‘You don’t want to go to Venice?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Did you have a bad experience there?’
‘No, I’ve never been to Venice. There’s lots of places I don’t want to visit and Venice is one of them.’
‘Oooo – why not?’
Luca was amazed. His glass had come to a halt in midair. People say ‘You must go to Venice, you’ll love it’, but they said the same about that other vision on water, New York, and when I did go to New York I found what struck me as giant sculpture, curiously inert. Not that I have a problem with cities-and-water per se. Those other water-mounted extravaganzas, Istanbul and St Petersburg, have meant much to me in the past, but they were cities animated by the warmth of poverty. Are rich cities necessarily cold to the heart? Venice, of velvet and marble, was always a rich town and is now immobilised beneath cling-film: the most expensive, most useless city in Italy. Simply to breathe its air is to drain one’s credit card.
Of course Venice circulates in the bloodstream of world culture. It is international, that is to say nowhere, and everyone has a chip of it in their brain. It is city as exhibit, as inauthentic experience. Do you think the search for authentic experience is doomed in our modern world? I don’t. But one must be mindful of having everything wrapped up for you by others. When did you last buy vegetables to which the earth still clung? Exactly. This is Venice: vegetables rinsed and trimmed in a see-through container. You see, we are afraid of authenticity – and yet we hunger for it. We are afraid of it because it involves loss of control. We hunger for it because we have so little, in the developed world at least. We have civility instead of authenticity, because lots of authenticity means a life close to violence. I’m looking forward to ocean-wonder Rio de Janeiro, mugging capital of the world, which illustrates the surprising truth that authenticity is the crucible of dreams.
When did Venice stop being real? And therefore, paradoxically, lose its magic? After John Addington Symonds and Baron Corvo? It began earlier, not long after the death of Byron I guess. In 1851 John Ruskin, outraged, reported that the arcades of the Doge’s palace were in use by tourists as a latrine; but the city had already been ruined for him by the arrival of the railway several years before. Mind you, travelling writers are always like this. I loved Penang before the airport was built. Pre-airport Penang will always remain my dream of the Orient; and its capital, Georgetown, my ideal of a maritime oriental town: all the charms of the East in a pocket edition (as I wrote to my friend Justin Wintle – who preserved the postcard!). On reflection I’d say that Venice experienced the kiss of death the day Wagner stepped into the foyer of the Danieli.
Luca laughed and clapped his hands. ‘More wine, vicar?’ he asked – Blackadder again. ‘I don’t like Wagner either.’
I said that I didn’t mind Wagner and that Wagner wasn’t exactly the point. Vampirism was the point; Wagner’s vampirism on Venice; which Wagner later emphasised by travelling there to die, confirming that this was no longer a city but a stage-set available for the greatest death-scene of his career. The Wagners had rented fifteen rooms in the gloomy and sumptuous Palazzo Vendramin where the composer would sit in the windows of the salone overlooking the Grand Canal, illuminated by the winter sun and dressed for death in a black jacket of quilted satin. As his heart gave out, Wagner struck extravagant, almost meaningless attitudes, declaring for example that the best which could happen to anyone in life was to be exiled to Ceylon. The arrival of Liszt at the palazzo did not thin the atmosphere. In Max Ophuls’s film Lola Montes, Lola says to Liszt that for her life is movement, but it was even truer of Liszt than of his mistress. He was probably the most peripatetic man of his time. He was also Wagner’s father-in-law and only challenger; indeed musically he had moved way beyond Wagner, who found Liszt’s spare late style incomprehensible and dissonant. In these last compositions of Liszt the Modern Movement has already arrived, while Wagner at the end had become obsessed with a popular song, Harlequin, thou must perish…
Luca had got me going and, if I may, I’d like to develop the theme here with a consideration of what magic might be. I would assert that the essence of magic is that it not be commonplace. Yes – conformism and magic are enemies. Magic demands the shock of the unexpected and the vibration of difference, not the comfort of sameness. Magic can be upsetting, is inconvenient, marks you. For those who don’t want that, there’s glamour. Paris – Monte Carlo – Hollywood – New York-Venice – these places have glamour before you go and after you come back, but strange to say, they usually don’t have it while you are actually there – this is because when you’re there you are too busy trying to photograph your experience with your mind. Quite a few places have both glamour and magic – Rome is a clear example – and they are indeed wonderful places to visit, but the number of such places is in rapid decline and most of them these days are in South America, the unmined continent.
They say Venice is beautiful. In my imagination it is spectacular, but I suspect that if I went, I’d find not spectacle but a toy. It would look smaller, more trite than in my imagination, the way film stars do when you chance upon them in a fashionable restaurant. Venice lacks mystery because it lacks ambivalence. Almost everyone comes away disappointed in some respect. You get less than you pay for.
Though once famously well-organised in the arts of licentiousness, Venice is no longer erotic. It is a desexed city. In Venice you will never meet anyone. The nearest you may come to it is, well, occasionally people will see themselves reflected in other people’s eyes. So I guess once in a while people might imagine they’ve had sex in Venice, or at least been smitten by someone drifting down a street, but it is only imaginary. Too much imagination, too little giving. I expect no one gives in Venice.
The crucial factor in all adventures is the gift. Something coming at you unannounced, unscheduled, free of charge, impossible to refuse. It is important to remember this. And it could no more happen in Venice than it could in, say, Saint Tropez. Should you by any chance imagine that you have met someone in Venice, do take them away, out of town, anywhere, but take them away quickly. Because only then will you be able to see them. If you remain in Venice, you will never see them. Venice is so jealous of lovers. Having rendered them coy, it erases them with ridicule.
Yes, Venice has been too much adored, and its only chance was to become decadent, but mass tourism put a stop to that. The Victorians could enjoy Venice because it was a city dying, a city enacting the myth of Atlantis before their very eyes. Then something terrible happened. A sort of cryonic engineering came along and said ‘Thou shalt not die. Thou shalt exist as a cripple for ever.’ The moment of psychic extinction, when its last nerve-endings briefly flashed before going out altogether, was – one might as well pin it on this – the funeral of Diaghilev. He died from surfeit at the beach hotel on the Lido, having beforehand sent a telegram to Coco Chanel and Misia Sert who were cruising on the Duke of Westminster’s yacht in the Adriatic – ‘Am sick: come quickly!’ The burial took place on the island of San Michele. Four mourners were present (some accounts add a fifth, a cousin). In addition to the two women there was the most recent ex-lover, Serge Lifar (lately ousted in Diaghilev’s heart by a teenage Russian pianist) and Diaghilev’s assistant, Boris Kochno – also an ex. Lifar and Kochno had fought from opposite sides of the deathbed while the maestro, still mid-departure, periodically raised his weary eyes to the ceiling. Four mourners merely, at the great Diaghilev’s funeral in Venice on a hot August day in 1929. That was when the Venice story ended. The city has been trying to drown itself ever since. But people in dark suits and diamonds and silk and richly crowned or implanted teeth, gathering in passionately concerned groups all over the planet, refuse to let it happen. So the bloated, floating hag known as la serenissima is kept on a life-support system of paralysed myth and hard cash. Venice isn’t a city, it’s a charity. But of course, one couldn’t let it sink without a fight because it would become the brazen herald of that eco-
disaster waiting to engulf us all.
Cheated of its own grand demise, Venice stares at you like an idiot. Maybe once not so long ago it had the good taste to be embarrassed by being an object of such pity. Now it takes everything it can get. It lacks the profundity of death, because only the living can die. Even Death in Venice is not death in Venice but Mann, Mahler, Vienna. Vienna once ruled Venice and the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, who liked double-barrelled titles, was once the King of Lombardy-Venetia.
In my thoughts Venice keeps transmogrifying into Vienna as though one instinctively passes from the sterile to the fertile, because one searches vainly the last hundred years for a significant Venetian-born artist or writer – more Italian poets have been born in Egypt (Marinetti, Ungaretti). Nor in the same period has Venice served foreign poets very well. Rilke’s ‘Late Autumn in Venice’ is, to put it mildly, uninspired. He should have tried something like ‘Late Autumn in Oslo’. Oslo is not the most happening town but ‘Late Autumn in Oslo’ sounds as though it would be a far more interesting poem. It’s the mental laziness of using Venice which is the turn-off. Italians themselves never find any fascination there and they avoid it. Venice is an elision of ‘very nice’, a place for Sunday painters and retirement holidays. I’m not attacking retired people if that’s where they want to go. Venice itself is retired. But once a year it tries to pass itself off as youthful. It has a carnival, a masquerade for people who must book via the internet the limited number of places available; and as for Venice’s nightclubs, my Italian friends tell me they are the worst in Italy. Which is a melancholy fact for this erstwhile city of revelry and freedom. Travellers travel in search of freedom and therefore should avoid Venice which is under permanent occupation and where their minds will be incarcerated in cliche.
Unable to drown itself, Venice lacks even the power to drown others. The great drownees, Shelley and Le Corbusier for example, gulped their last elsewhere. Although people do not drown in Venice, they do get submerged, trapped in an aqua fantasy between life and death, and instead of expiring they go on and on and on about it in their semi-sozzled purgatory, about this or that church, this or that palace, this or that restaurant. But nobody has an adventure in Venice, as nobody has an adventure in Disneyland or Harrod’s. Adventure has been edited out of the programme because adventure is commercially unreliable. And Venice’s allure becomes a Pavlovian reflex like that of the Pyramids of Giza or the Taj Mahal or Las Vegas. How very different – indeed the recollection of it makes me shudder still – was my encounter with the great pyramids of Teotihuacan outside Mexico City where atop the Pyramid of the Moon I discovered that the dipping and rising wind howls faintly but unceasingly for murder, with a nagging insistence which interferes with the rhythm of one’s heart.
Luca drew my attention to the winds outside our very window, louder, more full-bodied than those in Mexico, yet ablast with a comparable venom, and said that some places were necessarily not about exposure but about shelter, that Venice was about being sheltered by civilisation, at which I gave ground and granted him a point. He went on ‘So is there absolutely nothing you would enjoy in Venice?’
All right – what I’d like, perhaps, is to be smuggled one night across the lagoon in a closed gondola, guided by a single lamp and manoeuvred through side channels to the obscure entrance of the Palazzo Albrizzi. Rising from the canal, coiled in strands of mist, we climb green and slippery steps to find ourselves in a vaulted chamber. Shadows flicker everywhere from the disturbed water. Ahead, a monumental staircase of mottled marble draws us up – the building is uninhabited – of course it is – and silent too, apart from the slurping echoes of the canal. We cross the upper landing with a shiver and find our way by stealth to the ballroom where we should sit awhile and contemplate the wonder of this space whose ceiling of curtained plasterwork – oh, the incomparable plasticity of the Italians – is held aloft in rouches by flying cherubs, a ceiling which for once, mercifully, is unpainted. The Italians loved to paint their rooms and they have the finest painted rooms in the world – but sometimes, Orlando, desist! Candlelight is all this room requires for perfection and when so lit at night the walls and ceiling appear to be alive with swarms of pale rats. The Palazzo Albrizzi is one of those rarities, a Venetian residence with a garden, and through the windows, ajar, come the scents of orange blossom and jasmine on a warm night.
I can’t stand being herded. It’s one of my problems in life. And I know there is rarely any other way to explore Venice than as one of the herd. I wish I could be a herd member. I long for it, to be one of the crowd. I can understand why people enjoy war, as a way of joining up with the herd. But the days when I’d relish being in the thick of it at some pop festival for example, those days have passed – now I’d get claustrophobia. I don’t think Venice is the place to try and overcome my anti-herd instinct because there is too much coming at you at the art level which makes for extra sensitivity anyway. Venice’s ornate bulbousness, arising from its own reflection, has become Narcissus crushed by the charging hooves of bison.
Am I being cruel to poor, drunken Venice? Like a thwarted lover perhaps. My inability to have Venice for myself, the necessity of sharing it, means that I hate it and reject it. I don’t want something that’s been so handed around; don’t want to discharge where all the rest have discharged. And is it the romantic in me who can yearn only for the unattainable? I have always yearned for Venice’s great antecedent, Tenochtitlan, capital of the blood-soaked, heart-ripping Aztecs, perhaps the greatest lacustrine city in the world. At the time of the Cortes conquest, it was larger than any city in Europe – so they say.
The nearest I have come to a genuine experience of Venice is reading Brodsky’s prose work Watermark. He fell in love with Venice because for him it was the inauthentic, therefore containable and bearable version of his seething, super-charged home town of St Petersburg. Everyone, unless he’s mindless, has a complex relationship with his place of origin and, given that Russian history is probably the most terrifying of all histories, perhaps this is truest of Russians. St Petersburg has more bridges than Venice but is as blood-soaked as Tenochtitlan. The expatriate option – or exile, its involuntary counterpart – can solve many problems in the short term, and remember – our lives are short. For Brodsky, having been rejected by St Petersburg, Venice becomes paramour on the rebound, because Venice never refuses an advance, is open to all. Yet Watermark is a thin book, a polished letter to a courtesan. Even for Brodsky, Venice is not a place where anything much is born and he confesses that he would never go there in summer-time, not even at the point of a gun. I was going to meet Brodsky in New York once, but he had a stroke, or a heart attack, one of those ailments, and the meeting was postponed until he got better – but he didn’t get better and is buried in the same cemetery as Diaghilev. Shame. I could have put to him these doubts about Venice. I have often mentioned them to others, a few of whom agree with me but most do not and go into a kind of promo-paroxysm as though it’s essential that I be converted to the faith. Barbara Cartland had no doubts. ‘Been dozens of times!’ she swooped. ‘Adore it, written heaps about it, got loads of friends there – there’s a duke who gave me a party in his palace all lit up with candles, as it would’ve been in the eighteenth century. Venice doesn’t change which is good because every other place is always changing.’
And we haven’t yet mentioned the absence of cars. But I’m not convinced. Natale Maganuco, a Sicilian, said to me ‘The feeling I have is that Venice…emotionally it is lost. It has been wonderful but is now something unreal. Even the Venetians are something unreal.’ In fact do Venetians exist any more than do Ruritanians? One suspects not, and outsiders pour in to view the amazingly decked-out corpse of a unique urbanism. Oh, forgive me if I’ve gone on too long, but the true horror of Venice is that its fate, in a world of too many people, could well be the fate of all beautiful places: the fenced-off national park as much as the railed-off cameo township, trampled because protected, polluted becaus
e isolated, degraded because valued. Eventually the only beautiful places will be inside us. What a revolting thought.
The night winds dropped, the following day was again sunny, and Eigg glowed with warmth. The principal house of the island is called the Lodge and is the seat of the Laird. I found it down a winding lane among sheltered woods. The tranquillity was deep and birdsong enhanced it. Even the sea which is everywhere at hand on Eigg could not be heard here. Propping my bike against mildewed gates, and trusting that the weight of the machine would not bring to ground the tenuous fretwork of wood, I ventured up the drive. The site was deserted. Rhododendrons and blue & white hydrangeas, running continuously along either side, were interrupted every so often by outrageous palm trees. At the top of a low rise, and at a considered angle, a villa appeared in a glade. It had a steeply pitched roof and was flanked by matching pavilions. To the left was a derelict tennis court, to the right an orchard thoroughly overgrown.
I stood for some time staring at the broken red clay of the tennis court and I recalled another lodge, of exactly the same reddish colour as the court, which I’d visited many years before with Sarah Moffett in New Delhi, the Viceregal Lodge of the Viceroys of India. There is endless debate about the correct term for this Versailles of British India. Someone told us it should be called ‘Viceregal Lodge’ without the definite article. Someone else said no, it should be called ‘Viceroy’s House’ because ‘Viceregal Lodge’ was the place up at Simla – which does make more sense. And I recalled those wartime invitations to Bapsy Pavry which I’d seen in Winchester – they’d been sent from ‘The Viceroy’s House’, but of course war changes things, even little things like that. What I remember most poignantly from that morning in 1975 when Sarah and I had tea with the President of India, in what was no longer called Viceroy’s anything but ‘the Raj Bhavan,’ was that she and I broke away from the main party, left them to their porcelain cups and pink and lemon iced cakes, in order to explore the gardens. Sadly these were neglected. The peacocks had vanished, the ornamental fountains and tanks were dry. And we came to a tennis court similarly derelict, and we sat beside it with the long grass round our legs until I detected a lump beneath my foot, and rummaging in the tangled undergrowth I extracted an ancient blackened tennis ball which had obviously been struck and forgotten many years before by a departing British Raj player. I wish now I’d kept it as a souvenir, that very last viceregal tennis ball, but instead I flung it the length of an unkempt terrace where it disappeared once again into the maw of history.
How to Disappear Page 10