"Almost everyone has a Beatrice"

I have put the title in quotes because it's not my own. It was used by A.N.Wilson for an admirable article of his that was published in the Daily Telegraph of Monday April 2. It took my eye at once: first because I always enjoy any piece by A.N. Wilson; next, because it seemed to be about that Beatrice of all Beatrices, Dante’s – and last, because Beatrice just happened to be the name I had chosen for myself when I started blogging, three weeks ago. I'm not sure why I chose it; since, Dante notwithstanding, it’s not a name I have ever really liked very much. It just seemed to be the one that lent itself best to the kind of blog I meant to try to write. But now, suddenly, I find that the name is everywhere. Princesses, babies, French delicatessens - people’s cats , even; all are suddenly called Beatrice. And if A.N. Wilson is writing about her as well (as well, that is, as Dante, not myself), then it seemed to me that she must have something rather special going on for her just now.

A.N. Wilson was writing about a little book he had just re-read on an aeroplane travelling to the United States. He had read it first in 1974, and wanted to know if it would stand up to another scrutiny (it did). The book is called The Figure of Beatrice; it was written by Charles Williams, and it apparently excited a certain jocularity amongst US customs officers, when Wilson was required to hand it over for inspection. I'm not sure what they found to amuse them; and nor, it seems, was A.N. Wilson. Perhaps there was something vaguely erotic about the picture on the cover, that put them in mind of some woman they both knew? It seems unlikely they were devotees of Dante - though one never knows, of course; and there is no reason to suppose that US customs officials should be any less literate than anyone else.

I have never come across the book myself, but I mean to try to find it. Not because I am truthfully speaking a devotee of Dante either – though I have made it to the end of many a large and difficult book. I am on intimate terms with every word of Henry James, for example; and hopelessly addicted to Dickens. I have staggered through a good two thirds of Trollope, no mean feat; and managed all five volumes of Proust, I promise you, hand on heart…. But The Divine Comedy, like Ulysses, and some of the more esoteric Virginia Woolf, has always defeated me. It’s only the idea of Dante himself, and of his Beatrice, that has somehow always haunted me. I would be at a loss to say exactly why. The nearest I can come to it is to suggest that somewhere in that strangest, and most ineffable of relationships, is to be found not only the impossible dream of every man who ever sought the perfect woman..... but also (and this most of all, for me), the unattainable ideal of every writer who ever strove for a perfect expression of his own.

Here is how A.N. Wilson put it: “One of the reasons that Charles Williams wrote his book is that he wanted to suggest that such high-falutin’ experience is not confined to the theologically obsessed political fanatic of the early 14th century. It is an all-but-universal experience that Dante happened to be imaginative enough, and clever enough, to articulate into a system. What Charles Williams called “the Affirmation of Images” is shown forth, for most of us, not in our capacity to think or even, in the first instance, to pray, but in those moments when “the Florentine – the London, the San Franciscan – girl seems a miracle.”

One feels one knows exactly what Charles Williams means, without quite being able to put it into words oneself. It’s the reason, perhaps, why the idea of Beatrice can stay and stay with one, throughout an entire life, and even when The Divine Comedy itself has remained literally a closed book. It’s the reason too, why I have so often found myself impelled to wander the narrow back streets of Florence, looking for Dante’s house, and Beatrice’s church. (Both of which, astonishingly, are still there - though not often open, I’ve found.)

Everyone has his own interpretation of the enigma of Beatrice, I daresay. Some will find it in religious or creative experience, some in devoted service - others perhaps, in sex. For me, it has always seemed to lie buried somewhere inside the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; a book to which I am drawn back time and again, without ever understanding exactly why. Much like Gatsby himself though, I have always been convinced that the magic was in there somewhere - all one had to do was reach out and close one’s fingers around it…

Would it be fanciful, I wonder, to suggest that Gatsby too, was a seeker after Beatrice? His girl was a very far cry from Dante’s, of course; and in the end she was not the apotheosis, but the death of him. Yet even so …. is it possible that in Gatsby’s dream is also to be found the dream of Everyman; writ large, and clear (and to my mind exquisite) enough for every man to recognise as his own?

This is the way Fitzgerald encapsulated it, on his preface page:

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too;
Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you.”