Fitzgerald’s Switzerland is part-luxury hotel, part-clinic. His rich, careless people bray through Europe in leisure-class. Despite years in France, Fitzgerald had horrendous French and an “atrocious” accent, according to his daughter. “Je suis un stranger here,” was one of his more accomplished phrases. “Très bien, you son of a bitch!” was another, reserved for taxi drivers. He couldn’t spell either, Hemingway admits mischievously: “I knew him for two years before he could spell my name; but then it was a long name to spell…”

Palace Hotel, Gstaad

Gstaad, like the Côte d’Azur, was a gathering spot for Americans abroad. The Fitzgeralds stayed at the Palace Hotel with the beautiful people. Then as now, Gstaad and environs was where the wealthy parked their children in international schools and their money in banks. They indulged in the new sport of skiing. At a tea dance “four-score young Americans, domiciled in schools near Gstaad, bounced about to the frolic of ‘Don’t Bring Lulu,’ or exploded violently with the first percussions of the Charleston. It was a colony of the young, simple, and expensive…”

By the time the 1929 crash came, Zelda was in Switzerland for re-hab and Scott was leading a rootless existence in lakeside hotels. More than the economy was coming apart. She had always been high-maintenance. Scott booked her into the Valmont clinic in Montreux (Rainer Maria Rilke and the Belgian royal family had been patients). Later she was transferred to Les Rives de Prangins outside Nyon overlooking Lake Geneva, to the tune of a thousand dollars a month. For Scott it would mean more stories with trick endings.

"Tender is the Night," published in 1934, describes the arc of their slippery slope. Doctor Diver is a psychiatrist at “a rich person’s clinic” who thinks he’s on the way up but he’s really on the way down. He marries money but has been bought to look after his unstable wife: “swallowed up like a gigolo”. By the end of the novel, Diver is ensconced in the Hôtel des Trois Mondes in Lausanne with a louche collection of inter-war racketeers and the detritus of the Roaring Twenties: “throughout the hotel there were many chambers wherein rich ruins, fugitives from justice, claimants to the thrones of mediatised principalities, lived on the derivatives of opium or barbital … This corner of Europe does not so much draw people as accept them without inconvenient questions.”

Fitzgerald is onto something here. Switzerland for American writers between the wars was a funfair and a slippery slope in equal measure.

Information from Padraig Rooney, reprinted with permission.