The Fighter_Literary Essays

by Tim Parks

  In his excellent and erudite book Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy, Martines made it clear that he would not allow the traditional enthusiasm for Renaissance art to cloud his moral and political judgement. His considerable scholarship is always galvanised by an edge of personal engagement. So in April Blood he uses the melodrama of the attempt to assassinate Lorenzo in the Duomo first to lure a wider public to the subject of Florentine republicanism and then, more problematically, to defend those who were willing to resort to murder rather than go on working with an authoritarian regime.

  The events leading up to that bloody day make for excellent narrative. The Pazzi family at the time comprised an ageing uncle, Iacopo, with no fewer than ten adult nephews associated in a complex web of international trading and banking activities remarkably similar to, and frequently intertwined with, those of the Medici. For the last thirty years the Medici had been indirectly responsible for promoting the Pazzi to positions of government, and Lorenzo’s sister Bianca had been married to one of the nephews, Guglielmo.

  But in the late 1460s something went wrong and by the time the names of those eligible for the highest offices were reviewed in 1472, the Pazzi were clearly being discriminated against. In 1473 when Pope Sixtus IV tried to borrow from the Medici bank to buy the lordship of Imola for his nephew, Girolamo Riario, Lorenzo refused, Imola being a possible object of Florentine expansionism. He warned the Pazzi bank to do likewise. The Pazzi, however, not only gave Sixtus the money but told him of Lorenzo’s warning. In 1474 the Pope retaliated by making Francesco Salviati, a close ally of the Pazzi, Archbishop of Pisa, a town subject to Florence and eager to regain its independence. Offended, Lorenzo blocked Salviati’s entry into Pisa for more than a year.

  Largely thanks to the Pazzi, il Magnifico was now in open conflict with the Pope. Between 1474 and 1476 the Medici bank lost both its right to run the papal monopoly on the important trade in alum (crucial for the textile industry) and its function as the Pope’s main banker. The Pazzi were given what the Medici lost. In 1477 Lorenzo hit back by interfering in a complex piece of inheritance legislation which effectively deprived one of the Pazzi nephews of a huge legacy. What is remarkable about the escalating quarrel, as Martines points out, is that the Pazzi should have been so bold as to take on the Medici regime, or so stupid as to commit political suicide, in this way.

  Martines finds an explanation in the character of Francesco de’ Pazzi. A small, choleric man, whose father reputedly died of drink and debauchery, Francesco was running the Pazzi bank in Rome and thus had most to gain from the Pope’s favours while being poorly placed to observe Lorenzo’s real power back in Florence. Perhaps prompted by the murder of the Duke of Milan in 1476, Francesco had the idea of seeing off the Medici and rapidly drew in Salviati, now in place as the Archbishop of Pisa. He secured the services of Count Montesecco, a military commander for both the Pope and his nephew Girolamo Riario, now Lord of Imola. The King of Naples came on board and the Pope in person, knowing full well that the plan was to kill, gave his blessing to the overthrow of the Medici ‘but without anyone’s death’.6 Back in Florence, the head of the Pazzi family, old Uncle Iacopo, was not so easily persuaded, but as a notorious gambling man he eventually decided to join the conspiracy on the grounds that Francesco had always been lucky.

  After various failed attempts to lure Lorenzo down to Rome, the conspirators, nervous that their plot would soon be discovered, took advantage of the fact that the seventeen-year-old cardinal Raffaele Riario (nephew to the Lord of Imola and great nephew to the Pope, in short, nepotism incarnate) was visiting Florence. Armed men could be sent as his escort. The Medici brothers had offered the cardinal lunch at their villa in Fiesole; the plan was to murder them there. But Lorenzo’s brother Giuliano didn’t turn up. The conspirators were agreed that there was no point in killing one brother without the other.

  So the appointment with death would have to be at lunch a week later, after Sunday Mass, at Lorenzo’s palazzo in the heart of Florence where the juvenile cardinal was now invited to inspect il Magnifico’s famous collection of cameos. On the day, however, it again appeared that Giuliano wouldn’t be eating with them. Desperate, the conspirators now agreed to do the deed at holy Mass, only minutes away. The change of plan was fatal. Count Montesecco, the most professional of the band and Lorenzo’s designated assassin, declared that he would not kill in church. His place was taken, ironically enough, by two priests. Meantime, an army of papal soldiers were within striking distance of the town and the Bishop of Pisa with about thirty armed men from Perugia set off to take over the government building.

  Thus the bare bones of a complex and ultimately incompetent conspiracy. The two priests failed to dispatch Lorenzo. The archbishop failed to take the government building. The papal troops failed to show and old Iacopo’s cries of ‘Liberty!’ yelled from horseback as he galloped through the streets failed to impress the Florentine crowd. All too soon the conspirators, archbishop included, were being strung from the high windows of the government building, if not simply tossed into the piazza below. War broke out with Rome and Naples, Lorenzo was excommunicated, the Pazzi and their properties were pursued for years and the Medici regime eventually emerged much reinforced.

  It does make for fascinating reading. But it is hard to imagine a scenario more resistant to Martines’s desire to present the conspirators as noble republicans. The Pope and the King of Naples wanted to draw Florence away from Milan and into their sphere of influence. The Pazzi, in their determination to supplant the Medici bank in Rome, had reached a point where the only way back into Florentine politics was over Lorenzo’s dead body. All the same, one contemporary commentator does come to Martines’s aid. The patrician Alamanno Rinuccini, avid reader of classical history, hailing from a rich family of bankers and with a long record in highest office under the Medici, to whom he had dedicated various translations from the Greek, retired to his country villa in 1479 to write a Dialogue on Liberty in the classical style in which he argued that the state of Medici tyranny was such that the only thing an honest man could do was to withdraw from public life. Rinuccini spoke of the Pazzi as having undertaken ‘the just and honest task of liberating their country’.7 It has to be said, however, that Rinuccini had recently fallen out with Lorenzo and that his life savings were held in the Pazzi bank. Shortly after writing the dialogue, which he did not publish, he went back to Florence and served the Medici regime in a variety of public offices for many years.

  Martines imagines the core of Rinuccini’s identity as being in the republican dialogue and his public life as an unhappy charade, ‘helping to clean the face of a government which he condemned as criminal’.8 Similarly he identifies, rightly, a strong current of republican feeling running beneath the surface in Florence, but one in thrall to Medici manipulations. The insistently repeated assumption is that if only the Medici could have been eliminated, Florence would have enjoyed a freer, more productive, republican existence. It is on this point alone that one would wish to take issue with this intriguing book.

  Every situation and character Martines presents to us in April Blood is of marvellous complexity: the learned Pope turned feverish nepotist, the hardened mercenary who will not kill in church, the lucid Lorenzo, who hates church nepotism and does everything he can to get his son made a cardinal; then the general picture of a religious age in love with transgression, of a republican citizenry avid for the trappings of hierarchy. It is as if every player in this story contained not one but, in differing degrees and according to the role destiny assigned them, all the contradictory impulses of the time, as if the Florentine constitution with its obvious inadequacies had been thought up precisely to be open to subversion. In the end it is not hard to imagine Lorenzo the poet, deprived of power, becoming a most eloquent republican, and even easier to see Francesco Pazzi in power as a dangerous tyrant. More generally, one has the constant suspicion that the people of fifteenth-century Florence, and perhaps people
in general, did not, do not, find it so difficult to be liberal and virtuous in private while toeing an authoritarian line in public. It gave life an exciting tension, a sense of direction towards those brief and heady periods, as after the departure of the Medici, when some real republican freedom was enjoyed. Fortunately neither the historian nor the reader is obliged to reach a verdict on either Francesco Pazzi or Lorenzo il Magnifico. But it is a pleasure, and perhaps salutary, to reflect on possible analogies with the present time.

  Anachronistically, I imagine the Florentine patricians solving their problems by learning the trick of rotating apparently opposed but in the end complicitous factions according to the whims of a complacently enfranchised popolo anaesthetised by mass media and consumer goods.

  Love Letter

  * * *

  [Fleur Jaeggy]

  WHEN TEACHING THE limits and possibilities of literary translation, one tends to consider those writers whose highly individual styles pose special problems. For some years I have been putting the following passage from Fleur Jaeggy’s novel Sweet Days of Discipline before my students in Milan. The Swiss-born Jaeggy lives in Italy and writes in Italian, but her narrator here is speaking of her girlhood in a Swiss boarding school, presumably in the early 1950s:

  I hardly got any letters. They were handed out at mealtimes. It wasn’t nice not to get much post. So I began to write to my father, mindless letters saying nothing. I hoped he was well, I was well. He answered at once, sticking Pro Juventute stamps on the envelopes. He asked me why on earth I wrote to him so often. Both his letters and mine were short. Every month a banknote would be enclosed, my argent de poche. I wrote to him because I knew he was the only person who did as I asked, even though it was my mother who was legally in charge of me and it was to her decisions I had to submit. She sent her orders from Brazil. I had to have a German room-mate because I had to speak German. And I spoke to the German, she gave me presents, chocolates she was always eating, American chewing gum, and art books. In German. With German reproductions. Blauer Reiter. Even her underwear was German. And yet I can’t find her name in the pigeonholes of my mind; girls lost in my memory. Who was she? She was such a nonentity for me, and yet I do remember her face and body. Perhaps, thanks to some malign trick, those we didn’t pay any attention to rise up again. Their features are more deeply impressed on us than those we did give time to. Our minds are a series of graves in a wall. Our nonentities are all there when the register is called, gluttonous creatures; sometimes they fly up like vultures to hide the faces of those we loved. A multitude of faces dwell in the graves, a rich pasturage. While I write the German girl is sketching out, as in a police station, her own particulars. What is her name? Her name is lost. But it’s not enough to forget a name to have forgotten the person. She’s all there, in her grave in the wall.1

  Like everything Jaeggy writes, the passage (in my translation here) accomplishes surprising shifts of register, tense and narrative focus with disconcerting ease, as if they were the most normal things in the world. It opens with an apparently straightforward realism, but reporting – and again this is common with Jaeggy – an absence rather than an abundance, a disappointment rather than a fulfilment. The girl received very few letters. To rectify the situation, she writes to her father. And we arrive at once at a second ‘absence’. He is a dutiful correspondent, but has nothing to say. That he can’t understand why she writes so often suggests she has nothing to say either. ‘Both his letters and mine were short.’ At this point we have only a comedy of anxiety for contact on the one hand and incomprehension on the other. That the stamps bear the slogan Pro Juventute (For Youth) is one of Jaeggy’s constant and quiet ironies.

  In place of all she is missing the girl finds money, ‘my argent de poche’. The use of the foreign language here is significant, and not just to carry the authenticity of a polyglot Swiss education. Again and again, in Jaeggy’s writing, the occasional surrogates offered for intimacy and understanding present themselves in fragments of French or, above all, German, and almost always in the form of some little cliché or commonplace. In the last line of the first paragraph of Sweet Days of Discipline we are given the word Zwang, a duty or imposition. How ominously it clangs in the liquid, multisyllabic Italian. The last pages of Jaeggy’s new novel, SS Proleterka, echo with the German composites Wahrheitsleibe, love of the truth, and Leidtragende, she who bears the grief. It is as if, whenever we hoped to arrive at something essential, an unhappy distraction is imposed from without, some disturbing splinter of a foreign tongue, not part of the narrator’s native pattern of thought. It’s not long before we suspect that in each of these two novels the narrator is the only person who is actually thinking in the language of narration. Her mind will never be integrated with the surrounding reality.

  As if fearing she has given too much away, Jaeggy’s narrator now supplies an alternative reason for her letter writing: she wrote to her father, not out of a need for contact, but because he was the only one who would do as she said. She presents herself as spoilt, manipulative, not fragile at all. But this characteristic defensive posturing, so convincing psychologically, never generates much plot. We never hear what the girl asks for or gets. On the contrary, the reflection brings her at once to her mother, who holds the real power. And here my English version parts company with the original, which, translated literally, reads: ‘although my life had to be under the legal will of my mother’. It is hard in elegant English to convey the abrupt violence of this. Neither ‘be under’ nor ‘submit’ carry the punch of the Italian sottostare. The mother figure is at once remote (‘from Brazil she gave her orders’ is the way the original Italian puts it) and all powerful. She imposes German on a daughter she never sees, imposes a companion who is not the girl the narrator was eager to spend time with.

  The bitter little comedy of the German room-mate with her German art books and underwear but American gum in her mouth (unwanted gifts with foreign names) then leads to one of those shifts of perspective so typical of Jaeggy’s work. The girl’s name is not available in the ‘pigeonholes of my mind’ (in Italian, casellario, a series of boxes, for filing). Yet her face flies up like a vulture to hide the faces of those she loved. For now the mind is no longer a filing system but a series of ‘loculi’ (originally, burial niches, but used in modern Italian to refer to the system of slotting coffins into cemetery walls). The rapid shift of thought, somewhat muddled in the English, from filing systems to school registers to graves, is now more characteristic of poetry than prose. The word I have translated as ‘pasturage’ could also mean dung, or the bait thrown to attract fish to the hook.

  Then comes the most dramatic change of tense, the most unsettling switch of narrative focus. ‘While I write the German girl is sketching out, as in a police station, her own particulars.’ Just as we appreciate the point that systems of registration rather than recovering life seem to destroy it, and that the unwanted (with the complicity of such authorities as private schools and police forces) always substitutes itself for the intimate, so we reach the maximum narrative disorientation. The past will not stay in the past. The memory is not easily governable. At the same time, and largely because of these sudden, disturbing transitions, we become extremely anxious for the mental health of our storyteller. Has she survived her ‘sweet days of discipline’? What has life brought her to?

  All this by way of extended introduction to Jaeggy’s most recent work, SS Proleterkafn1, which in many ways must be read as complementary to the earlier novel. The Proleterka is a Yugoslav passenger ship on which a fifteen-year-old girl will take a two-week spring cruise around the Mediterranean. The ship’s name means, literally, proletarian girl, exactly what Jaeggy’s at once moneyed and deprived alter ego in these two novels is not. If the Swiss boarding schools of Sweet Days of Discipline were places where experience was systematically denied (‘there was always a shortage of men’,2 we hear with characteristic wryness, ‘in the areas around these schools’), the Proleterka, o
n the other hand, is the very ‘locus of experience’.3 Which is to say, its decks are stalked by swarthy Slav crewmen. The adolescent girl immediately sees her chance and seizes it. Having barely spoken to him, she has sex with the second mate. Nor does she stop there. ‘By the time the voyage is over, she must know everything. At the end of the voyage [she] will be able to say: never again, not ever. No experience ever again.’4 Initiation, in Jaeggy’s world, does not take a character through trial into fulfilment, a shared, purposeful life with other initiates, but into nothingness, withdrawal, even death. The spring cruise will not blossom into summer. Rather the reader senses an awful limbo stretching across the decades between the moment of experience and that of narration. Her life has been ‘very easy’5 the narrator remarks, in the closing pages. In the sense, we fear, that there has been no life at all.

  As in Sweet Days of Discipline, the main character of SS Proleterka is unnamed. She begins to speak in the first person, but constantly lapses into the third, apparently wary of identifying entirely with her narrated self. Similarly and with chilling, often satirical detachment, many of the characters will not be referred to by name, but by their role, or relationship to someone else: ‘Johannes’s former wife’, ‘Professor Z’s son’. It is as if a process of bureaucratic classification were constantly obscuring whatever inner being there might be.