Death in Venice — Chapter 1

Chapter 1 of 5 · Review of Death in Venice

Gustav Aschenbach—or von Aschenbach, as his name had officially stood since his fiftieth birthday—had, on a spring afternoon in the year 19.., a year that for months had shown our continent so menacing a face, gone out alone from his apartment on Munich's Prinz-Regentenstrasse for a rather extended walk. Overwrought by the difficult and hazardous work of the morning hours, which just now demanded the utmost caution, circumspection, penetration, and precision of the will, the writer had been unable, even after the midday meal, to arrest the onward swing of the productive mechanism within him, that “motus animi continuus” in which, according to Cicero, the essence of eloquence consists; nor had he found the relieving sleep which, as his powers became increasingly liable to exhaustion, he needed once during the day. Thus, soon after tea, he had sought the open air, hoping that air and movement would restore him and help him toward a profitable evening.

It was early May, and after weeks of wet cold a counterfeit midsummer had descended. The English Garden, though only delicately in leaf, had been sultry as August and, near the city, full of carriages and promenaders. At the Aumeister, to which quieter and ever quieter paths had led him, Aschenbach had spent a little while surveying the popularly animated inn garden, at whose edge several cabs and private carriages stood; from there, as the sun sank, he had taken his way home outside the park across open country and, since he felt tired and a storm threatened over Föhring, was waiting at the Northern Cemetery for the tram that was to carry him directly back to the city. By chance he found the stop and its surroundings empty of people. No vehicle was to be seen either on the paved Ungererstrasse, whose rails stretched away toward Schwabing in a solitary glitter, or on the Föhring highway; nothing stirred behind the fences of the stonecutters' yards, where crosses, memorial tablets, and monuments offered for sale form a second, untenanted field of graves, and opposite, the Byzantine structure of the mortuary chapel lay silent in the afterglow of the departing day. Its façade, adorned with Greek crosses and hieratic paintings in pale colours, also bears symmetrically arranged inscriptions in gold lettering, selected scriptural phrases concerning the life beyond, such as: “They enter into the dwelling of God,” or: “May the eternal light shine upon them”; and for several minutes the man waiting had found a grave diversion in reading off these formulas and letting his mind's eye lose itself in their translucent mysticism, when, returning from his reverie, he noticed in the portico, above the two apocalyptic beasts that guard the broad flight of steps, a man whose not altogether ordinary appearance gave his thoughts an entirely different direction.

Whether the man had emerged from within the hall through the bronze gate, or had unexpectedly approached from outside and climbed the steps, remained uncertain. Without troubling himself particularly over the question, Aschenbach inclined to the former supposition. Of moderate height, thin, beardless, and conspicuously blunt-nosed, the man belonged to the red-haired type and possessed its milky, freckled skin. He was plainly not of Bavarian stock: the broad, straight-brimmed straw hat that covered his head at least imparted to his appearance the stamp of the foreigner and the far-travelled. To be sure, he also wore the customary local rucksack strapped over his shoulders, a yellowish belted suit of what appeared to be loden cloth, a grey rain-cape draped over his left forearm, which he held braced against his hip, and in his right hand an iron-tipped stick, planted obliquely against the ground; with his feet crossed, he rested one hip against its crook. His head was raised, so that the Adam's apple stood out stark and bare upon the lean neck rising from his loose sport shirt; with colourless, red-lashed eyes, between which—fitting oddly enough with his short, upturned nose—stood two vertical, forceful furrows, he peered keenly into the distance. Thus—and perhaps his elevated station, which seemed to elevate him, contributed to the effect—his bearing had something imperiously surveying, bold, even savage about it; for whether he grimaced against the setting sun because its glare blinded him, or whether a permanent distortion of feature was involved, his lips appeared too short: they were drawn entirely back from the teeth, so that the latter, exposed to the gums, showed white and long between them in a snarl.

It was quite possible that, in his half-abstracted, half-inquisitorial inspection of the stranger, Aschenbach had failed in consideration; for suddenly he became aware that the other was returning his gaze, and so combatively, so directly eye to eye, so manifestly resolved to carry matters to the utmost and compel the other's gaze to retreat, that Aschenbach, uncomfortably affected, turned away and began to walk along the fences, with the incidental resolve to pay the man no further attention. He had forgotten him the next minute. Yet whether the traveller-like quality in the stranger's appearance had acted upon his imagination, or whether some other physical or spiritual influence was at work, he became quite unexpectedly conscious of a strange expansion within himself, a kind of roving unrest, a youthfully thirsty desire for faraway places, a feeling so vivid, so new, or at any rate so long disused and unlearned, that he halted as if spellbound, hands behind his back and eyes upon the ground, to examine the sensation for its nature and its aim. It was a desire to travel, nothing more; but it came on as a veritable seizure and rose to passion, indeed to sensory delusion. For he saw—as though to exemplify all the wonders and terrors of the manifold earth which his desire suddenly strove to imagine—saw as if with bodily eyes an immense landscape, a tropical marshland beneath a sky thick with vapour, humid, luxuriant, and unwholesome, a primeval wilderness shunned by humankind, made up of islands, morasses, and watercourses laden with mud. The low islets, their soil overgrown with leaves thick as hands, with gigantic ferns, with fleshy, swollen, fantastically flowering vegetation, sent up hairy shafts of palm; and strangely misshapen trees, whose roots grew out from the trunk and sank through the air into the earth, into the water, formed tangled forests. On the stagnant flood, green-shadowed and reflective, there floated milk-white blossoms as large as platters; birds of foreign kind, high-shouldered, with malformed beaks, stood on long legs in the shallows and gazed motionlessly aside, while through broad fields of reeds there ran a clattering rasp and rustle as through armies in armour; it seemed to the beholder that the tepid, mephitic breath of this lewd and useless waste, which appeared to hover in some monstrous state of becoming or decay, breathed upon him; for an instant, between the jointed canes of a bamboo thicket, he thought he saw the phosphorescent lamps of a tiger flash—and felt his heart pound with horror and enigmatic longing. Then the vision receded; and, shaking his head, Aschenbach resumed his promenade beside the fences of the gravestone yards.

At least since the means had been at his disposal to enjoy the advantages of world travel at will, he had regarded travel as nothing but a hygienic measure which, now and then, had to be taken against feeling and inclination. Too occupied with the tasks set him by his own self and by the European soul, too burdened by the obligation to produce, too averse to distraction to qualify as a lover of the colourful external world, he had been entirely content with the view of the earth's surface that anyone today can acquire without straying far from his own circle, and had never even been tempted to leave Europe. Especially since his life had begun slowly to decline, since the artist's fear that he might not finish—the anxiety that the clock might run down before he had done his part and wholly given himself—could no longer be dismissed as a mere whim, his outward existence had confined itself almost exclusively to the beautiful city that had become his home and to the rugged country house he had built in the mountains, where he spent the rainy summers.

And indeed, what had just now assailed him so late and so suddenly was very soon moderated and set right by reason and by the self-discipline practised from youth. He had intended to advance the work for which he lived to a certain point before moving to the country, and the thought of roaming the world, which would abduct him from his work for months, seemed far too loose and contrary to plan; it could not seriously be entertained. And yet he knew only too well from what cause the temptation had so abruptly arisen. It was an impulse to flee—he admitted as much to himself—this longing for the far and the new, this appetite for release, relief from burdens, and oblivion: the impulse away from the work, from the everyday scene of a rigid, cold, and passionate service. He did love that service, and by now almost loved as well the unnerving, daily renewed struggle between his tenacious and proud, so often tested will and this growing weariness of which no one must know and which the product must in no way betray by any sign of failure or lassitude. But it seemed sensible not to overstrain the bow and not wilfully to smother a need that had erupted with such force. He thought of his work, thought of the place where today, as yesterday already, he had again been forced to leave it, and which seemed unwilling to yield either to patient care or to a rapid assault. He examined it afresh, tried to break through or dissolve the obstruction, and abandoned the attack with a shudder of aversion. No extraordinary difficulty offered itself here; what paralysed him were the scruples of disinclination, which presented themselves as a fastidiousness nothing could any longer satisfy. Fastidiousness, to be sure, had seemed even to the youth the essence and innermost nature of talent, and for its sake he had curbed and chilled feeling, because he knew that feeling was inclined to content itself with a cheerful approximation and a half-perfection. Was the subjugated emotion now taking revenge by deserting him, by refusing henceforth to sustain and give wings to his art, and carrying away with it all pleasure, all delight in form and expression? Not that he produced anything bad: this at least was the advantage of his years, that at every moment he felt serenely certain of his mastery. But he himself, while the nation honoured it, took no joy in it, and it seemed to him that his work lacked those marks of a fiery, playful fancy which, born of joy, more than any inward substance or weightier excellence, constituted the delight of the enjoying world. He feared the summer in the country, alone in the little house with the maid who prepared his food and the servant who placed it before him; feared the familiar faces of the mountain peaks and walls that would once again surround his dissatisfied slowness. And so an interlude was needed, some improvised existence, some idling away of days, the air of distant places and an infusion of new blood, so that the summer might become tolerable and productive. Travel, then—he consented. Not very far, not as far as the tigers. A night in a sleeping-car and a siesta of three or four weeks at some commonplace holiday resort in the charming South...

So he thought while the din of the electric tram approached along the Ungererstrasse; and as he boarded, he resolved to devote the evening to studying maps and timetables. On the platform it occurred to him to look about for the man in the straw hat, his fellow participant in a pause that had, after all, proved consequential. But the man's whereabouts did not become clear to him, for he was to be found neither at his former station, nor at the next stop, nor in the car itself.