FranFredrick

gauntlet:

Sybille Bedford (1911-2006) by Victoria Glendinning

She was born Sybille von Shoenebeck, and although she wrote, impeccably, in English, her outlook was European. Her father was a German baron, her mother half-English, with Jewish blood. They divorced in her childhood. She stayed with her father at Schloss Feldkirch in Baden until he died, then with her mother in Italy and France. They settled in Sanary-sur-mer, where Sybille became intimate with Maria and Aldous Huxley, whose biography she later wrote (1973). Her mother’s hopeless drug addiction, which dominated Sybille’s adolescence, was elaborated without sentiment in the novel Jigsaw(1989). With the second world war looming, Sybille acquired a British passport by a marriage of convenience, and became Mrs Bedford. Her love-affairs, at least two of them of long duration, were with women.

She spent her adult years mainly in America, France, Italy and Portugal; her first book was a travelogue about Mexico. Only in 1979 did she settle in London, in Church Street, Chelsea. She was a great talker, in inimitable staccato, rapid, hushed tones, and loved food and good wine, on which she was a formidable expert. She was like a small brown bird, alert and curious, customarily wearing a rakish eye-shade to mitigate a sensitivity to glare.

Her main fictional material was her own early life, until in 2005 she published Quicksands, a memoir that illuminated but did not transcend her intense and dazzling fictionalisations. A Legacy, her first novel (1956), is superb, and has classic status. It immortalises her father, and contrasts his overstuffed, torpid Berlin connections, and the sadism of the German officer class, with the light-filled grace of life in the Mediterranean. Her principal non-fiction subjects were criminology and the law. She was an energetic member of PEN – and was working, and falling in love, into her 90s.