Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  It was during this time that Sybille was introduced to two friends of Eda’s, a couple with whom she was to remain close for decades to come. William and Elaine Robson-Scott, both academics, highly qualified in German and French, had first met in Vienna before the war, where William had been teaching at the university. Previously William had spent several years in Berlin, becoming a good friend of Eda, who was living and working there at the time, and also of Klaus Mann and of Christopher Isherwood, with whom he shared a keen interest in good-looking boys. Tall and bespectacled, William was fearless, even-tempered and polite, yet when the occasion demanded, as Isherwood recalled, “he would become imperious in an old-fashioned British way, brushing difficulties aside like insects.” After their marriage in 1948, Elaine, thirteen years younger, had given up her university career to devote herself to looking after her husband and their daughter, Markie.

  When Sybille first met the Robson-Scotts, they were living in a large, somewhat dilapidated flat in Dorset Square. It was here that she and Eda were invited to tea one afternoon, Sybille immediately impressed by her hosts’ intelligence and warmth, as well as by their familiarity with German and French literature. “We had huge Scotch tea,” Sybille recalled, with “a well-behaved small child and an ill-behaved but charming wire-haired dachshund. My first meeting: impression people of one’s own kind, so rare; warm, intelligent, liberal…Charming Oxford voice.” Sybille, usually wary of children, was also captivated by nine-year-old Markie, described as “v. v. bright and well brought-up.” It was Markie who tried, unsuccessfully, to improve Sybille’s illegible hand. “Dear Sybille,” she wrote in a childish but beautiful italic, “Here is your first exercise. Please begin on the letters, and go on then to the days of the week, writing them underneath mine. I will mark them and send it back to you, with your second exercise. I am sending you a postcard of some little horses, to cheer you up while you work.”

  Towards the end of 1960, not long after Sybille had delivered The Faces of Justice, news broke of a trial shortly to take place at the Old Bailey and quickly to become infamous: a charge brought against Penguin Books for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Determined to cover it, Sybille immediately wrote to Evelyn, now acting as her agent for journalistic assignments, asking her to try to secure a contract with Life magazine in America. She herself contacted Esquire in New York and the Listener in London, both of which immediately made her an offer. Sybille was delighted. “Instant, unalloyed, deep joy,” she wrote to Evelyn on receiving the news, wholly unprepared for the tone of Evelyn’s reply. “NOW LISTEN TO ME,” Evelyn’s letter began, “you are NOT to get in touch with Esquire yourself directly AT ALL. NOT, NOT, NOT, except through me.” Clearly Sybille had not understood that it was wholly unacceptable to go behind her agent’s back, to negotiate the same deal with different publications simultaneously. “You haven’t a clear conception what ‘Agent’ means,” Evelyn continued. “Your agent is not only acting for you, he IS you: YOU are bound, YOU must honour your agent’s commitment…[and] I cannot be in the position of perpetual hair-raisers, of terror at what you may do next!” Sybille was immediately contrite. “You do not often scold me. When you do I feel crushed…I did not mean to do wrong.”

  The trial, Regina v. Penguin Books Ltd, began on the morning of 20 October 1960, at Court Number One at the Old Bailey. Penguin had previously published a number of novels by D. H. Lawrence, and had now decided to risk issuing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which had never before appeared in Britain. This was a deliberate challenge on the part of the firm, putting to the test the recently passed Obscene Publications Act, the main purpose of which was to distinguish between literature and pornography. Penguin had assembled a group of thirty-six witnesses, most of them distinguished writers or academics, who during the six-day trial were successfully to contend that there was no case to answer, that despite the realistic descriptions of sexual intercourse, the frequent use of words such as “fuck” and “cunt,” this was undisputedly a work of literature, with no intention to deprave or corrupt.

  In her article for Esquire, Sybille gives a clear account of the proceedings, infiltrated by a delicate irony remarkably effective in illustrating her disapproval of the case for the prosecution. Beginning by explaining both sides of the argument, she goes on to describe the main players, drily portraying the judge, Mr. Justice Byrne, as “seemingly a man with little taste for fiction”; the red-faced prosecuting counsel, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, is “embarrassing to watch,” while Gerald Gardiner for the defence appears “unemotional, cool, undramatic.” Among the many famous names appearing as witnesses are E. M. Forster and Rebecca West, although most space is given to the two most effective testimonies, both from university academics, Helen Gardner from Oxford and Richard Hoggart from Leicester, whose courteous and informed statements were disastrously to damage the clearly ill-prepared Griffith-Jones. As the case continues it becomes ever clearer that the bullying Griffith-Jones is losing his grip. “He had never in his life been conditioned to regard with respect any modern classic in the realm of purely imaginative writing,” which explains why his “cross-examinations were so indignant, so ineffective and so very much beside the point.”

  While in court Sybille was seated between the writer Penelope Gilliatt, who had commissioned Sybille’s first article on the Old Bailey, and the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan. Although Sybille later reported that she and Tynan had been threatened with expulsion for laughing at some of the more ludicrous interactions, in fact the case had deeply disturbed her. “I felt so desperately strongly about it,” she wrote to Evelyn only days after the trial had finished. “I sat…shaking with anguish and fury.” Writing about it, she said, had been important to her on a personal level. “I really felt I had to pay back, put down some of what one had lived. But it has made me hate England. Curious, when I was young I never thought of DHL the whole year around, until the month one spent in London: then he seemed like the prophet in the wilderness, and one hated what he had hated, and I could not bear to get back to France.”

  Soon after finishing her long article, Sybille was delighted to hear from Evelyn that Simon & Schuster were offering a generous advance for her next novel. Bob Gottlieb, aware of her dissatisfaction with Mark Bonham Carter and Collins, was keen to have Sybille regard his own firm as her primary publisher. He felt that “you are ours and we are yours,” he told her, and “though you’re English and England is your base, we think that we are your publishers.”

  Anxious to begin work on a story that had been in the back of her mind for some time, Sybille at the end of the year was pleased to leave “wet, grey, cold, dreary” England for a couple of months in France. After a few days in Paris, she and Eda continued on to the south, staying with Allanah until the end of January. Despite a moderately merry Christmas, however, it was not a productive period for Sybille, who had sunk into one of her paralysing depressions. “Dawdle time away whining to and leaning on Allanah: and nothing lifts,” she noted in her diary. “I am a weak fool. Now it is after twelve noon. God help me. I looked at work for about ten minutes, then went down to make and eat lunch with Allanah in the chilly kitchen. Lamenting went on; near tears some of the time. Allanah very sweet. That is always consoling: the help of others. Deserved?”

  At the end of January 1961, she and Eda returned to England, both restless, both anxious to leave again as soon as possible. April saw the publication in London and New York of Eda’s first novel, Childsplay, on which she had been working for some time. Closely autobiographical and written with an elegant simplicity, the story follows her early years with her father in the Middle West, her grandmother in Chicago, continuing on to her schooldays in California, then at Stanford University, and ending with her brief career in advertising in New York. Sybille declared herself deeply moved by the book, and there were a number of appreciative reviews, among them one in the Manchester Guardian describing Childsplay as a “masterpiece, tour de force, work of a
rt.” To Eda’s particular gratification, her old friend Jimmy Stern, himself a reputable writer, told her he was overwhelmed by the work. It “is an amazing achievement…there isn’t a dull paragraph…one is left not kissing or hugging the child but kneeling at her feet.”

  By this time Sybille and Eda had again left England, in March travelling south to Aix-en-Provence, where they were joined for a few days by the Robson-Scotts; from there they went to spend a week with Allanah, before going on to Rome. This was Sybille’s first return to the city for over six years, an experience she found strangely disturbing. “I feel so much older,” she told Allanah. “This country needs a certain vitality and flexibility and toughness. Youth, in a word. I’ve loved it too much, and now one is back like a revenant.” There was much that had changed for the worse—the swarms of tourists, the heavier traffic, the often intolerable noise—but nonetheless the beauty of the city was “intact, incredible.” Staying once more at the d’Inghilterra, Sybille took pleasure in seeing a number of her old friends, among them Donald Downes, and also Kenneth Macpherson, who had moved from Capri to live in Rome after the death of his old associate, Norman Douglas.

  During this period Martha, too, arrived in Rome, her presence not entirely welcome. As before in London, Sybille felt she was regarded by Martha as “a grade B acquaintance,” an attitude she resented, particularly as, in Sybille’s view, she herself was of a higher social standing, and “never for a moment am I not imbued with the cast iron belief that M belongs to a different class than oneself.” She and Eda met Martha for dinner on a couple of occasions at Toto’s, their favourite trattoria—which “I am sorry to say she calls a Trat”; Sybille was made impatient by Martha’s indifference to the beauty of the city, her current absorption in shopping and dinner parties. “She worries me,” Sybille confessed to Evelyn. “One of the troubles is that what was possible for the free-wheeling journalist, all her rashness and brassiness and saying people were bums or one doesn’t need to eat, is not so for Mrs. T. D. Matthews, with the house in Chester Square and all the rest.”

  Despite the resentments and complaints, however, at this period there still remained a solid basis of friendship, Sybille grateful as ever for Martha’s support, particularly with her writing. It was Martha on whom she relied for advice on her work, and Martha one of a number of friends who continued to lend her money whenever she needed it. “You’re a good friend,” Sybille had written to her not long before their meeting in Rome. “Your part in my life has been strange: almost miraculously fruitful to me in some ways. The whole material basis of my present existence is chiefly due to strategic interventions and exertions at some turning point on your part.” The letter was signed “Love, dear girl, Your grateful & tearful old chum, S.”

  In June 1961, shortly after Sybille and Eda returned to England, Aldous Huxley arrived in London, on his own as Laura had been obliged to stay in California. Only weeks before, in May, the Huxleys had undergone a shocking experience: their house in Los Angeles had caught fire and been burnt to the ground, with almost everything, including Aldous’s books, manuscripts and correspondence, destroyed. Sybille had been appalled by the news, and within the first few minutes of their meeting in London had asked him how on earth he had coped with such a catastrophe. “Well,” Aldous replied, as calm and rational as ever, “I went out and bought a toothbrush.” Worried to see how thin and gaunt he appeared, his thick hair now mostly white, Sybille was soon reassured by Aldous’s energy and cheerfulness. On a warm evening the two dined together at Rules in Covent Garden, then set out on a long walk, through Holborn and Bloomsbury, eventually on up to Marylebone and Dorset Square, where Sybille was staying with the Robson-Scotts. “Only then, with no sense of urgency, did Aldous decide that he might as well go back to Kensington in a cab…It was a curious and rather moving evening for me,” Sybille reported to Allanah. “The first time we met since Maria died.”

  Shortly afterwards Aldous left England to attend a conference in the south of France. From there he wrote to Sybille, telling her “how good it was to meet again after all this time,” and suggesting the two of them might take a short motoring holiday together. “If you can provide the car & the driving, I will provide the petrol and the living expenses. It might, I think, be fun.” In the event, however, Aldous was unable to spare the time, returning to the States in September. Two years later, on 22 November 1963, Aldous died of cancer, the news of his death overshadowed by the assassination the same day of President Kennedy. Sybille learned of the circumstances from Eva Herrmann. “Eva writes that he did not suffer,” she reported to Evelyn, “and wrote until two days before he died. An essay on Shakespeare, and finished it. Something consoling in that.”

  Sybille was very shaken by Aldous’s death, by the loss of the man who for so many years she had regarded as her father figure, “the greatest moral influence on my life.” In her contribution to a memorial volume published two years later, she recalls the pleasure of her early years with the Huxleys in Sanary, fondly remembering “Aldous’s unfailing goodwill, his patience, his readiness to help…his inability to lie or hate, to form a petty thought or a malevolent emotion; his fortitude. Only now, can I see him then as the man who practised what he later preached. Era tanto buono [He was so good].”

  Meanwhile, Sybille had continued to work on her novel, with which she was now making good progress. Yet while she and Eda were glad of the privacy and quiet provided by Little Wynters, they now found the solitude depressing. There is “no counter lift in the evening in this wretched Essex wilderness,” Sybille complained. “I like to fling myself out into the street of an evening, friends, talk, drink.” Nonetheless, the lack of diversion had its rewards as Sybille finally completed the book at the end of March 1962. The news was excitedly relayed by letter to a number of friends, among them Evelyn, the Robson-Scotts and also Jimmy Stern, now regarded by Sybille as one of her most important literary mentors. “I have now finished my novel. It has nearly killed me,” she told him. “The relief is so great that I’m not used to it yet. It also feels like a cold silence after an incessant rush of noise.”

  As before with A Legacy, A Favourite of the Gods draws significantly on Sybille’s own family history and experience, although, curiously, in an introduction to a later edition she states that the novel was “my one attempt at fiction with almost no autobiographical sources or associations.” Certainly the first section, about an aristocratic family in Rome at the end of the nineteenth century, draws closer parallels with the novels of Henry James than with Sybille’s own story, yet from the very beginning the similarities are indisputable.

  In A Favourite, dedicated to Eda, the plot revolves around three generations of women in the same family: Anna, a wealthy American married to an Italian nobleman, her daughter, Constanza, and Constanza’s daughter, Flavia. In a short prologue, Constanza and the child Flavia are travelling by train from Italy to France in the 1920s, the same journey that all those years ago Sybille had made with her mother and Nori before settling in Sanary. When the train stops at the border, Constanza is shocked to discover the large ruby ring she had been wearing has disappeared. Desperate to find it, she decides to break her journey while an investigation is undertaken, eventually spending the night in a small fishing port on the French coast. And it is here, as it turns out, that she and Flavia will remain for many years to come.

  From there the reader is taken back in time, to Rome in the 1890s and a marriage between Rico, an impoverished Italian prince, and Anna, the independent-minded daughter of an upright New England family. While Anna plays hostess to a group of diplomats, intellectuals, clergy and visiting Americans, Rico, a charming if negligent husband, spends his time playing cards with his men friends and visiting his mistress. Inevitably the time comes when the naive Anna discovers her husband’s long-standing infidelity: enraged and implacable, she leaves Rome for ever, taking her daughter with her to live in London.

  Here Co
nstanza immerses herself in a sophisticated social life, her friends and many lovers mostly clever and ambitious young men, one of whom, shortly after the outbreak of war, she agrees to marry. Not long afterwards her husband is wounded while fighting in France, and it is shortly after his return to England that Constanza gives birth to their daughter, Flavia. The marriage soon founders, and after the divorce Constanza, accompanied by Flavia, returns to her peripatetic life of independence and adventure, eventually deciding to settle in the south of France, where she meets the Frenchman who will be the love of her life.

  The character of the beautiful Constanza, clever and self-assured, bears an undeniable resemblance to Sybille’s mother, reflecting Lisa’s beauty and intellect as well as her promiscuity; similarly, Constanza’s father Rico shares many attributes with Maximilian, a handsome philanderer, benign, unintellectual and emotionally detached. Their daughter, Flavia, as literary and inquisitive as Sybille herself, comes to develop, as Sybille did for Lisa, a protective fondness for her somewhat wayward mother. The small French fishing port in which the two of them eventually settle is an accurate depiction in every detail of Sanary, and the life the two women lead there, a mirror image of Sybille’s adolescence, the draughty little villa in which the family first settled, the afternoons she and Lisa spent playing cards in a café overlooking the harbour, the evenings when Flavia, like Sybille, would walk “down to the village with napkin and bowl…[to bring] back a takeaway dish from the caterer.”