Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  Keeping the affair secret would not be possible for long, and both were deeply apprehensive about the impact of revealing the situation, Eda to Hilary, Sybille to her beloved Evelyn. For Sybille this was a traumatic period: she was restless and impatient when away from Eda, especially when in the company of Evelyn, who was now constantly on her nerves. After one evening at Evelyn’s flat in Ashburn Place Sybille recorded, “I’m irritated bored and caged. Missing, missing, missing,” and after another, this time at Osten Mews, “Ev[elyn] for din. Irritable. Do not behave well. But Ev does not seem to have noticed thank God…very restless; these evenings are painful…” Fortunately Hilary was often away, allowing Eda and Sybille to spend whole days and sometimes nights together. “First day to ourselves and the sweetness of it all,” Sybille wrote on 22 March. “I go out quickly to do some shopping lunch here—work…D wonderful we make our dinner and eat it, then d leaves I do letters and tidy…to my joy she is back by 11 and still here till tomorrow…Happy, happy happy, bless -d-.”*4 Eventually, as spring moved into summer, Sybille began to feel emotionally more stable, even on one occasion summoning up the courage to issue an invitation to a woman with an intimidating reputation, a writer whose work she had long admired. This was Ivy Compton-Burnett, whose novels Sybille had first begun reading when in her early twenties. In 1952 while living in Rome Sybille had spent six weeks composing a long letter to the revered author, earnestly analysing her works and expressing in great detail the reasons for her veneration. The letter, over 10,000 words, twenty-two pages long, was finally posted on 10 August. Some weeks later Sybille received a reply. “Dear Mrs. Bedford, Thank you so much for your letter. I shall always treasure it as a possession. Yours sincerely, Ivy Compton-Burnett.” Four years later in London Sybille finally met the distinguished author, now in her seventies, at a luncheon party of Allanah’s: “sticky” was the adjective used to describe the occasion in Sybille’s diary. Undeterred, Sybille a little later wrote inviting Miss Compton-Burnett to tea.

  Both nervous and excited, Sybille went to great trouble to prepare for the occasion, enlisting the support of Eda and also of a new friend, Jane Stockwood, features editor of Harper’s Bazaar, who had already met the notoriously difficult author. As a gesture of respect, Sybille “struggled into a skirt” before carefully laying the table, covered in a borrowed white linen cloth: three kinds of biscuit, a Fuller’s walnut cake, toast, butter, jam and Gentleman’s Relish. At 4:15 the doorbell rang. “I opened manfully. Miss CB tottered in…black kid-gloves kept on, mackintosh and moth-holed felt tricorne hat.” As Sybille later described the experience to Martha, her guest “gave a sharp look round. ‘You know Miss Stockwood?’ ‘No.’ Miss S never recovered from this. It was like having a corpse on hand. I was kept nose to teapot and toast rack; the burden resting on Eda’s magpie chatter. There was a very slow sentence every other five minutes. Miss CB ate steadily and we sat at the tea table for five quarters of an hour. She would break up a slice of toast into a mound of mice dice and butter every single dice, and then dab it with Gentleman’s Relish. Same with jam…Conversation languished. I cut the Fuller’s cake (6/6, six and sixpence, oh). Miss CB declined. I almost cried…She stayed till nearly 7…We were all dead flies afterwards…What a hold this strange (put-on?) dragon has over people. Why?”

  Subsequently, hospitality was returned and Sybille was invited to tea by Ivy at her “stark lugubrious flat in Braemar Mansions…[I] went through trepidation as the time drew near…and awaited future approaches of her tea hour, a strict 4 p.m., as one awaits the tumbrel.” Despite the daunting nature of these encounters, Sybille continued respectfully to keep in touch, and for the rest of her life continued to regard Ivy Compton-Burnett as one of the greatest novelists of the age.

  During the weeks following the start of Sybille’s affair with Eda, the knowledge that she must eventually tell everything to Evelyn filled her with dread. When the moment came, however, Evelyn was typically generous, entirely sympathetic, promising Sybille her wholehearted support. And in a way the situation provided Evelyn with a welcome chance of release. While in London Evelyn had increasingly felt she was wasting her time: she had few friends of her own, her work was little more than a hobby, and it began to appear obvious that she should return to the States, which she had left over six years before. Sybille agreed that this was the right decision, although well aware of how painful their parting would be. “I shall miss her very much indeed,” she confessed to Allanah. “I am awed when I look upon these years of unflagging unselfishness and kindness.” And to Martha she wrote of Evelyn, “Her conduct to me, all those years, and during the last months is of such quality that one can only think of it with bated breath. And where did it get her? She would not even ask herself that question.” Finally on 22 July Evelyn sailed from Liverpool to New York, where she was to live with her parents. Soon after arriving she wrote to Sybille, perhaps in part to prevent her “dear Beast” from worrying, that “I cannot imagine London…cannot even force [sic] to recall one instant in England…This here and now is so immediate everything else has simply receded…Darling heart & beloved creature, all is well.”

  The following month Eda made the break with Hilary, and she and Sybille were at last able to live together openly. Although both knew that this was what they wanted, nonetheless the process had been painful. Finally, however, they were able to start making plans for the future, Sybille taking Eda with her to Provence to stay with Allanah at Les Bastides, her habitual haven, where they could recuperate in peace. Although she may not have foreseen it then, for Sybille her time with Eda, “in terms of fulfilment, life affection,” was to be one of the most rewarding periods of her existence.

  Skip Notes

  *1 The trio in question was made up of the English photographer Olivia Wyndham, Olivia’s lover, the African American actress Edna Lewis Thomas, and Edna’s husband, Lloyd Thomas.

  *2 “The Anchor and the Balloon” was later included in a collection of Sybille’s articles, As It Was: Pleasures, Landscapes and Justice (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990), then in Pleasures and Landscapes (Daunt Books, 2014).

  *3 A joke spelling of Evelyn’s surname which Sybille occasionally used.

  *4 In writing her diary Sybille struggled with finding a coded abbreviation for Eda’s name. “E” was not possible as that had always belonged to Esther. Instead she used the middle letter: thus Eda is usually referred to as “D,” “-d-” or simply “d.”

  nine

  “HEAVEN BLESS YOU, MRS. BEDFORD”

  To those who knew Eda in the post-war period, she appeared a timid, fragile creature, shy and retiring, clearly reluctant to attract attention or to express any opinion that might be considered remotely contentious. In her younger days, however, Eda had presented a very different image, a dark-haired beauty, sociable, intelligent and high-spirited, attractive to both men and women, eager for adventure and determined to make a successful career as a writer.

  Born in Mexico on 30 July 1907, Eda was the only child of Harvey Hurd Lord, an American mining engineer, whose first wife, Eda’s mother, died shortly after giving birth to her daughter. Lord soon remarried, and Eda’s childhood was subsequently divided into six-month intervals, between living with her father, who was always on the move, and with her wealthy maternal grandmother in Evanston, Illinois. Eda enjoyed the summers spent with her father’s family, living in a series of rented houses mostly in the Midwest, their easy-going domesticity in marked contrast to the strict regime imposed by her grandmother, a woman apparently incapable of showing affection.

  When Eda was nine, her father died and her grandmother, taking Eda with her, moved to California. At school in La Jolla, Eda did well both academically and in sports. “She exuded vitality and was one of the most popular girls on campus,” recalled Mary Frances Kennedy, a fellow pupil who had developed a passionate crush on Eda. Although Mary Frances, later to become celebrated as the food writer M.
F. K. Fisher, stayed at the school for only a year, the two formed a significant friendship which was to last for the rest of their lives. Recalling those early days, Mary Frances wrote of Eda, “I remembered her firm strong body, and the way she could always do anything, anything at school better than we could, and how she was more exciting and brilliant than any student had ever been.”

  At eighteen Eda began a course at Stanford University, and it was then, with the country in the grip of Prohibition, that she began to drink. Not long after leaving Stanford she found a job in advertising in New York where, still in her early twenties, she met and married Karl Robinson, an executive in the oil business. Robinson was based in China, and it was while on their way out east that Eda realised the mistake she had made to marry. After little more than a year she decided to leave her husband, travelling on her own across Russia to return to Europe. Here, while making her way through France she was delighted to encounter Mary Frances again, soon afterwards indulging in a brief affair with a friend of Mary Frances, the writer Lawrence Powell. Powell later portrayed Eda in his novel The Blue Train as the heavy-drinking Joyce, a green-eyed beauty “veiled in smoke from the strong cigarettes she favored.”

  Eventually Eda moved to Berlin, where she was to stay for some time. It was here she began writing, working as a journalist and also publishing a number of short stories. Eda had several affairs, one of which resulted in her undergoing an abortion, an experience that led to a period of almost suicidal depression. From this she was rescued when she fell in love with another woman, Tania Kurella, later the wife of Sybille’s old acquaintance, Jimmy Stern. Their relationship ended in 1935 when Tania married Jimmy and Eda began an affair with Joan Black, a union that was to last for over ten years.

  For the rest of the decade Joan and Eda lived in Paris, yet while Joan just about kept her drinking under control, Eda did not, describing herself at this period “as fat as a mountain and too hazy with drink to notice a kerb.” Both women were unrestrainedly self-indulgent, rarely awake before noon, spending hours downing cocktails and gorging in restaurants. When on one occasion Mary Frances encountered the pair, she was appalled by the change in Eda’s appearance, the slender beauty transformed into a drunken hulk: “fat…with compact hips and very heavy, almost bull-like shoulders. Her head stuck forward…and there was a roll at the back, like a caricature of a German burgher, so that the close-cropped hair made unattractive bristles…[her face] was dead white, with the close-pored vaguely dirty whiteness of an alcoholic’s.”

  Sybille first met Eda not in Paris, but in Berlin, when in 1932 she had been visiting the city with the Huxleys. Eda had been struck by this blonde, blue-eyed young woman, who had barely noticed her. “You were so occupied and preoccupied,” Eda recalled, “that you seemed truly impatient with any outsider tugging at your sleeve.” Towards the end of the decade the two met again, by which time Eda was living with Joan Black in France. When after the war Sybille returned from America, she found Eda strikingly changed, pale and thin, very anxious and shy, clearly traumatised by her wartime experiences: the terrifying flight from Normandy to the south, where she and Joan had been imprisoned by the Gestapo, half starved and in fear of their lives. After the war ended the two women had continued to struggle with the severe food shortages, Eda drinking large quantities of the cheap red wine then available, with disastrous results. It was not until 1947, when she began her brief affair with Allanah, that Eda started to make a serious effort to bring her alcoholism under control, an attempt at which, “with unrelenting effort—and the crutches of cigarettes and caffeine,” she was mainly successful.

  In 1953, when Eda encountered Sybille again in Paris, she had been living for several years in Wales with her lover, Hilary Williams. With Hilary she made occasional visits abroad and also to London to see friends, and it was in London in 1956 that the crucial encounter between Eda and Sybille had taken place.

  Sybille had been thankful and relieved by Evelyn’s generous acceptance of her successor. “I am so happy, on air, about what you say about Eda…Pink with pleasure,” Sybille told her. “You know, I do adore Eda. I think she is very, very vulnerable, and could shrink away at a cold or violent touch. All now is so easy and light. I never thought she would be so very good and sweet to me…It is all very warming: I am deeply grateful and still incredulous.” Eda, too, seemed happy with her new relationship, deeply in love with Sybille, whose talent, perspicacity and intelligence she had always admired.

  At the end of the summer, Sybille and Eda left London for France, staying for a couple of days with Esther in Paris before driving down to the south, where they were to spend nearly three months with Allanah. Sybille had been looking forward to a peaceful interlude with Eda at Les Bastides, but not everything proceeded as smoothly as expected. While driving down from Paris, the two women were crashed into by another car, leaving Eda covered in blood, while Sybille was taken by ambulance to hospital, badly bruised, with a broken rib and a lacerated tongue which had to be stitched up, “an extravagantly painful process.” She and Eda were obliged to spend three days recuperating before continuing south by train, and Sybille was acutely anxious about the damage done to her car, which was not covered by insurance. “The car is reparable,” she told Evelyn, “but will cost 250–275 frs…Pretty hopeless.” A few days later, however, two cheques arrived, one from Martha, another from Esther, who wrote reassuringly, “I want you to worry about nothing—the car or anything else. Take care of yourself, my darling, and get over your injuries.”

  As always at Les Bastides there was much to enjoy—swimming, lunching out-of-doors, sitting and talking in front of the fire after dinner. Relations with Allanah, however, were far from easy, she and Sybille angrily snapping and constantly on each other’s nerves, while Allanah was “so beastly to Eda, so resisting the fact of her presence that it had me isolated from her and sad, and cross too.” Allanah’s bad temper stemmed partly from the awkward fact that in the past she and Eda had themselves been lovers, and also from her current unhappiness over the end of her affair with Fay Blacket Gill; Fay had recently fallen for Patricia Laffan, the actress with whom Sybille had enjoyed a brief interlude while in Rome. Allanah was miserable over the rupture, and it was not until the beginning of the following year that she regained her good humour, happy with a new lover, Charlotte (“Charley”) Delmas, member of a wealthy shipping family, who owned a large house only a short distance from Les Bastides. By this time, good relations with Allanah had been restored, and Sybille reported to Evelyn that “Things are loving now…being very much in love, she has softened.”

  By the start of the New Year, 1957, Sybille and Eda had returned to Paris to stay with Esther and Katzi in the rue de Lille, a lively few weeks, with theatres, dinners and cocktail parties almost every evening. Katzi was in high spirits, immersed in an affair with a handsome Italian nearly twenty years her junior, whom she had met while on holiday in Positano. Gino Atanasio, by profession a chartered accountant, had spent the past few years looking after his ailing parents, and now finding himself almost penniless was hoping to settle in France and marry Katzi. “Gino malgré son caractère extrêmement difficile est un idéal délicieux” (“Gino despite his difficult character is a delicious ideal”), Katzi told her sister. Sybille was happy for her, although she had little liking for Gino; as she admitted, however, “that is neither here nor there. Katzi loves him very much indeed—and I think that he will be loyal to her as long as there is a decent modus vivendi.”

  For Sybille the endless comings and goings in the apartment soon became a tiresome distraction. “Eda and I never seem to have a moment dans cette maison,” she grumbled to Evelyn. “We read, we talk, we pour more water onto tepid leaves, and bang, the front door shivers: it is K back from son marché.” And to Martha she complained, “Paris stupefies me; the hot radiators, the lack of air, the people, the noise. We do too much and see too much and go to bed too late…Moreover I find Pa
ris repulsive (obsessively this time)…We long for home life, work.” Professionally there was one piece of good news: the French rights to A Legacy had been bought by the distinguished firm of Hachette, which, under the title Une Vue Impartiale, was to publish the novel the following year. “Yesterday I went to see my translator Beatrice Beck,” Sybille told Evelyn, “shy, farouche, left wing. No visible command of English. As she had only managed to do fourteen pages since October, I can hardly report on more.”

  Fortunately at this point Eda, who had a modest but regular income, found a flat to rent for a few months in London. The first-floor apartment was in a Georgian terrace in Elizabeth Street, Pimlico, and reported to be “new, clean, and warm.” On arrival, however, both Eda and Sybille felt disappointed and depressed. The flat, situated above a car showroom, was “everything it was not expected to be,” Sybille complained, “not clean, not pretty, convenient, heatable or even ready for human habitation…No char: none in sight.” Eventually, however, they managed to make the place comfortable, Sybille pleased with the large desk at which she worked in the sitting room, while Eda enjoyed the quiet and privacy of a small study at the back, where she could concentrate on the novel she had had in mind for some time. And fortunately their fellow tenants turned out to be agreeable, the well-known racing driver Patricia (“Speedy”) McOstrich, and the children’s novelist Noël Streatfeild.

  Sybille was impatient to return to her writing, but first she had to deal with a number of tiresome chores, “the kitchen of life,” in Martha’s disparaging phrase. Recently she had applied to become a British resident, a process requiring her to fill in dozens of forms, appear at numerous interviews with accountants and tax inspectors, re-register her now repaired car, and as well open a British bank account, with Coutts & Company, “the oldest private bank in England. God it’s grand!…they all wear frock coats with velvet froggings.” Yet as the days passed, despite the tedium her spirits rose, and she was soon reporting to Evelyn that she felt more relaxed, happy to have returned to England. “I think I have that sense of both bounce and ease I have in Swiss (different) and had once in Rome; and did not have at the Bastides, or Paris.”