Jigsaw (46 page)

‘A real architect. A little late now.’

I recalled another time when I had stood with him when he was ready to leave at Sorrento and I, seeking reassurance for her, had asked, ‘You will come back?’ I did not ask this now. I was filled by a surge of love, impersonal love, as though he and I had become a link in the chain of the brotherhood of man. I put my arms round him, elated with his need for release; absolution. Such absolution as one human creature can give to another. We stood together for some moments. I had never felt so close to anyone.

The words came out, ‘Go in peace.’

When he had left, I stood for a time by the balustrade. It was the break of another relentlessly beautiful morning in the Midi. There were steps. Alessandro had come back, he was carrying his Remington portable. ‘You had better have that. Use it.’ He was gone again.

I went into my room. The house was silent. I was about to shoot the bolt inside my door then realised that I could no longer allow myself to do this. I put the typewriter by the table I used for a desk, symmetrically, and went back to bed. It must have been about five o’clock. With luck I could count on a few hours’ sleep.

Jigsaw
is my fourth novel and, I very much fear, my last. I finished it over ten years ago – a long time that went quickly, in idleness, in pleasures, in much private grief. The decade before, a good chunk of it, went into gathering the strength of mind to shape, reshape and finally write this novel with two sub-titles and an author’s note trying to elucidate Who is Who, Who is Half-Who and Who is Not.

That note must be a clue as to why I went through so many hesitations, detours and delays before getting something down on paper that felt
right
. At the time this baffled and dismayed me: it was unexpected. I was no longer the innocent with the passionate aspirations to the literary life who, a quarter of a century before, had thrown herself with such a compound of conviction and self-doubt into her first (published) novel. I
was
a writer – a professional. I had just come out – we are in the mid-seventies – of a long discipline of servitude to factual truth (as far as
that
can be nailed down) – ‘a biographer is an artist under oath’ – six years of single-minded hard work on a biography of Aldous Huxley, and was looking forward to regaining my inventive liberty. As friends and editors were beginning to ask, ‘And what are you going to do now?’ ‘What are you going to write
next
?’ I would trundle out something to the effect that I was planning to return to the freedom of fiction. Well,
fiction
? Alone, at my desk, on my walks – now mainly in London streets or the back country of a more and more built-up South of France – I began to see pitfalls. What I had in mind – or wherever such directives originate – was to build a novel out of the events and people who had made up, and marked, my early youth: in fact the
Unsentimental Education
of my main sub-title. It had to be a novel in which the events had actually happened and happened largely as described; to invent, such was my
instinct, would have been pointless: it mattered that these things
had
occurred. Truth here was an artistic, not a moral, requirement – truth to be presented in the terms of the novelist, not the biographer, terms that meant timing, selection, avoiding repetition … It involved using myself as a character in the centre of the narrative; in plain words, writing about myself, my feelings, my actions. There I felt resistance and avoided recognising its cause, deluding myself that it could be … what? Left out? Circumnavigated perhaps. (Did one
have
to have a parent?)

For the moment I put it all aside. London held many attractions, distractions, now that I was beginning to live there practically for the first time as an adult. I became active in PEN, joined committees, canvassed in elections, was asked to act as assistant consultant on an encyclopaedic volume on wine. I jumped into that: it required more acquisition of knowledge than fine-tuned writing; it devoured a full six months. Above all there were friends; friends in walking or short driving distance, old friends, very new friends, a few brothers in wine as I called them, droves of writers everywhere: dinners, dinner parties, cooking for dinner parties … An existence unlike any of my previous ones – unlike the euphoric years in Rome, the years rusticating in southern France: steady work, companionship, the sea, dawn markets of fruit and fish, rough gardening with scant water on hard ground. Unlike, also, the intervals of travel journalism that fed my desire to see and to learn and helped to finance my slow books; unlike the often months-long reporting of controversial or political trials in courts of law here and there from the Old Bailey to Frankfurt, to Paris, to Texas. Then all this had come to an end with the absences in pursuit of Huxleyana, live witnesses rather than papers, since most of these had been destroyed in a Hollywood hill fire. The base was still France, writing in my austere, whitewashed room, though I had to be away for stretches of time: in provincial England, in Italy, Paris, Holland, a year almost in America, coast to coast. And now urban England, a deliberate move, deciding on another kind of life; a very great wrench. I never stopped missing France. (France, one of the three countries I can feel almost belonging to – England: attachment to language and
some institutions; Italy: romantic first love, visual, sensual; France: for everything else.) The new life now, London, if beset with real anxieties – how to acquire a place to live – was an interesting life of (guilty) leisure. As the right structure for my novel continued to elude me, they increased: the leisure and the guilt. Where was the proud professional? The writer who doesn’t get down to the next book – I had faced this before – is once more nothing. (Do I sound like Cyril Connolly carrying on? Well, I know how he felt. At least I did not lie in bed crying ‘poor Sybille’.)

The one thing I was in happy certainty about was my locale, my playground. A place I knew – none better – a fishing port on the French Mediterranean. Sanary. Sanary-sur-Mer. I had loved it. I still do. As it was then: small, unfashionable, modest – a French village, a back country of classical landscapes: hills, olives, vines. I had described it, briefly and under due constraint, in the part of the Huxley biography called ‘The Apparent Stability’ – Aldous and his incomparable wife, Maria, had lived, been at home there, for a good number of years. For them, as for myself, Sanary, their Sanary house (Villa Uley) had remained a
point de repère
, a compass point, throughout their lives. It was there that I spent a part of my adolescence and the best of my youth; there that I met the diversity of men and women who became mentors, examples, seducers, friends – loved friends, life-long friends … (Few of them at the time of my attempting this novel, alive.) Their origins were as varied as their codes of behaviour; most had come by choice, instinctive or rational. They were able to work and play in this place of benevolent climate and natural beauty remote from the centres of government and commerce, and dictate their private stories.
That
was in the brief span of time between recovery and new fear, the middle years between two wars. We are in the 1920s with the wish, the illusion that history
can
have a stop, moving into the thirties with our heads still in the sand.

So I had the time, the place, the people. Where was
I
? How plausibly could I insert myself, full-fledged, into a somewhat complex milieu in meridional France at the age of about sixteen? Who was I, where had
I come from? I needed
provenance
, an identity. Which must mean trotting out my short and recent past. I had little desire to go into what passes as my childhood. I had never been much interested in myself as a child
per se
, moreover I had already used tales that had come my way in a previous novel in which I had also tried to construct and interpret my own father’s nature and life to the best not of my knowledge but of my imagination perhaps, plus guesswork. He had died when I was so very young; was there anything more to learn? Could I or should I invoke him again? (I often dream about him – sad, puzzled, remorseful dreams, where he is a lonely, hurt, forgiving man whose existence I, long grown-up myself, have ignored throughout the years, as callous as the unfeeling child I had been.) Then, quite suddenly, wide awake, I realised that I had thought and written only about what he may have been as a boy, as a young man, both scarred and spoiled, as the man in his marriages, in his role of a prisoner, the kept son-in-law, of the innocent tied to public scandal; what I had
not
done was recall
our
life, the actual, utterly isolated life of his last years that he and I led together in rather eccentric circumstances of
un
genteel poverty in quite grand surroundings in the depth of the county. I was about seven when it began, he must have turned sixty, I believe (children did not ask their parents’ age in those days), still
very
handsome, still well turned out – those pre-1914 suits and shirts last for ever – and as I have said; isolated, cut off, alone. He saw no friends, no women. The house, in those parts called a château (twenty bedrooms, a considerable collection of Renaissance furniture and
objets d’art
, one bath), contained three inhabitants: a stranded man of the world; a bewildered, later acquiescent, somewhat know-all child; an elderly, good-hearted, deeply religious,
hard-working
village woman. The reason for all this was simple – no money. That had gone, radically so, when my mother left. It
was
her money and
she
had bought the château for her husband, my father, and let him keep it. That was a generous deed. It created a somewhat paradoxical situation – candles instead of electricity bills, masculine cast-offs (children’s clothes do
not
last), claret in the cellar and at table but no cash for butcher’s meat. (Hence decades into my adult life I would choose sirloin steak rather than Elizabeth David’s
gratin of courgettes.) The complete true tableau of my almost
prehistoric
origins appeared to me quite suddenly one evening in a public place, at dinner, with friends, noise, conversation, flooding over me, wine making thought glide on … ‘This could be told, this is how one could make a book begin; “Antecedent: Germany”.’ Next morning I did begin. The substance was flowing as though it was already on film; as ever, alas, I had to look after the words.

In due course that screen went blank; the rural phase had reached its sudden end. My mother claimed me (her legal right; not exercised for long because of the complexities, one surmised, of her own life). Within days of that claim, travel arrangements were made and I was whisked into Italy. That was then, now I had to go on tending my book – there still were years to cover before my entry into that French fishing port – memories in another key had to be tapped to bring sense and movement into my chronological past. Overcoming reservations, refusing to face that these were bound to become more serious as the tale went on, I set to work on that next stage necessary for balance and cohesion. Italy. My
mother
. The one character I wished to keep minor and knew all along that it could not be done. I remembered her as intellectually rigorous. This I approved of and admired (and am for ever grateful for); I had also been aware of her lack of interest in children and took it for natural – which indeed it might be for more women than we are nowadays taught to believe. I am not sure how she came out in my version of our Italian encounter. I can hope that she would have done what she nearly always could: laugh at herself.

After I was hustled out of Italy – Sicily to the Midlands, direct – I had to manage another kind of literary hurdle: the banality of my first experience of England and the English. Middle class and middle-class bohemia was my initial lot, so novel, so strange to me, so flatly familiar to a potential reader. Not that I think of them – readers, that is – as a rule, my precept being that a writer should not look beyond his page, his work. Hope of approval by a handful of elders and betters: yes; aiming at sales, fashion, success: no. However, I do not
wish
to bore. I was hampered by this likelihood when I began describing my 
early English past. Parlour maids, icy bedrooms, sodden vegetables, Australian Burgundy, pony traps, Boots’ lending library, the butcher calling, the crystal set … At the time of writing, not all of this had definitely vanished, and a butcher’s van could still occasionally be seen, whereas by now,
our now
, the turning of the century, so much of English social and domestic life of the 1920s has receded into an historical past. Not certain of this yet, I had decided to lighten my trite circumstances by introducing an alien element into the
Anglo-Saxon
scene, the Sisters’ Story –
not
from Moscow, from Berlin – a story I had often wanted to write: adult lives displayed to my barely adolescent self, their story true to a high degree, and originally
conceived
as a novella. As I got into it, I saw that it would fit well into this novel, a kind of counterweight, a link between the English and the French action of my jigsaw.

Did I say French? I did. We’ve got there at last. I have arrived in France, we shall get to the core of the action. I began, meandered into topographical descriptions … It was at
this
juncture that I got seriously stuck.

One day there came a nasty letter from my American publisher. (I had accepted – and used for living – an advance; how many years ago?) The letter gave me a jolt. It was not enough.

The dilemma remained: blocking future progress. This was not an articulate decision; I did not discuss the impediment with anyone. I didn’t discuss it with myself I did not
think
‘conscience’, ‘betrayal’, ‘bad taste’, I just had the feeling of being up to a wall like a horse refusing a jump while avoiding to give it even a glance.

Now that I
have
– given it a glance, and more than that – the obstacle can be defined in simple terms: it could not be right for
me
to tell what caused my mother’s undoing; my
mother
could not be left out of the book; my mother could not be
in the book
if one left out the sequence of factors/events that had led to that undoing. (Caused as usual, as I see it, like most misfortunes by a concatenation and logic of character, circumstances and – a big item – chance.)
La ronde
, the circle. If one stayed caught in that circle, there could be no book.

It resolved itself. Without any discernible push. Overnight, as it 
were, the writer had won over whatever we might call it: filial duty, decency … I wanted to write this book, in this way, and I did.

I already owed my mother a very great deal, not in conventional ‘maternal’ terms, but for the articulate private education with which she imprinted on me her unshakeable rejection of war, nationalism, social injustice (the latter theoretically), her passion for literature and art, good literature, great art. Due to her I was able to clutch a book earlier than I might have reached for a doll. Such talent as I may possess must have been directly inherited from her, writer
manqué
herself. I shall always be grateful, although, sadly, I was not often able to love her; and now I owe her for
Jigsaw
as well. How would she have taken it? my exposure of the tragic – at times comical – misfortunes that overtook her? As I said, she was able to laugh at herself. How far could it hold, her belief that the written word carried its own absolution?