Ramuz & the Abode of Devils

Grove Koger

September 24 is the anniversary of the birth of francophone Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, who was born on this day in Lausanne in 1878.

If you’re interested in classical music, you may know that Ramuz provided Igor Stravinsky with the libretto for his 1918 work Histoire du soldat. But Ramuz was also the author of a number of novels, chief among them Derborence (1934). I’ve just finished reading it, after having owned a copy for years, and it’s a striking and original piece of writing.

Since the original title was unlikely to resonate with English speakers, the novel was translated by Sarah Fisher Scott as When the Mountain Fell, a literal description of the catastrophic event it describes. It seems that, in 1714, the side of the Diablerets Massif collapsed near the village of Derborence in Switzerland, causing the death of 15 people and untold numbers of farm animals.

A second landslide, in 1749, created a rocky barrier behind which water rose to form what’s now known as Lake Derborence.

The summit of the Diablerets Massif lies on the border between the Swiss cantons of Baud and Valais and reaches an elevation of 10,530 feet. Ominously enough, its name means “abode of devils.” (That’s it you see below in a photograph by Zacharie Grossen, reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.) In looking for more precise geological information, I found a description in Landscapes and Landforms of Switzerland (Springer, 2021). There, Philippe Schoeneich and Emmanual Reynard write that the massif “is a striking structural landscape rising over 2000 m [6562 feet] above the valley bottom,” and add that “the historical Derborence rock avalanches … started from the southern rock walls of the summit area and form a spectacular rock avalanche deposit landscape.”

Ramuz’s short novel focuses on a small handful of characters, including old Seraphin, who’s been joined in his mountain abode for the summer by newly married Antoine. The latter is naturally anxious to be with his bride, but the custom in this part of the world is for the able-bodied men to spend the summer on the mountain heights with their herds. As Seraphin asks Antoine, “Are you at the other end of the world? Are you now? Anybody would think you were never going to see her again …” Which, of course, is precisely how Antoine feels.

Then, that night, the inexplicable happens: “[A]ll at once the roof fell in, and one of the beams, snapping off at one end, came crashing up against the bunk where Antoine lay.”

With seeming artlessness, Ramuz reproduces the scattered perceptions of his characters, who live in the shadow of the massif and the elements. “The lightning flashed again,” we read at one point. “Suddenly there was a window opposite her in the kitchen wall, then it was no longer there.

“A blinding white square, it sprang into being, vanished, flashed out again, and with it Therese too was first brilliantly lighted, then swallowed up in darkness, then lighted up again.”

This technique is particularly effective in describing the dilemma of the disaster’s one survivor, who must struggle, weeks later, to reassemble the reality that he took for granted before the mountain fell. “You see,” he explains, “I’ve got to learn everything all over again.”

As poet and diplomat Paul Claudel put it, “When the Mountain Fell is one of the summits of French prose.”

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Going Undercover with Somerset Maugham

Grove Koger

W. Somerset Maugham, who was born January 25, 1874, was already a successful playwright and novelist when he was recruited into Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6.

The writer’s first assignment as an agent (code name “Somerville”) took him in late 1915 to Geneva, Switzerland, where he booked a third-floor room at the Grand Hôtel d’Angleterre on the Quai de Mont–Blanc overlooking Lake Geneva. (Some authorities identify the hotel as the Beau-Rivage, two blocks down the quai.) Maugham’s duties were sometimes dangerous but more often routine, and included paying agents who had been working in Germany and accepting their reports.

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Maugham also made surreptitious visits by lake steamer to the French city of Thonon-les-Bains to report to another British agent, but because the vessel made a round trip beginning and ending in Switzerland, he managed to avoid having his passport stamped. In addition, Maugham visited Geneva’s Place du Bourg-de-Four market twice a week, ostensibly to buy butter from a woman from the French commune of Annemasse but actually to pick up written reports from her.

Maugham’s stint in Geneva lasted only eight months, but in 1917 he traveled to Russia on behalf of both the British and the American security services in what turned out to be an unsuccessful effort to bolster Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government in its struggle against the Bolsheviks. Maugham’s circuitous route took him across the Pacific from California to Japan, where he boarded a Russian ship to Vladivostok and then the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Saint Petersburg, then known as Petrograd, where he stayed at the Hotel Europa.

The fruit of Maugham’s experiences in the world of espionage is Ashenden: The British Agent, a collection of 16 short stories published in 1928, a decade after the conclusion of the war. The book would have appeared sooner, but concerns over whether the stories might reveal too much about Britain’s clandestine methods delayed its publication. As it was, after reading Maugham’s entire series, Winston Churchill told the writer that fourteen would have to be destroyed, as they risked breaching the Official Secrets Act.

Ashenden draws heavily on Maugham’s experiences in Switzerland and, in the last six stories, Russia. After being recruited in the first story, “R.,” an agent named Ashenden working (like Maugham) under the code name “Somerville” finds himself involved in a series of dangerous but often mindlessly routine tasks. In “A Trip to Paris” and “Giulia Lazzari,” Ashenden lures an enemy agent to the French-Swiss border, but the agent intends to manage his own fate. In another case, faulty information leads to the murder of an innocent traveler. In yet another, a naïve businessman traveling in Russia insists on picking up his laundry as violence erupts in the streets. And in what many will read as the most “cold-blooded” story, the decision to undertake an operation that will inevitably result in the deaths of a number of innocent citizens is decided purely by chance.

Ashenden realizes that he’s “no more than a tiny rivet in a vast and complicated machine,” someone to be manipulated by his superiors. “They desired the end, but hesitated at the means. They were willing to take advantage of an accomplished fact, but wanted to shift onto someone else the responsibility of bringing it about.”

The third volume of Maugham’s Collected Short Stories is essentially a revision of Ashenden, omitting “R.” and “The Flip of a Coin” and conflating the remaining fourteen stories as six. The volume also adds a story, “Sanatorium,” whose protagonist is named Ashenden, although it doesn’t deal with espionage and it’s not at all clear whether the character is quite the same Ashenden. However, like the other stories in the collection, it includes autobiographical elements, as Maugham himself had suffered from tuberculosis—an illness that prevented his going on a subsequent espionage mission to Romania.

Critics regard Ashenden as the first realistic work of fiction about spies and spying. Sadly enough, its success has overshadowed two of the novels I discussed in my post for November 30, 2020—Extremes Meet (1928) and The Three Couriers (1929) by the prolific and once-famous Compton Mackenzie. Where the introverted Maugham found a grim mundanity in Switzerland and Russia, the more extroverted Mackenzie found farce in Greece. We readers may take our pick.

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The image at the top of today’s post is the cover of the first American edition (Doubleday, Doran) of Ashenden, while the second is a postcard of the Grand Hôtel d’Angleterre in Geneva. The third image is a photograph of the steamship Genève, one of the ships of the Compagnie générale de navigation sur le Lac Léman; Maugham would have taken vessels much like this on his surreptitious visits to France. The fourth image is a portrait of Maugham by George Grantham Bain dating from the mid-1920s, while the fifth is a pre-1917 postcard of the roof garden of the Hotel Europa in Saint Petersburg. All images are in the public domain in the United States.

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How Mr. Williams Spent His Summer Vacation

Grove Koger

Mr. William Williams, that is. I’m pretty sure you’ve never heard of him, almost positive, in fact. But he wrote a little book called My Summer in the Alps, 1913, and reading it recently and tracking down some information about him has turned out to be an interesting exercise.

I bought the book for a dollar in Boise’s Book Shop decades ago, when I bought anything I could put my hands on that looked the least bit exotic. But the truth is that after glancing at it briefly, I put it on the shelf, and that was it for a long time.

Now I’ve taken a closer look.

My Summer in the Alps was privately printed in New York in 1914, or MCMXIV, as the title page has it. The book is 19 cm. wide by 27 high and is printed on crisp paper. The pages are deckle-edged (untrimmed), itself an indication of quality, and tissue guards have been tipped in to keep the handsome photogravure illustrations (taken from photographs by the Zurich, Switzerland, firm of Wehrli, Kilchberg) from offsetting (transferring ink) to the opposite pages. My Summer runs to 21 numbered pages, and on the verso of the last appears the following edition statement: “THREE HUNDRED COPIES ON DUTCH HANDMADE PAPER PRIVATELY PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR BY FREDERIC FAIRCHILD SHERMAN MCMXIV.” What’s more, as the verso of the title page makes clear, Williams took the trouble of copyrighting the work. All in all, My Summer is a small but handsome example of bookmaking at its finest.

What about Williams himself? It took some searching, but thanks to WorldCat, the immense online union library catalog, which has an entry for the book, I learned that Williams was born in 1862. With that information and a bit of patience, I tracked down obituaries for him that had been printed by the American Alpine Club and the Alpine Journal in 1947.

It seems that Williams was born in New London, Connecticut, on June 2, 1862. He attended Bellerive School in Vevey, Switzerland, on the north shore of Lake Geneva; received a B.A. from Yale in 1884 and an LL.B. from Harvard four years later; worked for a time in a law firm in New York City; and served in the quartermaster’s department in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War. He went into private law practice at the beginning of the twentieth century, but over time held a number of government positions as well, working for instance as Commissioner of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity for New York City from 1914 to 1917.

More to the point, Williams began climbing at the age of 13, joining London’s Alpine Club (publisher of the Alpine Journal mentioned above) in 1882 and the American Alpine Club in 1921. He wrote at least one other book, A Summer Trip to Ecuador, at some point. It also ran to 21 pages, but WorldCat doesn’t provide the name of its printer, its place of publication, or even its date.

Williams died in 1947 (the year of my birth, coincidentally) in his room at New York City’s renowned University Club, where he had lived since 1899. He had been recognized, according to the Alpine Journal, as “one of the four oldest active tennis players in the world.” In a tribute printed in the Journal, E.L. Strutt remembered him as “a strong mountaineer, equally good on ice or rock, possessed of an excellent judgment, and also one of the best of companions and friends.”

I’m fascinated with Williams’ precisely because he reveled in activities that would have frightened me beyond measure, even assuming I had the strength and perseverance to attempt them. I’m an extreme acrophobe whose aim is to spend as much time as possible on the ground, preferably at sea level, and preferably in a hot climate. But Williams found the heights and the snow and the ice of the Alps bracing. It’s impossible not to be impressed.

As he recounts in his plainly written book, Williams and his party departed for one excursion across the Alphubel Pass in Switzerland to the valley of Saas at 2:30 in the morning. It was, he wrote “good to be again walking in that crisp morning air, and glorious scenery of rock, ice and snow.” They reached the summit of the pass (about 12,500 feet elevation) at 7:40, but shortly afterward “it became very hot, the snow soft and the going heavy. We were constantly sinking in below our knees …”

Another morning, they set out even earlier, at 1:30, for an ascent and went on to spend more than six hours climbing. “The condition of the snow was not particularly good, but neither was it bad,” Williams wrote. And the weather? The party experienced “all sorts”—a snow storm, then clear skies, then a strong wind of 30 to 40 miles per hour and temperatures “well below freezing; which conditions, taken in connection with the rarity of the air above 14,000 feet, rendered the last part of the climb a very chilly affair.” Etc., etc.

The book’s climax comes as Williams assays a truly daunting series of aiguilles (rocky peaks) in the commune of Chamonix in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region of southeastern France. “Their rocks are firm and offer passages about as difficult as it is possible for human beings to ascend or descend without artificial aid; indeed, to the uninitiated some of the places … must often seem quite inaccessible.” In this case, by the way, Williams and his party had departed at 2:00 AM.

Williams’ adventures, remember, took place during the summer! But the man was also “extremely keen on winter expeditions,” remembered his friend Strutt. I wonder how early he liked to get up then …

The image at the top of today’s post shows the Alphubel Pass, the scene of one of the first of Williams’ “excursions,” with the Swiss village of Saas-Fee—the “Pearl of the Alps”—in the foreground. The second is Mont Blanc and the third the Matterhorn. The fourth shows the five summits of the Aiguille des Grandes Charmoz (beneath the tiny “x” above the frame), while the fifth is a closeup of one of the five. At the bottom is the slightly soiled cover of my copy, which somehow made it to Boise, Idaho, more than half a century ago.

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