When Sybille Bedford was born, in Germany in 1911, it was into a world already vanishing: a world where ‘people were ruled by their servants’, lived in opulent houses (fully staffed by their rulers), ate heavy Edwardian-Germanic cuisine at very frequent intervals, took nothing so vulgar as holidays, but went south for their health, or entrained (taking their own monogrammed linen) for the major European spas. Her own family’s values looked back to the 18th century; her father was interested in mesmerism, and knew a man in Grasse who could raise the dead.
In this long-awaited memoir, his daughter has performed the same feat. Her autobiographical novel Jigsaw was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989; it unfolded some of her story, its cast trimmed, the rough edges of life smoothed into fictional form. Now, in a book which takes, she says, ‘a zigzag course’, she unfolds more, in a less tidy but still compelling version of her extraordinary life and times. Her style is calm, graceful and distanced, and the whole text is lit by glowing pointillist descriptions of places and people.
Her mother was a wealthy and reckless Englishwoman, a glamorous bolter. She was a dreadful mother to have, except perhaps for a future writer. She ignored the young Sybille for long stretches of her childhood, leaving her behind with her father and pursuing a series of love affairs. Her mother’s second husband was a handsome Italian, 15 years her junior. When he began to be unfaithful to her, she took to morphine as relief from mental pain, becoming swiftly and savagely addicted. In Jigsaw, Sybille Bedford wrote that she was never able to love her mother, though here she pays tribute to her intelligence and her far-sighted understanding of the way the world was moving, between the wars. Of her father, she writes poignantly, ‘I am still trying to understand what he was like.’
Her mother had bought her father a schloss, but when she left he had no way of maintaining it. Father and child lived impoverished among the Renaissance furniture, reduced to one servant, drinking fine vintages but acorn coffee. Her father was an aesthete and a collector, a gentle man ill-equipped to respond to either the practical or emotional demands of a young child. And such a child: one of those who are both older and younger than their years, multilingual but ‘analphabetical’ at the age of eight, capable at 11 of crossing Europe by rail alone, tough-minded, tomboyish, craving the formal education her family’s eccentric ways had denied her: given some pocket money, she bought ‘an Italian grammar and a ball’. Unnoticed by grown-ups busy with their love affairs, a rigorous and sceptical intellect was incubating inside little ‘Billi’, and so was literary ambition — writing was her vocation, she says, even before she was able to form her letters.
In her teens she joined her mother and second husband at Sanary-sur-Mer and when the Nazis came to power she became a precocious member of a glittering set of exiles, most of them political refugees, but others in flight from the sexual mores of the time, as they obtained in less casual places. She was blacklisted after political comment in a magazine irked Berlin; she wanted, she says, to stand up and be counted. Known to be partly Jewish, she found her German assets — her only assets — confiscated, and was impoverished over- night; a generous group of friends came to her aid, and she remembers them here. She began to write seriously only when she was 40, living in Rome in picturesque and bohemian circumstances — no secure front door, but a marble bath. Her first book was A Visit to Don Otavio, based on her travels in Mexico. In 1956 she published a novel, A Legacy, and public recognition came for her when the book was warmly reviewed by Evelyn Waugh in this paper.
Spanning 50 years, A Legacy is a novel of epic reach but intimate texture, and reflects the author’s own background; it is concerned with the fortunes of three families, two of which belong to the Catholic south German aristocracy, the other to the haute juiverie of Berlin. During the Sixties she wrote two other novels, A Favourite of the Gods and A Compass Error; the latter contains perhaps the most persuasively wicked female character you will ever encounter in a novel, a sister under the skin to Laclos’ Marquise de Merteuil. Her real life originals — it seems there may be more than one — are to be encountered in this new book.
In the 1970s Mrs Bedford wrote a two-volume biography of her great hero, Aldous Huxley, whom she had known in Sanary. She was fascinated by the law from girlhood; she would have liked to be a barrister, she says, but it was girlhood that was the problem. Instead she channelled her interest into later writing, reporting on the trials of, among others, Jack Ruby, Stephen Ward, Jeremy Thorpe and 23 Auschwitz guards tried in Frankfurt two decades after they thought they had succeeded in hiding their past. She was a great traveller, a polyglot, a gourmet, delighting in good wine, in conversation, in landscape. Privileged in many ways and aware of her privilege, she did not withdraw into an intellectual ghetto or settle for good living; she became a fierce opponent of injustice in human affairs. The reader of her fiction is aware of a shrewd practical intelligence operating beneath the detached amusement with which she often views her characters.
In Quicksands she hardly explores the last 50 years — she is as reticent about her literary success as she is about her unconventional sex life. But in these pages you will find the solution to a puzzle: who was Mr Bedford, when did she marry him, and why? This is one mystery solved; she preserves a certain reticence elsewhere. There is an art in leaving the reader wanting to know more.
At the age of 94 Sybille Bedford is now almost blind. This book was composed with great difficulty, but you would never know it. Her polished manner is intact, and so too is her pleasure in the world’s surfaces, the sensuous precision that, combined with tough-mindedness and humour, is the foundation of her style. Moving lightly through a cataclysmic century, she feels herself one of the fortunate; but she is also one of the brave.