The Gilded Chalet

by Padraig Rooney

  He walked the right bank of Zürich Lake to a village with a silk-weaving factory, employing Italian migrant workers. In the mid-nineteenth century, Canton Zürich was the second-largest silk producer in the world, renowned for its black taffeta. Lawrence appears to have caroused and bedded down in Pfäffikon:

  They could only give me boiled ham: so I ate boiled ham and drank beer, and tried to digest the utter cold materialism of Switzerland.14

  He teams up with factory workers rehearsing a play in the back room. He finds them lively, loud and warm, in contrast to the ‘cold German-Swiss’ with their ‘ugly dialect’. Later, repairing to a more convivial Italian-frequented inn, he describes it as ‘a warm, ruddy bit of Italy within the cold darkness of Switzerland’. The miner’s son from Nottingham (he uses the same combination of adjectives, ‘warm, ruddy’, to describe his father) has happened upon Italian anarchists escaping conscription on the eve of the First World War:

  He gave me a copy of a little Anarchist paper published in Geneva. L’Anarchista, I believe it was called. I glanced at it. It was in Italian, naïve, simple, rather rhetorical. So they were all Anarchists, these Italians.15

  It’s a Sunday and Lawrence is on the road to Lucerne. His boots are chafing. He has another little rant to himself about the ‘Sunday nullity’:

  There was fat agricultural land and several villages. And church was over. The church-goers were all coming home: men in black broadcloth and old chimney-pot silk hats, carrying their umbrellas; women in ugly dresses, carrying books and umbrellas. The streets were dotted with these black-clothed men and stiff women, all reduced to a Sunday nullity. I hated it. It reminded me of that which I knew in my boyhood, that stiff, null ‘propriety’ which used to come over us, like a sort of deliberate and self-inflicted cramp, on Sundays. I hated these elders in black broadcloth, with their neutral faces, going home piously to their Sunday dinners. I hated the feeling of these villages, comfortable, well-to-do, clean, and proper.16

  As consolation to the Swiss, Lawrence had an even more bad-tempered view of the English:

  Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today. They’ve got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery it’s a marvel they can breed. They can nothing but frog-spawn – the gibberers! God, how I hate them! God curse them, funkers. God blast them, wish-wash. Exterminate them, slime.17

  At one point he impersonates Naturmensch Gusto Gräser: ‘I said I was from Graz; that my father was a doctor in Graz, and that I was walking for my pleasure through the countries of Europe.’18 Lawrence blows hot and cold about mercantile Swiss towns and inns. Despite the ranting, his quick sketches of landladies and innkeepers capture a unique spirit of place. In a sentence or two he can sum up a locale like no one else:

  Everywhere are the hotels and the foreigners, the parasitism. Yet there is, unseen, this overshadowed, overhung, sordid mountain population, ledged on the slopes and in the crevices. In the wider valleys there is still a sense of cowering among the people. But they catch a new tone from their contact with the foreigners. And in the towns are nothing but tradespeople.19

  Ascending towards Andermatt and the Gotthard Pass, he describes perfectly the ‘winter’s broken detritus’ of the high mountains, where winter and snow lend a makeshift aspect to human settlement.

  I went through the little, hideous, crude factory-settlement in the high valley, where the eternal snows gleamed, past the enormous advertisements for chocolate and hotels, up the last steep slope of the pass to where the tunnel begins. Göschenen, the village at the mouth of the tunnel, is all railway sidings and haphazard villas for tourists, post cards and touts and weedy carriages; disorder and sterile chaos, high up. How should anyone stay there!20

  He spurns Andermatt with characteristic spite and spleen, settling for a Gästezimmer in Hospental, in the lee of the pass, well out of the way of civilisation. It is perhaps as well that his landlady is partially deaf. Lawrence is appreciative of her dinner and the humble, clean dwelling house, cutting to the quick of experience in rhythmic lyrical prose. Reading him, I inevitably think of my old English professor at Maynooth, Pete Connolly, praising the felt life phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, in his best Leavisite manner, pencil hovering.

  The next morning Lawrence crosses the Gotthard Pass with a seventeen-year-old clerk from Basel, on a week’s holiday. They discuss Swiss military service. Paying tribute to south-facing Airolo, Lawrence floors us with another perfect, almost monosyllabic sentence: ‘It is as if the god Pan really had his home among these sun-bleached stones and tough, sun-dark trees.’21 He notices strip mining and the ugly housing blocks of the workers. In their horror at the destruction wrought by industrialisation, both Lawrence and Wells hark back to Dickens and Blake: ‘Life is now a matter of selling oneself to slave-work, building roads or labouring in quarries or mines or on the railways, purposeless, meaningless, really slave-work.’22 Their environmental and existential despair heralds a money-grubbing age: ‘Down the road of the Ticino valley I felt again my terror of this new world which is coming into being on top of us.’23

  Dance was an important part of the Lebensreform movement in Switzerland in the early decades of the twentieth century. The American dancer Isadora Duncan visited Ascona a number of times. She and her brother Raymond liked to dress in the Grecian manner. Californian by birth, they were vegetarians based in Berlin and later in Paris. I remember parties at the Duncan house on rue de Seine in the 1970s when some member of the family would don robes and dance in the small hours through the dope smoke, in the freezing rooms. Isadora was an early feminist, infamous in her heyday for young lovers and a dissolute lifestyle – a bit like Michael Jackson or Madonna in ours. She died tragically in a car accident, strangled by her scarf. Ascona locals used to buy tickets to the roof of the Villa Semiramis to spy on the nudists and dancers in the park of Monte Verità.

  Hermann Hesse lived for forty-three years across the lake from Monte Verità, in the Casa Camuzzi at Montagnola, following the break-up of his first marriage in 1919. Casa Camuzzi sits atop a peninsula with panoramic views across the Alps and the lake. Beatle George Harrison also bought a last home in Montagnola, near his oncology clinic, and recorded his final tracks there, before heading to California to die in 2001. The rock star and Hesse both shared a taste for orientalism and an eye for property values.

  In Klingsor’s Last Summer (1920), Hesse describes the wonderful stepped garden of the Villa Camuzzi:

  Below him, dizzyingly precipitate, the old terrace gardens dropped away, a densely shadowed tangle of treetops, palms, cedars, chestnuts, Judas trees, red beech, and eucalyptus, intertwined with climbing plants, lianas, wisterias. Above the blackness of the trees the large glossy leaves of the summer magnolias gleamed pallidly, the huge snow-white blossoms half-shut among them, large as human heads, pale as moon and ivory. From the massed leafage, penetrating and rousing, a tartly sweet smell of lemons drifted towards him.24

  Hesse is best remembered for Siddhartha (1922), Steppenwolf (1927) and The Glass Bead Game (1943), all of which chart spiritual quests. Hesse’s father was a missionary of Estonian origin. His mother was born in India and spent her first four years there, the daughter of a noted orientalist. The writer was born in 1877, in the northern reaches of the Black Forest. Like his father, he took Russian nationality. He became a Swiss citizen for the first time at age six when his father was attached to the Basel Mission. Hermann Hesse always looked on his adopted city with affection:

  And the vast and, for someone as small as me, infinitely large open space on Schützenmatte, then still undeveloped land, extending from the Schützenhaus out to Neubad, was my butterfly hunting ground and the scene of our cowboy and Indian games. Many of the recollections from this period are captured in the childhood chapter of Hermann Lauscher. Gradually, on Sunday walks wi
th my father, I got to know the centre of town better, the Rhine with the ferry at Blumenrain and the bridges, the Münster and the Pfalz, the Kreuzgang, the historical museum, which was then in the building over the Kreuzgang.25

  Swabian by culture and accent, Hesse’s stamping ground was the Upper Rhine, its ferries, marketplaces and Black Forest hinterland:

  This region in southwestern Germany/Switzerland is my home, and the fact that the region is crisscrossed by several state borders and one Reich frontier is something I was often made to feel quite acutely in both minor and more major matters, yet I have, in the inmost depths of my being, never been able to consider these borders to be natural … For me, home meant both sides of the Upper Rhine, whether the area be called Switzerland, Baden or Württemberg.26

  Young intellectuals of the late nineteenth century were influenced by the ideas of Ruskin and Tolstoy. They wanted to get back to the land, to ape the ways of the peasant, like their counterparts in the 1960s in lumberjack shirts and dungarees.

  At the Casa Camuzzi Hesse rented four rooms overlooking the garden with its magnolia and Judas trees:

  a little city and a landscape where years ago I had known intimately every small stream and gully, every fieldstone wall with cracks full of little ferns and wood pinks, a landscape that three times during the war sheltered and comforted me and made me happy and thankful once more.27

  Separation from wife and family played their part in his retreat. His third son succumbed to a serious illness. Hesse himself underwent psychoanalysis and treatment for alcoholism. Steppenwolf is the fruit of his psychological breakdown and the failure of his second marriage in the mid-1920s. Its double motif – man and wolf – and the gothic-horror atmosphere remind us of those other Swiss creations, Frankenstein and The Vampyre. A deranged world of drugs, jazz and ‘Americanised men’ characterises Harry Haller’s mid-life crisis. Harry thinks of himself as a wolf of the steppes, outside civilisation, prey to animal desires, preying in turn on fellow men and women. He has a bad case of schizophrenia, alcohol abuse and psychobabble, all of which plagued Hesse himself. Steppenwolf was written in Basel, in Room 401 of the Hotel Krafft overlooking the river, and finished in Zürich.

  Harry wanders the night streets ‘above the Rhine’, frequenting drinking and dancing dens, encountering barflies, a goodtime girl called Hermine and a dealer-trumpeter called Pablo. Harry doesn’t quite go howling down the street, but he suffers from delusions: ‘A wolf of the Steppes that had lost its way and strayed into the towns and the life of the herd’. He likes to rant, to vent his spleen, and I’ve often thought that there is something of the failed priest, the pastor manqué about Hesse:

  For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.28

  Hesse was approaching fifty when he wrote Steppenwolf and it is imbued with the travails of middle age coming to terms with what the young people are up to – the new jazz, new drugs, new dances. It’s a last waltz before heading for the mountains. Harry can’t help moralising and lamenting the American century becoming apparent after the First World War:

  One half of this music, the melody, was all pomade and sugar and sentimentality. The other half was savage, temperamental and vigorous. Yet the two went artlessly together and made a whole. It was the music of decline. There must have been such music in Rome under the later emperors. … There was something of the Negro in it, something of the American, who with all his strength seems so boyishly fresh and childlike to us Europeans. Was Europe to become the same? Was it on the way already? Were we, the old connoisseurs, the reverers of Europe as it used to be, of genuine music and poetry as once they were, nothing but a pig-headed minority of complicated neurotics who would be forgotten or derided tomorrow?29

  Once Hesse got this novel out of his system, he seems to have settled down to alternative living and a happy third marriage in 1931. His reputation as a writer sits uneasy, both in the German- and the English-speaking worlds. In the counter-cultural 1960s, however, his brand of oriental enlightenment was shaken out once more and given an airing. Enamoured of the spiritual seeker, the traveller in touch with nature, Hesse peoples his writing with craftsmen, journeymen, maverick tramps. Read in adolescence, he represents an invitation to the vagabond life, but one returns to him in middle age with a sinking feeling. Graham Greene nails it: ‘one can cease to be in love as easily as one can outgrow an author one admired as a boy’.30

  After The Glass Bead Game (1943) Hesse stopped writing novels. He wore homespun linen and started painting with fervour. His gouaches, in a palette of oranges and blues rather like his prose, are almost entirely devoid of people, but capture the light and warmth of the Ticino landscape. The novels he wrote in the Casa Camuzzi, in his distinctive old world copperplate, give off a golden hue as well.

  I was now a little, penniless, literary man, a threadbare and rather dubious stranger who lived on milk and rice and macaroni, who wore his old suits till they were threadbare and in the fall brought home his supper of chestnuts from the forest. But the experiment, which was the point of it all, succeeded, and despite everything that was difficult in those years, they were beautiful and fruitful. It was like waking from a nightmare that had lasted for years. I inhaled freedom, the air, the sun, I had solitude and my work.31

  In summer he retreated with his third wife to the Hotel Waldhaus in Sils Maria, escaping the tourists invading Ticino after the Second World War. And from time to time he would descend on Zürich:

  Zürich, of course, is one of those words that has a different meaning for each person. For me it has meant for years something Asiatic. I have friends there who lived for many years in Siam, and at their house among a hundred memories of India, of the sea, and of distant places, I descended, welcomed by the smell of rice and curry, beamed at by a golden Siamese temple cabinet, observed by the still, bronze Buddha. To wander out from this exotic cave into the elegant modern world of music, exhibitions, and the theater, even to the cinema, was for several days once more a pure delight.32

  Hesse died in Montagnola in 1962 at the age of eighty-five. Readers in the 1960s saw his luminous work in a trippy light and regarded the old German journeyman-sage as a mentor. Unlike the free-loving communards of Monte Verità, he had survived both world wars.

  A.S. Byatt, in The Children’s Book (2009), is the latest writer to fall under the spell of the Monte Verità commune:

  They danced there. Rudolf Laban later led his chain of naked maenads celebrating sunrise by the lake, in the meadows. Lawrence and Frieda came there, Hermann Hesse and Isadora Duncan. The anarchist Eric Mühsam came and the psychoanalyst Otto Gross, whose father, a criminologist, wanted him locked up for lewdness and drugs. Everyone wore sandals, like pilgrims, like apostles, like ancient Greeks.33

  Heliotherapy beds at Monte Verità

  Byatt takes her Fabian characters, Major Cain and his daughter, up to the sun-kissed meadow:

  Major Cain had discovered that it was new, and austere, giving courses in sunbathing, mud-baths, water and a strictly vegetarian diet, with no eggs, milk or salt. … A cottage was rented on the mountain slope, looking out over a meadow; a manservant was engaged, with a pony-carriage, and a string of young women were interviewed as housekeeper-companions.34

  Daughter Florence is an unmarried mother-to-be. She ‘spends her days purifying herself with vegetable juice, and water, and lying in the sun in a linen gown, on a long, slatted daybed’. She meets a golden child, an angel, called, appropriately enough for an alchemist, Goldwasser, and quickly marries him. Ascona is just a way station, a refuge from the approaching Great War.

  The old heliotherapy beds, nude dancing and vegetarianism limped on into the 1920s, but impetus waned. Hoffmann and Oedenkoven emigrated to Brazil where they founded further utopias. The First World War swept away the imperial culture against which the communards had revolt
ed. Members of the Dada movement were frequent visitors to Monte Verità. A cast of political and artistic luminaries passed through Ascona: Lenin, Carl Jung, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee. But by 1920 it was a spent force.

  The elusive Baron Eduard von der Heydt in Ascona, 1930

  Baron Eduard von der Heydt, a German banker and art collector, bought Monte Verità in 1926. Long a patron of Berlin’s artistic circles, he had just separated from his wife Vera. (There is some evidence that the marriage was morganatic.) The Baron engaged architect Emil Fahrenkamp and began the construction of the present-day hotel, conceived as a worldlier utopia than the collection of villas and shacks that had housed the earlier radicals. The building, recently restored, is a striking piece of classic Bauhaus architecture, with pristine lines and aseptic interiors. Like so many historic buildings in Switzerland, it is a spa, conference centre and luxury hotel rolled into one.

  The Baron consorted with all and sundry. His wife was Jewish. Hanna Solf, later a leading anti-Nazi conspirator, visited in the 1920s. Prince Auwi, the Nazi-supporting son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, was the Baron’s friend. During World War II, Monte Verità housed Jewish refugee children, as it had housed refugees during the First World War and Russian revolutionaries dating back to the time of Bakunin in the 1870s.

  But what should we make of the elusive Baron? Was he gay? Was he simply a blithe spirit? Blithe spirits do not become bankers, losing and making fortunes twice over. In period photographs he wears white homespun shorts and T-shirt, curiously modern and unstructured, and carries a parasol over his deep tan. He looks like someone on dress-down Friday rather than one of the richest collectors of his day. He sits cross-legged like a teenager at a party, in the company of the great and the good between the wars.