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- Herausgeber: Daunt Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
'Bedford's ability to recreate landscape is matched only by her appetite for mouth-watering descriptions of exotic food . . . She cannot write a dull page.' -- Financial Times 'The Naples boat was on time. Lightly one stepped ashore, and, after a brief, slow ascent, emerged into Piazza still warm under a late afternoon sun.' In these eight evocative and transcendent essays, Sybille Bedford chronicles her adventures through Europe over a thirty year period. With her elegant prose and razor sharp insight, Bedford takes us on a propulsive journey –dropping us into the passenger seat as she drives to meet Martha Gellhorn in Capri, taking us across the wind-swept piazzas of Venice in winter, and tantalizing our taste buds with a tour of the vineyards of Bordeaux. Packed with extraordinary excitement, Bedford shows us the world through her eyes – the eyes of a seasoned traveller – in all its beauty and wonder. Pleasures and Landscapes is a satisfyingly sensuous literary expedition told by one of the greatest travel writers of the 20th Century. 'When the history of modern prose in English comes to be written, Sybille Bedford will have to appear in any list of its most dazzling practitioners.' -- Bruce Chatwin 'Bedford writes of the lure of the sensual life, the picnics, lobster salad, hock and seltzer and going to the opera, in Italy, in summer . . .' -- Times
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‘Bedford’s ability to recreate landscape is matched only by her appetite for mouth-watering descriptions of exotic food … She cannot write a dull page.’ – Financial Times
‘When the history of modern prose in English comes to be written, Sybille Bedford will have to appear in any list of its most dazzling practitioners.’ – Bruce Chatwin
‘Bedford writes of the lure of the sensual life, the picnics, lobster salad, hock and seltzer and going to the opera, in Italy, in summer …’ – The Times
Pleasures and Landscapes
SYBILLE BEDFORD
DAUNT BOOKS
TO LESLEY from her nervous passenger
Depuis huit jours, j’avais déchiré mes bottines
Aux cailloux des chemins. J’entrais à Charleroi.
– An Cabaret-Vert: je demandai des tartines
De beurre et du jambon qui fût à moitié froid.
Bienheureux, j’allongeai les jambes sous la table
Verte: je contemplai les sujets très naïfs
De la tapisserie. – Et ce fut adorable,
Quand la fille aux tétons énormes, aux yeux vifs
– Celle-là, ce n’est pas un baiser qui l’épeure!
– Rieuse, m’apporta des tartines de beurre,
Du jambon tiède, dans un plat colorié,
Du jambon rose et blanc parfumé d’une gousse
D’ail, – et m’emplit la chope immense, avec sa mousse
Que dorait un rayon de soleil arriéré.
– Arthur Rimbaud
Contents
Introduction
IT IS ONLY HUMAN that those of us who live by the sweat of our inky fingers so often feel the urge to snatch our fugitive essays from oblivion and confine them once and for all within the covers of a book. For some of us, of course, it is just a form of vanity publishing: these compilations seldom make money for anyone and are fearfully vulnerable to the critical sneer, but they stand gratifyingly on our book-shelves, and they may give a bit of fun to our great-grandchildren.
For others, however, it is an assertion of art’s unity. Bruce Chatwin evidently thought that the pieces collected in his What Am I Doing Here were an essential part of his oeuvre. V. S. Pritchett’s miscellany At Home and Abroad was as worthy of his reputation as were his full-length travel books. And this collection by Sybille Bedford certainly clarifies her distinguished but somewhat imprecise status in the republic of letters. Everyone knows her name, but relatively few readers, especially perhaps in America, realise the range of her gifts – novelist, biographer, analyst of the law, travel writer, celebrant of food, and mistress of an altogether inimitable prose.
Pleasures and Landscapes will make things clearer. It is an ideal primer. It consists of eight essays of varying length written between 1954 and 2001 for publications English and American, Encounter to Esquire. Their matter ranges from the sensations of hill walking to the best way of pronouncing Portuguese (‘lop off the final vowel and as many others as laziness suggests …’), but their manner is one throughout: it is a deliberately but idiosyncratically literary manner. Although I suppose Mrs Bedford was usually writing in the first place to earn a dollar or two, she never relaxes her hold upon her technique, or her determination to translate scenes and events into a kind of apotheosised reportage.
This is wonderfully exhilarating, especially since none of the essays have been touched up in retrospect, except for an occasional footnote. These really are pleasures and landscapes, as they were at the time. Norman Douglas calls Martha Gellhorn ‘a poppet’ in the Capri of 1948. Mateus rosé is a wine to take note of in 1958. Going to Yugoslavia in the 1960s is a matter of ‘curiosity, tinged with apprehension’. The first impact of Switzerland after World War II comes rushing back in a torrent of immaculate, efficient, complacent, polite, and prosperous images. We feel that we are not looking back at life thirty, forty, fifty years ago but experiencing it for ourselves, with all its joys, hazards, and surprises.
All this means that the book is entirely personal and particular. There are very few generalisations. It is all instant response and instant emotion, and Mrs Bedford’s unique style, though for all I know it is honed through long midnight hours, reads as though it streams out of her sensibility without preoccupation and without review. Occasionally I find it a little too irrepressible, especially when it comes to food (she is very interested in eating and drinking) – her ‘sea bream, charred and nutty’, ‘limpid’ olive oil, and fish soup of ‘coruscating’ colour may drive readers of less urbane gourmandism, like me, all the more readily to the deep-freeze Ocean Pie.
On the whole, though, the impetuous integrity is fascinating to observe. Mrs Bedford has been writing her brilliantly individual (not to say eccentric) essays for decades, and to this day they make the work of most practitioners tame and conventional by comparison. Her piece ‘The Quality of Travel’ is as fresh now, and as full of relevant advice, as it was when she wrote it in 1961. She says in a footnote to this book that ‘it is for the reader to decide what is essentially unchanged and what is changed’, but I think the caveat is unnecessary. What is essential is the truth of her writing. It comes straight from the heart – the source, to my mind, not only of the best art but the best reporting too.
– Jan Morris
A Homecoming
CAPRI 1948
THE NAPLES BOAT was on time. The crossing – it was May – had not been too gruelling. Lightly one stepped ashore and into the funicular, and, after a brief, slow ascent, emerged into Piazza still warm under a late afternoon sun.
I was elated. To be back, to be back anywhere in those days – the year was 1948 – felt a miracle. One responded with a delirious sense of freedom, rediscovery, renewal: the Europe for so long known to be held down in agony and chaos, so long believed lost to us, possibly forever, was beginning to be regained. I had spent – immense privilege – the winter in Italy, Venice first, then Florence, and was now living, somewhat precariously, in a backstreet hotel in Rome. I had stayed up late the night before – all hours were precious – then left at dawn, driving south chanting poetry to myself in the car I had been entrusted to deliver. By full morning, when the near-empty road (not much legitimate petrol around then) glared before me, I had to fight drowsiness till at one point there was a great jolt and I came to with the front wheel already off the road and was just able to wrench the car back on course. Jolted hard myself, I stopped – I had missed the ditch, a milestone, a tree. Out of nowhere women arose from a field crying, ‘Mamma mia.’ I braced myself to inspect the damage, but no – no dent, no buckled mudguard, no burst tyre; the poor old Morris looked unscathed. I was not quite so sure about the steering as I drove on, slowly now, with circumspection, and contrite, appalled by my irresponsibility. This was not my car. Another hundred and forty kilometres to go, out of some two hundred and fifty. The prospect seemed long … The dawn jaunt had turned into a slow, hot, anxious drive.
In the end I got there. I left the car as arranged, in a garage considered – as far as is possible in Naples – one of the less blatantly dishonest ones, and instructed them to check and, if necessary, repair the steering (the bill to go to me). After that, lunching with a friend, the young British Vice Consul, I got my second wind. Constantine Fitz-Gibbon was with us, and Theodora – we were all high with the same postwar joy of being where we were, and I only just caught the boat to Capri.
On boarding, Constantine left me with a pill he said he’d got off a German officer he’d taken prisoner during the Italian campaign. It was a largish capsule, a bit tacky by now, issued reputedly to keep a man efficient and alert for forty-eight hours or more without sleep. Constantine seemed to think I might need it before the day was out (I had told him whom I’d have to face). Recklessness had returned: I accepted the pill, wrapped it in a scrap of tissue, and put it in my pocket.
And now there was Capri. The island looked itself. One point about the war was that where it had not destroyed, it had conserved. Craters and ruins, yes, but no new excrescences (yet): for five and a half years the developers had been kept at bay. And in Piazza there was the usual crowd, native and tourist, assembled to wait and watch the boat arrive and passengers appear. To my surprise and pleasure I saw Martha Gellhorn. I had not expected her to meet me, but she had.
‘I say,’ she said, ‘this is a glorious place.’ She had taken a room for me at the pensione where she was staying, a hundred feet up from Piazza. Clean and cheap. ‘That,’ I said, ‘would be delightful.’ But before we took one step further I had to tell her something. (Straight candour – with Martha anything else was unthinkable.) ‘I have done something very bad,’ I said. Then told her what had happened.
She and I had met only just over a week before at the studio flat of a man who to her was a fellow journalist and an ex-combatant (he had been parachuted into German-held Italy after Anzio and spent some intensely perilous months underground before the liberation of Rome) and to me a connection, a cousin in fact, of my stepfather, and a childhood chum. Meeting Martha Gellhorn, being addressed, being taken notice of by her, was like being exposed to a fifteen-hundred-watt chandelier: she radiated vitality, certainty, total courage. Add to this the voltage of her talk – galloping, relentlessly slangy, wry, dry, self-deprecatory, often funny. Add to this her looks. The honey-coloured hair, shoulder-length, the intense large blue eyes, the fine-cut features, the bronzed skin, the graceful, stalwart stance. I saw her as the (very feminine) image of the Pierro delle Francesca Archangel in the National Gallery, the presented sword, the heroic yet angelic look, the slender foot poised on the dragon’s head: a shining defender of the just, the oppressed, the poor.
Add her reputation. The intrepid American front-line war reporter for whom war had been the daily element when most of us had still tried to carry on with our private lives. Now she was back in Europe, in Rome at the moment, doing research on a piece, I forget about what, and she seemed to think I might be of some use. We had dinner together that night and lunch or dinner together again the next day and the next. I made no bones about the pleasure I took in her company, and a brand-new friendship began quickly. Before the week was out, Martha said that Rome had had it. (I was yet to learn about those barbarous spurts of restlessness.) I tried to point out the things she hadn’t seen, had not begun to see – it was her first time in Rome (to which I was passionately attached). To no avail. She decided to look at Capri. Off tomorrow. There was a snag, though – that stinker hadn’t yet come with her car.
Hiring a car in Italy was difficult or impossible, exorbitant at any rate (the Topolino had just appeared; blissfully, city streets were still crowded mainly with Vespas and pedestrians). Martha bethought herself of the Morris she had kept in storage in England during the war years and arranged for a young man, a colleague of sorts who wanted to get out to Italy, to drive it over for her. She was sure that the stinker would profiteer by giving lifts to girlfriends and cheating her over the petrol she was paying for. His name was mud already because he hadn’t arrived. The situation was resolved by my offering to drive the car down to Naples for her as soon as it turned up. (I jumped at the idea of revisiting Capri, where I had old friends such as Kenneth Macpherson, who was settling there in order to look after Norman Douglas in his old age.) Martha concurred, trusted me implicitly, and went ahead by train.
Now, what had impressed me most in Martha was the absolutism of her moral standards. Looking down on much I had thought permissible in days before, I resolved to become 100 per cent brave and truthful and reliable myself. This is a phenomenon well known to those who recall their first exposure to Martha Gellhorn. And now what had I done? Put myself in charge of her car after inadequate sleep. (In sober fact, I had not slept at all.)
‘I did worse than your stinker,’ I said as we stood rooted to the spot in mid-Piazza. ‘I may have wrecked your car.’ Then I told her what had happened.
Martha looked at me with almost benign amazement. ‘My,’ she said, ‘you might have killed yourself.’
That too had occurred to me – those seconds it took to get the car in control again had been drastically lucid.
‘I wouldn’t have to face you now,’ I said. Martha laughed, brushing the incident aside with casual, sunny forgiveness. (Since, I have been much censured, deeply disapproved of, about many things; the Morris on the brink was never held against me.)
‘Let’s get into that bar and have some martinis,’ Martha said. We did. Presently she and I went to have dinner. (A boy porter in Piazza had taken my bag straight to the pensione.) We went to the Savoia, the small trattoria a few steps from Piazza where Norman Douglas, walking down from the Villa Truto, ate at night. One went there – the food was seldom very good, and the wine, for anyone less hardened than Norman, just not undrinkable – in the hope of his company; his privacy, though, was inviolate. The convention was to wave to him as one came in; he would call out a greeting or a warning – ‘Don’t touch their squid tonight, my dear,’ or ‘The veal’s tolerable.’ You might approach his table and say a few words in return. Sometimes he ate alone, usually he assembled two or three or more companions; yet, great friend or distant, one would never sit down with him unless expressly asked to do so.
That evening he had a look at Martha and liked what he saw. He called to me to bring her over. The dinner went well, it seemed to me, because of Martha and Norman’s misapprehension of each other’s natures. He called her ‘my poppet’, declined to be aware that she was a formidable – and formidably committed – woman; what he chose to take in were her looks and charm. She might have been inclined to remain censorious and unamused (she had not read Siren Land, she had not read South Wind; she had heard of the pederasty, of which she disapproved with all the strength of her fundamentalist American Puritanism); what she took in was an exquisitely mannered old gentleman and his charm. The talk, as I remember, was chiefly about fish. Anything about the late war, Nazis, collaborators and their tortuous allegiances, would have glanced off Norman’s Rabelaisian urbanity. It would not have been appropriate, and it was not attempted.
The Trattoria Savoia closed down (not early). After cheerful good-nights in Piazza – ‘Bless you, my poppets’ – Norman stumped off for his steep walk home with pocket torch and stick. Martha and I went to our pensione, where a key had been left for us to find. The rooms, even under the weak bulb light, showed up clean and white, but they were stuffy, the shutters being closed. Owing to the peculiar topography of Capri back streets, the windows were near ceiling high: to get to them and undo those shutters one had to climb onto a pair of wooden stools. This we did and reached the small squares of open window – and there were Mauresque rooftops, stars, night air.
‘Isn’t this delectable?’ Martha said. It was. Jasmine, citrus, oleander, warm stone, a hint of sea … We drew it in, leaning into the night, our elbows on the windowsill, our toes on the wobbly stools.
