SYBILLE BEDFORD

A Legacy

1973 REPRINT

THE LITERARY SCENE ought to glow with bright mysterious personalities like Sybille Bedford,” I once wrote, “but rarely does so.” Her father, a German count, had the aristocratic virtue of keeping himself to himself. Grandfather Herz was eminent, cosmopolitan and Jewish. For the sake of the fiction, she changed the family name to Merz. There was a trace of a foreign accent in the way she rolled the letter r in her speech. The characters she writes about call each other Mammina, Caro, Herr Baron and Principessa, and it is taken for granted that civilized people speak the major European languages. “La bêtise n’est pas mon fort,” is a saying of hers: stupidity is not my strong point.

Evelyn Waugh was the first to point out that she was neither nostalgic nor apologetic. Continuing to give primacy to personal feelings and fates, she brought the past into the present. Her fiction has an afterglow, like Lampedusa’s The Leopard. She’s been in love with Aldous and Maria Huxley and other famous men and women, but it was difficult to extract from her anything about them. No name-dropping.

She took pride in her knowledge of wine, paying her way by buying twenty or thirty cases en primeur, and waiting for the right moment to open one case and sell the rest. When she came to the house, I consulted a friend who was in the trade and he recommended Château Verdignan. Sybille had not heard of it, she sniffed and tasted and said, Never mind, there are ten thousand vineyards, you can’t know them all.