Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  Similarly the early section of the story clearly derives from Sybille’s experience of Italy and of Rome. She demonstrates a flawless sense of period, even if the picture of her chosen stratum of society, the combination of Italian aristocracy and wealthy Americans, unavoidably evokes the world of Henry James, Sybille even naming one of her characters “Mr. James.” (This was a mistake, as she later admitted: although Mr. James “was a New Englander with a Harvard link, he was in no ways related, connected, or alike his illustrious namesake.”) Memorable, too, is the account of the prince’s estate in Umbria, much loved by Constanza when a girl. “Lyre-horned oxen moved the hand-ploughs along small patched fields; on the slopes goats pegged to stumpy trees tore at harsh shrubs, there were lizards on the walls and the days were strident with cicadas and the nights loud with frogs.”

  Rather less successful is the portrayal of the two heroines, Flavia and Constanza. While the chivalrous Rico and naive Anna are subtly drawn, both wholly convincing, Constanza and Flavia, with all their formidable intelligence and determination, appear somewhat two-dimensional. Constanza’s intellectual conversations are ponderous, and although high-minded and, we are told, frequently in love, she never appears to feel sufficiently for any one person or cause to convince the reader of the reality of either. Flavia as a little girl appears most unchildlike, sharing her mother’s egotism, wholly lacking in both humour and charm. As Sybille’s friend and mentor, Jimmy Stern, told her after reading the book, the two were difficult to envisage, too vague and unreal. “I do think you are inclined to make your characters talk a little too much in the same idiom, the same tone of voice. Now & again I could not tell them apart.”

  Fortunately, responses from other friends were more enthusiastic. Allanah described A Favourite as a novel of “technical perfection,” while Martha wrote to “Sibbie my hero…the writing is the best, clearest, strongest you have ever done.” From New York Evelyn described it as a flawless masterpiece, a work which had “in itself the power to soar…as though angels might take wing…The writing, the sheer writing, is plain virtuosity. Breathtaking.” Her opinion was shared by her boss. “The book is wonderful,” Bob told her. “Glorious Constanza and beautiful Flavia and awful Anna, I love them all…all of them so beautifully controlled and displayed, all of it so economical yet there.”

  Despite these encouraging reactions, Sybille was nervous about the book’s public reception, and with reason, as it turned out. When A Favourite appeared in Britain early in 1963, reviews were mixed. The Daily Telegraph described the book as elegant and civilised, the Spectator judged it “an exceedingly good novel,” while The Times praised the author’s mind and style which “while capable of subtleties are vigorous, gay and direct.” But V. S. Pritchett in the New Statesman was one of several who wrote in a more disparaging tone, complaining that after an excellent start, “the design vanishes into a flashy stream of mere chronology. As a feminist argument, Constanza is attractive; as a character she is totally unrealised.” In the States, too, despite a few mildly appreciative notices, the majority of critics were unimpressed. “Miss Bedford is often too consciously literary in her technique,” complained the New York Review of Books. Although her style is “supple and functional,” the plotting is over-elaborate, and the novel fails because “she appears to forget human models, or to bear them in mind only fitfully.” Even more condemnatory was the New York Times, which described A Favourite as “a mediocre novel…[that] drags and sags and finally expires in a burst of ingenious plotting.”

  Two readers who had expressed enthusiasm for A Legacy, Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, had been eagerly awaiting publication of the new work. When the time came, however, both confessed themselves disappointed. “It has been tremendously advertised by the Lesbian World here as better than A Legacy which it is certainly not,” Nancy told Evelyn. “There are of course excellent things…but to me there is a certain naivete, underlying a sophisticated story…& then the characters are of wood. Wooden figures after Henry James. The strange thing is that this tough little person & ferocious Lesbian, always dressed as a motor racer should choose to write about an age of elegance…A sort of Golden Bowl upside-down…The beginning—the first quarter—is excellent & one thinks it is the prelude to an unfolding which doesn’t happen—in fact the flower dies in the bud.” To this Waugh replied that he, too, had been dismayed by the book’s inadequacies. “Lovely first chapter—then it went to pieces…what is more, full of solecisms & anachronisms. I pointed out a few hundred of the more glaring ones to Mark Bonham Carter & advised him to withdraw & correct it, but he hasn’t answered. Umbrage perhaps.”

  Fortunately Sybille never learned of these opinions, depressed enough as she was by the reactions of the press. “I am very sick and sunk,” she wrote to Evelyn in New York. “I feel poisoned by those reviews…It has been rammed home to me, that I am not in the latest phrase ‘with it.’ The time for my kind of writing is pretty nearly over.” She had felt humiliated, too, by a television interview on the BBC with the formidable reporter Ludovic Kennedy, whom she described as “loud-mouthed and hostile…He told me…he had looked at my new novel, not read it through, and not liked it. And so we went off to the cameras. A degrading business. If I weren’t heavily in debt to Collins I should not have done it.”

  Sybille had finished A Favourite of the Gods in March 1962, but so bruised was she by its critical battering that it would be several years before any inspiration returned.

  ten

  “THE TREMENDOUS TRIALS OF OUR TIME”

  During the interval between delivering the manuscript of A Favourite and its publication, Sybille was delighted to be given the chance of leaving the country for a while. She had been commissioned by Esquire to interview a writer whom she much admired, Karen Blixen, who, under the pen name Isak Dinesen, was the author, most famously, of Seven Gothic Tales and Out of Africa. In July 1962, Sybille and Eda left for Denmark, a country Sybille had visited only once, when she had been taken there as a small child by her mother. For this occasion Sybille had rented a chalet at a seaside resort not far from Baroness Blixen’s family estate at Rungsted, a few miles north of Copenhagen. “I love the look of it, the fields, the trees, the duck ponds and white manor houses,” Sybille reported, but “oh dear, it is cold…Worse, much worse than England…We buy our food at Elsinore…Had Shakespeare really seen it, it would not have inspired him to setting his tragedy there.”

  A few days after arriving, Sybille was driven to Rungsted to meet the distinguished author, now in her late seventies. The house, a seventeenth-century coaching inn overlooking the sea on one side, a wood and orchard on the other, was “lovely”; the rest of the experience, however, if fascinating, was something of a disappointment. The baroness herself was tiny, fragile, gaunt-faced and skeletally thin. “She weighs 35 kilo…and is so weak that she cannot make a step unaided. She is dressed: narrow trousers, rough, white and black make up like Arlequin. She has the most extraordinary large eyes…She ate, during the whole longish meal, exactly one quarter of one strawberry. But as soon as the rest of us finished our chicken she began to smoke…and when she was carried back onto the verandah she clutched her package of cigarettes and a huge metal lighter…Later she drank cup after cup of black coffee, smoking all the time.” Sybille’s three fellow guests were Blixen’s secretary, a Danish literary critic, and an Italian academic, none of whom were given much chance to speak as their hostess, despite her physical frailty, dominated the conversation, “very conscious she was, one felt, of being a baroness…Her talk was pretentious and not very interesting…haute literature in a rather vieux jeux way: ‘Who would you say were the three greatest Englishmen? Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, Newton?’ ”

  In the event, Sybille’s article was never written. After leaving Denmark, she and Eda had driven to the south of France to stay with Allanah, where, not long after they arrived, news reached them that Karen Blixen had died. Sybille fulfi
lled her commission by writing a travel piece describing Copenhagen and its surrounding territory, her lack of interest in the country on the whole tactfully concealed.

  After a pleasant couple of months at Les Bastides, Sybille and Eda returned to England in October, where they were met by some unwelcome news. Their landlord, Sir Thomas Pike, was on the point of retiring and wished to end their tenancy of Little Wynters. Inevitably this threw Sybille into a panic, and the prospect of returning to “horrible, plebeian, ugly” London appalled her. And where were they to live? Fortunately Sybille’s old friend, Charlotte Wolff, came to the rescue, finding a flat for rent in Tregunter Road, Chelsea. “I don’t like it, Eda doesn’t like it…[but] dirt cheap for London,” Sybille told Evelyn. The contract was signed and the move from Essex planned for the New Year.

  Over the past few months, Sybille had received a number of letters from both Esther and Katzi, which had caused her considerable anxiety, each angrily complaining about the other. Although they had lived together for years and were close in age, the two were widely different in temperament, with almost no interests in common. Now, with Katzi in love with Gino and longing to spend time with him, she increasingly resented her domestic duties and what she regarded as Esther’s patronising manner. “Esther…toujours très distante…jamais un mot personnelle” (“Esther…is always very distant…never a personal word”), Katzi complained. “Elle m’a accusé de chose que j’ai jamais dite…A t-elle recommencé a boire?…C’est parce que Gino est ici?…Enfin je commence presque à croire—qu’elle est furieuse de me voir heureuse” (“She accused me of something I never said…Has she begun to drink again?…Is it because Gino is here?…Ultimately I begin to think—she’s furious because she sees me happy”). How was she to cope, Katzi demanded, with “ces angoisses perpétuelles” (“these perpetual anxieties”)?

  Esther, although by nature tranquil and benign, was being driven to extremes of irritation and despair by Katzi’s behaviour. “I am afraid the situation between me and Katzi cannot continue,” she told Sybille. “I cannot afford to live in this apartment with her…with Katzi taunting me all the time and saying how ‘moche [ugly]’ everything is and how she hates France. Forgive me for saying it, but in addition to her many fine qualities, there is a good deal of the German and the bully in your sister, and I have let her get out of hand…I do not think Katzi and I can continue to live together. I don’t blame her—this man means everything to her and she would walk over unborn babes’ skulls to keep him. It is ‘la dernière passion [the last passion]’ of an ageing woman…I do not think she ought to live with any woman—she is purely and entirely a man’s woman—least of all with a woman like me. I know how difficult I am and that I should probably live alone.”

  The battle between the two, begun during the summer and continuing well into the autumn, left Sybille feeling helpless, unable to see how they might ever become reconciled. Esther, despite her kindness, was “a kind of monster,” with her endless talking and drinking, while Katzi “is one of the stupidest women I know…The small brain has never learnt to order the emotions.”

  Then on the morning of Friday 23 November, while Sybille and Eda were still ensconced at Little Wynters, Esther in the rue de Lille woke late as usual, dressed in a leisurely manner and prepared for her customary walk across the Seine to Galignani, the English bookshop on the Right Bank. Before she had the chance to leave the apartment, she suffered a violent stroke, dying instantly. She had turned sixty-five only a few weeks earlier.

  Sybille was in Harlow when the news reached her. On the Sunday, in a state of shock, she went by train to London, staying the night with the Robson-Scotts and arriving in Paris the following evening. Here she found Katzi alone in the apartment, although Esther’s sister-in-law, Noël Murphy, had been with her most of the time. It was Noël, only hours after Esther’s death, who had arranged for a priest to give the benediction, the body afterwards packed in dry ice as the cremation was not to be held for several days. As Esther had had no religious faith, a simple ceremony had been organised for the following Tuesday, Sybille one of a small cortège leaving the rue de Lille shortly before 9 a.m. for the cemetery of Père-Lachaise. The brief rite was well attended, and among the mourners was Nancy Mitford. “Oh dear I shall miss her,” Nancy wrote afterwards to Evelyn Waugh. “Esther was a large sandy person like a bedroom cupboard packed full of information, much of it useless, all of it accurate. I was truly fond of her.” A few days later there was a funeral mass at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, after which Esther’s ashes were shipped to America, where her brother Gerald had them buried in the family plot in East Hampton.

  During the next few days, Sybille, assisted by Katzi, spent hours going through Esther’s papers, the notes for her unwritten biographies as well as a vast body of correspondence; Sybille burned almost everything, including all her own letters to Esther, spanning a period of over twenty years. When the will was read, unchanged since 1948, it was discovered that Esther had left the apartment and her few possessions to be divided equally between Sybille and Noël. The two women immediately agreed to make both their legacies over to Katzi, who since Esther’s death had been left with no source of income at all. For this Katzi was deeply grateful, later writing to her sister to thank her for “ta grande générosité envers moi—c’est finalement toujours toi dans ma vie qui m’a aidé et pouvait de vivre…J’éspère que un jour—ça sera mon tour” (“your great generosity towards me—in the end it’s always you in my life who’s helped me and enabled me to live…I hope that one day—it will be my turn”).

  On Sybille’s return to England, Eda, who had met her at Epping Station, was shocked by her appearance—she “returned in a state of collapse: white, shaking, exhausted,” Eda reported to the Sterns. “Going to Paris was a terrible ordeal, physically and mentally…S. has such a very unhardened side and Esther’s death touched it more closely than it has ever been touched before.” And indeed for the rest of her long life, Sybille continued to be haunted by memories of Esther. She had loved her dearly, missed her gentle nature, her intellect and unfailing generosity, yet at the same time suffered a feeling of frustration that Esther had never come near to achieving her remarkable promise: those planned biographies, those endless rivers of explication, all in the end resulting in nothing. “What’s the use of being brilliant,” Sybille later remarked, “if you sit at a café all day and are considered the greatest bore because you don’t know when to stop talking and never write anything down?”

  Not long after Sybille’s return from Paris, she and Eda left Essex for London, both in a state of depression, Sybille grieving for Esther, Eda miserable at leaving Little Wynters, which she had come to love. Fortunately, however, they were not there for long, as Sybille had taken a house in Asolo, the famously beautiful medieval city in the Veneto region of Italy. Casa La Mura, where Robert Browning had stayed shortly before his death, was a handsome building, set into the wall surrounding the city and immediately inside the arched gateway; on one side was a view of the cathedral and the central piazza, on the other of an undulating plain covered in fields and vineyards; at the back of the property was a shady garden planted with roses and olive trees. “The view from every window is like an Italian painting,” Eda told Tania Stern, while for Sybille La Mura on first sight appeared to be everything she wanted, “ravishing and no noise…[only] thirty-five miles from Venice, from Vicenza, Padua. Italian spring: mountains, sea.” Here they intended to stay for the best part of a year, looking forward to a peaceful period in which to write and gradually recover from the upheavals of the recent past.

  The two women left London by car at the beginning of May 1963, arriving in Asolo a few days later in torrential rain. Within the first twenty-four hours they realised the mistake they had made: although the interior of the house was spacious and comfortable, outside the noise was incessant and appalling. La Mura was like living in “the inside of a meat grinder,” Sybille complain
ed; “large motor coaches, not to speak of scooters and road-races pass through our very marrow…Below our bedroom windows is the narrow gate…revving, hooting, belching diesel fumes.” The noise continued until late at night and began again shortly after dawn, making it impossible to sleep into the morning. To make matters worse, it almost never stopped raining, and the maid, whose wages had been included as part of the rent, had fallen ill, so “we find ourselves again making beds and washing up, and paying 30,000 francs a month and her food for doing it.”

  Apart from a couple of excursions to Venice, there were few breaks from this dismal existence, one exception being an invitation to tea twice a week from the famous explorer, Freya Stark, resident in Asolo since the 1920s. Sybille had first met Freya while on a previous visit to Italy, and she now came to enjoy these somewhat austere occasions. “She’s a kitten compared to ICB [Ivy Compton-Burnett]. I find her likeable (what she allows to appear) and the first English resident in Italy I’ve talked to who shares my views about the hideous nature of the Fascist regime in the 20s and 30s.” But then again, agreeable although these visits were, there was much else that was objectionable about the town’s social life. “Too many English,” in Sybille’s view, while both she and Eda resented the fact that there was “no possibility of coming and going and dressing as one pleases. A bothersome idea to have to wear stockings in blazing sun. Skirts when slacks are better for country walks. Gloves when hands are cooler. Hats, when one isn’t used to hats. One somehow felt the unsaid rules.”