Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  It was during this period that Sybille formed friendships with two literary figures, Frances Partridge and Stanley Olson. Frances, now nearly eighty, was one of the last survivors of the Bloomsbury group, while Stanley, a protégé of Frances, was an American writer in his early thirties. During an occasion with Stanley at Frances’s flat in Belgravia Sybille recalled not only a delicious dinner but over all “a very good evening with talk flowing…without the Bloomsbury cattiness/bitchiness…We part, Stanley and I from Frances without kissykiss or handshake. Bloomsbury style? Probably.” Yet while she was fond of Frances, it was Stanley to whom Sybille grew closer, enchanted by his intelligence and eccentricity, delighted by his dedicated epicureanism. A short, rather plump young man, with a head of glossy black hair—a “weird amalgamation of small animal and Oscar [Wilde]”—Stanley had a tiny mews flat off Montagu Square, where he lived with his spaniel, Wuzzo, while working on a life of the painter John Singer Sargent. Stanley was a generous host, almost as knowledgeable as Sybille about food and wine; he entertained her at his flat to exquisite little dinners, and enjoyed acting as barman when she gave parties at Old Church Street. Before long Sybille had grown deeply fond of Stanley; he “had extraordinary sweetness of nature; also he was quite unspoilt. The feasts and the flowers and the wines were his natural toys. If he appeared eccentric—and, my goodness, he was eccentric—there was no affectation in it.”

  Meanwhile Sybille continued to see as much of Lesley as she could. The emotional bond between them was strong, but for Lesley it remained an affectionate friendship, while Sybille found herself deeply enamoured. One evening over dinner with Lesley and Anne Balfour, Anne began talking about her lover, Marie-Thérèse d’Arcangues, who before she met Anne had apparently never been to bed with a woman. “ ‘How extraordinary!’ S is moved to say. ‘Why,’ says L, ‘why extraordinary? I’ve never slept with a woman.’ ‘Different,’ says S, and Anne concurs. We don’t go further.” Often after an evening spent with friends, or attending a meeting at PEN, or dining together at Old Church Street, Sybille and Lesley would sit talking for hours, not parting till three or four in the morning, when Lesley would drive back to Ovington Gardens in her little blue Honda. When Lesley went abroad, as she often did, Sybille would wait impatiently for her return. “Full of tension, waiting for L to come back,” she noted one evening when Lesley was due to return from a visit to Austria. “Lie on bed, drop off. Take off jeans at 10.40, half min later telephone call. Dash to Victoria. One look: Lesley’s bright-eyed, well, herself. Surge of joy. We drive back here…Hear about Schrunz days. Take L to Honda…Tired but new lease. Bed midnight.”

  In November 1980, Sybille, to her intense delight, received a letter from the office of the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, informing her that she was to be appointed “an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.” “It’s such an improbable thing to have happened to me,” she told Jimmy Stern, that “I need being reminded that it’s real.” Founded in 1917 by George V to provide honours for the non-military, five classes of awards were established, of which the OBE is the fourth in line. The ceremony at Buckingham Palace was to be held on 10 February, and it was Anne Balfour who now took charge, determined to ensure that Sybille would be appropriately dressed, her usual garb of trousers, striped shirt, neckerchief and waistcoat exchanged for an elegant velvet jacket and silk scarf, both lent by Anne, a well-tailored flannel skirt and a pair of polished black brogues; as hats were no longer de rigueur, “I went without (the only woman in my draft who did).”

  On the morning of the ceremony, Anne drove Sybille and her “best man,” her Collins editor, Richard Ollard, to the Palace. Here on arrival Richard and Anne joined the rest of the audience in the ballroom while Sybille was escorted up the great gilded staircase and into a long gallery, where she waited with her fellow honorees until her name was called. Eventually, a loud voice announced “Mrs. Sybille Bedford,” “and up I went; saw the Queen: tiny, in a little beigey-browny batik day dress, looking very small and plain in front of her plumed guard. I made a deep straight entirely steady curtsey…walked up to the Queen who muttered, fussing with the hook in my coat. ‘What did you do for it?’…[I] said quite loud and proud, ‘I am a writer, Ma’am.’ The Queen: ‘Oh. And how long have you been at it?’ S: ‘All my life, Ma’am.’ The Queen: ‘Oh dear! Ah, well.’ She shook my hand, a very firm grip, a horse woman’s grip, almost pushing one back. I managed my smart steps backwards, another deep steady curtsey…[then was led] to a good seat, front seat, to watch my fellow OBEs being run through…After which National Anthem, we stood, the Queen walked out.”

  Returning to Old Church Street, Sybille went “to show off the order to the neighbours,” then in the evening attended a cocktail party given in her honour by Anne. Finally she was taken by Richard to dinner at a favourite restaurant of his, “to celebrate à deux. By midnight we were joined by the chef, the sommelier…the head waiter…I was being kissed by all. And the best brandy circulated till 2 a.m. by which time we all got down to the serious talk of food marketing, cooking, wine waiting and all shared a taxi home in the small hours.”

  During this period, Sybille’s feelings for Lesley remained as intense as ever, while Lesley herself remained in emotional terms tantalisingly out of reach. “Unrequited love…the delirium, the hopes, the despair, the waiting. At eighteen one may believe oneself to be uniquely stricken, at thirty one may be able to say that no pain is irreversible, at seventy one knows that it is: irreversible.”

  Over time Sybille’s frustration at what she began to regard as Lesley’s deliberate evasiveness intensified, resulting in some acrimonious exchanges between them. On one occasion, after an evening spent dining with Anne Balfour, Lesley had driven Sybille back to Old Church Street. “It’s two a.m. outside in the car,” Sybille recorded in her diary. “I say Everything I lay on for you bores you now. Says it’s tiredness. She’s never bored…Try to say something—hesitantly—about my despair and fears. I’m brushed off. Shut out.” Waking late the next morning, Sybille wrote, “feeling better physically though not in spirits. Resentments. Not good…L did not call…Unhappy afternoon trying to redirect thought and anger.” Later Lesley telephoned to say that she was going away, “but fails to say when she intends to return.” It was at this point that Sybille began to realise she had suffered enough, her anguish temporarily transmuting into a state almost of indifference. “Self-preservation, or the death of the heart? Honestly do not know.”

  With Lesley unattainable, Sybille found herself without an emotional focus, craving serious attachment as well as physical expression. Over the past few years she had occasionally gone with friends to the Gateways, a lesbian club off the King’s Road, but now she began attending a much less sophisticated venue, where the girls made themselves available by the hour. When Anne Balfour heard of this she was horrified. “I kept saying, ‘Sybille, I don’t honestly think it’s a good idea, it’s dangerous.’ However, she persisted and would come back after and pour it all out…She said to one girl, ‘And where do you work?’ ‘In the forecourt.’ So Sybille said, ‘Where is that? In the Inns of Court?’ ‘Naah! It’s a petrol station.’ She did think that quite funny.”

  It was now that Sybille embarked on a series of relatively brief affairs, all with much younger women, the details of each liaison recorded meticulously in her diary. In every instance the initial period of excitement was soon followed by impatience and disillusion, before eventually evolving into a state of amiable friendship. The first of these encounters was with “a young and pretty painter,” Laura Gethen Smith, who had recently written Sybille an admiring letter about her work. The two arranged to meet, and over the following weeks drifted into an affair, Sybille attracted by Laura and impressed by her intelligence. She took her to an event at PEN, to dinner with Anne Balfour, with Richard Ollard, and in June spent a week with her in Paris. Not long after they returned, however, Sybille began to tire of the situation, and afte
r a number of tense evenings together, Sybille snapping irritably while Laura sat “lowering like a brooding thundercloud,” she decided to bring it to an end: “some very good moments, but, but, but…”

  Shortly afterwards, Sybille met Rosamund Williams, an aspiring writer, originally from Germany, who lived in Sussex but came regularly to London. For a time Sybille found herself much taken by “R,” as she referred to her, visiting her at her house in Ditchling, although never, to Rosamund’s disappointment, agreeing to stay the night. While Rosamund declared herself rapturously in love—“deliciously, happily, gladly, gratefully…Darling…Why did we have to wait so long?”—Sybille’s own feelings grew ever more equivocal; after one occasion when she had taken Rosamund to meet Anne Balfour, Anne warned her, correctly, as it turned out, that she was heading for trouble. As Sybille started to retreat, Rosamund grew ever more irascible and demanding, “less and less pleasant…curiously un-housetrained,” and after a particularly difficult evening at Old Church Street, with Rosamund, that “tiresome little woman…very much her mulish stubborn ingrown unseeing ungracious self,” Sybille made up her mind to distance herself from the relationship.

  Fortunately by this time Sybille’s accord with Lesley had been restored, now achieving a harmonious balance, evolving into a close and loving friendship that was to remain unchanging and profound. After their reconciliation, Sybille wrote in her diary, “All so much more easy now for both. Happy…I do love her. The best of friends.” At the end of 1981, Sybille went to stay with Lesley at her house at Alba in the Ardèche region of France, which she shared with a French friend of hers, Corinne Stempfer. “Magical,” as Sybille described it. “Such wonderful country…mountains in background, wide expanse of trees, cultivated land. I loved it. And I loved Lesley’s charming house, and her friends…it was all perfect.”

  After the publication of her Huxley biography, Sybille had intended to start work on a travel book. To be entitled “Euphoria,” it was to be “a very personal book with a general theme,” as she had described it to Bob Gottlieb. “Reminiscences rather than serious autobiography.” The prospect of a life without writing seemed unthinkable, as recognising herself as a writer was crucial to her identity. “Writing does take it out of one, but there seems to be for me no peace of mind, no moral, or if you like spiritual health. I pay more for not working, than for working.” Yet despite her determination, the project failed to develop, Sybille unable to find a focus, discouraged, too, by Gottlieb’s apparent lack of interest. On a couple of occasions when Bob had come over to London she had lunched with him at the Ritz, but somehow the relationship was not as it had been. “The warmth all a bit à côté for me, a false note, aware of what small beer I am (in that US world)…leave sad, weighed down too by no work to offer.”

  With no book in progress, Sybille devoted much of her time to involvement with several societies, “literary, local residents, national and semi-international politics.” In political terms, Sybille as she grew older had moved away from the leftish tendencies of her younger days and further to the right. When in 1981 the ex-Foreign Secretary David Owen left the Labour Party to launch the more centrist Social Democratic Party, Sybille at first was keen to support him—until he declared his commitment to ending racial discrimination and promoting sexual equality. “I do believe that there are marked differences in many, many ways between the two sexes,” she wrote in her diary. “I believe that some races are superior or inferior to others in terms of human decency, civilisation, achievements, states of development—that some races mix less with some races; and of course there are better and worse religions. All self-evident. So—possibly no fiver from me to the SDP.” Then during Margaret Thatcher’s first term as prime minister, Sybille became an enthusiastic supporter of the Conservatives, to the disapproval of a number of friends, Martha among them. Yet Sybille remained unswayed. “I listened to the prime minister on Panorama tonight,” she wrote to Tania Stern. “Many things have gone wrong, but she needs and deserves all support.”

  One of the societies whose meetings Sybille regularly attended was the Royal Society of Literature, of which she had been made a fellow in 1964. She served for seven years on the council and was often present for talks at the society’s premises in Hyde Park Gardens, always seated in the front row, her eyes shaded by her green visor, impatiently checking her watch when the speaker droned on for too long. But it was PEN to which she became most closely attached, as a member of the committee helping organise events, acting as vice president for a number of years, and regularly attending lectures and dinners at the society’s premises in Dilke Street. “PEN parties are curiously non-nightowley,” she wrote approvingly in her diary. However, not every event was considered enjoyable. A “quite nice dinner,” she noted after one occasion, but the talk was “dire…read by a pedestrian and resentful Indian writer: the MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN man. Exasperated and coarse.” In 1981 she attended PEN congresses in Paris and Lyons—“muddle, muddle all the way”—and in October that same year took part in a “state visit” held in Nice. Accompanied by Richard Olney, she found herself “in constant tow—for three days and most of the nights—of Monsieur l’Ambassadeur de la Nouvelle Zélande, M. le Deputé Maire de Menton, M. le Ministre de la Couronne Belge…never so many speeches…so many receptions…so many banquets…Infinite boredom, strain, and at times Great Fun.”

  It was not long after the visit to Nice that Sybille embarked on a new affair, with an attractive young woman, Jenny MacKilligin. Jenny, who had worked in publishing, lived off the King’s Road, only a short distance away from Old Church Street. At first Sybille was enchanted by “my Jenny,” impressed by her intelligence and love of literature; soon, she was spending whole nights at Jenny’s flat, often not returning home till lunchtime the following day. There were frequent telephone calls, intense literary conversations over lengthy dinners, although Sybille was disappointed by Jenny’s indifference to wine. “ ‘J’ is worse than a gulper, a quick drinker who does not notice,” she wrote disapprovingly after one occasion, going on to add, “Nevertheless, a wonderful evening, slow, tender.” To Tania Stern Sybille wrote, “I feel very privileged, and a bit awed. It is very strange to be surrounded by so much gentleness and affection.”

  Inevitably, however, this period of enchantment came to an end. Before long Sybille was complaining of tears, jealous scenes, “so much touchiness, such a capacity for feeling hurt…Very weary making.” In October she and Jenny went for a few days to Vienna: “there were good moments,” Sybille reported, “but they all seemed to have to be worked for.” Back in London the two continued to see each other, but the relationship grew increasingly tempestuous, Sybille exasperated by the constant rows and reproaches. By the end of the year, she felt she had endured enough. “I cannot say how much J bores me, how little I look up to her opinions, or rather the way she arrives at and repeats these opinions…No rapport.” Fortunately, however, the affair soon transmuted into a more peaceful friendship, Sybille the following year even taking Jenny with her to stay at Les Bastides.

  With almost a decade having passed since the publication of Sybille’s most recent book, she at last began to feel ready to return to work. In her diary for 30 April 1983, she recorded, “After the appalling initial dithering did buckle down, stuck it for hours and got something down on paper—the exertion, the relief—something flowing—the exhilaration is incredible.” In fact this new work would take several years to complete, a length of time that imposed a certain strain on Sybille’s relationship with Bob Gottlieb. In 1974, the year of the American publication of the Huxley biography, Sybille had signed a new contract with Knopf for two further books, neither of which had so far materialised. Eventually Bob had written an admonitory letter. “I’ve been embarrassed to ask you about our overdue books, and haven’t known how to write without asking, but now our Money People are pressing me, so ask I must…Tell me do you think these are books you’ll be delivering wit
hin the foreseeable future? Or have you turned your back on them? And if so, how do you want to handle the monies you’ve had for them to date—($8,000 in total, I believe)…The important professional thing is not to let this drag on without resolution.”

  Sybille was contrite. “You are right to ask. It is I who am horrified by my slowness, dilatoriness, the sheer passage of time. I have been, am, at work on a book. The time it’s taking appals me…Things have been difficult in some ways in the last decade, domesticity, cookery, paperwork, entertaining, trying to sew buttons…However, other writers cope with these or similar impediments.” The book she had in mind, she told Bob, was “not easy to describe. A kind of a novel, autobiographical, though definitely not straight autobiography; nor—God forbid—my memoirs. The working title…is ‘Perspectives.’ It is a kind of story about people and places in my time…Not about myself—except as a learning and blundering human creature—but with me as a narrator. Does that make any sense to you?” Richard Ollard at Collins had been shown an early section of the book, and “likes it. Says it’s the best I’ve done so far.”

  As she continued to work on her book, Sybille was delighted to make a new friend, a writing friend, with whom, as before with Martha, she could talk in detail about the difficult daily struggle. Betsy Drake, American, just turned sixty, had had an earlier career as an actress in Hollywood, married for over a decade to the film star Cary Grant. After their divorce Betsy had settled in London, where she had trained as a pyschotherapist; she had also published a novel and was now at work on another. She and Sybille had met some years previously through a Chelsea neighbour, and now encountering each other again they became good friends, Betsy coming regularly to Old Church Street, Sybille dining with Betsy in her spacious flat, an easy walk away in Cheyne Gardens. The two were now in almost daily contact, reading aloud to each other from their work in progress, holding long conversations on the telephone. Although at odds over a number of subjects, politics in particular—Betsy disapproving of Sybille’s conservatism, Sybille of Betsy’s left-wing “Reagan antagonism”—they soon became close allies. “Odd to be really fond of someone…and so opposed, alienated by their notions,” Sybille wrote in her diary. But “she is a good friend, as well as a dear one.”