Sybille Bedford An Appetite for Life by Selina Hastings - 2020 -432 Pages

 Sybille Bedford An Appetite for Life by Selina Hastings  - 2020 - 432 Pages 

March 16, Berlin, Germany 

February 17, 2006 - London, England 

Previously I have pasted upon two biographies of authors from Selina Hastings, on Rosamond Lehmann and also one on W. Somerset Maugham.

Both of the biographies are marvellous so I was delighted to find her latest work Sybille Bedford An Appetite for Life by Selina Hastings available via Libby,

She had the bitter sadness of losing her much loved father when she was fourteen, and the misfortune to have to manage living with her mother Lisa,needy, selfish, anti-maternal, irresponsible, and later to be her carer before the drug-addicted Lisa was sent back to Hitler’s Germany for enforced detox treatment under the care of her own elderly mother, where she soon died. These difficult life circumstances deserve commiseration and sympathy.

 But throughout the rest of the biography Sybille turned into an amiable freeloading sociable partygoer, a growing authority on wine and an excellent cook and gourmand, who talked about writing a novel for twenty years before actually getting down to writing it.

As Sybille was so very, very fortunate in the friends who supported her throughout her life we have to assume that she was charming, delightful, fun and nice to have around. I can’t think that merely being an orphaned deserving cause would have been enough to warrant the colossal generosity and freely given accommodation, cheques and trips to and from the USA that so many of her friends bestowed upon She went through lovers like other women might go through hats or a pair of shoes, mostly women but a few men thrown in the mix.  

Hastings details the reasons for Sybille's hatred of her native Germany and her love for France.  Sybille in an arranged marriage, the himosexual groom was paid, was able to get a visa to England just before the Germans occupied Paris.  The account of her trip to Mexico was very interesting.  

Selina Hastings is a writer and journalist, biographer of Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, Rosamund Lehmann, Sybille Bedford and, in The Red Earl, of her father.

She is the winner of the Marsh Biography Prize, the Spear's Award for Outstanding Achievement and the Biographers' Club Lifetime Services to Biography Award.

Nancy Mitford a Biography by Selina Hastings. (1985)

 Zoe Heller Refutes the Notion that Nancy Mitford's Novels are just Frivolous  "Chic Lit"

Novels of Nancy Mitford 

• Highland Fling. London: Thornton Butterworth. 1931.
• Christmas Pudding. London: Thornton Butterworth. 1932. 
• Wigs on the Green. London: Thornton Butterworth. 1935. 
• Pigeon Pie. London: Hamish Hamilton. 1940. 
• The Pursuit of Love. London: Hamish Hamilton. 1945. 
• Love in a Cold Climate. London: Hamish Hamilton. 1949. 
• The Blessing. London: Hamish Hamilton. 1951. 
• Don't Tell Alfred. London: Hamish Hamilton. 1960.

Having recently read two wonderful biographies by Selina Hastings of well known British authors, Somerset Maughman and Rosamond Lehmann I was delighted to see there was a Kindle edition of her Nancy Mitford A Biography.  (She also has a biography of Evelyn Waugh I would love to read but there is no Kindle edition.)

Nancy Mitford (1904 to 1973) was the first born of the famous and infamous six Mitford sisters.( Part of my interest in learning more about the Mitford sisters,  there is also one brother,  comes from having three daughters 17, 20, and 22.)  I recently read and posted on a very interesting book  focusing on Diana Mitford's involvement with the British Union of Fascists and her affair with Oswald Mosley, leader of the organization, Mrs Guinness The Decline of Diana Mitford 1930s Socialite by Lyndsy Spence. Both Diana and her younger sister Unity Mitford became obsessed with Hitler and were ardent supports of Nazi ideology.  Diana ended up spending time in prison and Unity tried to kill herself when war broke out between England and Germany.  Nancy became very much in opposition to their views and wrote a novel mocking the political views of her sisters. She did publish an article seemingly supporting fascism, her thinking was that England should be ruled by sensible men of property.

As Hastings details in her book, the father of the girls did not particularly favor formal schooling for them.  Nancy was educated, but for six months in a boarding school in Paris, by a series of governesses.  Her father was a baron, land rich but not hugely so in ready cash so the family sometimes struggled a little to keep up appearances.  Of course once the girls got eighteen or so, they were all tall, blond, and strikingly beautiful, finding them a suitably rich titled husband was a top priority.

                          I think Nancy is sitting next to her father but I am not sure.

Nancy married young but it did not last.  It ended in divorce, a scandal at the time. Nancy's novels were very well received.  Her books on the Sun King and Frederick the Great were best sellers.  Nancy established residency in Paris, a city she came to totally love.  There she began an affair lasting many years with a wealthy Frenchman Gaston Palewski

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Palewski was from a very wealthy family, highly cultured and very much a womanizer. Nancy spent much of her life hoping for a few days with him once and a while. The romantic lead in The Pursuit of Love, which is dedicated to Palewski, is said to be based on him.  Hastings tells us that Nancy Mitford very much drew from her life experiences in her fiction.  Sadly we learn that as Mitford's life drew down, she was in terrible pain for the last six months of her life, Mitford who wrote such wonderful novels was not first in the life of anyone. When Palewski was at last free to marry, he married someone else but Mitford never gave up her passion for him.

• Nancy Mitford (1904-1973)
• Pamela Mitford (1907-1994)
• Thomas Mitford (1909-1945)
• Diana Mitford (1910-2003)
• Unity Mitford (1914-1948)
• Jessica Mitford (1917-1996)
• Deborah Mitford (1920-2014

Her acknowledged by all best works are The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate.

Please share your experience with Nancy Mitford and her sisters with us.

Mel u

The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings (2009)

My great thanks to Max u for the Amazon Gift Card that enabled my reading of this book.

Having recently completed  Rosamond Lehmann A Life by Selina Hastings, I was eagerly looking forward to reading her biography of the author of On Human Bondage, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham.  Maugham (1874 to 1965) was the first superstar author, making himself very wealthy from his writings.  More movies have been made from his novels, many plays and short stories than from works by any other writer.  Three movies have been made from his most famous short story, "Rain".    Maugham described himself as not a writer of tne first rank but very high in the second rank.  This is the judgement of literary history.    

I don't wish to give a micro recap of Maugham's fascinating life in this post.  I will say say at once that this is a fabulous book, providing much more than in depth look at the life of Maugham, including a very detailed account of his sex life, but a literary history of much of the period. Maugham would have been, if we can speculated, happier had he lived in an era when homosexual acts were not a crime.  The greatest misery of his life  after a difficult growing  he had up until he entered into dementia toward the end a life most would envy, was a marriage he was bullied into and which I think he acquised to inorder that he might cover up his  homosexual activities.   Hastings tells us a great deal about the love life of Maugham.  He liked younger than he slender handsome men and had several long term relationships.  He also liked having sex with rent boys.  While at his villa in the French Rivera, he cruised the bars for sailors. Maugham was very generous to his lovers, he was  predatory at times but he was also exploited.  

I loved this book.  I was so happy for Maugham, who graduated from medical school, as his literary career began to have one triumph after another.  His first significant wealth came from  from London and Broadway plays.  He also made a lot from book sales and movies.  Just from one short story, "Rain", he made, from sales and the three movies based on it, over three million dollars.  Maugham traveled the world, especially in South East and South India, where he got the inspiration for many of his stories. Maugham traveled in style, normally with his long term companion Gerald Haxton.  

For forty years Maugham's primary residence was in a property , The Villa Mauresque, he owned on the French Rivera.  He entertained many writers, including Rosamond Lehmann, and lots of celebrities.  He  had a staff of twelve.  Dinners were always formal.  Maugham loved elegant meals, fine wines, collected art, (his collection of paintings would be worth billions now if intact), he was very well read.  He always traveled with a  suitcase full of books so he could have variety in reading while traveling.  He mostly traveled transoceanic by boat.  

 

         Villa Mauresque

Hastings just has put so much great stuff in her biography, everything from details on homosexual orgies in Hollywood, the ways of literary agents and publishers, an account of  how Maugham's experience working for a short time as a doctor in the poorest part of London impacted his sensibility, and so much more. Maugham was very lucky  in that he had a totally honest very astute financial genius managing his money for him.  Maugham spent much of World War Two in the United States, sometimes in New York City where at one time four of his plays were on Broadway simultaneously, some in Hollywood working on scripts.  We learn a lot about the business side of being a playwright, dealing with temperamental stars and wondering how long a play would run.  

        Just a few of Maugham's works

Toward the end of his life Maugham became dependent on one of his nephews for care.  It was so sad to read of his falling out with his daughter and his terrible decline into dementia.

The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham is a great literary biography.  Even if you have never read any Maugham, you should read at least On Human Bondage and "Rain", I think anyone with an interest In Twentieth century literary culture will enjoy this book.  

I will, I hope, read her biography of Nancy Mitford one of these days.

Mel u

 

Rosamond Lehmann A Life by Selina Hastings (2002, 512 pages)

Just a few days ago I read my first work by Rosamond Lehmann, An Invitation to the Waltz.  I am now reading her first novel, which was received with great acclaim and made her famous, Dusty Answers.  

I greatly enjoy reading biographies of authors.  A good literary biography has to find a way to talk about the tale without losing the teller.  The temptation for biographers is to work backwards from the works and derive the writings of an author from her or his life experiences.  The literary biography is getting off to a very good start in the 21th century.  Recently I have read and posted upon very good biographies of Marcel Proust, his translator C. K. Scott Moncreiff, Colette, the Italian writer, Elsa Morante, Constance Fenimore Woolson, a neglected American writer, the incomparable Clarice Lispector and Iréne Nemirovsky.  Selina Hasting's Rosamond Lehmann is a suberb edition to this list.  

Lehmann (1901 to 1990) was born into an affluent family.  Her father was the founder of the literary journal Grata, a liberal member of parliament, a world class rowing coach and a pretty decent father.  Lehmann grew up pampered living a beautiful house on a river.  She was home schooled up until she entered Cambridge, just about the time women were first granted degrees.  She had a deep love for literature, particularly the great Victorian writers.  

Hastings tells us that as a writer and a woman Lehmann was always somehow in the not completely benevolent shadow of her great beauty.  (When I read this I thought of Clarice Lispector.)  She published seven novels, a collection of short stories and a spiritual autobiography.  She frequently lectured and was a vehement anti-Fascist.  

Once Lehmann graduates from Cambridge, Hasting structures the central part of the biography as an account of the men in Lehmann's life and the vagaries of her relationships.  She married in 1928, Wogan Philipps, Second Baron of Milford and an accomplished  artist.  They had two children, a son Hugo and a daughter Sally.  The marriage slowly disintegrated as the husband became deeply committed to communism and fought in the Spanish Civil War.  They divorced and she never remarried.

       Wogan Philips

 

  She had four long term love affairs, in each case her lover left her, sometimes for another woman.  Her longest romance was a nine year relationship with Cecil Lewis, a post Laureate of England.  She never got over the extreme almost unbalanced bitterness she felt toward Lewis, who was in fact married to another woman for the duration of their affair, when he left her for another woman, a well know actress.   Lehmann like and needed male validation of her beauty and sexual charisma.  I was surprised to learn of her brief fling with the James Bond Ian Fleming, on two trips to Jamaica. She has her share of short term relationships.

The biggest tragedy in the life of Lehmann was the death of her beloved daughter Sally in 1958.  Sally, also called STH,  was living in Indonesia where her husband had a government position. She died of a virus.  This event pushed Lehmann into a thirty year involvement  with spiritualism.  I learned, and it made perfect sense, that Spiritualusm first came to favor in England because of all the deaths of young men in their prime in World War One.  Of course Spiritualusm was fraught with many charlatans who claimed to let you communicate with the dead.  Lehmann for many years would write out letters from her daughter detailing the after life and was deeply involved in Spiritualusm. 

Hastings has a personal connection to Lehmann and I greatly respected her keeping this for the end of the book.  

For sure Hastings, who is deeply knowledgeable about the era, loves the work of Lehmann.  Lehmann. was  not, as I perceive her, always a joy to be around, she had a large ego combined with a strong need for male validation and a phobia of abandonment that impacted all her relationships.  She was highly intelligent, very into the best of literature, conscious of the power of her beauty, maybe as she aged a bit deluded on this, in need of validation from high status literary men, knew every body who was anybody in England, a writer of sublime power.  At her very best she belongs in the top ranks of 20th century writers.

There is a huge amount to be learned from Rosamond Lehmann A Life by Selina Hastings.  I strongly recommend it to all with an interest in the period. It is the very model of a literary biography. I would suggest you first read at least her Invitation to the Waltz.  

I have begun Hastings biography of Somerset Maugham, a close friend of Lehmann who stayed at his chateau in the south of France on several occasions.

Mel u