Paul Morand - Venices

Your body more banal than a mill.”

Is it Latin?

(Late 1910)

And here is another letter, still in mock-scholarly vein:

The Archives

Caen

This Thursday the 3rd of November 1910

My Dear Friend,

You are truly the pride of French and Ultramontane clergy; Abbé Galiani should bow low, he has a master! You are piquant, reproving and smutty, but never obscene, even when you are describing the Nuncio’s love affairs, “on the other side of the coin”. Is la Morosina susceptible to your signals? Why don’t you look at her through a telescope, as Lord Queensberry did from his Piccadilly window?

I have been reading a lot lately: Amiel’s Journal, Italian Women in the Renaissance by Rodocanachi; the letters of Pliny , The Dream of Polyphilus, in a fine 1599 edition, the Memoirs of the Princesse Palatine, Müntz’s Vinci, etc. I have heard very good reports of The Woollen Dress by Henry Bordeaux, which has even been compared to Bovary .

Wednesday 21 June 1911

Another letter, postmarked Caen, 36th Infantry Division, contains this childlike cry: “ My freedom, for G’s sake! I feel nostalgic for the universe, I’m homesick for every country! ”

1911

THIS YEAR, all I had to do to remind myself of Venice was to take a look at the famous floods that occurred in Paris in the spring; on leave, I went by boat from Saint-Germain-des Prés to the Champ-de-Mars, by way of the rue de l’Université.

MASTER CORVO

AS I WAS on the point of leaving Venice, one of the most eccentric of Englishmen had just arrived, that strange Corvo, whose existence was only disclosed to me forty years later. I was narrowly to miss, alas, the two most inexplicable islanders of those days, T.E. Lawrence and Corvo; in 1917 Georges-Picot, the French High Commissioner in a Holy Land not yet recaptured from the Turks, had invited me to accompany him to the siege of Jerusalem: it would have meant my spending over a year in the company of Colonel Lawrence; I turned down the position.

I remain equally upset not to have known Rolfe, who, during that summer of 1909 when we were both in Venice, was known as “Baron Corvo”; the poet, Shane Leslie, who wrote Corvo’s epitaph, and with whom I was on friendly terms, would have been able to introduce us. Why did he adopt the name “Corvo”? Why that never more ? Out of romanticism? Rolfe always loved heraldry; as a seminarist, he dreamt up coats of arms and devised banners, and he would walk into the refectory with a stuffed crow perched on his shoulder. Corvo was a mixture of Léon Bloy and Genet, of Max Jacob and Maurice Sachs. Poor and lonely in his lifetime, he was unstable and eccentric in character, as well as being litigious, spiteful, devious and vindictive; he had a talent for all the arts; he was constantly angry with his friends; he read horoscopes, and he was intoxicated with the Church’s past and with the Renaissance; he adored Catholic pomp and ceremony, but he had no vocation for the priesthood and he was expelled from every school, as well as from sinecures, salons and asylums; he let people down, deceiving both Cardinal Vaughan and Hugh Benson, those two pillars of English Catholicism, who were initially attracted to him, but very soon grew exasperated.

A.J.A. Symons in his celebrated The Quest for Corvo , a posthumous investigation among all those who had known this character, retraces his life from his time in the seminary up until his time in Venice. Master Corvo must have been unable to find anywhere to perch in this city without trees. In that summer of 1909, Corvo stayed at the Hotel Bellevue, paid for by his friend, Professor Dawkins.

A member of the Bucintoro sailing club, Corvo actually learned to steer a gondola, a highly difficult skill at which I have only seen a woman, Winnaretta de P., excel, for a misdirected blade, as President De Brosses has pointed out, can cut off someone’s head “like a turnip”; or cleave a gondolier’s in two, beneath a bridge. When Corvo fell into the water, he continued to smoke his pipe, just like Byron, who when he floated on his back in the middle of the Grand Canal kept his cigar in his mouth in order (he said) “not to lose sight of the stars”; his man-servant would follow behind, in a gondola, with his master’s clothes on his arm.

Corvo, the author of the famous Hadrian VII , which dates from 1904 and which only became successful after the war — while waiting to be revived on stage — has left us a letter about his impressions of Venice that is as beautiful as a page from the Confessions : a sleepless night on the Lagoon. Here is Corvo, beneath the stars, accompanied by his two gondoliers, on whose knees he is dreaming: “A twilight world of cloudless sky and smoothest sea, all made of warm, liquid, limpid heliotrope and violet and lavender, with bands of burnished copper set with emeralds, melting, on the other hand, into the fathomless blue of the eyes of the prides of peacocks.” Every bit the:

Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy

of Shakespeare’s thirty-third sonnet.

Chateaubriand wrote that “nobody has penetrated the gondoliers’ way of life”; this was something that was reserved for Corvo, as he presents himself to us, taking his revenge on those who barred his way to the priesthood, rejecting honours while at the same time eager for them, and imagining himself seated on a pontifical throne from which he could spit upon the evil World; it is almost as if we can see him, this Corvo, ejected from every inn, his tattered clothes lying in a dirty linen basket at the bottom of his boat, knocking at every door, constantly on the verge of suicide, sitting just above the surface of the water, in the middle of winter, writing, in a huge exercise-book, his Letters to Millard which no one would ever be able to read, a Corvo who was the shame of the British community whose charity he had exhausted, who was deprived by the winter of his wealthy English clientele for whom he procured a few of the little beggar boys who, dumbstruck with admiration, used to follow him around, before he set off, the earliest hippy, to the Lido, where he slept on the beach, powerless against attacks from rats and crabs…

1913–1970 LITTLE VENICE

IN LONDON, I only encountered Venice in the district to the north of Paddington station, which was not yet the sought-after area it is today,18 and which artists had nicknamed “Little Venice”. At the end of the Edgware Road, the endless four-mile avenue that stretches from Marble Arch to Maida Vale, there is a mournful waterway, the Grand Union Canal, which links the River Thames to Birmingham. Once upon a time, it was countryside; the famous Mrs Siddons died there, far from the stage; Hogarth was married at St Mary’s Church, and beneath a tree here the Brownings became engaged. Regent’s Park was extended by Nash who, at the end of the Napoleonic wars, and to the greater glory of George IV, designed this park and those noble neo-classical residences; being a promoter of the new canal, he planted it with trees, embellishing it with some delightful temples painted in ivory, with black doors and windows; along its quays, they have survived the bombs and the demolition men.

I often used to take a breath of fresh air in Blomfield Road, strolling beneath the hundred-year-old plane trees that sheltered the occasional barge. No one else ventured this far out.

Nowadays,19 barges, narrow-boats (including the Jason , which takes children to and from the Zoo) and sailing boats are moored beneath willow trees swarming with seagulls: you can even see a Bucintoro anchored there, with a floating art gallery. Amateur sailors come here in summer, sleeping on board their boats and seeking sustenance in places with names like Ristorante Canaletto or Trattoria Adriatica, where black women supply campers with Chinese take-away dishes; the waters are steeped in silence, the quite breathable air is no longer that of London, and the water-buses that a century and a half ago used to sail up and down the route to Limehouse, on the Thames, no longer pass through the mouldy brick walls of the locks; Little Venice remains one of the last secret corners of London. It helps those who are yearning to escape to the Lagoon to be patient.20