Watermark by Joseph Brodsky

I finished I Married a Communist on a plane ride to North Carolina to visit my dad. I read Watermark on the return flight to Los Angeles. I learned of Brodsky’s book from an article about Venice that appeared in the New York Times at the end of January that called Brodsky’s book, the “bible of travelogues”. I looked for a copy at the library but there was a long waiting list. Jim, my librarian friend, told me waiting lists always happen when a book is mentioned favorably in the New York Times. I put the book on hold, then thinking I might want to own it, went ahead and bought a copy, which arrived, from England, a few days later and I canceled the library hold.

It is a gorgeous book. And Venice is a gorgeous, magical city. But the book isn’t actually much about Venice the city. Venice is rather the setting for Brodsky’s meditations on his experience of being there. He doesn’t describe San Marco. He doesn’t visit La Fenice or the museums. It’s a very personal travelogue, a memoir about Brodsky’s Venice, rather than a Venice that might be ours, which is no less interesting for that. There’s a story of Susan Sontag and the widow of Ezra Pound. There’s a story of an unnamed Venetian woman that Brodsky met when she visited his school while Brodsky was still a boy in St. Petersburg who he arranges to meet on his first visit, years later, to her city. All of his visits happen in winter because Brodsky dislikes the heat, and he travels when he’s on his five-week winter break from his University positions in America.

It’s a memoir about light, and water, and beauty. It’s a book about seeing, rather than sights. The structure is a series of short chapters. They follow each other haphazardly, sometimes leading one to another, sometimes stopping at dead ends, rather like the experience of wandering through Venice itself. There’s no attempt to distinguish what he says are his seventeen winter visits or place them in chronological order. I love this advice from Brodsky on writing, which he clearly follows himself, “What makes a narrative good is not the story itself but what follows what” (p. 38).

Brodsky was born in St. Petersburg, when it was still Leningrad, in 1940. He began writing poetry at an early age. In the 1960s his work as a poet began to receive negative notice from Soviet authorities leading to Brodsky being confined to a mental institution and then sentenced to a labor camp. He was released upon being defended by the likes of Sartre and Shostakovich and returned to St. Petersburg where he continued to write. He was finally pushed out of the Soviet Union in 1972 and emigrated to the United States, befriended by W. H. Auden, and others. Auden is mentioned a couple of time in Watermark. Brodsky took teaching positions at several American universities. In 1987 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In 1991 he was named the Poet Laureate of the United States. Watermark was published in 1993. He died, in Brooklyn, in 1996.

I had not read him before.