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Caroline Chapman on Sybille Bedford, Slightly Foxed Issue 38

A Bath with a View

I once met Sybille Bedford. ‘Met’ is perhaps the wrong word; I pounced on her at a crowded Time-Life party and began raving about her novel A Legacy which I had just read. She looked at me vaguely. ‘Another lunatic’, I could see her thinking. Then we were separated in the crush, much to her relief I suspect. Sybille, I feel sure, was not one to suffer fools gladly.

On the back cover of her memoir Quicksands, published a year before her death in 2006, is a remarkable photograph. It shows Sybille sitting naked in a large marble bath, reading from a sheaf of A4 pages. It is a startling image, and it provides clues to several aspects of her life and singular personality.

The photograph was taken in 1950 by Evelyn Gendel, Sybille’s close companion for several years – an attachment she described as one of her happiest. The bath plus an L-shaped studio and small kitchen were contained within ‘a longish kind of shed’ perched on the roof of an office block in the Piazza di Spagna in Rome. To reach her eyrie she had to climb up five floors and a flight of wooden steps. For Sybille, the inconvenience of this ascent counted for nothing when compared with the incomparable view it gave her over the rooftops of Rome. The shed came to her, as did so many things in her life, through the kindness of friends; in this instance Theodora and Constantine FitzGibbon, who were leaving Rome and wanted someone to take on the unfinished lease of their ‘flat’.

The sheaf of papers could well be a section of A Legacy, since it was during these contented years with Evelyn that she wrote the novel. On close examination the pages appear to be covered with her famously atrocious handwriting: although Sybille had taught herself to read, her formal education was so brief and fragmentary that she had never been taught how to write. The eyes

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I once met Sybille Bedford. ‘Met’ is perhaps the wrong word; I pounced on her at a crowded Time-Life party and began raving about her novel A Legacy which I had just read. She looked at me vaguely. ‘Another lunatic’, I could see her thinking. Then we were separated in the crush, much to her relief I suspect. Sybille, I feel sure, was not one to suffer fools gladly.

On the back cover of her memoir Quicksands, published a year before her death in 2006, is a remarkable photograph. It shows Sybille sitting naked in a large marble bath, reading from a sheaf of A4 pages. It is a startling image, and it provides clues to several aspects of her life and singular personality. The photograph was taken in 1950 by Evelyn Gendel, Sybille’s close companion for several years – an attachment she described as one of her happiest. The bath plus an L-shaped studio and small kitchen were contained within ‘a longish kind of shed’ perched on the roof of an office block in the Piazza di Spagna in Rome. To reach her eyrie she had to climb up five floors and a flight of wooden steps. For Sybille, the inconvenience of this ascent counted for nothing when compared with the incomparable view it gave her over the rooftops of Rome. The shed came to her, as did so many things in her life, through the kindness of friends; in this instance Theodora and Constantine FitzGibbon, who were leaving Rome and wanted someone to take on the unfinished lease of their ‘flat’. The sheaf of papers could well be a section of A Legacy, since it was during these contented years with Evelyn that she wrote the novel. On close examination the pages appear to be covered with her famously atrocious handwriting: although Sybille had taught herself to read, her formal education was so brief and fragmentary that she had never been taught how to write. The eyeshade was a necessity as she suffered from an intolerance of glare – a particular hazard for someone who spent much of her life living within sight of the Mediterranean. She craved the warm south intensely, and used it as the setting for her other three published novels – so it comes as a surprise to find that much of the action of A Legacy takes place in pre-First World War Germany, principally in Berlin. But she herself was born there, in 1911, the daughter of Baron Maximilian von Schoenebeck and Elizabeth Bernard, his German-Jewish wife, both of whom share some of the circumstances and characteristics of their fictitious counterparts. A Legacy is written from the point of view of a young child (Francesca/Sybille) brought up among adults who looks back to the time before she was born. ‘Thus what I know or feel I know’, she wrote, ‘about the places and the men and women in this story is derived from what I saw and above all heard and overheard as a child at the age of roughly three to ten, much of which I managed to absorb, retain and, decades after, to re-shape in an adult mode.’ In other words, the book is largely autobiographical, as are all but one of her novels. If you read them all on the trot, as I have just done, the line between fact and fiction becomes hopelessly blurred. But Sybille’s life was so extraordinary that one can understand her obsessive attempts to make some sense of it. ‘Is everything only what we remember it to be – neither more nor less? Where, then, and when is truth?’ The plot of A Legacy revolves around the lives of three families and the way they react to a set of circumstances. Grandmama and Grandpapa Merz and their grown-up progeny occupy an ‘outrageously large and ugly’ house in a fashionable area of Berlin. They are Jewish, wealthy, sedentary, and isolated by choice from society. The house is run by the butler, the omnipresent Gottlieb, the only one apparently capable of making a decision. Amid the suffocating gloom of the décor, the family frequently assembles to eat gargantuan meals and discuss the goings-on of its members. Their eldest son, Edu, is a weak-willed gambler entirely dominated by his wife Sarah, one of the book’s most compelling characters. The second family occupies a very different sphere: Catholic landed gentry living in their ancestral schloss in a rural corner of Baden. Motherless from an early age, Julius (the book’s main character, ‘at once delicate and worldly, and much affected by lapses that were neither’) and his three brothers are brought up by their eccentric father Baron Felden to be cultured country gentlemen. The Merzes and the Feldens are united by the marriage of Julius to the Merzes’ docile daughter Melanie, who dies of TB soon after giving birth to a daughter (Sybille’s actual half-sister). When Julius remarries, this time to Caroline, a beautiful Englishwoman, the Merzes continue to treat him – and, by extension, Caroline – as one of the family. A daughter is born to Julius and Caroline – who is Sybille in all but name. What precipitates the book’s inciting incident is the unification of Germany in 1870. ‘No good would come of it, said the old Baron, and his tenants said the same.’ But the tenor of the times requires that his sons should take up careers: Julius as a diplomat, his younger brother Johannes as a soldier. Johannes is duly sent to a Prussian military cadet school at Benzheim. Appalled by its brutality and inhumanity, he escapes and returns home more dead than alive. The school demands his immediate return. The old Baron refuses to comply. ‘Then several kinds of forces began to move all at once. They were not directly interested in Johannes, he was discounted and at the same time [became] a factor in their calculations, and they crushed him.’ These conflicting ‘forces’ consisted of the German War Office and the authorities at Benzheim, the Feldens and, last but certainly not least, Count Bernin, father of Clara who is engaged to Julius’s eldest brother Gustavus. Bernin, the leader of a powerful Catholic clique, is wealthy, influential and ambitious. The newspapers take up the story and Johannes becomes the centre of a cause célèbre. There is a good deal of arm-twisting all round. Bernin, for one, is told he will be ‘rendering a lasting service to the German Government’ if he facilitates Johannes’s return to Benzheim. He resists. But Benzheim wins in the end and Johannes, now no longer wholly sane, is sent back. There is a desperate bid to save the boy which ends in a tragic accident; and a vital letter is not delivered which, in time, leads to yet another tragedy. Few of those involved feel entirely blameless for what has happened. When I first read A Legacy I assumed the title referred to the ripples that spread outwards from this sequence of events. But in her 1999 introduction to the novel, Sybille explained her choice thus:

Much of what was allowed to happen in these decades [1870–1914] was ill-conceived, cruel, bad (in simple terms); there was also a German dottiness, devoid of humour . . . 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. Hence the title.

She once said that she had written A Legacy out of a loathing for Germany and, apart from one brief visit with Aldous Huxley in 1932, she did not return there until the 1960s. She also made a conscious decision to abandon her native tongue and write in English. At heart she was a European – little wonder since she lived in Germany with her father until his death when she was 14, and her adolescence was spent partly with her mother in Italy and France, partly on her own in England. She was to continue this peripatetic and often precarious pattern throughout her life. This is reflected in her writing: the text of A Legacy is peppered with French and German sentences, even entire paragraphs. If your idiomatic French is a bit rusty, tough. ‘No one’, she once said, ‘has ever done anything worth doing who thought about the reader’, and this attitude is – for me – one of the great attractions of her books: she constantly challenges you to keep up with her. If you fail for instance to realize that three of the characters having lunch on the terrace are monkeys – too bad. (I retained a clear image of this lunch party from my original reading and wondered if I had carelessly missed an earlier clue. But I checked, and there was nothing to indicate their identity for five pages, although three of the guests did appear to be behaving rather oddly.) Sybille is brilliant at evoking time and place: the cicada-loud, pine-scented heat of the French Riviera; the claustrophobic opulence of the Merzes’ house in Berlin; the barbarism of the cadet school; the wit and sparkle of conversation among women of intellect and culture (she is particularly good at strong women); the mouth-watering food. And her dialogue is superb: in three words she can convey volumes. A Legacy leaves you dazzled by its artistry, originality and sureness of touch. Deftly, she ties all the ends together – with one exception. Following a series of hilarious events involving Julius and his monkeys, he is obliged to donate two of them to the zoo – but what happened to the third?

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 38 © Caroline Chapman 2013


About the contributor

Caroline Chapman has recently published a biography of the founders of the Bowes Museum in County Durham and is now researching a character who played a pivotal role in the Grand Tour.

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