Ile de J.J. Rousseau in Geneva, where Conrad’s Razumov takes up his pen
Razumov has clearly allied himself with Rousseau here, the philosopher of the Enlightenment. The notes he writes are his report to his handlers in St Petersburg, ‘his first communication for Councillor Mikulin’. Eventually, Razumov reveals his true affiliation to the revolutionaries and to the assassin’s sister. Conrad brings on the storm, as Mary Shelley did a century earlier in the same location at the crisis point of her harried protagonist in Frankenstein. Conrad situates his anarchist Geneva outside the old town, along the lake and in the new precincts by the Plainpalais. His Geneva is a city of night, its nihilists and anarchists like wandering ghosts, its hues those of Whistler:
We walked slowly down the street, away from the town; the low garden walls of the modest villas doomed to demolition were overhung by the boughs of trees and masses of foliage, lighted from below by gas lamps. The violent and monotonous noise of the icy waters of the Arve falling over a low dam swept towards us with a chilly draught of air across a great open space, where a double line of lamp-lights outlined a street as yet without houses.46
Conrad’s roots – like Eberhardt’s – are difficult to disentangle. He was a Pole brought up at the edge of the Russian empire, exiled in England after a formation at sea, a mariner who became a landlubber. His sympathies in Under Western Eyes are clearly not with the anarchists and yet he knows their milieu well. His story of spies, double agents, assassinations and international terror has a curious modern resonance. Some do it with poison, some do it with bombs: Conrad does it with words.
Isabelle Eberhardt grew up on the edge of Geneva’s petite Russie, learning early its tricks of disguise and survival. Like many Geneva travel writers who followed in her footsteps – Ella Maillart and Nicolas Bouvier come to mind – she itched to be away from its confining streets into a larger air, the powder country of the Sahara. Like Conrad’s Razumov she became a double agent of sorts: rooting for the desert peoples while reporting back to Lyautey. Like Razumov, uneasy in her own skin, she discovered herself as a writer under the auspices of Geneva. Today she has a street named after her in the Grottes area, a cul-de-sac behind the tracks of the train station. Her conversion and adherence to a secret Sufi brotherhood, her cross-dressing and hashish smoking, her fondness for a bit of rumpy-pumpy in the dunes, make her a peculiarly modern heroine, one hard to pin down. I don’t think Geneva will be erecting a statue any time soon.
While the Russians were going to pot and keeping the secret police of several countries on their toes, Switzerland also played host to the original hippies. A band of heliotherapists, vegetarians, dancers and flower children hid away in the mountains, where they were not afraid to take off their clothes and dream of utopia. As the world moved towards the first of two world wars, they thought they had found the land of milk and honey.
5
THE INFINITY POOL
Getting back to the garden with Wells, Lawrence and Hesse
Back to nature on the Brissago Islands, 1930s
where men and women are happy and laws are wise, and where all that is tangled and confused in human affairs has been unravelled and made right.
H.G. Wells
Sometimes on Sunday afternoons I visit the vegetarian restaurant in Dornach and check out the old eurhythmic dancers. Over tea and bio rhubarb tart, I notice their bone structure. They sit on after a light lunch with nothing much to do but mind their digestive systems. Long willowy figures, draped in expensive Weleda pastels, have a Grecian quality, as though they’d stepped off a frieze. All is health and maintenance here at the tail end of the Jura, where it meets the tectonic plate of the Black Forest. The Rhine runs between them on the fault line. We are cultivating our chakras at the golden dawn of the twenty-first century. When the dancers get up to go to the loo, they sashay across the restaurant with a spring to their step. The tea goes straight to their kidneys.
I could never get going with Rudolf Steiner, founder of the Anthroposophists, whose headquarters is on the hill above Dornach. What is it about seers and bad prose? At least Jesus Christ had good editors and knew how to keep the story forward looking: miracle here, crucifixion there. But the latter-day visionaries – Madame Blavatsky, Krishnamurti, Ouspensky – have lost the plot altogether. The Book of Mormon always strikes me as a rewrite by a Hollywood mogul after a weekend on peyote. And doe-eyed, fourteen-year-old Krishnamurti picked up on the beach at Adrar by Charles Webster Leadbeater? What’s going on there?
Leadbeater’s grooming of Krishnamurti in 1909 brought about Steiner’s break with the Theosophical Society. Leadbeater was a big-bearded Victorian cleric who published The Astral Plane in 1895. He used psycho-metry, the technique of divining character by handling objects. By touching Krishnamurti’s head, apparently, Leadbeater could tell that he had a very big aura. ‘His tastes ran mainly to boys and tapioca pudding’, as one critic put it.1
The slightly raffish, metropolitan atmosphere of Theosophy gave way in Anthroposophy to nature-worship and the simple life. Many Theosophists were vegetarians, dress reformers or anti-vivisectionists, but in what amounted to a parody of German thoroughness, Steinerism provided a complete way of life which included all these things in a coherent pattern. The polymath found himself giving guidance on every aspect of life, from the colour of auras to the colour of kitchen cupboards, as he extended his influence from the spiritual lives of his followers to the food on their tables.2
When Steiner established his headquarters at Dornach outside Basel, his was one of a number of loosely linked spiritual sites already flourishing in Switzerland. Heliotherapy (nude sunbathing), hydrotherapy (spas), aromatherapy (smells), vegetarianism (muesli) and assorted crystals and candles were already well established. Mumbo-jumbo was on the move. Steiner’s educational theories have stood the test of time, however, and are less fluffy. Anthroposophical medicine (massage, eurhythmie, plant-based treatments) and Big Pharma stare at each other across the Rhine at Basel, opposing attempts at health and well-being – or wellness, as it’s now known. Wellness is big business in Switzerland and has been for over a century. The poor paddled at Bognor and Butlins, but the rich prefer their infinity pools in the Alps.
The Czech writer Franz Kafka, always a bit of a hypochondriac, went in search of Steiner in 1911 at the Victoria Hotel in Berlin:
He eats two litres of emulsion of almonds and fruits that grow in the air.
He communicates with his absent disciples by means of thought-forms which he transmits to them without bothering further about them after they are generated. But they soon wear out and he must replace them. …
He listened very attentively without apparently looking at me at all, entirely devoted to my words. He nodded from time to time, which he seems to consider an aid to strict concentration. At first a quiet head cold disturbed him, his nose ran, he kept working his handkerchief deep into his nose, one finger in each nostril.3
The first time I visited the Goetheanum, Anthroposophy’s enormous, imposing concrete headquarters, I signed on for a guided tour. It turned out to be an hour and a half long, in German. I learned from it that anthroposophists don’t hold with right angles, so everything in their architecture is slightly off kilter. The site at Dornach was chosen because of the energy lines where the Jura and Black Forest meet. Dating from 1928, it is one of the first structures built in reinforced concrete. It replaced an earlier wooden building – equally impressive – that burned down.
The original wooden Goetheanum at Dornach, headquarters of Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy movement
The corner stone of the original Goetheanum was laid down ‘at an afternoon ceremony in September 1913 amid a howling gale and premature darkness’.4 Spiritual believers had come from seventeen countries to build it:
artists and intellectuals, artisans and amateurs, lay members and leaders, all working together to produce a wooden palace over sixty-five thousand cubic metres in size, erected on stone foundations and
roofed with Norwegian slate.5
Among the workers was Andrei Bely, author of Petersburg (1913), one of the four masterpieces of twentieth-century literature, according to Vladimir Nabokov. Summoned home for military service in 1916, Bely describes his journey from Dornach to Russia in Notes of an Eccentric (1918). He believed he was under surveillance by Allied counter-espionage agents and remembered hearing rumbling gunfire from nearby Alsace as he worked on building the Goetheanum.
Houses around the giant scarab-like structure have the trademark window frames and roofs, abjuring right angles. There’s an expensive bio shop, a massage centre, arts and crafts galleries exhibiting pastel-inflected art and lumpy unpolished sculpture – like the work Steiner produced himself. It’s a warren of alternative living. The road follows the camber of the hill, lined with affluent-looking houses. Like the new mountain spas, the houses are all clean slate and clean lines. The people inside them attempt to lead clean lives. Lush gardens run wild according to the best Steiner farming principles. The air seems rarefied.
Anthroposophy was a turn-of-the-century reaction to German patriarchal militarism in the same way that the hippy movement took umbrage at American wars in Asia. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, Switzerland became a refuge for disaffected sons, wayward women and wanton youth – the children of the educated middle class. They took off their clothes and ran naked through the Alpine valleys. Denizens of fin-de-siècle Swiss communes were the original hippies.
The fishing village of Ascona on Lago Maggiore is a corner of the world blessed by nature. Nearby Locarno has been a pilgrimage site since 1470, when the Madonna del Sasso appeared to a Benedictine monk. The mountain rising from the lake is pitted with caves – grotti – still used to store wine casks and as makeshift drinking dens. Clement air from the south brings a breath of la dolce vita.
The founders of the Monte Verità commune were the son of a rich Belgian industrialist, Henry Oedenkoven, his music teacher partner Ida Hoffmann, from Montenegro, and the Gräser brothers, Karl and Gusto, wild boys from the far reaches of the Austro-Hungarian empire. They bought land – Oedenkoven did, and the others tagged along – costing a hundred and fifty thousand Swiss francs. As with many communes, disagreements surfaced almost immediately.
The Gräser brothers were oddity personified. Karl believed that ‘all metals should be left in their native rocks, as ores’. His partner wore date stones instead of buttons. Gusto Gräser was a Naturmensch, part of the nineteenth-century equivalent of the back-to-nature movement. He was a vagabond whose agricultural policy was to throw fruit stones on the ground where he thought trees were needed. No sweat – nature did the rest. A haunting photograph of an emaciated Gusto Gräser, wandering through the Munich ruins at the close of the Second World War, shows only himself and the Frauenkirche left standing.6
They set up a sanatorium and built basic huts. They were vegetarian sun worshippers, reform minded as regards clothing and marriage. The women wore their hair pre-Raphaelite style. The wild men adopted the apostolic look – toga, wraparound skirt and tunic with nothing on underneath. Over time, vegetarians, pacifists, nudists, Freemasons, feminists, Theosophists and bohemians of all stripes made their way up Monte Verità in search of enlightenment or out of simple curiosity. Hermann Hesse visited and was buried up to the neck in soil as a cure for alcoholism. Isadora Duncan sunbathed nude on the roof of her Bauhaus hut, to the delight of onlookers. For twenty years at the beginning of the last century, Monte Verità was an experiment in alternative living.
Anti-war activist Gusto Gräser in the Munich ruins in 1945
Before the First World War curtailed his continental trips, writer, socialist and pacifist H.G. Wells wrote two books inspired by the fringe happenings in Ascona. He was a bit of a windbag for social improvement. A Modern Utopia (1905) follows a pair of wayfarers, the narrator and a botanist, dropped as though by magic into the Ticino landscape. Their observations on Utopia – Switzerland – are intercut with philosophical musings on the role of women, work, race and marriage.
With that absurd nearness of effect one gets in the Alps, we see the little train a dozen miles away, running down the Biaschina to Italy … Down the mountain we shall go and down the passes, and as the valleys open the world will open, Utopia, where men and women are happy and laws are wise, and where all that is tangled and confused in human affairs has been unravelled and made right.7
Wells’ utopian vision bears a remarkable resemblance to twenty-first-century Switzerland. He has the uncanny knack of being prescient:
Such great tramways as this will be used when the Utopians wish to travel fast and far; thereby you will glide all over the land surface of the planet; and feeding them and distributing from them, innumerable minor systems, clean little electric tramways I picture them, will spread out over the land in finer reticulations, growing close and dense in the urban regions and thinning as the population thins. And running beside these lighter railways, and spreading beyond their range, will be the smooth minor high roads … Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia, sometimes following beside the great high roads, but oftener taking their own more agreeable line amidst woods and crops and pastures; and there will be a rich variety of footpaths and minor ways.8
Trams, light railways, cycle paths: Switzerland here is the good life, meeting the needs of a leisured citizenry. Our time travellers approach Andermatt from the south and cross the famous Devil’s Bridge. They encounter a Naturmensch on the road. Perhaps Wells had in mind Gusto Gräser, whose distinctive hairy figure was well known on the mountain roads at that time. Booking into a Lucerne inn, they marvel at Swiss cleanliness and clockwork precision:
It is one of several such establishments in Lucerne. It possesses many hundreds of practically self-cleaning little bedrooms, equipped very much after the fashion of the rooms we occupied in the similar but much smaller inn at Hospenthal, differing only a little in the decoration. … and when I look out of my window in the early morning – for the usual Utopian working day commences within an hour of sunrise – I see Pilatus above this outlook, rosy in the morning sky.9
Wells’ Utopia could be any Swiss metropolis: functional, clean, peaceful, trams on time and cycle paths busy. Switzerland’s participatory democracy, its frequent referenda on anything from smoking to immigrants, catches the author’s eye:
Gräser towards the end of his life in the 1950s
From a number of beautifully printed placards at the street corners, adorned with caricatures of considerable pungency, we discover an odd little election is in progress. This is the selection, upon strictly democratic lines, with a suffrage that includes every permanent resident in the Lucerne ward over the age of fifteen, of the ugliest local building.10
Wells revisited his fantasy Switzerland on the eve of the Great War. In World Set Free (1913) he imagines, years before the Treaty of Versailles or the United Nations, a futuristic conference of world leaders taking place in 1959. They convene at what appears to be Monte Verità, in the great grass meadow where communards danced nude under the moon and worshipped the sun during daylight hours:
On the mountain-side above the town of Brissago and commanding two long stretches of Lake Maggiore, looking eastward to Bellinzona, and southward to Luino, there is a shelf of grass meadows which is very beautiful in springtime with a great multitude of wild flowers. … This desolate and austere background contrasts very vividly with the glowing serenity of the great lake below, with the spacious view of fertile hills and roads and villages and islands to south and east, and with the hotly golden rice flats of the Val Maggia to the north.11
Rudolf Laban and his dancers at Monte Verità
Humanity, however, was not saved and the great debacle of civilization ensued – and yet another war after that. The remains of the old heliotherapy beds are still there in the long grass, and the sun hasn’t budged. ‘The hotly golden rice flats of the Val Maggia’ is an inspired phrase, and wonderful risotto is still served up all along
the valley. Wells saw Switzerland as a land of peaceful plenty, a refuge from a world going to hell in a handcart. He observed those Swiss qualities of soulless organisation – everything pukka – and God’s grandeur in the landscape. They were qualities attractive to a boy who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps in middle England.
Wells is not the only English writer who came under the sway of Swiss utopian experiments before the First World War. In September 1913, D.H. Lawrence visited Ascona en route from Bavaria to Italy, a walk he recounted in Twilight in Italy (1916). He had left England with Frieda Weekly, née Frieda von Richthofen. She was six years older than him, already married and the mother of three young children. He was the ‘stripling lover’, a coal miner’s son from Nottingham, and she the ‘mother goddess’, daughter of a baron. Frieda became Lawrence’s muse. A year after his Alpine walk, confined to England by the war, Lawrence must have missed the sunny south:
When I went from Constance, it was on a small steamer down the Rhine to Schaffhausen. That was beautiful. Still, the mist hung over the waters, over the wide shallows of the river, and the sun, coming through the morning, made lovely yellow lights beneath the bluish haze, so that it seemed like the beginning of the world.12
Another disreputable exile, Norman Douglas, is right to claim Lawrence as one of our great painters of landscape in words. Lawrence took against bourgeois Zürich and the huckster-innkeeper quality he perceived in Switzerland. Twilight in Italy is filled with his mood swings:
One gets this feeling always in Switzerland, except high up: this feeling of average, of utter soulless ordinariness, something intolerable. Mile after mile, to Zürich, it was just the same. It was just the same in the tram-car going into Zürich … The horrible average ordinariness of it all, something utterly without flower or soul or transcendence, the horrible vigorous ordinariness, is too much.13
The Gilded Chalet Page 10