Penguins on Parade: the Heptameron of Marguerite of Navarre!

Some Penguin Classics have the field all to themselves. You publish a paperback edition of Pride & Prejudice, you can expect a little elbowing on the bookstore shelves from other publishers; you publish a paperback edition of the Paston letters, not so much. Penguin has always gone where the good scholarship is, and that has often led them into that bizarre world I know so well: the world of enduring works nobody’s ever heard of.

Take their wonderful edition of Marguerite of Navarre’s Heptameron. Marguerite lived from 1492 to 1549 and for many years presided over a fairly glittering court of intellectuals and artistes, and somewhere in that mélange of quips and quotes arose this book of some 70 stories that contain all the genteel raunchiness of Boccaccio’s Decameron (the court – and this book – loved Boccaccio to distraction, as indeed who does not?) but almost none of its subtle playfulness.

I say ‘somewhere’ because the Heptameron has one of the more tangled textual histories of any post-Dark Ages work – we know Pierre Boaistua put out a first edition in 1558, but we don’t know what manuscripts he was using, nor do we know anything substantial about the genesis of those manuscripts. We can’t even be sure of the book’s attribution; Marguerite, being royal and lovely and strong-willed, makes the most convenient and picturesque focal point, but the whole thing could just as easily have been assembled by Bonaventure des Perriers, her valet de chambre – and extremely cultured man who was in a perfect position to cadge story-contributions from all the noblemen and women in Marguerite’s circle (and from the lady herself). Likewise the names of the various characters in the book are clearly pseudonyms, and so are clearly meant to stand in for real people – but who those real people are, specifically, has kept French scholars busy for centuries.

The goal, at any rate, was to create a “French Decameron,” and so we have a framing device in which five men and five women retire to a mountaintop abbey and tell stories to amuse and instruct each other. The men and women are perfectly well-behaved even though their stories abound with sex, rape, and manipulation – hence the work’s undying appeal: it’s smut for the manor-born crowd.

And the Penguin edition is the only one out there in English – there are scholarly versions from university presses, but as far as a Heptameron you could actually find in a bookstore or used bookshop, it’s this Penguin Classic or nothing. The volume is a translation (a bit stiff in places, and a bit musty in other places) by P.A. Chilton from 1984, based on the edition by Michel Francois, and Chilton himself strikes a winningly humble note in his Introduction:

The most obvious of the problems any translator of the Heptameron faces is the confused condition of numerous passages in his source. Fortunately, when the sense is contradictory or obscure, or where the narrative sequence is awkward, it is possible to make plausible deductions from the surrounding context, as would any French reader of the original. The guiding principle has been to reproduce in English a meaningful Reading of the original, not a mechanical transcription of words on the page.

And after that, we’re off to the races, with story after story of lecherous monks and friars, brutal husbands, and lots of coy wordplay. Readers who perhaps discovered a disinclination for such matter when they were forced to read Boccaccio in high school should be warned – passages like this one occur with clocklike regularity:

“If I may say so, Madame, if the King didn’t have a crown on his head, he wouldn’t have the slightest advantage over me as far as giving pleasure to the ladies is concerned. What is more, I am quite sure that in order to satisfy a refined person such as yourself, he really ought to be wishing he could exchange his constitution for one more like my own!”

The Queen laughed and said, “The King may have a more delicate constitution than your own. Even so, the love which he bears me gives me so much satisfaction that I prefer it to all others.”

And for the rest of us – who love such stuff and can’t get enough of it – well, we owe Mr. Chilton, and Penguin Classics, another small vote of thanks.

The Decameron!

Our book today is Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, which some of you may remember as one hell of a tedious 'Great Books' assignment in college, where this 500-year-old 800-page Italian masterpiece is routinely made the mandatory reading assignment of clueless hung-over teenagers who've previously read nothing older or more demanding than Stephen King. It's small wonder that none of these students come away with fond memories of Boccaccio - the few who actually force themselves to read him almost always end up wondering what the big deal is; they've seen endless variations on the plots in The Decameron, after all - there's hardly been a movie or TV show in the last century that hasn't had an element or two of Boccaccio in it.

Oddly enough, Boccaccio's 14th century readers would have had a similar reaction - Boccaccio wholesale invents very little in the way of stories: The Decameron is a vast clearing-house of staple plots, staple characters, staple resolutions and narrative twists, which is why authors have been mining his quarry from the very moment the thing was first written (the most famous of these ... er, fans somewhat churlishly refuses even to mention Boccaccio by name - but then, the English in those days had no manners to speak of). So it's true that Western literature - and movies and TV - owe a debt to Boccaccio of such vast proportions that its full extent can't ever be known. But it's not just that he pulls together so many of the familiar plots floating around the slowly rebounding literature of his day, although he does indeed do that. No, Boccaccio does one central, amazing thing more: he refines into print the idea of telling stories. In The Decameron he revives the constantly-morphing morally-liquid narrator's stance last seen in Ovid's Metamorphoses, but he adds an element Ovid doesn't always - couldn't always (didn't dare always, with Augustus watching) - include: style. Panache. Sprezzatura. In Ovid, the deeper ironies of the various transformation stories are the point; in Boccaccio, the stories themselves - how well they're done, how well they're shaped as stories ... that's the point. The Decameron might be full of monks, abbesses, and holy men, but it's the single most secular book ever written.

The storytelling is the whole point of the story, too. As those poor unfortunate college students may dimly recall, the premise of The Decameron is that a small group of ten young people - three men and seven women - flee the plague-stricken city of Florence and go to a splendid villa outside Naples, where they spend ten days and ten nights telling stories to each other, to pass the time, to flirt, and to forget about the horrors stalking the cities and lanes outside (Boccaccio's pen-portrait of the Bubonic Plague is so vivid that it, too, has been quarried by countless writers on that disaster). Each day has a different judge of the stories, and although the tales themselves range into all kinds of subjects (virtually every occupation, station in life, and social rank is somewhere in this book, and plenty of animals too), they share some stray things in common - and the foremost of these is that our tale-tellers always put talking, tale-telling of some kind, a the heart of the stories they tell.

A few of those other common strands have been pointed out by scholars and appreciative readers over the centuries. It's been correctly observed, for instance, that Boccaccio's book is the first since ancient Rome in which women come across as actual people, rather than paragons and cautionary tales. Another that all readers from Alexander Pope to Randall Jarrell have cherished: this is a book full of laughter - despite the often-gruesome or grim turn several of the stories take, this is a fun, funny book. Harried students can't be expected to see this, but then, harried students shouldn't be forced to read The Decameron in the first place; it's too good for that. It should be approached willingly, eagerly, for the sheer joy it is.

Boccaccio wrote the book in his mid-thirties (probably around 1350), after having spent more than ten years as an assistant to his loving father during their posting with a large banking firm in Naples, and if ever a location perfectly served to incubate a talent, here was such a time. The Naples of 1330s was a paradise of wonder for a good-looking young man with a sharp brain, money in his purse, and an undemanding job, and young Boccaccio took every advantage of his luck. He studied, yes (scholars, being scholars, are always eager emphasize the quality of the Royal Library to which he would have had access), but he also rode horses and drank wine and listened to the thousand tall tales wafting through the streets of that bustling center of trade and travel. When his appointment ended and he returned to Florence, he set about creating a book that would burst at its seams with the sunlight, the warmth, the sheer joy of his time in Naples.

And he succeeded. The Decameron is the happiest of companions, a warm, beautiful afternoon pressed between two covers. Its stories of endlessly clever, articulate shapers and connivers never bore, never drag or wander (not many of those who quarried him can say that) ... they shimmer and burble through a million plot complications, slipping in and out of obscenity, immorality, and downright heresy without once being genuinely indecent.

This is one of my desert-island books, and so naturally I urge all of you - even those who are now or were once harried college students - to pack a bottle of wine and a wedge of cheese into a basket, take a copy of The Decameron to your favorite park (Everyman's Library has a very engaging new translation by J. G. Nichols - it'll set you back $30, but it'll last you your whole life and shrug off any number of wine spills), and make Boccaccio's acquaintance. I think you'll be glad you did.