Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  Several days passed, with Sybille in a state of acute anxiety, and then one morning a messenger arrived at the porter’s lodge bringing her passport with him. “It was stamped with a Deportation Order. If I had not left the United Kingdom within forty-eight hours, I would be deported to the country of origin. (Germany.)” Sybille had already consulted a solicitor, a contact of Sylvester’s, who had advised her to claim that she was of independent means, and thus no burden to the country of adoption, but this had had no effect. In desperation Maria decided to make one final attempt, going herself to the Home Office to lodge a personal and impassioned plea on Sybille’s behalf. Miraculously, she succeeded. “Some hours later came a message by hand—the Deportation Order was rescinded.”

  Shortly afterwards, on 15 November 1935, Sybille was married to Walter Bedford in a civil ceremony at Caxton Hall, with Aldous and Pierre Mimerel as witnesses. That evening the Huxleys gave a cocktail party at Albany, with among the guests several of Walter Bedford’s friends (“half a dozen showgirls…and some tough male bruisers”), as well as a Bloomsbury contingent, including the poet and playwright Robert Nichols, the Scottish novelist and poet Naomi Mitchison, Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Sybille was thrilled to meet Virginia, who “came up to me, took mine into her exquisite hand (I had not met her before, nor after). ‘This,’ she said, ‘is a very queer party. I can’t understand anything about it: one day you must come and tell me.’ ” Later in the evening, Mr. and Mrs. Bedford, as a present from Aldous, went to dine at the Trocadero off Piccadilly before attending a variety show. The two never saw each other again. Not long after her wedding Sybille finally found herself in possession of a British passport, the German document of “musty brown paper with a kind of eagle on the cover” replaced by the treasured dark blue and gold of the United Kingdom. When on her return to France she sent in her current carte d’identité for renewal, “they returned it with a ‘devenue Anglaise’ [become English] scrawled by hand across a front page.”

  For the rest of her life Sybille carried with her a feeling of guilt and loathing, what she described as the “national shame…of a German origin.” For some years after the Second World War she refused to visit the country or speak the language, and felt immediately uncomfortable if she found herself in the company of Germans. “I never felt I had the German identity, the Germanic mind,” she said once in an interview. “The fact that I had any connections with this terrible country became a cause of guilt, and for some time I tried desperately to anglicise myself entirely.” English had become her first language, the language in which she wrote, and although by no means uncritical of her newly adopted country, her British citizenship was always of vital importance to her; from now on England was to be her “home base.”

  For the present, however, most of Sybille’s time was spent in France. In December she was back in Sanary, staying with the Mimerels, as Eva with her lover, Lion Feuchtwanger, had left for Moscow; hoping to join them, Sybille had begun learning Russian but her application for a visa was refused. On Eva’s return Sybille joined her in Paris, where the two women remained until the beginning of June 1936, when they settled at La Juliette for the summer. In October both women again left the south, Eva to return to Russia, while Sybille spent a few weeks in Eva’s apartment in Paris, writing and also trying, without much success, to find a job.

  Paris, together with London and Rome, was over the years to become one of the centres of Sybille’s existence. Her first introduction to Paris had been at the age of fifteen while en route from London to Sanary; between arriving early in the morning at the Gare du Nord and departing in the evening for the south, Sybille had had almost a day at her disposal. Following Lisa’s detailed instructions, she had obediently visited the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Musée de Cluny, Montmartre and the Sacré Coeur, yet none of it particularly impressed her. “I felt nothing very much…Nor did I know what to make of the unfamiliar facades of the grands boulevards, the slate-grey straightness, the compound gusts of smells: open pissoirs with tin screens like fire-guards…I wandered about, unnoticed, unmolested…”

  Now ten years later, Sybille had come to feel a strong connection with the city, enjoying her long solitary walks after a morning’s writing. “The thing about Paris for me are these afternoon hours of walking the streets…looking, seeing, thinking…It is a kind of apprentissage…Here one is alone, strange and at home, in the quiet streets and boulevards.” A voracious reader, Sybille also spent many hours browsing in the two famous bookshops on the Left Bank, La Maison des Amis des Livres, owned by Adrienne Monnier, and Shakespeare & Company, owned by Monnier’s friend and lover, Sylvia Beach. Monnier “was invariably polite…no more…At Shakespeare & Company I subscribed to the lending library…There one had to pay a deposit of 50 francs, about two dollars, against loss of books, for me quite a wrench…[on leaving Paris] I asked (sheer necessity) for the deposit back…I wish I had not, for Sylvia Beach, handing 50 francs to me, gave me a shocked, astonished look.”

  Despite the many distractions, Sybille had been determined to develop a disciplined routine, especially as she was now starting on what was to be her first full-length work of fiction. Devil on the Brain (originally entitled “The Expense of Spirit”) recounts the amorous experiences of an eighteen-year-old Englishman spending the summer with his uncle and aunt in the south of France. The story begins with Charles in the process of disguising himself as a pirate in preparation for the fancy-dress party his uncle is throwing that evening. Among the guests, English, French and German, are a couple of scheming femmes fatales with whom Charles quickly engages, fancying himself in love with the beautiful Huguette while simultaneously indulging in an erotic pas de deux with a Madame Durand; it is Madame Durand who in the final section turns out to be spying for Germany. Both characters and location are clearly based on Sanary, its cafés and restaurants, its busy summer social life—with the fancy-dress party at the beginning a recognisable, if somewhat pallid, version of the pirate party thrown by Nori and Sybille seven years earlier. Although at the start the story shows promise, such signs quickly evaporate, the whole weighed down by two-dimensional characters, ponderous literary references, and a plodding, self-conscious narrative that quickly destroys all claim to conviction.

  Returned to Sanary, Sybille continued working on the book, Maria typing it out chapter by chapter. Once it was finished Maria showed it to Aldous, who was damning in his criticism. “It was a bad, empty novel, and he told me as much…‘lack of vital relationship between the characters…issues of little significance…the book needs to be simultaneously shortened and filled up.’ ” Although painful at the time, many years later Sybille found herself in agreement with Aldous’s verdict. “I had read too much and knew too little…My wretched words were derivative…I followed the master, but I followed him very poorly: watered-down Aldous Huxley was Huxley with flat water indeed.” The manuscript was sent to several publishers, all of whom turned it down: “rightly so but to my desolation at the time.” In fact it was to be another almost twenty years before Sybille was to find her own remarkable voice.

  The failure of her novel marked the beginning of a period for Sybille of traumatic upheaval and emotional crisis. In the autumn of 1936 while staying in Paris, Sybille had met a young woman with whom she had become instantly infatuated. Joan Black, exquisitely beautiful, the daughter of a well-to-do Irish couple, was staying in Paris having recently returned from a motor tour in the south with her sister. Joan was currently living with an American divorcée, Eda Lord, whom Sybille had briefly encountered in Berlin in 1932; Eda at the time had been much taken with Sybille, who had barely noticed her. Now it was Sybille who was rejected: Joan, after a few weeks of tantalising flirtation followed by a short affair, returned to Eda, leaving Sybille so miserable that she left Paris to take refuge with the Huxleys in London. This minor episode may have seemed of small significance, and yet all three, Sybille, Joan and Eda, were over time to bec
ome part of a complex web of love and friendship—and occasional hostility—that was to last for the rest of their lives.

  As always Sybille’s spirits revived in the company of Aldous and Maria. On this occasion, however, the Huxleys were able to offer little comfort, Maria greeting her with the news that they were shortly to leave Europe and settle, at least for a while, in America. Although Maria was loath to abandon her beloved Sanary, she thought it “quite pointless to stay and risk so much when we are among the few people who have the freedom to be able to escape.” Now, hoping to find a tenant for their set, they had moved out of Albany and with their son Matthew had taken three service flats in the Mount Royal Hotel near Marble Arch. Fortunately, however, Sybille was able to remain as before in their tiny maid’s room, from where late every evening she would walk up Bond Street, across Grosvenor Square to Oxford Street to spend the night in bed with Maria, returning to Albany at dawn.

  Meanwhile some troubling news was received from Anna in Berlin. By now the situation for Jews in Germany had become extremely perilous, particularly in the capital, where the authorities pursued a vigorous role in depriving the Jewish population of their rights. Increasingly, Jews were targeted, frequently spat at in the street and physically assaulted, with anti-Jewish propaganda placarded in shops and restaurants all over the city. Anna had always distanced herself from her Semitic origins, proud that her colouring—her blonde hair and blue eyes—gave her an Aryan appearance. In her view, most Jews, however wealthy and successful, were inherently inferior; both her children, Lisa and her brother, had been baptised at birth, with Lisa’s conversion to Catholicism at the time of her first marriage a source of considerable satisfaction to her mother.

  Now, however, to her extreme distaste, Anna found herself living in cramped conditions at close quarters with some offensively vulgar Jewish neighbours. Recently she had been obliged to move yet again, this time into a stuffy little room in a house crammed with lodgers, where she was reduced to doing her own cooking, washing and ironing. Her landlady, a Frau Jacobson, was “an insufferable Jew,” who refused even to supply her with lavatory paper. The house, she complained, “is a kind of synagogue without any discipline. I never talk to anybody…[and] I’ve always my door locked…I had a row with my disgusting Jewish Jacobson. She wanted M[arks]. 5 more because I burnt too much light…She is a beast…Today my room is so cold that I write in my seal coat and can’t hold the penholder.”

  Anna’s hostility towards her daughter was as vituperative as ever, and she appeared to take little pleasure in Lisa’s recovery. The previous Christmas she had written to Sybille, “Tomorrow week is Xmas Eve…shut up in my room without children or grandchild…without a Xmas tree…But no need to worry about me. I’ll go on living as long as possible—so that your mother shall wait for my death as long as I can help! May God grant it.” Now, however, her attitude began to soften as Lisa became overwhelmed by depression, triggered by an unexpected reversal in her divorce case: it was now Nori who had been awarded almost everything, leaving Lisa with barely enough to live on. Her doctor said “it will take a long time to get her sane again,” Anna reported. “The worst is that she has no courage any more.” Lisa’s condition then deteriorated further when she developed appendicitis and had to undergo an operation. Afterwards, her depression intensified to such a degree that she tried to commit suicide by swallowing pieces of broken glass from the tumbler by her bed, and by the end of the year it was obvious she would not recover. “Your mother is now immensely pitoyable,” wrote Anna. “She had tried to reconstruct her life with an admirable energy and brilliant success—and everything went to pieces by this devastating operation.” Finally on 2 February 1937, Lisa, aged fifty-three, died in hospital in Berlin; her body was cremated two days later.

  Sybille, staying in Albany at the time, first heard the news by telephone from Maria Huxley, followed a few days later by a letter from her grandmother. Now Anna wrote that she was “immensely sorry about our poor Lisa…they said it was Entartung des Herzmuskels [degeneration of the heart muscles] which didn’t work any more and gave such horrid pains.” Sybille’s feelings about her mother’s death remained ambivalent. For the rest of her life she felt remorse, blaming herself for her failure to love her mother; and yet with Lisa wholly lacking in maternal instinct, there had been small chance of any real emotional connection. During the last few years in Sanary Sybille had done everything she could to help and please her mother, whose problems had become an almost overwhelming burden for her daughter. And yet despite Lisa’s often appalling behaviour, Sybille had always admired her, admired her moral courage, her vivacity and wit, and above all her powerful intelligence. “She taught me everything about literature and art and world affairs,” Sybille said in an interview many years later. “She was a great influence on my intellectual life.” And crucially Lisa was to remain one of the dominant figures in her daughter’s imagination, this clever, wayward beauty to play a pivotal role in all four volumes of Sybille’s published fiction.

  Since her childhood, when she had spent months at a time staying with her grandmother in Hamburg, Sybille had encountered Anna only occasionally. Now the two of them agreed to meet. As it was out of the question for Sybille to go to Germany, they arranged to spend a couple of days together in Amsterdam, where they could talk about family history and the recent harrowing past. One morning they visited the Rijksmuseum and sat together on a wooden bench, silently studying The Night Watch. It was to be the last time Sybille was to see her grandmother. Some months later, Anna, fearing arrest and transportation, committed suicide.

  Returning to London, Sybille was faced with the Huxleys’ imminent departure for America. They had left Sanary in February, convinced—mistakenly, as it turned out—that they would eventually return, encouraging various friends and relations to stay at the Villa Huley and keep an eye on the house and garden. During the weeks before their departure, Sybille was with them constantly, helping them pack, running errands, joining their family and friends for dinner in the evening, all the time trying not to dwell on how desperately she would miss them. Finally on 7 April 1937, they sailed from Southampton on the SS Normandie, Sybille, wretchedly unhappy, accompanying them on the train from Waterloo. “When the bell rang for visitors to leave the ship, I said farewell to Aldous. Maria came up to the open deck—it was nightfall now—from where one took the launch. I was a symbol, the last of Europe, the last link…I was already down the gangplank when Maria took off her officer’s cloak, keep this, she called, and let it fall.”

  Sybille remained in London for several weeks, living in Albany while working on a new novel, her stay coinciding with the enthronement of George VI, whose coronation procession she watched slowly winding its regal way along Piccadilly. Here as before, Sybille supported herself by giving lessons in English, her pupils mostly well-to-do businessmen, German Jews on their way to the United States. “The idea was that I might be able to give them a crash course in easy, competent everyday speech. It worked…I discovered that I much enjoyed, and had an aptitude for, teaching. I craftily avoided having to write anything down by my own hand, and skated over spelling…The fee for a private lesson then would be five shillings an hour or could be as low as 3/6 or even 2/6. I was paid 7/6 which felt and was quite [a] lot.”

  Rarely happy when living alone, Sybille during this period took comfort in the company of an acquaintance whom she had first met a few years before in Sanary. Charlotte Wolff, then in her early thirties, was a Jewish psychotherapist who, banned from practising in Berlin, had moved to the south of France. Here she had been taken under the wing of Maria, who had been fascinated by Charlotte’s practice of chiromancy, or palm reading, which quickly became popular among the Huxleys’ friends, Sybille among them. “Maria Huxley once asked me whether I could see literary talent in Sybille’s hands,” Charlotte recalled. “I answered: ‘Yes, particularly as an interpretative writer.’ I frequently had to tell Sybille what
her hands disclosed…Like most artists, she had faith in the irrational and was very superstitious.” Tall and lanky, Charlotte was strikingly masculine in appearance, always dressed in trousers, shirt and tie, her thick dark hair slicked back like a man’s; an active lesbian since her student days, she was to become highly regarded for her writings on female homosexuality.

  While living in Albany, Maria had found a small apartment off Piccadilly for Charlotte, who was now permanently settled in London. Depressed by the Huxleys’ departure, Sybille was delighted to spend time with Charlotte: “two people affected in different ways by the Nazi upheaval became a comfort to each other.” The pair took to dining together once a week in a small restaurant in Soho. “We generally occupied a corner table at the furthest end, where we sat eating, drinking and talking,” Charlotte wrote later. “When I looked sideways at Sybille, I saw her eyes and mouth smiling. Nobody else I have known has managed to have such a worried and amused look at the same time. Her rapid speech was something one had to get used to. I often became nervous when, on some occasions, she could not keep still and walked about the room, talking; but chez Joseph she spoke in a quieter voice, relaxed by the good food and wine.”

  During the early summer Sybille returned to Sanary, again staying with Eva at La Juliette. It was the start of what was to be a particularly rackety season, Sybille just one of a group of friends who, lively and intelligent, were also capable of extravagantly outrageous behaviour. Among them were the two “Eddies,” Sackville-West and Gathorne-Hardy; the former was at work on a novel, and spent several weeks at La Juliette, prancing about in brick-coloured shorts with a tiny knitted skullcap on the back of his head. Almost every day Sybille would drive Eddy and Eva into town to meet the rest of the gang, among them Gathorne-Hardy and another Eton and Oxford contemporary, Brian Howard. Brian, a strikingly elegant figure with his black hair and large, heavy-lidded dark eyes, was charming, flamboyant, witty and malicious—later portrayed by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited as that dissolute exquisite, Anthony Blanche. In his mid-twenties Brian had been sent to Berlin to be treated for depression, and while there had fallen in love with an old school-friend, James (“Jimmy”) Stern. Brian’s passion was unreciprocated, but the two men had remained close, and after leaving Germany made regular visits to the south of France. It was here that the fond friendship between Brian and Sybille began.