Gstaad

There are lurid rumours circulating around this Alpine village that an international literature symposium has taken place, with some of the richest and more recent arrivals demanding that the arch suspect behind the alleged outrage deny it or else. ‘Say it ain’t so, Joe,’ screamed a nightclub freak at the suspect right on Main Street. The suspect’s name, incidentally, happens to be Thomas Gommes.

Now I am the first to admit that reading can be a dangerous waste of time, especially when there are great mind-expanding shows to watch on large and small screens such as Batman, The Masked Marvel, Godzilla vs. King Kong, and other similarly spiritually uplifting examples. Be that as it may, a literature symposium did take place with the support of many people who live here, and its prime mover and organiser was the aforementioned Thomas Gommes.

And about time, too! We’ve had a conference on how to make more money, and an even more popular one on how to live much longer if you’re rich (covered by your intrepid correspondent in this column last winter). A literature symposium is just what the doctor ordered for the residents of a resort known for very expensive chalets, much nouveau glitz, and too much après-skiing.
Granted, bookstores are as rare around here as Fabergé eggs are in downtown Mogadishu, but never mind. The locals are not exactly predisposed to purchasing books, and neither are the visitors. There are only two bookstores – financed by a pharmaceutical heiress, Vera Michalski-Hoffmann, also a symposium sponsor – in the whole valley, which includes the villages of Saanen, Rougemont, Schönried, Gstaad and Gsteig.

Like most good things, WOW (World of Words) started off with a bang. Giuliano da Empoli is an Italian-Swiss writer, a young man of so many talents, so many books, and so many awards that he should have been banned from a resort for the unemployed rich. His first novel, Le mage du Kremlin, which I am reading in the original French, will soon be translated into English. It’s a grand novel about Russia today. During his conversation with the French novelist François-Henri Désérable, one that was light and

delightful with none of that phoney seriousness that Brit and American novelists put on, I did not have a chance to ask him about the similarities between the Russo-Ukraine war and the Americano-Iraqi conflict. As we all know, America invaded its neighbour Iraq in 2003, Iraq being situated between North and South Carolina, whereas when Russia invaded, Ukraine was a faraway nation from which it was separated by an ocean.

No matter. Next came my buddy Jay McInerney on the role of and reasons for fiction. Jay became a star 40 years ago with his first book, Bright Lights, Big City, and coined the phrase ‘Bolivian Marching Powder’. He’s written 12 novels and many short stories since then, and he’s still a very bad boy – in the very best sense, that is. I took him to lunch the next day and we talked about Papa Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, our heroes. We agreed that the most heartbreaking closing scene ever is Dick Diver turning suddenly and blessing the beach in Cannes. That’s in Tender is the Night. The best opening paragraph ever is in Papa’s A Farewell to Arms.

Kyra Troubetzkoy’s sixth novel is The Paper Trap, and Alexandra and I were great friends with her mother, Sophie, who tragically committed suicide very young. Noble Russians tend to do that, especially when out of Russia as the Troubetzkoys were. There were many other writers, all of them talented, all of them young, and it made Gstaad feel different for a couple of days.

Let’s face it: there is nothing as satisfying as reading great prose, except perhaps for sex, and there’s nothing like the taut, understated writing style exemplified by Hemingway. Does the imaginative range of today’s writing seem limited? It does to me. Today’s writers generally describe men as dopey and destructive, whereas women are clever but thwarted. Long ago, Papa’s and Scott’s heroines rang rings around the men, but they were subtle about it; Nicole, Rosemary, Brett Ashley and so on.

Nah, Hemingway’s best work is deeply moving and rich in meaning and psychological complexity. He reinvented American prose and the short story. Needless to say, what I love so much about him is the larger-than-life persona as a hard-drinking, hard-working outdoorsman, and woman-chasing lecher. The latter was a pose, as Hemingway took marriage seriously. Papa’s competitiveness and belief in himself did not stop him from recognising Fitzgerald’s talents. Here’s Papa writing to Scott after the disappointing reviews of the latter’s master opus Tender is the Night:

You, who can write better than anybody can, who are so lousy with talent that you have to – the hell with it. Scott for god’s sake write and write truly no matter who or what
it hurts….

Papa could be hard on writers:

Zola and Hugo were both lousy writers – but Hugo was a grand old man… Flaubert is a great writer but he only wrote one great book… Stendahl was a great writer with one good book…

Have I gone on for too long about Papa? The answer to that is one can never go on too much about him, or Mozart for that matter.  When I started the Gstaad Symposium 25 years ago, I led with historian Alistair Horne and followed up with the great Maggie Thatcher. Then I took my eye off the ball and the thing deteriorated. With WOW, people who know how to read may even start coming to Gstaad.