A Reasonable World

10

On days when it was possible to breathe without a mask, Stevens walked the streets Of Rome, looking at people with a new curiosity. Here among the crowds of African and Asian mendicants were petty shopkeepers, a few artisans plying their trades, office workers going to their anonymous jobs: all of them, presumably, making some contribution in return for which they were fed and housed. But there were others who contributed nothing, and Stevens himself was one of these. What if he had grown up in a world where the use of violence had become impossible—the world which he saw taking shape around him at this moment? It could have happened, if he had been born only thirty years later. What would that man have been like? He could not answer the question, and he could not leave it alone. He had done what he had to do, yes, he still believed that, but if he had not had to do it, what would he have done instead? Suppose someone had said to him, you will be fed and housed in comfort, you don’t need to worry about that; now what will you do with your life?

What if Palladino’s insane dream came true? The farmers would give away their crops, the manufacturers their machines, the workers their labor. And he himself, would he be merely a social parasite, taking everything and giving nothing? Impossible.

He remembered his infatuation with poetry at seventeen. Years ago he had tried to translate Villon into English, God knows why. The lines came back to him now:

He had been attracted to Villon, no doubt, because of that settled resentment, the feeling of being an outcast, his hand against every man: but Villon had been nothing if not an unsuccessful thief.

This Thibault d’Aussigny of whom Villon complained was the Bishop of Orleans who had put him in prison, perhaps for stealing a votive lamp from a church, a crime of small account except that it might have been treated as sacrilege.

Say, then, was Villon’s misery his own fault or that of the world around him? In a better world, would he have had enough to eat without stealing—and would he then have written better or worse poetry?

That night, after the child was asleep, he found Villon’s verses in the net and printed them out. One stanza caught his eye:

Literally, it was something like, “I know the doublet by its hem, I know the monk by his habit. I know the master by the man, I know the nun by her veil. I know when a conman talks jargon, I know fools fed on creams. I know wine by the barrel, I know everything except myself.”

If the poet were alive tonight, and if he were an English speaker, what would he write? Some of his rhymes were forced, for instance “cresmes” and “moy mesmes”; he would not have done that if the language had given him a better choice. After a while he thought he saw some others that the poet might have liked. He wrote, and crossed out, and in an hour he had:

The more he read about Villon the more deeply interested he grew. As a young scholar, Villon had actually been proposed for a benefice and might have died a bishop; but then, as Wyndham Lewis said, “The Church would have gained a rascal and poetry would have lost a prince.” At the age of thirty-two he was arrested for a crime of which he was more or less innocent, tortured, and condemned to be “hanged and strangled.” On appeal, since the case was weak but Villon’s odor was strong, his sentence was commuted to ten years’ exile from Paris. That was the last anyone ever heard of him. Although he wrote, in The Debate of the Heart and Body of Villon, that the fault was in his stars, it was certainly his character and not mere circumstance that made him a criminal. He might have become a prelate, like many of his class at the University of Paris; instead, he chose poverty, crime, and poetry.