The Swerve (21 page)

No one is spared,
¹⁰
whether he is absent or present, and everyone is equally attacked, to the great guffawing and laughter of all. Dinner parties, tavern life, pandering, bribes, thefts, adultery, sexual degradation, and shameful acts are publicly revealed. From this one acquires not only pleasure but also the greatest utility, since the life and character of all is thus placed before your eyes.

Lapo is no doubt being ironic, but he is also, in the very manner of his irony, showing that he gets the cynical joke and thereby demonstrating his suitability to participate in the conversations he pillories. This was in effect a way of presenting himself to the members of the curia, and above all to “Poggio of Florence.”

By the time Lapo came on the scene, in the 1430s, Poggio had risen from scriptor to the much more powerful and remunerative position of papal secretary. At any one time there were about a hundred scriptors in the papal court, but only six apostolic secretaries. The latter had direct access to the pope himself and hence far greater influence. A careful suggestion here, a well-timed word there, could make all the difference in the outcome of an important case or the disposition of a wealthy benefice.

Among the secretaries, there was one in particular who was known as the
secretarius domesticus
or
secretus
, that is, the pope’s private or intimate secretary. This coveted position was the golden apple, and, after years of maneuvering, Poggio—whose father had once fled from Arezzo a step ahead of his creditors—finally plucked it. When ambitious Lapo or any
other
office seeker surveyed the court, it was easy enough to see that Poggio was foremost among “the pope’s men.”

But why then should Lapo have thought to ingratiate himself with Poggio by painting a slyly ironic picture of the corrupt institution to which he hoped to be appointed? Because already in the 1430s, and probably for a long time before this, Poggio had established himself at the very center of what he called “the Bugiale,” the Lie Factory. There, in a room at the court, the papal secretaries would regularly gather to exchange stories and jokes. “Nobody was spared,”
¹¹
Poggio wrote, in a phrase echoed by Lapo, “and whatever met with our disapprobation was freely censured; oftentimes the Pope himself was the first subject-matter of our criticism.” The chatter, trivial, mendacious, sly, slanderous, often obscene, was the kind of speech that is almost forgotten before its sound fades away, but Poggio seems not to have forgotten any of it. He went back to his desk and, in his best Latin, fashioned the conversations he had had in the Lie Factory into something he entitled the
Facetiae
.

It is almost impossible for jokes that are centuries old to retain any life. The fact that a few of the jokes of Shakespeare or Rabelais or Cervantes continue to make us smile is something of a miracle. Almost six hundred years old, Poggio’s
Facetiae
is by now largely interesting only as a symptom. These relics, like the remains of long-dead insects, tell us what once buzzed about in the air of the Vatican. Some of the jokes are professional complaints, of the sort secretaries must always have had: the boss routinely claims to detect mistakes and demands rewriting, but, if you bring him the identical document, which you pretend to have corrected, he will take it into his hand, as if to peruse it, give it a glance, and then say, “Now it is all right:
¹²
go, seal it up….” Some are stories, half-skeptical, half-credulous, about popular miracles and prodigies of nature. A few reflect wryly on Church politics, as when Poggio compares the pope
who
conveniently forgot his promise to end the schism to a quack from Bologna who announced that he was going to fly: “At the end of the day,
¹³
when the crowd had watched and waited, he had to do something, so he exposed himself and showed his ass.”

Most of the stories in the
Facetiae
are about sex, and they convey, in their clubroom smuttiness, misogyny mingled with both an insider’s contempt for yokels and, on occasion, a distinct anticlerical streak. There is the woman
¹⁴
who tells her husband that she has two cunts (
duos cunnos
), one in front that she will share with him, the other behind that she wants to give, pious soul that she is, to the Church. The arrangement works because the parish priest is only interested in the share that belongs to the Church. There is the clueless priest who in a sermon against lewdness (
luxuria
) describes practices that couples are using to heighten sexual pleasure; many in the congregation take note of the suggestions and go home to try them out for themselves. There are dumb priests who, baffled by the fact that in confession almost all the women say that they have been faithful in matrimony and almost all the men confess to extramarital affairs, cannot for the life of them figure out who the women are with whom the men have sinned. There are many tales about seductive friars and lusty hermits, about Florentine merchants nosing out profits, about female medical woes magically cured by lovemaking, about cunning tricksters, bawling preachers, unfaithful wives, and foolish husbands. There is the fellow humanist—identified by name as Francesco Filelfo—who dreams that he puts his finger into a magic ring that will keep his wife from ever being unfaithful to him and wakes to find that he has his finger in his wife’s vagina. There is the quack doctor who claims that he can produce children of different types—merchants, soldiers, generals—depending on how far he pushes his cock in. A foolish rustic, bargaining for a soldier,
hands
his wife over to the scoundrel, but then, thinking himself sly, comes out of hiding and hits the quack’s ass to push his cock further in: “Per Sancta Dei Evangelia,”
¹⁵
the rustic shouts triumphantly, “hic erit Papa!” “This one is going to be pope!”

The
Facetiae
was a huge success.

If Poggio’s work—the best known jokebook of its age—captures anything of the atmosphere of the papal court, it is less surprising that Lapo tried to call attention to himself by signaling openly a strange blend of moral outrage and cynicism. (As it turned out, a few months after he penned his
Dialogue in Praise of the Papal Court
, poor Lapo died of plague at the age of thirty-three.) By the sixteenth century, the Catholic hierarchy, deeply alarmed by the Protestant Reformation, would attempt to stamp out within its own ranks this current of subversive humor. Poggio’s
Facetiae
was on a list,
¹⁶
alongside books by Boccaccio, Erasmus, and Machiavelli, that the Church wished to burn. But in the world Poggio inhabited, it was still permissible, even fashionable, to reveal what was, in any case, widely understood. Poggio could write of the institution where he spent most of his working life that “there is seldom room
¹⁷
for talent or honesty; every thing is obtained through intrigue or luck, not to mention money, which seems to hold supreme sway over the world.”

Ambitious young intellectuals, living by their wits, the papal scribes and secretaries looked about and felt that they were cleverer, more complex, more worthy of advancement than the overstuffed prelates they served. Theirs was, predictably, a world of resentment: we complained, Poggio writes, “of the inadequate men
¹⁸
who hold the highest dignities of the Church, discreet and learned men being left out in the cold, whilst ignorant and worthless persons are exalted.”

Theirs was also, equally predictably, a world of intense sniping, competitiveness, and backbiting. We have, in the snide
remarks
about Poggio’s parentage, already had a taste of what they dished out to one another, and Poggio’s own “jokes” about his enemy, the rival humanist Filelfo, are cut from the same cloth:

At a meeting
¹⁹
of the Pope’s Secretaries, in the Pontifical palace, attended, as usual, by a number of men of great learning, conversation had turned upon the filthy and disgusting life led by that villain, Francesco Filelfo, who was, on all sides, charged with numerous outrages, and someone inquired if he was of noble extraction,—“To be sure,” said one of his fellow-countrymen, assuming a most earnest look, “to be sure he is, and his nobility is even most illustrious; for his father constantly wore silk in the morning.”

And then, eager to make sure that his readers get the point of the wisecrack, Poggio adds an explanatory note (always a sign of a damp squib): “meaning by that that Filelfo was the bastard of a priest. When officiating, priests are generally clothed with silk.”

At this distance, much of this squabbling seems childish. But these were adults intent on drawing blood, and on occasion the blows were not only rhetorical. In 1452, Poggio had been having a running quarrel with another papal secretary, the notoriously morose humanist George of Trebizond, over the burning question of who deserved more credit for several translations of ancient texts. When Poggio screamed at his rival that he was a liar, George struck Poggio with his fist. The two sulked back momentarily to their desks, but then the fight resumed, the seventy-two-year-old Poggio grabbling the fifty-seven-year-old George’s cheek and mouth with one hand while attempting to gouge out his eye with the other. After it was over, in an angry
note
to Poggio about the fracas, George represented himself as having acted with exemplary restraint: “Rightly I could have
²⁰
bitten off the fingers you stuck in my mouth; I did not. Since I was seated and you were standing, I thought of squeezing your testicles with both hands and thus lay you out; I did not do it.” The whole thing seems a grotesque farce, akin to one of the stories in Poggio’s jokebook, except for its real-world consequences: with his better contacts and more genial manner, Poggio had George expelled from the curia. Poggio ended his life covered with honors; George died obscure, resentful, and poor.

In a celebrated nineteenth-century book on “the revival of learning,” John Addington Symonds, recounting these gladiatorial struggles among humanist scholars, suggests that “they may be taken
²¹
as proof of their enthusiasm for their studies.” Perhaps. However wild their insults, the arguments swirled around fine points of Latin grammar, accusations of mistakes in diction, subtle questions of translation. But the extravagance and bitterness of the charges—in the course of a quarrel over Latin style, Poggio accused the younger humanist Lorenzo Valla of heresy, theft, lying, forgery, cowardice, drunkenness, sexual perversion, and insane vanity—discloses something rotten in the inner lives of these impressively learned individuals.

Though he was knocking at the door trying to gain admission, Lapo seems to have understood and analyzed the sickness of the whole environment. The problem was not only a matter of this or that difficult personality; it was structural. The papal court had, to serve its own needs, brought into being a class of rootless, ironic intellectuals. These intellectuals were committed to pleasing their masters, on whose patronage they utterly depended, but they were cynical and unhappy. How could the rampant cynicism, greed, and hypocrisy, the need to curry favor with perverse satraps who professed to preach morality
to
the rest of mankind, the endless jockeying for position in the court of an absolute monarch, not eat away at whatever was hopeful and decent in anyone who breathed that air for very long? What—apart from attempts at character assassination and outright assassination—could be done with the seething feeling of rage?

One way that Poggio dealt with the sickness—to which he himself had quickly succumbed and from which he was never entirely cured—was through laughter, the abrasive, obscene laughter of the
Facetiae
. The laughter must have given him some relief, though evidently not enough. For he also wrote a succession of dialogues—
On Avarice, Against the Hypocrites, On Nobility, On the Vicissitudes of Fortune, On the Misery of Human Life
, and so forth—in which he adopted the stance of a serious moralist. There are clear links between the jokes and the moral essays, but the moral essays allowed Poggio to explore the issues only hinted at in the comical anecdotes.

The essay
Against the Hypocrites
, for example, has its share of stories of clerical seducers, but the stories are part of a larger, much more serious analysis of an institutional dilemma: why churchmen, and especially monks, are particularly prone to hypocrisy. Is there a relation, Poggio asks, between religious vocation and fraud? A full answer would certainly involve sexual motives, but those motives alone cannot adequately account for the swarms of hypocrites in a place such as the curia, including monks notable for their ostentatious piety and their ascetic pallor who are feverishly seeking benefices, immunities, favors, privileges, positions of power. Nor can sexual intrigues adequately explain the still larger swarms of robed hypocrites in the world outside the curia, charismatic preachers who mint money with their sonorous voices and their terrible threats of hellfire and damnation, Observant friars who claim to adhere strictly to the Order of St. Francis but have the morals of bandits,
mendicant
friars with their little sacks, their long hair and longer beards, and their fraudulent pretense of living in holy poverty, confessors who pry into the secrets of every man and woman. Why don’t all these models of extravagant religiosity simply shut themselves up in their cells and commit themselves to lives of fasting and prayer? Because their conspicuous professions of piety, humility, and contempt for the world are actually masks for avarice, laziness, and ambition. To be sure, someone in the conversation concedes, there are some good and sincere monks, but very, very few of them, and one may observe even those slowly drawn toward the fatal corruption that is virtually built into their vocation.