Dipping a Toe in Wax
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John Berendt’s first book, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” (1994), lived on the best-seller lists so long that it could have had its number retired. Its huge success is testimony to the universal appetite for good gossip. The city of Savannah, Ga., ended up taking a resigned or perverse pride in a book that portrayed it as a seething hive of bad behavior, up to and including murder. After all, that is what decaying old cities are for – the combination of fading gentility, florid eccentricity, and Southern Gothic is a petri dish for scandal.
Venice has been a decaying old city for at least 200 years, ever since Napoleon abolished the republic that once, as Wordsworth wrote, “did hold the gorgeous East in fee.” It is the perfect setting for Mr. Berendt’s long-awaited new book, “The City of Falling Angels” (Penguin Press, 414 pages, $25.95). He is well aware that Venice is a well-wrung theme. Henry James remarked that “there is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject,” and that was back in 1882. After Byron’s lascivious Venice, Henry James’s sepulchral Venice, and Thomas Mann’s sickly sweet Venice, is there room for yet another exhumation of the city’s corpse?
Mr. Berendt proves that there is, and he does it by avoiding the usual Venetian subjects – the buildings, paintings, and besotted tourists. “My interest,” he writes, “was not Venice per se but people who live in Venice,” the same kind of larger-than-life characters he found in Savannah. And the resulting book is a fine follow-up to “Midnight in the Garden,” a fast-paced, entertaining narrative that serves up course after course of human folly. He introduces faded aristocrats in their Grand Canal palazzos, expatriate salonnieres, touchy American philanthropists, even a master glassblower, and a rat-poison tycoon. What they get up to is not exactly a surprise – the same old feuds over love, money, and status found in any rich, or for that matter every poor, city in the world – but Mr. Berendt reports on it with unabashed curiosity.
He is not a literary writer, and the reader is spared any attempt to discover the real meaning, the eternal spirit, of Venice. In fact, he is not even as glossy or wised-up a journalist as one now finds in most magazines (for instance, New York, which he once edited). Unusually, in the post-Janet Malcolm era, Mr. Berendt has a simple faith in the journalist’s ability to erase himself from the story. We learn almost nothing about Mr. Berendt himself in “The City of Falling Angels,” only that he spent most of the late 1990s living in Venice, making friends and sniffing out stories. Whether his cachet as the author of “Midnight in the Garden” helped or hurt his access, whether he felt his subjects were trying to manipulate the way they came across, even whether he is married or lives alone – all these questions go resolutely unanswered. Nor does he shy away from rendering quotation dialogue that was surely never spoken in such neat expository paragraphs.
Mr. Berendt’s straight-ahead style is well suited to the stories he has to tell. The seed of “The City of Falling Angels” was planted, he writes, when he happened to arrive in Venice as an off-season tourist in February 1996, just days after the devastating fire that destroyed the Fenice opera house. The seven-year effort to rebuild the theater provides the spine of the book, as the murder trial of Jim Williams did in “Midnight in the Garden,” and it provides ample opportunity for Mr. Berendt to display Venetian passions at work.
The fire inspires Archimede Seguso, a legendary artisan in Murano glass, to create a series of pieces that evoke the Fenice in flames: “swirling ribbons of sinuous diamond shapes in red, green, white and gold … It was a record of the fire in glass – the flames, the sparks, the embers, and the smoke – just as he had seen it from his window.” It touches off a different kind of passion in Felice Casson, a Javert-like prosecutor whose inquiry into the cause of the fire exposes citywide corruption and negligence (and leads to the incidental arrest of Woody Allen) before settling on two young electricians as the culprits. And the rebuilding process introduces a whole new cast of characters, including a high-born architect, a devoted restorer of frescoes, and the industrialist Gianni Agnelli.
But “The City of Falling Angels” ranges far beyond the walls of the Fenice, and Mr. Berendt has a knack for finding a story wherever he goes. He uncovers a bitter feud between old and new money in the genteel charity Save Venice; he looks into the mysterious suicide of a local poet, surrounded by rumors of blackmail and murder; he watches a modern-day version of “The Aspern Papers” played out over the papers of Ezra Pound’s aged mistress.
Naturally, as an American in Venice, he becomes curious about the Palazzo Barbaro, a Gothic mansion where Henry James and Robert Browning were the frequent guests of Daniel Curtis, an American expatriate, in the 19th century. Now, after a century as the most prominent Americans in Venice, the Curtises are selling the palazzo thanks to a dispute among the heirs.
As he investigates the story, Mr. Berendt unearths the book’s, and possibly the city’s, star eccentric: Ralph Curtis, whose answering machine message identifies him as “the Earth liaison of the Democratic Republic of the Planet Mars.” He will not grant Mr. Berendt an interview unless he fills out a bizarre application form: “The signature box called for a toe print of the big toe on my right foot. I figured the chances were about even that I had become the victim of a put-on.” Still, he gamely dips his toe in a can of shoe wax and plays along. Here, as always, the secret to Mr. Berendt’s success is that he is never fazed, no matter how strange things get.
akirsch@nysun.com