Word: papini
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DANTE VIVO-Giovanni Papini-Macmillan...
...these days except by amateurs of literature or professional students, this Catholic epic is one of the boasted glories of Italy. Many a schoolboy has heard of Dante and his Beatrice, could even recognize a picture of the poet, but no one knows much about his actual life. Biographer Papini, adducing no factual discoveries, intends his book to be "a moral and spiritual portrait." Readers will find it disappointingly dogmatic but its controversial scrappiness may whet their curiosity...
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) was a poet, a Catholic and a Florentine. So is Biographer Papini: without that happy concatenation of coincidence, says he, a full understanding of Dante is impossible. But anybody can at least partly understand the few known facts about him. Though of gentle birth, his father was a moneylender. Like every upstanding Florentine Dante was an active citizen, fought for his town against Arezzo and Pisa. In the battle of Campaldino he admitted that "he experienced great fear." When the political pendulum swung the other way Dante was first banished from Florence, later condemned to death...
...Beatrice he idolized was the wife of one Simone dei Bardi. Dante rarely met or spoke with her and she died very young. But, says Papini, Dante was no saint; there were "at least a dozen women in his life . . . there is no doubt that Dante was a sensual man." As a Catholic he was guilty of three besetting sins-lust, wrath, pride. "Dante is always a little aloof, and easily shows a surly temper. . . . [His] love is more of the head than the heart, more theological than evangelical." Of his wife Gemma and the children she bore him Papini...
...Cedar Paul-Boni & Liveright ($3.00). Emil Ludwig of Napoleon and Bismarck fame now tries his hand at a more dangerously familiar story-that of Jesus, Son of Man. Unadorned with the glittering paradoxes of Kenan's Vie, free from the sensationalism of Barbusse and the sentimentalism of Papini, clear of the pathos of the recent cinema version, Ludwig's is a popular, but none the less scholarly, interpretation. His indefatigable passion for historical records and documentary scraps immerses him in contemporary Latin and Greek commentaries, but chiefly in the self-contradictory New Testament records which seem...