Fifteen years ago, while researching my
biography of The New
Yorker’s Paris correspondent Janet Flanner, I came across a few
of Sybille Bedford’s letters squirrelled away in a box at the
Library of Congress. What struck me, beyond the distinctive
style and the atrocious handwriting, was the paper on which they
were written, thin green sheets, carefully folded. At the time,
I knew of Sybille Bedford only as someone I ought to read, one of
those British writers strangely out of print in the United States
even though her novel A Legacy had been the kind of bestseller in
1957 that even a curmudgeonly Evelyn Waugh had liked, despite its
errors in Catholic dogma. (He also pretended Mrs. Bedford to be a man,
which doubtless he considered a compliment). Reviewing A Legacy
in The Spectator, Waugh helped launch the dazzling novel, and in
America Janet Flanner inimitably took up the cause, calling the
book “the most interesting, entertaining, and illuminating novel
since Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which it in no way resembles.”
Arthur Mizener, writing in The Kenyon Review, shook his head in
terrified disbelief. The book was inhumanly perfect, he said,
intending, I suppose, another compliment.

I also knew Sybille Bedford’s writing refuses easy
categorization, partly because she depicts with equal aplomb the
trials of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and of Jack Ruby, the history
of Mexico, the court systems of Europe, and the life of Aldous
Huxley in a two-volume biography she once described