Venice for Lovers by Louis Begley & Anka Muhlstein

Author:Louis Begley & Anka Muhlstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2005-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

Venice: Reflections of a Novelist

by Louis Begley

Venice: It is a great pleasure to write the word, but I am not sure there is not a certain impudence in pretending to add anything to it. Venice has been painted and described many thousands of times, and of all the cities of the world it is the easiest to visit without going there. Open the first book and you will find a rhapsody about it; step into the first picture dealer’s and you will find three or four high-coloured “views” of it. There is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject.

The voice is not mine; it is Henry James’s, who famously and fortunately disregarded his own advice by writing again and again about la serenissima. As a novelist, I have obviously disregarded his counsel as well, and I am about to disregard it again now. The charming essay from which I have just quoted may be found in the collection of James’s travel pieces known as Italian Hours. Two instances of James’s transgressions as a writer of fiction, of his use of Venice as a setting for all or a part of his story, are The Aspern Papers, which ran in The Atlantic from March to May 1888, and The Wings of the Dove, published in 1902, when James had just passed the age of fifty-nine. I find it extraordinarily moving, and mention it out of reverence, and an ever-increasing sense of wonder, that the next two years saw the publication of two more of his masterpieces, each equal in scope to The Wings, and each as clearly a work of genius: The Ambassadors, in 1903, and The Golden Bowl, in 1904. With those three works finished, his life’s work as a novelist, although not as a man of letters, was over. Twelve years later, on February 28, 1916, James died.

I have been visiting Venice since 1954. In the 1980s, visits to Venice became an unquestioned annual event, one that my wife and I have come to regard as a fixed part of our lives. The rush of pleasure is just as intense when we first see from the water taxi we boarded at the airport the outline of the city glimmering in the morning haze; we still find that the way we live in Venice goes well with our work; our painter son who has lived in Rome for many years, and whose knowledge of Venetian calli and rii and sottoporteghi, and of the contents of the sacristies of out-of-the-way churches, is almost as surprising as my wife’s, has continued to spend harmonious days with us, organized around lunches and dinners, which we eat late to safeguard the working hours during which we are not to be disturbed. I had the great good luck to get to know the work of Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann long before I first went to Venice: Mann’s beginning in 1949, when I read Death in Venice, “Mario the Magician,” and “Disorder and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.