The Gilded Chalet

by Padraig Rooney

  Like Joyce, Borges spent many a stolen hour ‘fluttering about the lamps of harlotry’.13 Both writers suffered from progressive blindness and returned to Switzerland to die. In Borges’ case it was after a long life as Latin America’s premier writer. Against the wishes of his family, he married his secretary and companion, María Kodama, in Paraguay in 1986, a marriage not recognised under Argentine law. In May of that year Borges clarified in a press release his reasons for settling once again in the city of his adolescence:

  I am a free man. I have decided to stay in Geneva, because Geneva corresponds to the happiest years of my life. My Buenos Aires is still one of guitars, of milongas, of water-wells and of courtyards. None of that exists now. It’s a big city just like many others. I feel strangely happy in Geneva. This has nothing to do with the culture of my ancestors and the basic love of country. It seems strange that someone doesn’t understand and respect this decision by a man who, like one of Wells’s characters, has determined to be an invisible man.14

  Already aware of approaching death, in 1985 Borges expressed a wish to become a dual Argentinian-Swiss citizen. In his poem ‘The Confederates’, he balances the fate of a torn-apart Argentina, following the Falklands War, and the solidarity inherent in the founding of the Swiss Confederation, where men ‘resolved to forget their differences and accentuate their affinities’. Two weeks before he died in Geneva, he published a poem in The New Yorker titled ‘The Web’, questioning the notion of home, of a mother tongue, wondering where he might die. Geneva represented deracination but, paradoxically, the earth that nurtured him:

  Which of my cities

  am I doomed to die in?

  Geneva,

  where revelation reached me

  through Virgil and Tacitus, certainly not from Calvin?15

  In the Cimetière des Rois, blustery rain was coming off the lake, primroses and daffodils pushed up from distinguished graves – Calvin’s and Piaget’s among them. Borges’ has an inscription from the Old English poem ‘The Battle of Maldon’ – ‘be not afraid’. His last acrimonious weeks in Geneva were in flight from family and the press, stumbling blind a stone’s throw from the house where he had spent his teens and from the lake he hadn’t seen in over sixty years.

  Graham Greene was also a peripatetic moth, one of a number of English writer-spies flitting through Switzerland. He spent years away from his native Berkhamsted in the world’s hot spots, but since 1966 had been living modestly in Antibes on the French Riviera. In novel after novel he anatomised shifting post-war power and the dilemmas of lonely men in colonial outposts. This was Greeneland: an idiosyncratic body of work as recognisable as Nabokov’s hall of mirrors or Highsmith’s murder machines. In 1982 Greene cried foul against organised crime and corruption in a short tract echoing Zola: J’accuse – The Dark Side of Nice. He goes for the jugular in his opening salvo:

  Let me issue a warning to anyone who is tempted to settle for a peaceful life on what is called the Côte d’Azur. Avoid the region of Nice, which is the preserve of some of the most criminal organisations in the south of France.16

  His target was the Riviera mafia and the alleged corruption of Jacques Médecin, the then mayor of Nice. Médecin, whose father had also been mayor, initially responded with high dudgeon, but fled to Uruguay in 1993. Extradited back to France, he served time in prison for corruption. Greene had the last laugh in heaven, but in the meantime France banned his jeremiad and obliged the author to pay damages. He licked his wounds, sorted his tax affairs and retired to a flat outside Corseaux above Vevey in 1990, a year before he died from leukaemia. ‘His last home, the final sanctuary, was in Switzerland, his anteroom to death. He shut the door on the world.’17

  Charlie Chaplin was living in more opulent splendour outside the same village, in the fourteen-bedroom Manoir de Ban, with servants and garden. Chaplin too was a refugee from politics, having escaped the inanity of Senator McCarthy’s Communist baiting in the United States. Chaplin read Greene parts of his autobiography in manuscript. Actor James Mason had the cottage next door to Greene’s. Mason had played Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita and would take the role of Dr Fischer in the 1985 television adaptation of Greene’s Swiss-based tale. The writer, the comic genius and the matinée idol were in and out of each other’s houses.

  Greene’s reasons for visiting Switzerland since 1969 were mostly familial: his daughter and grandsons were living above Vevey. It was here, pulling Christmas crackers, that he conceived Dr Fischer of Geneva (1980), one of his last tales:

  At lunch on Christmas Day 1978, in Switzerland with my daughter and my grandchildren nine months after the publication of The Human Factor, a new book, Dr Fischer of Geneva, came without any warning to my mind. At the age of seventy-five, I found my future still as unpredictable as when I sat down at my mother’s desk in Berkhamsted and began to write my first novel.18

  The action of Dr Fischer of Geneva shuttles between Vevey where the narrator works and Geneva where his rich father-in-law holds court. Green spins a moral tale, cool as an after-dinner mint, from a group of wealthy elderly hangers-on. It’s hard not to see their moneyed old-world swagger as a morality play, a comment on terminal wealth. The characters represent vices – vanity, hollowness and obsequiousness, but above all greed. Notoriously tight-fisted, Greene skewers the rich. Jones, his narrator, is a translator and one-handed letter writer in ‘the immense chocolate factory of glass in Vevey’. (The headquarters of Swiss multinational Nestlé, the largest food company in the world, is in Vevey.) He lost his left hand in the Blitz. Dr Fischer is the inventor of a toothpaste called Dentophil Bouquet, ‘which was supposed to hold at bay the infections caused by eating too many of our chocolates’.19 The entanglement of one with the other – the sickly sweet and the squeaky clean – is Greene’s sorry tale. The toothpaste mogul and the one-handed chocolate underwriter seem an allegory for Switzerland itself.

  Greene’s grotesques are all wealthy Toads – from toadies, a group of sycophants – gathered around Dr Fischer’s table in Geneva in expectation of gifts. He humiliates them. Mrs Montgomery married well and enjoys a good widowhood; her matronly type makes an appearance in Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac. She is a predatory bird of late plumage, ‘an American with blue hair’.20 The others include an alcoholic film actor past his best, an international lawyer, a tax adviser and a Swiss General called Krueger. They’ve all got some connection with money – Krugerrands are gold coins from South Africa. ‘They were very well lined themselves. They had all settled around Geneva for the same reason, either to escape taxes in their own countries or take advantage of favourable cantonal conditions.’21 Greene’s group of sycophants satirises Switzerland as a tax haven for retirees.

  Dr Fischer humiliates his guests by playing on their greed. Jones has married the doctor’s daughter. ‘“Don’t ever mention Dentophil to him,” she said. “He doesn’t like to be reminded of how his fortune was made.”’22Is there a veiled reference to Swiss loot here? In a nod to how post-war victory quickly became commercial, the war-wounded Jones whiles away an hour in a Geneva pub, the aptly named Winston Churchill. Greene himself was a fire-fighter during the Blitz:

  There was what the Swiss call a Pub Anglais not far from the rank, named, as you would expect, the Winston Churchill, with an unrecognisable sign and wooden panelling and stained-glass windows (for some reason the white and red roses of York and Lancaster) and an English bar with china beer handles, perhaps the only authentic antiques, for that adjective could hardly be applied to the carved wooden settees and the bogus barrels which served as tables and the pressurised Whitbread. The hours of opening were not authentically English and I planned to drink up a little courage before I took a taxi.23

  The other authentic antique in this faux interior, of course, is the war-wounded narrator himself, for whom Churchill represented sacrifice and not just an ersatz commercial killing.

  Mr Kips, one of the Toads, is involved in shady arms deals. Greene’s nov
el appeared at the time of the US-imposed Iranian arms embargo in 1979. He enlists Jones’ help in translating a letter:

  There were references to Prague and Skoda, and Skoda to all the world means armaments. Switzerland is a land of strangely knotted business affiliations: a great deal of political as well as financial laundering goes on in that little harmless neutral state.24

  We have come across arms and the launderette before: Glauser, Dürrenmatt, Frisch and le Carré have all pointed the finger at Swiss shady deals. In true Greeneland fashion, characters hear midnight Mass at the Abbey of Saint Maurice. They ‘listened to that still more ancient story of the Emperor Augustus’s personal decree and how all the world came to be taxed’.25 The irony about Swiss taxation here is fleeting and subtle.

  Greene shows an intimate knowledge of wealth, retirement and the emperor moths. His one-handed bandit gets caught up in the spiritual shallowness of rich people, much as Dürrenmatt’s detectives do and Fitzgerald’s Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night. The greed of the rich knows no bounds and masks the emptiness of their appetites. They need baubles, and they toy with people to get them. Dr Fischer remains Greene’s only anatomy of mammon along the golden coast.

  Anthony Burgess, like Graham Greene (the two famously didn’t get on), was a globetrotting Englishman haunting the colonial service and the fallout of empire after the war. Burgess was a northerner, like D.H. Lawrence, who fell in love with the southern sun. His affair with exotica began in Malaya, from which emerged The Malayan Trilogy (1959). The novels A Clockwork Orange (1962) and Earthly Powers (1980) established his ebullient reputation. Film rights for the former and numerous screenplays made his fortune. He lived in Brunei (where he taught the Sultan’s son), then in Malta and Italy, before settling in 1975 in Monaco. As a tax exile from Britain, a modestly born Mancunian Conservative, Burgess could rest easy in the little principality. He and his family spent the hot months at their chalet in Savosa outside Lugano, in Italian-speaking Switzerland:

  Anthony Burgess, tax exile and man about Europe

  Ticino looks like an udder drooping from the vaccine body of Switzerland, and Lugano is the teat of the udder. It looks as though it is dripping milch or lait or latte into the mouth of northern Italy.

  In Lugano you will not find pasta-paunched deliverymen singing Puccini to the morning sun. Everybody is rather prim in the true Swiss manner, trim too, and there is not a single candy wrapper or cigarette packet thrown to disfigure the trim, prim streets.26

  In 1975, Albert R. Broccoli and Guy Hamilton commissioned Burgess to write a screenplay for Ian Fleming’s The Spy Who Loved Me. The script resurrects that old gothic-horror location of Swiss fiction, the private clinic. Burgess envisioned small nuclear devices inserted into the bodies of wealthy patients while they are under anaesthetic. This surgical procedure turns them into human bombs. The plan is for CHAOS (Consortium for Hastening the Annihilation of Organised Society) to blow up these walking explosives at a Royal Command Performance at Sydney Opera House. Bond’s role is to perform acupuncture to extract the bombs. Burgess’ script was rejected, but his wacky, not entirely serious imagination does anticipate the suicide bombers of our own CHAOS-filled century.27

  By the time Burgess came to publish the second volume of his autobiography, You’ve Had Your Time (1990), the Swiss clinic, interestingly, has become a German one, but the explosive plot remains the same. Burgess describes his Lugano surroundings with characteristic bravado, including that standard feature of all Swiss dwellings, a nuclear shelter: its ‘massive metal door … a grim cell rather than use which one would prefer to be nuclear-blasted’. He owned property all over the continent – in Rome, Bracciano, Monaco – and his view of Switzerland is geographically aware, not unkind, born of history and experience:

  I am very much in Europe here in Lugano. This is the remotest point of the triangle formed with Monaco and Milan. It is a triangle within whose body shady deals are done, governments cheated, money stacked, high denomination plaques thrown onto green baize. Switzerland itself is not quite Europe: it remained aloof from Europe’s last agony, as did Ireland, though it bought Nazi coal and was cautious about letting in refugees. It touches true Europe at four points, and it knows that its three linguistic cultures are mere tributaries of the main rivers.28

  Like Greene, and many of the writers in this book, Burgess has a jaundiced view of Swiss hospitality and neutrality. He was always ready to play the chip-on-the-shoulder northerner when it suited him, from the safety of his various tax shelters. Like Borges, his take on Switzerland was bookish – Lenin and Joyce rubbing shoulders in Zürich, the city as a cradle for modernism, a language backwater.

  The novel that best captures the melancholy air of the emperor moths is Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac (1984). Her Vevey hotel is less swanky than the Trois Couronnes of Henry James fame, downgraded from exclusivity to faded grandeur, a daisy gone to seed. The guests are retiring types, among them Edith Hope, a so-so writer of romans de rose, the ancestor of chic lit. A little entertaining intrigue is the most Edith can hope for, rather than the full game, set and match of Byronic romance. She glimpses Byron’s Château de Chillon in the distance, ‘the outline of the gaunt remains’, as though all that’s left her is toothlessness and sunken fires. The hotel offers ‘a mild form of sanctuary, an assurance of privacy’.29 Brookner has always been good at plucking the faded English rose in the noonday sun. Edith quickly ferrets out the unseemly behind privacy and discretion, but the lake keeps intruding into view, ‘spreading like an anaesthetic towards the invisible further shore’.

  Classic 1952 Samuel Henchosz poster for the Lac Léman Navigation Company that criss-crosses the lake

  An autumn sun, soft as honey, gilded the lake; tiny waves whispered onto the shore; a white steamer passed noiselessly off in the direction of Ouchy; and at her feet, on the sandy path, she saw the green hedgehog shape of a chestnut, split open to reveal the brown gleam of its fruit.30

  Unlike our emperor moths, Edith returns home to the world outside Switzerland – Knightsbridge, in effect – leaving the gleaming chestnut behind. She is the latest in a long line of arrivals to Switzerland, stretching back to Byron and the Shelleys: refugees from the wars, from the scandal sheets of romance, from history’s noises off.

  We could question the depth of attachment these emperor moths had to the Federation. Switzerland itself is used to creative types flapping in and sometimes settling; they are part of its self-image. Polanski in Gstaad. Nabokov in Montreux. Chaplin in Vevey. They bring the glamour of deposed royalty, these panjandrums of civilization, these monstres sacrés of the writing and cinema worlds. Royalty comes winging in too. Such celebrity confirms Switzerland’s image as a first-class retirement home for foreigners, a happening place. Davos is a global talking shop; Art Basel trades in high-end canvas or perhaps merely high-end concepts; Montreux showcases established jazz. Switzerland’s way of pulling in the punters may not be cutting edge or avant-garde, but it’s well heeled, well connected, curated for the money. The problem with writers is that by and large they don’t make money, although most of the above-mentioned moths didn’t do too badly. You can’t collect writers, but you can brand them when they’re dead. The emperor moths settle by the lake or in the valleys, harming nobody, paying favourable taxes, sorting their affairs before night falls.

  My power nap is over. Which way will I drive home? The back roads meander through vineyards, the lake appearing and disappearing below as I climb. Byron’s university chum Hobhouse thought that the finest view of Lake Geneva was from Cossonay. Winding up their hike through the Bernese Oberland in 1816, they stopped there for a bite to eat. Hobhouse went behind the château to lie down in a field and take in the view:

  From this field I looked down upon the deep woody dell in which runs the Orbe, on the swelling plains of mead-and wine-land set with villages, on the Lake of Geneva and its Savoy hills, with the Clarens mountains – in short, on one of the most lovely prospects in Switzerla
nd. The spot appeared to have been well selected for a view, as I found an overgrown bower. I lay down in the sun, enjoyed myself most entirely, and dared to write down in my pocket-book that I was happy.31

  At Aubonne, further south, Hobhouse dined with their Swiss guide Berger, the two of them discussing taxes and pig killing, Napoleon and cantonal politics. Aubonne’s oldest inn is the Hotel du Lion d’Or. The sign hanging in front has a prancing lion above the date: 1790. It’s a small hotel built around a garden, where I take a room in what must once have been the stables. A trilingual Gideon’s bible is by the bedside. When I ask the proprietor about Byron, he adds the title in deference, but seems unsure whether he wants his hotel associated with such a personage. Still mad, bad and dangerous to know.

  The full realisation of Byron’s exile from England, from wife and children, from his love for his half-sister Augusta, has been brought home to him in the mountains. In the final entry of his journal, written in the Golden Lion, he knows that the summer in Switzerland has come to its close. He has seen ‘some of the noblest views in the world’, but has not found solace:

  And neither the music of the Shepherd, the crashing of the Avalanche, not the torrent, the mountain, the Glacier, the Forest, nor the Cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty and the power and the Glory around, above and beneath me. I am past reproaches, and there is a time for all things, I am past the wish of vengeance, and I know of none like for what I have suffered. But the hour will come, when what I feel must be felt, and the – but enough.32

  Aubonne is one of those viewing points where you realise that Switzerland has had a long, fairly peaceful history, a place where not too much has changed. Nobody bombed the Lion d’Or. The castle above the town, built by gem merchant and orientalist Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, is intact and houses the village school. The view hasn’t been tampered with.