Venice For Lovers - Excerpt

Excerpt

The last section of the book is written singlehanded by Louis Begley and is entitled Venice: Reflections of a Novelist and opens thus:

"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.

"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 beginning in 1949, when I read Death in Venice, "Mario and the Magician," and "Disorder and Early Sorrow," and Proust's in the spring of 1951, when during one semester I made my way through all of À la recherche du temps perdu. It was also in the early 1950s, although I cannot pinpoint the year, that I began to read Henry James, at first probably some of the stories and perhaps The Turn of the Screw and Washington Square, and later, but while I was still at college, the longer works. Certainly, I had read The Wings of the Dove by the summer of 1954. I have a life-long unshakeable habit of peering at people, events and places through works of fiction I admire, as though they were so many different pairs of glasses, each of which in its own way adjusts my vision. Accordingly, I have no reason to doubt my memory of having looked at Venice from the start as Venice of James and Proust and Mann."