Books: Love in Venice

WHAT A WAY TO Go (310 pp.)—Wright Morris—Atheneum ($5).

Veteran Novelist Wright Morris’ new book is a kind of Cook’s tour of literary themes and cultural scenes that have recently proved captivating to American consumers. It has a collection of bizarre travelers on a sea voyage (Ship of Fools), a love story between professorial January and a relentlessly teen-aged May (Lolita), and sightseeing trips through Venice, Corfu and Athens (Greece, after all, is the In place to visit). Despite all this shifting scenery, What a Way to Go never really gets moving. But thanks to Author Morris’ gift for cleverness and crazy characterization, it does have its moments as a bookish tour de farce.

Wash-and-Wear Ulysses. The Ulysses of this uneven Odyssey is Professor Arnold Soby, a burnt-out romantic case (his young wife had died years before) with little left but his literary allusions. Encrusted with irony, hobbled by a pedagogue’s inability to face life except in terms of art, Soby nevertheless fancies himself a secret worshiper of the wisdom of the body—for him symbolized by the bacchic visions that lured Gustav Aschenbach, the aging hero of Thomas Mann’s famous novella, Death in Venice, to a debasing but idyllic passion for a beautiful young boy.

Properly girt about with wash-and-wear shirts, Soby sets sail for Venice and is set upon by a pair of memorable literary harpies: Miss Mathilde Kollwitz, a mosquito-sized Winnetka music teacher who perennially knits a succession of moose-sized sweaters, and Miss Winifred Throop, a mountainous ex-headmistress who wears a red wig as proudly as she does her overgrown schoolgirl’s faith in True Love.

To achieve his own aging heart’s desire (which soon turns out to be Miss Throop’s 17-year-old niece), Soby endures, besides the company of these two ladies, all manner of other trials. He tears around the Mediterranean to rescue an old tomcat (symbolically named Aschenbach).

He outwaits a series of grotesque fellow-tourist suitors who make fools of them selves by groveling before the peanut-butter-and-raisin-bread-chomping child as if paying homage to a Greek goddess.

Grotesque Coupling. Soby’s main impediment to love, however, is inside himself, in his own acute sense of the silliness and messiness of such a grotesque coupling. At last, in an outrageous love scene in a wildly heaving, water-sloshed state room, Soby cures himself of squeamishness and abandons himself to the delight of degradation and — to him — the inevitable degradation of delight.

Author Morris tells what may be the third-oldest story in the world too slowly, but with an engaging cheerfulness and a worldly man’s willingness to make the most of past masters. His multileveled literary pastiche has the changeable charm of a pousse-caf¶.