the appeal of the place, and was particularly pleased with the spacious terrace. “I have my tea there in the morning…Lunch out of doors, and dinner. It is like living in the country.”

  As spring evolved into summer, Sybille began to realise how happy she was in her rooftop eyrie. In many ways it was an ideal existence: there was a maid who came every afternoon to clean; and Sybille’s friend, Peter Tompkins, constructed a miniature summer house, open on one side and made of bamboo, where during the day she could sit in the shade. Although she continued to suffer problems with her eyes, obliged to wear very dark glasses when out-of-doors, she was now able to read for several hours at a time, emerging in the evenings to water the plants and gaze at the view. “I have acquired a new joy, gardening,” she told Allanah. “Thirty-five potted creepers (raised from seed); honeysuckle, jasmine, geraniums, moon flowers and morning glory, oleander and a pergola of vine; and the bamboo house full of greenery.” Here on the roof she regularly entertained friends for cocktails, after which they would go on to dine at Toto’s, a little trattoria round the corner. Among the regular visitors were her beloved Natalia Danesi, accompanied by Janet Flanner when she was in town; Peter Tompkins and his wife; Donald Downes; and “awful” Patricia Laffan, still filming at the Cinecittà studios.

  One morning while looking through letters at the concierge’s lodge, Sybille found an envelope addressed to her, inside it a note from an acquaintance in New York introducing a young American couple recently arrived in the city. Sybille immediately responded, inviting them to meet her the next evening in the bar at the d’Inghilterra.

  Milton and Evelyn Gendel, both in their early thirties, small in stature, slender and dark-haired, had come to Rome after Milton had been awarded a Fulbright scholarship. Sybille enjoyed their company, and after an hour or so the three of them went on to dinner at Toto’s. “Conversation flowed. Milton amusing, brief, detached; Evelyn chattered. Happily, disarmingly.” After that first evening, Sybille began to see the Gendels several times a week; they went to concerts and the opera together, dined at various local trattorias, and took to going for long walks through the city after dark, sometimes into the early hours of the morning. Before long the Gendels became regular visitors at the Piazza di Spagna; Milton reorganised the electrical system and installed lights on the roof, while Evelyn hemmed curtains, taught Sybille how to touch-type, and during the afternoons read aloud to her so that she could rest her eyes.

  As soon became clear, the Gendels had differing attitudes towards the Eternal City, Milton finding it disappointing—“I felt I’d moved to Yonkers or Westchester or somewhere…There was a very provincial feel to it”—while E
velyn was utterly enchanted. It was her first experience of abroad and she was eager to explore the ancient ruins, the galleries and palaces, everything the city had to offer. Unlike Milton, she was also passionately interested in food, which naturally endeared her to Sybille.

  During this time Sybille learned much of the couple’s history. Both had been born and brought up in New York, Evelyn’s father a schoolteacher, Milton’s in the rag trade. They had known each other since their schooldays, after which Evelyn went on to NYU, Milton to Columbia, where he left with a BSc as well as an MA in the history of art. They married in 1944, immediately before Milton, now in the army, was sent out to China, having become fluent in Mandarin after a four-month course at Yale. When the war ended, Evelyn found a job in publishing, while Milton stayed on in Shanghai for a couple of years before returning to the States. After several months with the War Department in Washington he finally rejoined Evelyn in New York. Awarded a Fulbright scholarship, Milton immediately made plans to return to China, plans that at the last moment were cancelled by the newly appointed Chairman Mao. It was at this point, somewhat reluctantly, that he accepted the State Department’s alternative offer of a year in Italy.

  Sybille was impressed by Milton’s clever, laconic and self-assured manner, although she found him not altogether sympathetic: he could be boring and seemed a little too pleased with himself, “one of those rather sarcastic, stuck-up young New York intellectuals.” Evelyn, on the other hand, was enchanting: “young in some ways; but steady, disciplined, mature in others…Intelligent, with a will of her own…She looks a little like a ballerina, with a curious Byzantine face, with those slanting inhuman eyes of the mosaics.” Curiously, both Milton and Sybille regarded the gap in age between them as a barrier to closer friendship. “I didn’t especially take to Sybille,” Milton recalled, “but then there was twenty years’ difference in our ages,” while Sybille stated, “Yes, I did like the Gendels well enough. But. They were young. The gap between their mid-twenties and my late thirties was too great.” In fact, both Gendels were in their mid-thirties and Sybille was thirty-nine, so the gap was far smaller than they believed.

  As her vision improved, Sybille was able to spend several hours a day reading and writing, her eyes protected by a white tennis visor lined with green. Gradually she felt able to return to her book. “I bit a nail, sat down before my pages and the typewriter every morning. I worked, and it worked.” In the early afternoon, she left her desk and went into the kitchen to assemble her lunch, which was then carefully placed on a small card table in a shady corner of the terrace—“tomatoes, an egg or two, salami, fruit, a large glass of water.” As the day cooled she emerged onto the roof to spend time pruning and watering the plants, then in the early evening settled back with a glass of wine to watch the swifts swooping overhead, later either going out with friends or eating on her own while listening to music on the radio. As always, Sybille took care in preparing her dinner, concentrating intently not only on the cooking, but also on a meticulous mise en scène. “The Gendels, who occasionally came to pick me up for our late-evening walks—seemed overtaken with mirth finding me à table formally set with hot plate, first course, main course and the right-sized spoon for every grain of Parmesan.”

  One afternoon Evelyn arrived unexpectedly, on her own and clearly nervous. Sybille asked her to help take down some laundry hanging out to dry on the terrace. “Evelyn and I were facing each other across the washing line folding pillowcases, kitchen towels, when I heard her clearly enunciate what I call the three fatal words.” Although Sybille had recently become aware of an emotional tension in the atmosphere the declaration took her by surprise. “I knew all the time, and yet did not know a thing, and the feather could have knocked me over. We talked and talked, it turned out that she had been married for twelve years,*2 but that the marriage had been rather dead for the last three or four.” Sybille for her part felt disconcerted, but also flattered and suddenly intensely excited, as Evelyn described how deeply she had fallen in love with her, how she longed to leave Milton and to live for the rest of her life with Sybille.

  Suddenly there was a knock on the door and Janet Flanner and Natalia appeared; Janet had come to say goodbye as she was leaving Rome the following morning. Soon after they left, Milton arrived, and he, Sybille and Evelyn went out for dinner, the two women revealing nothing, all three as usual spending an equable evening together. But “after that day,” Sybille wrote of Evelyn, “I ceased to lump her together with her husband in my mind and judgement.”

  Over the next few weeks, Sybille, by now feeling “rather madly in love,” did her best to arrange as much time alone with Evelyn as possible. “We had to be extremely careful, as her husband was not to know, and therefore of course, for decency even more than prudence, nobody else.” Every day Evelyn arrived in the early afternoon, when the two of them would have lunch and then talk while Evelyn sewed, both impatiently waiting for “the maddening, slow maid” to leave. By the time she had gone they usually had only a couple of hours to themselves before Milton presented himself, ready to go out to dinner. In her pocket diary Sybille briefly noted the emotions she experienced during this period: “overexalted & feeling oats…overwhelming longing…tired & v. nervous…frantic, active, happy.” As she admitted to Toni Muir, “It was a strain. Those curiously intense days of talking, and too little privacy. Weekends were worse, as Evelyn had to spend at least all Sunday with her husband…Once or twice, we worked an elaborate edifice of opera tickets given to me for two only…Rigoletto, the stars be thanked, lasts until 2 a.m. in Italy.”

  Finally both decided they wanted to live together—“that notion of For Ever which is so attractive, and so frightening at the same time”—and that Evelyn must tell her husband that their marriage was over. “I was beside myself with heat, nerves and worry,” Sybille recalled, but Evelyn remained relatively calm, explaining to Milton, who had known nothing at all about the affair, that she was determined to leave him. Initially Milton was both shocked and angry, feeling humiliated and betrayed. “After Evelyn left me I hated her for a while, though the relationship had been going wrong for some time…[but then] my anger evaporated. I realised the relationship had been over anyway and that that had nothing to do with Evelyn leaving me for Sybille.”

  In the middle of July 1950 Sybille left Rome and travelled with Evelyn to France. While in Paris, Sybille broke the news to Esther, who reacted with her customary kindness and understanding. Shortly afterwards Allanah arrived from London, “and thank God she and Evelyn get on well. We motored down to the South together in Allanah’s car.” By this time Sybille had recovered from the emotional turmoil of the last weeks in Rome and felt ready to enjoy herself. “I found the first weeks slightly worrying (I had rather wanted to live alone for some years)…Then I got over that, and I am peaceful and happy now.” In fact her relationship with Evelyn was to be one of the most rewarding of her life. “Many attachments have improbable beginnings,” she wrote later, and “this one for me was the most abrupt; it also turned out one of the happiest, due mainly to Evelyn’s innate goodness and serenity of nature.”

  To Sybille’s relief, Allanah accepted the new relationship, although, true to form, she was not entirely uncritical. Evelyn, she admitted, “was very nice and very intelligent, but she never opens her mouth without making some kind of gaffe…[and] her manner is too familiar.” However, at this juncture Allanah was more concerned with her own problems; now amicably separated from her husband, Robert, she was currently torn between her passion for Jane Bowles and a new affair, with an Englishwoman, Frances (“Fay”) Blacket Gill, a successful lawyer with a practice in London. “I love Jane as much as ever, but I am more in love with F[ay],” she confided to Sybille. “I want to live always with F yet the very thought of having thereby to give up Jane, appals me.” After much agonising, Allanah finally decided that a life with Fay would be the sensible choice: Fay was well off, her house “a haven
of luxury and comfort…With Fay I feel that I would be marrying the kind of Englishman and successful lawyer that I should have married had she been a man.”

  Sybille and Evelyn returned to Rome in October, Sybille determined now to finish her book. And yet although happy with Evelyn, she remained restless, over the next couple of years moving every few months between Italy and France, while Evelyn remained in Rome. Here she and Evelyn had squeezed themselves into another cramped little rooftop premises, this time in the Via della Fontanella; but while in Paris, by contrast, Sybille enjoyed the greatest luxury and comfort, staying in Esther’s recently acquired apartment in the beautiful rue de Lille.

  Sybille’s relations with Esther were better than they had been for some time, peaceful and loving, with all the past tensions and jealousies behind them. Now at last with a place of her own, Esther was clearly enjoying herself: “thank God [she] has a little more money and it has made all the difference to her,” Sybille reported to Allanah. “She is so changed, gay, buying herself clothes, and I’m afraid much too generous and spending most of it on other people.” Sybille was delighted by the elegance of her new surroundings, the carved marble chimney pieces and Directoire furniture, the handsome rooms hung with pictures and gilded looking glasses. The inner courtyard was planted with a magnificent chestnut tree, “the L-shaped inner facade, plain, grey, patinaed of a late eighteenth-century hôtel. Just the view one would want in Paris…Nothing could be nicer and I am very very pleased.”