ELLA WINDSOR - ARTICLES

THE MAIL ON SUNDAY
NIGHT AND DAY MAGAZINE
Portrait of the Artist

Sybille Bedford, OBE, 94, nearly blind and pained with spinal arthritis, took several years to write Quicksands, her newly published memoir. Her exquisite prose was penned on pale green paper to lessen the glare in a scrawl that even she finds barely legible. Quicksands is Bedford's tenth book and her first memoirs, although her novels A Legacy and Jigsaw (the latter shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989) were largely biographical. Quicksands tells of a life fraught with uncertainty, challenge and literary triumph.

Born Sybille von Schoenebeck,in Germany,in 1911,of mixed English-German-Jewish blood,she spent her early life, from the age of four,criss-crossing Germany,England,Italy and France,as Europe was riven by World War I.

It was her English mother, Elizabeth Bernard, the driving force in Sybille's life, who sent her abroad, only sometimes accompanying her. Maximilian von Schoenebeck, Bedford's father, was much older than his wife, and died with appendicitis when his daughter was young, leaving his widow free to engage in a series of whirlwind affairs, the last of which sparked her morphine addiction.

From the start, Bedford was subject to her mother's whims, and was frequently left to entertain herself. Aged 11, in Italy, in 1922, she was completely abandoned, left waiting at a hotel in Merano, in care that failed to materialise. Thrown back on her own resources, Sybille coped remarkably.

'My mother returned, not unduly disconcerted to find me by myself (there had been no address to communicate the fact to her). She saw me as fairly acclimatised, holding my own. I had managed to refuse hotel guests' kindly offers to include me at their table at meals, and instead strode nonchalantly hair brushed, hands washed to my own, a decent corner table for one, bringing a book.'

Her reading skills, up to this point, had been poor, retarded by erratic schooling and recurrent conjunctivitis. The nuns at one convent school had judged her 'analphabetic' having little knowledge of the written word. However, she was now lost in a written-world of make-believe. 'My mother had left me a clutch of Tauchnitzes, those pre-Penguin English-language paperbacks for sale at every continental bookstall; she had also left me some money. I bought an Italian grammar book and a ball. I went for walks. Sometimes I felt a little queasy, uncertain, as though I was playing a part.

"And how are we this morning?" they would say to me in the garden. I had to push away a secret question: what if nobody came back?'

Sybille's peripatetic existence continued into adulthood. In pre-World War II England, she became part of the Bloomsbury set, the avant-garde group of writers and artists that included Virginia Woolf, EM Forster and Lytton Strachey. She was also befriended by Bertold Brecht and Thomas Mann, great German 'writers in abrupt exile' whom she first met on the Cote d'Azur in 1933. In 1940, she and her mother left Europe to the California home of Aldous Huxley, eventually returning to France via stays in England, Portugal and Italy.

Meanwhile, in Germany, Sybille's Jewishness was revealed by the publication of an article she wrote for a literary journal critical of the Nazis. Her German bank account was frozen and passport withdrawn. To gain British citizenship, she hastily married the openly homosexual Walter Bedford. They never met again.

The style of Quicksands, often teasingly elusive, is telling of Bedford's haphazard life. Throughout her journeying, she strove to find her writer's voice, and through it her identity. She won critical acclaim for A Visit to Don Otavio: A Traveller's Tale from Mexico, her fourth manuscript, which the late Bruce Chatwin, novelist and travel writer, was to describe as simply 'the most perfect travel book of the century'. It was not, however, until 1956 that Evelyn Waugh's praise for A Legacy brought her to widespread public notice. She blames the delay on 'sloth, discouragement, distractions', but the truth was perhaps that she lacked confidence. 'I had read too much and knew too little,' she writes.

Bedford seems to have been highly suggestible. When a female friend, Evelyn, declared romantic love for her in Rome in the late Forties, her reaction was to invite her to move in.

'Up on the roof, Evelyn and I were facing each other across the washing-line, folding pillowcases, kitchen towels, when I heard her clearly enunciate what I call the three fatal words,' she writes. 'Most of us have heard or spoken them at one time or another, rashly or deliberately, gravely or lightly, acceptably or rejectably, meant for the moment, meant for ever. Now I did not believe what I heard. I looked at Evelyn, pulling down another piece of washing. She looked at me. The way she did forced me to say something. I did so in a soothing now-now sort of way, as one might to a cat wanting to get at one's plate.'

Although she was born into privilege, and raised in a small castle, Bedford has experienced appalling hardship. Friends and loved ones committed suicide or were murdered by the Nazis, and she and her mother were more than once reduced to poverty. Elizabeth, however, in the grip of drug dependency, and reliant on Sybille to administer her dosage via a glass syringe, remained ever the hedonist.

'One part of the life of pleasure was treating me to dinner at a good restaurant. ("Look one up in the Guide Michelin- never mind about kilometres, find a place with a view..."). I protested. We were spending far too much already. Yet there we would be on the banquette of some suave place, ordering an extravagant train of courses, hardly noticed once they had got on to her plate, with me watching for the first signs of agitation, ready to ask for the bill, too aware that there was still the order of an elaborate sweet omelette.'

Bedford does not flinch from telling how she finally let go of her mother, leaving her in a nursing home, wrecked by her morphine addiction.

'One afternoon I came home and found the large looking-glass, a clock and the flower vases knocked down and smashed, the jagged pieces of glass all over the floor. My mother had taken a poker to them; it hadn't required, she said, much strength.

'She was taken towards a long cure in another country. Later, circumstances were not propitious for direct contact. I knew that she had a period of remission, living on her own, free of any artificial paradise. Her physical health, however, was ruined. She died in a hospital in her midfifties; I fear, though I hope not, alone.'

Bedford's memory for details is as crystalline as her prose, and if her narrative wanders here and there, we must indulge it. She has, after all, a very long and vivid tale to tell.

'Quicksands', by Sybille Bedford, is published by Hamish Hamilton, priced at Pounds 20.