Venices

AFTERWORD

WHEN PAUL MORAND wrote Venises, at the age of eighty-two, he had finally achieved the recognition which had eluded him for a quarter of a century. His literary beginnings had been auspicious enough; many of his pre-war novels proved to be bestsellers. But after 1945, his reputation was ruined as the full extent of his wartime political activities came to light. Morand’s unfailing support of the collaborationist regime of Pétain and Laval during the darkest hours of the Occupation, rewarded with an ambassadorship to Switzerland, and his subsequent denial of any wrongdoing, had resulted in a long self-imposed exile in Vevey, along the shores of Lac Léman. Morand’s universe had collapsed. His books no longer sold, and he had to endure constant slights. Ironically, he was being persecuted for political beliefs which were never deeply held; rather, he had been opportunistic, short-sighted and foolish. Yet it is during those years of uncomfortable purgatory-like isolation that Morand wrote some of his best novels, and a masterpiece, Hécate et ses Chiens. His friends in France felt it was time to launch a campaign for his rehabilitation. After much discussion among literary and political circles, in 1968, General de Gaulle lifted his veto to Morand’s election to the Académie Francaise. This bittersweet victory, far from taming him, gave the ageing writer a partial sense of vindication.

But perhaps there is another explanation for the lack of esteem in which Morand was held until those late years. For much of his life Morand was preceded by his reputation: as a lightweight, a social figure who dabbled in literature — a certain kind of effortless but shallow travel-literature — the inveterate traveller, always hurried, restless, distracted, never grounded, never satisfied. Family connections, not to mention Marcel Proust’s friendship with the young writer, were thought to have advanced his literary career, when he actually saw himself as a solitary, melancholy, introverted adolescent whose literary ascent was hesitant1. Indeed, in his Journal inutile, Morand recalls his distaste for the sort of social life which would become his trademark.

There is little doubt that Paul Morand lived a privileged childhood; summers were spent in Italy, and he was first taken to Venice at the age of sixteen (in September 1904). His parents rented a small apartment in a palazzo near the Traghetto San Maurizio and would return to it every year. Evenings were spent with Eugene Morand’s artist-friends and poets, Brianchon, Dunoyer de Segonzac and the near-mythical figure of Henri de Régnier among them. Together they formed a small circle of high-minded friends who shunned publicity and ostentation in favour of refined intellectual pleasures. Often they would congregate in the cafés of a deserted Piazza San Marco. Amidst the universal theatre of his adolescence loomed the eccentric, extravagant figure of Gabriele D’Annunzio, the poet of immense erudition and charm. It did not take long for the young Morand to fall under the spell of the city that worships beauty, and, being an avid reader, he delighted in Venice’s historical associations with great literary figures, from Shakespeare, Goethe and Byron to Chateaubriand and Alfred de Musset. He also admired the more decadent figures of Casanova and Georges Sand. In Venice, the aspiring writer discovered the meanderings of a cultural tradition of which the Laguna itself provided a fascinating reflection in its layout. The sense of exhilaration derived from seeing the art of the great masters, from Crivelli to Tiepolo, from the innocence of the early masters to the decadence of the eighteenth century, helped define Morand’s aestheticism. Crucial to him was the understanding that Art is the path towards self-realization. This notion never left him, even in the bleakest moments of his life. In Venice, he also met his first great love, the young painter Lisette Haas. The impression La Serenissima left on the adolescent was such that he would return to it throughout his life, not unlike a man who revisits an old flame. Venice appears to be the thread that binds together the disparate episodes of the novelist’s long life.

At the end of 1910, Morand wrote his first novel, Les Extravagants (the manuscript, thought to have been destroyed in a fire, was found in Los Angeles in 1977 and published by Gallimard in 1986). In this first novel, Venice appears alongside London and Oxford as the city of youthful artistic and aesthetic dreams. But more interestingly, the same novel introduces Morand’s “cosmo politan” ideal, the meeting of culture and diplomacy among Europe’s elite which he felt was rooted in the humanist tradition. The gradual disappearance of this fragile order is at the forefront of Morand’s enquiry in Venises.

But this had not always been so. Let us not forget that Morand belongs to the generation that reached its maturity after 1918; after the abyss of the Great War, a sense of the absurdity of life had set in; this was the generation that longed to take flight from the horrors of the war and eventually lost itself through a frivolous lifestyle; the generation of Montparnasse and Le Boeuf sur le Toit, the age of Jazz. There is something deliberately lightweight and frivolous in Morand’s novels of the Twenties, in their pursuit of speed and lightness. But in 1970 the situation was quite different. Written at the end of his life, Venises reveals much of Morand’s precarious intellectual journey. For an author who was often accused of being superficial — although critics admired the polished, icy quality of his novels — the late work gains much in terms of depth and complexity, although never at the cost of elegance. The author of Tendres Stocks has seen enough of the spectacle of life, and if metaphysical despair seems absent, fatigue has set in. It encompasses the singular — the unity of life — and the plural, the lack of coherence in life, which went hand in hand with a loss of faith in the Catholic Church. Perhaps it is not surprising that back in 1930, Morand found comfort in reading Nietzsche’s Will to Power while sitting in a café on the Piazza San Marco. For Morand, the German philosopher’s work put its faith in man’s capacity to fight the demise of Western civilisation; it called for the spiritual uprising of the old European nations. Morand found in Venice a greater sense of resilience than elsewhere; if people, treaties and wars come and go, la Serenissima had resisted the forces of Barbary. It was also one of Nietzsche’s favourite cities, and the inspiration for a new, fascist Italy. Morand liked to quote him: “Men must be given back the courage of their natural instincts.” In this context, Venice appears not only as the city of pleasure, but also as the city of Manin, Wagner, Nietzsche, D’Annunzio: St Mark against the East, the last fortification preserving the ancient European order. The Europe he knew could still be felt in Venice, though in 1951, at the Marco Polo Ball given by Charles de Besteigui, Morand was assailed by doubts. In the aftermath of a war that shattered much in his life, it became obvious to him that the aristocratic, cosmopolitan Europe that he admired had vanished. And there was no better vantage point than Venice to contemplate the ruins of an Empire.

Self-portrait of Cecil Beaton at the Marco Polo Ball, Venice 1951

The recent publication of Morand’s Journal inutile gives us a sense of the difficult infancy of the manuscript. Although Morand had completed a draft in May 1970, he would revise the text well into the following year. It appears that he was careful not to offend the French war veterans; this concern seems to have been fuelled by the presence of numerous Anciens Combattants among his colleagues at the Académie Française. Morand also hesitated over the book’s tide: “My Venices. This title, so as to avoid Venice and I. An s on Venice? Such a beautiful word should not be interfered with; no s.”2 When Venises with an s finally came out in March 1971, to great acclaim, the first, rather modest printing of three thousand copies sold within days. The author wrote in his diary: “There’s something of everything in Venises; frivolity, memories, meditations, serious themes, portraits, politics (without bias). It’s a form that’s hard to define. I believe its success is a result of this.”3

Perhaps Venises is no more than a personal assemblage of various notations, quotes, descriptions, allusions, omissions. Many of Morand’s remarks are likely to puzzle the mind of the modern reader but to the author this intellectual game is not gratuitous, for it refers to the values of the cultural elite of his youth. As such Venises has no equivalent in modern literature. And what remains firmly in the reader’s mind is a rare sense of melancholy, elegance and poise. Morand liked to quote Chesterton: “Expensive clothes should always be worn casually.”4 What appealed to the readers of Venises—many of whom were too young to have known the upheaval created by two world wars — is a supreme combination of journalistic speed and sense of formula with the depth of a seventeenth-century memorialist. For these readers, Morand’s last book came as a relief to a generation more familiar with the left-wing, engagé literature of post-war France. No revolutionary dreams here — but a sense of beauty and elegance without equal in modern French literature. While in Venice, during the completion of this book, he wrote in his diary: “Yesterday evening, the sun was setting over St Mark’s. I’ve always loved that last ray of light on the domes, on the mosaics in the porch, on the patches of gold on the breasts of the green bronze horses in the quadriga… Venice. The city I have loved above all others.”5

OLIVIER BERGGRUEN

1 Paul Morand, Journal inutile, Gallimard Paris 2001, vol. I, 23rd May 1969, p.204.

2 Journal inutile, 23rd May 1970, p.397.

3 Journal inutile, 30th March 1971, p.499.

4 Journal inutile, 26th April 1971, p.507.

5 Journal inutile, 14th July 1969, pp.234–5