This essay was written by Cannon Sharp, a BYU Humanities Center student fellow.
I never like to cross a border unaccompanied. There is always some author in the knapsack, a stowaway chaperone, and choosing whom to smuggle is the most critical packing decision I make. Patrick Leigh Fermor’s accounts of his transcontinental walk served as pilgrim’s guides as I made my way across Mitteleuropa, visiting many of his waypoints in former Austria-Hungary. And I could never go out the door without the comfort of my Wodehouse paperback; each damp autumn morning on an early train to central Vienna, I’d read from the first page like a breviary, where Jeeves helped me make some sense of the weather:
“Good evening, Jeeves.”
“Good morning, sir.”
“Is it morning?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you sure? It seems very dark outside.”
“There is a fog, sir. If you will recall, we are now in Autumn — season of mists and mellow
fruitfulness.”
“Season of what?”
“Mists, sir, and mellow fruitfulness.” [1]
Vienna is a magnificent city to be damp in. However, notwithstanding what Keats and Jeeves could do, by midsemester, grown weary of the landlocked, foggy Austrian autumn, I joined a contingent of students on a night-train, which climbed the Semmering pass in the dark, ferried us over the Julian Alps, and rolled down to the Adriatic, alighting at Venice with the sunrise.
Venice is a problem for the bookish traveler. It’s hard to step off the ferrovia without feeling daunted by the weight of all her chroniclers. Out of these I found my most formative literary companion: the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, whose poem-essay Watermark never left my person as I navigated the island’s beguiling alleyways and innumerable churches.
Following his exile from the Soviet Union in 1972, Brodsky wintered in Venice every December for almost two decades. Watermark is a short, strange love letter to Venice, less a practical guidebook than an emotional one (but not less useful). Brodsky won’t tell you which church to visit. Instead, like Sargent’s watercolors of Venice, Brodsky captures the city’s impression. This is the mark of a good companion. A bad one merely tells you where to go; a good one changes how you look, and then, benignly, sends you out the door. I could hardly be found at my pensione for the rest of my stay.
The first night, he sent me out after dark. Brodsky likens the city’s alleys at midnight to “passages between the bookshelves of some immense, forgotten library, and equally quiet.” [2] The sentence spurred me to explore. Venice’s patron saint is Mark the Evangelist, whose emblem is a winged lion, and the Republic had accordingly put it on everything in reach. I decided to go lion-hunting. I scoured the quiet campi and shadowy porticoes for St. Mark’s lions, finding them on cornices and garden gates, some languorous, some amiable, others reproachful, in porphyry and marble. The abundance of these stone creatures is unbelievable, there must be nearly a thousand of them hidden on the island. The Venetian obsession with these cracked creatures gives their island immense charm. Regarding these emblems, Mark Twain wrote, “where the winged lion is, no harm can come.” [3] At two in the morning, lost in Venice, I believed him.
As the night wore on, I read Brodsky’s vision of the island as “a gigantic orchestra, with dimly lit music stands of palazzi, with a restless chorus of waves”. [4] This held up: the canals resembled a score’s staves, the bridges read like repeat signs, and the dark palazzi stood about as if awaiting their conductor’s signal.
The next morning I woke to find that Venice had rearranged itself in the night, as it does, and that my mercurial lions had gone back to stone. As daybreak brought crowds, Brodsky’s advice was practical: get lost. Easy enough. I discarded my map and began to andare per le fodere, a Venetian idiom meaning “to move among the linings,” turning off the main drag and following the water down the bearded fondamenti into quieter sestieri (neighborhoods), over bridges and under sotopòrteghi (portals under houses). A northeastern bora wind began to lighten my steps, and the sun ran ahead of me, “strumming its lengthy rays—like a hot-footed schoolboy running his stick along the iron grate of a garden—along arcades, colonnades, red-brick chimneys, saints, and lions.” [5]
That afternoon I boarded a vaporetto across the lagoon to San Michele, the isle of the dead, Venice’s municipal cemetery. The island is flanked by a stone wall and dark cypress trees. Its residents are overwhelmingly Venetian; foreigners are quartered separately, and there is no map of notable graves. In the Orthodox section lay Igor Stravinsky, but I couldn’t find Brodsky: I wondered if, as a Jew, he couldn’t lie alongside his compatriots, and so, in death as in life, had been put on the far side of a border.
It took me the better part of an hour to work this out, and another to find the Protestant section, where I stumbled on the grave of Ezra Pound, of all people, whose unkempt slab was surprisingly half consumed by greenery and bereft of offerings. Brodsky was only about thirty feet away, and his stone was exquisite, adorned with flowers.
Standing between them, I reflected on my choice of literary companion. I never seriously considered Pound. He lived in Venice for years, and his Cantos are what a serious person might bring. I weighed it for about as long as it takes to lift: at eight hundred pages, the Cantos were too heavy for my knapsack. Moreover, a travel companion is a voice at your elbow, and there are two kinds: one arrives already preaching a theory of the place; the other has simply been there longer, understands that you’re cold and overwhelmed, and points. Pound is the
first kind. While his Venetian cantos are occasionally lovely (“the white forest of marble, bent bough over bough” [6]), Pound mostly attempts to compress the archive of Venetian history into verse, as if enough minutiae could capture the feeling of a place. [7]
Brodsky’s verdict on Pound is gently damning. Pound’s “main error,” he writes, was “questing after beauty,” and “for a man with such a long residence in Italy, it was odd that he hadn’t realized that beauty can’t be targeted, that it is always a by-product of other, often very ordinary pursuits.” [8] Brodsky never seems to quest after anything, and his loveliest passages are serendipitous. Set out to find beauty and you’ll walk past it. I thought of my lion-hunt. I had gone out on a perfectly ridiculous errand, counting stone animals, and along the
way I gained the city.
The distance between the two men was more than aesthetic. Pound spent the war broadcasting for Mussolini—“wartime radio spiels,” Brodsky calls them, adding that by Russian standards, they would have earned him “nine grams of lead.” [9] Brodsky himself was always a thorn in autocracy’s side. In 1964, the Soviet state tried him as a “social parasite” for his poetry, and sent him north. As Charles Simic recounts, Brodsky served about twenty months, returned a folk hero to the young, refused the KGB’s tactful offer of a respectable but state-sanctioned writing career, and in 1972 was banished on a plane to Vienna—the city where I’d boarded my night train. He never went back. Brodsky began to winter in Venice, where he wrote Watermark. Fifteen years after his exile, to the dismay of his persecutors, he received the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in 1996. [10]
I stood at his grave, thinking how this northerner, driven from his homeland, had wintered in a city whose streets point nowhere in particular: “The only direction is sideways.” [11] An exile, unlike a tourist, learns to look at a place as though he might not see it again. With luminous ease, Brodsky conjures the past’s ochre texture in the present, rendering the feel of a place in a few lines: the weather, the stone, the centuries lodged together like tenants who don’t speak. Yet his writing never retreats into the past, but meets the reader out in the cold, a trick the Cantos, for all their erudition, never learned. [12]
I rode the vaporetto around the island on the way back. As we yawed around the southern side, I saw the sunset on the Grand Canal. For Brodsky, Venetian boats are “like scattered old shoes” floating in auburn-reflected clouds. “You sense this light’s fatigue” he writes of the red evening, as it rests on the island. “And the city lingers in it, savoring its touch.” [13] As the vaporetto glided onto the canal, I thought of Brodsky’s symphonic vision of Venice: “It really does look like musical sheets, frayed at the edges, constantly played, coming to you in tidal scores, in bars of canals with innumerable obbligati of bridges, mullioned windows… not to mention the violin necks of gondolas… The music is, of course, greater than the band, and no hand can turn the page.” [14] My stowaway chaperone, having done his job, returned to my knapsack.
References
[1] P. G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 1.
[2] Joseph Brodsky, Watermark (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 104.
[3] Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrims’ Progress (Hartford, CT: American Publishing
Company, 1869), 226.
[4] Brodsky, Watermark, 97.
[5] Ibid., 79.
[6] Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996), Canto XVII, line 107.
[7] Ibid., Cantos XXV & XXVI.
[8] Brodsky, Watermark, 70.
[9] Ibid., 70.
[10] Charles Simic, “Working for the Dictionary,” New York Review of Books, October 19, 2000,
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2000/10/19/working-for-the-dictionary/.
[11] Brodsky, Watermark, 45.
[12] For proof, see his essay “Flight from Byzantium,” published by the New Yorker in 1985.
[13] Brodsky, Watermark, 80–81.
[14] Ibid., 97.
Featured image: photograph of Brodsky taken by taken by Graziano Arici in 1974
