Venice circulates in the bloodstream of world culture. It is international-that is to say, nowhere. I have never been to Venice and have no wish to go. People say: you must go to Venice, you'll love it. But they said the same about another vision on water: New York. I did go to New York and found nothing except giant sculpture. Certainly no love there. On the other hand, those other visions on water, Istanbul and St Petersburg, I do love; they are dynamic but human, not buried in the prophylactic of affluence.
Rich cities are cold to the heart. Money enables the self to choose and usually it chooses to remain aloof. Choosiness is anti-life. Tokyo and Hong Kong-I know people who have failed to have any non-commercial experiences in these places. New York, ruled by money and fame, has succumbed to the glaciation of violence. Venice, once velvet and marble, is now tense with clingfilm-the most expensive, most useless city in Italy. Simply to breathe its air is to drain one's credit card.
Venice is city as performance art, city as inauthentic experience. Is the search for authentic experience doomed in the modern world? No. Just beware of virtual reality. These days vegetables no longer come out of the ground; they no longer come from the greengrocer-not even from a little net in Marks & Spencer. These days vegetables are frozen and put in a box with expensive photographs on the outside-of vegetables. This is Venice.
When did Venice stop being real? After John Addington Symonds and Baron Corvo? No, the process began earlier. In 1851 Ruskin, outraged, reported that the arcades of the Doge's Palace were being used as a latrine; but the city had already been ruined for him by the railway. (Travelling writers are always like this. I loved Penang-before the airport.)
Venice's only chance was to become decadent; but mass tourism put a stop to that. The Victorians could enjoy Venice because for them it was a dying city. Then something terrible happened: cryonic engineering. A Guggenheim Jesus came by and said: "Thou shalt not die. Thou shalt live as a cripple forever." Venice has been trying to drown itself for a long time but many people in suits and diamonds refuse to let it die. So it is kept going on a life support system of paralysed myth and hard cash. One cannot let it sink without a fight; it is a symbol of the eco-disaster waiting to engulf the world.
They say that Venice is magical. But a vital ingredient of magic is that it is not dependable: this is why democracy and magic are enemies. Magic demands the shock of the unexpected, the vibration of difference. In Venice magic is guaranteed.
They say that Venice is beautiful. In the imagination it is spectacular; but I know if I went I'd find a toy. It would look smaller, more banal, the way film stars do should you chance upon them in Bond Street.
They say that Venice is for lovers. Once the destination of haunted homosexuals from northern Europe, once famously licentious but civilised in the arts of heterosexual congress, Venice is no longer erotic. Desexed city of fancy only. In Venice you will never meet anyone. Occasionally people see themselves reflected in other people's eyes. Occasionally they imagine they've had sex in Venice or even been smitten by someone walking down the street-but it is only imaginary. Too much imagination. Too little giving. No one gives in Venice.
The crucial factor in all adventures is "the gift"-something coming to you unannounced, free of charge, impossible to refuse. This could no more happen in Venice than it could in St Tropez. Should you by any chance imagine that you've met someone in Venice, then take them out of town, anywhere, immediately. Because only then will you be able to see them. If you remain in Venice you will never see them. Venice is so jealous of lovers.
Venice stares at you like an idiot. Maybe once it had the good taste to be embarrassed at being an object of pity. Now it just takes everything it can get. It lacks the profundity of death because only the living can die. Death in Venice is not Venice but Thomas Mann and Mahler.
In vain we search the 20th century for an important artist or writer born in Venice. More Italian poets have been born in Egypt (Marinetti, Ungaretti). Nor has Venice served foreign poets particularly well; there is a dutiful but uninspired poem by Rilke called "Late autumn in Venice." He should have tried "Late autumn in Oslo." Oslo, I'm sure, is not the most happening town that ever drew breath, but "Late autumn in Oslo" sounds a more interesting poem.
Venice is an elision of "very nice," a place for Sunday painters and retirement holidays. Venice is retired itself, but once a year it tries to pass itself off as young. It holds a carnival-a pom-pom affair for people who work on glossy magazines and in boutiques. They flap about in dominoes and cr?pe de Chine. As for dancing, Venice's nightclubs are the worst in Italy. I have this on good authority, having lived in Sicily for some time and Sicilians know about these things. Byron had fun there-he was its last gasp of splendour.
I love the buildings of Palladio, Venice's great architect. If I went it would be for him. But for me Palladio is not so much Venice as Vicenza with its villas-and Palladio is England, too. I see Palladio not over water but peeping from a park among trees and deer: gold stone and green, not Venice's grey stone and sludge.
They say go out of season; but so many people do that the season now smears across 12 months. Soon they will be issuing a ticket of admission. Venice is ornate bulbousness arising from its own reflection. Narcissus is trampled underfoot.
I have been cruel to Venice-like a thwarted lover. My inability to have Venice, the fact that I must share it, means that I hate it, I reject it. I don't want something that's been so... passed around. This is an appalling snobbery; not to discharge where all the rest have discharged. Yet it is less snobbery than an attempt to avoid catching Aids. Perhaps I should just grit my teeth, remember the clingfilm and go.
What Venice might once have been in terms of romance and drama, thrilling chemical hinge between east and west, has passed to St Petersburg, our century's most dramatic city. Adventure is inescapable. It has everything that Venice lacks-and everything that Venice has. St Petersburg was home to the most luxurious court in the history of mankind, yet its style of opulence is less clogged. It even has more bridges than Venice, but no tourists to speak of.
The nearest I have come to a real experience of Venice is reading Joseph Brodsky's Watermark. He fell in love with Venice because for him it was the sterilised, inauthentic, therefore bearable version of his home town: St Petersburg. One can understand Brodsky's swooning disenchantment with his own country and city. Everyone with a mind has an ambiguous relationship with his home country and city; and given the ghastly horror and magnificence of their history, perhaps Russians most of all. The expatriate option (or exile, its involuntary counterpart) can solve many problems. For me, having been captured by St Petersburg, Venice becomes irrelevant. For Brodsky, having been rejected by St Petersburg, Venice becomes the paramour on the rebound-because Venice never refuses an advance, it is open to all. Yet his Watermark is a thin book, a polished letter to a courtesan; even for Brodsky, Venice is not a place where anything can happen.
I was curious to know if others had similar doubts and asked a number of people, regardless of whether or not they'd been: "What do you think of Venice?"
Pat (not been): "I tried to persuade my husband to go, but he said he didn't want all that fuss. He's a farmer. He's not into fuss."
Elisa (been): "I hated it. Claustrophobic."
My father (been): "A lot of oppressive religious architecture."
William Boyd (been): "Everybody should go at least once in their life-your life will be enhanced."
Gilbert & George: "We don't have any views on Venice. Only over- educated people have views on Venice." (I forgot-they've been.)
Justin Wintle (been): "Fabulous. The last city worth living in. When I was there, there was a convention of Danish poets. When I'm not there, it's saccharine; when I get there, I fall in love with it again."
Katya Galitzine (not been): "I'm saving it for my honeymoon."
Simon Burt (been): "Wonderfully beautiful, absolutely filthy. The glorious Peggy Guggenheim said that she would leave her art treasures to Venice so long as they stayed there even if the place sank. It is the most expensive city I've ever been to: two drinks and a snack at Harry's Bar, ?100. Its atmosphere depends on your mood. It can be radiantly sunny and can be immensely oppressive. Wherever you look there's something gorgeous to see. After a while you are stuffed to bursting and long for a New England farmhouse in a field of snow. It looks marvellous but its history is piratical-even St Mark was stolen."
Natale Maganuco (been): "I felt that it had been wonderful but is now something else, something unreal. Emotionally it is lost. Beautiful scenery with the wrong actors-Germans, Japanese and so on. Even the Venetians are unreal."
Dame Barbara Cartland (been dozens of times): "Adore it, written heaps about it, got loads of friends there. There's a duke who gave me a party in his palace all lit up with candles as it would have been in the 18th century. Venice doesn't change. I've just come back from New York which is terrible now, so big, changing all the time."
The jostle of voices above is appropriate to a contemplation of Venice because the place now belongs to everyone except the Venetians. Yet Venice is not cosmopolitan-people the world over come merely to view the amazingly decked-out corpse of a unique urbanism. The true horror of Venice is that its fate could well be the fate of all beautiful places: the railed-off cameo simultaneously trampled and isolated, forever outside us. Eventually the only beautiful places will be in our hearts-and what a revolting thought that is.
