Hemingway was an ambulance driver for the Red Cross on the Italian front at the close of the war. Wounded, shipped home, he was back covering the International Peace Conference in Lausanne in 1922 for the Toronto Star. In A Moveable Feast (1964) he recalls those halcyon post-war days with his first wife Hadley:
‘Do you remember I brought some wine from Aigle home to the chalet? They sold it to us at the inn. They said it should go with the trout. We brought it wrapped in copies of La Gazette de Lucerne, I think.’ … ‘They were such wonderful trout, Tatie, and we drank the Sion wine and ate out on the porch with the mountain-side dropping off below and we could look across the lake and see the Dent du Midi with the snow half down it and the trees at the mouth of the Rhône where it flowed into the lake.’3
Henry the ambulance driver and Catherine the nurse in A Farewell to Arms are on the run from the war and decide to sneak across the Italian border into Switzerland. Hemingway presents neutral Switzerland as a kind of escapist paradise. They agree to meet at Stresa on Lago Maggiore, before attempting to cross the lake at night. Hemingway couldn’t have chosen a more romantic spot, with grand hotels, perfect martinis and the Borromean Islands in the offing:
I took a good room. It was very big and light and looked out on the lake. The clouds were down over the lake but it would be beautiful with the sunlight. I was expecting my wife, I said. There was a big double bed, a letto matrimoniale with a satin coverlet. The hotel was very luxurious. I went down the long halls, down the wide stairs, through the rooms to the bar. I knew the barman and sat on a high stool and ate salted almonds and potato chips. The martini felt cool and clean.4
Military police are poised to arrest him for desertion. The barman has a rowboat, sandwiches and a bottle of brandy. The crossing is thirty-five kilometres with the wind behind them.
Hemingway’s Switzerland is a land of plenty, as it will be for Patricia Highsmith following the Second World War. ‘They have wonderful rolls and butter and jam in Switzerland,’ says Henry. Landing at Brissago on the border, the lovers head for breakfast, delighted at their escape ‘out of that bloody place’. Immigration officers send them to Locarno for temporary visas and they spend the night in the Hotel Metropole. Hemingway’s Americans always seem to find the best hotels, the best martinis and to land on their feet. But it is a temporary reprieve.
On the slopes above Montreux, Henry and Catherine’s war takes a turn into chalet paradise:
There was an island with two trees on the lake and the trees looked like the double sails of a fishing-boat. The mountains were sharp and steep on the other side of the lake and down at the end of the lake was the plain of the Rhone valley flat between the two ranges of mountains; and up the valley where the mountains cut it off was the Dent du Midi.5
Byron’s prisoner of Chillon looks out on the same island, longing for freedom. Hemingway paints an idyllic picture. The lovers play cards and war seems as far away as ‘the football games of someone else’s college’. They walk down into Montreux through the terraced vineyards of Clarens, where Rousseau’s lovers had disported themselves. Henry drinks ‘dark Munich beer’ and reads the papers while Catherine has her hair done. They take the electric train back up to their chalet.
A cold wind was coming down the Rhone Valley. There were lights in the shop windows and we climbed the steep stone stairway to the upper street, then up another stairs to the station. The electric train was there waiting, all lights on.6
Henry grows a backwoods beard. Catherine’s pregnancy begins to show. Hemingway seizes the Swiss landscape with characteristic simplicity:
There was an inn in the trees at the Bains de l’Alliaz where the woodcutters stopped to drink, and we stayed inside warmed by the stove and drank hot red wine with spices and lemon in it. They called it glühwein and it was a good thing to warm you and to celebrate with. The inn was dark and smoky inside and afterwards when you went out the cold air came sharply into your lungs and numbed the edge of your nose as you inhaled. We looked back at the inn with light coming from the windows and the woodcutters’ horses stamping and jerking their heads outside to keep warm. There was frost on the hairs of their muzzles and their breathing made plumes of frost in the air.7
Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald sketched in 1921–22
Close to Catherine’s lying-in, they descend to Lausanne to be near the hospital. ‘On the days of false spring’, Hemingway brings a swift end to this edenic romance. Catherine gives birth to a stillborn boy. The author very lightly connects the larger picture of war and this tragedy in Switzerland: ‘Still there would not be all this dying to go through.’ Then Catherine too dies and our deserter walks back to his hotel in Lausanne through the rain. The brief Swiss idyll is over.
For F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, Switzerland was also a tragic ending. Fitzgerald famously wrote: ‘Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.’8 In Tender Is the Night, Dick Diver first encounters Zürich as a twenty-six-year-old psychiatry student in 1917. He has had a good war as an Oxford Rhodes Scholar; like Bill Clinton during a later conflict. ‘Even in this sanctuary he did not escape lightly … the war didn’t touch him at all.’ Diver’s Switzerland is set apart, a suite of high-end clinics indistinguishable from well-heeled resorts, but peopled by profiteers. The pre-war world of Thomas Mann’s Davos has been wrestled into the American twentieth century:
Switzerland was an island, washed on one side by the waves of thunder around Gorizia and on another by the cataracts around the Somme and the Aisne. … the men who whispered in the little cafés of Berne and Geneva were as likely to be diamond salesmen or commercial travellers. However, no one had missed the long trains of blinded or one-legged men, or dying trunks, that crossed each other between the bright lakes of Constance and Neuchâtel. In the bier-halls and shop-windows were bright posters presenting the Swiss defending their frontiers in 1914.9
Those ‘diamond salesmen or commercial travellers’ are making a wartime killing of their own, and reappear in the work of Swiss detective writer Friedrich Glauser. Diver too is on the make. He spends two years at Dohmer’s clinic on the Zürichsee, thriving on the new therapy of psychoanalysis and on high fees: ‘a rich person’s clinic – we don’t use the word nonsense’.10 In finishing school or health resort there is no such thing as failure, just the higher nonsense, the gobbledegook of new-age psychiatry or anything-goes pedagogy.
The car had followed the shore of the Zürichsee into a fertile region of pasture farms and low hills, steepled with chalets. The sun swam out into a blue sea of sky and suddenly it was a Swiss valley at its best – pleasant sounds and murmurs and a good fresh smell of health and cheer. … the first modern clinic for mental illness; at a casual glance no layman would recognise it as a refuge for the broken, the incomplete, the menacing, of this world.11
When Zelda Sayre met Scott Fitzgerald at a Montgomery country club dance, she was a vivacious, ill-educated flirt from a family with a history of mental illness and suicide. High maintenance, we might say. It was 1918, the war just over. A decade of parties, drugs and drink, a daughter, three abortions and infidelities ensued. Fitzgerald was no cultural ambassador. Pugilistic, alcoholic, with taxicab French, the best he could rise to was ‘Très bien, you son of a bitch!’ Their Europe didn’t go much beyond hotels, nightclubs, American-style bars and raked Riviera beaches catering to wealthy expatriates – upper-crust young people, sophisticates and wannabes.12 We could draw a straight line between Fitzgerald’s Europe and the later films of Woody Allen. Switzerland is where they congregated for the new winter sports of skiing and sledding; the Princeton golden boy always liked to follow the money.
Fitzgerald presents psychoanalysis and mental illness as lucrative, as Thomas Mann did for tuberculosis. Rich children get educated, get treated for tuberculosis and madness far from state schools and public wards, in the mountain valleys of Swiss exclusivity. Fitzgerald mentions all the right places, like high school seniors dropping college
names: Johns Hopkins, Interlaken, Montreux, Geneva, the Palace Hotel in Zürich where ‘a magnificent Rolls curved into the half-moon entrance’. These are the gilded stations of the sickbay.
Cycling in Montreux, Dick Diver notices the world of wealthy leisure picking up again after the war:
He was conscious of the groups of English, emergent after four years and walking with detective-story suspicion in their eyes, as though they were about to be assaulted in this questionable country by German train-bands. There were building and awakening everywhere on this mound of debris formed by a mountain torrent. At Berne and at Lausanne on the way south, Dick had been eagerly asked if there would be Americans this year.13
Fitzgerald pays homage to the scenic beauty, to the echoing acoustics of the Grand Hotel in Caux, now the Swiss Hotel Management School. Here Doctor Diver first kisses his patient Nicole, whom he eventually marries:
‘My God,’ he gasped, ‘you’re fun to kiss.’
… Two thousand feet below she saw the necklace and bracelets of lights that were Montreux and Vevey, beyond them a dim pendant of Lausanne.14
Doctor and patient converge on Gstaad for the Christmas holidays, where the beautiful people are. Hemingway’s love nest in 1927 with his new partner, the fashion journalist and trust fund babe Pauline Pfeiffer, had been in the humbler Posthotel Rössli on the village street. Fitzgerald’s is the newer and more luxurious Palace Hotel. His characters descend to slum it in the ‘old-fashioned Swiss tap-room, wooden and resounding, a room of clocks, kegs, steins, and antlers’. Fitzgerald’s picture of expatriate life in Gstaad, private schools and all, holds true a century later:
The great hall, its floor pockmarked by two decades of hobnails, was cleared for the tea dance, and four-score young Americans, domiciled in schools near Gstaad, bounced about to the frolic of ‘Don’t Bring Lulu,’ or exploded violently with the first percussions of the Charleston. It was a colony of the young, simple, and expensive.15
The ‘schools near Gstaad’ are still there: Institute Le Rosey, The John F. Kennedy International School and Leysin American School. Like Stevenson and Conan Doyle before them, Fitzgerald and Hemingway relate the delights of the new sports of skiing and sledding. Fitzgerald describes the upper crust making use of people with a ‘cold rich insolence’. Dick and Nicole make their way by sled to Saanen along the valley: ‘They poured into the municipal dance, crowded with cow herders, hotel servants, shop-keepers, ski teachers, guides, tourists, peasants.’ Here Dick realises that being tethered to Nicole is a merger and acquisition by her wealthy family: they get two – caregiver and husband – for the price of one. Like Swiss finishing schools and health resorts, his ethics are inextricably tied to money. ‘We own you, and you’ll admit it sooner or later. It is absurd to keep up the pretence of independence.’16 Later, he realises he ‘had been swallowed up like a gigolo’.
Winter campus of Le Rosey International School, Gstaad, early 1900s
Dick marries flighty Nicole and becomes a partner in a sanatorium, underwritten by his wife’s family fortune. He enters the world of Swiss psychoanalysis: fashionable, tentative, pricey, full of ergotherapy (hot baths and exercise), hydrotherapy, woodwork and bookbinding. ‘Articulate among them would be the great Jung, bland, super-vigorous, on his rounds between the forests of anthropology and the neuroses of school-boys.’17 This spa world survives to this day in the valleys and on the slopes around Gstaad: hot pools and Jacuzzis cling to the snow-covered mountainside, offering a good Swedish thrashing and tickling of the chakras. Alpine health resorts provide the smells and bells of religiosity that a later Swiss writer, Peter Stamm, will gently satirise as ersatz spirituality. Hot pools, lava stones, yoga camps and personal trainers – all fleecing pilgrims at a price – have taken the place of the grottoes, monasteries and hermitages of Christianity.
But Nicole doesn’t get well, and they shift from clinic to clinic. In 1929 Zelda entered the Valmont Clinic above Montreux. Its website mentions Rainer Maria Rilke and the Belgian royal family as patients – you don’t get more neurasthenic than that. Zelda was transferred to Les Rives de Prangins on Lake Geneva. These were the luxury loony bins for which Switzerland was famous, combining the facilities of country club and health resort. Zelda began her long slide into madness. Dr Oscar Forel (his father Dr Auguste Forel is on the Swiss thousand franc note) treated both Lucia Joyce and Zelda Fitzgerald. He urged James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald to give up alcohol, as a contributing factor to mental illness – a tall order, but to no avail.
The grounds were spacious, the gardens immaculately tended; and it had farms, tennis courts and seven private villas for super-rich patients. ‘With the addition of a caddy house,’ as Fitzgerald wrote of Dick Diver’s clinic in Tender Is the Night, ‘it might well have been a country club.’ The clientele was international, and many of the patients came from families of distinguished ancestry and great wealth. The cost of treatment at Prangins, during the first year of the Depression, was an astronomical $1,000 a month.18
By 1929 Fitzgerald could command $4,000 a story from the Saturday Evening Post.19 In good times Zelda’s extravagance had drawn on Scott’s success. Now, in bad times, it did too. His portrait of the Hôtel des Trois Mondes in Lausanne recognises Switzerland as a refuge of sinners, not always repentant:
throughout this hotel there were many chambers wherein rich ruins, fugitives from justice, claimants to the thrones of mediatised principalities, lived on the derivatives of opium or barbitol, listening eternally as to an inescapable radio, to the coarse melodies of old sins. This corner of Europe does not so much draw people as accept them without inconvenient questions. Routes cross here – people bound for private sanatoriums or tuberculosis resorts in the mountains, people who are no longer persona grata in France or Italy.20
Fitzgerald haunted the lake towns in the manner of T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land. In 1922 Eliot had completed the first draft of his magisterial poem at Lausanne, following his own treatment for nervous disorders. Fitzgerald drank and philandered. He realised he had come to a bad end in his brush with the rich and careless. His marriage to Zelda was irrevocably cracked and she spent the rest of her life in various sanatoria. In 1948 she burned to death in an institution called Highland, in Asheville, North Carolina, in a room whose doors and windows were chained and padlocked. The Roaring Twenties were long over.
After my coffee I set out on the downhill path to Gstaad. The sky was baby blue and the mountains glittery. Trickles of melt water caught the sun, but I had good boots and the way was signposted. Just past the train station at Schönreide sits the winter campus of Le Rosey, the world’s most expensive school – fees in excess of £90,000. Every winter it moves from Rolle on Lake Geneva (state-of-the-art concert hall inaugurated by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra) to the slopes above Gstaad.
International schools in Switzerland have their roots in the nineteenth-century Grand Tour. Parents parked their kids in Geneva and around the lake while they crossed the Simplon to Italy. The Swiss had a reputation as stolidly dependable pedagogues. You could entrust your daughter to them and open up a trust fund at the same time. Henry James was the first to draw on his roving European childhood for fictional material. Polyglot tutors, governesses, chaperones and pale young men with second-class degrees, their sailor-suited charges in tow, became bit-part characters of the nineteenth-century novel. They were hired wherever the international affluent gathered, like migratory birds around a body of water:
Clean air and beautiful scenery provided an invigorating environment; the multilingual culture gave a sense of the cosmopolitan; and the country’s renowned stability and security reassured anxious parents. Social skills were often honed alongside improving deportment or developing artistic talents. But somewhere along the way, the dream faded. By the 1960s, gender equality, women’s liberation and an emphasis on higher education for all prompted a decline.21
The Chalet School series, begun in 1925 and running to fifty-nine titles, was wher
e most girls fantasised their way to the Alps. The series remains in print and has a growing fan following. Initially set in the Austrian Tyrol, the books needed to keep one step ahead of wartime German annexation. In The Chalet School in Exile (1940), Brent-Dyer shows she is on the side of the angels, tackling the Anschluss and the baiting of Herr Goldmann head-on:
Elinor Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School series ran to fifty-nine titles
an old man with a long, grey beard, plainly running for his life. A shower of stones, rotten fruit and other missiles followed him. Stark terror was in his face, and already he was failing to outdistance his pursuers.
… ‘He’s a Jew! Jews have no right to live!’ declared Hans Bocher sullenly. ‘Give place, Fräulein Bethany, and hand over the old Jew to us! Better take care, or you’ll be in trouble for this. Let him go! We’ll see to him!’22
From the Tyrol the school moved to Guernsey. When the Nazis occupied the island, the series settled in Hereford and then finally in Switzerland – The Chalet School in Oberland (1952). This search for safe haven, the last good place, mirrors not only Switzerland’s perceived role throughout two world wars, but also Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s trajectory. When the going gets tough, there’s always Switzerland. The popularity of the Chalet School series with generations of girls (and their brothers!) formed a Switzerland of the mind.
Elinor had long wanted to move the School back to Austria, but the political situation there in the 1950s forbade such a move, so she did the next best thing and moved it to Switzerland … The exact location is subject to much debate, but it seems likely that it is somewhere near Wengen in the Bernese Oberland.23
Brent-Dyer (1894–1969) was an internationalist and pacifist who came from a broken family and a terraced house in South Shields in the north of England. Her best friend in childhood died of tuberculosis. The Chalet School is coupled with a sanatorium further up the mountain where ‘mostly English ladies come to die of TB’. The proximity of school and sanatorium, children in one and parents in the other, is a feature of the series whether set in the Tyrol, Hereford or Switzerland. In the Chalet School books, torrents are always ‘raging’, laughter is ‘hysterical’, girls read ‘avidly’ and are fluent in at least three languages. Brent-Dyer is credited with inventing the expression ‘smashing!’ The three places you could graduate to after the Chalet School were the Sorbonne, Oxford or the Kensington School of Needlework.24
The Gilded Chalet Page 14