Venice and the Beyond

...The seven books that followed at lengthening intervals were guaranteed respectful attention and a particular audience...

...Soon he became the youngest editor-in-chief in Europe, of Der Morgen...

...Jardine, now dead at last, a siren till the end, whose haunting presence comes between the heroine and her lover...

...Jardine as well...

...Possibly owing to her adolescent freshness of vision, and a sort of naivete requiring her to tell exactly what she saw, Lehmann described relationships that hitherto had only been discussed behind closed doors...

...In all his writing, Habe's passionate concerns were the crucial problems and plagues of his time, with their corollaries of backstage sabotage and sellout that few people could know about...

...In this novel there is also a sort of merging, a dislocation in time, a circling back...

...Palazzo can be regarded as a last urgent message, a massive deathbed appeal to the world-symbolized by Venice-to save itself while there is still time...

...Curiously necessary to her creative imagination has always been the figure of the grandmother-vital, unorthodox, timelessly attractive, charming in both senses, dangerously powerful...

...Taking part in three invasions, he rose to the rank of major...

...Later, the man the heroine has loved since childhood is lost to another man...

...He was 30 when A Thousand Shall Fall was published, and a private in the U.S...

...One third of all works of art suffer fatal damage...

...officers of the American Army of Occupation ordered to promote the secret regrouping of unre-generate Nazis...

...In his own angry voice he reported on the American South of the '60s, on the pro-Arab New Left's desertion of Israel, and-most stingingly-on escaping from a Nazi prison and witnessing the 1940 debacle in France...

...Those striped poles belong to us...

...But would they...

...The very massiveness of Habe's assault may be needed to wipe out our dreamy trust in a Venice always there, unchanged and serene, awaiting our next visit...

...I am a Venetian...

...The character is given her former wilful malevolence, mingled with an unlikely wistfulness that could reflect Lehmann's kind of resistance to the inexorable finality of death...

...Just out of Girton College, Cambridge, Lehmann won fame overnight...

...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" These ominous words open Hans Habe's new novel: "I am the chronicler of the ark, and of the flood drowning my city, the city in the flood...

...This tended to become smaller and smaller, for never again would Lehmann be as "hot for certainties" nor suffer such deep disillusionment in facing the darker sides of others and herself...

...He was captured by the Germans, escaped, and in December 1940 reached the United States...

...Army...

...But their awareness of each other and of their own feelings is as keen and focused as a laser ray...

...It is a hard question...

...Those intensities, expressing the vulnerability of youth, explained the first novel's hold on her generation, but not the seriousness of the acceptance the critics gave her...

...A Hungarian educated in Vienna and Heidelberg, he won fame as a novice journalist by discovering that Hitler's real name was Schicklgruber...

...Yet Lehmann did have, and to this days has, the courage of her experience...

...Hinting intentionally at the morbid power lurking down by the water, Lehmann at the same time reveals, in spite of herself, the inevitable deadening of all that lives...

...After a few years in Hollywood, he returned to Europe as editor of anti-Nazi and anti-Communist periodicals, finally settling in Switzerland, where he died in September...

...A curiously delicate, sensitive revolutionary she was, without a thought for the condition of the proletariat or, indeed, anger at the war that had robbed her heroine of another lover...

...still, the implications for a whole class of English youth were clear...

...In A Sea Grape Tree it is the same Mrs...

...Yet there is a vigor and on-rushing force in his writing that gives the illusion of an eternal prime of life...

...But one feels Lehmann is Mrs...

...If Lehmann is conscious of any world problem, she gives no sign of it...

...the Contes-sa's young grandson and devoted ally, Romolo, explores the dusk-shadowed Lido dunes to find sexual fulfillment...

...With effort Lehmann tries to summon it up, as when the heroine searches through binoculars for the seaside hut of the man she will later love: "Stereoptically vivid in the powerful lens, the sea grape tree reared up, its pale trunk twisting smooth and serpentine, its branches carrying a canopy of glaucous blue-fleshed leaves and pendant clusters of green berries, sterile and hard as stone...

...Red-white, blue-white, violet-white poles fell, like drunken sailors going overboard...

...He, too, was telling the story of an old woman, one trapped and ill, and was himself on the brink of death...

...Readers welcomed with great relief the breaking of the taboo, and accorded Lehmann the awe due a revolutionary...

...Writing history," one such section begins, "is an attempt to fathom why man destroys what he has built...

...He cites page after page of terrifying statistics: "Every year the poison called environment destroys 6 per cent of the marble facades and marble walls and marble floors, 5 per cent of the frescoes and furniture, 3 per cent of the paintings on canvas, 2 per cent of the paintings on wood...

...In other novels Habe impersonated greedy media men in postwar Rome fighting over the choice murder of a call girl...

...Venice is possessed by and possesses those who have been there: It takes one gondola ride, a walk on an inner street, or a glimpse of the art celebrated by Mary McCarthy in Venice Observed...

...The speech is more natural than in many of the author's other novels, where he sometimes seemed to have too much to say to spare any time for his characters to natter and digress, to use half-sentences and suggestive non-sequiturs...

...Habe shows some of the more ludicrous aspects of the Biennial and a film festival...

...Would this tale have been better told without its heavy innundations of historical truth...

...Habe was one of those few...

...You have to fake yourself out of the present," explains the demented painter who helps her, "for the whole present is a fake...

...The book, brief as it is, seems a bringing together of what has meant most to Lehmann...

...Explicitly stated in her autobiography The Swan in the Evening, it is the belief that death does not mean the end of human relationships...

...These matters are very subtly treated, with Lehmann's wonderful objective precision, detail by detail-whisper, glance, half-uttered word, a leaning of a body, a glimpse in a mirror...

...Structurally the novel is a synthesis of the two methods Habe used in his earlier books-direct reporting of shocking facts and putting them into the minds and voices of fictional figures...

...In her new novel, A Sea Grape Tree, published in her eighth decade, she holds firm to a conviction that has deepened with the years and, as she well knows, places in jeopardy the respect she has earned in her long career...

...The problem with A Sea Grape Tree is that it is not strong enough to be convincing either as message or fiction-partly because of the author's unwillingness to force her views on others...

...Where Habe rushed from war to world crisis with a Polaroid, so to speak, Lehmann has spent her life probing the souls of the people in her own garden and the one next door...

...The answer would be yes, if it meant that more people would read the book-and if they would still get the message...

...Many others have this experience," she remarked...

...there is a kidnapping to raise funds for a movie...

...The new just pretends to be new, that's why it's a fake...

...Her kind of very personal novel was exactly what was wanted in 1927, when Dusty Answer was published...

...That 1941 book, A Thousand Shall Fall, was a worldwide best seller and became a film, The Cross of Lorraine...

...Influences, some of them evident to the physical senses, can reach us with their benign or evil potency from "the other side...

...during the occupation he was placed in charge of the 18 German-language newspapers published by the Americans...

...Her characters seem never to have read the newspaper, even its date...

...a Jewish physician becoming an intermediary to offer Jewish lives for sale by Hitler to "concerned" countries (no takers...

...As if in apology, she gives the unquestioning faith in them not to her startled heroine but to the eccentric, almost comic landlady of the remote hotel in the Windward Isles where the action takes place...

...And a storm sweeps over the city...

...Apart from a shared talent for lyricism, no writers could be more different than Hans Habe and Rosamond Lehmann...

...Strikingly, in The Ballad and the Source, published long before her daughter died, Lehmann had the romantic grandmother, Mrs...

...Moreover, the energy needed for weaving her old spells seems lacking...

...Palazzo's characters describe, debate and discuss the destruction of Venice, churning up ideas that are-as ever in Habe's books lively and original...

...In Dusty Answer one of the passionate, wounding triangles is all female...

...In this, again, there is a sharp contrast with Hans Habe...

...at last their manes were engulfed...

...Like Habe's other novels, Palazzo has been given respectful treatment because of its "tremendous subject," with reservations added about its total effect as fiction...

...That beautiful book, read in complement to Palazzo, should make fanatic Venice-savers out of us all...

...El Greco was new but he didn't intend to be, and if I paint an El Greco I paint something new...

...Yet the story itself, half-submerged by tidal waves of violent fact, has charm, piquancy, human wisdom, and the components of suspense...

...With great eloquence Habe indicts the businessmen of Venice's industrial neighbor, Marghera, who own the supertankers for which fatally deep canals have been dug, the corrupt or timid politicians, and the shortsightedly selfish Venetians who see without caring...

...Perhaps because of the fact that her most dramatic mystical experiences came after the death of her 23-year-old daughter, putting her in the dubious company of bereaved "seekers," Lehmann treats her other-world visitations very circumspectly in A Sea Grape Tree...

...now their nostrils, their eyes disappeared...

...With her middle-aged children using fair means and foul to keep her poor, she contrives an ingenious trick that involves the copying of her most valuable masterwork...

...Jardine, tell of feeling a strange oppression, part of her body but outside it, that made her know her own daughter's life was in danger...

...A Sea Grape Tree is set in 1933, with the young heroine at the age Lehmann could have been then...

...Venice can't wait, is already disappearing, we know now because Habe won't let us escape the knowledge: "The lions of the Palazzo dei Leoni had quenched their thirst at the feet of the column...

...A spirited old contessa is determined to save the disintegrating family palazzo...

...Although he said he always preferred living to writing, he produced three novels (one translated into 18 languages) before joining the French Army...

...But even in Pallazo the narrator interrupts to lay in background, to accuse and to plead, often before the story has developed enough momentum for a break...