Invisible Ink No 35: Sybille Bedford

It’s surprising how many authors adopt secondary nationalities and so gain the outsider status that’s often needed to maintain a dispassionate eye. Bedford was the daughter of a baron, born near Berlin in 1911.

She grew up with her impoverished father in his schloss near Baden as a “polyglot parrot”, then moved to Italy after he died, living with her mother, who had become a morphine addict. After hopping between England and Europe, she settled in the Côte d’Azur.

In 1933, she damned the rising Nazi regime in an article and her German bank accounts were frozen when it was discovered that she was Jewish.

In order to obtain a British passport she married the former lover of W H Auden’s manservant, Walter “Terry” Bedford. With help from Aldous Huxley she was able to flee Europe and spent the Second World War in California, before heading for Mexico. After this she headed for France and Germany, and fell in love with an American woman.

This incredibly colourful back-story wouldn’t be relevant but for the fact that Bedford began writing about it.

After cutting her teeth on a travel book called Sudden View: A Mexican Journey, she penned a fictionalised version of her father’s life in a cadet school of the German officer class.

A Legacy focused on her own troubled family, and the cruelty and anti-Semitism within the Prussian military in the build-up to the First World War.

Her next books looked at the law from both sides, The Best We Can Do: (The Trial of Dr Adams) was an account of a serial killer while The Faces of Justice: (A Traveller’s Report) compared legal systems in four countries.

These books were followed by a pair of romances, a biography of Aldous Huxley (told from the inside, one imagines) and a return to the fertile ground of her past in Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education.

The pattern of books more or less repeated itself with pieces on trials, travels and a further memoir, this set in post-war Berlin, written the year before she died.

Through them all her voice rings clear and true, a special achievement considering English was not her native tongue and she never went to school. Described by Bruce Chatwin as “one of the most dazzling practitioners of modern English prose”, this sensual, painterly writer could evoke sunlit French gardens or the gloomy horrors of Berlin.

An author’s author who felt she had no right to live without continually making something, she’s partially back in print.