I
The attitude of mind necessary to a complete enjoyment of the tales
in this book must first spring from the realisation that, as stories,
they are as different from our own short imaginative fiction as the
town of Pescara, on the Adriatic Sea, is different from Marblehead in
Massachusetts. It is true that fundamentally the motives of creative
writing, at least in the Western Hemisphere, are practically everywhere
alike; they are what might be called the primary emotions, hatred and
envy, love and cruelty, lust, purity and courage. There are others,
but these are sufficient: and an analysis of The Downfall of Candia
together with any considerable story native to the United States would
disclose a similar genesis.
But men are not so much united by the deeper bonds of a common humanity
as they are separated by the superficial aspects and prejudices of
society. The New England town and Pescara, at heart very much the same,
are far apart in the overwhelming trivialities of civilisation, and
Signor D’Annunzio’s tales, read in a local state of being, might as
well have remained untranslated. But this difference, of course, lies
in the writer, not in his material; and Gabriele D’Annunzio is the
special and peculiar product of modern Italy.
No other country, no other history, would have given birth to a
genius made up of such contending and utterly opposed qualities: it
is exactly as if all the small principalities that were Italy before
the Risorgemento, all the amazing contradictions of stark heroics and
depraved nepotism, the fanaticism and black blood and superstition,
with the introspective and febrile weariness of a very old land, were
bound into D’Annunzio’s being.
Not only is this true of the country and of the man, the difference
noted, it particularly includes the writing itself. And exactly here is
the difficulty which, above all others, must be overcome if pleasure
is to result from “Tales of My Native Town.” These are not stories at
all, in the sense of an individual coherent action with the stirring
properties of a plot. The interest is not cunningly seized upon and
stimulated and baffled up to a satisfactory finale. The formula that
constitutes the base of practically every applauded story here—a
determination opposed to hopeless odds but invariably triumphant—is
not only missing from Tales of My Native Town, in the majority of cases
it is controverted. For the greater part man is the victim of inimical
powers, both within him and about; and fate, or rather circumstance, is
too heavy for the defiance of any individual.
What, actually, has happened is that D’Annunzio has not disentangled
these coherent fragments from the mass of life. He has not lifted his
tales into the crystallised isolation of a short story: they merge
from the beginning and beyond the end into the general confusion of
existence, they are moments, significantly tragic or humorous, selected
from the whole incomprehensible sweep of a vastly larger work, and
presented as naturally as possible. However, they are not without form,
in reality these tales are woven with an infinite delicacy, an art,
like all art, essentially artificial. But a definite interest in them,
the sense of their beauty, must rise from an intrinsic interest in the
greater affair of being. It is useless for anyone not impressed with
the beauty of sheer living as a spectacle to read “Tales of My Native
Town.”