Annemarie notices the ‘spoilt cheekiness of the little boys who soon scorn the women’. The government had just opened the first girls’ school in Kabul:
The little schoolgirls of Kabul were extremely gifted, lively, receptive creatures, a match for the boys, pretty and with such radiant eyes that it was impossible to imagine these slender little forms and delicate intent faces ever banished to the shadow of the harem walls, the sombre confinement of the chador.16
Both women travel without veils in an overwhelmingly patriarchal society, and we may wonder how they are viewed by Afghani men. Annemarie knows that Kabul has morphine aplenty. The two women part ways after months on the road. ‘From the box containing our mountain boots, to my surprise, she produced a hypodermic needle which she gave me, saying: “This journey has freed me from the drug.” I decided to believe her.’17
But Annemarie was lying.
Ella Maillart continued alone to South India, where she spent six years writing and meditating under a number of gurus. She had always been a spiritual seeker. The war over, she returned to Switzerland to spend half of every year in Chandolin, two thousand metres above Sierre and the Val d’Anniviers. When she first settled in this remote village you had to climb there from St Luc by mule, but these days the yellow Swiss Postbus hairpins its way right to the end of the road.
In an essay written from the United States in July 1940, Annemarie addresses early on the contentious question of Switzerland’s neutrality. Defences are already in place – trenches dug in the gardens of the Baur au Lac and Dolder hotels, barricades constructed all along the road between Basel and Zürich – some of which can still be seen to this day. She knows that Germany won’t invade because of ‘certain interests’ and that Switzerland’s vaunted freedom and independence are a comforting illusion:
What could little Switzerland pretend to do if the Germans tomorrow insisted on passage of troops, or use of Swiss airbases, or the delivery of gold and goods, or merely the extradition of one lone German refugee enjoying Swiss political asylum?18
She acknowledges that neutrality has been a fiction right from the start of the war. Her assessment of potential German pressure on Switzerland – to return asylum seekers, to ban newspapers and books, to sack antifascist officials, to discriminate against the Jews – is chillingly accusatory. Her firsthand experience of the Swiss National Front comes from close to home:
And for a long time the National Front has enjoyed the support of industrialists, the right-wing officer class and the rich, who see in this ersatz civil defence a bulwark against ‘the socialist threat’.19
This extreme rightist party in Switzerland was a spent force by the time Annemarie was writing from the safety of Nantucket in 1941.
In his foreword to L’Usage du monde (1963), Nicolas Bouvier writes of having two years ahead of him in June 1953, and of quitting his native Geneva in a Fiat Topolino for Turkey, Iran, India, ‘maybe further’. Twenty-three years old when he hit the road, he traces his wanderlust back to staring at atlases between the ages of ten and thirteen, dreaming of exotic music, strange glances and ideas. ‘Something rises up in you and you lift anchor.’
Translated into English by Robin Marsack as The Way of the World (2009), Bouvier’s magnum opus was completed ten years after the road trip of a lifetime. The Taoist echo is well placed. Patrick Leigh Fermor, another intrepid young traveller and Bouvier’s English equivalent, introduced The Way of the World as ‘nothing short of a masterpiece’. Bouvier, like Maillart and Schwarzenbach, records a spiritual journey. The stresses and strains of the imminent world war come through the women’s 1939 accounts; Bouvier’s journey is undertaken between the Beat era and the Beatles’ first LP.
Nicolas Bouvier, Thierry Vernet and the Fiat Topolino in Turkey, 1953
Bouvier emerged from Geneva’s mandarin class. His grandfather was professor of German literature at Geneva University and his father director of the university library. Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil and Marguerite Yourcenar were guests at dinner.20 Books in the house, lakeshore retreats and ancestral busts in the public buildings. Grande bourgeoisie. On his mother’s side the inheritance was small lake nobility with a musical bent. Bouvier’s maternal grandfather, Baron Maurice de Saint Germain, studied composition under Gabriel Fauré. Our young traveller benefited from the best Geneva had to offer. He couldn’t wait to escape.
Nicolas met Thierry Vernet, seated beside him in ‘Pion-Pion’s’ class, in the Collège Calvin. Decades later Thierry would come out as bisexual, so there was a bit of amitié particulière to the initial attraction. Neutral wartime Switzerland was a gilded cage. Bouvier completed a double degree at his grandfather’s university, dreaming of east of Eden. Like the American writer Paul Bowles a decade earlier, the boys had an interest in folk music, in recording ethnographic sounds – what has come to be called world music. They read voraciously in several languages in a savvy way that the Beats, the young Americans of the post-war generation, did not.
The Way of the World opens in an artists’ colony in a dusty Belgrade suburb in 1953. The sculptors are doing well, their monumental work in demand in a country throwing up revolutionary heroes every decade. Serbia is behind the Iron Curtain. Tito and the Party rule. The censors can’t make up their minds whether irony is reactionary or progressive.
In Belgrade, a magazine asks Bouvier to write something about women in Switzerland: ‘In your home country they don’t have the vote. Write us a page on that. Your feelings.’ This throws the reader somewhat, as it does Bouvier. We are accustomed to think of Switzerland as in the vanguard of democracy rather than keeping half its population without franchise. Bouvier’s response is to soft pedal. Women should militate less and please more is his rather limp view. (In 1958 the Swiss community of Riehen was the first to grant women’s suffrage; it was where I worked fifteen years later in 1973.) The editor finds his article frivolous, as might we with the benefit of hindsight. The rejection slip in 1953 pits feminist socialist Belgrade against a capitalist post-war Switzerland where women are without the vote.21
The two travellers shuttle between the popular districts of Belgrade and the diplomatic enclave, washing socks and handkerchiefs in the hot-water bathrooms of the rich, dining on plate, capturing the West-meets-East atmosphere of the Cold War. ‘The warm glow of diplomatic cognac, the damascene napkins, the perfume of the lady of the house.’22 Like Maillart and Schwarzenbach, Bouvier casts his mind back to comfy Switzerland as the epitome of prosperity. In Belgrade ‘finery has disappeared along with a bourgeois clientele. Shop windows display barely finished goods: shoes piled higgledy-piggledy like logs, cakes of black soap, nails by the kilo or baby powder packaged like lard.’23 In the same year, Patricia Highsmith was marvelling at the abundance of Switzerland in contrast to the privations of post-war rationing.
Bouvier bought a Remington typewriter in Ankara and started taking notes. Much more than a travelogue, L’Usage du monde is the story of a style, the awakening of the eye to the world. It is much better written, more closely observed, than the outpourings of On the Road. The Beat generation always seem to have their legs in the lotus position and their heads full of hallucinogens. Bouvier’s mentors at the time were Robert Louis Stevenson, Julien Green, Jean Giono and Céline, all high stylists. He belongs to that line of French traveller poets – Blaise Cendrars and Valery Larbaud – tinted but not tainted by colonialism and classical training.
And then we return to the sunny street and the scent of watermelon, the central market where horses have children’s names, and the disorderly houses spread out between two rivers, this old encampment nowadays called Belgrade … There were formidable Muslim farm women snoring on benches between their baskets of onions, carters with pock-marked faces, officers sitting bolt upright in front of drinks, wielding toothpicks, jumping to offer you a light or engage in conversation. And nightly at the table flanking the entrance, four young whores chewing watermelon seeds and listening to the accordion player tickle delir
ious arpeggios from his ivory keys.24
With their ethnographic bent and use of the word bourgeois, Bouvier and Vernet remind me of earnest French coopérants I taught with in socialist Algeria in the late 1970s.
Bouvier spends time with the Kurds of northern Iran, appreciating their hospitality amid mutually suspicious cultures that have in our day spilled over into factional wars; ‘In small war on the heels of small war,’ as Robert Lowell put it in his poem ‘Waking Early, Sunday Morning’. Sixty years on, Kurdish allegiance is still with us and Bouvier’s description harks forward to the fragmented states of the second decade of the twenty-first century:
neither the Arabs nor the Mongols were able to dislodge the Kurdish shepherds from the high lyrical pastures which separate Iraq from Iran. There they feel at home, carving out a life as they see fit, and when they are called to defend their customs and settle a quarrel among themselves, Tehran authorities are hard put to be heard above the gunfire. Sometimes – in tough winters – they carry out a bit of extortion on the roads … It must be said that numerous underhand influences are brought to bear: British, Russian, American, Kurdish separatists, not to speak of police and army at cross-purposes. Everyone belongs to a faction and the task is to determine which one.25
In Kurdish northwestern Iran, the Swiss travellers are lodged in the town prison for their own safety and to keep a close eye on their activities. The prison director thinks they are spies:
Around nine the prison began to come awake. We heard yawning and singing in the cells. The tea boy of the neighbouring eating establishment brought in the guards’ tea perched on his head; then the barber turned up, leather strop on his shoulder, and did the rounds of the cells. Petitioners step over us to get to the prison director’s office: prisoners’ parents pitiably cowed, professional smugglers, rural mullahs leaving their donkeys at the door and, doubled up with bowing and scraping, heading in to intercede for one of their flock. Eyes half shut, at ground level, we watched this parade.26
At Tabriz the local mullah’s attitude to schooling clashes with the idealism of an American Peace Corps worker trying to build a school. The stalemate underlines an enduring conflict of values, noted earlier by Maillart and Schwarzenbach. Months pass. Construction material disappears. Donors grow impatient. The villagers look to western benevolence askance. The mullah wants to hold on to power resting on ignorance; the clash of civilizations echoes down the decades to our own time’s sorry mess. It reminds us of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Malala Yousafzai, shot in the face by the Taliban for daring to campaign for girls’ schooling:
the mullah is against the school. Knowing how to read and write is his privilege, his area of expertise. He draws up contracts, writes out petitions dictated to him, and deciphers prescriptions for the pharmacy. He carries out these services for six eggs, a fistful of dried fruits, and has no wish to lose this small revenue. Careful not to criticise the project openly, he makes sure his opinion is heard across the town’s thresholds at night. And is listened to.27
Bouvier captures the American attempt to win the Cold War, but it is his grasp of physical detail and local colour that stays. His analysis applies to the many wars in the region since the ‘tranquillised fifties’. The Great Game hasn’t changed.
We know that the American taxpayer is the most generous in the world. We know too that he is often ill informed, wants things done his way, and appreciates results flattering to his sentimentality. He is easily persuaded that building schools keeps communism in check – the cherished schoolhouse of memory. He has more difficulty admitting that what is good at home may not be elsewhere; that Iran, that old dowager of civilization who has seen it all – and forgotten much – is allergic to quick remedies and needs to be handled carefully.28
The French too had their mission civilisatrice: Gallic diplomatic puffery, frustrated missionaries and sundry expats taken to drink, opium or loose women. These are the outposts of French empire. I remember the Alliance Française – the ‘Dalliance’, we used to call it – in Bangkok, where film séances got cancelled without notice, reels never turned up, the salle was awash with floodwater as young cadres ponced around looking like a cross between Mormon missionaries and Maurice Chevalier.
After crossing Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and India, Bouvier drew breath in a guesthouse at 22 Hospital Street, in Galle Fort, Ceylon. He began to see the direction the writing would take him. He took ship for Japan and returned to live there with his wife and children in 1964, the country appealing to his spiritual cast of mind.
When the Swiss go abroad, as they do in their millions, they can’t help but notice how dirty it is, how bad the roads and inefficient the recycling. They are Brahmin travellers looking for leg room. (Americans must increasingly see ‘abroad’ through military night-vision glasses: are they for me or against me?) Long-term residents of Switzerland get habituated to the managed life, to things just pukka. One has to check the urge to Swiss thoroughness and organisation. When you step out of line you get slapped on the wrist once and then you do it the way it should be done. Step out of line twice and punishment ensues with Calvinist certainty.
Returning to Geneva after that first three-year trip, Bouvier had the opposite reaction. He noted the wealth, the cornucopia. He settled back into his parents’ house at Cologny, into the red room he had painted himself as an adolescent. He remained there on and off all his life. Married, with three children, he became a paragon of the nomadic and the sedentary; the two are complementary. He wrote about Japan, about Scotland, about the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland.
In A Journal of Aran (1990) he traces the Irish monastic expansion of the fifth century CE as it moves into Gaul, Switzerland and beyond, comparing it to the wanderings of Tibetan lamas or Mongol shamans. Saints Columba and Gall set out from the west of Ireland to Christianise the heathen Swiss:
In Burgundy, where they lectured the local baronets on their concubines, their bastards and gluttony – no less – they are asked to skedaddle. They move north to Lake Constance, into which they proceed to throw the most sacred idols of the Swabian tribe. There too, a bit fanatic. The monks flee and part ways. Saint Columba heads for Italy across the Alpine passes and founds the abbey of Bobbino. Saint Gall takes refuge in a wild valley to the west of the lake, overrun by bears. He gets rid of them with a swipe of his asperger – an asperger much revered by the Celts – always ready to cut a deal with capricious nature and its emissaries.29
In this apocryphal way the Irish saint founded the monastery of St Gallen in eastern Switzerland, and the noble bear was reduced to a mere emblem on the cantonal escutcheon. Irish monks brought a new system of musical notation and lifted the level of Gregorian chant, like a whizz-kid music teacher in a provincial school. They brought the art of manuscript illumination; to this day the library of St Gallen in eastern Switzerland has the largest collection of mediaeval Celtic manuscripts outside of Ireland.
Bouvier’s Journal of Aran is a return full circle on the wheel of hours: the Swiss nomad revisits those wandering monks of a millennium and a half ago. The Aran Islands present inhospitable weather, heating breaking down, tinned salmon and sardines in the one shop, returned emigrants from New York, a dilatory sense of time. ‘The feeling of indigence, of emptiness, of nothingness born of this severing is not a surprise but a healthy exercise.’30 Bouvier, like Maillart, is always up for a bit of eastern mysticism, wherever he finds it; Calvin under the bodhi tree. He notices too the parish priest in those pre-scandal days, his hail-fellow well-met bonhomie:
A curly-haired burly curate, frenetically digging in the ribs, clasping hands, giving accolades and slaps on the back. Overplaying the forced familiarity, perhaps because of the weather. Not really the look of a holy man or a saint, more like a rugby coach after a converted try.31
Literary recognition came late. In The Scorpion Fish (1981), one of Bouvier’s best books, we find him in Ceylon in 1955 at the tail end of his first big journey. The narrative of
fewer than a hundred pages, set in a guesthouse in Galle Fort, achieves the grace of poetry. After a quarter century, the traveller’s traumatic encounter with Ceylon accents the dark side of paradise. Vignette after vignette illustrates how initiative fritters away in the east. The oppression of the tropics weighs on the spirit: torpor, the end of the road. It was his first book published by Gallimard in Paris, and earned him the accolades of his peers. Always a traveller’s writer, he became a writer’s writer.
Maintaining a comfortable relationship with Switzerland, he identified a strain of what he called Swiss nomadic literature, writers emerging from a country with little physical and psychological room; Ireland is another case in point. One in six Swiss make their lives elsewhere:
Geneva is an artificial appendix with a mere six kilometers bordering the nearest canton as against a hundred kilometer border with France. The town looks towards France more than it does to Berne. It repudiates its illustrious men, Rousseau and Dunant (founder of the Red Cross): Geneva only recognises its sons when they’re lauded elsewhere or dead. Bouvier knew that notoriety gets sorted out with death – thinking of Ella Maillart, of himself. This view also holds true in Switzerland as a whole. The country is small, Geneva tiny, a society very much kept under thumb; those who stick out, who are embarrassments, do well to leave.32
Bouvier was a child of the lake, born under the sign of Pisces. His errant life had a tidal rhythm – not the great surge of the ocean, perhaps, but the circumscribed loveliness of Lac Léman, fog wrapped, prey to sudden storms. How could you not be sedentary in such a landscape? In a late interview he recalled his watery childhood in the environs of Allaman:
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