Dante
R W B Lewis
Weidenfeld £12.99, pp193
After reading Paradise Lost, William Blake famously declared that Milton was of Satan's party without knowing it. Most of us are. Populated only by the virtuous, devoid of conflict, heaven furnishes none of the ingredients of a good story. Frankly, I would rather read about hell, and for sheer entertainment value Dante's Inferno is still unrivalled. Who can forget Bertran de Born swinging his severed head by its hair 'just like a lantern', or Count Ugolino, condemned forever to gnaw on the skull of his enemy Ruggieri, looking up at Dante and wiping his mouth on Ruggieri's hair?
When he set out, sometime around 1307, to imagine a journey from perdition through purgatory to paradise in the shape of an epic Commedia (the ' divina ' was added two centuries later), Dante opened, with a sure sense of the dramatic, in hell. Nor did he focus his story on remote divinities. Dante's protagonist is himself, and he will be conducted through eternity by his poetic model (Virgil) and his romantic ideal (Beatrice). Encountering real people in the Inferno, Dante names names, not only of literary forbears like Virgil, Homer, and Ovid, condemned to eternal torment for their bad luck in having been born before Christ could offer them salvation, but also of pivotal historical figures in Italian, and Florentine, affairs. In other words, Dante's hell is personal - and it is decidedly political.
Besides being poet, philosopher, and critic 'par excellence', Dante was also a city official, a diplomat, polemicist, and eventually a political refugee. The Commedia was written after he was exiled and sentenced to death on trumped-up charges by a rival political faction in Florence; forced to wander for the remaining 20 years of his life, Dante would never return to the city he loved.
This new, short life of Dante by R.W.B. Lewis places Dante's life and writings firmly within their cultural sphere: a life of a 'literary man engagé' that is also a life of Dante's Florence, a city seething with violence, carnality, betrayal and retribution. Lewis, who lives much of the year in Florence and has previously written about the city, clearly shares Dante's devotion to it. Because Dante was 'first and last a Florentine', writes Lewis, 'his masterwork, the Comedy , is an expression of his passionate feelings about Florence, his rage against the conspirators who had driven him out, his longing to return'. Wandering through hell, Dante thinks nothing of kicking one tormented soul in the face and pulling his hair, or of callously reneging on a promise to another to relieve his suffering. His bitterness informs even Dante's notion of paradise, which features St Peter furiously denouncing the popes whose machinations contributed to Dante's exile, as if admitting that they really were enough to try the patience of a saint.
But Lewis's Dante loved with equal fervour, passionately committed to his civic duties, his literary ambitions, his religion and, of course, his adoration of Beatrice (Bice Portinari). Beatrice is not only Dante's guide to paradise; she is also the subject of La Vita Nuova, a collection of sonnets describing Dante's legendary love at first sight at the age of nine, his secret devotion to her despite the paucity of their encounters, both of their arranged marriages to others, and her early death.
Much of what we 'know' about Dante's life is actually inferred from these writings. Lewis, the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Edith Wharton, once again with erudition but without pretension distils a formidable range of literature, history, philosophy and politics in order to elucidate Dante's astonishing complexity. Sometimes, however, Lewis doesn't distinguish sufficiently between conjecture and verifiable fact, his literal readings foreclosing other interpretations, as when an exchange of insulting poems between Dante and his friend Forese Donati denotes, we are told, a falling-out between them; Lewis does not even acknowledge the possibility that they might have been joking.
This tendency toward the literal is symptomatic of a general, if mild, case of piousness. One damned soul in the Inferno is cleft from neck to 'where one farts'; Lewis reprints the phrase but doesn't noticeably crack a smile. Maybe flatulence jokes are cheap. But then there's poor doomed Francesca, who describes her adulterous love for Paolo developing while they read together, until one fateful day: 'That day we read no further.' Lewis solemnly explains that 'the book acted upon them like a Pandar', but surely Francesca delivers her line with a wink.
Ultimately, however, Lewis makes a compelling case for taking Dante's rage seriously. At best, this is a very dark Comedy , in which even paradise promises vengeance. At the end of his long pilgrimage, Dante is assured (in John Ciardi's translation) that his enemies' 'bestiality will be made known/ by what they do; while your fame shines the brighter/ for having become a party of your own'. If Dante envisions his poetic enterprise as poetic justice, this new life of Dante does great justice to that vision.
