of a husband she never had…”
“A FREUDIAN SHOCKER …”
— The New York Times
Would she laugh out loud at that? (All those times in the graveyard I never heard her laugh.)
Claire,
I felt some relief writing my essays on Eminent Men of Italy for Dionysius Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia. Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli—those lives so far from mine, from Lerici, glass skin and burning skin, the graveyard, and “the boat was flawed in its design and never should have sailed.“Far from “his voice, a peculiar one, engraved in my memory,“and “joy would destroy me.“My task was to make a life become a kind of story, not to dwell in its intricate unsolvable mysteries. To build a life like an equation but not quite—even with those far-off lives I knew there could be no definitive summary or angle. I pared away so much, ignored so many shadows (had little access to those shadows). I was an outsider, there was much I couldn’t know, wouldn’t even know I didn’t know, didn’t sense (unlike the way I’d sensed in the one from the graveyard things for which I had no words). I knew I was writing a kind of lie, that to sum up a life at all is always in some sense a lie. But I liked the straightforward, practical feel of it, the steady task. Godwin said I did it well—had a gift—could do it better than he. And of course it brought in money. So I could write the most straightforward facts, and take pleasure in those facts: “When Petrarch was eight years of age, his parents moved to Pisa.” Or “At the age of fifteen Petrarch was sent to study at the university of Montpellier.” I could write, “Niccolo Machavelli was born in Florence on the 3d of May, 1469” and not worry I was wrong. Those spare facts comforted me, stood like massive walls but even more so, stronger and more stable than anything I’d known. When I quoted from Machiavelli’s letter recounting how the duke, no longer needing his cruel underling Ramiro “caused him one morning to be placed on a scaffold in the marketplace of Cesena, his body divided in two, with a wooden block and bloody knife at his side,” I barely felt the horror. It seemed distant, unreal, though I knew it was more fact than much of what went on in my own mind. I could write, “The great doubt that clouds Machiavelli’s character regards the spirit in which he wrote the ‘Prince’—whether he sincerely recommended the detestable principles of government for which he appears to advocate, or used the weapons of irony and sarcasm to denounce a system of tyranny which then oppressed his native country.” But I didn’t have to worry much about it, didn’t have to hear the stirrings and nuances of his voice, whatever tinge of pleasure, dread or hatred might have been there, or a mixture of all three. I didn’t have to know. And absences didn’t haunt me. I quoted a letter from Machiavelli’s son written after his father’s sudden death (some wondered if he died by suicide, a deliberate overdose of pills, but I don’t think so): “Our father has left us in the greatest poverty, as you know. When you return here, I will tell you many things by word of mouth.” Whatever was said “by word of mouth” had long been lost, no more than air in air. I found that freeing. There was so much I didn’t need to know with Petrarch too. His copy of Virgil for instance: on parchment hidden and glued beneath the cover a note by him was discovered with writing so faded it was nearly effaced. It held dates recording the loss then recovery of the book, the death dates of various friends mingled with expressions of regret and sorrow, his feelings of increasing isolation. But if that leaf hadn’t begun to peel (in 1795, in the Ambrosian Library in Milan) no one would have thought to look or found the ghost-note underneath. I didn’t feel responsible for such mysteries, such chance discoveries, the absences and presences, we call a life, call knowledge. I could write, “This is a brief and imperfect sketch of Petrarch’s Life,” and not worry. Could write, “This letter of Machiavelli’s is lost; and we are thus deprived of a most interesting link in the correspondence, and an insight into Machiavelli’s feelings.” And I’d still sleep well that night. I accepted my distance from those “eminent Italian men.”