Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  Another bond between them was the difficult relationship both had experienced with Martha, who had recently brought to an end her long friendships with both Sybille and Betsy. Her break with Betsy, in January 1983, was the more recent: “B[etsy] had a blast from Martha—a breaking off, ‘poisonous,’ leaving B sick and numb,” Sybille recorded. Not long before, Martha in a similarly terse manner had dispensed with Sybille, telephoning her one morning to tell her, “Sybille, you are too boring…I’m fed up with you.” Shortly afterwards, when Betsy had brought up Sybille’s name, Martha had been brusquely dismissive. “Please don’t involve yourself or make a thing between us. Sybille does not need me; I served her wondrously well when she did need me and have no further obligation.” Sybille had been very shaken at the time, although aware that over the past few years her relationship with Martha had been deteriorating, Martha growing increasingly impatient with what she regarded as Sybille’s tiresome obsession with food and wine, while Sybille was equally riled by Martha’s, in her view, bleak puritanism. “She’ll never understand the pleasure of giving friends something good, of giving enjoyment, well-being…She does hurt people, always did; never knows. Goodness, how it used to hurt me. One never quite forgets. And yet the good sides. I owe her much.”

  It was at this same period that Sybille embarked on another affair, with Anne Gainsford, a talented costume designer for films and theatre. After one of their first nights together, Sybille confided to Lesley that “I had again that sense of tenderness and lovingness…an immense feeling not only towards that woman here and now whom I have unaccountably come to love so much, but love tout court.” Anne lived in Richmond, where Sybille on several occasions drove down to visit her, while Anne came regularly to central London, often staying overnight at Old Church Street. Sybille took her to dine in favourite restaurants, to wine tastings, and also to meetings of PEN. On one occasion Sybille accompanied Anne to the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket, where Anne was delivering some costumes, Sybille enthralled by her first sight of an auditorium from the wings, amazed by the steep rake of the stage. Not long after they met Sybille gave Anne a gold brooch which had once belonged to Esther, but when the affair ended she asked for it to be returned.

  Meanwhile Sybille continued to enjoy her life at Old Church Street, one of her chief pleasures the meals, at home and with friends, recorded in detail in her diaries. One evening in 1980, for example, “made self a simple and delicious dinner of fine egg pasta with a grated zucchini in butter/fresh cream, 3 chopped prosciutto crudo, Parmesan unguent…Very good and pure. Opened a bottle of the STWC [Sunday Times Wine Club] Bergerac, not bad at all, if not my usual style.” A few months earlier, she had attended a dinner given by Richard Olney in Conduit Street, her fellow guests the poet Kathleen Raine and T. S. Eliot’s widow, Valerie. “KR enters chattering…I do not like her. But I do like VE…We start with the galantine sliver out of the stuffed suckling pig…The galantine and jelly not particularly good, indeed I don’t like it…The Montrachet ’75, Domaine Jacques Prieur is very very good, but overpowering on the cold gelatinous food, not truly matched.” Finally, with the cheese, “the awaited 1948 Lafite. A disappointment…far from expectation.”

  During her years spent living in Chelsea, Sybille was particularly appreciative of “the neighbourliness of one’s neighbours.” Among those living near who had become firm friends were the actress Judy Campbell and her husband, David Birkin. Amalia Elguera, a distinguished academic originally from Peru, impressed Sybille not only by her intellect but also by her generous hospitality: a great admirer of Sybille’s writing, Amalia frequently entertained Sybille at her house as well as at lavish dinners at the Connaught. Immediately next door was David Cossart, managing director of the wine merchant Ellis, Son & Vidler, of which Sybille had for some years been a customer. Delighted to have in easy reach such a knowledgeable member of the profession, she frequently asked David to accompany her to tastings in the evenings, an experience he enjoyed although at times found exhausting after a long day’s work in the trade.

  Another prominent figure in the same field whom Sybille came to know was Simon Loftus, who as a wine expert worked for the Adnams brewery in Suffolk, of which Sybille was a customer. Not long after they met she and Anne Gainsford drove to Southwold to visit the brewery, staying at a local hotel, the Crown, where they were entertained to a memorable dinner by Simon, the wines including a superb 1948 Latour as well as a bottle of 1978 Meursault. “I can’t thank you enough,” Sybille wrote to him afterwards. “One cannot thank—adequately—for being given ’48 LATOUR to drink, one can only try, and one remembers for ever after.”

  One of the new acquaintances of whom Sybille became most fond was a young American journalist living in London, Carla Heffner, who was shortly to marry the Conservative politician Sir Kenneth Carlisle. Sybille first met Carla when she had been interviewed by her for an article about Janet Flanner. The interview had gone well, Sybille immediately taking to Carla, “quite a literary and literate girl. Loves and knows wine. Enjoyed it all immensely and liked her. Mutual, I think.” Shortly afterwards Carla invited Sybille to dinner at her flat in Putney, an occasion marking the beginning of a rewarding friendship, the evening described by Sybille as “euphoric…& (in my opinion) one of the most perfectly composed, cooked and served dinners I can remember ever.”

  In June 1983, Sybille travelled to Berlin with Carla. Her last visit to Germany, to Hamburg, had been nearly ten years earlier as one of a group of writers from PEN, an expedition Sybille described at the time as stimulating and enjoyable. But now, in Berlin for the first time in over half a century, her reactions were very different, all too aware of what, despite her “disassociation” with Nazi Germany, she described as “the horror…and shame of a German origin.” The worst moment was at Checkpoint Charlie, while crossing the high-walled border for a day’s visit to the East, when Sybille began trembling with fear as her passport was taken away for inspection. She only properly recovered after their return to West Berlin that evening, when she and Carla dined at the Café de Paris, a reassuringly French restaurant “that served impeccable entrecôte grillé, pommes frites and Fleurie served frais.” During the rest of their visit, Carla recalled, Sybille refused to eat anywhere else.

  Another, rather less stressful, expedition was made a few weeks later, a fortnight in Ireland with Anne Gainsford, with whom at this stage Sybille remained infatuated, like “a crazy, obsessed teenager.” Sybille’s closest confidante during the affair was Lesley, to whom she was as devoted as ever. When Lesley was away Sybille still missed her painfully. “Life is so much less joyful when you are not there,” she told her. “Everything with you is on an entirely different level (height) of fun, pleasure, enjoyment.” Sybille was distraught when Lesley decided to move permanently to her house in France, although the two continued to keep in touch by letter. It was Lesley to whom Sybille turned for guidance when eventually her liaison with Anne began to unravel. “[I] could easily get into mischief again,” Sybille admitted, but “no, no, you can be assured that it will not be indulged…Let us hope that the newly acquired self-knowledge will keep one out of mischief. But I am bored. (As well as emotionally underemployed: if you knew what was good for me—I dare not speak for you—you’d never let me out of your sight.)”

  Despite the time and energy consumed by her social life and love affairs, Sybille continued to work on her novel, at intervals reporting her progress to Bob Gottlieb. “How wonderful that you’re well into the book,” he told her. “Now that I know you’re working on it, and that, DV, it will come to pass, I have no worries or complaints.” In an interview Sybille described in detail the structure of her working day. “I get up late—about 11 a.m., sometimes later—having gone to bed between midnight and 1 a.m. I make tea and take it to bed…I try not to listen to the radio, or to look at the post which is hidden under a teatowel…I dress slowly, putting off the awful moment of starting work…Between 2 p.
m. and 3 p.m. I stop for a light lunch…I drink nothing alcoholic, just weak black China tea. Then the real working day starts. If all goes well, I finish with about 250–300 words. Sometimes I get stuck, really stuck…[and] I limp around Paulton Square, trying to gather my thoughts. In the evening, I do ‘cook prep’ in my wretched kitchenette. If I am alone, I cook myself a good dinner and drink very good wine, my work simmering underneath. But on the whole I have a very active social life in the evening.”

  It was during this period that Sybille found a new writing ally, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, whom she had previously met at a party given by the Letwins. Jane had recently divorced her husband, Kingsley Amis, and was now living in a pretty terraced house near Regent’s Park. It was here one evening that Sybille was invited to dinner. “Liked it from the first moment,” she recorded. “EJH’s greeting and warmth and the presence of the VSPs [V. S. Pritchett and his wife]…Put next to my hostess in a charming way…V. animated, also friendly dinner, good, not overefficient…a passable white wine with a good smoked salmon mousse and hot toast…Jane gives, and signs, me her book just out. Very affectionate farewell. I enjoyed myself and showed it. Felt happy.”

  For a while after this occasion, Sybille became infatuated with Jane, although Jane herself was entirely a man’s woman, uninterested in a lesbian relationship. Sybille “used to say to me, I think we could have a very lovely time, because I do know how to love (said with great conviction)…And I knew what she meant…I think she was very highly sexed and thought a lot about it, but wasn’t at all offended when I said no.” Sybille for her part admired Jane’s novels, while Jane had always regarded A Legacy as a masterpiece; before long the two women formed a close collaboration, reading passages from their work aloud to each other over the telephone, meeting regularly to discuss their progress. “The prospect—utopian!—of our future as comrades at writing is dazzling,” Sybille wrote enthusiastically to Jane. “[Sybille] did make a great performance of being a writer,” Jane recalled. “She saw herself in this operatic role, really. If you were a writer and she approved of you that put you into a kind of exclusive club…She was a good sounding-board, picking on things that were wrong or that she wanted to know more about. It was an enormous help and I was very touched.”

  With Jane now established as her writing partner, Sybille turned away from Betsy Drake, with whom up till then she had continued to discuss her work in minute detail. During a telephone call, described by Betsy as “breathtakingly tactless,” Sybille told her, “I want my book back. Somebody else is going to read it, Elizabeth Jane Howard, because I have to have my book read by somebody I respect.” Betsy, devastated, wrote Sybille a furious letter. “I really let her have it, and she called up weeping and said she apologised.” But the friendship was irredeemably damaged, and from then on the two saw each other very little. Sometime later Betsy in a letter to Sybille told her, “my enthusiasm for your writing has never diminished, but eagerness to be your disrespected reader dropped as markedly as a thermometer plunged in a bucket of iced champagne.”

  In July 1988, four months after her seventy-seventh birthday, Sybille finally completed her book, Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education; a Biographical Novel. Earlier in the year she had signed contracts with Hamish Hamilton in London and Knopf in New York, both overseen by Elaine Greene, the literary agent whom Sybille had left over thirty years ago but to whom she had now returned. Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, the director of Hamish Hamilton, agreed to bring in Richard Ollard again as Sybille’s editor, a decision with which Sybille was “overjoyed.” At Knopf Bob Gottlieb, who had recently left the firm to take up the post of editor of the New Yorker, had been replaced by Charles (“Chuck”) Elliott, who wrote enthusiastically of the book, “I enjoyed it enormously…I’m delighted to be publishing it.” Richard Ollard was similarly impressed, telling Sybille that he had been deeply moved by Jigsaw. “It is a most powerful and wholly achieved piece of writing.”

  In this, her fourth, and final, published work of fiction, Sybille tells the story that had long been embedded in her memory and imagination: the history of her own early years, her childhood in Germany, her life as a young girl in England and the south of France. “Novels among other things are galleries of mirrors,” Sybille once stated. “I feel the past as something good and rich and not really the past.” Written with an unparalleled vitality and charm, the novel’s style is lucid and fluent, the characters portrayed with remarkable subtlety and conviction, as though Sybille had finally arrived at the culmination of a long journey, the destination to which in her previous novels she had been travelling all her life—from her own early childhood and her parents’ history in A Legacy, her girlhood and arrival in France in A Favourite of the Gods, to her time in Sanary in A Compass Error. In an “Afterword” to a later edition, Sybille explained that what she had aimed to achieve with Jigsaw was a story narrated “in plain words, writing about myself, my feelings, my actions.”

  Although presented as fiction, in Jigsaw the difference between reality and imagination is almost impossible to discern. At every stage the story closely matches Sybille’s personal experience, with people, places and events that are instantly recognisable as part of her own life. In a brief note at the front of the book, Sybille admits that all her characters are portraits of real people, some appearing under their own names, such as the Kislings and Huxleys, others thinly disguised by pseudonyms.

  The book begins with Sybille’s, “Billi’s,” early childhood in Germany, her life at Feldkirch and the time spent staying with the Herzes in Berlin. After her charismatic mother eventually walks out of her marriage, Billi is left for a while in the care of her father, and it is only after his early death that she rejoins her mother, who is never named in the book, travelling first to Italy, then France. Her mother’s new young husband, “Alessandro,” is a mirror image of Nori Marchesani, and the years the three of them spend living in Sanary are described in the novel with detailed actuality. The book ends early one morning, with Billi watching as Alessandro prepares to leave, knowing that from now on she will be left to cope on her own.

  Jigsaw, dedicated to Allanah, was published in Britain and America in the spring of 1989, and shortly afterwards, to Sybille’s delight, appeared on the shortlist for the highly regarded Booker Prize. She was photographed by Jane Bown and, for the second time, by Antony Armstrong-Jones, and she gave a number of interviews to newspapers and magazines. The reactions from friends and acquaintance were largely favourable, with praise from fellow writers, such as A. L. Barker and Victoria Glendinning, of particular satisfaction. Perhaps most unexpected was a note from Martha: “Dear Sibbie: The writing of Jigsaw is very beautiful. I think your best ever, and that is a real triumph. Martha.” Rather more expansive was a letter from Martha’s ex-husband, Tom Matthews, describing Jigsaw as “a beautiful book, the best of a good lot and I think the finest you have written.” This was an opinion that particularly pleased Sybille as she had much respect for Matthews’s own writing. “Such a stimulating letter from you this morning,” she told him. “Am I a temporarily very happy writer? Yes. It would be untruthful if I said I were not. I have a certain sense of achievement with this book.”

  Reviews on the whole were good, Frances Partridge writing in the Spectator that “the stylish, casual, exhilarating ambience of the Côte d’Azur [is] marvellously described,” while Paul Bailey in the Sunday Times remarked on “the pleasure of places vividly evoked; of human beings seen glancingly, and yet substantially realised, in arrested moments.” Francis Wyndham in the Daily Telegraph, while favourably comparing the novel to its two predecessors, was somewhat critical of the author’s style, and admitted that in his view her obsession with food and wine made him “dread those occasions in the story when mealtimes seem to be drawing near…However, such minor drawbacks are of little consequence, they should deter nobody from reading this book which is of absorbing interest from start to finish—a treat.”r />
  In the States, most critics agreed with the Chicago Tribune that Jigsaw was “a treasure of a book,” although some were rather less complimentary. Gabriele Annan in the New York Review of Books, while describing the work as “compulsively readable,” was irritated by Bedford’s style, “lyrical, breathless, and jaunty by turns, with an occasional clipped, verbless sentence coming down like a stiff upper lip over boiling emotion.” Rather more hurtful was Annan’s criticism of the “bad joins between novel and biography. Bedford doesn’t seem to have thought out the amalgamation of the genres.” This Sybille considered unfair, although she herself admitted the near invisibility of the dividing line. “I called it biographic partly to tease, partly to be able to put a few people in with complete biographical accuracy…I wanted to do them justice and have them remembered as they were. Or as I thought they were.”