Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  By the beginning of 1956, Sybille in London was living in a tiny apartment in Osten Mews, South Kensington, while Evelyn, whose job with Mrs. Torrens had come to an end, rented a room in Ashburn Place, only a few minutes’ walk away. Finally in March A Legacy was published, dedicated to Evelyn. “Yes—Evelyn Gengel,”*3 Sybille told her. “The Book, such as it is, is dedicated to you. And quite Right TOO! (Such a pleasure to me.) Love, my Love. S.”

  A Legacy, regarded by many as Sybille’s finest work, is closely based on recollections of her own childhood and of what she had absorbed of her parents’ history before she was born. The story follows the interlinking through marriage of three families in a newly unified Germany. Like the Herzes, her father’s first parents-in-law, the Jewish Merzes are wealthy industrialists, inward-looking and resolutely uncultured, living in suffocating luxury in Berlin, while the Feldens and Bernins, both Roman Catholic, have long been established in the country, in the bucolic south, near the border with France.

  The novel opens with a magnificent description of the Merzes in their over-stuffed mansion on Voss Strasse, indolent and self-indulgent, with no interest in politics or the arts or indeed in anything except their own comfort. The Merzes “never went anywhere, except to take a cure, and then they went in a private railway carriage, taking their own sheets.” The head of the family, Grandpapa Merz, still regards himself at nearly ninety as a dashing Lothario, while Grandmama, short, placid and very stout, rarely moves from her armchair, her sole domestic duty to interview the cook for half an hour every morning. One son is an idle bureaucrat, while another, Edu, a compulsive gambler, is married to Sarah, a wealthy wife with whom he moves, according to season, from Berlin to London, Paris and the Riviera.

  Of the two rural families, the Feldens, like the Schoenebecks, are “old, landed, agreeably off without being in the least rich and of no particular distinction…the centre of their world was France. They ignored, despised, and later dreaded, Prussia.” The eldest son marries into the Bernin family, while the second, Julius (“Jules”), leads a solitary and sybaritic life, wandering between France and Spain, devoted to a large menagerie of animals and to the courtship of beautiful women. The third son, Johannes, a docile simpleton, brings disaster on the family after running away from his regiment only days after his enrolment. At first vigorously pursued by the army, he is eventually left in peace for over thirty years. Then suddenly his case is revived by the War Office, Johannes is arrested and accidentally shot dead. The event is seized upon by the press, with “the Felden scandal” purveyed to the nation in slavering detail to the horror and humiliation of Johannes’s family.

  On receiving the news of his brother’s arrest Jules, by now in his fifties, reluctantly returns to Germany from Spain. After the early death of his first wife, Jules had married again, to a beautiful and affluent young Englishwoman. Caroline, strong-willed and intelligent, had quickly become bored with her life in Spain, but before she can leave her husband the news reaches them of Johannes’s death, and it is while on the long train journey back to Berlin that Caroline realises she is pregnant. With the press feeding ravenously off the Felden scandal, and with her own condition to consider, Caroline feels trapped, accepting her obligation to stay with Jules, at least for a while. She buys a small estate in the south of the country; a daughter is born; when the little girl, Francesca, is a few years old her mother finally returns to England, leaving the child in the care of her father. It is only after Jules’s death a few years later that mother and daughter are eventually reunited.

  A Legacy is an extraordinary feat of recollection and reconstruction on Sybille’s part, powerfully evocative and indicating an exceptional clarity in vision and understanding. The story draws copiously on Sybille’s own childhood memories, which, as she later remarked, “must have stayed in me suspended in amber.” Vivid, sensual, impressionistic, the complex plot is shot through with wit and irony, as well as with a disturbing portentousness, a hint of darkness to come. The story moves between first and third person, with the little girl, Francesca, appearing intermittently as narrator, a version of the Cheshire cat, as Sybille herself phrased it. From her earliest childhood Sybille had been alert to her surroundings and fascinated by family history, both when living with her parents at Feldkirch and while staying with the Herzes in Berlin. “The sources of A Legacy,” as she later explained, “were the indiscretions of tutors and servants, the censures of nannies, the dinner-table talk of elderly members of a stepfamily-in-law, my own father’s talks, polished and visual; my mother’s talent for presenting private events in the light of literary and historical interpretation.” The characters of Jules and Caroline are immediately recognisable portrayals of her parents, Maximilian the isolated aesthete, Lisa with her flamboyant sexuality and love of sophisticated society. The depiction of Jules is particularly intriguing, with the balance between his exquisite courtesy and a ruthless self-absorption never quite explained—even perhaps not wholly comprehended by the author.

  At a slightly further remove from actuality is the harrowing story of Johannes, concocted from the experience of two families, the Schoenebecks and the Gunthers. Like Johannes in the novel, Maximilian’s elder brother, Gustav, had been cruelly mistreated at his military academy; while Sybille remembered Lisa’s great friend, Mursel von Gunther, describing the sadism of a family tutor, which had resulted in the death of one brother and the lifetime’s confinement of another to a mental institution. The repercussions caused by the fictional Felden scandal closely echo the Allenstein affair, when Gustav, then a major in the Prussian army, was shot dead by his wife’s lover, the story seized upon by the campaigning journalist Maximilian Harden and spread widely throughout the country and abroad. In A Legacy, Sybille gives voice to her rage at the pain this caused her family, with Harden appearing barely disguised as Quintus Narden, “one of the most ruthless and accomplished publicists of the day.”

  As it evolves, the military theme in the novel begins to take on a more sinister significance, a foreshadowing of Germany’s future, as do the final stages of the Merzes’ history. After Grandpapa’s death their fortune is found to be almost depleted, their wealth no longer sealing them off from the threat of an emerging anti-Semitism and the rapid rise of Prussian military ambition. “Much of what was allowed to happen in these decades was ill-conceived, cruel, bad,” Sybille wrote later. “Is some of this a foundation of the vast and monstrous thing that followed? Did the private events I lightly draw upon leave some legacy? Writing about them made me think so.”

  With A Legacy based so closely on fact, Sybille was particularly anxious about the reaction of her sister, Katzi, who appears in the novel under her baptismal name, “Henriette.” Katzi had not only lived for years at Voss Strasse but, unlike Sybille herself, was a blood relation of the Herzes. To Sybille’s relief, however, Katzi told her that she liked the book, thought it “admirablement écrit” (“admirably written”), although she admitted she had been shocked by the lack of discretion about their father, and by the fact that Sybille had not troubled to disguise the Herz family name other than by changing the initial letter.

  It was this last point that proved unexpectedly contentious. Not long after the book’s publication, Sybille was summoned to meet several members of the Herz family, who had recently arrived on a visit to London. After a frigid half-hour she was left alone with the eldest of the group, Marta Strich, née Herz, daughter of the heiress portrayed in the book as Sarah Merz and of the rakish Edu. The conversation that followed was extremely uncomfortable as Marta, white-haired, discreetly elegant in a plain tweed suit, coldly described to Sybille the pain inflicted on the family by her “ghastly book.” Why had Sybille made so little attempt to disguise the family name? Why had she not changed the name of the street where they lived? “You did not think? That is your answer? You just did not think?…My mother was not like that. Not like that at all.” Sybille, mortified, offered profound apologies
and gradually the atmosphere relaxed. “ ‘We were very angry with you, we wanted to make a libel suit.’ ‘And now you are no longer angry?’ ‘No, it is over now. You didn’t think. It wasn’t malice.’ We shook hands and she said breaking into German ‘Nichts fuer ungut [no offence].’ ”

  A Legacy was published on 17 March 1956. A few days earlier George Weidenfeld had invited Sybille to lunch, again at the Ritz. A little nervous but looking forward to the occasion, she was dismayed to find her publisher sullen and depressed. Weidenfeld “was in an awful mood, tired, sloppy, low,” she told Martha. “He seems most tepid, tired, unenthusiastic about this book. Publishing going to the devil anyway, no one wants quality, we won’t advertise before we get reviews…I hope we get some…[and] no, he doesn’t know anyone special to send it to.” To begin with it seemed such pessimism was justified, the first few notices unencouraging in tone, several reviewers bemused by the disconcerting non sequiturs and long passages of unattributed dialogue. “Some of Miss Bedford’s creations might creep as ‘extras’ into the kind of world Proust created,” wrote The Times condescendingly. On the radio the reaction was even less favourable: the “critics on the Third Programme…tore it to pieces,” Sybille reported gloomily to Allanah. “They called it pretentious feminine drivel.”

  It was now, with Sybille’s spirits descending lower by the day, that Esther came to the rescue. A passionate admirer of the novel, Esther had been enraged by what she saw as Martha’s disastrous interference, resulting in Sybille’s move to “Weidengeld,” as she disparagingly referred to him. Dismayed by the publisher’s lethargy and lack of interest, Esther decided to take matters into her own hands, giving a copy to a friend of hers in Paris, Nancy Mitford, and asking Nancy to send it to her old ally, Evelyn Waugh. After reading the novel, Nancy wrote to Sybille. “My dear Mrs. Bedford,” her letter began, “It would be absolutely impossible for me to tell you (I mean really to convey) how much I admire your book. It is certainly one of the very best novels I have ever read.” There was only one small error that Nancy, supernaturally alert to such matters, felt she should point out. “The Almanach de Gotha (surely, I’m sure I’m right) only deals with princely & ducal families—?”

  Three days later Nancy received a response from Waugh. “I am hugely grateful to you for sending me A Legacy. I read it straight through with intense pleasure.” Inevitably he had a number of criticisms, in particular the author’s distressing lack of knowledge about Catholicism, but overall he had been fascinated by the book and, he added teasingly, was very curious as to who “this brilliant ‘Mrs. Bedford’ could be. A cosmopolitan military man, plainly, with a knowledge of parliamentary government and popular journalism, a dislike for Prussians, a liking for Jews, a belief that everyone speaks French in the home.” To this Nancy, who had recently met Sybille for the first time, replied, “The real Mrs. Bedford is a small, fair, intensely shy woman, about forty I suppose, half German. There is something very sweet about her, but never would you suspect talent & when a mutual friend sent me the book I dreaded having to read enough to be able to comment…Of course I was immobilised for days.”

  On 13 April, a short review by Waugh was published in the Spectator. “A novel has just appeared by a new writer of remarkable accomplishment,” his article began, “a book of entirely delicious quality…cool, witty, elegant.” This was not to say the work did not have its weaknesses—a disruptive time sequence, for instance, in which “the daughter relates things she cannot possibly ever have known as though she were an eye witness.” There were also indications of theological ignorance, a certain clumsiness in narrative technique, especially in the second half, “as though the author had taken a deep, unaccustomed draught of Henry James.” But overall it was an exceptional work and “we gratefully salute a new artist.”

  For Sybille, Waugh’s review changed everything. “Nothing that has been said about my work has given me so much pleasure,” she later remarked. “It’s the one thing I hang on to sometimes when I start to wonder what I have done with my life.” Other laudatory reviews soon followed, among them one by Francis Wyndham in the London Magazine, who described the book as “original, witty, entertaining, informative, elegant, intelligent.” Another, in Encounter, by Waugh’s old friend Christopher Sykes, acclaimed Sybille as “a writer of extraordinary power. Her book is unconventional, bold, experimental…It has considerable faults and is probably not a masterpiece for that reason, but it is written with genius.” It was Sykes, then working at the BBC, who also produced a dramatised version of A Legacy, to be broadcast on radio the following year.

  Nine months after its British publication, the novel appeared in the States. Initially there had been little enthusiasm in New York, where it had been turned down by five firms, among them Knopf, Random House, and also by Cass Canfield at Harper’s; Canfield, who had published The Sudden View, was reported as saying it was one of the dullest books he had ever read. But then Sybille, through her agent, Elaine Greene, received an offer from Simon & Schuster, which was gratefully accepted. Here her energetic young editor, Robert Gottlieb, “fell madly in love” with A Legacy. Convinced he had a masterpiece on his hands, he at once began promoting the book, writing dozens of letters to critics and well-known writers, publicising it as widely as possible. “We did everything,” he later recalled. “And it worked.”

  A Legacy came out on 30 January 1957, and for several weeks appeared on the bestseller list of both the New York Times and the Herald Tribune. The book was bought for $1,500 by the Readers Subscription Club, whose editors were W. H. Auden, Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun, and to Sybille’s particular delight received a laudatory review from Janet Flanner in the New Yorker. “Cosmopolitan, ironic, penetrating,” Janet described it, “the most interesting, entertaining, and illuminating novel about high-class, old-fashioned Germans since Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which it in no way resembles.” Before long Simon & Schuster had sold 20,000 copies, which, as Bob Gottlieb later remarked, for such a European and elitist novel was “a highly unlikely success back in the fifties.” To Sybille he wrote appreciatively, “We are simply delighted with the way the book has been received. It is for us a wonderful proof that we can publish books we really love and still MAKE MONEY.”

  While A Legacy was significantly to raise Sybille’s professional reputation, it was now that her private life, too, was to change dramatically. At the beginning of the previous year, 1956, Sybille had been somewhat nervously awaiting the day of publication. She and Evelyn were still living apart in London while hoping soon to find a place they could share. They saw each other almost daily, Evelyn working industriously on her lampshades, helped by Sybille, who in her little Citroën took on the job of collecting the supplies of raffia and wire frames that Evelyn required. Sometimes the two of them had supper together in Sybille’s tiny flat in Osten Mews, South Kensington, but more often Sybille, usually accompanied by Evelyn, spent the evening with old friends, among them Allanah and Fay Blacket Gill, Joan and Peter Churchill, Toni Muir, and Sybille’s old friend from her Sanary days, Sylvester Gates, now a successful banker and contentedly settled with his second wife.

  And there was also Martha, at this period still one of Sybille’s closest and most trusted confidantes, now living with her husband in a large house in Chester Square, Belgravia. It was Martha who suggested one January day that the two of them should drive out to the country to see the famous gardens at Luton Hoo in Bedfordshire designed by Capability Brown. Afterwards they went to a local pub where they lunched off beer and beef sandwiches, an ending to an expedition that Sybille recalled as both pleasant and unremarkable. Returning to London in the late afternoon, Martha dropped Sybille off at Osten Mews. That same evening Sybille noted in her diary, “Everything changes.”

  It had been almost three years since Sybille had last seen Eda Lord, when they had encountered each other while in Paris in 1953. Now Eda and her lover Hilary Williams, with whom she ha
d been living in Wales, had recently arrived in London, and were staying with Joan and Peter Churchill in their apartment near the Strand. It was almost certainly with the Churchills that Sybille and Eda met again, and on this occasion the effect on both was tumultuous. Over the next couple of weeks Sybille’s brief diary entries chart her emotional state as she and Eda, now passionately in love, planned to meet whenever possible, Sybille in the grip of an overwhelming emotion, sometimes ecstatic, often in an agony of tension and anxiety. “A held-in day of pacing and inner monologues and waiting…Wait for telephone all day…Walk the block again and again at night. Not good…Desolate.” Then one day, after lunching with Martha, “Come home and find message…Babbling with relief. Very warm…Radiant day…Everything more and more wonderful…”

  As the weeks passed, the two saw each other whenever they could, intently discussing their plans for a future together. At this point they had known each other for more than twenty years and had many friends in common, even, in one instance, a lover: in France after the war Eda had had an affair with Allanah, who had been devastated when Eda subsequently left her for Hilary Williams. At forty-eight, Eda was four years older than Sybille, slender, fragile and pale-faced, with large dark eyes and beautiful thick hair streaked with grey. Shy and retiring, Eda gave the impression of “a wounded bird,” in the words of one acquaintance, always arriving at social occasions clutching a thermos of coffee as in the past she had been a serious alcoholic. Now both she and Sybille were faced with uprooting their lives, breaking out of long-established relationships in order to begin again with each other, neither for a moment in doubt that this was what they must do. Being with Sybille, Eda said, “makes me feel as though I were a tail attached to a very bright comet.”