I’ve come to Lausanne on business. T. S. Eliot came here for psychotherapy. Hemingway came here as a journalist, writing for the Toronto Star. Eliot was feeling the grind of his 9-to-5, a worn-down poet masquerading as a bank clerk at the Colonial & Foreign Department of London’s Lloyds Bank (could any job be more British?). Hemingway was a young writer, covering the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, perhaps not the most creative naming convention, but that’s what they do with treaties, always has been.
Perhaps the reward for hosting a treaty signing, including all those administrative costs and the coffee service, which must be considerable, is that they name the treaty after you? I imagine that it takes a lot of coffee to make peace. This particular treaty would outline how to manage Turkey after World War I. Turkey committed a lot of genocide in those days.
Hemingway came to watch the whole thing. He wrote a poem about the peace negotiations and Mussolini, using casually racist language.
It’s late on a Tuesday, dark and quiet. Voices stream out of the Bleu Lézard, young folks drinking on the patio, all very Swiss and orderly.
Eliot wrote large swaths of his 1922 epic “The Waste Land” here in Lausanne. He came, like I said, for therapy. He described his condition as “aboulie and emotional derangement.” Eliot came to see Dr. Roger Vittoz, a psychiatrist who specialized in mind control (of your own doing) and the development of new neural pathways. Vittoz seems to have stumbled on “mindfulness” before the millennials did. Eliot recovered, it would seem, and went on to write his greatest work, though I always preferred his earlier poetry book “Prufrock and Other Observations.”
I disembark the train from Geneva, a quick one-hour trip, and I’ve arrived in Lausanne. This lakeside town is Switzerland’s fourth largest, and it bustles on this warm afternoon. From the main station, the rest of the city is more or less uphill, and steeply so, and so I look forward (not!) to wrestling my rollaboard up the cobbled roads and alleys to the Hotel de la Paix.
The heat that’s gripped Europe this summer hasn’t spared the mountainous Swiss Confederation. It’s hot, like Italy hot. While dragging my too-large baggage along the quaint, busy streets, I think of Hemingway, whose luggage was famously stolen in Paris at the Gare de Lyon as he was departing for Lausanne. I imagine it made his arrival a little easier.
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