The Slipstream of Style

It's a cliché you've heard a million times, but that doesn't make it any less true: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Come, I'll show you what I mean.

On Friday, I finished this spellbinding memoir by English writer Sybille Bedford (1911-2006).

(available here)

It's not a conventional biography, but then Sybille didn't live a conventional life (morphine-addicted mother, eccentric upbringing, love affairs with men and women). Absorbing and quixotic, "Quicksands" reads like a poetic dreamscape of memories from a rich life. She starts in the middle, skips forward, then wades decades backward, alights on certain places and returns to them, again and again.

The village of Sanary-sur-Mer on the French Riviera is one such enchanted place.

(Sanary-sur-Mer, France)

Sybille lived there in the '20's and '30's when it was a secret haven for emigré artists and writers like Aldous and Maria Huxley, Berthold Brecht, Thomas Mann and Jean Cocteau, among others. (Even Edith Wharton, "rotund, corseted, flushed and beautifully dressed", was a Sanary habitué.) I've travelled through the South of France many times; how is it that I have never stopped here?

* * *

From the early 1920's on, here and there on that Mediterranean coast, one would find a handful of people who had chosen to live in places of benevolent climate and great natural beauty ...where one could play and work in the belief that History can have a stop.

~ Sybille Bedford, "Quicksand"

* * *

(photo via here)

Now it's Monday, but try as I might, everything keeps circling back to Sanary. Case in point: I was sent a special digital preview of June's Elle Decor (it's amazing, by the way) and clicking through it today, this beautiful photo of a Connecticut garden sent me speeding back to Sybille's chapter about life at Villa Huxley in the 1930's:

(Elle Decor, June 2010. Photo: Miguel Flores-Vianna)

"Here all is exquisitely lovely," Aldous wrote to Juliette, his sister-in-law...."There is the eucalyptus tree and the stumpy palms from which the hammocks swing. [It is] silence, leaves, the sky."

That description fits Miguel Flores-Vianna's photo beautifully, don't you think?

But it gets better than this. There are no photos in Bedford's book, so I did a Google search for "Sanary" and after some tunnelling, found this image buried deep inside a website. Look familiar? Grove of trees, table on the left, hammock on the right.

(Aldous, Maria and Matthew Huxley,

Sanary-sur-Mer, 1930's. Photo via here)

It's an eerie döppelganger of Miguel Flores-Vianna's wonderful photo, taken from an eighty year vantage point on time.

The more I leafed through the June issue, the more Sybille's memories burrowed insistently into the present:

"At dinner there was a sense of release, of being lightly en fête."

(Elle Decor, June 2010. Photo: Miguel Flores-Vianna)

"The house ran with a civilized simplicity. Breakfast about ten o'clock and everybody came down for it...Aldous still a bit groggy with sleep was comfortably silent. The jam, homemade, was mostly rose or quince."

(Elle Decor, June 2010. Photo: William Waldron)

"Maria [Huxley] would have been up for hours: looking after her artichoke bushes and scented tuberoses in the garden."

(Elle Decor, June 2010. Photo: William Waldron)

There is but a slender membrane that separates us from the past.

* * *

Note: For further Sybille Bedford exploration, "Jigsaw" (shortlisted for the Booker Prize) is a wonderful novelization of her youth which covers Sanary in perhaps even more detail. All the characters in "Quicksands" are there, although the names are disguised. I can recommend it highly.