If your novel has a character who roams the streets after he’s been presumed dead, then there’s a city that fits your setting, one suffused with centuries of mystery and intrigue and shadow:
Out of a strange self-consciousness at standing still, Ray began to walk, shy now of the humble brushing sound of his desert boot soles on the cement…Near the end of the arcade, he went out into the Piazza again and looked at the cathedral as he walked by it, blinked as he always had at its complexity, its variety of styles all crammed together. An artistic mess, he supposed, yet it had been erected to amaze and impress, and in that it succeeded.
Ray Garrett, a character believed to have been murdered in Rome, has made his way to Venice, a city more primed for the sinister and suspicious—two required elements in Patricia Highsmith’s novel Those Who Walk Away. The novel has a pursuit, and a reversal of that pursuit, with neither of her two primary characters quite certain whether they are hunting or hunted. What intrigues me is that Highsmith selected Venice for her story. For a narrative that’s clouded with confusion and for unstable characters, it is certainly an apt setting. Clarity of thought, or even of intentions, isn’t really available, and Highsmith takes full advantage of her location—as the enigmatic comes alive in Venice’s narrow lanes, darkened canals, and disorienting alleys.
All readers can surely agree with one conclusion: Venice shouldn’t exist. A reasonable and logical world wouldn’t permit the continuation of a city in which its very existence is preposterous. Any basic calculation of finances and prudence would shut its ports and transfer its population tomorrow. It is impossible to maintain, it is crowded, inefficient, wasteful, and, as you are busy reading, it is busy sinking.
One consequence is that all jobs in Venice are maritime jobs: construction workers and electricians and bartenders are crew members on this sinking ship. Cleaning a storefront is to be a deckhand; wearing a police uniform is to join the coast guard; selling produce from a small stand involves a detailed understanding of the tides. Not one task is removed from the result of floods, humidity, and salt. Imagine being a Venetian plumber. Or a printer that manages a daily press run by steel, oil, and paper. It is a city of maritime workers.
When I first visited Venice a few years ago, I was provided a rather startling warning. The words themselves didn’t necessitate any need for alarm, yet the owner of the single room that I rented decided to imbue her sentences with a tone more appropriate for danger. Venetian by birth, her words came laced with the accent distinct to her city, but her phrasing slowed—almost comically—to say: There’s no time here. Be careful. It was the sudden inclusion of mystical or numinous language in an otherwise humdrum conversation that startled me enough to remember her words. She went on to tell me—still in a tone of caution rather than delight—that afternoons slip into evenings, that midday strolls slip into midnight wanderings. For a new lodger setting down his bags and picking up his keys, there wasn’t a logical reason why her admonition didn’t take a joyful, illuminating tone, though her chosen register did have the effect of being unforgettable.
She could have added that Venice is where those with a good sense of direction go to get lost. Italy isn’t known in particular for its watches, but an abrupt explanation comes every evening, I discovered, for why so many storefronts in Venice sell timepieces. The sun does—as forewarned—seem to fall rather than descend, and there’s enough reflective canals and narrow lanes for the shadows to consistently mislead. And the trancelike aspect that’s created instills the city with its elusive, almost eerie, atmosphere—justifying Highsmith’s setting as the right location for a narrative based on suspicion and confusion and with an absence of reason.
Death in Venice is one of the most prominent stories set in the city, and contemporary readers might lift an eyebrow when they realize that its pages contain a plague. Gustav von Aschenbach is a writer struggling with his pen—a most unfortunate and truly sympathetic character. In an attempt to jumpstart his writing, he travels to Venice, where he encounters the same mysterious elements that Ray Garrett discovered in Highsmith’s novel and that nearly all visitors experience—it is a city that hides behind a mask. Confusions abound. Stories mislead. Truth seems to be, at best, rather slippery. In Thomas Mann’s novella, however, there’s an implicit sense that all these shortcomings and peculiarities and the plain unreasonableness of Venice just might serve a purpose. Perhaps what’s prudent isn’t always what’s best.
While dealing with the city, Aschenbach wavers as a writer—should he trust the inexplicable aspects of creation, or should he obsess about what he can understand with cold rationality? It is the writer’s dilemma, that never-ending fight between spontaneity and planning. Mann’s novella prompts you to start questioning the prudent path—and that’s partly because the destination of Venice isn’t designed for prudence. Nothing prudent comes from having waiters, tailors, and grocers spending all their time beating back salt and tide and wind. How can a sinking city not be absurd? In Venice the only conclusion is that the illogical must be essential. Even in Aschenbach’s arrival the numinous comes alive:
He again set eyes on the most astounding landing, that blinding composition of fantastic architecture, which the Republic has to offer the awestruck looks of the approaching seafarer: the light grandeur of the Palace and the Bridge of Sighs, the columns topped with the lion and the saint close to the shore, the flauntingly projecting flank of St Mark's, the view of St Mark's Clock, and thus contemplating he thought that arriving in Venice from the train station was like entering a palace through the servants' entrance and that one should always, like himself, travel across the ocean to the most improbable of cities.
Of all the locations that Thomas Mann could have chosen for his novella—a story of artistic longing, lust, where appearances deceive—we should consider it notable that he, like Highsmith, felt pulled toward Venice. Here’s one place where the incoherent and absurd and preposterous rule, where the meaningful isn’t contingent upon reason—a perfect setting for Gustav von Aschenbach, an artist unable to create. With imperfection always a required ingredient in perfection—a lesson artists must learn again and again—perhaps Venice is a good spot to begin doubting what’s considered reasonable, as it certainly isn’t where you travel when you’re searching for order.
Although a newfound sense of preparation has come to Venice in recent years, as the city has water gates now—the MOSE system—which battle the Adriatic Sea’s encroachment, a test of human engineering against the worst floods. Here is the ordered and prudent mind contesting danger and volatility, which we can all agree is a good step. The gates seem to work better than expected, and have caused celebration, but I do remember one occasion when they weren’t deployed—the gates weren’t raised, the city flooded, and an all too fitting bureaucratic dispute seemed to be the culprit.
A more prudent world would have prevented that fiasco—either by removing the potential for human failure or, in a more financially sound decision, shuttering the island and deeming the cause lost. Thankfully we are in no danger of a sudden outbreak of prudence in the world—so the intangible values that can’t be tabulated yet are, in fact, most essential to life will occasionally survive. If value in life were measured by empirical factors alone, we could pack up now and stop our obsessing: all of our answers would be technocratic and self-evident and beauty would be quantified by mathematics. But, instead, there’s a curious satisfaction in knowing that Venice’s endless struggle against nature will persist, with those not yet born still continuing in the costly, ridiculous, and imprudent resistance against the sea, despite the illogic of the expense. Because living in a world that doesn’t include Venice would certainly be miserable, as that would reveal the horror of living in a world that accounts for prudence but knows nothing about value.