Unanswered Questions About Petronius

It's relatively rare that a book is read by as many as a million people. Big-budget movies which aren't seen by millions of people, on the other hand, are flops. Federico Fellini made big-budget movies which definitely weren't flops. Although the novel is almost 2000 years aold, and the film about 40 years old, I think it is fairly safe to say that more people have seen Fellini's movie Satyricon than have read the work by Petronius on which it is based -- loosely based, Fellini has the decency to say right there in the credits.

No, I don't like Fellini's Satyricon. I don't like Fellini's movies in general. Neither did Pauline Kael. Kael made the argument, which I second, that Fellini never bothered much to develop the characters in his movies, because the main character in every Fellini movie is Fellini. If you find Fellini himself to be absolutely fascinating, as he himself clearly did, then there's a chance that you might like some of his movies almost as much as he did -- and oh, what it must be like to love a movie that much! If, on the other hand, you find Fellini to have been a fatuous egomaniac, come on ever here and have a seat by me and Pauline.

In addition to the egomania, there's the grotesquerie. Fellini loved to look at freaks, at deformed people, people who were very fat or very thin, people with huge scars or boils, etc, etc. I don't, so much. I really appreciate how, in most movies and TV shows, most of the people are ridiculously good-looking and impossibly perfect, in many cases much more perfect-looking than the actors who are skillfully altered to look that way. I get more than my fill of grotesque reality away from the screen.

So, first I saw Fellini's Satyricon, and was greatly disappointed, because I assumed that my disgust meant that I would also find Petronius' Satyricon to be disgusting. Then I read Kael's review of Fellini's Satyricon, which gave me hope that there was much in Petronius' version which I might like, which Fellini had missed. Then I began to perceive that many, perhaps most film critics disagreed with Kael, about Fellini and about a lot of other things. A while after that, I ceased to care very much what most film critics think, about Kael or about anything else. Later, I noticed that the Latin and Greek passage quoted at the beginning of TS Eliot's "Waste Land" is a quote of Trimalchio. By that time, I had begun to think somewhat less of Eliot than I once had, but diciphering that passage both made me think a little more of him again, and made me want to read Petronius. (Is the passage in Fellini's film? If so, I slept through it.) So I read Petronius.

That is to say, of course: I read what remains of Petronius. 195 pages in Konrad Mueller's corrected fourth Teubner edition of 2003.

Which brings us to some unanswered questions about Petronius and his poem. Unanswered as far as I know. As always, if you want to be sure, ask experts, and I'm not one. How long was the Satyricon when it was whole? I believe the best guesses there are: at least several times as long as those 195 pages, perhaps ten times as long, perhaps more. Which would make the Satyricon longer than War and Peace but not quite as long as the Old and New Testament together.

Who was this Petronius who wrote this novel? Yes, boys and girls, it's a novel. The novel wasn't invented by Fielding. Or by Cervantes. Or by Rabelais. Or, for that matter, by the ancient Romans. They got the idea from the Greeks. Was it the Petronius Arbiter who was the style advisor to the Emperor and would-be artist Nero, who was obliged to commit suicide in AD 66, when Nero suspected him of plotting against him? (Did Nero suspect correctly?) That Petronius was not yet 40 years old when he died -- assuming that he is our author, what more might he have written, if the rotten Nero had been wiped out first?

Oh, and by the way, just in case this wasn't already completely clear: read it, by all means read it, it's staggeringly good.

What would our author think of Fellini's film? Did Fellini understand Petronius better than Pauline and I, after all? Has my squeamishness blinded me to vast realms of aesthetic and artistic edification? Has it lead me to read a version of the novel which is pale and anemic and quite unlike the author's intent?

And by the way, here's a question which stopped me dead in my tracks over 30 years ago, and which has bothered me ever since, a question I have not been able to even begin to answer: Why do so many of us grown-ups expend so much time and energy discussing made-up stories with such fearful earnestness? How serious a question was it for me at the time? Well, it struck me as an undergraduate right in the middle of an honors English class,right in the middle of something particularly pretentious which I was saying to the professor and the class, and English was one of my double majors. So, it was, and remains, what you might call a rather dramatic existential crisis.

Onward: more questions: would we have more of the novel today, had Poggio never lived, or never learned to read? Yes, him again: Poggio discovered part of what we know of Petrobius today, in 1420. The manuscript he found was copied, and then, of course, Poggio lost it. Additional manuscript discoveries in the 16th and 17th centuries brought the text to the length it has today. Scholars continue to work on the text, and the condition of the manuscripts continues to give them plenty to do.

Are the manuscripts so scanty because Petronius wrote for a small, private audience? Did so much of the text come to light so late because there's so much gay sex in it? Yes, there's also quite a bit of hetero sex, and violence, in the story, but Christian authorities have always objected more strongly to sex in literature athan to violence, and more strong to gay sex than to heterosexuality.

And, of course, there remains that favorite question of mine: Will still more of the text come to light?

The Most Horrible Experience Of My Life

It happened to me again just recently, and I know that it happened to some of you, too. It's horrible, but I think it's important that we talk about it: I was watching The French Connection, and I heard The Three Degrees singing "Everybody's Going to the Moon."

So bad! At the time The French Connection was released it was the movie's score by Don Ellis which raised somewhat of an uproar. The Three Degrees were one of the few musical interruptions, over the course of the entire movie, of Don Ellis' work, which was controversial among film folk at the time. People found it very harsh. The normally quite sensible Pauline Kael got a little carried away and called Ellis' soundtrack an integral part of the movie's effort to effect a fascist overthrow of the world's democracies. Kael used the term fascist to describe two movies which were released around the same time in 1971, The French Connection and also Dirty Harry. In the case of Dirty Harry I can see her point: the title character is a deliberately-glamourized version of a basically lawless vigilante employed temporarily by the police who is held back from ridding society of a cartoon version of a hideous villain by cartoon versions of impossibly misguided liberals. In The French Connection both the criminals and the police are much more lifelike, and if there's one thing fascist fiction isn't, it's realistic. The star of Dirty Harry went on to be a horribly-overrated movie director, a jazz musician who through decades of very hard work went from very poor to mediocre with occasional flashes of not bad (Yes, that's him singing half of the title track at the end of Gran Torino), a Republican mayor of Carmel, California and a nationwide punchline babbling at an empty chair at the 2012 Republican National Convention (Like I said, fascist fiction is never realistic), while the star of The French Connection managed to maintain a mostly-liberal reputation despite one collaboration with America's most horribly-overrated director and a long-term voiceover deal with a nationwide hardware-store chain. Anyway, Kael spent some time describing each movie's score, seeming to like Lalo Schifrin's work on Dirty Harry -- "he works on you," she remarked, employing the metaphor of police brutality, as does the band name The Three Degrees (like "the third degree") -- somewhat more than Ellis' soundtrack for The French Connection.

Well, I dare to disagree with the great Kael on that point, except that it's really not daring at all anymore. Schifrin's score sounds much more dated and corny 42 years on than Ellis'. Ellis' score no longer sounds like deliberate acoustical torture. Ellis was way ahead of his time, our ears have done a lot of catching up in the meantime. Far from sounding harsh, resuming right after The Three Degrees are done singing "Everybody's Going to The Moon," Ellis' brass and strings are downright soothing.

Not that most any sound wouldn't have been soothing coming right after that song. It's so bad! It's stuck in my head and it's making me sick! Each one of the Degrees, portraying the entertainment in the bar where Popeye and Smoky first spot some of the hoods involved in smuggling all that smack, wears a sequined dress in a different primary or secondary color. This and some superficial aspects of their music lead me to believe that they were attempting to ride the coattails of Diana Ross and the Supremes, one of the most popular bands in the world at the time. But the Degrees were no Supremes. They were just -- hold on. I just found out that The Three Degrees are the band that recorded "When Will I See You Again," the huge R&B hit which was released in 1974. I love that record. Maybe you kids haven't heard it, but it's the one David Carradine calls his favorite soul record from the 70's in Kill Bill vol 2. I wouldn't go that far, because there are just a huge number of great soul records made in the 70's -- if you're not familiar with any of them, maybe the best introduction would be Boogie Nights, the movie about the adult-entertainment industry in the Valley in the 70's -- but it's wonderful, smooth and full of heart and style. This just breaks this post in half. What am I gonna do now?

Well, I stand by assessment of The Three Degrees' performance in The French Connection. Terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible! I was going to say that they were one of the bazillion fake rock and R&B bands you can see in Hollywood movies until well into the 70's, whose music is grotesque and strange because it was the conception of Hollywood music pros who didn't understand or like rock or R&B. I was going to place them in the same genre as Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett and Count Basie, who didn't understand the new music taking over their market shares beginning in the mid-50's, and whose main impression of the new stuff was that it was very loud and shrill, and so they fought back by amplifying their own music more and partially electrifying it in some cases, and the results weren't necessarily terrible, misguided as these efforts to adapt may have been, because Sinatra and Bennett and Basie and a lot of others in their genre, whatever one might want to call it, had lots and lots of talent, and I was going to say that in the case of The Three Degrees, the talent wasn't there, which left you with loud and shrill, and give you a terrifying glimpse into the lives of people who just didn't get the new loud music at all. I was going to say things such as that those sequined dressed didn't make The Three Degrees the Supremes any more than than calling The Guess Who The Guess Who made them The Who. And I was also going to say things about genre, like how Blue Öyster Cult and Grand Funk Railroad were both in the same genre but only one of them was good.

But finding out that one and the same group sang both "Everybody's Going To The Moon" and "When Will I See You Again" throws a huge wrench into all of that. Maybe The Three Degrees were simply very badly mis-recorded in The French Connection, because the person making the recording for the movie was one of those crusty old Hollywood pros who equated R&B with ear torture, and so when he was assigned to record this, surprise surprise, the recording came out sounding like torture, like Please, God, kill me now.

Be all of that as it may: we don't have to listen to it any more. When that bar scene comes we can fast-forward or hit the mute button, or change channels, or step out of the theatre into the lobby and stretch our legs, or do whatever we have to do. We'll get through this. Together.