He went for a stroll – and saw that the famous ‘mûrier,’ that spread its great limbs over a humble lavatory on a raised terrace at the top of a cobbled lane, was now in sumptuous purple-blue bloom. He had a beer at the café opposite the railway station, and then, automatically, entered the flower shop next door.22
Only the dead end of the rue du Cygne remains cobbled today, but the café opposite the station – The Grand Café Suisse – is still serving excellent espresso. The mulberry bush does not have ‘great limbs’; this is Nabokov in playful mood, whimsically morphing the vegetation. Photographed for a Life magazine feature in front of the station kiosk, Nabokov joshed with the proprietor. Joshing was his manner. He purchased his polylingual dailies and glossy weeklies opposite the station, on the covers of which old Cold War warriors – Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak, Bobby Fischer and himself – slogged it out for democracy.
When I hover over the rear exit of the Montreux Palace on Google Street View, with its weeping cedar and fresh tarmacadam, the oncoming cars magically rush through me as I zoom and navigate. I have become a Transparent Thing, outwitting time. I can zoom in on Morskaya Street in St Petersburg with the stroke of a trackpad, or travel to Vyra, the Nabokov country estate. None of this surfing is a match for his subtle, multilayered prose, tracking consciousness:
A gingko (of a much more luminous greenish gold than its neighbour, a dingily yellowing local birch) marked the corner of a cobbled lane leading down to the quay. They followed southward the famous Fillietaz Promenade which went along the Swiss side of the lake from Valvey to the Château de Byron (or ‘She Yawns Castle’). The fashionable season had ended, and wintering birds, as well as a number of knickerbockered Central Europeans, had replaced the English families as well as the Russian noblemen from Nipissing and Nipigon.23
In Ada, Van alludes to his long memory of Switzerland. Having lost one country – the Russia of his childhood – Nabokov looked on all countries as temporary backdrops for his imagination, to do with as he sees fit. Montreux is the magical town of his fancy and Swiss hotels are a kind of assemble-it-yourself world that pops into life on Mnemosyne’s whim:
‘When I was a kid,’ said Van, ‘and stayed for the first – or rather, second – time in Switzerland, I thought that “Verglas” on roadway signs stood for some magical town, always around the corner, at the bottom of every snowy slope, never seen, but biding its time.’24
When not writing his late, magical novels, Nabokov hunted butterflies, played tennis on the hotel courts and walked along the lakeshore promenade. He was a fan of Swiss efficiency. His biographer Brian Boyd recounts how Nabokov’s broken American dentures were mailed to Lausanne at eleven o’clock in the morning and returned fixed at nine in the evening. Between braced teeth in Berlin in 1910 and false teeth in Lausanne, a half-century of turbulent history had transpired.
Nabokov cut a dapper figure on the streets of Montreux. He had always been sartorially interesting. His Cambridge undergraduate threads – boating and tennis whites, the canary-yellow cardie – gave way to cable-knit V-neck sweaters in the 1930s, thin at the writing elbow. Once he gave up smoking, Professor Nabokov morphed to the rotund, tweedy elegance of middle age. Montreux photographer Horst Tappe snapped a mischievous, multi-faceted, outdoorsy man of letters: 1950s sack suit, desert boots, the full regalia of the butterfly hunter.25
On the esplanade across from the Montreux Palace sits a statue of the master in butterfly-hunting duds, facing the lake and the mountains. Knickerbockers and thick knee socks give him a resemblance to Baden Powell. A butterfly net beside him brings to mind a word I picked up from Nabokov and cherished for years: tarlatan, the green mesh used for catching butterflies or striddlies. Nabokov’s statue suggests a fulfilled life, a man pleased with himself. It’s not a particularly good likeness, but it captures him in magisterial mode, looking out at a view he probably clocked better than any other.26
A break from one hotel to another, at the Grand Hotel in Saas-Fee in the Valais in June 1970, allowed the slim novel Transparent Things (1972) to ‘burst into life’ after a dinner of raclette and white wine. Nabokov was still working on it a year later and staying again in the Valais. He asked for a room facing south, but because of construction noise (‘a tremendous crater full of excavating machines’; a motif in Transparent Things) the manager gave him both a room facing south and another facing north.
Transparent Things is the master’s most Swiss novel. The interchangeable resort hotels and mountain slopes of the Swiss Riviera and the Valais, where Nabokov had made his home, form its shifting backdrop. Hugh Person (You Person), the protagonist, is trapped in time, returning to the same locale over decades, as Nabokov had now been doing in Switzerland since his twenties:
This was his fourth visit to Switzerland. The first one had been eighteen years before when he had stayed for a few days at Trux with his father. Ten years later, at thirty-two, he had revisited that old lakeside town and had successfully courted a sentimental thrill, half wonder and half remorse, by going to see their hotel. A steep lane and a flight of old stairs led to it from lake level where the local train had brought him to a featureless station.27
Trux seems a shoe-in for Montreux, and we are back at Nabokov’s old stamping ground: steep lane, hotel and featureless station. These days there are statues of Miles Davis and Quincy Jones side by side with Nabokov’s on the waterfront – stars at the jazz festival that has become Montreux’s calling card. Freddie Mercury, microphone in hand, regales the lakeside. I’m not sure Vladimir would relish such loud company. He was inclined to call modern music ‘jungle jingles’ or ‘primitive’, in the same way as his homosexuals are always described as ‘mincing’. Jazz from below decks, the workingman’s blues, was never his thing.
In Transparent Things the distinguished writer R. is a guest of the Versex Palace. Nabokov parodies the august manner of the grand old man of letters, but somewhere in this hall of mirrors he’s sending himself up:
Yet what a grand sight R. presented – his handsome chauffeur helping the obese old boy on one side, his black-bearded secretary supporting him on the other, and two chasseurs from the hotel going through a mimicry of tentative assistance on the porch steps. The reporter in Person noted that Mr. R. wore Wallabees of a velvety cocoa shade, a lemon shirt with a lilac neck scarf, and a rumpled grey suit that seemed to have no distinction whatsoever – at least, to a plain American.28
In one of the many photos of Nabokov at Montreux, he’s wearing 1960s cocoa-coloured Wallabees. He was good at describing staff – waiters, tutors, servants. It is a patrician view, that adjective often used for his sense of hierarchy, his place in the world. Reading him, we get an idea of Switzerland as one big, many-roomed hotel, with the sounds from outside muted and the scenery bright as a chocolate box. Here’s what he likes about it:
Nabokov 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! Also, the pleasant surprise of a metaphorical sunset in charming surroundings.29
On my visits to Montreux I usually sit on a bench on the promenade and look up at the Montreux Palace, picking out the rooms the Nabokovs stayed in. It costs a small fortune to rent them. Yellow scalloped awnings shade the balconies, as though a theatre has been turned inside out, each trimmed with palatial gold monogram. The forecourt is ‘cordoned off with blood-coloured ropes’,30 as John le Carré puts it in a completely different context, a cordon sanitaire suspended between brass goalposts.
On one visit I sit in the coffee shop and watch a tall flunkey go about his business. He fills out his doorman’s uniform – a grey, three-quarter-length morning coat with brass buttons. Beside him a bellboy in a little cocked pillbox hat, one step lower, in lovely livery. Then a big silver BMW with French plates pulls into the forecourt and an elderly man is escorted towards it. He’s wearing a check flat cap,
the kind that Maghreb men wear in retirement. His bodyguard holds the car door open for him as he laboriously manoeuvres himself and his cane down and in. Is he a retired general, an ex-president, a deposed despot? He could be any of these. The man behind me is talking loudly into his mobile phone in a hybrid of Arabic and English management-speak.
It could be R. from Transparent Things, being helped out of the Versex Palace. But I suspect he is some old oily potentate past his best, off for an afternoon nap and perhaps a bit of how’s-yer-father with a call girl masquerading as a masseuse. Barely legal babes, I say to myself out loud in the coffee shop, rolling it around in my mouth the way we’re encouraged to enunciate Lo-lee-ta. It has a satisfying assonance and alliteration. Nobody pays me the slightest bit of notice. Mr Management-speak is still talking on his phone. The moral climate of Montreux, I think, is torrid, and immune to such things. I imagine the old patriarch writing his memoirs in Arabic with the help of a ghostwriter, and then breaking off for a spot of mint tea.
During the hot summer of 1977, the summer of punk, I was a street sweeper in Amsterdam. The job was a good one, cleaning the pavements of the Oud-West district, the fruit and vegetable market at Kinkerstraat. My day started at six in the morning but finished by eleven. I headed to the American Bookstore on Spui, where I read Andrew Field’s Nabokov: His Life in Part, which had just been published. Fifty pages at a sitting, cross-legged on the floor upstairs in the window alcove. I finished it within the week. In those pre-internet days there was little about the master beyond the biographical note. Nabokov, too, claimed never to have bought a book in émigré Berlin, but to have ‘read whole tomes little by little in the bookshops’.31
I’d been a lone Nabokov fan for years. Lifting my head from Imperial Russia, the 1970s flotsam of Amsterdam swam into view. There was a longhaired couple we called Jesus and Mary who panhandled to feed their heroin habit. They had the addict’s dogged stride, those cheesecloth shirts with the sleeves rolled down. The smell of fried krokets, mayonnaise on chips, drifted up from a fast food outlet. The new punk hairdos. I dipped back into the hardscrabble world of émigré Berlin in the 1920s, into Nabokov’s astonishingly prolific imagination.
Down on Spui a posse of Hare Krishnas swayed and jangled. They always looked as though they’d cacked their pantaloons. It didn’t occur to my young self that Nabokov was dying in Switzerland as I read. I could have hitchhiked down the Rhine valley, popped across the border and stalked the hospital at Clarens, hiding out in the expensive shrubbery. Vlad! Volodya! Lody!
With age the world grows transparent, we become transparent things: we see through the ploys of our employers; ‘our cloudy blackboards’ become whiteboards, become interactive; there is more memory than anticipation; we start thinking we’ve been here before, the whole show is déjà vu. We start to look again at writers who have accompanied us along the way, who have been guides.
For me it was round about 1972 and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, bought in Hamills on the North Road in Monaghan. It stocked Sweet 16 or Teen 16 or 16 Sweet Teens, American import magazines that had a gloss, lick and spittle entirely absent from The Lourdes Messenger, say, or the Catholic Truth Enquirer or Our Boys. Memory tells me the proprietor was Irish-speaking. Broad-planed face, brilliantined hair like a shogun’s. Amateur dramatics and cathedral choir: that kind of decent provincial newsagent.
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight’s air of continental savvy drew me in. I was a sucker for the wagons-lits, French dropped into a sentence. All aboard for the Conti-nong! And the niggling sense that something tantalising was going on beneath the writing.
These days I like to drive up to the graveyard at Clarens, park the car to look down on the lake and across at the Dents du Midi. The master’s buried there beside Véra, both part of the Russian diaspora, an exile that in many ways gave him a subject. The revolution pulled his childhood in St Petersburg and Vyra from under him. Assassins shot his liberal father, and one of them became Hitler’s deputy of émigré affairs. Life thereafter became an invention, a short-time hotel, an enfilade of rooms for hire, a magic carpet. Below, following the old vineyard paths, sits the rococo Montreux Palace Hotel, like a doddering dowager in a bath chair on the lakeshore. A susurrus of leaves, a breath of oxidation from Rousseau’s vineyards, traversed by Byron and Shelley, Dickens, Hugo, Twain, James, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Nabokov – all the big boys. Slowly the mountains turn pink as a twelve-year-old’s lipstick and then decline to purple – the puce of a good-time-girl’s mouth.
I leave you with Nabokov’s masterly description in Transparent Things of the inadequacy of Swiss hot chocolate:
You were served a cup of hot milk. You also got, separately, a little sugar and a dainty-looking envelope of sorts. You ripped open the upper margin of the envelope. You added the beige dust it contained to the ruthlessly homogenized milk in your cup. You took a sip – and hurried to add sugar. But no sugar could improve the insipid, sad, dishonest taste.
Armande, who had been following the various phases of his astonishment and disbelief, smiled and said:
‘Now you know what “hot chocolate” has come to in Switzerland.’32
10
TICINO NOIR
Highsmith plays hide and seek
Patricia Highsmith’s Columbia University ‘cahier’
As long as there’s a Switzerland, I don’t know when I’ll get around to going home again.
Patricia Highsmith
She first arrived in Switzerland after the war as a successful young novelist, a material girl with everything going for her. The last thirteen years of her life were spent as a recluse in Switzerland’s Ticino. Alcoholic, her looks gone, her mind poisoned by right-wing phobias – but rich. Patricia Highsmith’s almost fifty-year relationship with Switzerland hardly impinged on her work as the mistress of murder, but she did write a final novel set in Zürich. She thought of Switzerland as a refuge from the dirty world, from tax inspectors, and as a place to work in peace. Although she left her considerable fortune to Yaddo writers’ colony in upstate New York, she left her papers to the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern. She is a dark moth, winging her way back to Switzerland, looking for a place to call home.
At the end of 1952, thirty-one-year-old Patricia Highsmith had good cause to feel happy. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), was a critical success. She had seen Alfred Hitchcock’s masterly film production of it in Munich. Her second novel, The Price of Salt/Carol (1952), had sold to Bantam for $6,500. It would become a cult classic on the lesbian daisy chain and go on to sell a million copies. In 2015 it would be made into yet another successful Highsmith film. She was already working on a third novel, The Blunderer (1954). Her first three books would in time become noir masterpieces. In June she had spotted ‘a solitary, young man in shorts and sandals’1 on the beach at Positano, whose fictional reincarnation as Tom Ripley would make her fame and fortune in the decades to come.
But Highsmith was not constitutionally made for happiness. She was born in Fort Worth, Texas, nine days after her mother divorced. Mother and stepfather abandoned her with her grandmother while they went off to find work in New York. She was an only child. By the age of twelve she knew she was a boy in a girl’s body. In 1952 she was in the middle of a quarrelsome on-again, off-again relationship with Ellen Hill, a forty-two-year-old sociologist about whom nobody has a good word to say.
For two years Highsmith had been zigzagging across Europe, dropping one woman and picking up another, hobnobbing with the great and the articulate. She met Peggy Guggenheim and Somerset Maugham in Venice. Maugham made her his signature dry Martini. In Forio on the Amalfi coast, she encountered W.H. Auden ‘barefoot with a pansy’.2 To her dismay, the famous conversationalist wittered on about the cost of living – a subject the miserly Highsmith was not averse to herself.
Patricia Highsmith, age 12, on the Staten Island ferry, New York, early 1930s
They travelled by car from Paris, across Switzerland, t
o Trieste, where Hill had a job inspecting refugees. Europe was recovering from the devastations of war, but you would hardly notice it from Highsmith’s account. She describes the 1952 road trip in the spiral-bound Columbia University lined notebooks she kept all her life, which she called her cahiers. Together with her typewriter, the cahiers have taken up permanent residence in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern.
On a previous spin through Zürich, Highsmith had noted that it was ‘very prim and bourgeois and opulent. I am a bit sated on luxury.’3 Hill footed the bills for the best hotels, as well as providing the car. It was that golden period after the war when everybody who mattered seemed to be on Fulbrights, the dollar was riding high and ‘empty young heads were living on some ancestors’ money’. Highsmith envied the trust fund babies their easy, careless movements, and the key to Ripley’s arriviste pretensions lies in her own insecurities of class and gender. Throughout the 1950s, she used the cheaper trans-Atlantic tramp steamers rather than Cunard liners.
On Christmas Day 1952 they were in Basel, staying at the Hotel des Trois Rois, the city’s finest. They had a ‘tournedos dinner’ in the hotel dining room. Highsmith noted the Rhine flowing ‘like a millrace northward’. Basel was closed for the holiday, but she carefully observed the façade of the cathedral and remarked on its ‘gabled-like roofs, decorated with yellow lozenges with red dots, like a calico parasol’.4
Highsmith’s Olympia Deluxe portable, used from 1956 onwards
It was the untouched post-war prosperity of Switzerland that appealed to Highsmith, in contrast to the privations of France. This view of Switzerland as a shiny little America appealed to her acquisitiveness, her eye for consumerism. She was an author on the make in a land of plenty. She was also homesick:
The Gilded Chalet Page 18