Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  *2 In fact the Gendels had been married for only six years.

  *3 “The ’potamus can never reach / The mango on the mango-tree; / But fruits of pomegranate and peach / Refresh the Church from over sea.”

  eight

  “THAT OGRE, THE SNAIL NOVEL”

  The lack of inspiration was short-lived. Since childhood Sybille had known that writing was her métier, and now at last, after years of failure and procrastination, her ambition had been realised. “The impulses behind writing are obscure in everyone,” she told Evelyn. “Why one wants to tell a good story, for instance, is mysterious to me…[but] I do want to.” Impatient to start work, and with several ideas for a novel in mind, she was finding it difficult to decide which direction to take. Initially she had been drawn to the subject of an eccentric ménage à trois she had known in New York,*1 but then abandoned that in favour of focusing on Mursel von Stohrer, “the bad baronessa,” who had been much in her thoughts since their meeting on Ischia. However, it was not long before she decided on a story that had been with her since childhood, that of her father, Maximilian, of his family and early life, and of his two marriages.

  Sybille when writing required hours of solitude a day, but she also strongly felt the need of a writing colleague, someone with whom she could discuss in minute detail the problems involved, talk about her progress or lack of it, with the firm understanding that each would be honest and outspoken when criticising the other’s work. While engaged on The Sudden View, she had relied on Esther for advice on the historical background and had read occasional passages aloud to Evelyn, but Esther, although impressively well informed, was reluctant to criticise, while Evelyn simply seemed bemused: “her boredom with the text was evident…she said she just did not know what to make of it.” Fortunately, by the time Sybille began work on her new project, she had found the perfect partner in Martha Gellhorn.

  Martha was now living in a rented farmhouse a few miles outside Rome, together with Alessandro (“Sandy”), the little boy she had recently adopted from an orphanage near Florence. Martha, too, was about to start work on a novel, and the two women immediately became engaged in a close critical alliance, meeting several times a week to discuss their work (always referred to by Martha as “bilgers”), and corresponding almost daily, their letters often running to seven or eight closely typed pages. As Sybille explained to Allanah, Martha’s “arrival showed how much I needed someone to talk to in exactly that way, someone intelligent, sensitive, entirely different from myself, who is, apart from very amusing, and so witty, entirely serious, entirely in the grip of the same questions that beset me: conduct, human destiny, writing, the use of minor talent, the ordering of one’s life and efforts.” And Martha for her part was equally reliant on her dear “Sib” or “Sibbie,” as she usually addressed her. Sybille “has become my bosom companion,” she told William Walton. “She is the best person to talk writing with that I have ever found; she loves going over, by the hour, words, effects, motives; she is such a help it isn’t even true; has a fine literary education so one can listen to her; and I like her own work.”

  Several times a week Martha drove into the city in her little Fiat Topolino to see Sybille, and the two women spent hours intensively picking over not only the act and art of writing but the minutiae of each character, the nuance of every scene. Although their literary styles were very different, the two shared a number of personal characteristics: restless, perfectionist, and given to frequent periods of anxiety and depression. For both, writing was a vital part of their existence, although Sybille was less methodical, less accustomed to routine than Martha; while Sybille had periodic bursts of working hard, Martha, an experienced journalist, was ruthlessly disciplined, long used to the intractable demands of the deadline. Sybille explained to Martha how important to her their partnership was. “This letting me in on your work is a true pleasure for me, a stimulus for my own work, and I think it’s a privilege, something you give.” And Martha for her part was equally enthusiastic. “Sybille dear…I take everything, I take greedily, with both hands, without consideration, sparing you nothing…There is absolutely no sense in my being in Italy except this astounding, unexpected sense of having you to do my work with.” Sybille was very moved when Martha made her one of two dedicatees of The Honeyed Peace, a collection of short stories published during this period.

  Although devoted friends and colleagues, in some areas the two women were somewhat less compatible. Martha found lesbianism distasteful (“There is nothing I do not know about Lesbians,” she told Walton, “except how they make love; I couldn’t bear to ask that for fear of hearing”); while Sybille for her part was critical of what she saw as Martha’s streak of American vulgarity. When for the first time Sybille visited Martha at her farmhouse she was appalled by the interior, which to Sybille was distastefully reminiscent of California. “All windows closed…everything spotless,” she reported to Allanah. In the bedroom “the servants (3) had switched on the electric blanket, laid out a white nylon plissée nightgown, a bed jacket, white mules, the dinner table laid with doilies, little salt arrangements…My dear, I had a cold shiver…M’s workroom is padded, noiseless, cut off. It gave me the creeps.” Worse was when they sat down to dinner and Sybille to her horror was served with tinned tomato soup. But then she already knew that Martha was shockingly indifferent to what she ate, while Martha for her part was irritated by what she regarded as Sybille’s gastronomic obsessiveness. “Do you realise that not a chapter of your present book is without detailed eating?” she complained of the novel in progress. “People do meet at meals; good. It cannot be avoided. But the menus can be skimped. I know I am right. There is too much of it…PLEASE Sybille.”

  Meanwhile Sybille continued to commute between Paris and Rome. While in Paris Sybille was constantly in touch with Evelyn by letter, always guilty at leaving her so much on her own, yet reassured by Evelyn’s stability and goodness of heart. “She has the most astounding qualities,” she told Martha. “Not only unselfish, but incapable of self-pity or dramatisation. I really believe she is happy.”

  And it was true that Evelyn by temperament was both sensible and calm, neither given to panic nor easily annoyed. Sybille was the centre of her life, and her admiration and respect never wavered. “Her heart and mind are so good and absolutely uniquely giving,” she noted in her diary. “And the work, the writing, the scrupulous love of writing, that’s altogether wonderful.” At the same time Evelyn recognised her lover’s failings, and understood very well that although Sybille was undoubtedly devoted, she had many different worlds and levels of emotional attachment that had little to do with her. During Sybille’s absences Evelyn profoundly missed her, and yet she peacefully continued with her routines, writing almost daily to her “DEAR Beast” to report on what she had done, whom she had seen, and, most important, the meals she had prepared and eaten, described in minute and sensuous detail. “Oh his pot-roast: he took off the lid of fat, and put it back into the oven (mod-slow) until his fagiolini and potatoes were ready…Ate quantities of meatie and sauce (pure meat-glaze, my how strong and good) and strips of pancetta and grasso di vitello, and small boiled potatoes and fagiolini with oil and lemon too, and then had potatoes and salad with sauce and oil and lemon, MY it was good.”

  When in Paris Sybille as usual stayed with Esther and Katzi, Esther having recently moved into a comfortable apartment in the rue Madame. Sybille’s relations with Esther continued affectionate and relaxed, helped by the fact that, at least for the moment, Esther’s drinking was under control. Katzi, however, she soon came to find intolerable. With her now blonde-streaked hair, her painted nails and showy costume jewellery, Katzi exasperated Sybille, banging and clattering about in her full skirts and high heels, cigarette in hand, arguing with almost everything Sybille said. “My sister is an amoral nitwit. Her every touch rubs me the wrong way, and she knows it, resents it.” There were constant spats between the
two, their shouting matches entertaining Esther and making her laugh. Nonetheless the three of them continued to live together, spending most evenings in each other’s company, and often entertaining friends to dinner at home.

  One evening a new guest appeared at the rue Madame, Eda Lord, with whom Allanah had previously been deeply infatuated. Eda, who was briefly in Paris with her lover, Hilary Williams, had encountered Sybille one afternoon as she was walking past Les Deux Magots in Saint-Germain. “A soft voice called Sybille—I turned and there was Eda. Will you speak to me, she said. My dear, I said, of course. And we sat down, and drank Coca-Cola (only thing one could think of to ask the insistent waiter) and talked, and I was really very pleased. Eda has great charm…I asked her, and her friend Mrs. Williams, in for drinks here, later in the evening.” When at the appointed hour Eda and Hilary arrived, Sybille was in the kitchen stirring saucepans and opening bottles of wine. Esther, hospitable as ever, immediately insisted they stay for dinner, which they did, and Sybille found the evening exceptionally enjoyable. “Eda was very affectionate, and I found myself being so too.” The pleasure and excitement Sybille felt was to remain with her for some time.

  Towards the end of 1953, when Sybille was again in Paris, Evelyn for the first time was invited to stay. The prospect made her uneasy: well aware that neither Esther nor Katzi had the slightest interest in her, she nonetheless believed she must accept for Sybille’s sake. And indeed from the moment of her arrival, Evelyn felt an outsider. “They don’t care for me,” she noted in her diary, “but I must not let them see I know that.” Katzi, true to form, was particularly brusque and impatient. “Says: ‘why don’t you go out?’ Says: ‘comment, vous avez bouffez tout le pain? [what, you’ve gobbled all the bread?]’…Says: ‘alors, vous êtes fini? [so, have you finished?]’ Because I sit on chewing slowly after she’s left the luncheon table…E is bored, squirms visibly. Katzi is angry and bored…S says nonsense, nonsense, enjoy yourself, but that’s impossible, one cannot be happy feeling unwanted.”

  In the morning Evelyn remained in her bedroom, reading, sewing, writing her diary and making plans for a children’s book she had in mind. In the afternoon she explored the city and once or twice met friends she had known years before in New York. After a few days, much to her relief, the atmosphere lightened and she began to feel more welcome, Esther smiling and benign, Katzi much friendlier. Evelyn was perceptive about the relationship between the two sisters, the tensions and unspoken resentments that simmered below the surface. “I am so surprised to hear that S ‘never laughs,’ that she is so ‘serious’ poor K has to retire in the evenings for boredom. The point is of course, that S laughs all the time, only her jokes and interests are incomprehensible to K, and K’s easy nightclub gaiety is not merely incomprehensible to S, but she disapproves, sees it as symbol of all the easy vulgarity, the lack of taste etc, which it is. I feel a fool, laughing with K when she dances about, singing her nightclub songs (as she did last night, before bed, weaving about, reminiscently, in her peignoir); she looked so happy then. ‘Oh, that’s the life,’ she seems to say.”

  For Evelyn, her stay in Paris, if not wholly enjoyable, had provided her with a much deeper understanding of the complexities of Sybille’s situation; it had also served to clarify the relationship between them. By the time she returned to Rome, Evelyn had regained her emotional stability while also attaining a new sense of liberty. “Felt free, and also, more independent…for the first time truly…independent of S. NOT less loving—but independent…My life depends on ME, so finally, possibly along with this small drama, it has become a practical working REALITY. Darling S, the most valuable of human beings I know, is my beloved valued creature, not my prop or my crutch.”

  While in Paris, Sybille had been working not on her novel but on a long article describing a journey she had made earlier in the year to Switzerland. In Rome during the spring she had felt particularly restless, “trapped in my recluse life here…trapped also by the complete lack of money which makes even an evening at a Roman trattoria something as financially impossible as say an evening at Glyndebourne.” Fortunately she was rescued first by Martha, who gave her a generous $200, enough to live on for several months, with the promise of more whenever she needed it; then by the final payment from Harper’s in New York for The Sudden View; added to this was the magnificent sum of $1,200 from the American magazine House Beautiful for four cookery articles she and Evelyn had written together. Temporarily relieved of financial worry, Sybille immediately began planning her escape. Esther wanted to spend the summer in the mountains, and as Austria was out of the question for Sybille—“I still cannot bear a Germanic country”—they eventually agreed on Switzerland. “I am rather looking forward to it,” Sybille told Martha. “I long for surrounding order and responsibility.”

  In August 1953, Sybille from Rome and Esther from Paris met at the station in Geneva, from where they travelled by train to Berne, then on to Gersau on Lake Lucerne. Although Sybille was enchanted by the scenery glimpsed from their carriage window—“past the vineyards, past grey-stone chateaux…past orchards, fir trees, cuckoo-clock houses, village spires”—Gersau itself was a disappointment, “clean, honest, stolid, but no charm, no mystery, no magic.” Far worse, however, was the discovery that her fellow guests at the hotel were German Swiss. This appalled her, particularly as she was obliged to speak to them in German: “one is automatically taken for a Reichs Deutsche. God forbid.” When Sybille went down to the lake to bathe she found the dreaded Schweizerdeutschen already in the water. “The Germans talk about my slow descent into that liquid Frigidaire (‘sie hat ja Gänsehaut [you have gooseflesh]’…HOW I HATE THEM) When I was in they all said, snuffling in the water, ‘herrlich, herrlich [glorious, glorious]’ to each other. Well it wasn’t magnificent it was just extremely steely bone-touchingly cold.”

  From that moment on, however, Sybille began to enjoy herself. Every morning, dressed in shorts, striped jersey and espadrilles, a cardigan tied round her waist, knapsack on her shoulders, she left Esther at the hotel while she strode off into the mountains for day-long walks by herself, “smelling the moss, hay, with the sound of the brooks, passing the goitered localry saying Grüsse [greetings]…E is most considerate,” Sybille reported to Evelyn, “but has expressed a wish to walk herself, which means 30 minutes (perhaps) to a café with a view.” As the days passed, Sybille came to love the country more and more. “A resurgence of health, physical activity and traveller’s curiosity. The excitement of discovering a new country. I have fallen for it…its happiness, innocence and kindliness.”

  But after a week this peaceful existence was suddenly disrupted by a telegram, followed by a telephone call, from Martha announcing her imminent arrival. Martha had been in Yugoslavia, it appeared, and now, restless as ever, had decided to drive nearly 1,000 miles to join Sybille in Gersau. Privately Sybille was dismayed, knowing how disruptive Martha’s presence could be. “M said isn’t it ‘rather fun.’ To me it’s rather grave,” she told Evelyn. “Also will she stay one night, two, three, hate it…Will she turn me against it all? One of the points here for me was inner freedom. So you see. Yet I feel ungrateful…I suppose I don’t want to be another paving stone on M’s road of disillusionment.” The next day Martha’s little Topolino drew up outside the hotel. “It made me feel odd, unsettled, unreal. There was M sitting & powdering her face, then I opened the door and said Hello, and she said Hello, isn’t this fun. And I felt heavy and shy, but swiftly we got up to her room and into sneakers and off we were for a walk…and then we were sitting on a bench above Gersau under an apple tree, looking at a view I had often looked at…and there she was en Chair et Os [in flesh and bone], and it felt flat and strange.”

  The immediate problem was with Esther, whom Martha had met briefly in Rome and instantly disliked. Sybille’s “beloved,” she had reported to William Walton, “is six foot two, wall-eyed and talks like an early American primer.” Now, as
Sybille feared, this second encounter was equally awkward. Esther, who joined the two women for tea, was silent at first, then suddenly launched into an unstoppable spate of name-dropping anecdotes about people of no interest to Martha. Martha for her part made little attempt to hide her boredom, within a very short while leaving to spend the rest of the evening in her room. Upset, Sybille went to find Esther “and explain and be nice—and that meant beer in a v. noisy Gasthaus…I feel I am taking this trip from E somehow. I don’t know. It should be more joyful.”

  The next day she and Martha set off for a whirlwind five-day tour of the country, hurtling along in the Topolino, up tortuous mountain passes, by the side of lakes, through valleys and orchards, past castles and picture-book villages. Whenever they stopped to look at a view, within minutes Martha would say, “Let’s shove”—and on they shoved, pausing only to eat and sleep. Luckily Martha was in a good mood, and Sybille quickly found herself enjoying the expedition, particularly happy that for once Martha was tolerant of her love of food. “Oddly enough M and I ate superbly and often, though at odd hours. Toblerone is what M likes best,” while one of Sybille’s greatest treats was Turkish cigarettes, “the most expensive, and I think the best in the world…They are the only cigarette that comes near a cigar in enjoyment…I smoked mine to the last fraction of an inch.”

  Shortly after Martha left, Sybille and Esther also departed, Sybille sad at leaving a country she had by now come to love. After a brief stay in Rome, she returned to Paris to work on an article about her Swiss experience. Entitled “The Anchor and the Balloon,” the piece gives a lively, impressionistic account of the people and places she encountered, and in particular her travels with Martha, endearingly portrayed with all her impatience and curiosity. Sybille’s sentences, sometimes a paragraph in length, whirl the reader up mountains and into pastures, through long walks in the country, swimming in icy rivers and lakes, exploring Berne, Geneva, Zurich, Lucerne, shopping and lunching, idling over coffee while reading the paper. In Lucerne she listens to Mozart played in the open air. “It was pitch-dark and music and musicians came curiously distorted over the intervening water. The strings, now muted, now carried, floated thin; conductor and violins were reflected, enormously agitated, tail-coated cardboard frogs…The whole quite unreal; lovely, though perhaps too charged with romanticism. Mozart does not need this setting.” With her keen novelist’s eye, she also portrays with notable elan the characters she meets en route, most memorably the hotel manager in Gersau, “in black coat, silk tie and polished boots,” unfailingly courteous as he beadily assesses his customers. The tone is powerfully subjective so that the reader is always aware that they are seeing the country through the author’s eyes.