Women, war and crime

Francis King

A Favourite of the Gods A Compass Error Sybille Bedford (Virago £3.50 & £2.95)

In its diversity, its erudition and, above all, its moral and intellectual fastidiousness, Sybille Bedford's work is remarkably similar to that of her friend, Rebecca West. Most people would agree that Rebecca West's Black Lamb, Grey Falcon is one of the half-dozen or so Masterpieces of travel-writing produced in Our times. At once less grandiose in scope

and more subtle in its evocation of place

and delineation of character, Sybille Bed- ford's A Visit to Don Otavio: A Traveller's 'ale from Mexico deserves no less acclaim.

Both women have written extensively on crime, with the same ability to discriminate not merely between right and wrong but,

More important, between good and evil. But there is a radical difference between

them. When one reads Rebecca West's

Magisterial The Meaning of Treason, one has the impression of some world-famous

zoologist looking down, in lofty detach-

ment, into a pit in which reptiles are writhing in their death-throes. Sybille Bed-

ford's accounts of the trials of such notorious figures as Jack Ruby, Stephen Ward and Dr Bodkin Adams are, on the other hand, full of compassion. This com- passion does not, however, at any moment Make one feel that one cannot trust her

judgments. On the acquittal of Dr Bodkin Adams, there were many people who said in Private that he had been damned lucky to

have got off; on his death, there were many People who said the same thing in public. But the fact that, having sat through his

trial, Sybille Bedford believed that justice had been done, must surely convince all but the most cynical of his innocence. SYbille Bedford's first novel, The Legacy, published in 1956, remains her

Most famous. At once family chronicle and

social history, it exhibits the same kind of determinism as its two successors, A Favourite of the Gods and A Compass Er- ror, here under review. On the one hand, Jere are the Merzes, rich, cultivated Berlin

_ews; on the other hand, there are the Feldens, minor South German aristocrats. (One at once sees an interesting parallel to the conflict between E. M. Forster's

Schlegels and Wiicoxes). How the members of these two clans behave is largely Predetermined by their different genetic in- heritances; and the same kind of genetic in- heritances largely predetermines the behaviour of the three women who are the central figures of the two later novels. _ The first of these, A Favourite of the (-1°c1s, begins with a Prologue, set in the late

1920s, in which all three women are in- troduced. Constanza, whose ancestry is half American bourgeois and half Italian aristocratic, is travelling by train from Italy to France with Flavia, her daughter by a now dead English husband. She is on her way to a tryst in Paris with an art-dealer of dubious reputation, whom she plans to marry. Suddenly she finds that a ruby ring, a present from her Italian father, which she has always regarded as a talisman, is no longer on her finger. Frantic, she decides to break her journey on the French Riviera, while a search is instituted. The break becomes decisive. She and the man are never reunited and instead, years later, she forms an alliance with another married man, a French intellectual, whose character, one guesses, is in part based on that of Aldous Huxley, whose masterly biographer Mrs Bedford eventually became.

Although Constanza dominates this Pro- logue as she dominates both the officials on the train and her daughter Flavia, what follows is as much concerned with the story of her mother, Anna, as with hers. Born in New England in the 1870s, heiress of a rich, liberal, Republican family, Anna marries a Roman prince 'with the head of a young man of a renaissance bust'. Brilliantly Mrs Bedford evokes the life, wide-horizoned for a man and claustrophobic for a woman, of this aristocracy in the period immediately before the 1914-18 War. Although she has little to tax a mind so acute and a body so active, Anna is at first happy with her charming, negligent husband, her beautiful, clever daughter, Constanza, and a series of platonic admirers, none of whom can overcome her puritan inheritance of unassailable rectitude, so markedly in con- trast with the tolerant promiscuity of the society in which she finds herself. But when, belatedly, she learns of the Prince's long-standing infidelity with a woman already his mistress before she married him, Anna is so shocked — that puritan in- There's a lot of it about. It's called unhappiness. heritance again — that she leaves him forever, taking the teenage Constanza off to London with her but abandoning an in- fant son.

It is Constanza, not her mother, who is the Favourite of the Gods. Uninhibited by Anna's sexual squeamishness, she has a number of affairs, culminating in a mar- riage terminated by her gallant agreement to give her English husband, a would-be politician terrified of scandal, the grounds for a divorce. Constanza's story not merely

occupies the last third of A Favourite of the Gods but is also recapitulated by her daughter, Flavia, to a woman lover, wife of a fashionable French painter, near the beginning of its sequel, A Compass Error.

At first, one's reaction to this repetition of already familiar events is that it is technical- ly maladroit; but then one realises that in the contrast between the two narratives there lies a wonderfully effective lesson in the art of story-telling.

All three women are as strikingly delineated as the societies in which they find themselves. The most interesting, at least to me, is the youngest, Flavia, at once so worldly and so innocent, so tough and so vulnerable. A lover of food and wine - Mrs Bedford writes of the delights of eating and drinking with all Colette's artistry - she takes herself off alone to restaurants when still in her teens. Told by the fascinating, capricious woman with whom she is infatuated that she cannot know her true nature until she has slept with a man, she at once proceeds to do so. Mrs Bedford sums her up: 'Ignorant, arrogant, generous, self-enclosed, yet visited, however briefly, by a flash of intellectual passion.'

The book ends with a rapid summary of the fates of its characters during the Second World War and its aftermath. As in real life, so in Mrs Bedford's novels the ex- pected rarely happens. Constanza, the Favourite of the Gods, dies in a ditch in France, riddled by German machine-gun bullets; Flavia marries, albeit unsuccessful- ly; and the woman whom she loved, so cruel and even evil, is decorated by both the British and the French for her bravery in France during the Occupation. One guesses that the story does not really end at this point and that there will be at least another novel, perhaps more, to amplify these last few pages.

Like Nabokov and Edith de Born, also foreign-born writers possessed of the ability to use the English language with far more virtuosity than the majority of native-born ones, Mrs Bedford is essentially a European novelist, equally at home in Germany, Italy and England. In one of his two excellent in- troductions, Peter Vansittart exactly defines the quality of her work: ... Reflec- tive, slightly amused, sceptical about perfectability but alert, even in adversity, for personal oddity, for "some mad, en- chanting detail".' This Favourite of the Gods, blessed by them with so multi- faceted a talent, deserves to become the favourite of every discerning novel-reader.