Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

four

  THE DELIGHTS AND DANGERS OF SANARY-SUR-MER

  For Sybille the transition from summer in Sanary to the shabby bed-sitting room in Gloucester Place was inevitably depressing. Haunted by her unrequited love for Jacqueline and its humiliating exposure, she yet did her best to put it behind her, relieved that none of her London friends knew anything about it. In order to increase her inadequate income, she again started to teach, offering lessons in French and German, her pupils mainly young men preparing for the diplomatic service or for business abroad. Thanks to Percy Muir, she also found work translating booksellers’ and auctioneers’ catalogues, less well paid than teaching but welcome nonetheless. Her only problem was with her atrocious handwriting: without Nori’s typewriter she was obliged to write in capitals in order to make her transcriptions legible.

  As before Sybille’s social life revolved around the Muirs, although to her disappointment the weekends in the country had come to an end. During her absence, relations between Toni and Percy had seriously deteriorated, Percy having fallen in love with a young woman whom he had met at the Symonses’ house in Essex. From the moment Toni discovered the affair the Muirs’ marriage was over: not only did Toni refuse to discuss the matter with her husband, but she immediately moved out of their flat, taking her sister with her to an apartment in Highgate. Kate meanwhile continued her evening journeys into the West End to see her judge, who to her delight had recently suggested that for the first time the two of them should go on holiday together. With Sybille’s help rooms had been booked at a hotel in Sanary for a fortnight in the summer.

  When in due course the two of them arrived in the south of France, Sybille went to meet them at the Hôtel de la Plage. Henry McCardie turned out to be delightful, impressing Sybille not only with accounts of the various trials he had participated in but also with his knowledge of wine, evident in the expert analysis of the fine burgundy he had ordered for their luncheon. Unfortunately the affair with Kate was not to last. For some years McCardie had been a secretive and compulsive gambler, and in 1933 he was suddenly to lose almost everything he owned. Unable to face the consequences, he shot himself one evening while alone in his apartment. Kate was devastated, and from then on retreated further and further into herself; although the friendship with Sybille continued until the end of her life, it was Toni who arranged everything, who became the spokeswoman for them both.

  During the period of Sybille’s adolescence in England, the friendship and support of the Muir sisters had been of crucial importance. In the years to come, however, she was to see them only infrequently, although she continued to keep in touch. In those early days she had spent more time with Kate, but it was with Toni that she was to form the closer relationship, writing to her regularly, regarding her as the confidante to whom, almost more than anyone else, she could reveal her private life and feelings. While Sybille retained a genuine fondness for the sisters, she was aware, too, of an eccentricity and sadness about them that continued to intrigue her. For over half a century their strange story lay dormant in her imagination—before it was retrieved and vividly brought to life as a substantial component of Jigsaw, the last of her four published works of fiction.

  When Sybille returned to France at the end of June 1930, she was nineteen, a short, sturdy figure, her blonde hair cut short like a boy’s. During the months of her exile in London she had longed to return, longed for the world of which she had come to feel part. “[I had] come to feel that Sanary was the true South, and that Sanary and the French were for me. I had fallen for it and for all that it had offered already. Here was my home, here I was going to live…and here, the gods willing, I was going to write my books.” She felt intensely happy to be once more in these familiar surroundings, and at first all seemed to be well, the house in immaculate condition, both Lisa and Nori quietly pleased to see her. Very quickly, however, she sensed a tension between them, that Nori in particular seemed on edge; she noticed, too, that Lisa had aged, had grown thinner, her face more lined. There was an uncomfortable atmosphere between husband and wife, the cause of which Lisa lost little time in explaining to her daughter.

  Unexpectedly one day Doris von Schönthan, the young woman who had acted as escort when Sybille first left Germany, had arrived in Sanary for a few weeks’ holiday. Lisa had been delighted to see her, welcoming her to the house, enjoying long conversations about actors, poets, writers, the changing political climate, particularly the rise of the right wing and the fragility of the Weimar Republic. It was not long, however, before she noticed a powerful attraction developing between Doris and her husband, which inevitably sparked a series of explosive rows. On this occasion her husband was unable to reassure her: Nori admitted that he and Doris had fallen in love, and although he promised to end the affair eventually this would not happen overnight.

  For Lisa the situation was intolerable. In all her relations with men, it was she who needed to be in control. “She was too beautiful, too talented, too amusing,” Sybille recalled. “Everybody adored her, and she constantly went from one man to another, and when it happened to her she just couldn’t take it.” For almost the first time her rages made no difference, her raw, resentful moods had no effect. She felt desperate, furious with Nori, and at the same time terrified of losing him, of being left to live alone. Unable to sleep even with increased doses of Veronal, she consulted the local pharmacist, who gave her the name of a doctor known for his liberal prescribing. Dr. Joyeu, referred to behind his back as “Docteur Lugubre,” was as “gaunt as a starving horse, yellow-faced with darkly ringed, sunken eyes and a few strands of flat black hair.” Obligingly he produced a syringe and gave Lisa an injection which had an immediate, almost magical effect: within minutes she was feeling calm and happy. The doctor wrote her a prescription and told her she might inject herself once, at the most twice, a day. Delighted, Lisa returned home, handing a little box containing a glass syringe, a thin steel file, and some tiny ampoules to Nori, instructing him that it was he who must administer the injections as she could never do it for herself.

  This was all explained to Sybille shortly after her arrival, by which time Lisa had already increased her dosage. Predictably that “wonderful feeling,” as she described it, was lasting for shorter and shorter periods, with her moods in between growing progressively darker, her gaiety and good humour succeeded by profound depression, by a spiteful despondency and frequent outbursts of rage. Lisa showed Sybille the equipment. “You had better learn how to do it,” she told her. “Because I have to have it three times a day now. Sometimes four.” “What is this magic substance?” Sybille asked. “Morphine,” her mother replied.

  The following month some friends of Lisa’s came to stay for a couple of nights, the rumbustious South African poet Roy Campbell and his English wife, Mary. Campbell was a heavy drinker, and after an alcoholic luncheon he suddenly demanded to be taken to see his old friend, Aldous Huxley, who had recently moved to Sanary. Sybille was astonished: since first being introduced to Huxley’s work by Kate Muir she had become an avid admirer, reading his novels with intense enthusiasm. Now the idea of actually meeting the great man himself was overwhelming. “I was not prepared, I did not think of, an encounter with the writer in the flesh.”

  With Nori at the wheel, the Campbells and Sybille drove over to La Gorguette, an area to the west of town where close to the beach the Huxleys’ new property was situated. A few months previously Aldous Huxley, his Belgian wife, Maria, and nine-year-old son had left Paris, where they had been living for the past couple of years, for the south of France, in order to be with their old friend, D. H. Lawrence, during the last weeks of his life. After Lawrence’s death they had decided to remain in the region and had bought a house, an unprepossessing little villa which they had had enlarged and renovated; on the two stone gateposts at the entrance the local mason had painted in bright green letters what he had understood to be the spelling of their name, “Villa Huley.” With Roy
Campbell leading the way, the four visitors walked through the open front door to find Aldous, in khaki shorts and sandals, “sitting on a red-tiled floor, grasshopper legs neatly disposed, amidst piles of books he was trying to cram into a rotating cage…Aldous smiled sweetly and said, ‘Roy! How nice of you to come!,’ then turned to us, raising high both hands, ‘There is no horror greater than the First Day in the New Home.’ ”

  Sybille was immediately fascinated by this strikingly handsome man. Then in his late thirties, Aldous was very tall, slender, bespectacled, with a keen, sensitive face and a head of thickly dishevelled dark hair. After a few minutes Maria came into the room, delicate and tiny, a pale-faced beauty with dark blue eyes and auburn hair, dressed in white trousers and a linen shirt, a string of coral beads round her neck. She made them warmly welcome before disappearing to supervise the making of tea. While the Campbells talked to Aldous, Nori, instantly aware of how much these new neighbours would appeal to Lisa, left in the car to fetch her. He soon returned, and everyone settled round a table beneath an arbour in the garden. Lisa, who appeared calm and fresh-faced, immediately began an intense dialogue with Aldous about books and politics. When the maid brought out a tray of tea and placed it on the table, Lisa, “going on with what she had been saying and without taking her eyes off Aldous, reached across the table, seized the pot and drew it to herself…However, she did not pour out…My mother, hand on teapot, went on talking. Maria now made a discreet move to regain possession. My mother grasped the pot more firmly, drew it closer to herself and, still without losing the thread of her conversation, opened the lid, peered inside and quickly dropped the lid again…Our cups stayed empty.”

  That evening, after the Marchesanis and Campbells had returned home, a car drew up, a big, beautiful red Bugatti, and out of it stepped Maria carrying a bunch of tuberoses for Lisa and a small home-made loaf.

  From that day onward the Huxleys became key figures in Sybille’s life. She looked up to and worshipped them both, and they for their part were to become not only friends, but in a sense her guardians, too. “The Huxleys took me on. When I said Aldous was the best man I ever met, so was his wife. They were both extraordinary people and it was a very, very good marriage, I think.” Indeed it was. Aldous was the epitome of the cerebral intellectual; a highly disciplined, hard-working writer and philosopher, he lived most of the time in a world far removed from most people’s daily experience. Bookish and scholarly, he possessed an intense curiosity about the world that rarely descended to the mundanity of ordinary human existence. He would talk brilliantly in his “culture-saturated purr,” holding his listeners enthralled; then, disconcertingly, as though unaware of their presence, would often lapse into a long, thoughtful silence, silences, that as the poet Edith Sitwell described them, “seemed to stretch for miles, extinguishing life, when they occurred, as a snuffer extinguishes a candle.” Kind and generous by nature, unfailingly courteous, Aldous was remote and emotionally detached, indifferent and benign, maintaining an impenetrable barrier between himself and the rest of humanity. Two tragedies in his early life—the death of his mother when he was fourteen, a brother’s suicide a few years later—had made him withdraw “into an inaccessible inner shell”; as one acquaintance phrased it, “Nature has erected on the edge of his emotional garden a board: ‘trespassers—against the will of the owner—are apt to be prosecuted.’ ”

  Possessed of an exceptionally intuitive intelligence, Maria was her husband’s facilitator, and he depended on her for almost everything. It was she who protected his privacy, cared for him, and read to him. As a boy Aldous’s eyesight had been seriously damaged, consequently leaving him unable to read without strong spectacles, and so Maria typed his manuscripts, and minutely organised every hour of the day to suit his working routine. She ran the house, looked after their son Matthew, undertook all the shopping and cooking, instructed the maids, and organised their social life, inviting to luncheons and dinners those friends whom Aldous wished to see while fending off others who bored him. He relied on her to tell him all the gossip of the town, to provide the bridge between his private self and the world outside. As Sybille soon discovered, many friends looked on Maria as a confidante, a sympathetic shoulder to cry on, “offering gossip, pouring out our troubles, our stories, answering anything she might ask (and my goodness, she did ask, but of her own quick interest and to pass on to Aldous), to be scolded, comforted and teased.” Although fragile in appearance, Maria had enormous energy, and was often in the garden at first light, planting and pruning her vines and figs, digging over the carefully tended beds of vegetables. One of her greatest pleasures was driving her red Bugatti at sometimes reckless speed along the narrow coastal roads, a dashing and glamorous figure, slender and beautiful, with her magnolia complexion and enormous dark eyes.

  From the time of that memorable first meeting, Sybille began to spend more and more time with the Huxleys. She adored them both, Aldous for his exceptional intellect and moral authority, Maria for her beauty and kindness, as well as for her forceful character and remarkable intelligence. Maria “was very outspoken, she was very critical; in fact she could be quite didactic…One was not allowed to get away with things…And how she could puncture pretension. By teasing or laughing…If Aldous girded himself to rebuke or educate, he generally did it by letter; which of course was so much worse for the recipient.” Despite Aldous’s disciplined working routine, the Huxleys enjoyed an active social life. As one of Maria’s sisters put it, Maria “était toujours heureuse d’avoir autour d’elle des êtres qui pouvaient distraire Aldous” (“was always happy to have around her people who could distract Aldous”). Guests came to stay, friends to luncheon and dinner, they themselves frequently dined out with neighbours, among them the Marchesanis. Best of all for Sybille were “the hilarious Huxley picnics, on beach and cliff and windswept plateau, nocturnal picnics with Aldous’s planter’s punch to drink, Maria’s eccentric food—she was fastidiously anti-food…fried rose leaves, fried zucchini and rabbit, quince jelly to eat, games to play. These and music at night—Aldous’s Beethoven records listened to in hammocks in the garden under the stars and leaves.”

  It was not long after her first meeting with the Marchesanis that Maria began to realise the difficult situation in which Sybille was entrapped. Within a very short time she became not only friend and confidante, but also someone who could provide an important refuge from the stressful environment at Les Cyprès.

  The strain on Lisa of Nori’s continuing affair was growing increasingly intense. Doris, his girlfriend, had left Sanary, and was now moving from one hotel to another along the Riviera, where Nori visited her at regular intervals, often remaining away for several days at a time. His absences reduced Lisa to periods of profound depression punctuated by explosions of anger, meanwhile growing ever more dependent on her daily doses of morphine. With Nori away, it was Sybille who was obliged not only to collect the prescriptions from the sinister Dr. Joyeu but also to give her mother the injections. Nori had carefully instructed her in the procedure: sterilise the syringe in boiling water, file open the little glass ampoule, fill the syringe, then swab Lisa’s arm before inserting the needle. For a while afterwards Lisa enjoyed a few hours of contentment, but as the days, then weeks, passed these periods of tranquillity grew shorter and soon she was demanding injections throughout the day. “We were ignorant of all that is now common knowledge…We did not know the meaning of addiction. Nor its signs.”

  Understandably, Sybille escaped from her mother’s company whenever she could to the Villa Huley, where she was soon introduced to a new and highly literate society. It was through Aldous and Maria that she met Cyril Connolly and his young American wife, Jean Bakewell, who had recently arrived and were living in a rented villa on the outskirts of town. Connolly had a somewhat difficult relationship with the Huxleys: he hero-worshipped Aldous, the main reason he had come to Sanary, but the Huxleys saw Cyril as a self-indulgent ti
me-waster, and they disapproved of his chaotic way of life, his exotic and incontinent pets. “Eating your dinner with your fingers reading before the fire meant leaving grape skins and the skeletons of sardines between the pages. The ferrets stank; the lemur hopped upon the table and curled his exquisite little black hand around your brandy glass.” Sybille was intrigued by Connolly and enjoyed his stimulating, astringent company. “He was nice to me (mildly)…I didn’t know that people were afraid of him, of his silences, his rudeness. I was too obscure for Cyril to be beastly to.”

  Among other English writers encountered with the Huxleys were those two erudite Bloomsbury figures, Raymond Mortimer and Edward Sackville-West, both regular guests at Villa Huley. Although in theory Aldous was unsympathetic to male homosexuality, to “the buggers,” as in true Bloomsbury tradition he always referred to them, he had many bugger friends, Raymond and Eddy among them. Raymond, “spinsterish and in his little brown way, intensely vital,” had been at Balliol with Aldous, subsequently establishing himself as a noted essayist and critic, while Eddy, a few years younger, had been a pupil of Aldous’s during his early career as a schoolmaster at Eton. Sybille took to them both, particularly to Eddy, who had been a colleague of Percy Muir’s at the Bond Street bookshop. Percy used to talk amusingly about Eddy, whom he admired while also finding him profoundly irritating. “I disliked this very superior, willowy young man, with his long wavy hair…his cordless, rimless monocle, his languid Oxford-accented speech, and his general Bloomsburyism,” Percy wrote in his memoir. “It was bad enough to have an impertinent whippersnapper unseat a valuable book from its hallowed position; to find he was right was altogether too much.”

  It was also with the Huxleys that Sybille was introduced to the celebrated American novelist Edith Wharton, memorably described by Aldous as “a formidable lady who lives in a mist of footmen, bibelots, bad good-taste and rich food in a castle overlooking Hyères.” When asked to lunch on one occasion the Huxleys took Sybille with them, an experience she found daunting, interpreting her hostess’s habitually condescending manner as specifically hostile towards herself. Shortly afterwards the Huxleys returned Mrs. Wharton’s hospitality by inviting her to one of their famously eccentric picnics. “Never shall I forget the sight of Mrs. Wharton, rotund, corseted, flushed and beautifully dressed…being led by Aldous up a goat-track on a rock face to the nonchalantly chosen picnic ground.”