Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  Most important was her meeting with Bob Gottlieb, who had been unfailingly supportive, if not entirely uncritical of the Huxley biography. Bob had for some while been a major figure in the publishing world; recently, as Evelyn had reported, he had been pictured in a magazine “showing editor supine on sofa editing ms, and talking Bob-nonsense…He is v. grand now in publishing…and successful as Croesus.” Now, for one of the few times in his career, Bob found himself faced with taking an author out to lunch, an obligation which he had always made a point of avoiding. While his colleagues lunched daily in some midtown restaurant, Bob stayed in his office, offering no more than a sandwich to any agent or author who wished to see him. For Sybille, however, such conduct was out of the question, and she insisted that Bob take her to one of the most highly regarded French restaurants in the city. “I was terribly nervous,” Bob recalled, “because what do I know about it all…Food is food, if it’s good that’s wonderful and if it isn’t who cares. The menu came and they were serving rack of lamb, and I said, Sybille, would you like the rack of lamb? And she said, ‘Yes, yes, but you know, my dear Bob, lamb is really nothing but the vehicle for a good claret.’ Which of course she chose…and it was good.”

  Sybille returned to England at the beginning of December 1974, immediately immersed in the familiar state of anxiety and depression from which she had been free while in New York. “I miss you,” she told Evelyn, “and the cosy life we led, and the gay one…London feels small, back-waterish.” As the flat in Old Church Street was so tiny, her main worry now was to find somewhere with enough space for herself and Eda to live together, with separate studies and preferably with easy access to a garden. Despite all the difficulties and irritations, Sybille’s devotion to Eda remained solid. “Now I shall say what is in my mind,” she had written to her recently, “that you are close to me and that I love you. And need you…I don’t want to live without you…I want to be with you, my Eda Bug; and I will try not to be led into superficial day to day irritation.”

  For some time Sybille had been searching for a suitable property, “going all over London 5 afternoons a week with 20 different estate agents with no goal in sight so far…I feel very discouraged.” Fortunately, her financial affairs were in a better state than usual, partly due to a generous donation from Laura Huxley, to whom Sybille had confided in detail her worries about the expense of moving house, and as well a bequest of several thousand pounds from her old friend Toni Muir, who had died the previous year. Nonetheless both she and Eda knew it would be difficult to afford the kind of accommodation they wanted, everything they viewed either too costly or too dilapidated. Then finally in January 1976 they found the ideal property, an apartment in a house in Markham Square, off the King’s Road. “It is in a quiet square with trees in Chelsea…We shall have the maisonette on the two top floors,” Sybille reported to Tania Stern. “I am very happy & hopeful, above all relieved.”

  The plan was to move into Markham Square in May, which would allow plenty of time for all the necessary sorting and packing. But then the renting of the flat had to be cancelled when in February Eda fell ill, developing a painful ulcer in her mouth. She made an appointment with her dentist, who immediately referred her to a specialist at Guy’s Hospital. Here a biopsy revealed a cancerous tumour in her throat, requiring an immediate operation. “Eda herself is very brave,” Sybille wrote to Allanah, “but it has been a great shock…The thing had already eaten into the throat muscles and was not cut out altogether. It now has to be killed by deep ray treatment…Terrifying…I try to be optimistic, and to SHOW optimism.” Shortly afterwards Eda returned to her little flat, where Sybille visited her daily, bringing her food as well as large supplies of cigarettes which, despite her doctors’ orders, Eda had refused to give up. For the next eight weeks Eda walked every morning to the Royal Marsden, the cancer hospital in the Fulham Road, undergoing treatment which left her with a painfully sore throat. “A terrible thing, of course, is trying to eat,” she told Mary Frances. “Everything tastes metallic…and swallowing is painful.” The good news, however, was that Dr. Lederman, “one of the top cancer men in England…told me that I was going to be quite all right.”

  In June Eda was feeling so much better that she was able to accept an invitation from Mary Frances to fly out to the south of France and spend a few days with her in Aix. “I feel jubilant and overwhelmed,” Eda told her. “Sybille is exhilarated beyond belief. And I am made happy.” Indeed, Sybille was most grateful to Mary Frances, knowing how much a return to France and time spent with her old friend would mean to Eda. “Physically and spiritually, this visit to Aix is the first light at the end of a nasty tunnel,” Sybille told her. “When I first wrote to you the bad news in early spring, there was some cause for anxiety that she might not come through the treatment. Thank God, one can say now that all that fear is behind us. And the prognosis is very good.”

  After a week in Aix, Eda went on to stay with Richard Olney’s brother James and his wife, who, with Richard away, were spending part of the summer in his little farmhouse. “Even after nine days I am still aware of this miraculous air in which one bathes,” Eda reported, and “more than happy just to sit still and enjoy the garden and what I can see of the world spread out below.” When James Beard, who was staying nearby, came over to see her, he was delighted to find not the usual silent, retiring Eda, but an Eda communicative and forthcoming. “I had never known Eda talk so much, or with such brilliance and ease. She talked of her childhood and youth, of her strange early womanhood and her journeyings…of Berlin…of her experiences in France during the war.” The day after the James Olneys left, Richard arrived, overjoyed to find Eda waiting for him. Although shocked by how thin she had grown, he found her looking “eerily more beautiful than ever…She was in good spirits, but her thoughts were with eternity and the mystery of life. We were studying the world in bowls of black coffee…the conversation, memories and chain-smoking continued. She stayed for a week. I accompanied her to the Marseille airport and put her on a plane for London. We knew that we would never see each other again.”

  When at the beginning of August Eda returned to London, Sybille was delighted to see how well she looked, “charming & handsome & clear-eyed.” Sybille went to visit her every day, sometimes accompanied by a friend, one of whom was Martha, who, true to form, had not hesitated to reproach Sybille for her treatment of Eda. “You MUST NOT always interrupt her when she talks,” Martha reproved her. “You not only interrupt her but you also tell her stories. She came back from France with her stories, told you, and when she started to tell me you took them over. You have always done this…I notice it every time we three are together.”

  A rather less abrasive visitor was Evelyn, who had flown over from New York for three weeks to stay at Old Church Street, her arrival instantly buoying Sybille’s spirits. During the day the two of them spent hours with Eda, cooking soup, bringing her ice cream, with Evelyn encouraging her to go out as much as possible. “Evelyn has created a festive round,” Sybille told Jimmy Stern, “spoiling us with what she calls treats. She even took Eda, Anne Balfour and me to dinner at the Etoile, sending me there half an hour in advance as her wine steward, a role I enjoyed and carried out, I think, with some success.” At Old Church Street she and Evelyn enjoyed sitting out-of-doors in the tiny garden, basking “in the glorious unbroken warmth…every night at dusk (already now) we drink our wine looking at the trees.”

  Sybille was so cheered by Evelyn’s presence that she decided to give a party in the garden one evening in early September, “years of unreturned hospitality coming home to roost…Evelyn will do the donkey work, I the drinks, Eda ashtrays and introductions.” Guests began arriving soon after six; just before 7:30, by which time the party was in full swing, everyone standing and talking outside, the sky suddenly darkened and it began to rain. Sybille in a panic began carrying as much as she could indoors, but then noticed that nobody followed, all happily cl
ustered together under a tall tree, “like fowl huddling away from a shoot in progress. Everyone was shrieking with laughter and refusing to come indoors. This went on for about ten minutes; then the heavy shower was over.” When eventually the guests departed, Sybille and Evelyn, in the highest spirits, elated by the success of the evening, did what they could to restore order before going out to a local pub for supper.

  Shortly afterwards Evelyn returned to New York. A few days later Sybille found Eda in bed one morning having suffered a haemorrhage. Her doctor told her she must go to hospital at once to undergo a hysterectomy. “It does seem inhuman and impossible for her to face it all again,” Sybille told Tania Stern. “Today, she seems less shattered, and speaks quite hopefully about a harmless outcome.” The operation took place at St. Thomas’s Hospital on 1 October. At first all appeared to be well, yet as the days passed Eda showed little sign of recovery, Sybille allowed in to see her for only two hours in the evening. “She seems very ill to me,” she reported to Tania, while to Allanah she described how appalling it was “to see a human being disintegrating…The difficulty with Eda is that she is so hard to know. I feel that I do not really know her (which makes everything even sadder).” In a letter to Eda’s oldest friend, Mary Frances, she wrote, “Eda is not recovering…What the doctors said might happen in some months is happening now…I cannot bear this fate for her, for her to lose life, to disappear…What waste & desolation it is.” On 23 October, Eda died. Her funeral took place four days later in Harlow, in Essex, her ashes buried in a local churchyard, at Great Hormead in Hertfordshire.

  For some while after Eda’s death, Sybille was overcome by grief, distraught at the ending of a close relationship that had lasted over twenty years; she was tormented, too, by the conviction that in some way she had let Eda down. “[I] do not hold that I have been really good to her,” she confessed to Allanah. “I did something, but failed her in the essentials, an emotional stability, a great need to be needed she was looking for all her life. I have been very selfish, always domineering, often putting other emotions first; bulldozing on with work…I also made her feel unwanted after the move to London.” To Mary Frances she wrote, “I believe, when all is said, I was very very close to Eda (and I think she to me); but did I know her well? Understand her?”; while to Jimmy Stern she lamented, Eda’s “absence now is almost unbearable. I had not realised how fused our lives had become…When people live one does not know how fortunate one is & only grumbles about the cigarette smoke. How I wish I hadn’t.”

  Skip Notes

  *1 This Timeless Moment: A Personal View of Aldous Huxley, Laura Archera Huxley (Chatto & Windus, 1969).

  *2 Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith (Harper & Row, 1969).

  *3 In Antic Hay, Nancy Cunard is portrayed as Myra Viveash.

  twelve

  “NOVELS AMONG OTHER THINGS ARE GALLERIES OF MIRRORS”

  The impact on Sybille of Eda’s death was profound and long-lasting. “Grief is something so unlike anything else—sadness, depression, unhappiness—quite different from that. Pain of absence. I miss Eda so dreadfully. I wish she knew.” All Sybille’s close friends were consoling and supportive, chief among them Evelyn, Martha, the Sterns, Richard Olney and Allanah. Rosamond Lehmann, too, showed great compassion, persuading Sybille to communicate with Eda through a medium. Since the death of her daughter nearly twenty years earlier, Rosamond had become deeply immersed in the spirit world, a distinguished member of the College of Psychic Studies in South Kensington, in constant contact with what she reverently referred to as the “au delà” (“beyond”).

  Desperate to believe, craving any form of communication, Sybille eagerly agreed, and Rosamond arranged a private seance for her at the college. To Sybille’s joy, Eda almost immediately “came through,” full of loving messages and reassurances of her own well-being. “Eda was so well,” Sybille afterwards told Tania Stern, “writing again…and so loving and near that it made me indescribably happy…Rosamond telephoned afterwards, the same evening, at 11 p.m….and I was able to tell her that all was transformed.” However, although Sybille was convinced at the time that she had been in touch with Eda, the belief did not remain with her for long.

  Anxious that Sybille should not be left on her own, Allanah invited her to stay for several months at Les Bastides, a prospect that Sybille both longed for and dreaded. “Going back to Les Bastides, to house, olive grove, every corner of our life for so many many years will not be easy. Yet I didn’t think it would be right for me not to go, when Allanah has always considered her house, wherever it was, a home for me…We have been something like closest family for near half a century.” As she expected, Sybille found herself pleased to return, enjoying the company of Allanah, of the Mimerels, the Childs, Richard Olney, while also frequently overwhelmed by sadness and regret. “Here I am in Allanah’s spare room, looking down on our former home in the olive grove below, seeing the bushes we planted, and the one tree. It’s all a bit overwhelming.” In June 1977, to her great joy, Evelyn arrived from New York, spending a couple of days at Les Bastides before returning with Sybille for a brief stay in London.

  In her will Eda had made Sybille her sole legatee, thus ensuring that she could now afford to stay permanently at Old Church Street. Despite the cramped quarters, Sybille had come to feel at home in the little flat, fearing the prospect of having to move. “The news is unexpectedly good. In fact, ever since I’ve been floating in a kind of disbelieving half-shocked relief,” she told Allanah. The owner, Alice Binnie, “will allow me to stay without buying; and will write a letter to her trustees saying that she wishes me to stay for my natural life.” Not long afterwards Allanah telephoned, “wanted to say that she has more money now…she wants me to have more, and to get everything I want for the flat. I was terribly touched. Really, one’s friends!…Also oddly cheered. Money had been such a nightmare some of these last years.” Not long after Evelyn returned to the States, a letter arrived enclosing a cheque for $1,000. “I love that place,” Evelyn had written, “and that’s why my thousand is not open to discussion…this way I’ll be contributing extra luxuries you’d not permit yrself—a really pretty sofa; a good frig/freezer…Remember, it wd make me happy. So no fussing, pls.”

  As always, Sybille had been left desolate by Evelyn’s departure, yet cheered by the fact that their period of separation would not last long, Evelyn promising to return for three weeks at the end of August.

  Meanwhile in London Sybille soon became immersed in the kind of social life, “interesting, often stimulating,” which, now alone, she increasingly felt she needed. “The giving and taking of affection, understanding, warmth. It gives me a sense of identity…It gives me a sense of still having something to offer.” During the next few weeks she dined on several occasions with Richard Olney, currently in London preparing to start work as chief consultant of an eighteen-volume World Cookery Anthology to be published by Time/Life. Then there was an evening with Elizabeth David, “en beauté, as easy to talk to as ever”; dinner with Sybille’s editor at Collins, Richard Ollard, almost as knowledgeable about wine as Sybille herself; time spent with Raymond Mortimer, the Sterns, Rosamond Lehmann, and “an intellectual cocktail party” given by her one-time lover, Annie Davis, and her husband, over from Spain, where they were now living. At the beginning of September Sybille attended an eightieth-birthday celebration for the president of PEN, the novelist Lettice Cooper, an occasion which rather to her surprise she enjoyed. “Too much standing of course—[but it] had a good atmosphere as everyone tried to be pleasant…it was very friendly—quite lacking in that superior chilly snootiness of many English intellectual parties.”

  By this time Sybille had expected Evelyn to be with her, but to her disappointment the visit had had to be postponed. Evelyn had not been well, it appeared, drained of energy, for several weeks obliged to work from home. “I spend the day on bed, NY Times & work & cups of tea & th
ings all around me, and the days pass very slowly and peacefully, punctuated with telephone calls.” She was still hoping to come to London, but first there were a number of tests to be undergone, the results revealing that she had been suffering from a severe bout of hepatitis. Once diagnosed, Evelyn felt better, glad to be able to return to work. “Only sign is that after 3 or 4 hrs in office, suddenly begin to yawn head off. So go home, fling off clothes, into nightgown and gratefully on bed for nap.” Enormously relieved, Sybille suggested that she herself should come to New York in December, a plan to which Evelyn readily agreed. “Really bucked that we’ve agreed on Xmas visit; darling, tap wood of course, but one always does.”

  Over the next few weeks, Sybille received frequent reports on Evelyn’s progress. After recovering from hepatitis, she was found to have an inflamed gallbladder, which would have to be removed, but once this was done everything should be all right. “I have no cancer, no ulcers, NO abnormalities of any kind…It may seem curious to be so pleased about an operation—but darling think of the bliss to get it over with fast?” The procedure took place at the Beth Israel Hospital on 19 September, Sybille waiting anxiously for news. “Last night, her 3rd day, she was able to telephone me herself from hospital,” Sybille reported to Tania Stern. “Very reassuring.” Over the next few weeks Evelyn’s condition continued slowly to improve, but then at the end of October she had to undergo a second operation, followed in December by an emergency procedure, this time to cut out a large ovarian tumour. Sybille had known nothing of this until she was telephoned at midnight from New York. “They told me not to come as she was in an intensive care unit and under heavy sedation.” Three days later, on 18 December, the eve of her sixtieth birthday, Evelyn died. The final operation had been too much, “her heart gave out,” Sybille told Elizabeth David. Evelyn “was one of the best human beings I have ever met—sheer goodness. And no one ever had such a friend…It is shattering, & I’m shattered.”