Dante in Love

by A. N. Wilson

  DANTE IN LOVE

  Also by A. N. Wilson

  FICTION

  The Sweets of Pimlico

  Unguarded Hours

  Kindly Light

  The Healing Art

  Who Was Oswald Fish?

  Wise Virgin

  Scandal: Or, Priscilla’s Kindness

  Gentlemen in England

  Love Unknown

  Stray

  The Vicar of Sorrows

  Dream Children

  My Name Is Legion

  A Jealous Ghost

  Winnie and Wolf

  LAMPITT CHRONICLES

  Incline Our Hearts

  A Bottle in the Smoke

  Daughters of Albion

  Hearing Voices

  A Watch in the Night

  NON-FICTION

  The Laird of Abbotsford: A View of Sir Walter Scott

  A Life of John Milton

  Hilaire Belloc: A Biography

  How Can We Know?

  Landscape in France

  Tolstoy

  Penfriends from Porlock: Essays And Reviews, 1977–1986

  Eminent Victorians

  C.S. Lewis: A Biography

  Paul: The Mind of the Apostle

  God’s Funeral: A Biography of Faith And Doubt in Western Civilization

  The Victorians

  Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her

  London: A Short History

  After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World

  Betjeman: A Life

  Our Times

  DANTE

  IN LOVE

  A. N.

  WILSON

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

  Atlantic Books, and in export edition by Callisto,

  imprints of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © A. N. Wilson, 2011

  The moral right of A. N. Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  The permissions to quote from material in copyright contained on p. 373 form part of this copyright page.

  Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The Publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library.

  ATLANTIC ISBN: 978 1 84887 948 5

  CALLISO ISBN: 978 0 85740 027 7

  eBook ISBN: 978 0 85789 581 3

  Printed in Great Britain

  Atlantic Books

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.atlantic-books.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I WHY THIS BOOK HAS BEEN WRITTEN

  II ROME

  III DANTE’S FLORENCE 1260–74

  IV GEMMA DONATI AND BEATRICE PORTINARI

  V DANTE’S EDUCATION

  VI A NEW CONSTITUTION FOR FLORENCE AND THE SICILIAN VESPERS

  VII LATE TEENS – THE DREAM

  VIII A POET’S APPRENTICESHIP

  IX THE WARRIOR WHO FOUGHT AT CAMPALDINO

  X DEATH OF BEATRICE

  XI THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY

  XII THE DARK WOOD

  XIII DANTE AND THE PAINTED WORD. GIOTTO AT PADUA

  XIV THE COMMON TONGUE

  XV MEDIEVAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  XVI DANTE IN LOVE WITH A WOMAN IN CASENTINO. THE ORIGINS OF THE COMEDY

  XVII CROWN IMPERIAL 1310–13

  XVIII DANTE IN LOVE AGAIN WITH BEATRICE

  XIX RAVENNA AND VENICE

  XX IN PARADISUM

  XXI DANTE’S AFTERLIFE

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  PERMISSIONS

  INDEX

  For Rowan and Jane Williams

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Jeremy Catto, Katherine Duncan-Jones, Barbara Reynolds, Aidan Nichols OP, Gerald Peacocke, Alessandro Gallenzi and Matthew Sturgis all read the book at various stages of composition and helped enormously with their expertise. J. C. Smith gave helpful advice about the origins of the Romance tongues. Grateful thanks too to Matthew Sturgis and Rebecca Hossack for conversations about Dante in Italy and in London. Thanks too to Jinny and Robin White who, together with Iona, Honor and Romilly, entertained us so royally in Tuscany. Like the peasants observed by Dante, we sat and watched the fireflies in the hill-country he knew so well. At a late stage, I was lucky enough to acquire Georgina Capel as my agent, and a Vita Nuova began. She it was who introduced me to Atlantic Books: and the enthusiasm of Anthony Cheetham, Toby Mundy and the team has been enormously encouraging. Especial thanks to Orlando Whitfield who helped in so many ways, and to Margaret Stead, the best editor I have ever encountered, whose literary intelligence, sharp eye, patience and accuracy put me forever in her debt. Tamsin Shelton has been a stimulating and conscientious copy-editor. All those named will undoubtedly be encountered if I ever reach Paradise, and before that dawning, they have made the experience of writing about Dante, discussing Dante, and knocking a book about Dante into shape, a foretaste of Heaven.

  DANTE IN LOVE

  I

  WHY THIS BOOK HAS BEEN WRITTEN

  DANTE IS THE GREATEST POET OF THE MIDDLE AGES. IT COULD BE argued that he was the greatest of all European poets, of any time or place. Yet, for many, perhaps nearly all (non-Italian), readers, he also remains unread. Most literate people are aware of only a few facts about him and nearly all of these are wrong, such as that he was romantically involved with a girl called Beatrice. Dante, a married man with children, did have love affairs, some of them messy, and about some of them, he wrote. Beatrice was not in this sense one of the women in his life. She was something different.

  There are other readers who have begun to read Dante’s book the Vita Nuova under the impression that it would have been all about Beatrice, and then they have given up because it was about something else – Dante himself, chiefly. Sometimes they have tried to read his Comedy, which was named by Boccaccio (1313–75) the ‘divine’ Comedy, and they have abandoned the attempt. The intelligent general reader of the twenty-first century – that is to say, you – might or might not have a knowledge of classical mythology and Roman history. Dante expects you to remember who Briareus was, and who Cato, and how Arachne was transformed into a spider, and what was the fate of the Sabine women. On top of this, he expects you to share his knowledge of, and obsession with, contemporary Italian history and politics. Some translations and modern editions of his poem endeavour to ‘help’ you here by elaborate explanations of the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, which soon have your head spinning. And on top of all that, there is the whole confusing business of medieval philosophy and theology – what Thomas Aquinas owed to Averroes, or the significance of St Bernard of Clairvaux.

  No wonder that so many readers abandon their reading of Dante’s three-part Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso) long before they get to Purgatory. No wonder that so many who manage to read as far as the Purgatorio find that very little of it has remained in their heads. Such readers are prepared to take on trust that Dante is a great poet, but they leave him as one of the great unreads. And in so doing, they leave unsavoured one of the supreme aesthetic, imaginative, emotional and intellectual experiences on offer. They are like pe
ople who have never attended a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, or of King Lear, never heard a Beethoven symphony, never visited Paris. Quite definitely, they are missing out.

  If you belong to this category of Dante-reader, or non-reader, then this book is specifically designed for you. And before we go any further, it had better be admitted that, as your travel guide in unfamiliar terrain, I know that my work will be difficult. The greatest of all European poems cannot be understood unless you familiarize yourself with the Europe out of which it came. So we must set off on a journey together to the Middle Ages, which were a strange land.

  Dante was the most observant, and articulate, of writers. He was profoundly absorbed in himself, but he was also involved with the central political and social issues of his time. Indeed, it was his involvement with politics which led to his being expelled from his native city, Florence, and spending the last two decades of his life in bitter exile. If he had been a successful Florentine politician, he would never have written the Comedy. He would be remembered as a poet – no doubt about that. His Canzoni and Ballate and Sonnets would ensure that his name had lasted. But his true greatness was to sum up in one narrative poem, not only his own autobiography, but the lives of his contemporaries, and the tremendous change which had taken place in Europe in his lifetime.

  Dante lived from 1265 to 1321. Nation states, and independent city states, were emerging. Hindsight sees that. At the time, the institutions of papal monarchy versus the Holy Roman Emperor fought out their dinosaur battles, thinking to use the smaller units of nation state or city state. History would make nation states stronger than either the Holy Roman Empire or the papal monarchy. (The Papacy as a religious institution, which was all that Dante wanted it to be, clearly survives to this day but with no obvious hope of universal jurisdiction over all Christendom, let alone over all humankind.)

  Dante’s age was a time of great economic change, above all to the money supply of Europe, with Florence, the fountain of florins, being a supremely important place, as were the other Italian towns which pioneered that medieval invention, the Bank. Symptomatic of the era of change during which Dante lived was the rate of technological advance of the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries. Technological advance always brings with it great social and intellectual change. And if Dante did not live through anything so momentous as the Industrial Revolution, he nonetheless saw a Europe which would have been unimaginable to his great-grandparents, a Europe in which Arabic learning and Greek philosophy were available to Latin-speaking intellectuals for the first time for hundreds of years.

  But before we begin the story, you might like to ask what my qualifications are for telling it? And let me admit at once that I am no Dante scholar. To be a Dante scholar is a full-time, lifelong occupation. Such rare beings need to possess a knowledge of medieval theology, astronomy, linguistics, poetics, mathematics and history of which I possess only an amateur’s smattering. I first began to read Dante when I made a teenage visit to Florence. I became hooked on the Inferno, but it was some years before I went beyond it and read the rest of the Comedy. I think there was a simple reason for this. I did not realize how comparatively easy it is to master the historical and biographical background to the poem. I did not realize that Dante was an impoverished aristocrat living in a burgeoning city republic; the more you know about medieval Florence, of course, the better equipped you will be when you open the Comedy. But, to start with, all you really need to know is that this young man – his family identity pretty shadowy if not actually disguised in the early books of the Comedy – has two ambitions. One is to be a great poet, and in this ambition he has been encouraged by two people – Brunetto Latini (c.1220–94), the most famous Florentine intellectual of the generation before Dante’s own, a (probably) homosexual older friend who was in some senses Dante’s teacher; and the better-born, better-placed, brilliantly innovative older poet Guido Cavalcanti (c.1250/55–1300).

  The only other thing which you need to master before you begin is that Dante had political ambitions. He had been married by arrangement, as was the custom of those days, into one of the grandest families of Florence, the Donati. He writes not one word about his wife Gemma, though it is possible that, as I have come to suspect, he uses her as an unnamed figure in his allegories. Her cousins were his boyhood friends. One, Forese Donati, was a good friend of Dante’s and exchanged ribald sexy jokes with him during their teens and early manhood. The other, Corso Donati, one of the most brutal of the big Florentine magnates, was, together with the Pope at the time, Boniface VIII, responsible for Dante’s fall from political grace and his exile from Florence, a catastrophe which ruined him financially and broke his heart.

  At first I read Dante only in English, then in the little blue Temple Classics editions which had the Italian on one side of the page with English on the other. Still a very good way to read him, in my opinion. Dante’s Italian, clear, concise and sharp, is comparatively easy to master. But in this book I have decided to quote him in translation, using a variety of the excellent modern English translations available. After school, I went to the British Institute in Florence where Luisa Rappaccini’s lively language classes gave me a basic grounding in Italian, and Ian Greenlees’s lectures began to open my eyes to the extraordinary story of Italian medieval literature and culture.

  Yet, as a young man, I still thought that the historical and biographical background of the poem was too complicated to be mastered before I read the Comedy. Therefore, when any contemporary references occurred in the Comedy, I did not exactly ‘skip’ but I did not bother to see what was happening. I was racing on to the ‘famous’ scenes – such as the everlasting sorrow of the doomed adulterers, Paolo and Francesca, or the everlasting intellectual curiosity of Ulysses. Those who read the Comedy in this way definitely derive something from the experience – it would seem as if there were many Victorians who enjoyed such an approach. But the book remains for such a reader a set of ‘lovely’ scenes interrupted by passages which are only semi-comprehensible.

  What I needed as a young man when I first read the Comedy was a book which did not take for granted any knowledge of Dante’s background. I needed a guide to thirteenth-century Florence. I needed someone who had read the principal Latin texts in Dante’s own library – Virgil, of course, Lucan, Boethius. I needed someone who had at least a basic grasp of medieval philosophy, and who was prepared to tell me who was Pope, who was King of France, and, when there were battles or political quarrels, what the fuss was about. And then again, I wanted this author to tell me how Dante’s life and work did, and did not, relate to his contemporaries. He lived in a period which, loosely, contained the early Franciscans, St Thomas Aquinas, King Philip IV (the Fair) of France, Pope Boniface VIII. The Sicilian Vespers happened during his manhood – I needed to be reminded what they were. And then I needed to be told something of his poet-contemporaries in Italy. And oh yes, I should like some help with Courtly Love, and Love theory in general.

  Over the years, I became an amateur Dantean. Trawling second-hand bookshops, I would look in the Italian and medieval sections first, and add to a collection which ranged from exceptional generalist essays, such as the superb short book by R. W. Church, friend of Gladstone and Newman, and Dean of St Paul’s, to Bruno Nardi’s groundbreaking and sometimes bewildering Dante e la cultura medievale. In my early twenties I discovered a remarkable book, The Figure of Beatrice in Dante by Charles Williams. I read it all the time throughout 1973 and 1974, over and over again, and the child that was born to us in March 1974 was inevitably christened Beatrice.

  Tall of figure, cocknified of speech, Charles Williams (1886–1945) is a cult author among a small number of people at present alive; it is a number which includes the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams (no relation). Charles Williams worked all his adult life as a publisher for the Oxford University Press (OUP), he was fascinated by magic, and his series of supernatural thrillers (Shadows of Ecstasy, All Hallows’ Eve, etc.) are un
like anything else either in the genre of spiritual writing or of crime adventures. He was also a poet, believing himself to have been heavily influenced by Dante – a ‘Beatrician experience’ in 1910 convinced him that romantic love was a path to God,1 a belief which caused his long-suffering wife Michal some anguish as he moved from one passionate, though apparently platonic, obsession to the next. The poet W. H. Auden met him when OUP commissioned the poet to edit The Oxford Book of Light Verse. Auden only spent a few moments in Williams’s company, but he felt himself in the presence of sanctity, of palpable goodness. T. S. Eliot, who published Williams’s books, said something similar.2

  My feelings about Williams, and his book, changed a good deal over the years. At one time, to escape the all-pervading influence he seemed to be having, not just over my attitude to Dante, but over my life, I lampooned him in a series of novels.3 When this did not seem enough, I abandoned the Christianity which was at the core of his life-view. When, years later, I came back to the Church, I found I was worshipping at Williams’s regular place of worship, St Silas the Martyr, Kentish Town – though I had no idea of this when I started going there, nor when a third child had been christened there. To Williams, with his fascination for the occult and the bizarre, perhaps nothing was accidental. Nor, too, was anything accidental for Dante, who would have found nothing odd in Williams’s preoccupations with magic and astrology, nor his capacity to mix them up both with sexual fantasy and Christian piety of an arcane and ritualistic flavour.

  Even when I had set Williams on one side – and for eighteen years I did not read a word he wrote – I continued to read Dante. His Sherlock Holmes-like profile haunted me. That angular, angry face, living 700 years ago, was as unforgettable as his poem. The more often I read the Comedy the more it seemed a work which wanted to be read again. For seven years of my adult life I taught, in a very junior capacity, at two colleges in the University of Oxford. My brief was to help the young people master the rudiments of medieval English – the Old English of Beowulf, the Middle English of Chaucer. In Chaucer I found a man steeped in Dante. If Charles Williams was – is – the Crazy Guy among Danteans (and quite a crazy company some of us are), Chaucer was the voice of sanity. He had absorbed Dante, seen his stupendous, gigantic significance in the history of Europe, and at the same time domesticated him.