Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  “The Anchor and the Balloon” was submitted first to Cornhill, which turned it down, then sent by Allanah to Stephen Spender, editor of Encounter. Spender replied he would be delighted to run it if Sybille would cut it by half; this she did, and the article appeared in the issue of August 1954.*2

  Although keen to return to work on her novel, Sybille felt restless and dissatisfied, longing for change, tired now of both Paris and Rome. “I don’t like living in Rome any more,” she wrote of the city which she had once loved so passionately. “I am not at all happy here…everything grates, from the slovenly mindless careless humourless people to the noise, to the dirt, the general unreliability.” This was a pattern that was to be endlessly repeated, ecstatic love for a city alternating with deep distaste. Over time London, Paris and Rome, the three capitals in which Sybille spent most of her life, would in turn be both vilified and adored. London, where she was to live the longest, was the ideal city with its magnificent trees and peaceful parks, and alternately “horrible, plebeian, ugly, confused…and so dirty.” Similarly, Paris was found to be ravishingly beautiful and at other times repulsively ugly, “a monstrous agglomeration of filth and greed, disguised as civilisation.” Now it was the turn of her beloved Rome, considered deeply depressing, the weather intolerable and the Italians “mindless, mechanical, dirty, dishonest.”

  Fortunately for Sybille’s state of mind, at the beginning of 1954 she was able to leave Rome for a couple of weeks in England. Her visit had been arranged by Martha, whose situation had substantially changed. Recently Martha had agreed to marry Tom Matthews, a wealthy American widower, previously editor-in-chief of Time magazine in New York. Martha was not in love, but she liked and respected Matthews, was tired of Italy, and was particularly anxious to secure a stable home for her young son, Sandy.

  On arrival in London Sybille stayed in Chelsea with Allanah and her lover Fay Blacket Gill, but the atmosphere quickly curdled as a mutual dislike developed between Sybille and Fay, whom Sybille described as “philistine and difficult.” Fortunately Sybille was soon able to escape by joining Martha for a few days in a house she had taken in the country, although this turned out to be little better as Martha was in “a murderous mood” and Sandy a source of constant irritation. “Sandy burst in at 8.45…chatted through my pot of tea, dropped my pen, put on my rings…he may be insecure, but he is spoilt too…[and] I am not in such a state of awe at the sacred demands of childhood this morning as I ought to be.” Soon afterwards all three returned to London, Martha’s wedding to Tom taking place at Caxton Hall on 4 February 1954, with Sybille and Moura Budberg, an old friend of Martha’s, as witnesses.

  A few days later Sybille returned to Paris to join Evelyn, who was again staying with Esther and Katzi. As before Evelyn had kept devotedly in touch, almost daily sending long letters interspersed with little notes written in their private baby-talk. (“He LOVE him-y…Now is lunch, he go, den he post this, to his DEAR…spruce himself a little, fluff his hair, scent himself…and out he go.”) To Sybille’s relief, relations between the three women were far easier than before, Evelyn, now amused by Katzi’s snapping, had grown genuinely fond of Esther, the two of them “instinctive conspirators against K…I don’t find E boring at all, anymore,” she told Sybille, “except when drunk, but that’s something else.”

  During this period Sybille worked hard on her novel, regularly reporting her progress, or lack of it, to Martha. “[I] must say how I thank you. I had been trying to work on that beastly novel before your letter came…and at last today the ice broke…I seem to need words, your kind, so much. It’s like cranking up those old motor cars, so that their own engine can start running.” By the end of March, Sybille and Evelyn were back in Rome, where Sybille looked forward to an uninterrupted period of writing interspersed with some vigorous rooftop gardening. But then in early summer, to her surprise, the Huxleys arrived; on their first visit to Italy since before the war they were planning to spend a couple of weeks in the city, then go on to France to stay with one of Maria’s sisters.

  At first Sybille was apprehensive: it was now nearly fourteen years since she had last seen them and she was unsure what to expect. When on their first evening she walked up to their hotel at the top of the Spanish Steps she found to her relief that the couple were almost as she had first known them, Aldous relaxed and more handsome than ever, Maria pale and thin but cheerful and lively. “All is joy and ease,” Sybille reported to Martha. “Very happy. And such jokes…Aldous angelic…giving out a plenitude of serenity, calm, benignity…It is all as though one had never parted, not going back to youth, but a circle. Happy family feeling…almost a sense of roots.” Later Sybille described Aldous at this period as very different from the strained, tormented figure she had known during the war. “There was a sleekness, a smoothed-outness…and this had an extraordinary peace-inducing effect as though one were sitting…at the feet of a large and benign cat.” Initially Maria, too, seemed much the same, “en beauté, animated, gay,” although it was not long before Sybille noticed a sudden sinking into tiredness, which seemed to be more than ordinary exhaustion.

  During the next couple of weeks Sybille saw the Huxleys almost daily, usually in the evenings after they had returned from a day’s sightseeing. Over the past few years Aldous had become immersed in the study of various forms of parapsychology, then much in vogue in California, and to Sybille’s slight unease the subject of Aldous’s own “magic” was now at the centre of attention. When at one point she mentioned she was suffering from a period of insomnia, he immediately offered to cure it with what he called his “animal magnetism.” Submitting somewhat reluctantly, Sybille sat with her back to Aldous, who rolled up his shirtsleeves, then started pummelling with his right hand up and down her spine, while the fingers of his left rested lightly on the base of her neck, “like a violinist’s hand on his keys. ‘Aldous, what is that for?’ ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea, that’s where the abracadabra comes in.’ ” The first phase completed, Aldous continued by making wave-like motions with his arms, while intoning in a solemn, slow voice, “You are going to have a deep, deep sleep, a restful sleep, a deep refreshing sleep…” Later Sybille refrained from telling him she had stayed awake throughout the whole of the following three nights.

  In the course of one of their evenings together, Maria began talking of a friend of theirs whom she said she would like Sybille to meet. Laura Archera, born in Italy, now living in California, was a lay psychotherapist, currently on a visit to Rome. Shortly afterwards the Huxleys brought Laura with them for drinks on the roof with Sybille and Evelyn. Laura, in her early forties, slender and dark-haired with large brown eyes, was high-spirited and attractive, not at all “the forbidding esoteric therapist I had half expected.” Sybille took to her at once, finding her charming and sympathetic. At one point while Aldous was in full flood expounding another of his theories, Maria and Laura quietly disappeared indoors, where they remained talking together for some while. “There was a scent of honeysuckle, jasmine, tobacco flower,” Sybille wrote of the evening. “Above us, garlands of vines and in their interstices the sky. There was Aldous’s voice…and I knew as if I had been there that Maria was speaking at last about her illness.”

  As was soon to become clear, Maria was terminally ill with cancer, a diagnosis she had accepted with characteristic equanimity. “To me,” she had told Laura, “dying is no more than going from one room to another.” Maria was anxious, however, both to protect Aldous from the reality of her condition and at the same time to make provision for his future well-being. Aldous for his part understood at one level how serious the situation was but on the surface at least preferred to remain in denial. “Of course he knew,” said one of his sisters-in-law. “But he pushed it away. Didn’t want to talk about it. He was protecting himself from a truth that was unbearable.” Maria’s most urgent project had been to find a replacement for herself, a second wife, and it
was about this that she had talked to Laura. Bringing Aldous together with Laura, Sybille wrote later, “was a kind of consecration.” On the Huxleys’ last evening in Rome, Sybille and Evelyn joined them for dinner at a trattoria near the Piazza Colonna. “Afterwards I went with them as far as their hotel. At the door, Maria turned from me. ‘We don’t have to say goodbye,’ she said, ‘we’ve had our goodbye.’ ”

  Sybille was never to see Maria again. After Rome the Huxleys went on to France before returning to California, where on 12 February 1955 Maria died. A little over a year later Aldous and Laura Archera were married.

  Meanwhile, soon after the Huxleys’ departure, Sybille arranged another meeting with Laura. Maria had talked of Laura with enthusiasm, praising the effectiveness of her unconventional form of therapy, which she was sure would cure Sybille’s increasing vulnerability to anxiety and depression. Over the next fortnight Sybille saw Laura for several long sessions, during which the two women formed an affectionate friendship, Sybille convinced, at least for a time, that Laura had finally enabled her to achieve a new stability, both mental and emotional. “No orthodox analyst or doctor could do what I think Laura Archera can…It has made a total difference to my life. To everything,” she told Martha. “The effect was extraordinary…It has filled me with lightness, strength and hope…liberation from fear, a new ease and openness…And I believe now, entirely, that everything is curable.”

  In August Sybille left Rome for a prolonged stay in the south of France with Allanah at Les Bastides. Here she planned to immerse herself in her novel, energised by the “tremendous experience” of Laura’s “voodoo,” as she later referred to it. Unfortunately this buoyant mood was not to last, and before long Sybille found herself irritated and depressed, constantly distracted by the extensive building work under way on the house and by the people around her, in particular by Terence, a little English boy whom Allanah, together with Fay Blacket Gill, had recently adopted. “Bastides quite the wrong place,” she complained to Martha. “[I am] stuck, in writing, in everything, hedged in, repressed, angry, trying, trying, trying, getting nowhere. Not been able to write a word since end of August, though at desk, and quite frightened about it.” Martha, accustomed to Sybille’s complaints about staying with Allanah, was brisk in her reply. Les Bastides “has always been a disaster,” she told her. “You are like a repetitive lemming, going annually to your doom.”

  The following month, however, Sybille was able to escape for a fortnight, travelling to Switzerland, where she experienced much the same lightness of spirit as before. The purpose of the expedition was to buy a car, a little grey Citroën 2CV, a present from Esther, which had been found for her by her old motoring colleague, Pierre Mimerel. A couple of days after the sale went through, Sybille set out on the long journey from Berne back to Rome, relishing every moment of the “monotonous, strenuous, solitary driving days.” As it was too expensive to run the car on a daily basis, it was to be used for long journeys only, kept meanwhile near the tomb of Augustus by the Tiber, “with an anti-aircraft balloon to cover it, and an old scoundrel to keep an eye on it occasionally for a thousand lire a month. I sometimes go and polish it. I love that car,” she told Martha. “It will carry one, if God wills it, to London…So look at it not as wickedness but a bid for freedom.”

  Cheered by her acquisition, Sybille settled down to a final bout of intense concentration on what she described as “that ogre, the snail novel.” Finally in January 1955 it was done, and as before Sybille turned to Martha, not only for her critical opinion but also for help in finding a new publisher as she was determined not to return to Gollancz. Although Martha had her reservations about the book—“the novel seems to me almost too carefully embroidered, as if you never let yourself go”—she promised to do everything she could to help. First, however, Sybille had to decide on a title, her initial suggestions—“The Choice & the Moments,” “A Wheel,” “All that Was Possible,” “Failure and Interference,” “An Inheritance”—all disliked by Martha, particularly the last, which “sounds like Anthony Powell to me, and I cannot say worse.” Finally, after a few further weeks of struggle Sybille came up with A Legacy, which both agreed was by far the best choice.

  Sybille had been disappointed by the slow sales in England of The Sudden View, and was excited when Martha arranged for her to meet her publisher friend, George Weidenfeld. Weidenfeld, from an Austrian Jewish family, had arrived in London as a young man not long before the war, setting up his firm, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, in 1948. Short and plump, with dark eyes and a pasty white face, George was clever, sociable and intensely ambitious; immediately sensing an interesting opportunity, he invited the two women to luncheon at the Ritz. The occasion went well, Martha later reporting that Sybille was now “certainly established in George’s mind as the next best thing to Henry James.” As George himself had little interest in fiction, the manuscript would be read by his chief editor, Sonia Orwell, George Orwell’s widow, who had previously been employed by Cyril Connolly on his magazine, Horizon.

  Before any contract could be signed, however, Sybille needed to extract herself from Gollancz, who was reluctant to release her. Again it was Martha who took control, introducing Sybille to her own literary agent, Elaine Greene. A New Yorker, married to the brother of Graham Greene, Elaine was director of the literary branch of MCA (Music Corporation of America) in London. When Sybille first met her at her office in Piccadilly, she found Elaine both practical and friendly. Elaine was impressed by A Legacy (“It will not, of course, be everybody’s meat, but no one ever expected—or wanted—you to dish up anything but the finest quality caviar”) and agreed to arrange matters with Gollancz. Privately, however, she was dismayed that Sybille had chosen to be published by Weidenfeld: “no fait accompli has ever distressed me more,” she was later to tell her. Weidenfeld meanwhile was reported to be delighted at the prospect of Sybille joining his list, offering her £200, exactly twice the amount paid by Gollancz for The Sudden View.

  It was at this point that Sybille was introduced to Sonia Orwell, “a pretty, blowsy, reddish blonde, full of joie de vivre and generous to a fault.” Although Sybille later claimed that Sonia had had reservations about A Legacy, she was nonetheless an excellent editor, whose comments and criticism her author willingly accepted. The two women took to each other, enjoying long, gossipy conversations about their mutual acquaintance. On a couple of occasions Sybille was invited to dine alone with Sonia at her little flat in Percy Street, where the two of them downed quantities of red wine while Sonia provided divertingly salacious accounts of Weidenfeld’s current affair with Barbara Skelton, Cyril Connolly’s second wife.

  Sybille signed her contract almost a year before the date of publication, a period full of restlessness and unease. Her financial situation was particularly precarious, with Esther currently paying the rent on the flat in Rome, which Sybille, now hoping to settle in England, was longing to leave. After finishing her book in January 1955, she spent the next twelve months almost constantly on the move, in February travelling from Rome to Sanary to stay with the Mimerels, then to Paris, where Esther had recently moved back to the rue de Lille, into another spacious apartment; after this there was a holiday in Switzerland with Martha and Tom, then back to Rome before moving on to London in August; then to Paris again, followed by several weeks at Les Bastides with Allanah. In September Sybille left for a month’s motoring tour of Spain and Portugal with Esther and a couple of American friends, her first experience of Spain since her visit there with the Huxleys before the war. Then it was a return to Provence, followed by a few days in Geneva, then Paris, and finally in November to London, where, remarkably, Sybille was to remain for over six months.

  During this peripatetic period, Sybille inevitably saw little of Evelyn, who spent much of her time on her own, working on a children’s book, Tortoise and Turtle, “which I find delightful: very simply written; full of jokes,” Sybille reported to Martha. As
the flat in Rome was to be let, arrangements were made for Evelyn to move to London, where eventually she and Sybille hoped to settle. Meanwhile, Evelyn needed to find work; her first job was in Surrey, as paid companion to a Mrs. Torrens, a widow, a position Sybille had found for her through that famously genteel employment agency, Universal Aunts. It was Evelyn’s first experience of England, but although she saw Sybille only occasionally, she settled contentedly into her new existence, looking forward to the day their life together could be resumed. To supplement her small income, Evelyn had taken to making lampshades—“he rather loves working the raffia,” she reported—which she was soon selling to a number of shops and decorators and eventually to Selfridges.