Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  Sybille returned to Les Bastides in October, somewhat reluctantly as she now felt far more at home in England. “Leaving England was a wrench,” she told the Sterns, “and life here feels rather grim (sticking to that book) and limited. Determined to return to England and live there, DV, if & when I’ll be free to think or move.” Increasingly, she was coming to dislike the commercialism of the south of France, where “almost weekly: another tall building, another walk or view gone; the sea polluted,” whereas London offered “peaceful parks, and peaceful walks, and some quiet streets left, a neighbourly life.” Most important, there were her friends, “the physical ease of reaching them in the evening after a day of work; the libraries, the interesting life going on…In France one is alien if not French. Also the English are so much kinder still, more benevolent, open…I feel happy and at ease in London.”

  Meanwhile at Les Bastides there was some encouraging news for Eda: her novel Extenuating Circumstances, about a young English widow living in Cannes during the Occupation, had just been published in New York, and had been sold by Bob Gottlieb to Hodder & Stoughton in London. Evelyn, who had come over from the States for a short holiday, was with Sybille and Eda on the day of publication and took them both out to dinner in Cannes to celebrate. It was a cheerful evening, although Evelyn herself had experienced a difficult year, having unexpectedly been sacked in January by Knopf. “I have some ungood news,” she had written to Sybille. “I’ve been fired. Not me alone—there’s been a bloodletting: six of us in all…Reason is said to be that business is bad…[and] no, Bob did not instantly offer me safe haven…but he couldn’t have been more sympathetic.” Evelyn’s next job, with a new firm, Arbor House, was short-lived, but it was not long before she found a post with Bobbs-Merrill, famous as the publisher of The Wizard of Oz. Here she was to settle contentedly, in charge of commissioning titles on gardening, needlework and interior decoration. “I couldn’t be happier,” she told Sybille, “because the atmosphere is so good. No politicking.”

  By now, Sybille was in the fourth year of writing her biography of Aldous. “What I am trying to do…is to make it flow, and continuous, to make it a clear narrative: I should like the reader to know always where he is, and when, time of years; sequence; Aldous’s age…give a life a shape, make one see, convey emotion.” Increasingly, however, she was struggling with the project, stressed by the volume of work, suffering badly from eye-strain, and then while at Les Bastides incapacitated by a long bout of ill health, described as “a sort of breakdown…due to overwork.” Once returned to London she immediately felt better, but then fell seriously ill with a virus infection, confined to bed for nearly two months, followed by a long period of weakness, anxiety and depression. “It’s very disagreeable…The world sways about one, and one tingles inside, above all one feels exhausted, exhausted, unable to cope, not even the next step.” Eventually she began to recover, her old friend, Charlotte Wolff, helping by prescribing a daily dose of Valium to calm her nerves.

  After the summer when Eda came over to join Sybille in London, she, too, was in a fragile state, “unhappy, defeatist, tired. She can’t sleep; says she hasn’t eaten for weeks.” Although she understood Eda’s strong attachment to Les Bastides, Sybille had been concerned about the effect of her isolation there: her closest friend, Richard Olney, was over two hours’ drive away, while Allanah was “nice to her, niceish, but indifferent; and this makes Eda feel a ghost, unwanted. Something which is very bad for her.” Increasingly Sybille worried about Eda’s vulnerability, her endless fight against depression, the fundamental passivity in her nature which made her emotionally dependent on others, and on Sybille in particular. By now this constant need for care and protection was becoming an almost intolerable encumbrance, Sybille uncomfortably aware that the more helpless Eda became, the more she herself felt a growing resentment and irritation. “I’m becoming more worried about Eda,” she told Tania. “So negative; so closed in, and, I fear, so unhappy…She said—today—that her instinct tells her that I do not love her now, find her a burden. The terrible thing is there is enough truth in this to make it hard to convince her of the contrary.” Gradually the atmosphere lightened, however, after Sybille’s doctor, Patrick Woodcock, was able to treat Eda with effect, and slowly she began to recover. “I gather it’s the old old deep-seated depression on top of a low physical state,” Sybille reported to the Sterns. “Both are very improved. The relief is immense.”

  Fortunately by the end of the year Sybille had returned to work. Her publishers were insisting on delivery in March 1973, as November was the tenth anniversary of Aldous’s death. Although struggling to cope with the pressure—writing Aldous’s biography was like “wearing chains all the time”—Sybille remained as reverential as ever of her subject. “How Aldous grows. How overwhelmed one is by what he was; the sheer astonishing beauty of his goodness and being…At times I feel very inadequate to put it across…What people want to hear and believe is the malicious, the sick—not of goodness and maturity and perfection. To make them see and believe. Very very hard. One can only try.” Finally, in February, shortly before her deadline, Sybille finished the book, all 300,000 words of it, immediately sending a copy to Evelyn for comment. The achievement was tremendous, Evelyn told her “brave, splendid beast. You can’t imagine how proud of you I am.” Nonetheless in her view there were a number of flaws: Sybille as narrator was too worshipful, throughout portraying Aldous as a kind of saint; “and do loosen up yr tone, T—suddenly yr so mangy & stuffy…Speak up, forthright & plain. Not Miss Mincy-Mouse. Friendship brings insights, & that’s fine. Make the whole thing human & simple & yrself.”

  When soon afterwards a typescript was sent to Chatto, the response on the whole was gratifying—“magnificent,” as Ian Parsons described it. He did, however, have a number of technical criticisms, most burdensome his insistence that she check and correct all Huxley’s quotations. “Just when I thought that all was smooth with the M/S of the biography it transpired that I had made innumerable typing mistakes in transcribing quotations from Aldous’s works…So I left rattled and ashamed; and Ian Parsons was very cold. It was rather awful. So I had to settle down to getting A’s books out of the library—not my marked copies which are in France—and try to find several hundred quotations, sometimes half sentences hidden in the long novels and essays—a miserable job.” Once these corrections had been made, proofs were printed and sent to Sybille for revision, an undertaking she found wearisome in the extreme, “the eye-strain, the boredom”; she resented the fact, too, that authors were not paid for the time spent correcting misspellings and renumbering footnotes. Eventually, by mid-August, it was done, and the book on which she had been working for nearly six years was finally out of her hands, leaving her feeling “so strange, and flat, and désorientée, and emptied.”

  In her introduction to the biography, Sybille writes, “The object of this book is to give a truthful and coherent account of the life of Aldous Huxley and of Aldous Huxley as a man…If the work was a labour of love, it was also a work done in a spirit of detachment.” Early on she had made the decision not to read any books or articles about Aldous, nor to go in search of correspondence, preferring to rely instead on the selection of letters that had been published six years after Aldous’s death,*2 on her own memories, and on the memories of the many still living who had known him. Throughout, her two-volume account depends heavily on lengthy quotations, which take up well over half the narrative, from correspondence and also from interviews Sybille herself conducted, interspersed with often very brief intercessions of her own. Where the book comes most vividly to life are in the substantial passages from Maria Huxley’s letters, to her family and also to Sybille, and in Sybille’s evocative accounts of her own association with the Huxleys, from the early years in Sanary to her last encounter with Aldous in London in 1961. Although Sybille as narrator often seems unsure, nervously changing tone, shifting tense from past to present, repeatedl
y bringing herself in, without explanation, as “I” or “we,” it is here, when recalling her own experiences, that the text takes on a new dimension, full of character and colour, the writing instantly more fluent and relaxed.

  Aware of the need for discretion, Sybille omitted a considerable amount of information regarding the sensitive subject of Aldous’s voracious sexual appetite, his many adulterous liaisons, some shared with Maria. This was to protect the reputation not only of her subject but also of the women still living who might have felt damaged by such revelations. “I never confirmed nor denied,” Sybille recorded in her diary. “ ‘They’ would not have liked it…Just avoided. Evaded.” One whose affair with Aldous she does describe is that of the eccentric bohemian Nancy Cunard, who had died in 1965. Nancy’s rackety life is told in some detail, including her acquaintance with Sybille: “To us,” Sybille wrote, Nancy “was the friend one loved, whose arrival one often dreaded.” Aldous’s passion for Nancy in 1923 nearly ended his marriage, and the experience is movingly recounted in Sybille’s narrative, based closely on what Maria had told her many years later. When Aldous’s obsession eventually became intolerable, Maria had presented him with an ultimatum: “She would leave England the next morning with him or without; for him to make up his mind, but he must make up his mind now…they went straight to Italy…Aldous wrote Antic Hay. He wrote it all down*3…it was over. He never looked back.”

  In the later section, covering Aldous’s life from 1939 to 1963, Maria’s letters, revelatory and engaging, are again quoted at length, Sybille continuing to link them with a detailed chronological account of the Huxleys’ domestic circumstances, their extensive travels, their engagement with a wide circle of friends. After Maria’s death in 1955, followed less than a year later by Aldous’s marriage to Laura Archera, the narrative inevitably becomes more monotone, although Sybille succeeds in providing a sympathetic portrait of Maria’s successor, careful to credit Laura with the kindness and support she always showed her husband. As before, Sybille makes use of long extracts from Aldous’s own works, not only from his books and articles, but also from lectures, and from broadcasts on radio and television, in one instance, an interview for the BBC in 1961, including nearly ten pages of quotation. Sybille’s affection and respect for Aldous, her profound love for Maria, are clearly relayed, her personal recollections, lucid, sympathetic, often witty. In the many periods of Aldous’s life in which Sybille was not involved, however, her narrative is less confident as she skitters from one source to another, only infrequently taking control herself, her “Cheshire Cat manner,” as one reviewer described it, “by turns fanciful, informative and vanishing.”

  On account of its length Aldous Huxley was published in Britain in two volumes, the first in November 1973, the second in September 1974, while in the States it appeared in one volume only. The reactions of Sybille’s acquaintance were on the whole appreciative, among the most encouraging Raymond Mortimer and Graham Greene. “The book enchanted me by its constant intelligence, its depth of feeling and the felicity of the style,” Raymond told her, while Greene wrote, “I can’t wait to shout my admiration. This surely is the big biography of our times…There has been nothing like it…You’ve written with such knowledge & affection & only a writer could have touched the nerve as you have done.” The approval of closer friends was rather more muted: Allanah, although moved by the later years of Aldous’s life, found the first volume disappointing; Jimmy Stern criticised Sybille’s style, which he found less distinguished than in her previous work; while Martha admitted she had been puzzled by Sybille’s adulatory attitude towards such an unsympathetic subject, “a gentle man with a steel selfishness,” as Martha described Aldous. “He had a perfect right to live as he did but it is not a very interesting life in action. And in the mind, isn’t there a lot of faddery and nonsense mixed with the great learning?”

  Both volumes were dedicated to Aldous’s son, Matthew, who himself had certain reservations about the work. “Poor Sybille,” he wrote to Norah Smallwood at Chatto, “once my mother’s lodestone vanishes, not merely does the territory become utterly different, but the subsequent accounts become as improbable as the fabliaux of the Middle Ages.”

  If reactions from friends were varied, the reviews on both sides of the Atlantic were even more so. Raymond Mortimer praised the book enthusiastically in the Sunday Times, as did Angus Wilson in the Observer, while V. S. Pritchett in the New Statesman declared the biography “the major work on a major figure in the literary and intellectual history of the twentieth century.” Several critics remarked on the author’s naivety about her subject, among them C. P. Snow, who found it strange that “she doesn’t recognise with completely clear eyes that, for anyone so intelligent, he was also one of the most credulous men of the age.” In the States, one critic described the work as “gossipy, flighty, unintellectual,” another disparaged the author’s “slapdash prose,” while Diana Trilling in the New York Times complained of the work’s “deficiencies of critical perceptivity…its wilderness of parentheses, brackets and lost antecedent nouns.” Far the most damning review, however, was by Philip Toynbee in the London Observer, who described the biography as “not only unsatisfactory but almost, at times, repellent…[Huxley’s] social life, so breathlessly retailed to us here, is enough to make the heart sink into the boots with its lists of names and occasions and adulations…[and] the trouble goes deeper. When Miss Bedford comes to deal with Huxley’s many infidelities to his first wife and Maria’s amused complaisance (at least on the surface), the amused complaisance of Sybille Bedford is an utterly inadequate reaction.” None of this, he concludes, will “for a moment do as the first-hand description of a real, interesting and poignant human being.”

  Inevitably Sybille was disappointed and depressed by such reactions. “I feel curiously crushed and low,” she confessed to the Sterns. “More wretched than for a long time. Set off by Toynbee, perhaps…This whole business of publication…is more shattering than I expected. One feels exposed. Also cannot imagine now ever to be able to write another word. Not even a letter. Great reluctance to buckling down to say even this much to you.”

  In the meantime there were further causes for anxiety. While Sybille had been correcting her proofs and preparing for publication, Eda had arrived in London from the south of France, very dejected and in a fragile state of health: an abcess had developed on the side of her jaw, requiring a course of antibiotics which made her feel weak and nauseated. Recently Eda had received a serious lecture from her doctor, who had “told her if she didn’t stop smoking her toes would fall off”; but such a warning was inevitably ignored. With Sybille in her mouse-hole in Chelsea, separate accommodation had to be found for Eda, who stayed first at Martha’s apartment in Cadogan Square, then with Anne Balfour, before a tiny flat was located only minutes away from Old Church Street. Here towards the end of her stay Eda seemed to grow less despondent: “the last ten days, she was better in some ways in spite of tears and uncertainty; because we both enjoyed having dinner together there, then watching television. She made delicious meals, and seemed to enjoy having me and making it nice…She was the hostess, and we were happy and easy.”

  Eda left again for France at the end of May 1974, where Sybille joined her for a couple of weeks before returning to London in June. In August came the wholly unexpected news that Allanah had decided to take back the little dwelling in which over the years they had stayed at Les Bastides. With the publication of the Huxley biography making it difficult for Sybille to leave London, “the monster task” of organising the departure was left to Eda, who, despite her grief at leaving her beloved Provence, efficiently packed up, arranging for most of their possessions to be placed in storage in Nice. Eda herself arrived in England in October, by which time Sybille was about to leave, due to sail to New York in order to promote her book in the States. Fortunately, Anne Balfour was able to take Eda in at her house in Sutherland Street, providing her
with a couple of rooms on the top floor. Anne could hear Eda pacing back and forth, hour after hour, dense clouds of cigarette smoke drifting down the staircase. “After Eda left I had to have the whole floor fumigated,” she recalled.

  Sybille had been looking forward to returning to the States, delighted to be sailing in comfort on the Queen Elizabeth 2, “expenses paid by Alfred A. Knopf Inc. Nice of them.” During her time in New York she stayed with Evelyn in the East Village, receiving invitations almost every day to lunches and dinners, “all a bit unbelieving at the belated popularity.” She gave a number of interviews, appeared on television, delivered a lecture at Columbia University, and was the guest of honour at a cocktail party given by Alfred Knopf at the St. Regis Hotel, followed by dinner with Knopf and his wife, Blanche, an occasion which Sybille “did not enthuse about.” She also saw a number of old friends, including Janet Flanner and Natalia Murray, Matthew Huxley and his wife, and Richard Olney, who was in New York giving a series of private cookery lessons at James Beard’s apartment.