Death in Venice and Other Tales

  He had been young and raw along with the times and, poorly guided by them, had publicly stumbled. He had blundered, embarrassed himself, violated tact and good judgment in both word and work. Nevertheless, he had also achieved the goal of dignity, toward which, in his way of thinking, all great talent possessed an inborn drive and impulse. Indeed you could say his entire development had been a conscious and hard-nosed climb toward dignity, to the ultimate abandonment of any inhibiting skepticism and irony.

  Easily comprehensible fiction that is filled with lively figures and does not unduly tax the reading mind may delight the middle-of-the-road masses, but youth, with its uncompromising passion, can only be captivated by what is problematic. Aschenbach had certainly been problematic, and as uncompromising as any boy. He had indulged the imagination, strip-mined the intellect, pulverized promising seeds, revealed secrets, incriminated talent and exposed art itself. Indeed, even as his verbal sculptures had entertained, exalted and inspired the devout enthusiasts, the young artist had also held the twenty-year-olds breathlessly enthralled with his cynical pronouncements about the dubious nature of art and the artist himself.

  There seems to be nothing, however, to which unalloyed imagination, conscious of its duty, becomes more quickly inured than to the stinging, bitter lure of the intellect. There can be no doubt that the apprentice’s most dourly conscientious labor proves shallow against the experienced master’s profound resolve to reject intellectual knowledge, to dismiss it, to step over it with head held high, insofar as it serves in the least to lame, discourage or derogate his own will, his capacity for action, his feelings or even his passion. How else could that famous short story “A True Wretch” be understood except as an outburst of contempt for the vulgar pseudopsychology of his age, embodied in that ridiculous weakling, that half-pint scoundrel, who, inspired by moral velleity, weakness and turpitude, attempts to glorify his own pathetic existence by driving his wife into the arms of a fresh-faced boy, telling himself that plumbed depth justifies despicable deeds? The brunt of those words, in which dissipation was disdained, signalled Aschenbach’s own repudiation of moral relativism, of all sympathetic attraction to the abyss. It announced his rejection of that all-forbearing maxim which says that to know is to forgive: what was being prepared, indeed realized, here was that “miraculous rebirth of unfettered innocence,” to which the talk returned, explicitly and not without a portentous emphasis, in one of his interviews shortly thereafter. Strange coincidences! Was it not a creative consequence of this “rebirth,” this new dignity and rigor, that readers then began to notice in him an almost hypertrophic increase in aestheticism, that aristocratic purity, simplicity and formal symmetry which would henceforth give his entire output an unmistakable, surely intended stamp of classical mastery of technique? And yet moral conviction beyond the realm of knowledge, of all-unravelling and all-inhibiting intellect—did this not amount to a simplification in its own right, a moralistic reduction of the world and the human soul? And did it not also entail an encouragement of what was evil, forbidden, ethically indefensible? Does not form have two faces? Is it not simultaneously moral and amoral—moral, insofar as it is the ultimate expression of discipline; amoral, even immoral, insofar as it automatically entails ethical indifference, aspiring to make all that is ethical bow down before its own proud, unchecked scepter?

  Be that as it may. Development is destiny—and how could one unfolding to the applause and mass faith of a broad popular audience not be different from one transpiring without the luster and gratitudes of fame? Only the eternal vagabond yawns and tries to scoff when a great talent outgrows its libertinistic incubation period, expressly affiliates itself with the dignity of the human imagination and claims the court privileges attending a lonely existence full of solitary, unshared suffering in battle, which has brought societal influence and accolades. How much playfulness, spite and sheer pleasure is there anyway in talent in its formative stages? With time, something official, pedagogical, crept into the public Gustav Aschenbach. His style dispensed in later years with boldfaced audacities, subtle and original nuances, to become paradigmatic and solid, polished and familiar, conservative, formal, even formulaic. Moreover, like the Louis XIV of historical record, the older he got, the more he purged his vocabulary of words with vulgar associations. At this point it happened that the ministry of education adopted select passages from his work as mandatory school reading. His own inner sense of himself was confirmed—and he did not demur—when a newly crowned German prince wished to honor the creator of Frederick by bestowing upon him, on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, the title of personal nobility.

  Early on, after a few unsettled years trying out various locations, he selected Munich as his permanent residence and lived there enjoying a position of the highest bourgeois respect, the sort of respect that is occasionally granted to men of intellect in certain exceptional cases. The marriage he concluded while still a young man, to a girl from an academic family, ended after a few short years of happiness with her death. He was left with a daughter, already married. He had no son.

  Gustav von Aschenbach was slightly below average height, clean-shaven and brunet. His head looked a bit too large for the almost delicate figure he cut. His brushed-back hair, thinning on top, quite thick and heavily gray at the temples, framed a high, lined, perhaps even scarred forehead. The bow from a pair of rimless gold glasses dug into the base of his stout Roman nose. He had a wide mouth equally wont to droop and suddenly tense up and purse, a set of cheeks gaunt and furrowed, and a clearly defined chin with a delicate cleft. Great moments of destiny seemed to have passed over this head, which he usually held at somewhat of an angle, as though in pain. It had been art, though, that had taken over the work, otherwise associated with a difficult and stormy life, of wringing these physiological changes. Behind these brows had been born the lightninglike exchanges between Voltaire and the king as they debated war; these eyes, gazing with such weary depth through those glass lenses, had seen the bloody inferno of the lazaretti during the Seven Years’ War. Art—understood as personal experience, too—is life raised to a higher power. It gives a deeper pleasure and exacts a quicker toll. It etches the real traces of the imaginative mind’s adventures onto the face of its servant and produces, though that servant may lead an external existence of monastic calm, nerves that in the long run are overindulged, hypersensitive, exhausted and perennially craving, such as a lifetime of dissipate passions and pleasures can hardly equal.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Several matters, literary and practical, kept the eager traveler in Munich for an additional fortnight after that fateful walk. He finally ordered that his country house be made ready for habitation within four weeks’ time and departed one day between the middle and the end of May, taking the night train to Trieste, where he delayed only twenty-four hours before embarking for Pola the following morning.

  He was looking for something exotic and disconnected, but within quick reach, so he took up residence on an Adriatic island not far from the Istrian coast, highly praised of late, with natives in colorful rags babbling wild sounds and beautiful sets of jagged cliffs wherever there was access to the sea. But the rain, the humidity, a self-contained hotel clientele of provincial Austrians and the lack of that peacefully intimate contact with the sea which only a soft, sandy beach can provide conspired to oppress his mood and never allowed him to feel as though he had found the place he was meant to be. Some impulse within—toward what he didn’t know—made him restless. He began studying ship schedules and inquiring around when, suddenly, the surprising but obvious destination materialized before his eyes. Where did you go when you wanted to arrive, overnight, somewhere incomparable, somewhere fairy tale–like and exotic? It was clear as day. What was he doing here? He’d gotten off track. He’d wanted to go there all along. He wasted no time canceling his ill-made reservations. A week and a half after his arrival on the island a speedy motorboat was carrying him throu
gh the early morning mists back to that wartime harbor. He only stepped foot on land long enough to walk up the gangplank onto the damp deck of a passenger ship waiting under steam to depart for Venice.

  It was an aged vessel flying an Italian flag, decrepit, sooty and grim. No sooner was Aschenbach on board, than an unwashed, smirkingly polite hunchback of a deckhand ushered him into a claustrophobic, artificially lit compartment in the ship’s interior. There a goateed man sat behind a table with a face like that of an old-fashioned circus impresario, his hat slanted down over his brow, the tail end of a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth. He was checking passengers’ identification and writing out tickets with the gesticulating flair of a salesman. “Venice!” he said, parroting Aschenbach’s request and jabbing his pen into the thickening dregs of a sharply tilted inkwell. “First class to Venice! You’re all taken care of, sir.” He scratched out a few giant letters, scattered blue sand from a box upon them, shook the paper out over a clay bowl, folded it in his bony yellow fingers and resumed writing. “A well-chosen destination!” he chattered while doing so. “Ah Venice! A lovely city! A city no cultured person can resist, be it for its history or its present-day charms!” There was something hypnotic and distracting about the slickness and rapidity of his movements and the accompanying empty phrases, almost as though he were worried that the traveler might have second thoughts about Venice. He hastily took Aschenbach’s money and, with the dexterity of a croupier, tossed the change on the stained cloth covering the table. “Enjoy yourself, sir,” he said with a theatrical bow. “It’s a privilege serving you . . . Next!” he called out, immediately raising one arm as if doing the briskest of business, although there was no one else who needed to be served. Aschenbach went back up on deck.

  One arm on the handrail, he stared at the idle quayside crowd dawdling around to watch the ship’s departure and at the other passengers on board. Those traveling second class, men and women, crouched on the foredeck, using crates and packed bundles for seats. His company on the upper deck was a group of young people, evidently clerks from Pola, who had decided on the spur of the moment to take a day trip to Italy. They were attracting considerable attention to themselves and their little excursion, jabbering, laughing, fatuously enjoying their own exaggerated gestures and leaning over the rail to shout glib taunts at busy, briefcase-toting colleagues who walked down along the harbor street and who shook their walking sticks back at the celebrants above. One fellow in particular, all done up in a bright yellow summer suit of extravagant cut, a red tie and a boldly cocked Panama hat, screeched louder than all the others in his merriment. Yet no sooner had Aschenbach gotten a somewhat closer look at him than he realized with horror that this youngster was a fake. He was old—no doubt about it—for wrinkles surrounded his eyes and mouth. The dull flush on his cheeks was mere rouge, the brown hair under his colorfully woven straw hat a wig, his neck a gnarl of sinews, his affectatious mustache and imperial a dye-job, the toothy yellow grin whenever he laughed a cheap set of dentures, and his hands, signet rings on both index fingers, those of a geriatric. Unnerved, Aschenbach watched him moving in the company of these young friends. Didn’t they know he was old? Didn’t they notice the deceit of his wearing the same foppish, festive attire they did, of his pretending to be one of them? As a matter of course, out of habit, so it seemed, they tolerated him among the group, treating him as an equal and responding without disgust when he playfully elbowed them in the ribs. How was this possible? Aschenbach put his hand upon his forehead and shut his eyes, which burned from lack of sleep. He felt as though not everything were getting off to exactly its usual start, as though a dreamlike strangeness were beginning to expand and engulf the world, a bizarre metamorphosis to which a stop might be put if he could briefly shade his eyes, then take another look around. At that moment, however, a sensation of swimming began and he glanced up in unthinking panic, only to discover the ship’s grim hulk moving slowly away from the stone wall of the harbor. Inch by inch, as the engine alternated between forward and reverse, the slick of oily water between the quay and the side of the ship widened, and after some clumsy maneuvering, the steamer turned its prow toward the open sea. Aschenbach walked over to the starboard, where the hunchback had unfolded a deck chair for him and a steward in a stained jacket asked if there was anything he required.

  The sky was gray, the wind damp. The harbor and the islands were quickly left behind, and soon all land was lost to view in the fog. Heavy flecks of coal ash, soaked with mist, fell on the freshly scrubbed deck, which seemed as if it would never dry off. An hour into the trip, it was already necessary to unfold a canopy, for it had started to rain.

  Wrapped in an overcoat, with a book in his lap, the traveler relaxed, not noticing the hours that passed. It had stopped raining, and the canvas awning was folded back up. The horizon was absolute and infinite. Under the gloomy dome of the sky an eerily immense surface of desolate sea stretched in every direction. When space is empty and undivided, we have no measure of time either and begin to lose ourselves in the sheer infinity. Strange shadowy figures, the old fop and the goateed man from the ship’s interior, passed through the resting Aschenbach’s mind, indistinctly gesturing and speaking some scrambled dream language. He fell asleep.

  At noon he was required to assemble below with the others in the ship’s mess, a mere corridor to which one gained access via connecting doors from the sleeping berths. There he ate at the head of a long table, directly across from the clerks, old fop included, who had since ten o’clock been drinking toasts with the gregarious ship’s captain. The meal was wretched, and he finished it quickly. The open air beckoned. He wanted to check the sky: perhaps it was clearing over Venice.

  He hadn’t even considered the possibility of it being otherwise, since the city had always greeted him in full splendor. But today the sky and the sea remained gloomy and leaden, misty rain fell intermittently, and he found himself approaching a different Venice by sea than he had ever encountered on land. He stood by the foremast, gazing expectantly into the distance, trying to spot the coastline. He thought of that melancholy, overexcitable poet, whose vividly dreamt domes and church bells had long ago arisen from these waters, and he silently recited several of the carefully metered verses into which reverence, joy and sadness had so long ago been wrought. Being easily moved by passion already thus sculpted, he checked his grave, exhausted heart to see if some new enthusiasm and excitability, some late emotional adventure, might be in store for an idle traveler like himself.

  There, to his right, the flat coastline began to emerge, fishing boats dotted the sea, and the island resort appeared. The steamer passed it on the left, sailing at reduced speed into the narrow port of the same name. Then it came to a full stop in the Lagoon in front of some picturesque ramshackle structures to await the quarantine authorities’ skiff.

  An hour passed before it appeared. They had arrived and yet not arrived. There was no reason to hurry, yet they felt driven by impatience. The young clerks from Pola had had their usual patriotism excited by the bugle calls carrying across the water from the vicinity of the public gardens and had come up on deck. There, bolstered by asti spumante, they cheered on the bersaglieri exercising on the opposite shore. It was repulsive to observe the effect upon the aged fop of falsely kept company with youth. His old head had not stood the wine as those younger and hardier ones had, and he found himself in a lamentable state of drunkenness. Bleary-eyed, his cigarette trembling between his fingers, he swayed as he stood, struggling to maintain his balance against the back-and-forth pull of intoxication. He dared not take a step for fear of falling down, yet he still behaved with appalling presumption, grabbing at all who passed, babbling, winking, giggling, raising a wrinkled index finger and signet ring with each inane jest, his tongue flicking at the corners of his mouth all the while in a disgustingly suggestive manner. Aschenbach scowled at him and once again felt dazed, as if the world were subtly but relentlessly beginning
to warp toward the bizarre and fragmentary. It was a feeling that external circumstances prevented him from pursuing, for at that very moment the engine resumed its pounding, and the ship, having stopped so short of its ultimate destination, started once more up the San Marco Canal.