look--to individuals who care nothing for groups and less than nothing
for tendencies, either to follow or to combat them, but who carve out
unaided their own conception of life. Of such was Giovanni Verga, who
died a few years ago more than eighty years old, neglected and almost
forgotten, but with a magnificent achievement behind him that throws a
bleak pitiless light on the tawdriness of his contemporaries and
successors. Now that he is dead, appreciation of what he accomplished is
growing; people are reading him more. Imitation of Verga will not be
Verga; you cannot create a race of giants without giant blood; but it
cannot be quite profitless to turn at last to an author who built
literature out of life.
LUIGI PIRANDELLO
Pirandello has written a great deal. In addition to the numerous plays
by which he is rightly known, there are several novels and a large
number of short stories--so large a number, in fact, that he is
collecting them in a twenty-four volume edition under the title,
_Novelle per un anno_--one for each day of the year. Five of the
twenty-four volumes have been published so far--closely printed books of
some three hundred pages each; but I find in them little of the
Pirandello who is an important figure in Italian literature to-day.
Despite his announcement in the preface that many of the stories are
new, that all have been carefully retouched and many rewritten, they
bear the brand of journalism. They rarely descend as low as the average
American magazine story, but, for all the prolific inventiveness they
reveal, they have something of the same monotony, adequate workmanship
and lack of distinction. Nor is the significance of the thought or
emotion often striking. Now and again one does get a hint of the
Pirandello of the plays--in the extraordinary, almost wasteful (and
often wasted) power of characterization, for example, or in the
preoccupation with death--but these things are obscured by the verbose
pedestrian prose, quite without freshness. This lack of distinction is
certainly not due to carelessness; rather, the tales seem heavy and
laboured. Indeed, from all that I have read of Pirandello I am inclined
to believe that it is only conversation, dramatic dialogue, that he can
write well and freshly. There would be nothing surprising in this. It is
notoriously rare for a good dramatist to be a good novelist or
_novellista_. And I am not even convinced that the monotonous melancholy
of the stories (somebody dies in almost every one) has much to do with
their author’s predisposition to tragedy. The tragic ending is almost as
much a convention in an Italian, as the happy ending in an American,
story; and since in only a few of these tales have I felt the note of
real poignancy and been even faintly moved, I am the more inclined to
class their sadness as conventionality.
Those that deal with Pirandello’s own native Sicily have greater warmth,
a hint of tenderness. _Lontano_, the story of a Norwegian sailor left,
ill with typhoid, by his ship companions at the little town of Porto
Empedocle, nursed by the niece of that absurd, delightful, old
character, Don Paranza, a Sicilian ‘Vice Consul for Scandinavia,’
finally marrying her, and settling down to live in that sunburnt
country, an eternal stranger to every one, including his wife, is
genuinely touching. But the undistinguished prose in which it is too
wordily told is like a dry field that should be burned over for the
sake of the fresh green grass struggling beneath.
The last stories in this volume (the fifth) are the best, hint more
clearly at the Pirandello of the plays, at both his virtues and his
defects; so it is just possible that the entire collection is being made
chronologically (though nothing is said of any such plan in the
preface), in which case, to judge them fairly, one ought, I suppose, to
await the publication of the other nineteen volumes.
It would be unfair to blame these stories for lacking profundity of
thought, since a story may of course have profound significance without
actually expressing any thought at all, were it not that there is a
great deal of philosophizing in them, and that often it is made the
point of the story. Since this is so, it seems fair to note that the
philosophizing is pretty superficial. Take, for instance, the story
called _Niente_ (which is far superior to most of the others because it
is nearly all in dialogue). A hack doctor is awakened at three in the
morning at the pharmacy where he is on duty, to attend a young man who
has attempted to commit suicide. But on arrival at the horrible
tenement-house in which the tragedy took place, he finds that the
victim, dying, has been removed to a hospital. So the whole story is
simply conversation--first between the doctor and the annoyed
middle-class relative of the suicide, then between the doctor and the
wretched inhabitants of the apartment in which the young man had lived.
Bit by bit through this dialogue the tragedy and its causes are
revealed, with a skill worthy of that displayed in _Sei personaggi in
cerca d’autore_. (Indeed, of this story a striking one-act play might
easily be made). One would like the point to be merely the revelation of
the obscure tragedy, with no more moral to it than to Kipling’s _Without
Benefit of Clergy_--or with the tremendous moral of its not having one.
But what, instead, do we get? The doctor’s philosophizing. The
unfortunate young man (he says) had written verses, wanted to be a poet,
dreamed of glory--and the daughter of the house was in love with him.
Supposing he had lived, what would his dream of glory have come to? A
poor useless book of verse. And his dream of love? ‘Your daughter! He’d
have married your daughter!’ he cries to the irate dishevelled mistress
of the house. ‘Oh, beautiful and adorned with all the virtues, I have no
doubt, but still a woman, my dear lady, a woman! And after a little,
good God! with children and misery, think what she’d have been! And the
world, my dear woman, do you know what the world would have become for
him? A house! This house!’ And the doctor goes out, muttering: ‘_No_
books! _No_ women! _No_ house! Nothing!’
Now, despite its vividness, this is thin and superficial and, if taken
as the moral, at least as inadequate as any other moral would have been
to such a tragedy. It may perhaps be taken as an adequate moral if the
point of the story is not the young man’s tragedy, but the character of
the doctor; but I fear that, instead, we have here Pirandello himself in
a characteristic mood of hatred and disgust for grovelling life. In the
last story in the book, _La distruzione dell’uomo_, you get the mood
again, and the moralizing, unrelieved by a really possible, poignant
tragedy. Here a young student murders a commonplace woman of forty-seven
because she is about to have a child. She has been pregnant year after
year before this, but each time has had a miscarriage. This time it is
clear that the child will be born. And the student, in disgust for her,
her husband, the squalid tenement-house they, and he, live in, and the
squalid world beyond, murders the woman with her unborn child, feeling
fiercely that he is murdering humanity itself, destroying Man.
A pity! Not only because there are a dozen moods that might be felt in
considering that middle-aged couple, that distressing eighth-rate
apartment-house, with its dirty dishevelled walls and ragged display of
washing and the filthy children swarming in its courtyard, instead of
the one, not very perceptive mood of disgust to which we are held; but
also because in the expression of even this one mood Pirandello has
here, as often elsewhere, overdone himself, so that positively one
finishes the story in such a reaction of cheerfulness as almost to agree
with dear Pippa’s favourite remark. There you had it all--a masterly
picture of the house, of the quarter (that quarter of Rome has
certainly changed for the better of late years), and of the heavy
elderly couple, she with vast distorted stomach, he with an only less
vast one, making laboriously the daily walk prescribed for her by the
doctor, out past the church of Sant’ Agnese and back again, out and back
again. Why not let it go at that and leave the reader to feel what he
pleases? Most readers, I think, would feel pathos in the solemn anxiety
of those two to add one more inhabitant to that house and quarter--and
world, if you like. But if disgust was all one could feel, that, too, he
would surely feel more keenly if left to feel it undirected.
The best known of the novels, _Il fu Mattia Pascal_, first published
some twenty years ago when Pirandello was still a comparatively young
man, is better written than the short stories. Or is it? Perhaps it has,
rather, a youthful brio that they lack, a kind of gusto that rushes one
along through the dry heaps of words. And also it is told in the first
person; which gives it an advantage. It is only in this gusto that the
book is young, however. Its spirit is not young at all, but cool, rather
hard and sophisticated--not in a callow way, but maturely. I like the
moralizing in the novel as much as I dislike it in most of the short
stories, partly because here it is a natural expression of the
characters who indulge in it, partly because it is in itself often very
suggestive; indeed, I am inclined to think that the moralizing is the
best of the book. On the other hand, the most interesting thing is the
plot, because in it one discerns the as yet incoherent beginnings of an
idea that, developed, has come to haunt Pirandello--the idea of the
reality of illusion, and thus of the manifold nature of personality. In
the plays one almost never gets away from some variation on this theme.
_Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore_ is hardly less frankly concerned with
it than _Vestire gli ignudi_ or _Come prima, meglio di prima_. But in
the novel there is only the foreshadowing of the idea; it is certainly
not made clear to the reader, and was almost equally certainly not yet
clear to Pirandello himself; and the result is confusion.
Mattia Pascal is believed by his family and friends to have committed
suicide. A body supposed to be his is discovered and formally buried.
Taking advantage of this, he gives himself a new name, Adriano Meis,
invents a past for himself, and sets out to live anew, free. But he
finds that he cannot endure the emptiness of liberty any more than he
could endure the chains in which he struggled when alive. He is sucked
back into life, and eventually falls in love with a girl, Adriana, but
cannot marry her because the man as whom she knows him is a fictitious
man, with no papers, no _stato civile_, nothing. He--or, at least, the
man he was before he died--has a wife already. So he ‘commits suicide’ a
second time, becomes once more Mattia Pascal, and returns to his
home--to find his wife long since married to his best friend, and with a
baby. As far as I can make it out, what he then does is to live in a
state half-way between life and death. He leaves his wife to his
friend, and becomes--calls himself--‘the late Mattia Pascal.’
Now this is all very unsatisfactory, not really worked out, and in that
single sense ‘young.’ Whatever significance was intended remains
obscure, because, I am convinced, it was obscure to the author. There is
an abundance, a super-abundance, of ideas--enough, it must be admitted,
to justify in part those critics who already twenty years ago found
Pirandello ‘too cerebral.’ But my own objection is not that Mattia
Pascal reasons about himself exceedingly at every moment, nor even that
I cannot discern significance beneath the story, can only feel that it
might have held some profound significance. A study of a man who reasons
exceedingly is a quite legitimate subject for a novel, and it is not
essential that a study of character should pretend to be anything more.
My objection is that, even granting the contradictions that go to make
up any individual, Mattia Pascal does not hold together. He is shown us
at the beginning as an impetuous young man of considerable force of
character; yet, when freed from his unpleasant surroundings, and, by a
run of luck at Monte Carlo, the possessor of 82,000 lire, he sets out to
live frugally on this sum for the rest of his life, doing nothing at
all. Would he really have behaved in this way? The explanation, that he
could never have a _stato civile_, is weak. He was not so possessed of
love for his own country as to have to live there. He could have gone
anywhere else, almost (this being before the war), and have been taken
at his word. Indeed, before his stroke of luck, he had seriously thought
of emigrating to America. Neither was he a sick soul burdened by life
and glad to be free from it. He was merely, quite justifiably, burdened
by the conditions of his own personal environment. He might well, being
curious and cynical, have done for a short time what he did; but two
months of it would have bored into action the Mattia Pascal we had met.
Again, he is hard to the point of callousness, if not of brutality; that
we see at once. Nevertheless, in his way, he did love the girl he
married, and that he was not incapable of intense emotion we see from
his grief at the death of his child. Then, allowing for all possible
contradictions, is it conceivable that he could have so gaily let his
wife imagine him dead and, if not grieve for him, at least remain in
misery, while here was he with 82,000 lire in his pocket? He might have
done it--but so blithely? Again, we are shown him really in love with
the gentle and pathetic Adriana. Yet he can simulate a second suicide
and leave _her_, at any rate, to an agony of grief. Why? Because as
Adriano Meis he has no real existence, is but a shadow. He has no _stato
civile_, and can’t marry her; while, if he is Mattia Pascal, he can’t
marry her, since he has a wife already. Nonsense! He could have told
Adriana the truth, broken the whole tenuous chain of reasoning, and let
her decide whether she would escape abroad with him and marry him as
Adriano Meis. A hundred to one that she would have done so despite her
religion! But if she had not, she would have been infinitely less
unhappy than he made her by what he did do. There is a hardness, a
cruelty, about all this that is due more to the author than to the
protagonists. It is as though he would not let them alone. They are
flesh and blood, and he will treat them as marionettes--for the purpose
of his thesis. And, to save me, I cannot make out what his thesis really
is. It might be: that there is no such thing as freedom, no escape from
life; or that liberty is more unbearable than slavery; or that
everything is illusion. It does not seem to me to be clearly any one of
these things or any other--least of all what Pirandello himself
indicates in a short essay written for the new edition of the novel:
that people are the marionettes of their own idea of themselves until
that idea becomes intolerable and they tear off the mask and reveal
their naked faces. This is, in truth, an idea that underlies the plays,
and Pirandello, writing to-day, may now read it back into what he wrote
twenty years ago, but I challenge any one to discover it in the novel
itself. A perplexing, unsatisfactory, frustrated book, but closer than
the short stories, in power, to the plays.
There are two of the plays that I have neither seen nor read, but, among
all the others, _L’uomo, la bestia e la virtù_ stands by itself. It is
true that here you get, and with a vengeance, the idea expressed in
that supplementary essay to the novel--about the _burattinaio_ who makes
people imitate puppets until at moments of intense feeling they break
loose and become natural; but there the resemblance ends. For this play
is a wild, magnificent, breathless farce. Yes ...? The exasperating
thing in writing about Pirandello is that one must qualify any such
definite statement as that. The play is, indeed, a rollicking farce--for
the audience; but for the characters it is a desperate drama coming to
the sheer edge of tragedy. Now in a typical farce of the French variety
(to which, in its exceedingly risky plot, its tricks and unexpected
turns, this play might well belong) the spectator feels that the
characters are only playing at suffering, in order to heighten for the
audience the farcical effect. Here they are in desperate earnest, in
anguish. Once grant the absurd situation, which, after all, is
conceivably possible, and their agony is not even overdone. They are
real people struggling in the midst of a farce situation. And, with
this, cruelty is deliberately, maliciously forced upon the spectator by
the author. For the more acutely the characters suffer, the more violent
becomes the spectator’s mirth. There is something--I don’t
know--sadistic about it, and afterward one is left troubled,
uncomfortable and a little resentful toward the author. It is as though
one had laughed at a man who had fallen down in the street, when really
he had been seriously hurt by his fall. And also what is one to think
of a farce in which things as profoundly true as the following are
said? ‘A real home, with all the sweet painful associations that the
word “home” stirs within us, is what others--our fathers and
mothers--made for us with their thoughts and their solicitude. And
_their_ home was not that one, but the one _their_ parents had made for
them.’ ... ‘You look at others from the outside, and they don’t interest
you. What are they for you? Nothing! Images passing in front of you!
Inside, inside, you must feel them, identifying yourself with them,
testing their suffering by making it your own!... Oh, I know! The
passions of others, even the saddest, the most poignant, make every one
laugh. Of course! You haven’t ever felt them, or else, accustomed to
mask them (because you are all stuffed with lies), you no longer
recognize them in a poor man like me who can’t hide and control them.’
What a qualification to have to add to the innocent remark that _L’uomo,
la bestia e la virtù_ is a roaring farce and unlike the other plays! It
is certainly unlike them in a technical way, however. For, after a brief
and skilful exposition, it rushes on toward a distant developed
conclusion. In this it differs radically from all the other Pirandello
plays with which I am acquainted. They move backward, rather than
forward. No one has made such an art of exposition as Pirandello.
Perhaps no one before him grasped its possibilities. Remove the
deceitful robe of cleverness, and the exposition of most plays is
revealed as nowise different than in the days when two servants were
disclosed, dusting, and conversing about the imminent return of young
mistress who had been ... etc. There is always the feeling of haste,
that this must be got over with, so that the audience will know where
things stand and the play can begin. Now this is totally unlike real
life (which is what Pirandello is concerned with), where all that has
gone before to create a certain situation is richer and more complicated
than the development of that situation in two hours and a half can
possibly become. Pirandello throws you into the midst of a situation
which you begin to apprehend as interesting (absolutely as things might
be in real life if you entered a room full of people you did not know);
then, as he digs down beneath it, turning up other and other facts that
have gone before, as intensely dramatic; and, finally, as itself almost
the climax. (How magnificently this is done in _Come prima, meglio di
prima_!) In fact, in the best of Pirandello’s plays the exposition is
all but everything. The initial situation, that looked so simple at
first, is revealed at last as only one step this side of the
catastrophe. At the end, that one step forward is taken, and the curtain
falls. Certainly this is true of the almost unbearably painful _Vestire
gli ignudi_ (called, heaven knows why, a comedy!) and of what is perhaps
Pirandello’s masterpiece, _Enrico IV_.
All of the plays are thesis plays. The ‘this-fable-teaches ...’ is
never absent, and there is no doubt that it is with this, the moral,
that Pirandello started. Well, many lesser artists than he have started
out with a moral, and then, blessedly, thrown it overboard half-way on
the voyage. Not Pirandello! He clings to it, worries it, and makes human
sacrifice on its altar. Perhaps he would not do this, were it not, as I
have already suggested, that his theses are always one thesis,
variations on an idea that haunts him. As well as I can make it out (for
it is a perplexing elusive thing), the idea is that illusion is
essential to life, which last, bare and unadorned, would be unendurable.
_Vestire gli ignudi_--clothe the naked. And that all the varieties of
illusion in regard to personality gain, as soon as thought, an objective
life of their own. What am I? I am my naked self, but I am, with equal
truth, my own very different idea of myself, and the varying ideas that
all those who know me have of me. (To say nothing of the different
person I was yesterday and of the still different person I shall be
to-morrow). Each one of these ideas has an objective life of its own,
and gets often in the way of the others; which makes of any individual a
fluctuating insecure complexity. Given this terrifying conception and
its intensity in Pirandello’s mind, _Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore_
is revealed as not in the least a _tour de force_, but as an allegorical
expression of the passionately felt Idea. Pirandello never goes in for
_tours de force_; he is too desperately in earnest.
Now this (I trust I have not done it too much injustice) is extremely
interesting, and plays written around it, with puppets working it out,
would in any case be more stimulating than those written around, say,
Brieux’s thin theses. But the heart-breaking thing is that Pirandello
has genuine creative genius, and that genius and a thesis cannot live
together any better than youth and crabbed age; sooner or later the
former becomes too strong for the latter. He sets out to create
characters that shall prove his point, and, lo! the puppets spring into
real life, become actual men and women, while he, the _burattinaio_,
continues to flog them onward along the path of the Idea. The result is,
in almost every case, an exasperated sense of frustration in the
observer, the conviction that an abstract idea has killed something
true.