Grove Koger

Born in Prussia in 1911, Sybille Bedford settled for a time with her Jewish mother and her mother’s lover in Italy before the trio moved on to the little Provencal port of Sanary-sur-Mer. There Bedford met Aldous Huxley, whose writings were to be a great influence on her, and Huxley’s wife, Maria. It was thanks to the Huxleys that she was able escape France before the Nazi invasion.

Bedford’s first novel, A Legacy, which dealt in fictionalized terms with the tangled lives of her parents and their families, was published in 1956 to wide acclaim, and her last novel, Jigsaw (1989), which described her childhood and youth in similarly fictionalized terms, was short-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize. However, her second and third novels, A Favourite of the Gods (1963) and its sequel, A Compass Error (1968), have attracted less attention.  

In A Favourite, Anna, the daughter of a wealthy New England family, marries Rico, a member of the minor Italian nobility, in the late years of the nineteenth century or the early years of the twentieth, and is shocked to discover, much later, that he has long had a mistress. Anna’s family believe in “absolute domestic respectability,” but her refusal to accept the fact of her husband’s infidelity shocks her Italian relatives, and, in time, her own daughter, Constanza, the beautiful “favourite” of the title.  

Constanza herself marries Simon, a little unwisely, and divorces him just as unwisely. Simon is more calculating in his actions, cultivating Anna before courting Constanza. But his strategies do him no good in the end. “In her youth,” Constanza realizes, “she had looked at fate as the bolt from the clear sky, now she recognized it in the iron rule of time on all human affairs. Today is not like yesterday; the second chance is not the first. Whatever turning points are taken or are missed, it is the length of the passage, the length of the road that counts.”

And, for the most part, Constanza’s road is a long and easy one. “Life was still good to her,” Bedford writes. “Exceptionally good. She had what all mortals pray for and unfortunately few are given.”

A Compass Error takes up the story of Constanza and Simon’s daughter, Flavia, who’s as intelligent and attractive as her mother, but so hungry for the world that she inadvertently betrays her mother. In Bedford’s estimation, it seems, naïveté is a sin, perhaps a mortal one. Flavia can nearly absolve herself, can nearly conclude that she has acted in innocence. But can she? Has she? “She goes over those days again hour by hour, word by word,” but Bedford refuses to give her (or us) a definitive answer.

Bedford called A Favourite of the Gods her “one attempt at fiction with almost no autobiographical sources or associations,” as she wrote in the introduction to the 2001 Counterpoint reprint. The comment isn’t quite true, as it surely applies to A Compass Error as well. And while the autobiographical details may be few, the locales Bedford evokes—Rome, London, Sanary sur Mer (thinly disguised as “St.-Jean-le-Saveur”)—are ones she knew intimately.

Upon publication, A Favorite was criticized in a kind of reverse snobbery, as if the lives of the rich and cultured are of less interest or importance, from a literary point of view, than those of the poor and uneducated. And yet they offer far more opportunities for the novelist experienced enough and perceptive enough to do them justice.

A minor character in A Favorite is named “Mr. James,” which might lead us to think that the famous Henry James has stepped from real life into the novel. But no, he isn’t Henry, and in her foreword to the 2001 Counterpoint edition of A Favourite, Bedford explains that naming him thus was a mistake. Nevertheless, the milieu Bedford deals with is one that Henry James would have understood perfectly well, although Bedford’s nimble, impressionistic style is a far cry from James’ greyer one.

I had the pleasure of reviewing Selena Hastings biography of Bedford in the 2022 edition of The Limberlost Review, edited by Rick and Rosemary Ardinger. The edition is a substantial one, running to nearly 400 pages, and, like Bedford’s novels, would be a fine addition to your library; you can order a copy here.

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