Another contemporary writer with a noir flavour is Alex Capus. In Almost Like Spring (2002) Capus imagines the Basel of 1933, when Hitler was sabre-rattling across the border and bank robbery open to a number of interpretations. Capus’ narrator has an eye for Basel’s Jurassic heritage.
My maternal grandparents were born and raised and spent their whole lives in a village in Basel’s hinterland, nestling among the last gentle foothills of the Jura, far from the noise and bustle of the city. The area is famed for its cherry brandy, and the hills afford a fine view of Alsace in the west and the Black Forest in the north. Whenever Germany and France were at war with each other, the sound of artillery fire came rolling across the mountains like thunder and at night one could see the lightning flashes of the guns. However, no foreign soldiers had set foot in Basel’s hinterland since the Napoleonic Wars.28
Capus’ characters too haunt Basel’s riverfront, like a shifting tide of detritus. His Bonnie and Clyde outlaws on the run from Germany take to walking along the Rhine in the company of a Globus shopgirl:
They don’t take the riverside path but walk along the 20-metre-wide banks of gravel that have formed this winter because the level of the Rhine is unusually low. It’s as if the water has emigrated. Lying on the riverbed are encrusted lavatory bowls, rusty murder weapons and old bicycles overgrown with waterweed, and the frozen gravel is slippery and smells of the sea.29
The two bank robbers shoot Constable Nafzger in a guesthouse in Kleinbasel. ‘His mouth is filling up with blood and everything is going black before his eyes.’ Basel’s police force is mobilised and the ensuing shootout prefigures the war to come:
The frontier force college in nearby Liestal offers its services to the police. From Basel to Belfort, all crossing points into Alsace are placed on the alert, the Garde Mobile deploy on the French side, complete with steel helmets and carbines, mounted police patrol the German bank of the Rhine and the Reichswehr is called out. The frontier is hermetically sealed for 50 kilometres.30
It’s the goon squad in full force. Capus’ allusion to Bonnie and Clyde suggests that Switzerland too has its folk heroes (William Tell) and its daylight robbery. Throughout the twentieth century, spies and detectives operated in Switzerland against a background of the Russian Revolution, two world wars and the Cold War. These gumshoes all rattled the gilded bars of the climbing frame, the swings and roundabouts of history.
But one writer eventually took up residence in the Swiss playground. A rouble millionaire at seventeen, he escaped from the Russian Revolution to Cambridge, paid for with the jewels hidden in his mother’s talcum powder. Émigré Berlin and the booted fascists kept him nimble on his toes and he fled to Paris. There too, approaching war saw him leave the sinking ship at the last minute to board the transatlantic boat. In America he made his fortune and returned for sixteen years to the luxury and discretion of a Swiss grand hotel. His name was Vladimir Nabokov.
9
HIS MASTER’S VOICE
Nabokov in Montreux
Vladimir Nabokov in knickerbocker glory outside the Montreux Palace Hotel
Exquisite postal service. No bothersome demonstrations, no spiteful strikes. Alpine butterflies. Fabulous sunsets – just west of my window, spangling the lake, splitting the crimson sun!
Vladimir Nabokov
One January morning in 2002, I hailed a taxi on Nevsky Prospekt and told the driver to take me to Morskaya Street. It was minus twenty-eight outside and snow squeaked underfoot. I was escaping for a few hours from supervising a school tour. ‘Morskaya?’ the driver confirmed. ‘Morskaya,’ I said, imitating him, rolling the r and trying to get the stress right. ‘Nabokov Museum,’ I added, remembering the master’s precise injunction about the second syllable.1 He still had that pedantic effect on me. You minded your ps and qs around Vladimir. Vladeemirr.
It was warm in the taxi, but the ride was short. The driver seemed trustworthy and I unbuttoned my coat, removed my gloves and watched the wide prospect, glad to be away from my responsibilities. I remembered that the teenage Vladimir had been chauffeured to the Tenishev School, Petersburg’s most prestigious, in the family Benz, one of only two in Imperial Russia in the second decade of the twentieth century. The other belonged to Peter Ustinov’s family. It was the kind of boffin detail about Nabokov I had picked up over the years and cherished like arcane knowledge.
The BMWs and Mercedes of the Russian plutocracy ploughed ahead through snow towards a bridge over the Moika canal. I recognised the horseman at the centre of St Isaac Square as we turned along the quay. Was it in Speak, Memory? Was it Bely’s horseman?2 During the strikes and demonstrations of 1905, children had climbed the trees in the square in an attempt to escape the soldiers.3 The bullets picked them off one by one.
47 Morskaya Street: a wide, three-storeyed townhouse in the grand manner. The building had an Italianate palazzo quality that had come down in the world. To the left was an entry, where carriage, sleigh and Benz would have waited. I imagined myself as Vladimir dreaming in exile, his long exile in Berlin, America and finally Switzerland – Vladimir re-exploring the old family pile. We conjured it together, standing in rutted snow with streaks of car exhaust and horse piss run through it. Morskaya Street 2002. Herzen Street under the Soviet. He had been born here, above the abyss, just over a century before, in that upstairs room at the eastern end, his mother’s dressing room.
When you leave the motorway for the lakeside road to Montreux, the town takes you by surprise. One overgrown fishing village blends into another: St Saphorin, Vevey, La Tour de Peltz, Clarens. They sound like wines or perfumes or skin creams. They smell of money. You’re there before you know it. The streets slope downwards, following old vineyard paths on the hillside, conveying you to the lake. Distracted by the view of the Dents du Midi, reined in by the speed cameras, you need to keep an eye on the road. Only past the forecourt of the station – a gap between tunnels – does the playground character of the town begin to assert itself. Jewellers and casinos, Carpe Diem Nails, a gold medallion in the chest hair of a gigolo or an off-duty croupier. But an espresso machine bangs and clicks, there’s a wide selection of international glossies on the racks, and as you swing onto the promenade you begin to think in terms of a drink with a paper umbrella in it.
Parking is a problem. You roll the windows down on both sides. There’s plenty of eye candy. The women look kept. The men have the swagger of keepers. Balmy air off the lake adds a chop to the water, carrying smells of frying fish and Chanel No. 5 across the promenade. Palm trees this far north. Then a little red T-model hatchback pulls out just below the Montreux Palace, pumping drum ’n’ bass, the shaven-headed driver in shades, and you slide your thirteen year-old Peugeot into the vacant space and let it idle there for a minute, not believing your luck. A Caipirinha, you think. Maybe a mint julep.
The atmosphere of a nineteenth-century spa still clings to Montreux and to the gold coast towns of Switzerland. None is new to the hospitality business; they’re all grown-up babes. In A Little Swiss Sojourn, William Dean Howells describes the town’s charms and seems to pre-figure Vladimir Nabokov’s stay here:
What struck me principally in Montreux was its extreme suitability to the purposes of the international novelist…
There is a very pretty theatre in the Kursaal, where they seldom give entertainments, but where, if you ever go, you see numbers of pretty girls, and in a box a pale, delicate-looking middle-aged Englishman in a brown velvet coat, with his two daughters. The concert will be very good, and a young man of cultivated sympathies and disdainful tastes could have a very pleasant time there.4
By 1960, the writer Vladimir Nabokov was an older man of cultivated sympathies and disdainful tastes. What brought him to Montreux for the final sixteen years of a wandering life? He was returning to Europe after two decades soaking up American Cold War democracy. The runaway succès de scandale of Lolita (1955) had made him wealthy,5 following émigré poverty in Berlin and twenty years of postwar tea
ching in American Ivy League colleges. But why an ice-cream and casino town like Montreux?
A determined Nabokov chasing butterflies above Montreux
For the first time in his adult life, Nabokov was free from material dependency – a fancy way of saying he was rich. He’d been a rouble millionaire before, when he was seventeen, and had inherited his Uncle Ruka’s estate – a gay old blade who liked to dandle Vladimir on his knee. But the revolution swept that largesse from under him. For forty years Nabokov had kept the day job. Lolita’s success and the sale of the movie rights had released him from the drudgery of teaching in the American college towns he knew so well. Before America there had been two decades of poverty in Berlin, giving ‘grinds’, as we used to call them in Ireland: private language classes, some tennis coaching, watching the clock in a thousand bürgerlich living rooms. Under the nom de plume Sirin (‘Firebird’), he became the premier Russian writer of his generation. The Russian Revolution had long drawn the curtains on Morskaya Street in St Petersburg. In 1939 in Paris he began to write The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) in English, sensing that the Nazis were bringing his European period to a close. Like Joyce and Mann, Nabokov nimbly kept one step ahead of history.
Besides, he was sixty, as old as the century, and felt he had earned Switzerland. In 1959 Stanley Kubrick was about to direct the movie of Lolita from his author’s revised screenplay, with a fourteen-year-old Sue Lyon in the title role and a music score of Nelson Riddle strings. (Nabokov came round to thinking that the ten-year-old Catherine Demangeot, in Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le Métro (1960), would have been ideal in the part.) Nabokov had written screenplays before and had been a keen moviegoer throughout the interwar years in Berlin. Kubrick’s production of Lolita would open up to the reclusive author the Hollywood glamour of the Swiss Riviera, where Chaplin lived, where the beau monde kept their hideaways.
Summering in Europe and chasing butterflies, the Nabokovs reunited with family after a twenty-year hiatus. Sister Elena was a Geneva resident, and brother Kirill lived in Brussels. A second sister, Olga, remained in Prague behind the Iron Curtain. Nabokov’s other brother, Sergei, had died in Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg. Sergei had been openly homosexual, associated with sexual activist Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin, Jean Cocteau, impresario Diaghilev and artist Pavel Tchelishchev in the gay scene in Paris.6 Vladimir never had much time for ‘poor stuttering Sergei’7 and was distinctly homophobic.
By mid-August 1961 the Nabokovs were dining with Peter Ustinov, resident in the Montreux Palace. Actor and raconteur, Ustinov was of Russian, Jewish and Ethiopian descent. His Russian forebears had made their fortune in Siberian salt. His father had worked for MI5. The actor had just won an Academy Award for his role in Spartacus, and had been considered for the role of Humbert Humbert in Lolita. Ustinov could almost have been a Nabokov creation.
At Ustinov’s instigation, the Nabokovs moved into two sets of rooms in the original ‘tawny and gilt’ Cygne wing of the Montreux Palace Hotel.8 Ustinov tried to restrain his children in case they would disturb ‘Mr. Nabokov, who is writing a novel upstairs’, but it was the heavy-set Ustinov himself whose treads Nabokov heard.9 Eventually occupying a suite of rooms on the topmost sixth floor, Vladimir and Véra unpacked their cases for a stay that stretched to sixteen years. Véra continued to live at the Montreux Palace after Vladimir’s death in 1977, until shortly before her own death in 1991. It was their longest stay anywhere and perhaps the longest room occupancy in hotel history.
Europe’s grand hotels were a familiar habitat for this child of the Russian emigration raised with a retinue of servants. Aged five, Nabokov stayed in the Hotel Oranien in Wiesbaden. At ten it was Biarritz. The Nabokov boys had their teeth braced in Berlin, staying at the Adlon Hotel. Entering the Hotel Negresco’s rotunda lobby on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, the adult author vividly recalled running around it as a child, only to discover that it had not been built at the time.10 Memory was so much his stock in trade that strict truth became immaterial, tricky. In Speak, Memory he calls these slips the ‘leakings and drafts from another dimension’.11 Memory and imagination had created their own truth by the time Nabokov booked into the Montreux Palace. He summed up the hotel’s usefulness:
The original Cygne wing of the Montreux Palace Hotel
It simplifies postal matters, it eliminates the nuisance of private ownership, it confirms me in my favourite habit – the habit of freedom. … One of the reasons I live in Montreux is because I find the view from my easy chair wonderfully soothing and exhilarating according to my mood or the mood of the lake.12
He had been visiting the Swiss Riviera for many decades and had made use of Swiss locales in his work right from the start. In ‘Wingstroke’, a 1923 short story, a triangular relationship involves lust in a Zermatt hotel, against a background of ski slopes: ‘he went out onto the enormous enclosed veranda, where a chilled band was playing and people in bright scarves were drinking strong tea, ready to rush out again into the cold, onto the slopes that shone with a humming shimmer through the wide window-panes’.13 The story reconfigures Nabokov’s real-life sojourn in St Moritz with a gay Cambridge pal, Count Robert Louis Magawly-Cerati de Calry. Nabokov would always be fond of arresting names.
In ‘Easter Rain’ (1926), a story lost for seventy years but unearthed in former East German archives, Nabokov dissects the sentimentality towards Russia of an old Swiss governess: ‘in the morning, the mountains on the far side of Lake Leman were all veiled in silky mist, like the opaque sheets of rice paper that cover etchings in expensive books’.14 This little cameo of exile was drawn from Nabokov’s visit to his former governess in Lausanne, Cécile Miauton, the ‘Mademoiselle O’ of Speak, Memory.
Glory (1932), Laughter in the Dark (1932) and Despair (1934) all have their Swiss scenes in hotels and sanatoria and alpine meadows. Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Lolita, has a Swiss father, ‘a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins’.15 Humbert grows up in the Midi, where ‘the splendid Hotel Mirana revolved as a kind of private universe, a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside’.16 From early on, Nabokov liked and exploited hotel settings, the sense they give of a command performance with the guest as conductor. In the novels written in Montreux, characters pass through the same space at different times, like guests in rented rooms.
The novel Nabokov was writing at the start of his stay in Montreux was Pale Fire (1962), considered by many his most perfect achievement. He worked steadily on it through a rainy summer, inventing Zembla, Kinbote’s imaginary kingdom, which borrows from Switzerland’s clockwork idyll. Nabokov admitted making Zembla ‘out of the rejects of other countries’.17 Montreux’s microclimate gives a tropical glow to Nabokov’s prose in Pale Fire: ‘intense enjoyment and exquisite heartbreak from the balustrade of a terrace at nightfall, from the lights and the lake below, from the distant mountain shape melting into the dark apricot of the afterglow’.18 This is as good a description as any of the view from Nabokov’s top floor rooms at the Montreux Palace.
In Strong Opinions (1973), Nabokov singles out the hotel garden that had become his study:
A good deal of Kinbote’s commentary was written here in the Montreux Palace garden, one of the most enchanting and inspiring gardens I know. I’m especially fond of its weeping cedar, the arboreal counterpart of a very shaggy dog with hair hanging over its eyes.19
The success of Lolita, novel and film, gave the author a certain celebrity on the Swiss Riviera. American friends who visited him found a Nabokov code-switching from his new-world courtesies back to the European grand manner with a dollop of Russianness. By the 1960s, Hollywood had discovered la dolce vita and the delights of wintering in Switzerland. In February 1966 Nabokov began writing Ada (he had the habit of composing novels in his head long before noting them onto index cards), following a drive along the shore to the Hotel
des Trois Couronnes at Vevey. Véra and Vladimir had arranged to dine with actor James Mason, like Nabokov a Cambridge graduate (Trinity: second-class honours in Russian and French for Vladimir; Peterhouse and a first in architecture for Mason). Mason had played Humbert in Kubrick’s Lolita. The fourth member of the party was Countess Vivian Crespi, formerly Vivian Stokes, a Newport childhood friend of Jacqueline Kennedy and an ‘international socialite’. She had married a son of Standard Oil first time round and Italian nobility on the rebound. This mix of old Europe and Hollywood glamour fed into the worldly characters of Van and Ada, the romantic incestuous couple at the heart of Nabokov’s new novel.
He amalgamated the Montreux and Vevey hotels to build his house of cards in the air. Van and Ada’s steamy trysts take place at the Hotel Trois Cygnes. The real Hotel de Cygne, built in 1837, became the Montreux Palace in 1906. The hotel has a mural ‘seen through its entrance, the huge memorable oil – three ample-haunched Ledas swapping lacustrine impressions’.20 The swan wall painting is still there in the lobby.
The Three Swans overwinged a bastion. Anyone who called, flesh or voice, was told by the concierge or his acolytes that Van was out, that Madame André Vinelander was unknown, and that all they could do was to take a message. His car, parked in a secluded bosquet, could not betray his presence. In the forenoon he regularly used the service lift that communicated directly with the backyard.21
Thus Nabokov, like Van, had his habits. The rear entrance to the Cygne wing leads to a garden encroached on these days by parking bays. Two adjacent exits take the guest onto the junction of Avenue des Alpes and the narrow rue du Cygne, which descends to the lake. Towards the end of Ada, Nabokov twice describes this tiny corner observed so well on his daily stroll to the newsagents:
The Gilded Chalet Page 17