Liberation (60 page)

Peter was there to meet us, as he'd promised, all briskness and wisecracks. He drove us up a winding road into the Klosters valley. (The train goes there too, but you have to change from the Zürich train into another one, so it's quicker to drive.) Light snow fell, the peaks were hidden by clouds; you felt the claustrophobia of a forlorn grey day in the Alps. The chalet belonging to Peter and Deborah seemed forlorn and shut-in too when we first saw it; dark woods of conifer all around, the branches extending their heavy paws of snow. Near it is an immense old barn which used to be part of the original farm, Wyhergut.

The inside of the chalet is richly comfortable, furnished in a mixture of styles, plutocratic peasant and Kensington dainty. Local craftsmen carved its ceilings and put stained glass windows in its doors.

Peter put us to work at once, shovelling snow off the steps, lest we shouldn't be able to get back up them when we returned from Klosters later in the evening. He didn't ask me to help, knowing that I would anyway. With Don he was apologetically bossy. “Don't make a lifework out of it, as my sergeant used to say.” Peter's conversation keeps reverting to his army memories. As long as the light remained, skiers would keep shooting out of the woods and whizzing by, in twos and threes, uncannily silent. The massive snow-hush was broken only when Peter started up his miniature snowplow. Once, we heard a faint rumbling as the train passed, improbably high above us, on its way to Davos.

Wyhergut is about a mile beyond Klosters. We drove down there to have supper with Salka, who has a pleasant little flat in the middle of the village. She is still strikingly handsome but now she is old, really old. You feel how bitterly aware she is of her increasing isolation from the outside world. No doubt Klosters, with its gothic, incurably Swiss villagers and vulgar international millionaire ski-bums, seems a place of exile to her; the local dialect must jar on her theatrically trained ear; and the place itself, though actually so accessible, has an air of hopeless remoteness, tucked away in the very back of Switzerland near unfindable Liech[t]enstein. Also, Peter told us that Salka had been terribly depressed by a recent visit from her sister Rose, who is younger than she is but already gaga, with a failing memory. Nevertheless, Salka is probably better off here than she would be anywhere else. Everyone says how kind Deborah is to her—when Deborah is there. And we all have to make our last stand somewhere.

After supper, we went round to see Irwin Shaw and his girl friend Bodil Nielson.
⁵⁵
He was very drunk; Peter says he always is. Shaw has turned into the usual type of heavy-duty huffing and puffing Jewish writer, oracular but unsure of himself, and expecting a pogrom to start any minute. (The most ghastly punishment imaginable for him would be to condemn him to live in Israel.) I liked him. I always have.

February 12. The sun shone and everything was instantly transformed. The whole valley seemed to have opened up. Peter cooked breakfast, refusing to let us help, and announced the orders for the day. We were to go up with him into the mountains by cable car. He would ski down and we would ride down. After breakfast, he made and received long-distance phone calls—talking to London, Paris and Rome as if they were neighboring villages, and switching without effort from English to fluent French, German or Spanish. Driving down to Klosters, he told me about a girl he had known who was killed by an avalanche. This was one of his beloved Hemingway-style guilt stories; Peter claimed that he felt responsible because the girl had started out with him and several others and had gone off on her own, accompanied by Irwin Shaw's son; Peter, as the most experienced local resident in the party, felt he ought to have stopped her from doing this because they were in an area of possible avalanches.
⁵⁶
If there are a lot of you together and an avalanche does fall, it's more likely that a few of you will escape and be able to dig the others out of it.

It was only after I had questioned him that he had to admit that the girl herself was no beginner but a ski instructor. And the avalanche only killed her indirectly, by knocking her head against a tree. Shaw's son, who was also buried by it, was able to struggle out of the snow and could have rescued the girl, if she hadn't been dead already. The fact is, Peter is carefully cultivating his guilt because he is planning to turn the story into a novel.

Later in the morning, Don and I went down to Klosters on foot, to enjoy the exercise and the intoxicating pre-pollution air. We took a walk with Salka before lunch—she is still surprisingly active—and watched people setting out on a langlauf, which is skiing on the more-or-less flat. (Peter has decreed that, when we next come to Klosters, I shall be sent on a langlauf while he teaches Don to ski. In Switzerland, if you can't manage a langlauf you are ready for burial.)

After lunch, it was time for our ascent. Although I had quite made up my mind to go through with this, I mentioned my proneness to vertigo, chiefly to give Peter the pleasure of feeling that he was putting me through a test of my manhood. No day in the life of a Hemingway devotee is complete without one. However, Peter decided that, as a concession to my weakness and advanced age, we should definitely go up the Gotschnagrad on the cable car rather than the ski lift to another peak. Even the cable car gave me a breathless moment but I really enjoyed its vast upward swoop and the exciting joggling with which it passes the towers. (The downward swoop, as I found later, is far more breathtaking, but by then my nerve was stronger.) The upper snowfield and its view over a vast havoc of mountaintops and gorges, and the whiteness of the snowshine—that was beautiful beyond description. And I was so full of joy to be seeing it with Don. We rejoiced together in the wonder of the light, after London's dank dim days. The snow itself was so dry that you could plunge your leg into it and brush it off again without getting the least bit wet.

Then Peter left us to return on the car while he skied down to Klosters. He makes this (I believe) quite dangerous run nearly every afternoon, by way of a short constitutional. He arrived at the inn which was our rendezvous only a few minutes after we did.

While it was still light, Peter drove us up to Davos, an uninteresting hotel-village, with scenery inferior to that of Klosters and a heavy odor of Swissrichness. He pointed out to us the clinic which is the original of Mann's Zauberberg sanitarium. I was disappointed because I'd imagined (quite arbitrarily) that it would be perched on the edge of a precipice with a tremendous view below and snow peaks above.

We had supper at a restaurant which is halfway between Davos and Klosters, called the Landhaus Lantet, as the guests of Count and Countess de Chandon, champagne aristocracy.
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The Count had beautiful manners and a sulky blonde mistress named Susie—or was Susie the mistress of the Countess? Anyhow it was all highly Frog and civilized and suave and I had to fight off an acute attack of Francophobia all evening. Meanwhile, Peter chattered and Salka looked a bit dazed and deaf and Don, as always, did his charming social best to pretend to be entertained.

February 13. Since the dollar was still on the skids in Europe, Peter decided that we'd better change our great bundles of remaining expense-account pounds back into dollars while they were still so cheap. So we followed him on a paperchase around the Klosters banks; it was necessary to visit several, no one bank had nearly enough. We stuffed the money into our pockets as we ran back and forth across the street—it was getting late. I imagined that people were laughing at us, mad Yanks in a rush to buy back their unwanted dough. Salka came to the station and said goodbye with the tears of an old woman whose every parting from friends may be her last. Actually I do hope to see her again, because we are both eager to visit Klosters in summertime.

We started at 10:40, got to Zürich at 1:00, took off by Alitalia plane at 2:25, landed at Rome airport at 3:45. Luckily we didn't have to drive through Rome to reach Gavin Lambert's villa. It's on a side street called the Via Lugari, off the Appian Way. One might say that it is in the Campagna—some sheep were wandering about in the drizzle—but that part of the Campagna is being encroached upon by buildings and billboards. No doubt it was more romantically isolated when it was new. Its rust-red walls, within a courtyard, still suggest the romantic melancholy of a nineteenth-century watercolor. Our driver (after treating us to a positively surrealistic display of recklessness) exclaimed on arrival: “It's a paradise!” Gavin, emerging from the house in a caftan, seemed amused by his enthusiasm; and when we later complimented him on the elegance of the interior said, in his inimitable tone of campy surprise: “Oh, do you
think
so?” We didn't really think so. The library had a certain old-world air of meditative calm, but most of the rooms seemed merely cold and empty. We were given a big naked bedroom with beds too small for it and a bathroom which was out of order. (There were two others which did work, however.) Of course, the wet weather did nothing to brighten one's spirits. I got the impression that Gavin had stranded himself here, neither in nor properly out of the city, in a situation which—if you didn't keep reminding yourself that this was Roman—was merely suburban and dull. Gavin must have felt as we did. Anyhow, he told us he was leaving very shortly to take another look at Tangier and perhaps find a place to stay there.

Gavin lives with a very handsome big Yugoslav lover whose first name is George, or rather, Georges, since his only other language is French. Gavin is very proud of Georges and of their affair but, at the same time, characteristically, he kept giving us the impression that Georges is lazy, passive, fatalistic. Georges is having trouble with his passport; it must be renewed almost at once, otherwise he will have to return to Yugoslavia. Renewing the passport is one of the things he has been passive about.

Georges had been to the dentist, so decided to stay at home. Gavin drove us into Rome to have supper at a restaurant, the Bolognese, on the Piazza del Pop[o]lo. This was an extraordinarily happy choice, because it was the restaurant Don most warmly remembered from our stay in Rome in 1955. He had often said to me since[,] how he looked forward to going back there and eating their delicious risotto with peas. So the risotto was ordered—but, alas, it was a huge disappointment.

The inner city wasn't a disappointment, what we saw of it— fantastic glimpses of buildings and columns and arches in all their authority of fame and history. At night they are as improbable as designs for a vast imaginary theater which, you think, could never actually be constructed. But the traffic makes any drive miserable. Seeing all those cars converge from a relatively broad street into one of the narrow alleys, you know in advance what a madden-ingly long wait is in store for you. The Italians must have a totally different attitude to this kind of frustration; otherwise they would all ride bicycles or horses or reintroduce sedan chairs.

February 14. It rained in the morning but stopped later. We drove into Rome with Gavin. Gore Vidal had invited us to lunch. We went up to his apartment first, for drinks. Howard Aust[e]n was there too, amidst dogs. They showed us pictures of a spectacular hillside villa they have just bought at Ravello. Gore talked about his nearly finished historical novel; the central character is Aaron Burr. Gore claimed to have “debunked our founding fathers”; he also indulged in the usual anti-Capote anecdotes. He took us to lunch at Passetto's, unshowy but very grand. When I told him that today was Don's and my twentieth anniversary, he ordered Dom Pérignon. Afterwards, he showed us the inside of the nearby Pantheon, which, oddly enough, Don and I neglected to visit in 1955. It really is overwhelming. Don thought it the most impressive building he had ever seen in his life. Then Gavin left us and we wandered around the streets, windowshopping. We had been into Bulgari's that morning, trying to find a chain like the one Truman Capote had bought there, a few years earlier. They told us that they no longer make that kind. But we returned in the afternoon and asked to be shown bracelets, and finally chose one which both of us liked enormously—pale gold with heavy links which looked rather like the links of a bicycle chain,. When it was time for supper, we met Gavin and Georges at Nino's. Georges and I managed to converse in French. . . . I have written all this down with deliberate flatness, not knowing how to convey the day's essential quality; it was a strangely joyful anniversary, simply because we were both of us happy that we had met each other and that we were still together.

February 15. We left Rome by Alitalia plane at 9:05 a.m. On the way to the airport, I had noticed a Russian Aeroflot poster, announcing that you could fly from Rome to Moscow and thence across Siberia to Tokyo, in fifteen hours. That would also be approximately the time span of our flight today. Crossing the Alps, we got a perfect view of the Matterhorn; I had never seen it before. We arrived in London at 10:20 a.m, where we collected our baggage and took off by Pan Am plane at 1:20. We got to Los Angeles at 4:10 p.m, Pacific Time. The flight was one of the most boring I've known.
Judge Roy Bean
on the screen. Having given up our first-class tickets in order to pay for the Klosters–Rome side trip, we had to endure tourist class and its swarming children. And never has the Canadian wilderness looked more dreary tha[n] it did that afternoon. I wish it could at least have been Siberia, to make a bit of a change.

As a postscript to this record, here is Richard's comment on my visit to Wyberslegh, in a letter I received about two weeks after my return home:

Your visit was terribly short but
much
better than nothing, and if it wasn't perhaps quite all it could have been it was entirely my fault, and it shan't happen again. Sometimes I think when it is a case of one's nearest
and dearest
who one only sees occasionally one is apt to feel a little nervous, specially when they are famous. It was
very
nice of you to travel up to Stockport to see me. . . .