Even more depressing was the sight throughout the city of groups of Hitler Youth marching down the streets. “It was a mixed up and foreboding time, with daily clashes between communists and Brownshirts…There was an ominous feeling about the country.” The atmosphere was heavy with violence and tension, and in this sinister and unsettling environment it came as little surprise that Sybille was refused permission to transfer her money, a refusal she accepted with courageous insouciance. “I found bureaucracy off-handedly blocking the way…[so] I let the future take care of itself and left Germany with Maria smuggling a couple of my thousand-mark notes hidden in her shoes.”
Although there had been much to enjoy, Sybille had been profoundly shaken by what she saw taking place. Since childhood she had been brought up to love France and distrust Germany, the country of her birth, and now more than ever she felt the need to distance herself from her roots, as far as possible, to erase her nationality. “My German beginnings I discounted, sought to obliterate…I never felt I had the German identity, the Germanic mind…but the fact that I had any connections with this terrible country became a cause of guilt, and for some time I tried desperately to anglicise myself.” It would be more than thirty years before Sybille set foot in Germany again, and now after returning to France she made determined efforts to camouflage her nationality, efforts which did not pass entirely unnoticed. The writer and philosopher Ludwig Marcuse, who was to spend several years as an exile in Sanary, remarked that Fraülein Schoenebeck was “eine deutsche Halbjüdin, die englisch sprach, als wäre sie auf dem Campus von Oxford geboren…hatte nicht den geringsten Respekt vor Deutsche, innerhalb Germanias oder ausserhalb, von deutscher Literatur hielt sie noch weniger, worin sie vielleicht ihr Idol Aldous Huxley kopierte, der von den deutschen Schriftstellern Sanarys kaum Gebrauch machte—und tief verbarg, dass er deutsch verstand” (“a German half-Jew who spoke English as if she had been born in an Oxford college…She hadn’t the slightest respect for Germans, within the fatherland or abroad, and even less again for German literature; in so doing she perhaps copied her idol Aldous Huxley, who had no use for Sanary’s German writers—and hid deep the fact that he understood German”).
On her return to Sanary Sybille moved in to the Villa Huley as Lisa was away, undergoing further treatment at the clinic in Nice. With Raymond Mortimer and Eddy Sackville-West her fellow guests, she spent an enjoyable few weeks, swimming, reading, talking, dining with the Huxleys, with the Dincklages and Mimerels—Jacqueline by this time little more than a sentimental attachment: “much as I was inclined to admire, I no longer admired all the way.” As a gesture of gratitude for the Huxleys’ hospitality, Sybille for a couple of hours every day sat typing out Aldous’s manuscripts, which she was more than glad to do, even if it left little time to concentrate on any writing of her own. “So much siesta and dining out and never any work,” she noted in her diary. More and more it seemed she was following her mother’s path, intending to write, full of ideas for writing, but somehow never getting down to it. Lisa always claimed that it was her frequent love affairs that had prevented her from writing, a problem which her daughter in time came to understand very well.
Within a few weeks Sybille was again on the move, leaving Sanary to join Eva Herrmann in Turkey. Eva had spent the past few weeks in Moscow, a city she loved. Shortly before leaving for Russia she had been profoundly shaken to learn of the suicide of an ex-lover of hers, and perhaps in need of distraction had had a brief affair with a young Polish architect, apparently without considering the possible consequences.
In the middle of July Eva and Sybille met in Constantinople, Sybille arriving on the Orient-Express: “la journée passé vite…je lis, écrit, dors, et ai très chaud” (“the journey passed quickly…I read, write, sleep, and am very hot”). From Constantinople they went to Athens, neither of them enjoying it much, Sybille pining for the south of France, Eva complaining about the food and the smell of food, the cause of her revulsion soon to become apparent. From Greece they returned to France to meet Sylvester Gates, an English friend of Eva’s, and stayed in what Sybille described as “a horrid house” on an island off the coast of Brittany. It was here that Eva discovered she was pregnant, and so it was decided that the three of them should go to Switzerland, where Eva could have an abortion. After arriving in Zurich, Eva moved into a clinic where Sybille also stayed, while Sylvester rented a room nearby. Eva’s condition proved complicated and it was nearly two months before she could undergo the operation, weeks that Sybille was delighted to spend in the company of Sylvester.
Sylvester Gates became not only a lover but a close friend of Sybille. Tall, slender, with a fine-featured, handsome face, Sylvester was a brilliant young barrister then in his early thirties. An outstanding scholar at Winchester and Oxford, musical and a talented linguist, he also had a highly refined appreciation of good food and wine, which naturally appealed to Sybille. His marriage, to a daughter of the Scottish industrialist Sir Charles Tennant, had recently ended because of Sylvester’s terrifying explosions of temper, not infrequently culminating in physical violence. (As his Oxford colleague, Maurice Bowra, wrote of him, “Anger that ill becomes our kind, / Unbalancing the sober mind, was poor Sylvester’s bane…”) Yet despite his rudeness and irascibility, Sybille became and remained very fond of him, in awe of his intellectual ability, relishing his wit and cleverness as well as his sophisticated epicureanism.
During the few weeks they stayed in Zurich Sylvester found an understanding listener in Sybille, who was sympathetic to his unhappiness over his failed marriage. The two of them explored the city, went to the theatre, sat for hours over inexpensive meals—Sylvester was short of funds after his divorce—and when Sybille returned to her room in the clinic Sylvester accompanied her, the two of them spending much of the night talking, drinking and making love. When at the end of her life Sybille was asked in an interview whether she had ever fallen in love with a man, she replied, “Yes. I had one very serious attachment to a man.” This man was Sylvester, and although their physical relationship may have been intermittent and had certainly ended long before 1936, when Sylvester married again, their friendship, founded on an intellectual compatibility and a strong emotional bonding, remained unbroken for forty years.
In October, when Sylvester returned to England, Sybille and Eva made their way back to Sanary. Here Eva, still fragile after her operation, remained until the following month when she left for New York, while Sybille went back to living with her mother. On New Year’s Eve she and Lisa were invited to a dinner party at Villa Huley, a poignant occasion as the Huxleys were on the point of leaving to spend several months in Mexico and Central America. The New Year also marked the end of a period of relative political stability: on 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Reich Chancellor in Berlin, and on 27 February the Reichstag building went up in flames, an act of arson later recognised as pivotal in establishing the Nazi regime.
It was during the weeks after the Reichstag fire, with Jewish communities increasingly under threat, that the great exodus from Germany began. In France the government immediately declared the country’s readiness to accept large numbers of German refugees, a statement that was to have a significant impact not only on Paris but particularly on the south. Within a very short time exiles began arriving in Sanary and Bandol, some to stay only a few weeks, others remaining for a number of years. Distinguished writers came to form one of the largest groups, among them the brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, René Schickele, Bruno Frank, Stefan Zweig, Bertolt Brecht, Ludwig Marcuse, Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler. Soon Sanary was being referred to as the secret capital of German literature, “a gregarious and gossipy world,” as Klaus Mann recalled it, with the marble-topped tables of La Marine and La Veuve Schwob now occupied throughout the day by a galaxy of German literati. “A galaxy indeed. And didn’t they know it,” Sybille wrote later. “Their entourage, a gathering of secretaries, housekeepers
, agents, referred to them—straight-faced—as Dichterfürsten, princes of poetry.”
Most famous of the princes was Thomas Mann. Mann was not Jewish but his wife, Katia, was, and so therefore were his six children. It was his two eldest, Erika and Klaus, who had persuaded him to leave Germany, Mann agreeing with reluctance, loath to abandon his affluent life in Munich for the comparatively rustic conditions of the south of France. Arriving in May at the Grand Hôtel in Bandol, he wrote disdainfully in his diary, “ich finde in diesem Kulturgebiet alles schäbig, wackelig, unkomfortabel und unter meinem Lebensniveau” (“I find everything in this cultural milieu shabby, rickety, uncomfortable, and beneath my accustomed standard”). Fortunately he was obliged to spend no more than a couple of nights there before moving into a comfortable villa in Sanary, La Tranquille, the house which a few years earlier had been renovated by Nori. Indeed it was Lisa who had arranged for the Manns to take it. As a young woman Lisa claimed to have known Thomas Mann, had even, or so she said, turned down a proposal of marriage from him, ever afterwards referring to him pityingly as “poor Tommy.”* Almost everyone else, however, regarded the great novelist with awe, treating him with the flattering deference to which he had long grown accustomed.
Not one of those who shared this view, Sybille found Mann pompous and conceited, and Katia’s frequent references to her husband’s “Welt Ruhm” (“world fame”) ridiculous. To his two eldest children, on the other hand, Klaus and Erika, she quickly became devoted. Erika, in her late twenties, the elder by only a year, was often taken as the twin of Klaus, partly because the two of them looked so alike—slender, pale, with dark eyes and short dark hair—and partly because they were so closely involved with each other, both emotionally and intellectually. Erika, a wild, exuberant personality, determined and tough, was an actress, winning much acclaim with her performances in Die Pfeffermühle (“The Peppermill”), the political cabaret she had recently founded. Both were heavy drinkers and smokers, with Klaus, but not Erika, dangerously addicted to drugs; Erika had affairs with both men and women, while Klaus was wholly homosexual. They were both passionate opponents of the Nazi regime, and Klaus spent much of his time travelling round the European capitals, attempting to organise anti-fascist protests among the various émigré groups. On 8 May, two days before the notorious burning of the books in Berlin—a campaign organised by the Nazis to destroy all works considered subversive—the names of both Klaus and his uncle Heinrich appeared on the blacklist of 136 writers whose works were to be banned in Germany.
It was Klaus, frail, complex and highly strung, to whom Sybille grew closest; with Erika she enjoyed “a sporadic camaraderie,” while “for Klaus I came to feel much affection. I loved him as a brother in many situations and years to come.” A dedicated writer, Klaus was the author of several plays, had published a couple of novels while still in his twenties, and in 1932 a first volume of autobiography which had made a considerable impact. His writing was crucially important to him, and as Sybille, too, was determined to write, she regarded Klaus’s ferocious dedication with awe, while at the same time having reservations about his style. “I never knew anybody who was more naturaliter a writer, by temperament, steady work, everything; but the talent was not commensurate.” She wholeheartedly sympathised with his courageous opposition to the Nazi regime, with consequences that were shortly to prove extremely damaging.
Not long after the Manns’ arrival in Sanary, Willie Seabrook threw a garden party to welcome a number of the recent arrivals. It was a hot afternoon, and Seabrook, glass in hand, greeted his guests wearing nothing but a pair of khaki shorts, his hairy chest on full display. Sybille, who had arrived with the Huxleys, was amused to see the contrast between their host’s rumpled dishabille and the formally dressed Mann brothers: Thomas, with his ramrod back, slick grey hair and trimmed moustache, famously compared to a walking stick, while Heinrich, in a high collar and black coat, extended, “like M. de Charlus, two fingers to anyone offering to shake hands.” Most of the German haute culture kept themselves to themselves, only Lion Feuchtwanger, the celebrated novelist and playwright, talked to the other guests, “making the round of the younger and more attractive women telling about his latest sales figures.” The reaction of some local residents, Sybille and the Huxleys among them, was slightly derogatory. “What struck the Huxleys was the regard some of them had for themselves. They threw their weight about; they were pompous.”
Once settled in Sanary Thomas Mann and a number of his writer colleagues decided to form a weekly reading circle, their meetings to be held at La Tranquille. Here, “der Zauberer” (“the magician”), as his family reverently referred to him, sat at the centre of a table on the terrace, flanked by a group of compatriots, with their wives positioned on chairs behind them. When the performance was due to begin Erika solemnly placed her father’s manuscript before him. In the garden below, perched on steps, cushions, a wooden bench sat the groundlings, among them Sybille, Lisa and Nori, Eddy Sackville-West, the Huxleys, all straining to hear as Mann mumbled his way through a section of Joseph und seine Brüder, his work in progress. “Je n’ai jamais lu un de ses livres” (“I’ve never read one of his books”), Aldous later confided to Klaus. Afterwards the high table was served with Riesling and chicken salad, while fruit cup and biscuits were distributed among the rest.
The following month, in August, Lisa gave a soirée to which she invited all the Manns, the Meier-Graefes, the Stefan Zweigs, the Huxleys, and also Willie Seabrook and Marjorie Worthington, who were shortly to leave Sanary for good. That evening Lisa was at her best, witty and charming, apparently in excellent spirits, although as it turned out this was one of the last occasions on which she was to appear in full possession of her faculties. Within a very short time it became clear she was suffering from serious depression, and for the first time in her life she began to drink heavily. She slept “long, sometimes into the afternoon. One day I came across the gin bottle in her bed. It fell out, it was empty.” Sybille and Nori tried to take control by offering to make cocktails which the three of them could enjoy together, but now all Lisa wanted was to lie in bed on her own with whatever alcohol she had been able to lay her hands on. Worse was to follow: somehow, probably through the compliant Dr. Joyeu, she had again begun taking morphine. The smell of ether permeating the house was an unmistakable indication of her decline, as was Lisa’s ravaged, emaciated appearance, “not a Giorgione any longer,” in her daughter’s words, but “a Rembrandt woman, an ageing Jewess howling by a wall.”
At this stage there were still a few hours in the day when Lisa felt able to dress, go into town, see friends, but now she was careful always to lock her bedroom door before leaving the house. On one occasion she and Sybille returned only to find she had lost the key. Lisa “with quick resource fetched a flat-iron and smashed one of the lower panels of the door…leaving an opening roughly the size and shape of that of an average dog kennel. My mother got down on the floor and wriggled through this aperture with astonishing agility and invited me to follow her. I declined…Her head appeared near floor level. ‘Then we must talk from where we are. Bring a cushion, I’ve got one.’ I fetched a cushion and we soon began talking quite normally, each crouching by one side of the hole.” This grotesque situation continued for several days, with Lisa on all fours crawling in and out of her bedroom, until Nori, who had been away, returned home. “When [Nori] came in and saw us, he swore—most rare—and slammed the passage door on what to him must have appeared the ultimate in disorder.”
One of the friends who called at the house during this period was Maria Huxley, who was astonished by what she found. Returning to the Villa Huley she described to Aldous the extraordinary scene she had witnessed, a scene which, to Sybille’s horror, appeared in excoriating detail three years later in his novel, Eyeless in Gaza. Not only is there a vivid account of Lisa wriggling her way into her bedroom but also a ruthlessly accurate picture of her alcoholic degeneration. “
Hennaed to an impossible orange, a lock of tousled hair fell drunkenly across her forehead…A smear of red paint, clumsily laid on, enlarged her lower lip into an asymmetrical shapelessness, a cigarette end had burned a round hole in the eiderdown…The pillows were smudged with rouge and yolk of egg. There was a brown stain of coffee on the turned-back sheet. Between her body and the wall, the tray on which her dinner had been brought up stood precariously tilted. Still stained with gravy, a knife had slipped on to the counterpane.” After Lisa’s mother, Anna Bernhardt, read Eyeless in Gaza, she wrote resignedly to Sybille, “I hadn’t known that AH had been one of her endless Leporello list.”
When on the book’s publication Sybille came across this passage she was appalled by what she regarded as Aldous’s perfidy, shocked by the merciless detail in which Lisa’s condition was described. “When I remonstrated, Maria told me that he would put anything he got hold of into the book; sooner or later and in his own way. So if I had a story I didn’t want to see in print, ‘Don’t tell Aldous.’ ” And it was no doubt true that Maria’s account as retailed to Aldous had been embellished by Sybille, who would certainly have discussed her mother’s condition with the Huxleys. As Anna Bernhardt wrote to her granddaughter, “It is not you who wrote the book, but it is you who expressed your feelings to Mr. Huxley.” Aldous had not intended to be cruel, but as his old friend Ottoline Morrell once wrote of him, he was “a scientific student of human behaviour…singularly lacking in the emotion of the heart…he listens and looks as if he were looking and listening at the behaviour and jabber of apes.”
Sybille Bedford Page 11