Tuesday Morning Read
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.
¶ The Seventh Day of the Decameron is dedicated to stories about the tricks that wives have pulled on their husbands — whether or not they were, as McWilliam puts it, “found out.” VII, i is about a wife who claims that that late-knocking on the marital portal — she and her lovers have got their signals crossed — is a werewolf who, now that her husband will stand by her side, the woman has the courage to exorcise. Needless to say, her incantation is in reality a warning to her boyfriend. The story is thought to be so amusing that an alternative incantation is provided.
What caught my attention, though, was this bald line at the beginning:
Realizing that she had a nincompoop for a husband, she fell in love with Federigo di Neri Pegolotti, a handsome fellow in the full vigour of his youth, and he with her…
The mocking note is not struck in the original; nor is the causation so firm.
la quale, conoscendo la simplicità del martio, essendo innamorata di Federigo di Neri Pegolotti, il quale bello e fresco giovane era, ed egli di lei…
Note that McWilliam makes a complete sentence out of this. In the Italian, it’s knowing the simplicity of her husband, [and] being in love with Federigo, and he with her… McWilliam suggests that Monna Tessa falls in love with Federigo because her husband Gianni is a “nincompoop.” Boccaccio’s implication is more limited: because the husband is a simpleton, Monna Tessa sees how he can be fooled. She’s already in love.
Which of course makes it all right, no?
¶ King Turnus rouses his frightened troops by reminding them of the Trojans’ penchant for stirring up conjugal outrage. He sounds so authentically Roman that you wonder if this idea of Virgil’s wasn’t a gross miscalculation. Why would Augustus of all people wish to be descended from a pack of defeated adulterers?
¶ Aubrey: Batchcroft, Beaumont, Billingsley, Birkenhead, Birkhead, Blake, Blount, Bonner. Perhaps you can tell me what this sentence, from the Life of Birkenhead, might mean:
He had the art of remembering places; and his surroundings were the chambers in All Souls College (about 100), so that for a hundred errands he would easily remember.
The best of the lot (so far as Lives go) is Sir Henry Blount’s. Said to be “pretty wild when young,” Blount was also
a great shammer, i e one that tells falsities not to do anybody any injury, but to impose on their understanding: e g at Mr Farr’s: he said that at an inn (naming the sign) in St Albans, the innkeeper had made a hog’s trough of a free-stone coffin; but the pigs, after that, grew lean, dancing and skipping, and would run up on the tops of the houses like goats. Two young gentlemen that heard Sir H tell this so gravely, rode next day to St Albans to enquire; coming there, nobody had heard of any such thing, ’twas altogether false. The next night, as soon as they alighted, they came to the Rainbow, found Sir H, looked threateningly on him, and told him they wondered he was not ashamed to tell such stories. “Why, gentlemen,” said Sir H, “have you been there to make enquiry?” “Yea,” said they. “Why truly, gentlemen,” said Sir H, “I heard you tell strange things that I knew to be false. I would not have gone over the threshold to have caught you out lying:” at which all the company laughed at the two young gentlemen.
And the following bit of advice is unlikely to have made its way into Mrs Beeton:
He was wont to say that he did not care to have his servants go to church, for there servants infected one another to go to the alehouse and learn debauchery; but he did bid them go to see the executions at Tyburn, which work more upon them than all the oratory in the sermons.
¶ In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I read the first several hundred lines of Fitt III with uneasy incomprehension. While the master is out hunting, Gawain is accosted in his bed by the lady of the manor. He fences with her and keeps, so to speak, his pants on; but at the end she coaxes a kiss from him. It seems chaste enough, but the stanza ends mystifyingly.
Then they courteously commend one another to Christ,
and without one more word the woman is away.
He leaps from where he lies at a heck of a lick,
calls for his chamberlain, chooses his clothes,
makes himself ready then marches off to mass.
Then he went to a meal which was made and waiting,
and was merry and amused till the moon had silvered
                       the view.
             No man felt more at home
             Tucked in between those two,
             The cute one and the crone.
             Their gladness grew and grew.
Hmm…
¶ In Le rouge et le noir, Julien seems equally determined not to be made a fool of — about half the time, anyway. Mathilde, you’ll recall, has instructed him to climb up the garden latter to her bedroom at one in the morning, full moon and all. The chapter in which Julien agonizes between cynical doubt — he hardly knows which to dread more, the torture to which the marquis’s servants will subject him after they drag him away from the complicit girl’s chamber, or the scandalous tales of his dishonor that will rock Paris thereafter — and a horror of seeming cowardly by not showing up. It’s funny and grim at the same time, and one wishes, not for the first time, that Berlioz had worked up an opera out of all this.
¶ Clive James on Paul Valéry: two brief pieces, both of them about the creation of poetry. First, James takes up a point of honor that we’ve already encountered in Mathilde de La Mole: is it all right for the poet to jot down a great line when it comes to him, and save it up for a poem that, later on, may or may not come to him? James, quite predictably, sees nothing wrong with this, and he cites a line that Philip Larkin, it seems, never managed to use: “dead leaves desert in thousands.” I have jumped past wondering why I don’t really think much of Larkin’s verse to wondering why he wasn’t taught when I was in school. I’m sure he’s taught today.
The second piece is about the cloudy congress of inspiration and perspiration that provides the ideal climate for artistic creation — what Valéry called “la régime d’execution.” The essay takes off, at the end, with a welcome thought about women and the arts.
Baudelaire, seeing Victor Hugo taking a walk along the boulevard, correctly deduced from Hugo’s rhythmic gait that he was polishing alexandrines in his head. From all the testimony we have been given by the poets about themselves and about each other, the common theme which emerges is that everything else must be laid aside in the last phase, when the thing is integrating itself. This could be the reason women’s poetry is on the whole a comparatively recent event in history. It used to be very hard for women to lay everything else aside. Unlike men, women were not allowed to be hard to live with. Poets have traditionally been hard to live with, and the tradition will probably continue. At the very moment when a poet is working hardest in his head, he looks exactly as if he isn’t working at all. On the face of it, it’s the ideal moment for asking him to do something useful. The answer is unlikely to be diplomatic, and probably wasn’t even from such a smooth operator as Valéry.
I can’t help thinking, though, why it is much more agreeable to polish off alexandrines while walking than blank verse. Alexandrines, like human beings and unlike lines of iambic pentameter, after all, have an even number of feet.