Reticent achievement.(Quicksands: A Memoir)(Book Review)

Reticent achievement

Sybille Bedford Quicksands: A Memoir. Counterpoint, 224 pages, $24.95

"Yes, I hung on" says Sybille Bedford early in this memoir. And so she has. In her mid-nineties now, she sees herself as a survivor, an "escapee"--to use her own term--someone who fits in nowhere and therefore anywhere. Hers has been a cosmopolitan life with elective affinities instead of roots, and in defiance of the demotic age, its dangers, and impoverishments. Her memories and evocations are too rich to be compressed by anything so mundane as chronology or narrative, but the fragments, as she insists on calling them, nevertheless form a whole. To read this fascinating book is like wandering from one brilliantly illuminated patch to another in an otherwise misty landscape.

In keeping with the reticence of her generation, perhaps, she withholds what others might consider essential, for instance the name and title of her aristocratic German father, and therefore her own maiden name, as well as the names of her mother and grandparents. A Baroness von N. looms up, a D, an X. Who are they, quite, and why so long after the event do they have to travel incognito? Under Kaiser Wilhelm, it is true, society was a cauldron of sad secrets, of scandals, unsuitable marriage with Jews, affairs that ended in murder and suicide, as depicted in A Legacy, Sybille Bedford's great and lasting novel. But the poor tragic human breed, as she puts it, has experienced far worse horrors during her long life.

Her nameless father, she says in a portrait full of a regretful unrequited love, was not a man of the twentieth century. Aesthete, collector of high art, shy, stern, he appeared to the young Sybille, otherwise Billi, to have grown an uncrackable shell around himself. One rare remembered human touch is that he raised his hat to the donkey kept with other animals in the park of his schloss in the Grand Duchy of Baden. Sybille's careless and heart-free mother had had an affair with someone described as the Danish Maupassant--and who might that be ...? Soon she ran away from her marriage. And Sybille ran away too, to her half-sister Maximiliana Henrietta, otherwise Jacko. When her father then suddenly died, as inconsequentially as he had lived, Sybille was at the mercy of her mother, a beauty incapable of distinguishing between romance and ruin. Eloping with Alessandro (again no surname), she flitted from one place to another before reaching Sanary, then an unspoilt fishing village in the south of France.

Sybille had to keep up, with nobody except herself on whom to rely. She had always wanted to write, to make sense of her father's remoteness and of her mother's fecklessness and egotism. Mademoiselle, governesses, Ursuline nuns, the village school, were little or no help. Her untutored handwriting remains illegible. Today she can quote Racine or Dryden appropriately, or recite Rimbaud, only because she has taught herself. Cooking is one unexpected bent of hers, fast cars another.

At Sanary, her mother was eventually to become a morphine addict, dying in misery. But also living there were Aldous Huxley, and his wife Maria. Sybille Bedford has written what must remain the definitive biography of Huxley, but here she gives a charming ...