Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  From time to time Sybille left Gadencourt to spend a few days in Paris, staying at the Saints-Pères, a small hotel on the Left Bank. It was here one day that she came upon her old friend from Sanary, Pierre Mimerel, “sitting in one of the stiff armchairs in the narrow anteroom…wearing riding breeches and a hacking jacket.” Delighted to see her, Pierre immediately asked her to stay at his new property in Touraine, an invitation that was eagerly accepted.

  Pierre’s situation had radically changed since the pre-war days. He had parted from his wife, Sybille’s once-adored Jacqueline, and was now married to Simone, a woman he described as the love of his life. Leaving Sanary soon after the Occupation, he had spent the war years farming in the Savoie, before eventually purchasing Les Couldraies, the hunting lodge of the magnificent Château de Chenonceaux in the Loire valley. The property included a farm and a vineyard, and Sybille during the long, hot summer spent happy hours riding with Pierre over the estate, as well as picking grapes and bottling wine. After her father, Pierre of all her friends was the most knowledgeable about wine, and he and she spent many hours tasting and judging the contents of his cellar, talking with intense absorption about labels and vintages, fermentation, tannins, bouquet and various crus. Sybille had taken immediately to Simone, so much calmer and less egotistic than her predecessor, and she relished the country-life routine of “vast meals on time, wood fires, cards and Monsieur le Curé in the evening.”

  To please Sybille, Pierre invited a number of her friends to join them, among them Janet Flanner and Noël Murphy, and also Esther. Uninterested in the farm and vineyard, although ready to consume quantities of wine, Esther came into her own over dinner in the evenings. “She spellbound her hosts,” Sybille recalled, “with her broad evocations of French and American history delivered in an oratorical voice…while she vaguely stirred about the noisette de porc aux pruneaux congealing on her plate.” While Sybille described Esther’s French as grammatically “near-flawless,” another of Esther’s acquaintance, the writer and critic Edmund Wilson, was rather less complimentary. “How is it that she has lived in France so long and still speaks French so badly?” he wondered. “It seems to me that she actually gets worse: she aspirates the h’s in hélas…and talks about Madame Bovairy. She is fluent in her rugged and rocky way…[but] pays little attention to genders.” To Sybille’s relief Pierre obviously knew nothing about the nature of her relationship with Esther. “The Mimerels were entirely out of it…there was a chaste austerity about Pierre…[who] had already begun his habit of addressing me as ‘ma fille.’ ”

  Returning to Normandy, Sybille was prepared for the tensions surrounding Allanah’s affair with Eda; what she had not expected was Esther’s sudden infatuation with Joan. Almost from the start Allanah had been critical of Sybille’s devotion to Esther—“I wish you would fall in love with someone else, who does not drink, and rave about politics from nine in the morning till 12 at night”—but had never questioned the solidity of their relationship. Now, faced with Esther’s infidelity, Sybille felt shocked, angry and hurt. With Esther, her “dear monster,” she had felt settled and secure, committed to an enduring alliance that perfectly balanced the physical side of love with the emotional; it had never occurred to her that their powerful bond would not, as she expressed it, “weather the years.” Esther’s “moral stature has been diminished,” she wrote to Toni Muir. “That for me is the beginning of the end of any love. The Trusted and Trusting alliance…the feeling of security…has of course gone down the drain.”

  Deeply unhappy, Sybille felt she must escape, and within a very short time had made up her mind to leave France for Rome, remembered fondly from her visits there years before with her mother and Nori. From Rome, she wrote to Allanah, “I am rather sad and quite lonely. And it is rather humiliating to say the least to think of ALL the misery and destruction brought about [by] that ass [at] Vernon. A wilful, minor maniac of a rather uninteresting kind.” Within a few weeks, however, a very contrite Esther arrived to join her, full of abject apologies for her behaviour. “I know I have forfeited all claim to your love,” she told Sybille. “I have played fast and loose with our relationship and I would not blame you at all if you felt that my conduct has killed something in it that cannot be revived”; Sybille must understand, however, “how unspeakably I love you…and how completely I realise that you are utterly indispensable to my life.”

  Although undoubtedly true that Esther’s love for Sybille was genuine and unchanging, her relationship with Joan was to continue for some time, with Esther regularly commuting between Italy and France. At first Sybille continued to feel betrayed, as well as miserable at being left for long periods on her own, but after a while she came to tolerate and eventually to forgive. Nonetheless from this time onward her feelings for Esther began to change, gradually evolving from love affair into a devoted, if not uncritical, friendship. And in due course Esther’s infidelity was to give Sybille the freedom to indulge in affairs of her own.

  Meanwhile there was Rome, the city which Sybille now claimed she loved more than anywhere else in the world. “Some people can write love letters and some can’t,” she once said. “I can’t, but if I could I’d write them about Rome.” Life in Rome in the early post-war years was glorious; with little traffic and the crowds of tourists yet to return, the city was a walker’s paradise, with “the sun, the sweet air, the new near quiet.” While Esther was with her the two women stayed at the d’Inghilterra, a hotel in the Via Bocca di Leone, a narrow street near the Piazza di Spagna. The d’Inghilterra was far from luxurious—there was no food and only a skeleton staff—but immediately inside the entrance there was a small bar with a cosy, club-like atmosphere; much patronised by English and Americans, it had become a well-known meeting place, a fact which had immediately appealed to Esther.

  When after a few weeks Esther returned to France, Sybille, needing to economise, rented a room in a private house in the Via Angelo Brofferio, a cheap if not particularly comfortable location. The family were pleasant, but it was a bleak winter, “the cold is breaking me…and THERE IS NO SIGN OF A BATH EVER.” Here she had intended to start on her Mexican book, but apart from taking classes in Italian she did no work at all, spending her time exploring the city and lunching and dining with friends. “I am not writing,” she told Toni Muir, “but momentarily the sense of guilt and failure is held at bay by some of these inexplicable periods of light-heartedness that descend upon one as fortuitously, though more rarely, as the periods of staleness and depression.”

  A few months after her arrival, in the spring of 1949, Sybille left Rome to visit her sister, Katzi, now living in Austria. Following the end of the war Katzi had remained for a while in Paris, but her situation there had been precarious, associated as she was with her ex-husband, Dincklage, and tainted by rumours of collaboration. Finally she had been persuaded to leave France for Austria, where she was taken in by a cousin, Carl-August von Schoenebeck, a nephew of Maximilian, who had a small estate at Hinterstoder, in the Austrian Alps east of Salzburg. Carl-August had had a distinguished war as a Luftwaffe general, but was later arrested by the Americans and confined for two years as a prisoner of war; he understood very well the importance for Katzi of leaving France but also of changing her name and nationality. Much as the Huxleys had done in finding Walter Bedford for Sybille, so Carl-August paid a young Dane—Axel Nielsen, an impoverished homosexual—to marry Katzi.

  Katzi, who had startled the locals by wandering around the village in a pair of bright red trousers, cigarette in hand, her now grey hair tinted blue, had looked forward to her wedding. Expecting at least a new dress and a bouquet of flowers, she had been disappointed that she was simply taken one morning to the registry office in Hinterstoder, where she met her future husband for the first and only time. Once the process was completed, Nielsen instantly disappeared, refusing even to come back to the house for a glass of champagne.

  Subsequently Katzi wa
s to remain in Austria for several years, supported by Carl-August. Sybille’s visit was of importance to both, but while Katzi was cheerful, open and affectionate, Sybille, although as fond of her sister as ever, was deeply uneasy. Austria was not Germany, but she nonetheless felt a profound hostility to the people surrounding her and to their political views, which often “made my hair stand on end with antagonism.” But for Katzi there were no such problems: she “remained the loving, generous sister often seeking my advice, more often mocking my preoccupations, ‘Oh, la grande intellectuelle!’ On my side there was a good deal of cowardice, sad to admit. Her uncertain standing with the French authorities never ceased to resurrect my own fears.”

  For Sybille it was a relief to return to Rome. “I can’t tell you HOW lovely Rome is now,” she told Allanah. “The streets are full of tables with people drinking wine, and stalls bursting with fruit: cherries, strawberries, plums, tomatoes, early peaches…One cannot live in Italy long without feeling proud to be alive, and connected with a kind of human eternity.” Thanks to Esther’s generosity, Sybille had been able to move back into the d’Inghilterra, occupying a spacious room on the top floor: “French windows giving on to ochre-and-apricot facades of the side street, a huge almost square bed, my own bath, a well-swept fireplace and a marble-topped sideboard on which I kept the paraphernalia for my breakfast—an economy the albergo [hotel] never commented on.”

  By now Sybille had made a number of friends in the city, among them two Americans, Peter Tompkins and Donald Downes, both of whom had worked at high levels in U.S. intelligence in Italy during the war; the writer Constantine FitzGibbon and his wife; Patricia Laffan, a young actress friend of Allanah’s; and there was also Janet Flanner, a kind and constant ally of Sybille’s, who came regularly to Rome not only to research subjects for her New Yorker column but also to see another of her close attachments, Natalia Murray.

  Now in her fifties, Janet was grey-haired, strong-featured, rather masculine in appearance (“a gentleman of the press in skirts,” as she was once described). Janet had been writing for the New Yorker under the byline “Genêt” for twenty-five years, reporting mainly from Paris, but also from other European cities, and, during the war, from the States. Married in her twenties, she had shortly afterwards fallen in love with Solita Solano, a young journalist, with whom she moved from New York to Paris, where she was to remain for most of her life. It was while in France some years later that Janet began her affair with Esther’s sister-in-law, Noël Murphy. On returning to New York in 1940 she had met her third love, Natalia Danesi Murray, Italian, dark-haired and very pretty, who was working as a newscaster for NBC. Somehow Janet managed to maintain close relations with all three, with Solita in Paris, Noël in Orgeval, and from the late 1940s with Natalia, who by then had moved back to Rome.

  As always, Sybille sent regular reports of her daily life to Allanah, who never hesitated to speak her mind. While congratulating Sybille on “the enormous moral progress you have made during the last seven years,” Allanah was disparaging of her social deportment. After Sybille’s arrival in Rome, Allanah had provided her with several introductions, among them to the British ambassador, Sir Victor Mallett, and also to Roger Hinks, head of the British Institute. But with both men, Allanah had learned, Sybille’s manner had been ridiculously timid. “I cannot understand,” she scolded her, “why you behave like a maid being interviewed when you first meet people like that?…Behaving with ease and a certain boldness on meeting new people, whoever they are…[is] a class thing, and for a person of your breeding and obvious upper class and even aristocratic family…[your manner] is impossible…It gives people the wrong impression about you; it is only after they have met you several times that they discover your brilliant mind.” Sybille knew Allanah was right and thanked her for her “rather nasty letter about my behaving like a housemaid,” admitting that her shyness was “not an amiable quality.”

  It was shortly after her return from Austria that Sybille heard the shocking news of Klaus Mann’s suicide at the age of forty-two. Having returned to Europe from America, Klaus had lost his sense of direction, failing to make progress with his new novel, reduced to translating his English works into German simply because he needed the money. “Klaus could no longer find himself in the post-war era,” said his brother Golo. “The times were against him.” Always vulnerable to depression, Klaus had attempted suicide at least once before, and now while staying in a hotel in Cannes he had finally succeeded. Sybille was profoundly saddened by the news. The image of Klaus killing himself, she told Allanah, “goes on like a great heavy wheel slowly turning inside one’s mind and heart.” Despite disapproving of his “romantic, German fixation on death,” she had always admired Klaus, regarded him as one of her closest friends, with whom she had shared not only nationality, culture and generation, but actual experience, in particular “that fear of arrival, angst and loneliness in strange places…I loved him very much.”

  While Esther continued to visit Sybille in Rome, insisting that her feelings were unchanged, and that she felt mortified by her infidelity, Sybille for her part began to enjoy a new sense of freedom. Planning to start work on her book, she was also determined to enjoy herself to the fullest. “I am free of Esther,” she wrote to Toni Muir, “and it has probably saved me as an independent person and a writer…My one idea now is to make something of my life or such abilities as I may have…I have the feeling that for the moment I am out of the wood of human relationships. I’ve never felt so free.”

  In the immediate future such freedom did little for Sybille’s literary career; it did, however, enable her to enjoy a particularly carefree summer. While Janet Flanner had been in Rome, Sybille had come to know her lover, Natalia Murray, attractive, intelligent, “a woman of radiant vitality.” Born and brought up in Rome, Natalia had married an American, and spent much of her earlier life in New York, which is where, after divorcing her husband, she had first met Janet. As Janet was often away, Natalia now spent much time on her own, very ready to enjoy an affair with Sybille. Natalia was charming, Sybille told Allanah. “Not educated in our sense but with a natural emotional sense of style and beauty. She is also very smart indeed which I think is so much nicer than dowdiness in a travel companion.”

  The two of them went to Florence for the music festival in May. “I had what is called a good time in Florence,” Sybille reported, “a sort of fullness of doing the things I like so much: ballet, opera, pictures and pictures and pictures.” While in the city, the most memorable encounter was with a fellow guest at their hotel, Una, Lady Troubridge. Una Troubridge was the “widow” of the lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall, author of that notorious work The Well of Loneliness. One evening Sybille and Natalia joined her for cocktails, or “cocktailinos” as Natalia always referred to them, both intrigued by this stern-faced, masculine figure sitting very upright in her tailored suit and tie. “I never met a more self-righteous woman,” Sybille recalled. “There was something very hard about her and it wasn’t just the stiff collars and the monocle…[she] went to early Mass every morning (in the bitter dawn), was rather good company, intelligent about music and Italian art, preposterous about politics, ungiving about friends, and a source of much amusement.”

  Returning to Rome Sybille and Natalia continued to see each other although they were careful to keep their relationship secret. “How guilty one feels,” Sybille confessed to Toni. “The jerk at the collar. I’ve been letting go too much lately, you know; it frightens one.”

  The following month Sybille let herself go again, involved in an even briefer liaison, this time with an actress friend of Allanah’s. Patricia Laffan was taking part in a film, Quo Vadis, an epic of ancient Rome, with Peter Ustinov as the emperor Nero and Patricia as his wife, Poppaea. “Your friend Patricia Laffan seems charming: warm and open and such zest. I liked her,” Sybille reported to Allanah. Shortly after this first encounter Sybille found herself dining with a group that
included Patricia, who “took me aside and made a declaration that could not have been more straight from the shoulder and direct. God, the young are crude…She’s twenty-seven, very pretty, without the slightest mystery.” Later the two of them retired to bed, afterwards making a date for the following night, a commitment that Sybille almost immediately regretted. “I tried to dodge my actress, but apparently one had been far more of a success than one thought, and it became absolutely impossible to get out, without great show of ill grace, of that 2 a.m. rendezvous. The awful thing is I rather like her. I went, and fell asleep in five minutes. With the young one can’t even laugh about it.”

  Despite her good intentions and much nagging from Allanah, Sybille was yet to make any progress on her book. The previous year Allanah had completed a work of her own, All Trivial Fond Records, a childhood memoir dedicated both to her husband, Robert, and to Sybille; well reviewed in the States, it was shortly to be published in Britain. Pleased by her success, Allanah had renewed her efforts to promote Sybille’s writing career, generously continuing to provide her with an income so that she could devote herself to her work. Recently while in London Allanah had lunched with Diana Gollancz, daughter of the publisher Victor Gollancz, who had expressed enthusiasm for Sybille’s Mexican project. “She was very excited about it,” Allanah told Sybille, “said, ‘That is just what Father wants now. I am nearly certain he will take it.’ So for heaven’s sake get on with it.”