RLS: I didn’t want to become a permanent invalid, a “Symonds person.” I was a “workhorse supporting a household of idling adults” (Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson).
JAS: I called it “the wolf,” “that undefined craving coloured with a vague and poignant hankering after males” (The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds), which I thought would be cured by marriage.
RLS: My only friend at the Hotel Belvedere was the head waiter, Christian, who, as described by Lloyd, “like many Swiss of mediocre position, was an extremely intellectual man” (Osbourne, An Intimate Portrait of R.L.S.). Together we would pace the empty dining room in interminable discussion while the tables were being spread for the next meal.
JAS: My first winter. I spent three weeks sitting all day on the gravel terrace in front of the Hotel Belvedere. Then I was allowed to go into the wood. “My manservant took me up in a little carriage, hung a hammock between two pine trees, and placed me in the hammock, and when the sun came near to setting fetched me again in the carriage” (The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds). Catherine read to me for two hours every afternoon. Dr. Jenner advised interrupting the journey to Egypt with a sojourn in the High Alps. My sister Charlotte and her husband, T. H. Green, suggested joining them in Davos. It is not a beautiful valley, like Mürren, which has no invalids, but the air is still and dry and cold. I delivered a lecture on Michelangelo for the Literary Society in the dining room of the Hotel Angleterre.
RLS: The south-sea climate was considered bad for the tubercular, but once I arrived there, I throve. I became the “South Sea Don Quixote,” the “Polynesian Walter Scott,” even Tusi Tala, the “teller of tales.” I wanted to be buried on Mount Vaea. It took forty Samoans, including several chiefs, to cut a path through the jungle up the mountainside.
JAS: “L’amour de l’impossible est la maladie de l’âme. It cannot be doubted that the congenital aberration of the passions which I have described has been the poison of my life” (The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds).
RLS: There was concern that your erotic preoccupations were destroying your intellectual gifts. Henry Sidgwick persuaded you to lock all of your poetry in a black tin box on the bank of the Avon, where he dramatically threw the key into the water.
JAS: I was not a poet, but I had an irresistible urge to write poetry. Writing poetry was like a holiday from the profession of literature, the via dolorosa. “Had I wanted to live a poem, I should have chosen Venice” (The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds).
RLS: What they call my English style is really my alertness to an unknown native tongue, namely Scots. I admit my native tongue is dying in a foreign tongue that is my first language. Some things I can only express in Scots. Most of my Scottish books I wrote under tropical trees.
JAS: “The quest of ideal beauty, incarnated in breathing male beings, or eternalized in enduring works of art, was leading me to a precipice, from which no exit seemed possible except in suicide or what I then considered sin” (The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds).
LS: “I confess … that I am a fanatic. I believe that the ascent of mountains forms an essential chapter in the complete duty of man, and that it is wrong to leave any district without setting foot on its highest peak” (Stephen, The Playground of Europe).
RLS: I was attracted to the underworld, where I had relations with many fallen women. I remained oblivious to how men fell in love with me. “Hauf a laddie, hauf a lassie, hauf a yellow yite!” (Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson) is what the boys called after me on the streets of Edinburgh. Either that or I was seen as the reincarnation of Shelley. When I did come out, to the deep chagrin of my parents, it was as an atheist.
JAS: You had one incurable malady, although it was difficult to name, while I had two: disease of the lungs and perversion of the sexual instincts. The son of an eighth-generation physician in Bristol, one of Shelley’s earliest admirers. Was work an opiate for l’amour de l’impossible?
RLS: “I have a more subtle opium in my mind than any apothecary’s drug” (Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson), namely my overworked imagination.
JAS: “Nevertheless, the mountains take a lasting hold upon their foster-children, and foreigners who have lived among them long acquire something of the Nostalgia, or Heimweh, which the natives feel for Switzerland” (Symonds and Symonds, Our Life in the Swiss Highlands). Of course I never would have agreed to have Johannes, a handsome peasant, marry Madge, which is why we sent her to England, to live with the Leslie Stephens, ostensibly to study painting. We also believed it was wrong to marry an invalid, because tuberculosis was thought to be inherited, but Katherine, our youngest, known in town as the Symonds Büebli, did so anyway.
LS: Virginia worshipped Madge, to whom she first opened up about her literary ambitions. Then she thought Madge wasted her talents by marrying the future master of Rugby, and she became Sally Seton in Mrs. Dalloway.
JAS: One needs a mental occupation.
RLS: My occupation: “I sling ink” (Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson).
JAS: Christian Buol. Financial gifts cemented our friendship. When he drove the sledge, he seemed like a Greek charioteer. When we traveled to Italy, where he had never been, we shared the same bed, so I could view the “naked splendor of his perfect body.” When I visited the cembra-paneled house of the Buol family, it was like a scene out of a Whitman poem, the Swiss peasantry as democratic ideal, “their noble, because absolutely natural, breeding” (The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds). You and I never agreed about Whitman, I the hot lover and you the cool admirer, whether his poetry was art, whether comradeship included sex.
RLS: The intoxication of tobogganing alone and at night. The speed, the “spinning round a corner, and the whole glittering valley and all the lights in all the great hotels lie for a moment at your feet” (Stevenson, Essays of Travel).
JAS: The intoxication of the day-long sledge drive with my favorite postillion, “the only noise—this short, sharp shriek of the frozen snow; that and the driver’s whip, and the jingling bells of the harness.” We called these “Little Changes,” something that broke the monotony of life in an alpine valley (Symonds and Symonds, Our Life in the Swiss Highlands).
RLS: I courted adventure and escaped with my life.
LS: I admired your boyishness and mistook it as a sign of genius. I fault myself for the fact that our friendship never ripened.
JAS: I overtaxed my strength but knew when to lie still.
LS: When I came to visit shortly before your death, that is what made me think we could never be friends. “Poor man—he seems always to have to patch himself up” (Selected Letters of Leslie Stephen, vol. 2).
JAS: I am buried near Shelley in Rome. The day after my death, Sophie Girard, my beloved Swiss governess, who, like Rosa Engel, lived near Thun, also dies. The last letter I write to you I never send: “A curious sense of being drawn to you is on me to-night” (Lockett, Robert Louis Stevenson at Davos). I become wistful of your life in the South Seas. My little “Study of Walt Whitman,” which I send to you, appears on the day of his death.
RLS: “He is a far better and more interesting thing than any of his books” (Lockett, Robert Louis Stevenson at Davos).
JAS: “I asked a friend of mine—a staglike youth from Graubünden, tall and sinewy, like young Achilles on a fresco at Pompeii—how all the gymnasts in this country came to be so brotherly. ‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘that is because we come into physical contact with one another. You only learn to love men whose bodies you have touched and handled’” (Symonds and Symonds, Our Life in the Swiss Highlands).
It is getting late. I will invite some of the peasants to come in and sing for us. Then we will offer them supper.
Scene II
Characters
JCS: Janet Catherine Symonds, wife of JAS.
MS: Margaret Symonds (Mrs. W. W. Vaughan), third daughter of JAS and JCS; author of Out of the Past (1925), a memoir.
KS: Katherine Symonds (Dame Katherine Furst), fourth daughter o
f JAS and JCS; author of Hearts and Pomegranates: The Story of Forty-five Years, 1875–1920 (1940), a memoir.
FS: Fanny Stevenson, wife of RLS.
MM: Mrs. Elizabeth McDonald MacMorland, author of Davos-Platz; A New Alpine Resort for Sick and Sound in Summer and Winter By One Who Knows It Well (1878).
BH: Beatrice Harraden, author of Ships that Pass in the Night (1893), a novel.
Place
The sitting room of Janet Catherine Symonds at Am Hof. The walls are paneled in cembra wood up to six feet, at which point a shelf runs around the room under three feet of Morris-blue fruit paper. There is an old carved Swiss cupboard, smelling of hay, a dark-green stove with figures in relief and on the walls photographs of people such as Lady Mount Temple and Julia Stephen, as well as a signed photograph of Queen Victoria, JCS having been born the year she ascended to the throne. There are paintings of apple blossoms and anemones by her sister, Marianne North, nicknamed “Pop.” In addition there are several of her own landscapes, including a water color of hyacinths, narcissus, and crocuses in full flower with the window open, a view of the Davos Valley deep in snow with the Tinzenhorn in the distance. There is a Persian carpet on the floor, and a big, soft divan runs around two sides of the room. The room is tidy, and JCS hopes to keep it that way.
Masses of plants are hibernating on every windowsill. Ivy in pots are trained around the window frames and across the ceiling. Harts-tongue ferns from England are growing in earthenware bowls. An old orchid in a grey Delft jam pot has been brought from Clifton Hill House in Bristol. The porter at the Kurhaus has given JAS two wooden boxes of carnations, over which she reigns like a queen. She has hauled them in because of a sudden snowstorm, places them on two inverted blue stone jars in front of the window, and feeds them with liquid manure procured from a peasant friend.
A Kentucky cardinal flies free in the room, brought across Europe after the death of Pop. When evening falls, it perches on the frame of Queen Victoria’s portrait and roosts there.
JCS sits at her table painting a giant saxifrages (Saxifrago pyramidalis), which she has placed in a jug of water with its stalk supported by a strong paper collar. She has been sitting here nearly a week, painting, occasionally interrupted by guests.
Time
The late 1890s.
JCS: Fanny. You’re back. I hear you have the only row of peas in the Pacific.
FS: I asked my devoted servant to plant some vanilla seedlings, which he put in upside down. My daughter Belle and I replanted them root-downward, only to find that Lafaele redid his work to surprise me.
JCS: I’ve been carrying rocks again, which makes my fingers so rough that working with embroidery silks becomes unmanageable. In the middle of a hayfield, where the scent of flowers mingles with that of Alpine herbs, sheltered by the wooden Wandelbahn and watered by a tiny stream, the garden is a never-failing source of happiness and interest to a quiet person like myself.
MS: “People sought my mother out just because she hid herself away from them” (M. Symonds, Out of the Past).
KS: She called herself the “Missing Link,” sandwiched between a distinguished husband and an accomplished sister. Pop, a well-known painter of flowers, whose paintings are on exhibit at Kew Gardens, was one of the first women to travel around the world alone.
JCS: JAS becomes annoyed when I all I do is talk about flowers. My passion is not for old art but for open air.
FS: I was both feminine and “one of the boys.” I began to write fiction and became increasingly confident in my writing. I contributed first ideas, then entire chapters. Some say my literary skills were on par with his.
JCS: Once we abandoned Clifton House by burning the letters of five generations of Nonconformists and burying the busts of emperors gathered on grand tours, I was against building a house at Davos. I thought tent life would be the most prudent. When our Janet, my eldest and most perfect child, died of consumption, I embroidered a Horsefieldii daffodil on a white satin pillow for her coffin.
FS: When Hervey was born, Sam was living openly with a mistress in San Francisco. When he arrived in Paris, Hervey was almost dead. Hervey’s death marked the end of our marriage. From then on, every illness of Lloyd’s, and then Louis’s, became a crisis.
JCS: I envied Pop her freedom from responsibilities on the eve of her setting sail for Japan.
FS: I suffered from what I called “brain fevers” or brain congestion, what Louis later called the “sulks.” Much later he described me as “a violent friend, a brimstone enemy,” with “insane black eyes, boy’s hands, tiny bare feet, a cigarette, wild blue dress usually spotted with garden mold” (Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson). By the end, he was convinced I was deranged.
JCS: I suffered from postpartum depressions, which became more severe with every birth. We agreed not to have more children, to lie in separate beds, to live in separate rooms.
FS: I was never well in Davos: sore throat, stomach disorder, heart trouble. When I went to Bern, they thought I might have a gall bladder infection; I thought it might be malaria. Without Mrs. MacMorland, it would have been intolerable.
JCS: She tells the story of the first two patients in Davos, a German medical man with a bad lung and his young consumptive friend, with so effeminate an exterior that he was thought to be a Polish princess in disguise. It turned out he was a publisher and bookseller. The pair, whose accommodations consisted of an unheated room and barely enough food, improvised by laying on hay-sleighs in the open air.
MM: I arrived in Davos with my husband, the Reverend John Peter MacMorland, in 1871, for the benefit of my health. We were the first English, or rather Scotch, family to spend a winter here. We stayed at the original Kurhaus, which burned down in 1872, then at the Flüela Post Hotel, then at the Hotel Schweizerhof. There we met a German visitor named J. C. Coester, who wanted to build a hotel for English visitors. Mrs. Bradshaw-Smith, my mother, laid the foundation stone for the Hotel Belvedere. We were its first guests when it opened in 1875, and we returned for thirteen years. In 1877 I published a pamphlet, anonymously, based on my exploration of the geology, flora, fauna, people, and history of Davos. It didn’t seem sufficiently comprehensive, so I wrote a complete guide book for the English public. I felt obligated to make the healing influences of the valley more widely known.
JCS: Your paintings show the dreariness, untidiness, and emptiness of the old Davos, without a single tree.
FS: When we arrived at the Belvedere, the Reverend, Elizabeth MacDonald MacMorland, their little daughter Bessie, and Mrs. Bradshaw were also staying there. Like Louis, Mrs. MacMorland was born in Edinburgh. Louis used to spend hours in Mrs. Bradshaw’s sitting room, listening to her stories of Scottish life. She nicknamed him “the Sprite.”
MM: After you left the second time, you wrote a letter saying you had a dream about me.
FS: “I dreamed that you said that you had grown to dislike me so intensely that you could not stay in the same hotel with me” (Lockett, Robert Louis Stevenson at Davos). I said I would be the one to move, which you agreed would be the best.
MM: I regularly ran up and down the steep path that led from the Hotel to the Chalet am Stein, seeking out your company.
FS: I asked you to send several photographic views of Davos, which you did, but I never acknowledged them or repaid you. I asked Louis to write for me, but he never did. We met some Dutch people who had just come from Davos, but they couldn’t tell me anything about you. Finally I wrote and hoped that we were still friends.
JCS: Beatrice Harraden! What a surprise!
BH: I arrived in October 1890 and left the following spring. I was twenty-six at the time I came with my sister Gertrude. We stayed at the Villa Germania, a dépendence of the Kurhaus.
KS: I remember you living in the Kurhaus with your red-haired sister and the shy, silent man who became the hero of your book.
JCS: Your first novel became a bestseller translated into nine languages and has been chosen as an English reading book i
n foreign schools and colleges. It sold five hundred thousand copies in America, and in 1921, with your adaptation, it was made into a film.
BH: I published Ships that Pass in the Night in 1893. I renamed Davos “Petershof.” I made the heroine, Bernadine, a working woman and suffragette, like myself. She works in her uncle’s secondhand bookshop in London, teaches, writes for newspapers, attends socialist meetings. At twenty-six, she falls ill with “an overstrained nervous system,” and travels alone to Petershof. There she meets another loner, a tuberculosis patient known as the “Disagreeable Man,” with whom she shares her ambition to write a book. He has been there seven years, is staying alive only for the sake of his mother, and lends Bernadine his camera. His response to her ambitions to become an author: “There are too many books as it is; and not enough people to dust them” (Harraden, Ships that Pass in the Night).
MS: I remember him saying: “My dear young woman, we are not living in a poetry book bound with gild edges. We are living in a paper-backed volume of prose” (Harraden, Ships that Pass in the Night).
BH: She recovers, returns to London to dust books, and he writes a letter he never sends, revealing the depth of his feeling. His mother dies, which leaves him free either to die or to return to the mountains. He finds Bernadine in the bookshop where she has begun to write her own book. Although she has revealed the depth of her feelings to her uncle, she convinces her suitor to choose life by returning to the mountains. By evening she has been run over by a wagon.
Coming Out Swiss Page 9