Then come those inspired by the view. Wordsworth describes his walking tour of the Alps, journeying three thousand miles, including two thousand on foot. Rousseau reads Haller; Shelley and Byron read Rousseau, in a boat on Lake Geneva. Queen Victoria is carried to the top of the Rigi by sedan chair while she mourns the death of Prince Albert, who sent her a pressed flower from its summit. Mary Shelley likens the Alps to the Arctic. Emily Dickinson, in a poem that begins “Our lives are Swiss—/So still—so Cool—” likens the Alps to a curtain that stands guard between Switzerland and Italy that might be drawn to enlarge her view from Amherst. Dickinson’s Alps are as imaginary as those of Friedrich Schiller, who also never set foot in Switzerland, although his play William Tell has been performed every evening during the summer months since 1912 in an open-air theater on the shores of Lake Lucerne.
Then come the true mountaineers, in search of exercise, excitement, and self-enlightenment. They come with ice axe, ropes, and nails in their boots. Their holidays are short, and instead of enjoying long walking tours, they ascend virgin peaks and cross crevasses with the aid of ladders carried by guides. Most of the early climbers in the High Alps specialize in one summit, and once they climb it they give up. By the middle of the nineteenth century, some continue after a first ascent to dedicate their entire summer holidays to alpine scrambles. In the 1850s Mont Blanc could be reached from London in twenty-four hours and the Swiss Alps in fifty-six. The Continent was now accessible to those with a long vacation, one that lasts at least six weeks.
The golden age of mountaineering begins in 1854, with the first climb of the Wetterhorn near Grindelwald by Alfred Wills, High Court judge who presides over Oscar Wilde’s trial, who claims the pursuit is worthwhile in itself and does so in writing. It ends in 1865 with Edward Whymper’s ascent of the Matterhorn whose descent ends in four deaths, including that of Lord Francis Douglas, whose brother Alfred takes Oscar Wilde to court. Of the thirty-nine major peaks ascended during that time, thirty-one are ascended by British amateurs, most of them accompanied by Swiss guides. By the time mountaineering enters its silver age, 1900–1910, the piton and carabiner have been invented; the most familiar mountains are attempted by the most dangerous routes; and the competition between nations, primarily Austria and Germany, takes place between climbing buddies rather than the Englishman and his guide.
What on earth can you find to do in Switzerland. For goodness sake, don’t take to climbing mountains. Every newspaper almost, has a Matterhorn tragedy in it. Are you anywhere near the Matterhorn? I have the vaguest idea of your or anybodies [sic] geography. (Letter from Virginia Woolf to Emma Vaughan, August 8, 1901)
How could I think mountains and climbing romantic? Wasn’t I brought up with Alpenstocks in my nursery, and a raised mp [sic] of the Alps, showing every peak my father had climbed? Of course, London and the marshes are places I like best. (Letter from Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, August 19, 1924)
Leslie Stephen makes first ascents of the Schreckhorn and the Blümlisalp in the Bernese Oberland, the Zinal Rothhorn near Zermatt, the Monte della Disgrazia in the Grisons, the Mont Mallet in Chamonix, among others, crosses most of the high Oberland passes and finds new routes up many peaks, including the Allalin and the Weissmies. He is dismissive of scientists, but on the Blümlisalp he agrees to take a barometer, which, unbeknownst to him, slips out of the guide’s rucksack and falls into the Lake of Oeschinen. When he climbs the Mont Blanc, he times it so that he will be at the summit at sunset, thus his companion, the French painter Gabriel Loppé, can capture the landscape against the sinking sun. The Col des Hirondelles owes its name to him because during his first ascent he finds a pile of dead swallows on the snow at the foot of the pass. He never climbs the Matterhorn, thinking the guides will be too nervous after the Whymper disaster, but he ventures into the much-less-traveled Dolomites and Carpathians. He criticizes guideless climbing and invites his favorite Swiss guide, Melchior Anderegg, who has never been in a city larger than Berne, to London. An early member of the Alpine Club, also its chairman, vice president, and president, as well as editor of the Alpine Journal, Stephen walks from Cambridge to London in twelve hours to attend a club meeting. He wears the same tweed coat in the mountains and in London, its waistline stained yellow from the ropes that have been fastened round it.
In 1871 Stephen publishes a collection of essays titled The Playground of Europe, about which he writes: “I have published a small book about the Alps, a collection of articles called the Playground of Europe, the best part of wh. is the name.” The essays are intended for the Alpine Club, describing routes that might be followed by fellow members while decrying the crowds that are increasingly encroaching on what they consider their private playground. In spite of the impossibility of solitude given climbing with guides, Stephen is at his most philosophical when he writes: “The mountain solitude is so intense because the mountains are, in one sense, so far from secret. … You know that you might fall, for example, from the summit of a cliff, upon which a hundred sightseers are gazing at the time, and yet they would be unaware that a tragedy was being performed before their eyes.” The view, which for the Romantics begins at the foot of the mountain and for the Victorians involves looking down from a peak, has become a show for sightseers whose sight is enhanced by the eyeglass. “Solitude in a crowd is supposed to be the worst kind of solitude; but perhaps the most impressive is the solitude on a point visible and familiar to half a nation.” For the mountaineer, solitude has become a spectacle whose spectators remain unsuspecting.
It is this solitude that Stephen exchanges for his first marriage.
The Honeymoon
On June 19, 1867, Leslie Stephen and Minny Thackeray marry and spend their honeymoon in the Alps. In Grindelwald, Minny is left to read in the hotel, elegantly dressed in her “grey & blue French costume,” having packed only a pair of “dancing-boots.” She sends Leslie for a walk while she watches him through an eyeglass. She is startled by the size of the mountains, one of which, the Schreckhorn, Leslie was the first to climb. “We are so close to these enormous brutes,” she writes to her sister Anny, “that even I could see anyone running up & down their sides.” In Zermatt she writes to Blanche Warre-Cornish: “I am trying not to look out of the window, for if I do I shall see the Matterhorn with the moon shining on it and you can’t think how horrid it looks, like a great hooky sort of gleaming ghost. I always think it will come and poke its great hook nose into the window.” The journey to an unfamiliar landscape in the form of the upper-middle-class honeymoon is meant to realign the gaze of the single subject with that of the married couple; so observes Helena Mitchie in her study of fifty-three honeymooning couples whose wedding dates range from 1829 to 1886. If for Minny the honeymoon means a reorientation in terms of learning not to fear a landscape and therefore a body identified as masculine, for Leslie it means returning to the mountains as a final turning away from his exploits as a mountaineer. The “ideal honeymoon as a learning experience in which the husband figures as a guide” is an impossible one for a mountaineer who can only abandon, rather than share, the “sight” from the summit of an alpine peak. His solitude is now complete.
The fundamental change that marriage brings to the groom, rather than the bride, finds its expression in the more recent and most frequent use of the honeymoon in the Swiss Alps, the Bollywood film. In Raj Kapoor’s now classic Sangam (Meeting of souls) from 1964, Sundar, a member of the Indian Air Force who returns after two years missing in action, has his first posting in London, which allows for a honeymoon in Europe with his bride, Radha. In the first Indian film to be shot in foreign locations, the couple journeys from London to Rome to Venice, and then to Paris, which Mitchie identifies as “a privileged site of contestations between sexual innocence and experience.” This contestation takes a more oblique form in the contest between two consumer goods, the expensive handbag that Radha desires and the new set of bagpipes Sundar purchases. It becomes more explicit when Sundar su
ggests that the show he will attend at Place Pigalle is only for men and Radha puts on a show just for him, wearing black tights, playing the new bagpipes, with a lampshade for a hat and window curtains for a gown. Switzerland provides the obligatory scenes on the train and rolling around in the snow, but more unusual is the invitation Sundar extends to Gopal, his best friend and the man Radha is still in love with and would have chosen to marry. It is Radha’s birthday, and Gopal, who “will bring warmth to these icy mountains” from Bombay, is Sundar’s gift. The day begins with Radha listening to the church bells from her hotel balcony, but it is in a mountainous gorge, rather than in a meadow or on a peak, that Sundar shouts, “Gopal,” and he appears. Radha makes clear to Gopal that he is never to return, and by the time Sundar has set a table for three in the hotel room, he has once again disappeared. Sundar pages him in vain at the Geneva airport, still unaware of a groom’s need to realign his gaze from a homosocial friendship to his marriage.
In Yash Chopra’s 1995 Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The brave heart will take the bride), the longest-running film in Indian cinema, the story begins in London, where a son and daughter of Indian immigrants decide to travel to Europe after college. Simran is given permission to travel by her patriarchal father before she marries the stranger she has been promised to in India, and Raj’s millionaire father encourages him to take a trip, even though he has failed to graduate. The pair meets on the Eurostar shortly after leaving St. Pancras Station, Simran using her eyeglasses in an attempt to read a book in solitude while Raj uses his sunglasses to avoid solitude, playing the role of seducer. The first foreign scene is in Paris, where light opera becomes an occasion for Simran to embarrass Raj and Raj to declare his attraction to Simran’s “magic.” When they both miss the train from the mountains back to Zürich, the Alps become the scene not for a honeymoon but for an extended courtship that mimics scenes from a marriage. Raj pretends to be Simran’s husband when the Swiss police ask for her passport; Simran wakes up wearing Raj’s shirt in the chalet where they have been marooned for the night. He tries to convince her that in spite of his joking, he is still a Hindustani who would not only not take advantage of her but refuses to elope with her when it becomes clear that she would rather marry him than the stranger waiting for her in Punjab. While he claims “I hate girls” and she dismisses boys by saying “they are all the same,” this journey to the Continent becomes one not only away from England toward compulsory heterosexuality but away from the India of their parents and its arranged marriages. Raj removes the Swiss cowbell from Simran’s front door in London before he follows her to India. There, the scenes from Switzerland are replayed as a way of motivating an apparently endless courtship that finally ceases when the bride’s father allows his daughter to marry for love.
Over two hundred Bollywood films have scenes filmed in Switzerland. This is due in part to political difficulties making it impossible to film mountain scenes in the Himalayas and in part to the filmmaker Yash Chopra, who spent his honeymoon in Gstaad in the 1970s, where he promised his wife that every movie he made would include a romantic scene or song filmed in Switzerland. In April 2010 Chopra, in conjunction with his production company Yash Raj Films and the Kuoni Travel Group, with its origins in Switzerland, organized a fifteen-day tour, “The Enchanted Journey.” Groups of middle-class Indians are taken to the sites of their favorite Bollywood films, have their picture taken in the same poses as their favorite actors, watch films while they are traveling, and receive a package of five Bollywood films to take home. Chopra has been presented with a prize from the Swiss government for “helping rediscover Switzerland,” while the town of Thun had its first Bollywood film festival in May 2010. The attraction of Switzerland? “No noise, no pollution, no crowds.” “A place for romance and natural beauty.” Like Byron and Shelley on Lake Geneva, these tourists hope to make the fictional real by revisiting the scenes that produced the original intensity of their reading or viewing experience. Swiss hotel managers complain that guests cook curry dishes on camping stoves in their rooms, just as they complained when the first English expected afternoon tea, water closets, and Anglican church services. It will nevertheless not be Swiss ambivalence toward foreigners that encourages filmmakers to look elsewhere. It has become both less expensive and more novel to shoot scenes in countries such as Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.
The Alps
Napoleon crossed the [St. Bernard] pass [in 1800] on the back of a mule but apparently said nothing about the beauty of the scenery; his wife, Joséphine, on the other hand, was so taken with the place that she later invited a Swiss farmer and his wife, along with seven cows and a bull, to live with her in a mock-Alpine chalet on the outskirts of Paris.
Andrea Beattie, The Alps: A Cultural History (2006)
Of the numberless attractions offered by the Exposition, the most extensive, picturesque and animated, as well as the most interesting for novelty, is the Swiss village; and this chalet is one of the collections of houses that compose it. Here we have Switzerland in the heart of Paris, a living synthesis of the incomparable little country whose beauty and grandeur of scenery excite the wonder and admiration of thousands of intelligent tourists who are attracted thither annually from all parts of the world.
Paris Exhibition reproduced from the official photographs (1900)
I change planes in Amsterdam, between the midwestern university town where I live and my initial destination, a minor European city.
I choose a hotel in Zürich on the street where my mother grew up, in a building that reminds me of my grandmother’s house: the curved staircase, the polished banisters, the creaks in the wooden floorboards. My uncle dies, he has disinherited me, and my brother inherits the house that has been in the family for over a hundred years. I am forced to abandon the one room I have returned to all of my life. Here, closer to the lake, I am reminded of the grandmother with whom I fed bread to the ducks and a mother with whom I went swimming while she kept her head above water in order to enjoy the view.
I recover from jetlag, return to the main train station, and continue my journey into the Alps. The trip to Davos Platz requires changing trains in Landquart, something I have done numerous times. From here the tracks narrow, the train ascends inside spiral tunnels, and I remain seated until the final stop, one stop farther than that of Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain when he arrives in Davos Dorf in the early 1900s. I breathe in the thin alpine air, the cure of many ills, although not his, and most likely not my own.
After escaping from Russia to Switzerland, emigrating from Switzerland to America, migrating from the East Coast to the West, my father chooses this “city in the mountains” as his permanent residence. He pauses briefly between Palo Alto and St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg and Rhodos, Rhodos and Majorca, his bags arriving before he does, waiting at the train station ready to be repacked. Although I have entered a vacationland, why am I not enjoying myself?
My father pulls out an old photo album and reminisces about the early years of his first marriage, the one to my mother. How after the war there were so few people traveling and resources were so scarce that one accepted without hesitation the invitation of a stranger. The itinerary in the album, recorded in my mother’s handwriting, documents a series of international conferences attended by my father, accompanied by a wife eager to resume traveling, even if adverse to playing the role of an accessory. I am his oldest child, although I am neither a son nor a daddy’s girl. Two subsequent marriages bring two additional daughters. The first my father refuses to adopt, even though her mother is dying of cancer; the second he insists on adopting, in spite of her mother needing someone else’s kidney, filling the daughter’s closet with countless pairs of shoes.
My journey continues to an even more remote valley in Graubünden, a place no one in my family has ever visited. In the 1850s, children between six and sixteen left for Swabia to earn money for food and clothing, setting out on foot across the Alps in March and returning in November
. They suffered, excessively homesick and deprived of shoes, but if fortunate enough to land a benevolent employer, they would have been places, they would have seen things, beyond those confined to a barely accessible valley.
The author (right), with mother and brother, Graubünden, 1950s (photo taken by author’s father)
This time my father decides to accompany me.
He invites himself to Vals.
I insist on taking the train. I try to explain that I live in a part of the country that invented the automobile, on which I, like others, am utterly dependent. Vacation allows independence from a private means of transportation. He will make me feel like a prisoner in a vehicle that will take me to friends I have never met, who possess wealth I fail to admire and embody success I refuse to esteem—“trophy friends,” one of my friends calls them. The meal will be opulent, the wine abundant, the view impressive, but my feeling will be one of redundancy.
I change trains in Bad Reichenau and then disembark in Ilanz, where I board the postal bus that travels up the valley with place names I can barely pronounce, in the one national language I have never learned to speak. It will blow its horn around tight curves to announce itself to oncoming traffic. It will navigate the steep, narrow road with trucks carrying bottles of mineral water, Valserwasser, now owned by the Coca-Cola Company. It will deposit me at a hotel where as soon as I arrive I am invited to enter the mineral baths, owned by the local community, designed by a Swiss architect. Peter Zumthor is known as an architect’s architect, with a small oeuvre; his stark granite pools and views framed by striated granite openings bring architecture students and professors from as far away as Oregon. I recognize the “severe, minimalist perfection” that Matt Tyrnauer has identified as an aesthetic I call my own, providing an oasis in austerity from the sadness that comes with irreconcilability.
Coming Out Swiss Page 7