The Swiss well knew that their country was the scene of all manner of intrigues; agents of the secret service, spies, revolutionaries and agitators infested the hotels of the principal towns and, jealous of their neutrality, they were determined to prevent conduct that might embroil them with any of the belligerent powers.7
Swiss concern to keep the peace among belligerent powers runs through the twentieth century’s wars and into the conflict resolution of the twenty-first century. ‘Talks in Geneva’ can be part of a century-long conversation. Towns around the lake – Geneva, Lausanne, Évian – all have hosted talks in their day. Maugham, like Conrad, manages to give Geneva a cloak-and-dagger charm:
At that time Geneva was a hot-bed of intrigue and its home was the hotel at which Ashenden was staying. There were Frenchmen there, Italians and Russians, Turks, Rumanians, Greeks and Egyptians. Some had fled their country, some doubtless represented it.8
The hotel in question was the Beau Rivage, where Charles II, Duke of Brunswick, died in 1873. He bequeathed his considerable fortune to the city on the proviso that it bury him in an ostentatious tomb – Brunswick Monument in a triangular park right next to the hotel. Empress Sisi was stabbed by an anarchist after leaving the Beau Rivage, so the hotel had complex royal, diplomatic and anarchist associations by the time Willy Maugham entered the lobby. The code name Maugham gives Ashenden, ‘Somerville’, was one the author used himself. Ashenden ferrying back and forth across the lake corresponds to Maugham’s routine:
He took a room in the Hotel Beau Rivage in Geneva and filed his weekly reports by taking the ferry across the lake to the French side. Maugham was back in London early in the New Year to see Caroline open in the West End, and then in March, he resumed his duties in Switzerland, accompanied by his newly divorced mistress, Syrie Wellcom.9
Ashenden is tainted with English snobbery, as was Maugham himself. Two Egyptian princesses are ‘dressed with a rich loudness which suggested the Fish-market at Cairo rather than the Rue de la Paix’. A count is ‘of great family and indeed related to the Hohenzollerns’. The Beau Rivage becomes the drawing room of the world in the manner of a Henry James novel. Ashenden parcels out the day like the gentleman spy he is, confident of Britain’s place in the world and himself as a defender of it.
W. Somerset Maugham’s agent Ashenden, spying for king and country
He saw his spies at stated intervals and paid them their wages; when he could get hold of a new one he engaged him, gave him his instructions and sent him off to Germany; he waited for the information that came through and dispatched it; he went into France once a week to confer with his colleague over the frontier and to receive his orders from London; he visited the market-place on market day to get any message the old butter-woman had brought him from the other side of the lake; he kept his eyes and ears open.10
Ashenden’s runner in London is called R., abbreviated in the manner of later spy novels. The further away from cosmopolitan London they are, the more exotic the characters become. Chandra Lal is an Indian nationalist, a lawyer taking advantage of wartime to advance his country’s independence. Maugham describes him as ‘a dangerous agitator’ and R. calls him ‘a greasy little nigger’. ‘Little’ is an adjective much used by Maugham (himself a bit on the short side) when it comes to foreigners. Lal takes up with a gold-digging dancer called Giulia Lazzari in the ‘Tingle-tangle’ music halls of Berlin. Lazzari appears to be based on Mata Hari, real name Margaretha Zelle, a Dutch dancer turned German spy who performed in her jewellery and not much else. Ashenden uses Lazzari as a honey pot to trap Lal in Lausanne.
Maugham has an eye for the trains, ferries and lakeshore landscapes of Switzerland, all observed from a first-class carriage. Here and there the style rises above that of the shilling-shocker to a kind of Edwardian grace:
Ashenden sat down on the chair in front of the dressing-table and looked idly at the odds and ends that littered it. The toilet things were cheap and tawdry and none too clean. There were little shabby pots of rouge and cold-cream and little bottles of black for the eyebrows and eyelashes. The hairpins were horrid and greasy. The room was untidy and the air was heavy with the smell of cheap scent.11
Maugham’s sympathetic movement between female demi-monde and male romance, his understanding of the ticky-tacky theatre world, comes from deep within himself. As a closeted homosexual he toyed with actresses just as the actresses played their paramours. The West End man about town was really a closet within a closet in a long line of homosexual double agents.
Ashenden’s attempt to snag Chandra Lal is foiled by prussic acid in the Hotel Gibbons in Lausanne. Indian independence will have to wait for another war. Our heartless spy moves on to cross-border espionage in Basel.
Gustav, who lived at Basel, represented a Swiss firm with branches at Frankfurt, Mannheim and Cologne, and by virtue of his business was able to go in and out of Germany without risk. He travelled up and down the Rhine, and gathered material about the movement of troops, the manufacture of munitions … His frequent letters to his wife hid an ingenious code and the moment she received them in Basel she sent them to Ashenden in Geneva.12
R. in London gets a feeling that ‘some hanky-panky was going on’ and sends Ashenden to investigate. Gustav’s cross-border spying is curtailed by the war and he has invented information to keep the cash flowing. Maugham sketches in the three-corner world of Basel: the station, the trams, clerks and tradespeople. ‘He knew that both the Germans and the Swiss guarded the frontier with severity.’ Gustav is milking the firm. Ashenden leverages his betrayal by extracting information about another double agent called Grantley Caypor, an Englishman living in Lucerne. Maugham’s first assignment as a spy provided the real-life betrayal for this story:
Maugham made his way to Lucerne where his first assignment was to contact an English operative who had a German wife. The man was suspected of being a double agent who was actually working for the Germans. Maugham not only made contact with this agent, but also convinced him to go to France, where he was seized and shot as a spy.13
Ashenden evokes the sights of Lucerne – stone lion, covered bridge, the lake looking ‘just as tawdry and unreal as it looked on the picture-postcards’. He recalls an earlier visit as a child. Maugham’s style deepens, coming closer to that of le Carré half a century later. Both writers return to Switzerland as a wellspring, where they first gazed at their own duplicity:
Now, in wartime, Lucerne was as deserted as it must have been before the world at large discovered that Switzerland was the playground of Europe. Most of the hotels were closed, the streets were empty, the rowing boats for hire rocked idly at the water’s edge and there was none to take them, and in the avenues by the lake the only persons to be seen were serious Swiss taking their neutrality, like a dachshund, for a walk with them.14
Writers as different as Conrad, Maugham, Hemingway and le Carré have attempted to capture Switzerland as a still centre in a changing world. Smug, self-satisfied, prosaic are the words most often deployed. A century of spies slip in and out of hotel rooms in Swiss cities, dining alone, observing guests and inhabitants with professional equanimity.
In Lucerne, Ashenden draws out the German wife of English double agent Grantley Caypor. She speaks with a ‘guttural’ accent and plays Debussy disdainfully. She views the Swiss with ‘Teutonic superiority’, deploring the accent and maligning their allegiance: ‘after all these Swiss are absolutely pro-German’. Washing her bull terrier’s ears, she compares it to ‘a nasty little Swiss schoolboy’.
This portrait of Frau Caypor and her exiled Englishman strikes me as a mischievous dig at D.H. Lawrence and his German wife Frieda, née von Richthofen. Married at the beginning of the war, the Lawrences spent much of it under suspicion of spying. The couple eventually left Cornwall under the Defense of the Realm Act. They quit Britain definitively and met Maugham for the first time in Mexico in 1924. The two writers were antipathetic: two radically different Englishmen, brought up poles apar
t. Lawrence thought Maugham ‘a bit rancid’ and ‘sehr unsympatisch’.15 Reviewing Ashenden, Lawrence found the stories as rancid as their author.
Caypor pays ‘the penalty of his crime’. His wife realises the full extent of her abandonment. The bull terrier ‘threw back his head and gave a long, long melancholy howl’. The real-life Caypor was shot for treason. There was an unflinching cruelty in Maugham, which emerges in these Swiss spy stories.
The thriller tradition comes alive in the works of Swiss writers as well. Friedrich Glauser (1896–1938) is the daddy of Swiss Krimis, as they’re known. The German-speaking world’s premier crime fiction prize – the Glauser Prize – is named after him. He wrote a quintet of noir novels in the 1930s and died aged forty-two, committing suicide two days before his own wedding. Glauser is one of a few Swiss crime writers to have crossed over into English. The genre has yet to see the kind of mass appeal that Scandinavian noir has attained, but conditions are ripe for a Swiss takeover: wealthy façade and criminal underbelly has proven a winning formula.
Glauser led a turbulent life. An opium and morphine addict, he spent long periods in psychiatric clinics and a couple of years in prison. He cultivated connections with the Dadaists in Zürich and spent time in the Foreign Legion. His loony-bins are much more sinister than Fitzgerald’s gilded palaces. Fitzgerald had a taxi waiting; Glauser was confined for the duration.
His superiors have sidelined Chief Inspector Studer of Bern city police (as they say in Thailand, ‘transferred to an inactive post’) because ‘that business with the bank had cost him his job and he had had to start again from the bottom as a plain detective’.16 Sergeant Studer is fond of Brissago cigars and the Bern dialect. With Glauser we are very much on the low rungs of society, looking up. His Switzerland, like Dürrenmatt’s – a writer he influenced – is a country of shady influence, tight-knit communities, run like clockwork. It was from Glauser’s In Matto’s Realm (1936) that Dürrenmatt borrowed the conceit of a mental hospital as a country in microcosm.
Randlingen – ‘Edgeville’ in Swiss dialect – Psychiatric Clinic is a gothic world unto itself, and the reader doesn’t leave it until Studer has solved its crimes:
Friedrich Glauser, the father of the Krimis, in 1931
A red-brick building, U-shaped as far as Studer could tell, with lots of towers and turrets. Surrounded by pine trees, lots of dark pine trees. It disappeared for a moment, then reappeared; there was the main entrance and the rounded steps leading up to the door.17
Matto of the title is the spirit of madness. The clinic director has been murdered and Dr Laduner is in charge. Laduner is fond of occupational therapy, brightening up the wards and psychoanalysis. It’s the time of the first flush of what Joyce in Finnegans Wake called ‘The Swiss Tweedledum, who is not to be confused with the Viennese Tweedledee.’ Dr Laduner represents the correctional impulse in Swiss life – how to tidy up the mess. In his more extreme moments he seems to anticipate the rise of the Nazi era.
The military march faded out and a foreign voice filled the room. It was an urgent voice, but its urgency was unpleasant. … foreign states dare to accuse me of breaking a treaty. When I seized power this land lay desolate, ravaged, sick … I have made it great, I have made others respect it.18
Dr Laduner is listening to Hitler vaunting his achievements on the radio. Glauser did not live to see the madness of the Second World War. His salutary picture of Swiss poverty between the wars is a reminder of the Left-leaning 1930s.
In Matto’s Realm (1936), Glauser’s noir masterwork
You can’t do much on eighty rappen an hour, but he led an orderly life at first, his wife too. Three children. Not enough money. The man went out drinking, the woman took in washing. Two more children. Rotgut schnapps is cheapest, twenty rappen a glass – you can’t expect a man like that to drink blanc de Vaud at five francs a bottle, can you?19
Glauser knew his psychoanalysis as a patient-victim. His characters are institutionalised, having fallen through the net of sane Swiss society. Glauser’s prose has the hectic quality of Dostoyevsky or Gogol. Characters rush along corridors in the dark, into wards, cellars, dayrooms, attics. Their institutional life reeks with the smell of refectory meals, loneliness and pipe smoke. At one point Studer interrupts an analysis session:
They cured them by exploring their dreams and all kinds of obscene stuff came out. Studer’s friend Münch, a lawyer, had a book about the method. There were all sorts of things in it you wouldn’t even talk about on an evening out with the boys – and what was said then was not for sensitive ears … So that was analysis … The real name was different, though, there was another word that went with it … psychoanalysis, that was it! Psychoanalysis, if they insisted, every profession had its own jargon. In criminology they talked of poroscopy, and no outsider had any idea what it meant – and in Witzwil Labour Camp they called the warders ‘screws’. That’s the way it was, every profession had its own jargon, and psychologists talked of schizophrenia, psychopathy, anxiety neurosis and psycho … psycho … psychoanalysis.20
Twenty years after phrenology had burned itself out as pseudo-science, and seventy-five years before attention deficit disorder, dyslexia, dyspraxia, massaging the amygdala and Ritalin, Glauser knew from experience how each new generation invents its professional jargon to give a cloak of respectability to the truth.
His correctional facilities, reformatories, clinics and labour camps are ‘like a huge spider stretching its web out over all the land around, and the inmates’ nearest and dearest were caught in its threads, wriggling but unable to free themselves’.21 He had reason to see Switzerland as a gilded cage, an image that runs through twentieth-century Swiss literature from Glauser to Dürrenmatt to Zorn.
Glauser’s The Spoke (1937) also makes use of a spider web, this time describing how international finance enmeshes Switzerland: ‘Its threads run from the big lake in the east to the other in the west, shimmering in the sun.’22 The lake in the east is Lake Constance, where Studer is investigating a hotel murder. There are hidden doors, back staircases, spiked martinis and a clod-hopping detective. The murder weapon is a sharpened bicycle spoke. Victims proliferate. Glauser voices his own unhinged mind through Studer’s mordant asides:
The dead were well off. They’d put everything behind them: their own wedding, the christenings, their children’s weddings. No more detection for them, no more playing at being a mole and digging dark passages underground. They had made their last molehill and were sleeping beneath it, waiting. Were they really waiting? What for?23
The mole here recalls Kafka’s short stories, which Glauser might have read in 1931.
The Spoke takes us back to a Swiss peasantry in the grip of financiers and loan sharks following the 1929 Crash. As a small population surrounded by more powerful neighbours, the Swiss are easily moved to paranoia and xenophobia. Glauser’s victims are salt-of-the-earth Swiss, his villains moneymen – themselves often Swiss with foreign connections. It is a quintessentially 1930s novel with shades of anti-Semitism, predatory international finance, the exploited worker and socialist rumblings. Viewed from our own post-crisis world, its financial underpinnings look disturbingly familiar:
These people owe money to Rechsteiner too. It’s understandable. Farming’s never brought in much up here. Their main source of income was embroidery; farming came second. But since the economic crisis, all the embroidery machines have fallen silent.24
Appenzeller farmers are caught in a web spun by bankers, loan sharks and money launderers. High finance and low methods have barely changed in a century. Glauser’s fat spiders are prone to spin webs in the shade – ‘the post-war world: bankers – German, French, American’. His Switzerland is where dirty money gets washed whiter than white. The motif of money laundering runs through twentieth-century fiction about Switzerland, by Swiss and foreign authors alike.
Other Swiss writers have picked up his noir style. Hansjörge Schneider’s Inspector Hunkeler works for the Crimi
nal Investigation Department in Basel. The twelve novels featuring the inspector give a flavour of the contemporary border world of Basel: drug smuggling, swimming in the Rhine, the murder of a Turkish woman, stolen art. Schneider’s detective has been adapted for television and the author traces his origins as a writer to the need to peel back the smug conformity of post-war Swiss materialism:
Wanting to become a writer was tied up with wanting to make a revolution: a revolution against the life of that time, the conditioning of the 1950s, the rigidity of the Cold War. First I studied literature at university, and after my doctorate the time had come where I could no longer say: ‘What I’d really like to be is a writer.’ I had to take a decision. And so I started.25
In Flattermann (1995), second in the Hunkeler series, a pensioner called Freddy Lerch falls off a bridge into the Rhine at St Johann. Hunkeler’s Basel is local, closely observed, laconic; the author is clearly a walker. The endpapers of these handsomely published novels sport a detailed map of Basel. Each case in the series colonises a different area of the city:
He thought the view was wonderful. The green river, ducks below in the slight current, the overhanging linden trees deep green, the bridge above to the right with cars in both directions. Behind stood the Münster, rising above the bend in the Rhine, and in the background the Jura hills darkly forested and over it all the blue sky. What a great life! And what was death doing in the middle of it?26
Basel’s riverfront is a favourite beat of Hansjörge Schneider’s Detective Hunkeler
Hunkeler dips into the Rhine on hot summer days, death on his mind, fond of the ferries that have been part of Basel’s riverscape for a thousand years, plying from bank to bank like Charon on the Styx:
Hunkeler boarded, sat, extracted the fare from the pocket of his togs. Strange, he thought, in or out of water, it had no role to play. The main thing was: water. Man is an amphibian. In the beginning he swims in amniotic fluid and then reaches dry land and laboriously learns to breathe and crawl. Walking upright comes later.27
The Gilded Chalet Page 16