Hell and Back Read online

  Copyright © 2001, 2011 by Tim Parks

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Originally published in England by Seeker and Warburg, a division of Random House, U.K.

  Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-631-8

  Also by Tim Parks

  FICTION

  Tongues of Flame

  Loving Roger

  Home Thoughts

  Family Planning

  Juggling the Stars

  Goodness

  Shear

  Mimis Ghost

  Europa

  Destiny

  NONFICTION

  Italian Neighbors

  An Italian

  EducationAdultery and Other Diversions

  Many thanks to Robert Silvers and all the crew at the New York Review of Books for their generous help and encouragement.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Hell and Back Dante

  The Universal Gentleman Borges

  Here Comes Salman Rushdie

  Surviving Giacomo Leopardi

  The Hunter Sebald

  Different Worlds

  Sentimental Education Seth

  A Chorus of Cruelty Verga

  Voltaire’s Coconuts Buruma

  Literary Trieste Svevo, Joyce, Saba

  Party Going Green

  The Enchanted Fort Buzzati

  In the Locked Ward Neugeboren

  Fascist Work Sironi

  Sightgeist Saramago

  A Prisoner’s Dream Montale

  Unlocking the Mind’s Manacles Bateson and Ugazio

  Christina Stead: Our Luck Stead

  Writerly Rancour

  References

  Acknowledgements

  The essays in this volume have appeared or are scheduled to appear, some in slightly different form, in the following publications:

  ‘Hell and Back’ was published in The New Yorker.

  ‘The Universal Gentleman’ was published in the New York

  Review of Books.

  ‘Here Comes Salman’ was published in the New York Review of Books.

  ‘Surviving Giacomo’ was published in the New York Review of Books.

  ‘The Hunter’ was published in the New York Review of Books.

  ‘Different Worlds’ was published in the proceedings of the

  Nobel Symposium on ‘Translation of Poetry and Poetic Prose’, and later, in shorter form, in the New York Review of Books.

  ‘Sentimental Education’ was published in the New York Review of Books.

  ‘A Chorus of Cruelty’ was published in the New York Review of Books.

  ‘Voltaire’s Coconuts’ was published in the Literary Review of Books.

  ‘Literary Trieste’ was published in the New York Review of Books.

  ‘Party Going’ was published as the introduction to the new Vintage Edition of Party Going and also in the New York

  Review of Rooks.

  ‘The Enchanted Fort’ was published as the introduction to the new Penguin edition of The Tartar Steppe and also in the Threepenny Review.

  In the Locked Ward’ was published in The Lancet and later in the New York Review of Books.

  ‘Fascist Work’ was published in the New York Review of Books.

  ‘Sightgeist’ was published in the New York Review of Books.

  A Prisoner’s Dream’ was published in the New York Review of Books.

  ‘Unlocking the Mind’s Manacles’ was published in the New York Review of Books.

  ‘Christina Stead, Our Luck’ was published as the introduction to the New York Review Books edition of Letty Fox: Her Luck and will be published in the New York Review of Books.

  ‘Writerly Rancour’ was published in Pretext, the magazine of the University of East Anglia.

  Hell and Back

  [Dante Alighieri]

  ‘Good Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ the rich man asks Jesus. ‘Sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor,’ is the reply, ‘and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.’ At which the rich man is sorrowful and turns away. ‘It is easier,’ Jesus remarks to his disciples, ‘for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.’

  Some 1,300 years later, banished from his native Florence and thus largely bereft of this world’s goods, Dante Alighieri, politician, poet and philosopher, was nevertheless still having trouble threading the eye of that needle. It seems there are other attachments aside from wealth that make it difficult for us to turn our backs on this world. Passion for one: Dante had loved a woman who rejected him, married someone else, then compounded the affront by dying young and thus remaining for ever desirable. Ambition was another: aside from a cycle of secular love poems, Dante had written a provocative work of political philosophy suggesting the kind of state in which man would be free to pursue perfection. It was not a scenario in which divine grace appeared to be very important. Now, quite suddenly, he found himself confused, disoriented:

  Midway in the journey of our life

  I came to myself in a dark wood,

  for the straight way was lost.

  So begins the Inferno. It’s a feeling that many approaching forty, as Dante was when he wrote the lines, will recognise. How to proceed? As daylight breaks in the dark wood, the poet sees a mountain before him. It is Purgatory, it is the way to Paradise. All is well. But suddenly three ferocious beasts are blocking his path. The needle’s eye is defended by a wolf, a leopard, a lion. They are lust, pride and avarice, say some commentators. They are incontinence, malice and mad brutishness say others. They are Dante’s Florentine enemies, the French monarchy and the papacy, say yet others. Whatever or whoever, they are insuperable.

  Just as the poet despairs, a figure emerges from the gloom and offers an unusual alternative. By special intercession of his dear departed Beatrice, now in Paradise, Dante is to be given the opportunity to approach the blessed place through Hell. A vision of the damned will surely teach him to turn away from the things of this world. After some hesitation, he agrees. It was a fatal decision. Hell would never be the same again.

  For all of us,’ Borges wrote, ‘allegory is an aesthetic mistake.’ Schopenhauer, Benedetto Croce and D.H. Lawrence all concur. “I hated, even as a child, allegory,’ writes Lawrence. Reduced to a series of equivalences, he complained - white horse equals faithfulness and truth - a work of literature is explained away. It does no more than state a position. We read it once and we never need read it again.

  The Divina Commedia, most celebrated of all poems, is almost always presented to us as an allegory. Certainly this is the case with the huge and heavily annotated edition my son is poring over in high school in Verona. Who is the figure who appears to Dante in the wood? He is Virgil, the great Roman poet of the Aeneid emblematic in the Middle Ages of the best that can be achieved by reason and conscience. He will take Dante as far as mere earth
ly knowledge can take a man. Who is Beatrice? The personal embodiment of heavenly truth, say the commentaries. She will take over where Virgil, with his human limitations, is obliged to leave off. And the pilgrim poet? Obviously he is Everyman, or Christian as Bunyan was to call him. Would Bert Lawrence, we wonder, have read a poem thus described even once?

  Yet long after the fires of Hell have burned themselves out, the debate about the Divina Commedia rages on. Leafing through the commentary that Robert Hollander has prepared to accompany his new translation, one is immediately aware of a fierce rift between different schools of opinion on the poem: the Romantics, who were convinced that Dante sympathised with the sufferers in Hell, thus subverting the Christian tradition, and the traditionalists equally convinced that, while the pilgrim in the poem sometimes wavers, the poet behind the work wholeheartedly endorsed every last lacerating pang of a misbegotten, unrepentant humanity. The academic Hollander is decidedly among the anti-Romantics and enters the fray with gusto. Meanwhile, his poetess wife, who was responsible for establishing the versification of the new translation, has recently written a poem of her own, ‘A Mix Up in Dante’, that has two unrelated characters from the Inferno, the Tuscan Francesca and the Greek Odysseus, enjoying a casual affair in a mishmash of contemporary settings; it’s a piece that implicitly supports her husband’s position that these two figures, adored by so many, are nothing more than incorrigible sinners. Until one has read the Inferno itself, it is hard to understand why the debate is so heated.

  The poet turns away from this world. He is going to descend the nine circles of subterranean hell, shin down Satan’s hairy legs to a hole (that needle’s eye?) at the very core of the planet, squeeze through, then climb out of the globe at the antipodes, scale the mountain of Purgatory and achieve Paradise. That is the overall trajectory of our allegory: man in contact with sin, man rejecting sin, man purifying himself, man returning to his maker.

  But by virtue of this holy pilgrimage, Dante also intends to become one of the most famous poets of all time, human, historical time. That is an integral part of his project, and he doesn’t disguise the fact. What’s more, the journey will offer him a chance to stage one last poignant meeting with the ever beloved Beatrice. He will see and talk to her again.

  So has he really turned away from this world? Well, yes and no. The poem teems with contradictions and antithetical energies. Virgil, we soon suspect, despite the commentaries, is not merely the abstract apex of human piety and reason. More interestingly, he is indeed the great poet whom Dante most sought to emulate, a charming individual who is not to be admitted to Paradise for the simple reason that he lived too early to accept Christ’s offer of salvation. It’s an outrage.

  Beatrice, meanwhile, is Beatrice Portinari whom Dante has worshipped, despite rebuffs, since he was nine years old. And the pilgrim poet, as it turns out, is not Everyman at all, but Dante Alighieri in person. The same goes for the damned when we meet them. Never merely murderers, thieves or pederasts, they are magnificently, abjectly themselves, still sinning and suffering in a place that, far from abstract or notional, is scorchingly, stinkingly real.

  But how can a living man go unscathed through Hell? And how can a reader follow him? Will the poem be bearable} ‘Abandon all hope you who enter here,’ announce the words above the gate. Hopefully, we go through. First, Dante sees the wretched souls of those ‘who lived without disgrace yet without praise’. Rushing aimlessly back and forth, they suffer because they would rather be anyone but themselves. Well, we’re used to people like that. Six hundred years later T.S. Eliot would watch them flowing every day over London Bridge. “I could not believe death had undone so many,’ Dante says. Nothing new here.

  Then, across the River Acheron, in the limbo of the first circle of hell, are other noble souls who, like Virgil, perished before Christ got round to saving us. Homer and Plato are here, though sadly they don’t appear to be producing anything new. With them are the souls of the tiny children who die unbaptised. It’s a strange mix. Their only torment is that ‘without hope we live in longing’. Again it’s not something the average reader will be entirely unfamiliar with. Thus far we can handle it.

  But these opening scenes are only a foretaste of what’s to come, or perhaps a response to the exigencies of the encyclopaedic vocation of the poem (all the famous dead will have to be put somewhere). Nevertheless, Dante is immeasurably sad as he reflects that ‘beings of great worth were here suspended’. Already we sense how difficult it is for the human mind to be in tune with the divine will. Is it possible Homer isn’t in Heaven? The reader notes with disquiet that having encountered all the greatest poets before we’re barely inside the porch of Hell, Paradise is going to have little to offer in that department.

  Then the real horror begins, the souls tossed this way and that on stormy winds, torn apart by a three-headed dog under endless rain, sunk in bogs, sunk in boiling pitch, sunk in shit, sunk in blistering tombs, sunk in solid ice. Dante sees sinners forever unconsumed in consuming fire, forever scratching the scabs from their flesh, forever metamorphosing into snakes and lizards, forever upside down in filthy holes, forever brushing off burning embers that sift constantly down onto scorching sand.

  There is no change, no rest, no night nor day, no meal breaks. And even more disturbing, when the damned are not being whipped or clawed by demons, they are punishing each other, shoving each other about, gnawing at each other’s necks, insulting each other. Uenfer, cest les autres. In short, if Hollywood wishes to avoid legislation against excessive violence on the big screen, the Inferno is not a picture to make during an election period. How can Dante pass through it all unscathed? And how can Robert Hollander conclude the introduction to his and his wife’s new translation with the remark that ‘this is not a bad place once you get used to it’?

  ‘So as not to be hurt,’ says the Tctittiriya Samhita ‘before coming near the fire, he wraps himself in the metres.’ It’s a formula often repeated in the Vedic texts. Whether ‘he’ be god, priest or mere mortal man, in order to approach the sacrificial fire, through which alone the heavens can be conquered, he must ‘wrap himself in the metres’. Such advice is more practical than it may at first seem. The real punishment of Dante’s damned is not this or that torture - many in Purgatory will face similar sufferings - but the fact that the torture can know no solution. Neither release nor oblivion are available. And while the body - in so far as the damned have a body - is forever in pain, the mind revolves unceasingly around a particular image or experience. An adulteress is trapped for ever in her moment of passion, a suicide is irretrievably marooned in the circumstances that led him to dash his brains out against a prison wall. In this sense, Dante’s damned are not unlike those ghosts who always appear in the same place in the same clothes, conservative creatures shackled for eternity to some experience they can never go beyond.

  It is thus understandable that while the trials of Purgatory will take place on a breezy mountainside open to the sky, the tortures of the inferno must be closed inside an inverted subterranean cone that funnels down in narrowing circles to the pit of ultimate despair. It is a place of obsession, a place where time has stopped and thought has become its own prison. To get through such horror, we must wrap ourselves in the metres, for metre obliges us to keep moving on.

  Now perhaps we see why Dante chooses a poet as a guide, a poet renowned for the perfection of his verse. What is Virgil’s role throughout the Inferno) As he leads Dante from circle to circle, he first directs his attention, inviting him to engage with the damned - after all, he must learn from his experience - but then, and this is crucial, he decides exactly how long he is to be allowed to stay and talk in any one place. ‘We must not linger here,’ he says. ‘Let your talk be brief.’ The constant danger is that the poet will find himself paralysed, blocked as the damned are blocked, and as he himself was at the beginning of the poem.

  The many people and their ghastly wounds

  did so intoxicate
my eyes

  that I was moved to linger there and weep.

  So says the pilgrim poet at the opening to Canto 29. It’s an understandable response when you’ve just spoken to a decapitated nobleman holding his head by the hair. But Virgil is having none of it. ‘What are you staring at … the time we are allotted soon expires and there is more to see.’

  In short, Virgil sets the pace. It is not that we now need to start thinking of him as a personification of metre. Just that he understands as no one else does the mutually tensing, only apparently contradictory vocations of poetry: to take us, yes, to the core of things, through evocation, but then to get us out on the other side unscathed, with the reassuring, even anaesthetising, progress of verse.

  The metre Dante chose to wrap himself in involved the arrangement of hendecasyllables, lines of eleven syllables, in a verse pattern known as terza rima. That is: the poem progresses three lines at a time, the first and the third rhyming and the second setting up the rhyme for the opening line of the next threesome, each stanza, if they can be called that, standing alone, pausing a moment, but in that very pause passing the baton to what quickly follows. Once we have a sense of the role this structure is to play in the story - how it thrusts us before what is too awful to contemplate, then snatches us away from it - we can begin to appreciate how difficult the Inferno is to translate, and how all-determining the initial decision: What form am I going to use?

  A dozen and more modern translations are strewn on the desk before me, too many to analyse in detail, each with its merits and its drawbacks, each the fruit of enormous labours. The choice of staying with Dante’s terza rima is, of course, only for the boldest, or perhaps one might say the most reckless. Here is Dorothy L. Sayers, Christian, scholar and detective writer, giving us the speech in which that epitome of recklessness, Ulysses, confesses that he was not a family man and remembers his fatal, hubristic voyage through the pillars of Hercules: