Chapter Four
Magic Mountain
Before sailing aboard the Rochambeau on October 10, 1929, the brothers were met at their hotel by Mr. Winthrop, who solemnly presented them each with a letter of credit for 2,000 dollars, as well as 500 dollars in travelers’ checks (“for emergencies or spending money till you get to the bank in Davos”). It was a festive nine-day crossing: Charlie and Fred shared a big double cabin, and joked with their fellow passengers that the old boat—creaking and groaning in the warm but windy weather—would crack up on this, its final voyage. From Le Havre they took a train to Paris, stopping overnight at the Palais d’Orsai and going to a “wonderful” nightclub where the orchestra played American tunes such as “St. Louis Blues”; then on to Zurich, where the next morning Charlie stepped out on his balcony at the Hotel Baur au Lac and watched the Jungfrau shimmer awesomely into view as the mist lifted over the lake. Wayne County seemed a rather dreary pastoral in comparison. At Landquart they ascended five thousand feet into the Grisons aboard a narrow-gauge train, excitedly running from one side of their first-class compartment to the other as peak after peak materialized beside them. When at last they disembarked in Davos-Platz, the snow was falling slow and thick through the twilit air; hardly any wind ever blew at the bottom of that mountainous bowl where the health resort was situated.
For the next few days they saw the sights, such as they were—the largest skating rink in Europe (its waiters gliding about with cocktails aloft on little trays), the nude Spengler in the Public Gardens—and arranged for lodging and medical care. They chose the best suite at the second-best hotel, Kurgarten-Carlton, where for fifty Swiss francs a day or about ten dollars (“Of course we were being had, like the Americans we were”) they got two top-floor rooms, a bath, and a spacious balcony with two liegerstuhls and fur sleeping bags for their afternoon “cure” naps; the rate also included a stern, loving maid named Lena and three meals a day. After unpacking and arranging their effects, they toured a half-dozen sanatoria before settling on the Schweizerhof, a modern white building in the center of town with a big garden and sun terraces overhung with protective blue glass. Afterward they were having tea in the Kurgarten lounge when an Englishman struck up a conversation, inquiring what a couple of Yanks were doing there in the midst of the stock market crash (“I’m told that financiers are popping out of Wall Street windows like so many champagne corks”). The brothers hadn’t heard a thing about it, and the impression it made now was muted at best; suddenly their new life seemed stranger than ever: “Davos was a world to itself, an isolated world, a world apart … ”
They worried the winter would be a dull one—apart from the obligatory afternoon nap, what to do but write letters and read? They were soon disabused. At four o’clock the town came alive: “Sleighs flew back and forth in the street with bells jangling,” Jackson wrote, “carrying passengers, very likely, to assignations; skiers appeared by the dozens; the rinks filled up and the bands played … the sidewalk cafés were crowded till sundown and the bars filled up.… It was as though the raison d’être of Davos was not disease at all but rather winter-sports and the gay hotel life.” Seventeen-year-old Sonja Henie, fresh from winning her first gold medal at the 1928 Olympics, practiced daily at the Davos rink, and one day taught Charlie how to do the “spread eagle” (arms extended, heels apart and pointing toward each other); thus the two were photographed by the rink’s roving photographer.1
For patients, however, the main diversions of Davos were dancing, drinking, and sex, or some combination of the three, seeing as how life was short but one’s leisure in the meantime was long. Indeed, as Jackson noted, doctors made a point of recommending a certain amount of sexual exertion, since it kept the patient’s mind off morbid thoughts and was simply good physical medicine besides: “In tuberculosis one’s body burns faster; all one does during the cure is to lie around and store up energy, which must be expended somehow—and, after all, what else is there to do in Davos? … what happened here did not matter to the outside world and even, in a sense, had not happened at all.” In The Lost Weekend, Don reminisces about his Davos affair with a Norwegian woman, Anna, a character based on a fellow resident of the Kurgarten, Marion “Tom” Holzapfel; with her sister, Dorothy, she invited Charlie and Boom to a concert their first week in town, after which the four became almost inseparable. “You and Dorothy were (if I may put it in such a high-flown fashion) one of the finest ‘chapters’ of my life,” Charlie wrote Tom in 1945, referring to her rather substantial role in his first novel. In Farther and Wilder, too, he would remember the quiet excitement of the Davos cocktail hour, as the four sat in the Kurhaus sipping gin-vermouths and making plans: “Beyond the wide windows, the stark snowy slopes and mountains were fading from their evening pink to dusk; coucheurs drove their closed, box-like sleighs up and down the main street, the little candles already lighted within … ” Such plans included a certain amount of hell-raising in St. Moritz, where Charlie and Tom were “always being arrested,” as he recalled, and no wonder: their escapades included stealing a sleigh, going down the bob run after dark, and refusing to pay an enormous taxi fare incurred during a night of drunken meanderings. Also, Don Birnam remembers (in The Lost Weekend) “the nightmare time at five in the morning” when he exploded a helium balloon with his cigarette and almost burned down the Suvretta hotel, the flame igniting some streamers and “touch[ing] off the whole room with a sudden hellish roar till the place was all one instant flame—which immediately, miraculously, went out (sparing not only him, that time, but the several hundred … who slept in the rooms above).”
Tom was a boon companion, then, but whether she was Charlie’s main love interest is problematic. As he later pointed out, the “characteristic assumption” around Davos (“but never with a moral judgment, never a raised eyebrow”) was that he and Boom were something more than brothers. One day they went to get their picture taken at a studio, and Charlie noticed the photographer’s wry little smile as he posed them in double profile: bald Charlie and the boyishly gorgeous Boom. “Somehow you haven’t been able to make us look like brothers in any way,” Charlie complained afterward, poring over proofs. The man was taken aback; obviously he’d assumed the two were amants, the younger kept by the elder. And what was the truth of it? A love poem Charlie wrote around this time might have been merely playful:
TO MY VALENTINE
(P. S.—There couldn’t be 2)
I don’t send my heart, I don’t want to, much;
For my poor heart has been knocked rather goofy
By phthisis [i.e., tuberculosis] and pneumo and needles and such,
Injected by Doctors Staub, Lloyd and Lafloofie.…
But I still have my pencil, if not my brains,
And looking below I see there’s still room
To indite in few syllables all that remains
To be said on the subject today:
J’adore Boom.
Davos, again, was another world, and these were unusual circumstances. As for whatever abided between the two in later years: at least one person, who knew them both very well, remembered a kind of allusive, ribald “fencing” that “created an awkward thing in the room,” but was never quite definitive one way or the other.
Another reason Charlie might have clung all the more closely to his brother was that, despite surface merriment, he never quite felt at home. In due course—and somewhat at the time—he would consider writing a great novel about the Davos years (“Europe in decay”) from the perspective of an American provincial who felt “like a child at a party [he] hadn’t been invited to.” Sitting in the Kurgarten dining room, he’d survey the cast of this future opus: the Dutch prime minister’s son, jauntily sipping white wine while seated, then walking with a painful limp because of his missing ribs; the promiscuous, absinthe-drinking princess from Berlin; and best of all, to Charlie, a family of strapping blond aristocrats on the far side of the room, “voluble and festive” like the Rostovs in War and Peace. These were the Mumms: the father, Peter, was grandson of the Champagne magnate G. H. Mumm, but had lost most of his fortune in the Great War, while the improvident mother, Olga, was daughter of Karl de Struve, Russian ambassador to the United States. Olga would “discover” Charlie during his second season in Davos (“doubtless she had learned that I was an American, and that, of course, meant money”), and was soon regaling him with some of the best dirty stories he’d ever heard, or with memories of the real-life models for Proust’s masterpiece. Charlie also befriended her children, bobsledding with the brothers, Brat and Kiki, down the four-mile run from the Schatzalp, or having his portrait painted by Elena, who charged him a hundred francs for the privilege (scribbling the price shyly on a scrap of paper before leaving the room). But Charlie was closest to the youngest, little Olga (“Olili”), with whom he had a standing Ping-Pong date in the Kurgarten rec room each day at five. Out of admiration for the Empress of Russia (whose emblem it was), Olili had inked a little swastika on the handle of her racket, and was shocked when somebody left it outside her door, broken in two, with a note: “We don’t want any of this around here.” Nobody knew what it was all about. “Isn’t it dreadful to think of us all being so ignorantly gay and carefree in Davos?” Charlie later wrote Tom Holzapfel. “Who could have foreseen at that time how horribly Europe would change in ten short years, and what would happen to so many of the people we were so fond of there.” By then (1945) Charlie had run into Elena Mumm Thornton in New York, where she worked as an editor at Town & Country; the rest of her family, she grimly reported, had become “ardent supporters of Hitler”: Olili was a leader in the Mädchen branch of the Hitler Youth, while both brothers had been killed in battle, fighting for the Nazis.2
Jackson’s girlfriend Tom was also in Paris, where they’d agreed to meet for a final five-day fling before sailing back to the States together aboard the Bremen. As he later claimed, it was during that raucous crossing that he began to realize he had a drinking problem. Each morning he and Tom would walk around the deck with their fellow revelers, desperately hungover, and Jackson was always a little startled—and contemptuous—when the others would object to having a morning pick-me-up: “I can’t look at another drink!” they’d groan, in effect, while Jackson himself was dying for one. Later he’d discover that Richard Peabody actually defined drunkards as people who want a drink the next morning: “They say it makes them feel as if they were coming back to life, as if they were no longer going crazy, and so forth.” But why the compulsion to be always drunk in the first place (especially in social situations)? Why the question of “going crazy”? While dancing with Anna at Armenonville, Don Birnam’s heart sinks when she suddenly turns serious and announces she has a question to ask once they’re alone: “‘Why do you only come to bed with me when you are drunk?’ He roared with delight. He knew damned well she had reason to ask; but in his relief that it had been no worse he was able to laugh as if it were terribly funny and he almost shouted ‘Because I’m always drunk!’ ”
Certainly aboard the Bremen that seems to have been the case. The rest of his life he would particularly remember one night (and there would be many like it) when he broke away from Tom, staggering, and clambered up on a slippery railing, threatening to jump into the boiling wake; wisely, perhaps, the woman walked away, and Jackson was left teetering there until a sudden gust of wind filled his camel’s-hair coat and flung him back to the deck (“It was just one of those moments,” he wrote Tom, “and God, for no known reason, steps in and protects the drunk from himself”). Waiting on the pier in New York—a vision of safe harbor—was Rhoda, to whom Jackson introduced his Norwegian friend, and later, by chance, the three met again at the theater. By then Tom had gotten the picture, though apparently felt no hard feelings: “You are like a plant of slow growth,” she wrote him, “but the flower will be beautiful.”
But Boom would remain in Europe a long time. The next month he suffered a relapse in Venice, and was barely alive when he and Charlie were reunited at the Schweizerhof. Hemorrhaging now from his “good” lung, Boom was forced to lie with an ice pack on his chest in all but total silence, not even allowed to laugh, lest he waste precious breath; the next step, if matters worsened, was the dreaded thoracoplasty—the surgical removal of ribs to collapse a severely diseased lung. “It is most distressing,” Winthrop wrote Charlie, “and rather a sad homecoming for you.… Of course Fred is a bit apt to make light of things, especially in his own care; so do please give me the right dope—the low down as my tough friends say.” Boom was, for a fact, managing rather miraculously to make light of things—“it was his nature,” as Charlie would write, “and I believe that is how or why he recovered.” Before long all the nobs of Davos were paying court to the charming invalid—the Duchess of Alba, the Countess von Gerlach, the wealthy Trads from Tehran—listening to his Victrola and admiring the cheerful Dufy prints on the walls of his lovely room overlooking the gardens and ski slopes beyond.
As Mr. Winthrop pointed out, it was Charlie who needed cheering up more than Fred, and indeed the former seemed to be going through an existential crisis of sorts, albeit in good company: Ralph Monroe Eaton was a Harvard philosophy professor who, following a nervous breakdown, had taken a sabbatical to be psychoanalyzed by Jung in Zurich; he and Jackson had met in Italy the previous spring (Eaton had introduced Charlie, in Rome, to George Santayana, Eaton’s former teacher), and that second season they shuttled between Davos and Zurich as often as possible. Eaton was a fascinating figure: then in his late thirties, he was a great friend and protégé of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and had himself published one book, Symbolism and Truth, and was in the process of completing another, General Logic, that would remain in print for almost thirty years. Jackson described him as “rugged, athletic, look[ing] like those early photos of Hemingway (the ski cap and black-mustache ones),” but he was evidently fragile on the inside: recently divorced (his estranged wife had taken their child and moved to California), he’d gotten involved in a chaotic affair with a charismatic Harvard psychologist, Christiana Morgan—“the veiled woman in Jung’s circle,” as her biographer put it—who was then helping her sometime lover, Henry A. Murray, develop the Thematic Apperception Test. Morgan was witness to Eaton’s unraveling: gentle at first, he grew more and more erratic as his drinking worsened, insisting on absolute fidelity and threatening suicide when Morgan refused. Finally he tried to get himself run over on a turnpike near the Parker River on Plum Island, whereupon Morgan and Murray persuaded him to see Jung in Zurich.
By the time Jackson knew him, Eaton seemed more or less on an even keel, and they had wonderful times together. One day the two were drinking in Davos—shortly after they’d attended a production of Madama Butterfly in Zurich—and Eaton put his brandy aside, sat down at a piano, and proceeded to play the opera’s score from start to finish: “A thrilling afternoon,” wrote Jackson, who hadn’t even known Eaton could play. When in Zurich, they made a point of being at the Dolder Grand Hotel, above the city, every Saturday evening at seven when all the church bells would ring until they “blended into one prodigious note.” The effect was all the more enchanting, perhaps, given that the friends were rarely if ever sober.4 Once again, but at the Dolder this time, Jackson passed out with a cigarette in his mouth and woke up to find his bed in flames. As for his friend: “Alcohol had a place in Eaton’s difficulties,” Henry Murray’s biographer noted; “so did an uncertain sexual identity.”
Whatever his problems otherwise, Eaton was above all a mentor to Charlie—his own Settembrini—and perhaps inevitably he, like Winthrop, tried to interest the young man in Plato, to little avail (“there was a barrier of ignorance, or maybe self-interest, that intruded and kept me ever from [Plato’s] meaning and beauty”), while Jackson, for his part, appears to have helped the man feel a little happier for a time. While correcting proofs for General Logic, Eaton wrote Charlie a desolate letter complaining of the “fatigue” he felt toward his work nowadays; the “passion for coldness” required for such “quibbles and intricacies of thought” was, he’d decided, “a horrible atmosphere to live in”:
My life as a pedagogue is ended. I have been in confinement like you; confinement to order, convention, precision—not daring to live or feel in unconventional and irrational forms, except furtively. I think everything is produced out of the irrational, growth, creation, is irrational. If I could only have a year to write—to say what I think, and to feel, to carve out a new and beautiful book, not for money but for the thing itself. It would be worth making any sacrifice for. The alternative is the conventional pedagogue’s life I have been leading; I dread going back to that—because I begin to feel free of it; and you have helped to give me that freedom.
Perhaps with Eaton’s predicament in mind—and wishing to find a better atmosphere for his own calling, from which he’d strayed too long—Jackson was contemplating a year in Russia, and wondered if Mr. Winthrop would be willing to stake him. “I should think that life in Russia in 1931 would be hard indeed,” the latter replied with patient understatement; nevertheless he’d discussed the matter with their mutual friend Thor,5 and both agreed a Russian sojourn might be a good thing if Charlie used the interval for “earnest hard work and study.” As for the oats he insisted on sowing in the meantime, well, Winthrop was loath to reproach him (“It is best to get them out of your system”), though he begged him not to “do anything foolish or extravagant” since these were hard times and, besides, Charlie had to consider his health.
Jackson responded by going on his most colossal bender yet, burning through the rest of his money with a two-month, hundred-dollar-a-day trip to Juan-les-Pins on the Riviera. In later years the thought of that place—with its plush nightclubs and beaches and dazzling cerulean sea—would make him smile; at the time he was probably more ambivalent. Don Birnam casts back to the “agonizing mornings at the bank” in Juan-les-Pins when, palsied with hangover, he’d sit outside breathing deeply of the salty air while trying to steady his hand enough to sign a letter of credit under the teller’s impassive gaze. “I am afraid that what you have often told me is true,” Winthrop wrote him afterward, with an unwonted note of asperity, “that when you get some money you do not spend it wisely. So I have arranged with Thor to send him a remittance, and he will do what is right. Until you get some work to do, I don’t want you to be adrift for I don’t know what you’d do—so Thor has promised to do what is necessary to give you board and lodging. I hate to write all this. I do wish you would pull yourself together. You really must try my dear Charlie.” Duly chastened, Jackson dropped all thought of Russia (hardly an option, in any event, given the new arrangement with Thor), informing Mr. Winthrop that he’d decided to come straight home and get on with his writing, whereby he hoped to win back some of his benefactor’s good opinion. The kindly man was mollified: “Everything has been worth while my dear Charlie if only you are well and strong again and able to make good as I always knew and now know you will. But don’t talk nonsense about my faith in you being shaken.”
“A Summer Passion” treats the same theme with a good deal more sentimentality, suggesting that Jackson realized his morbidity was doing him no favors in the fiction market. Philip McKenna is a doting older brother to his seven-year-old sister, Mary, “an ideal playmate” who assures him that he is “the onliest person in the world that I will ever ever love.” However, after a “grand romp” of a summer with the girl, Philip is about to marry the sophisticated Christabel and begin work as an English instructor in distant Albany. Little Mary despises her brother’s fiancée, who treats the girl with gauche condescension (“It’s very pretty,” she says of Mary’s dress, “but isn’t it a little too old for you?”) and is a rival besides, and Philip is forced to choose between the two. Naturally he chooses passion, with all its “danger and adoration and treachery,” assuring himself that his little sister, without his love, will yet remain “uninjured, whole.” Thus he bids farewell to the sleeping child (“God bless you, Mary dear”) and leaves to take up his life, while the reader is left wondering why sexual love and sibling love should be considered mutually exclusive.
Perhaps the author figured a change of venue would help, and anyway both Thor and Ralph Eaton were now living in Boston, where Jackson moved that winter and took a job as a feeder in a jigsaw factory.6 Eaton had recently returned from Zurich, and was planning to teach one more year at Harvard and then practice psychoanalysis in New York. Jackson had found his friend in “wonderful shape”; however, in her biography of Christiana Morgan, Claire Douglas paints a far more lurid picture:
Just when Eaton needed a tight rein on his growing hysteria, Jung, perceiving the richness of Eaton’s unconscious, carried him off into archetypal realms that, alas, further unbalanced the young man. Eaton started to become delusional. He didn’t remain in Zurich long enough for Jung to rectify his mistake, but panicked and fled. Jung wrote forebodingly to [Henry] Murray: “He seems to be promising. If only America doesn’t swallow him up and grind him to dust.”
If America did, in fact, swallow Eaton up in some way, Jackson saw only vague hints of it; during their final meeting Eaton struck him as being in “perfect health.”7 But in Christiana Morgan’s view, the man was so incoherent with drink and mania that she feared for his safety and her own. On April 12, 1932, Eaton became dizzy while teaching a class at Radcliffe, and dismissed his students. At the insistence of Morgan and Henry Murray, he spent the night in a hospital but slipped away the next morning; Murray rounded up some colleagues and went looking for him, and finally they found his body in some woods near West Concord, where Eaton had cut his throat. Two days later he was eulogized in the Harvard Crimson: “It is our misfortune that frequently, in a world so lonely as ours can be, it is not possible for the questing mind of the teacher to draw peaceful satisfaction from the art of teaching.”
Jackson’s own ideas about Eaton’s death had only a little to do with pedagogic disenchantment or, for that matter, oppressive archetypes and the like. “This seems to me—this kind of thing, that is, seems to me the real American tragedy,” he wrote Boom in 1953, after one of Boom’s acquaintances had killed himself (and three weeks before Charlie himself would threaten suicide): “the man of fine mind and decent tastes whose deepest basic instincts cause him to go against the social grain whether he likes it or not.… It is the story of Ralph Eaton all over again, and thousands and thousands of other far-better-than-average men.” After a fashion, then, perhaps America had swallowed Eaton up, rather as Jung had feared. What is certain is that he yearned for a more passionate life—“to express all that you see in me,” he wrote Charlie, and referred to Whitman’s longing to leave behind the “charts and diagrams” of the “learn’d astronomer” and simply gaze at the stars amid “the mystical moist night-air,” a sentiment echoed in a poem Eaton had written shortly before his death, which Charlie transcribed in his journal:
From the hot hell of life, gazing at the cold eternal stars—
To speak what there is to speak—
Of love, tender, springing green in the soul and turning to desolate withered grass;
Of effort given in vain, work ending in death;
Of the passage of all things into nothingness—and the prayers of saints and religious men;
Of philosophical systems, buttresses of man’s hopes against the unknown;
Of the mystery of the universe, revealed on a summer’s day when the sea is blue and the sands are white;
The universe—the earth—taking me to its bosom, caressing me, holding me,
Because I shall die and descend into it again;
I—a part of the earth, a blessed animal, loving like an animal, dying like an animal.
