Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  Since Mary Frances in her manner towards Sybille was charming one moment, caustically critical the next, it was hardly surprising that Sybille found her puzzling; after their few days together in the Napa Valley she remarked that although Mary Frances could not have been kinder, “I cannot make her out…[I] find her a very, very strange woman indeed.” For her part Mary Frances enjoyed the expedition, particularly pleased to be able to spend time with Eda, although worried by her old friend’s non-stop smoking, her hacking cough and obvious frailty—“I feel as if she is nourished on cobwebs,” she wrote to a friend afterwards.

  Finally, after six months in the States, Sybille and Eda sailed for Southampton in April 1969. In London they stayed at Chester Square, where Tom Matthews was now living with his new wife. Sybille was impressed by the change in atmosphere, remembering all too clearly the rows and tensions endemic during Martha’s reign. “Tom seems very well and contented,” she reported to Evelyn. “The servants are welcoming. So is the hostess. There is food, drink, delicious breakfast in bed; solicitude. A changed house. One only realises how peculiar it was in M’s time.” After a few days the two of them moved into a borrowed apartment in Chesham Place, and during the following weeks Sybille saw a number of friends, among them Rosamond Lehmann, first encountered some years earlier and whose novels she much admired. It was Rosamond who had proposed Sybille as a member of the PEN Club, to which, to her great satisfaction, she had been elected in 1962.

  On this occasion Rosamond invited Sybille to dinner at her flat in Eaton Square. Although taken aback by the change in her appearance—Rosamond, once a famous beauty, was now in her late sixties and very overweight—Sybille was enchanted by her hostess’s intelligence and charm, her profound interest in life and literature. “We talked and talked, about writing and Aldous and life and death and learning about human life…Then she walked me home, from Eaton Square where she lives to Chesham Place, less than ten minutes, then I walked her back, then she walked me home, then once more, in the May night in creamy Belgravia, the trees out with Gainsborough’s vistas, all like old times and being young, walking, talking through the night. Her last words to me were, ‘You ought to live in London.’ I think I know that too.” Soon after leaving for Provence, Sybille wrote to Evelyn, “I loved London and left it with sadness and reluctance. I love it more and more…Feel at home. More so than in France.”

  Returning to Les Bastides in May, both Sybille and Eda looked forward to a hard-working summer, Eda determined to finish her novel, Sybille writing and busily organising the material gained from her Huxley research. Despite the increase in her advance, she remained acutely anxious about the state of her finances, an anxiety she had confided to several close friends. But now, at least for a while, the problem was solved, first by the arrival of a large cheque from Tania Stern, then by an even larger sum from Martha. “I’ve written to my Swiss bank,” Martha wrote. “After 20 August, when illicit money comes in (never never breathe about this Sibbie for it would destroy me, you must promise) you will have word from the American Express Cannes that there is $2,500 in Travellers checks for you and $2,500 for Eda—that ought to see you through the Huxley book.” Sybille, long accustomed to relying on financial support from friends, was nonetheless profoundly grateful. “I think it’s an extraordinary deed, and that alone is a source of joy,” she wrote to her. “This will make the whole difference to the next years—doing the biography with that peace of mind which is the real need.”

  Over the following months, Sybille committed herself to a disciplined routine, “revising, retyping, cutting, adding to, despairing over, the 40,000 words I wrote this winter.” One of the most effortful jobs was the transcription of an interview with Aldous on a series of gramophone records. “I have to begin by transcribing—less audibly—to a tape recorder. An hour gets me about two pages of transcriptions: 7 mins or so of spoken. There are ten hours of it…It is all fascinating and essential, but oh the mechanics of it.” A rather less stressful undertaking was a meeting with Graham Greene, conducted at his “gimcrack modernissimo” apartment in Antibes. “We were alone. It was very pleasant…We talked about Evelyn Waugh and Aldous…There is a gentleness about him that may come from an immense désabusement…which is at once sad, dead-endish and a kind of facade. I think we were intimate and open in our talk—but it did not seem to match anything inside. I came home exhausted.”

  In October 1970, both Sybille and Eda were delighted to hear from New York that Bob Gottlieb and his new wife, the actress Maria Tucci, would shortly be arriving on the Riviera. For Eda, who had grown slack over work on her novel, the prospect of Bob’s imminent appearance instantly galvanised her. “I buckled down and finished it. The last word on the day of his arrival. I handed over the manuscript that night after dinner.” Fortunately Bob liked the novel, promising publication for September the following year.

  The day after the Gottliebs left, Mary Frances, accompanied by her sister, Norah, arrived from California, having rented an apartment in a house almost next door to Les Bastides. The presence of Mary Frances marked the beginning for Sybille of one of the most intensely epicurean periods of her life, in the midst of a community of internationally known professionals, “a v. large section of the US Cooking Establishment,” as she reported to Elizabeth David. As well as Mary Frances, also in the region were Richard Olney, for years highly regarded for his writing in the journal Cuisine et Vins de France; James Beard, the celebrity chef, who had founded his own cookery schools in Oregon and New York; and most famous of all, the writer and television star Julia Child, with her husband, Paul. All were living or staying in an area a few kilometres south of Grasse and within reach of Les Bastides.

  Sybille had first met the Childs three years earlier, when the couple had arrived from the States on a visit to London. By then Julia had become a mass-market phenomenon in America, with her immensely influential book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, selling in the hundreds of thousands, while her television show was watched by millions. Julia, an old friend of Mary Frances, had written to Sybille expressing her admiration of Sybille’s article on Elizabeth David, and this had led to a meeting. “One likes them immensely,” Sybille had reported. Julia “is so warm, spontaneous.” Not long afterwards while in France Sybille and Eda were invited to dine at the Childs’ small house at Plascassier, La Pitchoune, or “La Peetch,” as Julia referred to it, where they spent several months every year.

  The Childs had lived for long periods in France, Paul working as a diplomat in Paris, while Julia had enrolled in a course at the famous Cordon Bleu cookery school. Cooking soon became her passion, but it was not until the early 1960s, when she collaborated on Mastering the Art of French Cooking, that she became famous. Both were fluent in French, but while Paul was scholarly and serious, Julia, over six feet tall, ungainly, with big bones and large, flat feet, was like a jolly schoolgirl, her conversation peppered with exclamations—“Yuck!,” “Boo-boos!,” “Wooh!,” “Hooray!” Although Julia was the celebrity, it was Paul on whom his wife wholly depended, his knowledge of cuisine and wine far more profound and intellectual than hers. As Mary Frances remarked to Eda, “professionally she is Trilby to his Svengali.”

  Before long Sybille and Eda became regular guests at La Pitchoune, sometimes on their own, sometimes with the Childs’ gentle giant of a friend, James Beard, who was currently being treated in a clinic in Grasse for life-threatening obesity. “We had a smashing evening, I must say,” Julia reported to Mary Frances after one such evening. “We started with an excellent champagne (Clos des Goisses, at Sybille’s recommendation), then a lovely (if I do say so) oeuf en pistouille (poached egg in tomato filled with eggplant mixture, cold) with a Chablis ‘Fourchaume.’ With the MAGNUM of H[aut] B[rion], we had a new version of the ubiquitous Boeuf Wellington…(sliced, spread with Duxelles, then baked in a very thin brioche crust) and pommes Anna fromagées. It was one of those evenings where everyone was happy
and everything went wonderfully well including all the food.”

  On another occasion with the Childs, Sybille, Paul Child and Eda sat at the kitchen table while Julia, in Sybille’s words, “like the dear unflappable, slightly clumsy, St. Bernard she looks…began whisking up things in a great copper bowl for making her own pudding, her version of baked Alaska. It is a superb chocolate ice cream (Julia made) on some cake with a cap of whipped white of egg baked for seconds in a hell-hot oven, then you sink an empty egg-shell into the mountain crust, fill it with rum, strike a match and the flames leap up, burning Vesuvius, she calls it, I call it Pelion on Ossa. That was borne flaming back into the dining room and we ate that with a bolt of Château d’Yquem (not tasted for over thirty years). Later we finished the bottle by the fire. Memorable, even more than the wines, was the generosity and spirit of our hosts. It was lovable.”

  Fond though she was of the Childs and much as she enjoyed the evenings at La Pitchoune, Sybille always slightly looked down on Julia’s cuisine, regarding it as no more than good hotel cooking. As she told Evelyn, Julia “is competent, enamoured of French food and style, an imitator. All her home-cooked food, served with great charm and ease, tastes like first-rate mass-produced…Don’t let it go further…as one has such affection for them.”

  When in December 1970 Mary Frances had arrived in the region, her main purpose was to see Eda as well as her old friends, the Childs, but she was eager, too, to meet Richard Olney, whose scholarly writing on food and wine she had long admired. Richard had been a close friend of Eda since the early 1950s, when after leaving the States as a very young man he had settled in Paris. Intently focused on learning to cook, he had remained in the city for nearly a decade before moving to the Midi, to Solliès-Toucas, where he had bought and restored a tiny derelict farmhouse on a hillside overlooking the ancient village. Now in his mid-forties, slender and dark-haired, Richard lived a solitary, orderly life, and apart from the occasional boyfriend saw almost no one for weeks at a time. A ruthless perfectionist, he was dedicated to his cooking, his style at once sensual and austere. Highly intelligent, Richard when in company could be both daunting and extremely charming, often relaying devastating criticism of his friends and neighbours behind their backs. “He lives so outside the world, not only world of world affairs but of private affairs. Strange boy,” Sybille noted in her diary.

  Soon after Mary Frances’s arrival, she, Sybille and Eda were invited to dinner by Richard at Solliès-Toucas. The drive took over two hours and they arrived in mid-afternoon, escorted by their host to a vine-covered terrace overlooking the garden. Here they sat and talked over aperitifs until the early evening, when Richard led them into the small kitchen, where they sat at a table in front of a large fireplace hung with copper pots. At a leisurely pace the three women were served with course after exquisite course: artichokes poivrade, a roulade of fillets of sole with a mousseline of sea urchins in aspic, daube à la provençale with pasta macaronade, a rocket salad, cheese, and a raspberry sorbet. Accompanying each course was a fine vintage wine from Richard’s excellent cellar. “Dinner was superb. Endless,” Mary Frances reported. “The wines were very good indeed, and also endless. The talk, which with Sybille racing a hundred words a minute, was mostly about those two subjects, wine and food, it was endless.” Throughout the meal, Eda sat mostly silent, as usual smoking and drinking coffee. “Eda was gentle and comfortable to be with,” Richard recalled; “her conversation was quietly ironic…her voice and laugh corrugated by a dedication to cigarettes…She loved the table and was fascinated by wine, sniffed it, but dared not taste it.” It was not until the small hours that the three women finally left, tottering back to the house in the village where they were to spend the night.

  The alliance between Sybille and Richard quickly grew close, each enjoying the other’s artistry and expertise, with Richard in particular relishing Sybille’s sharp tongue, the comedy and cruelty intrinsic to her assessment of the talents and personalities of their mutual friends. “I had a couple of evening sessions with Sybille,” Richard told his brother, “critical, negative, destructive judgements about everything and everyone—the terrible thing is that we agreed about everything.” Mary Frances, on the other hand, began to grow tired of these lengthy conversations, these “strange, gastronomical capers,” with Richard and Sybille taking centre stage while Eda sat on the sidelines, saying little. “I almost never see Eda except through a dense Sybillian fog,” she complained. Both she and Julia Child were worried, too, by Eda’s fragile appearance, by her “bubbly cough,” and the fact that, with Sybille working hard on her book, all the chores, all the cooking, driving, shopping, were left to Eda. “Sybille is very bad for Eda,” Mary Frances warned Richard. “We must work together to separate them,” a suggestion which Richard, however, firmly dismissed. Fortunately, Eda was able to take a few days off occasionally to stay on her own with Richard, away from the stresses of life at Les Bastides, where Sybille frequently burst “from her workroom to prowl and growl like a bear with a sore head.”

  One of the strongest bonds between Sybille and Richard was their love for and expert knowledge of wine. “A great nineteenth-century wine,” Sybille said once, “is as living and romantic to me as a piece of archaic art.” Like Flavia in A Compass Error, Sybille “had loved wine from childhood…[loved] the range of learning and experiment afforded by wine’s infinite variety; but what she loved more than these was the taste—of peach and earth and honeysuckle and raspberries and spice and cedarwood and pebbles and truffles and tobacco leaf; and the happiness, the quiet ecstasy that spreads through heart and limbs and mind.” In 1968 Sybille had written to Jimmy Stern, “I quite seriously think that if I were only ten years younger…I would give up writing…[and] get myself apprenticed in the wine trade; I should have been very happy in that.” Yet while never joining the profession, she nonetheless became closely connected to it, from the early 1960s attending tastings and joining a number of societies, including the Wine & Spirit Trade Association and the Directors’ Wine Club, although not the Wine Society, which she considered mainly for amateurs and on the whole “pretty mediocre.”

  Over the last decade or so Sybille at Les Bastides had been carefully assembling a personal cellar, buying wine on a regular basis—white wines, Riesling, Muscat and Pinot Blanc, from Alsace, while cases of red, of Médoc and Graves, were purchased from three or four chateaux, where they were stored for several years before drinking. For more immediate consumption wine was bought from a small local co-operative, and every year as well a barrel was ordered from a vintner in the Var, its contents bottled by Sybille at home. “This was a great labour, what with the hand-worked corking device…and my scrubbing out and washing 200 bottles under the village pump; but the wine, fresh and honest and low in alcohol…was a pleasure.”

  A more serious involvement with the wine trade began in 1967 when Sybille was lured by the “siren song” of Justerini & Brooks in St. James’s. This old-established firm offered “a simple persuasive plan for financing one’s drinking of fine wines. The idea was to buy young wines…keep them till they were ready and (almost inevitably) appreciated in value, then drink, say, one half and sell the other.” The scheme turned out to be excellent value, Sybille investing in some fine clarets as well as hocks and Moselles, purchasing Châteaux Latour, Margaux and Mouton-Rothschild at under £3 a bottle. Wine for her own drinking was held in store, and “twice each year I work out my needs, study the form, consult with the merchant/guardian concerned, then draw two dozen or so.” When in the company of Richard Olney or of other oenophile friends, Sybille would talk absorbedly for hours about vintages and chateaux, identifying, classifying, comparing varieties, discussing the perfect sequence and combination to accompany different ingredients and dishes. “That is what is so fascinating about wine,” she said once in an interview, “one never stops discovering things. There is always more to learn.”

  After the departure of M
ary Frances at the end of the year, Sybille and Eda remained at Les Bastides for another six months, eventually leaving for London in the middle of June 1971. Both had been worried that they had nowhere to stay, but eventually, almost at the last moment, a friend located a ground-floor apartment in Chelsea, available for a modest rent of only £10 a week. From the description, the flat, at 23 Old Church Street, sounded unappealing, with a small sitting room, a tiny windowless kitchen, a miniature bathroom, and one single-bed cubicle, with a folding cot to be opened when necessary. “We are dismayed about it,” Sybille told Evelyn. “A little hole.” The day they arrived it was pouring with rain and both were depressed when they saw the accommodation. “Flat pretty awful,” was Sybille’s view. “Inconvenient, too cramped…One will not take to it.” Fortunately, another temporary apartment was found for Eda only five minutes’ walk away, and gradually Sybille began to warm to Old Church Street. She soon discovered the small space was perfectly adequate for one, and there was a little garden, “with an acacia tree which I adore and flowering bushes,” where on warm evenings she and Eda could sit and eat outside. And indeed over the following years, Old Church Street was to become Sybille’s London base, and the tiny flat eventually her permanent home.

  On this particular occasion, Eda, craving the hot Mediterranean summer and long hours spent in the sea, returned to France after only three weeks, while Sybille, who with her weak eyesight always found the sunlight painful, remained in London till the autumn. During the day she continued to work hard on her book, in the evenings dining with friends, among them Elizabeth David, Anne Balfour-Fraser, the Sterns, the Robson-Scotts, Rosamond Lehmann, and also Martha, who was temporarily in London. Sybille had been looking forward to seeing her old pal after such a long interval, but unfortunately the evening quickly turned sour. “She said 7.30, came at 8.20,” Sybille told Eda. “She was in a disagreeable mood. Saying I bored and irritated her. ‘You were much nicer and funnier years ago Sibbie, before all the femme de lettres stuff. You don’t make me laugh any more…’ I tried to talk open and seriously about my feelings past and present about her. Met a kind of deadness. Surely not femme de lettres stuff? Surely, surely? Also said I was categorical, and pompous. She may have something there.”