The month of May came and went; the Proustian acid combined marvellously well with the Venetian base. La Fugitive contains a hundred divers impressions in which Venice merges or fuses with Combray (the function of the houses in the Grand-Rue compared to that of the palaces, the relationship between the sunlight playing upon the awnings on the canal and those on the family drapery shop, the comparison of the Danieli Hotel and Aunt Léonie’s home, etc.). The Conversation avec Maman in Contre Sainte-Beuve reveals further recollections: “At lunchtime, when my gondola brought me back, I noticed Mamma’s shawl upon the alabaster balustrade”, etc.
These memories from Contre Sainte-Beuve precede those in La Fugitive; what they have in common is that they both mention a tiff between mother and son that has always intrigued me, a curious quarrel which, considering that this disagreement was to have such lasting overtones, one would like to be able to shed some light upon; the odd thing about them is that Contre Sainte-Beuve, which was published first (although it is difficult to establish a firm date, since it is made up of fragments collected together between 1905 and 1909), tells us about “an evening when, spitefully, after a quarrel with Mamma, I told her that I was leaving (Venice)… I had given up my idea of leaving, but I wanted to spin out Mamma’s sadness at believing that I had left”. It is the son, therefore, who in this instance wants to return to Paris (but since his mother has only come to Venice for his sake, one fails to understand why she did not yield to her son’s wish to return)… whereas, later, in La Fugitive, in which the visit to Venice is treated at greater length, the situation is reversed; this time, it is the Narrator who refuses to leave Venice and return to Paris with his mother: “My mother had decided that we should leave… my plea (to remain) aroused in my nerves, stimulated by the Venetian springtime, that old desire to resist… that determination to fight which once used to drive me to impose my own will brutally upon those I loved most.” We know what ensued: having allowed his mother to leave for the station, the Narrator rushes after her and catches up with her just before the train is about to depart; it’s a long way from the Danieli to the Stazione, but the surge of filial affection shortens the journey. The umbilical cord remains uncut once more.
This new account of a conflict between mother and son seems closer to reality than the earlier one. For Proust, Venice is the city of his unconscious (1900 style).
Each of us has his dead-weights; the best known are perhaps the least obscure, those one can get away from. Proust, the very image of the introvert, contrasted with that exemplar of the extrovert, Casanova.
Where was the Venice of Proust if not within his own self? Throughout the whole of À la recherche, Venice continues to be the symbol of freedom, of his freeing himself from his mother, in the first place, and from Albertine later on; “Venice is the image of what passion prevents him from realising”; Albertine conceals Venice from him almost as if love was blocking out all other joys.
In reality, Proust returned to Paris in late May 1900, with his mother. In the autumn, he took his revenge; stubbornly determined, he went back to Venice, alone this time, just as he had wanted to do. He stayed there for ten days in October 1900, not at the Danieli, but at the Hôtel de l’Europe, opposite the Salute. “This mysterious visit,” writes Painter. Psychologically, perhaps, but not in a literary sense, since La Fugitive has given us some celebrated passages, describing the Narrator’s solitary wanderings “through humble campi and little abandoned rii”, in an ardent search for Venetian girls, “alone… in the middle of the enchanted city, like a character in the Arabian Nights’”.
Proust was the masked prince of a Serenissima that was far from serene, of a Venice that was very different to the city of banquets, ceremonies and fanfares that had greeted Adrien Proust, Marcel’s father, in October 1892, when as a professor of hygiene he had represented France at an international health conference that took place in Venice.
For peace of mind, I thought as I left San Lazzaro, better to choose another city to the androgynous Venice, “where you never know where the land ends, or where the water begins”, as Elstir tells Albertine.
THREE VENETIAN CAFÉS
OVER THE YEARS, three Venetian cafés have remained unchanged for me. In the mornings, it’s the one at the foot of the Accademia, under the shelter of the bridge; the glass of orange juice is on a level with the Canal. At about ten o’clock, the sun is facing you; the air is still fresh and its invigorating breeze is blown straight from the sea. Seated at this little café, almost beneath the arch of the bridge, I’m reading See Venice and Die by James Hadley Chase. It’s in the “Série Noire” series, that last refuge of the romantic… “With one hand, Don seized his adversary by the throat; with the other, he delivered a hook to the jaw; Curzio fell into the canal…”
In this secretive republic, where smothered bodies are found weighted down or are drowned discreetly off Sant’Ariano, such brutal uppercuts direct to the body ring a bizarre bell. There is a symmetry there that adds spice to the antithesis.
At night-time my café is at La Fenice. The little piazza contains two churches, the theatre, a large restaurant and the theatre bar. Something of everything has been performed in this square, from Carlo Gozzi to Georges Courteline. A thick curtain of white polygonums conceal the lanterns and filters the smoke from the bar full of hippies, with their vague, drugged expressions, looking like frogmen who have been forgotten beneath the water. The square is lit by projectors which darken the ribbon of sky and cause the sheen of the stone to dazzle and the columns to loom out of the shadow; it’s between God and the Muses as to who has most to boast about; everything here has been created by man, for man; everything is so well balanced, so well accommodated over the invisible water below and all the plans so harmoniously compatible that you feel as happy as you do when you’re drunk.
When the weather is scorching hot, there is another cafe, on the Campo San Zanipolo, where you can take a siesta behind the pages of the Gazzettino without being disturbed. Above you is the Colleone statue, and behind, the Ospedale; to left and to right is the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, the Gothic pantheon of the most famous doges, Mocenigo, Morosini, Loredan, as well as the tomb of Sebastian Venier, who commanded the fleet at Lepanto, thus avenging that poor Bragadin to whom the Senate erected a monument, in this very nave, as consolation for his having been so badly treated by the Turks. In Eastern countries, there is no more unforgivable crime than to pose as a victor when one has been defeated. In the sixteenth century, Famagusta, exhausted by a lengthy siege, surrendered to the Turk. The Venetian admiral, Marcantonio Bragadin, the defender of the city, gave himself up to the pasha who very courteously invited him to dine. Bragadin, with an escort of great magnificence, arrived at the banquet beneath a red silk parasol, the Asiatic symbol of suzerainty. The pasha was so deeply offended that he had Bragadin arrested before he left the table; the admiral’s nose and ears were chopped off; his execution was postponed three times; for ten days running he was hauled before the pasha and made to kiss the ground; after which, he was flayed alive (scorticato vivo); his corpse, stuffed with straw, was paraded through the city on a cow, before being dried and shipped to the arsenal in Constantinople.