¶ In the Decameron, we come to the end of the Eighth Day, with the tale of Salabaetto, the gulled Florentine, and Jancofiore, the scheming Sicilian. Dioneo sexes up his tale with some very gratuitous lewdness involving slave girls and bathtubs, but in the end the wicked lady rues her misjudgment: Chi ha a far con tosco, non vuole esser losco, which McWilliam renders nicely as “Honesty’s the better line, when dealing with a Florentine.” (Note: tell Édouard about the Tuscan’s name.) (more…)

¶ Decameron VIII, ix shrieks more loudly for operatic treatment than any story so far. How can there not be a comic masterpiece called Bruno e Buffamalco? Then I remember the finale of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme, which sanitizes and perfumes Dr Simone’s “induction” by the “contessa di Civillari.” Still, I can hear the echoes of a rousing final chorus:

Così adunque, come udito avete, senno s’insegna a chi tanto non s’apparò a Bologna.

So now you have heard how wisdom is imparted to anyone who has not acquired much of it in Bologna.

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¶ In the Decameron, a short story between two much longer tales: the improbable, wife-swapping account of Zeppa’s “revenge,” upon discovering that his best friend, Spinelloccio, has been dandling his wife.

Zeppa having consented to this proposal, all four breakfasted together in perfect amity. And from that day forth, each of the ladies had two husbands, and each of the men had two wives, nor did this arrangement give rise to any argument or dispute between them.

What a totally adolescent fantasy.

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If I’m tardy today — too tardy to sip at Merrill — it’s because I wound up reading Boccaccio’s story of Rinieri the scholar aloud to Kathleen. Sleeping in and rousing late, she was nursing a cup of Kenya when I sat down to the Morning Read, and it seemed churlish not to read aloud, which entertained her so much that she didn’t start packing for Albany until long after she ought to have been out of the house. (more…)

A tad late today, perhaps. I lavished the morning on bits and pieces of household paperwork.  

¶ In the Decameron, VIII, vi, we have another Calandrino story. You remember the “simpleminded” painter, who thought he’d become invisible? He’s back, and so are his friends, who set him up to fail one of those religious oath tests that the medievals were so fond of. The whole tale has a good-ole-boy, Lone-Star quality that makes me wonder if “Tuscan” and “Texan” derive from the same root. Not. (more…)

A bit of cheating. I haven’t been reading this morning. I haven’t even been at home. My attempt to launch a truncated Morning Read yesterday came to nothing; having done the reading, I took a nap, and when I woke up there were too many pre-wedding matters to attend to to write anything up.

No Merrill and no Aubrey today. But I did finish the third quarter of the Decameron, and Book X of the Aeneid. Although I’ll be very proud of myself when I finish with Boccaccio (for the time being), I could go on reading his saucy tales forever. Virgil’s epic, on the contrary, can’t be done with soon enough. And although I’ll be glad to have done with the adventures, shambolically related, of Julien Sorel, I’ve ordered a copy of La chartreuse de Parme from Amazon in France. I bought my copy of Le rouge et le noir, which I’m finally reading for the first time in 2008, in 1973, but if I haven’t started with the other big Stendhal book within a fifth of that interval, I’ll give it the heave-ho. (more…)

It has been difficult to focus the Morning Read books this week, because the sunny zephyrs of spring — bearing bird songs that I thought I’d only heard in the country — have lit up the imminent prospect of my daughter’s marriage, which would have been something of a happy distraction in any case but which, thanks to the weather, is an overpowering delight. The strain makes the two most congenial books on the list stand out in relief, and they are the oldest and the newest, Boccaccio and James. (more…)

¶ In the Decameron, VIII, iii, a story funny enough to film, perhaps as a silent movie. Duped by his chums, Calandrino thinks that he has discovered stones of invisibility-granting heliotrope. He’s lovably loopy until he gets home, where he blames his he thinks sudden visibility on his wife and beats her up. It would be amusing to know the facts behind this anecdote. Calandrino, as the painter Nozzo di Perino was nicknamed, appears in three forthcoming tales as well. Nozzo’s simple-mindedness is presented as a kind of dim egoism. (more…)

¶ In the Decameron VIII, ii, a priest tricks a married woman more or less as the German soldier did in the last story — with the judicious use of witnesses, obliging the tricked party to return property. As the trickster is a priest, however, the accent is anticlerical and the jokes tinged with blasphemy. When the padre beds the wife, for example, he makes her “a kinswoman of the Lord God.”

¶ Much to my own surprise, I was so gripped with the exploits of Arcadian Pallas that I went ahead and read a second hundred lines, right through to his death. Hercules’ “lament”:

stat sua cuique dies, breve et inreparabile tempus
omnibus est vitae; sed famam extendere factis,
hoc virtutis opus…

¶ In Aubrey: Fleetwood, Foster, Florio, Fuller, Gascoigne, Graunt, Gellibrand, and Gill. Impenetralia from the last of these, about a schoolmaster fond of whipping:

This Dr Gill whipped Duncombe, who was not long after a colonel of dragoons at Edgehill-fight, taken pissing against the wall. He had his sword by his side, but the boys surprised him: somebody had thrown a stone in at the window; and they seized the first man they lighted on. I think his name was Sir John Duncombe (Sir John Denham told me the story), and he would have cut the doctor, but he never went abroad except to church, and then his army went with him. He complained to the council, but it became ridicule and his revenge sank.

Oh, well, you get the idea…

¶ From Merrill’s “River Poem”:

For although the old man, by the time we all went home,
Had moved away he stayed there wandering
Like a river-flower, thinking rivery things.

¶ In Le rouge et le noir, Julien goes to work on his very insincere seduction of the Maréchale de Fervaques. I have no idea what Stendhal is up to.

¶ Clive James on Raymond Aron: four pieces, all saying the same thing, but in a style quite at odds with the message. Aron’s tricky political positions, we’re told, are expressed in lucid, nuanced prose; but James seems to be stumbling through the terrain, defending his man from attacks that begin to seem chimerical. It were better to make the case for Aron before working so sweatily at dismantling the case against him. Lots of pot-shots at Sartre, of course, such as:

… Aron, unlike Sartre, had always been the kind of student who actually read the books…

¶ In the Decameron, a German soldier living in Milan is outraged when the lady he loves agrees to grant him her favors — for two hundred florins. “Quasi in odio trasmutò il fervente amore.” His scheme to beat her at her own game succeeds. The dishonor of the cuckholded husband is elided entirely, sunk in the “virtue” of the soldier’s trick, which gets him into the lady’s bed quite cost-free.

Is Boccaccio a pagan or a post-Augustinian? Stories such as this one (originally a French fabliau, and retold by Chaucer) make him seem nakedly pagan.

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¶ In the Decameron, a story worth waiting for: Dioneo, King of the Seventh Day, and clearly a young man who ought not to be allowed entry into respectable homes, is going to tell his tale, which ought to be a corker of marital trickery — ¶but wait! He begins with an apology, claiming that the tale he intended to tell has already been told. If it were anyone else, you just might believe him.

In a very sweet touch, the whole business is prefaced with a remark about the ladies’ “mourning” the “innocent pear tree” that was sacrificed in the previous story.) (more…)

¶ Decameron, VII, ix, is one of the nastier tales in Boccaccio’s dossier against aged husbands who take beautiful young wives. In this retelling of a Latin poem that Boccaccio had translated earlier, the action is shifted to Argos. The farther the setting from Florence, it seems, the more improbable the events. Lydia, the two-timing wife, plays Little Red Riding Hood to her old-wolf husband. “Goodness, what a rotten tooth you have, my dear! Let me extract it for you.” The tooth, perfectly healthy, is a trophy for the boyfriend. You’d think that that would be enough, but there follows some partridging-in-a-pear tree. I cast Isla Fisher as Lydia. (more…)

¶ In the Decameron, VII, viii, the unfaithful wife ties a string to her big toe. When her boyfriend tugs on the other end, below her window, she lets the string slip if she’s alone and the coast is clear. The husband discovers the string and sees instantly what it means, but because he’s a buffoonish merchant — un mercatantuzzo di feccia d’asino, according to his mother-in-law’s exuberant, Mamma-Mia stream of abuse — while his wife is an aristocratess, her clever duplicity wins the day, and Arrigruccio is left standing like a smemorato — like an idiot. (more…)

James Merrill or Wallace Stevens? I recall some loose talk about adding the latter’s Harmonium to the list, but Merrill’s Collected Poems has yet to be shelved. Reading the first two poems of First Poems, however, I find myself distracted by low-grade problems relating to the new computer. I shall have another go in the morning.

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¶ Decameron VII, vi reminds me of a painfully smutty joke that, among numerous others, signaled the end to what Freud called “latency.” The punchline was, “GODDAM IT, DING DONG!!!” But the wife in this story has two men on the side. (more…)

¶ Could it be that the reason why Decameron VII, v is not one of the famous ones, even though it is unusually clever and amusing (and that’s saying a lot, considering the company it keeps) is that neither the jealous husband nor his clever wife bears a name? The boy next door is called Filippo, but he is more of an appliance than a character — a tool that the wife uses to get back at the husband. I can’t help thinking that, if it had the handle of distinctive nomenclature, this tale would have inspired several operas. Or at least a play by Goldoni.  (more…)

¶ In the Decameron, VII, iv, Boccaccio once again strikes what seems to be “the moral of the story.” After the wife makes a fool out of her jealous husband, he has to win her back by promising to trust her in a different key, as it were. (more…)

Reading the rest of Fitt III of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I see that Fitt IV (the conclusion of the poem) is only seventeen pages long, if you ignore the facing original; so I shall read all of on Monday. On the following Monday, I’ll dip into James Merrill.
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As you can tell from the accompanying photo, I’m reading The Aeneid in Robert Fagles’s new rendering(Viking, 2006). But I find that, once I’m tripped into the Loeb Classic text of the original by something or other in the rendering that makes me wonder how Virgil put it, I tend to stay with H R Fairclough’s facing translation (in prose), first published in 1918. This is curious, because all previous attempts to get through the epic by relying on the Loeb edition alone have failed.   (more…)

Well, at least it’s still morning. Unlike yesterday…

Having written everything up, I scour my desk for stray bookmarks. I get so involved copying out passages &c that I too often close books without marking my place. Which is no great problem, as, thanks to this exercise, I always know where to pick up the next day; but it is very irritating to come back to the desk, having replaced the books in their pile in the bedroom, to find it littered with bookmarks. (more…)