The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

A new perspective
Writers at rest

A writer friend wrote me she was traveling to Venice. Could I suggest restaurants? Reading material? I suggested a restaurant on the main square in Burano for spaghetti con vongole, and a splurge lunch at the rooftop restaurant of the Danieli, overlooking the Canale di San Marco and its chaos of crisscrossing boats, where George Sand and Frédéric Chopin stayed. And I suggested she read Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark (1992), about his annual winter retreats to Venice, and I’d read it, too.

Brodsky’s memoir is a series of short meditations upon his yearly forays to Venice in winter and their effect upon Brodsky’s heart, mind, and spirit. He arrives in Venice on a cold night, and steps from the station into the darkness and notices something utterly unique yet quintessentially Venetian in winter—the “smell of freezing seaweed,” which fills him with “utter happiness” because it recalls the Russia of his youth.

Brodsky relates his observations about why winter there is so compelling for him and how Venice changes your perceptions about beauty and human behavior—the city is a series of stage sets and everything that occurs there seems dramatic. The sense of confinement you feel in its alleys yields to the expansiveness you feel when you emerge at the edge of the lagoon. The quality of Venetian sunsets. Winter’s inevitable fog—it’s often so thick that the only way to find your way back to your hotel after a brief errand is to hope the path your body cut through the fog is still visible. The interior of an ancient palazzo—rotting draperies, corridors filled with terrible paintings of unattractive ancestors, ever-present mold and mildew.

Reading Watermark reminded me how, when great writers travel, their way of seeing changes, and this shift in perception inevitably changes their works in progress or later works. When Brodsky traveled to Venice in winter, he began to view his experience there as a series of vignettes rather than as one continuous narrative, and that’s how he composed his memoir. “If I get sidetracked [in relating my narrative],” Brodsky says, “it is because being sidetracked is literally a matter of course here.…” Finding one’s way in Venice inevitably means taking a wrong turn, getting lost, finding one’s way again.

Watermark suggests that each time we visit a new place, our senses are bombarded with a series of disconnected observations: it’s as if cause and effect don’t exist because we haven’t been there long enough to understand the connections among the events we witness. We’re forced to live in the moment. And what we see becomes paramount: “the eye identifies not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.”

Brodsky traveled to Venice in winter in part because he’d read Provincial Entertainments (1925) by Henri de Régnier, which described the “damp, cold narrow streets through which one hurries,” and this sounded like the Petersburg of Brodsky’s youth. But the format of that novel was significant, too. The novel taught him “the single most crucial lesson in composition”: “what makes a narrative good is not the story itself but what follows what.”

And so Brodsky’s Watermark is a series of vignettes in which the meaning of each tiny narrative reverberates against what has come before and foreshadows what comes after. He invites the reader to ponder how “what follows what” contributes to its meaning, a personal experiential account of Venice rather than a linear narrative of his journeys. Watermark describes Brodsky’s Venice only.

Brodsky doesn’t immediately tell us why he visits Venice in winter. All this backstory (about reading Provincial Entertainments, about how he doesn’t like to see glorious monuments spoiled by scantily clad people) comes later. If Brodsky began with his life in St. Petersburg, continued with his reading Provincial Entertainments, his decision to visit Venice in winter, and his first and subsequent journeys, the narrative would have been different. But that linear arrangement wouldn’t have revealed the “what follows what” chain of Brodsky’s associations nor his experience of being in Venice.

Reading Watermark didn’t make me remember Venice. Instead, it made me see and understand Brodsky’s Venice—it shifted my perception of that city immeasurably, inviting me to understand every place exists both as a communal referent and as a deeply personal space for every person who lives or journeys there. It taught me to respect my seemingly trivial impressions of a new place—my own equivalent of Brodsky’s frozen seaweed—rather than viewing it through a guidebook’s eyes. It made me remember the gunshot holes in the facades of buildings throughout Provence, a reminder of the Axis retreat and the Allied advance. Before reading Brodsky, I wouldn’t have thought to describe them.

The impact of place upon the formation of character is central to Watermark. Brodsky describes that the Venetians can only be understood with reference to Venice’s geography: “Because of the scarcity of space,” Brodsky observes, “people exist here in cellular proximity to one another, and life evolves with the immanent logic of gossip.”

After reading Watermark, I realized my work about my parents’ lives during World War II didn’t account for the impact of their living in Hoboken, New Jersey, a prime German target during the war, and a place where you could see warships assembling for their forays to the great sea battles of the war. I knew I’d have to consider this issue when I revised, for I’d been treating Hoboken as just another city, rather than as a place where it was dangerous to live and where battleships were constant reminders of the war.

Two moments I might juxtapose. The first—my mother scurrying up to the parapet overlooking the Hudson River with her friends to watch the U.S. fleet sail up the Hudson to celebrate the 1939 World’s Fair; my father (whom my mother hasn’t yet met) stands in formation on the deck of the aircraft carrier Ranger; neither yet knows the other exists. The second—my mother pushing me in a stroller up to that same parapet years later to watch warships assembling for the next naval assault on the enemy while my father is away in the Pacific.

Reading Brodsky helped me discover an important thread of meaning that was missing from my narrative; Watermark invited me to think about the importance of juxtaposition—what follows what—in my narrative.