Quicksands: A Memoir [Paperback]

Sybil Bedford is (or, rather, was) a rare and remarkable writer. In this memoir, her last book, she retells the stories around which she varied the narratives of her novels: A Legacy, A Compass Error, A Favourite of the Gods and Jigsaw. All of them fragment personal experience across the fragmented geography of mid-century Europe, and yet none is the same and none is quite as extraordinary as the life that comes out of Quicksands, at once privileged and yet subject to frequent privation; fiercely intellectual but seldom immune to emotional intelligence. She flies between the autocratic and the democratic; admires luxury and asceticism; and she is as wise and wonderful a guide through her extraordinary life as one could wish for. Ravishingly well written, sparkling with a life richly led, this is one of those few books you want to re-read as soon as you come to the end. That it marks the end of such a remarkable and generously rendered life is a gift for which we should all give thanks.

A wonderful memoir containing vignettes of the authors history. Her life touched a highly unusual range of people and places. As always her writing is simply wonderful. Was there any other person of her period who was born partly into the German aristocracy and partly into the very rich German bourgeoisie who lived when young in German, Italy (from where she acquired a step father), France and Briton (with an erratic artist and his wife and kids). #

Whose life touched that of disgraced Nazi's, German Jewish family members, British Literati, Italian step fathers, drug addict, highly cultured and intelligent German mother's, German, British and French artists and American Journalists - to reference only her most obvious influences. She seems to have loved and been loved by the some of the greatest creatives of her time.

Beautifully told and written Ms Bedford's life stories are her legacy to us all.

Sybille Bedford, OBE (16 March 1911 - 17 February 2006) was a German-born English writer: a novelist, journalist and biographer. She was born Sybille von Schoenebeck in Berlin. Her parents were Baron Maximilian Josef von Schoenebeck (1853-1925 and his wife, Elizabeth Bernard (1888-1937). Sybille was raised in the Roman Catholic faith of her father at Schloss Feldkirch in Baden, and had a half-sister, from her father's first marriage ( Maximiliane Henriette von Schoenebeck). Her parents divorced in 1918, and she remained with her father, until his death in 1925. Sybille then went to live in Italy with her mother and stepfather. With the rise of fascism in Italy, her mother and stepfather settled in Sanary-sur-Mer, a small fishing village in the south of France. Sybille settled there as a teenager, living near Maria and Aldous Huxley, with whom she became friends. Sybille Bedford also met some of the other writers and intellectuals (including Alma Mahler, Wilhelm Herzog, Lion Feuchtwanger, Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht) who also settled in this area during that period.

During this period, Sybille's mother became addicted to morphine and, in what was for me, some of the most moving writing in this memoir, Sybille describes how this occurred and how she became responsible for procuring and administering the drug to her mother. There is no self-pity in Ms Bedford's account, simply a description of causation, events and consequences.

`My next account - not joyful - will have to be about a destructive blow of fate brought about through a blend of antecedents, chance, ill luck.'

In 1935, Sybille entered a marriage of convenience with Walter `Terry' Bedford. The marriage did not last, her use of his family name did. With the assistance of Maria and Aldous Huxley, Sybille Bedford left France for America before the German invasion of France. Her memoir ends once she is in America.

`Wish I could tell the half of it ... But, I repeat, there seems to be no time.'
`Had I but world enough and time ... I have not. And shall not now write about the life that followed.'

This memoir covers Sybille Bedford's life from World War I in Berlin, to World War II when she leaves Europe for the USA. I do not recognise much of the world in which she lived and of which she writes, but her writing gave me some sense of that world and of her experiences within it. At one stage, when she has a guest for a period, she writes:

`What I minded was the loss of solitude - essential to the cashing in of writing-thoughts.'

This is the first of her books I have read: I hope to read some of her novels later this year. I enjoyed both the content and the presentation of this memoir. I found it inspiring: there is no room for self-pity, nor is there any sign of resentment. Things just happen, and they are written about. Perspectives may change.

`To get into one language deeply, I found, one has to forsake all others.'

Jennifer Cameron-Smith