Loving mother and mother's lover
Frances Partridge
JIGSAW: AN UNSENTIMENTAL EDUCATION A BIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL by Sybille Bedford Hamish Hamilton, f12.95, pp. 352 Billi, the heroine of Sybille Bedford's new book, is only 19 when she starts work on her first novel, while living on the Cote d'Azur with her remarkable mother.
'What is that novel of yours about?', her mother asks, and is told that it is not the most original of plots — merely the life of a young man in the south of France. 'You have me', says her mother. 'I'm a much more interesting subject than your dreamt- up young man.' I said: No, I don't think I ever could.' But this is just what Jigsaw has done. In a panoramic landscape stretching from babyhood to the age of 20, and from Germany by way of Italy and London to Sanary-sur-Mer, Billi's mother stands out as the most striking figure among many others depicted with great subtlety and skill, though without the same emphasis. As we finish Sybille Bedford's book with a sense of having liv&I extremely close to her during those 20 years, we may well ask ourselves exactly what she means by the two subtitles: An Unsentimental Education and A Biographical Novel. The first is apt. the subject is certainly an education, though not such a one as is got from schools and 'establishments'. For it is the story of Billi's growing up through adolesc- ence to maturity; and the grindstone on which her intelligence has been honed and polished is her mother's acute and well- stocked mind. It is an education concerned with civilised values as well as factual knowledge, and derived from omniverous reading, from listening to the talk of clever people, and from travel. 'How often does one not wonder what thoughts accompany the talk', Billi reflects, 'what is said thrice quicker than speech — inside the head, and what goes on beneath those thoughts, at the back of the mind.' As for the second subtitle, the Biographical Novel, shouldn't it be Autobiographical, for the reader is bound to think of Billi, the book's observant eye and 'I', as Sybille Bedford herself rather than a creation of her imagination? Her mother is a great beauty, a woman of many affairs, a daz- zling conversationalist, erratic, disorga- nised, 'someone who would rather talk about a plant than grow it.' She makes an eloquent first appearance: 'I was in some kind of narrow space and my mother, wearing an enormous hat and veil, was bending over me, for it was she who, quite exceptionally, had wheeled the pram.' This delightful glimpse emerges later as evi- dence of a clandestine love affair, and proof that space had somehow to be found for both infidelity and maternal feeling. Billi's earliest years are described in short, sometimes very short, sentences which suggest the pointilliste manner of a child's perception of the world rather than an adult remembering childhood. A few years later, with a parental divorce brewing, 'I was interested — and influenced — by my mother's general opinions, but dreaded being alone with her. She could be ironical and often impatient; she did not suffer little fools gladly.' There follows an epi- sode of village life alone with her father, before Billi returns to her mother who is about to marry Alessandro, 'a slim young man with long beautiful hands', referred to by mother and daughter as 'Titian's Man with the Glove' — a character who will remain with us to the end of the book and grow in stature. Realising how much her mother loves him, Billi comes to love her mother herself. It is a turning-point in the story.
The life led by the trio — Billi, her mother and step-father — is set in the stylish, casual, exhilarating ambience of the Cote d'Azur, marvellously described in terms of food and wine, elegant clothes and endless talk interrupted by the hectic rhythm of short, sharp love-affairs. Now and again Billi goes to England to get on with her education, and she plunges eager- ly into various literary and artistic worlds, entering responsively into their compli- cated problems; back in France the pattern of her life is much the same. At about the time that Aldous and Maria Huxley be- come important to her, we begin to realise that her mother's insomnia must be treated as an illness, and on doctor's advice she goes away for a rest, leaving Alessandro and Billi at home in the villa. They 'take to the whirl like ducks to water', give a party, and go on a spree to Saint-Tropez, a place 'with a tangible atmosphere of eroticism', spend most of the night drinking and dancing, and end up each in bed with someone else. Billi's account of losing her virginity is rational and light-hearted.
The last episode introduces a shattering development. Soon after Billi's mother returns she learns that Alessandro and a young friend of the family have fallen desperately in love. What's to be done? The first and unsuccessful solution is for the lovers to separate, the second that they should go away together. Billi's mother backs this plan but cannot live up to such altruism and is swept away in a flood of violent jealousy which drives her to drink, drugs, and lastly to a shady doctor who provides her with morphine. The stress of this crisis falls entirely upon her sensitive, responsible daughter, and a terrifying sense of tension is built up. A clinic achieves a temporary cure followed by relapse into a state when 'her nocturnal uproar . . . pierced the marrow'. Her final portrait is of 'an apparition, emaciated, with a macabre elegance about her; the lined intense face still beautiful — not a Giorgione any longer, a Rembrandt woman, an ageing Jewess howling by wall.'
The end is inconclusive and distressing, Alessandro can bear no more and prepares to leave. 'I went back to bed,' says Billi. 'It must have been about five o'clock. With luck I could count on a few hours sleep.'
Can we perhaps count on a sequel?
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