If you happen to be caught in an autumn
storm in Venice, you know all about it. Late September is, however, in many
ways an ideal time to visit the city: the high-summer crowds have dwindled; the
frenzy of the Film Festival is over; there are no longer any queues at the
Biennale. Even locals dislike excitements such as the recent wedding of a human
rights lawyer to a coffee-machine salesman: the
Clooney cortège and its accompanying charivari* aroused the wrath of
gondoliers and everyone else. Venice doesn’t care to be treated as if it were Sunset
Boulevard.
Our arrival in Venice, earlier that same
week, had been rather different. We’d installed ourselves in a quiet apartment
behind the Arsenale, before heading back to Marco Polo airport to meet friends
coming to share our holiday. We had brought them to Piazzale Roma, and were now
sitting on the open seats at the back of a Number 1 vaporetto, heading down the
Grand Canal. It was nearly 7pm, and the sun was setting. We’d been lucky with
the weather all day: the forecast had threatened rain.
By the time we reached Ca’ d’Oro, the last
of the sun had gone, and the sky was getting rapidly darker. When we emerged
from under the Rialto Bridge, it was clear a storm was approaching. First,
though, we were treated to a remarkable son
et lumière: spectacular lightning and thunder
far away over the Alps. Wherever the storm was, it didn’t seem to be overhead.
We thought we’d get away with it: if rain was coming, we told our friends, they’d
be safely in our apartment before it started. We were wrong. We should have
noticed the gondolas and water-taxis scurrying for cover, for as we left Santa
Maria della Salute, the tempest began, the vaporetto bucked, and we were soaked
in an instant.
How we got home, I hardly know. The boat battled
against the wind but eventually made it to Arsenale; we got off and found the
water on the Riva degli Schiavoni already ankle-deep. There was nowhere to
shelter, so we ran against nearly horizontal rain towards the nearest
passageway, stumbled left into the Calle della Pegola, then splashed our way
towards Campo San Martino, staggering with our friends’ sodden suitcases across
the little iron bridge over the canal to reach, at last, our front door. What I
had planned as a gentle early-evening stroll though one of the quaintest,
quietest corners of Venice had turned into a nightmare worthy of the film Don’t
Look Now.
Henry James describes
a storm like this in The Wings of the
Dove, his novel about Milly Theale, a beautiful young American in Venice pursued
by two predatory suitors: the aristocratic Lord Mark and the penniless Merton
Densher. ‘It was,’ says James’s narrator, ‘a Venice all of evil that had broken
out.’ This storm fits the mood of Densher who, to his dismay and after weeks of
being an intimate guest, has been turned away from Milly’s palazzo by a common gondolier.
Failing to discover why Milly won’t
see him, he heads into
… a Venice of
cold lashing rain from a low black sky, of wicked wind raging through narrow
passes, of general arrest and interruption …. He had to walk in spite of
weather, and he took his course, through crooked ways, to the Piazza, where he
should have the shelter of the galleries. Here, in the high arcade, half Venice
was crowded close, while, on the Molo, at the limit of the expanse, the old
columns of St Theodore and of the Lion were the frame of a door wide open to
the storm. (pp.403-4)
Henry James is not my favourite writer, but
when he allows himself to observe and record without wrestling lexis and syntax
into submission, I warm to him at once. Having reached St Mark’s
Square, Densher surveys the chaotic scene; and, in a fine example of free indirect style, James famously writes that
The whole place,
in its huge elegance, the grace of its conception and the beauty of its detail,
was more than ever like a great drawing-room, the drawing-room of Europe,
profaned and bewildered by some reverse of fortune. (p.404)
I enjoy the touch that James adds next: the
café tables have been moved out of the rain and crammed under the arcade, ‘and
here and there a spectacled German, with his coat-collar up, partook publicly
of food and philosophy’. Mocking the manners of Germans abroad is evidently an
old sport.
But the philosophical German is a distraction, and this
whole description of the crowd sheltering from the storm a deft piece of
indirection on James’s part. We, reading, are busy establishing the confused
scene in our mind’s eye, and we are even told that ‘These were impressions for
Densher too’, who needed to walk three times round the ‘whole circuit’ of the
piazza to recover himself – a walk that
in reality would take at least twenty five minutes but which James describes in
seven words. Yet before we have caught up with him, he has already stopped
dead, having spotted a man he recognizes, sitting (as an English gentleman
evidently should) inside, not outside, the
café Florian. Densher is appalled: his
rival, Lord Mark, has returned to Venice. For a moment, the two men face each
each other through the window; and in that instant Densher realizes, ‘as if he had
caught his answer to the riddle of the day’, why he has been turned away by
Milly Theale’s servant.
This is what Mikhail Bakhtin
called a chronotope**: an unexpected conjunction of time and place, a chance
meeting in a crowded place that creates a crisis in the plot, leading the
reader forward towards the resolution of the story. I’m pleased to say that,
after our storm, we woke to clear skies and bright sun. Venice doesn’t
disappoint. Merton Densher was less lucky: for him the storm signalled the
beginning of the end.
*Charivari: a raucous procession accompanying an
ill-matched couple to their wedding.
**Chronotope: “The chronotope is the place where the knots of narrative are tied
and untied. It can be said without qualification that to them belong the
meaning that shapes narrative.” MM Bakhtin, in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, 1981, p.250
All quotations from The Wings of the Dove, Oxford World’s Classics paperback, 1984,
pp.403-405
[illustration:
Santa Maria della Salute, seconds before the storm, 22 September 2014
Here are links to my earlier posts about
Venice:
Text and illustration © Adrian Barlow
'...Henry James is not my favourite writer, but when he allows himself to observe and record without wrestling lexis and syntax into submission, I warm to him at once....'
ReplyDeleteThat's something I might want to steal. I like that bit from The Aspern Papers that Eliot altered and used as part of the epigraph to his unpleasant Venetian poem:
'...The gondola stopped, the old palace was there; it was a house of the class which in Venice carries even in extreme dilapidation the dignified name. "How charming! It's gray and pink!" my companion exclaimed; and that is the most comprehensive description of it. It was not particularly old, only two or three centuries; and it had an air not so much of decay as of quiet discouragement, as if it had rather missed its career....'
I enjoyed reading this, Adrian, as ever, and will be reading it again.