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An Interview with Sybille Bedford

By

Arts & Culture

Young Sybille Bedford with her mother and unknown man.

Tonight is our reading celebrating the centennial of Sybille Bedford. In 1993, The Paris Review ran an interview with Bedford:

Oh, when I was about seven I was intensely shocked when the village people told me that my parents would be damned because they were divorcing. I was also worried about myself, realizing that we ate meat on Fridays and thinking about my first stolen cigarette. Then I told myself that it was all quite silly and unjust. That was the English idea that it “wasn’t fair.” On the other hand I liked Catholic ritual. Not for long though. By the time of my first communion, I had been taught God was everywhere—and I thought why bother to go to mass on Sunday? I thought the whole thing was invented by people, and that was it. But fear of hellfire stayed with me for a long time—into my thirties or forties. I became very anticlerical; that is, I’m acutely aware of the extreme menace of religious fundamentalism. On the other hand I was very impressed by the mystical element in the last years of Aldous Huxley’s life. Somehow he exuded sanctity; one felt the presence of something different. I have not had this feeling of otherness in the presence of any other human being, except possibly Yehudi Menuhin.

Read the entire interview here. And don’t forget to read Lisa Cohen’s essay about Bedford and New York City, as well as Brenda Wineapple on the legacy of Bedford as a writer.