Full Circle

Midway through my master’s degree, I found myself sunk in a sofa, listening to one of those arguments you encounter mostly at grad school parties: that you did not need to read a book to have — well, read the book. A classmate had mounted this claim after it became apparent that his criticism of a seminal text came from its general shape rather than readerly observation. The novel was bad, he said. Derivative and unconvincing. He didn’t even need to open it to know that. “It’s like travel,” he insisted. “You don’t have to go somewhere if you know what’s there. I don’t have to go to Greece to have been to Greece.” At which point the woman beside me — our host — turned toward me, a faraway look in her eyes, and murmured, “I’m in Greece right now.”

To tell about those nights is hard, for I was very inebriated and very sad, newly bereft of the mentor whose sins would place him, generously, in the second circle of Dante’s hell, more shrewdly in the eighth or ninth. But despite claims to the contrary, I had never read Inferno, and now such dubious intellectualism worked just fine for me, unmoored as I was. My pontificating peer confirmed that I did not need to: after all, I was already in hell. I was, more accurately, in Houston, a strange land to which I’d ferried the copy of Robert Pinsky’s translation that I’d been carrying around for years, extracting lines to plunk into poems that needed . . . what, exactly? Classmates and professors praised the “intertextuality”; a journal accepted one of these forgeries from the first submission I ever sent out. I was twenty then, and I was on my way, riding a charmed trajectory toward poetry fame — until I was merely drunk and lost in a graduate program far too advanced for the likes of me, rubbing elbows with doctoral candidates and pretending I had previously encountered the phrase “accentual-syllabic.”

What to do but double down on the grift and announce that Dante’s Inferno would be the backbone of my thesis, an idea that had come to me — full disclosure — in the form of auditory hallucination. While sweating at a red light on my way into campus one morning, I’d heard the voice of Virgil explain I was destined to write a contemporary version. This made terrific sense to me, until I started reading my source text. What, I despaired, two pages in, was a Mantuan? The year was 2002, and my free AOL trial strained beneath the weight of my ignorance. (I did not realize there was back matter.) I gave up.

Finally reading Inferno this summer, nearly a Keats’s lifetime later, I was curious to see how wrong I’d gotten my allusions. It was strange to encounter lines I already knew by heart, like bumping into an old friend in the wrong city, a place where you’d have expected a different population of lost souls. And, like trying to catch up with one of those spectres, it was boring. Things that one might wish would behave as metaphor resist its legerdemain, the historical details of Dante’s casting being all but impossible to overlook. If my early poems worked, they worked despite the fact I hadn’t thought about them very hard, drawn instead by the drama of the sinners’ lives, the power of Pinsky’s language.

So instead of the tortured academic study I’d envisioned, I decided to ignore the paths that led to digression. Biographical context? Who needs it when you have a map (front matter!) and the willingness to see where it will take you. Liberated, I was back where I’d started, reading for pleasure, for story, for the love of a well-made line — minus the need to look smarter than I am. What I could not glean from the page I ignored. What’s left in Inferno, read this way? A story of real friendship, I’m tempted to say. Virgil is a good teacher — the kind of guide I could have used as I tried to find my way back to the living. He is invested in Dante’s success but with no thought of what he’ll get from his student; he seeks neither flattery nor indulgence. One is also left with, yes, the general shape — in this case, the literal shape of suffering. Circles within circles. Like the wounded mind, spiralling unbidden along its fractured neural pathways, the damned complete their tortured circuits only to begin again. For Dante, hell is repetition. And for the faithful traveller, the only way out is through.