Sybille Bedford: A Life

by Selina Shirley Hastings

The first biography of the universally acclaimed British writer, Sybille Bedford, by the celebrated author of books about Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh.

Passionate, liberated, fiercely independent, Sybille Bedford was a writer and a journalist, the author of ten books, including a biography of Aldous Huxley, and four novels, all of which fictionalized her extraordinary life. Born in Berlin, she grew up in Baden, first with her distant, aristocratic father, and then in France with her intellectual, narcissistic, morphine-addicted mother and her lover. She was a child with a German Jewish background who survived two world wars and went on to spend her adult life in exile in France, Italy, New York, and Los Angeles, before finally settling in England.

Bedford was ahead of her time in many ways, with great enthusiasm for life and all its sensual pleasures, including friendships with bold faced names in the worlds of literature and food as well as a literary network of high-powered lesbians. Aldous Huxley became a mentor, and Martha Gellhorn encouraged her to write her first novel, A Legacy; in 1989, her novel Jigsaw was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In the 1960s, she wrote for magazines and newspapers, covering nearly 100 trials, including those of Auschwitz officials accused of Nazi war crimes and Jack Ruby, on trial for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Brenda Wineapple has called Bedford one of the finest stylists of the 20th century, bar none. In this major biography, Selina Hastings has brilliantly captured the fierce intelligence, wit, curiosity, and compassion of the woman and the writer in all the richness of her character and achievements.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Travel, British Literature, Germany, Literary Criticism, Queer

432 pages, Hardcover

Published February 2, 2021

About the author

Lady Selina Shirley Hastings is a British journalist, author and biographer.

Reviews

[Anne]

Sybille Bedford met the Queen of England in 1981 upon being awarded the OBE. Their conversation:

Queen: What did you do for it?
Bedford: I am a writer, Ma'am.
Queen: How long have you been writing?"
Bedford: All my life.
Queen: Oh, dear! Oh, well."


I found Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life to be a comprehensive, entertaining and sympathetic biography. Although Bedford wanted to be a writer since she was 5 years old, she did not publish her first book until she was 42. As Selina Hastings recounts in this biography, Bedford’s appetite for life interfered with her writing— in particular, her appetite for love. Hastings calls her existence a “sexual carousel.” She had 19 love relationships during her lifetime, one lasting 20 years. Each relationship is accounted for in this book. The final one, Aliette, was her French translator. They fell madly in love when Aliette was in her 40s and Sybille was 81.

Bedford would agree with Hastings’ assessment. As she said: “I wish I’d written more books and spent less time being in love. It’s very difficult doing both at the same time.. “

She was greatly dismayed that it took her so long to get started on her writing career. "As soon as I could speak I wanted to be a writer." Besides love, other things interfered with Bedford getting started as a writer. She had a very active social life and a love of fine wine and food. She never turned down an offer to meet friends for a meal or a party. And with Bedford’s clever chat and sharp wit which flowed fluently in four languages she received many invitations. Bedford accepted most of these invitations.

“And then there were the girls. Bedford had an inexhaustible need not just for sex, but for a histrionic kind of emotional intimacy that had its roots in her love for her beautiful, impossible mother. When one of your jobs in adolescence has been to stop the car suddenly to help mummy shoot up with morphine, then it stands to reason that your idea of romance is not a quiet night in.”


Aside from her love life and her socializing, Bedford’s delay in starting or completing a novel was also due to the fact that she found writing to be an agonizing process.

“I sit before my hostile typewriter and sicken before the abnormal effort. What is this blight I have suffered from all my life that makes trying to write … such tearing, crushing, defeating agony?”

With great difficulty, Bedford would write four autobiographical novels over the course of her long life (1911-2006). She had a wealth of material to cull for her novels given her family history, her relationships and the life she led over the course of a century.

Bedford described her mother as "ferociously intelligent." She was exceptionally well-read and well-educated and would have young Sybille “discuss Dostoyevsky over breakfast” as a very young child. Bedford later said that this was "good preparation for a novelist." However, her mother was a very cold and self-centered woman. Sybille never felt loved by her mother and, in turn, often could not love her. (No wonder Sybille had a constant need for love.) There are many examples of her mother’s self-centered nature in this biography, but just one will do:

“You were very sweet as a baby,“Bedford’s German mother said to Sybille when she was five, ‘but you’re going to be very dull for a long time — perhaps ten or 15 years. We’ll speak then, when you’ve made yourself a mind.”

If ever a young girl made herself a mind it was Sybille Bedford. Her brilliant mind would be apparent to all who met her. She also “noticed everything going on around her and felt emotions keenly. ” Her novels were filled with these early observations, among many others.

Sybille was born in Berlin, in 1911. She grew up in an emotionally frigid German atmosphere with warring parents in a country devastated by war and inflation. Her mother left to marry a younger man in Italy and Sybille, age 8, was left behind with her father who sent her to the cellar every day to pick out the vintage wine of her choice, igniting a lifelong passion for good wine and food. One day, when she was 15, her mother (as good as her word) demanded her back. She whisked her to Italy, then decamped to the French Riviera, and promptly despatched Sybille to England to lodge with some strangers in London and pick up a smidgen of official education. This was the early 1920s and Sybille often travelled between England and Italy. But with the rise of fascism in Italy, her mother and stepfather moved to Sanary-sur-Mer, a small coastal fishing village in Provence in the south of France. This would be Sybille’s beloved home for the next 15 years.

Sanary-sur-Mer turned out to be one of the best places they could have found, with a brilliant and unconventional group of writers and intellectuals, some of whom would have an impact on Bedford's writing. These included Aldous and Maria Huxley and later, refugees from Germany: Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Stefan Zweig, Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler, Bruno Frank, Ludwig Marcuse and Bertolt Brecht, among others. Sybille got to know many of these writers and became close friends with Erika and Klaus Mann, children of Thomas Mann.

Sybille became very good friends with both Aldous and Maria Huxley. Aldous was a father figure to her and he and Maria would both come to her aid often in the course of her life. But throughout this period in Sanary, Sybille’s mother descended into morphine addiction often having a very upset Sybille hunting down morphine in order to give her more injections. Her mother died in 1937 from complications due to her morphine addiction.

Bedford's maternal grandmother was Jewish so after the passing of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 and a French parliamentary act restricting the movement of refugees, Sybille was under threat of being deported. Also, Germany froze her bank account so she had no access to this money. Sybille went to the Huxleys with her problem and Maria famously announced: “We must get one of our bugger friends to marry Sybille.” Sybille entered a marriage of convenience with an English Army officer, Walter Bedford. Walter Bedford, an attendant at a gentlemen’s club in London, was induced to marry her for 100 pounds, giving her a British name and passport.

Now, as a British citizen it was possible for Bedford to travel to the United States. Bedford was lucky to take the last passenger ship crossing from Genoa to New York in June 1940.

She spent most of World War II in New York or Los Angeles waiting out the war. Unable to get passage back to Europe at the end of the war she spent a year traveling through Mexico in 1946-47. Fascinated by the people, the food and the culture of Mexico Bedford, feeling guilty for not writing during her years in the US, was determined to write a book about Mexico which she did…eventually.

In 1953, at the age of 42 Bedford published her first book, A Visit to Don Otavio, based on her travels in Mexico. It was greeted with great critical success in Europe and America. It is still considered one of her best works. One critic called it "radiant with comedy and colour",

Once back in Europe, Bedford spent the rest of her life living and traveling in England, France and Italy always with one of her lovers. She lived for seven years in Rome and three in Essex, England. “She was forever taking houses for long, lazy summers in Italy and France” with her latest love. She would try to write by day and see friends at night.


In 1956 she published her first novel, A Legacy based on her own family history. Evelyn Waugh hailed the 48-year-old Bedford as a “new writer of remarkable accomplishment.” Bruce Chatwin saw her as "one of the most dazzling practitioners of modern English prose". A Legacy was to establish Bedford’s reputation as a notable member of the literary profession of which, from her earliest days, she had longed to be a part. 30 years later, in 1981, at age 78, Bedford published the sequel to A Legacy, Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education. It was a critical and financial success. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and, in America, it was on bestseller lists for many weeks. Her final book, Quicksands: A Memoir was published in 2005, one year before her death.

In the intervening 30 years she wrote one other novel and many articles on travel and the law. In England, some of her staunchest admirers think of Sybille Bedford as principally a law reporter. She covered more than 100 trials for publications like Life, Esquire, The Observer and The Saturday Evening Post. Some of these trials were controversial criminal trials, like the English doctor whose wealthy patients (mainly female) kept mysteriously dying, though not before writing him into their wills. She also covered the trial of Jack Ruby, the obscenity case against “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” and the 14-month long prosecution of the guards at Auschwitz. She also wrote a very well-received comparative study of the legal systems in five countries. It is a collection of trial reports and anecdotes about the workings of the English, German, Swiss, French, and Austrian legal systems in the 1950s. She was a travel writer, too. Often, she blended the subjects of travel and food. To her, it seems, they were one subject, the goodness of life.

During most of her life Sybille was short on money but was often supported financially by her lovers and even some of her ex-lovers. She also had very generous friends like Martha Gellhorn who subsidized her travels and writing periods.

Sybillle had a knack for making friends. Some literary friends included the aforementioned Huxleys; Rosamond Lehmann; Elizabeth David; Elizabeth Jane Howard, Rebecca West, Peggy Guggenheim, and many men and women of letters in Europe and America considered her a friend. But she also had her detractors. She was considered “sweet” by some, but often her snobbish and condescending airs put off others. Professionally, she was criticized for her writing “autobiograhical fiction.” Her critics wanted to know if she was writing fiction or autobiography and did not approve of her treading the line between the two genres.

Sybille Bedford has been mostly forgotten, but among her fans in Europe and the U.S. she is held in high regard. Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life presents the life of a fascinating woman and a forgotten writer. Perhaps it will help to find a new audience for Bedford's works.

[Susan]

Having read, and enjoyed, other biographies by Selina Hastings, I was delighted to receive her latest for review. Interestingly, while previous biographies by the author have been of favourite authors of mine, such as W. Somerset Maugham and Evelyn Waugh, I am less familiar with the work of Sybille Bedford and have read only some of her non-fiction. I was intrigued to find out more about her and was surprised that, while I love Maugham and Waugh, I was less impressed with them on a personal level (perhaps, particularly Maugham) by the end of reading their biographies, I found myself warming more and more to Bedford as I read of her life.

Sybille Bedford lived to a ripe old age and was born in 1911, so her life spanned all of the twentieth century. She was born to an impoverished, eccentric and remote, Bavarian baron and a much younger mother, who was the daughter of a wealthy merchant. Sybille was the only child of the unhappy marriage, although her father had a daughter by a previous marriage. Her father was disappointed she was not a boy, while her mother felt tied to a marriage she wanted to escape by the birth of a child. Sybille felt unwanted – indeed, her mother told her so, in no uncertain terms, and this relationship was a difficult one throughout Sybille’s life.

In her life, Sybille announced she wished she had spent more time writing and less time falling in love. Having read this, wonderfully researched, biography, I have to agree. Sybille seemed to fall in love with almost monotonous regularity and most of her relationships, although not all, were with women. These love affairs do become a little confusing at times, although this is partly because Sybille appears to have been a kind-hearted person, who tended to remain on good terms with lovers and friends, throughout her life, so people tend to appear, and re-appear. She also had some problems getting published initially and was easily discouraged (in a very human way) by criticism, bad reviews or unkind comments. This often led to her thinking about writing, rather than actually working, although she had a great deal of success.

Sybille came from a German background, which caused her a great deal of discomfort; not least because her mother had a Jewish heritage. Indeed, Sybille gained her, very English, surname, after marrying an English man she met only once, in order to gain British nationality before the war. There is a real sense of the world closing in, as German émigré authors flocked to the part of France where Sybille was living pre-war, and of that sense of doom. Indeed, Bedford was uncomfortable with her German heritage throughout her life and found it difficult to come to terms with.

From the war years in the United States, her friendships with notable figures, such as Aldous Huxley, Klaus Mann and Elizabeth Jane Howard, her travelling and her writing; from fiction often based on her childhood to her travel writing and reports of notable criminal trials, this is a really detailed re-telling of an important, twentieth century author. As well as the story of a life, it is the story of an era. Of her early life, where she was much respected as the daughter of a Prussian nobleman, but lacked much formal education. Of being desperate to leave Europe during the war and resented on her return for living in comparative comfort in New York and LA. Of her love of food and the fine things of life and her constant search for love and inspiration, which made her always lively and engaged, throughout her life. This has left me longing to explore Sybille Bedford’s work and glad to have read about her life. As always, Selina Hastings never disappoints. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

[Jane Louis-Wood]

This a throrough and detailed account of the chronology of Bedford's life, work and loves, but has that rare quality, in biography, of needing more analysis and informed speculation about the subject's interior life and motivations.

Tracking Bedford's locations over her 95 years must have have been an undertaking in itself, given the peripatetic nature of her existence. She led what seems, to the average plebian reader, a charmed existence. She was the daughter of a minor German aristocrat who became comparatively impoverished after WWI, but throughout her life she was supported by friends, lovers, lovers' husbands, ex-lover's husbands and girlfriends and incredibly tolerant American publishers. Money, homes, holidays, cars and even, at the start of WWII, a conveniently English husband, were provided for her.

Given the only work she was obliged to do was writing, and that she was insulated from the privations of mid-century by being able to ride them out in America, her output is surprisingly slight, though the best of it is marvellous. The biography is subtitled An Appetite for Life and sensation, food, wine and love clearly dominated her existence, as they do her novels.

The loves are fascinating. In the first section of the book, it is possible to form the impression that the number of upper class lesbian and bisexual women is so limited they have to keep recycling each other's girlfriends in the claustrophobic way that people had to in small market towns in England before the advent of the internet. I was almost tempted to draw a diagram of the connections to keep track of them. By the time she gets to America, it seems to be teeming with bisexual women with very rich, very tolerant tolerant husbands and wealthy lesbian heiresses (some of whom also have husbands, acquiring them as they do houses, for convenience of situation and and tasteful decor).

The lovers are listed, but not really explored in terms of what they tell us about Bedford's character or how they inform the work. This is particularly unsatisfying in the final section of the book, when the elderly Bedford is still so sexually driven she visits prostitutes, and has a frankly impressive series of relationships with younger women, all of whom fall madly in love with her. The casual reference to the existence of a molly house for rich lesbians in 1990s London is particularly frustrating. The book is strong on her struggles to manage her life and commit herself to her writing, but weak on the passion that motivated her and the charisma that not only drew so many to her, but sustained their admiration and love when passion was spent and friendships beset by frustration with her selfishness and snobbery.

The cast of characters is extensive and Hastings clearly assumes that readers will be reasonably familiar with the range of French, British and American literary and culinary figures who feature. If a second edition is published, it would benefit from a section of brief biographies. Most secondary figures in the book are very sketchily drawn, though some are re-introduced a chapter or so later with exactly the same information. There is also repetition of the very few quotes from Bedford's writing. We are told why her early literary efforts were weak, but not shown how she developed as a writer. Most readers will be drawn to the biography because of their interest in her novels. Anyone under 60 is unlikely to be familiar with - or even aware of - her jounalism, and a few succinct examples of why it was award-winning would have been illuminating.

It is a well-written and often engaging account of what Bedford did, where she did it and who she did it with, but it is a life story with too much life and not enough story; it lacks Freud and footnotes.

[Lizzie]

Bedford is a writer I encountered with her Aldous Huxley: A Biography, then I read and enjoyed her first novel, A Legacy, based on her family history.

She grew up in Baden, Germany, with a distant aristocratic father and narcissistic, flighty mother. After her parents divorced, she accompanied her mother and her mother's lover to the south of France. She was sent to England to be educated but returned to France where she was lucky to find a community of interesting intellectuals. That's how she met Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria, among others, who became close friends (Maria was a lover, too). “Bedford” was from a “one of our bugger friends” the Huxleys found, who married her for £100 so she could get an English passport and escape WWII France.
She always knew she was a writer and was encouraged by Huxley but took a while to find her voice. After several attempts she wrote A Legacy. A good review from Evelyn Waugh helped sales. She went on to write more novels and memoirs and died at 95.
She moved around France, Italy, London, New York, and Los Angeles and spent time with interesting people wherever she went: Huxley and his second wife, Martha Gellhorn, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Thomas Mann and his children, and other writers. Elizabeth David, Paul and Julia Child and others in the wine and food world. I had not know she was a lesbian who had many lovers. She and her friends, straight, bi, and gay, were constantly having affairs, breaking up, finding new loves, having more affairs, and mostly staying friends. I wish I had a more exciting life!
The book is filled with details of all her moves and travels and who she was with, but not much about her interior life. How did she approach writing? What helped her grow as a writer? How did she feel about the many women who come and go? It's clear she had many lifelong friends, and interesting that women kept falling in love with her and wanting to care for her, to the end of her life. In many relationships she was the adored one and it was assumed that she would be left to write while the partner would take care of household things.
The NY Times review of this book described her as a "world-class freeloader" but I prefer to think of her as someone who was lucky to have many friends she loved, and who loved her.

[Stephen Pierce]

Disappointing

This book, which I so looked forward to, didn’t give me a better understanding of Bedford. Bedford only had one story and she told it four times, I love her writing, which is why I was eager to learn more, but there wasn’t much left to tell in a biography except details of whom she slept with. I have decided that I’m happy never to have met her, as she appears to have been thoroughly disagreeable and needy.

[Katy Wheatley]

I'd never heard of Sybille Bedford before reading this book. I requested it from Netgalley because it looked really interesting and she seemed like the kind of woman I would like to know about. I was right. It was an interesting book and she is exactly the sort of woman I enjoyed finding out about. I am now going to hunt down her novels and read them. It stuns me that she was so feted in her day, and so well considered as an author and yet I hadn't heard of her, and I studied literature at university and women's literature as a post grad. I'd like to bet that if she had been a male author I'd have heard of her, even if I hadn't read her. She lived an amazing life, all 95 years of it seemed pretty jam packed one way and another, with lovers, with friends, with work. Her network was vast and starry. A fascinating life, well told.

[Michael Goodine]

Here we have the first biography of English writer Sybille Bedford. This is a very detailed biography of the author, and supported by copious quotations from her numerous letters and diaries (now stored at the University of Texas at Austin). We're lucky that Bedford kept everything, and that she was willing to send it to the university late in her life. While she often held back in her biographical novels (and memoir) I guess she had no qualms about everything coming out after her passing. Indeed, there is quite a lot about her personal life in here. Everything a fan might want to know. And more.

The first half of the memoir largely concerns the parts of Bedford' life that we know very (very very) well from her books. That's her life in Germany as a child, life in Sanary and London as a young adult, the escape to America with the rise of fascism and the years she spent in Italy immediately after the war. What is added to our existing knowledge is a long list of girlfriends. Some readers might lose track of all these names... there are so many of them. And each new girlfriend seems to be the ex of one of Bedford's own exes. Such a web of relationships. We also learn all those details that Bedford left out. Like her grandmother's ultimate fate or her step-father's actual name. Or her sister's full story. There is also a startling new revelation about Bedford's father that she herself learned only near the end of her life. I won't spoil it here for you, but it adds an interesting dimension to the oft-repeated stories of his early life.

The last half of the book gives us a decent picture of Bedford's life in the 1970s through to her passing in 2006, the period that she rarely touched on in her own works. And it is what you might expect to read. Hastings paints a picture of a person who depended largely on the generosity of friends, who traveled, who loved food and wine... and who worked only occasionally (and with great difficulty). Some people might be put off by the portrayal of their favorite author as one of the twentieth century's great freeloaders but it shouldn't be a great surprise. It's all very Bohemian. That's why we love her, right? Fans should be pleased to see that Bedford lived a very full and interesting life all the way into her 90s. That's more than most people get.

On a second reading of the memoir I'll grab a notepad and make a list of some of the names that come up. Many of Bedford's friends are writers now somewhat forgotten. It could be enjoyable to rediscover their works.

[Eliza]

4.5. I’m not surprised that Bedford chose to constantly rewrite her life in her own work - as this biography shows it was more fantastical and interesting than most fiction. Like a who’s who of the literary 20th century Bedford knew a huge number of people to greater or lesser degrees, including Aldous Huxley, Martha Gellhorn, Ivy Compton Burnett, Elizabeth Jane Howard…and on it goes. From a quasi-aristocratic and immensely privileged background Bedford is the very definition of entitlement. A tricky character and a parasite for most of her life, she must also have been deeply loved and this is sometimes missing from Hasting’s work (why did these people not only tolerate but actively support and embrace her?). Whilst managing to skirt the biographer’s trap of only listing names, dates and places, the people within could use more flesh. Equally the early life is much more detailed than the later - no doubt due to fewer sources and lived material. Overall, absolutely fascinating.

[Carolyn Lawry]

I think that Sybille was blessed by having lived in interesting times, surrounded by interesting people. I frankly couldn’t understand why so many extraordinary people befriended her, gave her money and allowed her to live with them for lengthy periods of time. She is variously described as shy, arrogant, irritable, condescending, a bore about wine, kind, humourous and a terrible mumbler who could fall in love at the drop of a hat. I haven’t read any of Bedford’s work so perhaps that’s why she didn’t totally hit the mark for me. Despite all this, there are some fascinating stories and (mainly literary) people that make this a half decent read.

[Jill]

Unable (unwilling!) to finish this very lengthy biography… after sticking with it through 3/4 of the work. The work, initially promising up and through publication of Bedford’s novel The Legacy, considered to be her best, just began to settle into the humdrum and mundane, became just plain dull, and perhaps that was the true state of things with Bedford, but it wasn’t worth it to me to stick around to find out. At least knowing that several of her major later works after The Favorite of the Gods merely reconstitute her early years/earlier works saves me the trouble of reading them!

[olga wolkenstein]

Exquisite writing.

I loved the writing but I despised the selfish characters in the book: especially MS Bedford who inspite of her literary genius was a spoiled selfish creature who thought nothing of being a freeloader with the expectation that the world owed it to her.

[Rudy Seifert]

SB is one of my favourites, much more complicated than would seem, but Hastings treats her well. A re-reading will be needed.

[Bill]

Excellent biography about an an amazing woman and woefully neglected writer.

[Kathrin Peters]

A beautifully written and well researched account of an interesting writer and human being. Selina Hastings brings all her literary subjects very close to the reader.

[Jill Schroeder]

I loved Jigsaw and this was very informative and interesting.