InterviewOn the eve of publication of his long-awaited new book, John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, talks to Belinda McKeon in New York
John Berendt, you could say, is passionate about the task of making things new. But passionate too, at the same time, about keeping alive, in all its richness, the spirit of the old. The editor and journalist who seared his name into literary annals with the international bestseller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - the book that at once refined and redefined the genre of the non-fiction novel when it was published in 1994 - tells an anecdote about his childhood that explains much, as is the way of such things, about the writer he has become. It explains much about his attraction to cities such as Savannah, Georgia, which that first book so deliciously explored, exposed, and indulged; or like curious, coquettish Venice, the subject of his long-awaited new volume, The City of Falling Angels.
In this story, Berendt is a 12-year-old boy growing up in Syracuse, New York, with his writer parents, who have a deep-running love of antiques.
"They were very, very keen," he remembers, as he sits in the elegant library of his townhouse in Manhattan, a room filled with handsome prints and paintings, and flooded with the light of a sunny September morning. "We would go to country auctions, and in those days you could find really terrific furniture with paint slopped all over it. And my parents, they bought a corner cupboard, pine, all painted, looked terrible, and they bought it for a dollar and a half."
Back at home, the young Berendt was assigned the task of stripping this find of the gaudy colours which had cloaked it for too long. "I had to be very careful, because pine is not very hard. And they knew what it was. It was early American, we kept it in our house in Martha's Vineyard for 30 years, and then when they sold the house it sold too. For $40,000."
He smiles. "I always enjoyed stripping the paint. Because what would emerge would be this glowing cherry stand or bureau from this ugly, beaten up, really distressed, dirty dresser. Something really fine and remarkable. It was fun - it was like treasure coming out. And then you would oil it or stain it, and the grain would show. And it would be so beautiful."
Certainly, Berendt's Venice is beautiful, just as his Savannah was beautiful. But not in the superficial sense, not in the sense of being easy on the eye, light on the mind. The close reading, the canny gaze with which Berendt surveys these places takes him right down to a grain which is as raw and cruel as it is rare and charming. Though it has transformed the tourist industry in Savannah - visits to the city have doubled on its strength, and on the strength of Clint Eastwood's decidedly slighter film version - Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was just as much a foray into murder, corruption and prejudice as it was a jaunt through the quirks and whims of its fascinating true-life cast, people Berendt got to know over the several years he lived among them. And though it, too, has its characters - the master glassblower and his feuding sons, the rich American expatriates, the Rat Man of Treviso and his secret poison, the fiery performance artist and the lonely gay poet - all of those who inhabit The City of Falling Angels are thrillingly, intricately real, and so too are the tensions and betrayals that stalk their island home.
The beauty at the heart of Berendt's Venice is a beauty lost, destroyed, burnt to sorry shards; the author who stumbled upon a scandalous shooting in Savannah happened to arrive in the setting of his second book just days after a mysterious fire which had ravaged the city's treasured opera house, the Fenice. Five of Verdi's operas had their premiere in its auditorium; priceless original manuscripts of works by several composers were stored there; centuries-old frescoes depicting Dante's Inferno graced its bar; and as the last remaining opera house in a city which had once had over a dozen, it meant more to Venetians, right across the classes, than any amount of galleries or gondolas. The Fenice was theirs, and would never belong to the thousands of tourists who thronged their city's narrow passageways for 11 months of the year.
Now, on a January night in 1996, it was gone, and from the months and years of vulnerability, bewilderment and recrimination that would stem from this extraordinary evening, Berendt would weave his narrative of Venetian life in all its colour and complexity.
Did he realise, sailing into the city by water taxi that day, dust and ashes from the ruined Fenice still lacing the air, that he had discovered that mix of exoticism and intrigue for which he had been searching since Savannah?
In fact, Berendt explains, he had already fixed his gaze upon Venice. He had visited the city several times, first as a teenage exchange student, and just like the artists whose names and whose visions run through The City of Falling Angels - Robert Browning, John Ruskin, Lord Byron, Virginia Woolf, but most particularly Henry James - he had been snared from the beginning. Not just by the way the city looked, but by the way it was - by its people. In The City of Falling Angels - the title comes from a sign posted outside the then-dilapidated Santa Maria della Salute Church in the 1970s, "Beware of Falling Angels" - Berendt sketches the people who become his friends, neighbours and confidantes with the same mixture of richness and ruthlessness which rendered the millionaire Jim Williams, the transsexual showgirl Lady Chablis, and the swindling, sweet-talking rake Joe Odom in Midnight.
Nothing about these individuals - most of them eccentric, some of them unfortunate, and a couple of them insidious - escapes his eye. It quickly becomes apparent that the burning of the Fenice was not accidental, but the trial of the two young men on whom the crime is pinned is only one of the battles he documents; there is too, the momentous clash of wealthy egos which descends on Save Venice, the American charity established to preserve the city's heritage in the wake of the fire. There's the case of the Muranese glassblower, Seguso, who creates works of art from his memory of the Fenice fire, and his son who seeks to have him declared insane so that he can take over his thriving business.
There's the suspicious death of the aforementioned poet, and the friend so desperate to prove it murder rather than suicide, that he seems to invent a force threatening him to stay silent.
And then there's perhaps the most unnerving and unforgettable story of all: the story of how the ageing Olga Rudge, lover of Ezra Pound for 50 years, signed away his papers and correspondence, worth about $1 million, for a few thousand dollars. Olga - immortalised by Pound in his last Canto as having the name of "Courage", and being the author of "acts of beauty" that should "be remembered" - was at that stage prone to confusion.
At first she had no reason to question the generous help of the Rylandses, the young English-American couple who had, upon arrival in Venice in the 1970s, made themselves similarly "indispensable" to another ageing woman, Peggy Guggenheim.
They slowly climbed a ladder which led, for Philip Rylands, to heading up the Pegy Guggenheim Collection, and for his wife, Jane, to the wide net of power and influence which helped her to set up the Ezra Pound Foundation in the 1980s, and to acquire the papers of a befuddled old woman.
Inspired as much by his reading of Henry James's novel, The Aspern Papers, as by Olga Rudge's story, the chapter in which Berendt details what was a true literary drama has the pacing and the depth of a thriller, and it, even more than his exploration of the truth behind the loss of the Fenice, shows that the flair and fire of Midnight is still going strong.
"There's another theme in the book, which is probably even bigger than the fire actually, which is the relationship of the present to the past," he nods. "The uses of the past. And in Venice, you see a lot of taking advantage of the past." Between taking advantage, and "making it new", there's a world of difference. Empathetic and interrogative in equal measure, Berendt has achieved a superb portrait of Venice.
But, for a brief period in the mid-1990s, it looked as if another city might become his fixation, his fascination, his second home, in the way that Savannah formerly had. He breathes a sigh of relief now that an initial flurry of interest did not put down roots. The city he had been considering, but eventually decided against, stands now more ravaged and more bereft of hope than a Venetian opera house ever could: it was, of course, New Orleans. "I did spend time there, and I do have friends there," he says quietly, "some of whom I can't find right now."
Those descriptions, in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, of Savannah before the preservation committees got to work - its noble squares and buildings desolate, downtrodden, "deserted and empty", leading one visitor to call it the "beautiful woman with a dirty face" - now have an eerie ring of prophecy to them. Even more pitifully, so too do the words of Jim Williams: "what's frightening is that while it was happening, nobody gave one goddamn".
Lots of people care, of course, about what has befallen New Orleans and other parts of the American South in the past month. Not everybody can turn away from visions of floating bodies, of elderly patients dying on sidewalks.
Berendt, you sense, is not easily angered; in conversation, as in his writing style, he is easy-going and restrained, and the trust he establishes with those who appear in his books is testimony to the patience with which he goes about things. Patience which can mean that a book takes 11 years to write.
However, he's capable of quick action, too, as he showed earlier this year after the controversial sacking of his editor, Ann Godoff, by Random House, due to lower-than-projected profits. Berendt quickly denounced the decision - on the front page of the New York Times - and followed Godoff to her new imprint, the Penguin Press. But if he was angry then, it is nothing on how he, and much of the rest of the US, feels about its government's response to the disaster in New Orleans. "I'm horrified," he says.
"I had not known of the danger to New Orleans, that it was below sea level. But that was well known to the people in authority, for a long time. It's just so upsetting. I did know it was a city predominantly of black and poor people, and of course they're the ones who are getting the brunt of this. They have nowhere to go. And the shooting and the looting . . . there's a reason for it. There are drug addicts remaining.
"And they are in a terrible situation. In awful pain, they've got to get a fix . . . these are people who are physically ill. But the money that could have been spent dealing with this terrible drug problem was lost to a tax break for rich people." He shakes his head; the massive sales of Midnight (2.5 million in hardback alone) and the advance for City of Falling Angels will earn him a healthy tax break this year, which he will, he says, "disperse" to those more in need of it.
For the next couple of months, Berendt's life will be all about Venice, as the publicity tour for the new book kicks off in earnest. But just as his accent sometimes veers toward the American South - a lengthened vowel, an almost-drawl - so too, you sense, part of his heart stays there. And it's sore right now.
The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt is published on Tuesday by Sceptre (£20)