The School of Whoredom E-Book

Pietro Aretino

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Aretino's The School of Whoredom offers a rare – and hilarious – chance to eavesdrop on the conversation between Nanna, a seasoned Roman prostitute, and Pippa, her young daughter, as Nanna seeks to teach her protégée how to make a living as a whore.

Leseprobe

THE SCHOOL OF WHOREDOM

PIETRO ARETINO

Translated byROSA MARIA FALVO

Foreword byPAUL BAILEY

Published by Hesperus Press Limited

167-169 Great Portland Street, London W1W 6PF

www.hesperus.press

This translation first published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2003

This electronic edition published in 2023

Introduction and English language translation © Rosa Maria Falvo, 2003

Foreword © Paul Bailey, 2003

Designed and typeset by Fraser Muggeridge Printed in Jordan by Jordan National Press

ISBN (paperback): 978-1-84391-036-7

ISBN (e-Book): 978-1-84391-976-6

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

The School of Whoredom

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

FOREWORD

You are about to read a conversation between a mother and her doting daughter that is like no other in literature. It was written in or about 1535, and is in effect a lampoon. The high-minded Platonist dialogue was then in fashion, and Aretino mocks its ideas of self-improvement and exemplary virtue for what he believes they are worth. Perhaps a health warning of sorts is necessary, for if Pietro Aretino has an equivalent in English, it is John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, the satirical thorn in the flesh of Charles II and his debauched Court, who used words like ‘fuck’, ‘cunt’ and ‘prick’ with wit, inventiveness and an appropriate vigour. Aretino does the same in Italian. Satire is as nothing if it lacks a moral purpose, and that of both Rochester and Aretino is plain to see for those who have the open-mindedness to look.

Nanna, the mother in this constantly surprising dialogue, knows the ways of the world and the tricks of the trade. She is an expert in what Shakespeare has Hamlet call ‘country matters’. She wants the best, as all good parents do, for her beloved Pippa. Nanna has a lifetime’s experience of men and their curious sexual demands to pass on to the girl who is anxious to lose, and retain, her virginity, and start to earn a living. Pippa must realise that whoredom is an art as well as a craft, and its skills have to be mastered. The lastingly successful whore is required to be a consummate actress, playing the intricate game of love with cunning and panache. It is all a question of working ‘miracles’, and Nanna has plenty of them at her command. Without ‘miracles’, a whore’s career ends with the fading of beauty and the anticipated ravages of time.

The School of Whoredom is not merely a catalogue of positions – though there are enough of those to intrigue the ever-attentive Pippa and startle the innocent reader. No, its power lies in Aretino’s gifts as a storyteller. He is a master of the telling anecdote, the one that reveals as much about the anecdotist as the person whose comic misfortunes she is recounting. There is a wonderfully complicated story at the heart of this book, involving a mean and violent client, a painter named Andrea, who paints a gash on Nanna’s face, a friend called Mercurio who administers lint to the fake wound and bandages it, and a charlatan from Naples who – miraculously, of course – removes it for a large sum of money extorted from the guilty abuser, who is now the subject of contemptuous gossip. Nanna, whose days as a courtesan had seemed numbered, can entertain again, once her features are restored to their original, attractive state. Pippa listens, enraptured, to her mother’s account of how this wiliest of wily tricks was performed, making each of the tricksters richer with its satisfactory outcome. ‘You were a valiant man, Mummy, to perform a feat like that,’ she gushes, and Nanna responds, ‘We’re not at the Alleluia yet’, meaning that she has even greater triumphs to relate.

‘Whoredom has such a genius for invention,’ Nanna reflects, after her daughter wonders why she doesn’t run a school to teach people what she has learned. ‘I love watching you talk,’ Pippa says later, and the reader is left to imagine the gestures Nanna is employing when she remembers the habits and needs of her customers. In a key sequence, the ageing whore explains the necessity of making certain, romantically inclined men jealous. One ruse is accidentally to misplace a forged letter from another ardent suitor so that it just happens to find itself in the hands of the man whose feelings she wishes to inflame. There are dangers and pitfalls to negotiate, because a jealous lover can turn nasty to the point of murder. Nanna is a negotiator par excellence. She remembers the exact wording of the letter that created a very profitable fit of jealousy, and Pippa is impressed once more.

‘You could say that a courtesan whose heart pounds for anything other than her purse is like a greedy, drunken tavern-keeper, who, instead of denying himself, eats and drinks what he should be selling,’ Nanna counsels, and Pippa, heeding her advice, exclaims: ‘You really, really do know everything.’ Yet the delightful conceit inherent in Aretino’s dialogue is that Nanna, for all her vast experience, is cognisant of the fact that each new day brings with it fresh knowledge to assimilate. A whore cannot rest on her laurels. Life is a matter of chance, and a brothel is a place where certain chances have to be taken and opportunities seized. Nanna may boast, and do so with justification, but there is an element of modesty in her complex nature, which she hopes Pippa will appreciate.

The School of Whoredom is a work of serious comedy. Its author befriended one pope, and risked assassination from another before he reached the age of thirty-five. He was in the business of scurrilous exposure, with hypocrisy in all its manifestations as his principal target. Yet his is not the tarnished soul of the tabloid hack, forever rummaging for information concerning the follies, mostly sexual, of the famous. He is a genuine moralist, in the widest sense, who can detect qualities in an old whore that her lustful clients are blinded to. He sounds the human note, and it is worth listening to. He is known – along with Boccaccio (the name means, literally, ‘foul’ or ‘dirty mouth’), Chaucer, and my revered Rochester – as a celebrator of an aspect of existence that is either ignored or condemned, and will continue to be so for as long as civilisation lasts.

That human note sounds memorably and movingly at the close of The School of Whoredom, with Nanna and Pippa taking a well-earned nap. On awakening, the women refresh themselves and resume their conversation. The excited Pippa has had a ‘lovely dream around daybreak’ and Nanna must wait to warn her of the ‘betrayals that come from men’s love’. A human note, and a tender one too, for even whores, Aretino hints, can be betrayed.

– Paul Bailey, 2003

INTRODUCTION

While Aretino’s two works Ragionamento [Conversation] and Dialogo [Dialogue] became known in modern times as Sei Giornate [Six Days] (in the 1969 Laterza edition by Giovanni Aquilecchia), they are distinctly independent works, quite separate in the way they address two different phases and approaches of the writer’s cultural development. Dialogue was first published in Venice in 1536 and Aretino claims to have written each of its three days in a day.

In Conversation, which preceded the Dialogue, the conditions symbolising womanhood – nun, wife, whore – are illustrated through Nanna’s personal account of her experiences, and each forms a segment of a tumultuous and sentimental biography. Through her voice and train of thought, Aretino provides a sense of the richness and complexity of contemporary society together with a series of references to the uncertainty of the future, and there is no doubt that the events, places, people and social environs described by Nanna were also those of Aretino himself while he was living in Rome during the Medici papacy. Thus the biography of the courtesan can be seen as coinciding with the personal memoirs of the writer.

Dialogue is a fast-track encyclopaedia of sexual material that refers in principal terms to prostitution: the techniques and perils of the profession, and the pimping and opportunism that surround and support it. Nevertheless we can also appreciate, even without further background, that it is a social and political thesis on two worlds, Roman and Venetian, set in a time of great human, geographic and economic upheaval.

The first day of the Dialogue – which here forms The School of Whoredom – can be seen as a self-contained unit, following its own logic, but it also begins a conversational journey which eventually leads us to a global definition of its themes and a complete description of the world of prostitution and the various characters who populate it. Dialogue as a whole provides us with a treatise on human behaviour, and the author’s intention is indicated from the outset in each of its titles: ‘Day One: Nanna teaches’; ‘Day Two: Nanna recounts’; ‘Day Three: Wet Nurse explains’. The reader’s attention has shifted from the biographical accounts of the protagonist in Conversation to a didactic account of the tricks of the trade, the doctrines, and the entire ‘school of whoredom’ on the first day of the Dialogue. Aretino presents a dazzling show of his technical expertise, and while Conversation has a genuinely Roman soul, the Dialogue, despite its being set in Renaissance Rome on a summer’s afternoon, has a Venetian one – it was written during his long and happy exile to the ‘Virgin City’, about which he sang endless praises from his privileged residence on the Grand Canal. Together they represent the personal metamorphosis of the author.

Despite the bawdy content of the Dialogue, it is Aretino’s style, rather than his subject matter, that affords his most controversial effects. Through jest and in earnest he stuns the reader – one is tempted to say ‘audience’ since his power as a dramatist is no less in evidence than his dexterity as a prose writer – by evoking the vulnerability and dignity of the human condition with the skill of a painter; and he is indeed ‘such a painter with words’. Aretino’s competence as a writer was recognised outside Italy, and he was a noted intellectual on the socio-political stage of his time, earning, in the space of a few years, a fortune and the prestige of exceptional appointments and the support of important patrons. Yet all this, as he was most bitterly aware, was relatively undervalued when it came to establishing a career of any stable significance, despite the excellence of his craft. His subject matter, the precision of his pen and the incisiveness of his social analysis – hallmarks of a true satirist of any era – kept him at a safe distance from public acceptance and therefore historical commentary. He was, as Aquilecchia coined him, one of the ‘new men’ who entered the Italian literary scene with the advent of the Bembian reform (so named for Pietro Bembo, 1470‒1547), which exercised a tremendous classicising influence in the first half of the sixteenth century, establishing Boccaccio’s writings as the model for prose and beginning the Petrarchan movement. Aretino was predisposed, given the favourable social conditions, to anticonformist attitudes.