Displaced Person by John Clellon Holmes

Author:John Clellon Holmes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

“Venice About Which Everything Has Been Written—"

On our second morning in Venice (our first in that jewel of a hotel on its quiet campiello in back of the Teatro La Fenice), I sat trying to write in front of a window, the heavy wooden shutters of which had been creaked back to reveal a mottled pink wall across the way, and a small iron-fenced garden below it where a large black dog was confined, ears expectantly alerted, who glanced up at me now and then out of his mid-morning boredom. Beyond, through rusty palings, there was a glimpse of a bit of narrow back-canal the color of cloudy jade, flower pots trailing begonia over a carven sill, and a leafless vine that had worked up a drainpipe out of a chink in the exposed brick. It was Venice in the blear of a chilly November morning, seen from the window of a large room at the back of the red-and-gold, paneled-and-glassed Hotel La Fenice; a room up to the windows of which the exaggerated human sounds of Venice backstreet-life rose with the acoustical clarity of a stage whisper: a carpenter hammering, his mate calling out ribald comments, a barge-man whistling, somewhere in the cavern of the theater next door a trumpet attempting a glissando, high heels pattering along the flagstones, the lapping of the canal against a bridge-pier—all reverberating up between steep walls to distract me from my words. I didn’t feel like writing. I hadn’t come to Venice to second-guess reality. The very act of putting pencil to paper seemed absurd. Still, the habit persisted.

We were just back from morning cappuccino and croissant, and the purchase of a large bottle of Campari Bitter which, at the moment, I was sampling against the dead taste of the cigarettes, while idly trying to find images for the impressions of the past two days. Images for the first sight of Venice from the air as we swerved in a steep bank over it—a risen Atlantis in the blue and gold lucidity of late afternoon, floating as weightless as a fading, brocaded glove on its wide lagoon. Images for the ugly Eighth Street-feeling of the Lista di Spagna (where we spent the first night), and my certainty once I threw open the single window of the tiny room we rented there on blank walls, soiled light, and the dead breath of an airshaft, that we could not stay in it if Shirley was to wipe out the memory of a bad Venetian summer, years before, and if I was to encounter the Venice (and the Italy) my mood hungered for, and so got us together and onto the vaporetto to come all the way along the twilit Grand

Canal to check out hotels and pensiones nearer to the center of things.

Above all, images for nighttime Venice itself—for the wash of shimmering lights on black water in the autumn dark, for the silhouettes of crenellated cornice, intricate grating through which lampshine flickered, and gondola-prow fretted

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