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Good Reading : August 2001
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authorprofile Although she takes her writing very seriously, she can be irreverent about some of its more public aspects. ‘I thought being nominated for the Booker (for Jigsaw in 1989) was a joke. The winners are always mediocre, always writers I don’t like. When friends went to Ladbrokes, I wanted to bet I wasn’t going to win – the odds were the lowest: 8 to 1. When the television cameras focused on me at the dinner, I was gnawing on a pheasant leg,’ she chuckles, while conceding that the increased profile bought her peace of mind and ‘some decent bottles’. She refuses to be edited ‘except for spelling, which I’m bad at. Even for the New Yorker, I refused an editor. I once wrote a love scene and set it in the Dorchester, which had not been built at the time, so I had to make it into the Savoy!’ she laughs. But she is fastidious about punctuation and rhythm. ‘These days, I’m becoming minimalist: I keep descriptions to a minimum,’ she says, while conceding that she has always found writing dialogue easy. Age and infirmity have changed her habits of writing in the morning, as advised by Huxley. Now she manages two hours in the afternoon, battling ‘sloth and lack of belief in oneself’. She is currently struggling with a new book, Quicksands, due out in February 2002, ‘but I write very slowly, and in terrible, illegible handwriting’, she says, and the script on her desk confirm this. ‘It will be about the perspectives of an outsider,’ she says, ‘seen through a sieve or a strainer of memory. It is neither autobiography, nor fiction, but it is about someone with a huge love of life, with a very anxious, nervous, nature, beset by fears and superstitions. I think it is a bit like Cyrill Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, except without all the references and quotations he used, and not as well written.’ Bedford has a remarkable memory, but has kept no diary during her life, except for quick jottings about people which are now of no help. Her first attempts at novels were so bad, ‘I left them in a dry cistern in France. Actually the last one was not so bad, it was about the Munich crisis of 1939 and I called it What Can We Ever Do? after a line from Eliot, but I hadn’t found my voice yet’. Her ferociously cultured, multilingual, literary mother never read any of her work ‘except for my first short story. I have a scrap of paper on which she wrote “My God, that child is a genius, except that it’s all a plagiarism of Aldous!” She was right’. Bedford’s mother is a delicate, and one suspects, still painful subject. Bedford has made no attempt to disguise the fact that the mother in her most acclaimed novel, Jigsaw, is based on her own: Elizabeth Bernard, a ravishingly beautiful and highly cultured creature who, after her marriage to Sybille’s father broke down, settled in Italy and then the South of France with a much younger man, Nori Marchesani. Bernard was forty to his twenty-two. ‘She wore her beauty completely The way to Bedford’s heart is through her stomach. She once said that ‘food is as revealing as money and sex.’ She is nostalgic for certain wines the way others miss favourite people. ‘The only wine I ever cried over was a bottle of ’53 Chateau Margaux, it spoke of such a different world...’ casually, she dressed badly, in fact she was sluttish, with no idea what suited her. But through her charm, her brilliance, and her looks, she was always top dog with all men.’ Bedford remembers her as ‘speaking seventeen languages’ and conducting brilliant conversations about art and literature at the table with which she was expected to keep up. ‘She talked about Dostoyevsky at breakfast, she read me Maupassant and Baudelaire. I got my desire to write from her, she thought it was a noble and serious endeavour.’ But when her mother developed an addiction to morphine, following the break up of her marriage to Marchesani, Bedford, still in her teens, was left to look after her, procuring the drug on her mother’s behalf, increasingly desperate about money, and her mother’s worsening condition. ‘It’s not that she was addictive, she was abstemious with champagne,’ says Bedford, musing in answer to my question. ‘The doctor who supplied her with the morphine initially was corrupt. When I was sixteen, I had to go to cafes to buy her drugs, because the doctor would not supply any more.’ Bedford’s mother spent the rest of her life in and out of institutions, dying in 1937. As for her father, he is one of the most colourfully eccentric characters in Bedford’s novel A Legacy, in which he is incarnated as Julius von Felden. In real life, Baron Maximilan von Schoenebeck lived in a small chateau at Feldkirch in southern Germany, where he maintained a small menagerie of animals, including monkeys and a lion. It was he who steered his 21
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