Le Corbusier And A Non-Ideological Bowl Of Spaghetti

I don’t often find myself in Le Locle. This is perhaps odd since I write about watches and clocks for a living. Occasionally I get to write about other things. I wish that I wrote, for a living, about things other than clocks and watches more often, having written almost exclusively about watches for probably a decade, but perhaps I should be happy with what I have. As better writers than I am have observed (Jim Harrison, for one, whom I have just started reading, and whom if things had turned out a little differently, I might have actually met; I read with some sadness that he only died in 2016) it is only through great luck that one is able to make a living writing at all, and besides, I don’t necessarily live badly (as someone said to me when I was complaining about exhaustion after coming back from a trip to Italy last year, to interview Brunello Cucinelli, “You know, no one feels sorry for you.”) I like to think that my success, such as it is, as a writer, is directly related to my being better at it than lots of other people trying to do the same thing but this may of course be untrue, and more a manifestation of a writer’s two handmaidens, ego and insecurity, than anything factual.

In any case, the reason it is odd to not go to Le Locle more often if one writes about watches and clocks, is because Le Locle is historically one of the great centers of Swiss watchmaking and nowadays, it rejoices in also being a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Moreover it is the location of a number of buildings designed by Le Corbusier, who was born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in the sister city to Le Locle, which is La-Chaux-de-Fonds. (The two towns are right next to each other, just to the north of Lake Neuchâtel).

I went to Le Locle earlier this month to visit the Zenith watch factory, which I also, and also rather oddly, have never visited before. The week was a long one and started with flying into Geneva on a Sunday morning; the plane got in just after six AM, which is a disastrous time to arrive when you have crossed five or six time zones.

The problem with arriving at six AM, after a fairly short flight (about six hours thanks to a brisk tailwind) is that, flying in from New York, you leave at about six PM. This means I wasn’t tired enough on the flight to sleep properly, at least without taking a pill, which I dislike because every sleep aid I’ve tried makes me feel depressed the next day – they produce a sort of low grade existential despair. which to be fair is only about a three out of ten on the existential despair scale, but that’s enough to take a lot of the fun out of life. Anyway, they are something I try to avoid which means that I’d only slept about three hours on the flight, and the announcement that we were on final dragged me out of some very nice deep restorative non-REM sleep. That meant that a nap in the morning at the hotel was unavoidable and so I was sunk. Also, I should certainly know better than to eat the provided food on an airplane by now but I find myself reliably unable to resist it – it’s free (or it feels that way even if, considering the cost of the flight, it is probably more expensive than dinner at Masa) and the privations of my childhood still cast their long shadow.

It poured rain for the next four days straight which didn’t stop me from adhering to a daily routine of a brisk walk up to the Cathedral de Saint-Pierre. There has been a church of some sort on the site since the fourth century, and like most ancient buildings of civic importance it is also militarily defensible, standing as it does on a hilltop; it is reachable from where I was staying (a hotel across the Rhône) only by climbing up some fairly steep streets. I ended up favoring a route which goes straight up from the Rhône crossing at the Pont du Mont-Blanc, past a merry-go-round which when it is running, rather improbably plays a lot of American R&B music. Then, just past the merry-go-round on the right is the Passage de Dégres de Poules, which means “passage of the ladder of the chickens.”

This Passage is a narrow, ascending tunnel running through the old massive walls that surround the cathedral’s foundation; climbing its stairs is a nice bit of final exertion before reaching the back of the Cathedral itself. I have read a couple of possible explanations for the odd name – one is that the Passage is as narrow and steep as the ladder to a chicken coop (which made me remember a chicken coop I knew as a boy, which indeed had a narrow, steep ladder leading up to its entrance) and the other is that it was used by prostitutes going from the old red light district of the Place du Bourg-du-Four up to the Cathedral. Human history being what it is I find the latter theory far more plausible.

It might have been the rain, or the dour atmosphere of Calvinism which can hang around Geneva on its bad days, or the jet lag and lack of sleep, but I found myself in rather low spirits for much of the time I was there, this time around. Two weeks before, I had been in London and Glasgow; I haven’t been to Glasgow in over twenty years (the last time was on a vacation through Scotland with my wife, who was then five months pregnant but who still managed to do creditable on-the-fly translations of some Latin inscriptions – twelve years of Catholic school Latin doesn’t disappear overnight) and I always sort of fall in love with London when I go there. The fact that I was going through a research jag on the test that London black cab drivers have to pass, didn’t hurt and nor did the fact that the first night there I saw a ghost in my room. London in short had spirit, and spirits, to spare and I suppose the fact that I have been a lifelong Anglophile doesn’t hurt either. Americans of mine and earlier generations seem to reliably become Anglophiles or Francophiles or both (both, in my case) but nobody ever seems to become – I don’t know what you would call someone head-over-heels in love with the romance of Switzerland; a Helvetophile?

In any case I felt very much that at least this time around, Geneva was suffering by comparison. There is to take just one example, the food – this is probably the best time in the entire history of England to eat in London, and to do so there is to feel how widely English culture has interacted with others and made aspects of those cultures its own. Swiss food can be robustly delicious but to be honest no one has ever accused it of tremendous breadth. Once you get past fondue, raclette, and rösti there does not seem to be much variety, at least in really indigenously Swiss food. I had on one occasion years ago, in Switzerland, in a remote country inn, the best game dinner I have ever had – it was game season and I think based on limited exposure that Swiss cuisine du gibier is as good as it gets. And the best Swiss wines are astonishing; you are unlikely to ever experience them unless firstly you are in Switzerland, and secondly you have a good friend who is Swiss as the best stuff is exported if at all in homeopathic amounts and moreover, does not appear at the big expense account hotels at which you are likely staying. But on the whole Swiss cuisine is not notable for its diversity.

There were other things to be blue about too. Periodically if you write about a single subject for long enough, and you do it for a living and there are enough commercial considerations affecting what you produce, it is easy to begin to feel put upon– to feel that a sensitive artist in short, should not be weighed down by the millstone around one’s neck of needing to appeal to an audience, and needing to keep up the delicate balance of editorial credibility one needs on the one hand, with the necessity of diplomatic relations with the industry one covers on the other. By Thursday, and after several days of meetings, I had begun to feel downright blue and expected to continue so until getting back home.

I was therefore not expecting to find myself exhilarated by a bowl of spaghetti on Friday afternoon. I was especially not expecting to find myself exhilarated by a bowl of spaghetti in Le Locle. It was perhaps unfair of me to have preconceptions about the general state of cuisine in Le Locle; as I have already admitted, I have spent very little time there and rationally speaking ought to have no reason to have any particular expectations about cuisine in Le Locle one way or the other.

I had honestly expected, from lunch that day, something along the lines of the quite decent fondue I’d had for dinner on Tuesday night. The fondue was in Geneva, at La Buvette des Bains, which sits on a pier jutting out into the Lac Leman (in the winter if the wind is blowing hard, the walkway ices up and going out to the restaurant can be actively hazardous, as can the return trip, especially if you’ve had the recommended amount of Fendant and kirsch with your fondue. I had one very bad spill there a few years ago when the wind was blowing fifty miles an hour, and through I know not what good luck, escaped injury and possibly being precipitated into the lake.)

The dinner by the way was not without anthropological interest. I sat at a table with a gentleman from the German-speaking part of Switzerland to my right, and one from the French-speaking part across from me and I inadvertently ignited a very heated debate on the relative merits of fondue in the two regions, with each asserting with increasing indignation, the supremacy of the fondue in their respective homelands.

Fortunately I was able to negotiate an entente by enquiring about French fondue which produced an immediate consensus. Certainly fondue is identity cuisine and bound up with many rituals, and I should not have been surprised to find feelings on the subject in Switzerland running very high (the taxonomy of fondues from different parts of Switzerland is surprisingly complex and best left for another day). The fondue from Savoy, which is in France, just south of Geneva, came in for especial expressions of contempt. I thought briefly of mentioning the fact that fondue is of relatively recent origin; that an early record of its ingredients, from Brillat-Savarin, included eggs (“it is nothing other than scrambled eggs with cheese,” he opined, in 1834) and I also thought about the fact that there was not much of a notion of it as a Swiss National Dish And Source Of National Pride until the Schweizerische Käseunion (Swiss Cheese Union, the cheese manufacturer’s cartel) started promoting it as such in the 1930s. By then, however, my dinner companions were well into a very stinging quince liquer which as far as I can recall, tasted as if were flavored with benzene so I thought I ought to quit while I was ahead.

With respect to Le Locle pretty much the only thing I knew about it, other than its connections with watchmaking, were its connections with one of La-Chaux-de-Fonds’ proudest sons, Le Corbusier (the aforementioned Charles-Édouard Jeanneret). Periodically, one of the watch brands from around the region likes to make much of this and over the years I have seen a number of attempts to reference his work in limited editions of watches, some of which, as is the nature of the beast, are more successful than others.

Le Corbusier heaven knows has his fans, and I am sure many of them are people of good will and good taste but over the years I have found my initial interest, giving way gradually to suspicion and then outright dislike. He is an interesting case. Le Corbusier was given a methodical early education using a system of toys intended to inculcate certain cognitive skills in a staged fashion, and in a very particular way and at least to me, it seems to have left him with a very menacing affinity for ideologically motivated art and architecture. Like many artists of his generation he was very fond of manifestoes and ex cathedra pronunciamentos, which aside from giving rise, at least for me, to an indignant desire to ask who died and left you in charge, has always seemed to me a particularly poor foundation for art, which I have always thought ought to serve reality and not the other way around. He ought to be cut some slack I suppose in that, in the 1920s and 1930s quite a lot of manifestoes were being written – artistic and otherwise – but in retrospect writing a manifesto for Purism, which movement he founded, and the motivation for which was his view that, get this, Cubism was too decorative and romantic (you can’t make this stuff up) seems ominous given the times. I don’t care if he was the Grand Officier of the Légion d'honneur, his aesthetic and moral absolutism gives me the creeps.

In any case, the visit to the Zenith factory was interesting although not revelatory (in writing this I am aware that for most watch enthusiasts, who do not get to travel to Switzerland on a regular basis, much less visit watch factories on a regular basis, this may sound jaded if not actively, snootily blasé. In the wonderful piece of horror fiction, The Upper Berth, the narrator frequently crosses the Atlantic by steamship and remarks that it is rather monotonous, saying at one point that, after all, “Whales and icebergs are indeed always objects of interest, but, after all, one whale is very much like another whale, and one rarely sees an iceberg at close quarters.” Never having seen a whale at quarters close or otherwise I always found that remark, indeed jaded if not snootily blasé). The factory’s most authentic-feeling area is in fact the attic, which is famous in watch enthusiast lore as the place where engineer Charles Vermot hid the tooling for making the El Primero chrongraph caliber, without which the movement would have died a permanent death.

Perhaps it was the intangible but unmistakable sense of the presence of Le Corbusier, or the four days of gloom, or the jet lag, or the melancholy induced by the deserted attic, jumbled as it was with the dusty detritus of decades of watchmaking, but I sat down to lunch in a somewhat grim mood. To be honest, I was thinking ungratefully of how scripted, and indeed rather ideological, much of the food I eat while on the road feels – all the hotels seem to be imitating each other in the same timid post-Nouvelle Cuisine fashion and I had been thinking quite a lot, in the weeks leading up to the trip to Le Locle, of one of the most ideological of all cooks (if you can call him that) – the Futurist, Marinetti. Marinetti was in fact the founder of Futurism, an avid supporter of Mussolini, and the author of the Futurist Manifesto, which contains gems like, “We will glorify war—the world's only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman." He is also the author of one of the worst cookbooks ever written, which is called, predictably enough, the Manifesto Of Futurist Cooking, which M. F. K. Fisher found amusing when she wrote about it in Serve It Forth (1937) and which prescribes a diet which does away with foreign foods, names, and recipes and indeed, has contempt for many traditional Italian ones as well – he rails agains pasta, for instance, of which he says, “It is no food for fighters.” (This particular diatribe produced a widespread outcry – the book at least in part seems to have been written slightly tongue-in-cheek, or at least with the apparently deliberate intention of annoying as many of Marinetti’s fellow Italians as possible; the mayor of Bovino told a reporter, "The angels in Paradise, eat nothing but vermicelli al pomodoro [fine spaghetti with tomato sauce]." I was beginning to feel disposed to find, in the monotonous quoting of strategies for culinary novelty in the absence of any actual ingenuity, or indeed, much in the way of flavor, which one is exposed to so much as a business traveler, some of the same deleterious effects on cooking and eating which seemed a necessary consequence of Marinetti’s approach as well. In short, I was becoming increasingly convinced that just as ideologically motivated art becomes predictable and uninteresting very quickly, so does ideologically motivated cooking as well.

So it was with enormous pleasure that I had, that afternoon at lunch, right after visiting the Zenith factory, one of the best plates of spaghetti I had ever had in my life. It was a pretty simple dish – spaghetti in a cream sauce, with mushrooms but that’s sort of like saying the Mona Lisa is a picture of some rich lady with a smirk on her face. It was the sort of thing that even with the elevated approach it took to simplicity, you should be able to get, theoretically, in an awful lot of places but it was unlike any plate of spaghetti I have ever had before, or since. The spaghetti had been made that morning, with local eggs and locally milled flour; the cream and butter were from a local farm; the mushrooms had been gathered in the woods around Le Locle the day before. Dishes of spaghetti in a mushroom cream sauce are a dime a dozen, but this was the ne plus ultra of spaghetti in mushroom cream sauce – there was about it an air of barely leashed vitality, a palpable presence of the spirit of the ingredients which was as far removed from ideological motivation as you can get. It had what in Chinese medicine and the martial arts, we call qi – a kind of quivering on the brink of the energetic and the material which I have experienced in no dish of spaghetti before or since (well, there were a couple in Umbria in 2018, but that’s really about it). You could get the recipe, but the dish was so much of its place and of its time that reproducing it would be impossible – it was as good as it was, just in that moment, on that particular day and in that particular place. It was, Marinetti be damned, food for fighters, excepting only the fact that it was so languorously delicious that it made you want to make love, not war, albeit with martial vigor.

I started writing this months ago which is why it is too long, and why it wanders a bit (I wonder what my colleague Joe Thompson, who finds my affinity for subordinate clauses and tendency to bury the lede troubling, would say about it – we have a great relationship, don’t get me wrong; he doesn’t say anything about my insistence on using semicolons where periods would do just fine, and I don’t say anything when he takes them out). In the months between starting this and more or less finishing it, the whole idea of writing about ideologically motivated food vs. non-ideologically motivated food has started to seem a little off, or at least a little out of context – one is increasingly aware that one is lucky to have food at all, especially when more than ever, so many are without. But perhaps this whole story is best taken as of its time and place, like the dish of spaghetti that inspired it. Anyway, if you happen to be in Le Locle, the restaurant in question is up behind the Zenith factory next to the train station – Restaurant De La Gare, Chez Sandro. Tell ‘em that crabby American who was in last November and gobbles his spaghetti sent you.