Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  From the time of its first publication in 1989, Jigsaw has never been out of print. In Britain the novel was issued in paperback by Penguin in 1990, by Eland Books in 2005, in the States by Counterpoint in 2001, and translated into French, German and Spanish. At the time of its initial appearance, Sybille was approaching her eightieth year, and although proud of her achievement she now looked forward to a life free of the demands and pressures of the deadline. With a long career behind her, she had no wish to write another book—any more than she felt at her age she was likely ever again to fall in love. As it turned out, she was to be proved wrong on both counts.

  Skip Notes

  * Later included as a foreword in the edition published by Eland Books in 2002.

  thirteen

  “GETTING OLD & WEAK IS HORRIBLE”

  With Jigsaw behind her, Sybille, now approaching her eighties, was able to look forward to a life free of work—or so she believed. She had had an idea for another novel, set during the Second World War, but the project was soon abandoned. Instead her time was dedicated to an active social life, and for hours a day to reading for pleasure. As always, Sybille was a voracious reader of fiction, but whereas in the past the novels she most admired were by such writers as Edith Wharton, Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett, now she preferred more lightweight fiction, the historical romances of Georgette Heyer, the popular novels of Arthur Hailey—Airport, Hotel, The Moneychangers—and in particular thrillers, among her favourite authors Patricia Highsmith, and also Dick Francis, to whose crime novels, set in the horse-racing world, she was wholly addicted. Television and radio, too, she enjoyed, devoted to series such as Upstairs, Downstairs, and every evening on the BBC tuning in to The Archers. She never missed an episode, listening intently, her head slightly lowered, and if friends were with her, all drinking and conversation had to stop for the full fifteen minutes.

  “Sybille was a gentleman, an Etonian manqué,” as one of her friends astutely described her. Although her short blonde hair had now turned grey, Sybille’s appearance remained largely unchanged, always dressed in the same masculine garb: loose-fitting dark trousers, a striped shirt with cufflinks, a woollen waistcoat, with round her neck a kerchief and on her wrist a heavy gold watch. Although she never cared much for cigarettes, in the evenings she occasionally smoked a cigar. When reading she wore dark-framed spectacles, and for much of the day the green visor essential to protect her eyes from the light. While lacking the energy of her younger days, she continued to engage in a busy social life, a familiar figure at literary gatherings and at the dinner parties of friends. “It’s not easy to be my friend,” Sybille said in an interview at this period. “I have very, very high demands on intelligence, manners, appearance…but on the other hand I have such kind friends.”

  Among the many by whom she was entertained during these later years were the writer Peter Quennell and his wife, who lived in Cheyne Row, only a short walk from Old Church Street, and also the biographer Victoria Glendinning and her novelist husband, Terence de Vere White. Sybille was in frequent contact, too, with Tom Matthews, who with his third wife had moved to a fine Regency house in Suffolk, where Sybille stayed on a number of occasions. Tom was working on a study of T. S. Eliot, and while Sybille was writing Jigsaw the two them had spent many hours appraising each other’s work; they also indulged in lengthy exchanges on the subject of wine, about which Tom was almost as expert as Sybille. Through Sybille, Tom became a member of PEN, and when in London he often took her to dine at some of the venues she most enjoyed: the Berkeley Hotel, Buck’s Club, and the Garrick. “I very much like the Garrick,” she told him, “the wines, the atmosphere, the candlelight.”

  For years in notebooks she kept at home Sybille chronicled almost daily and in meticulous detail the food and drink she consumed. She also kept numerous wine-company catalogues, and regularly attended tastings, carefully categorising each wine in turn: “highly recommended,” “borderline,” “poor,” with an occasional enthusiastic “YES” or a ferocious “NO” scrawled in the margin. Sybille relished talking at length to anyone in the wine trade, including restaurant sommeliers, many of whom were surprised and impressed by the depth of her knowledge; an inexperienced waiter who proved inept, however, would immediately receive an imperious scolding. For some time Sybille had been a member of the Wine Pool, a small group which met at the Reform Club in Pall Mall. Its founder was Kit van Tulleken, not only a successful businesswoman but a distinguished gourmet and oenophile, whom Sybille had first met when Kit was working with Richard Olney on his Time/Life cookery books. Sybille liked and admired Kit, and took pleasure in these occasions, although she could be critical of the food and drink set before her. In 1990, Sybille herself became a member of the Reform Club, where for a while she enjoyed taking guests to dinner, although she resigned after only four years, preferring the rather less grandiose surroundings of restaurants such as Hilaire in South Kensington and Le Colombier in Chelsea.

  As she entered the new decade Sybille became increasingly aware of a diminution of energy, a reluctance to travel. “I wish I were still in travelling shape,” she told Julia Child, “[but] I’m not—I dread it more and more, and do not even get to France as much as I should or would.” To Mary Frances she admitted that she loved the Midi as much as ever yet found the journey too exhausting, and in London “I’m afraid I’ve got used to a very varied and very social social life.” Nonetheless, when in 1989 Sybille to her delight was awarded a travel scholarship by the Society of Authors she spent the money on a fortnight’s holiday in Menton on the Riviera, accompanied on this occasion by an attractive new friend, Penelope Bennett.

  Penelope, a potter and horticulturist, lived near Sybille in Chelsea, was a member of PEN, and knew a number of Sybille’s friends, Lesley Huston, Allanah and Anne Balfour among them. Sybille was charmed by Penelope and enjoyed her company, the two of them often spending evenings together at Old Church Street, Penelope nervously doing the cooking under Sybille’s strict supervision. On a number of occasions, Penelope drove Sybille to wine tastings, “although all I knew about wine was the difference between red and white. It was wonderful going to those tastings, however, although Sybille used to tick me off when I exclaimed about the wine. ‘Do stop making those bedroom noises!,’ she would say.” During their time together in Menton, Sybille remained in bed all morning while Penelope was despatched to research local restaurants, reporting back at lunchtime so that careful plans could be made for the evening.

  It was in October the following year, 1990, that Sybille made what was to be her final visit to Les Bastides, staying with Allanah, and also visiting her old friends, the Mimerels in Sanary, Pierre, now in his nineties, visibly frail but as clever and charming as ever.

  In Allanah, by contrast, Sybille saw worrying indications of decline. Over the past years the two had continued regularly to see each other, in France and also during Allanah’s visits to London, when she stayed at the Sloane Club in Chelsea. Now in her late eighties, Allanah had grown thin and frail, her face very lined, her memory increasingly unreliable. Fortunately, for the past few years she had been devotedly cared for by Olympia Zamfirescu, a younger woman with whom Allanah had fallen deeply in love. Olympia, from a wealthy Romanian family that had been devastated by the war, had lived for some years in England, meeting Allanah only after Olympia had moved to France in the early 1980s. The effect Olympia had on Allanah was immediately apparent, Sybille delighted to find that the bossy, irritable friend of the past had been transformed. “What happiness can do,” she noted. “Never has she been gentler, less possessive, a kind of miracle…angelic and generous…providing affection, comforts, food, champagne and social engagements for me beyond wildest dreams.”

  Sybille turned eighty on 16 March 1991, the occasion celebrated the following month by a formal dinner given by PEN, at which a speech in her honour was delivered by Elizabeth Jane Howard. S
hortly afterwards Sybille was delighted by the appearance of a new edition of her first book, The Sudden View, since 1960 retitled A Visit to Don Otavio. Over the past decades the work had been reissued on both sides of the Atlantic, but it was this version, from a one-man publishing house, Eland Books, that she had found most gratifying. “I am so pleased,” she wrote to Eland’s founder, John Hatt. “You, unlike Folio and others, are the most punctual (and generous) publisher breathing…How superior your beautiful white Edition.”

  The previous year a collection of Sybille’s articles had appeared, under the newly established imprint of Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson. Entitled As It Was: Pleasures, Landscapes and Justice, and dedicated “To Lesley, from her nervous passenger,” the book includes accounts of Sybille’s travels in Europe as well as her reporting of various trials, among them the Lady Chatterley case and the trial of the Auschwitz guards in Frankfurt. Sybille had been anxious about the book’s reception, but in fact the reviews were largely appreciative, among them one by Dervla Murphy in the Times Literary Supplement, who described the work as subtle, shrewd and deeply moving. Another, by Jan Morris in the Independent, saw the collection as clarifying Bedford’s “distinguished but somewhat imprecise status in the republic of letters”; Morris did add, however, that the author’s enthusiasm for eating and drinking was “a little too irrepressible…[and] may drive readers of less urbane gourmandise all the more readily to the deep-freeze Ocean Pie.”

  Inevitably as the decade progressed Sybille began to lose a number of her oldest friends. In July 1992 she heard from Olympia Zamfirescu that Allanah was very ill and had been taken to hospital; after a few weeks she was allowed to return home, where she died on 3 November, three days before her eighty-eighth birthday. Sybille, devastated by the news, flew out to Nice a few days later, delivering an affectionate eulogy at Allanah’s funeral at the Church of Notre Dame de Bon Voyage in Cannes. That same year in May had seen the death of Elizabeth David, and in 1993 of another old friend, Jimmy Stern, on whom for years Sybille had relied as a candid critic of her writing. In old age Jimmy had become increasingly difficult, his drunken rages, mainly aimed at Tania, often exploding dangerously out of control. Recently, however, he had changed: fragile in health, fast losing his memory, he had grown quiet and acquiescent; during the spring, after three bad falls, he had become bedridden, and in November he died, leaving Tania “very frail and distraught.” Although Sybille had been frequently appalled by Jimmy’s behaviour, she nonetheless mourned the loss of such an old ally, who had supported her so generously during her most penurious years.

  It was during this period that Sybille, through her publisher, received a letter from an unknown correspondent in Paris. Aliette Martin, who for some years had worked as a translator, had recently come across a copy of Jigsaw, which had so impressed her that she had gone on to read Sybille’s life of Aldous Huxley; now she was eager to translate the Huxley biography into French. In a courteous reply, Sybille agreed, on condition that she would be shown a sample chapter first. Aliette was delighted—“Thank you so much for trusting me as you do”—and sent Sybille a resumé of her professional life: her initial period as a freelance translator, followed by seventeen years working in the theatre, as Directeur de la Coordination Artistique at the Comédie-Française, a demanding career which she loved. “Besides literature,” she had written, “the other great passion of my life is the theatre.”

  In the event, it would be two years before Sybille and Aliette met, Aliette meanwhile spending as much time as she could on her translation. “Aldous Huxley et le projet de traduction de votre biographie ne sont pas un instant sortis de mes préoccupations. J’ai eu malheureusement un énorme surcroit de travail à la Comédie-Française” (“Aldous Huxley and the project of translating your biography are never for a moment out of my mind. Unfortunately I have an enormous extra amount of work at the Comédie Française”). Finally in September 1993 Aliette came over to London, feeling “horribly nervous,” priming herself with lunch at Harrods first before going to Old Church Street in the evening. “[I] found the bell very easily. I heard the sound of keys being shaken, and the door opened, and I saw the most extraordinary cornflower blue eyes and the very high brow. And that was it.” When Sybille opened the door she saw standing before her a small, fair-haired woman in her forties, clearly very shy, whom she showed into her tiny sitting room. With a glass of white wine in hand, the two sat talking rather awkwardly, until the taxi arrived to take them to a restaurant in South Kensington. Here their conversation continued in French, until towards the end of the evening Sybille insisted on reverting to English, the language with which for many years she had felt most at ease.

  After Aliette returned to Paris, she wrote Sybille a long letter, to which Sybille replied by telephone: “vous me manquez; il faut revenir” (“I miss you; you must come back”). Over the next days and weeks, many conversations followed, during one of which Aliette spoke what Sybille always described as “the three fatal words.” Sybille “tut-tutted…but somehow I knew that I had to say it, that I was not being rejected and that it would be all right.” A few weeks later Aliette came again to London, dining with Sybille while en route to visit some old friends in Edinburgh. After returning to Paris, she and Sybille talked regularly on the telephone, eagerly making plans for the next visit. During one of their conversations, Aliette recalled, “Sybille told me, ‘j’accepte,’ and a week later, she did say herself the fatal three words.”

  When Aliette next returned to London, Sybille took her to dine at the Reform Club, talking in fascinating detail, “in her breathless, passionate, sotto voce tone, so difficult to follow,” about her early life in Germany, of France, Mexico, of her parents, the Huxleys, her passion for the law. From this time on, Aliette came to London frequently at weekends, Sybille at first reserving rooms for her at expensive hotels such as the Wilbraham or Claridge’s, until Aliette “gently put [her] foot down,” staying instead in the very cramped quarters of Sybille’s flat. “23 Old Church Street, however tiny and uncomfortable, became my London home, my harbour, my anchor…I was too much in love to pay attention to the somewhat spartan surroundings.”

  Soon a pattern established itself: mornings spent with Sybille remaining in bed while Aliette read aloud to her, then a late, frugal lunch in the flat, after which Aliette went out to shop while Sybille stayed at home reading and writing letters; on Aliette’s return the two would take a short walk together. In the evening they dined at home, or in a restaurant, or at the houses of friends. As Aliette recalled, “Dinner had to be a great moment of conviviality, with good food, good wine and good conversation…[Sybille] became most lively and dominated the scene with a flurry of interesting memories, scattered with witty anecdotes and brilliant independent views on many subjects.” Sunday afternoons, by contrast, were filled with gloom and dread, as it was in the early evening that Aliette had to return to Paris. “After lunch…a sort of heaviness and sadness settled. Each time, when the moment came for me to leave, it was the same arrachement [extraction] and we parted as if we didn’t know whether we would see each other again.”

  From then on, despite the incessant demands of her job at the theatre, Aliette came to London every other weekend, and when they were apart she and Sybille talked twice a day on the telephone. For Aliette it was an affair both intellectually stimulating and emotionally profound, she fascinated by the stories Sybille recounted in enthralling detail about her past. “She was opening a whole world to me,” Aliette recalled. “I was entering unknown territories…another era, a very sophisticated and cosmopolitan universe, a dream land.” It was not long before friends began to notice the change in Sybille, how happy she was—“suddenly radiant, a girl,” as Victoria Glendinning observed. Over time Aliette was introduced to many of Sybille’s circle, Elizabeth Jane Howard among them. “I met Aliette when the three of us had dinner. I liked her very much immediately, and Sybille was over the moon about her. Sybil
le told me fairly soon after it started that she’d fallen in love and that she never thought that would happen to her again. It changed her life.”

  In February 1995 it was announced that Sybille had been made a Companion of the Royal Society of Literature, her fellow honorees William Trevor and V. S. Naipaul. Shortly after receiving news of this distinguished award, Sybille while alone in the flat fell and broke her hip; she was taken to the King Edward VII Hospital to be operated on, and Aliette, in a state of frantic anxiety, flew over from Paris the following weekend to see her. As Aliette recalled, the moment she entered the room, Sybille “turned her face towards me saying, ‘oh, my angel’ with bright eyes and pink cheeks, [and] I knew she would be all right.” For a while after leaving hospital Sybille remained comfortably ensconced in the Basil Street Hotel in Knightsbridge, before eventually returning to Old Church Street. Here she was cared for by friends and neighbours during the week, until Aliette arrived every Friday evening to stay for the weekend.

  It was then that Aliette decided she must encourage Sybille to return to writing. Money was no longer a problem as Sybille was now financially secure: over the past few years she had received some generous bequests from friends, among them from Allanah, and had been able to buy and for a time let the flat above hers in Old Church Street. In 1993 she had begun negotiations with the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin over the purchase of her papers, which were eventually bought for the large sum of £24,975. The Center’s director, Professor Tom Staley, had called on Sybille, who had found him “an immensely simpatico man, the first rate American academic at his finest—plus looks, charm, voice…I agreed to let them have the lot…And I feel relieved, naked, bereft, bewildered and somewhat sheepish.” Most of all, however, she was proud that in Austin her archive would join those of such “august writers…[as] Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene…Hemingway and Joyce.”