Commentary |

on Sybille Bedford: A Life by Selina Hastings

In the late fall of 1962, Esther Murphy, one of Sybille Bedford’s former lovers, died. She was almost universally considered a great failure and a tragic waste. Erudite, brilliant in conversation, eternally fully of plans to write biographies of the subjects from French history about whom she knew everything, somehow Murphy never got around to her life’s work. After her funeral, Bedford sorted through and disposed of her private papers: traces of a vast correspondence, reams of unused notes. She “had loved [Esther] dearly, missed her gentle nature, her intellect and unfailing generosity,” writes Selina Hastings in Sybille Bedford: A Life, “yet at the same time suffered a feeling of frustration that Esther had never come near to achieving her remarkable promise: those planned biographies, those endless rivers of explication, all in the end resulting in nothing.”

Just like Murphy, Bedford could easily have become a byword for wasted potential. Her life, as Hastings tells it, was a conflict between the taste for pleasure and the ambition to write. Ultimately she synthesized them, living high, partying hard, loving often, and also writing several of the 20th century’s great novels — such as A Legacy and Jigsaw — as well as some remarkable travel writing and legal reportage. But it wasn’t easy.

Bedford inherited both parts of her character from her parents. She was born in 1911 in Berlin to the ill-matched partners of an unfortunate marriage. Her father was a retired army officer, a passionate art collector and gourmand from an aristocratic German family. He wished to live in solitude with his collections, drinking fine wine and keeping an exquisite table. But Bedford’s mother was a beautiful, ambitious woman: she wanted lovers and intellectual stimulation. Neither of them wanted Sybille, and they didn’t scruple to conceal this from her: “When still very small Sybille was told by her mother that she had not been wanted: her arrival, she explained, had been considered a disaster by both parents, by her father who had hoped for a son, while [her mother] herself had felt trapped by the birth, obliged to stay in a marriage she was impatient to leave.”

This terrible news was the first of many alienations. Other blows followed. The family had to flee their schloss during the first World War. Her parents separated, and she stayed with her father; then her father died and her mother took her. Her schooling was an afterthought. First it was neglected, then in quick and disorienting succession she was committed to a convent school, dropped into a public school, and sent abroad to study in England. As a result her educational attainments were uneven: literate in many languages, widely read, she could not at first write, and never managed to acquired legible handwriting. By the time she was 20 she had lived for extended periods in Germany, France, England, and Italy. It set a pattern of rootlessness that would define her whole life. But despite the failure of her parents to provide her with a stable childhood, they did furnish her with her defining characteristics. From her father she absorbed the appetites and attitudes of a connoisseur, and from her mother the aspiration to write, to be known and respected in the society of intellectuals and artists.

These desires proved difficult to reconcile. For years Bedford suffered from her own distractibility, unable to turn down an invitation to a party, squandering her days in excursions and feasting and a dizzying sequence of love affairs with many women and a few men, even as she wished to model herself after disciplined literary acquaintances like Aldous Huxley and Thomas Mann. And this essential struggle of her personality was only complicated by a precarity that began early and never went away. Her first publication, a simple book review that she wrote while living with her mother in France, published in Die Stammlung, a magazine edited by Klaus Mann, included a few lines critical of Nazism, and it resulted in the confiscation of her entire patrimony by the German government. Fearing her citizenship would be next, she wrangled an English passport through a fake marriage (from which she took the surname “Bedford” and nothing else — she never met her husband again after the day of their marriage). During World War II she fled to America, and after the war she cycled through accommodations in London, Paris, and Rome, with stints in the French countryside. All she wanted to do was write (and eat and drink and make love), but despite occasional critical success — and the rare high-flying assignment from a big magazine to report on a major trial — she never made enough money to support herself, and she lived on the generosity of friends and lovers, who provided her with shelter and frequent cash infusions.

It’s a lot to do, conveying the zig-zagging narrative line of Bedford’s life. Selina Hastings is up to the job, displaying in this biography a deft skill with summary narrative, tracing her subject’s peregrinations, the course of her oenophilia and gourmandizing, and her many rides on the “sexual carousel” of upper-class European lesbianism. (Bedford’s appetite for love was as voracious as her other appetites: in her 80’s, she was still falling passionately and mutually in love with people, such as her much younger French translator Aliette Martin.) But the real joy of this book is Hastings’ willingness and capability to center the reason her subject is notable at all — her writing — and to describe in detail how she wrote.

Unfortunately for Bedford, to write well she required “hours of solitude a day,” never an easy thing for her to come by. She wrote very slowly, at most a few hundred words. And this pace grew slower as she aged. By the time she was writing her final book, a day’s work looked like this:

“Wearing her green visor and a large-framed pair of spectacles, she sat at her metal desk near the tiny window, its surface piled with books and pale green paper, a tall red-shaded lamp on one side, on the other a reading stand which obscured the typewriter that, to her regret, she was no longer able to use.'[Now] the writer actually has to write. Arthritis has undone me, I can no longer tap those keys. Writing slow-hand is all I can do: the scrawl is back; not improved.’ Every day Sybille composed a few lines, occasionally a paragraph or two, went over each new sentence, every page of the chapter in progress, rewriting again and again before eventually putting it aside and beginning the next. At weekends Sybille and Aliette spent hours together struggling to decode Sybille’s ‘insect traces’ before Aliette took ‘the precious sheets’ back with her to Paris to copy them onto her computer. For Aliette, ‘it was an extraordinary discovery and a great lesson . . . seeing how her mind and memory worked and how then she painfully assembled words, sentences, paragraphs, very slowly, step by step.'”

This book is full of vivid descriptions like this of the act of writing. The result of Bedford’s extreme deliberation was a style generally acknowledged to be among the most striking of the 20th century. But she also developed an extravagant attachment to the reputation of her so laboriously constructed texts. Criticism could crush her, and on several occasions the poor reception of a novel left her unable to write another for years.

Bedford’s writing was always premised on the support of other people. In addition to work-time solitude, the main ingredient for a good writing situation was, for her, “a writing colleague, someone with whom she could discuss in minute detail the problems involved, talk about her progress of lack of it, with the firm understanding that each would be honest and outspoken when criticizing the other’s work.” The first person to fill this role was the journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn, and she was followed by a succession of other confidants.

Even more fundamental than conversation partners were the friends who created the conditions, in the midst of Bedford’s precarity, for her to find the time and freedom to inch toward the end of her manuscripts. One friend (and erstwhile lover) Alannah Harper even made “some significant alterations to her property, her aim to provide Sybille, in return for a modest rent, with the space, privacy, and quiet she needed to write.” As her reputation grew, Bedford relied more and more upon her partners to take care of her. She had an early model of the coddled, dependent writer in Aldous Huxley, whom she met through her mother, and in whose menage she often traveled and sometimes lived. Huxley’s wife arranged every aspect of his daily life and schedule to free him from worry, even arranging love affairs to entertain him. Sometimes Bedford seemed to be following his example. For instance, her most sustained romantic relationship involved Eda Lord, also a writer, who fulfilled this “literary wife” role for years at the expense of her own writing. Lord’s friends observed her subservience with consternation. One of them, the writer M.F.K. Fisher, wrote to a mutual acquaintance that “Sybille is very bad for Eda,” and tried to plot a breakup. When Eda died, in the late 1970s, Bedford felt remorse for how she had presumed upon and abused her love and support (which could not be said of Huxley, whose solipsism was untroubled by self-reflection, and whose wife went so far as to arrange a second marriage for him when she discovered she was dying of cancer). “I have been very selfish,” wrote Bedford, “always domineering, often putting other emotions first; bulldozing on with work” — and on another occasion: “I had not realized how much Eda did.”

Not just Eda: it took a whole community to support the delicate instrument of writing that was Sybille Bedford. Selina Hastings’ honest account of this communal effort is unbalanced in neither of the ways that literary biographies often are: it doesn’t treat Bedford’s life as an individualistic myth of genius overcoming all, nor does it reduce her to the itinerary of a career and the experiences of a body.

My only criticism of Hastings account is that she could have told us more about Bedford as a reader. Although she was vastly well-read in multiple languages, this essential aspect of Bedford’s intellectual life comes in for discussion only on a few occasions — as when she makes the acquaintance of Ivy Compton-Burnett whom, we learn, she had read and loved as a girl, and to whom she had sent a 22-page fan letter. I would have liked more of this, an account of Bedford’s reading through the phases of her life as rich as the account Hastings provides of her writing or her relationship to fine wine or her many romances.

But Hastings’ biography is one of the most complete accounts of a writer I have had the privilege to read. Putting it down, I had to reflect on the question of what separated Bedford’s life from that of her lover Esther Murphy, who suffered from similar obstacles to her work and was defeated by them. “What’s the use of being brilliant,” Bedford once wrote about Murphy, “if you sit at a cafe all day and are considered the greatest bore because you don’t know when to stop talking and never write anything down?” This book’s answer to that question, in all its complexity, is well worth the attention of an era too apt to distinguish success or failure by simplistic assertions about willpower or equally naive reductions of accomplishment to circumstance. Life is more complicated that; and so should be biography.

 

[Published by A. A. Knopf on February 2, 2021, 432 pages, $32.50 hardcover]

 

Contributor
Robert Minto

Robert Minto is an essayist, critic, and writer of speculative fiction. He lives in Pittsburgh.

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