The Gilded Chalet

by Padraig Rooney

  Peter Stamm: Cool, chiseled, lean writing

  Sonia, in contrast to Ivona, is disembodied and driven. More so than Alex, she hails from a class that recalls Fritz Zorn’s golden coast:

  This was her social sphere, people who were demonstratively hiding their wealth and treated the staff in such a jolly, friendly way that it almost had the effect of condescension. They all seemed to be playing a game, and observing themselves and one another. They were playing at high society, the cultivated art lovers, hurrying out of the dining room to the events hall to catch the chamber music concert, as if there were no other possible way of getting through an evening.12

  This triangular dilemma between Alex and his two women highlights a spiritual malaise. ‘Perhaps I’m more interested in inner rather than external conflicts,’ Stamm admits. Nebulous Swissness and national literature are secondary concerns to him:

  I have, of course, a close relationship with some Swiss writers, not primarily because they were Swiss but rather because I treasure their books. Gottfried Keller, Robert Walser, Friedrich Glauser, Dürrenmatt and Frisch I particularly treasure, and also certain contemporaries. Perhaps it makes little difference that we stem from the same cultural origins. I particularly like Robert Walser’s regional sense of place, the feeling he brings to the locality and people he describes, a place and people familiar to me.13

  In Stamm’s most recent novel, All Days Are Night (2014), Gillian is a television arts presenter in a world of ‘openings and premieres’. Her face has been damaged in a car accident in which her husband Matthias died. Gillian undergoes reconstructive surgery, a reshaping of her physical but also psychological identity. Stamm fractures her and puts her back together as a different person. He abjures a grander statement about national identity for a precise rendering in a cool, efficient, chiselled style.

  In both his recent novels Stamm has fun with the fluff belief systems that have supplanted organised religion. In Seven Years, a manager on the make starts a company called ‘EGO plc’:

  He talked about spontaneous networks and people who had a sort of entrepreneurial approach to their lives, and kept asking themselves, okay, what are my strengths, my preferences, my assumptions? What am I making of them all? Where am I going, and how will I get there? That’s where the future is, EGO plc.14

  In All Days Are Night, the heliotherapy and dancing of a century ago, Hesse’s oriental mumbo-jumbo, have been updated to ‘power points’ in the mountains, the caring and sharing rhetoric of self-help. Art too, of the conceptual kind, has become a sort of ‘flummery’: ‘You could do something with teddy bears. Or with bear poop. Like that African guy who works with elephant dung.’15

  The writer Tim Parks, like myself a fan of Stamm, sees him as ‘not necessarily very “Swiss”’:

  Stamm’s native language is a Swiss dialect but he writes in German, which is a literary construct for him. This helps him to be lean. One of the things clearly happening in this period of globalization is that we are getting a lot more writers writing in very lean styles.16

  Switzerland emerged as a federation in protest at Habsburg power; whether Alsace burghers or Aargau castle Catholics is neither here nor there. Swiss identity for Max Frisch had an existential cast, ponderous with soul-searching. A new politicised talking-back to the state emerged in the later decades of the twentieth century, as hard historical facts came up against Swiss myth-making. Fritz Zorn bit the hand that fed him, but he is a maverick one-off. We might wonder what sort of writer he would have become had he lived, had illness not tragically presented him with a literal dead end and with his subject matter. Daniel de Roulet confronts his Leftist past with the wisdom of hindsight. Identity is central to Peter Stamm’s work, not as a nationality or even a regional allegiance, but as a kind of spiritual quest. In literary terms there is no one Swiss identity, but a fairly fractured assembly of voices in several languages, all clamouring to be heard.

  15

  THE EMPEROR MOTHS

  All quiet on the golden coast

  Charlie Chaplin statue, Vevey, Switzerland

  By the waters of Léman I sat down and wept.

  T.S. Eliot

  Many of the foreign writers in this book saw Switzerland as a haven – from two world wars in the twentieth century, from tax and celebrity towards its end. And not just writers: glitterati, rock aristocracy, royal and imperial has-beens, oily billionaires, anybody seeking the quiet slopes after life’s fitful fever. Wealth helped, as it always does, with residence permits. Switzerland isn’t exactly bohemian central, with poets in garrets living on the royalties of a slim volume. Celebrity comes into the mix too. Byron was the first of the bestseller bad-boy poets and Freddie Mercury was – well – mercurial and on his last legs.

  Our haven-seekers span the twentieth century. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, reluctant to return to Germany after the First World War, settled down and died in the Valais. Erich Maria Remarque wrote the century’s most famous German novel, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), about his traumatic war experience. Persona non grata in Germany once the Nazis came to power, he took American citizenship and spent much of his life in political exile in Switzerland. Jorge Luis Borges was no stranger to Geneva. Educated there as a teenager, he returned to the city as a blind old man, a Tiresias escaping the paparazzi. Graham Greene, after a life wandering the world’s trouble spots and a bit of bother in Antibes, came to Switzerland to die. Anthony Burgess spent the last decades of his life in Monaco – Suisse-sur-Mer – but kept a flat in Locarno, shuttling between the two. They all slept easy and woke in rooms with a view.

  These very different writers are our emperor moths. In his 1950 travelogue about Switzerland, John Russell describes the wealthy retirees wintering on the shores of Lake Geneva as the ‘emperor-moths of western civilization’. On my way back and forth from the south of France, I often stop by Lake Geneva. I park the car in any of the small littoral towns, their grassy foreshores impeccably maintained, and take a power nap. Half an hour later the light has declined, the mountains turn flamingo pink, a mist creeps over the face of the water. It’s like waking up in paradise. I drink from a thermos flask of coffee and imagine what it must be like to wake to this view every day. Women clad in burkas take the evening air in twos and threes, their toenails polished, diamonds or perhaps mere rhinestones in their toe rings. Well-heeled boys from Le Rosey lark around a pinball machine before they have to be back in their rooms – very Brideshead in cashmere and Nantucket red shorts.

  Rising behind the north shore are a thousand years of vineyards, carefully husbanded. The vines are up on trellises, trained high for more light. Before the emperor moths came winging in, this entire south-facing slope was grapes and fishing villages. The Romans took one look at it and thought: vino. Part of the shore’s attraction for retirees is that it has many of the benefits of the French Riviera and few of the inconveniences. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage site. Moths have always been attracted to rich pickings, to folds in the fabric. It’s not just the vines looking for more light.

  This corner of the world has been home to exiles and retirees of the better sort probably since the Romans. In the 1760s, an anonymous author remarked on the lake’s attractions: ‘It has even sometimes had the advantage of possessing some celebrated foreigners who have been drawn to retire there by its agreeable situation and the liberty which is enjoyed.’1 Andrew Beattie catches this vesperal atmosphere:

  There is a strangely melancholic air about the lake, too. It is hard to pin down its exact nature: perhaps the huge, gloomy hotels that line the shore, clinging with quiet pride to a previous age of refinement and deference that has now virtually disappeared; or perhaps it is the sense of transience which cloaks the place: people come here, after all, to die, or to convalesce in a place bathed in cool air and soft light.2

  Prague-born poet Rilke was attuned to transience and forever staying in other people’s country houses. The First World War traumatised him. Even though he didn’t see a
ction on the front, his few months of service in the Austrian army, working in the War Records Office, were enough to send him scurrying to Switzerland in 1919. He wanted to get on with his poems, the Duino Elegies, the flow of which the war had had the temerity to interrupt.

  Rilke’s romantic involvement with Baladine Klossowska determined his stay in Switzerland. He first met her in 1907 when she was already pregnant with the future painter Balthus. They crossed paths again in Geneva in 1919, at the Hotel Richemonde, by which time Baladine had separated from her husband and was the mother of two young sons. The poet had a penchant for the older woman – there had been a few – and if she came with apron strings he would be left to get on with his poems.

  On the night before Baladine went on a previously planned vacation to the resort of Beatenberg on Lake Thun near Berne, they spent a memorable evening talking until all hours on the balcony of her apartment. She left with some reluctance, only to be overwhelmed on her first stopover in Berne by an abundance of flowers from Rilke. ‘At five in the morning, I was awakened by roses,’ she wrote on August 13.3

  Rainer Maria Rilke, Baladine and Balthus in Batenberg, 1922

  Rilke came running to meet her at the Bellevue Palace in Bern at the conclusion of her holiday. He became a surrogate father to the boys, encouraging the artistic talents of the young Balthus by writing a preface in French to Mitsou (1921), the boy’s pen-and-ink drawings of a cat.

  In 1921, a friend offered Rilke an extended stay in yet another castle, the Château de Muzot in Veyras, in the Valais. He’d seen a photo of it in a shop window in Sierre: it was rent free, the views were splendid and he could get on with his rhyming. Baladine furnished the rather forbidding building, which had no electricity and no gas. ‘I am saved,’ the poet wrote about their affair.4 Later, Baladine described their domestic arrangements with nostalgic affection: ‘My sons were my school and my pleasure and I was their playmate. When Rilke came, we were like four happy children.’5 The affair continued until Rilke’s death in 1926.

  He might have passed on his love of castles to Balthus, who in adulthood indulged a number of delusions of grandeur – that he was descended from Lord Byron, the Romanoffs or the Polish Counts de Rola. As a young painter, Balthus had a studio at the Villa Diodati for a time, where Byron stayed that rainy summer of 1816. Balthus also lived for many years in the Villa Medici in Rome. Indulging this taste for gilt-edged dwellings, he bought the Grand Chalet in Rossinière in 1977, one of the oldest in Switzerland, built in 1754, and certainly the largest. It sits in the rolling countryside behind Gstaad. Its roster of guests has included at one time or another Victor Hugo, David Bowie and the Dalai Lama. Balthus, the ‘king of cats’, became one of the great painters of the twentieth century. The Aga Khan and Henri Cartier-Bresson attended his funeral, while U2 frontman Bono sang at it. The painter is buried below the old whitewashed village church. Rilke’s grave is not far away as the crow flies, in Raron in his beloved Valais, surrounded by roses and the towering mountains he immortalised.

  The Grand Chalet at Rossinière, largest in Switzerland, home to the painter Balthus

  War and exile from Germany determined the long retreat in Switzerland of the writer Erich Maria Remarque. Wounded by shrapnel in the First World War, Remarque wrote from harrowing experience in All Quiet on the Western Front, completed in just six weeks. By the time the National Socialists came to power in Germany, he had bought a villa in Porto Ronco, right on the Swiss border with Italy, facing the Brissago Islands and Lago Maggiore. The Nazis banned and burned his books while trying to misrepresent him as Jewish. They beheaded his sister for speaking out against the regime, a clear warning to him not to return. Finally, they stripped him of German nationality. Remarque began his long exile as a German writer of conscience, whose theme became political and psychological statelessness.

  Handsome and fond of actresses, he went for the A-list: Heddy Lamarr, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and Paulette Goddard. He met Dietrich at the Venice Film Festival in 1937 and was bowled over. She was on the rebound from Douglas Fairbanks, Jr, and he had just broken up with Austrian actress Heddy Lamarr. Dietrich’s opening line is a classic of its kind, designed to soften the heart of any writer: ‘You look far too young to have penned one of the greatest novels of our time.’6 To celebrate their relationship, he threw a bottle of his most valuable vintage into Lago Maggiore (for the record, a 1911 Hessische Staatsweingüter Kloster Eberbach Steinberger Riesling Kabinett). Remarque imagined a future diver coming across this love token. In 2012, a group of Remarque fans dived in search of the bottle off the lakeshore, and found it – intact after a century under water and authenticated by the label.7

  Dietrich was notoriously chameleonesque, bisexual and a bit frosty, with a string of leading men as lovers. Like Remarque, she refused to return to Hitler’s Germany and was a regular guest at the Hotel du Cap in Antibes, where she conducted her various assignations with the connivance of her husband. Here she also began an affair with Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, holidaying with his large family. Joe had always been fond of a showgirl, a penchant passed on to his son Jack. Dietrich managed to get her hand down Jack’s trousers as well. Meanwhile, Remarque kept to his room, writing his bestseller Arch of Triumph (1945). Their correspondence, published as Tell Me That You Love Me (2002), is one of the great epistolary love stories, and has recently been adapted for the stage.

  Remarque had been living in the Villa Monte Tabor in Ronco since 1931. It sits majestically on a cliff above Lake Maggiore, and had originally been owned by the artist Arnold Böcklin. In 1958 he married the actress Paulette Goddard, the former Mrs Chaplin. It was her fourth marriage and his second. Remarque liked mixing cocktails, collecting cars and artworks. There are moves afoot to turn the splendid residence above the lake into a museum.

  What did Switzerland represent to this writer whose lasting value critics have sometimes thrown into doubt? All Quiet on the Western Front remains the best-known and most widely read German novel of the twentieth century. Remarque wrote about displacement and flight from the Nazi state, but rarely about the haven of Switzerland itself. In Heaven Has No Favourites (1961), a couple of short stories and the screenplay for The Other Love (1947), he makes use of a Davos sanatorium as a backdrop to a love story between a racing car driver and a tubercular femme fatale, modelled somewhat on Dietrich. Like Nabokov, Highsmith and le Carré, success in the film world gave him an added material independence. Switzerland provided a haven from Germany’s poisonous politics, as it did for Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse. Remarque died in 1970 an American citizen and a German writer living in Italian-speaking Switzerland. The Great War and the great dictator, fast cars, actresses and a villa by the lake had turned him into a grand old man of gilded letters.

  Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is an unlikely transatlantic moth. The Borges family moved to Geneva in 1914, when Jorge was fifteen. His father, a lawyer and psychology teacher with hereditary failing eyesight he passed on to his son, sought treatment from a Swiss ophthalmologist. Borges senior took early retirement and packed his family off to Europe: the strength of the Argentinian peso meant it was cheaper to live there than in Buenos Aires. The advent of war kept them in Geneva. The Irish writer James Joyce and his family were stuck in Zürich for the same reason. The young Borges had left behind a sheltered bilingual English–Spanish childhood in the colourful suburb of Palermo in Buenos Aires – ‘a place of slaughterhouses, late-night bars, muleteers and smugglers’, as his biographer James Woodall describes it.8 Geneva must have been a sobering shock. Bookish, near-sighted, with sultry good looks, Borges affected English dress and manners, much like the young Nabokov at the same time in St Petersburg.

  The Borges family lived at 17 rue de Malagnou (now 7 rue Ferdinand-Hodler), with a view of the Russian Orthodox Church and the cathedral. Decades later he acknowledged Geneva’s multicultural influence, a city filled with war refugees like himself. But at the time the family encountered ‘a certain disdain for the fo
reigner’ among the Swiss.9 Borges’ two best friends during his years there were Jewish. He bought his books from the Librairie Jullien, still in business on Place du Bourg-de-Four. His maternal grandmother died in Geneva in 1917, in the Spanish flu epidemic. In Atlas (1986), his last book, he catalogues this psycho-geography:

  Of all the cities on this planet, of all the diverse and intimate places which a man seeks out and merits in the course of his voyages, Geneva strikes me as the most propitious for happiness. Beginning in 1914, I owe it the revelation of French, of Latin, of German, of Expressionism, of Schopenhauer, of the doctrine of Buddha, of Taoism, of Conrad, of Lafcadio Hearn and of the nostalgia of Buenos Aires. Also: the revelation of love, of friendship, of humiliation and of the temptation to suicide.10

  No mention of Geneva or the Genevans themselves here, but rather an old man’s bookish dream of his youth. At the time, the young Borges ‘conceived a hearty loathing of Switzerland: it was terribly bourgeois, a place of hotels and chocolate factories’.11 Time had clearly softened this view.

  The ‘humiliation’ refers to Borges’ first known sexual experience at age nineteen. Borges senior arranged for his son to be deflowered in a studio flat on Place du Bourg-de-Four, in time-honoured Latin tradition. The woman may have been one of his father’s own mistresses, and the experience turned out to be traumatic:

  Dr. Borges gave Georgie the address of a flat on the Place du Bourgde-Four, which was in the red-light district not too far from where they lived, and told him that a woman would be waiting there. Most young men approach their first experience of sexual intercourse with considerable apprehension, and when Borges finally reached the woman’s flat, he was in a state of high anxiety. As it turned out, it appears that he was too precipitate in his approach and did not fully go through with his initiation.12