A friend wrote to me yesterday to say that she admired my discipline in getting through all of the Decameron, something that in fact had not happened before today. But discipline had nothing to do with it. Rather it was a case of giving myself permission to devote the latter part of three or four mornings a week to several pages of a few books each — in its way, the height of luxury. You cannot be spoiled by intellectual luxury so long as your appreciation of the pleasure is keen. The trick is not to press it, not to suffer diligence to decay into effort. (more…)

¶ Decameron X, ix, the penultimate story in the collection, is the first to strike me as thoroughly appropriate reading material for children. Messer Torello of Pavia (a man of wealth but not an aristocrat) and Saladin (touring the West, disguised as a Cypriot merchant, in order to take the measure of his impending adversaries in the Third Crusade), indulge in an orgy of potlatch. The nature of the generosity that motivates their barrage of gift-giving strikes us as oddly impersonal at first, only to become oddly personal: the men become dear friends because they’ve given each other so many lovely presents.

So Saladin enfolded him tenderly in his arms, kissed him, and, weeping copiously, bid him God-speed and withdrew.

It’s almost creepy. Torello is transported back to his native Pavia on a wondrous bed, but instead of materializing in his town house it shows up in the cathedral!

The most interesting detail is Saladin’s recognition that Torello, although a “knight” (cavalier), is “no prince, but a private citizen” (cittadino e non signore). My Italian text glosses this distinction for modern readers as “un privato, non un feudatorio.” By Boccaccio’s day, the replacement by the bourgeoisie of the aristocracy was already well underway.

¶ Clive James is extremely interesting about Sigmund Freud: how Freud’s intensely secular outlook blinded him to the horrific potential of Nazism.

He never grasped that Nazi destructiveness was a complete mind in itself. Surely he was the victim of his own poetry, which was so vivid that he took it to be a map of reality. From the realm of the human spirit he had banished God and the Devil, and replaced them with a family of contending deities bearing proud Greek names. They were household gods: aided by judicious therapy, they would one way or another always reach an accommodation, in a world where people like his old sisters, even if they were not happy, would die in bed. But the Devil came back. The Devil had never been away.

James is almost scathing about “Thanatos,” the supposed death-wish.

Thanatos was no gentleman, and he came not to rescue minds from their torments, but to torment bodies until minds collapsed. Thanatos was a raving maniac, not a mental principle. How was it that Freud, of all people, could not foresee this?

James’s answer to that question is that Freud’s focus was too fixed upon the individual ego: “The real psychodrama was too big for him to see.”

¶ In the Decameron, we’re served a Ciceronian oration on that dearest of antique topics, friedship. In other words, Boccaccio couches his story in terms of what ought to happen, and not of what usually does. Gisippus, an Athenian, is betrothed to Sophronia, but his college roommate (so to speak) and boon companion, the Roman Titus, conceives such a passionate longing for Sophronia that Gisippus simply hands the girl over to him after the wedding feast.*

I should perhaps not be so generous, if wives were so scarce and difficult to find as friends, but since I can find another wife, but not another friend, with the greatest of ease, I prefer, rather than to lose you, not to lose her exactly, but as it were to transfer her.

If this story (X, viii) were at all representative of the whole collection, none but scholars would read the Decameron. I expect that the original breathes the very best Italian going, but I’m not competent to judge.

¶ You never know where Clive James is going to go. His long piece about Fitzgerald is such an interesting meditation on style and influence** that it seemed perverse not to keep reading when I turned the page to the much shorter piece on Flaubert. This latter, however, turns out to have nothing to do with writing as such. Instead it focuses on another pet theme: the mad wickedness of totalitarian régimes. What’s Flaubert got to do with that, you may ask. Well, in one of his letters (not one of the ones addressed to George Sand), Flaubert posits an era of secular toleration that stretched “from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius.” This passage, in turn, has attracted the attention of Unamuno and Vidal, two gold-standard mistrusters of the religious impulse. Presently James is fretting about the extremism of “moderate” Islamic opinion. A whirlwind in two pages!

* Boccaccio is canonically correct — for his time, anyway — in placing the wedding ceremony in the bridal chamber, when Titus and Sophronia are alone, and they exchange vows. Later, when Sophronia is understandably sore about having been tricked on her wedding night, Titus rather scrupulously chides her for having failed to ask him who he was.

** James believes that Fitzgerald was born writing the way he did, that influence played little or no role in his development.

The end is nigh — for this round of books. Three stories in the Decameron, six pieces in Cultural Amnesia (Edward Gibbon is where I came in, so Charles de Gaulle is my exit), and not much more of James Merrill’s A Scattering of Salts or John Aubrey’s Brief Lives.

To be so close to the close of the Decameron makes me feel rather like the Bold Lover on Keats’s Urn.

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¶ Decameron X, vi, which tells the story of Messer Neri and King Charles of Sicily, sounds a lascivious note.

On seeing that the fish had been cooked, the girls emerged from the pool, their fishing done, with their thin white dresses clinging to their flesh so as to conceal almost nothing of their dainty bodies. And having taken up each of the things they had brought with them, they walked shyly past the King and made their way back into the house. (more…)

It’s too hot to read Aubrey. Ditto Merrill — or verse of any kind. So:

¶ Decameron X, v disappoints on two fronts. First, it depends on a magic act, which is very unusual in this collection. A magician causes a garden to bloom in Dolomitic Friuli in January. He’s hired to do this by a grandee who wants to win the affection of a married woman; she has proposed the stunt thinking it to be impossible. The moral, spelled out by her husband, is “don’t barter” with would-be lovers. If I were more industrious, I would enumerate the other stories in the Decameron that flaunt this precept. IX, i comes straight to mind.

Second, the orgy of liberality at the end of X, v is unpersuasively excessive. Why, the magician won’t even take his fee!

¶ Clive James on Duke Ellington: It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing. James shows that Ellington didn’t follow this advice himself, but kept trying to write earnest, “symphonic” jazz. About Coltrane, James is almost savage.

There is not a phrase that asks to be remembered except as a lesion to the inner ear, and the only purpose of the repetitions is to prove that what might have been charitably dismissed as an accident was actually meant. Shapelessness and incoherence are treated as ideals. Above all, and beyond all, there is no end to it. There is no reason except imminent death for the cacophonous parade to stop, a fact which steadily confirms the listener’s impression that there was no reason for it to start.

James astutely notes that the Twentieth-Century’s general disapproval of pleasing art was intensified in the world of jazz, and given great political force, by the determination of black musicians not to be condescended to by grateful audiences.

¶ Decameron X, iv is very much a young person’s tale. Don’t you remember those college bull sessions — do they still call them bull sessions? — in which someone would propose a fantastically unlikely, but nevertheless very catchy, hypothetical situation, so that everyone could chew over that most important of youthful questions, “What would you do?”

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¶ In the Decameron, X, iii, the story of Nathan and Mithridanes, is the one that I would urge everyone to read, not so much because it’s a “good story” as because it casts a  beautiful light on bygone mores. Again, as in X, i, the longing for recognition is praised as a sign of noble character, even though — this time — the fame-seeker seeks to murder the gentleman whose reputation he would outshine. (more…)

¶ In the Decameron, a sort-of Robin Hood story, involving a brigand and the Abbott of Cluny. Did I say “brigand”? Ghino di Tacco comes off as a Mafia don. As for the Abbott, I remember him: he appears in I, vii.

On the whole, I find Boccaccio’s anecdotes from real life to be somewhat disappointing. I much prefer the tales that, even by Boccaccio’s day, had been handled to a fineness. (more…)

¶ Neifile begins the Tenth Day of the Decameron with a story about that earliest of life’s discontents: wanting something just because other people have it. Ruggieri de’ Figiovanni, a Florentine knight, sojourns at the court of the King of Spain. He has no intention of becoming a Spaniard himself, but he resents the King’s liberal handing out of castles and estates to men less illustrious than himself. Interestingly, the story rewards the longing for recognition that underlies Ruggieri’s discontent. Whether canny or sincere, Boccaccio takes pains to appeal to aristocratic readers. (more…)

As I glance over the last ten stories in the Decameron, I’m tempted to cover them in five days: the first four in one, then the next three, and a day for each of the last stories, which are on the long side. Within the end so near at hand, I want to run for it. And yet… I shall miss this daily companion. We shall see. (more…)

¶ In the Decameron, IX, ix, the taming of the shrew — an unseasonable tale. Queen-for-a-day Emilia prefaces her story with an exhortation to women to submit to their husbands that is but a prose version of the lyrics to the final song in Kiss Me, Kate. This philosophy would be significant if the women who spouted it were not speaking words written by men.

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¶ In the Decameron, IX, viii, another anecdote that, more than most of Boccaccio’s occasional reports of everyday retaliation, smacks of “you had to be there.” Duped by the promise of a delicious meal, Ciacco the glutton avenges himself by setting up Biondello for a beating at the hands of an ill-tempered wine merchant, Messer Filippo. The anecdote hangs on an inappropriately familiar use of slang. Oddly, given the comprehensiveness of his notes overall, McWilliam nods here, and I had to turn to the notes in the Italian text for a little enlightenment. Like I knew what I was doing. (more…)

¶ In the Decameron (IX, vii), a shrewish wife ignores her husband’s foreboding dream, takes a walk in the woods, and is disfigured by an attacking wolf. The moral of the story, although coated with misogyny, is sound: don’t go out of your way not to take good advice. Although it can’t be easy to take advice that begins:

“Donna, ancora che la tua ritrosia non abbia mai sofferto che io abbia potuto avere un buon dì con teco…“

“Woman, your cussedness has been the bane of my life since the day we were married…”

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I did a bit of counting yesterday: I had fifteen more stories in the Decameron, and eighteen brief lives in Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia. In three to five weeks, then, only two of the six books in the photo will remain unread — and I have no intention of reading all of James Merrill at one go. The new lineup (which will probably take me until Spring ’09) will include Moby-Dick, Don Quixote, and The Anatomy of Melancholy. The “French novel” slot will be filled by Georges Bernanos’s Journal d’un curé de campagne.

“Are you crazy?” I asked myself, about the combination of Melville and Cervantes. But it’s not a combination so much as a juxtaposition. The two epics share the same basic story.

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¶ Le rouge et le noir — fini. And what a shambolic finale! Whole chapters of attitude and reflection compressed into paragraphs of two sentences. Mathilde de La Môle decays into drama queenery before our eyes. Julien stoic, Julien pathetic — Julien, revolted by “le mauvais air du cachot,” cracking jokes worthy of Woody Allen:

Le pire des malheurs en prison, pensa-t-il, c’est de ne pouvoir fermer sa porte.

This novel is great fun, but even greater fun to have done with. (more…)

¶ In the Decameron (IX, iv), an anecdote rather than a tale, involving actual Siense gentlmen, contemporaries of Dante: the two Cecchi, very dissimilar men who were united only in their given names and their hatred of their fathers. The story will put readers of a certain vintage in mind of Eddie Haskell.

¶ In Aubrey, two Lives: Ben Jonson and Ralph Kettell. The second gent, who served as the second President of Trinity College, garners quite a few more pages than rare Ben does. Of the latter’s celebrated career, Aubrey write “I need not give any account.” Whereas Kettell, who would have been lost to time, emerges very clearly as a sort of gangly Monty Woolley, born at forty, more able administrator than scholar — an amiable loose-leaf with regard to everything but discipline. And the quality of the beer at Trinity, which was so excellent that the scholars “could not go to any other place but for the worse.” Surely another college president must have given Kettell’s theory about excellent beer a try — surely?

¶ Returning to Merrill, dipping into the “Previously Uncollected Poems” at the back of the book. From “En Route”:

Tank dry, this eerie, by now selfless power

Was bearing me beyond
The windblown kids with signs
Upheld in hope: New Haven, Providence …
Their mouths worked. But a wand
Had grazed me. On I drove
Under the curse or blessing of no love.

¶ In Le rouge et le noir, I gallop through the final titled chapters toward the finale. That leaves four to which Stendhal couldn’t be bothered to affix titles. Once I’ve done with them — I already know what’s going to happen — I shall read the introductory material with hopeful interest, in search of an explanation for Stendhal’s manifestly fading interest in this project. Could it have been the tumult of the Revolution of 1830, which replaced one branch of Bourbons with the other? More anon …

¶ Clive James, rather briefly, on Nirad Chaudhuri, according to him the “most distinguished” Indian master of English prose. I have added Chaudhuri’s The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian to my reading list.

Chaudhuri’s prescience was about a future that had not yet happened, and is happening only now. By the mere act of writing such a richly reflective prose, he suggested that a civilization continues through the humane examination of its history, which was its real secret all along.

Quis mihi nunc tot acerba deus, quis carmine caedes
diversas obitumque ducum, quos aequore toto
inque vicem nunc Turnus agit, nunc Troius heros, expediat?

Now what god can unfold for me so many terrors?
Who can make a song of slaughter in all its forms —
the deaths of captains down the entire field,
dealt now by Turnus, now by Aeneas, kill for kill?

¶ Done. I have finished, forever, with the Aeneid. Or perhaps I have just begun. Virgil’s elegant Latin is but the silver husk of the grisliest barbarity. Not once in this epic have the ends of war been justified — much less the means! If this disgusting bloodlust is an inescapable part of our human nature — and I do not believe that it is; rather, it is an aristocratic affectation — then we can do the universe no swifter favor than immolating our human race in a final holocaust. (more…)

¶ In the Decameron, more rather unsophisticated humor. Rushing off to scold the beautiful nun who has been caught with a handsome young man in her room, the abbess gropes in the dark for her veils but instead dons the breeches of the priest who is visiting her. Now, I’d like to see that get past the censors in today’s Hollywood — and don’t think that there aren’t any!
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¶ The Ninth Day of the Decameron begins with a Laurel-and-Hardy prototype, as two Florentines, unknown to one another, are charged with a very unpleasant task by the lady from Pistoia whom they both admire but who wishes to be rid of their “importunities.” If the story is not Boccaccio’s most successful, that is because its blend of comedy and Gothic horror no longer emulsifies. It’s not that we can’t have fun with dead bodies anymore — just think what Boccaccio might have done with the recent tale of Virgilio Cintron. But, perhaps because romantic comedy has come to be our foremost celebration of life, we find the odor of death unpleasantly incongruous. By our lights, the lady from Pistoia’s plot is in very poor taste. (more…)