Sybille Bedford - Quicksands

A Memoir

SYBILLE BEDFORD

HAMISH HAMILTON

an imprint of

PENGUIN BOOKS

HAMISH HAMILTON

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First published 2005
1

Copyright Sybille Bedford, 2005

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and
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EISBN: 9780141911885

to Aliettexs

Nothing happens without consequences; nothing ever did happen without antecedents.

Anon.

Perspective la prospettiva aims at delineating solid objects on plane surfaces so as to give the same impressions of relative positions as the actual objects do. This technique may achieve images as real as Uccellos pattern of lances, horses, men in battle, or as real as a trompe-loeil.

Anon.

Writing of the past, I have come to think it is memory that clarifies The rest diaries, letters, notes, are sediment

Anon.

We think we know who we are and what we ought to do about it, and yet our thought is conditioned by the nature of our immediate experience Life is Times fool inasmuch as it is changing from instant to instant, changing the outside and the inner world so that we never remain the same two instants together.

from Aldous Huxleys last essay, Shakespeare and Religion

Oh pauvre, oh heureux voyageur sur la terre

Anon

Geneva: one neutral day Who was I? Where am I?
Delays: events, unsuitable aspirations, love of living A kick
into a future

I shall begin as I hope to continue: from the middle.

Saturday, August 1st. Morning. Stepped off the train, still trailing a little sand, by the door banged shut last night on the platform at Cannes, followed the unhurried porters trolley through the double customs Douane Franaise Douane Suisse to the cloakroom down the station hall and walked, free for a space of hours, into the spacious sparkling luxurious town pouring with light, ablaze with water, snow-lit above the summer blue. Quai des Saules, Pont du Rhne, Pont de lIsle, Quai des Bergues: the Lake of Geneva, wide-shored and open and there the Jet dEau, slenderest fountain shaft, white comet of water, self-flung into the sky

Fifty steps inland and all is changed. An older smaller rooted world. The roofs are lower and the faades more simple, the dazzle of lake and mountains shut out. There are plane trees in the square and a little shade, print-shops, flower-stalls, cafs. Women walk by with bread

Up cork-screw lanes into the Old Town a scramble over a hill top, drawing level to another change stillness, lines of patrician streets, municipal buildings with private faades, hints of gardens behind walls And so on and up, standing, drifting, walking: concentrated and aimless in the manner of a traveller who has no engagements, no duties nor homage to pay to great sights, who expects to be pleased enough with what he may find but knows he will not sleep in the town

from A Diary in Switzerland

Well, yes But that August was in 1953 and the diary was not put on paper on that day nor in that summer month, it was written, exaltation unabated, the January after in an attic in the sixth arrondissement of Paris and now, another fifty years on, the sense of unsolicited discovery, the euphoria of those hours at Geneva are still with me. Then, as I stepped off that train, I felt mildly curious, on my own, uninvolved Within minutes of mountain, sky and water, elation struck. It lasted through the day.

Through the brief broiling train journey in the trough of the afternoon with one last flash, stabbing bright, of Lman and Mont Blanc, past the vineyards, past grey-stone chteaux and fat-leaved slopes of the Pays de Vaud into sweet pasture country, past orchards, fir trees, cuckoo-clock houses, village spires: picture-book Switzerland. It lasted, that detached elation, through the stroll into another town along the arcaded streets of the city of Bern which looked like a handmade child-sized dream. There, the half-century old diary need not remind me, nothing was ugly or big or shabby or chic or new. It lasted through the evening in another fast clean train streaking towards the Lake of Lucerne in a long twilight, lasted through the gross satisfying supper in a cheap anonymous inn, the night at a modest house of strangers, scarcely perceived (address provided by a station bureau); it lasted, in a quieter, ruminating way throughout that summer cadenza: the weeks to come On that day, I took a tall white paddle steamer down the lake to a small resort to meet a friend.

* * *

And what was I doing there?

Who was I, what was I at that stage? What had I come to, and from where? As time goes (age), I was in my early forties: free to live where, if not how, I chose. Unlike an unspeakably large number of my fellow beings, I had come alive and physically intact through four decades of our frightful century, and I was conscious intermittently of the privileges and the precariousness of my existence. I was conscious also of the pillars that more recently sustained it. The stoutest of these was the fact that I had a book published a few months ago. I was now I told myself, I told myself quite often, a writer. At last. That book was not a first attempt. Writing: to be someone who wrote books of course was what I had wished to be from childhood, seeing it as an exalted calling, a vocation, bestowed (by whom?) on me, however unworthy My limitations were large: an almost entire lack of formal education; a lack of facility in getting words on paper la page vide que sa blancheur dfend (I read French early, and it did bite deep); great natural sloth Make me a writer, but not yet. So, no tales scribbled lying on the nursery floor, no essays imposed by school (hardly ever went to school); only a guilty headful of unwritten letters.