5 - Gore Vidal, "Vidal in Venice" (2006)

Gore Vidal, Vidal in Venice, photographs by Tore Gill, Summit Books (printed in Italy), 2006

 

In my youth, it seemed that every American had an Aunt Fenita. No matter where one’s family lived or was from, Aunt Fenita was always from Ohio. As she grew older, she tended to move east to New York State or Connecticut, where she would settle in a white-frame house in a town with a name like Plandome. By definition, Aunt Fenita was of a certain age, as the French say; and, widow or spinster, she lived contentedly alone. She had enough money to travel, and that is what she did best—and most. Since European travel was still an adventure for Americans before World War II, Aunt Fenita was positively glamorous in her knowledge of steamship lines and railroad schedules, hotels and pensions. She was what was then called a globe-trotter. Had anyone collected her postcards, he would have had a panoramic, even Braudelesque, view of just what it was that our innocents abroad most liked to look at: in Aunt Fenita’s case, the Matternhorn loomed rather larger than the Louvre; but then she never saw an alp that she didn’t like. Of course, we were Alpine folk.

Aunt Fenita was the self-appointed emissary between the family in America and the family in Europe. Before World War II, we were remarkable in that the European branch was far more distinguished than the American. Things had not gone well for the first two generations in God’s country. But in Europe, titles abounded; and though she always got them wrong, Aunt Fenita was an eager, even obsessed, genealogist. Postcards of castles where relatives lived, or allegedly lived, would arrive, such as Schloss Heidegg in Gelfingen. A neatly-drawn arrow, pointing to a noble casement, marks ‘Your grandmother Caroline’s room.” On Aunt Fenita’s death, trunks were found filled with Brownie snapshots of houses, castles, stout ladies, bearded burghers, coats-of-arms, pressed flowers from gardens of relatives in Feldkirch, St. Gallen, Unterwalden, Lucerne, and a list of the doges of Venice—her greatest discovery and the family’s Rosetta Stone—of whom three were called Vidal or Vitale, the magic name triply underlined in Aunt Fenita’s triumphant porphyry-purple ink. There were also postcard views of, variously, the church, the piazza, and the Rio S. Vidal.

I was much impressed; and grateful to Aunt Fenita for connecting me with that slightly comic title of doge (‘Git along little dogie’ was a popular old Western song). Of course one never took Aunt Fenita all that seriously; even so, there was something mesmerizing about her – the gray knowing eyes, framed by steel-rimmed prince-nez; the huge dentures not unlike those of Woodrow Wilson; and, always, the knowledge that she had been to Europe a thousand times, and met Cousin Ludwig, Cousin Emma and all those mysterious von Hartmanns and von Baldeggs and de (why not ‘von’?) Traxlers. The family was mittel mittel-europa in spades, occupying that area which was once the Roman province of Rhaetia, an Alpine district which Tiberius filled with legionnaires as a defense against the German tribes. At Aquileia, I have worshipped at a monument of a defunct Roman army officer named Vitalis; his descendants are everywhere in that part of the world and, literally, lively.

Rhaetia has now been split by three countries: Switzerland, Austria, and Italy. Our family lived – and lives – in all three sections, as if the province was still a living entity. There is even a Rhaetian language, Romansch, now spoken by very few people; rich in triple diphthongs, it is close to the vulgar Latin of two millennia ago.

Inspired no doubt by the restless ghost of Aunt Fenita, I finally went to the back, as it were, of all those postcards. I drove from Zurich to Liechtenstein to nearby Feldkirch in the Austrian Vorarlberg. here, from 1300 to 1848, the Vidals were apothecaries – more like wholesale chemists – and Vidalhaus still stands, a splendid fourteenth-century arcaded building, currently occupied by the provincial tax office. The setting is best described not by me but by that wicked travel writer of genius, Norman Douglas, who was brough up near Feldkirch, and who describes the wild countryside in a book due for revival, Together.

By the nineteenth century, the Vidals were renting out flats in Vidalhaus, and one was home to the late good President Frei of Chile. Were there any Vidals left? The priest at St. Stefan’s Church thought not. Together we went through the registry of births. There was my great-grandfather Eugen Fidel Vidal, born in 1820; but after him, the line ends. I know little about him. He graduated from the University of Lausanne; he married Emma, an heiress from Lucerne (who was promptly and permanently disinherited); he arrived in Wisconsin in 1848. No matter what he put his hand to, he failed. Then, one day, he disappeared. The bitter Lucerne heiress supported their four children by translating French, German and Italian stories into English for newspapers. After a twenty-year absence, Eugen Fidel came home. Emma committed him to the poorhouse, where, each evening, he put on a tattered red velvet smoking jacket; he died a long way from Vidalhaus.

As the priest and I went through the records, I noticed that the family vanished at the end of the sixteenth century; then they surfaced again in the 1790s, when one Johan Felix Vidal reappeared in Feldkirch, reoccupied Vidalhaus and married the daughter of the burgher-meister, who gave birth to the poorhouse-bound Eugen Fidel Vidal. Where, I asked the priest, was the family from 1590 to 1970? Friuli, he said, pointing to the yellowed page. Johan Felix was born in the Friuli, at Forni à Voltri. And where – or what – I asked, in Fenitaesque confusion, is Friuli? A part of Rhaetia that is now part of Italy and, before that, for centuries, a province of Venice. I knew ecstasy! The Vidals had gone south to be doges. Aunt Fenita was vindicated. Git along, little dogie, indeed. Had we not, in Byzantine splendor, thrice wed the sea?

In due course, I visited the mountain town of Forni à Voltri. The church records were missing for births and deaths; but the marriage records were intact. We were still apothecaries; but a large number had become priests. In the high main street, circled by sharp alps, I stopped an old man to ask him the way to the cemetery. When he looked me directly in the eye, I found myself staring into my dead father’s agate-yellow eyes. But then, as it turned out, everyone in the village looked like my family, except for the kindly Virgilian ghost of Aunt Fenita. She was not Romanischer but Ulster, and shared with us the turbulent blood of that most dear of presidents, William McKinley. She was also very good about the fact that our family had been Roman Catholic, something so unfashionable at the turn of the century that Emma, after a losing battle with the Jesuit order over some property in Feldkirch, became an atheist, that is, an Episcopalian.

The town baker is called Michele Vidali. I told him that I was sad to see that a vowel had been added to the name. He said it was inevitable now that Friuli was neither Venetian nor Austrian but Italian. I introduced him to my uncle, a retired air force general. To make conversation, the general, Felix (yet again!) Vidal, said that he had been based in Italy during the war, and that he had led several bombing expeditions over Germany. Michele looked grim. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I remember. Your flight path was just here, to the west.’ He pointed to an attractive alp. ‘You bombed Innsbruck, didn’t you?’ The general said that he had. Michele sighed; then he produced a bottle of grappa, and we drank to Vidals with and without vowels at the end of their names. I daresay had Michele and not Felix gone to West Point, Michele would have bombed Innsbruck.

I came to Venice late. The city has been so over-praised that I saw no reason for visiting what I had already heard too much about. Why fall in love with that glorious light which Canaletto and Bellotti and Guardi have dealt with so much better than the retinas of my myopic eyes could ever do? Also, pre- and post-war Venice was a center of what used to be called café society, and I steered clear of all that. The thought of Oswald Mosley romping in the sand of the Lido was my idea of the true death in Venice. But, in due course, at some point in the 1960s, I came to Venice; checked into the Danieli Hotel; escorted the beautiful Clare Boothe Luce to a ball held in the Palazzo Rezzonico. We arrived by boat, as torches flared in rooms where once the Brownings had played Offenbach while cloudy Venetian mirrors reflected crystal chandeliers, diamonds, and every splendid familiar face that one had spent a lifetime avoiding, including (could it be?) Oswald Mosley’s. one had stepped into the pages of a novel by Frances Parkinson Keyes, Aunt Fenita’s favorite cicerone to Romance. And so it came to pass that at a green damask-covered table, where Browning had worked beneath a huge, gaudy, candy-lie Venetian chandelier, beautiful Clare and I got into one hell of a political row. But that was in another country; and besides, she still is fair.

Every year I come to Venice at least once, in August, because a friend is only free in that month and she loves Venice. I hate the place in August (too many people, and the heat is African), but the air-conditioning at the Gritti is excellent, which it should be as one is paying for what it seems to be the mineral rights to Antarctica; and there are still those churches to see and see again, and the islands of the lagoon to explore. I particularly like Burano, a miniature city on whose church wall there is a plaque commemorating those who died in World War I: three Vidals. There is also a plaque to those who fell in World War II: not one Vidal is listed – lesson learned. As for our three doges, Aunt Fenita, alas, got it all wrong, as usual. The first name of three doges was Vidal. So that little dogie has finally got along; nor were we to be found in the Book of Gold where the noble families are listed. On the other hand, we are well and truly represented in the Venetian telephone directory and Vidal Soap – the Lifebuoy of Italy – seems rather more our speed. Six centuries of pharmaceuticals, concentrated in a cake of soap. (You can smell the pine!)

For some years now I have spent New Year in Venice. That is the magic time. The weather is apt to be good while the light – oh, that light! – is nacreous, for once a proper use of that word. there are few foreigners on view, and Harry’s Bar is more than ever a shrine to the martini while the light… But I’ve just done the light.

There is nothing quite like writing and appearing in a two-hour television documentary on Venice to stumble on a truth: as, talking and talking, I slowly sank into a mud flat near Torcello, I realized that not only did I have nothing to say but there is nothing to say. The place is there – still. Look at it. In a world of glass and plastic, of toxic wastes and poisonous air and lethal rain, Venice is as scarred and damaged as everything else. But, even so, the city in the sea still remains like some natural – that is, currently, inhuman – formation created out of a sense of wholeness that we have entirely lost as the second Christian millennium sputters (you pick your own verb) to its unmourned end.

 

The Face of Venice

It has been said more than once that the Square of St. Mark’s is – now brace yourselves for the first cliché – the drawing room of Europe. And indeed it is, but then Venice itself is perhaps the most beautiful cliché on earth.

Venice is best seen at its emptiest, at dawn, before the tourists arrive on the scene. For the Square of St. Mark’s, a symbol of the city, is all too often the most crowded, although always the most beautiful, of Europe’s many drawing rooms, both indoor and outdoor. The first-time visitor to Venice may take a bee-line for a chair in that marble-colonnaded parlor. But the frequent visitor knows better – and may avoid St. Mark’s altogether. That takes considerable strategy, but it can be done. The trouble with Venice is that all movement is either by foot or by boat, and all foot navigation ultimately leads you to a bridge where you are forced to converge with other walkers. Venice is a labyrinth which is difficult to master. It also seems to have been designed in such a way that, however much you try, you are helplessly funneled into one of the main streets leading to St. Mark’s. it is an astounding fact that no map exists which both shows and names each Venetian street. So the traveler who boasts that he can study the map, leave it at the hotel, and get to where he wants to go is out of luck in Venice. Wherever he may be heading, he is bound to end up in St. Mark’s Square.

The majority of tourists anywhere in Italy are Italians, and even though you may not be aware of this, the Venetians certainly are. Most Italian tourists are day-trippers – families, parishioners led by their priest, entire classrooms of rowdy schoolchildren happy to be anywhere but in school. But there are also hordes of Bavarian peasants, who do arrive at dawn in their hired bus, toting their lunch of sausages, brown bread, and wine in string-bags, and who return to their farms the following dawn. After writing some postcards, and maybe buying a gondola-shaped ashtray, all these day-trippers leave behind them are a few lire and a lot of rubbish.

There has been a ten-year debate in the city council about limiting the number of tourists who may enter Venice during the high season. Even though the closure of the causeway that connects Venice with the mainland is easy enough – it was done during the last days of Carival in 1984-85, when the number of travelers in St. Mark’s Square was estimated to exceed 100’000 people – a ‘democratic’ filtering system for tourists during the rest of the year has yet to be devised.

Venice should also be seen in winter, a winter dawn if you like, for under a heavy snowfall it is the most beautiful sight on earth. But beware. If the snow freezes, the bridges, which are really flights of steps, become hazardous. Winter is the only season in which Venice is both visible and sometimes also invisible, for from November to mid-March there are very few tourists. The rest of the year they ‘swarm like locusts’ as a Venice city councilor put it, St. Mark’s, the Rialto and the Accademia being the three basis that everyone feels they must touch before making the home-run.

Venice is like a once-great beauty who deserves to be seen by candlelight, and the soft light of winter works like a photographer’s air-brush on the city’s many cracks and wrinkles. Venice is particularly beautiful in a winter mist. But only for one day, and not in those frequent dense fogs when even the vaporetti (water-buses) cannot safely navigate the Grand Canal.

In winter, too, there is a real chance of being hindered by the aqua alta (high water), which happens about fifty-five times a year. The approach of these high tidal waters, which cover the city’s lower areas (St. Mark’s being one) with two or three feet of water, is announced in the morning newspapers. If the water is expected to be exceptionally high, sixteen exceptionally loud and alarming sirens warn Venetian merchants to put their merchandise on the highest shelf. But the lagoon’s tidal waters follow the laws of the universe (or of the moon?) and reverse themselves every six hours. Even the acqua alta can be considered part of ‘seeing’ Venice and the Venetians.

The clichés about Venice are imposed upon us because, like most clichés, they are based on true observations which have occurred to some of the greatest and most modest minds alike. ‘Venice is unique’ is the supreme, mother-cliché of them all. And no other three words can even be truer. ‘There is nothing new to be said about her [Venice] certainly… it would be a sad day indeed where there should be something new to say,’ wrote Henry James a hundred years ago. ‘Nothing can be said here (including this statement) that has not been said before,’ wrote Mary McCarthy, many years later in Venice Observed. When you go to Venice for the first time, unlace yourselves for your own clichés.