The Gilded Chalet
Page 6
Once the Shelley party was safely on its way to England and Polidori given his marching orders for his indiscretions, Byron accompanied his old Cambridge chums, Hobhouse and Scrope Davies, on a trip to Chamonix. Davies forms a lucrative pendant to the events of that stormy summer of 1816. An inveterate gambler, he spent some £17,000 in the following year and in 1820 fled to Paris to escape his creditors. Before leaving he deposited a suitcase of papers in a Pall Mall bank vault. He died a wastrel in Paris in 1852. The suitcase remained undiscovered until 1976. Among its papers was a manuscript copy of Byron’s Childe Harold Canto III (the triple concept album), letters from Byron (a superb letter writer), as well as manuscripts of Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, ‘Mont Blanc’ and two previously unknown Shelley sonnets. The poems had been entrusted to Davies on the diligence from Geneva to London. The find was valued at half a million pounds. Had he lived he would have been solvent.
Three children were on board the boat to Portsmouth that September: eight-month-old William, Claire’s unborn child by Byron and the manuscript of Byron’s Childe Harold. William Shelley died at the age of four in Rome, and is buried there in the Protestant Cemetery, under the cypress shade by the Pyramid of Cestius. Allegra, Byron’s illegitimate daughter by Claire, was born in Bath, a safe distance from the chattering classes of the capital. Byron removed the four-year-old Allegra from her mother to a convent near Ravenna, where the child died of typhus the following year.
In September 1816, Fanny Godwin, Mary’s stepsister and the original love child of Mary Wollstonecraft and her American paramour, committed suicide in Swansea by overdosing on opium. She had recently discovered her illegitimacy. Nobody claimed the body, the suicide was hushed up, and she was buried anonymously in a pauper’s grave. Shelley’s first wife Harriet was found drowned in the Serpentine on 10 December 1816. She was ‘far advanced in pregnancy’. Her death allowed Shelley to marry Mary Godwin and to make an honest woman of her too. Polidori, the progenitor of a thousand vampire stories, movies, television series, Halloween masks and T-shirts, committed suicide in 1821 by swallowing prussic acid.
In October the Byron circus crossed the Alps into Italy. Byron himself had dropped a few pounds and wrote about the wonder of that Swiss summer:
It is the hush of night, and all between
Thy margin and the mountains, dusk, yet clear,
Mellowed and mingling, yet distinctly seen.
Save darkened Jura, whose capped heights appear
Precipitously steep; and drawing near,
There breathes a living fragrance from the shore,
Of flowers yet fresh with childhood; on the ear
Drops the light drip of the suspended oar,
Or chirps the grasshopper one good-night carol more.27
It was illness rather than poetry that brought the next band of Englishmen to Switzerland, as tuberculosis moved through the smog of nineteenth-century industrial cities. Those who could afford it could breathe the rarefied air of the Swiss Alps. The tiny mountain village of Davos was about to undergo an invasion that would transform it forever into a synonym for wealth, health and the good life.
3
THE BLUE HENRYS
Symonds, Stevenson, Conan Doyle and Mann on the magic mountain
The Waldsanatorium in Davos, inspiration for Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain
death by gradual dry-rot, each in his indifferent inn…
Robert Louis Stevenson
Davos owes its origin as a spa town to the district physician Dr Spengler. He noticed that returning emigrants with pulmonary complaints quickly recovered in the mountain air. In the Deutsche Klinik for 1862 he published his findings. Soon patients came from all over Europe, as tuberculosis racked and coughed its way through nineteenth-century lungs. Treatments included cold morning showers, fresh milk, long spells of lying on deckchairs, breathing clean mountain air and spitting into their Blue Henrys, or Blauer Heinrich, a cobalt blue glass sputum bottle.1
English writer and traveller John Addington Symonds arrived in 1867 and spent his winters in Davos until his death in Rome in 1893. Symonds was an art historian and man of letters with a classical bent. He built a splendid chalet, Am Hof, on a meadow of the same name in Davos Platz, which became the locus for visiting English intellectuals and artists. Writers Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle followed him to this quiet valley in search of fresh air and a measure of health. Thomas Mann, visiting his wife Katia at the Waldsanatorium in the spring of 1912, was inspired to set his quintessential novel of spa life here, The Magic Mountain (1924).2
Symonds’ early life followed a predictable enough curve: home tutoring, Harrow, Oxford, continental wanderlust in search of art and health. Calculatedly married, he produced four daughters and many now unread books on art and literature. Behind the façade of family man, however, he conducted mostly platonic relationships with Davos village lads and with gondoliers on his forays to Venice – Sodom-on-Sea for Victorian homosexuals, as it had been for an earlier generation of Regency bucks.3
Symonds was never short of a Greek epigram. If you were male, young and attractive around him you had to watch your bum. The Hellenic flummery that cloaks his writing reminds me of Alan Bennett’s line in The Habit of Art about Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden’s final meeting: ‘and all that counterfeit classical luggage – we know it’s boys’.4
Symonds knew it was boys early on. His earliest childhood fantasies featured sailors: ‘I used to fancy myself crouched upon the floor amid the company of naked adult men; sailors, such as I had seen about the streets of Bristol.’5 A classical education spruced up this rough trade a bit:
J.A. Symonds’ self-portrait in a hat, Davos, 1876
What I really wanted at this period was some honest youth or comrade, a sailor or a groom or a labourer, who would have introduced me into the masculine existence for which I craved in a dim, shrinking way. My equals repelled me.6
He kept up an enormous, knowing correspondence with the great bearded men of his time, always ready with a Latin or Greek tag where plain English would suffice. Slipped between the sheets of Davos notepaper were his dirty snaps from Rome and Sicily.7 This dualism began early. While his dorm mates seemed to ‘spoon’ all before them, he remained aloof from the bed-hopping of Harrow life. He describes one classmate as ‘a good-natured longimanous ape, gibbering on his perch and playing ostentatiously with a prodigiously developed phallus’. Another ‘suddenly dared to throw his arms round me, kissed me, and thrust his hand into my trousers. At that moment I nearly gave way to sensuality.’8
Sex in the head always seemed to win out over the hand in the trousers. Many years later, writing from Davos, this fundamental dilemma remained unresolved: ‘Eros Pandemos is everywhere. Plato lends the light, the gleam, that never was on sea or shore.’9 It would take a later English sexual rebel, D.H. Lawrence, to give the boot to Plato and put a bit of flesh on Eros Pandemos.
J.A. Symonds tobogganing in Davos
Part of Switzerland’s attraction for Symonds was its democratic ethos, so different from class-bound England: ‘Had Willie [a Bristol chorister] been a boy of my own rank, our friendship need not have been broken; or had English institutions favoured equality like those I admire in Switzerland, he might have been admitted to my father’s home.’10 His coming to terms with homosexuality involved consigning the class baggage of England to the hold. Symonds’ relationships with the lower orders strike us now as a kind of sex tourism: ‘When I came to live among peasants and republicans in Switzerland, I am certain that I took up passionate relations with men in a more natural and intelligible manner.’11
Poor health brought him to Switzerland for the first time in the summer of 1863. The 23-year-old fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford stayed at the Silberhorn in Mürren. Here the young virgin spied his future wife, Catherine North, at a time when he was attempting to wean himself off a taste for choristers and onto a ‘coaxed-up emotion’ for women. ‘Alpine inns are
favourable places for hatching acquaintance and gaining insight into character,’ Symonds notes.12 It is clear from his Memoirs that he had no genuine interest in women and that Catherine’s own tetchiness of temper stems from their passionless marriage. Mother and daughters in time grew tolerant of father’s ‘special friendships’ in a way that seems remarkably enlightened.
A year later he followed Catherine to Switzerland, calculatedly a-wooing:
Paris, Basel, Zürich, Chur: I do not well remember how I did the journey. I only remember crossing the Lenzer Heide and the Julier in the banquette of the diligence, and feeling the aridity of Graubünden in painful contrast to what I had so fresh in memory of Mürren … There is a bridge above the stream at Pontresina; and this became our meeting place; and here, one afternoon, I think, when snow was falling in thin flakes, I asked her to be my wife.13
The bridge and the stream at Pontresina are still there, and the five-star Grand Hotel Kronenhof is still in the business of welcoming the betrothed. Symonds had few illusions about what he was doing: ‘I could not so conquer the original bent of my instincts as to feel for her in the brutal unmistakable appetite of physical desire.’ Faute de mieux is how sexologist Havelock Ellis describes this state of affairs.14
A serious haemorrhage of the lungs brought Symonds and his family to Davos on 7 August 1877. His initial impression was unfavourable:
As the valley opened before me from the height of Wolfgang, veiled in melancholy cloud, towards the close of a weary day, I thought that I had rarely seen a less attractive place to live in. Everything looked so bleak and bare; and though I loved the Alps, I discerned little of their charm in Davos. What should I have thought, had I then been told that twelve years afterwards, on the anniversary of that day, I should be penning these lines in a house built for my habitation here?15
Soon Symonds was eyeing up the Tyrolese peasantry as it took a quick pee in a meadow.
He had probably taken too much wine, and there was licence in his gait. Desire for the Bursch [youth] shot through me with a sudden stab. I followed him with my eyes until he passed behind a haystall; and I thought – if only I could follow him, and catch him there, and pass the afternoon with him upon the sweet new hay! Then I turned to my Campanella’s sonnets, and told myself that these things were forever over.16
Symonds initially stayed at the Belvedere Hotel, where he soon befriended nineteen-year-old Christian Buol, youngest in a family of sixteen. Along with Christian Palmy, ‘my friends and fellow-travellers’, they are the dedicatees of Symonds’ collection of articles Italian Byways (1883), which includes three essays about Davos and Graubünden. The apparently chaste friendship with Christian Buol lasted for the dozen years Symonds lived at Davos. They became travelling companions to the cities of the plain – Milan, Venice, Genoa.
We often slept in the same bed; and he was not shy of allowing me to view, as men may view the idols of their gods, the naked splendour of his perfect body. But neither in act nor deed, far less in words, did the least shadow of lust cloud the serenity of that masculine communion.17
Italian Byways includes a fair bit of high-flown art appreciation and circumspect comment on gondoliers. A fine essay on wine, ‘Bacchus in Graubunden’, and a piece on ‘Winter Nights at Davos’ bear up well as journalism goes. The rest has the tedium of ‘chronicling small beer’, as Symonds himself suspects from time to time.
Symonds gave generously to local causes and helped many young men starting out in business. The Buol boys and Symonds were instrumental in the establishment of an English church in Davos, which opened its doors in January 1882. He funded most of the cost of the Davos Gymnasium, founded the Davos Gymnastic Club, and hosted wine parties for its members; we can see where all this is going. In Our Life in the Swiss Highlands (1892) he’s off again, waxing lyrical about Swiss gymnasts:
Bruisers like Milo of Croton, brawny, thick-set men, of bone and muscle, able to fell oxen with a fist-blow on the forehead. Most people think the Swiss an ugly, ill-developed race. They have not travelled with 600 of these men on a summer day, as lightly, tightly clad as decency and comfort allow. It is true that one rarely sees a perfectly handsome face, and that the Swiss complexion is apt to be muddy. But the men are never deficient in character; and when denuded of the ill-made clothes they usually wear, they offer singular varieties of strength, agility, and grace.18
At the same time as Symonds was ogling Swiss musclemen, Tchaikovsky was visiting his former student and lover, Iosef Kotek, in Davos in November 1884. Soso Kotik (‘Joe the Tomcat’) was Tchaikovsky’s nickname for him. They had met when Tchaikovsky was teaching composition at the Moscow Conservatory. The composer described his pupil in these terms:
The Swiss bobsleigh team takes off, Davos, ca. 1910
When he caresses me with his hand, when he lies with his head inclined on my breast, and I run my hand through his hair and secretly kiss it … passion rages within me with such unimaginable strength … Yet I am far from the desire for a physical bond. I feel that if this happened, I would cool towards him. It would be unpleasant for me if this marvellous youth debased himself to copulation with an ageing and fat-bellied man.19
Seven years later, in November 1884, the composer described his arrival at Davos to visit his erstwhile lover, who died there in January 1885 aged only twenty-nine:
Driving up to Davos I imagined it to be a wilderness and feared that I would not be able to get either cigarettes or cigars. But I found that at this great height there is a row of first class hotels, and shops where you can get whatever you like. They have their own newspaper, theatre. … At last Kotek appeared. I was afraid that I would see only a shadow of his former self and imagine my joy when I saw him looking much fatter, with a clear complexion, and seeming perfectly well. But this is only on the surface. When he started talking I understood how bad his lungs are. Instead of a voice he has a hoarse croak and an incessant heavy cough.20
Though Tchaikovsky and Symonds never met, it would be interesting to commission Alan Bennett to script their meeting in one of those fevered hotel drawing rooms or on a deep white balcony. Both men married in attempts to cover their homosexual tracks or to bring about a cure. Both carried on liaisons behind the scenes, and expressed their true selves through music and writing.
Robert Louis Stevenson thought Davos was ‘death by gradual dry-rot’
Robert Louis Stevenson was a writer of an altogether different calibre and stamp to Symonds. Consumptive Stevenson spent two successive winters on the mountain, 1881 and 1882, from November until April, with his wife Fanny and stepson Samuel Lloyd Osbourne, age twelve. He completed Treasure Island at Davos, in a winter of feverish work.
Like Symonds, the sun-loving Stevenson was at first disillusioned by the atmosphere of ‘death by gradual dry-rot, each in his indifferent inn’.21 The two writers got on and shared a passion for tobogganing, although we get the impression from letters and stray comments that Stevenson had scant regard for the older man’s books: ‘He is a far better and more interesting thing than any of his books.’ Other letters betray a more ambiguous, qualified response to Symonds’ sagacity.22
Lloyd Osbourne brought with him a small portable printing press, now on display at the Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh. The press, a gift from Stevenson, had travelled from San Francisco to Silverado, to Edinburgh and Davos. It was used in Davos to print the programme for the weekly concerts at the Hotel Belvedere. Stevenson was much more adventurous and less hidebound than Symonds. He regarded his surroundings in Davos with a sharp eye:
For about the health resort the walks are besieged by single people walking rapidly with plaids about their shoulders, by sudden troops of German boys trying to learn to jödel, and by German couples silently and, as you venture to fancy, not quite happily, pursuing love’s young dream. You may perhaps be an invalid who likes to make bad verses as he walks about.23
His second winter in the mountains was particularly productive. In the spring he collected
together the stories that would make up New Arabian Nights (1882). In addition, he wrote four short pieces for the Pall Mall Gazette on the benefits of mountain air. Together with his lively letters, these give a quick view of invalid experience and the mountain environment. He was particularly taken by tobogganing:
You push off: the toboggan fetches away; she begins to feel the hill, to glide, to swim, to gallop. In a breath you are out from under the pine tree, and a whole heavenful of stars reels and flashes overhead … in an atmosphere tingling with forty degrees of frost … and adds a new excitement to the life of man upon his planet.24
Stevenson’s eye for local detail, his rapid sketch of a scene, remind us that he was an early exponent of travel journalism in Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879). In ‘Health and Mountains’ he brings the feverish world of the spa town alive.
a few noble peaks seen even from the valley; a village of hotels; a world of black and white – black pine-woods, clinging to the sides of the valley, and white snow flouring it, and papering it between the pine-woods, and covering all the mountains with a dazzling curd; add a few score invalids marching to and fro upon the snowy road, or skating on the ice-rinks, possibly to music, or sitting under sunshades by the door of the hotel – and you have the larger features of a mountain sanatorium.25