Sybille Bedford

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 10:09

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety eight and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My Castaway this week is a writer. She was forty two before her first book was published. Before that she led a life that sounds rather like the plot of a novel itself. Her German nobleman father had died when she was nine. She went to live with her beautiful mother in Italy and the south of France, where, in a whirl of artistic unorthodoxy, she became friends with Aldous Huxley and Thomas Mann, and mingled with the likes of Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolfe.

Presenter0:56

Her first novel, A Legacy, published in 1953, was much praised by Evelyn Waugh. Her fourth, Jigsaw, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989. In between, she wrote about travel, food, and wine, and published accounts of famous trials. She believes that the seeds of our downfall are within us. We all ruin our own lives, she says. She is Sybil Bedford. So character is destiny, is it, Sybil? There's a sort of inevitability about that.

Sybille Bedford1:27

I think if we

Sybille Bedford1:28

If you choose.

Sybille Bedford1:30

Uh do you find it inevitable? I think one can, one can try to to fight it.

Sybille Bedford1:36

To make oneself

Sybille Bedford1:38

Better. It depends of course on chance, um whom one meets, what happens to one, how one deals with experience.

Presenter1:44

And of course, you met so many people who had an enormous influence. Enormous influence. Not least Aldous Huxley, who, of course.

Sybille Bedford1:47

Normal cypherens.

Sybille Bedford1:49

Uh

Presenter1:50

I think you said that was the most important turning point in your life, wasn't it?

Sybille Bedford1:55

It was because he was not only one of the most remarkable men who ever lived, and he was a man who was uh good through and through, I mean, apart from his enormous intellectual abilities, but he had this

Sybille Bedford2:07

Good will was the most important thing, you know. The early Huxley despaired of mankind and politics and the war, and then he uh went into mysticism and and pacifism, and his one concern was how.

Sybille Bedford2:22

to make life possible for for for for mankind and they

Presenter2:25

Yeah.

Sybille Bedford2:26

And and I was it.

Presenter2:27

True.

Sybille Bedford2:27

The fairy.

Presenter2:27

But what he made possible for you, it seems to me, was that he ultimately, anyway, enabled you to write. You'd always wanted to write, hadn't you?

Sybille Bedford2:36

I I think as far as writing is concerned he was rather a hindrance because I admired him so much as a as a writer now I admire him much more as a prophet and a moralist and a man but yet I wanted to write like him and of course it didn't work at all it was neither my voice nor my style and it was very weak.

Presenter2:52

But apparently you told your mother when you were only three years old that you wanted to be a writer.

Presenter2:59

Yes, but that

Sybille Bedford2:59

I think that was normal because my mother wanted to be a writer. And like me, she suffered from sloth and the distractions of life and the joys of life. And I

Sybille Bedford3:09

I was grew up in such an atmosphere of books and reading and writing such was a a very great calling, you know, it was like a bouquet.

Presenter3:17

Aish Hmm.

Sybille Bedford3:18

Yeah.

Presenter3:18

What's this sloth and love of life that you you seem to accuse yourself of?

Presenter3:23

Bath Yeah.

Sybille Bedford3:24

Yeah.

Presenter3:24

What?

Sybille Bedford3:24

I still accuse myself of accusing I I love life and the distractions of life, of friendship, of of of travel, of of um food and wine and and falling in love and the pursuit of love. And um

Sybille Bedford3:41

I still I haven't worked enough and um I yes, I reproach myself for for sloth. Not the love of life, because it brought me a great deal of happiness.

Sybille Bedford3:50

Tell me about your first record.

Sybille Bedford3:53

My first record, um

Sybille Bedford3:55

I had no idea about music because my family was very unmusical. My father had sort of a caruso literally howling on an old-fashioned gramophone, you know, with the horn, it's ever called gramophone and the record players. And um when we lived in Italy with my mother, uh who was quite unmusical, I went to the opera very, very often with the cook and did it that time, you know. It it was an outing, like going to see Chaplin or Busta Keaton, and I quite enjoyed it, like the circus. But I had no idea about real music. And then when I was um

Sybille Bedford4:25

And I did lessons. One evening

Sybille Bedford4:28

At Daudos Axelism.

Sybille Bedford4:29

We went out into the garden and there

Sybille Bedford4:32

hammocks and deck chairs under leaves and the Mediterranean sky.

Sybille Bedford4:36

And all this put on them.

Sybille Bedford4:39

But seemed to me

Sybille Bedford4:41

an extraordinary revelation, the beauty of it and the emotional beauty of it, and it happened to be um Beethoven's first piano concerto played by Arthur Snabel.

Presenter5:50

Artur Schnabel playing part of Beethoven's piano concerto number one in C with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent.

Presenter5:57

Give me a flavour, then, Sibyl, of that childhood during the First World War, with only your father, I think, in a rural setting in southern Germany, a kind of genteel poverty.

Presenter6:09

Not genteel, no.

Sybille Bedford6:10

Boop.

Presenter6:11

Yeah.

Sybille Bedford6:11

It was a chateau with land.

Sybille Bedford6:15

Ernam.

Sybille Bedford6:16

At the beginning before the war, I mean, there were horses and and um

Sybille Bedford6:20

and the normal staff and that all that.

Sybille Bedford6:23

But it all came from my mother, my mother's money. My father was completely unworldly, and only liked living in Paris or in Spain and collecting antiques. And the chateau was stuffed with um with a collection, a very gloomy collection of Gothic and Renaissance stuff and, you know, um

Sybille Bedford6:42

crucifixes and pewter all very, very gloomy indeed and very grandiose. And then my mother.

Sybille Bedford6:48

Um

Sybille Bedford6:50

It didn't come back.

Sybille Bedford6:52

And she just left him.

Sybille Bedford6:54

and we began growing potatoes on the lawns, and the nettles came to the door, and the horses were no more, and we had the donkeys to p to pull us a cart to the station, you see. And what we still had was a very fine cellar, mostly of claret.

Sybille Bedford7:10

My fatherhood.

Sybille Bedford7:12

much of an idea of the world treated me as though I was a grown up woman.

Sybille Bedford7:17

and whom he was taking out to dinner.

Sybille Bedford7:19

And so we had conversation about what life was like in Monte Carlo at the turn of the century and um who were the great chefs of the time. And I learned to drink clarity which I took quite easily, but it was very, very strange. And were you frightened ever in living in this place or did you?

Presenter7:35

Eventually.

Sybille Bedford7:36

Very. Because it was uh um

Sybille Bedford7:40

Well, he believed there was a ghost, and of course I believed it too. I was supposed to go in the cellar, yes, I was always very frightened. What did he send you down into the cellar to get the claret? Yes, yes, I was very frightened, especially as I had to hold the candle and and the claret.

Sybille Bedford7:54

And what I had learnt, you know, from the village, what you did when it was a ghost was to cross yourself. But I didn't have a hand free to cross myself, so it was a great problem, you know. I was more afraid of my father to smash the clarity.

Sybille Bedford8:06

Some methods somehow is.

Presenter8:07

Then when you were about nine, he he died. How great a shock was that to you?

Sybille Bedford8:14

Uh

Presenter8:14

That's

Sybille Bedford8:14

They are the heartless, you know.

Sybille Bedford8:17

He was very loving when he loved me very much, and but he couldn't show it.

Sybille Bedford8:21

Then we went to Italy and of course I took to Italy and I liked my Italian stepfather.

Sybille Bedford8:25

She was much younger than my mother, much older than I was. My mother was not maternal, but I learned an enormous amount learning from her about books.

Speaker 48:32

About the torture.

Speaker 48:33

Uh

Sybille Bedford8:33

Uh Books and and paintings. Tell me about record number two.

Sybille Bedford8:37

Once I started to love music,

Sybille Bedford8:39

and became a parasite of music, because I'm not musical, I can't hold a tune, I have no ear. I simply love great music for what it does to me, the pleasure.

Sybille Bedford8:48

The emotional pleasure are the

Sybille Bedford8:51

life it gives me, and so I took very much to the Brandenburg concertus, especially at number one.

Sybille Bedford8:57

And um

Sybille Bedford8:59

But at one

Sybille Bedford9:00

unforgettable occasion. It was one September three friends and I had a shared a flat.

Sybille Bedford9:07

High up on the cliff in the Malfi, you know, everything is built in the Malfi, the Gulf of Salerno, um, up the cliff. And uh we had a flat directly.

Sybille Bedford9:17

above the very respectable and rather good hotel, where the only bath we had was a huge Roman marble tub.

Sybille Bedford9:26

which stood on a space of of exposed terrace outside our flat. And none of my friends said we could use it, because we'd always be seen. And I was the only one who did. And

Sybille Bedford9:39

I usually gardened in the evening, which meant watering in the sweltering heat and so on, and one also did one's cooking and it was hot and so on. And then came the great moment.

Sybille Bedford9:49

During the evening.

Sybille Bedford9:51

The sun was going down and one had a cool bath.

Sybille Bedford9:55

You know, they always turned on the first Brandenburg concerto. That was the beginning of the evening, you know, and the BITF was going and so on.

Sybille Bedford10:04

I thought I got away with it, but I'm not certain. I think if somebody saw, they couldn't believe their eyes.

Presenter11:06

Part of the first movement of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. One, played by the Consentus Musicus of Vienna, conducted by its founder, Nicolas Arnencourt.

Presenter11:15

So there you were, Sybil Bedford, a young girl in the twenties in Italy, watching the growth of fascism, to the great distaste of your mother and stepfather. You were apparently used to convey subversive literature about the men.

Sybille Bedford11:31

Of the bad I was still a small trail.

Sybille Bedford11:34

As an adolescent one would not have been able to do it con do the literature. And uh one had it you know, when you think of the horrors that happened later with the Nazis in Russia it was nothing. But all the same, one woke up in the morning and the professor next door had been raided at night brutally and his papers been messed about and taken away, you know, and and and uh what wasn't allowed was the Times. The Times newspaper. The Times newspaper and the New Statesman.

Sybille Bedford12:01

And of course the um

Sybille Bedford12:03

Black shares are very kind to children.

Sybille Bedford12:05

And so I had them in a sort of pinafore, you know, and I went about, you know, distributing mutilated copies of the Times, the new statesman. But then.

Sybille Bedford12:14

Quite soon by um

Sybille Bedford12:17

26 and 27 when um Matteotte was murdered and everything became much more serious. So it was 1990.

Presenter12:22

So it was 1926-27, it all got really rather too

Sybille Bedford12:25

Yes, we simply we simply went to France. And of course I at that time uh spent half the time in in in England getting in getting it.

Presenter12:35

Education. But you set up home, first of all, in the south of France, in a little place called Saint-Arisure-Mer. How was it chosen, this village that was to become such an important part of your lives?

Sybille Bedford12:41

How was

Presenter12:46

What became a bit?

Sybille Bedford12:46

important part of my life, but it only happened because uh we missed the right train and the right con right connection.

Sybille Bedford12:53

My mother was very vague and very absent minded and travelling with all her books and and and matters of dogs. And we were supposed to um you know, we had a slow train outrated and then we were supposed to get an express. And the express we had sleepers had gone. And so by the time

Sybille Bedford13:10

We got to the station concerned and by that time my mother said I'm not going to sit sit up all night in the train.

Sybille Bedford13:16

Uh

Presenter13:16

And the We got out. And it was there in Saint-Narie that the Huxleys came to live, wasn't it?

Sybille Bedford13:22

To live wasn't.

Presenter13:25

They rather adopted you, it seems.

Sybille Bedford13:27

If

Presenter13:27

They took took me on. Yeah.

Sybille Bedford13:28

And it was a very wonderful education because it was um

Sybille Bedford13:32

Unless example.

Sybille Bedford13:34

You see, when I said that Aldous was one of the best men I've ever met, so was his wife. I mean, they were both extraordinary people, and it was a very, very good marriage how she supported him and looked after this man, who, um, you know, had very great difficulties in seeing and has very frail physique.

Sybille Bedford13:51

And also

Sybille Bedford13:52

Orphan strayed, he was very susceptible to beautiful women.

Sybille Bedford13:56

And um

Sybille Bedford13:58

Two things we were told. One was you must always try to give something and do something for people before they have to ask.

Speaker 414:05

Hmm.

Sybille Bedford14:06

No, never wait till they have to ask you for money. And the other one was, Never think that you're so wonderful that you can be sufficient to one man in one marriage.

Sybille Bedford14:15

This is not the way it's meant to behave. It may be painful.

Sybille Bedford14:19

Battle

Sybille Bedford14:20

Do you really have this kind of marriage? In any way, marriage does not uh depend on that kind of identity. Tell me about your third record.

Sybille Bedford14:28

Well, that gets us into an entirely different world. I mean, these are the

Sybille Bedford14:33

There are already two records, two Mozart records.

Sybille Bedford14:37

And try to play because they're so?

Sybille Bedford14:39

Because of their beauty and the kind of um emotion evoked. The first is the Contessa's song. It both come from figures.

Sybille Bedford14:48

Because mate.

Speaker 414:48

Must manage

Speaker 114:49

Yeah.

Sybille Bedford14:49

And uh

Sybille Bedford14:51

In the

Sybille Bedford14:53

And recording I've chosen.

Sybille Bedford14:55

It is sheer.

Sybille Bedford14:57

It is nostalgia and longing, but it she's still

Sybille Bedford15:00

very young and hopeful and you feel that, um

Sybille Bedford15:03

love will come back and it has hope.

Sybille Bedford15:05

Very, very beautiful.

Speaker 415:24

You're fine.

Presenter16:08

Auliki Ratovara as the Countess Almaviva, singing the Aria Dovesono from Act Three of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, and that was from the Gleinborn recordings of nineteen thirty four five, conducted by Fritz Busch. Your mother, Sybil, during all of this time, I I think I'm right in saying used to sort of palm you off from time to time, send you off to England, didn't she? So you sort of shuttled between France and England. Well, she thought I was getting an education.

Sybille Bedford16:27

So you saw

Presenter16:33

But she didn't look into it very deeply. But as I understand it, she just palmed you off with some people she met on the beach, said, you know, will you have to do that?

Sybille Bedford16:40

But they turned out to be very nice. And and well, uh, there was a method in it, you know. She was having difficulties but she was marrying an Italian who was um fifteen years younger.

Presenter16:42

Luckily.

Sybille Bedford16:52

and she was very, very good looking.

Sybille Bedford16:55

and a very good stepfather he was, you know, and I've been fond of him fond of him all my life. But his family was against it, and she was a divorced woman and not a Catholic, blackly Jewish and and and um so they went married.

Speaker 417:04

Tuition.

Sybille Bedford17:07

Um

Sybille Bedford17:08

There was very little money because he was about to become an architect, but couldn't because of of being anti fascist. And really, you know, a child was was a great encumbrance. But

Presenter17:19

If you had been, you know, less self reli reliant, if you had been, you know, a less strong character, you could have gone under with all. If your character is your destiny, your character certainly saw you through all of this.

Sybille Bedford17:30

Because I I I'm to this day exceedingly anxious. If I wait five minutes in the lobby of the BBC, I think I'll be deserted forever, you know. But the English life I liked because I had enormous respect for the what I thought was was the laws and institutions and so on. And I I I um was constantly reading and studying and reading books and and um frequenting the law courts instead of going to the cinemas which which um fascinated me entirely.

Presenter17:54

Uh

Sybille Bedford17:54

But

Presenter17:55

Tell me about record number four.

Sybille Bedford17:57

We like it number four really

Sybille Bedford17:59

Uh is a very uh follow-on on record number three. This time it's the wonderful thing of Susannah waiting in the garden and and and is recording. She's not up

Sybille Bedford18:11

playing it as as the trick she's supposed to play on the counter. She's really singing her love a figuro and it's the waiting for the beloved to arrive, you know, and you have that scented garden and, you know, the night is in front of you. And it's a, I think, a wonderful declaration of of love and life. That's why I thought it might might uh be a good thing to have on a desert island.

Speaker 418:50

Glory for the

Speaker 419:00

Oh, if you wouldn't believe me.

Speaker 419:11

I cannot get it all.

Presenter19:22

Audrey Mildmay as Susanna singing the aria De Vieni non tada from Act Four of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, and again part of that same Gleinbourne nineteen thirty four recording.

Presenter19:34

You had to get out of France, Sybil, in 1940. You'd written an anti-Hitler articles. You've got some Jewish blood, too. Yes.

Sybille Bedford19:41

Uh

Presenter19:41

How did you have a

Sybille Bedford19:42

How did I was on a guest upper list and that?

Sybille Bedford19:45

The Huxleys had gone to America a year before, not because of the war, but for diff different reasons, and um they arranged for us to go on a freighter from Italy.

Sybille Bedford19:55

If Italy didn't enter the wall.

Sybille Bedford19:58

And we just managed.

Sybille Bedford20:00

That was forty-eight hours before I went.

Presenter20:02

Was your mother dead by this time? My mother was

Sybille Bedford20:05

And months of time.

Presenter20:05

Now in in in Jigsaw, your biographical novel, the description of her descent into alcoholism and morphine addiction is is is very moving and and desperately sad that such a fiercely intelligent, beautiful woman as you describe could come to such an end. Is that how it was? Was that the reality?

Sybille Bedford20:20

Do you describe the company?

Sybille Bedford20:24

Unfortunately, that was the reality, yes. The reality went on much longer. Yes, yes. And if Huxley hadn't helped me, I would have come to pieces too.

Presenter20:32

Uh

Sybille Bedford20:32

However.

Presenter20:33

What of your role in it all? Because again in the book the young girl tries to find drugs for her mother, tries to get her into a clinic.

Presenter20:40

gives her injections, puts up with her.

Sybille Bedford20:41

Beer.

Presenter20:43

cruel jibes and her ti is that how it was? That's how it was, yes.

Sybille Bedford20:43

Cruel

Speaker 120:43

Yeah.

Presenter20:47

Terrible, terrible experience for a young girl.

Sybille Bedford20:49

Uh

Sybille Bedford20:53

Yes, but it must have been worse for her to fight that kind of drug and that kind of unhappiness and that kind of jealousy.

Sybille Bedford21:02

It's all started because she was jealous of her young husband having being discovered with having an affair.

Sybille Bedford21:08

And the

Sybille Bedford21:09

It taught me the evils of and the destructiveness of jealousy.

Sybille Bedford21:13

When it happens, it's very painful.

Sybille Bedford21:16

which happened to me and I

Sybille Bedford21:18

I may have inflicted, or have inflicted it on others too.

Sybille Bedford21:21

It's part of life with Bunnam.

Sybille Bedford21:24

if I has the misfortune and f to fall into a drug habit. No, I feel feel terribly, terribly sorry for her.

Presenter21:30

Yeah.

Presenter21:32

But again, going back to your point about, you know, our all being authors of our own ruin, do you think the seeds of her own destruction were there in her always?

Presenter21:43

I think she was too beautiful.

Sybille Bedford21:47

too am amusing because she had women friends too adored everybody adored her.

Sybille Bedford21:52

And she constantly went from one man to another, and when it happened to her, she just couldn't take it.

Sybille Bedford21:59

I think it was being s being spoilt and being um

Sybille Bedford22:03

I suppose to see it up here.

Sybille Bedford22:07

Yes.

Sybille Bedford22:09

Record number five.

Sybille Bedford22:12

That is quite different to Schubert, isn't it? Yes. That is really an honour.

Sybille Bedford22:17

of a friend.

Sybille Bedford22:19

who just died, called Audrey Wood, who was a Quaker, a Quaker elder, and they called her a Quaker saint. And she was also the longest serving secretary of the

Sybille Bedford22:31

Institute of Midwifery and did a very, very great deal for that. And this she was a a wonderful friend to her, but it's been very, very odd because, you know, we um

Sybille Bedford22:41

developed an addiction to Dick Francis, which she used to read to me, and she wanted for her service, which was just a few weeks ago.

Sybille Bedford22:48

She wanted Thale, a dodger of the Schubert, very beautiful movement.

Presenter23:53

Part of the slow movement of Schubert's string quintet in C major, played by the Amadeus Quartet with William Pleith.

Presenter23:59

So, Sybil, you eventually found your voice, your writing voice. After the war you wrote about your travels in Mexico, and then came that first novel, A Legacy.

Presenter24:10

About what else but a German nobleman who marries a headstrong younger woman who eventually leaves him with their young daughter. You wrote in English. W having been brought up, as we've heard, in Germany and Italy and France, why do you choose English?

Speaker 124:13

Marries a headstrong younger woman.

Speaker 124:15

And she leaves him.

Presenter24:26

I have a oh

Sybille Bedford24:27

Uh Uh

Presenter24:28

Ming

Sybille Bedford24:28

This love for the English language. I mean, I think the English language is one of the most marvellous instruments there is, you know.

Presenter24:33

Ba

Sybille Bedford24:35

Yeah.

Presenter24:35

But why? What is it? What is it about the English language that is so much better to write?

Sybille Bedford24:35

But what I

Sybille Bedford24:38

So much better to write in, in your view. Well it it it depends whom it's whom it suits, you see. And um

Sybille Bedford24:45

It's the

Sybille Bedford24:47

Possibility of concision or vomte taking liberties or vomp.

Sybille Bedford24:53

Uh in this wonderful double thing, you know, some very, very simple fractional origins and a very complicated gibberness styles, you can do all kinds of things. I mean simply English prose I find immensely exciting.

Presenter25:06

You you you wrote something somewhere I read uh that it was m more like swimming in the sea as opposed to a swimming pool, writing in English. There was a kind of freedom to it. Yes freedom, yes.

Sybille Bedford25:16

For me, it has a freedom. Although I don't write at all freely, I write with enormous difficulty and and and

Sybille Bedford25:25

It's almost a physical labor because I I um

Sybille Bedford25:28

Write every sentence over and over and over again. It's more like picking up s stones, paving stones, and fitting them together.

Presenter25:35

You've also made the point before now that you come from a generation which had in a way, and I quote you, much greater freedom and openness about everything, which is an interesting observation really, um in a generation which believes itself to be ever more open at this end of the twentieth century than ever it was before. What do you think?

Sybille Bedford25:50

Yeah.

Sybille Bedford25:53

So I see the present

Sybille Bedford25:54

print and then paste as you see.

Sybille Bedford25:57

I I can't say the generation, I mean um amongst educated people, amongst my own own milieu, you know.

Sybille Bedford26:04

People were um

Sybille Bedford26:06

open about orientation. So but you weren't blatant about uh blatant about it. It was your private life. But perhaps I lived in a very um

Sybille Bedford26:15

Emancipated Migneux.

Sybille Bedford26:17

Actually in in France and Paris it at them.

Sybille Bedford26:21

It had something to do with they

Sybille Bedford26:24

I suppose they

Sybille Bedford26:25

a whole feeling of post-war liberation, you know.

Presenter26:28

Perhaps it's one of the great paradoxes of our time, in fact, that we now have this freedom of society when in fact there is not such great freedom as there was when society was discreet about it.

Sybille Bedford26:39

Yes, and nobody had to go about and march from Westminster and on rights and so on. Yes, it was.

Sybille Bedford26:47

It was a very p polite sort of freedom, you know.

Sybille Bedford26:50

Breckle number six.

Sybille Bedford26:53

Record number six is simply for for the sheer heart-rending beauty of it. And that would be wonderful to have on on the on the island.

Presenter28:01

Yehudi Menouin and Christian Ferras playing part of the slow movement of Bach's double violin concerto in D minor, with the Robert Masters Chamber Orchestra, directed by Yehudi Menouin.

Presenter28:11

Once you'd established a name for yourself, Sybil, and as I mentioned, Evelyn Woore was a great help in that, I think cool, witty and elegant, he called Legacy that first novel publishers then asked you what you wanted to do next, and I gather to their horror you said, um, I want to do some non-fiction. I want to write a book about the trial of Dr John Bodkin Adams. Now he was a man who was accused of administering poison to a rich elderly female patient. Why did you want to write about that trial?

Sybille Bedford28:39

First of all, I think it's a very good education for a novelist, and it's drama, drama in court.

Sybille Bedford28:46

I am immensely interested in the English judicial system and also in eccentricity. Nothing could have been more eccentric than what one heard about Dr Adams, you know, with keeping the morph morphine and and and and the poison and the chocolates all in the same

Speaker 429:00

Yeah.

Sybille Bedford29:00

Uh

Speaker 429:00

Mm-hmm.

Sybille Bedford29:00

And there's a medicine cupboard, and it promised to be a very good trial. Of course, uh it turned out

Sybille Bedford29:06

You believed he was innocent. I believed he innocently. You and the Daily Express. The Daily Express, yes, yes.

Presenter29:10

You b

Presenter29:11

I believe

Presenter29:14

Yes. And then you went on to cover other trials, the Lady Chatterley trial, of course.

Sybille Bedford29:17

The native

Presenter29:19

The trial of Jackson.

Sybille Bedford29:19

Yeah.

Presenter29:21

And you went to the uh the Auschwitz trial, which was held in sixty-three in in Bankford?

Sybille Bedford29:27

Thus Time. The drummers themselves.

Sybille Bedford29:30

I had a trial against the personnel of a concentration camp of Auschwitz.

Presenter29:34

And what seems to have preoccupied you there was the sort of

Presenter29:39

ghastly normality of the people who had perpetrated these terrible acts.

Presenter29:43

Yes, some some of them.

Sybille Bedford29:44

Yes, but the

Presenter29:46

Uh

Sybille Bedford29:46

The whole thing was was was appalling, but I thought it was a duty. I was asked to do it. I thought now I must face it and I must do it. Why was it a duty for you?

Sybille Bedford29:55

I thought it was so extraordinary that I I must get myself escaped it and it had been a

Sybille Bedford30:02

a nightmare, part of one's one's one's life. And uh always felt very strange. I mean, if it hadn't been that

Sybille Bedford30:09

I managed to get to America and all of it and um

Sybille Bedford30:13

it came very near to everything. Many people were new and

Sybille Bedford30:18

It was a very, very painful thing to do.

Sybille Bedford30:20

but not as bad as it was for the

Sybille Bedford30:24

But council and judges who had to do it for the two and a half years. We journalists only came every few weeks, every few months, you know when there's something important going on.

Presenter30:32

Mm-hmm.

Sybille Bedford30:32

Could I

Presenter30:32

Yeah. It's

Sybille Bedford30:32

Yeah.

Presenter30:32

Uh

Sybille Bedford30:34

Do you know, this island I mean, we all think about this island, you know, it's become very real, but it it it it it must be very traumatic. You don't get there just like that. There must have been been a shipwreck. And what about your shipmates and your friends? And you find yourself there sitting alone on the sand and nobody there to say dry clothes and brandy and soda. And uh and then what to do the first night, and and who will come out of the bushes and so on. I think it's absolutely terr terrifying. But I thought I need something which just just bucks one up, you know. And um the horn is is, you know.

Sybille Bedford31:09

Yeah.

Presenter31:09

Yeah.

Speaker 431:09

Yeah.

Presenter32:08

Part of Mozart's Horn Concerto, number three in E flat major, with Dennis Brain and the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Carrion. Today, Sybil Bedford, you live in Chelsea, in London, and you've been made a companion of literature by the Royal Society of Literature, which which brackets your name with the likes of Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, indeed, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark.

Presenter32:28

Confirmation, really, if you needed it, that you have achieved your ambition, isn't it?

Sybille Bedford32:34

And it made me very happy.

Presenter32:35

Uh

Sybille Bedford32:35

Yes, but I don't don't quite believe in it, you know. Yeah.

Presenter32:38

Yeah.

Sybille Bedford32:39

Right.

Presenter32:39

Uh

Sybille Bedford32:39

Uh

Presenter32:39

Uh

Sybille Bedford32:39

Minded.

Presenter32:39

The f

Sybille Bedford32:39

Yeah.

Presenter32:39

Uh

Sybille Bedford32:39

Uh

Presenter32:40

So you you you you sit on your desert island thinking about what you have and in what you haven't achieved in life.

Sybille Bedford32:45

haven't achieved in life.

Presenter32:47

But if I understand again the character that represents you in your novels,

Presenter32:52

you would fare very well because you

Presenter32:54

Fundamentally you you've been able to take most of what life can throw at you, haven't you?

Sybille Bedford33:00

Will I I've been

Presenter33:01

Yeah.

Sybille Bedford33:01

has had wonderful escapes, you know.

Sybille Bedford33:04

a very fortunate life.

Sybille Bedford33:07

Nothing much has been found of me, I was supposed to know.

Sybille Bedford33:11

I wasn't caught up in the drumming drum and machine, I

Sybille Bedford33:14

Yeah, I wasn't bombed in the wall.

Sybille Bedford33:16

And um

Sybille Bedford33:17

If

Sybille Bedford33:19

Never been really penniless when I was made myself penniless.

Sybille Bedford33:23

The island would be a real interruption.

Sybille Bedford33:26

A welcome interruption.

Sybille Bedford33:28

No.

Sybille Bedford33:30

They want to do it.

Presenter33:30

Because of

Presenter33:31

Uh

Sybille Bedford33:31

Hmm.

Sybille Bedford33:33

Tell me about your last trick.

Sybille Bedford33:34

Well my last record is um

Sybille Bedford33:38

It

Sybille Bedford33:39

I think it's a sort of a sort of lovely tune, you know, the serenade in Don Giovanni. The little tongue in tree, and there's the the serenade, and I feel that wherever one is I suppose not on the desert island, however old one is, uh, there may be some one who comes to one's window. And I'd like to have that in my ears, you see.

Speaker 433:57

To guide our golden.

Speaker 434:18

No, I should joy on the

Speaker 134:20

No, I see

Speaker 434:23

We are

Speaker 434:27

Preliminary.

Speaker 434:30

We lost your man of the world.

Presenter34:44

Ezzio Pinza as Don Giovanni singing De Vieni alla finestra miotessoro from Act two of Mozart's Don Giovanni, and that was recorded at the Salzburg Festival in nineteen thirty nine.

Speaker 134:49

What wrong

Presenter34:55

If you could only take one of those eight records, Sybil, which one would it be?

Sybille Bedford35:01

Well, I suppose the um both violin concerto because it's it's brutal, but it it's it's it's tough, but you know, we have to choose one. What about your book as well as the Bible and Shakespeare? I want a Larry Shevd Klavan Proust because the I would have the dimension of another language.

Sybille Bedford35:18

And there would be many, many things which would come back to to to explore which one hadn't explored yet. And I also realize some of the later volumes, the Albertine volumes, I haven't haven't read for years, and this would be the right thing, yes.

Sybille Bedford35:31

And your luxury.

Sybille Bedford35:33

I um first thought, oh well yes, one has to have some structure and one must work and therefore um you know a portable typewriter and and I thought this is too dreary and then I thought that um

Sybille Bedford35:43

A very distinguished and well known castaway of yours was able to command an entire cricket ground. That's not so if the BBC can do that.

Sybille Bedford35:53

I want a French restaurant in full working order, not a Michelin Four style, but a good traditional solid restaurant where people go to eat and talk of us. There will be no people and it will be well stocked and I will be um

Sybille Bedford36:09

suddenly the the keeper of all all this and uh in the evening I should when all the dinner is you know in the bag and simbering away, I should go out and look at the look at the sea with a glass in my hand.

Sybille Bedford36:21

And I will do my writing. I will do it as Ernest Hemingway said he did and one must, in my head.

Presenter36:27

Yeah.

Presenter36:28

It sounds like bliss. Simple Bedford, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Speaker 136:40

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co. uk slash radio four.