Legal Studies Forum
Volume 29, Number 2 (2005)
reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum
CRIMES GONE BY
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Collected Essays of Albert Borowitz
1966-2005
THE RING AND THE BOOK AND THE MURDER*
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It is said that you can't make a silk purse
out of a sow's ear, and yet a great literature has been created about murder
and crime. In making this claim, I would not be taken to exaggerate the
literary merits of Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner. If we place
these popular writers low in the critical scale, it may be because they
ask and answer the least interesting questions about crime. The classic
question is, of course, "who-dun-it," and the answer, depending on the
ingenuity of the author, may range from the butler to the reader himself.
Edmund Wilson has give the response of many serious booklovers to the most
famous "who-dun-it" posed by Miss Christie by entitling his savage essay
on detective fiction "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?"
A second traditional puzzle pattern of the
orthodox detective novel has been sometimes referred to as the "how-dun-it,"
that is, a narrative where the mystery arises mainly from the culprit's
use of a unique murder weapon or method. We are all familiar with the gun
concealed in the baby grand and primed to go off when the concert pianist
plays his chronically wrong E-flat. This kind of plot is often enthralling,
but of limited educational value, except to the extent that it underscores
the importance of hard practice at the keyboard.
Ingenious variations on these themes have
been worked out. Pat McGerr in Pick Your Victim (1947) must be credited
with the invention of the "whom-was-it-dun-to": a group of marines at an
isolated wartime base in the Aleutians read a torn news article about the
murder confession of a friend and try to determine which member of their
social circle was done in. Another new path was opened in Mary Kelly's
Due
To a Death (1962). In this novel, which might be styled a "what-was-dun,"
we only learn at the very end what crime has been committed.
However, in speaking of a great literature
of crime, I am not referring to the annual bumper crops of the "who-dun-its"
and their variants but to a genre that may be called the "why-dun-its,"
that is, to works where the identity of the criminal and victim may be
known at the outset or at least comes as not great surprise, the means
of death is commonplace, and the primary questions relate to the murderer's
motives and the significance of the crime to the community. It is appropriate
to borrow from Raymond Chandler's praise of his master, Dashiell Hammett,
by saying that this category of crime writing "[gives] murder back to the
kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide
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a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling
pistols . . . and tropical fish."
Crime literature of the "why-dun-it" variety
includes both fiction and nonfiction, and other works that fall somewhere
in between -- the so-called "nonfiction novels" or "new journalism." Much
of this literature, regardless of whether the fictional or nonfictional
mode predominates, is based on, or to some extent inspired by, the facts
of actual crimes and trials. To explain why this is so, one may, of course,
have recourse to Byron's observation that "truth is stranger than fiction."
This adage is pertinent to the field of crime in the sense that certain
of the classic cases that crime writers have described involve murders
more bizarre in their conception and execution than any that owe their
origins to the pens of Ellery Queen or John Dickson Carr. However, the
most significant respect in which crime history may be stranger than fiction
is that the motivations of the real-life murderer are usually more complex
and ambiguous than his counterparts in the pages of who-dun-its. Crime
annals teach us that murder, the gravest human offense, is often committed
for rewards or impelled by motives that appear to be less substantial or
less comprehensible than those that have incited men to lesser crimes.
Though a fully satisfying explanation of a criminal's actions may ultimately
elude us, rich resources for speculation about human conduct are often
provided by the extraordinarily detailed testimony and documentation to
be found in the records of investigations and trials.
One of the most eloquent appraisals of the
unique treasures that may be mined from the study of crime history was
written by Friedrich Schiller in his introduction to a popular German edition
of causes célébres published in 1792:
We catch sight here of people in the most complicated
situations, which keep us in total suspense and whose dénouements
provide pleasant employment for the reader's ability to predict the outcome.
The secret play of passion unfolds before our eyes, and many a ray of truth
is cast over the hidden paths of intrigue. The springs of conduct, which
in everyday life are concealed from the eye of the observer, stand out
more clearly in motives where life, freedom and property are at stake,
and therefore the criminal judge is in a position to have deeper insights
into the human heart.
As this passage reveals, crime annals attracted Schiller because, unlike
much of the fiction of his day, they offered a combination of powerful
narrative suspense and unusually vivid psychological insights. Although
he did not deceive himself that any crime is completely explicable, he
was a strong believer in the capability of judicial inquiry to arrive at
a
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rational elucidation of human behavior, and accordingly regarded knowledgeable
summaries of criminal trials as likely to come closer to an accurate rendering
of cause and effect than the most painstaking study of broader historical
events.
From the nineteenth century onward the scope
of crime literature has immensely expanded as our understanding of irrational
behavior has deepened and as we have had to confront an increasing incidence
of murders committed out of what Coleridge (in reference to Iago's crimes)
called 'motiveless malignity." In his 1854 essay "Three Memorable Murders,"
Thomas De Quincey wrote the first important study in English of an insane
urban mass killer, John Williams, the Ratcliffe Highway Murderer. His imaginative
reconstruction of the massacre of two London households brought his narrative
to a pitch of suspense that would have delighted Schiller; at the same
time he attempted to mirror the emotions of the terrorized city and to
plumb Williams's dark compulsion to annihilate. The crime literature that
has followed De Quincey has approached its subject matter from all the
vantage points from which human conduct may be appropriately viewed. Some
writers have continued to explore the psychological or philosophical implications
of murder. Others are primarily interested in the historical or political
significance of criminal cases. Devotees of social history have looked
to the light that microscopic examination of a crime and its setting may
shed so clearly on the environment, manners, morals and sensibility of
a particular society or era. Many lawyers and other writers with knowledge
of law have placed their main emphasis on the functions and limitations
of the legal process as a means of assessing and judging human conduct.
It is a special value of Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book
(1868-69), and a basis of its honored place in imaginative crime literature,
that Browning successfully brings many of these approaches to bear on the
antique criminal case that his poem recreates.
In book one of The Ring and the Book
Browning rejects the idea that legal procedure and legal thinking have
a monopoly over the search for the truth about human actions. Using a rather
painful dental pun, he ironically refers to the law as "the patent truth-extracting
process" (book 1, line 1114; subsequent references are to book and line
numbers). Against the claims that the legal profession makes to expertise
in fact-finding, Browning asserts the competitive claims of the creative
imagination, of fictional reconstruction, and of poetry.
The Ring and the Book is a long narrative
poem that follows, for the most part with scrupulous accuracy, the events
of a triple murder committed by Count Guido Franceschini and four henchmen
in Rome in 1698. Because I will later refer to some of the events of the
crime in
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greater detail, I had better begin, as lawyers are accustomed to do,
with a brief statement of the case.
The principal defendant, Guido, was a poor
nobleman from Arezzo in Tuscany. He had gone to Rome to seek his fortune
and served as secretary to a cardinal. But he had entered his forties without
having obtained either distinction or financial success. Then he married
Pompilia Comparini, the thirteen-year-old daughter of a well-to-do Roman
middle-class couple. Guido's motives for entering this marriage may be
a subject for controversy, but there is no doubt that it turned out to
be another unsuccessful venture. He brought his child-bride and her parents
home to his family mansion. Soon dissension developed between Guido and
Pompilia's parents, and they returned to Rome leaving their daughter behind.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of this family dispute may have been, Pompilia's
parents, once back at home, took a step that was certainly not designed
to charm their son-in-law. They publicly announced that Pompilia was not
their daughter after all, but the daughter of a Roman prostitute. On the
basis of this claim they instituted legal proceedings against Count Guido
to recover their dowry (2.549-602).
Meanwhile, Pompilia was very unhappy with
her husband. Under circumstances that were later to be the subject of considerable
legal dispute, she arranged to flee to Rome in the company of Guiseppe
Caponsacchi, a young nobleman of Arezzo who held the ecclesiastical office
of canon. Count Guido intercepted the two fugitives en route. A prosecution
was then instituted in Rome against Pompilia and Caponsacchi for elopement
and adultery. It is not clear what the court's conclusion was as to the
more interesting of the two charges, but the two defendants were punished
very lightly, Caponsacchi being confined to a small town near Rome for
three years and Pompilia being placed, perhaps without any formal judgment,
in an institution for penitent women (3.1376-1418).
About one month later, Pompilia was released
to the custody of her parents and shortly thereafter, on December 18, 1697,
gave birth to a son. The news of the birth appears to have enraged Count
Guido further. On the evening of January 2, 1698, Guido and four armed
accomplices went to the house of Pompilia's parents and murdered them together
with the young mother. The five assassins were tried, convicted, and executed
for their crime in February 1698.
In summarizing the main events that form the
basis of Browning's poem, I have tried to state the facts that are not
disputed.
Browning is a determined adversary, however, and does not readily permit
any facts to be withdrawn from the arena of contention. Indeed, one of
the most fascinating aspects of The Ring and the Book is the poet's
insistence that
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the truth about human behavior does not consist of a single accurate
statement from which all inconsistencies are sifted out and excluded. In
Browning's view, to render a mature judgment on a human dispute one must
first allow the actors in the drama to place their own widely varying interpretations
on the actions and motives of themselves and their enemies, and one must
also listen to the highly partisan arguments of the professional and lay
adherents to the parties in the dispute. In order, in the words of G. K.
Chesterton, to "depict the various strange ways in which a fact gets itself
presented to the world," Browning tells the story of Guido's crime from
the points of view of nine narrators: the pro-Guido man in the street ("Half-Rome");
the anti-Guido man in the street (the "Other Half-Rome"); the sophisticated
newsreader ("Tertium Quid") who knows the issues but leaves the decisions
to the professionals; Count Guido himself; Caponsacchi; Pompilia; counsel
for the defense; counsel for the prosecution; and the Pope, who considered
and rejected Guido's appeal.
As examples of the ferocious divergence of
Browning's narrators on the facts of the case, two crucial issues may be
cited: (1) Did Pompilia write certain love letters to her rescuer, Caponsacchi,
that were placed in evidence, or, indeed could she write at all? (2) What
was the significance of the ruse that Guido used to gain entrance to the
murder house? As principal antagonists on these issues I will choose the
pro-Guido and anti-Guido man in the street. I cite these narrators because
they are purely of Browning's creation and because they may be taken to
represent a layman's reaction to legal issues and possibly (although we
would hope for less partisanship) the reaction of a juror to the presentation
of a case.
The pro-Guido man in the street is a married
man who thinks women should be kept in their place. He makes fun of Pompilia's
claim of illiteracy and cannot reconcile it with what he conceives to be
another fact -- that she admitted receipt of letters from Caponsacchi.
Nor does he think Pompilia's claim is consistent with Caponsacchi's admission
that he received letters that he believed to be from Pompilia (2.1126-60).
Yet none of these "facts" seems to damage Pompilia's claim in the slightest.
The letters from Caponsacchi, if received, may have been read to her; the
alleged letters from her may have been forged by Guido, as was indeed charged
(2.1143-47).
The anti-Guido man in the street is a bachelor
who apparently has a soft spot in his heart for the young Pompilia. To
him it is clear that the alleged love letters were forged by Guido:
Love-letters from his wife who cannot write
Love-letters in reply o' the priest -- thank God --
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Who can write and confront his character
With this, and prove the false thing forged throughout
. . .
(3.1310-13)
It is interesting to compare these two extreme
fictional points of view on the issue of Pompilia's literacy and the composition
of the letters with the position taken by the prosecution at the actual
trial. In noting Browning's departure from the trial record, we must appreciate,
of course, that the goal of the prosecution differed from that of the fictitious
anti-Guido man in the street. The prosecution was not necessarily interested
in affirmatively proving Pompilia's innocence of adultery but only in showing
the unavailability to Guido of a defense of justifiable homicide. Moreover,
counsel for the prosecution showed the valid professional concern, quite
absent from Browning's man in the street, of not attempting to prove more
than they thought the court could be persuaded to believe. Thus, they did
not argue strongly that Pompilia was illiterate but contented themselves
with the technical position that authorship of the alleged love letters
had not been proved by the defense. Apparently believing that the court
might attribute the letters to Pompilia, however, the prosecution's counsel
pushed their argument further: (1) the letters, even if written by Pompilia,
did not provide sufficient evidence that an adulterous affair was being
carried on; and (2) even if the terms of the letters were more amorous
than would ordinarily be expected in the correspondence of a married woman
with the local canon, Pompilia was merely faking romantic interest in order
to lure Caponsacchi into rescuing her from her cruel husband. Quite likely,
these arguments would have irritated both the pro- and anti-Guido factions,
as Browning has depicted them.
Another example of a conflict between the
pro-Guido partisan and his anti-Guido counterpart is provided by their
interpretations of the fact that Guido and his accomplices gained admittance
into the murder house by knocking on the door and announcing the name of
Caponsacchi. In their comments on this issue we see these two partisans
differing little on the basic fact of what Guido did. Instead, each narrator,
on the basis of his own prejudices about the rights and wrongs of the case,
constructs elaborate and over-strained inferences as to the significance
of Guido's ruse in determining his motives and the guilt or innocence of
Pompilia
The pro-Guido layman says that after knocking
on the door, Guido paused and decided to give Pompilia one last chance
to prove herself innocent of adultery. Guido believed, he says, that if
Pompilia had not had illicit relations with Caponsacchi she would refuse
to open the door on his name being called. With this intention of giving
Pompilia an
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opportunity to save her life by proving her good morals, Guido, according
to the version of his partisans, shouted "Giuseppe Caponsacchi," and the
door flew open (2.1405-32).
The anti-Guido partisan believes that the
message at the door was itself less compromising; it did not announce a
personal visit by Caponsacchi but "'A friend of Caponsacchi's bringing
friends/A letter'" (3.1598-99). Moreover, the inferences as to Pompilia's
guilt are flatly rejected. Her partisan reasons that (1) being a new mother,
if Caponsacchi's name had inspired her with any guilt or shame, she would
not have opened the door (3.1601-6); and (2) if, as had been rumored, Caponsacchi
had been visiting her secretly, he would have entered the home stealthily
and by password, so that Pompilia would have been suspicious at the open
announcement of his name (3.1607-12). Moreover, in the mind of Pompilia's
partisan, Guido's use of Caponsacchi's name affirmatively proved that Guido
knew Caponsacchi was not visiting Pompilia or else he would have feared
that Caponsacchi might be inside at the very moment and the ruse accordingly
frustrated (3.1613-14). Thus the inferences are reversed, Pompilia exonerated
of adultery and Guido's role of a husband retrieving his honor rejected.
The reasonings of the two partisans about
the knock on the door may strike us first as very ingenious, but even brief
reflection will show that they make no logical sense at all and are purely
arbitrary conclusions based on the prejudices of the speakers. Thus the
pro-Guido spokesman assumes that if Pompilia opened the door to Caponsacchi
she must have had an illicit affair with him. Yet it is obvious that even
if she were innocent of adultery she would owe a debt of gratitude to Caponsacchi
as her rescuer and would not shut the door in his face. On the other hand,
the anti-Guido spokesman assumes that if Caponsacchi had been paying visits
to Pompilia he would have entered the house by use of a password, and thus
the door would not have been opened when Guido used the ruse of announcing
Caponsacchi's name. The weakness of this inference is obvious when we recall
that Pompilia was living in her parents' home; that her parents were accused
by Guido of having encouraged their daughter's elopement; and that, if
this accusation was true, Caponsacchi would not have had to use any passwords
to find an ample welcome in Pompilia's home.
Bewildering as these two versions of the "knock
on the door" incident may strike us, we are to be further perplexed when
we are later presented with two inconsistent versions by Guido himself.
In his first monologue. Guido seems to support his adherent's version by
stating that he pronounced Caponacchi's name as "the predetermined touch
for truth" (5.1629). But in his second monologue, as he awaits his execution,
he recalls only that as he knocked on the door he was afraid that some
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neighbors might be inside visiting Pompilia and the baby and might summon
aid, or that one of the three intended victims might escape (11.1582-99).
In giving examples of conflicts in the Browning
testimony, I have discussed issues turning on authenticity of documents
and evidence of an oral statement at the Comparinis' door, and have not
considered the more significant conflicts on issues of motivation, morals,
and psychology. After being led through the thicket of these deeper conflicts,
one can sympathize to some extent with Browning's statement in the last
book of the poem that the lesson of The Ring and the Book is that
Our human speech is naught,
Our human testimony false,
our fame And human estimation words and wind.
(12.834-36)
But this summation is a misrepresentation of the poem's achievement. Browning
is not saying that there is no truth and no falsehood in the murder case;
if he were to do so his claims at the beginning of the poem as to the truth-seeking
power of art would have proved a false advertisement. It is true that on
many of the factual issues of the case we never receive Browning's findings.
It is true also that the poet has emphasized the importance of the witness's
point of view and the bad man's ability to say more for himself than one
might have imagined possible. But it is wrong to conclude from this that
Browning is teaching that there is no reality apart from the witness's
viewpoint. In this respect we must contrast him with some of our modern
relativists, like the Italian dramatist Pirandello, who answers questions
on even the most concrete factual points with the statement, "Right You
Are! If You Think You Are!"
Browning, unlike Pirandello, appears to make
a judgment on the case and to find Guido guilty. He is not concerned with
Guido's legal guilt, however, but with what G.K. Chesterton, in his essay
on the poem, has called "spiritual guilt." To Browning, Guido was guilty
of renouncing the power to feel or inspire love in favor of an empty pursuit
of a career and of wealth; he was guilty in his assumption that his noble
birth guaranteed him certain rewards withheld from common men and exempted
him from their moral code. The contrast between Browning's judgment and
the judgment of the legal process in the historical trial is striking and
discomfiting. Guido was apparently convicted at the trial because, even
assuming Pompilia had committed adultery, (1) he did not satisfy himself
with killing his wife but killed her parents as well, (2) he did not do
the deed alone but conspired with four men, and (3) he and his accomplices
carried murder weapons shorter than permitted by statute.
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The potential existence of broad gaps between
legal guilt and the moral, spiritual guilt that Browning considered in
this poem has remained an obsessive theme for the writers of our own time.
As one of many available examples, we may refer to the criminal in Albert
Camus' The Stranger, who is convicted legally for murder but spiritually
for his inability to feel the emotions that the community feels.
Wholly apart from issues of the guilt of Guido,
Browning's version of the trial, particularly in the monologue of the Pope,
takes on a social, political, and religious significance that is, quite
properly, not within the scope of the pleadings that counsel made in behalf
of Guido's prosecution and defense. The Pope sees in Guido's career evidence
of an outgrowth of a materialistic age which promises more than it can
deliver. He says of the defendant: "So, Guido, born with appetite, lacks
food" (12.835). Study of the case also leads the Pope into consideration
of the distance that the Church system has moved from the spiritual sources
of the Christian religion. This distance is marked by the fact that Guido,
whose life and crime showed clearly the complete absence of Christian feeling,
appealed to the Pope for reprieve on the ground that he was entitled to
exemption from the death penalty as a minor Church official.
It is, of course, quite right that the legal
process does not extend its fact-finding to the broad issues of spiritual,
institutional, and historical guilt that Browning brings within the range
of his speculations. Therefore, the powerful fictive reconstruction of
crime history in The Ring and the Book does not make its impact
upon us by serving as a critique of the procedural shortcomings of legal
inquiry. The achievement of the poem, it seems to me, lies in its bringing
us to the realization that a criminal case is not the exclusive preserve
of its parties, witnesses, lawyers, and judges, that it may have philosophical
or social significance that others may be better able to interpret. This
lesson is nowhere better illustrated than by the Guido Franceschini trial
itself which would have apparently fallen into complete oblivion had not
Browning found a soiled report of the case in an Italian bookstall and
seen things there that nobody had seen before. In modern times, the Sacco-Vanzetti
case provides another example of a criminal prosecution whose significance
has radiated far beyond the court records. On the technical level, that
trial, of course, presented important issues as to the trustworthiness
of eyewitness testimony and the proper limits of examination and argument
as to a defendant's political beliefs. But the condemnation and execution
of Sacco and Vanzetti have meant a good deal more to our poets, dramatists,
and novelists. From such causes célébres, we have gradually
learned to accept Browning's persuasive argument that the law does not
have a monopoly over the "truth-extracting process"; and that the essential
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meaning of a criminal case may remain to be elaborated by the writers
of succeeding generations.
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BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
For quotations from The Ring and the Book
and line references, I have used the edition by Richard D. Altick published
in The English Poets series (Yale University Press, 1971).
For trial documents on which The Ring and
the Book is based, I have drawn on two English translations, the so-called
"Old Yellow Book": The C.W. Hodell translation, The Old Yellow Book:
Source of Robert Browning's The Ring & the Book (E.P. Dutton &
Co., Everyman's Library, 1911) and the John Marshall Gest translation,
The
Old Yellow Book: Source of Browning's The Ring and the Book, a new
translation with explanatory notes and critical chapters upon the poem
and its source (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1927). The Gest edition
reorganizes and groups the arguments and counter-arguments in logical legal
sequence, and includes annotations summarizing the cited authorities. Certain
supplementary documents relating to the case are published in Curious
Annals, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Beatrice Corrigan
(University of Toronto, 1956).
Richard D. Altick & James F. Loucks, Browning's
Roman Murder Story: A Reading of The Ring and the Book (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1968), the first full-length literary study of The
Ring and the Book, appeared after the original publication of this
essay in 1966.
The quotations from G.K. Chesterton are from
Robert
Browning (Macmillan & Co., 1951), pp. 160, 168.
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* Editor's Note: "The Ring and the Book and the Murder"
is Albert Borowitz's first essay on crime in literature. It was previously
published in 54 California Law Review 292-297 (1966) and in A
Gallery of Sinister Prespectives pp. 1-10. |
