The Sphinx of Sanary

To mark the 90th birthday of the novelist Sybille Bedford this Friday, Martin Mauthner recalls her remarkable role as a multilingual gobetween in the bohemian colony that settled between the wars around Sanary, a small port on the Cote dAzur.

he year is 1933 and it is late afternoon on a summer day in Sanary-sur-Mer, a fishing village near Toulon that is turning from a holiday resort for the Anglo-American avant-garde into a sanctuary for literary refugees from Germany. The scene looks like a set from a play by Coward or Rattigan. A dissolute and now forgotten American writer, William Seabrook, and his companion, Marjorie Worthington, are hosting a party for their neighbours in their rented villa.

Seabrook has just taken off his shirt. He is a boisterous, hairy-chested man, wearing fisherman's shorts. Some of his guests, accustomed to the manners of a Berlin salon, are more formally dressed. For all the heat, one arrives in high collar and black coat. He is Heinrich Mann, at that time still basking in the fame that The Blue Angel, the highly successful film version of his novel Professor Unrat, has brought him and Marlene Dietrich a few years previously. Heinrich's younger brother Thomas, awarded the Nobel prize for literature four years earlier, also appears formally dressed.

Aldous Huxley — 'brave new world' has become a household phrase following the publication the previous year of his novel, which he wrote in Sanary — is dressed more appropriately, in a white cotton ensemble. He arrives with his Belgian-born wife Maria, who carries a satchel bag and wears a belt, both of which she has acquired on the couple's recent travels in Central America.

Lion Feuchtwanger and Arnold Zweig, both well-established German authors whose work has attracted attention in other countries, come along with their wives. Other writers there are less well known beyond the German-speaking world or are familiar in narrower fields; one such is the art historian Julius Meier-Graefe, whose book, Modern Art, Kenneth Clark will praise as 'a pioneer work which for the first time saw the [modern] movement as a whole'.

One of the guests is an acute observer. The daughter of a German countess, she is a lively and talented young woman called Sybille von Schoenebeck. Twenty-two years old at the time, she is to become a central figure in this coterie over the next seven years, and will later piece together her youthful experiences in her biography of Aldous Huxley and Jigsaw and other noteworthy novels. Today, known under her married name of Sybille Bedford, she lives in London and is the last survivor of Sanary-les-Allemands'. She was born in Berlin and celebrates her 90th birthday on 16 March.

Sanary is indeed the backdrop to an astonishing story. It is on what even before the war was the less fashionable westerly stretch of the Cote d'Azur, a region where life was cheaper than around Nice and Cannes and which provided the setting for many novels. It was there that Anthony Powell wrote his first novel, Afternoon Men, and set part of his What's Become of Waring? Eric Ambler's classic, Epitaph for a Spy, takes place in a fictitious St Gaitien that resembles Sanary, itself a corruption of Saint Nazaire. Cyril Connolly followed in Aldous Huxley's footsteps, hoping to learn from him how to become a successful writer. While Evelyn Waugh was Connolly's guest in Sanary the two of them went off to Toulon to visit the port's quartier pave.

From 1933 Hitler's persecution of Jews, socialists and communists forced many German writers to seek shelter in Sanary from what they at first expected to be a short-lived tempest. A plaque was unveiled by the German and Austrian governments after the war commemorated 36 of the émigré writers associated with Sanary. Besides those at Seabrook's party, they include Bertholt Brecht, Arthur Koestler, Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig and Franz Werfel. Sanary was dubbed, ironically, the capital of German literature.

None of these writers was associated with Sanary as closely and for as long as Sybille Bedford. Her mother settled there in 1926 with her second husband, an Italian architect called Non i Marchesani. Lisa Marchesani had known leading literary figures in pre-Hitler Germany, among them Thomas Mann and his family, and several came to Sanary to visit her.

One was the German communist poet and playwright Ernst Toiler, who regularly looked up colleagues at the New Statesman. Another acquaintance from Berlin who called on Sybille Bedford's mother was Alfred Kerr, the famous theatre critic in Weimar Germany; he fled to France and later found refuge in Britain, where his son became a judge and his daughter, Judith Kneale, a highly successful writer of children's books, including two about the family's life in exile in Paris and in London. (Her son, Matthew Kneale, is the author of English Passengers, which won the Whitbread prize earlier this year.) While Sybille Bedford was being educated privately in England she went out to stay with her mother and Italian stepfather in the holidays. With her cosmopolitan background and mastery of English, French and German, the attractive young lady glided easily among the locals and foreigners. She was the catalyst for Seabrook's garden party.

She and her mother helped Thomas Mann and his wife find a house to rent in Sanary. The Mann family called Sybille Bedford's mother 'Signora Morphesani', an allusion to her morphine addiction. When the right-wing poet Roy Campbell came over from Martigues to visit Signora Marchesani, he asked to be taken to a friend in the village; that was how Sybille Bedford first met the Huxleys. In 1932 she guided Huxley around Berlin.

Sybille herself appears frequently in novels, memoirs and published letters and diaries. Ludwig Marcuse, an émigré writer who lived in Sanary, described `Fraulein von ... ' as a half-Jewish German who spoke English as if she had been born on Oxford University's campus. She was so 'highbrow' — he used the English word — that sometimes she alone understood what she was saying. Marcuse thought that she had not the least respect for the Germans, whether they were living within or beyond 'Germania'. He suggested, perhaps unfairly, that like her idol Aldous Huxley she appreciated German literature even less.

Marcuse found Sybille Bedford insecure and a snob, although good-hearted. She was, he thought, constantly urging others to arrange some kind of get-together. He regarded her as the main driving force behind the parties organised by the English in Sanary — in his opinion, a smaller but louder clan than the German group. Marcuse was impressed by two of them: lively and scantily clad young sisters, who were 'generous with the many assets at their disposal'. It was in fact Sanary's small English contingent that seems to have provided most of the local fun. Their behaviour led some Germans to conclude that the English were reacting against the puritan Sundays they had left behind — a feature of the period that Continentals visiting Britain found so forbidding.

Marjorie Worthington's novel about her Sanary years with William Seabrook, Come, My Coach, refers to

Ilsa von Sternbeck. a young German girl who dressed from preference and not fashion in mannish slacks and shirts [and] Doris Gray, a pretty American girl who lived with Ilsa in a small house on the outskirts of Sanary, who was as feminine as Ilsa was not...

Sybille Bedford shared a house with Eva Herrmann, an American artist of GermanJewish origin who left behind a fine collection of caricatures of writers she encountered — among them Huxley, Mann. Maugham, Malraux and Hemingway.

While staying with the two young women Eddie Sacicville-West wrote his novel, Simpson. The garden of their house was the setting for an unusual open-air theatre evening to which local French families as well as the expatriates had been invited. By the time Marcuse came to write his autobiography he had virtually forgotten the first play. Had the audience known what was to follow, Marcuse opined, they would have left their maids, children and grandchildren behind. Called The Secret of Mayerling, the second one-act drama suggested that the Austrian crown prince Rudolf had committed suicide in Mayerling in 1858, not because of his doomed love for Mary Vetsera, who died with him, but because Rudolf loved one of his huntsmen.

The play was by one of Sanary's more unconventional English residents, Brian Howard. who would serve Evelyn Waugh as a model for two unsympathetic characters — Ambrose Silk in Put Out More Flags and Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited. Howard's German companion, Toni Altmann, played the huntsman in question, and Sybille Bedford also had a role, performing in exquisite English, according to Marcuse. By 1937 Brian Howard was writing to his mother from Sanary that it was 'Sybille von Schoenebeck [she had in fact married Walter Bedford in 1935, the same year that her friend Erika Mann married W. H. Auden] who runs the place.'

But in the 1930s parties and plays drifted into the background as many of Europe's writers came together, determined to use their pens as weapons to fend off fascism. Huxley, with Andre Gide and Heinrich Mann, became a patron of and contributed to Die Sammlung, the exiles' literary review produced by Thomas Mann's son. Klaus. Romain Rolland and Bertrand Russell helped Feuchtwanger and other émigré writers establish a 'library of the burned books' in Paris. As international president of PEN, H. G. Wells, with Ernst Toilet was instrumental in forcing the Nazified German branch out of the movement.

Huxley and Feuchtwanger went up to Paris from Sanary in 1935 to join E. M. Forster, Pasternak, Musil, Malraux and many others at the great international writers' congress to 'defend culture' — a gathering derided since as a futile Moscowcontrolled event. Like other intellectuals, many exiled writers became disillusioned with communism; towards the end of the decade it was Stalin's apparatchik Walter Ulbricht who thwarted the German writers' quixotic efforts to give their 'popular front' initiative a liberal complexion.

Sybille Bedford, who wrote for the New Statesman, acquired what she called 'a minor anti-Fascist record'. When the war broke out she and Eva Herrmann were in Sanary. Alfred Kantorowicz, a lesser literary figure, recorded how the gates of a nearby camp, where the French had interned him, were about to close when a luxury car arrived. Eva and Sybille alighted and entrusted to him, the only detainee they knew at the camp, a tender-looking young man who spoke with an English accent. It was Toni Altmann, Brian Howard's German companion; as an 'enemy alien', he was obeying French orders to present himself at the camp. On Sundays the two women joined detainees' wives and companions in bringing food and cigarettes to the inmates.

After the German invasion of France Sybille managed to escape via Italy, reaching California in July 1940 on an American ship. She later returned to London, where she established her reputation with her coverage of the trials of Dr John Bodkin Adams, Jack Ruby, Stephen Ward and Nazi war criminals, and with A Legacy, her acclaimed first novel about the Berlin of her childhood.

In three later novels —A Favourite of the Gods, A Compass Error and Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education — Sybille Bedford vividly recalled her youth; it is Jigsaw that especially evokes everyday life in the south of France before the advent of mass tourism. For the multitude of post-war German scholars who turned 'exile literature' into a flourishing field of research, the pages in her life of Huxley that deal with Sanary after the émigré writers settled there became a standard source.

Although she herself has said — in 1998 on Desert Island Discs — that Jigsaw, written in the first person, is 'how it was', Sybille Bedford has surely left a lot untold about her own 'world of yesterday' and particularly the many unusual characters with whom she mixed in Sanary, in Paris and elsewhere in that troubled decade. Ludwig Marcuse thought that Sybille knew more Sanary secrets than anyone else. Let us hope that the Sphinx of Sanary will soon provide the missing pieces and complete the autobiographical jigsaw on which, she told an interviewer a year ago, she is working.

Martin Mauthner has written a book about German writers who found refuge from Hitler in France after 1933.