Dante's Beard?1 Victoria Kirkham (bio) As we students knew him, Charles Singleton always wore a beard. About that there can be no question. His beloved wife of many years, Eula, once told us at their annual spring picnic that he kept it to protect his face from the irritations of a razor. I remember being driven to one of those legendary gatherings out in the country, not far from Baltimore. It must have been 1970. We approached their eighteenth-century farmhouse on a bumpy dirt road lined on the left by a solid row of iris in full bloom, the most magnificent stand I had ever seen, rising profuse in every imaginable color, bearded and beardless. Our professor himself had cultivated them, being a lover of the land who had grown up as an Oklahoma farm boy. Allowed a glimpse inside the small picturesque home, we saw burnished, hand-pounded antique copper pots hanging thickly from a high rack in Eula's kitchen. Outside, cooled in a nearby spring, awaited the centerpiece of our party on the grass, new wine pressed from grapes harvested in his vineyard just the past fall. For a time, he had marketed it commercially under the Caroli label that declared it his, "of Charles." Why did he stop? "It took too much time from my studies," he told us. Now he delighted in proudly sharing it among Johns Hopkins friends. After the meal, he led a little tour to his private study, adapted from an [End Page 80] old farmhand's house a short walk away. There, within arm's reach of his desk, the complete works of Thomas Aquinas in folio stood at the ready, aligned on the lower shelves of a bookcase like ballast. We were awestruck. The iris, the Aquinas; the farmer, the scholar—those were the two sides of Singleton we saw. They lent him a special talent for explaining barnyard similes, plentiful in Dante Alighieri's Inferno. When we got to the circle of violence and the Paduan usurer Reginaldo Scrovegni, he read aloud the verses: "[q]ui distorse la bocca e di fuor trasse/la lingua, come bue che 'l naso lecchi."2 With perfect dramatic timing, he paused to look up at us in our Gilman Hall seminar room and asked a class member, Lee Jacobs, if she had ever seen a cow lick its nose. She had. I think that was not the answer he expected. Undeterred, he took back the floor and proceeded with relish to the factual details. The cow, it seems, possesses a very long tongue that it sticks out, lifts back to the side and then curls up at the end to wipe the insides of its nostrils. For ever after indelible in my mind, that repugnant image revealed the sinner's scorn and bestial depths.3 Singleton's beard, which he kept full, clipped short and slightly pointed, gave him an elfin look. A smile lurked behind it, emerging at unexpected moments, sometimes in surprised amusement, sometimes with a trickster's chuckle. New students were fair game for his academic traps. He had asked the same young woman, only newly arrived in our seminar, what she thought Dante meant when he wrote, "mi ritrovai per una selva oscura" (Inf. 1.2, italics added). Was he reawakening? After some hesitation, she obligingly said yes, only to realize the ruse when his reply sailed with a rumble across the table, "Miss Jacobs! Do you really think Dante DREAMED in TERZA RIMA??" Those of us who had survived into our second year knew that was coming but we had no way of signaling to save her. His impish purpose was not to tease [End Page 81] but to imprint a lesson: there are two Dantes, poet and pilgrim. That Singletonian insight has over seven decades become fundamental to our readings of the Commedia.4 By contrast, Dante's countless portraits, descending painted and plastic in genealogical chains from fourteenth-century prototypes, have come to converge in a single individual, the Author as Afterworld traveler. So distinctive in his features is this hybrid character that he rivals Christ for recognizability.5 Companion to the...
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Apr 19, 2024
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