Drinking wine aged 10, endless parties and so many women … a fine novelist who preferred good times to writing
The novelist Sybille Bedford is the patron saint of writers who hate writing. She described the actual act as “tearing, crushing, defeating agony” and filled her journal for 1949 with despairing accounts of “Thinking – Dawdling – Dreaming – Fiddling”, ending always with an accusatory blank page. Sometimes she tried to trick her muse by practising typing exercises, but even her typewriter seemed to get wise to this and she was left feeling “sick with disgust, discouragement, heaviness”. She used drink and drugs to jolly herself into a more productive state of mind, but in the end found that only weak black tea did the trick.
Even then her struggles weren’t over. Seven years after those punishing diary entries, Bedford finally published her first novel, A Legacy, based on her own family history of the late 19th century, but said she could only look at it with a shudder – “that ogre, that snail novel”. The fact that Evelyn Waugh hailed 48-year-old Bedford in the Spectator as a “new writer of remarkable accomplishment” wasn’t enough to get her going again. It took 30 years for her to produce a sequel, the intensely autobiographical Jigsaw. This time, and by now pushing 80, Bedford was nominated for the Booker.