Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  Later, looking back on her life in New York, Sybille admitted she had felt uneasy, even guilty, that during the war years she had been able to live in safety and comfort while so many were experiencing conditions of extreme privation and danger in Europe—a fact with which she would be confronted with some resentment on her eventual return. After America entered the war in December 1941, Sybille enrolled in a first-aid course under the aegis of the American National Red Cross, and on a more personal level she was able, at one remove, to provide practical support for members of Maria Huxley’s relatives in France.

  Since leaving Los Angeles, Sybille had kept in close touch with Maria, who was in a state of intense anxiety about her family, particularly her mother and her sister Rose, who had recently escaped into France from Belgium. Desperate to arrange safe passage for them to America, Maria was also attempting to find a secure method of sending food parcels, which from California was an extremely uncertain operation. Sybille promised to organise both of these projects, and it was agreed that Maria would send Sybille money to buy the necessary provisions, and also instruct her how to have the relevant papers processed. “I have got all the information from the [Belgian] consul,” Maria told her. “Not difficult to get them out. Can be done fairly quickly. But we need affidavits…It must be you to help me…I enclose a cheque for fifty dollars…I cannot guess how much the food costs and mailing and so on. We ought to send once a week don’t you think. Chocolate is what my mother asks for…I kiss you very dearly and I cannot tell you what a comfort it is to know I can rely on you exactly as on myself.”

  Aware of Sybille’s impoverished state, Maria had been sending small sums of money to help with her living expenses, but now, she told her, with her own family to support, these payments would have to stop. “Malheureusement je dois dire que vous ne devez plus compter sur nous que dans la toute extrémité. J’ajoute cela parce que, vu la guerre, notre aide n’aurait plus de fin et que vous devez vous adapter à vivre à la guerre comme à la guerre. C’est toujours mieux que d’être en France ou en Hollande, n’est ce pas?” (“Unfortunately I have to tell you that you can no longer count on us except in an emergency. I add this because, given the war, we can see no end to the help we must give my family and you must adapt to living in the war as if you yourself were at war. It’s much better than being in France or Holland, is it not?”).

  Despite the slightly admonitory tone of this letter, the two women remained devoted as ever, Maria telling her sister Jeanne that although she and Sybille were so different she always looked on her as her closest friend, “my always dear Sybille.” To her “very dear Sybille” herself she wrote, “it is good to say one loves. And dearly. You have always known it and so have I,” while Sybille for her part regarded Maria throughout her life as “the most remarkable and adorable woman I ever knew.”*1

  Shortly after Sybille left California, Aldous had published a book on which he had been working for some time, Grey Eminence, a biographical study of François Leclerc du Tremblay, otherwise known as Père Joseph, the famous éminence grise of Cardinal Richelieu. Sybille suggested to Klaus Mann that she write a review for his newly launched (and disappointingly short-lived) literary journal, Decision,*2 a suggestion received with enthusiasm by Klaus.

  Sybille’s article is of particular interest not only for its critique of the work but also because here for the first time she communicates in her own voice. There is none of the ponderousness, of the self-conscious bookishness that so weighed down her previous endeavours. Instead, she says exactly what she thinks, deftly summarising the subject as well as offering a perceptive analysis of the author himself, in particular his remote form of intellectualism and his failure to connect with ordinary humanity. Defining cowardice as the refusal to face “the difficult facts of life,” she takes the opportunity to examine Aldous’s failure to confront the horrors of war, his escape from it into religious mysticism. “Many have ceased to cope,” Sybille writes, “and, instead, have sought a consoling substitute…[for the] irreparably sad and heartbreaking facts of reality. Once again, life has become too bad to be true. Therefore it is not true. Reality…is an illusion. Ultimate reality, so Mr. Huxley reiterates throughout Grey Eminence, is only in God…The man who wrote that ‘to talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance’…now writes, unflinchingly, about the That and the Thou. To the world, jealous, and a little sad to have lost him, the change is somewhat disconcerting.”

  Although Sybille remained fond of Aldous, indeed continued in many respects to admire him unreservedly, she had been painfully disillusioned by his evasiveness. It appalled her to witness the dissolution of the irony, the steel rationality she had so admired in Sanary, now replaced by this flaccid and sentimental form of religious belief. Nonetheless she was relieved to receive Aldous’s generous, if slightly “spiritual” letter written in response to her review. “I have just read your article on Grey Eminence in Decision,” he told her, “& am writing to tell you how good I think it is. Painfully good, at times, so far as I am concerned; for you have said many true and searching things in it. I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, & have made, in a curious way, the worst of both…”

  Meanwhile at the beginning of summer, in order to escape the stifling heat of the city, Sybille and Allanah moved to the country, initially staying with Jean and Annie in Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard, the following year in a house at Snedens Landing, a pretty hamlet in a wooded area west of the Hudson, about twenty miles from New York. Yet as well as providing a tranquil retreat, these locations were also the scenes of wild partying, particularly at weekends, with dancing and heavy drinking often continuing into the small hours. Here Clem Greenberg was a regular presence, usually accompanied by Mary McCarthy and a group of colleagues from Partisan Review.

  Others included Jimmy and Tania Stern, a couple whom Sybille had known since before the war. Jimmy, dark-haired and strikingly handsome, was an old friend of Brian Howard, who for a couple of years had been unrequitedly in love with him. During the 1930s the two young men had become familiar figures in Sanary, Jimmy, like Brian, notorious for his promiscuous behaviour among the good-looking boys on the beaches at Bandol and La Napoule. In 1935, however, Jimmy had decided to change tack and to marry Tania, the daughter of Alfred Kurella, a prominent German-Polish psychiatrist from Berlin. Orphaned in childhood, Tania had been brought up by Ernst Freud, a son of Sigmund Freud, and while still in her teens had decided on a career as a therapist, working first in Paris, then New York as a teacher of “bodily consciousness.” Before meeting Jimmy, Tania in the early 1930s had had a long affair with Eda Lord, who eventually left her for Joan Black, the Irish beauty with whom Sybille for a time had been infatuated.

  The Sterns had left France in 1936 for Portugal, where they lived for a while with Christopher Isherwood and his boyfriend, before moving to the States in 1939. Jimmy had always wanted to write: during the 1930s he had published a couple of short-story collections, and during the war had a job at Time magazine. Sybille admired Jimmy’s style, slightly in awe of his sharp, critical intelligence. At his suggestion she had sent him a typescript of her third novel, of which he had made a lengthy appraisal, concluding, dispiritingly, that “I was, on the whole, disappointed. Perhaps I expected too much.” Her friendship with Jimmy was to endure nonetheless, with Tania, too, the three of them keeping closely in touch throughout the years to come. Sybille continued to rely on Jimmy as literary mentor and critic; and she was grateful as well for his generosity: the Sterns were comfortably off, and throughout most of Sybille’s life continued to provide her with considerable financial support.

  Returning to the city in September 1942, Sybille and Allanah moved into a spacious new apartment on East 75th, between Madison and Park. “It’s frightfully underfurnished,” Sybille told Tania Stern. “In fact, my room which is as large as the second best drawing room at Versa
illes, has nothing but crystal chandeliers, yellow draperies, looking glasses, a vast fireplace…However, I decided that space, high ceilings, French windows, streaming sunlight and a balcony on which we sit and dine of a summer evening, more than offset the incongruous furnishings.” Here the two women continued their energetic social life, with Sybille again taking on the shopping and cooking, happy to have “a full-sized kitchen, which I garlanded with garlic and peppers and earthenware casseroles and which is my Mediterranean wish-fulfilment.” She was also delighted to make several new friends who shared her serious interest in wine, chief among them the American painter and photographer Curtis Moffat. In London, where he lived after the First World War, Moffat had been an early member of the Wine and Food Society and the Saintsbury Club, and after returning to America soon became known for the contents of his remarkable cellar. After one particularly vinous evening at his house, Sybille sent him a poem in thanks:

  …Of Hock and Fine your table be as sure

  As set with Lafite, Brion and Latour.

  Your cellar dry; bins full that may abound

  With rows of Corton in good bottles round,

  Richebourg galore and Pommard by the case,

  Montrachet, not Bâtard. And then to face

  The morning after: Fernet’s bitter brine,

  Black preface to another day of wine.

  Although at first the daily life of Sybille and Allanah continued much as before, in fact some profound changes were about to take place. Allanah, to her friends’ astonishment, suddenly announced she was engaged to be married, her fiancé Robert Statlender, a young Frenchman whom she had met one evening with the Youriévitches. Robert had been wounded while fighting with the Free French in 1940, and had afterwards been transported by sea to America. Small in stature, charming, wealthy and very clever, Robert had impressed Allanah by his love of music and wide knowledge of literature, both English and French. When he proposed, she accepted immediately, a response which puzzled her friends, struck by the emotional awkwardness all too apparent between them. “Poor A. trying to prove to herself she is not Lesbian,” Maria Huxley remarked to Sybille, while Tania Stern wrote, “I found myself a bit depressed…by the sight of two so hopelessly inefficient people as Allanah & Robert…[they] so obviously have no relationship with each other and don’t even know it—because they don’t know what it is to have any relationship!”

  Like everyone else, Sybille was taken aback by the engagement, although she had always recognised that Allanah had a conventional streak, that, at least in theory, she valued the idea of marriage and a family. Sybille found Robert both clever and engaging, and she soon became accustomed to his almost constant presence in the apartment. When plans for the future were discussed, Sybille willingly agreed to Allanah’s proposal that after her marriage the three of them should stay together. Robert “is devoted to you and wants you to live with us always,” Allanah told her, and “we could all three live much more comfortably with his money as well as ours.”

  Meanwhile the two women continued to move in the circle of writers and artists revolving around Peggy Guggenheim and Clem Greenberg. Clem, having amicably ended his affair with Annie, was now passionately in love with her sister, Jean. On one occasion when Clem was out of town, Annie sent him an account of a party given by Sybille and Allanah. As well as Jean and Annie, the guests included Jimmy and Tania Stern; the novelist James Agee; Curtis Moffat’s son, Ivan, the British film producer and screenwriter; and Bush Meier-Graefe, whom Sybille had known in Sanary, now married to the Austrian novelist Hermann Broch. The dinner had been cooked by Sybille. “An extremely good dinner (as you can imagine),” Annie reported, “roast pork and mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, apple sauce, bread and wine, avocado salad, and ice cream, which we put coffee on…Everybody was gay and happy, I would say, and Sybille at her peak of gaiety so it was very nice.”

  Particularly nice for Annie, who had suddenly fallen in love with Sybille. Surprised by such an unexpected development, Sybille was nonetheless enchanted by this pretty young woman, small and slender, with thick dark hair and enormous brown eyes. Within a very short time the two became lovers, with Annie writing to Sybille almost daily to tell her how much she adored her, playfully addressing her as her “delicious white pig” or “my sweet sale cochon [dirty pig].”*3 “Darling, wasn’t it fun last night or rather this morning, because going to bed with you last night wasn’t fun so much as pure delight…Tonight I shall have to go to bed by myself. No delicious white pig to come into the place I’ve warmed for her…I am so sad I don’t know what to do…How shall I get along without my sweet sale cochon, je me demande…” Yet while Annie was blissfully immersed in this new turn of events, Sybille remained slightly cautious. There was “a new affaire de coeur, I have to admit rather sheepishly,” she confessed to her old friend, Toni Muir. “Someone rather young, and sweet and silly. Not at all what you’d expect. It may be most unsuitable, and I am quite frightened sometimes, as I don’t know where it will lead…I ought to be sensible enough by now to look before I leap, but then I didn’t do much of the leaping.”

  One of Annie’s chief concerns was to keep the affair hidden from her mother. Mrs. Bakewell was a forceful personality, on whom her daughters depended for their generous incomes—“her nasty old allowance-power,” as Annie resentfully described it. The sisters were living together, Jean anxious to conceal her current affair with Laurence Vail, an ex-husband of Peggy Guggenheim, while Annie knew her mother would be outraged to discover the nature of her new relationship. For this reason she decided to persuade Peggy’s latest crush, Kenneth Macpherson, to act as her cover, a curious choice in a way as Kenneth was openly homosexual, his face always heavily made up, his hair dyed a startling blond.

  For Peggy such details hardly seemed to matter. Her marriage to Max Ernst had soon disintegrated and she had become deeply infatuated with Macpherson, a tall, handsome Scotsman who had been married to the lesbian writer Annie Winifred Ellerman, always known as Bryher. Bryher, a generous philanthropist from a wealthy shipowning family, had left Macpherson very well off when they parted. He and Peggy were now living together in a large duplex, Kenneth maintaining the upper floor for his private apartment, a sumptuously furnished space, including a dressing room stocked with expensive cosmetics where he entertained his fellow “Athenians,” a term he preferred to “fairy,” “sissie” or “queer.” It was during this period that Sybille first met him, running into him one day with Allanah, who had known him in Paris during the 1930s. He and Sybille took to each other at once, although it was not until after the war that their friendship was to become more firmly established.

  As time passed Annie fell ever more deeply in love with Sybille. “I could never have enough of you, in bed and out of bed,” she declared in the spring. “I want to be with you all the time. Will we ever be living together, I wonder?” In another letter of this period she included a drawing of herself and Sybille naked in bed, under which she wrote longingly, “If only you could be here tonight, then morning would show two contented sleepy pigs, only hungry for breakfast, nothing more. For I’m sure we would have made such a lot of love.” Yet there was little possibility of moving in together; and just as Annie knew to be wary of her mother, so did she have to tread carefully with Allanah, whom, unsurprisingly, she disliked. “I feel so worried and constrained when Allanah is around,” she admitted. “I never look at her any more than necessary.” The feeling was mutual. Annie was “too boring for words,” Allanah told Sybille. “Kenneth in the middle of lunch said that it was unbelievable that such a remarkably intelligent girl like you could like what he considered the stupidest girl he had ever met…I must say it does bring you down in my estimation, you liking a silly creature like Annie.”

  Eventually during the summer of 1943 the two women were at last able to spend some time alone. Annie and her sister Jean had rented a house for a couple
of months in Gaylordsville, Connecticut, while Allanah, accompanied by Robert, had decided to return to Martha’s Vineyard. At Gaylordsville Jean with Laurence Vail appeared only occasionally, so for most of the time Sybille and Annie had the place to themselves. This, as Sybille admitted, was “delightful…We were very cut off, with of course no car…A country store, poor at the best of peace times, making deliveries twice a week. We swam: and later when it got too cold for the lake, played croquet…And walks, also a new discovery. I can walk twenty miles in a day now…we used to go off for the day, with lunch in a bundle, through the woods, make a fire and cook sausages on a stick.”

  Allanah on the Vineyard, separated from Sybille, had plenty of time to ponder her friend’s situation, which increasingly became a cause for concern. Allanah firmly believed in Sybille’s talent as a writer, and she found it frustrating that she was idling away the summer in the country with Annie, and when in town doing little but attending parties and giving extravagant dinners for friends. Why could she not try to focus and begin work on a new novel? “Darling,” Allanah wrote to her, “you are so unusually talented that it makes [me] ill to think that you do not write another book…Remember you are a writer not other people’s cook.” Fundamentally Sybille knew she was right, but when forced to confront the problem her guilt made her irritable with Allanah. “If only you were not so horrible to me all day I would love to be with you always,” Allanah told her, “but you treat me rather like a poor relation…whose presence gets on one’s nerves and who every time they open their mouths to speak one shuts up with a sharp answer because one does not really want to hear anything they have to say.”