Leslie Hartley - The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

All this sounds very snobbish, but it was really not so; for certainly in the smaller towns everyone knew everyone else and was hail-fellow-well-met with him; there were no Trades Unions; the carpenter was satisfied with being a carpenter, and had no feeling of inferiority or envy when he talked to a white-clad member of the tennis club (perhaps lately elected) swinging his racquet. There was a kind of democracy based on neighbourliness and familiarity. Enter the motor-car, with its money-borne social distinctions and its capacity to move its owner and his family from a dull town to a gayer one, and this democracy of place and local habitations began to wane.

Not so in the great cities and even the smaller towns of Italy. There the bourgeoisie had, and no doubt still have, their social rivalries, their jockeying for place, their intrigues, their equivalents for keeping up with the Joneses (though it must be said that most Latin countries, if not so democratically governed, are socially more democratically-minded, than we are, and this is true of all ranks of society). They have not a common parlance, a lingua franca , indeed they have not, least of all in Venice where only a few of the aristocracy can speak the dialect of the popolo , which is almost a separate language. At the same time a duchess could talk more freely to a window-cleaner (if such exists in Venice), and with less sense of the barriers of class than she could here. The Venetian popolo has very little sense of social or intellectual inferiority; cat can look at a king, and address him too. But they have a very strong sense of pecuniary inequality. ‘ Questa Duchessa ha molti milioni ’ (This Duchess has many millions) and of this discrepancy they take what advantage they can, as their employers, should they be private or public, well know.

But what I wanted to say was that the social system of Italy in its upper reaches such as would have appealed to Proust, differed from ours in being predominantly urban, not rural. The great families, the Colonna, the Orsini, the Caetanis, the Medicis, the Sforzas, the Estes, the Gonzagas, the Contarinis and Mocenigos, had and no doubt still have, great estates in the country, but the centre of their lives, their point d’appui , was urban, in the city to which they belonged and over which they ruled.

In England, noble families arc seldom denizens of the towns or counties from which they take their titles. The Duke of Norfolk doesn’t live in Norfolk; the Duke of Devonshire doesn’t live in Devonshire; the Duke of Bedford doesn’t live in Bedford; the Duke of Northumberland does live in Northumberland, but Northumberland is a large county, and many people would not know that his home town was Alnwick, where his castle is.

At the time of which I write, bridging perhaps half a century between 1890 and 1940, English people, emigrants or semi-emigrants, had established a hold, based on affinity, in many cities of Italy, chiefly Rome, Florence and Venice. Others went further afield; but the lure of Italy, for many English people, especially those with aesthetic tastes, was irresistible.

‘Open my heart, and you will see graved inside of it, Italy,’ wrote Robert Browning; and how many of his compatriots have re-echoed those sentiments. The Italians, great and small, seemed to re-echo them too. There was a genuine feeling of affection, based on more than mutual advantage, between the two nations. I remember my gondolier saying to me when the troublous relationships between our two countries began over Sanctions, ‘There was a time when an Englishman was a king in Venice.’

But that was much later.

Going back to earlier years and adopting (as far as one can!) a Proustian outlook of the upper ranks of ‘Society’, and how they comported themselves, one heard of the Anglo-American colony in Venice, residents with beautiful houses. They were completely different from and slightly aghast at the rash of moneyed visitors who invaded Venice after the First World War, a cosmopolitan crowd who thronged the Lido, behaved anyhow in the Piazza, and at a given date—dictated by fashion—departed one and all to an hotel on Lake Como. These rather noisy immigrants were called by the Italians ‘The Settembrini’, and various odd and irregular modes of behaviour were attributed to them.

As it happened this post-war violation of Venice coincided with, though it did not cause, the exit from the city of the older and stabler foreign colony. Some died; some just went away, and these included several distinguished ladies, titled and untitled, who had made Venice their second home, and had there entertained many eminent literary figures, some from foreign countries including Henry James, and also including (last and least) Baron Corvo, who bit the hand that fed and lent him money.

It cannot be supposed that the Italians, to whom Venice belonged, were socially inactive during this time; but they had no tradition of hospitality except possibly between themselves; they accepted hospitality from guest-hungry forestieri , but they didn’t always return it. They had indeed a queen, a social sovereign, who, besides being a famous beauty, and the favourite, it was said, of a King, enjoyed playing bridge more than entertaining the bridge-players to dinner.

The Anglo-American colony, though now sadly diminished in strength and numbers and money, closed their ranks and were still the only section of the Venetian community who said to their friends—Venetians or foreign—‘Will you come and have tea with me?’

Now Mr. and Mrs. Carteret, in their narrow and narrowing orbit, reigned supreme.

They had come to Venice in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Why they had taken this step of expatriation I do not know.

He was an American from New England, whose original name was Carter; she was a Jewess called Hannah Filkenstein from New York, whose family (they were bankers) was, it was said—and this was confirmed by many people who didn’t like her—the first Jewish family to be received in the best New York society. She was one of the 400; ‘I should not be here,’ she said once, ‘if it wasn’t from having some holes and corners in New York.’

How James Carteret and Hannah Filkenstein ever met was never explained, still less why they married. It was said, of course, that he married her for her money; but he had money of his own. He was a small, rather chétif-looking man with a moustache (his wife once said to me ‘No man can afford to be without a moustache’); he had a nervous manner and a high-pitched laugh. ‘Oh don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,’ he used to say, after any remark made by him or anyone else which had the faintest element of humour in it—as though the effort to laugh was more than he could bear.

He was a petit maître , literally and figuratively. He had exquisite taste and a talent as a painter in the style of Sargent. This he abandoned when he married. If his friends reproached him he would say, ‘I gave up painting when I began to mingle with the rich and great.’

His wife had not his talents, but she was a very cultivated woman who spoke French and Italian (and probably German) rather slowly, as she always spoke, but quite correctly, and who read a great deal, though she would not always admit to this.

Together they occupied the Palazzo Contarini dal Molo; not a typical Venetian palazzo, but with the most beautiful view in Venice, and perhaps in the world; for being on the north side it overlooked the inward curve of the Fondamenta Nuove, on the Laguna Morta; and further to the left on the cemetery of San Michele (too beautiful to be thought of as a cemetery) and then towards Murano and Burrano. Those who had eyes to see could see what Guardi, one of whose favourite subjects it was, had seen.