The City of Falling Angels

  He went over to a cabinet between two windows and started pulling drawers open, one after another. They were filled with broken pieces of marble, Istrian stone, bricks, shards of old glass, and iron ornaments.

  He picked up a small, irregular piece of reddish stone.

  “This stone broke off the step at the top of the stairs outside my door.” He picked up a brick. “This was dislodged from a chimney during a storm, and this piece of iron came from an old window grille. Everything about this house is sacred to me.

  “One day, I swear to you, I will buy Palazzo Barbaro from Ivano Beggio. I will get back every piece of the palace that was sold to him. He’s a very smart businessman. He got a great deal, and he knows it. He will probably demand twice what he paid for it. Fine. I will earn the money, I will find it, I will borrow it from rich friends. And why not? It would not be the first time someone named Daniel Curtis bought the Palazzo Barbaro.”

  {9}

  THE LAST CANTO

  ON HIS FIRST VISIT AS A HOUSEGUEST at Palazzo Barbaro, Henry James was met at the water entrance by white-gloved servants, who led him from his gondola onto the carpeted steps of the landing dock and up the courtyard stairs to the piano nobile. He was enchanted by all of it: the luxury, the polish, the reminders of the distant past “twinkling in the multitudinous candles.” But even as he gazed at the Barbaro’s painted walls and sculpted ceilings, James had in mind a very different sort of palace.

  At the time, June of 1887, he was deep in thought about a dilapidated ruin on a lonely canal in a melancholy, rarely visited part of town. The once-grand interior of this other palace was shabby, dusty, and tarnished. Its walled garden had become an overgrown tangle of weeds and vines. Two impoverished spinster ladies lived in the palace, rarely went out, saw no one.

  James told nobody about this other, derelict palace or its two lonely inhabitants, because they were fictional. They were characters in a short novel he was just then composing—The Aspern Papers, the other of his two masterful novels set in Venice. In the mornings, he would go to the Barbaro’s breakfast room, sit down at the Chinese lacquered desk beneath the “pompous Tiepolo ceiling,” and write a few pages. During his five-week stay at the Barbaro, he put the finishing touches on the manuscript and sent it off to his publisher.

  James had come upon the idea for his story during a sojourn in Florence earlier in the year. A friend had told him of a recent discovery: Lord Byron’s former mistress, Claire Clairmont—the half sister of Mary Shelley and the mother of Byron’s illegitimate daughter, Allegra—was living in obscurity in Florence. She was by then well into her eighties and a virtual shut-in, tended only by her middle-aged niece. A Boston art critic and devotee of Shelley’s named Captain Silsbee suspected that Claire Clairmont might have a collection of letters from Byron and Shelley, and he came to Florence to seek her out. He rented rooms from Miss Clairmont, “hoping,” as James recorded in his notebook, “that the old lady in view of her age and failing condition would die while he was there, so that he might then put his hand upon the documents.” When Claire Clairmont did, in fact, die while Captain Silsbee was a tenant in her palace, he approached her niece and revealed his desire of obtaining the letters. In reply the niece said, “I will give you all the letters if you marry me.” Silsbee fled.

  The story fascinated James. He suspected that it might make the basis for a good novel. “Certainly,” he wrote in his journal, “there is a little subject there: the picture of the two faded, queer, poor, and discredited old English women—living on into a strange generation, in their musty corner of a foreign town with these illustrious letters their most precious possession. Then the plot of the Shelley fanatic—his watchings and waitings . . .”

  In fictionalizing the story, James moved it to Venice in order to, as he put it, “cover my tracks” and at the same time take advantage of the city’s aura of mystery and its sense of a lingering past. He also altered the characters, creating an American Byron (Jeffrey Aspern) and an American Claire Clairmont (Juliana Bordereau). The covetous Captain Silsbee became the nameless narrator of The Aspern Papers, an American publisher, who worships the long-dead Jeffrey Aspern and comes to Venice hoping to gain possession of Aspern’s love letters.

  In James’s version, the narrator goes to see Juliana Bordereau in her run-down palace in an out-of-the-way corner of Venice and asks to rent rooms on the pretext that he has a passion for flowers and must live near a garden; but gardens being a rarity in Venice, he would, if he lived in the house, hire a gardener, restore the weed-choked rear courtyard, and fill the house with flowers. The old lady agrees. He moves in, restores the garden, supplies the women with bunches of fresh flowers, and even takes the younger Miss Bordereau out for a chaste evening in St. Mark’s Square. Upon the old woman’s death, he asks the niece for her aunt’s letters, and she replies nervously that perhaps if he were “a relation,” he might have them. Stunned, he rejects her offer, but the next morning he tells her he has had a change of heart: He is ready to accept. But it is too late; she, too, has had a change of heart: “I’ve done the great thing,” she says. “I’ve destroyed the papers. . . . I burnt them last night, one by one, in the kitchen. . . . It took a long time—there were so many.”

  More novella than novel, The Aspern Papers is a psychological thriller, a fraction the length of The Wings of the Dove, and far more readable. As different as the two stories are, they share at least one important theme: the feigning of love as a means of gaining something of value. In The Wings of the Dove, the prize is money; in The Aspern Papers, it is the letters of a famous poet.

  The Aspern Papers had long been a favorite of mine, and on an earlier visit to Venice I had walked over to Rio Marin to have a look at Palazzo Capello, the faded pink palace that James had used as his model for Juliana Bordereau’s crumbling abode. The building was forlorn and unoccupied. It also appeared to have been looted. From what I could see through a grimy windowpane, the interior had been stripped of mantelpieces and cornices. As I was peering inside, a door in the garden wall opened and a dour-faced woman came out. I asked if I might have a look at the garden.

  “Giardino privato,” she said, closing the door abruptly and walking away down the canal.

  THE ASPERN PAPERS CAME TO MIND about a month after the Fenice fire, when I read in the Gazzettino that Olga Rudge had died at the age of 101. Like the fictional Juliana Bordereau, Olga Rudge had been an American woman who had lived in Venice to an advanced age and had been the mistress of a long-dead American poet, in her case Ezra Pound. Like Claire Clairmont and Byron, she and Pound had also had an illegitimate daughter. But the similarity seemed to end there.

  The remarkable relationship between Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound had lasted fifty years, despite innumerable obstacles: his marriage to another woman, the dislocations of the Second World War, Pound’s indictment for treason, and his thirteen-year imprisonment in an insane asylum after being judged unfit to stand trial. The bond between Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound was not, like Clairmont and Byron’s, just another brief, discarded affair.

  Also, unlike Claire Clairmont and Juliana Bordereau, Olga Rudge had a life of her own. By the time she met Pound, she was already well known as a concert violinist. Later, while conducting research into the music of Antonio Vivaldi, she discovered 309 Vivaldi concertos that had not been performed for centuries, if ever. With Pound’s encouragement and collaboration, she organized and played in Vivaldi festivals and was in large part responsible for the Vivaldi renaissance.

  After Pound’s death in 1972, Olga continued to live in their tiny house not far from the Salute Church. She lived alone (there was no spinster niece), but hardly as a recluse. She loved company and was, by all accounts, charming, bright, talkative, and energetic.

  Curious to have a look at the house where Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge had lived, I went to Rio Fornace, a tranquil canal in the quiet neighborhood of Dorsoduro. There, a few steps off the canal in a shady cul-de-sac, I found 252 Calle Querini, a nar
row, three-story cottage. A marble plaque mounted above the door bore the inscription “With unwavering love for Venice, Ezra Pound, titan of poetry, lived in this house for half a century.”

  A pane of frosted glass made it impossible to look inside, but I heard stirrings in the house next door and saw figures moving about through the window. This, I remembered, was the house Rose Lauritzen’s mother had bought as a summer retreat and later, Rose told me, sold to the Anglican church as a vicarage. I knocked on the door and was greeted by a friendly-faced, white-haired man with the accent of an American southerner. He was the Reverend Mr. James Harkins, the Anglican minister of St. George’s.

  “Not at all!” he said when I introduced myself and apologized for showing up unannounced. “I’d say you’ve come at just the right time! My wife and I were about to sit down to cocktails—weren’t we, Dora? Won’t you join us?”

  A short, dark-haired lady stepped out of a closet-size kitchen and smiled as she removed her apron.

  Reverend Harkins poured Beefeater gin liberally into a measuring cup. “You like your martinis on the dry side, don’t you?” He turned toward me, eyebrows raised in expectation of a yes. “By the way, you can call me Jim.”

  We settled into armchairs in a cozy living room. Politeness required that I not plunge immediately into questions about Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge, so I asked about St. George’s Church.

  “Oh, we’re very low key,” he said, “very small scale.” He took a sip of his martini and paused to savor it. “The Anglican ministry here is a retirement post. There’s no salary. We live free in this house, and we get utilities and medical insurance.”

  “When do you have services?” I asked.

  “Sundays. Matins at ten-thirty, Holy Communion at eleven-thirty.”

  “No evensong?”

  “Mmmm . . . not regularly.” Reverend Jim swirled his drink pensively, no doubt recalling how, at some defining moment long ago, he had faced up to the necessity of choosing between evening prayers and cocktails, and chosen cocktails.

  “How large is your flock?” I asked.

  “We get twenty-five to fifty on Sundays,” he said, “mostly visitors. But if you’re asking about permanent resident members . . .” He thought for a moment. “Oh, I’d have to say we have no more than six, including Dora.” He smiled benignly. “And of those six, most don’t come on a regular basis.”

  “So you have an intimate parish,” I observed.

  “Yes, but it’s a good ministry. We enjoy much more prestige and status here than we deserve. We’re always invited to cultural events and RC events. I usually wear my clerical collar when I leave the house, even when I’m not on official business, to let people know I’m here, fly the colors, show the cloth. That’s my purpose, really. To be here if I’m needed. I like to think of St. George’s as an ecclesiastical convenience store.”

  Nearby church bells started pealing and were answered by another bell farther away.

  Reverend Harkins cocked an ear. “Salute and Gesuati.”

  “Oh, no, Jim,” said Dora, “I don’t think we can hear Gesuati from here. It would have to be the Redentore.”

  “Right, right,” he said.

  “Let me ask you something,” I said. “How well did you know your former next-door neighbors, Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge?”

  Dora perked up at this. “Well, Pound died years before we got here,” she said, “and Olga was living up in the Tyrol with her daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz. But the minister who was here just before us knew Olga very well and told us about her. She was tiny as a bird. Delightful. She had sparkling eyes, and even in her nineties she wore very stylish clothes. She took an interest in everyone. She was curious about everything. But, you know, Venice is a terrible place to grow old in.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Old people have a harder time getting around here than anywhere else, because nobody can pick them up and drive them door-to-door the way they can in other places. You have to walk; you have no choice. And that means you have to climb over two or three bridges every time you go out. Even if you could afford water taxis, you’d have to walk to a place where a taxi could pick you up, and then you’d have to walk from wherever it dropped you to wherever you wanted to go.”

  “We love Venice,” said Jim, “but we’ll have to leave as soon as we have trouble getting over the bridges.”

  “Katherine, the minister’s wife, would check up on Olga at least once a day,” said Dora, “sometimes twice, just to see if she was all right. But, you know, at her age there were times she’d become confused. It got to the point that Olga needed constant care, and that’s when Mary came and took her back to live with her. That’s where Olga was when she died.

  “No one is more vulnerable in Venice than old people living alone,” Dora went on, “especially foreigners without family to look after them. They become dependent on outsiders; they have to put their trust in them. I’m told that’s what happened with Olga, and that’s when all the trouble started.”

  “What trouble?” I asked.

  “I’m not very clear about it,” said Dora, “because it happened just before we got here. It seems that some friends of Olga’s who’d been very kind to her for years gradually became deeply involved in her affairs. Olga had boxes full of letters and other documents—thousands of letters between her and Ezra Pound, and letters from dozens of other famous people. Some of the letters were valuable, some weren’t. But before anyone knew it, the papers were gone.”

  “SO YOU’VE FOUND OUT about the Ezra Pound Foundation,” said Rose Lauritzen, with a look that suggested I had uncovered a well-kept secret.

  “Not really,” I said. “Tell me about it.”

  “I can’t,” said Rose, “because for once, thank God, I don’t know enough about it to blather on like an idiot and get it all wrong!”

  “The Ezra Pound Foundation,” said Peter, “is, or rather was, a tax-exempt entity, the purpose of which was to promote the study of Ezra Pound and his works. Olga had often mentioned wanting to set up something like that to perpetuate interest in Pound. But the odd thing is that when she went ahead and formed this foundation, none of the people you’d have expected to be involved knew anything about it. Mary de Rachewiltz, the daughter of Olga and Pound, was largely in the dark, and she is her father’s literary executor. James Laughlin, the founder of New Directions, Ezra Pound’s publisher since the 1930s, didn’t know anything about it, and neither did Yale, where the bulk of Pound’s papers are housed.”

  “How did it come to light?” I asked.

  “Well, the first we heard of it,” said Peter, “was from Walton Litz, who was my adviser at Princeton and a great Joyce and Pound expert. Litz often came to Venice to visit Olga, and on one occasion he came to see me and asked, ‘Who are these people called Rylands?’

  “I told him, ‘Philip Rylands is the director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. He’s English. Jane Rylands is his wife, and she’s American. Why?’

  “‘Well,’ Litz said, ‘it seems they’ve created an Ezra Pound Foundation! And Olga has given her papers and her house to the foundation. ’

  “Rose and I were shocked, because Litz and Mary de Rachewiltz had often discussed the idea of an Ezra Pound study center along similar lines, with Litz running it.”

  “What’s become of the foundation?” I asked.

  Peter drew a deep breath, as if preparing to deliver a detailed explanation. Instead he said, “Why don’t you ask Jane Rylands?”

  As it happened, I had already met Philip and Jane Rylands. A friend had taken me to the Guggenheim Collection one evening just after closing time to meet them over a glass of wine. There were six of us altogether. We stood in a gallery that had once been Peggy Guggenheim’s dining room on the ground floor of Palazzo Venier, her home for thirty years until her death in 1979. Philip Rylands was in his mid-forties and on the timid side, I thought. He had a pale, square face with a protruding chin. Large glasses magnified his eyes, which,
together with eyebrows that lifted at the outer ends, gave him a look of perpetual alarm. Jane Rylands was short, sturdy rather than petite, and had a firm face and light brown hair. She appeared to be somewhat older than Philip. They were cordial but stiff. Several times Jane murmured comments to Philip, barely moving her lips, ventriloquist style.