In Quicksands – A Memoir by Sybille Bedford (2005), the German-born English author, wrote at 92 years of age. It was published a year before her death at the age of 94. It is the account of the author’s fascinating life from her birthplace in Germany to post-war Italy, France, Portugal, and the United Kingdom from the 1950s.
Born Sybille Aleid Elsa von Schoenebeck (1911-2006), she married British army officer Walter Bedford in 1935 to avoid deportation to Germany, and to obtain a British passport, when the Nazis found out about her Jewish ancestry. The marriage was short-lived and she left France during the invasion and headed to America with British writer Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria. From the 1940s, Sybille lived in Europe, settling in London with American novelist Eda Lord (1907-1976). This memoir recounts those years from her starting point – 1953 – or as she says: “I shall begin as I hope to continue: from the middle.”
Her memoir is in three sections: Part One – Segments of a Circle; Part Two – Junctions: and Part Three – Fast Loose Ends.
Sybille Bedford describes the south of France as the “actual beginning” of her “true compass point” – her happiest years. Those years were spent at Sanary, a seaside village 50 kilometres (30 miles) southeast of Marseille. “The happiness in the south of France was one of place, not achievement, nor events… What I lived then, day by day, were the sea, the light, the sun, cicada sounds at night, first amorous pursuits, some exhilarating, some hopeless or mistakes, some attachments outlasting change – all punctuated by evasions of authority, evasion of evolving tragedy at home.”
There in the south of France was the only loved and permanent home she ever had: “a conversioned annex built on Allanah Harper’s property: a rural patch … with a pergola, a terrace, jasmine and honey-suckle, night-flowering climbers, tree frogs, set in an olive grove.”
Sanary accommodated a great number of German, American, British, and French creatives, from Bertolt Brecht to Jean Cocteau, Aldous Huxley, and D.H. Lawrence. Sybille Bedford wrote of Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World (1932) and Point Counter Point (1928): “An open door, behind it, Aldous sitting on a red-tiled floor, grass-hopper legs neatly disposed, amidst piles of books he was trying to cram into a rotating cage.” It was his first day in his new home and not a pleasant experience for him, as he told Sybille: “There is no horror greater than the First Day in the New Home.”
She writes a lot about Aldous Huxley and other writers, as if to know more about her own craft and herself: “Aldous used to complain about himself as a fairly slow writer in terms of Arnold Bennett’s daily thousand. Actually, he must have averaged five hundred words a day (less than Maugham, more than Greene, more or less than Proust?) and this was with very great regularity.” She eventually wrote “the standard, authorised biography” of Aldous Huxley published in 1973.
And of American writer Edith Wharton, she wrote: “Never shall I forget the sight of Mrs Wharton, rotund, corseted, flushed and beautifully dressed.”
This memoir is more about others than of herself; though nonetheless an interesting and beautifully written expression of tragedy and circumstance in historical times.
MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009). She lives in Paris.
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