The Best Women Writers That You've Maybe Never Read: Sybille Bedford

How would you like your first novel to have been reviewed by Evelyn Waugh in the following terms? “A book of entirely delicious quality… everything is new, cool, witty, elegant… we gratefully salute a new artist.”

Janet Flanner (“Genêt” of the New Yorker) had this to say: “An astonishing and fascinating first novel.”

And Nancy Mitford said, “I think it one of the very best novels I have ever read.”

From such commentary (and from the magnificos who stepped up for this dustjacket love-fest for the first U.S. edition) you might easily surmise that Sybille Bedford’s A Legacy is somewhat snobbish in tone, and you’d be so right. Even this defect, however, which normally sends me screaming into the streets, will likely fail to faze the reader of that superb novel, first published in London in 1956.

As a prose stylist, Bedford was like a god walking this earth. She could be as thrilling as Robert Harris, and as observant and witty as Lampedusa. Everything the august trio above had to say is true, and to their praise I will add that A Legacy is very touching, and acidly funny and also funny in an entirely original way. Perhaps much of the special flavor of Bedford is owing to her having spent her earliest years in Germany with the impoverished nobleman who was her father, one Maximilian von Schoenebeck, and so her style has a different grain and texture from the Anglo stuff one is accustomed to; she spoke mainly German until her father died, when she was ten:

After her father’s death, she moved with her mother to the French Riviera-as yet unsubmerged by money and fashion-and began wondering if she should write in English or French. “I’m so glad I chose English. You can play about with English.”

In her adopted England, Bedford was even more celebrated for her reporting on the law than she was for her novels and memoirs, if that were possible. She covered the Chatterley trial, the trial of the former staff at Auschwitz and the trial of former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe, accused of conspiracy to murder. Bedford held hands in a taxi with Dr. Stephen Ward, the osteopath who was a victim of trumped-up charges at the center of the Profumo mess, only a few hours before that unfortunate man committed suicide. She even covered the trial of Jack Ruby for Life Magazine-she’d spent the war years in the U.S., having had to flee Italy because her mother was part Jewish. In this she was helped by Aldous Huxley and his wife, Maria, who allegedly opined, “We need to get one of our bugger friends” for passport purposes.

And so:

Sybille entered a marriage of convenience with an English Army officer, Walter “Terry” Bedford (an ex-boyfriend of a former man-servant of W.H Auden’s) […] and obtained a British passport. The marriage ended shortly thereafter, but Sybille took her husband’s surname, publishing all of her later work as Sybille Bedford. [via Wikipedia, via Victoria Glendinning in Sybille Bedford: In Memory]

Bedford was a devoted oenophile whose writings on food and drink are models of that genre as well. Reading just those, it would be easy to let the idea that she was a heedless sybarite get away with you. She was a great sensualist in all ways, widely traveled, with many lovers and a zillion friends; a great bonne vivante. Once in a while you see people complaining that she lays on too much food in her novels, even:

In some of her books wine and food feature so often that even the admiring critic Francis Wyndham confessed that he had begun to dread the arrival of another meal.

There’s such a wonderful tension between the hedonist and the historian in this author. My favorite of her books might be Faces of Justice, a comparison of the judicial systems of England, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and France, just because it is such an odd book. Bedford had a lifetime addiction to courtrooms, and she reported on their proceedings with the penetration, the discernment and the slight loopiness she brought to all her writing.

There used to be two features of the London courts which were unique; nothing like them could be seen anywhere else in the entire world; they were the prostitutes and the motorists. […]

“Mary Cheam-” A tall girl, not very young, in a sober tailormade and well-done hair. One would have taken her for a saleswoman in a good London shop.

“Here frequently?”

“She is, sir.”

“You admit that?”

“Oh, many times.”

“Forty shillings.”

[…] A red-wristed housewife in a shapeless cardigan, “She’s been here twice last week, sir.” … A slim girl in stove-pipe slacks … A tart who looks like a tart … A neat lady from Japan, “Why didn’t she appear yesterday?” “She went to Marylebone by mistake, your Worship.” “Funny, many people seem to do that.”

The most terrible and moving part of Faces of Justice is to do with the Rückerstattungskammern, The Courts of Restitution. These courts were set up in Germany in order to deal with claims for possessions torn from the Jews between the years of 1933 and 1944.

A Turkey carpet driven off by the SS; a brooch and two gold rings confiscated in a precious-metals drive; a Bechstein grand; a wireless set… A boy’s motor bicycle…. A fur coat taken away by the Gestapo after a morning raid… Anyone who cares to may walk in and hear; this is the aftermath of what everybody knew, and here it is going on, in living memories. And it is as grim and pitiful and unbearable as it ever was.

All of her writing is as valuable, and as beautiful, as this.

She enjoyed a good cigar “two or three times a year.” She loved good food, fast cars, Italian wine. In the opening of The Quality of Travel, from 1961, she wrote: “You can trundle Italian wines around in your car, open them, fling in a handful of ice, drink them without a glass, with any food, in carefree quantities.” She lived to be nearly ninety-five years old.

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“The Smartest Thing She Ever Said” is a Tumblr based digital storytelling art project featuring four teams of two-one artist and one story editor-between now and the end of the year. For three weeks each, the teams were asked to interpret the phrase, “The Smartest Thing She’s Ever Said.” The current team features photographer Laura Taylor and writer Tess Lynch with support from project curator Alexis Hyde. ArtSheSaid.com and its artists are entirely supported by Ann Taylor in collaboration with Flavorpill.

See the story unfold HERE.

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.