Going up the stairs of the palazzo, one of the first things I see each time I leave and enter is a bust with an obsidian Augustus, who looks at me rather accusingly. Or maybe it's just that I'm not the biggest Augustus fan.
En route half way across the city to the Santa Margherita Da' Foscari auditorium, you meet half the nations of the world, by way of hearing fragments, and I imagine that's always been the case here in Venice. The audience for Michael Ondaatje's and Linda Spalding's reading was a mix of locals and visitors as well. Before the conversation between them and the moderator started, each read first two excerpts of their latest novels, which were projected in Italian translation behind them on the wall - a new method, the readings I've attended before that were held in a non-local language usually had an actor or the translator reading the translations in tandom with the author reading the originals. This method is far less time consuming!
Linda Spalding is originally from Kansas, like Dorothy, and moved to Toronto much later, and Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, left when he was 11 and went to England, and ended up in Canada, but they're both listed as "Canadian writers", so one of the earliest questions posed to them by the moderator was that, given nearly none of their books take place in Canada - though some feature Canadian characters - and neither of them were born in Canada, do they see themselves as Canadian writers? Ondaatje replied that he does, because Canada was his catalyst. That he wouldn't have become a writer has he remained in Sri Lanka, nor in England because in England he had the impression, growing up, that writers belong to a mysterious elite. Not until Canada did he see writing as something accessible to him, that he could do.
His voice struck me as being stuck somewhere mid-Atlantic, while Linda Spalding's is distinctly American. They're both good readers, which actually isn't often the case with authors. I had not read anything of Spalding's before, but the excerpt she read, of her novel
The Purchase; intrigued me. (You can hear her read
another excerpt of the same novel here on You Tube, I've since checked.) It's a historical one, which she later during the conversation said she had gotten the idea for when finding out that some of her ancestors were both Quakers and slave owners. Since Quakers were strictly anti slavery, this shocked her, and trying to get into the mindset that allowed for both struck her as a writerly challenge.
Michael Ondatjee read from
The Cat's Table, also historical, an excerpt about three boys on board a ship crossing the Suez Canal while there are mysterious goings-on. When asked about his ideas and concepts for novels, he insisted that to write a novel based on an intellectual construct, a theme or a thoughtline, would be deadly to him. "It would run out of life after two pages," was how he put it. "I don't know the characters, I discover them" when starting to write, he said, and mentioned that when beginning
The English Patient, he didn't know who Hana and the Patient were, he just had the image of a nurse and her patient, none of their backstories, not even when the novel would take place, and that was the start; as a visual person, the first thing that comes to him is said image. Which of course makes editing and redrafting very important once the manuscript has been finished for the first time, but he enjoys that: "The craft of editing is such a pleasure."
Someone who came as a complete surprise to him in
The English Patient was Kip, who became a key character and indeed, as Ondaatje put it, "saved the novel". When complimented about the ending by the moderator - the news about the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Kip's reaction to them (for non-readers of the novel who also haven't seen the film, Kip is an Indian soldier serving in the British army, who's been busy disarming bombs throughout the film) - he said originally the ending was strongly critisized. "Everyone brought up that Kip says - actually, it's Caravaggio who says it, but people remember it as being Kip, which is interesting in itself - 'they would not have dropped the bomb on a white race'. And a lot of reviewers, American reviewers in particular, took issue with that. And then the prime minister of Canada actually said, referring to the nuclear bombs, 'Thank God they didn't drop them on white people'."
As Ondaatje is also a poet, and used to do illustrations for some of his books, he loves interaction of the arts. Collages especially, "mongrel art, as I call them". For Linda Spalding, visual inspiration isn't as key, but one of the things that interested her about a book she was suggested to do by her publisher was that she could write it with her daughter, and she had never worked with someone writing a book before, which was one of the reasons why she eventually said yes. The original suggestion was to go to Borneo "and write a biography of a crazy woman", who followed the footsteps of Dian Fossey, only with Orang Utans, not gorillas. The at first proposed non-fiction character of the book put Spalding off because she felt it limited her, but then she got to write the same story as fiction, which was good since by then she'd been to Borneo and felt very criticial about what her subject was doing, not least because of her contact with the indigineous people there. She also got the idea for yet another novel from the stories she heard, so she ended up being inspired not to one, but two novels.
Neither of them actually edits or is the first reader for each other, which is extremely interesting to me because most writer couples whom I've heard of usually do end up showing each other the writings first. Not these two. They both said they're too close to each other to have good judgment, which I can understand. Ondaatje told an anecdote about a Jewish writers, whose name I can't recall right now, who said a young colleague told him "I've written a novel, and my mother likes it, my father likes it, my sister likes it, what should I do?" whereupon the older writer replied "move out and leave home".
The hour with them virtually flew, if you allow me the cliché, and there was a lot of enthusiastic applause before they moved on to the book signings.
The second reading/discussion I absolutely wanted to attend was Stephen Greenblatt's. I had read
Will in the World, though not
The Swerve yet, which was the book he was reading and discussing from. (However, I dimly recall reading a review in
The New Yorker which took issue with several of its central arguments.) Stephen Greenblatt was interviewed by Gilberto Sacerdoti, and as Friday happened to be a day where there were train strikes, both of them were late. The audience took it philosophically.
As it turned out, Stephen Greenblatt speaks Italian, which meant that Gilberto Sacerdoti asked in Italian and Greenblatt answered in English; the reading itself was in English (with the text projected above him again in Italian) as well. It was a bit like hearing a one sided telephone conversation, though my smidgeons of memories from the mid 90s plus what remains of my Latin plus Greenblatt's replies meant I could follow the Q & A pretty well.
If Michael Ondaatje had a bit of an Old Testament Prophet As Painted By Michelangelo look, Stephen Greenblatt struck me as more of a journalist from Fellini's movies back when he was still filming in black and white type; dark haired, slender, with a perpetually sardonic look often mixing with lighter amusement.
The Swerve deals with the (re)discovery of
De Rerum Naturae by Lucretius, which happened via an Italian named Poggio in 1407, if I jotted this down correctly, who found a transcription of Lucretius from the Carolingian era (i.e. 800 AD plus) probably in Fulda. Poggio the book lover on his way across the Alps was the passage Stephen Greenblatt read, but vivid as his description of the hoping-for-findings Poggio was, it was superceded for my biased self by the summary of one of Poggio's letters he gave in reply to Sacerdoti's first question a moment later. Because in said letter, Poggio, presumably en route to Fulda or back, writes about how these Germans really are a happy go lucky people who know how to relax and have fun, though none too industrious, whereas "we Italians are so hard working and serious". I think I'll have to get this book for that letter alone. Elaborating further on how this discovery that we used to be known as hip fun lovers who knew how to party at the dawn of the Renaissance, Greenblatt said that though the German reputation has, err, changed since then, you can find echoes of German hedonism by our national passion to get our clothes off. (This is how he phrased it.) "I mean, have you ever been in the Englischer Garten in Munich when it's even a little bit sunny?"
(Later, when I paid my respects and said how much I had enjoyed his presentation, especially the letter, he said, well, the first time he noticed the particular way of German hedonism was when he was holidaying with his wife and going into a sauna where the American and Italian guests would wear bathing suits where the Germans would be in the nude. "But how else would you visit a sauna BUT in the nude?" quoth I. "It seams to me wearing anything defeats a sauna's purpose." Which btw is what I do think, though I was being a bit disingeneous. When I was holidaying with my mother as a present for her 60th birthday a few years back and we were in an English-run hotel in Mallorca in spring, we timed our sauna expeditions so that if possible no one else would be there because the hotel had a list of dos and don'ts and among the don'ts was "no nudity in the sauna unless you're alone as it offends the Americans".)
Back to serious business. Greenblatt's central thesis - that it was this rediscovery of Lucretius via Poggio who brought
De Rerum Naturae back into circulation which kicked off the Renaissance, to put it glibly - and that there was indeed a Renaissance, a distinct break from the Middle Ages, though it didn't happen over night, which is as he admitted "an old fashioned view" argued against for the last thirty years or so - was something presented with passion and verve. And contemporary allusions; Lucretius' atheistic world view of a material cosmos with no afterlife for the individual was not one "any American President could hold even today". The reasons why
De Rerum Naturae become such a bestseller post-Poggio, he said, were a) that after Petrarca, Italians were receptive to the eros of poetry, and
De Rerum Naturae was written in breathtakingly beautiful poetry, and b) it was a hit with the teachers because the Latin Lucretius uses is "fantastically difficult" and thus ideally suited to torment students with. So basically: form over barely realised content. By the time Machiavelli made his own handwritten copy of
De Rerum Naturae, about two hundred years later, its ideological impact seems to have been realised as Machiavelli after copying the whole damm poem in his own hand writing never alluded to the fact he'd done it anywhere else in his writings.
Greenblatt had spotted the poet Alicia Stallings in the audience and mentioned her as the author of the current best translator of
De Rerum Naturae into English; he said that to him the contemporary relevance which the poem still has is less the old differentiation between
dovere and
piacere and more that by being a poem and a scientific treatise as the same time, it proves that it is possible to unite science and beauty, which according to him is the big split in our days - the idea that facts and aesthetics are irreconcilable, and Lucretius proves it isn't so.
Going back in time, he also mentioned the discovery of Montaigne's own copy of
De Rerum Naturae only a few decades ago, covered with annotations in Montaigne's own hand writing, and managed to get across a sense of excitement and discovery; it reminded me suddenly of A.S. Byatt's novel
Possession and the moment Roland finds Ash's letter in Ash's copy (with annotations in his handwriting) of a book. Now you can of course argue about whether or not this single book over the course of one and a half centuries really had that much impact on how people (for people, read: people able to read Latin and to have access to books, which of course was a distinct minority pre Gutenberg) thought, but what is unarguable is that Greenblatt, as a writer and as an orator, made the intellectual excitement which a text can cause palpable to his audience in the Santa Margherita da' Foscari auditorium, and that's something marvellous for an author to achieve.
(That, and he reminded the world gli Tedesci once were known as careless hedonists by one hard working serious Italian visitor. Ha!)
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naraht, Britten afficiniado extraordinaire* With a slight nod towards the Visconti movie. Said lecture was given by a husband and wife team, who were the Canadians I had dinner with afterwards. It was a great take in the trickiness of adopting a mostly interior - with nearly no external action - bit of literature in two different media, film and opera - and how the different adaptions solved said problem. For example: Tadzio, the boy whom the central character of Death in Venice loves hopelessly from afar, at no point in the novella actually communicates with Aschenbach (the main character). They never speak. And of course opera can't just let Aschenbach endlessly describe him in song. Britten comes up with a musical equivalent for this by writing Tadzio as a dancer who never sings. So the different ways of expression are kept, but in a musical form - one sings, one dances - and the dancing is also in tune with Aschenbach's repressed sexuality being drawn out by falling for Tadzio. Incidentally, since we've discussed The Charioteer recently, it occurs to me that Mary Renault probably read Death in Venice as well - it was published in 1911, and is absolutely bursting with our hero overintellectualizing his emotions via Greek myths and Platonic imagery until he has to admit Dionysos wons. 
