Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  After the typescript was sent to New York, Evelyn told Sybille that both she and Bob had loved the book; they did have a few reservations, however, chief among them the disproportionate length of Flavia’s monologue. Sybille was taken aback. “Let me say at once that I do not agree,” she replied, but “don’t let us argue about it. It is quite horrible to have to explain and defend one’s own work.” A number of her friends expressed similar views, among them Jimmy Stern (“I found that early monologue far too long”) and also Allanah. The “one colossal error in the construction…was the fifty pages recalling the Favourite of the Gods, it should have been reduced to five…It made one want to put the book down and not go on.”

  In the event, no cuts or changes were made, and it was not until nearly thirty years later that Sybille came to change her view about the novel’s construction. “I was making an experiment. Deliberately. I was not recapitulating, or repeating events in A Favourite for new readers—that was far from my intention. I wanted to try what painters sometimes do—the same subject in a different format, light etc…Anyway, today I think it was a mistake. I wouldn’t try that way again.”

  As with A Favourite, reviews were mixed. Bernard Levin in the Daily Mail described the novel as “beautiful, civilised, clear-eyed, haunting, evocative,” while the Observer judged it “a work of distinction.” Others were less complimentary, however, the Sunday Times finding it “slightly maniacal about explanation and biographical detail,” while the Times Literary Supplement described the novel as “curiously irrelevant, dated, and mannered…[not] one to reaffirm those high-flown hopes which A Legacy inspired.”

  With the novel finally behind her, Sybille could now turn her attention to her biography of Aldous Huxley. She would have two years in which to write it, and as she was careful to clarify, the result would be a short, compact book, “scholarly (in a modest way)…a straight narrative…and not too long.” The work was to take her nearly six years to complete.

  Skip Notes

  * As Christine Keeler had yet to be tried, it was considered that the publication of the article could damage her defence. I owe this explanation to Desmond Browne QC, who gave it as his opinion that “the account of Christine Keeler’s lifestyle, coupled with Sybille Bedford’s doubts about her truthfulness, were potentially prejudicial. There is always a danger in a court report in which the author interpolates their own assessment of the evidence.”

  eleven

  “FOOD IS PART OF THE LOVE OF LIFE”

  “I love food, good food, simple, authentic,” Sybille said once in an interview. “Taking food with friends has a sacramental dimension for me. It is part of the love of life.” Since early childhood, when she was introduced by her father to the highest levels of fine cuisine, Sybille had been alive to the perfection of simplicity, to the finely tuned balance of taste and texture. Over time she had met a small number of amateur cooks whose talents she admired, one of the most gifted her early mentor, Renée Kisling. But it was not until the mid-1960s that Sybille came to know some of the most influential exponents of the period, among them the English writer Elizabeth David. Elizabeth, like Sybille, had lived in France and Italy, and since the early 1950s her books had had a significant impact on transforming the eating habits of the English middle classes. Her first, A Book of Mediterranean Food, had been published in 1950, four years before food rationing had ended, at a time when olive oil was still sold in miniature bottles as a medicament in Boots. Mediterranean Food had been followed by French Country Cooking, Summer Cooking, Italian Food, and in 1960 by French Provincial Cooking, all five works revered by Sybille, who was in awe of the author’s knowledge and discernment, impressed by her outstandingly elegant style.

  In 1963, after reading an article by Elizabeth on the markets and restaurants of Venice, Sybille had written to express her admiration. “Dear Mrs. David…I read ‘Point de Venise’ about six times…It is so beautifully written…so exciting, and so true…I do so like every word you write about food and cooking and eating.” Within days she received a gratifying reply. “Dear Mrs. Bedford, It isn’t every day that one gets a fan letter from one of one’s own most admired writers…Your own writing about food is so beautiful, and the passage about Melanie and the loup de mer in The Legacy [sic] is to me one of the most luminous and moving of expressions of the impact of the Mediterranean that I know.”

  Not long after this exchange, Elizabeth invited Sybille to dinner at her house in Chelsea. Sybille was immediately excited by the prospect while at the same time feeling a certain level of apprehension, well aware not only of Elizabeth’s distinguished status, but of her formidable reputation for speaking her mind.

  Arrived in Halsey Street, Sybille was led by her hostess along a narrow hallway and into the drawing room, “books, and books and books, up to the ceiling, on the floor, rather beautiful furniture, Edwardian photographs, objects (many, too many, but somehow right), bowls and platters of pomegranates, melon, nectarines.” Here Elizabeth introduced her sister, Felicité, who acted as her secretary, the three of them settling down to talk over a bottle of vintage Gewürztraminer, Sybille’s favourite white wine. After an hour or so Felicité was despatched to her room upstairs while Elizabeth took Sybille down to the kitchen in the basement. Here they sat at a long wooden table, Elizabeth with her back to an old gas cooker, a packet of Gauloises close to hand. A great beauty in her youth, she was still at nearly fifty very handsome, with large dark eyes, her thick grey hair now worn in a chignon at the back of her neck. The dinner was simple and delicious, shish kebabs and a fresh green salad, followed by cheeses and apricots, to drink a white Beaujolais, a wine Sybille had never tasted before, and a premier cru Sauternes.

  The two women talked intensively for hours, about food, but also about painting, Shakespeare, poetry, and one or two friends they had in common. Both, as it turned out, had known Norman Douglas, Elizabeth in the south of France at the beginning of the war, Sybille a few years later during her visits to Capri. It was during her first stay on the island that Sybille had assisted Norman with a cookery book he had been working on, Venus in the Kitchen, a collection of mischievously aphrodisiac recipes. In his preface Norman had expressed his gratitude to Sybille, “without whose friendly help and expert knowledge of matters culinary many mistakes might have crept into the text.” With so much gossip, so many subjects to cover, Sybille and Elizabeth remained at the table for hours, talking absorbedly until nearly midnight, when Sybille, “v. v. tipsy,” finally took her departure.

  From that time on, their friendship continued to flourish, Sybille almost in thrall to Elizabeth, admiring her natural authority as well as her scholarly understanding of her subject. When during the following year the Sunday Times approached Elizabeth to commission an article about her, she agreed on two conditions: that Sybille should write it, and that there should be no personal detail, nothing about her marriage and divorce, nor indeed about any aspect of her private life. Once this was settled, she and Sybille met on several occasions, mainly over dinner at the flat off Sloane Square where Sybille and Eda were currently ensconced. As Sybille needed to concentrate on interviewing Elizabeth, it was Eda who undertook the cooking, “oddly enough,” as Eda remarked, “because Sybille is almost a professional in that line and I am not. All went well, but it took up a good deal of time and thought.”

  Published on 1 January 1967, Sybille’s article focuses on two aspects of her subject, Elizabeth David the writer and Elizabeth David the scholar cook. “If one had to sum up in a few words Elizabeth David’s own contribution to the development of cookery,” Sybille states, “one might say that it was her postulate of the authentic…her outspoken stand against the non-foods of every kind.” To Sybille’s relief, Elizabeth not only approved of the piece but told her how much she had relished her company. “I enjoy talking to you so much,” she wrote. “You make me forget the nonsenses I’ve created, and take me to another world, out of my own
little pool in which I lie too much. You have, and give out, very great strength.” Over time the friendship remained firm, although it took Sybille some while to realise just how difficult Elizabeth could be, that their relationship would be conducted solely on Elizabeth’s terms, not hers. “I was an innocent in those days,” she later recalled. “I thought we were equals.”

  During the next few years Sybille was to become ever more deeply embedded in the world of gastronomy, forming significant friendships with some highly distinguished members of the fraternity. Meanwhile, however, there was the Huxley biography, on which it was essential that she begin work as soon as possible. The contract had been signed nearly three years ago, and her publishers were beginning to grow anxious, Ian Parsons in particular expressing his frustration that Mrs. Bedford had still not started work on a book “which—even if she began next week—couldn’t possibly be published before the spring of 1970.”

  At this point Sybille’s procrastination had been due mainly to her dissatisfaction with the terms of her contract, in particular her publishers’ refusal to pay the costs of her research. As she told Bob Gottlieb, she thought it a disgrace that the author should be responsible for the expenses “for the biography of one of the world’s most distinguished men of letters.” This injustice, as she saw it, had continued to rankle, and eventually, without informing either Bob or Evelyn, Sybille placed herself in the hands of a literary agent in London, Jan van Loewen. Van Loewen was reassuring, promising that he would negotiate a more profitable deal, at which point Sybille wrote to Evelyn to tell her what she had done.

  Both Evelyn and Bob reacted with fury. Sybille’s behaviour was wholly unacceptable, Evelyn told her. “If you had serious objections, T, you should have voiced them then. It seems to me very wrong to expect Bob to reopen negotiations after two years’ time.” Bob, enraged when he heard the news, was equally outspoken. “PUBLISHERS ARE PEOPLE TOO!” he wrote to Sybille. “It was agony working out that contract…Now Mr. van Loewen reopens the very points we settled after endless discussion…I don’t know how to answer him, Sybille, because—I have to tell you the truth—I feel we have been treated badly in this matter…Forgive me if I sound petulant about this. I’m really disturbed.”

  But Sybille stood firm: she had no intention of putting herself permanently in van Loewen’s hands, she explained. “When I have, DV, ordinary books, not involving research expenses and a thousand of other considerations…I propose to continue as before…All that is being asked now is slightly increased expenses.” Over the next few weeks letters were exchanged between all four publishers, anxiously discussing how to respond to Sybille’s demands and to what they regarded as van Loewen’s objectionable intrusion. Finally an agreement was reached: the advance would be slightly increased and, crucially, the delivery date extended by two years: according to van Loewen, Mrs. Bedford felt it would be unfair “if a delivery date were inserted in the contract which may harass her over much.”

  A further upheaval occurred when shortly after these altercations had ended Bob Gottlieb left Simon & Schuster for the firm of Alfred Knopf, taking Evelyn with him. Fortunately, as Sybille told Martha, “S&S rather generously let one choose where to go, and that Eda and I chose to go with Bob.” From then on Sybille had no further dealings with Simon & Schuster.

  During the previous year, with Sybille almost constantly at work, Eda had been attempting to write a third novel, but had made little progress; this was partly on account of the demands of her domestic duties (“Eda the general handyman,” as one of her friends referred to her), but also because of long periods of severe depression. “Last year’s depression was very, very bad indeed,” Sybille reported to Jimmy Stern, Eda “ill, depressed, unwilling to go on…it was a tragic situation: an oozing away of any hold on or pleasure in life.” Recently, however, Eda’s condition had improved, largely due to her discovery of the antidepressant drug Drinamyl, which had been recommended to her by Martha. Thanks to these pills, Sybille told Martha, Eda is “as well and strong this summer as she was ill, depressed, unwilling to go on last year…now she is working away, without great faith but with tenacity and courage, on her novel, struggling to finish it before we set off on our travels.”

  The travels, in the United States, would turn out to be extensive, but first there were a number of conversations to be conducted nearer home, both with the Huxley family and with friends and colleagues of Aldous’s. As Sybille recognised, verbal testimony was of particular significance as the bulk of Aldous’s papers had been destroyed when his house in Los Angeles had burned down. One of her earliest interviews had been in Italy with Laura Huxley, the two meeting for the first time in nearly a decade. Laura was both friendly and helpful, eager to talk about Aldous and about the memoir*1 she had recently written about her marriage, an account Sybille found admirable in many ways, while also shockingly “unprivate.” Sybille also met and talked to Aldous’s brother Julian and to Maria Huxley’s sister, Jeanne Neveux, as well as to friends of Aldous such as Leonard Woolf, Bertrand Russell and Enid Bagnold. Returning to Les Bastides, she settled down to read Aldous’s works and to organise her notes. For Sybille as biographer this was a new discipline to be learnt, sitting hour after hour, day after day, putting herself through “the sheer drudgery…of sifting, noting, filing facts, checking and sorting like a book-keeper, and at the same time trying to remember and to forget, to think and simmer. It is fascinating and rewarding work, and I believe in it.”

  After the summer in France, Sybille, accompanied by Eda, sailed in October 1968 for New York. Before her was the lengthy process of tracking down and interviewing Aldous’s friends in America, an undertaking that was to extend over six months. After a few weeks in New York, Eda left for California while Sybille travelled to Washington to see the Huxleys’ son, Matthew, and his wife in their large, comfortable house in Chevy Chase. “The Huxleys most kind and hospitable…[I] did enjoy Washington. How curiously old-fashioned it is…[but] the boredom of the social life! My goodness…The US seems the nadir in voluble vapidity.”

  From Washington, Sybille went on to California, joining Eda, who was staying with an elderly aunt in Del Mar. Aunt Margaret “is kindness herself,” Sybille reported, “but the days are spent in maddening slow rounds of trivia: cookie making, cousins to call, sing-song parties…Dinner is at six…Eda tells me every morning: ‘This is why I left.’ ” And indeed for Eda, “shrivelled with boredom,” the situation was particularly depressing, struggling to write her novel but almost never allowed a minute alone, constantly at the beck and call of her inexhaustibly social aunt. Hardest of all was the strong disapproval repeatedly expressed of Eda’s smoking. “Smoking is the very devil to Margaret’s friends,” she complained to Jimmy Stern, “which gives [me] the intense longing for it as Prohibition did for drink. A sensible time to give it up but human nature doesn’t work that way; especially under a glaze of boredom.” Fortunately she and Sybille were allowed at least some time to themselves, taking long walks on the beach, “miles and miles of broad sand. Seals & surf bathers in the sea. Hot hot sun.”

  While Eda remained incarcerated in Del Mar, Sybille made several expeditions further afield. One of the most memorable was to Santa Barbara, where a group of twenty friends of Aldous’s assembled, meeting first for dinner, then seated in a semicircle while taking it in turn to recount their memories. Sybille, who listened intently throughout, had decided not to take notes nor use a tape recorder—“it became almost a mediumistic thing,” she said later, and she “absorbed it all like a sponge.” During this same period she visited Igor Stravinsky and his wife in Los Angeles, and also Christopher Isherwood, with whom she spent most of a day, time which “could not have been more agreeable and exciting.” (Isherwood for his part recorded in his diary, “Sybille Bedford…is a hypochondriacal mess but intelligent, really perceptive.”) It was Isherwood who arranged for her to meet Aldous’s guru, Swami Prabhavananda, who gave her a pri
vate audience at the Vedanta Temple. “I was a bit overawed, as you can imagine.”

  In between these expeditions Sybille returned to Del Mar. Here, while grateful for the kindness and hospitality of Eda’s aunt, her contempt for America remained undimmed. “Life here is really too crass and harsh and nothing functions and all the values are odd.” She and Eda were shortly to leave California and journey east, to Denver, Chicago and New York, but shortly before their departure they were provided with a welcome interlude, several days spent visiting the wineries in the Napa Valley with Eda’s old friend from her schooldays, M. F. K. Fisher.

  Mary Frances had remained fondly in touch with Eda, who “has more than fulfilled all I dreamed of her in [my] boarding-school crush of 1923.” Professionally Mary Frances had been successful, although her private life had been full of tragedy, with two of her three marriages ending in divorce, and her adored second husband, the writer Dillwyn Parrish, committing suicide. Now living in San Francisco, Mary Frances was revered for her highly personalised style: as one critic said of her, a large part of her appeal was that she wrote as “a whole human being, spiky with prejudice.” Mary Frances had met Sybille on several occasions in France during the 1960s, both enjoying each other’s company, although Mary Frances had been ambivalent in her attitude towards Sybille: while admiring her intelligence she was disturbed by what she saw as her domineering attitude towards a helplessly submissive Eda.