High life
Look back in gloom
Taki
TRougemont he sun is out, it's cool and good old Helvetia is the only country in Europe not moving in the direction of EU totalitarian sameness. There is something wonderful about a Swiss peasant's xenophobia. All it means is a refusal to eat McDonald's ham- burgers, espouse equal rights for child- molesters and allow psychopathic thugs to walk free. Although life as I knew it here for the last 40 years is vanishint, the pro- cess is as slow and subtle as ageing.
Next week, on 11 August, I shall hit the big 64. It's a melancholic thought as well as a melancholic age. I have very little to show for it except lots of meaningless posses- sions. No great books written, no great sporting victories to brag about to my yet unborn grandchildren. Lots of wasted time, and then some. And everywhere I turn, on the Riviera, in a Paris bistro, even a leafy New York street, a scent or a song reminds me of the past, of being in love, of being young and full of confidence that I would one day conquer the world.
Oh well, enough self-pity, nostalgia should be made of sterner stuff. And yet. Scott Fitzgerald was the undisputed master at evoking the loss of youth, at portraying lives wrecked by over-indulgence and irre- sponsibility. His heroes, nevertheless, like himself, never lost their innocence, and that's what made them sadder in a way. In his haunting 1931 short story Babylon Revisited, Fitzgerald's hero, Charlie Wales, returns to Paris after an absence of two years to find that things and people are not the way he left them. Nowadays, Charlie Wales is never far from my thoughts.
Last week my Nicolas de Stael arrived, along with my latest Balthus. The latter lives around the corner, but the great de Stael killed himself 45 years ago. He was a giant of a man, manic, charming and full of Russian melancholy. He ate and drank prodigiously, laughed and groaned in agony. His passion was Braque — the most sainted and mystical of men — and regard- ed himself as Braque's disciple. He saved Braque's life once, when the latter was in the throes of an emphysema attack. According to John Richardson, Douglas Cooper said of de Stael that he was the only aristocrat since Delacroix who knew how to paint. 'Thank God for the revolu- tion. If Nicolas had inherited the family palace on the Nevski Prospect, he would never have been such a great painter.' I love de Stael the man as much as I love his paintings. He lived a life of extremes, one minute morose, the other exuberant, one day supremely confident, the next full of doubts. He threw himself off his terrace on the rocks at Antibes while suffering chagrin d'amour. He could not bear to leave his wife and children, but could not live with- out his mistress. Now that's what I call romantic with a capital R.
But back to Switzerland. My painting, 'Marine', is probably the last view of the world de Stael had before he hit the deck. I look at it a lot, and I am starting to under- stand it. Poor Nicolas de Stael. Perhaps he did, after all, do the right thing. What a rotten world this is. Just as we defeated the evil empire, another, far worse enemy, crops up: totalitarianism by EU regulation. Political correctness, endowments for the arts, state-funded academia, all ways of bribing the elite to keep their mouths shut over our loss of liberties. In Switzerland we still have a chance, but the EU commissars have lotsa moolah to spend, and their pro- paganda is ferocious. The EU is deter- mined to regulate our lives, to destroy family, faith, tradition, small business and local communities. It wants a globalist empire embodied by people like Robin Cook and Madeleine Albright, like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. There is no room for the de Staels of this world in this empire, and at times, at my gloomiest, 1 feel there's hardly any room for me.
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