Daisy Dunn, Catullus' Bedspread (William Collins)What a tremendous book. Daisy Dunn is a young classical scholar who it would be no surprise to see on telly reporting back from the ancient world as soon as a production company can scribble out the contract for her to sign. This life of Catullus appears alongside a volume of her new translations of the poems, which are quoted generously here, too.
It's not as if Latin poetry is short of compelling personalities with Horace, Ovid and Juvenal but Catullus is the most provocative, forthright and, in many ways, 'colourful'. Daisy's account of him is confident, hugely informed by a wide range of sources, and joins the poet to the history of his times through the poems vividly and with panache. Her detailed description of his appearance is taken from a portrait found painted on plaster on the site of his family home in Sirmio (pictured) but she doesn't entertain any doubt that this is him even though there is no title by which to identify him.
Catullus hasn't long been in Rome, from Verona, using family connections to invite himself to some select gatherings, when he sees and immediately becomes obsessed by Coldia, the wife of Metellus Celer, he
watched her- and watched her husband watching her- and almost passed out
and there begins a story in poetry to put alongside Petrarch's Laura, Shakespeare's Dark Lady or any such journal of love's trials and tribulations. I don't think poets feel these things any more deeply than anybody else but, by definition, the best of them make them the most memorable in poems. However, I do think that the cause is in the capacity of the admirer to feel such admiration and not necessarily always in the suitability of the beloved. But there's not much we can do about that. This particular lady, who it seems wasn't all that particular, wasn't the only object of desire for Catullus but she was well ahead of any other in his preferences. However, the senator, Celer, is found dead at his house which one might think - or Catullus certainly did- gave them the opportunity to make their unofficial relationship more official but Clodia was not quite so enamoured of such an arrangement or, solely with Catullus.
A further bombshell - and I don't want to ruin the whole book for any potential reader- comes with the death of his brother on foreign shores, across the Aegean Sea in Rhoeteum and the poet is compelled to travel there full of complex feelings of bereavment, family, his insufficiently requited love and correspondances with history.Catullus' bedspread itself is the subject of poem, no. 64, that Daisy Dunn makes the book's central motif. A long poem, featured in her translation in an appendix, makes a similar tapestry of historic events (beginning with the Argo and including Prometheus and the loss of the Golden Age) and personal themes. The book might not need such a device to hold it together unless it is in parallel to her own sewing together of history and Catullus' life and work but her literary criticism is as impressive as her biographical research. Included in it are such telling insights as how the Latin for 'business', negotium, which I see can also mean pain, trouble, annoyance or distress, is simply the direct antonym of otium, for 'leisure'. And we also learn how fashionable Romans would adopt accents from other regions to give themselves a more plebian image, if need be, for effect.
Part of the political background is the rise of Julius Caesar, the machinations of the triumvirate with Pompey and Crassus, the end of the Republic and the establishment of the dictatorship but Catullus' father was a friend of Caesar's and it is suggested here that somehow that is why Catullus could even include Caesar in his targets for derogatory remarks in his poems with impunity. It is hard to imagine any literary author now having quite the licence to produce work like that but none of it would be available to us now had copies not been made by admirers that by various very unlikely circumstances allowed them to be rediscovered and that part of the Epilogue is the most astonishing part of the story.
Dead by the age of 30, Catullus could hardly have wished for quite such longevity for his poems. Daisy Dunn makes a good case for how great his poetry reads in the Latin and he was clearly admired by subsequent generations but, with a poem being a literary event not necessarily the sincere words of the author, there is no telling if Catullus was quite as bad and dangerous to know as his finely crafted verses make him out to be. If he was one of the first poets to be a different person in his poems to what he was in real life, he wasn't going to be the last.
Slightly discouragingly, the first piece of blurb on the back cover of this book is by that well-known classical scholar and statesman, Boris Johnson. It is recognizably Johnsonian in its composite verve and grandiose overstatement but, for once, I can see what he means. Any book that can make me agree with him must be a good one. On a scale of 1 to 10 on which 1 represents a book you have to abandon because it's not worth the effort and 10 means you can't put it down, Catullus' Bedspread is close to a 9. I hope Daisy's getting down to work on Ovid or Horace.
