Sybille Bedford - Pleasures and Landscapes

I T IS ONLY HUMAN that those of us who live by the sweat of our inky fingers so often feel the urge to snatch our fugitive essays from oblivion and confine them once and for all within the covers of a book. For some of us, of course, it is just a form of vanity publishing: these compilations seldom make money for anyone and are fearfully vulnerable to the critical sneer, but they stand gratifyingly on our book-shelves, and they may give a bit of fun to our great-grandchildren.

For others, however, it is an assertion of arts unity. Bruce Chatwin evidently thought that the pieces collected in his What Am I Doing Here were an essential part of his oeuvre. V. S. Pritchetts miscellany At Home and Abroad was as worthy of his reputation as were his full-length travel books. And this collection by Sybille Bedford certainly clarifies her distinguished but somewhat imprecise status in the republic of letters. Everyone knows her name, but relatively few readers, especially perhaps in America, realise the range of her gifts novelist, biographer, analyst of the law, travel writer, celebrant of food, and mistress of an altogether inimitable prose.

Pleasures and Landscapes will make things clearer. It is an ideal primer. It consists of eight essays of varying length written between 1954 and 2001 for publications English and American, Encounter to Esquire. Their matter ranges from the sensations of hill walking to the best way of pronouncing Portuguese (lop off the final vowel and as many others as laziness suggests ), but their manner is one throughout: it is a deliberately but idiosyncratically literary manner. Although I suppose Mrs Bedford was usually writing in the first place to earn a dollar or two, she never relaxes her hold upon her technique, or her determination to translate scenes and events into a kind of apotheosised reportage.

This is wonderfully exhilarating, especially since none of the essays have been touched up in retrospect, except for an occasional footnote. These really are pleasures and landscapes, as they were at the time. Norman Douglas calls Martha Gellhorn a poppet in the Capri of 1948. Mateus ros is a wine to take note of in 1958. Going to Yugoslavia in the 1960s is a matter of curiosity, tinged with apprehension. The first impact of Switzerland after World War II comes rushing back in a torrent of immaculate, efficient, complacent, polite, and prosperous images. We feel that we are not looking back at life thirty, forty, fifty years ago but experiencing it for ourselves, with all its joys, hazards, and surprises.

All this means that the book is entirely personal and particular. There are very few generalisations. It is all instant response and instant emotion, and Mrs Bedfords unique style, though for all I know it is honed through long midnight hours, reads as though it streams out of her sensibility without preoccupation and without review. Occasionally I find it a little too irrepressible, especially when it comes to food (she is very interested in eating and drinking) her sea bream, charred and nutty, limpid olive oil, and fish soup of coruscating colour may drive readers of less urbane gourmandism, like me, all the more readily to the deep-freeze Ocean Pie.

On the whole, though, the impetuous integrity is fascinating to observe. Mrs Bedford has been writing her brilliantly individual (not to say eccentric) essays for decades, and to this day they make the work of most practitioners tame and conventional by comparison. Her piece The Quality of Travel is as fresh now, and as full of relevant advice, as it was when she wrote it in 1961. She says in a footnote to this book that it is for the reader to decide what is essentially unchanged and what is changed, but I think the caveat is unnecessary. What is essential is the truth of her writing. It comes straight from the heart the source, to my mind, not only of the best art but the best reporting too.

Jan Morris