The School of Whoredom E-Book

Pietro Aretino

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

Seitenzahl: 156

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.

His iconoclastic social satire is presented with even more vigour in some of his other writings, particularly his letters, where the variety of his lexicon is remarkable. His work in general represents a reaction to the new linguistic-literary elitism of the period and his popular vulgarisms attest to the honesty and precision with which he evoked the very animal truths of which we are all aware. In The School of Whoredom, and the Dialogue as a whole, set against the contextual backdrop of ‘civilised’ Renaissance man, Aretino dares to confront our secret understanding of what is all too close to home and better packed comfortably away in the cupboard of social taboos. The reader is privy not only to a private conversation between mother and daughter, but also to a host of personal interpretations that can only come from the most intimate of experiences. The shock factor is a tribute to the power and poignancy of his words – we feel almost as if we were reading a private diary – while he angles the full thrust of his creativity in striking out at the powerful.

In The School of Whoredom, Aretino endows his characters with sheer theatricality. Nanna is not only an irresistibly entertaining narrator – she is able to articulate her skills as a shrewd dialectician, dissecting her subject with penetrating logic and listing ever subtler schemes for achieving success. She identifies herself as a veritable ‘well’ of information, keen to relate what her eyes and ears have witnessed since her days in the monastery, and if prostitution itself offers no guarantees in life, all the social etiquette will nonetheless be of some value to Pippa; hence, the sharp attention to language, clothes, appearances, behaviour, power games, social positioning and other details. While Nanna’s speeches are without scruples, perhaps testament to her avarice and the fear of ageing, Aretino is careful to contrast this with Pippa’s girlish eagerness, and though the latter is forced to live in times more hostile for whores, she has the advantage of her mother’s careful preparation and precious guidance, and so can reasonably hope to make a go of this profession.

Through Nanna, Aretino launches a scathing attack on contemporary scholarship and social pretension, warning Pippa of the arrogance of feigned social graces and favouring simplicity, reiterating the premise that: ‘Flattery and deceit are the darlings of great men’. In his anecdotal characters we find the clergyman who often and willingly betrays his mission, the rich who frequently elude the ideals they proclaim, and the rest of society – of which the courtesan is undoubtedly at the lower end, the wicked example par excellence – among whom misery and envy are the chief causes of every type of imbroglio, infidelity and compromise, including prostitution. Everything that would normally hide behind innuendo is made explicit; his writing seems to flow as spontaneously as Nanna’s storytelling and backtracking, asserting an absolute lack of interest in any form of linguistic indoctrination. He has a preference for other, more concrete values, which, in Nanna’s case, means cold, hard cash.

Aretino’s style positively revels in a series of reiterations and crescendos, showing a marked tendency to generalise and classify, and an unquenchable taste for playful, blasphemous and provocative listings. Bursting with sexual metaphors, deformed Latinisms, and Hispanic borrowings, his language includes malicious citations of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and Pulci. Always with parodic intent, he hoards proverbs, colloquialisms, compound nouns and Wellerisms. One can imagine the writer brandishing his pen, as he waxes lyrical through the voice of Nanna, a character who seems both to live and to talk. Indeed, it’s the illiterate Pippa who shares and expresses the reader’s enjoyment. His descriptions are indeed a visual as well as a philological feast, a banquet to which we are invited, on the proviso that we throw caution to the wind and share in his spirited disdain for convention, just like Nanna’s ‘old codgers’ who are ‘the enemies of formality’. Sometimes crude and violent, sometimes allusive, and often lovably confidential, Aretino’s writing seems in constant pursuit of caricatured and twisted, even surreal effects. He loves personification and hyperbole, and cultivates alliterations, playing a clever game of juxtaposition on many levels, and demonstrating a hearty appetite for detail in the many vignettes that make up Nanna’s lecture.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of his language is its proliferation of metaphors, especially with erotic terminology; and his comic genius for differentiating the seemingly countless ways of terming male and female genitalia alone saves him from appearing repetitive. Aretino is a master of metaphor, and each one grows from the one before in a virtually endless procession; like a cancan sequence, the images dance uninterruptedly out onto the stage of Nanna’s, Pippa’s and our imaginations. Aretino is, of course, perfectly aware of his own gifts, making a point of using Pippa as a mouthpiece for their appreciation: ‘I wouldn’t mind if you kept on for a whole year.’

While the seasoned and masterful ruses employed by Nanna are a far cry from the ‘sexy shop’ of today’s Italy, there is no doubt that this ageless practice was as much about careful marketing, satisfying clients and cutting one’s losses then as it is now; Pippa must avoid returning home at the end of the day with ‘a full belly and an empty purse’. For a prostitute, sex is always mediated by the requirements of the ‘trade’, subject to the ruthless laws of survival, and thus almost entirely freed from the mythologies of love and sentimentalism. But there is a difference between the type of whore Nanna wants her daughter to become and the ordinary ‘poor wretches’ out there, and her long speech on the perils of simply ‘planting [oneself] outstretched on the bed’ shows her compassion for the misfortunes of those who must pay, inevitably, with their bodies. Here Aretino introduces a moment of reflection, a shadow side, emotive rather than stylistic, bestowing the work and the discourse with an unexpected weightiness and a very real depiction of the pathos of prostitution.

– Rosa Maria Falvo, 2003

Note on the Text:

The current text comprises the first ‘day’ of Aretino’s Dialogue; it is based on Pietro Aretino: Ragionamento – Dialogo, BUR Rizzoli, Milan (1998).

Nanna: What’s this fury, this temper, this fever, this frenzy, this anxiety, this badgering and this tantrum of yours all about, you little nuisance?

Pippa: I’m cross because you won’t let me be a courtesan as my godmother, Lady Antonia, advised you.

Nanna: You can’t have lunch at nine o’clock, you know.

Pippa : You’re a wicked stepmother, sniff, sniff...

Nanna: Whimper away, my little one.

Pippa: I certainly will.

Nanna: Forget your pride – forget it, I say, because if you don’t mend your ways, Pippa, if you don’t mend them, then you won’t have anything to cover your arse, because nowadays there are so many whores out there that those who don’t work miracles for a living won’t make ends meet; and it’s not enough to be good-looking, to have pretty eyes and blonde braids; only art or luck will give you the edge, the rest is a waste of time.

Pippa: If you say so.

Nanna: That’s how it is, Pippa, but if you follow my good advice, and if you open up your ears to what my experience can teach you, then lucky, lucky you...