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The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri |
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This book is both literally and
figuratively unreadable. First, the literal problems: many (presumably) important lines
are in Italian, Hebrew or Latin. Further, Tosches bogs his narrative down to dwell, at
mind-numbing length, on numerology and etymology. Second, the figurative problem: the
book’s style. When Tosches does abandon his pedantic impulses, and deign to tell his
reader a story—and, make no mistake, it’s an extremely interesting story—he
does so in language so florid it quickly becomes, and remains, laughable. It’s hard
to enjoy a book when the reader's desire for the author to shut up and tell the story is
as overpowering as it becomes here.
In The Hand Of Dante’s plot revolves around The
Divine Comedy. Tosches makes himself the protagonist, a writer and sometime gangster
hanger-on who is conscripted to retrieve the original manuscript of Dante’s poem.
Savage crimes are mentioned in casual tones throughout the book. Some of these are
obviously fictive, but others may well be true. Tosches goes out of his way to mingle
fiction and reality here, and the way he describes his own actions, there’s no way to
check his story. This is interesting. What’s less interesting is Tosches’ use of
Dante as a character. He describes the poet’s life, in a narrative that runs parallel
to (and sometimes parallels) the main story.
Tosches is obviously obsessed with
Dante, and that’s fine. But his book carries an irreparable flaw, which makes it the
lurching failure it is. Its author is an autodidact, with all the lack of discipline and
unfettered enthusiasm that implies. He began his writing career as a rock critic, but by
the late 1970s had effectively retired from the work in disgust, an understandable
reaction. The crassness of the music industry has broken many a seemingly hardy spirit.
Tosches’ response to the depredations of the music biz was a
withdrawal into obscurantism. His primary tactic as a writer became the acquisition of
arcane knowledge which allowed him the freedom to make extravagant claims because the
facts were uncheckable. Nobody else knew about the subjects he tackled, so he became the
default authority. He’s not trustworthy, though. He’s a crank. During the course
of this book, he goes off on tangents about the worthlessness of the contemporary literary
scene and contemporary society, that are so dyspeptic, they’re almost worthy of the
French writer Michel Houellebecq, a depressive alcoholic whose novels advocate human
extinction as a solution to their author’s pain.
Tosches is forever chasing some idealized past, whether it’s the
rural south of the 1950s (in his rock ‘n’ roll writing, he seemed to believe the
music was already spoiled by the time Elvis walked into Sun Studios) or the medieval Italy
of Dante. In the book’s most useless, and (one hopes) unintentionally laughable
section, Tosches-the-character takes a trip to Cuba. This happens seemingly for no other
reason than to allow Tosches-the-author to indulge his worst Hemingwayesque impulses. A
sample passage:
It was in the music of the sea to the south, in the almighty roar of creation and destruction, the endless vagitus, lullaby, and threnody of the waves, whose tides bore away every dying soul, that I had found the true sway and rhythms of the true thing. Lying there alone in that hammock in the black of night, it was to me as if the stars, like glintings of infinity, and the clouds, like gatherings of shades, drifted and wove to the music of that roar, that vagitus, that lullaby, that threnody of those soul-delivering and soul-taking waves of that vast and deadly and godly song that was without beginning and that was without end. Lying there alone in that hammock in the black of night, the strange thirst in my veins had been quenched by the warm water of the fresh-cut coconut that had been brought to me by the kind young stranger. Lying there alone in the black of night, I felt the sea to be the great old stranger: the great old stranger that was beyond any epithets of kindness or of evil, just as its entrance into me was beyond both my will and my understanding.
In The Hand Of Dante is stuffed with passages that
florid. Eventually, the mind rebels; the eyes refuse to take in one more
pseudo-incantatory sentence, one more word chosen not for its aptness but for its
archaism, one more paragraph that fails to advance the story a jot but serves only to make
Nick Tosches swell up at the keyboard. At last, the brain begins to plead for one simple
declarative, one page that limits itself to English, one chapter free of references to
poets no professor is so pretentious as to even assign anymore.
If part of Tosches’ point is
to demonstrate the inadequacy of contemporary education, then he’s to be
congratulated. His jeremiads against the current state of the publishing industry are, if
hardly the first word on the subject, at least entertaining and momentarily convincing.
But it’s hard to take any of it seriously coming from a man who writes for Vanity Fair.
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