* * *
What was it like that French Mediterranean coast between Marseille and Toulon, Toulon and Fréjus, in the nineteen-twenties? Le Petit Littoral, the unfashionable part of the Côte d’Azur (not the Riviera) with its string of fishing ports and modest resorts – Cassis, La Ciotat, Saint-Cyr, Bandol, Sanary, Le Lavandou, Cavalaire, Saint-Tropez? The sea and sky were clear; living was cheap; there were few motor cars, there were few people. During the holiday months, cafés and beaches filled with visitors, families mostly from French southern towns, Nîmes, Marseille, Montélimar. Neither tourists nor rich went to the South of France in summer, and no Frenchman born north of Valence would have dreamt of exposing his womenfolk and children to the heat. Some of this changed soon. In that very 1926 Colette discovered the aestival Midi, the clarity of the mornings, the stillness of the sun-struck monochrome noons, the magic of the scented nights. She bought a summer house at Saint-Tropez, La Treille Muscate; clans of artists and writers followed with their entourages. From then on visitors became more cosmopolitan and varied: flamboyant or monastic of habit, famous or notorious, as the case might be. They were still not noticeably more numerous.
Sanary in 1926, like Cassis, like Bandol, had about half a dozen small hotels, some pensions, a score or two of (unheatable) villas for summer letting – were there a hundred who came for the quatorze juillet and August? a hundred and fifty? The permanent local population was about two thousand according to the Michelin of the time; it has gone up since though not horrendously so, while the transient summer population has swollen to fifty thousand by the 1980s – need one spell it out in terms of housing estates, car parks? In the decades of innocence the inhabitants lived mostly off each other and the export of vegetables, flowers and fine fish. They were cultivateurs, fishermen, shopkeepers, a doctor or two, the notaire, the pharmacien, the postmistresses, the schoolmistress, the retired naval officer sustained by opium and his books, the stray Scandinavian artist. The fishermen caught sardines, langoustes, red mullet, rockfish, loup de mer, their wives mended the nets – in public on the quai, in winter in the sun, in summer seeking shade – their children collected oursins and mussels. Inland the cultivateurs tended their greenhouses, olives and vines. The wine, some honest, some not so honest, red vin du Var was for regional consumption. A family of Swiss vignerons, called Roethlisberger, produced a reputable white wine along with their good red, a forerunner of the big, complex post-war wines that achieved the Appellation Bandol. Mimosa and carnations, some of the olive oil, the best of the fish and the first of the vegetables were shipped at dawn, the fresh pick or catch of them, to Paris, London, Brussels. Shipped, if we chose to get up early, under our eyes. Every morning except Monday there was a criée, an auction sale held in the square at first light – a display, straight from orchards and steep fields of apricots, narcissi, green almonds, artichokes in their leaves, young peas, slim haricots verts curled in flat baskets. It was long before the nouveau franc, or the new pence for that matter: in England a dozen of claret were still sold in shillings, here in Provence the bidding was not just in old francs but in sous, five centimes (small is cheap). I have quinzé sous, quinzé sous, fifteen sous, the auctioneer would sing out in that nasal meridional tone, accenting every syllable, a gnarled little man as crooked as they come, trenté, I’ve thirty sous … quaranté – à vous la jolie petite dame … cinquanté sous – à toi, Jo-Jo. And Jo-Jo in his bleu, his singlet and his espadrilles would sling the crate of artichokes into his Peugeot camionnette …
That square, the Place de Sanary, was the meeting point, the stage of social and commercial life. Its backcloth was the Mairie fluttering the Tricolor from an absurd little tower like a fattened minaret, flanked by the church, a pharmacy, a bakery, the Café de la Marine, the Café de Lyon, and two bars tabacs. The front of the square opened on the palm walk across the road and the small harbour, where fishing craft and sail boats lay at anchor, and on the sea beyond.
The rest of Sanary proper, Sanary-ville, consisted of a network of a few narrow streets, cleft by the sun only at noon, inhabited by families of commerçants and their shops, butchers and bakers, épiceries, laiteries, cordonneries, quincailleries, a couple of bonneteries where one bought thread, beach hats and canvas shoes. The houses were modestly urban, late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, with bead curtains over the doorways, here and there a stone arch, shutters on every window. Outer Sanary was pine groves and palms to eastward, small hotels, most of them new, bathing huts spread thinly between a flat road and the plage of Six-Fours; to westward there were hills, pine was relieved by ilex; villas with gardens of a sort (incipient suburbia) followed the contours of rock-bound bays, Port Issol, La Cride, La Gorguette – which became Huxley territory – Bandol. Inland all this vanished.
Inland lay the back country, sun-baked, cicada-loud, the ageless country of scrub and terraced hills where the peasants lived in their sparse stone-built mas, the archetypal Mediterranean landscape of rock and olive, wild thyme, vineyards, light.
This I had known in Italy; here there was a difference, a dichotomy: the timelessness of land and sea, and the indelible Frenchness of so much else; if the Midi was Arcadia it was also a Department of France. La République, Third, Fourth or Fifth – ‘Françaises et Français!’ – is as tough, as rooted, enduring, cohesive and diverse as the more ancient meridional civilisations, and the conjunction of the perennial austere beauty of climate and nature – scouring mistral, the unfudging sun – with the sweetness and sharpness and quickness, the rippling intelligence, the accommodating tolerance of the French manière de vivre gave one a large sense of living rationally, sensuously, well, of pleasure on many levels: now and before us and for years to come, as no other place in Europe, no other place in the world, France between the wars made one this present of the illusion of freedom.
As I was to learn. Later; imperfectly, conjecturally (the French and their ways are infinitely complex), at times sharply, with conscious joy. Not yet then; not during that summer, my first time in France.
* * *
I had come by way of Paris, a stopover not attempted before. So the first time I put foot in France, after a sleepy queasy transfer from boat to train, was on the pavement outside the Gare du Nord. I did not kiss the ground; I found a bus to take me to the Gare de Lyon. The female conductor was unamiable about my suitcase, which couldn’t have been large. Having left it at the cloakroom, I had the day before me (from noon that was until the last night-train South). I still remember how I spent it and still blush. What did Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein feel on their first day in Paris, France? I cringe, for I felt nothing very much. But then these illustrious expatriates had not stepped off the quick green omnibus at the Place de la Madeleine at the age of fifteen and a half. That was where I started. I was not impressed and wondered if I should have been. Nor did I know what to make of the unfamiliar façades of the Grands Boulevards, the slate-grey straightness, the compound gusts of smells: open pissoirs with tin screens like fire-guards being prominent and numerous. I ate a hurried lunch at a prix fixe and trotted off again. My mother had told me to go to the Tuileries, stand in the Place du Carrousel and look at La Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe beyond. This I did, and the nobility of the perspectives, evidence that the theme contrapuntal to French easeful dailiness is La Gloire, left me not entirely unvisited by a sense of grandeur. It was so again in front of the Hôtel des Invalides.
I visited the Louvre, experienced dumb inadequacy with the Mona Lisa and found more familiar enjoyment in the quattrocento rooms. On impulse I went to the Cluny, stabbed by the unexpected memory that this had been my father’s favourite museum (Paris: a place he loved), and felt spookishly pulled back among exhibits I could recognise as the source of inspiration for his own collection … Oh, I did fill my day. I walked down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, no associations flowered. I missed the Luxembourg, missed crossing the Seine over a bridge on foot, I missed Notre-Dame. I took a bus instead back to
the Right Bank to look at the Sacré-Coeur; it was still daylight, hours before night-life, and there was something menacing about the quiescent garishness of Montmartre. I wandered about, unnoticed, unmolested. Eventually I had dinner in some small restaurant. The food was unmemorable (curious point, that). All the same, I must have lingered because I did not miss my train by what seemed seconds, propelled by a furious guard and scolded by a corridorful of disagreeable people.
Next morning I was met by Alessandro and my mother at the modest railway stop that serves Sanary-cum-Ollioules, a dot of administrative France so inconsiderable in the countryside that it might have been in rural Mexico. Now it was my turn to be conveyed to what would doubtlessly be another transitory summer home by that ramshackle little station bus. (It continued its not unuseful career for many years to come.) For me its juddering inside remains the scene of a most painful moment of my early life. Rattling along in heat and dust and din, my mother opposite on the wooden seat sprang an entirely uncharacteristic question: Have I changed? It went home: there was no lightness in her tone, nothing of the self-mockery that had seen us through so many predicaments, she required something from me. Her beauty had been an intrinsic attribute, hers by nature, unassisted, worn without vanity, casually, carelessly as a well-bred man is supposed to have worn his clothes. Now it seemed not so. I did what her question imposed, and I did it a fraction too late, I looked at her. I saw what unasked I might not have seen: intimations of wear. Oh she was still beautiful – some might have said more so – what was gone? a glow? She was older.
I can still hear the answer I gave – again not quite quickly enough – the forced voice (and what showed in my face?), an answer to the effect that for me she was, she would be, always the same. I remember the exact words but cannot bear to write them down in their shameful inadequacy. My mother, so merciless on verbal shoddiness, let them pass.
The house was small and jerry-built, a bungalow without attempts at amenity or charm: it was less than two minutes’ walk from beach and sea and that was it. One entered through a verandah into the kitchen, there was the salle à manger and two largish bedrooms with a very large bedstead and a wardrobe in each and little else; the walls were thin and the wallpaper florid and hideous. It was all quite clean. For once my mamma and Alessandro had not left their mark beyond a scattering of books and dog baskets; a bad sign, I thought. In retrospect the main impression of those weeks I spent with them was constraint. I don’t know what, if anything, had happened; we were talking less. One thing was an evident shortage of money – a consequence of their move from Italy? – embarrassing small economies of the kind that upset the young. I was used to them with the Robbinses but Susan and Jack cracked jokes: my mother had almost stopped doing that, another bad sign. She had asked me how much money I’d brought and taken it off me without a by your leave. It was understood that Alessandro knew nothing of this, it was like the pawning of my cigarette case – Susan doing the deed, Jack not to be told: so the women think up the hanky-panky while the men are supposed to keep their ignorance? Perhaps Alessandro had been allowed to grasp some facts about the erratic nature of his wife’s financial situation, and he – who was a neat man and a realist at heart for all his floating on the surface of the days – had in his turn been shaken into some cognisance. Both seemed troubled. The house was kept going by a femme de ménage who came in the mornings, a dumpy woman, not too well disposed; we thought her a slut. Supper was cooked by Alessandro or my mother, both quite good quick cooks and he a tidy one as well. We had no guests. No friends had been asked to stay that summer. At Sanary we knew no one: we had not mixed with the summer people and to the inhabitants we were just that.
The house had neither mosquito nets nor screens which made for fuss and inconvenience in the night (mosquitoes being a much greater plague in those days before the Allied Armies had done something drastic, or so one is told, with DDT); one had to undress in the dark if one wanted to keep the window open, and before that one either had to spray with a substance called Flytox, as noxious to humans as it was to those elusive buzz-diving pests, or fumigate. We used little brown cones, Zampironi, which we stood up and lit in saucers where they glowed then crumbled into dust filling the room with acrid smoke. My mother, an insomniac, took more and stronger sleeping pills. Veronal was one of the most potent on the market then and one could get it without prescription, two cachets at a time. The chemist allowed my mother four. (Good nature? Carelessness? Not profit: they were a few pence apiece; I never knew. That chemist played a painful part in our lives later on.) I went for the veronal, I ran most of the errands. The veronal induced heavy, sometimes alarmingly heavy, sleep. Once or twice I came home from the beach at two p.m. and found Alessandro saying, I can’t wake her up. This would be when the evening before they had talked of his need to go away, go to Paris, go to a city, to see a man, to see a woman who might buy a picture or want her house doing up.
I spent much time in the sea (and loved it – summers without water: salt water, rock-pools, open bays, calm pellucid depths, breakers and spray, were like prison to me), I swam as one might stroll, a slow quiet drifting towards horizons not counting distance or hours. It was then that I did my dreaming, shaped what I had seen and thought into sentences, cadences, meaning (so I hoped) – words at great speed were running … I was writing in my head. It was intoxicating and elusive. When I sat down before that sheet of paper, it was gone. I never wrote in my youth. I was not one of those novelists who filled notebooks lying on the hearthrug when they were tots. For me that struggle (it is that) long postponed, came later.
On Port Issol, our small beach, one could hire a basic kind of canoe, both flimsy and clumsy but a pleasant means of getting out far and swift. One afternoon as I was about to launch this contraption, I bumped into a child who was splashing in the shallows, a fair lanky girl, with straight short hair, of about twelve or more, nice-looking in a boyish way. I wasn’t much adept at social intercourse with people of or near my age, but here we were in the sea. I offered her a ride. She got herself into the thing all right and we struck off, I doing the paddling. The sea was glassy flat, the girl very slight, the going was not too heavy, land began to recede. Annette (names, too, come easily in the freedom of the sea) was smiling; or was the smile a little fixed? The way she crouched and clung might make one think that she was putting on a brave act. What about? True the canoe was badly balanced and none too buoyant, it did capsize quite frequently; what of it? One would right it again and after a refreshing dip clamber again aboard. I was about to impart these cheering facts when Annette emitted a weak sound, Maman. I looked round and saw a form, still recognisable as female, on the shore, frantically hopping to and fro signalling like a tic-tac man. Annette, still contained, hung her pretty head, ‘Je ne sais pas nager – I ’ave not learn to swim.’ Heavens … Gingerly I turned us round, tiptoeing, as it were, with the paddle, got her safely back into her depth and on to land, only to run into a human storm. The first encounter with la bourgeoisie française à sa proie attachée! Madame Panigon – Maman – knitting dropped, arms raised au ciel, vast in wintry clothes, was furious and let me have it. My own mother had appeared – we were only a stone’s throw from that beach which had become a stage dominated by a gorgon in full spate. Her voice vibrated: Madame! Votre fille est dangereuse … Cette gamine, she called me, I had tried to drown her child … I had done it on purpose. Another figure hovered, another daughter, about my age, not in bathing-dress, clucking and moaning, weakly striving for peace; and so did my mother, employing her social graces. It was not a quick process. (Madame Panigon’s tirade, my mother later said, had not been lacking in a certain grammatical elegance … Imagine an English or Italian mother’s syntax in a similar situation.) I apologised for the anxiety I had caused, not on purpose, I had not known the facts while there leapt into my head: Now I do – frogs can’t swim. (Where had that come from? Oh, the multiple sources of chauvinism!) Eventually we all became good friends, after a fashion.
The only other break in our social isolation that summer came when we heard that one of my mother’s friends of other times was staying at the Hôtel des Bains at Bandol with a young and glossy mistress (I had seen her). It was Ernst Toller, the playwright and poet. He was a communist then and in exile (Paris, not yet Hollywood and New York where he eventually killed himself), having lately served a two-year prison sentence in Germany (pre-concentration-camp Germany) for his part in some subversive action, and had published a poem written in his cell (like Oscar Wilde, I thought). I was awed – had it been unbearable? Would it show? I was also agog to meet a writer. He came to supper at our bungalow one night (without the mistress, without Alessandro, too, as it turned out, he was spending a few days in Marseille trying to see that man about a job). Home before dusk, still in damp espadrilles and bathing-shorts, I found a youngish man – not yet thirty? – sun-browned, healthy-looking, handsome, sitting on the verandah with my mother. I had offered to do the cooking, and they presently joined me in the kitchen. I remember that he seemed a nice man, an animated talker, even jolly in a gentle way, and he made a nice evening of it, against odds. I do not remember what we, what they were talking about, what a poor cheap thing it is, one’s memory: Toller, that doomed and talented man, much loved by his friends, and all that I am able to tell about him at first-hand is his niceness about my own foolish predicament. Which was that we got nothing to eat; or rather: little, very late. I was trying to make us a dish of gratin dauphinois, once taught me by my father: finely sliced potatoes cooked in light cream with a touch of garlic and black pepper. The potatoes must be well washed and dried, and arranged in a neat pattern in their dish, and it looked promising enough as it went into the oven. Our kitchen stove burned wood; firewood in the South of France is either pine which makes a quick flambée then dies, or olive, often green, which is slow to ignite then dies and smokes. Need I say more? I still have the strip cartoon Toller drew afterwards for my mother. It shows a series of an anxious figure – me – bending in a cloud of smoke over a tepid stove under a clock (drawn not quite round) displaying the advancing hours. ‘Not quite ready …’, say the balloons from out of my mouth. Under the last image, showing midnight, he wrote, ‘But it was delicious all the same.’ (Not true: it was shrivelled and still not quite ready.)
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