While living with the Mimerels, Sybille enjoyed a freedom she had almost never known. The crushing burden of her mother’s problems had disappeared, and for almost the first time she felt unfettered, able to do as she pleased, to embark seriously on the career to which she had always aspired, as a writer. For this, her present environment was ideal, her few weeks at La Pacifique encouragingly productive, as she began on a short story she had had in mind for some time. With a room to herself and no domestic responsibilities, she lived a well-ordered existence in a spacious, impeccably kept house, whitewashed inside and out, set among olive trees, well off the road, beyond earshot of any noise from neighbours. Every morning a maid came in to open the blinds and bring her breakfast in bed, making sure that a pile of ruled paper was correctly positioned on the table. After the chaos of the previous few years the serenity and order were inspirational, and Sybille found she was able to work with great concentration. “To my astonishment I found myself writing; not merely keeping regular hours…but actually writing…It was painful, hard work and a great joy.”
In this undertaking, slightly to her surprise, she was encouraged by Jacqueline. Now, instead of the mocking, patronising treatment Sybille had received during the period of her infatuation, she found Jacqueline adopting an almost maternal manner, softer and more serious. “I became for her ‘mon jeune écrivain [my young writer],’ whose career she nursed.” After the day’s work the three of them often spent the evening together, Jacqueline sewing while Sybille and Pierre read or played patience. Only once was the tranquil atmosphere broken, when during dinner one evening Jacqueline suddenly snapped at Sybille, who was casually helping herself to yet another large glass of wine, telling her she was drinking too much, that she should be careful as after all “ta mère est une morphiniste” (“your mother is a morphine addict”).
After a few industrious weeks with the Mimerels, Sybille left La Pacifique to stay with Eva Herrmann, who had recently returned from New York, where she worked as an illustrator and caricaturist for several magazines. Eva, who had plenty of money, had rented a handsome villa with a large garden at Sainte-Trinide, an area in the back country about four kilometres inland from Sanary. La Bastide Juliette, set in a gentle landscape of vineyards and olive trees, was isolated and fairly primitive: there was no electricity, no telephone, and water was supplied from a cistern which had to be hand-pumped for ten minutes a day by a maid who came in every morning. The house itself was beautiful in an austere, rather monastic style. On the ground floor, giving out onto a pine-shaded terrace and a wide expanse of lawn, was a spacious whitewashed library with an enormous sofa piled with cushions. While Eva slept in a large room upstairs, Sybille’s bedroom was below, almost bare of furniture, with a crucifix on the wall and a copy of Pascal’s Pensées on her bedside table.
Both Sybille and Eva intended to devote themselves to their work, but inevitably there were distractions. Eva, after her return from New York, had enjoyed a couple of liaisons, including the obligatory brief affair with Aldous, but now she had embarked on a serious relationship with Lion Feuchtwanger, which his wife appeared to accept with much the same level of tolerance as that shown by Maria Huxley towards her husband’s adulteries. Sybille for her part was still intermittently involved with her lawyer friend, Sylvester Gates, who came to stay at La Juliette for a couple of weeks in August. Despite his impatience and explosive temper, Sybille was delighted by his company. “He is so intelligent and agreeable to talk to which is rarely found, especially combined with a liking for food and wine…and till the next row we are all remarkably pleased with each other.”
Another impediment to work was the summer social life, in which Sybille was always a keen participant, almost daily ferrying herself and Eva to and from town in her battered old Ford. Maria Huxley’s sister, Suzanne Nicolas, described Sybille at this period as “un personnage fascinant. Le centre d’un groupe d’intellectuels anglais et allemands et, lorsqu’on se rencontrait au petit café sur la rade à Sanary ou à Bandol, elle était l’animatrice des conversations” (“a fascinating person. The centre of a group of English and German intellectuals and, when one met her in the little café at the harbour in Sanary or Bandol, she was the driving force in conversation”). At the many social gatherings, the longer-established residents, such as Sybille and the Huxleys, continued to show a slight air of condescension towards the ever-increasing numbers of German émigrés, a feeling of de haut en bas towards the newcomers which did not pass altogether unnoticed. The writer Ludwig Marcuse, recently settled in Sanary, described Sybille as “eine grosser Snob” (“a big snob”), adding perceptively that she had a kind heart while also showing signs of considerable insecurity—despite a voracious appetite for entertaining, “immer in Bewegung, jemand zu bewegen, dass er etwas in Bewegung setze (im Zweifelsfalle allemal: parties)” (“always in motion, to set someone else in motion, to put something in motion [parties, more often than not]”).
At La Juliette, Eva and Sybille were now able to give parties of their own, supper followed by dancing on the terrace or leisurely luncheons in the garden. “We had a picnic party the other day,” Sybille reported, “all the Dichters [poets] bringing their own fruit salad or mayonnaise or drink, it was rather fun…We go out a good deal now, about three of four nights a week, what with picnics and going ‘a-bathing’ in moonlight, and the Huxley Sundays and birthdays and an awful English girl we all dislike and find rather pathetic but gives very good dinner parties at a new restaurant.”
By this time the friendship between Sybille and Eva was easy and affectionate, as it was to remain for the rest of their lives. In appearance and manner they could hardly have been more different. Sybille, with her pink cheeks and short blonde bob, was boyish and plump; straight-backed, brisk in movement, dressed always in a shirt with trousers or shorts, she gave the impression, said one of her friends, of a well-brought-up guards officer. Eva by contrast had a slender figure and thick dark hair; a fragile, romantic-looking beauty, she was always elegantly dressed, her manner reticent and shy, although underneath she was tough and determined in achieving her ambitions. Marjorie Worthington in one of her novels portrayed the pair of them as “Doris Grey, a pretty American girl who lived with Ilsa in a small house on the outskirts of Sanary, a slender brunette, who was as feminine as Ilsa was not.” When entertaining at La Juliette, it was Sybille who did most of the organising, planning the menus, setting out plates and glasses, arranging the furniture, with Eva during the evening obediently carrying out instructions conveyed by Sybille’s meaningful glances. The partnership worked well; their friends enjoyed coming to La Juliette, enjoyed hearing the laughter of the two girls, as one put it, sweeping over the company like the beam of a lighthouse.
With the onset of autumn, however, the two women settled down to a more disciplined routine, Eva painting, Sybille concentrating on the story she had begun while staying at La Pacifique. “I am really working at present,” she reported, “so I only go to Sanary once a week, and that only in order to buy food for us.”
“Mon Pigeon,” written in English and the first surviving piece of fiction by Sybille, is a whimsical short story about an English couple, a painter and his wife, living in the south of France. One day in a field near their house the couple notice a pigeon perched unmoving on the branch of a large tree, apparently mourning the death of its mate. The bird is seen by the husband, the narrator of the tale, as a symbol of his own disintegrating marriage, the unravelling of which provides the momentum of the plot. “Mon Pigeon” is well written, the rural setting sensitively observed, yet the whole effect is slightly ponderous, mainly because of somewhat stilted dialogue and a cumbersome vocabulary—“puristically,” “fusslessly,” “arboreous,” “pre-tempestial”; and the piece is heavily overloaded with literary references and quotations, from Emily Brontë and Jean de Joinville to Strindberg, Fielding, Rimbaud and Poe. When the story was finished Sybille took it to Maria, who persuaded Ald
ous to show it to his American publisher, Cass Canfield, currently on a visit to Europe. Canfield was polite, softening his rejection by saying if Sybille were to write a full-length novel one day he would be pleased to read it.
By the end of the year Sybille was making plans to join the Huxleys, who were spending the winter in England. Her resources were dwindling fast, and she was eager to find a job. “Ernstlich…don’t you know about any literary work I could do?” she asked Toni Muir, with whom she had continued to keep regularly in touch. And indeed she had reason to be worried: the money smuggled out of Germany two years earlier was almost gone, leaving her largely dependent on friends to support her: the Huxleys, the Mimerels, Eva, with whom she lived at La Juliette rent-free, and also Anna Bernhardt in Berlin, who sent what money she could, coded in her letters as “eggs.” But as Anna repeatedly reminded her, Sybille must stop depending on others and start earning her living—until, that is, she succeeded in making “a nice marriage,” which would comfortably ensure her financial future.
In mid-November 1934, Sybille in her small car drove with Eva to London, where she was to stay with Aldous and Maria. The Huxleys had recently taken the lease of a flat in Albany, a handsome Georgian mansion overlooking Piccadilly where Lord Byron and William Gladstone had once lived. At the start of the nineteenth century the building had been converted into apartments for bachelors, with a courtyard at the front, and at the rear two parallel long buildings divided by a covered passage opening into Vigo Street, each entrance supervised by a uniformed porter in a top hat. (“Albany was both rather wonderful and a bit preposterous,” in Sybille’s view.) It was behind the main building, along the “Rope Walk,” that the Huxleys’ rooms, their “set,” was situated, comprising a spacious drawing room, a couple of bedrooms, a kitchen in the basement, and a tiny gaslit maid’s room, temporarily Sybille’s quarters, on the top floor.
Here Sybille planned to begin the book which had been in her mind for some time. Aldous was diligently at work on his new novel, which might have set her an example; but Sybille, while she admired his self-discipline, found herself unable to imitate it. From childhood her sole ambition had been to write; yet she was always to struggle over writing, dreading it, avoiding it for long periods altogether, then battling furiously, sometimes for years at a time, with the current work in progress. “I sit before my hostile typewriter and sicken before the abnormal effort,” as she later described the process. “What is this blight I have suffered from all my life that makes trying to write…such tearing, crushing, defeating agony.”
A serious impediment at this period were the distractions currently on offer. In the weeks leading up to Christmas there were luncheons and dinners almost every day, not only with the Huxleys and their friends, but also with the Dincklages and Mimerels, who had come over to London for the holiday. On New Year’s Eve, Aldous and Maria threw a party, attended among others by Sybille and Eva, Eddy Sackville-West, Raymond Mortimer and Lady Ottoline Morrell. In the early hours of the morning, after a great deal of champagne, Aldous with Sybille walked out into the courtyard to wave goodbye to the departing guests. “Auguri, we shouted, Auguri! Rather a nice beginning to the New Year, I thought.”
It was not until the spring of 1935 that Sybille returned to France, as before living at La Juliette with Eva. Here in their tranquil haven they were joined for a while by Klaus Mann, in need of a retreat from his anti-fascist campaigning in order to work on a new novel, Mephisto. In June, after a peaceful few weeks, he took the two women with him to Paris to attend the first Congress of Writers on the Defence of Culture. They found the city in a state of extreme political tension, with street battles breaking out between the right-wing, anti-Semitic nationalists of Action Française and the socialist-communist Front Populaire. For five days in sweltering heat they were part of an audience of nearly 4,000, listening to speeches from distinguished literary figures from all over Europe, among them, E. M. Forster, Boris Pasternak, André Malraux, Bertolt Brecht, as well as Huxley, Feuchtwanger, Klaus and Heinrich Mann, all focused on the importance of defending intellectual freedom from the threat of fascism and war.
That same month news came from Anna in Berlin that Lisa had been released from her clinic; she had made a good recovery, Anna reported, was going out, seeing friends, even organising a little art exhibition in her small apartment. Anna, who had recently moved to be close to her daughter, remained as ferociously critical as ever. “Lisa looks frightfully old and fanée [withered]…and not a bit pretty (for any taste) and her nails are as dirty as ever…she is awfully fat now and looking so old, and always these showy outfits…I can’t get along with her! Her way of always reproving me and snubbing me—my nerves are overstrained.” The divorce case was at last reaching a conclusion, with the judgement at this point in financial terms going against Nori, who, it appeared, would be ordered to pay Lisa a substantial sum, a decision that in Anna’s view was unjust. “The Court has decided against him in every concern…I am very sorry for him,” she told Sybille, adding sarcastically that Lisa of course “is a white lamb who has never done the slightest harm and has only been ah! so ill!!! and abused by everybody.”
Anna’s letters rarely refer to the state of affairs in Germany, despite her own Jewishness and the rapid growth of a nationwide anti-Semitism. That year, in September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were passed, withdrawing citizenship from German Jews as well as prohibiting their marriage to Aryans. Inevitably this resulted in greater numbers crossing the border into France, and as a consequence levels of anxiety were intensified among the French. In Paris the Parlement had approved an Act restricting the movement of refugees, requiring those who wished to change residence to apply for a special permit. Even those Germans who, like Sybille, had long been settled in France could no longer consider themselves safe. With the large number of émigrés in and around Sanary, the atmosphere was becoming increasingly charged, and “the locals were prolific in poison-pen complaints.”
Alarmed by the precariousness of Sybille’s situation, the dangers inherent in her German nationality, the Huxleys decided to act. The most effective method of securing her status, they concluded, was to obtain a British passport, the easiest route to which was marriage to an Englishman. A friend of Sybille who had done just that was Erika Mann, who had recently travelled to England to marry a man she had never met, the poet W. H. Auden. Inspired by this example, the Huxleys determined to make a similar arrangement—“We must get one of our bugger friends to marry Sybille,” Maria announced. None of the bugger friends, however, seemed willing to oblige, and the project turned out to be more difficult than anticipated. Aldous sent numerous letters asking for help in locating a potential husband for their “German friend…The solution, it seems to me, consists in finding someone combining impecuniosity, honesty and homosexuality…She will give fifty pounds—which might, at a pinch, be raised to a hundred; but she can’t afford more.” Unfortunately, not a single volunteer came forward.
It was at this point that Sybille decided to consult Sylvester Gates. Sylvester responded immediately, and within a very short time had located a suitable prospect: an acquaintance of his had a butler whose ex-boyfriend had agreed to marry in exchange for a payment of £100. Walter Bedford (originally Walter Croan) was living in Soho and working as an attendant at a gentleman’s club in St. James’s.
Once the agreement had been confirmed, Sybille at the beginning of November travelled to England, accompanied by Pierre Mimerel, who at the time had business in London. On Sylvester’s advice she stayed not with the Huxleys but in a hotel in Kensington, she and Pierre, again on Sylvester’s recommendation, careful to take rooms that were not adjoining. The next morning, shaking with nerves, she went to Albany, where she found Maria in the drawing room with a stranger, “on the handsome side, in his thirties probably, rather more masculine than Maria’s b. friends.” This was Walter Bedford, in fact forty years old. The two of them shook hands, and shortly
afterwards set off to the local registrar’s office to apply for a licence.
Early on the day of her wedding, Sybille was dressing when the receptionist telephoned to warn her that an official from the Home Office was on his way upstairs. “He was in the room within seconds, a tall man holding a briefcase and a bowler hat.” Immediately he began questioning her: “So you have been living mostly in France over the last few years. And you intend to marry a British subject this morning?” Unimpressed by her replies, the gentleman asked to see her passport, which he carefully examined before putting it in his briefcase; her marriage was not feasible, he told her before taking his leave. Shocked, Sybille telephoned Sylvester, who instructed her to go at once to the Huxleys in Albany. Here she remained, at night sleeping on the drawing-room sofa.
Sybille Bedford Page 13
