Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  Despite these complaints, however, Allanah continued to do her best for her friend. When Sybille finally completed a short story it was Allanah who sent it to Chimera, a small literary magazine, whose editor, Barbara Howes, agreed to publish it in the issue of September 1944. “Compassionata at Hyde Park Corner” follows two friends, a middle-aged woman and her younger male companion, as they drive in heavy traffic along Piccadilly, all the while learnedly discussing the aesthetics of certain styles of architecture. At Hyde Park Corner Osbert, the driver, forced to come to a halt, is intrigued by the sight of an old woman in a bath chair on the road beside them and starts to imagine her history. Then as the car in front moves forward, he makes a sharp turn and accidentally runs her over. When referring to the story some years later, Sybille accurately described it as “quite bad.”

  Allanah meanwhile had problems of her own. Robert was putting pressure on her to marry him, a prospect which was suddenly causing her to panic. “I do not know what to do,” she told Sybille. “I cannot bear the thought of you and I not living together, I love you more than anyone in the world, and admire your mind more than anyone I know…Please help me I am in such a dilemma.” Her main fear was that if she turned down Robert to live with Sybille, then eventually Sybille would leave her for another woman, “and I shall be left too old to marry…[and] would go dotty with depression…I want you to answer this quite selfishly…[do not] ever let money considerations come into the question, because they do not exist, you are an economy for me, I could not live at all without your marvellous management.” Until she had come to a decision, Allanah begged Sybille not to discuss the situation with Annie or Jean. “Annie repeats everything and Jean writes everything to Cyril [Connolly]…and he will read the letters out to a bunch of sissies [homosexuals] at the Café Royal, who will all titter about it.”

  A few months later, Allanah made up her mind and she and Robert were married in New York early in 1944. Robert moved into the apartment, the three of them amiably co-existing, apart from some grumbling from Robert over what he regarded as Sybille’s insensitive invasion of his private space.

  By this time encouraging news had started to arrive from across the Atlantic. In September 1943, Italy had finally surrendered to the Allies and shortly afterwards declared war on Germany, a reversal of immense significance, awakening in Sybille a passionate desire to return to Europe. “The news has been so exciting these weeks that one dares hardly breathe,” she wrote to Toni Muir. “I long to get back, but what one will find, and how one will fit, is difficult to imagine. I have been here for three and a half years. Although it has been undeservedly easy, and comfortable, it has also been barren. Just waiting. I like being in America, but do not feel in the least at home or belonging, or ever could.” She yearned to live again in France, “in a warm place, a Mediterranean place,” although not in Sanary, which was too fraught with memories of the past. After the turn of the year, as the strength of the Allied position increased, culminating in the Normandy landings on 6 June, Sybille’s longing grew ever more intense. All around her, friends were making plans and booking their passage home, but in fact it would be more than three years before she would be able to return.

  One evening in June 1944, Allanah met a friend of hers, Esther Murphy, for cocktails in the bar of the Gladstone Hotel. During their conversation Esther remarked that she had enjoyed Sybille’s article on Aldous Huxley in Decision, a compliment that Allanah lost no time in reporting back. Not long afterwards Sybille was introduced to Esther at a dinner party of Curtis Moffat’s. She found herself spellbound by the older woman, thrilled to be in the company of someone so scholarly and well read. A few evenings later Esther came for a drink at the apartment before taking Sybille and Allanah out for dinner. When Allanah left to go home, the other two went on to the fashionable Stork Club, where Esther, although dressed in slacks and a shabby overcoat, was immediately shown to the best table by an obsequious maître d’. “I must warn you that Mrs. Bedford does not like ice in her highballs,” she magisterially instructed him. Here the two women sat and talked until the club closed for the night, by which time both knew they had fallen in love.

  Esther was from a wealthy family, her father, Patrick Murphy, the owner of the Mark Cross luxury leather goods company. Her brother Gerald was a close friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who in Tender Is the Night had modelled the characters Dick and Nicole Diver on Gerald and his wife. From childhood Esther had spent lengthy periods not only in New York but in Paris and London, where her father spent months at a time supervising his shops and factories. Born in October 1897, Esther had early on shown signs of a formidable intelligence; possessed of a restless intellectual energy, she was widely read in both English and French, with a passion not only for literature but also for politics and history, in particular the political history of the United States and of France in the seventeenth century. “The past is so satisfactory to me,” she wrote once to Gerald. “Ah! Why could I not have lived at Versailles under Louis XIV!”

  Esther had always wanted to write, over the years securing contracts for several biographies, none of which were ever completed. In her twenties and thirties, travelling ceaselessly between Paris and New York, Esther had become part of a mainly literary society, in New York a close friend not only of the Scott Fitzgeralds, but also of Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy, Muriel Draper and Dorothy Parker; and in Paris she was a frequent visitor at Gertrude Stein’s, and part of the lesbian circle surrounding the American salonnière Natalie Barney, with whom for a while Esther had had an affair. Since her early twenties Esther had known her sexual preference was for women, although this had not prevented her from marrying twice, first, in 1929, to the British socialist politician John Strachey, secondly, in 1935, to Chester Arthur, grandson of the twenty-first president of the United States.*4 Although she remained on good terms with both her husbands, it had always been clear that Esther was not designed for marriage, a fact amicably acknowledged by Strachey, who had married her for her money, and by Chester, who was himself homosexual. During her brief first marriage Esther had lived in London, then moved to California after marrying Chester; but although it was nearly thirty years before she obtained her second divorce, she and Chester soon separated, he remaining on the West Coast, Esther returning with relief to New York.

  Six feet tall, ungainly and very masculine in appearance, Esther had a large plain face, one slightly squinting eye, thick short brown hair and a somewhat mannish figure. Indifferent to her appearance—usually dressed either in trousers or an old tweed suit, with shirt, cravat and sensible shoes—Esther since the days of Prohibition had become a dedicated drinker, now spending much of her time at the Gladstone bar, glass in one hand, cigarette in the other, talking, talking, talking—about Louis XIV and Madame de Maintenon, about the Hanseatic League, the Catholic Church, about the war and President Roosevelt, for whose election she had energetically campaigned. As her first husband said of her, Esther was “proud, loyal, warm-hearted, generous and extravagant…[but] she never drew breath.” Much more damagingly, however, she almost never stopped drinking.

  Sybille, nearly fifteen years her junior, was immediately impressed by Esther’s remarkable intellect, fascinated to hear that she was planning to write, indeed was currently under contract for a book about Madame de Pompadour. She felt an intense emotional connection with this remarkable woman, excited and moved, too, by the depth of Esther’s feelings for her. “You crossed my path like a wandering apparition,” Esther told Sybille not long after they met. “I have never in my life felt about anyone the way I feel about you. I ask you to believe this.” When Sybille left town for a few days, Esther wrote passionately, “I love you and miss you much, much more than I can express or that I could have imagined missing anyone ever again. So I shall see you Monday night. Otherwise I shall send bailiffs after you so be careful.”

  Before long Sybille had moved into the Gladstone with Esther, an arrangemen
t somewhat grudgingly approved by Allanah, who resented the fact that when the three of them were together it was always Esther who took centre stage. “Everything I say seems to irritate you,” Allanah complained to Sybille. “I don’t think I ever opened my mouth at dinner without your waving your hand at me, and saying schussh schussh. Why should Esther be the only person allowed to speak. It is a form of selfishness and egomania to speak as much as she does. Of course it is because she drinks too much…People who drink as much as she does have little sense of the reality of what [is] happening at the moment.” In time Sybille, too, would come to dread Esther’s drinking, but at the start of what would develop into one of the most important relationships of her life she was too happy to care.

  While Allanah had misgivings about her friend’s new affair, it caused intense pain to another of Sybille’s ex-lovers, Annie Bakewell. “I only love you more and more instead of less and less,” Annie wrote after discovering what had happened. “I think of my Pig and long for my Pig all the time. And I have lost her, my darling. How suddenly and sharply it all happened. I now feel I will never get over you and when I see you I shall feel like dying…I will unwillingly address this letter to you at the hated Gladstone, care of the person who took you away from me.” Indeed it was many months before Annie began to emerge from depression, wretchedly unhappy at Sybille’s defection; in time, however, she began to recover her balance, first reigniting her affair with Clem Greenberg, before eventually marrying again, this time to yet another ex-lover of Peggy Guggenheim’s, the very wealthy and famously foul-mouthed William (“Bill”) Davis.

  Meanwhile in New York euphoria over the end of the war was everywhere, with peace declared in Europe on 8 May and on 14 August in America. Sybille and Esther spent the summer on Martha’s Vineyard, a time of real happiness for Sybille, who was deeply moved and impressed by what she described as her lover’s “goodness of heart, her lovingness.” The plan had been for the two of them to spend their time working, Sybille on a projected cookery book, Esther on her life of Madame de Pompadour, but in fact they did very little except enjoy themselves, Sybille swimming and cooking, while Esther, wholly undomesticated, spent her time smoking, drinking and endlessly talking about her yet-to-be-written biography.

  The following winter the two women returned to the Gladstone, by which time it had begun to be clear how much Esther relied on Sybille. “Supernaturally erudite,” Esther commanded respect, despite her shabby, tousled appearance, and yet there were areas of considerable insecurity. “She talks constantly,” one acquaintance observed, “not as an exhibitionist but as a tireless defender of her own privacy…barriers of statistics must be piled up like sandbags to protect the small shy bird within.” When Esther was asked to take part in a radio series, hosted by the journalist Dorothy Thompson, she readily agreed, but then suffered appallingly from nerves before each broadcast, turning to Sybille for support. For Sybille, the situation began to appear familiar: Esther’s scholarly conversation, her alcoholism, her failure to write, inevitably brought back memories of Lisa, with her brilliant talk, her endless plans for books never written, and her destructive addiction to morphine.

  As the weeks passed Sybille’s longing to return to Europe grew ever more intense. Esther had agreed to accompany her, but, with vast numbers waiting to cross the Atlantic, tickets were almost impossible to obtain. Allanah and Robert had been among the more fortunate, in May 1946 sailing for England on the Queen Mary, still painted a wartime grey and, as it turned out, very overcrowded and uncomfortable. Allanah was miserable at leaving Sybille, begging her to follow as soon as possible. “The only thing that matters now is that our separation be a short one…I love you my darling White Angora, and shall miss you every day until we meet again.” Arriving at Southampton, Allanah immediately reported back to describe her joy at returning home, of hearing gentle English voices—“everyone shrieks in America”—of seeing once more the luscious green countryside, the fields covered in wildflowers. Within a month she had left for France, reviving in Sybille a feeling of acute homesickness—“Oh Bull how you made me long to rush to Paris…your letter excited and unsettled me…I couldn’t hear enough of the streets, and your feelings.”

  As well as from Allanah, there were letters from friends in France with whom during the war communication had been blocked. After the Liberation, Joan Black, once so adored by Sybille, wrote to her from the village in Normandy where she and Eda Lord were living. “It is over five years since we had the smallest word from you,” Joan complained. “We survived, which sometimes seems a miracle…we are absolutely starved for outside news and people. So I hope you will answer this by a very long and complete letter.” Inevitably there was a certain resentment felt towards those who had lived out the war in safety and comfort abroad. In a lengthy postscript to one of Joan’s letters, Eda described the hardships they had been forced to undergo, particularly the persistent hunger resulting from the scarcity of food. “Poor Joan started reading detective novels, English ones, for the bacon and eggs, whiskey and sodas. Literary bacon and eggs are not very sustaining…Normal life is coming back to us—but so very slowly.” Allanah, too, was faced with a barrage of reproaches, including from her one-time lover, Poppy Kirk, who said she never wanted to see her again, and from Joan, who felt deeply hurt that neither Allanah nor Sybille had once made contact with her. Looking back Sybille wrote of this period, “What one also did not know was that one would not be able to receive letters from or write to Occupied France, and that when this became possible again, one often did not write. The gap, in every sense, had been too great.”

  It was shortly after arriving in Paris that Allanah discovered what had happened to Sybille’s sister, Katzi. The two met in a bar in the rue de la Paix, where over several glasses of champagne Katzi told her story. “She looked very well and smartly dressed as usual, but her hair is grey,” Allanah reported. “She has had an appalling time, she was put in prison in 1944 and only got out this May, so it was two years in prison, in the most filthy conditions and for months only bread and water. She said, typically, that it was amusing in the beginning because the prison was full of marquises and countesses who had collaborated, but after a few months they were all let out through influence, but she remained on with only ‘les femmes de ménage et des grues’ [charwomen and tarts]. She thinks she was put in because of her husband, but I think it was for going about with officers.” Soon afterwards Sybille received a fuller version in a letter from Katzi herself. Interned by the French at the beginning of the war, she had been released after a short period only to be arrested again, this time by the Germans, who on account of her Jewishness made her wear a yellow star and threatened her with transportation to Poland. It was at this point that Katzi was rescued by her ex-husband, Dincklage, then part of the Kommandantur, after which she remained in Paris unharmed throughout the Occupation, supporting herself by selling lingerie on the black market.

  Katzi’s final period in prison, for collaboration, a charge of which she was eventually cleared, had left her in a fragile condition. “Her health has suffered a great deal, especially her teeth, complete undernourishment,” Sybille told Allanah. “I am trying to send her food and cigarettes…she seems very lonely too. I am very affected.” Despite Katzi’s marriage and her dubious wartime record, from now on she came to harbour a loathing for Germany, an “aversion insurmontable,” as she described it, which made it easier for Sybille to deal with her sister’s somewhat unsavoury past, even if she could never quite bring herself to forgive her for it. Katzi “was no collaborator…she loved France as much as I did, was alienated by most things German, but had little conscience about what she called ‘just politics.’ Some of her connections, men and milieux she was capable of associating herself with, were to me a source of deep distress, and this unspoken discord underlaid our relationship.”

  With Allanah gone and the papers full of news from Europe, Sybille felt an almost frantic des
ire to escape. She missed Allanah painfully. “I suppose I feel closer to you than to anyone else alive,” she told her. “I wish we would have some kind of future to look forward to—being neighbours in a house in France or Italy.” She longed to return to Paris, but the waiting lists for transatlantic passage were impossibly long and the tickets were expensive. Sybille was wholly reliant on the generosity of friends, while Esther’s finances were currently in chaos thanks to the irresponsible behaviour of her husband. More and more Sybille was driven to reflect on how little she had achieved during her years of exile. “I am very desperate in many ways,” she told Allanah. “I feel that I have wasted the remainder of my youth in America…I am not writing, and I do not like my present life…I am rather frightened that unless I make some drastic change in my own life it may be too late.”

  It was at this point that Sybille decided she must leave the States, she must travel, and as Europe for the time being was out of reach then she would go south. “I had a great longing to move, to hear another language, to eat new food; to be in a country with a long nasty history in the past, and as little present history as possible.” She and Esther spent many hours poring over maps and examining the possibilities of Peru, Uruguay, Montevideo, all of which turned out to be far too costly. So they settled on Mexico. “It only costs just over a hundred dollars to get to Mexico,” Sybille told Allanah, who had agreed to pay for the journey. “I am longing to see it and in a way quite wild with joy, though nervous and apprehensive…Esther is reluctant to leave and depressed…it does not make it easier. Still we should be pleased enough, going off with plenty of books, not too much luggage and a picnic basket.”