A Romance of Modern Venice, written for the most part in 1909, was published in London in 1934.

This posthumous publication was the merit of A.J.A. Symons, also author of The Quest of Corvo. An experiment in biography, 1934.

Venice dying
Although this obviously autobiographical work only has incredibly strong and magnanimous characters in it, Rolfe himself (1860-1913) was forced to live by expedient, not the least of which was to disappear from the scene with one name and reappear under pseudonyms (the most famous of which, Baron Corvo, was the one that eventually stuck).

An English eccentric, he converted to Catholicism in his youth.

In The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, he gives us the story, with poetry and descriptive delight but also extraordinary bitterness, of his years in Venice, which were his last. He even manages to invent an incredible ending to his human existence, while the reality of it was in fact squalid and even sordid.

But what interests us, more than the vicissitudes of the protagonist, is the city. Its maritime empire having been lost in 1700 after a decline in productive, mercantile and military terms, the city turned itself into the capital of festivities and theatres.

Byron, Ruskin, Proust, Ezra Pound, Lawrence, Mann. They all watched Venice dying – but from a box in the Fenice, from a hotel window, from a table in a bar in Piazza San Marco or, almost adventurously, from a cushioned seat in a gondola.

Their writings on Venice are very different from those of this Englishman who attempted the impossible – to become Venetian.

“A mad Englishman trying to look Venetian", he also boasted he could handle a gondola like a real gondolier. Perhaps Venice can only really be seen and understood in this way. At water level, straining with effort, canal after canal, island after island, the lagoon looks different. The sportsman can thus know the city in a way not available to the tourist. Rolfe was maybe the last traveller there in this sense. After him, only tourists.

A emblematic moment in the novel is when Crabbe, Rolfe’s alter ego, is “gondoliering” along the Canal Grande. “Two motorboats shot past, a big boat carrying the guests of a hotel on the Lido and a dangerous, cigar-shaped racing boat, belonging to Palazzo Contarini, adding their waves to the wakes of the steamers. He was overcome by a momentary giddiness and stepped down off the stern board so as not to fall in the water.”

It’s said that in fact Rolfe not only should have got off the stern but actually fell in the water, only to remerge immediately swimming, a perfect gentleman, with his pipe still in his mouth.

There is nothing casual in this scene: Venice lived at water level has really changed: Zildo, a Venetian gondolier, swears even more angrily than Crabbe against “those five-times damned and misbegotten steamers” and against the even more dangerous motor launches.

The railway came to Venice half a century before; the new port (Marittima) was a hive of activity. Big hotels were springing up on Riva degli Schiavoni and the Lido. A city built on “rows of wooden posts stuck deep in the mud” maybe wasn’t made for this. An equilibrium established over a thousand years – a balance of human trades and a eco-system – was upset. Talking of Venice dying is perhaps empty rhetoric.

Today, like the eccentric Englishman, gondoliers are having to jump off their majestic stern boards more and more often. Rolfe doesn’t enact literary deaths in Venice. He chooses to really die in Venice. To die with Venice.