Dante in Love

by A. N. Wilson

  Another essentially nineteenth-century Dante emerged from the pages of Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, one of the few works of contemporary literature admired by Burckhardt’s colleague at Basel University (though they were never friends), Friedrich Nietzsche. Born in Basel in 1818, Burckhardt studied in Berlin under the philologist Jacob Grimm and the historian of the Popes, Leopold von Ranke, both legendary German synthesists, capable in their vast canvas of painting huge catch-all collective portraits of humanity. Burckhardt became fired with the idea of writing a monumental history of the Middle Ages in a series of linked monographs, beginning with one on Constantine the Great and ending with the Renaissance. But when still only forty-two, having returned to Basel from an Italian tour and taken up a teaching post at the university, he published his radiant The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. It is not an encyclopaedic ‘Germanic’ work, but a collection of superbly alert reflections. He illuminates every subject he touches, but we long for fuller accounts. Dante is mentioned in a very few enlightening pages. If Burckhardt’s book had a central idea, it was that the political circumstances of the Italian cities in the Middle Ages made them the ideal fertile ground for a Renaissance. The wealth of the cities enabled a detachment of ‘Church and State’ which was not possible in the Byzantine or Muslim cultures. In such an environment, the individual could flourish. One sees this clearly as a very ‘free market’, anti-Marxian viewpoint, and perhaps it was appropriate that it was a view that came from Switzerland, the land of banks. When Burckhardt wrote, it was not known that Dante’s own father had practised as a banker or moneylender, a Florentine equivalent of a ‘gnome of Zurich’. And as far as Dante himself was concerned, the beginnings of capitalism which he saw in the power of the florin were the undoing of the Good Old Days, lamented by his ancestor Cacciaguida. Nevertheless, Burckhardt’s picture of the Italian Renaissance as the cradle of individualism has great plausibility, as well as imaginative appeal. He also believed that the cruel system of banishment threw artists and thinkers upon themselves and gave them, whether sought or not, the leisure to become individuals. (‘Among these men of involuntary leisure we find, for instance, an Agnolo Pandolfini (d. 1446) whose work on domestic economy is the first complete programme of a developed private life.’27) Burckhardt’s Dante is above all the poet of the private life, the man who has absorbed the whole world into his own soul. He applies to Dante the saying of Ghiberti in his autobiography – ‘only he who has learned everything is nowhere a stranger’:

  Dante, who, even in his lifetime, was called by some a poet, by others a philosopher, by others a theologian, pours forth in all his writings a stream of personal force by which the reader, apart from the interest of the subject, feels himself carried away. What power of will must the steady, unbroken elaboration of The Divine Comedy have acquired! And if we look at the matter of the poem, we find that in the whole spiritual or physical world there is hardly an important subject that the poet has not fathomed, and on which his utterances – often only a few words – are not the most weighty of his time.28

  Burckhardt’s book, published in Basel, made almost no impact upon its first appearance. In 1868, the year that Nietzsche came to teach at Basel, the Swiss publisher sold the remainders and rights to a German publisher, who printed a further 1,600 copies. It took him five years to sell them. Burckhardt had sold the rights, so when his book became a classic, read all over Europe, he received not one Swiss franc.

  The fate of Dante in the twentieth century was stranger than his Victorian incarnation. Nationalism for the Victorians was a liberal cause, and the Victorian Dante appealed to liberal nationalists such as Mazzini, Cavour and Garibaldi. In the twentieth century, the Dante who had sought salvation in the person of Henry VII became a Dante who would have, or might have, or should have, been a Fascist sympathizer.

  And then again, speaking just of his purely literary legacy, for the Victorians he had been the poet of the inner life, the champion of individualism. For the twentieth-century modernists, he was the preserver of a common culture.

  The two great modernist poets in English, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, were both – slightly disastrously for Dante’s later reputation – determined to read him both as a proto-fascist and as a proto-modernist. He was neither, of course, though we can see that neither Eliot nor Pound would have been the poets they became without Dante. Both drew out of him things which are certainly there but which, in a modern context, could enjoy a potentially dangerous life of their own.

  It would be a mistake to attempt to paraphrase what Dante achieved in his Paradiso. The best commentary in English which I know is not to be found in the endnotes of the learned editions of the poem, but in the allusions to, and imitations of, Dante which are to found in the poetry of T. S. Eliot. It is clear that Eliot, unusually among readers of the Comedy, was especially drawn to the Paradiso and to the wonder that it accomplishes. He came across Dante when he was a student at Harvard.

  In New England they decided the culture needed an epic and elected Dante’s. Longfellow commenced to profess the Comedy in 1836. Though Margaret Fuller disapproved because Dante was high and transcendental and not for classrooms, James Russell Lowell continued the practice at Harvard after 1855, Charles Eliot Norton after 1877, Charles Hall Grandgent after 1896. The students plunged in with or without Italian grammar. In this tradition, T. S. Eliot puzzled out the meaning with the help of the Temple Classics crib, and used to recite aloud whole cantos of the Paradiso he did not know how to pronounce, ‘lying in bed or on a railway journey’, say from Cambridge home to St Louis’.29 When he went to England, the Temple Classics Dante accompanied him. Even before he committed himself to Christianity, he echoes the Paradiso in his skittish (published in Poems, 1920) ‘A Cooking Egg’. It is a cruel poem of rejection. He is going to drop his girlfriend Pipit, with her limited, middle-class grandfather and great-great-aunts:

  I shall not want Society in Heaven,

  Lucretia Borgia shall be my Bride;

  Her anecdotes will be more amusing

  Than Pipit’s experience could provide.

  Eliot’s imagination is preparing, however, for conversion. He, or the persona of the poem, laments the innocence of an earlier love he possessed for Pipit, the ‘penny world’ he bought for her behind a screen in a teashop. It is a North London suburban version of Dante’s own experience of glorifying a childhood love. But whereas Dante had lived through the experience of loving Beatrice, idealizing Beatrice, replacing her with the Donna Gentile, and then re-enthroning her in Heaven, the author of ‘A Cooking Egg’ can only live with his disillusionment: ‘Where are the eagles and the trumpets?’

  He makes a joke, in this pre-Christian poem, of the consolations of Heaven. He associates them with the mumbo-jumbo of the Theosophist quack Madame Blavatsky. Nevertheless, he can’t help being drawn to the figure of Piccarda de’ Donati, Dante’s childhood friend who teaches Dante the poet-pilgrim that it is in God’s will that we find our peace:

  I shall not want Pipit in Heaven:

  Madame Blavatsky will instruct me

  In the Seven Sacred Trances;

  Piccarda de Donati will conduct me.30

  In his serious poem of Christian Conversion, ‘Ash-Wednesday’, Eliot again returned to the figure of Piccarda and her teaching that ‘e ’n la sua volontade è nostra pace’. He mingles the words of the Christian prayer the Anima Christi, in which the soul pleads that it will never be separated from Christ, with Piccarda’s utterance to Dante in Heaven, and as Christendom prays to the Virgin Mary:

  Teach us to care and not to care

  Teach us to sit still

  Even among these rocks,

  Our peace in His will

  And even among these rocks

  Sister, mother

  And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,

  Suffer me not to be separated

  And let my cry come unto Thee.31

  ‘Ash-Wednesd
ay’ was a poem of conversion. In the established poems of faith in the Four Quartets, Eliot again returned to Dante’s Paradiso. After they have passed from the Primum Mobile, Beatrice leads Dante into the Empyrean itself. There they, and we, witness, an extraordinary vision of light and fire, blazing with Divine Love and the mystic snow-white Rose, which is both an emblem of the Blessed Virgin and a rose-shaped circle of the Redeemed who dance in an ecstatic yet ordered joy, around which the angels swarm like delighted bees. Eliot, more than any commentator or imitator known to me, captures this extraordinary moment in the Paradiso, Canto XXXI, with his tightly impassioned lyric in the fourth part of Little Gidding:

  Who then devised the torment? Love.

  Love is the unfamiliar Name

  Behind the hands that wove

  The intolerable shirt of flame

  Which human power cannot remove.

  We only live, only suspire

  Consumed by either fire or fire.32

  Eliot had achieved, by allusion to Dante, what had perhaps, by that date in history, become a near-impossibility: that is, a vision of Heaven in contemporary language. Christianity was no longer part of the Common Tongue. When Dante wrote, it still was.

  But it was Pound whom Eliot called ‘the Dante to his age’.33 Pound was certainly self-consciously Dantean in his poetry, especially in the Cantos, but in his love of Imperial Rome, his belief in authority, his obsession with the ills of usury, Pound’s Dantism led him into trouble – led him, indeed, to be locked in the cage at Pisa and threatened with execution by his fellow-Americans. The cage was a bit of theatre, designed to show the world, and Pound’s fellow-Americans, what the US military, who had arrested him in Italy, thought of his notorious wartime broadcasts, in which he had extolled the merits of Fascism, uttered vulgar anti-Semitic abuse, and tried to convince American radio audiences that ‘A thousand years of European thought went to making what is best in life as we know it; or as we had known it before the last two outbreaks of bellicosity… Europe is fighting for the good life. The shysters are fighting to prevent it.’34

  Pound, a towering figure of twentieth-century poetry in the English language, presents his admirers with a number of paradoxes difficult indeed to absorb. He was extraordinarily generous – seeing not merely the virtues of the young Eliot, but also those of Robert Frost, Basil Bunting and hosts of others. When Hemingway met him he felt he was in the presence of a ‘sort of saint’. Yet you cannot read Pound’s Cantos, with their frequent denunciations of ‘usuary’ and their unveiled denunciations of the Jews, without thinking that the vulgarian rabble-rouser who delivered the wartime broadcasts and the great author of the Cantos were one and the same, very strange man.

  Pound’s admiration for Dante did the Italian medieval poet no good at all. True, the later Cantos appear to put Fascism behind him, and to extend his interest more and more frequently into the traditions of Confucianism and Buddhism, but refer with ever greater frequency to Dante’s Paradiso. Readers of the Cantos, especially academic readers, have tried to make of them an organized Comedy. The commentary, by contrast, which the Cantos appear to be making on the Comedy is that there can never be another Dante, our cultural (Kulchural?) experiences will henceforth only ever come to us piecemeal. We have outlived the age of the Summa, the catch-all. Anyone setting out to build a Gothic cathedral today would end up only, however magnificent the result,35 achieving a pastiche.

  A Dantean pastiche would be a waste of paper. The Cantos are the greatest tribute to Dante which avoid direct imitation. They alert us to the dangers, as modern people, of attempting to understand Dante. The great European mainstream, the Canon, which began with the troubadours of Provence, died with the Pound generation. There is no common Kulchur to which we can all respond. Dante is locked away behind the wall which separates us all, however cultivated we may be, from that lost world. But although we cannot read him whole or understand him as a contemporary understood him, the experience of reading Dante remains one of the most nourishing, and puzzling, and endlessly exciting of which a literate person is capable.

  Since the Pound generation, there has been a renaissance of Dante translation and Dante scholarship. The British Library catalogue contains over 8,000 publications on Dante and a great proportion of these are modern academic monographs. My own book would have been impossible to write without them, and yet it has been inhibited by them in two ways. First, I have asked myself whether I dared venture into print on a subject until I had read, if not all, then at least much of the secondary material now available. Secondly, I have been frequently intimidated into believing that the study of Dante requires skills in so many areas of expertise that I am unequal to the task. As in other areas of academic life, the bulk of learned commentary and exposition has left the unfortunate impression that the subject in question is only for the ‘experts’. One very welcome development in Dante scholarship which has led to an opposite tendency, however, is the extraordinary surge, in the last forty years, of admirable translations of Dante’s Comedy into English. Among the great modern poets who have used Dante in their work, or translated from him directly, one could mention Robert Lowell, who read, and re-read and translated from the Purgatorio throughout his career. His poem, ‘The Soldier’, written in 1950, is typical:

  In time of war you could not save your skin.

  Where is that Ghibelline whom Dante met

  On Purgatory’s doorstep, without kin

  To set up chantries for his God-held debt?36

  Amy Clampitt is another modern American poet who has both translated from Dante and used him in her own work, where the Greyhound bus and the greyhound met at the beginning of the Inferno wittily juxtapose one another in her poem ‘At a rest stop in Ohio’. Derek Walcott, for many the most impressive English-language poet alive today, wrote: ‘I happen to have been born in an English and a Creole place, and love both languages… It is mine to do what other poets before me did, Dante, Chaucer, Villon, Burns, which is to fuse the noble and the common language, the streets and the law courts, in a tone that is true to my own voice, in which both accents are heard naturally.’37 There are allusions to Dante in Walcott’s impressive long poem Omeros. In much of Geoffrey Hill’s recent output, Dante has played a large role.

  Reading Dante in a mood of angry dislike

  for my fellow sufferers and for myself

  that I dislike them.38

  These examples are quoted from a modern compilation entitled Dante in English, an excellent introduction to the relationship between Dante and English readers, from Chaucer to the present day. We go on reading Dante. Poets go on experiencing their own poetic journey through him.

  We are lucky to live in a period of rich Dantean translation into English. It remains true that the best way for an English-speaker to read Dante is in a parallel text. Many of us began with the small blue Temple Classics texts, with Dante on one side of the page and an English translation facing. Penguin Books has recently published a superb edition of the Comedy in three volumes, with Italian and English facing texts, explanatory notes and introduction. The notes and translation are by the poet and scholar Robin Kirkpatrick. An alternative is to buy a copy of the Comedy in Italian. Dante wrote a clear and simple Italian which it does not take you long to master. But if the prospect of reading a foreign text is daunting, there remain, in addition to Robin Fitzpatrick’s, many superb English versions on the market. The new Everyman Library has a particularly appealing one-volume version, with Botticelli’s line illustrations, and a version, which I consider excellent, by Allen Mandelbaum. Robert Pinsky, Poet Laureate of the USA since 1997, has produced a superb parallel text edition published by Farrar Straus & Giroux, and, published by W. W. Norton, there is a commendable and extremely accessible English-language version in terza rima by John Ciardi – known to many in the US as a children’s author and presenter of a TV arts programme. There is also an excellent version by Mark Musa, published in Penguin. And for sheer liveliness, combined with a
ccuracy and closeness to the text, it would be hard to rival the version, published first by Hesperus Press and currently by Oneworld Classics, in England, of J. G. Nichols, who, with Anthony Mortimer, has also produced a superb version of Dante’s other poems, Rime. These translators have all contributed to Dante’s liberation from his admirers and interpreters. His incarnation as the favourite poet, at first of the Victorians, and then of the right-wing twentieth-century modernists, burdened him with a weight which we in the twenty-first century were not prepared to absorb. Meanwhile, we, as readers, continue to lead our own lives and find (those of us who read him) that Dante still speaks about our fundamental concerns. The chaos and consolations of Love matter as much to us as they did to him. The relations between religious faith and public discourse might have seemed, a generation ago, as if they had gone away. But since the arrival of the ‘War on Terror’, religion is no longer confined to the history books, whatever we ourselves think about it. The Christian Churches are themselves in a state of ferment – about sex, about creationism, about the struggle between fundamentalism and liberalism, for want of better terms. To these phenomena, Dante, a somewhat agonized member of a Church in Crisis, with messages to which most Christians would still rather remain deaf, has eloquent things to say. So Dante lives – if only we would read him.