A siren in winter, perhaps. The Baroness is one of those fascinating figures on the margins of writers’ lives. She was born in St Petersburg in 1856 and was rumoured to be the illegitimate daughter of Tsar Alexander II. Her birth certificate gives her parents’ names as Nicolas Alexandre and Maryam Meyer. Antoinetta was pretty and vivacious. Her piano teacher had been Franz Liszt. Two husbands quickly palled. Her third husband was the Anglo-Irish Lord Richard-Fleming Saint Leger, from Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire), apparently descended from Richard the Lionheart. They bought the two Brissago islands for 10,000 Swiss francs and the Baroness proceeded to import thousands of plants and turn the hideaway into a botanical paradise befitting the Mediterranean microclimate. Her other passion, like Circe’s, was for young men; husband number three soon abandoned her in 1897.
By the time Joyce pitched up in 1919, she was sixty-three and as flighty as ever, coming over the water to greet him standing up in her boat. The poet Rilke, fond of people’s castles as he was, had visited the Baroness the same year, so she had no shortage of scribbling admirers. She liked to make puppets and had hundreds of them on the island, which may indicate her psychological makeup.
Penniless in 1927, she was forced to sell her islands to the department store magnate Max Emden. He was German-Jewish and fed up with the retail business. (He was founder of the KaDeVe chain, still ringing the tills in Germany.) Emden is yet another maverick. On a good day he dressed in a kimono and did his yoga and meditation around the Roman baths he had built on the island. Curvaceous lovelies kept him company. There was nude water-skiing and slap and tickle among the guests. He was a department store Gatsby. Our Monte Verità art collector, Baron Eduard von der Heydt (more of a toga man), was an occasional poolside visitor. Emden died in 1940, after fifteen good years in a kimono. The Baroness outlived him, saw out two world wars as well as the Crimean War and the downfall of the Russian Empire, and died aged 92 in 1948 – still penniless, in an old people’s home in Intragna.
Joyce’s friend Frank Budgen in sailor suit
Like many Swiss stories, this one has a sting in the tail. In 2012 the grandson of Max Emden, a Chilean, claimed ownership of Claude Monet’s ‘Poppy Fields at Vétheuil’, valued at over €20 million. The Bührle Foundation in Zürich has the famous painting and is clear about its provenance. Max Emden’s only son fled Switzerland for Chile at the beginning of the war and the painting was apparently sold to finance his escape from the Nazis. The German government has not ruled in favour of restitution.
Other details of Joyce’s Swiss stay make their way into Ulysses. A visit to the Rhine falls near Schaffhausen found a faint echo in ‘Circe’. Joyce’s foray into am-dram, in setting up a troupe called the English Players, led to litigation with a functionary at the British consulate:
Up to rheumy Zürich town came an Irish man one day,
And as the place was rather dull he thought he’d give a play,
So that the German propagandists might be rightly riled,
But the bully British Philistine once more drove Oscar Wilde.13
Fritz Senn, the keeper of the flame at the James Joyce Foundation in Zürich, has uncovered numerous references to his city in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Zürich served as a refuge from the war and provided Joyce with an atmosphere, an urban vibe and a cacophony of friends who fuelled his masterpiece. When the Joyce family returned to Trieste in 1919, it was not for long. It had become a backwater. Paris was the happening place, and Zürich had whetted Joyce’s appetite for it.
Department store magnate Max Emden bought the Brissago Islands and took up yoga
One evening, driving back to Switzerland, I tuned into France Musique and immediately recognized the voice of Maria Jolas, resurrected from the Paris of 1979. But it couldn’t be, could it? She would have to be a ghost, pushing a hundred and ten years of age. It turned out, however, to be her musician daughter Betsy. The resemblance between their voices was uncanny.
Born in 1893 in Kentucky, Maria Jolas accompanied James Joyce’s pure tenor voice in the 1920s and 1930s, when her husband, Eugene Jolas, was publishing the Irish writer in the magazine transition. ‘Carry me along, Taddy, like you done through the toy fair!’ Joyce writes on the last page of Finnegans Wake. In her memoirs, Maria relates that it was her father, carrying her through the Jefferson County Fair in Louisville, Kentucky. Before the First World War she had seen Gustav Mahler conduct the New York Philharmonic and heard Caruso sing at the Met. In November 1913 she sailed to Bremen on the Imperator and drank hot bouillon on deck each morning of the ten-day voyage. In Berlin she studied singing and saw a revival of Frank Wedekind’s play Spring Awakening.14
It was this play that she gave me sixty-five years later in 1979, when she was well into her eighties. I was working as a surveillant at an international school in Paris, so perhaps she thought I had need of Wedekind’s scurrilous awakening. Maria had founded the first Bilingual School of Paris in Neuilly in 1932, which flourished until the Occupation. Usually around teatime I rose in the creaking lift to her apartment on rue de Rennes. I remember the sound of electric typing followed by her heavy tread on the parquet. She was protective of Joyce in his academic afterlife, but voluble nonetheless. A helmet of white hair, and the big-boned Kentucky frame, made her seem formidable. ‘I used to know another Padraic, but he spelled it with a c,’ she said, referring to the Irish poet Padraic Colum. She had been a militant dissenter to the US war in Vietnam, helping deserters who had drifted into Paris.15 She roped me in to do some typing for her. Once, after a glass of sherry, she broke into ‘The Lass of Aughrim’, one of Joyce’s favourites. She cited his reaction to the German soldiers in occupied Paris: ‘what would they have been like if they were fed?’
Joyce was almost blind in those last months of 1940. He and his family were on the run from yet another war and biding their time with Jolas near Vichy, where she soldiered on with the remnants of her school:
Then our students left little by little during the summer months. Little by little the anguished families were able to come to us – most of the time on bicycle – and before my departure from Vichy, on August 28, 1940, the last pupil was with his family, the last textbooks were put up in the attic, waiting until the school could open once more.16
The Swiss Federal Aliens’ Police rejected Joyce’s initial application for visas on the supposition that he and his family were Jews. The Swiss writer Jacques Mercanton put the authorities right on this point. Joyce himself privately declared that he ‘was not a Jew from Judea but an Aryan from Erin’.17 The mayor of Zürich, the rector of its university, the Swiss Society of Authors and other notables vouched for him. Cantonal authorities wanted a guarantee of 50,000 Swiss francs, later reduced to 20,000. The Joyce family eventually succeeded in gaining entry permits.
In December 1940 they came into Switzerland by way of Geneva, where Stephen Joyce, the writer’s eight-year-old grandson, had his bicycle impounded at the border because of inability to pay import duties.18 They spent the night of 14 December at the Richemonde Hotel, before moving on to Lausanne. Sean Lester, acting Secretary-General of the League of Nations and a Belfast man, had tea with the Joyce family on the Sunday afternoon, in the marble and ormolu salon of their hotel:
The famous Joyce is tall, slight, in the fifties, blue eyes and a good thatch of hair. No one would hesitate in looking at him to recognize his nationality and his accent as Dublin as when he left it over thirty years ago. His eyesight is very bad and he told me it had been saved some years ago for him by the famous Vogt of Zürich, who had also operated on de Valera [President of Ireland and statesman]. His son, seemingly in his late twenties, came in first. A fine, well-built fellow, with a peculiar hybrid accent in English. He told me he is a singer and has sung in Paris and New York.19
The Richemonde sits one block back from the more illustrious Hotel Beau Rivage on Geneva’s lakeshore. The Beau Rivage is where royalty stayed, where Empress Sisi of Austria-Hungary died from a madman’s stiletto, where Som
erset Maugham and other international spies kept their ears open. The Richemonde is equally glitzy: Charlie Chaplin, Sophia Loren and Michael Jackson found rooms with a view there. It’s a historic corner overlooking Brunswick Monument – a history not lost on James Joyce. As a boy he had lived on Dublin’s North Richmond Street. Great Brunswick Street was where he sang in the Antient Concert Rooms at the beginning of the century. The Joyce family might have felt they were once again at history’s mercy.
Finnegans Wake (1939), seventeen years in the writing, had received a puzzled reception the previous year. Needing two magnifying glasses to read and write, Joyce was addicted to Radio Éireann. Since 1920, he, Nora and their two children had been living in Paris, where the writer had achieved fame and squandered some fortune. Now Paris was occupied and they were on the move once more.
They were going to settle in Zürich, where they had some good friends. I said I thought it was an unusual place for him to choose and asked, what about Suisse Romande? His wife then intervened and said that Zürich had always been associated with certain crises in their life: they had rushed from Austria at the beginning of the last war and had lived in Zürich very comfortably; they had spent their honeymoon there; it was there that Joyce’s eyesight had been saved and now they were going back in another crisis. They liked the solid virtues of the people.20
It was those solid Swiss virtues that supported them as the world turned once more towards war. When they returned to Zürich in December 1940, it must have seemed like déjà vu. Not more bloody Swiss German, Nora might have thought – it was her fourth language. Friends met them at the Hauptbahnhof. Staying at the Hotel Pension Delphin on Muhlebachstrasse, Joyce wrote to the Mayor of Zürich to thank him:
The connection between me and your hospitable city extends over a period of nearly forty years and in these painful times I feel honoured that I should owe my presence here in large part to the personal guaranty of Zürich’s first citizen.21
The Joyce family celebrated Christmas with friends. He walked out in the snow in the afternoons with his grandson Stephen, to the confluence of the Sihl and the Limmat rivers, where today the spot has an inscription from Finnegans Wake: ‘Yssel that the limmat?’ and ‘legging a jig or so on the sihl’.
On a grey Saturday in April I arrange to meet Paul Doolan for lunch at the Kronenhalle, where Joyce ate his last dinner. The bistro has priceless art on the walls – we’re seated under a Chagall – and has been feeding artists from Joyce to Picasso to Dürrenmatt and Frisch for over a century. Paul is an old friend from my Japan days in the 1990s, and now teaches history at Zürich International School. When I first met him and his wife Esther they were footloose and fancy free, but since then three daughters have come along. We’re old Leftie intellectuals and have weathered what Orwell calls ‘the smelly little orthodoxies contending for our souls’. Paul conducts tours around the city’s nooks and crannies and I want him to walk me around some of Joyce’s old haunts.
We order, and talk books, as we usually do, and whine about our respective schools, their new buzzwords (‘protocols’ in his, ‘concepts’ in mine) and office politics. We teach in vivariums of privilege and try to put some polish on the wealthy. And we endure: two middle-aged humanists skulking along the edges of a managerial culture. Around a million Saturday lunch tables a similar tone must sound; only the details differ. Madame Meyer comes over to say hello and to see if everything is OK and to crack a joke about Scotland.
Frank Budgen in birthday suit for this August Suter statue near Zürich’s Uraniabrücke
After lunch we cross the street to check on a couple of Joyce’s former hangouts. Paul’s daughter sometimes has a pricey brunch in the Terrasse Café. He tells me she’s up in the University Library revising for her Baccalaureate exams – it’s where Joyce researched Ulysses – and then a minute later there she is, a trilingual eighteen-year-old in brief sunshine, out for coffee with her friends. The Pfauen has shut – it used to have a fine hanging sign – but the Schauspielhaus right next door, where Brecht’s Mother Courage got its premiere, is still packing them in. One of Joyce’s old apartments has gone, Paul tells me, bulldozed by the developers.
We cross under the Uraniabrücke and run into one of Paul’s philosophy students, sitting cross-legged on a wall and reading Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. We gaze up at Frank Budgen, Joyce’s model friend, in the stony buff. Imagine having to go past yourself like that every day? I say. Finally we check the dates on the plaque in front of Lenin’s old apartment and I head off on my own down to the confluence of the Limmat and the Sihl rivers, where Joyce liked to walk.
Together with Thomas Mann and Vladimir Nabokov, Joyce is one of the twentieth century’s literary greats. All three were marked by history. As Joyce fled Vichy France for Zürich, Nabokov boarded the boat for America and Mann took refuge in California. They all eventually found peace and quiet to write in Switzerland, sometimes engaging but more often disengaging from the conflicts that surrounded them. Nabokov’s final resting place is at Clarens above Lac Léman. Mann is buried at Kilchberg across the lake from Joyce, who died on 13 January 1941, age 59. The great modernist is buried next to Nora in Zürich’s Fluntern Cemetery, within a lion’s roar of the zoo.
The American century that followed the First World War ushered in a brasher class of writer. Kitted out to ski and party, flush with dollars, monolingual, Hemingway and Fitzgerald brought a breath of victory to Switzerland’s valleys. Spilling over from the Roaring Twenties, these writers sought hot water, room service and clean martinis in a string of ski stations and lakeside hideaways. They gave Switzerland a run with their money.
7
LOONY BINS AND FINISHING SCHOOLS
Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the Chalet School girls on the slippery slopes
Four climbers descend the Wildstrubel in Gstaad the hard way, 1912
Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
A magnum of Roederer champagne and three flutes sat on the tray, when the dirndl-wrapped waitress brought my eleven o’clock coffee in the Hermitage Hotel in Schönreide. Leaning over, she kept the whole thing in expert balance. A few minutes later I heard a discreet pop from the terrace and a rich murmur of voices.
I was escaping for a few hours from ski camp. After breakfast, the camp cook, Armand, had settled in at the picture window of the chalet cafeteria and we chatted in a mixture of French and English. Gstaad sat snug in the valley among snowfields. The sun was glancing off the peaks of Les Diablerets, turning them a shiny gold. Armand had just signed up for a master’s degree in French literature at the Sorbonne and was phenomenally well read. His favourite writer was Proust.
Earlier in the season he had cooked for a school group from Azerbaijan. ‘The teachers were afraid of them,’ he said. ‘The kids did what they liked. They would pick at the food and then walk down to Schönreide and order a sixty-franc steak. They asked me, these thirteen year-olds, “Where’s the whorehouse?” And they were dead serious.’
We laughed at the follies of new money, a perennial subject among international teachers. I thought of Nabokov’s returned Swiss governesses on the benches of Lausanne: the Russian Revolution had reduced their circumstances.
One is always at home in one’s past, which partly explains those pathetic ladies’ posthumous love for another country, which they never had really known and in which none of them had been very content.1
We are all governesses in reduced circumstances in Gstaad. International teachers have their seasoned anecdotes: minor royalty, nouveau riche Russians, corporate brats we’ve taught and chaperoned towards a college education in the Anglosphere. In that day’s Financial Times the headmaster of King’s College, Wimbledon, was lamenting that British private schools are becoming ‘finishing schools for the children of oligarchs … facilities have never been so glitzy, fees have never been so high, results have never been so consistent’.2
The beau monde at the Palace Hotel in Gstaad, 1928
Armand noticed that I was reading Tender Is the Night (1934) and pointed me in the direction of the Palace Hotel in Gstaad, where Hemingway and Fitzgerald drank in the 1920s. They were the chroniclers of the low, dishonest decades between the wars, the first writers to draw attention to Gstaad as a playground for wealthy foreigners. Hemingway’s lovers in A Farewell to Arms (1929) cosy up in a chalet down the valley from Gstaad, escaping from the horrors of the First World War. Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night presents a portrait of the golden couple coming undone in Swiss ski stations and sanatoria. Both books are morality tales conceived and played out on the slippery slopes.
Beside these giants of twentieth-century literature, Elinor Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School series for girls might seem minor. But the Chalet School books, published between 1925 and 1970, formed early a certain notion of Alpine luxury – Kaffee und Kuchen, galumphing girls with crushes on handsome ski instructors and mistresses of French alike. Muriel Spark’s more recent Finishing School (2004) reflects the ethos of exclusivity and private education in the Swiss Alps that Fitzgerald’s generation began. Sanatoria, wellness centres, finishing schools: gilded service is still there in Gstaad, as are the galumphing girls and the filthy rich. It helps to have the school, the bank account, the loony bin and the ski slope all in the same valley.
It was Ernest Hemingway who first immortalised this snow country in A Farewell to Arms. He saw Switzerland as a sanctuary from the horrors of the First World War and wrote parts of the novel in Les Avents, in the Pension de la Fôret de Chamby and in the Posthotel Rössli in Gstaad. Unlike Byron, Hemingway wasn’t a scratcher of other people’s woodwork, so there’s not much trace of the burly American in the valley today.
The Gilded Chalet Page 13