Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  Also pleasing was the fact that her sister Katzi, recently returned from Austria, was also in residence, employed as a housekeeper by Esther. Here Katzi was in her element, busily organising Esther’s social life, planning the menus, even doing much of the shopping and cooking herself—Esther, according to Sybille, did not even know where the kitchen was. Thanks to Katzi, the cuisine was excellent. “We are going to have [a] marvel for dinner it appears,” Sybille reported to Evelyn. “Champagne, Oysters, Roast Poulet de Bresse, with, if fancy does not deceive, a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild, and a hot cheese savoury.” In the evenings, Katzi sometimes visited friends or accompanied Sybille and Esther to the theatre, but her favourite occupation was staging elaborate dinner parties at the apartment, the marble table strewn with roses, crystal glasses gleaming in the candlelight. As in their childhood, Katzi kept a sharp eye on Sybille, and when dining in the company of her sister Sybille was careful to appear neatly dressed, in black jacket, shirt and trousers, her short blonde hair carefully slicked down; yet even so she came in for criticism. “Je mange du cochon, mais je ne mange pas comme un cochon” (“I eat pig, but I don’t eat like a pig”), Katzi remarked meaningfully at lunch one day as Sybille gorged on a plateful of new potatoes. “Tu peux être insupportable,” she told her on another occasion, “et c’est pire maintenant que tu vis avec une personne [Esther] qui pense que tu es un ange” (“You can be unbearable, and it’s worse now that you’re living with someone who thinks you’re an angel”).

  To Evelyn in Rome lengthy descriptions were despatched not only of Sybille’s social life but also of her working routine. Each morning she spent several hours at her desk, before taking long walks through the city in the afternoon. At the rue de Lille the atmosphere was cheerful—“Katzi well and easy…Esther merry as a grig”—and with everything so well organised Sybille was able fully to concentrate on her book. These letters to Evelyn also included detailed accounts of Sybille’s preparations for lunch, much appreciated by Evelyn, whose interest in food was as passionate as her own. “Yesterday,” Sybille reported, “buckled down to a little work, interrupted by lunch…Ryvita, butter, duck drippings, smoked fish roe, boiled eggs, and a large plate of cold cuts on table. Beer, Nescafé…I ate half a slice of ham…and two Ryvita with fish roe (it looks and has the consistency of Mettwurst but tastes like soft not very salty botarga and partakes of the nature of oursin and red caviar. I have a savage passion for it, always drawn between eating or saving it). I took my second cup of Nescafé to my desk and worked undisturbed (Wanda Landowska tinkering Bach in the background).”

  For her part, Evelyn in Rome responded with meticulous records of her own daily activities. In their correspondence the two women had amorously adopted the habit of referring to themselves in the masculine third person, as “he,” often characterising themselves as animals, “Tortoise,” “Turtle,” “Goat,” “Hare,” “Great Beast.” “This afternoon, he changed the ribbon and cleaned his typewriter,” Evelyn reported. “THEN he will begin to think about his DIN…Porker, and beans and salad, and then he will eat it, very gentlemanly, with red wine, and he will listen to Beethoven 4th piano concerto and 3rd symphony…and all the time, thinking lovingly of his dearest creature…his Great BEAST. SO sweet. So kind. It makes HIM CRY. Bless you my darling.” A few evenings later, “He was ravenous, so he put on his roast at seven, and peas pud at the same time…Roast, he will tell him honestly, was quite good—tasty, and edible—but nothing like his darling’s…THEN he mended, stitch stitch stitch…then he made the rounds, spoke to all the dear plants.” Sybille’s letters meant everything to her, Evelyn wrote. “They are yourself, in conversation, with your face with the eager and talkative look it gets, when he begins to rock back and forth, caught in the flow of his own story.”

  Sybille treasured these missives, acutely missing Evelyn’s company. “I think of my Dear constantly and with great tenderness,” she told her. Yet after the intense excitement of the affair’s beginning she had soon become aware that although she loved Evelyn dearly she was not in love with her. “I cannot really love my lovers,” she confessed to Allanah. “There IS something false about a relationship between two women. At least for me. But I do not suffer from it. Only one does not give enough: and then of course some day the tables are turned on one.”

  Nonetheless over the next couple of years as she continued her peripatetic existence, moving between Rome, Paris and the south of France, Sybille felt increasingly protective towards Evelyn, guilty about leaving her so much on her own, worried that she was imposing too heavy a burden. It was Evelyn, after all, who now undertook all domestic duties, and Evelyn’s small savings that largely covered their rent and household expenses. “I do feel,” Sybille wrote to Allanah, “that Evelyn should share some of the good things of my life, and not only slave for me…[Evelyn] has changed her life, milieu, everything, entirely for me; she has given up everything in fact including earning a decent amount of money in America…my life as it is now is entirely thanks to her: how could I work all day…be read to in the evenings, have all dates and historical business looked up for me, doing all the errands…I should be very unhappy if I were completely alone. This almost ideal setting for a writer is perhaps paid for by the future of another human being…Evelyn is not a second-class appendage and I will not treat her so.”

  Mainly due to Evelyn’s care and kindness, Sybille had been able to write uninterruptedly for hours a day in order to meet her deadline. “Yes he realised that he will have to work and work, and it makes him happy to think so,” Evelyn replied. “He will type and type for him, with pride and pleasure. And make him thermos tea, and his lunch-munch, and love him, and answer the telephone for him…It is very coocoo and happy for him to think of his Beast in his room snorkling and mumbling and tapping.” For Sybille it was a period of intense concentration, at her desk all day, wearing her tennis visor to protect her eyes, only emerging in the evenings to water the plants and eat dinner prepared by Evelyn. Finally by the autumn of 1951 the first section of the book was done, the typed pages parcelled up and posted to London. “It is gone,” Sybille told Allanah, “and this morning I tidied my desk and tore up the notes…It is no pleasure at all. How long will it take one to make such an effort again?”

  It was now that Allanah, as before, took control, sending the manuscript to the publisher Victor Gollancz. The following January Sybille learned to her joy that Gollancz was prepared to offer her a contract on condition that the second part was of as high a standard as the first. They wanted to talk to her as soon as possible, she was told, and a meeting was arranged for early February. Delighted by such a positive response, early in the New Year Sybille arrived in London.

  Evelyn, who had worked in publishing while in New York, was anxious that Sybille should present herself in the best possible light. It was important that she should not appear too masculine, she told her, but instead give the impression of a conventional lady writer. “Please,” Evelyn begged her, “will he NOT wear stocks…[but] a pretty chiffon instead??…He wants them to see a fair and feminine creature.” Evelyn also tried to calm Sybille’s nerves. “Don’t make a nonsense by clinging to your idea that it will be an ordeal. It will only be a conversation, between you and people who like your work, and who want to know…what you have in mind. And so, tell them, without any of this false modesty…HE IS RIGHT. DO AS HE SAYS. And don’t mumble.”

  In London Sybille stayed in Chelsea at the house of Allanah’s new attachment, Fay Blacket Gill. On the day of her appointment with Gollancz she awoke acutely anxious, well aware of the firm’s distinguished standing, of its list of famous authors, among them Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Orwell, Kafka and Colette. When she arrived at the address in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, she was surprised to find how shabby the premises appeared. The interior of the house was ramshackle, “even for an English publisher,” she reported to Evelyn. “Up a narrow uncarpeted staircase,
a tiny office, complete with coal fire, teapot, gas ring, hideous cheap pine furniture…rattly sash window.” However, she found Sheila Hodges, who was to be her editor, a “very nice girl, young and simple.” Sheila offered Sybille an advance of £100, rather less than Sybille had hoped, on the understanding that the second half of the book was delivered within six months.

  Slightly to Sybille’s relief she had not had to encounter the head of the firm himself, “a tricky old bird,” as he was known in the trade. She did, however, catch a glimpse of him on her way out. “I had been warned that old Victor Gollancz might come in to have a look at me. He did not. I left the office, and hopped down the stairs much relieved…I muttered, though inaudibly, to myself, that’s over; how mean they are. Then I looked up: and in the door, on the lower landing, poking his head round the jamb, stood watching me VG himself: great wreath of white curls, like Einstein on the stage. Our eyes met, he wriggled back and closed the door.”

  The second section was finished at the end of May 1952, and posted to London. Meanwhile Sybille had been trying without success to think of a title, “something that gives a hint at the Marx Brothers quality of Mexico.” Her first choice had been “The Mango on the Mango-Tree,” a quotation from T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hippopotamus,”*3 but that, it turned out, had recently been used by another Gollancz author. Finally it was Martha Gellhorn, recently returned to Rome, who provided the solution. Martha had been enthusiastic about the book—Sybille “has written a travel book about Mexico which is as funny and perceptive as anything I have ever seen,” she told her friend, the composer William Walton—and had written to Sybille with two suggestions, “The Train of the Day Before Yesterday” and “The Sudden View.” Sybille found it difficult to make up her mind, but eventually chose the latter.

  Finally on 23 February 1953, The Sudden View was published, dedicated to both Esther and Allanah. Sybille was in Rome on the day of publication, sitting reading in the flat by herself, “when the door flung open and in came Martha and Evelyn bearing a champagne bucket and a cake, like a birthday cake, but saying BOOK on it…a very happy moment…We drank two bottles of champagne (but did not get raving), then I struggled out of my old corduroys, and Martha took us out to dinner.”

  The Sudden View, Sybille’s account of her eight-month journey through Mexico, part memoir, part invention, makes for one of the most engaging travel books ever written. Accompanied by “E,” her unnamed companion, Sybille keeps herself at the centre of the frame, an endearingly fallible figure, constantly frustrated, often delighted, occasionally enraged, from the very beginning avid to explore all levels of experience, from squalid to sublime. As the two women begin their travels, everything is observed with close attention, Sybille graphically describing her surroundings and vigorously engaging with the people she encounters en route—nuns, hoteliers, shopkeepers, as well as resident expatriates from Europe and America, many of the latter regarded with a frigid disdain. Food, of course, is the focus of intense examination, but so is the way of life at every level of society, from aristocrat to peasant. Sometimes the travellers find themselves most eccentrically lodged, as in Guadalajara, where at their hotel, a magnificent sixteenth-century palace, they discover the staircase to their first-floor room has yet to be installed and there is no running water. (“There doesn’t seem to be any water in our bathroom.” “Of course not, Señora. It has not been laid on. One thing after another. Perhaps next year?”) Elsewhere, by contrast, they find themselves living in exquisitely serene surroundings, most notably on the property by Lake Chapala belonging to “Don Otavio.” And as in life, so in the book, it is Don Otavio and his luxurious estate that provides the central focus of the adventure.

  A particularly beguiling element of the story is the contrast of Sybille’s enthusiasm to the languor of her companion. “E” is a fond and accurate portrayal of Esther, who throughout her time in Mexico showed a complete lack of curiosity in her surroundings. “ ‘I have not the slightest desire to see the wonders of nature’…‘I will not go to this volcano,’ said E in the manner of Edmund Burke addressing the House of Commons.” Yet despite her reluctance to explore the sights, it was Esther who had guided Sybille in much of her study of the country’s history, from Aztecs and conquistadors to the modern era, all of which Sybille found invaluable for her research. When she had first begun reading about the country she had been unimpressed by most contemporary accounts, naming only Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano as outstanding, with D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent dismissed as “weak and hysterical,” and both Huxley and Waugh as “uninteresting.” Ultimately it was Esther’s suggestion of two nineteenth-century works—William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico and Frances Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico—that contributed most to her understanding of the country’s past.

  The vivid, highly personal account of Sybille’s adventures recounted in The Sudden View was to make a significant impact, establishing her as a talented member of the profession to which she had always yearned to belong. It was with The Sudden View that Sybille finally emerged from the heavy Huxleyan influence in which up till now she had been immersed, here that she found her own voice, that clear, distinctive voice which in the years to come would win her recognition as one of the outstanding writers of her time. The work “was an immediate critical success,” Sybille recalled in an interview many years later. It “made a great difference to me. It meant that I had reached the identity I wanted—that of a writer.”

  Shortly after the day of publication Sybille received a letter from Allanah. “Great Rabbit, A thousand thanks for the dedication, for which I feel deeply honoured…I read about thirty pages without a stop, one cannot put it down, and then tears streamed down my face and I cried out every few minutes, HE CAN WRITE, HE CAN WRITE, IT’S A GREAT BOOK…Oh, Rabbit, what an achievement. The book is so funny every page has some anecdote or some description that makes one laugh.” Sybille was profoundly grateful to Allanah, who had not only encouraged her to write the book—“Without you,” Sybille told her, “I should [still] be sitting in a café, talking about writing”—but with her wide range of literary contacts had been instrumental in promoting it. Although Allanah had failed to persuade Aldous Huxley to contribute an introduction (“his eyes were too bad to permit him to read anything that was not connected with his work,” Allanah explained), she had shown the book to several influential figures, among them Cyril Connolly, who described it as “first class,” and to Raymond Mortimer, who reported that he thought it “brilliant, quite an extraordinary performance for somebody who, so far as I know, has had little experience of writing.”

  Mortimer was also among several critics who reviewed it in the press. “This book can be recommended as vastly enjoyable…radiant with comedy and colour,” he wrote in the Sunday Times. “The frequent snatches of dialogue that enliven the descriptions might be the work of a skilled novelist, so sharp the eye for character, so alive the ear to the run of speech.” John Davenport in the New Statesman was equally enthusiastic, while Peter Quennell in the Daily Mail described the book as “Absorbing…Its account of the lake and the garden, and the flowers and birds of the subtropical landscape around Chapala, has made me long to go to Mexico.” It was also recommended by the Book Society and extracts were read aloud on the BBC.

  Early the following year The Sudden View was published in the States. At first, to Sybille’s disappointment, it had received a number of rejections, but then Cass Canfield, head of Harper’s in New York, agreed to take it on. Nearly twenty years earlier, Canfield, while visiting Aldous Huxley in Sanary, had read one of Sybille’s short stories, writing to her afterwards that although he did not think it worthy of publication he would be pleased to see any of her future work. Now he reacted with enthusiasm. The Sudden View, he told her, “is one of those rare books which a publisher is fortunate to encounter once every few years.” Altho
ugh extremely pleased by Canfield’s response, Sybille had been unimpressed by Gollancz’s handling of the American offer. “They did very badly indeed. Rotten contract, v. low advance. I am afraid it is rather a mess, and I am sick of them.” Nonetheless she was gratified by the book’s reception. “A delightful, unclassifiable, and shimmering book,” wrote Alfred Kazin in the New Yorker; “one of the travel books of the year” said the New York Times, while the Washington Star described it as “something new in travel literature…[with its] vivacious and malicious narrative.”

  Translated into Italian, French and German, The Sudden View in years to come was to be rarely out of print. With its title subsequently changed to A Visit to Don Otavio, the book was later reissued by the New York Review of Books Classics, and in Britain was published in turn by William Collins, by Picador (with an introduction by Bruce Chatwin), and by Eland Books, whose edition remains in print today.

  Exhilarated by her success, Sybille felt she must not lose her impetus, must start work again as soon as possible. Both Martha and Allanah were begging her not to waste time, to begin exploring some of the many themes for the novel she had talked about over the past couple of years. Sybille knew they were right but somehow inspiration failed to arrive. “Maintenant il ne reste que commencer un autre livre” (“Now it remains for me to start another book”), she told Allanah. “But what has one got to say?”

  Skip Notes

  *1 When The Art of Seeing was published in 1943, the distinguished ophthalmologist Stewart Duke-Elder wrote in the British Medical Journal, “For the simple neurotic who has abundance of time to play with, Huxley’s antics of palming, shifting, flashing, and the rest are probably as good treatment as any other system of Yogi or Coué-ism. To these the book may be of value. It is hardly possible that it will impress anyone endowed with common sense and a critical faculty.”