He calls to say he will arrive a day late.
He arrives early and wonders why I am not waiting for him. He treats himself to a leisurely lunch that includes a bottle of wine. He reprimands me for not being there when he shows up. He is raising his voice. I imagine he is raising his hand, like Lily Biscoe facing Mr. Banks at her canvas in To the Lighthouse. His lunch, which cannot yet be put on his tab, ends up on my bill. He, who checks in as the professor, will be confused with his daughter, also a professor, although she rarely identifies herself as such.
I take his hand and guide his frail body across the granite floor. I accompany him from pool to pool. The one that amplifies sound and the one with scented petals. The not so small and very hot one in red, the very small and very cold one in blue. The one that moves from indoors to outdoors and frames the hay huts dotting the hillside across the valley. The water that turns the grey granite to saffron, that tastes like sulfur from cups dangling on metal chains.
The entrance, he says, reminds him of a pissoir in Paris.
We agree on a time for dinner, when wine will supplant most of the interest in food, and interest in the wait staff will surpass much of the interest in his daughter. He will try to persuade me of things that make me think he is dining with someone else. This time it seems to be how to reconcile science and religion. They have proven that religion is biological by telling children a story about a crocodile and a mouse. The crocodile eats the mouse. Does the mouse still miss its mommy? Yes. This proves the mouse has an afterlife. This proves children have religious feeling, and because it is expressed by children, it must be innate.
I have spent my life in literature, interpreting fictions and insisting that their meanings remain undecidable. Religion has been of interest as another kind of fiction. Science, like religion, imagines that what it knows can be elevated to the status of truth. I begin to speak; I fail to articulate my views; I end up in tears.
I will excuse myself, and when I return we pretend nothing has happened.
Is it true that he has sold the apartment in Basel that was once my grandmother’s for one in St. Petersburg, where she once lived? Will he own it with the second in command of the Russian Orthodox Church, and his so-called sister, who might never have been related and most likely was more than a companion? The metropolite has made a vow of celibacy, although apparently not one of poverty. He is retrieving my father from the diaspora and returning him to Mother Russia. Does it matter that her son, his adopted “brother,” does not believe in God? It turns out he had an apartment not in St. Petersburg but in Spain, an apartment registered not in his own name but in that of a fictitious corporation. I am told that he was in love with the “sister” and that she was in love with Spain.
No, I have no interest in visiting St. Petersburg.
I already uncomfortably inhabit the position of the American whose relatives live in Switzerland, or is it that of the Swiss who lives in America?
He reminds me that I am one-quarter Russian, but the city once known as Leningrad is not one I need to know.
Visiting a place that will leave me illiterate will not cure the homesickness of the daughter for whom the Alps, rather than their lack, instills a sense of homelessness.
A woman is playing piano in the hotel bar. As the evening progresses, she leaves her classical repertoire and turns to jazz. She begins to sing, in a sultry voice. She is attractive in an unconventional way. Her back is very straight as she leafs through her notebook, looking for the next song. She tells me, in a voice that sounds American, that they want her not just to play but to sing more. I am the only one listening.
Epilogue
In 1912 Paramount Pictures makes its official logo the Finsteraarhorn, at 4,272 meters the highest peak in the Bernese Oberland. Like the Matterhorn, it stands alone with a shape like a pyramid. At the turn of the century, it is more famous than the Matterhorn, after Mark Twain writes about it in A Tramp Abroad (1880) and Gertrude Bell, the first woman to attempt the northeast wall in 1902, nearly loses her life. Since the early 1990s the mountain has been protected as a trademark.
After ten referenda, the voters of Graubünden finally allow automobiles on their streets. Until then, drivers must turn off their motors and hitch their cars to a horse. In 1925 they are permitted to drive only on the main roads. One young driver, so impressed by the purity of the air at the top of the Julierpass, flattens his tires and refills them with alpine air to take back with him to Berlin.
Glaciers cover 3 percent of Switzerland’s land mass. In the past two decades, they have lost 15 percent of their surface. By the end of the century, small and middle-sized glaciers will have completely disappeared.
Davos, or “How the English Invented the Alps”
* * *
Davos is likewise a rare “find” for young men looking out for a spot in which to read during the “Long” [a vacation that lasts at least six weeks]. It is not “slow” enough to be voted tiresome, nor so “fast” as to induce the conscientious student to leave the inevitable books in the unopened portmanteau. The English colony which, summer and winter seems to have pitched its headquarters in the Hôtel Belvedere, always finds something to do. Excursions are constantly planned. Gay parties of picnickers may often be descried having themselves “carted” up the lateral valleys. Some again test their walking powers on the various peaks and summits; while yet others go in for a favourite hobby with select and sympathising friends.
[Mrs. Elizabeth MacMorland], Davos-Platz: A New Alpine Resort
for Sick and Sound in Summer and Winter
by One Who Knows It Well (1878)
The theory of a cure for phthisis by means of dry, pure, rarified mountain air is so essentially consistent with common sense that we wonder it was not put into practice long ago. But consumption has always been too timorously, too leniently, too indulgently dealt with. Parents and doctors unite to humour and soothe the patient at home, and, when the last stage was drawing nigh, sent him to end his sadly useless life, fittingly enough, in some romantic southern region. Davos demands qualities the very opposite of the resigned sentimentalism in which too frequently the phthisical youth or maiden was encouraged. Here is no place for weak and despairing resignation; here you are not pusillanimously helped to die, but are required to enter into a hard struggle for life.
Davos, with 20 illustrations by J. Webber, and a Map (ca. 1880)
January in London, with few exceptions, had been a month of raw and foggy days—days that were bitter cold, with the coldness of a damp cloth, and stuffy with the airlessness of that which a damp cloth covers. Far otherwise was it at Davos, where morning after morning, after nights of still, intense cold, the sun rose over the snow-covered hills, and flamed like a golden giant, rejoicing in his strength, through the arc of crystalline blue.
E. F. Benson, The Relentless City (1903)
What a contrast! Here at Platz, a bit of a city in its way, with enormous hotels, elegant villas, large shops, all flooded at eventide in a brilliant sea of illumination, the streets and pavements alive with a gay crowd, representing every language, every range of education, every faith, gathered here from off the face of the whole earth, the strangest town in all Europe, at an elevation of more than 5000 feet,—and there, close by, the old folk, simple and content, the world forgetting, by the world forgot, living in their lonely farm-houses, away there in the folds of the Sertig, in the Spina, on the Hitzenboden, where never a stranger is known to stray.
Davos as Health-Resort: A Handbook (1906)
Villa auf’m Egg, Rütistrasse 17 (today Rosenhügelweg 6), ca. 1890, also known as “Boulevard des Anglais” (Dokumentationsbibliothek Davos)
Scene I
Characters
JAS: John Addington Symonds (1840–93) author of the seven-volume The Renaissance in Italy (1875–86) and coauthor, with his daughter Margaret, of Our Life in the Swiss Highlands (1892). He fails to write The History of Graubünden. He first arrives in Davos in 1877 and lives in
Am Hof from 1881 to 1893.
RLS: Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), author of Treasure Island (1883), which he completes in Davos, and four essays on the Alps collected in Essays of Travel (1905). He fails to write History of the [Scottish] Highlands. He resides in Davos for two winters, 1880–81 and 1881–82.
LS: Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), author of The Playground of Europe (1871) and editor of the Alpine Journal (1868–72). He visits Symonds in Davos in 1893.
Place
Am Hof, the house John Addington Symonds built in Davos in 1882, the first house in a meadow of the same name, a queer composite of Swiss architectural style and English amenities. The water supply comes from a spring above the house, pouring through pipes that produce a “continuous and sonorous sound of rushing waters” (M. Symonds, Out of the Past), at times disturbing the sleep of unaccustomed guests. A Wandelbahn, or “ambulatory,” a covered veranda built at right angles to the house, provides a place to walk under cover on wet or snowy days, as well as a place to sit for breakfast or tea. The attic is filled with the scent of apples, a Union Jack, and pith helmets left over from the aborted trip to Egypt. The basement has a kitchen supervised by M. Bérard, a superb cook who prefers cooking for men; the two wine cellars are filled with casks of wine from the Valtelline valley.
JAS occupies a bedroom and two studies paneled in cembra or Arven wood. The largest knots have been reserved for these rooms, which are permeated with the sweet smell of wood not varnished, or oiled, or waxed. The inner of the two studies is known as the carpenter’s shop, furnished with a green serpentine stove, old peasant furniture, a Persian rug, and a large table with a slate top. There are photographs of people, places, and pictures. Books line the walls, except for an old medicine chest with two skeletons of fine inlaid wood on its door, and a shelf with a collection of pipes. Piles of miscellaneous papers, known as precipices, are stacked on the table, which also contains “fancy articles” such as Venetian beads, stuffed owls, Japanese matchboxes, and select stationary. It is a tidy room, excessively tidy.
JAS changes his clothes, because he has so many, several times during the scene.
Ciò, the Venetian boat dog, enters and exits at will.
Sequestered in his study, JAS lives up to ten hours of each day in Italy and Greece.
Time
The early 1880s.
JAS: The life can be exceedingly monotonous. I think we can agree on that.
RLS: Smoking eases it, as can talk. “Cigarettes without intermission except when coughing or kissing” is how I describe my nicotine habit (Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson). I’ve been limited to three pipes a day, one after each meal.
JAS: I’ve just come in from smoking a pipe with the grooms. It’s not too late for a glass of Valtelline.
LS: When Stevenson came for dinner with Edmund Gosse in London, Anny, my sister-in-law, did all the talking. The summer before I married Minny, the two sisters visited the Alps for the first time and I failed to propose, in spite of a romantic picnic by the Riffelhorn.
JAS: In my household, I encourage vigorous discussion rather than sitting in silence. When invited to the house of a lady or gentleman, my daughters are told: “You are not invited merely to enjoy yourself and to think about yourself and to stare and take notes about your fellow-guests in silence. You are there to contribute to the general pleasantness” (M. Symonds, Out of the Past).
RLS: “In short, the first duty of a man is to speak; that is his chief business in this world; and talk, which is the harmonious speech of two or more, is by far that most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money; it is all profit; it completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health” (Stevenson, Memories and Portraits).
LS: I was horrified when RLS, a twenty-nine-year-old groom, married a forty-year-old widow. JAS and I have quite different relations to alpine natives: I argued against guideless climbing; I consider married homosexuals to be blackguards.
JAS: I gesticulate and leap up in mid-sentence to take down a volume.
RLS: Talk is impromptu, collaborative, to be continued, like the many books I have never finished. I read aloud the stories I am writing and ask my stepson, Lloyd, to take notes and discuss them with me. Later they will perceive our collaboration as a form of pederastic seduction.
JAS: We both had moderate talents, but what genius we had for work! By producing no discernible masterpiece, we made it difficult for posterity.
RLS: I include you in my “Talk and Talkers.” I name you “Opelstein.” “He does not always, perhaps not often, frankly surrender himself in conversation. He brings into the talk other thoughts than those which he expresses; you are conscious that he keeps an eye on something else, that he does not shake off the world, nor quite forget himself” (Stevenson, Memories and Portraits).
JAS: I encourage reserve, but no taboos.
RLS: Our second winter in Davos. Fanny, Lloyd, and I were living in the Chalet am Stein, just above the Hotel Buol, where you occupied a suite of rooms. You and Catherine came to visit almost daily. I was too ill to write; “dry rot,” Fanny called it. Fanny became ill: the doctors thought she was too stout. Even Woggs the dog fell ill.
JAS: Your first winter. I sought you out at the Hotel Belvedere the day after you arrived. You appeared with a letter of introduction from Edmund Gosse, an early admirer of Whitman. I wasn’t sure how to spell your name. All I knew was that you were a friend of Leslie Stephen, who as the editor of the Cornhill nursed both of us to fame. I consented to writing a letter of reference for the Professorship in History and Constitutional Law at Edinburgh University. Needless to say, it was unsuccessful, since you held none of the necessary qualifications.
RLS: My favorite chalet, the happiest of all our homes, was La Solitude, in Hyères-les-Palmiers, a miniature Swiss chalet constructed for the Paris Exposition of 1878, relocated to southern France. There I developed ophthalmia and sat in the dark wearing bandages or goggles. Fanny was afraid I was going blind.
JAS: I put in my name and then withdrew it for the professorship in poetry at Oxford, not because of my “Arcadian tastes” but because of my agnosticism. Once I became consumptive, I could hardly use my eyes, inflamed under blue spectacles and green eyeshades. I was forced to hire readers.
RLS: Bertie Sitwell dies of consumption in the Hotel Belvedere, leaving his toy theater to Lloyd, my stepson. His mother, Mrs. Francis Sitwell, is the initial “bereaved matron with an absentee husband” I fall in love with, seven years earlier. “Madonna” I call her, the endlessly eager and sympathetic listener with a reputation for “nurturing a string of needy young men” (Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson). I write a poem in memory of Bertie, the only means I have for assuaging his mother’s grief: “I begin to hope I may, if not outlive this wolverine upon my shoulders, at least carry him bravely like Symonds and Alexander Pope” (Lockett, Robert Louis Stevenson at Davos).
JAS: Our health was our greatest trial; our weakness, needing the attendance of women.
RLS: I paint scenery for the theater and help Lloyd give performances, sliding the actors in and out on their tin stands, making sounds for galloping horses and screams for damsels in distress. I remember buying dozens of printed cutouts for Skelt’s Juvenile Drama on Antigua Street in Edinburgh, the playbooks imprinting a lifelong sense of adventure and romance. My father, the last in a line of engineers who built lighthouses on the Scottish coast, thought that leisure was the proper place for letters.
JAS: Madge, our second youngest, joins Lloyd in your attic, where you and he play elaborate war games with six hundred miniature lead soldiers on the floor made into a map, “with mountains, towns, rivers, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ roads, bridges, morasses, etc.” (Osbourne, An Intimate Portrait of R.L.S.). You need playmates and prefer them not to be girls. After you leave, the cardboard theater remains in our attic for years. Margaret, or Madge, as we renamed her, after my favorite mare, is forced to imagine t
he Switzerland she has never seen every time Catherine and I return from one of our interminable journeys abroad. What she sees is “a sort of décor de theatre place in my imagination, made up of high mountains cut out of cardboard which rose at regular intervals like teeth, and with a perpetual and most vivid ‘afterglow’ upon their snows; and edelweiss and gentians here and there upon the foreground” (M. Symonds, Out of the Past).
RLS: I kept my costume on as long as possible after any performance, as one young woman observed, as if “he were acting to himself being an actor” (Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson).
JAS: I remember playing with tin soldiers the day my sister died of consumption.
RLS: I changed my name from Lewis to Louis and adopted the black velvet smoking jacket of French bohemianism. They called me “Velvet Coat.” I met Fanny in France, in Grez-sur-Loing. She was still Mrs. Samuel Osborne, originally Fanny Vandegrift from the backwoods of Indiana. She was one of fifty-seven women in a silver-mining camp in Nevada. She owned a pocket derringer pistol and smoked roll-ups. When I followed her to Monterey, I stayed in the French Hotel and befriended its owner, Simoneau. She finally divorced Sam and we spent our honeymoon in Silverado.
JAS: My affection for Rosa Engel taught me to love the Alps. I met her in Mürren when she was fifteen, when she reminded me of Goethe’s Margaret. We spoke French, and I presented her with a love poem and a ring. She rejected my proposal, never married, and after her hair turned white appeared in Davos for one last visit. That same year, I met Catherine North, also in Mürren, who together with her sister was among the first women to discard the crinoline for traveling. I followed her to Pontresina, where she accepted my proposal. She reminded me of Dante’s Beatrice. We exchanged rings on Piz Languard. We picked a blue Eritrychium and placed it inside a golden locket I wore on my watch chain until the day I was robbed in the Public Gardens in Naples. We honeymooned not in the Alps, not even in Italy, but in Brighton.
Coming Out Swiss Page 8