Bedford A Compass Error

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-907970-19-1
Verlag: Daunt Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 232 Seiten

'A powerful and merciless book - a classic coming-of-age novel' -- Hilary Mantel 'Wide windows, not yet shuttered at that hour, opened from the circular white-washed room on slopes of olives and the distant shimmering bay. Flavia turned seventeen, alone, entirely alone for the first time in her life . . .' As the Second World War looms, Flavia is living in a small village in the South of France. She studies for her Oxford entrance, swims in the sea, eats at local cafés, and lives with the confidence and relish of youth. Drawn into the demi-monde of artists and writers, Flavia awakes to the pleasures and complications of adult life. Her world is overturned when she becomes fascinated by Andrée - beautiful, sophisticated, yet manipulative - and is caught up in a devastating intrigue. This is a dramatic companion novel to A Favourite of the Gods, also published by Daunt Books. There will always be people for whom her books are part of their mind's life, and people who are discovering her for the first time as if entering a lighted room.' --Victoria Glendinning 'A mesmerising writer' -- Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telegraph 'One of our greatest writers' -- Rosie Boycott 'The lure of the sensual life, 'the picnics, lobster salad, hock and seltzer and going to the opera, in Italy, in summer' . . . Bedford has the supreme novelist's openness to chance experience, the ability to trace significant patterns in seemingly inconsequential things.' -- The Times 'Sophisticated.... skilful... she demonstrates firm control of form and clarity of style.' -- New Statesman

Sybille Bedford was born in 1911 in Charlottenburg, Germany, the daughter of a German father and an English mother. She grew up in Italy, France and England. The account of her travels in Mexico A Visit to Don Otavio was her first published book in 1953, and she followed it with three novels, A Legacy (1956), A Favourite of the Gods (1963) and A Compass Error (1968). Her semi-autobiographical novel, Jigsaw, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989. Her memoir, Quicksands, was published in 2005. Sybille Bedford died in 2006.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bedford, Sybille

Leseproben

Introduction   I had taken it for granted that at one time or another I would write a sequel to my novel, A Favourite of the Gods. The characters – dead or alive – invited further consequences of their actions, if not necessarily in a straightforward way. What these would be, healing? destructive? I was confident that I should know in time. Time, as it happened, lengthened into several years, hard-working, nomadic. For different reasons in each case, I had come to take on a row of journalistic assignments; the most taxing of these had been two interminable trials, first reported by me on site, later written about at length. This, besides great emotional involvement, had entailed much travelling and long absences from whatever was home base. One was the trial of Jack Ruby for the murder of President Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald at Dallas, Texas, in the spring of 1964. That trial was a mess – clownishly conducted, long-winded, hysterical, at moments grotesque. It dragged on day after day, week after week . . . For the spectators, the world press crammed into insufficient space, it was not merely tedious and exhausting, it devalued the awe and grief in which many of us had begun approaching our task. Here is not the place to go into the prosecution of twenty-three men – plucked out after nearly two decades of anonymity or hiding, who had served as staff (innocent word)  at Auschwitz Concentration Camp, tried by a – wholly exemplary – German court at Frankfurt in one hundred and eighty-three court days spread from the end of 1963 to the summer of 1965. What was revealed there, extracted, proved, step by patient legal step, the suffering at that camp (and other camps), of a degree and scale inconceivable to normal minds, is too immense.   Here, I am supposed to tell about the writing of a book which is a story about people and events belonging to a day-lit world. A world perhaps sustained by some illusions but also by not unjustifiable hopes. They were felt to be such by people who were allowed – thanks to chronology, geography and chance – to lead their lives not as the victims of deranged atrocities and war, but as individuals free (within the, always tricky, human condition) to shape their own achievements and misfortunes. I did want to write such a book again; I wanted to give another turn to the story of that favourite of the gods, but could not easily or quickly make the transition from giant misery to the subtleties, passions, pleasures and minor wickednesses of reprieved private lives. Many novelists, from the greatest to the meretricious, have chosen to write about the vast dimensions, now tragic, now squalid, of human destiny in the mass. I have neither the talent nor the desire to write epic fiction. I can at the most imply. I am not a stranger, though, to the consciousness of ever-lurking horror – I was brought up with the rise of Fascism on our (Italian) doorsteps; moreover, I was born of partly Jewish descent, and in Germany which by a chain of coincidences I left  – while the Weimar Republic was still footling along – early and for good. This makes me an escapee, a survivor. And so would I be had I been born by another throw of the dice, like incalculable numbers of men and women in Russia, say, or China or parts of Africa. I do not forget it.   By the time I actually tackled this novel, it took on a shape different from the one it might have had if written sooner after the end of volume one. It became an offshoot rather than a continuation. The protagonists of A Favourite are indeed evoked; except one, the youngest, they are never as it were on stage. A Compass Error is a juxtaposition of two tales: one, a new story, Flavia’s, faced alone with a new life and an onslaught of new people; the other a version, a compressed repetition, not a summary for ‘new readers begin here’, but rather, as painters allow themselves to do, the same subject taken in a different light and on another scale. It is a retelling by a seventeen-year-old girl of what she saw, heard and experienced of a family life governed by mutual misunderstandings – now vaudeville, now tragic – which is playing a part in determining her present behaviour. This she seems not to be aware of. I decided that it was necessary for the reader to get to know by way of Flavia’s narrative (both precocious and naïve) one or two données such as the girl’s solemn love and fierce protectiveness for her mother.   Flavia’s autonomous life begins almost exactly at the time and place the favourite’s novel ends. That had run for well over half a century; the compass error is set in under two summer months in a year of the late 1920s. What was the Error of the title, which suggests that at some key juncture Flavia made a mistake that blew her life off course? Does it refer to her sudden striding into a sexual orientation? Hardly; though that comes into it. The matter is left unclear. We are not told whether the girl’s first experiences were juvenalia or forerunners of definite adult form. (In which latter case the compass could not be said at fault.) The deviation, driven by call it infatuation or involuntary first love, is a falling short of her staunch childish code of conduct with its result of damage, permanent damage, to the lives of those who are most to her in the world. Flavia can only be accounted guilty if she knew, and we must ask ourselves if it was possible that at several crucial moments she had no suspicions, never came near to question Andrée’s, the dazzling schemer’s, real identity. Did she abandon her vigilance? Or was she truly unaware of ambiguities? She might have picked up one or another of the clues I slipped in, detective-story fashion. Why is it that no one ever mentions a give-away surname? What about introductions or the lack of them? And how does Flavia manage to get to the right hotel suite for that dinner? (There could have been a way; I chose to draw no attention to the problem.) How does it strike a reader? One, a friend, a barrister (I have a penchant for them) confronted me at once: the whole thing, he thought, might have been brought to a stop at that reception desk: the girl would have smelt a rat. One answer to that could be, she did not want to – smell a rat. The novel contains a brief leap into the future, a prologue (three sections: two dialogues, one soliloquy) when the adolescent of the story that follows has turned fifty. There she is: sane, composed, established (a place in the world). Little is given away. We get some sketchy allusions to those long-receded summer months we have yet to read about: a name, a line here and there about the men and women –  all defunct – who were the lifeblood of both novels, A Favourite and Compass. The prologue is inconclusive. ‘It takes two to tell the truth,’ Flavia says. One for one side, one for the other? ‘No,’ she says, ‘one to talk, one to listen.’ The truth? What do I, the author, make of it? Now, as  I am writing, another thirty years on, from another perspective, I am not Flavia: so I do not know. I am not Flavia. Indeed. As I said elsewhere (in a recent introduction to A Favourite of the Gods) nothing in that novel happened to me; the plot – entirely – and the characters once assembled from their various sources – observation, hearsay, books and let’s hope a pinch of imagination – are fictitious. For the record (conjurors sometimes enjoy unveiling their own props), Flavia’s grandmother has some attributes I think I can see in Lady Byron and in my own grandmother; both ladies underwent a sea change by fictional transplantation to a joint New England origin. By contrast, in A Compass Error, I began edging towards, not autobiography, but autobiographical fragments. Things that happened to Flavia happened to me, in a fairly similar form (more overtly told in Jigsaw later on). Most did not. I have known an Andrée, and she played a part, several parts, in my life, but not that part. She got me into trouble, passing trouble; and if she was capable of villainy – she was – she did not go as far as the elaborate act of betrayal mounted by her fictional alter ego, that self-invented femme fatale (she would have quite liked to have been) who played for high stakes, not just for feline pleasure. The ‘real’ Andrée had many talents (under-used), great courage; and was capable of deeds of generosity.   So Flavia and I share some youthful adventures, and of course many thoughts, aspirations, tastes. (I gave her the relief map of the vineyards of France I invented for her and still wish that such a map could be made for me and all who follow the siren lure of these names, la Saône, le Rhône, la Gironde . . .) Here I am speaking of the very young Flavia, adolescent Flavia, not of Flavia aged fifty at her brief appearance in the prologue: I did not have her self-assurance...