There are many well-known books written by virtuous people unjustly imprisoned by wicked or unenlightened authorities—the Consolation of Philosophy, Ralegh’s History of the World, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, to name a few. But some years ago I became interested in the phenomenon of real criminals toiling away at their writing in their well-deserved prison cells. Specifically I was writing about “Jan Valtin” (Richard Krebs), a German Comintern thug who profited from his residence in San Quentin for attempted murder in the late 1920s by studying creative writing in extension courses from the University of California. He went on to publish a lucrative blockbuster in New York in 1941. But I discovered that he was only one of several incarcerated scribblers in residence at the time. One of them, a famous Canadian bank-robber, actually left an unpublished manuscript entitled “Prison Literati” cataloguing the incarcerated writers. I was moved to the conclusion that San Quentin, in the mid-Twenties, “would appear to have housed about as much literary talent as any given summer session of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.” But surely, it struck me as I was writing about the benefit of clergy last week, our greatest literary felon must surely come from one of my own fields of special interest: medieval French literature. I refer to François Villon, inveterate criminal, sentimental Marian Catholic and literary genius.
Considering Villon’s social obscurity, we know an amazing amount about him, though much of what we most want to know remains a mystery. He was born in 1431 and was able with luck and meritocratic pluck to take arts degrees at the University of Paris. Like Ovid and Alexander Pope he “lisped in numbers,” meaning that he began composing verse as a child, and was already the most famous poet in Paris by the age of twenty. His criminality is amply documented in police records. In 1463 he was spared execution and mercifully exiled from Paris as an habitual offender, a punishment only technically less severe than death for a man whose entire life was the vibrant world of the taverns, markets, gambling dens, whorehouses, and religious shrines of the great city. He disappears, never to be heard of again; and I half imagine that his life actually ended on some obscure provincial gallows.
There is a brilliant—I use that overworked adjective soberly—a brilliant biography of Villon written by the English journalist and Catholic convert, D. B. Wyndham Lewis: François Villon, a Documentary Survey (NY, 1928). The religious dimension is relevant, for it differentiates Villon’s villainy from that of our contemporary criminals, and I think makes it more approachable. In the essay I was writing about Jan Valtin I touched briefly on Jack Abbott, a psychopathic killer and the author of In the Belly of the Beast (1981), a searing indictment of our penal system. Abbott was briefly championed by Norman Mailer, but his career as literary flash-in-the-pan ended when he was arraigned for a brutal murder on the same day that his self-pitying best seller was reviewed in the Times. Though the two may have similar results, psychopathy is different from sin, the latter being a mainly discarded theological concept based in the theory of individual agency and the autonomous will. “[Villon] was a great sinner…”, writes Wyndham Lewis, the Catholic convert. “During his hunted life he had twice, possibly three times, lain under sentence of death, had been half a dozen times punished by the Question, twice banished voluntarily….He had committed homicide at twenty-four and burglary and sacrilege at twenty-five, and his unrecorded thefts, stabbings, cheats, and brawlings are probably innumerable.”* And he was the greatest poet of his age.
It is fascinating to me that the most serious engagement with the moral problem raised by Villon’s habitual and serious criminality is to be found not in the several historical biographies devoted to the poet, but in a work of fiction by the great Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who published a short story entitled “A Lodging for the Night: A Tale of François Villon” in 1877. It has more than once been called “the first modern short story”. In it Villon, in his mid-twenties part of a dissolute crowd of desperate ne’er-do-wells, is at a sordid nocturnal festivity. While the poet works at writing a poem, one of his mates stabs another to death over a card game. After dividing the dead man’s spoils, everyone must flee the premises to avoid association with the crime. This is a rather desperate situation. It is after curfew; the night is freezing, and the vigilant police watch patrols throughout the locked-down city. In the confusion, an agile cutpurse steals Villon’s money as he departs, leaving him penniless. He must seek refuge for the night by knocking on random doors. Amazingly he is admitted at the door of an imposing house. Its only occupant is an elderly aristocratic military officer formerly in the King’s service. He welcomes Villon, and retires to the scullery to fix him a plate of food. In his absence the poet contemplates how easy it would be to steal some precious objects in plain sight in the sitting room.
For the rest of the long night they engage in a pointedly personal conversation about their “life styles.” Villon defends his life of dissolution and crime on the grounds of penury and lack of social status. The knight claims that his military exploits, including the frequent injury to non-combatants, is noble because it is founded in honor. Villon’s brawling and thieving , on the other hand, are vile and dishonorable. Villon responds with an argument already ancient in Antiquity, made famous by Augustine in the City of God, and actually reproduced by Villon in the Testament. A certain notable pirate named Diomedes was chastised by Alexander the Great for his criminality. Diomedes boldly replied that the only difference between the two of them was the matter of scale. Plunder one ship and you are a criminal for hanging. Plunder ten countries and you are Alexander the Great. Augustine called that answer “elegant and true”. Perhaps more proximate to the situation in Stevenson’s story is the way John Locke puts the issue: “Should a robber break into my house, and with a dagger at my throat make me seal deeds to convey my estate to him, would this give him any title? Just such a title, by his sword, has an unjust conqueror, who forces me into submission”. However, as Villon leaves his host as dawn renders the streets once again safe, he has made the decision—the ambiguity of which is wonderfully “modern”-- not to rob the old man.
Villon lived beneath the shadow of the gallows—and what a gallows! The authorities had erected at Montfaucon (near the present site of the Gare de l’Est) a monstrous three-tiered, open roofed edifice with forty-five symmetrical piercings tall enough to accommodate a hanging corpse. Some malefactors were actually executed at Montfaucon; but its main purpose was to expose the bodies for the edification of travelers on the busy crossroads that met at its southwest corner. Supplementary corpses from the city’s numerous “minor” gibbets were brought there in sufficient quantity to keep most of the gruesome windows full at all times. The stench, the raucous bickering of carrion birds, the incremental dissolution of human flesh left to rot for weeks and months—all this, according to medieval penal theory, full of healthy moral lessons for the populace.
We shall never know where his bones lie, or how they got there. But his readers took more care with his poems, which were wildly popular among a new reading public in the first flush of the Gutenberg revolution. Closer to our own time they have been edited and explicated with great care by French literary scholars: the love poems, the satirical poems in slang, the erudite poems, the personal poems that, like Dante’s Commedia, are full of the names of his actual contemporaries, “real life” characters from the Parisian demi-monde. He conceived of his poems as legacies—gathering them as Testaments, as in “last will and testament,”—the final attempt of the dying to influence the world of the living.
Even many people who are not poetry lovers are likely to know one of his lines, and may even know it in French: Ou sont les neiges d’antan?, “Where are the snows of yesteryear?...” from his “Ballad of the Ladies of Times Gone By” in the Grand Testament. This is a conventional wistful meditation on the transitory nature of the phenomenal world as illustrated in the brief lives of famous beautiful women of history; but of course Villon always stamps convention with his own original hallmark. We are in this “sweet world”, as Dante calls it, for but a moment, as transitory as the fallen snow. In the midst of life we are in death. This the poet knew, believed…but…but the savor of a hot meat pasty, the sweet notes of the lute, the rush from the flask of a southern wine, the cunning ambiguity of an obscene rhyme in one of his poems, the thrill of caressing a firm breast beneath a flimsy bodice…O stay, thou passing moment, thou art so fair.
Villon’s French is sometimes difficult mainly because of its heavy use of now disappeared slang and informal usage, urban argot, and fifteenth-century in-jokes that probably even some of his contemporaries didn’t get. I don’t get all of them either. But that is actually true for practically any book published before the day before yesterday. There are many available English translations of Villon’s poems, some bilingual. The best by an English language poet is probably that of Galway Kinnell (Princeton ’48), But if you are one of those who really wants to know, I suggest tracking down a second-hand copy of the Wyndham-Lewis, several copies of which are for the moment available at ridiculously low prices on Abebooks.com. Easy-peasy. Wyndham-Lewis gives excellent translations of most of the many texts he cites through the course of his “documented survey”. And his dedication page alone is worth the price of the book.
*Wyndham Lewis, François Villon, 221. “The Question” was interrogation under excruciating torture.
