Dress Down Sunday: A Legacy by Sybille Bedford

Published 1956   Part 3 chapter 5  set in the 1890s

LOOKING AT WHAT GOES ON UNDER THE CLOTHES

[Newly-married, Julius and Melanie are living in Spain]

She was easy enough to have about; how easy, having no points of comparison, he did not know; and very pretty; and this, coming in sometime at twilight from the Granada road, he could see again. After the brief greeting, after his bath, after the first glass of manzanilla by himself, pale, light, lightly iced, coming down again at that hour when the heat of day still rises from the earth and walls, and cool is divined already in the veins and skin, he would find her in the opened loggia in muslin and ribbons, her shoulders bare, her hair high, the small, shod, pointed feet visible on the chaise-longue, and make his own entrance like a man at the play into his box, during the second act, before the aria by the new soprano.

observations: This has been one of my all-time favourite books since I first read it 25 years ago, but I have never known for sure what the legacy was, and tootling around on the Internet looking it up, I’m not alone in that. But I also found a reference to an interview which quoted Bedford as giving the answer: that the rise of the Nazis, and attendant horrors, were the legacy of the brutality and anti-Semitism of the cadet schools of the German officer class. Which actually doesn’t quite sound right, it’s a surprising idea: to be precise, the cadet schools are shown to be brutal to a mediaeval degree, but there is no sign of anti-Semitism. German society in Berlin is shown to be very divided along religious lines, but it is done with a very light touch (the Jewish patriarch: ‘My son been to the moneylenders?... Who does the fool think he is, a Goy?’) and it certainly doesn’t prevent any of the marriages in the book. Poor Melanie, above, gets herself baptized so she can marry Julius, but doesn’t realize she has gone to the wrong kind of Christian church.

The story of three families, their marriages and careers, is underpinned by the deeply upsetting story of Jean/Johannes at the Cadet School, which brackets the book. Of all the moments, the one where Jean sends his niece a dog is the saddest.

But actually this is a very funny book, full of wonderful conversations and lines

Here Clara made the movement of her mouth that had contributed so much to the boredom of Gustavus’s life.

-- a line that resonates even more by the end of the book. The food at one house is ‘almost ostentatiously perfunctory and, if it was not, appeared skimpy.’ There is an ambitious political character whom the others suspect never married in the hope that one day he might become a Cardinal, and who-knew-what after that…

There’ll be another entry on this book later this week.

The picture, In the Boudoir by Friedrich C. Frieseke, comes from The Athenaeum website.