Friday Morning Read
¶ 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.
¶ In the Aeneid, Jupiter declares his impartiality: Trojans, Italians, sauve qui peut.
               rex Juppiter omnibus idem;
fata viam invenient.
At our next read, we’ll be treated to another parade of worthies.
¶ In Aubrey, the three Digbys: Everard (father), Kenelm (son), and Venetia (Kenelm’s wife, and a great beauty). Kenelm Digby — well, first of all, there’s his name. Second, he was, as Aubrey arrestingly calls him, “magazine of arts.” Pirate, peacock, and scholar, he spent at least a thousand pounds commissioning a stupendous manuscript in which were collected all the illustriousnesses of his lineage; this was the only thing that his son, John, with whom he had a falling-out, inherited from him. Venetia Stanley — how strange is this? — lived again, in the person of Arthur Balfour’s “friend.”
¶ Merrill: From “The Flint Eye,”
She watched as though her eyes of artifact
In a profound age had from darkness cut
Clean diagrams in vaults of perfect rock
That no air dampens. Luminous in these schools
Language is glittering of flint rituals
And a race of sober children learns long smiles.
The whole stanza (and, in particular, “Luminous in these schools’) could be Stevens; only Stevens would not have inverted the syntax in “had from darkness cut.” From “Medusa,”
The snake-haired head with overturned eyeballs,
Being all our summer’s pleasure, has become
Our mouldering autumn;
“Accumulations of the Sea” is a very beautiful poem about Nice People at the seaside.
                             They touch clam-shells
Perhaps, or tangled plants or a blind stone,
Then plummet upward, leap half out of the sea
To greet with waterfall eyes the gentle air;And swim to shore, trampling on wind and waves,
And gaze upon the surface of the sea,
And turning, wring the water from their hair
And rub the cold from their cold eyes and bodies.
“Bodies” seems slippery and awkward there, the feminine ending encrypting a second glance.
¶ In Le rouge et le noir, Julien is dispatched to Mainz. At Metz, he is delayed by the innkeeper in a manner reminiscent of the “nuit de Varennes.” Of the aristocratic conspirators to whom he serves as amanuensis, Julien remarks (to himself, bien sûr) on their “incroyable naïveté“:
— Ces gens-ci me feront empoisonner… Comment dit-on de telles choses devant un plébéien?
¶ Clive James on Anna Akhmatova — what? you thought I was through? Well, if I didn’t like Cultural Amnesia so much, I would be; but as it happened I began, so characteristically, to read this book in the middle — the letter H to be exact. So there’s still quite a bit to read. Akhmatova drew an unlikely lifetime for one of her beauty and originality. The suggestion is strong that, although, as James says, she was not allowed to function as a poet by the Soviets, she was transformed by the crucible from a first-rate critic into a monument to the martyrs.
Akhmatova also occasions a robust premiere for one of this book’s most curious tropes, James’s recollections of the foreign-language books that he has acquired over the years, largely in out-of-the-way places. What’s curious is the dim echo of Aubrey.