3rd - 5th January 1984

Don't look now in Venice

The difference between Venice when it is crowded and when it is empty is more marked than in any city I know.  For when it is empty, it becomes sinister.  Bare stone lanes and empty canals, bridges leading through archways which lead to alleys leading to empty squares – I’m terrified of getting lost here.  As one walks through the crowded streets and overhears the irritable moaning of tourists who are lost, it’s funny – but if one were left alone at night in an unfamiliar quarter with no map and no-one to ask for directions, it would be frightening.  One would have to walk until finding some familiar sign or landmark and then make one’s way from there, of course.  Sooner or later one always comes across a sign for the Rialto or San Marco or the Ferrovia. But still the idea is frightening, and more frightening still is the business of not just trying to find one’s way through the city but of trying to locate something one has stumbled across once before.  I spent hours yesterday looking for a particular pipe shop which I had seen on my first day here, but had no success.  Every now and again I am reminded of the film Don’t Look Now and that terrifying little figure in red.  What makes it more eerie is that all the women in Venice are wearing red this year, red and black being this autumn’s colours.  One is constantly catching sight of something in red sliding round a corner or disappearing through an archway. 

Sometimes one has to state the obvious in order to see it clearly.  There are no trees in Venice, or so few as makes no difference.  There are no green spaces and no wild animals.  There is a park in Venice, but it is psychologically inaccessible as one is walking through the narrow streets of the city centre.  It is farther out of reach than any municipal park I know.  The animals of Venice are muzzled dogs and stray cats, and pigeons which clatter across the cramped squares just above head height, and fish which loll dead in the restaurant windows on luxurious beds of lettuce and lemon.  This morning I had to go out before breakfast to fetch a litre of milk.  The milk carton showed the lion of St. Mark and pattern of gondola prows, and as I ate my cereal I meditated on the impossibility of ever seeing such a thing as a cow in Venice. 

Venice is narrow, tortuous and labyrinthine, and yet the great open space of the lagoon is enough to give one agoraphobia.  Looking at it even in pictures, I am mildly disturbed by the vastness of the flat expanse of water.  I’ve always been frightened of the sea, but perhaps it is the contrast between the city and the lagoon which makes the impression peculiarly strong when one stands on the Riva degli Schiavoni and looks out across the water.  Such a huge space is impossible, and yet it is there.  The narrow alleys of Venice, where you see a cat or a dog or a nun in black turning the corner and disappearing from sight – they are so quiet that the presence of a solitary figure seems to make them more deserted than ever, and yet only yards away the main streets are so crowded that everyone has to walk on the right just to get by.  When it rains, the streets turn into rivers of umbrellas. 

It is remarkable that without ever having been to Venice, Shakespeare could create its atmosphere so accurately in Othello.  The question to ask about this feat is not how did he do it but rather, can it still be done?  In an age of satellite pictures plagued by the literality and the over-descriptiveness of the photographic image, can one still create the atmosphere of a country one has never visited, with a few strokes of the pen?  Perhaps.  Look at Susan Sontag’s Project for a trip to China.  It is a question of suggestiveness, I think, one of identifying the elements in one’s subject matter which will suggest most to the reader’s imagination without actually giving impressions that are false.  This is extremely difficult, for suggestiveness tends to deceit, but it is possible all the same.  One has to remember that people hear what they want to hear but that some of them listen to it very closely.  Again I am thinking of strokes of the pen, a line here, a couple of dots there.  The preliminary etching always interests me more than the accomplished canvas.

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