September 1960
This book was first published in 1958 as The Sudden View, when it was much acclaimed but sold hardly at all. Since then, its author has published A Legacy, a novel which deservedly made her such a reputation as would provide the excuse for re-issuing this earlier book - if one were needed.
It is an account of her journey from New York to Mexico City by train, her travels in the country and her long idyllic sojourn in Don Otavio’s hacienda on the shores of Lake Chapala. What chiefly strikes one about Mrs. Bedford - apart from her impressive literary powers - is that she is a most formidably civilised lady, widely read and travelled, cultivated to a pitch of intelligent curiosity which has become very rare in these days of housewife and organised travel: someone who has neither had her tastes imposed upon her by commerce, nor stumbled upon them in the single dark flight of reaction to which most of us resort once in our lives. She is therefore most excellent company, and this book has that ageless quality which is what most people mean when they describe a work as classical. From the moment that the train leaves New York at the height of its tormenting metallic summer with the author and her companion settling to an iced aperitif and a mutual exchange of irresponsibility, it is certain that this journey will be rewarding.
The choice of Mexico was something of an accident, but proved an admirable idea, since, apart from its exotic, remote and ungovernable quantities, Mexico seems also to possess this ageless quality where changes of any kind merely add to its variety of contrast - paradox piled upon paradox as it were - without making any appreciable difference to the country or its inhabitants. Mrs. Bedford seems naturally to understand this situation; as a traveller she both makes and takes opportunities, and she is also able to slip from the personal present - her observant eye upon the adventures of the day - into the volcanic violence of the general past, from the first great clash of Spanish and Indian religions until the present day.
The visit to Don Otavio, which occupies many months, occurs after a frightful journey (all their journeys seems to have been a nightmare, with a total uncertainty about arrival the only reliable factor), when they were met by three mules, an Edwardian tea-basket and a remarkable letter from their host. Don Otavio has been ruined for thirty years and has seventeen servants (as Mrs. Bedford says, the dirty work is done by so many for so few that it has ceased to be dirty), he is infinitely kind, gentle, innocent and eccentric - a perfect host: the apricot house built in the eighteenth century and set facing the immense lake in a garden brimming with scents and colours and quivering with bees, humming-birds, dragon flies, etc., is a small paradise, and one wonder how the visitors could tear themselves away for periodical sorties to other parts of the country - possibly to prove that they are not quite caught in this isolated amber of content. But when one finally leaves Mrs. Bedford on the point of departure, it is with the double regret of leaving Mexico and her company, and one cannot say very much more than that.