A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  In the left foreground there is a daily (or more likely hourly) moment of drama. A child has fallen over (there are lumps of stone lying about everywhere). The mother drops her broom and holds out her arms in dismay. Another woman leans, rather dangerously, from the drying balcony of her house. This is the women’s world, although one of them has crossed over to do some washing to the men’s world of work on the right. There are boulders of white stone, hewn and unhewn, and the masons can be seen in their rickety wooden shelters, which appear to be made out of driftwood.

  The picture, then, is divided into what is made and who does the making, somewhat like Velázquez’s Hilanderas, where the barefoot weavers are in the foreground, with the tapestries and important personages at the back. (There is no way of telling whether either Velázquez or Canaletto had any social comment to make. Tapestries have to be woven and buildings have to be built and repaired, and no one is likely to understand this better than a practising painter.)

  J. G. Links, an organizer of the show and the world’s leading authority on Canaletto, comments in the catalogue that the picture is ‘Canaletto at his finest, the Canaletto that might have perpetuated but for the pressures of the English dukes and their representatives in Venice.’ He is thinking in particular of the Duke of Bedford, who commissioned, through his agent, twenty-two views and two festival scenes.

  However this may be, Canaletto seems not to have resented the pressure of money, and continued for forty years to paint the majestic Venice that we (although not dukes) expect to see and want to have seen. The effect of these paintings, Ruskin said, was that ‘we fancy we are in our beloved Venice again, with one foot, by mistake, in the clear, invisible film of water lapping over the marble steps in the foreground. Every house has its proper relief against the sky, every brick and stone its proper tone of retiring air.’

  Ruskin, of course, wanted much more than this, and denounced Canaletto (although he admitted that his materials were good and his colours lasted) for material-mindedness. ‘Let me count—five-and-fifty, no; six-and-fifty, no; I was right at first—five-and-fifty bricks.’ Here he was mistaken, for Canaletto did not aim at that kind of accuracy. He combined different viewpoints to include everything that he wanted, altered the bend of the Grand Canal, and even moved, if necessary, the column of St Mark. This makes his work more, rather than less, delightful to topographers.

  But in the main, the just-likeness, the unfailing control, even the five-and-sixty (no, five-and-fifty) bricks are some of the great pleasures of looking at these pictures, and so they were meant to be. Canaletto is meticulous, too, about which roof is being retiled, which façade is being patched up and which pavement is being laid, and although it is hard to tell what season it is you can judge the time, not by the unreliable clock towers but by the length and angle of the shadows.

  Venice is often said to have changed less since the eighteenth century than any other city in Europe. The current exhibition, although it hasn’t been arranged with this in mind, will take you on a majestic journey up the Grand Canal. You will, however, have spent a good deal of time over the early stages since Canaletto, naturally, had to concentrate on the most splendid, popular and often-commissioned vedute, or views.

  After an entry from the sea along the Molo, the quay at the foot of the Ducal Palace, with a heartening display of shipping from many nations on the sparkling water, you land at the Riva del Schiavoni and then pause while Canaletto shows view after view of the Piazza San Marco. Trained as a stage painter, he is presenting the Piazza as a vast theatre. It is said to be never quite empty, not even in the cold Venetian winters, not even in the early hours of the morning. Canaletto (whether Tiepolo painted the figures in for him or not) has arranged it with groups of substantial-looking citizens in wigs and tricornes, together with Moors, Turks, and beggar boys approaching likely customers who are obliged, perhaps, to give something in order to avoid losing face in this most public of places. There are women, too, with baskets and in black clothes, who may or may not be selling something, and a number of small curly dogs of a breed that can still be seen in the Piazza.

  In this Venice without vaporetti, without aerials, without pigeons except for an occasional flight across the limpid sky, you are not exactly at home, for you are always watching from the outside and usually slightly from above, but if you have a little time to spend you become a deeply concerned spectator. Then you will notice the sweep attending to the trumpet-shaped Venetian chimneys from the outside, a puppet show raised high above the spectators, friars arriving by boat at the landing stage, knife grinders, street vendors protected by unwieldy umbrellas, men urinating in quiet corners or stretched out in the sun. Above all, these people, if they possibly can, are conversing with one another, for that is what they came out into the streets to do. You can feel the human pace of life necessary to the city that, after all, is still like no other on earth or water.

  It you leave the Piazza with Canaletto’s patrons and embark, at last, up the Grand Canal you pass on your left the little Dogana—still in business as a customs house—and the great plague church, Santa Maria della Salute, the Virgin of Health and Salvation. The architect was commissioned, in 1631, to give it ‘presence,’ as a mark of thankfulness for the city’s deliverance from the plague, without incurring too much expense. His solution was the vast dome, grey as the passing clouds, and apparently out of proportion with the rest of the Venetian churches; it seems almost to have hypnotized Canaletto, who includes a view of it, near or far, in as many of his pictures as possible.

  After the Salute you have to trace your course to the Rialto, the only bridge at that time across the Grand Canal. Here Canaletto pauses again, to take views from different positions on the steps and in different directions—north, northwest, southwest. The next great reach ends where the Cannaregio Canal joins the Grand Canal, leading away towards the mainland.

  There is a great deal that Canaletto could not, and in any case would not have wanted to, tell us about Venice. To many addicts it seems an autumnal, twilight city, melancholy with the weight of its past. There is not much trace of this in Canaletto, or (this is Ruskin again) of ‘what there is of mystery or death.’ Perhaps this is only to say that Canaletto, who died in 1768, before the final ruin of the Republic, was not a romantic. He doesn’t—as Francesco Guardi does—show us the restlessness of the light, the uneasiness when a squall blows up, the slip and slop of the water or the strange weathers when the buildings seem to be disappearing or even taking off into the mist.

  There is a darker side, too, to what D. H. Lawrence called the ‘abhorrent green slippery city.’ When one of the oddest residents of all, Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), found himself at the end of his resources, he rowed a sandalo out to one of the empty islands. ‘I’ll be quite plain about it. If I stay out on the lagoon, the boat will sink, I shall swim perhaps for a few hours, and then I shall be eaten alive by crabs. At low water every mudbank swarms with them.’ The scandalous novel the unhappy Rolfe wrote in Venice was called The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, and the hopeless search is another powerful image of the mazelike city.

  Henry James’s American visitor never gets possession of the Aspern papers. He is left drifting among the small canals and backwaters ‘to the continued stupefaction of my gondolier, who had never seen me so restless and devoid of a purpose and could extract from me no order but “Go anywhere—everywhere—all over the place.”’ In Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Aschenbach, staying on and on in humiliating pursuit of Tadzio, falls in love with his own corruption. ‘The atmosphere of the city, the faintly rotten scent of swamp and sea—in what deep, tender, almost painful draughts he breathed it in!’

  These are seasons of the mind when the gondolas look—as they have done to so many people—like swimming coffins. To Canaletto, it is surely safe to say, they never did. It was his business—in every way his business—to leave us with only the serene aspects of the Serenissima.

  New York Times, 1989
>
  The Holy Land

  If you go to the Holy Land as a pilgrim, you are hoping for (which, of course, is not the same as expecting) an experience not like any other.

  Someone gave me a pocket guide ‘prepared by the Polyglott Editorial Office’ that says that the visitor to Jerusalem does not expect sights of the usual kind; ‘he wants above all to visit the Holy Places.’ More blood is said to have been spilled over Jerusalem than over any other city on Earth. You are going there, however, to walk where Christ walked, and you hope for the gift of tranquillity.

  Probably you ought to do what you can to guard against disappointment. You have to take yourself to one side and remind yourself that you know, or have been warned, that almost all the churches have been rebuilt, that there is scarcely any proof that anything’s what it’s traditionally said to be, that Jerusalem itself has moved northward over the centuries so that the walls are in a different place. The Inn of the Good Samaritan is a police post, where you can be photographed sitting on a camel. The Holy Sepulchre is a nightmare, divided up between every Eastern church that reunited with Rome from the twelfth to the nineteenth century. Possibly you particularly wanted, as I did, to see Emmaus, where, three days after the crucifixion, Christ sat down with two of the disciples ‘and was known to them in the breaking of the bread.’ But you won’t see Emmaus, because nobody has any idea where it was.

  Then there is the question of the lilies of the field. Polunin and Huxley, in their Flowers of the Mediterranean, say there are a thousand different flowering plants within a five-mile radius of Jerusalem. I hesitated to ring up the travel agency to ask them how many would be out at the beginning of April, because I didn’t want to sound like what I was, an elderly English female traveller. In the end, I did ring up. It turned out that everyone else had asked the same thing. And although it had been snowing the day before we arrived, the lilies of the field were out in their myriads.

  The bulbs and seeds lie dormant in the unpromising-looking batha—the dry heath between patches of rock. Now it was their season—the corn gladiolus, dark red corn poppy, field marigold, star of Bethlehem, scilla, dwarf iris, anemones in drifts, and the pale pink Cyclamen persicum, a reminder that cyclamen, like budgerigars, should be seen wild, and in flocks.

  The native flora mustn’t of course be dug up or picked. The New Zealand couple in our party, a retired chemist and his wife, said that this was a good thing in ways you mightn’t expect. A few years back they had taken home some packets of English wildflower seeds from the Chelsea Flower Show and planted them and they had grown out of all proportion—giant feverfew, overwhelming cowslips. Both husband and wife seemed almost to welcome each day’s difficulties, as something to be got round and put right. Their tolerance was a miracle in itself.

  Equally calm, and almost equally skilled with photographic equipment, were two good-looking Australian women near retiring age. They were nuns, belonging to an Australian teaching order which had quite recently given up the habit, so that they had been faced with the situation other women can only dream of: they had been given a reasonable sum of money and told to buy everything new from scratch. Sister Paula’s great-grandfather had been an Irish convict—he had been transported for setting fire to a house—and it amused her to think that this ‘sin’ had turned out to be a great help to her.

  The Franciscans have been caring for the holy sites and their excavations since the fifteenth century. Like other custodians, they have closing times during the day, but if Sister Paula was at the gate there seemed to be none.

  In charge of all of us was a Methodist minister who knew every stone of the way. It’s impossible to calculate how many religious groups are circulating through Palestine in the weeks before Easter, but all of them have to welcome each other in fellowship, yet avoid crowding each other in practice. As he negotiated this, without apparent effort, it struck me that the minister might have been the right man to bargain for hostages. On April 3rd we went into Jerusalem through the Damascus gate. All new buildings in the old city must now by law be faced with the local limestone, so as soon as the sun falls on it, it is Jerusalem the Golden.

  In the morning, the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock.

  In the afternoon, the Shepherds’ Fields, the old night pasture a few miles to the east of Bethlehem.

  The driver was unwilling to go, because not long before there had been some bus stoning. He was persuaded. There were anemones in the fields, and poppies, mustard, cyclamen, yarrow, chamomile, thistles. At the Franciscan chapel, built to the north of the fields in 1954, the brother in charge spoke only Spanish. Responsibility for the Holy Places is supposed to be shared between the nationalities, but it’s difficult to get enough Franciscans from Britain and the United States, and the Spanish and Italians do much more than their share. You can rest here before going down to Bethlehem and the bewildering Church of the Nativity.

  On Wednesday, along the old Roman road via the Wadi Quelt, with the rock-built monastery of St George high up on the other side of the divide, to the mud-coloured ruins of Jericho which lie along the wadi’s banks as it opens into the Jordan valley; then to the high plateau of Masada, where the Jewish rebels, the Sicarii, held out for three years against the Roman armies; then a bathe in the Dead Sea, and back through Bethany to the house of Lazarus, a rock-cut tomb in the cellars. No one pretends to know whose house it is—but it dates, at least, from the first century. Lazarus, perhaps, was buried there twice, since after being raised from the dead he must have died again.

  On Thursday, the Mount of Olives. The most beautiful of the gardens is not Gethsemane, but the garden of the Russian Orthodox church of Mary Magdalene, built by Alexander III in memory of his mother. But it is not always open.

  On Friday, north to Caesarea, lunch, in a stiff breeze, at Herod’s Palace overlooking the lake of Galilee, a coach (with the driver shouting ‘Hallelujah!’ as he rounded the corners) up Mount Tabor, in the evening the Ganei Hamat Hotel at Tiberias, warm, prosperous, palms, mangoes, orange groves, storks, white-tailed fish-eagles. From the hotel’s drying-roof at night you could watch the lights of the fishing boats moving like sparks on the dark blue water of the lake.

  Saturday was left for northern Galilee. We took off our shoes and stood in one of the streams that are the sources of the Jordan, a clear shallow edged with thick rushes. On the way back we crossed the Golan Heights down to the eastern shore of the lake. At the kibbutz at Ein Gev, like everyone else, native or stranger, since the Feeding of the Five Thousand, we were given St Peter’s fish for lunch. Further round the lake, a Byzantine mosaic at the Church of the Loaves and Fishes, which has been moved now to a place near the high altar, shows the basket with five miraculous loaves and two of these fish. They are lake mullet, ornate, deep-finned, fried deep brown, with a reproachful eye and many bones, succulent but strongly flavoured. We took the ferry back, six miles or so across the lake, and bathed in the natural hot springs at Tiberias. (This is expensive, but if you stay for two nights the hotel gives you one free ticket for the baths.)

  Meanwhile Sister Paula went to dine with yet another Franciscan friend of her brother’s, this one from Sydney, at a waterfront restaurant; St Peter’s fish again, she told us. On Palm Sunday we were at Cana, where Christ, at the wedding feast, turned water into wine. Sweet wine was already poured out for us to try in the brilliant sunshine. After Cana there was only one place left for us to visit before Tel Aviv airport, and that was Nazareth.

  I must have left out a quarter of what we saw and did. After a few days, I began to think I had been wrong to ask for the precious experience of tranquillity, or rather an idea of what tranquillity was like. I changed my mind, or rather my mind was changed for me, on the northwest shore of Galilee. Very early on Palm Sunday we went to the chapel of St Peter’s Primacy, which commemorates the place where Christ gave the charge to Peter, ‘Feed my sheep.’ The air was still cold and the sky, from end to end, was the colour of an opal. The minister st
ood in the open air, under an evergreen oak, to celebrate Communion. Outside the lakeside chapel the rock projects a little and the clear water of the lake washes over the stones, grinding them down, so much more slowly than the sea, into pebbles.

  Some may have travelled down from as far as the snows of Mount Hermon. I took one of these pebbles from the edge of the lake and kept it. It is a pale red conglomerate, perfectly flat and smooth and almost a perfect oval. I think it may have some jasper in it, and it shines a little in a good light.

  Independent, 1992

  * * *

  1A review of ‘Canaletto’, an exhibition organized by Katherine Baetjer and J. G. Links, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, 2 November 1989—21 January 1990.

  PART IV

  Life and Letters

  CURRICULUM VITAE

  I consider myself lucky, because when I was four years old I lived in a house with a garden, and in the garden was a double rose hedge—two hedges, that is, planted close to each other, but with enough space between them, even now they’d grown thick, for a person of my size to sit there without difficulty. Into this space the briar roses shed pale pink petals and heavy drops of rainwater or dew, so that it never quite dried out. I collected the petals into small heaps, each heap representing one of the dozen or so other regular inhabitants of the rose-hedge space. I knew their names then, but now can remember only a few. (One of them was Fatty Arbuckle, which gives you the date but not the circumstances. I am sure nobody in the village knew anything then about the misfortunes of Arbuckle. It was simply a name for anyone fat, whether male or female.)