Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  Now alone with her daughter, Lisa for the first time talked frankly on a personal level, describing her various dilemmas, confessing how guilty she had felt about breaking her engagement to Wätjen, but also how profoundly she had come to love Nori. Although still youthful in appearance, she was worried by the difference in their ages, she forty-two, Nori in his late twenties; yet he was so devoted, so tolerant and good-natured that she could not believe it would ever make for any difficulty between them. Never had Sybille felt so close to her mother, never before had Lisa talked to her as an equal. “ ‘Billi—can you understand that one can miss one human being…to the point of…well, extinction of all else?’ ‘Yes,’ I said…For the first time I felt the sting of compassion…It was as if some ice had been broken between us.”

  Soon afterwards Lisa decided to move south, she and Sybille travelling by train to Rome, then on to Naples. Not long after the start of the journey they were joined by Nori. “Our compartment door opened and in stepped a young man more handsome than I could have imagined him to be. He kissed my mother’s hand.” This was Sybille’s first encounter with her stepfather and she took to him immediately. Tall and slender, with a head of glossy brown hair—he “looked as though he had stepped out of a Renaissance canvas,” Sybille wrote later—Nori was elegantly dressed and exquisitely well mannered; as quickly became clear, he was also gentle and kind, with a boyish sense of humour and a winning smile. From the beginning Nori sympathised with Sybille’s situation, his understanding laying the foundations of a friendship that was to be important to both. Sybille for her part was charmed by Nori, touched by the fact that he was prepared to listen and take her seriously, as well as tease and make her laugh; his manner was lightly paternalistic while at the same time he treated her as the near contemporary she was. The fact that in age he was almost exactly halfway between mother and daughter enabled him in a sense to act as interpreter and intermediary for both.

  After Naples, the three of them moved at a leisurely pace to Sorrento, and then for a time to Sicily, before returning to the mainland. Lisa was an energetic guide, taking her two companions to see the famous sites she had first visited as a child with her mother, Anna Bernhardt—Capri, Pompeii, Positano, Paestum, Ravello. For Sybille this was an enthralling experience, not only the exploration of the country but also the fact that every day “we ate the food of the Italian south…melanzane, thick-cut pasta, calamari, frittura di pesce…peaches, figs, mozzarella di bufala dripping with freshness.”

  It was while they were in Sicily that her mother told Sybille that she had decided to send her to England to complete her schooling. No doubt wishing for some time alone with Nori, Lisa was also genuinely anxious that her daughter should be properly educated. Since they had grown so much closer over the past few months, Lisa had come to recognise in Sybille not only her own passion for reading but her ambition to become a writer. In Lisa’s view, if Sybille wanted to write, she should “stop rattling about like a polyglot parrot…[she] should go to England. To a first-rate boarding-school.” Recently Lisa had met an English couple, Christopher and Berry Perkins, who had three children of their own, and who she was sure would agree to take her daughter as a paying guest and oversee her education. And so it was arranged. Nori escorted Sybille from Palermo to Naples, from where, and entirely on her own, she was to take the train to Paris and then on to London. “[I was] given a bag to wear under my clothes with lire, French francs and a large crisp white paper which was a five-pound note.”

  At Victoria Station Sybille was met by Berry Perkins, an amiable woman in early middle age, who took her to spend the night in the Green Park Hotel on Piccadilly. Next morning they set off for Peterborough in Northamptonshire where the Perkinses were temporarily living.

  Both Perkinses were painters, Christopher having trained at the Slade, where Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler and Stanley Spencer had been among his fellow students. By the mid-1920s his work was becoming known, although a recent exhibition in London had not been a success, and soon afterwards he and his family had been obliged to move in with his parents. His father, a retired manufacturer of agricultural machinery, lived in considerable comfort in a large house with his wife and a number of relations. This new environment was unlike anything previously experienced by Sybille, who never forgot what she described as “the banality” of her introduction to English life: “parlourmaids, icy bedrooms, sodden vegetables…pony traps, Boots’ lending library…four punctual sit-down meals a day, no wine in sight…no horses, no motor car, a (nice) pony and trap, stacks of bicycles.” Christopher and Berry she liked, although she had little in common with either; but Christopher was kind and even-tempered, Berry “a light-hearted, self-deprecatory woman, ready to put up cheerfully, if not always effectively, with what circumstances threw at her.”

  Before long Christopher managed to secure a teaching job in London, and the family moved to an apartment in Hampstead. Sybille saw little of the three children, who were away at school most of the time, while she, dressed in a handed-down blazer and gymslip, was sent to take lessons with a local tutor, a man who fortunately turned out to be an inspirational teacher. “Being taught, learning, was all I had imagined it might be. Most mornings I walked to his Hampstead study for a couple of hours, some of the afternoons I worked…Reading was pleasure given dignity by being called work…The tutor steered me away from much that had been already impregnated by my mother, such as the nineteenth-century French and Russian novelists and poets, I became inducted to the Victorians, to Fielding, to Dryden and Pope, to Gibbon.”

  Unfortunately this rewarding arrangement was short-lived as yet again the Perkinses were obliged by their perilous finances to move, first to Winchelsea on the south coast, then returning for a while to London, followed by a few weeks in Peterborough—and so it went on. While in London other teachers were found, some good, others less so, and increasingly, instead of attending lessons, Sybille spent more and more time reading and writing on her own. Crucially it was during this period that she began to realise where her future lay. “My attachment to England was instinctive, a bid for, if not roots, a kind of self-preservation. From early on I had the absolute if shadowy conviction that I would become a writer and nothing else; I held on to the English language as the rope to save me from drifting awash in the fluidities of multilingualism that surrounded me.”

  Under the Perkinses’ liberal regime, Sybille was free to spend her spare time very much as she chose. During one of their longest periods in London, the Perkinses rented a flat in Belsize Park, and on most days, after a morning spent with her books, Sybille took a bus into the West End. Here she started to explore the different areas of the city, the fashionable shopping streets of Bond Street and Savile Row, the grandeur of Whitehall and St. Paul’s, the Georgian terraces of Bloomsbury; with keen interest she read the menus posted in the windows of Soho restaurants, and was intrigued by the sight of bewigged barristers standing talking outside the law courts in the Strand. One day for the first time she entered the National Gallery and was struck by two artists in particular, El Greco and Piero della Francesca, whose impact “raised a curtain I had not known was there.” From then on she became a frequent visitor not only to the National Gallery but to the Wallace Collection and the Tate.

  At the end of every school term Sybille returned to Italy, where Lisa had planned to settle permanently. Now, however, the atmosphere was becoming uneasy, with the country fast turning into a police state. In 1924 Giacomo Matteotti, the socialist politician and critic of Mussolini, had been murdered. Since then the situation had grown ever more threatening, with Mussolini and his Fascist party effectively creating a dictatorship. Neither Nori nor Lisa had made any attempt to hide their socialist sympathies. “They had not belonged to any visible resistance to Il Fascismo, yet it was obvious that they were not for…refusing to join what one was expected to join, posting compromising material to a foreign address, circulating copies of th
e London Times.” And so in the spring of 1926, “almost from one week to the next,” the decision was made to leave Italy and settle in France.

  Before the move took place, however, there were some complicated matters to be settled. Since her father’s death, no legal guardian had yet been appointed for Sybille, her mother considered ineligible as she now held an Italian passport and was no longer resident in Germany. For weeks documents had been arriving in the post from the court in Baden, the sight of the buff envelopes causing Sybille acute anxiety. At her suggestion Katzi’s husband, Hans Borgmann, was asked to assume the role of legal guardian, to which he agreed; but then Katzi suddenly left him for another man and he backed out, leaving Sybille with no option but to be declared a ward of court.

  Further problems then arose over the Feldkirch property: this Maximilian had left to be equally divided between his two daughters, but only on condition that the estate remained within the family and his collection preserved in perpetuity. This was clearly impossible, and so the lengthy process was begun of revoking the will so that everything could in due course be auctioned off—a sale which did not take place until a further two years had passed. Consequently Sybille was left with no income of her own, until finally Lisa’s trustees came to the rescue, agreeing to maintain her for the time being.

  It was in the early spring of 1926 that the family left Italy for good. Curiously, in her written accounts, both fictional and factual, Sybille maintained she was not present, that only later she learned the details of the long journey by train and its somewhat haphazard ending in a small port on the Mediterranean coast. But in fact she was there, as her arrival in France on 12 April with her mother and stepfather was recorded by the Sûreté nationale, which at that period was keeping a careful watch on traffic entering the country over the Italian border.

  Lisa’s original intention had been to stay for a while in Biarritz, where she had friends, before deciding where to settle. This plan was abandoned, however, while they were still en route. The train journey seemed endless, with lengthy delays while crossing the border, the three of them crammed into a carriage full of suitcases, coats, a picnic basket, boxes of books and Lisa’s three little black-and-white Japanese spaniels. Once in France the stops became increasingly frequent, and it was nearly midnight when they reached the station where they were to board the express to take them on to their final destination. But “by the time we got to the station the express had gone,” Sybille recalled, “and as my mother didn’t want to sit up all night in the train we got out.” Fortunately they were directed to a bus standing by, into which the three of them climbed with their luggage and dogs, and after a short rattling ride were deposited within sight of a hotel, which despite the late hour still had its lights on and rooms available.

  Next morning they woke to find themselves in a small fishing port, Sanary-sur-Mer, halfway between Toulon and Marseilles. Their hotel, the Hôtel de la Tour, built on to what had been a medieval watchtower, stood at one end of a pretty harbour full of dinghies and fishing boats. The harbour was lined with palm trees, and away from the water, on the other side of the road, was a row of cafés, bars and little shops. The town appeared peaceful and charming and the decision was taken to remain, at least for a while. A house was found, the Villa Ker Mini, “a hot, ill-stuck-together bungalow,” situated on the edge of a narrow bay, ten minutes’ walk from the centre. Here they could stay while Nori and Lisa began the search for more suitable accommodation.

  In fact for the next nearly fifteen years Sanary became Sybille’s home, but much more than that: the town itself, the country behind it, the sea and rocky shore, and above all its cast of remarkable characters were to provide not only the setting and inspiration for her finest novel but also an important emotional focus that was to remain with her for ever. Indeed no other period in her long life affected her as profoundly as the years spent in that idyllic region in the south of France, nowhere that she identified with so closely. The sea and the landscape, the friends she made there, the emotional impact of her love affairs, were part of a world to which in her memory and imagination she constantly returned. “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.”

  Meanwhile the family began to settle into a more organised existence. The bungalow was given up and another house found, unprepossessing but comfortable enough, on the chemin du Diable, a narrow street near the centre of town. Sanary itself was very different from the fashionable Riviera, far removed socially and culturally from the luxurious villas and large hotels of Nice and Cannes. Sanary was a modest but thriving community mainly comprised of fishermen and shopkeepers, with a lawyer’s office, a pharmacist, two doctors, a couple of retired naval officers, and a few writers and painters living in modern villas situated on the outskirts of town. In the square, the place de Sanary, was the Mairie and the parish church of St. Nazaire. Along the cobbled streets were a number of bars and cafés, and small shops with beaded curtains over their doorways; during the week there was a busy market with stalls displaying meats and cheeses, locally grown fruit, flowers and vegetables, while the fishermen sold their daily catches on the quayside. A little distance beyond was a sandy beach with a few bathing huts, and stretching uphill behind the town an ancient Mediterranean landscape of scrub and terraced hills, vineyards, cypress, ilex and olive groves.

  Almost from the beginning Sybille was enchanted by Sanary. She loved the simple Mediterranean cuisine, the swimming, the hot summers. “The great constant was the climate, the inflexible summer climate of the Mediterranean coast. It embraced, contained, our existence; the ever-present sun and sea, the scented air, the strident sounds of tree-frog and cicada were the element we moved in.” And crucially, it was here for the first time that she began to know and understand her mother.

  In later life Sybille admitted that although she profoundly admired her mother she was never able to love her. Lisa was too self-centred, too volatile, and almost proud of the fact that she was wholly lacking in maternal instinct. Now that her daughter was growing up, however, Lisa began to look on her as a rewarding companion, someone to whom she could talk almost as an equal, who listened eagerly as she expounded her liberal idealism, her moral and political philosophies. Most inspiring for Sybille was her mother’s passionate love of reading, her wide knowledge of French, English and German literature. As Lisa’s ambition was to become a writer herself, for years she had talked of ideas for books which she had never had the time or patience to produce. She “was very well educated and she instilled into me the idea that it was a very grand thing to be a writer…I suppose I always had a passion for writing, but being brought up to talk about Dostoevsky at breakfast was a great advantage. I owe her an enormous amount.”

  Indeed even more than her beauty and charm, it was Lisa’s conversation that drew people to her, the wit and ebullience of her talk, which was “never relentless, quite interruptible, full of self-mockery…[and] often very, very funny.” During this early period of their life in Sanary, Sybille for the first time saw her mother serene and happy, her contentment endowing her with a natural grace and radiance that proved magnetically attractive. Although Lisa never cared much about what she wore, often flinging on the nearest garment to hand—rumpled trousers, an old linen shirt—her beauty was as striking as ever, aesthetically as remarkable as that of her handsome young husband.

  For Nori was nearly always at her side, providing the love and emotional support which in her earlier marriage she had never known. Nori adored Lisa, loved her “gently, dearly, protectively, beyond the dazzle and the attraction, with the wholehearted devotion of one human being to another.” Although with most women he was naturally flirtatious in a gently teasing manner, there wa
s no question but that it was his wife who was the centre of his existence. Watchful and protective, he was always at hand to solve her problems, calm her anxieties, find the keys she had lost, the purse mislaid, gently reassuring her with his affectionate banter. “She would smile sweetly at him: all was as it should be…their difference in age did not seem to be a factor—not to her, not to him, and this was also the face they presented with complete naturalness to the world, and the world appeared to accept.”

  With Sybille, too, Nori was kind and completely at ease, delicately navigating this somewhat unusual relationship, part fatherly, part fraternal. It was he who smoothed the path, made it possible for mother and daughter to grow closer, for Lisa at last to recognise her relationship to her only child. It was not all perfect, of course. As at Feldkirch, Lisa was given to violent outbursts of temper: even a minor annoyance could set her off and she would explode with rage, leaving Sybille shaken and depressed while Lisa herself, apparently unaffected, recovered within minutes. As at Feldkirch, too, the servants disliked her: the two maids who came in by the day dreaded her bad moods, and if there were a problem, broken china or a malfunctioning stove, they always went to Nori, not Lisa, to report it.

  Yet on the whole the atmosphere within the family was one of calm and cheerfulness. The Marchesanis soon settled into their new way of life; they began to make friends, find congenial company among their neighbours. When Sybille was not in her room reading she could often be found with a group of young companions swimming and playing on the beach. (Over dinner one evening a friend of Lisa, the German poet and playwright Ernst Toller, said to her, “Funny kind of girl you’ve got here, comes in from making sandcastles then reads André Gide.”) To increase their inadequate finances, Nori, a trained architect, set himself up in business as a builder and decorator. Soon he started finding houses for summer visitors, which he would then renovate and repair, and in this he was assisted by Lisa. “My mother had a knack of making any room look charming…and [Nori] was immensely handy with anything he touched; together they supplied taste and imagination.” All in all that first summer in Sanary was a period of tranquillity, with little indication of the devastating sequence of events that were ultimately to unfold.