Corvo, the author of the famous Hadrian VII, which dates from 1904 and which only became successful after the war — while waiting to be revived on stage — has left us a letter about his impressions of Venice that is as beautiful as a page from the Confessions: a sleepless night on the Lagoon. Here is Corvo, beneath the stars, accompanied by his two gondoliers, on whose knees he is dreaming: “A twilight world of cloudless sky and smoothest sea, all made of warm, liquid, limpid heliotrope and violet and lavender, with bands of burnished copper set with emeralds, melting, on the other hand, into the fathomless blue of the eyes of the prides of peacocks.” Every bit the:
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy
of Shakespeare’s thirty-third sonnet.
Chateaubriand wrote that “nobody has penetrated the gondoliers’ way of life”; this was something that was reserved for Corvo, as he presents himself to us, taking his revenge on those who barred his way to the priesthood, rejecting honours while at the same time eager for them, and imagining himself seated on a pontifical throne from which he could spit upon the evil World; it is almost as if we can see him, this Corvo, ejected from every inn, his tattered clothes lying in a dirty linen basket at the bottom of his boat, knocking at every door, constantly on the verge of suicide, sitting just above the surface of the water, in the middle of winter, writing, in a huge exercise-book, his Letters to Millard which no one would ever be able to read, a Corvo who was the shame of the British community whose charity he had exhausted, who was deprived by the winter of his wealthy English clientele for whom he procured a few of the little beggar boys who, dumbstruck with admiration, used to follow him around, before he set off, the earliest hippy, to the Lido, where he slept on the beach, powerless against attacks from rats and crabs…
1913–1970 LITTLE VENICE
IN LONDON, I only encountered Venice in the district to the north of Paddington station, which was not yet the sought-after area it is today,18 and which artists had nicknamed “Little Venice”. At the end of the Edgware Road, the endless four-mile avenue that stretches from Marble Arch to Maida Vale, there is a mournful waterway, the Grand Union Canal, which links the River Thames to Birmingham. Once upon a time, it was countryside; the famous Mrs Siddons died there, far from the stage; Hogarth was married at St Mary’s Church, and beneath a tree here the Brownings became engaged. Regent’s Park was extended by Nash who, at the end of the Napoleonic wars, and to the greater glory of George IV, designed this park and those noble neo-classical residences; being a promoter of the new canal, he planted it with trees, embellishing it with some delightful temples painted in ivory, with black doors and windows; along its quays, they have survived the bombs and the demolition men.
I often used to take a breath of fresh air in Blomfield Road, strolling beneath the hundred-year-old plane trees that sheltered the occasional barge. No one else ventured this far out.
Nowadays,19 barges, narrow-boats (including the Jason, which takes children to and from the Zoo) and sailing boats are moored beneath willow trees swarming with seagulls: you can even see a Bucintoro anchored there, with a floating art gallery. Amateur sailors come here in summer, sleeping on board their boats and seeking sustenance in places with names like Ristorante Canaletto or Trattoria Adriatica, where black women supply campers with Chinese take-away dishes; the waters are steeped in silence, the quite breathable air is no longer that of London, and the water-buses that a century and a half ago used to sail up and down the route to Limehouse, on the Thames, no longer pass through the mouldy brick walls of the locks; Little Venice remains one of the last secret corners of London. It helps those who are yearning to escape to the Lagoon to be patient.20
1914
AS A FRENCHMAN living in England, I continued to dream of myself as a Venetian. In London, Paul Cambon21 peered at the orange and black curtains of my window at the embassy, which might have been painted by Bakst; “One of my cubist attaché’s notions,” he sighed. I have come across a letter written from London, to my mother, shortly before the war, on the 11th of July 1914:
“Yesterday evening we had a terrifically impressive Longhi party, given by a Mrs C. On the terrace, on the rooftop, in the middle of town, a lake had been constructed upon which gondolas floated. This lake was festooned with some marvellous Japanese lanterns that looked like huge luminous oranges; a bizarrely shaped hump-backed bridge, orange-coloured too, crossed over it, a real Rialto from Yokohama, brought back by some Marco Polo or other. The dining-room was Venetian rococo, painted by JM. Sert, in the same style as his silver and gold designs for the ballet Joseph, which Diaghilev has just put on at Covent Garden. A large table was arranged in a horse-shoe and laid for a hundred people; in front of each guest a silver plate and a candle had been placed: pheasants and peacocks, adorned with feathers, served as display pieces; the table was covered in gold cloth; in the centre of the horse-shoe was a carpet made from the skin of a polar bear, upon which Egyptian dancers and jugglers performed. The servants were dressed in dark tunics with wide white collars. Everybody wore the bauta over their full-length Longhi coats; masks and three-cornered hats were obligatory. I was dressed in the caftan of a Turk from the Riva degli Schiavoni. Baron de Meyer (the foremost photographer of our time) was dressed as Louis XV, in gold lame, with a silver wig and a bauta in black point de Venise. It was the first time that I had seen a private entertainment done with such bold taste and such sumptuousness in London. As a social gathering, we were on the confines of the real world.”
I had first discovered London in 1902 or 1903; the last of the troops that had been demobilized after the Boer War were gradually returning from South Africa: what a proud conquest of the world it was, by Jingo!
Since my wandering mind has led me to London once more, I shall make a detour, through time and space. London, in any case, was the Venice of the universe at that time. One after another, without interruption, the little omnibuses with their brightly coloured advertisements passed by; you climbed aboard even when it was raining, on double-deckers, your legs covered with horse blankets beneath black wax-cloths. The “cabbies”, who drove the cabs, those “London gondolas”, as Disraeli called them, sported pink carnations in the button-holes of beige overcoats with mother-of-pearl buttons. I was taught that when accompanying a lady, I should proffer my left hand to assist her on to the cabriolet’s high running board, while the right arm should be interposed between her dress and the cab’s large wheel to protect her from the mud; the horse flew off, for the cab weighed no more than the prow of a gondola, and you felt as if your protecting hand would never ever touch the ground again. Leicester Square was then the hub of the music halls, those places of perdition to which those under the age of fifteen were forbidden. Pubs, too, were places where ladies were never seen, being frequented only by cleaning women, costermongers, and, once dusk had fallen, the whores. Around Covent Garden, where the fruit and vegetables were piled high, as far as the Opera House, flower-sellers would offer buttonholes of gardenia to gentlemen in tails, as in Pygmalion. On the damp pavements, minstrels, smeared in soot, played upon an entirely new instrument, the banjo; you might have imagined yourself to be at the Fondaco dei Turchi, by the Rialto.