There were others among the Huxleys’ friends whom Sybille came to know, among them an American couple, both writers, William Seabrook and his mistress, Marjorie Worthington. Seabrook’s large house was almost opposite the Villa Huley, and the two couples saw each other frequently. Maria was particularly fond of Marjorie, a shy young woman who obviously adored her “Wolf,” as she referred to him. According to the much relished local gossip, Seabrook was a man of sadistic inclination: a small building next to the house was hung with iron rings where he enjoyed chaining up naked young women—ankle shackled to wrist was a favourite posture. “A number of disagreeable and sensational stories were going round about his sexual savageries, yet he never hinted at these practices to the Huxleys.” They knew about them, nevertheless. “Sanary,” Aldous wrote to one of his correspondents, is “in a flutter of excitement to know Mr. Seabrook, because the rumour has gone round the village that he beats his lady friend…”
Despite his private practices, Willie Seabrook was a generous host and Sybille enjoyed his lavish, lively parties, although she remained wary of the man himself, “a very strange man indeed…beset with inner problems.” Marjorie recorded in her diary her first meeting with Sybille one evening when dining with the Huxleys. “A young German girl, very blonde and red-cheeked, wearing a dinner jacket and a monocle…introduced to us as La Baronne something or other…hearty, sense of humour, spoke Eng. with British accent.” In a novel published a few years later Marjorie portrayed Sybille as “Ilsa von Stembeck, a young German girl, who dressed, from preference and not fashion, in mannish slacks and shirts.”
The Huxleys were due to go to London in September 1930, planning to stay there until the end of the year. One of the last occasions on which Sybille saw them that summer was in August, at a soirée given by Pierre and Jacqueline Mimerel to celebrate the completion of their impressive new villa, La Pacifique. It was a glamorous event, attended by most of Sanary’s international society, the Huxleys, the Marchesanis, as well as some fashionable Parisians, including Charles de Noailles and the novelist Drieu La Rochelle and his wife, and also several English friends of Aldous and Maria. The greatest pleasure for Sybille was the presence of her sister. Katzi’s husband, now based in Paris as a special attaché at the German Embassy, had rented a villa for the summer, and the two of them were much sought after during the busy social season, Katzi as pretty and frivolous as ever, Dincklage, “her sun prince,” handsome, clever and flirtatious. At the party Katzi attracted much attention in a ravishing white evening dress, while her sister by contrast wore a cut-down black dinner jacket of Aldous’s and a plain black skirt. Sybille and her mother had arrived late, Lisa making a tempestuous scene and refusing to leave the house, then suddenly changing her mind, throwing on a shabby lace dress, with a lopsided mantilla covering her hair. They both enjoyed the evening nevertheless. After dinner there was an act by two famous cabaret stars, Félix Mayol and Maurice Chevalier, their performance setting “the audience alight…Aldous and my mother, lured from their separate inner worlds, gave themselves to its small magic.”
Sybille dreaded the Huxleys’ departure, and taking leave of Maria was particularly painful. From Aldous, however, there was no show of emotion, simply some practical directions to specific volumes of Greek philosophy in his study with a kindly recommendation that she read them before his return.
Shortly after the Huxleys left, so did Nori, this time on a tour of Spain with Doris which was to last for several weeks. Before his departure, he gave Sybille further detailed instructions on how to cope with Lisa while he was away; he also promised to send regular telegrams with his location so that she could contact him in an emergency.
With Nori gone, Sybille found herself yet again alone with her mother. As before, Lisa moved through periods of drug-induced euphoria followed by intervals of serenity during which she earnestly promised to give up what she referred to as her “paradis artificiels.” As these paradisal effects dissipated, however, she grew violently angry, railing against Nori’s cruelty and betrayal, her outbursts giving way to moods of black depression which could last for hours. When elated, Lisa insisted on Sybille driving her along the coast to shop extravagantly and dine in expensive restaurants, which Sybille knew they could not afford. She would terrify her daughter by suddenly demanding an injection—right now, this instant, they must find a lavatory or pull in by the side of the road as she was unable to wait another second. At this stage of her mother’s addiction, there was no mistaking the cause of her unnatural appearance, “the staggery walk, the glitter in the eyes, the erratic make-up.” Behind her back Lisa was mockingly referred to as “Madame Morphesani”; anecdotes were told of how she would appear at lunch or dinner in a lively mood, then suddenly slump, grey-faced and silent, clutching at her daughter, with whom she would disappear for a few minutes, returning vivacious as ever, as if nothing had happened. It was, said one observer, like seeing Coppélius from The Tales of Hoffmann winding up his puppet-doll.
Then suddenly an already desperate situation was made worse when without warning the local pharmacy told Sybille they could no longer accept Dr. Joyeu’s prescriptions, that legally such dosages were beyond the limit. To keep her mother supplied, Sybille was now obliged to go ever further afield, to Bandol, La Ciotat, Toulon, Le Lavandou, “to find yet another pharmacy still willing or ignorant enough to cash the prescription I tried so nonchalantly to tender…There was no intention of cutting down…I did what I had been advised: take these prescriptions as far afield as you can, and never, ever to the same place twice.” Inevitably her resentment of her mother’s behaviour, of the unending emotional stress it imposed, affected Sybille’s feelings for Lisa. “I did feel pity, though not enough…I was exasperated, frightened, seldom kind…I longed for escape.”
A form of escape materialised at the end of the year with the return of the Huxleys. Immediately recognising the gravity of the situation, Maria took charge, insisting that Lisa must be persuaded to enter a clinic for professional treatment of her now very serious condition. Gently but authoritatively Maria began talking to her, and eventually Lisa agreed to see a highly regarded specialist in Nice. When the day came Sybille and Nori, who was once more at home, accompanied Lisa to Nice on the train. The consultant “was brutal and direct…never had he had a case of such rapid addiction…Need for an institutional cure was urgent.” Arrangements were quickly made, a room booked at a private clinic for a stay of several weeks, during which no contact with the world outside would be permitted. Aware that the Marchesanis’ finances had been seriously depleted by Lisa’s extravagance, the Huxleys insisted on paying for everything.
When after several weeks Lisa came home the change was immediately apparent: she was calmer, more confident, more even-tempered, and although very thin, her lovely face noticeably more lined, she seemed ready to return to a semblance of normality. Undoubtedly relieved by the improvement in her mother’s condition, Sybille was struck by her altered appearance, her face “etched with a tragic refinement…with lines and features grown more Jewish now than Latin.” Before long Lisa felt well enough to go out and see friends, and only with Nori did she refuse to abandon hostilities, constantly attacking him, complaining bitterly of the way he had treated her.
Sybille’s position with the Huxleys, her role almost as an honorary member of the family, was by this time well established. It was now, however, that her relationship with Maria started to shift, emotionally, to evolve at a much deeper level. From the beginning Sybille had looked on the older woman as friend and mentor, an almost maternal figure, on whom she depended and whom she wholeheartedly admired. Now the two of them became lovers—a sexual bonding that was to continue intermittently for a number of years. And at about the same time Aldous added Lisa to his long list of sexual conquests.
The Huxleys’ marriage had always been unconventional. Aldous was extremely susceptible to beautiful women, although apart from Maria he felt
little emotional engagement with any of them. In analysing this aspect of his character one of his girlfriends remarked, “I doubt that Aldous is capable of love (personal love) and I think the recognition of this lack in him has made him so unusually kind.” As for Maria, not only did she tolerate her husband’s liaisons, she encouraged and enabled them, regarding them as a necessary distraction from his work. Aldous enjoyed making love but he had no interest in courtship (“He would have grudged the time—it was dinner and bed, or nothing”), and thus it was Maria who arranged the meetings, purchased the presents, and frequently befriended the women themselves. “In a subtle way she prepared the ground, created opportunities, an atmosphere…It was a measure of how certain they were…of the great niceness that there was between them.”
And Maria, too, enjoyed extramarital affairs, always with women, which came as a surprise to some: as one acquaintance put it, “her feminine appearance left her masculine side well hidden.” For a number of years during the 1920s Maria had conducted an affair with Mary Hutchinson, a friend of Virginia Woolf and one-time mistress of Lisa’s admirer, Clive Bell; as Mary at the same period was also a lover of Aldous’s, the result was a happy ménage à trois, regarded as richly rewarding by all three. Now with Sybille, Maria opened up a sexual dimension to their friendship which was to remain important to both. In reflecting upon their lovemaking some years later Maria wrote to her, “I recall delicious softness, gentle warmth and flowing curves…Thank you for all the pillars of your hidden treasures. I accept them gratefully…It seems we were always in tune.”
As to Aldous, there would have been little trace of his affair with Lisa had he not chosen to describe it in easily identifiable detail in one of his novels. In Eyeless in Gaza, published in 1936, Aldous, with his cool, clinical eye, had bestowed on the character of Mary Amberley Lisa’s temperament and appearance. Mrs. Amberley is known for her charm, intelligence and sexuality—her “graceful indolence, so wildly exciting because of that white round throat stretched back like a victim’s, those proffered breasts, lifted and taut beneath the lace”—but equally apparent is her emotional neediness, her desire for attention, and perhaps most tellingly her terror of the physical signs of ageing. In one scene her lover watches as she walks upstairs: “The first half of the flight she negotiated at a normal pace, talking as she went; then, as though she had suddenly remembered that slowness on stairs is a sign of middle age, she suddenly started running—no, scampering…when they returned to the drawing room, no tomboy of sixteen could have thrown herself more recklessly into the sofa or tucked up her legs with a more kittenish movement.”
With her mother in a relatively stable condition, Sybille continued to enjoy herself. It was at dinner at the Villa Huley one evening in June 1931 that she met a young woman with whom she was to form a lifelong friendship. Eva Herrmann, American, thirty years old and very beautiful, was a gifted artist who had come to Sanary with a commission to draw a pencil portrait of Aldous for a New York magazine. For Sybille the impact of meeting this pale, delicate, dark-haired young woman, “with a lovely, secret Etruscan face,” was powerful and immediate. Although Eva was shy, she soon relaxed under the influence of Maria’s kindly manner, responding to Sybille’s obvious sympathy and interest. Sybille for her part knew at once that this was the start of an important relationship, and so, it quickly became clear, did Eva. Over the next few days they saw each other whenever possible, meeting at the Hôtel de la Plage, where Eva was staying; and when after a few days Eva eventually left Sanary to go to Italy, Sybille drove her to the station. As the train drew out, Eva leant out of the window: “Our friendship is for life,” she said; and so it turned out to be.
Born in Munich in 1901, Eva was one of five children, the daughter of Frank Herrmann, a wealthy German-American painter. Husband and wife, both Jewish, divorced in 1910, and in 1919 Frank took Eva to live in New York. Two years later Eva left the United States to enrol in an art course in Berlin, and it was while in Germany that she began an affair with the young communist writer Johannes Robert Becher, under whose influence she herself became a communist sympathiser. By 1924 Eva had established herself as a talented caricaturist, and after her return to New York the following year won a series of commissions from several newspapers and magazines. In 1929 her success was formally recognised when the New Yorker published On Parade, a volume of forty-two of her drawings of famous authors. While living in New York Eva had become friends with Klaus and Erika Mann, children of the revered German novelist Thomas Mann, and it was with the Mann siblings that Eva had arrived in the south of France, the purpose of her journey a commission to draw Aldous Huxley, whose phenomenally successful novel, Brave New World, had recently been published. After a week in Sanary Eva left for Italy to visit her father, returning a few days later to Bandol where she joined Klaus and Erika at the Grand Hôtel des Bains.
Only during the first weeks of their long friendship were Sybille and Eva lovers, Sybille discreetly joining Eva every night in her hotel bedroom, returning to Sanary at dawn. When at the end of the month Eva again took her departure, this time for Russia, Sybille went by car to meet her for twenty-four hours in Venice, after which, driving at reckless speed, she caught up with Eva’s train for three highly charged minutes before it left the station in Verona. Sybille then returned to Sanary, where she collapsed, falling asleep while still seated behind the wheel; here she was discovered by her current amitié amoureuse, Christa von Bodenhausen, in whose apartment she had been staying.
Christa von Bodenhausen, an attractive young woman in her early twenties, was part of a growing population of German émigrés settling in and around Sanary during the 1930s, although Christa, like Katzi’s husband, Dincklage, was one of the few who were not Jewish. It was after the Reichstag election of September 1930, and the dramatic rise in power of the Nazi Party, that the first expatriates had begun to arrive, attracted by the peaceful atmosphere and beautiful coastline of the south of France. At this early period there was little sense of immediate danger, rather a desire to exchange an unstable way of life for a more secure and tranquil alternative. France was an obvious choice: a democratic country sharing a border with Germany, with its Mediterranean coast offering a warm climate and a cheaper cost of living than in Paris.
Among the earliest of the new arrivals were Julius and Annemarie Meier-Graefe, he an eminent art critic now in his sixties, she, his third wife, always known as “Bush,” a lively, flirtatious young woman over thirty years his junior. When Sybille was introduced to Bush, “I kissed her hand…I still knew enough to follow, on this occasion, the custom of the German and Austrian upper classes which was that an unmarried woman kisses the hand of a married one.” Sybille was enchanted by both husband and wife, relishing the leisurely al fresco dinners on their shady terrace, the wide-ranging conversations about painters and writers and life in pre-war Berlin. Meier-Graefe, who in the past had been a lover of Lisa’s, was “a life enhancer if ever there was one, a viveur, at the same time oddly delicate, moody, sharp, very difficult.” Bush, with whom Sybille was to enjoy an enduring friendship, was by contrast “gay and giggly…running the house hospitably, typing the books, managing at the same time to get on with her own painting.”
Over the next few years Meier-Graefe was to provide crucial support in helping others of his countrymen leave Germany and settle in the region. Most of these early exiles were relatively well off, able to rent comfortable villas and afford a leisurely way of life. Yet despite bringing an increased prosperity to the neighbourhood, the newcomers were not always welcome: memories of the last war were still uncomfortably vivid, and in many local communities there was an innate xenophobia that lay only just below the surface. “Swarmed upon by actual living Germans, distaste and instinctive fear rose readily to the surface. ‘Un Boche, c’est toujours un Boche,’ could be heard when a cleaning woman had been reprimanded or paid late.” Even among Sybille and her friends there was a somewhat judgemental a
ttitude. “Rather a dismal crew,” as Aldous described the exiles, complaining that “Swarms of literary Germans infest the countryside like locusts.” Maria, who with her Belgian family had herself been a refugee in the First World War, was also somewhat equivocal in her reaction. As an émigré, in her view, “one behaved with dignity, pliancy, showed gratitude, whereas the present refugees, the more visible ones, were throwing their weight about.” Inevitably her attitude influenced Sybille. “Maria remained distant, disapproving. I was ambivalent in my likes and dislikes. Together, Maria and I collected anecdotes, told Aldous, laughed.”
In the spring of 1932 Sybille, now twenty-one, went to Germany, her first return to her native country in nearly seven years. The main purpose of the expedition was to disentangle her somewhat complicated financial affairs, and, if possible, to arrange for her bank account to be moved to France. Passionate as ever about cars and motoring, Sybille had recently bought a cheap little open-top Ford, in which with considerable courage she set off alone from Sanary, driving for several days across France and over the German border. After arriving in Baden she went first to Feldkirch, not to the schloss, but to the village to call on her father’s old maid, Lina Hauser. From there she met the Huxleys and Raymond Mortimer in Berlin, where the four of them spent several days exploring the city, a haunting experience for Sybille with her childhood memories of the Tiergarten, the Siegesallee, the Herz house on Voss Strasse, now all images from a vanished past. On this occasion they were simply tourists, visiting the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, the zoo, the opera. “One evening we went to have a look at a large and glittering nightclub whose speciality was table telephones: middle-aged couples and a sprinkling of commercial blondes ringing each other up across the floor. The whole thing was of deadly vulgarity, a repulsive combination of facetiousness and lust…Aldous duly remarked how extraordinary it was and how depressing.”
Sybille Bedford Page 10