Descending again to the lake, the car swings through roundabout after roundabout: Yverdon, Moudon, Nyon – the old Celtic stronghold names survive behind the Roman and Savoyard arrivals. A landscape rich in association. The Romans, Rousseau, the Romantics, refugee writers, the spies and detectives, bright young things of the Twenties and of the low, dishonest decade, the double agents and murderers, his master’s butterflies and the emperor moths… they’ve all written about this immortal landscape and its effect on the viewer.
Early on it was Rousseau, a son of the soil, who drew the writers here. He was inspired by kicking the traces of Calvinism, spurning bourgeois habits and overhauling convention. The yearning and rebellion of his fictional young couple by the lake – Julie and Saint-Preux – imbued the landscape with feeling that got passed on to later tearaways. The Romantics imagined the Alps as authentic, impulsive, pure nature, unlike the civilisation they’d fled. For the most part the Romantics died young and thereby avoided the slippers and the comeback album. It’s hard to imagine Byron as a big fat slob with a plummy voice, hauled up for a spot of jiggery-pokery with an underage Greek.
And it wasn’t just a pretty landscape. The Romantics saw Switzerland as a functioning democracy and William Tell as a folk hero who sent the overlords packing. In the political sense too, Switzerland was the great good place. Topography helped foster the federation as a redoubt holding out against God’s anointed kings who seemed always to be plotting for a piece of it. This conception of Switzerland lived on into the twentieth century when Russians were getting uppity against their tsars and conspired from the bars and tea-rooms of Zürich, Lausanne and Geneva.
Poets and travellers nurtured Switzerland as a psycho-geography: lacustrine, rocky, wild, Mother Nature on steroids. Victorian England followed in the poets’ footsteps, clutching Baedekers and well-thumbed Tauchnitz editions. The prattle of guides and grasping innkeepers, milkmaids and slaphappy yodellers in Lederhosen added some local colour, a Swiss floor-show for the tourists. As the nineteenth century waned and tuberculosis ravaged industrial lungs, Switzerland morphed into an advertisement for health. Writers began to see the mountain sanatorium, the spa town, the grand hotel and the ski resort as havens and retreats. Foreign writers didn’t get much beyond these confined spaces, into a more hardscrabble or authentic Switzerland. On the Grand Tour the locals are servants. Daisy Miller, besides being a little flirt, is a no-nothing heiress doing Europe on a gap year. Thomas Mann’s talking heads are well fed but hardly ever leave the hotel. Switzerland becomes a terrace, a promontory above the world, an exclusive resort varnishing its woodwork for the visitors.
In the twentieth century, both Swiss and foreign writers imagined how Switzerland managed its neutrality during two world wars and the long Cold War that followed. From Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls to le Carré’s The Constant Gardener, the detective thriller, the spy novel, the Bond brand and a noir sensibility have had a century-long literary engagement with Switzerland and its secrets. Wheeling and dealing, cross-border practices, the wages of sin, arms and the high-level launderette have all cast a long shadow on the pure-as-the-driven-snow image of Switzerland.
Occasionally, my dormant Trotskyite reawakens here and I think: ah, so that’s how the rich do it! It could be at a parent–teacher meeting. Or watching the world go by in St Moritz. Or crossing Bankverein in Basel, knowing gold is underfoot in the vaults, five floors beneath the pavement. We have been conditioned to think market capitalism benign, and sometimes forget that the rich become so on the backs of the rest of us. Does anybody any longer believe it’s all a matter of innate intelligence plus elbow grease? The 99% and 1% model is back in business with a vengeance. ‘Behind every fortune is a dead dog’, as the saying goes in South America. Writers about Switzerland get a whiff of it. England’s prosperity at one point rested on sugar and slavery in the Caribbean, America’s on the bring-and-buy of a new continent. Switzerland’s apple on the head of Tell Junior is tame as a founding myth in comparison to genocide, say. Between a spot of child labour and executive bonuses, many a company lies.
Switzerland took writers in, sometimes grudgingly, often with good grace. It gave them a room with a view and a place at the table – maybe not the Stammtisch, but you can’t have everything. Service was brisk and efficient, the wine not too bad, the food rough and ready but nourishing. Demi-pension.
You’re a writer, are you? We’ve had a few of those.
And the writers responded by doing what they do best: reportage, poems, horror fiction, travelogue, novel, detective and Krimi, great modern masterpiece. They bit the hand that fed them. They pointed out the dry rot. Suggested there’s a smell under the floorboards. Often enough writers just got on with it – up some secluded valley or in a flat in Münchenstein. From time to time fruitful exchange between local scribblers and arrivistes led to new forms, mutual recognition. But this being Switzerland, they kept a wary eye on each other, knowing they might merely be passing through, taking shelter from the storm of history. Writers flitted into the gilded chalet, attracted by the light. What would the world be if there were no chalet, no refuge, no little lifeboat?
And are you paying cash or credit card?
It’s impossible to move mountains: a certain resilience, inwardness and frugality are required of those who live in them. Caesar knew this. Latin, Germanic and Gallic cultures converge here, those three great linguistic streams. Peter Stamm makes a case for Switzerland being the watershed of Europe: ‘water symbolises distance, a way to the sea that we sorely lack’.33 And Swiss writers have often gone that distance and floated downstream. Just as the three great rivers of Europe have their source in its mountains, so the example of Swiss federal harmony has slaked the thirst of writers for centuries.
I hope this book has shown that Switzerland inspired a wealth of writing, and that writers from all over make it a rich literary landscape. They came, they saw, they did a little shopping. Switzerland is replete with small museums, writers’ boltholes, hidden archives and literary landmarks: a truly inscribed and inspiring terrain. A three-hundred-year-old chalet still standing in Montbovon hosted Byron and Hobhouse for a fish supper. The archives are full of surprises.
And are you staying long, sir?
My journey is nearly over and I head up the motorway in the direction of Lake Biel and the Île St-Pierre. You remember that Rousseau was happiest there. You might recall that the green fairy sidetracked me the last time I attempted a visit. These days a causeway joins the island to the shore. Rousseau spent only five weeks on the island, but it was a period he never forgot.
Emerging from a long and happy reverie, seeing myself surrounded by greenery, flowers and birds, and letting my eyes wander over the clear and crystalline water, I fused my imaginings with these charming sights and finding myself in the end gradually brought back to myself and my surroundings, I could not draw a line between fiction and reality.34
And so it is with me: no longer able to draw the line between fiction and reality; not even wanting to. I first read Rousseau studying French in Maynooth after that 1973 summer in Switzerland. I can’t pretend I fully understood him. Who knows what understanding is? It might be a wine laid down long ago in the mind’s eye until it is ready for drinking.
Solvitur ambulando, as Saint Augustine wrote, it is solved by walking. I left the books and the laptop in the car – ‘all these gloomy old papers and books’, Rousseau calls them35 – and walked out on the causeway. Books were beginning to take over the chalet, to perch on every surface. You could do worse than to leave them behind, find a quiet island on a lake, and breed rabbits.
NOTES
Introduction
1. ‘By Verona, Mantua and Milan, Across the Pass of the Simplon into Switzerland’, extracted from Dickens, Pictures from Italy.
2. Twain, A Tramp Abroad, pp. 213–14.
3. Extract from ‘Letter to Mick Flick’ by Daniel de Roulet. English translation Daniel de Roulet, from a performanc
e piece in Gstaad, 2014.
4. Conrad, Under Western Eyes, p. 180.
5. ‘Geneva’ in Rousseau, Letter to d’Alembert, and Writings for the Theatre, p. 241.
6. Caesar, Gallic War, trans. W.A. McDevitte and W.S. Bohn, Book 1, Chapter 2.
7. Aus dem Tagebuch 1933. Hoffmann and Piatti, Europa Erlesen: Basel, p. 167.
8. Ó Muraíle, Turas na dTaoiseach nUltach as Éirinn, p. 147. This sterling work of editing, translation and annotation, together with the earlier translation by Rev. Paul Walsh, represents a labour of love for these Maynooth men. Ó Muraíle’s translation incorporates Walsh’s earlier work published in Dublin in 1916. I have standardised the spelling of Basel.
9. Ibid., p. 157.
10. Ibid., p. 157.
11. Judt, The Memory Chalet, p. 220. The Swiss referred to here is Federal Police Chief Heinrich Rothmund, who recommended stamping a ‘J’ on the passports of German Jews as early as 1938.
1: Run Out of Town
1. Rousseau, The Confessions, p. 37.
2. Ibid., p. 59.
3. Ibid., p. 39.
4. Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 69.
5. The Confessions, p. 51.
6. Ibid., p. 102.
7. Ibid., p. 105.
8. Edmund Burke in ‘Letter to a Member of the National Assembly’, 1791. Burke was only the latest in a line of moralists who blamed reading as the cause of depravity. French physician Bienville’s treatise On Nymphomania (1771) attributes sexual laxity in young girls to the loose reading habits and degeneracy of domestic servants.
9. The Confessions, pp. 146–7.
10. Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise, I, XIV.
11. Oeuvres complètes de J.J. Rousseau: Corréspondance, letters to the Maréchal de Luxembourg, 28 January and 20 February 1763, my translation.
12. Ibid.
13. The Confessions, p. 586.
14. Ibid., pp. 598, 603.
15. Maurice Cranston, The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity, p. 57.
16. Rousseau, Meditations of a Solitary Walker, p. 28.
17. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 3, LXXVII.
18. Hawthorne, Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks, pp. 532–3.
19. James, Collected Travel Writings: The Continent, pp. 625–7.
20. Meditations of a Solitary Walker, Fifth Walk.
21. Conrad, Under Western Eyes, pp. 239–40.
2: Here Come the Monsters
1. Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote the anonymous introduction to the first edition (1817) of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.
2. Shelley in a 3 October 1814 letter to Hogg, quoted at length in Spark, Mary Shelley, pp. 16–18.
3. Mary Shelley, p. 19.
4. Cited in Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, p. 238.
5. Published anonymously by T. Hookham & J. Ollier, London, in 1817 and including Percy Shelley’s poem ‘Mont Blanc’, p. 40.
6. Ibid., pp. 49–50.
7. Ibid., p. 59.
8. Shelley: The Pursuit, p. 248.
9. Letter of Mary Shelley published with History of a Six Weeks’ Tour.
10. Shelley: The Pursuit, p. 241.
11. Rossetti, Diary of Dr. John William Polidori: 1816, p. 96.
12. Byron’s poem ‘Childish Recollections’ in his first book of verse, Hours of Idleness.
13. Hobhouse diary entry for July 19, 1811, following a meeting with Byron at Sittingbourne. See also Peter Cochran’s comments on ‘Leon’ on www.newsteadabbeybyronsociety.org.
14. History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, p. 110.
15. Shelley: The Pursuit, p. 335.
16. Ziegler, The Swiss, the Gold and the Dead, p. 210.
17. James, Collected Travel Writings: The Continent, p. 630.
18. Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. V.
19. Galiffe to John Backhouse, quoted in John Clubbe, ‘Byron in Switzerland’, Times Literary Supplement, 6 February 1969. Jacques Augustin Galiffe (1773–1853) was a Genevan historian, exiled himself to Italy for his sins. He is buried in the Swiss-owned ‘English’ Cemetery in Florence.
20. Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind, pp. 106–7.
21. Frankenstein, pp. 93, 95. The Bodleian Library holds Mary Shelley’s manuscript of the novel, emended by Percy Shelley and with some passages in his hand. The bulk of the manuscript, however, is in her handwriting.
22. Ibid., pp. 31–2.
23. Ibid., p. 69.
24. Ibid., p. 198.
25. Ibid., p. 199.
26. Byron, Fragment of a Novel, 1816.
27. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 3, LXXXVI.
3: The Blue Henrys
1. Ivo Haanstra examines this elegant item for inelegant purpose, with period illustrations, in Blue Henry: The Almost Forgotten Story of the Blue Glass Sputum Flask. Blue Henrys are now collectible items.
2. A Thomas-Mann-Way now links the Waldhotel Davos (former Waldsanatorium) and the Schatzalp, fixing in the landscape various scenes from Mann’s novel. The spa town’s connection with Nobel laureates has a pendant in the 1936 shooting of German Nazi Wilhelm Gustloff by a young Jewish man, David Frankfurter. Nobel laureate Günter Grass has fictionalised this incident in his novel Crabwalk.
3. Symonds corresponded with Venice resident Horatio F. Brown (1854–1926), and stayed with him on his summer visits to the city. Brown became Symonds’ executor and published John Addington Symonds, a Biography. As such he was responsible for suppressing information and papers on Symonds’ homosexuality. Symonds first befriended the schoolboy Brown at Clifton College, where the twenty-three-year-old Symonds was lecturing on the Greek poets. Later, Brown lived with his mother in a house on the Zattere, in company with a gondolier, Antonio Salin, and his family. Brown became a historian and leading light in the city, his public life recorded by another Venice man-about-town, Frederick Rolfe, the infamous Baron Corvo. Henry Scott Tuke painted Brown’s portrait and he was connected to all the leading lights of his time, including Lord Roseberry and Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote a poem for him.
4. Alan Bennett, The Habit of Art. Bennett wrote about the nexus of feelings and identities behind his play, in the London Review of Books, 5 November 2009.
5. Symonds, The Memoirs, p. 62.
6. Ibid., p. 78.
7. Nude photographs by the Arcadian photographers Baron von Gloeden (1856–1931) and Wilhelm von Plüschow (1852–1930), resident in Taormina, Sicily and Rome respectively. Von Gloeden’s guest book was a who’s who of turn-of-the-century pederasty, and included the signature of Oscar Wilde. Anne Thwaite’s Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape cites Edmund Gosse in the choir stalls at Robert Browning’s funeral in Westminster Abbey, peeping repeatedly at one such snap by von Gloeden, sent to him as a Christmas present by Symonds (p. 323).
8. Symonds, The Memoirs, pp. 94–95.
9. Symonds in a letter to Benjamin Jowett (1817–93), Master of Balliol College, Oxford.
10. The Memoirs, p. 117.
11. Ibid., p. 191.
12. Ibid., p. 138.
13. Ibid., p. 154.
14. Case XVII in Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion, which includes as part of Point 10: ‘He was very curious to know why the Emperors kept boys as well as girls in their seraglios, and what the male gods did with the youths they loved.’
15. The Memoirs, p. 259.
16. Ibid., p. 261.
17. Ibid., pp. 265–6.
18. Symonds with his daughter Margaret, Our Life in the Swiss Highlands.
19. Tchaikovsky, in a letter to his brother, Modest, in Letters to His Family.
20. Ibid.
21. Stevenson, ‘Health and Mountains’, in Essays on Travel.
22. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Vol. II (1880–1887), p. 90.
23. Stevenson’s ‘Davos in Winter’ first appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette, 17 February 1881, and was collected in Essays on Travel. The volume also included ‘Health and Mountains’, ‘Alpine Diversio
n’ and ‘The Stimulation of the Alps’, all originally appearing in the Pall Mall Gazette in February–March 1881.
24. Ibid.
25. Stevenson, ‘Health and Mountains’.
26. Letter from Stevenson to his mother, 26 December 1881, in The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 74.
27. Mann, The Magic Mountain, p. 104.
28. Conan Doyle, ‘An Alpine Pass on Ski’, The Strand, August 1894.
29. See Lellenberg et al., Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters.
30. Conan Doyle, ‘The Final Problem’, The Strand, December 1893.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. See Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art.
34. Adair, The Real Tadzio, p. 93.
35. The Magic Mountain, p. 5.
36. Ibid., p. 7.
37. Behl and Gerberding, in the chapter dealing with the Schatzalp Hotel in Davos, in Literarische Grandhotels der Schweiz, p. 122. In 1950, Grand Duke Dimitri’s remains were exhumed and reinterred on Mainau, an island on Lake Constance, in the Bernadotte family crypt. He was of the house of Holstein-Gottorps on the Romanov side. The tiny island belonged to Frederick II, Grand Duke of Baden (1857–1928), and is still administered as a ‘flowering park island’ by the Bernadotte family.
38. The Magic Mountain, p. 99.
39. Ibid., p. 54.
40. Ibid., p. 68.
41. Ibid., p. 73.
42. Ibid., p. 310.
43. Ibid., p. 316.
4: Going to Pot
1. James Guillaume’s biographical sketch of Mikhail Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy. Guillaume was a founder of the First International in Geneva in 1866.
2. Mikhail Bode, ‘Russian visions of Switzerland’, in Pakhomova et al., Russian Switzerland: Artistic and Historical Perspectives 1814–2014.
3. From Sergei Nechayev’s Revolutionary Catechism (1871), quoted in Annette Kobak’s Isabelle: The Life of Isabelle Eberhardt, pp. 9–10. Nechayev was a twenty-three-year-old exile in Geneva when he wrote his catechism, which advocated a by-any-means-necessary approach to revolution. It was reissued by the Black Panthers in 1969.
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