Fragments of an unconventional life

In the 1930s, whenever Aldous Huxley’s wife Maria, visited a fortuneteller, she always asked whether her young friend Sybille Bedford would find success. What the German-born Bedford wanted, more than anything, was to be thought of as an English writer. Yet it would take 20 more years before she published her astonishing first book, “A Visit to Don Otavio,” in 1953. It’s now considered a minor classic. Three years later, Bedford succeeded again. Her masterpiece, “A Legacy,” dazzled critics and achieved bestsellerdom. Today, it remains one of the outstanding if underappreciated novels of the 20th century.

It had been a long apprenticeship. “Oh what has remained undone by sloth, discouragement, and of course distractions,” Bedford writes in her enthralling memoir, “Quicksands.” “Often choice had led me to spend the squandered years in beautiful or interesting places: to learn, to see, to travel, to walk in nocturnal streets, swim in warm seas, make friends and keep them, eat on trellised terraces, drink wine under summer leaves, to hear the song of tree-frog and cicada, to fall in love.”

One of the finest stylists in the English language, Bedford now recounts those “squandered” years of joy, grief and friendship from the perspective of one who endured -- and survived -- the last century’s appalling cruelties.

Bedford was born in 1911 in Charlottenburg, near Berlin, of an aristocratic German father, who preferred to speak French, and a British mother of partial Jewish descent (who insisted on English). After World War I and her parents’ divorce, the girl stayed with her father. Broke, they lived in a small chateau in Baden, where they grew vegetables, trading them for candles and salt. Her father, a polite aesthete who, when walking in the park, tipped his hat to the passing donkeys, taught Sybille the proper way to decant wine. This idyll continued until her more mercurial mother, soon to remarry, briskly summoned her to Italy. Sybille never saw her father again.

With her mother and young Italian stepfather, Bedford lived successively in Sorrento, Naples, Fiesole and then, with fascism on the rise, Sanary-sur-Mer, in the south of France, where they were soon joined by the Huxleys, German refugees such as Thomas Mann and, later still, by writers such as Brian Howard, a member of the “Brideshead” generation that included Cyril Connolly and, of course, Evelyn Waugh. Some of this is reflected in Bedford’s four novels, the most recent being “Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education” (short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1989). “When I feel that I must repeat myself -- to explain, to twitch the thread of chronology -- I am afraid that I shall bore,” she writes. She needn’t worry. Her mesmerizing memoir does not rehash tales. With control, candor and an elegant style understated enough to seem inevitable, Bedford conveys place, people and situation with such sparkling clarity that we feel as though we are swimming with the Huxleys on the “sun-buttered” Cote d’Azur or celebrating alongside the Italian friends who in the 1950s cleared a rooftop living space for Bedford in Rome.

The character at the heart of “Quicksands,” of course, is Bedford, an unconventional woman who wished to be “someone who wrote -- books of course -- seeing it as an exalted calling, a vocation, bestowed (by whom?) on me, however unworthy.” In fact, the act of writing is itself crucial to her story. The memoir opens with Bedford at midlife, 50 years ago, after her first book appeared. It’s a high summer’s day in 1953 Geneva, or so she records it in her diary five months later while in another country. Writing is like that. We create another world, and ourselves, and come to know both as if for the first time.

Beginning in the middle, Bedford’s memoir jumps back and forth in time. “An account by an amalgam of fragments,” she calls it, explaining that events “are inevitably preceded by a myriad of other events. To give sense and sequence to the recollection of anything one has in person felt and lived, one needs second-hand foundations, expositions, prior events not experienced but guessed at, heard of, cobbled together, judged.” Such too is the narrative method in “A Legacy,” not just because its narrator must piece together the story of her antecedents but because this story, and all Bedford’s work, is about consequences.

Now in her 90s, eyesight failing, the remarkable Bedford sees far back into the frightful century she lived through, relatively unscathed, despite her Jewish ancestry, a morphine-addicted mother, dwindling funds and a musty German passport due to expire in 1935. An early antifascist, she had been blacklisted in Germany for her written attacks on the government, which confiscated what was left of her family money. But, assisted by good fortune, exceptional friends and a series of sustaining lovers, she was ushered into a marriage of convenience to secure British citizenship.

She taught English to German Jews fleeing the Nazis and in the spring of 1940, with the assistance of the Huxleys, boarded an American passenger ship filled with Polish refugees. She was lucky. “In the long years when the perennial deeds of human courage, crime and madness were committed the world over in an unfathomable crescendo, much depended on where and what one was -- the accidents of place, age, race.”

“Quicksands” is in part a tribute to the people and places that sustained her through years of doubt and suffering. But survival too has its costs. “If you want to survive, you must swim, not sink,” says an acquaintance, once connected to the Gestapo, who went on to save several Jews in Paris. Nothing is easy or completely clear. After all, “what do any of us know about one another?” Bedford quietly asks. “And what does a writer know?”

In this sense, “Quicksands” is about learning to write in the most concrete, meaningful way: about the difficulties of getting one sentence right and the importance of it. Therein lie sanity, gratitude, remembrance, judgment. Therein lie conscience -- and release. *