DEATH IN VENICE
Do you know the great novella by Thomas Mann, Death in Venice? If you haven’t read it, you may well have seen the movie. When I was in Venice, I was haunted by the story as I wandered through the narrow, twisting calles on my last trip more than seven years ago. In fact, I entitled this photograph taken of a cafe on San Marco, Death in Venice.
Take a look at one of my photographs taken in Venice in March 2002 entitled Death in Venice
In that story, a very great writer, Aschenbach, has been propelled by unknown forces arising within himself to leave his home in Munich and travel to Venice. This is the cold and austere German heading south to a completely foreign setting where customs are somewhat different.
Exhausted from his writing and before leaving Munich, he has a “vision” which demands that he set out on his journey. I love the description Mann gives of the vision within the first few pages of the novella. He sees:
...a landscape, a tropical marshland, beneath a reeking sky, steaming, monstrous, rank—a kind of primeval wilderness world of islands, morasses, and alluvial channels. Hairy palm-trunks rose near and far out of lush brakes of fern, out of bottoms of crass vegetation, fat, swollen, thick with incredible bloom. [I quote only a part]
For me, this is a wonderful description of the wild, underworld within ourselves which we ignore in our daily lives. Some of us are not even aware of its existence. And so, the austere, intellectually exhausted Aschenbach is driven on his journey to Venice by this strange vision.
In Venice, Aschenbach experiences something completely new to him. He becomes passionately obsessed with a beautiful young man and, although he never actually approaches him, he cannot take his eyes from him and follows him about. This writer, who normally deals with purity of thought and ideals, is quite unprepared for the onslaught of hot emotion the young man’s presence arouses in him.
Aschenbach is renowned for his intellectual prowess and the young man is the epitome of beauty, grace, comeliness—like a Greek God. While telling himself that he prizes him for his beauty, he cannot admit to the element of sexual attraction—at least that is my reading of it.
And so, Aschenbach engages in all sorts of activities, such as having his hair dyed and his face made up so that he may appear younger and more attractive. On the one hand, we almost laugh at the great man’s foolishness, but at the same time must acknowledge we all have done something equally human when in the grip of such strong emotion. And so, he has been propelled on this journey by the very earthy vision which I have quoted— but he never makes real contact and nothing ever comes of it.
A plague is lurking about the city. Death is at every turn. One morning, after many have already fled the city, the writer dies sitting in his beach chair mesmerized by the god like beauty of the young man who is wading in the water on the beach.
I must admit that I had to read the novella three times before I really began to appreciate and understand it. After the first reading, I knew I had to return to it because there were gems buried in it—at least for a writer. Besides being a great story, Death in Venice is Thomas Mann’s sincere effort at describing the problems which writers [at least of his calibre] encounter.
Writers tend to hold themselves apart from everyone. They are considered observers of and commentators on humanity. In order to describe and comment on the human condition, it seems necessary to hold oneself aloof. And so, there is this tension between participating fully in one’s own life and emotions as a regular person and standing back, isolated as the observer. I think Thomas Mann has much to say about this aspect of the writer’s life in Death in Venice.
But I am so enchanted with Venice that I have written two novels both of which a partially set in Venice.
A Trial of One finds the protagonist, Harry Jenkins—a lawyer, searching frantically for a long lost treasure of money for a client, while being pursued by the malevolent Dr. Robert Hawke who claims the money for his fraudulent research into Alzheimer’s. This novel is the third in The Osgoode Trilogy, the first of which is Conduct in Question and the second, Final Paradox. You can read selected chapters on this website www.theosgoodetrilogy.com or at www.authorsden.com/maryemartin just to get a taste. The novels are easily obtained anywhere online.
I’ve also just finished the fifth draft of a novel provisionally entitled The Drawing Lesson. This is about an artist who has lost both his art and his muse and is searching in Venice. I hope to publish this in 2009.
In the meantime take a look at this trailer from the Dirk Bogarde film of Death in Venice which will give you a flavour of the place and the story.Instead of portraying Aschenbach as a writer, Dirk Bogarde plays him as a conductor and composer of music, which I am sure is far easier to express in film. Enjoy! Death in Venice Visconti film trailer
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