How happy those are who know how to write! - Browning's little joke - a post on The Ring and the Book

No one wants to read about it and I don’t want to write about it, but I read The Ring and the Book (1868-9) so I’m going to get some blog posts out of it.  It’s Robert Browning’s massive 21,000 line verse novel about a sensational Roman murder and trial from 1698.  Not exactly pulled from the headlines, but rather from a yellow book of documents Browning bought from an antique dealer in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria.

The problems with Browning’s “Italian murder thing” (Vol. VII, p. 261) are, to be clear: 1) length (800 pages of blank verse), 2) difficulty (it’s by Robert Browning), and 3) monotony, although much of the latter is a necessary help with the book’s difficulty.

The poem is in twelve chapters, an introduction by a narrator I will call Browning, ten dramatic monologues by participants in the case, including two by Count Guido, the murderer, and a return to Browning for a wrap-up.  Each of the characters tells the story of the murder in his (or, once, her) own words, which means that the entire story is actually repeated ten times, each time with subtle variations in detail and emphasis.  Ideally, I would I would file away every discrepancy and error with an eye to discovering the motive of the speaker, then filtering it all to piece together the True Story of the murder.

In practice, it was hard enough just keeping track of where I was in each retelling.  “Oh, this is where Pompilia meets the priest, right.”  Very useful, repetition, for the reader who is lost.

The murder story is complicated, but Browning had the right instinct, since it’s a good one.  Pompilia, all of fourteen, has been married off by her aged parents to the noble but poor Count Guido, who mistreats her.  With the help of a young priest Pompilia flees her husband.  The fugitives are captured and separated, the priest exiled, Pompilia put in a convent.  The twists start coming – e.g., Pompilia is pregnant (but by whom?) – leading to Count Guido’s murder of his child wife and her parents.  One more twist – Pompilia, a tough teenager, clings to life long enough to identify her own murderer, along with a 1,828 line dramatic monologue.  “How happy those are who know how to write!” she says in line 81, an inside joke from a poet whose specialty is speech in verse.

Anyway, thus the trial, the real-life documents, and the imagined monologues, from the murderer, the victim, the priest, lawyers for both parties, and even the Pope.

Jeanne of Necromancy Never Pays was, on her sixth anniversary, taking requests for poems.   Eying the bulk of the thing myself, I suggested The Ring and the Book – as a joke, I swear, as a joke, except that I was going to and in fact did read it. The poem’s a stunner, a great achievement, and I will do my best, or at least second-best, let’s not go nuts, to point out some of its real pleasures, despite the element of absurdity about the whole thing – to reading it, or writing about it, or, directed at Browning, having written it.

I felt, once I had finished the poem, that I was finally ready to read it, that if I turned back to the first line and began again I might be able to get somewhere.  But instead I read something else and write this.

I read The Ring and the Book in volumes VII, VIII, and IX of The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Ohio University Press, 1985-9.