Sanary - so not St Tropez

I've been away the past week, a working break on the Côte d'Azur, if that doesn't sound too implausible. An old fishing village on the shores of the Mediterranean is such an old cliché that these days it almost always means millionaires on yachts and bronzed stick insects dripping in bling. But not always. Sanary-sur-Mer is still a working fishing town as well as a jolly holiday place for the more down-to-earth French.

I really was working. The page proofs of the new novel, 300 Days of Sun, had to be painstakingly checked, mistakes hunted down and sentences forensically assessed. With the house full of visitors again, I couldn't see how it would get done, so this was my answer. Work in the morning, sun in the afternoon.

It was great! I've never been away specifically to work on my own before, and I like it. Rather too much, perhaps. Previous brief visits to Sanary had intrigued me. It seemed friendly, with a lovely atmosphere, and is pretty as a picture. It has some lively literary connections, too, which are always interesting. Thomas Mann lived here in the 1930s, and Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World just out of town along the coast. D H Lawrence found some easing of his tuberculosis here, and Sybille Bedford - a wonderful writer who deserves to be better known - wrote Jigsaw, her "unsentimental education" among the wild and eccentric bohemians in the twenties and thirties in Sanary.

 

A short walk down a tree-lined, almost suburban, street to the west of the port was the pretty Portissol beach, where the water can change colour from pale grey-green to deep blue.

 

 

I even took the train along the coast to La Ciotat one day, as I've had the glimmering of an idea for yet another novel and wanted to do some research. Another afternoon, I took a boat trip to the calanques at Cassis and beyond.

 

At night, there were unpretentious restaurants by the harbour where I felt perfectly happy eating on my own, watching the world go by and the night market being set up. After that, there were various bands and other free entertainments that sprang up along the esplanade. As I told the family when I got back, having completed my list of changes to the proofs and sent them off to New York yesterday morning before I left: it was a full week's work!

Red rocks at Cassis



Anyone for an infusion of sunshine while all is rain and gloom? Here is Cassis on a summer’s evening: pastel stucco buildings along the waterfront; boats lined up in the marina. Dominating the eastern side of the bay, a medieval chateau-fort sprawls across the towering rock of Cap Canaille, which surrounds the town like a huge protective arm. As the sun sets over the sweetly curving harbor, the castle catches flame from the west, and burns blood-gold for up to an hour each evening.

                                                                                      

This classic old fishing village on the Provençal coast has a rather different feel from the internationally fashionable resorts like St Tropez further to the east. It’s much more relaxed and less crowded, though you’ll need to get up at dawn to park in August. The atmosphere is arty-bohemian, though leavened by the sailing crowds and families. This has always been a resort where the French themselves come on holiday.

It’s also a place for anyone who enjoys a good book trail, because among the foreign visitors down the years, there are plenty of stellar literary associations.

Virginia Woolf travelled here to be with her sister Vanessa Bell, Vanessa’s husband Clive Bell and her lover Duncan Grant in 1925, and wrote after spending her days wandering on flower-edged footpaths through the woods and tiny beaches amid red rocks: ‘No-one shall say of me that I have not known perfect happiness.” For the next few years it became a veritable Bloomsbury-sur-Mer.

It’s a wild, rocky coastline here, a far cry from the white marble and manicured lawns of the palaces near Nice, where we picture F Scott Fitzgerald and Somerset Maugham. This is closer both geographically and in spirit, to tough, earthy Marseille.

In the 1920s a desperately-ill D H Lawrence came to try to calm his tuberculosis at Bandol, yet another stop among so many increasingly frantic attempts to find a climate kind to his failing health. Katherine Mansfield came for the same reason. Aldous Huxley lived at Sanary-sur-Mer, another small seaside town – very pretty but not over-glitzed even now. Sanary would become the chosen place of exile for a group of German writers fleeing Hitler’s fatherland during the Second World War, most notably Thomas Mann.

A little further round the coast is Hyères, once home to Robert Louis Stevenson, and where Edith Wharton had a house for many years and wrote several novels, including The Age of Innocence. She also wrote the lovely lyrical poem In Provence, which begins:

Roofed in with creaking pines we lie
And see the waters burn and whiten,
The wild seas race the racing sky,
The tossing landscape gloom and lighten.

With emerald streak and silver blotch
The white wind paints the purple sea.