A Small Legacy

...they're quirky, and psychologically convincing...

...but her novels are deft without being pretentious, displaying a very English sort of sturdiness that retains its own appeal, perhaps particularly among American readers...

...But the nomination brought new attention to Bedford and her previously published works...

...Bedford too will have her champions, particularly among fellow writers drawn to the careful grace and luster of her prose...

...Evelyn Waugh, Bedford proudly notes, much admired A Legacy—despite its "too large a dose of Henry James...

...The first three—A Legacy (1956,), A Favourite of the Gods (1963), and A Compass Error (1968)— earned good reviews and then sank from view, as most novels do...

...Still, Bedford's novels are too aloof, fatalistic, and mandarin to attract large numbers of readers...

...Here are artichokes, olives, almonds, "spicy fish stews," and a "coeur-crème with apricot jam...

...As It Was features Bedford's coverage of the trials of both Jack Ruby and Lady Chat-terly's lover...

...It's a worthy enterprise, for Bedford is a smart, singular writer with an intriguing career...

...Private life is private life," she insists, "which means private...

...For Bedford, I think, isn't best represented by her novels, which are self-obsessed as well as self-possessed— the often elegant works of a highly observant writer whose eye is too frequently turned inward...

...they're oddly inconsistent too...

...and when an "instinctive" hedonist like Renée Kisling could still fancy herself a pioneer of the new morality, striking her own blow against "bourgeois sexual orthodoxy...

...Critics and readers were surprised when, in 1989, Bedford's fourth novel, Jigsaw, was shortlisted for one of Britain's most important literary honors—the Booker Prize...

...No contemporary writer can match her fondness for rhetorical questions, French phrases, and italics used freely as a mark of emphasis...

...She enjoys books, but she's high-spirited too, and—after living in England on marmite and tea—is understandably eager to enjoy a range of French pleasures...

...She based many of its characters on members of her own fading aristocratic family...

...Byatt, among others...

...Jigsaw isn't social criticism of any kind...

...Jigsaw shows how a single individual can powerfully affect the lives of those around her, for good or ill, and for a very long time...

...Pym is no Jane Austen, to whom she is sometimes compared...

...Billi, it's clear, will spend the rest of her creative life coming to grips with a commanding parent who was both stimulating and slighting, inspiring and remote...

...Still, you don't have to like Bedford's novels to admire her nonfiction...

...The book is nearly half over before the narrator admits that "it occurred to me—a little late—that I have not said what my mother looked like...

...Pym's characters can be complex, contradictory, like the people we know...

...And yet, as A Legacy first demonstrated, Bedford's fiction draws repeatedly, if teasingly, on the facts of her life...

...In these eight essays Bedford emerges as an innovative and idiosyncratic reporter and writer whose best work retains its power and relevance still...

...Bedford, born in 1911, has also published four novels, all of them ambiBrian Murray teaches writing at Loyola College in Maryland...

...Of course, mixing fact and fiction is as old as print...

...Moreover, she professes no interest in exposing old lovers or settling scores...

...tious works of art...

...Given such ample praise, Bedford's American publisher has recently released all four of her novels in smart new editions...

...Although limited as a novelist, Huxley was in fact a splendid essayist, idiosyncratic and erudite, and one of the most influential public intellectuals of his day...

...In other words, it's a memoir...

...But it recalls a time when summering in the South of France was still a privilege...

...We'll speak then, when you've made yourself a mind...

...Readers of modern British literature might recall that, during the 1960s, Bedford emerged as an English journalist in the wry, cold-eyed manner of Rebecca West and Nancy Mitford...

...Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival and Saul Bellow's Ravelstein) that almost no one bothers to complain anymore of its ethical or aesthetic implications...

...Packaged as a "biographical novel," Jigsaw features a narrator called "Billi"—just as Bedford was herself known to family and friends...

...And like Bedford herself, Billi is drawn particularly to Aldous Huxley and his family...

...It's a personal narrative with some imagined dialogue and other fictional bits thrown in...

...In brief, it's a highbrow romance that, although published in the 1960s, retains the flavor of prose published thirty years before—as if Cyril Connolly were collaborating with Elinor Wylie...

...When she's not eating like Julia Child or savoring the local wine, Billi's pursuits are familiar enough: She falls in love, broods about life, dances the foxtrot, battles with her mother, and longs to write...

...A Legacy is Bedford's most accomplished novel...

...And yet, in one scene, a character "flung herself into a chair...

...For the young Bedford, dinner with mom could turn suddenly into an oral examination...

...This is particularly curious since Billi's mother dominates the novel...

...when a writer like Colette was still considered shocking...

...Bedford's fiction, meanwhile, was hailed by John Fowles, David Leavitt, and A.S...

...Both Barbara Pym and Penelope Fitzgerald, for example, wrote dark, oddly comic novels that languished for years before attracting large and avid followings...

...But at a very minimum, what a book is called affects the way it's read...

...It takes place between 1870 and 1914, and focuses on three affluent, influential families: two are Catholic, one Jewish...

...At the time of her Booker nomination, Bedford was compared to other recent writers who came to fame late in their careers...

...Bedford's tone, like Aldous Huxley's, tends to be ironically cool...

...in exchange for successfully creating characters they must become characters themselves—exposed, diminished figures in somebody else's narrative...

...Like Fitzgerald, Pym possessed a shrewd understanding of human nature that was belied somewhat by the clarity and directness of her style...

...My mother and I are a percentage of ourselves...

...In the current climate, established writers are easy prey for scriptwriters and biographers...

...And here, most impressively, is a New Year's feast that includes, among other things, "a platter of fruits de mer" and "quenelles de brochet as light as feathers," as well as "small young turkeys, roasted unstuffed in butter" that are "served with their own unthickened roasting juices," and complemented, of course, by "a creamy chestnut purée," a "sharp salad of watercress," some "carefully chosen cheeses and a bombe à glace...

...It's an admirable stand...

...even Auberon Waugh, a man not easily pleased, called her "a writer of consummate artistry...

...like him, she often portrays artists, intellectuals, and wealthy bohemians...

...More important, "she instilled into me the idea that it was a very grand thing to be a writer...

...For Bedford, he was both an "intellectual and moral idol" and a trusted friend who proved particularly reliable when her increasingly unstable mother developed a dangerous addiction to morphine...

...Bedford notes that A Legacy derived "from what I saw and above all heard and over-heard as a child...

...It also includes "The Worst that Ever Happened," a particularly memorable account of the 1963 trial, in Frankfurt, of 22 Germans who abetted the horrors at Auschwitz during the Second World War...

...Bedford specialized in the courts and the law...

...Even in Britain, where she has lived for many years, Bedford was known mainly for her critical writing and reportage...

...We learn of his "regular working hours" and the Beethoven records he "listened to in hammocks in the garden and under the stars...

...Like Ivy Compton-Burnett, Bedford is drawn to dialogue...

...And they are at least partially responsible, Bedford implies, for those "vast and monstrous" things that came in the wake of German unification: Prussian-ism, Nazism, and two world wars...

...In her introduction to Jigsaw, Bedford notes that she found "the freedom of fiction" bracing after long stints of writing nonfiction prose...

...As It Was, a 1990 anthology of Bedford's nonfiction, was widely and rightly praised...

...But you're going to be very, very dull for a very long time—perhaps ten or fifteen years...

...As a novel, Jigsaw seems pretentious and slack: The author is both intrusive and coy...

...Bedford didn't win the Booker, which went instead to Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day...

...Moreover, it's a practice that, over the past decade or so, has grown so commonplace (consider only VS...

...These new editions include attractively candid introductions by the author herself...

...Given Bedford's dramatic life, one might be surprised to learn that she hasn't yet published her memoirs...

...Bedford is reluctant, however, to "retell or analyze" her own novels, which are distinctive in many ways...

...and, like Henry James, she favors psychological analysis, internal action, and elaborate prose...

...another "succumbed to Rome at sight...

...Her self-destructive mother rips through life in top gear and resorts, ultimately, to drugs...

...During the 1920s and '30s, the two spent much time together in Sanary, a village in the South of France where her mother lived with her second husband, a robust and obliging Italian much younger than she...

...Pym was living quietly as a pensioner in Oxford, her books long out of print, when in 1977 Philip Larkin called her the most underrated novelist of the twentieth century...

...But one senses in Bedford's fiction the lingering presence of her early literary heroes...

...Jigsaw makes an often fascinating memoir, effectively recalling a period in European history that, more than a half century later, seems both prescient and quaint...

...Her own talk was "always about books or concerts or paintings," Bedford recalled, "and if you couldn't keep your end up, no matter how young you were, you either left the table or ate in silence...

...Pym's characters contend with loss and dullness and disappointment...

...They're attractively ordinary too...

...Thus A Favourite of the Gods alludes to Gibbon, Byron, and Stendhal and includes the sort of characters who collect books and hang about villas and who could tell you the difference between a Pomerol and a Pauillac...

...The Huxleys "were far less touched by gossip than most people"— although it's not quite clear why...

...And they visit the dentist and attend flower shows...

...A Legacy proved especially difficult...

...The Kislings and the Aldous Huxleys are the Kislings and the Aldous Huxleys," she explains in a prefatory note...

...They are for the most part highly unattractive people— haughty, humorless, a bit dotty...

...Suddenly Pym became a literary celebrity, the subject of books, articles, and at least one television film...

...Like her mother, Billi easily attracts suitors and friends, including the Polish painter Moise Kisling and his wife, Renée—a "force of nature" whose "infidelities were frequent, unconcealed, casual on the whole, often concurrent...

...Food, it seems, is the chief of these...

...Huxley, "all six foot two of him," is vividly portrayed...

...In a memoir, however, one expects a looser structure, a string of lively if unrelated episodes, and the chance to watch an intriguing mind at play...

...But Jigsaw sticks so closely to the known events of Sybille Bedford's life that it hardly seems fair to call it a novel at all...

...Writing, Bedford admits, "was and is and ever will be very very tough for me...

...You were very sweet as a baby," Bedford's mother once told her...

...The Best We Can Do (1958), her account of the 1957 trial of John Bodkin Adams, a British physician suspected of dispatching patients with overdoses of morphine, has been called "a classic of its kind...

...But it's also risky...

...Inevitably, readers are left wondering which parts of the book are "true," and which are imagined...

...Bedford's books suggest that over time she grew closer to her mother, who remained something of a conteuse—and an intuitive collector of talented friends...

...This is completely understandable, of course, for narrating facts can be tedious, and it's almost always more amusing to just make things up...

...For Bedford, filling pages is like "chiselling" words...

...Between the wars, Sanary had become a fashionable retreat for artists, intellectuals, and assorted bohemians, including the writers Aldous Huxley and Thomas Mann, whom Bedford's mother liked to call "poor Tommy...

...Bedford spent the rest of her childhood and much of her adolescence living in boarding schools or with family friends, for her beautiful, volatile English mother "was not interested in children, not at all...

...Bedford, tellingly, admits to "a puzzled sense about the relativity of given truth...

...And yet, she was "grateful," for her mother "taught me everything about literature and art and world affairs...

...In fact, her American publishers would do well to reissue As It Was, which first appeared in English and American magazines during the 1950s and '60s...

...Her mother expected good food and wine and sparkling conversation...

...Bedford's father, for example, appears in A Legacy (and again in Jigsaw) as a handsome, eccentric Francophile—a man whose "prudent" but "susceptible" ancestors had similarly "married late and died young...

...Even now her more ardent fans pore over Excellent Women and Quartet in Autumn at annual meetings of the Barbara Pym Society...

...Billi, like Bedford, spends her holidays in Sanary...

...Oh I got stuck so often," she writes, "made what I call fausse route...

...Bedford told one interviewer that, as a child, "I never had any maternal love...

...Ma mère," she admits, "est une femme impossible...

...Billi's father, like Bedford's, is an aging sensualist facing poverty at the end of his days...

...But Bedford matured as a writer back when autobiographical writing was relatively rare—the discreet, ghostwritten genre of explorers, statesmen, and sports stars...

...And no wonder Thomas Pynchon is still out there, somewhere, lying low...

...Occasionally Billi pauses to discuss her literary career, which mirrors exactly Bedford's own...

...other characters are "to a large extent themselves...

...Both A Compass Error and A Favourite of the Gods include characters modeled closely on Bedford's mother and Bedford herself...

...Huxley, who died in 1963, is no longer widely read, although certain students can still readily identify him not only as the author of Brave New World, but the dude who, in The Doors of Perception, turned Jim Morrison onto the mind-altering possibilities of LSD...

...Bedford was only nine when her father died, broken and broke, and she left Germany for good...

...But then, various names and characters drift through Jigsaw with little or no direct connection to each other, or to its larger design...

...No wonder Bedford is wary...

...Others might remember Bedford as a travel writer, wine critic, or biographer whose big 1973 study of Aldous Huxley was widely noticed and praised...

...Jigsaw abounds with explicit descriptions of memorable meals...

...Consider only the case of the late Iris Murdoch, a disciplined and widely admired novelist whose often disordered personal life, kept private for years, is now vividly displayed in books and on movie screens...

...Huxley's wife, we're told, is an "eccentric" cook and "the soul of tact...