Sybille Bedford by Selina Hastings review a huge appetite for life

Drinking wine aged 10, endless parties and so many women ... a fine novelist who preferred good times to writing

The novelist Sybille Bedford is the patron saint of writers who hate writing. She described the actual act as “tearing, crushing, defeating agony” and filled her journal for 1949 with despairing accounts of “Thinking – Dawdling – Dreaming – Fiddling”, ending always with an accusatory blank page. Sometimes she tried to trick her muse by practising typing exercises, but even her typewriter seemed to get wise to this and she was left feeling “sick with disgust, discouragement, heaviness”. She used drink and drugs to jolly herself into a more productive state of mind, but in the end found that only weak black tea did the trick.

Even then her struggles weren’t over. Seven years after those punishing diary entries, Bedford finally published her first novel, A Legacy, based on her own family history of the late 19th century, but said she could only look at it with a shudder – “that ogre, that snail novel”. The fact that Evelyn Waugh hailed 48-year-old Bedford in the Spectator as a “new writer of remarkable accomplishment” wasn’t enough to get her going again. It took 30 years for her to produce a sequel, the intensely autobiographical Jigsaw. This time, and by now pushing 80, Bedford was nominated for the Booker.

It might be understandable if Bedford had been knocked off course by the familiar burdens placed on creative women during the mid-20th century – the pram in the hall, cooking for a household with rations, a hated day job spent teaching a classroom of bored adolescents. But actually none of these applied. Born in Berlin in 1911 to a German Catholic baron and a German Jewish socialite, both wealthy and progressive, young Sybille never had to do anything she didn’t want. From earliest childhood she was allowed to go her own queer way – crop-haired, trouser-wearing and blondly handsome. She read voraciously, lunched enthusiastically, holidayed with a passion and never ever seems to have taken the bus.

What actually derailed Bedford, suggests the subtitle of Selina Hastings’s elegant biography, was her “appetite” for all the non-writing bits of life. By the age of 10, she was a full-blooded oenophile, who could hold forth knowledgeably about the best vintages in her father’s cellar. As a teenager living with her mother on the Cote d’Azur she could never turn down an invitation to tea. And there were a lot of teas, not to mention dinners and late breakfasts too: Bedford’s clever chat and sharp wit flowed fluently in four languages, which meant that she could be relied on to make any polyglot party go with a swing.

And then there were the girls. Bedford had an inexhaustible need not just for sex, but for a histrionic kind of emotional intimacy that had its roots in her love for her beautiful, impossible mother. When one of your jobs in adolescence has been to stop the car suddenly to help mummy shoot up with morphine, then it stands to reason that your idea of romance is not a quiet night in. At times one feels sorry for Hastings having to martial all those Edas, Evelyns and Fays who turn up, stay too long, quarrel like crazy and then get their own back on Bedford by sleeping with her other girlfriends.

Even this most gilded of lives, though, had to knock up eventually against the unyielding reality of geopolitics. In 1933 Bedford’s maternal Jewishness was enough for the Nazis to freeze her bank accounts and make it imperative that she get out of continental Europe. Her great friends Aldous and Maria Huxley helped her to London where they planned to wangle a British passport by marrying her off to one of their Bloomsbury “bugger” friends. But since the now impoverished bride could offer only £50 – or maybe a £100 “at a pinch” – no groom proved forthcoming. In the end she had to resort to the lower orders, which, as a crashing snob, doubtless pained her. Walter Bedford was the ex-boyfriend of someone’s butler. In November 1935 the unlikely couple got married and Sybille von Schoenebeck emerged from the brief civil transaction as Sybille Bedford, the name she used for the rest of her long life.

All of her fiction is based on her own experience and family history, which means that when she came to publish a memoir in 2005, the year before she died, there was little for her to do beyond tidying up some familiar stories and substituting real names for fictional ones. Hastings is faced with a similar dilemma – everything that makes Bedford interesting is already there in her novels, or rather in Legacy and Jigsaw (there were a couple of duff ones in between).

Perhaps this scrupulous biography’s greatest achievement is to remind us that Bedford had a second string to her writerly bow. From the 1950s she became a high-grade court reporter, writing several long-form essays about legal cases, including the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial and the Profumo affair. Because writing journalism for a contracted fee didn’t count as “art”, Bedford finally found an ease and a fluency and a certain artisanal satisfaction in a job well done.

Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life is published by Chatto (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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