Gloriously Over-the-top

Jan Morris loved to provoke. Though she wrote elsewhere of nationalities as a ‘cruel pretence’, she was not above outrageous generalization or outrageous distinction – in this case, between the sexes. Of all Venice’s visitors, she observes, ‘the British seem to me to provide the best of the men (often distinguished, frequently spare, sometimes agreeably individualist) and the worst of the women (ill tempered, hair unwashed, clothes ill fitting, snobby or embarrassingly flirtatious)’.

If my mother took offence at this, it did nothing to dim her response to Morris’s Venice, which accompanied us on our Easter family holiday in 2016. ‘Accompanied’, that is, in the sense that a real person might tag along, for Morris felt almost like the fifth member of the family. She was invoked more than Casanova, Vivaldi, Titian; more than any doge or dignitary, indeed any Venetian at all. No doubt Venice was open on my mother’s lap as we approached the city, in a vaporetto that always sounded close to conking out. It was certainly always on the table in our Cannaregio Airbnb, just a few canals away from the northern waterfront, where tourists fear to tread. Cannaregio is a part of Venice where the sound of footfall is an event, where the air hangs motionless, and where everything, in Morris’s words, is ‘damp and padded in sleep’. This was late March or early April, but though the afternoon temperatures rose to the mid-twenties, it was still winter as far as the locals were concerned. The arrival of spring, Morris tells us, is ‘not any old morning, but specifically 15 May, for the Venetians believe in the infallibility of the seasons’. Morris was our guide, but Venice is not really a guidebook. She doesn’t linger in particular churches or palazzos, enumerating Doges or Old Masters. She writes in a spirit of wonder. The miracle of Venice is that it exists at all; that stonework of such extravagance and weight can escape sinking; that it stands on the same tens of millions of wooden stakes or pali that Venice’s founding fathers first drove into the seabed, and which through time, pressure and strange chemical processes have more or less petrified in the silt. But open Venice at the contents page, and you will see that of the three long subdivided chapters, ‘The People’ comes before ‘The City’. For Morris, it is the former who make the latter. She believes there is a definable Venetian character: polite, pragmatic, generally kind but with an unfailingly sharp eye for business, evidenced by the grim jaw-setting of the waiter before he explains to the bewildered tourist in Piazza San Marco that yes, sir, the bill is indeed correct. And she is delighted by the Venetians’ record of scant regard for Church and Pope. Prima veneziani, poi cristiani went the motto, and we learn of Doge Enrico Dandolo’s typically Venetian response when a papal envoy appealed for help in provisioning Crusade ships: ‘On what terms?’ It’s no surprise that the Venetians’ crusading zeal was lukewarm (and in 1204, famously treacherous), for the Islamic world offered a wealth of trading partners. Morris quotes a sixteenth-century Englishman who observed that in Venice it mattered not ‘if a man be a Turk, a Jew, a Gospeller, a Papist or a believer in the Devil’. Five centuries later, the melting pot appears to survive beneath the touristy surface. Bar Puppa, the tiny café that Masud ran below our Airbnb, charged a mere €2.50 per spritz – a price that spoke of a thoroughly local and self-respecting establishment. For years I was daunted by my mother’s adulation of Venice, and rather than try it myself, I preferred to go back to Morris’s Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (2001: see SF no. 58), one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. But last summer, a very Venetian nostalgia began to tug. I wanted to roll across the lagoon on an early morning regionale in winter, when the air and the water seem to merge into one. Morris is the Orient Express of armchair travel, and so I climbed aboard again. What I found was a young writer driving a flag into the sand. Venice was first published in 1960, before James Morris became Jan, and when she had been living as a Venetian for a number of years. If the nineteenth-century writer Alessandro Manzoni ‘washed his clothes in the Arno’ – in other words, adopted literary Florentine as his style of choice – Morris dyed hers in the lagoon. If Venice is decadence, magnificence, over-the-top-ness and sheer unlikeliness, her prose is equally grand:

Much of the colour and richness of the city still comes from the Church – its myriad wonderful buildings; its processions and festivals and treasures; its incense and organ music, billowing through curtained doors into dim-lit squares; its thousands of monks, biting their lower lips in self-deprecation as they make their rounds of mendicancy, or swarming athletically up dizzy wires to attend to the lamps of the Frari . . .

That word ‘billowing’ is dramatic, but it’s the syntax, the piling-up of clauses and information, that typifies Morris’s style in Venice. If I had a criticism of the book, it would be that the heady, sensuous density of the prose, as tightly packed as the Venetian streets, rarely leads into more open water. Trieste, written forty years later, is sparer, slighter, perhaps more quietly confident: a line drawing to Venice’s sumptuous oil painting. But Trieste is elusive, Venice is illusive; Trieste is sober, Venice is soubrettish. Consciously or not, I think Morris wrote the character of a place into her prose, and surely this is what sets great writing apart. A Dorling Kindersley guidebook can tell you what you’ll see in a city, but it can’t make you believe that you’re already there. So we can forgive the excesses of Venice the book while embracing the excesses of Venice the city. In a place that sometimes succumbs to a millpond stillness, Morris always manages to find movement, from the footfall on the fondamente to the swirling undercurrents that churn the seabed. Indeed, she pans out from ‘The People’ and ‘The City’ to her third act, ‘The Lagoon’ – which she treats as a living, capricious organism, both Venice’s mighty mother and, perhaps, her nemesis. ‘It has always been . . . an atrocious place to navigate. Its tides are fierce, its storms blow up suddenly and dangerously, and it is treacherously shallow’. It is ‘uncommonly lonely’, its mud ‘horribly sticky’ and its horizons ‘infinitely distant’. There are reckoned to be some 20,000 bricole or wooden stakes in the lagoon, hammered into the mud to mark out the safe channels, but sometimes a deviation of inches is all it takes to run aground. The lagoon also provides Venice’s longest passage of autobiography, when Morris decides to visit the Cason dei Sette Morti (the House of the Seven Dead Men), a fishing station with a story to match its macabre name. The whole enterprise is ill-starred from the outset: ‘no bricole mark the channels, the charts are notoriously vague, and . . . fishermen from the littoral, I discovered, no longer much frequented that part of the lagoon’. Eventually, Morris finds an old man of the sea, who agrees to a price and who even welcomes a chance to set eyes on the Cason again, for that was where he had hidden from the Germans during the war and to which his wife had rowed out in the dark with weekly victuals. But the voyage is fruitless: ‘That predatory, dissatisfied, restless, rapacious lagoon had been at work again’, and all that’s left is a mound of collapsed masonry. Morris and the fisherman make their solitary way back home, laughing and drinking wine, until they bottom on a sandbank and break the engine’s forward gear. They have to complete the journey in reverse. We all know that if the climate is allowed to unravel and if no extraordinary measures are taken, Venice will go the same way as the House of the Seven Dead Men. But for Morris, provocative to the last, this is the city’s natural destiny. ‘I write sourly,’ she admits, ‘for disliking artificially conserved communities, I have tended to see the salvation as more distressing than the threat.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 82 © Harry Cochrane 2024