FROM THE TELEGRAPH OF 1 NOVEMBER 2005
Sanary sur Mer
The port of
Toulon nestles in a corner between Côte d’Azur and the peninsula of St
Mandrier. It is not a very attractive city. But just across the peninsula to
the west is a charming little port called Sanary sur Mer. Its promenade is like
many along France’s east coast – yachts, hotels, restaurants and curio shops.
But behind it looms Mont Faron; the streets of the town meander up towards it.
I do not know how it is now; but only a few decades ago one could easily walk
out of the town and into a gentle, hilly countryside to the north. A place for
quiet relaxation.
That was my
impression of Sanary sur Mer till I read Der Spiegel of 25 September,
and learnt that it had been called the capital of German literature in exile by
Ludwig Marcuse. Apparently Jean Cocteau first brought Heinrich, the son of
Thomas Mann, here in the early 1930s; they used to smoke opium together.
(Cocteau turned to opium for solace when his boy friend Raymond Radiguet, a
15-years-old novelist, died in 1923.) The Nazis burnt the Reichstag in 1933 – the
same building that houses the German Parliament today. (Its ruin stood in the
wasteland that divided East and West Berlin till 1989, and was renovated by in
the 1990s by Sir Norman Foster, who placed the glass dome on top of it which
one can now walk up to get a great view of Berlin.) Then Thomas Mann decided to
leave Germany, and his son persuaded him to move to Sanary sur Mer.
After seizing
power in 1933, the Nazis stopped Jews from practicing their professions and
closed down their shops. Finally in 1938, they confiscated the houses and
property of Jews, and began to send them to concentration camps. Between those
years, the lucky ones escaped.
The first
amongst them was Leon Feuchtwanger, who wrote Jud Süss, a story of an
eighteenth-century Jewish financier of a king who, on the king’s death, was put
by his successor into an open cage in a public square and left to starve.
Feuchtwanger had fought as a German soldier in World War I; the experience made
him a socialist – and hence doubly hated later by the Nazis as a Jew and a
leftist. He was on a tour of America when Hitler seized power in Germany;
warned by a friend, he did not return to Germany and eventually settled down in
Sanary sur Mer, where he wrote two novels, The Oppermann Family and The
Pretender, both exposés of Nazi oppression. When the Nazis took over France
in 1939, he was arrested, but with the help of an American friend, escaped
across the Pyrenees to the US, together with Thomas Mann’s two sons, Heinrich
and Golo. Arthur Koestler and Stefan and
Arnold Zweig were also in Sanary sur Mer for some time. Another distinguished
exile in Sanary sur Mer was Bertolt Brecht, who sang his radical songs in the
seaside bars.
Then in October
this year, Antonia, Leon Feuchtwanger’s grandniece, made a nostalgic visit to
Sanary sur Mer and wrote about it in New York Times; she brought it back
into my consciousness. She had read about it in Sybille Bedford’s memoirs, Quicksands,
so that is where her article led me.
I was probably
aware of Sybille Bedford at some point; she had published her Mexican
travelogue, A Visit to Don Otavio, just before I first went to England,
and she later published a number of novels. But having seen postwar British
life at close quarters, I had no interest in British fiction of that time, and
took no notice of her. It was only when I read Quicksands that I learnt
how she acquired the mundane British surname, Bedford.
She was born the
daughter of Maximilian von Schönebeck, a descendant of a noble family of Baden,
a small German state – and grew up in a sort of palace not far from the French
border. But then, when she was four, World War I broke out, and her family had
to retreat – to Berlin and then to Schwerin on the Baltic coast. Schwerin was
then capital of the German province of Mecklenburg; after World War II, the
Allies handed it over to the Poles, who call it something else now. After World
War I was over, Sybille was shuttled back to the manor house in Baden. But soon
afterwards, her mother started an affair with a famous Dane – she had quite a
taste for affairs – which forced her to be away for long periods. Her father
put Sybille in a convent school, but was unhappy with the meager results of the
education, and withdrew her. So she grew up wild in the cavernous halls of the
country house and the orchards around it.
This idyllic
existence lasted till Sybille reached her teens. Then suddenly her father died,
and she had to go and join her mother. That journey takes quite a few pages in
the book, for the mother was changing lovers at the moment and had no fixed
address. Sybille was taken from one cheap hotel to another to wait for the
mother, who would turn up once in a while and disappear again. Finally she
turned up with Alessandro, a much younger lover. Sybille, not knowing quite
where she stood, called him father in a restaurant, and all eyes turned towards
them. But soon they became good friends. When he in turn started having an
affair, she covered up for him. He followed her mother’s pattern, and started
disappearing for long periods with his girl friend. Finally he vanished
forever. Rather than accept that he had abandoned her, Sybille’s mother took to
morphine and died of it.
Amongst the
residents of Sanary sur Mer were Aldous Huxley and his wife. When World War II
approached, they took Sybille under their wings, arranged a fake marriage
between her and some Englishman called Terry Bedford, and got her asylum in
England.
That, so to
speak, was the end of her youth. She is now 94, so she has a lot of life to
relate. But she does so in a systematically spasmodic style, jumping from
period to period, event to event, person to person, without any respect for
chronology. While doing so she runs from time to time into another problem –
she comes to a sequence that she has built into one of her novels, so then it
is taboo for the memoir. So Quicksands tends to be chaotic. But it is
riveting chaos: it is a history of a dying, ephemeral set of pretty idle
not-so-rich litterateurs and dilettantes of Europe during a time when their
world was turned upside down. If it had been written with rigour, this memoir
would have been comparable to Il Gattopardo. Without it, it is a peep
into to a Europe that was there just a few years ago – during my lifetime – and
is gone forever. But perhaps it is better described as Perspectives of an
Outsider, the subtitle Sybille had chosen for it but later chose not to
give.
