Venices
Page 8
Romanticism had survived for so long that its last vestiges still existed half a century later; it constructed no more lasting temples to its gods, however, than the present age does to its idols of the 1920s; 1970 is still illuminated by the lamps they lit; from Picasso to Kisling, from Proust to Saint-John Perse, from Honegger to Satie, the masters of those days have never had their authority questioned; and Gabrielle Chanel, who dressed the Deauville of 1915 in her jerseys, was still dressing high society of the 1970s in her outfits. They represented the true portfolio of stocks and shares of their day, the real Suez, the real I.B.M. It is a phenomenon that has to do with the athletic qualities of the artists of the heroic age. The boulder has continued to gather pace, and a great number of trees have been felled: yet not one of the geniuses of the 1920s has been dislodged.
It’s a French phenomenon; you only have to transport yourself mentally to the Berlin of the expressionists, the England of Huxley, the Rome of Malaparte, or the New York of the Dial to compare how fortunate Paris was at that time. The other day (1970) I was in New York, in the same Algonquin bar where in about 1925 we used to meet Mencken, George Nathan, the Ernest Boyds, Carl Van Vechten, Walter Wanger and Scott Fitzgerald; seeing nothing but ghosts in the famous “roaring twenties” grill room and dining-room, I observed that whereas the force of the storm and the lust for life had toppled our American friends off their perches, we had been more fortunate or more wise, in this Paris in which Dos Passos used to relate how, after wild nights out, I used to protect him, Cummings and Gilbert Seldes from being beaten up.8
I can see myself opening an envelope from the N.R.F.: it’s my first cheque from Gallimard; I felt pleased, yet at the same time irritated; I had never been paid any salary except by the State; I had the feeling that I was betraying it, not freeing myself from it. Many civil servants, from Maupassant to Valery, have lived in this way, one that was honourable and accepted by everyone, but they had not belonged to the “grand corps”,9 the War Office, the Admiralty, the Treasury, the Audit Office, the Department of Transport, the Conseil d’Etat, the Foreign Office, etc…. the schools which trained you for these professions constituted bodies in whose eyes the State was sacrosanct; and the entrance examinations for them (the “Concours”) were a sort of gateway to the top. What did an entrance examination consist of, particularly in those days? A formality, in which one’s popularity rating and a sort of common law were what chiefly mattered; nevertheless, a man who wasn’t “a product of the Concours”, and who had entered these top careers through prefectural channels, through journalism or by political means, was never quite considered as an equal. State salaries were not generous, but this money was something special; it was not other people’s money; nobody had ever touched it; the six louis d’ors granted me each month for ten years were, at least until 1918, newly minted by the Banque de France.
This cult of the State still exists today, but people nowadays often become employed in the civil service as if for a training period, they branch out into the Banque de France (the slang term is pantouflage10), private interests come into play and the boundary lines separating a diplomatic ambassadress from an ambassadress of fashion have become blurred; the numerous international organisations, the way in which one’s colleagues are selected, the infiltration of large companies through side entrances, by publicity methods, by press or cultural attachés, all these must have altered the attitudes of the staff in the civil service, such as I knew it.
Parisian life and my stormy experiences among the varied milieux of the capital would gradually dampen the respect I felt for that unwritten code of honour and loosen the bonds that bound me morally just as tightly as the diplomatic corps had coerced an officer in the time of Alfred de Vigny. Seeing my name suddenly in bookshop windows felt like setting foot in another country; it was the end of that absolute anonymity that for so long had been the Civil Service’s golden rule. When I returned to the “office”, my former kingdom, on the eve of the last war, I did not find what I had relinquished twelve years previously; politics, the post-1936 trade union mentality, the new intellectual approach, the arrival of École Normale graduates in the profession, meant that it no longer had quite the same atmosphere; I sometimes came across the last vestiges of former days tucked away in the hotel rooms of Vichy.
I feel sure that there are just as many great civil servants as there were, perhaps more, for the country has grown smaller; they will probably get used to life within the hexagon that is France.
I can only think of a hexagon as something etched in the spheres.
1925
A LOVE ON THE ROAD
A PHOTOGRAPH that is often reproduced shows the composers known as Les Six,11 Valentine Hugo and myself in one of those fairground boats painted on canvas; I am leaning over the rails, throwing up, and Valentine is supporting my head; it is the very image of the way I felt in 1925; the post-war years gave me a sudden desire to be sick.
In Paris I was becoming the “cosmopolitan Parisian”, as sketched in crayon by Vlaminck in his Portraits avant décès. The “Boeuf’ in the rue Duphot had moved to a smart area, and our youth there was over. We left behind us newly published books, black velvet sofas, blue antimacassars, zebra rugs, Russian cabarets, fishnet stockings worn by sirens, claw-like and silver-painted nails, syncopated music, plucked eyebrows, everything to do with the Paris of Van Dongen that the artist was in the process of parading through the provinces, where it was being lapped up. Paris was the city of false life which simultaneously could throw a Katherine Mansfield into Gurdjief’s magnetic snare; people were fleeing towards every outlet, every religion, there were false conversions, instant tonsures, it was the very opposite of Heaven, call-up time for the guardian angels. Paris lost her moral control of the world; she has never regained it again. The “Coupole” in Montparnasse was no longer the universe. Salvation lay in flight! Henceforth, complimentary copies of books would be inscribed: “On behalf of the author, who is away from Paris.’” From then on “travelling became my only concern”.
The Groupe des Six (from left to right): François Poulenc, Germaine Tailleferre, Louis Durey, Jean Cocteau, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger and a drawing of Georges Auric by Cocteau, 1931
In Bangkok, I rediscovered Venice; was it the water or the mainland? “Stretches of land that are so low that they seem to have escaped the sea as if by a miracle”, wrote the Abbé de Choisy; in those days Thailand still wore her tiara and called herself Siam. There were the same golden fishing boats, with fifty oarsmen, as on the Lagoon in the time of Guardi; the floating teak rafts and the sampans laden to the brim with paddy rice reminded me of the baskets of fruit along the meandering Brenta; the cabins in which the Siamese stored their dried palms resembled the huts built by the first Veneti, the stupas of the royal Wat Phra Kaew were just like Venice in the time of Marco Polo, and the sailing boats with their unfurled sails that looked like vampires’ wings bore the same eye painted on their prows as those of the fishermen in Malamocco.
1926
PHILIPPE BERTHELOT’s fall from grace gave me cause for reflection; the complete athlete, he had wanted to experience life to the full, serving the State under Poincaré, playing tennis with Giraudoux, frequenting the Paris of horse racing and dress rehearsals, the Opéra and Lugné-Poe’s plays; a man with the administrative orderliness and the intellectual anarchy of a Sturel, who both kept dangerous company and mixed in society,12 and who set off on journeys lasting two years; he was the author of a sonnet the lines of which rhymed with the syllable omphe; he knew the whole of Hugo by heart as well as the stud-book of the Jockey Club from the date of its foundation; he wore himself out both physically (he never slept) and mentally (despising everyone except his colleagues and friends). I realised that you could not serve the State as well as have other masters. There could be no second career. The State demands total dedication. I had to make a choice: I opted for happiness, for the open road, for lost time, that is to say time gained. I set off once more
on the road to Venice.
Venice is but the thread of a discourse interrupted by lengthy silences in which, from time to time, different countries have occupied her, just as they have occupied me: twenty-five years in Switzerland, ten years in Tangiers or Spain, eight years in England; not to mention Paris.
Barrès wrote: “This image of my own being and this image of Venice’s being tally in a number of ways.” My credentials for expressing this are less imposing, but the time I have devoted to Venice may permit me to apply this remark to myself. It is mainly through my past that Venice, as well as Paris, continue to hover without sinking.
LA BRENTA, 1925–1970
HOW MANY TIMES, before the last world war, did I take the little road along the banks of the Brenta to return to Venice from the thermal baths at Abano, near Padua! The tedium of mud baths, which were over by nine o’clock in the morning, drove me away from the Orologio, where I had a room in which to spend the night, to Venice, where a room in which I could spend the day awaited me. At that time there was very little traffic between Venice and the mainland; today Padua has become an annexe of Venice, extending it as far as Verona and Vicenza; buses, coaches and lorries run every half-hour between the Eremitani and Piazzale Roma, swallowing up the Lagoon faster than any train; the sleepy, provincial town of Padua is now an important business centre, full of bustle and noise and the sound of gas explosions, and drowning in carbon monoxide fumes that mingle with the foul stench of the Mestre oil refineries, reminiscent of Maracaibo or Sainte-Adresse.
To avoid the autostrada, you can travel by water; the Brenta opens its five or six locks to the Burchiello, or passenger barge; leaving St Mark’s Square the river bank is approached from the west, from Fusina, thus avoiding Mestre and Porto Marghera, which are shrouded in a blackish haze. The Burchiello was once the only means of transport, that of Montaigne, of President De Brosses, of Goethe, and of Casanova, whose Memoirs open with such a pretty description of this type of horse-pulled barge, of which the Correr Museum possesses a model of the period; it’s a boat with painted panels, with mirrors and candles on the walls; travellers wearing masks would gossip away at the bows while the boatmen steered from the back; on the roof is an area surrounded by railings where the luggage is stored and where there is bedding (see the Tiepolo in Vienna).
A well-known passage by Philippe de Commynes, the most ingenuous and probably the oldest description of Venice in the French language, is devoted to Fusina; I’ve always had such a strong affection for it that I must quote it in passing: “The day lay before me on the morning I arrived in Venice and I went as far as Chafusine [Fusina] which is five miles from Venice; there you leave the boat on which you have come, along a river, from Padua, and you climb into little boats that are very clean and covered in fine tapestries with beautiful velvet carpets inside… The sea is extremely calm there… You have a view of Venice and a conglomeration of houses all surrounded by water…”
The Brenta is no longer the summer-time river whose Alpine waters cooled Venice’s holidaymakers; tatty huts replace the trees, the water is the colour of olive oil and on its surface float the bloated corpses of dead cats, discarded crates and empty tin cans: pylons and power lines form the dense vegetation of the new Italy; ducks attempt to swim among the plastic bottles, those latter-day water-lilies; next come a few willow trees (one understands why they weep), or reeds that resemble the plumes of the bersaglieri; over the water, swing bridges, looking haughty and poorly laminated, raise their metal arms for the present-day Burchiello, which has nothing in common with its ancestor (“Bucentaurus’s grandchild”, De Brosses used to say), a vessel with fifty seats, decked out in varnish, chrome and banners, and which sounds its siren impatiently from the bottom of the locks, where it is sometimes forgotten.
It is in winter that the Venetians of former times used to take refuge in the city, after the hunting season, when in November the bora had begun to blow from the heights of Grappa. The dances and public life continued until June; then people would return back along the Brenta, or go to their Palladian villas in the Euganean hills. It was in the sixteenth century that the Brenta became fashionable; each patrician family owned one or more villas there; the Pisanis had as many as fifty of them; the Contarini’s residence, at Piazzola, boasted five organs, two theatres into which five horse-drawn carriages, side by side, could be driven, a lake, and enough bedrooms to house one hundred and fifty guests, as well as their servants.
The earliest fourteenth or fifteenth century engravings depict fortified, crenellated houses without windows or staircases; two or three centuries later they have become quite different sorts of dwellings, such as those we see in the Tiepolos or Longhis in the Rezzonico museum, or those in the rustic scenes in the Papadopoli gallery. The atmosphere is one of indolence, with music, siestas, ladies prattling, their husbands chatting to their servants on horseback, surrounded by a horde of friends, parasites, clavichord players, all of them gazing intently at the tables upon which piles of pewter dishes await the arrival of the food.
I don’t know in what state the hundreds of villas I once visited are now in; they all used to be more or less the same, with their cast-iron gates that could not be opened because of the long grass, and their pilasters crowned with obelisks or statues of divinities wearing lichen for wigs; what has been left of them by the developers, by devaluation and by those who live in them? Only the Villa Pisani de Stra, which is maintained by the State, has its future assured. But what has become of the Psyche Room and the trompe l’oeil ceilings of the Villa Venier; those at the Casa Widmann; the chinoiserie at the Villa Barbariga; the games room at the Villa Giustiniani; the Juno room at the Villa Grimani; all those gardens of Armida or of The Dream of Polyphilus and all that enchantment of the houses I once knew, some of them intact after three centuries, while others lay in ruins? And of their almond-green or pale pink drawing-rooms, the walls cracked from top to bottom, filled with ploughs and harrows and carts into which Veronese’s goddesses, or the dancers of Tiepolo’s minuet, have fallen from the ceiling in great slabs, rotting with damp and dilapidation?
I have over-indulged in Palladio (one can get indigestion from lean fare); this dictatorship of antiquity over three centuries, from Stockholm to the Brenta, from Lisbon to St Petersburg, and these rigid façades of Greek temples encasing a block of bricks can sometimes offend the imagination; it needs all the genius of a Gabriel,13 allied to what is the most beautiful material in the world after Pentelic marble, Vaugirard stone, to dispel the tedium of the neo-classical.
LA MALCONTENTA
THE PRIVATELY OWNED gondolas at their moorings nod their iron prows sadly as we pass by; we disturb their slumber. The first villa at which the Burchiello stops is La Malcontenta. The origin of its name is obscure, it may be that a woman of the Foscari family, to whom the house belonged, was once confined there for bad behaviour, or possibly local people were unhappy about water being brought there, which meant it was taken from them.
I scarcely recognized the villa, so shaded was it by Italian poplars, those beautiful trees that grow so quickly; I had remembered a house that was dramatically isolated, and now I found it surrounded by formal lawns. It had been beautiful the way it was, its lines intact, purified by poverty and solitude, just as the centuries had left it, ever since 1560, far away from anything, in a bare landscape, haunted by ladri and rapinatori,
Balzac set a scene there, one in which Massimilla Doni holds the handsome Emilio by the hand; hidden away between the Lagoon and the mountains, Massimilla bemoans her over-respectful lover… Did Balzac know the Brenta, or did he have the same instinctive sense about the countryside that he had for people? His description of a Palladian palazzo has all the precision of those legal documents that are justifiably known as writs.
In about 1928, Catherine and Bertie had discovered La Malcontenta in the state in which it had been left after the Austrian bombardment during the siege of 1848. Bertie had decided to buy the villa and to restore it: an e
ntire lifetime would not have sufficed; lying abandoned in the middle of cornfields, among willow trees that were not much more than stumps, and amid pools of stagnating waters, La Malcontenta dominated the flat river plain; initially a mountain stream, like the Isonzo, the Mincio, the Adda or the Tagliamento, and exhausted by its descent from the high Alps, the Brenta flattens out into pools as it approaches the Lagoon; its dull, lacklustre waters, the colour of engine oil and shimmering with rust, seem to be reluctant to reach Mestre; its banks of cracked mud, its bridges that cast no reflection, and the impervious surface of its waters have created an unspeakable stew that no wind can ruffle; the ancient maps trace its course: imitating the other rivers of the Dolomites, the Brenta displays the tentacles of an octopus encircling Venice.
With all the patience of the eager enthusiast, but with out any money, Bertie had lugged bedding, Brazilian hammocks and tents from the upper Amazon to La Malcontenta; Catherine, tireless, imperious, uncompromising, and intent upon her futile quest, supported him with her exuberance. At the centre point of a Latin cross at which four rooms converged, meals were served upon a ping-pong table that was weighed down with all the fruits of the Rialto, on china that came from the flea-market, while Catherine, the descendant of Vittoria Cappello doubling as a rag and bone woman, got on with the restoration of the building.
The parties at La Malcontenta were a bit like Plato’s Banquet and a bit like Rabelais’s Abbaye de Thélème. In rooms painted in a very soft, sometimes pinkish, light-straw colour, the guests made their way into the past through simulated doors. There was no furniture, just bales of straw for chairs, and crates. (As an anonymous visitor, yesterday I recognized the gigantic eighteenth-century maps of the world, and even a portrait of Bertie.)