{"id":112379,"date":"2017-07-11T12:31:21","date_gmt":"2017-07-11T16:31:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=112379"},"modified":"2017-07-19T12:53:19","modified_gmt":"2017-07-19T16:53:19","slug":"a-woman-with-all-advantages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/07\/11\/a-woman-with-all-advantages\/","title":{"rendered":"A Woman with All the Advantages"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Sybille Bedford in 1989.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cOh, shall we never escape the muddling consequences of our family history?\u201d Luckily for readers of Sybille Bedford\u2019s novels, the answer to that question\u2014asked rather rhetorically by the heroine of A Favourite of the Gods<\/em><\/a>, Bedford\u2019s 1963 novel about a woman who has \u201call the advantages one would wish for and more,\u201d with the exception of some very difficult relatives\u2014is \u201cno.\u201d All of Bedford\u2019s fiction, including A Favourite <\/em>and its 1968 sequel A Compass Error<\/em><\/a>, is preoccupied with the muddling consequences of history on whole families and their individual members. One of the epigraphs Bedford chose for A Compass Error <\/em>is Victor Hugo\u2019s observation that \u201cthe past is a part of us, perhaps the most essential.\u201d The inescapability of the past, embodied above all in family histories and family behaviors, leads inexorably to a truth evoked by another epigraph she chose, this one from Middlemarch<\/em>: \u201cOur deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves \u2026 Ay, truly, but I think it is the world \/ That brings the iron.\u201d The intersection between our deeds and \u201cthe world\u201d\u2014the larger histories of families and nations that often mock our belief in our ability to act freely\u2014is a place to which Bedford returned again and again in her writing.<\/p>\n

The families in question are always of a given type: European, upper-class, sometimes titled, moneyed (usually as the result of an advantageous marriage to non-upper-class, non-titled outsiders), sophisticated, undogmatic except when their own self-image is concerned. The histories in question are sometimes private\u2014the crucial background drama in A Favourite <\/em>results from the cultural clash between an American heiress and her charmingly dissolute Italian husband\u2014and sometimes political, even global. In A Legacy<\/em>, Bedford\u2019s remarkable 1956 debut, the military ambitions and protocols of Wilhelmine Germany set in motion a sequence of events that begins as absurd and ends in a tragedy that engulfs all of the novel\u2019s families. The rise of Italian fascism in the 1920s impinges on the lives of that American heiress and her descendants in both A Favourite of the Gods <\/em>and, even more strongly, A Compass Error<\/em>, at whose conclusion the woman with \u201call the advantages\u201d finally runs out of luck as she flees from Paris in 1940.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bedford herself was all too familiar with muddled families buffeted by complex histories. She was born in 1911 as Sybille von Schoenebeck, to a father of the lesser German aristocracy and a wealthy half-Jewish mother. (Both were clearly the prototypes for characters in A Legacy<\/em>, the narrative of which is composed of layered reminiscences of two grand families at the fin de si\u00e8cle, one a charmingly eccentric, rather Rousseauian clan from the south German nobility, the other a close-knit if spectacularly dysfunctional group of wealthy Berlin Jews.) After her parents\u2019 divorce and, later, her father\u2019s death, the adolescent Sybille traveled extensively in England, Italy, and France, often in the company of her morphine-addicted mother and the mother\u2019s Italian lover, an architect; eventually she settled in the Proven\u00e7al fishing village of Sanary-sur-Mer, where she was befriended by Aldous Huxley and, while still very young, absorbed into a literary circle that included Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht. After the rise of the Nazis, Bedford entered into a mariage blanc <\/em>with a gay acquaintance of Huxley\u2019s (Walter Bedford, \u201cone of our bugger friends\u201d) in order to obtain a British passport and flee Europe. After spending the wartime years in America, she ended up living in England for many years with the American writer Eda Lord. During the postwar years, she wrote her novels. The two subjects that preoccupied her journalism were the workings of the law\u2014among other things, she was responsible for Life <\/em>magazine\u2019s coverage of the Jack Ruby trial\u2014and, unsurprisingly, travel. Readers bemused by the apparent incongruity of the author\u2019s interests would do well to reflect on a line from A Favourite<\/em>: \u201cIf a lawyer\u2019s mind means an ability to grasp facts and their implications, a gift of exposition and a willingness to see the other side, then a lawyer\u2019s mind is an asset indeed for any writer.\u201d Bedford died in 2006, a month shy of her ninety-fifth birthday.<\/p>\n

It is hardly surprising that the author couldn\u2019t resist mining this dazzlingly rich material for her first novel. But because A Legacy <\/em>takes the form of a kind of elaborate narrative scrapbook\u2014consisting of fragmentary conversations, dimly recalled anecdotes, and oft-retold family legends interwoven with transcriptions of letters, telegrams, and newspaper accounts, all eventually assembled by a young girl who is the product of the two families entangled by the novel\u2019s plot (all this being the \u201clegacy\u201d to which the title refers)\u2014this novel has no real protagonist other, perhaps, than \u201cfamily\u201d itself. Yet the women in particular are arresting, memorable, as Bedford\u2019s female characters always are: a consumptive Jewish heiress who has unsuspected passions (the first wife of the little girl\u2019s Charles Swann-ish father); the heiress\u2019s sister-in-law, a shrewdly realistic woman with an eye for a good investment and a head for business but no talent for love (\u201cher most refreshing talks were with lawyers\u201d); the girl\u2019s mother, a striking Englishwoman with a bracing lack of sentimentality about love and sex. The girl herself is a cipher, but we understand (they are born in the same decade) that to some extent she represents the author herself as a child.<\/p>\n

But those characters are stars in a vast constellation. In her next novel, Bedford clearly wanted to focus on a single heroine, an amalgam of those earlier characters: a headstrong young woman of good family and considerable means, intelligent enough to understand that her advantages have created their own problems for living a meaningful life\u2014not least because the \u201cworld\u201d impinges on her deeds more than it does for men. In order to create such a character, the author had to free herself from autobiography: \u201cThis is my one attempt at fiction with almost no autobiographical sources or associations,\u201d she wrote late in life, in an introduction to a reissue of A Favourite of the Gods<\/em>. \u201cI wanted to be on my inventive own.\u201d The protagonist of this second novel would, inevitably, be the product of a family like Bedford\u2019s\u2014\u201cone <\/em>family of multiple <\/em>nationalities divided (often without realizing this) by the customs of their origins\u201d\u2014but, unlike Bedford, would lack an artistic talent that might allow her to make something of her interesting background and of her beauty, intelligence, culture, and passion; a character who is all too \u201cconscious that it was not enough, that glowing start, that something more is needed. A purpose, a target, a belief? A part<\/em>. Where?\u201d<\/p>\n

That \u201cwhere?\u201d is a particularly difficult question for Constanza, the novel\u2019s heroine, precisely because there are too many possible answers. The substantial first part of A Favourite<\/em>, devoted to a leisurely account of Constanza\u2019s family background, the complex parentage and international milieu, makes clear the nature of her dilemma even as it cannily alludes to other authors, other literary expectations. Rico, Constanza\u2019s father, the Roman prince, is kindly, philandering, amused and amusing, his family old and Catholic, its manners unchanging; her mother, Anna, who takes center stage during these early pages, is the independent-minded daughter of a wealthy and upright New England family, \u201cin most respects civilized as well as virtuous,\u201d of a stamp familiar from both history and literature: \u201cthey believed in, and practised, absolute commercial probity, tolerance, the arts, charity, good manners. They also believed in absolute domestic respectability.\u201d As anyone who has read Henry James will guess, trouble lies ahead.<\/p>\n

But the delicious difference between Bedford\u2019s novel and those of James and Edith Wharton (whom one of A Legacy<\/em>\u2019s interesting women is reading as she speeds toward the tragic climax of that book) is that, because of the author\u2019s background, A Favourite of the Gods <\/em>is like a Jamesian novel inside-out\u2014told, that is, from the point of view of the mondain Europeans. Here is the prince, responding to his high-minded wife\u2019s suggestion that they try to educate their peasants:<\/p>\n

They wouldn\u2019t enjoy Leopardi and they\u2019d believe the newspaper. Most people are stupid and many things that are printed are stupid and stupid people always read the stupid things, so what you get is a more stupid world. When the stupid peasant has read the stupid newspaper, he feels he is a clever man and knows everything.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In James, we might be invited to disapprove the prince and his lordly disdains, but Bedford indulges him, and not without disapproval. A great source of the pleasure in this novel, as in all of Bedford\u2019s fiction, lies in its richly detailed and often tartly amusing evocations of the class, now vanished, that Bedford knew so well, one for whose delusions, as well as for its sardonic but humane worldliness, the author shows a citrusy admiration.<\/p>\n

The Jamesian echo is one that Bedford herself seemed to want the reader to hear: a crucial character in both A Favourite of the Gods <\/em>and A Compass Error<\/em>\u2014an old American friend of Anna\u2019s, long resident in Rome\u2014is in fact called \u201cMr. James.\u201d The author later claimed to have regretted this choice of names (\u201ca mistake \u2026 though a New-Englander with a Harvard link, he was in no ways related, connected, or alike his illustrious namesake, nor to be thought so<\/em>\u201d) but you have to wonder. For in A Favourite<\/em>, as in so much of James\u2019s fiction, an encounter between the old and new worlds proves to be the fulcrum of the plot\u2014and the crucial ethical test of its heroine. After years of happy, if somewhat aimless, marriage, Anna\u2019s discovery that her husband has a long-standing affair with an obliging marchesa shocks her to the core, and she leaves Rome with young Constanza in tow. (\u201cShould I have warned her?\u201d the prince, incredulous that his wife didn\u2019t know, exclaims to his sister. \u201cShe reads so many books\u2014novels\u2014don\u2019t they tell her what people do?\u201d To which the sister replies, \u201cThat\u2019s why we <\/em>weren\u2019t allowed to read them.\u201d) The peripatetic life that Anna and Constanza subsequently lead, those too many \u201cwhere\u2019s\u201d\u2014London, Alassio, Tuscany, a life lived in hotels, rented villas, the mother and daughter distractedly shuffling their decks of admirers and lovers\u2014is the backdrop against which Constanza, born before the twentieth century, must figure out who she is.<\/p>\n

Here is where \u201chistory\u201d makes itself felt. For however rich and lofty Constanza\u2019s provenance, however passionate her desire to live as a modern woman, to exist unconventionally, she is still, in the end, a woman living at the fin de si\u00e8cle, and hence cannot escape being the heroine of a nineteenth-century tale\u2014can\u2019t help being reduced to her passionate desires. \u201cShe had the power to inspire love,\u201d we are told. She is not, the author adds, unhappy; but \u201cthere was only a vague disquiet, a nagging question: What is it for? What have I made of it?\u201d The answer to that question lies in the substance and textures of the novel itself: Its desultory progress through decades and cities and landscapes, through Roman palazzi and English hunts, through the English and French and Italian languages, produces in the reader (as it is intended to do) the same combination of sensual pleasure and vague spiritual unease that its heroine struggles with and never quite resolves, even as the reader understands the implications of her dilemma.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

One thing Constanza does make is her daughter, Flavia, the heroine of A Compass Error<\/em>. She, like her mother, is the product of a wrongheaded match: during an extended sojourn in London before and during World War I, Constanza is briefly married to an English art lover (who seems to be more in love with Anna, his mother-in-law, than he is with his wife). But there the resemblance ends: history, again, asserts itself. For in the second novel we are in the late twenties and early thirties, and it is up to Flavia\u2014wholly a child of the new century, the era not of James but of Aldous Huxley, of sour dystopianism but also of the fervor for \u201cHuman Potentialities\u201d (as Huxley called it)\u2014to make something more meaningful of her life than her grandmother or mother were able to do.<\/p>\n

Much of the novel is devoted to how badly she bungles her own \u201clegacy\u201d at first, but this is a bildungsroman, and errors are to be expected. (The third of the epigraphs Bedford chose for this book is from David Copperfield<\/em>: \u201c \u2018You are young, sir,\u2019 he said, \u2018you are young; you are very very young sir.\u2019 \u201d) Indeed, if the optimism implicit in the title of the first of these two novels is ironic\u2014Constanza is fortune\u2019s favorite, but where does it get her?\u2014then so too is the pessimism implicit in the title of the second. True, A Compass Error <\/em>is, like so many coming-of-age stories, largely about making mistakes. Left alone in the South of France by Constanza (who has disappeared to Spain with her latest lover, a statesman and man of letters who is the \u201cright\u201d one, we are tempted to think\u2014finally), the seventeen-year-old Flavia, intellectual but naive, both ambitious and clueless, inadvertently betrays her family during the course of her first grown-up love affair, with a slinky and mysterious Parisian femme fatale who has a destructive agenda that the reader will recognize at once but that the young protagonist is too self-absorbed to see. The novel is about her moral education, about the acquisition of an adult realization that life is more complex than the absolutist young imagine, about a \u201cfalling short of her staunch childish code of conduct with its result of damage, permanent damage, to the lives of those who are most to her in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet we know that all will end well enough. This is only partly because A Compass Error <\/em>is cast as a bittersweet comedy of manners, full of sly Bedfordian touches and a pointed, worldly wit. (\u201c \u2018Does the literal truth matter?\u2019 \u201d an interviewer asks the grown-up Flavia in a prologue. \u201cShe thought about that. \u2018To the person to whom it happened.\u2019 \u2018Even if that person is a writer?\u2019 \u201d) Mostly we know this story ends well because it did<\/em>. There is, after all, something about young Flavia that rings a bell. She is a young woman who has careered through Europe with a difficult mother, only to find herself stopping in a charming Proven\u00e7al fishing town; there she is soon engulfed by a colony of fascinating artists and their circle, among whose members she has her first experiences of desire, love, art, and faithlessness.<\/p>\n

This girl yearns to be a writer and tries to apply herself daily to her \u201cvocation,\u201d even as she fantasizes about what she will do:<\/p>\n

She had even less desire to write autobiography than straight fiction; she did not see herself as a future novelist; ideas were what she believed that she was after. Aldous Huxley … professed that ideas were more interesting \u2026 than men and women, and Flavia was sure that she agreed.<\/p>\n

What she hoped to write (talent and acquired knowledge permitting) were essays, books of essays, proposing changes in government, economics, law and general conduct; rational changes, effected by good will, technological advances and the lessons learnt from history \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As we know, this was only half true: the girl grew up to be a writer, but her novels are every bit as good as her other writing; their subject, certainly, was \u201cthe lessons learnt from history.\u201d (Or not learnt.) If this particular work of fiction turns out to be more autobiographical than Bedford said it would (\u201cI am not Flavia<\/em>\u201d), who can blame her? Hers was a remarkable life, and it makes for a remarkable tale.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This essay appears as the introduction to\u00a0<\/em>A Favourite of the Gods\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>A Compass Error<\/a>, reissued in a single volume this month by New York Review Books. Reprinted with permission.<\/em><\/p>\n

Daniel Mendelsohn\u00a0was born in 1960 and studied classics at the University of Virginia and at Princeton. His new memoir, <\/em>An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic<\/a>, will be published by Knopf in September. His essays and reviews appear regularly in<\/em> The New York Review of Books,\u00a0The New Yorker, and\u00a0the<\/em> New York Times Book Review. His books include<\/em> The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million; a memoir<\/em>, The Elusive Embrace; and two collections of critical essays, including<\/em> Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture. He teaches literature at Bard College.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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