The Gilded Chalet

by Padraig Rooney

  Productivity apart, Stevenson’s two winters in Davos were marked by crisis and death. Fanny fell ill with kidney stones in December 1881 and was treated in Bern. They returned to Davos on Christmas Day by open-air sleigh:

  seven hours on end through whole forests of Christmas trees. The cold was beyond belief. I have often suffered less at a dentist’s. It was a clear, sunny day, but the sun even at noon falls, at this season, only here and there into the Pratigau.26

  Fanny wrote of the proximity of death in Davos, shadowing the beauty of the valley:

  Louis is much cut up because a young man whom he liked and had been tobogganing with has been found dead in his bed. Bertie still hovers between life and death. Poor little Mrs. Doney is gone; my heart is sad for those two lovely little girls. In a place like this there are many depressing things, but it is encouraging to know that many are going away cured.

  By the time the crocuses had pushed through the snow of their second spring, the Stevensons had had enough. Inveterate travellers and sun worshippers, they settled for good in Samoa.

  Another well-travelled Edinburgh writer, the thirty-four-year-old Arthur Conan Doyle, came to Switzerland in August 1893 to give a series of talks in Lucerne. Perhaps it was his final school year spent with the Jesuits at Feldkirch in Austria that gave him a taste for the Alps.

  Conan Doyle was a sporty doctor. He had seen skiing in Norway and imported one of the first pair of Norwegian skis to Davos. Along with the Branger brothers (who possessed the other two pairs), he scaled the saddle of the Jacobshorn in the Albula range, now served by cable car and renowned for snowboarding. They then tackled the 2,253-metre pass between Davos and Arosa, rising at 4 am, heading to Frauenkirch, crossing the Maienfelder Furka pass and sliding down to Arosa. Since 2008 this area has been added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites, traversed by the wonderful Rhaetian railway and by ‘lads leaping about on planks tied to their feet’.27 Doyle wrote up his travels for The Strand, the magazine that had been serialising his Holmes stories:

  But now we had a pleasure which boots can never give. For a third of a mile we shot along over gently dipping curves, skimming down into the valley without a motion of our feet. In that great untrodden waste, with snow-fields bounding our vision on every side and no marks of life save the tracks of chamois and of foxes, it was glorious to whizz along in this easy fashion.28

  He predicted that ‘the time will come when hundreds of Englishmen will come to Switzerland for a skiing season’. Time has proved him right.

  Besides skiing, Conan Doyle left his mark on Switzerland by setting one crucial Sherlock Holmes story here. Holmes is the first of many detectives and spies to stick their noses into Swiss literary history. Somerset Maugham, Friedrich Glauser, Ian Fleming, Friedrich Dürrenmatt and John le Carré have all peopled the genre in the course of the twentieth century. ‘I think of slaying Holmes … and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things,’ Conan Doyle wrote to his mother in November 1891.29 He attempted to kill off Holmes in the story ‘The Final Problem’, published in the December 1893 issue of The Strand, while the author was safely wintering at Davos.

  Switzerland hosts two Conan Doyle museums. Holmes, like Ian Fleming’s Bond, has become a literary brand, diversifying into television, film and costume. The Hotel Parc du Sauvage in Meiringen is where it is thought the writer stayed with his wife. Here he conceived the idea of killing off Holmes in a struggle with Moriarty, ‘the Napoleon of crime’, at the nearby Reichenbach Falls. He renamed the hotel ‘The Englischer Hof’. Holmes is the only fictional character to have been made an honorary citizen of Meiringen, with full voting rights. Renamed Conan Doyle Place in 1988, the village square proudly sports a statue of Sherlock Holmes. The little faux-gothic English Church hosts a tiny museum featuring one of two Swiss replicas of 221b Baker Street. A plaque up on the Falls commemorates the detective’s apparent demise.

  Meiringen in winter is a lonely place to die. Dirty snow littered Place Sherlock Holmes when I visited in late January. The bakeries were selling Haslikuchen, made from hazelnuts, with a prancing caster-sugar cock on the crust. The main street was almost deserted and the Hotel Parc du Sauvage wasn’t serving lunch. In the Portakabin adjoining the ice rink, staff kept warm and sheepskins were spread on the benches of the café. I mooched around town, noticing everything. A hotel up the hill was called The Sherlock Holmes. A man in the bakery was speaking loud Russian into his phone.

  In the story Holmes escapes from Victoria station disguised as an Italian priest. Watson is along for the ride in the first-class carriage. Baker Street is in flames and Moriarty is in hot pursuit. They make their way ‘into Switzerland, via Luxembourg and Basle’, across the Gemmi Pass and along the Daubensee. It’s a curious, roundabout route:

  Sidney Paget’s 1893 illustration of Sherlock Holmes’ demise at the Reichenbach Falls

  It was on the 3rd of May that we reached the little village of Meiringen, where we put up at the Englischer Hof, then kept by Peter Steiler the elder. Our landlord was an intelligent man, and spoke excellent English, having served for three years as waiter at the Grosvenor Hotel in London. At his advice, on the afternoon of the 4th we set off together, with the intention of crossing the hills and spending the night at the hamlet of Rosenlaui. We had strict injunctions, however, on no account to pass the falls of Reichenbach, which are about half-way up the hill, without making a small detour to see them.30

  Conan Doyle dovetails his real circumstances with those of Watson and Holmes:

  an English lady had arrived who was in the last stage of consumption. She had wintered at Davos Platz, and was journeying now to join her friends at Lucerne, when a sudden hemorrhage had overtaken her. It was thought that she could hardly live a few hours, but it would be a great consolation to her to see an English doctor, and, if I would only return, etc. The good Steiler assured me in a postscript that he would himself look upon my compliance as a very great favor, since the lady absolutely refused to see a Swiss physician, and he could not but feel that he was incurring a great responsibility.31

  Doctor Watson falls for the ruse and returns to the Englischer Hof. Moriarity tackles Holmes at the Falls. Watson realises his mistake and returns to find

  Holmes’s Alpine-stock still leaning against the rock by which I had left him. But there was no sign of him, and it was in vain that I shouted. My only answer was my own voice reverberating in a rolling echo from the cliffs around me.32

  Clear and melodramatic, Holmes’ end allows the possibility he might rise again from the ‘dreadful caldron of swirling water and seething foam’. Thousands of readers cancelled their subscriptions to The Strand magazine in December 1893 in protest. Conan Doyle was obliged to resurrect his detective in a later story, ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’.

  A second Conan Doyle museum is in Lucens, between Lausanne and Lake Neuchâtel. The writer’s son, Adrian Conan Doyle, established it with lordly aplomb in the resplendent château overperching the town. He built a replica of the sitting room in 221b Baker Street for the 1951 Festival of Britain. The room is authentic down to the last sourced detail. Since 2001, when the château was sold, the museum has moved to the Maison Rouge in the village.

  It was the German novelist Thomas Mann who made the most sustained use of Davos in his long novel The Magic Mountain. In 1911 he had been writing Death in Venice in Bad Tölz in Bavaria, where the Manns had a summer home. In 1912 he journeyed to Davos for three weeks to visit his wife, flush with the knowledge that he had just written a small masterpiece and feverish with his own demons.

  Mann, like Symonds, was another of those old-style married homosexuals, with their Hellenic baggage, a clatter of children and a patient wife. Katia Mann bore her husband six children: proof perhaps of the ascendancy of hydraulics over chemistry. Three of their children were homosexual – two sons and a daughter. Katia was fully aware of her husband’s infatuations behind the carapace of the family man. In 1912 she was recove
ring from two recent miscarriages and the birth of their fourth child, Monika. She had contracted tuberculosis and booked into the Waldsanatorium above Davos.

  Thomas Mann’s visit from mid-May to mid-June gave him the germ of the thousand pages of The Magic Mountain, a story he would drop and pick up again over the following war-torn decade. It is a swansong to the Belle Époque and to the class that propped it up. A curious fact about Katia Mann’s six-month stay emerges from her X-rays, which have been preserved. They do not present any evidence of tuberculosis, according to present-day experts.33 Perhaps it really was all in the head. Perhaps Death in Venice, ‘the paradigmatic master-text of homosexual eroticism’,34 had brought their marriage into sharp focus and she needed a rest cure.

  The Magic Mountain’s twenty-four-year-old protagonist, Hans Castorp, travels by train to Davos to visit Joachim, a sick cousin, at the International Sanatorium Berghof (today the Hotel Schatzalp). Musing in the mountains, he describes what appears to be the Solis Viaduct, built in 1902, as it curves across the Albula River on the Rhaetian Railway.

  He looked out – the train was winding through a narrow pass; you could see the forward cars and the laboring engine, emitting great straggling tatters of brown, green and black smoke. Water roared in the deep ravine on his right; dark pines on his left struggled up between boulders towards a stony gray sky. There were pitch-black tunnels, and when daylight returned, vast chasms were revealed, with a few villages far below.35

  What traps the thoroughly bourgeois Castorp is the cloying atmosphere of illness. His initial visit of three weeks extends to seven years. Balconies and terraces give the sanatorium the appearance of a sponge, but also the baroque spectacle of a theatre. Time becomes a sponge too, and not just for Castorp. The reader of this novel gets drawn into its cavities. Mann elaborates illness as a metaphor for artistic sensibility, for the sexual drive and for the malaise of Europe on the eve of the First World War. He always liked to think big. In Death in Venice there is a similar linkage of illness (cholera-ravaged Venice) and artistic creativity. Mann’s first novel Buddenbrooks was the Downton Abbey of the early twentieth century. The boy aesthete Hanno dies of typhus at the end. Hanno, Aschenbach and Castorp attempt to kick over the traces of bourgeois existence and become prey to decadence and desire. Their ramrod-straight author never did.

  Mann was conversant with the health crazes, fitness regimes and rest cures of his day, many of which anticipate the expensive therapeutic culture of present-day Switzerland. The Magic Mountain could be read as a bible of the spa class, where healing, money, splurge and purge meet. Spa people are not great readers, however. The rich like to render their illnesses as exclusive, and Davos found ways of catering to them over the years – first the tubercular Russians, then the Germans, now the Russians again.

  No sooner well-met at Davos than cousin Joachim shows Hans Castorp his Blue Henry:

  now he pulled something halfway out of the nearer side pocket of his ulster, showed it to his cousin, and put it away again at once – a curved, flattened bottle of bluish glass with a metal cap. ‘Most of us up here have one,’ he said. ‘We even have a name for it, a kind of nickname, a joke really.’36

  Castorp breathes his first lungful of Davos air: ‘it lacked odor, content, moisture, it went easily into the lungs and said nothing to the soul’. Installed in a room where an American has died two days before, he marvels at the humour of corpses ferried down by bobsleigh from a sanatorium higher up the mountain.

  Among the last corpses bobsleighed to the cemetery was that of Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, one of three assassins of Rasputin. Carried out of Room 309, exited by the back door of the sanatorium, he was ferried by sled down to his final resting place in the forest cemetery in March 1942. The assassin was first cousin to Prince Philip. The Grand Duke’s son, Prince Romanovsky-Ilyinsky, became mayor of Palm Beach, Florida. Russian royalists have made overtures and offered him the position of Tsar, but he’s staying put in the Sunshine State.37

  A florid and voluble Italian called Settembrini joins the cousins on their walks through the Davos woods. He is one of Mann’s caricatured exotics, a Faustian littérateur, a turn-of-the-century gadfly. Castorp says of his pedagogic conversation: ‘listening to him always reminds me of fresh hot buns’.38 The schedule of the International Sanatorium Berghof reminds me of a New Age retreat centre crossed with a Catholic seminary, where a young priest with sideburns might ask you if you like Simon and Garfunkel. At any moment a conversation about cigars might veer off into the higher truths of why we’re here. To be ill is to be of the elect, pontificating above the treeline. When Mann wants to suggest wayward sexuality or bohemian culture, as he does with Settembrini, he gives his characters yellow trousers. He adds, ‘his greeting was precise and melodious. And now he stopped, striking a graceful pose in front of them by propping himself on his cane and crossing his ankles.’39 Camp, the reader thinks, as Christmas.

  Mann gives us a snapshot of Davos transformed by the coming of the spas, typical of the change in Swiss mountain villages of the time:

  One could not really call Dorf a village; at least, nothing except the name itself was left now. It had been devoured by the resort spreading relentlessly towards the entrance to the valley, and that part of the settlement called Davos-Dorf merged imperceptibly, without transition, into what was called Davos-Platz. Hotels and boarding houses, all of them amply equipped with covered verandas, balconies, and rest-cure arcades, lay on both sides, as well as private homes with rooms for rent. Here and there new buildings were under construction, but sometimes the line of houses was broken by an open space that allowed a view of the valley’s green meadows.40

  Mann’s pinched face with close-set eyes and bristly moustache stares out at us from his photos, not unhandsome but not forthcoming either. He’s very much the author. He has a Prince Charles way of handling a pocket, always anxious to look the picture of probity.

  In the early twenty-first century Davos is a byword for skiing and economics rather than tuberculosis. Castorp’s observations of sanatorium life have an eerie poignancy, reminding us of the reality of medicine before penicillin:

  Those balloon-shaped containers with short necks, for example, which were set out beside the doors in the corridor and which had caught his eye on the evening of his arrival – Joachim explained about them when he asked. They held pure oxygen, for six francs the demijohn, and the stimulating gas was provided to dying patients in order to help preserve their energies and rouse them one last time – it was sipped through a rubber hose. And behind the doors where these potbellied containers stood lay the dying or the moribundi.41

  On page 301 we finally get down into the village for a glimpse of the bobsled races. Our cousins observe, characteristically, but don’t take part:

  A little hut had been built at the finish line, and inside was a telephone that rang whenever a sled began its run. Steered by men and women in white wool and with sashes in various national colors across their chests, the low, flat frames came shooting down, one by one, at long intervals, taking the curves of the course that glistened like metal between icy mounds of snow. You could see red, tense faces with snow blowing in their eyes. There were accidents, too – sleds crashed and upended, dumping their teams in the snow, while onlookers took lots of pictures. There was music playing here, as well. The spectators sat in a little grandstand or thronged the narrow pathway shovelled free next to the course itself. Farther up, wooden bridges spanned the course, and they, too, were crowded with people, who could watch the competing sleds hurtle by under them from time to time. The bodies from the sanatorium on the far slope whizzed down the same course, taking its curves, heading down to the valley.42

  Hans Castorp, his cousin Joachim and a young girl soon to die pay a morbid visit to Davos village cemetery in mid-winter:

  The gravestones and crosses were unpretentious affairs placed there at no great expense. As for the inscriptions, the names came from every corner of the earth, wer
e written in English, Russian or other Slavic languages, in German, Portuguese, and many more tongues. The dates, however, had their own delicate individuality – on the whole these life spans had been strikingly short, the difference in years between birth and demise averaging little more than twenty. The field was populated exclusively by youth rather than virtue, by unsettled folk who had found their way here from all over the world and had returned now for good and all to the horizontal form of existence.43

  Shortly after reading that graveyard scene from The Magic Mountain I gave up. It was a mylar-covered school library edition, so I refrained from throwing it across the room. The ‘Date Due’ card on the inside back cover was virginal. At the end the words FINIS OPERIS seemed fatuous. Life got too short to dutifully struggle through a novel I wasn’t much enjoying. Lugubrious, ponderous, stuffy, garrulous – all the old epithets thrown at Mann, like so many playground snowballs, were true. The famed rolling periods left me cold. His stuffed shirts I found preposterous. His straight relationships didn’t work and his gay ones were all talking heads. Where Anthony Heilbut saw grandeur I saw obfuscation. Re-reading The Magic Mountain had been one of those challenges of late reading – would the monumental writer of one’s youth meet the older reader’s eyes?

  And what of the magic mountain itself? During the Second World War a little coven of Nazi sympathisers controlled at least one of the sanatoria, as Danielle Jaeggi has outlined in her documentary À l’Ombre de la Montagne. Behind the clean façade, Switzerland’s chic spa turned nasty.

  The Thomas-Mann Way follows in Castorp’s footsteps from the Waldhotel Davos, pausing at benches, winding through the trees – a literary stations of the cross that takes up a good deal less time than reading the novel. The Schatzalp Hotel in Davos hosts an annual four-day conference in August, focusing on The Magic Mountain. Speakers from German, British and Italian academies toss the ball about, in much the same way as their fictional counterpart in the novel, Dr Krokowski, lectures the inmates on love and illness. Sessions end with wine tasting and an aperitif.