Dante: A Life (PENGUIN LIVES)

by Lewis, R. W. B.

  when in the world hour by hour

  you taught me how man makes himself eternal;

  and while I live, my tongue, I think

  should show what gratitude I have for it.

  “How man makes himself eternal”—come l‘uom s’etterna. The reference cannot be to immortality through great literary achievement—Latini’s literary gifts were not of that highest kind—nor can it be a theological statement; Latini was in no way a religious counselor. Most likely, Dante is acknowledging the inspirational value of the Tesoretto, the long, incomplete, allegorical work that Latini put together during his exile years in France. It is the account of a journey through the next world in search of redemption. In the course of it, the pilgrim must make his way through a dark wood and ascend a mountain where he meets a guide, who begins to teach him the rudiments of astronomy. Here the poem breaks off, probably because Latini heard that the way was clear for him to return to Florence. The Tesoretto was thus in some important ways a model for the Comedy, a work enacting the search for eternal life. (Piero Bargellini has argued the point most persuasively, even when observing that the Tesoretto is literarily “insipid.”) Dante the pilgrim foresees the moment when, in exile, the poet will compose a drama of redemption for which Latini’s poem was the honored predecessor.

  So the two of them pace along and talk together, Latini, naked, treading the burning plain that is his eternal agony, and Dante walking on a roadway just high enough to be out of reach of the flames. They have greeted each other in a warm and wondering manner. “What a marvel!” exclaims Latini, and “Are you here, Ser Brunetto?” cries Dante in return. The master foresees Dante driven out of Florence by his political enemies, whom he denounces with all of his old vigor as a people “avaricious, envious, and proud,” descendants of that evil element, the Fiesolans, who were among the founders of the city. He also predicts a shining future for Dante the poet:If you follow your star

  you cannot fail to reach a glorious port,

  if I discern rightly, in the fair life.

  The question remains why Dante placed his teacher and role model in Hell, among those guilty of violence against nature and, specifically, of sodomy. Homosexuality was, needless to say, an unredeemable sin in Dante’s Catholic world; but there is no evidence anywhere, outside the Comedy , that Latini was homosexual. (For what it is worth, Latini was married and had several sons.) The matter has been endlessly argued by the commentators, with some slight indication that Dante’s early readers themselves were astonished at the charge. The literary consequence is certain: a nearly unbearable tension between Dante’s love and admiration for Brunetto Latini, and the old man’s humiliation and perpetual pain. The moral and religious laws of the universe may not be breached, Dante may seem to be saying, even by one as noble as Brunetto.

  But another age-old poetic impulse may also be at work, the one that the critic and theorist Harold Bloom has named “the anxiety of influence,” whereby a literary artist, as a mode of self-identification, discounts and denies the influence—even the importance—of a great predecessor. In American literary history, we have the example of Henry James belittling his unmistakable literary forebear Nathaniel Hawthorne. But as such language suggests, there is also somewhere in the downscaling treatment a shadow of the father-killing process.

  Having completed his portrait of the old master, Dante, in his last glimpse of Brunetto, gives us one of the most stirring images in the entire Comedy. It derives from the annual footrace in Verona on the first Sunday in Lent,

  something Dante had seen more than once as an exile in the city: the naked contestants running across an open field, with the first prize being a bolt of green cloth:Then he turned back, and he seemed like one of those

  who run for the green cloth of Verona

  through the open fields; and of them he seemed

  one who wins rather than one who loses.

  On his trips out to the Alighieri farmlands in Pagnolle, Dante, it may well be imagined, journeyed on horseback; a phase of his education had been in the skills of horsemanship, including those of cavalryman. As a member of a family of noble ancestry, Dante was trained as a matter of course in the knightly arts and could expect to be called on for military service in time of need.

  Dante may have taken part in a foray of November 1285, when he was still in his twenty-first year. The Sienese had asked for help from Florence in quelling an uprising incited by the Ghibellines in Arezzo, and Florence sent down a cavalry contingent. In an elusive passage in the VitaNuova, Dante speaks of riding away from the city at about this time on a journey that displeased him, since it took him away from his beloved. He might have been going forth to war or perhaps merely on a three-day hunting party.

  Four years later, in any case, Dante was definitely in the forefront of the Florentine battle line when the Florentines met the Aretines head-on, at Campaldino in the Casentino Valley on June 11, 1289. The Ghibelline forces in Tuscany had been biding their time since their stinging defeat at Benevento in 1266. But in the later 1280s, they managed to seize control of Arezzo, just fifty miles southeast of Florence and up the course of the Arno River. The Guelph hegemony was clearly threatened.

  It was decided, presumably by the priors of the moment, to send a force south to engage the Aretines, and by a sort of secret ballot the military commanders chose not to head due south along the river but to move eastward across the mountains to a convenient battle site. So it was that the Florentine cavalry, Dante among them, rode up over the Consuma Pass and down into the Casentino to the broad open field called Campaldino (campo of course means “field”) directly below the hilltop fortress of Poppi, where the treacherous (to the Florentines) Guido Novello resided.

  The Aretines marched up from the south; and the two forces drew opposite each other in battle array, on the morning of June 11, almost as though they were about to meet in a jousting tournament. The Florentines, with their allies from Siena, Lucca, Pistoia, and elsewhere, fielded about a thousand cavalrymen, flanked on both sides by ten thousand foot soldiers carrying big white shields. The supreme commander of the Florentine army was one Amerigo di Narbona, young, hardy, inexperienced. At the head of the cavalry was Dante’s neighbor Vieri dei Cerchi. At the rear was a reserve force of cavalry, led by another neighbor, Corso Donati, who was then the podesta, or chief magistrate, of Pistoia. Amerigo had instructed Corso firmly not tc stir unless given the order.

  The Aretines, supported by allies from the north and east, numbered distinctly fewer than the Florentines. At their head was Buonconte da Montefeltro, a gallant Ghibelline warrior; the person actually giving orders was the Bishop of Arezzo, a belligerent personality but fatally myopic in both mind and eyesight. Staring over at the white shields of the Florentines, the bishop asked impatiently, “What are those white walls over there?” Buonconte would have preferred to hold back a little, to study the Florentine intentions, but the bishop called him a coward and a traitor and commanded the Aretines to charge.

  They did so, and managed to break through the Florentine forward lines. But while the horsemen were prancing about in exultant disorder, Corso Donati, disobeying instructions, led his cavalry unit in a furious attack that dispersed the Aretines entirely and led to a total rout. Some seventeen hundred Aretines were killed, and three thousand were taken prisoner. But the Florentines were prevented from taking full advantage of their victory when a torrential storm descended in the late afternoon and darkened the valley.

  On Mount Purgatory (Purg., v), Dante is accosted by the spirit of Buonconte, the Aretine chieftian, who tells him how he was wounded and crept away to hide; but he was engulfed by the storm that swept his body into the valley stream, the Archiano, whence it was carried along and dumped into the Arno.

  The saturated air was turned to water,

  the rain fell ...

  and as it changed into great torrents,

  it rushed so swiftly towards the royal stream

  that nothing held it back.<
br />
  My frozen body at its mouth the raging Archiano

  found,

  and swept it into the Arno, and loosed the cross

  upon my breast.

  Dante in exile wrote a letter to the Florentine authorities (now lost but quoted from by Leonardo Bruni, the fifteenth-century biographer of Dante), in which he cited his participation in the battle of Campaldino “in which the Ghibelline side was almost completely destroyed and dispersed, in which I showed myself no child in armed warfare, in which I felt much fear and at the end great happiness over the outcome of the battle.”

  The Florentines were back in their city by July 24; but scarcely three weeks later the priors dispatched another force, this time about fifty miles westward to the neighborhood of Pisa. It was a smaller army, comprising perhaps four hundred horsemen, including Dante, with a few thousand men on foot. The aim was to besiege the castle fortress at Caprona, a dozen miles inland from Pisa, and restore it to its previous Guelph resident Nino Visconti.

  The Pisan story had undergone various twists and turns in the 1280s. Long a Ghibelline stronghold, the maritime republic had been subdued in 1284 by the combined efforts of Florence, Genoa, and Lucca—a league organized by Brunetto Latini. Count Ugolino della Gherardesca was installed as ruler; but he soon conspired with the Ghibelline archbishop of Pisa, Ruggieri degli Ubaldini, to consolidate his power by ousting his own nephew Nino Visconti, who had resided in the tower at Caprona. The canny and ruthless archbishop then betrayed Ugolino, getting him thrown into prison with two sons and two grandsons.

  There all five of them died, in a slow and horrifying process described to Dante by Ugolino in one of the chilliest sequences in the Inferno. In the lowest circle of Hell, Ugolino is seen gnawing endlessly on the head of Archbishop Ruggieri. He tells Dante how the children died of starvation, one by one, and how at last “Hunger was stronger than grief,” and Ugolino fell to eating the young bodies.

  Nino Visconti fled to Florence, where he became friendly with Dante, and at Nino’s urging the small Florentine battalion undertook to recapture the fortress at Caprona. It loomed above a massive rock formation, about ten miles east of Pisa, in a country area filled with quarries (many of them active today). Adjacent is the village of Caprona, small and attractive, if (today) a trifle dilapidated. Below, the Arno swirls and curves, and it was the ancient charge of the fortress to guard the river crossing at that point. A contingent came down from Lucca, twenty-five miles to the north. The siege lasted ten days, during which all supplies to the castle were cut off. Finally, the troops inside made signs of surrender, and they were allowed to come out unharmed. It was that tense and dangerous moment which Dante remembered in narrating a fearful personal moment, infested with demons, in the Inferno: Thus once I saw the footmen, who marched

  out under treaty at Caprona, frightened

  at seeing themselves among so many enemies.

  FOUR

  The Death of Beatrice and a New Life: 1288-1295

  WE MAY GO BACK a year or two, to the moment when the screen-lady departed for a distant city. Dante, riding away one afternoon on a short journey, was visited by another vision of Love: of that being whom he regarded, or pretended to regard, as a separate entity, but which he gradually acknowledged to be a fantasizing part of himself. Love, this time, was dressed as a poor pilgrim, and he had new counsel to give. What Dante needed, he said, was a follow-up screen-lady, “who will be your defense as was the first one.” Love named his candidate for the role, and Dante recognized her at once. He then set about courting her so openly and insistently that people began to talk reprovingly about him. Hearing such talk, Beatrice, passing Dante in the street one day, withheld her greeting. Dante was stricken to the core.

  One senses in Beatrice’s behavior a certain maturity of mind, even a slight hardening of character. It was probably due to her new state, the married state. At some time in late 1287, so it seems, Beatrice Portinari was married to Simone de’ Bardi and went to live with him in his family home in the Oltrarno.

  The Bardis were a highly successful merchant clan, experts in banking and wool-making. Their houses and towers stretched along a street—it is now called Via de’ Bardi—that curved upward from the Ponte Vecchio area, running parallel to the river and then descending to a point near the Ponte Rubiconte. The Bardis would experience grave trouble forty-odd years later, when a pointless entanglement with young Edward III of England led to bankruptcy. Half a century after that, Cosimo de’ Medici, principal founder of the Medici dynasty, was happy to take as his wife Contessina de’ Bardi.

  Beatrice at twenty-one was the second wife of Simone de’ Bardi. She brought with her as dowry six hundred lire in gold florins, four times the amount Gemma Donati contributed for marrying into the Alighieri family. Beatrice now lived, not virtually next door, but on the far side of the Arno, and Dante had to walk through town and across the river to catch glimpses of her.

  Meanwhile, wandering in a haze of self-reproach, Dante had still another vision of Love, on this occasion as a young man dressed in white. Love tells him—or, as we may say, Dante now told himself—to stop playacting and instead write “certain words in rhyme” to Beatrice herself, words that would make clear “how you have been hers ever since childhood.” Dante responded with “Ballata, i’ voi, ” which begins:Ballad, I want you to seek out Love,

  and go with him before my lady,

  so that my excuse, which you must sing,

  My Lord may then recount to her.

  “She who must hear you,” the ballad continues, “as I believe is angry with me.” Love must tell his lady that Dante has been steadfast from the first in his love for her, and “never has he strayed.”

  To this, Dante added the sonnet “All my thoughts speak of love.” Then, by chance, a friend came by to take Dante to a local gathering. A number of young ladies had come together in the house of a newly married woman: it being the custom in Florence, Dante explains, for ladies to keep a bride company “the first time she would sit at the dining-table in the house of her new bridegroom.” As he stood there gazing at the group, Dante felt a tremor seize him, so strong that he had to lean back against a painting that covered the wall behind him. The seizure was caused by his suddenly recognizing Beatrice among the ladies. The others, observing Dante’s condition, began to make fun of him among themselves, and evidently Beatrice joined in.

  When he had recovered somewhat, Dante wrote a grieving sonnet about the experience, “Con l’altre donne mia vista gabbate”: With the other ladies you mock my aspect;

  and you do not think, lady, whence it comes

  that I resemble a figure so strange

  when I behold your beauty.

  If you knew it, Pity could

  no longer hold against me her wonted obstinancy ...

  In two further sonnets, Dante tried to explain his condition. “When I come to see you,” he says in the first,My face shows the color of my heart;

  which, failing, leans wherever it can,

  and through the intoxication caused by great trembling,

  the stones seem to shout “Die, die.”

  The second one concludes:... I struggle, seeking to help myself;

  and all pale, of all valor empty,

  I come to see you, thinking to be healed;

  and if I raise my eyes to look,

  in my heart arises a tremor

  that from my pulses causes the soul to part.

  These lyrical excursions, be it remembered, were written at the times—1287, 1288, 1289—and under the circumstances described by Dante. It was only later, in the mid-1290s, that they were brought together in the work called the Vita Nuova, an extraordinary composite of poetry and narrative, and given their places in Dante’s account of his love of Beatrice from her childhood to her death.

  In the wake of these three confessional sonnets, and after considerable inner debate, Dante arrived at a major turning point in his life. It also comprised the first of two critic
al turning points in the Vita Nuova. The narrative is particularly rich in these portions (sections XVII-XIX) and may be quoted from at some length.

  Because of the discouraging reception of the poems addressed to Beatrice, Dante says, he resolved to “keep silent.” He would no longer speak directly to her. He would, instead, “take up new matter,” something “more noble than the previous. And because the reason for taking up the new matter is delightful (dilettevole) to hear, I will recount it as briefly as I can.”

  He then tells of encountering a company of young ladies one day, Beatrice (he noticed carefully) not among them, and heard one of them call him by name, and ask why he continued to love Beatrice, since she made him so unhappy. Dante replied:“Ladies, the end of my love was indeed the greeting of this lady, of whom you are perhaps thinking, and in that greeting lay my beatitude, for it was the end of all my desires. But because it pleased her to deny it to me, my Lord Love in his mercy has placed all my beatitude in that which cannot fail me.”

  The ladies murmur among themselves, amid many sighs, until his interlocutor asks Dante to explain where the new beatitude lies. And Dante answers, “In words that praise my lady.”

  He had said it: his happiness now lay in writing poetry in praise of his lady. But he held back for some time, fearful of making a poor beginning. Then one day, as he walked down a road with a stream running alongside, it occurred to him that he should speak of Beatrice only by speaking to other women—to gentle ladies and “not just women.” There came into his head an opening phrase: “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore. ” Back home, he pondered this phrase for some time before beginning the canzone that, by any reckoning, was his first genuine poetic triumph.