Quote of the Day (Robert Browning, on "The Ring and the Book")

“I can have but little doubt but that my writing has been, in the main, too hard for many I should have been pleased to communicate with; but I never designedly tried to puzzle people, as some of my critics have supposed. On the other hand, I never pretended to offer such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar, or a game of dominoes, to an idle man. So perhaps, on the whole, I get my desserts and something over, — not a crowd, but a few I value more.”—Robert Browning to W.G. Kingsland, Nov. 27, 1868

Browning told Kingsland he’d been “far from well, and oppressed by work.” No wonder—he was preparing for publication his epic “murder-poem,” The Ring and the Book. The first volume had appeared six days before Browning’s letter, while the remaining three appeared in each of the following months.

This was indeed a far cry from the American poet Longfellow—who, as I discussed the other day, despite his vast learning, could be read by a larger middle-class audience—but also from the more obscure verses that T.S. Eliot would create in the 20th century. Imagine a Baroque-era Rashomon, set in Rome in 1698, concerning the trial of a count, accused of murdering his wife over her alleged affair with a young minor cleric.

Only it’s more than that—so much more. The poem is long (more 600 pages, not counting notes, in my edition), consisting of 12 sections or books. The action advances, then refocuses, in a series of dramatic monologues, including by the victim, Pompilia, her would-be clerical rescuer, the “man in the street,” the murderer himself, Guido Franceschini, and even Pope Innocent XII (to whom Guido unsuccessfully appealed his guilty verdict).

Browning, who inherited his lifelong fascination with crime from his father, discovered this real-life case when he picked up for a pittance “an old yellow book” from a Florentine bookstall. The beat-up volume was a documentary goldmine, containing legal briefs, pamphlets and letters about the case.

Over the last 15 years, commentators have noted similarities between this case and O.J. Simpson’s. Each contained an element of all-consuming interest for the contemporary society of its day: Catholicism for Rome, race for America.

Although we have to be careful about the dangers of presentism (i.e., judging an incident from the past overwhelmingly with reference to our time and little or none to its own) and some large differences remain (e.g., O.J. was never executed or even found guilty at a criminal trial for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole and Ron Goldman), some factors figure prominently in both cases:

* Class—Simpson rose from a low-income neighborhood, Putrero Hill, Calif., just outside San Francisco, to a $5 million Tudor mansion in Brentwood. Franceschini managed to marry into the wealthy Comparini family by misrepresenting his origins as a poor nobleman of inferior rank.

* Domestic violence—L.A. police were constantly called to the Simpson house because of domestic disputes, but in all but one case did not press charges. The Comparani family were enraged that their daughter was living in an impoverished and abused condition, and sought to deny their son-in-law the dowry he would normally have received by claiming in court that Pompilia was adopted—in actuality, the daughter of a prostitute they had saved out of pity—and that, thus, she was illegitimate and her husband was not entitled to their money.

* Legal wrangling--In addition to his infamous criminal trial, Simpson also faced over the years a successful civil suit brought by the father of Ron Goldman--along with the aforementioned calls to the home by the LAPD, two divorces, and his more recent conviction on all charges from a Las Vegas incident involving robbery with a deadly weapon, burglary with a firearm, and others too numerous to mention. A judgment in favor of Guido regarding the dowry settlement was still being appeared at the time of the murder, while a second suit, the summer before the crime, resulted in Caponsacchi being confined to Civita Vecchia for violating his oath of celibacy and in Pompilia being placed in the care of the Scalette Convent.

* Collateral damage—Ron Goldman was unlucky enough to be around when Nicole Simpson was murdered. So were Pompilia’s parents when Guido and the assassins he’d hired came to kill his wife. Goldman suffered multiple stab wounds; the Comparinis were decapitated by the assassins. (Pompilia was mortally wounded, living just long enough to finger her abusive estranged husband.)

* Blaming the victim—Guido sued his wife and minor cleric Guiseppe Caponsacchi for adultery and flight before the Jan. 2, 1698 murder. After Pompilia’s death, an order of nuns, the Convent of Convertites, unsuccessfully sought her estate on the ground that she was a “debased woman.” The Simpson defense team floated, without any evidence, the highly speculative theory that Nicole Simpson had died as part of a Colombian drug hit meant for good friend Faye Resnick.

· Media sensations—Just as the Lindbergh kidnapping case demonstrated the power of the relatively new medium of radio news reporting, the Simpson case confirmed the arrival of the cable-driven, 24-hour news cycle. Neither tabloids nor cable TV were around in the 17th century, but it’s now clear that the murder of the Comparinis were of all-consuming interest during its time. Browning scholars confirmed in the 20th century that the “old yellow book” found by the poet, along with another account presented him by a friend two years later, were not the only contemporary accounts of the case; other manuscripts were found in the Royal Casanatense Library in Rome; the Armstrong Browning Collection at Baylor University, Texas; and a codex twice as large as “the old yellow book” found in the Biblioteca del Comune in Cortona.

Perhaps somebody has done this already, but I think an interesting book could be written on literary masterpieces inspired by real-life tabloid-style crimes. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is one; Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (which I discuss here) was another. The Ring and the Book deserves inclusion on this list.