THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE ZURICH BOURGEOISIE
1.
The most sincere compliment you could pay Zurich is to describe it as one of the great bourgeois cities of the world. This might not, of course, seem like a compliment – the word bourgeois having become for many, since the outset of the Romantic Movement in the early 19th century, a significant insult. ‘Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom,’ felt Gustave Flaubert, a standard utterance for a mid-nineteenth-century French writer, for whom such disdain was as much a badge of one’s profession as having an affair with an actress and making a trip to the Orient. According to the Romantic value-system which today still dominates the Western imagination, to be a bourgeois is synonymous with labouring under an obsession with money, safety, tradition, cleaning, family, responsibility, prudishness and (perhaps) bracing walks in the fresh air. Consequently, for about the last 200 years, few places in the Western world have been quite as deeply unfashionable as the city of Zurich.
2.
Attractive girls born outside Switzerland are particularly against going to Zurich. Such girls (and modern science has proved this) prefer LA or Sydney. Even if they are looking for something protestant and homey, they chose Amsterdam or Copenhagen instead.
I’ve always tried to interest girls in Zurich. I’ve always thought that a girl who could like Zurich could like important recesses of me. But it’s been hard. I recall a trip with Sasha. She was an artist, she was beguiling, she was tricky. We’d have furious arguments, often in the middle of the night. Sometimes the argument went like this:
SHE: You don’t like intelligent women, that’s why you’re disagreeing with me.
HE: I do like intelligent women, but sadly you’re not one of them.
Neither of us came out of this sort of thing very well. It’s a reminder (were one to need it) that lovers practice a form of rudeness that is generally impossible outside of open warfare.
One weekend, Sasha and I flew to Zurich (we lived in Hackney in London, we were bohemian, we had views, evolved ones, about Habermas). I tried to point out how exotic Zurich was. Trams were exotic, as was the ‘Migros’ supermarket, and the light grey concrete of the apartment blocks and the large, solid windows and the veal escalopes. We normally associate the word exotic with camels and pyramids. But perhaps anything different and desirable deserves the word. What I found most exotic was how gloriously boring everything was. No one was being killed by random gunshots, the streets were quiet, everything was tidy and, as everyone says (though you don’t see people trying) it was generally so clean you could eat your lunch off the pavement.
But Sasha was bored. She wanted to go back to Hackney. She couldn’t bear the tidiness. On a walk through a park she told me she wanted to graffiti insults on the walls - just to shake the place up a bit. She did a little mock scream, and an old lady looked up from her paper. Her boredom reminded me of my friend Gustave Flaubert, who’d grown up Rouen, which is perhaps a little bit like Zurich minus the lake. ‘I am bored, I am bored, I am bored,’ Flaubert wrote in his diary as a young man. He returned repeatedly to the theme of how boring it was to live in France and especially in Rouen. ‘Today my boredom was terrible,’ he reported at the end of one bad Sunday, ‘How beautiful are the provinces and how chic are the comfortably off who live there. Their talk is of taxes and road improvements. The neighbour is a wonderful institution. To be given his full social importance he should always be written in capitals: NEIGHBOUR.’ Sasha was bored of Flaubert (she’d tried A Sentimental Education, but got bored half way), but she and Flaubert at least agreed on how boring it is to live in a boring place.
However, as mother tends to tell you near the end of the school holidays, it’s mostly boring people who get bored – and I began to lose patience with Sasha’s boredom. I wanted someone interesting enough inside not to ask of a city that it also be ‘interesting’; someone close enough to the well-springs of passion that she wouldn’t care if her city wasn’t ‘fun’; someone sufficiently acquainted with the darker, tragic sides of the human soul to appreciate the stillness of a Zurich weekend. Sasha and I weren’t an item for much longer.
3.
But my attraction to Zurich continued. What most appealed to me about Zurich was the image of what was entailed in leading an ‘ordinary’ life there. To lead an ordinary life in London is generally not an enviable proposition: ‘ordinary’ hospitals, schools, housing estates or restaurants are nearly always appalling. There are of course great examples, but they are only for the very wealthy. London is not a bourgeois city. It’s a city of the rich and the poor.
According to one influential wing of modern secular society, there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being ‘like everyone else’; for ‘everyone else’ is a category that comprises the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people should be to mark themselves out from the crowd and ‘stand out’ in whatever way their talents allow. But the desire to be different depends on what it means to be ordinary. There are countries where the communal provision of housing, transport, education or health-care is such that citizens will naturally seek to escape involvement with the group and barricade themselves behind solid walls. The desire for high status is never stronger than when being ordinary entails leading a life which fails to cater to a median need for dignity and comfort.
Then there are communities, far rarer, many of them imbued with a strong (often Protestant) Christian heritage, where the public realm exudes respect in its principles and architecture, and where the need to escape into a private domain is therefore less intense. Citizens may lose some of their ambitions for personal glory when the public spaces and facilities of a city are themselves glorious to behold. Simply being an ordinary citizen can seem like an adequate destiny. In Switzerland’s largest city, the urge to own a car and avoid sharing a bus or train with strangers loses some of the urgency it may have in Los Angeles or London, thanks to Zurich’s superlative tram network – clean, safe, warm and edifying in its punctuality and technical prowess. There is little reason to travel alone when, for only a few francs, an efficient, stately tramway will transport one across the city at a level of comfort an emperor would have envied.
4.
Pieter de Hooch, A Mother and Child with Its Head in Her Lap
[Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam]
There’s something faintly embarrassing about loving the Dutch 17th century painter Pieter de Hooch deeply, so deeply that one would include him among one’s favourite painters of all time. Of the hundred and seventy works assigned to him, most are plain mediocre, overly coarse in the early years or mannered in the later ones. He is operating in a minor genre, his pictures are too pretty and yet not quite pretty enough, not as pretty as Raphael’s or Poussin’s, and compared to his countrymen, he lacks the inventiveness of Van Steen, the grace of Vermeer or the density of van Ruisdael. His morality can appear reactionary, a celebration of the most banal human occupations: delousing and cleaning the patio. He doesn’t even paint people very well, look closely at his faces and they are no better than sketches. And yet I’ve long loved him for reasons very similar to why I love Zurich: because he understands and celebrates bourgeois life, without sentimentalising it. The world he paints, despite the differences, seems in essence identical to the Zurich I grew up in.
De Hooch is often described as fitting into a tradition of Dutch art and literature which sermonised about the virtues of domesticity. Although de Hooch’s paintings do look positively on domestic pursuits, although one would be unlikely to come away from them emboldened to break up one’s marriage or leave the kitchen dirty, it seems unfair to label him a crude moralist of domestic virtue. He never tells us that it is important to love one’s children or keep the house tidy, he merely provides us with such evocative, moving examples of maternal love and ordered rooms that we would be unlikely to disagree.
Furthermore, his art has none of the smug tone of much overt propaganda of domestic virtue. The simple pleasures of home come across as highly vulnerable achievements. Critics might argue that de Hooch was not painting seventeenth century Holland the way it really was, they could point out that many women were abused by their husbands, many houses were dirty and primitive, there was a degree of blood and dirt and pain that de Hooch chose not to represent, idealising matters instead. And yet his art is never sentimental, because it is so infused with an awareness of the darker forces liable at any point to vanquish the hard-won serenity. We don’t need to be told that the whole of Holland was not spotlessly clean, we have enough suggestion of it through the many windows at the ends of corridors in de Hooch’s canvases. We don’t need to be told that the order achieved by women in their homes might be destroyed by war or feckless husbands, we can feel the danger only too.
In A Woman with a Young Boy Preparing for School, a mother butters some bread for her son, he stands dutifully beside her, a little man holding his hat, dressed in a neat grey coat and polished shoes. If the scene is both unsentimental and moving, it is because we are made to feel the evanescence of these intimacies of mother and son. To the left of the canvas, a corridor leads to an open door and out to the street, where there is a large building marked Schole. The boy will soon disguise his debts to his mother who has over the years buttered him loaves and checked his head for lice.
De Hooch’s art helps us to recover positive associations of that word with which we may have deeply ambiguous relations: bourgeois. It seems laden with negative connotations, it can suggest conformity, a lack of imagination, stiffness, pedantry and snobbishness. But in de Hooch’s world, being bourgeois means dressing in simple but attractive clothes, being neither too vulgar nor too pretentious, having a natural relationship with one’s children, recognising sensual pleasures without yielding to licentiousness. It seems the embodiment of the Aristotelian mean. His works perform the valuable task of reminding us of the interest and worth of modest surroundings, quelling vain ambitions and temptations to disengage snobbishly from ordinary routines: the evening meal, the housework, a drink with friends. By paying attention to the beauty of brickwork, of light reflecting off a polished door, of the folds of a woman’s dress, de Hooch helps us to find pleasure in these omnipresent but neglected aspects of our world.
5.
Some seventy years before Pieter de Hooch painted his greatest works, in a passage in his Essays, Michel de Montaigne expressed thoughts that appeared to capture in words the atmosphere of de Hooch’s art – and in turn, the qualities upon which the greatness of Zurich is in my view founded. Seeking to remind his readers of the adequacy of ordinary lives, Montaigne wrote: “Storming a breach, conducting an embassy, ruling a nation are glittering deeds. Rebuking, laughing, buying, selling, loving, hating and living together gently and justly with your household - and with yourself - not getting slack nor belying yourself, is something more remarkable, more rare and more difficult. Whatever people may say, such secluded lives sustain in that way duties which are at least as hard and as tense as those of other lives.”
Unfortunately, the point keeps getting lost. We keep forgetting that buttering bread for a child and making the bed have their wondrous dimensions. Sir Joshua Reynolds clearly didn’t understand. Writing of Jan van Steen in the next century, he remarked that though Van Steen’s work was wonderful, “he would have ranged with the great pillars and supporters of art” had he been able to live in Rome, the greatest city in the world for artists, rather than Leiden, a depressing Zurich-like backwater. In Rome, he would have been inspired to paint really great canvases, he would not have had to limit himself to beggars and merchants, provincial towns and the clutter of daily existence. It is one of the glories of Dutch seventeenth art that it proves Sir Joshua Reynolds conclusively wrong. Alongside van Steen and Vermeer, Peter de Hooch and his housewives cleaning the patio deserve much of the credit.
6.
Zurich’s distinctive lesson to the world lies in its ability to remind us of how truly imaginative and humane it can be to ask of a city that it be nothing other than boring and bourgeois.
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