Books: The Floating City

VENICE OBSERVED (199 pp.)—Mary Mc-Carthy—Reynal ($15).

More than a century has passed since Byron swam from the Lido to Venice and through the Grand Canal (four miles), and nearly two since Napoleon pronounced the pigeon-swept square of St. Mark’s “the best drawing-room in Europe.” But the destiny of Venice remains constant, to be “the observed of all observers.” The latest to succumb to the spell of the floating city is Critic and Novelist Mary McCarthy (TIME, Nov. 14, 1955), who has fashioned the spectacle of Venice into a handsome and intelligent mosaic of art, history and personal impressions. Complete with 46 elegant color reproductions and more than 100 photographs, Venice Observed is a model travel book in that it heightens the reader’s perceptions and gives him a sense of place without sentimentally usurping the place of sense.

Observer McCarthy early admits that in Venice, appearance is reality: “The tourist Venice is Venice: the gondolas, the sunsets, the changing light, Florian’s, Quadri’s, Torcello, Harry’s Bar, Murano, Burano, the pigeons, the glass beads, the vaporetto. Venice is a folding picture-postcard of itself.” But Tourist McCarthy is no ordinary tourist. Whether she is discussing the merits of Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Bellini, Giorgione, or building up a rare head of social protest steam over the teen-age slaveys whose eyes are being ruined in the lace factory at Burano, her reflections bear the stamp of a rangy mind not to be fobbed off with commonplaces. To get the feel of Venice, she proceeds not by touch, but by touchstones.

Images of Money. Gold is one, the daemon of the Venetian genius, as Mary McCarthy sees it. Not only does it glint from painting, palazzo and cathedral, but from the hard surfaces of the Venetian mind as well. It was typical of the Venetians to sit out the first three Crusades except as close-bargaining transport agents. How explain the paradox, asks Author McCarthy, of “a commercial people who lived solely for gain—how could they create a city of fantasy, lovely as a dream or a fairy tale?” Her answer is as tantalizing as her question: “There is no contradiction, once you stop to think what images of beauty arise from fairy tales. They are images of money. Gold, caskets of gold, caskets of silver . . . the cave of Ali Baba stored with stolen gold and silver, the underground garden in which Aladdin found jewels growing on trees … A wholly materialist city is nothing but a dream incarnate. Venice is the world’s unconscious: a miser’s glittering hoard . . . This is the spirit of the enchantment under which Venice lies, pearly and roseate, like the Sleeping Beauty, changeless throughout the centuries.”

Another touchstone is the mirror, developed by Venetian craftsmen. Observes Mary McCarthy: “The perennial wonder of Venice is to peer at herself in her canals and find that she exists—incredible as it seems. It is the same reassurance that a looking-glass offers us: the guarantee that we are real.” In its decay, Venice is frozen in a kind of narcissistic trance with each Venetian “a connoisseur of Venice,” and somehow slightly saddening in his obsessive concern with sacred artistic relics.

The Lust for Beauty. In its heyday, Venice pioneered the income tax, statistical science, the floating of government stock, state censorship of books, the gambling casino, and the ghetto (though no Renaissance power was less overtly anti-Semitic). Many of these reflect what Author McCarthy regards as the persistent Venetian style and temperament—dry, succinct, tough-minded. In the 18th century, the last of the doges, handing the ducal cap to an attendant, remarked matter-of-factly, “I won’t be needing this any more.” Venice can boast no profound thinkers, no religious martyrs, no native-born legendary lovers. Of the world, worldly, it pursued wealth and reared up pleasure domes to become what Byron called “the revel of the Earth, the masque of Italy.” But the Venetian eye was as “true as a jeweler’s lens,” and it lusted for lasting beauty. Venice had few friends when she ruled the seas but, as Mary McCarthy’s grave and gracious tribute reaffirms, time was one of them.