the only Italian nineteenth-century novel which had... - Calvino and Lampedusa steal from Nievo, Nievo steals from Foscolo, Foscolo steals...

From a 1985 interview with Italo Calvino, found in Hermit in Paris (2003, tr. Martin McLaughlin):

You would like me to mention some book I read as an adolescent and which subsequently made its influence felt in things I later wrote.  I will say at once: Ippolito Nievo’s Le confessioni di un ottogenario (Confessions of an Octogenarian), the only Italian nineteenth-century novel which had a novelistic charm that was comparable to that found so abundantly in foreign literatures.

What I am pretty sure Calvino meant was the kind of foreign books boys like: Treasure Island and Poe and The Count of Monte Cristo, books I have seen Calvino mention elsewhere as favorite childhood reading.  The Nievo novel he loves, then, is likely a partial one, the novel of the kitchen boy in the crumbling castle.

An episode in my first novel, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests [1947], was inspired by the meeting of Carlino and Spaccafumo [the bandit].  An atmosphere vaguely reminiscent of the Castello in Fratta is evoked in The Cloven Viscount [1952].  And The Baron in the Trees [1957] reworks Nievo’s novel around the protagonist’s entire life, and it covers the same historical period, straddling the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the same social environments; moreover, the female character in my novel is modelled on Nievo’s La Pisana.  (240, everything in brackets are my insertions)

Calvino has mentioned his first three novels.  I doubt any other writer has made such through use of Nievo.  I reread Path and Viscount to see for myself, but actually before I came across this interview, and the connections were obvious.  The Path to the Nest of Spiders, as translator Archibald Colquhoun called it, is a realistic novel about a band of misfit anti-Nazi partisans operating in the woods of Calvino’s native Liguria.  It is told from the point of view of a boy, a ruffian, too young to understand women or politics or even violence, really, so a good outsider.  His name is Pin, so he is a protagonist like Kipling’s Kim (mentioned by name on p. 105) or Huck Finn or Jim (Hawkins).  Or Pinocchio.  It is only that one scene that looked like a direct nod to Nievo, where Pin, like Carlino, is lost in the woods and is guided to safety by a misfit, a smuggler in Nievo, a partisan in Calvino.

The tone of The Cloven Viscount could hardly be more different.  The title character is split in half by a Turkish cannonball, one side purely good, the other evil.  The evil side returns to his castle to terrorize his subjects.  The narrator is an eight year-old boy, a neglected nephew of the Viscount – so now we are in Nievo’s world.  Little action takes place in the castle itself, but rather everywhere in the surrounding countryside, the woods and hills.  I am getting more of a hint about what part of Confessions Calvino really liked.  The Baron in the Trees, which I have not read for twenty-five years, is also almost completely set outdoors (see title).

I had forgotten how comically disgusting The Cloven Viscount was, how many mutilated corpses of men and animals, casual murders, and disfiguring diseases were featured, all for a laugh along with details like the bride who “still had a few yards of veil left, [so] she made a wedding robe for the goat and a wedding dress for the duck, and so ran through the woods, followed by her two pets, until the veil got all torn in the branches and her train gathered every pine cone and chestnut husk drying along the paths.”  (240)

I had thought about writing a bit about Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958), in which the author reaches back a century to describe the moment his family’s world was demolished by Garibaldi’s invasion of Sicily (by his side, Ippolito Nievo, who had just written Confessions).  But it is so obvious, right?  Manzoni, Nievo, Lampedusa, all following the same strategy.   Lampedusa also stole Nievo’s dog.  Lampedusa made some improvements, but the death of the dog in Confessions is a fine scene.

Nievo played the same game.  The great recurring guest star in Confessions, aside from Napoleon, first seen getting a haircut, is the radical Italian nationalist poet Ugo Foscolo, who plays a part in the overthrow of the Venetian Republic.  Nievo’s novel is even more packed with collapses, suicides, and weeping than The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis.  It has more weeping men, actually, than any non-Japanese novel I have ever read.  Foscolo’s novel is a blatant imitation of Goethe.  Etc. etc. etc.  It is all one great chain of books if you want to look at it that way.

I swear to you that I’m spinning no romance here - the narrator of Confessions of an Italian spins a romance

Carlino the kitchen boy is in love with his cousin, La Pisana, daughter of the Count, but second daughter, and thus neglected and badly raised by a noble family nearing its end.  She treats Carlino badly, promises marriage then dumps him, flirts with other boys, and is alternately kind and cruel.  Carlino is ten years old, La Pisana eight.

I loved and I despised.

You will probably laugh at this tale of two children pretending to be adults, but I swear to you that I’m spinning no romance here: this is simply the story of my life.  (Ch. 6, 241)

No, Carlino is fourteen there and La Pisana twelve.  I need to go back to when they were ten and eight to find the most shocking, sexual scene in Confessions of an Italian.  Carlino has wandered far from the castle, far enough that he has gotten his first glimpse of the sea, instantly and permanently converting him into an early Romantic, which is amusing.  He is out late, gets lost, and is escorted home by a friendly bandit.  For years, he has slept in the same room as his beloved cousin, but now he is banished to a closet as punishment, not just for being late but for lying to protect the bandit.  Carlino screams and even injures himself to no avail.  But finally, late at night, La Pisana sneaks into his little kennel:

“But before I go I want you to thrash me and pull my hair hard for all my wickedness towards you.”  And here she took my hands and put them on her head.

“Goodness, no!” I said, withdrawing her hands, “I’d rather kiss you.”

“I want you to pull my hair!” she said , taking my hands again.  (Ch. 3, 111)

And after some back and forth, he does.

She was in a fury now.  And while I stood there, uncertainly, she jerked her head back so forcefully and so suddenly that the lock was left in my fingers.  “You see?” she said happily, “that’s how I want to be punished when I ask to be punished!  Goodbye now and do not move from here or I shall never come to play with you again.”  (112)

Finally, a reminder  - the boy is ten, the girl eight.  And the history between the two characters goes on for another six hundred pages, with the basic pattern that they are separated by circumstances, Carlino plunges into History, giving his life to Italy if he cannot give it to this woman, until the characters are reunited in some unlikely fashion, usually involving one saving the other from death, like in a Dumas novel.

I went with the love affair, which is never as intense as in this one scene, however the effect might linger, likely because the censorship allowed more license with the children.  I also thought about working through Chapter 5, the Siege, which really is like something from Scott or Dumas, one long adventure purposefully designed to feel like an episode from the Middle Ages except now made farcical, unless you are a little boy in which case it is absolutely thrilling.

During Carlino’s childhood, history is purely local, almost frozen for hundreds of years.  Then comes adolescence and the French Revolution; the end of the Venetian Republic; the first efforts to create Italy – in other words, History.  Until finally History passes Carlino by and he writes his book.  That is the conceit of Confessions of an Italian, plainly stated.

As I recall it aloud, I write what I recall - Nievo describes the kitchen, and other things

It was all about getting the voice right, said the translator of Confessions of an Italian.  The opening chapter is a tour of the Castle of Fratta (“today no more than a pile of rubble from which the peasants gather stones to brace their mulberry trees”), in Venetian territory a bit north and a ways east of the city, by the boy who turns the spit in the kitchen.  Chapters are long – 42 pages here – so there is room for a couple dozen characters, from the ancient Countess down to the old loyal servant now useless for anything except “grating the cheese.  Down to “Marocco, the Captain’s dog,” actually, another resident of the kitchen.  The friendly  Penguin edition thankfully includes a Cast of Characters for reference.

As if all those characters, including several clergymen of various ranks, were not sufficient, it turns out that the narrator (and the author, Ippolito Nievo) is a fan of Tristram Shandy and has a tendency to wander.  The seven page digression on the functioning of the Venetian legal system is the most surprising of them, and the dullest.  Then it is, finally, back to the kitchen.  There were points where I wondered if the narrator was ever going to get out of the kitchen.

He addresses the point in the first lines of the second chapter:

The principal effect of chapter one on my readers will most likely be a great curiosity to finally learn just who this Carlino is.  In fact, it has been quite an accomplishment on my part – or maybe just simple fraud – to send you rambling through an entire chapter of my life, always nattering on about me, without first introducing myself.  (Ch. 2, first lines, p. 45)

So Nievo is much more efficient than Sterne.  It is only Chapter Two, and the memoirist is not only born but as old as eight or nine.  If anything, the rambling, chaotic first chapter suggests Sterne much too strongly.  Mostly the novel is more conventionally told than the first chapter suggests.  Mostly Nievo and Carlino moves forward.  “As  I recall it aloud, I write what I recall,” Carlino says, and I believe him (Ch.6, 241).  As when he describes his discovery and love of Dante – surely this is the author himself speaking without a mask – and ends by saying that “It is unfortunate, but we often have to put up with such digressions when someone is telling his story,” which leads to an amusing digression on clarity:

Courage, therefore: I criticize no one, but when you write, consider the fact that many are going to read you.  (Ch. 10, 372-3)

Lucky for me, Carlino is wrong; I am read by few.

I also had the strange feeling in the early chapters of resemblances to later novels by writers that cannot possibly have known Nievo.  The decaying castle at the end of its long history full of useless inhabitants evoked Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan, if that novel were narrated by the kitchen boy Steerpike.  There are several parallel characters.  Odd.

One of those characters suggests even more novels.  Confessions is built on a duel plot where one long line is Italian history, the futile struggle for independence, and the other is the kitchen boy’s ongoing love affair with his demonic cousin La Pisana.  Ongoing for decades, so at points the novel resembles Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor and Gabriel García Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera.  Those examples suggest a command of language and imagery which Nievo does not have, but there are – I need a vague word – resonances.

Tomorrow, let’s follow the loves of Carlino and La Pisana.

a miserable account of a few, ordinary boyish feats - Ippolito Nievo's Confessions of an Italian

The week, a short one (holiday on Friday) is devoted to Confessions of an Italian (1867) by Ippolito Nievo, one of the two great novels of 19th century Italy, meaning “great” in the sense of “large” (858 pages in the new Penguin edition) as well as important.

The author wrote this beast in 1858 in a frantic fit of despair after one of the long series of failed attempts to free Italy from foreign rule.  Nievo was 27 and maybe a bit of a propagandist hack, not so promising as an artist, and he had never written anything on this scale.

The narrator is in his 80s.  So his story reaches back far before Nievo was born, back to the series of invasions, fizzled revolutions, and double-crosses of the Napoleonic Wars that shattered the lasting medieval institutions (for example, his beloved Republic of Venice) and inspired the dream of a free, unified Italy.

Perhaps Nievo thinks the earlier revolutions had something to do with the one for which he fought.  The other great – greater – Italian epic novel, Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (1827), also features invasions of Italy by French and Austrian armies, but during the 17th century.  What else is the historical novel for?  Three-quarters of Confessions of an Italian are set during the 18th century.  Although the narrator lives on, it essentially ends with the failed revolutions of 1848, one more in the series.

The novel is full of events, maybe too full, described at secondhand, interspersed with “a miserable account of a few, ordinary boyish feats” (620).  The reader without a strong sense of the relevant Italian history will need some patience.  It does not help that Nievo is not a first-rate prose writer.  He uses conventional language, is unafraid of cliché, and has limited descriptive capacity.  But, you say, is that not perfectly appropriate for the narrator, since the book is written by an ordinary fellow, not a professional writer, and is memoir, not fiction?  Yes, you are right!  The concept of the novel was ingeniously chosen to hide what I assume are real artistic limitations of Nievo’s.

Tim Parks has a terrific review of the novel in the April 2, 2015 New York Review of Books, not available online, I am afraid, which he ends with a little comparison with Manzoni who, he says,

is still a staple of the Italian school curriculum, while it is rare to meet anyone who has read Nievo.  Yet there is no doubt in my mind which author English-speaking readers will prefer now that Confessions of an Italian is at least attractively translated in its entirety.  (66)

I also have no doubt – they’ll prefer Manzoni!  I seem to always disagree with Parks.

An abridgement of Confessions of an Italian has been available in English before, but Frederika Randall has made the first complete translation.  What a service she has done.    It was all about getting the voice right, she says.

Now that I know what is in Nievo’s novel, I am seeing it all over Italian literature.

The saddest line in this sad novel is on p. 466:

“To die at twenty-eight, greedy for life, avid for the future, mad with pride, replete only with pain and humiliation!”

Ippolito Nievo died at twenty-nine, in a shipwreck.  He had joined Garibaldi’s Thousand and had helped Garibaldi liberate or conquer Sicily and Naples.  He helped create a unified Italy, but he did not quite get to see it.

Now that Italian valor lies uprooted, one huge ruin - Leopardi, Belli, Manzoni, Nievo

I went to a different Leopardi poem, Canto VI, “Bruto Minore, ” p. 57 in Galassi.  Giacomo Leopardi is the great poet and essayist of pessimism.  I am tempted to go on and on about him, but I should save that for a longer treatment.

One inspiration for turning to Italian literature was to take a crack at the 2010 Jonathan Galassi translation of Leopardi’s Canti (1818-35), which is proving to be ideal as a study guide.  The translation is on the literal side, and not so poetic.  The J. G. Nichols translations from 1994 are more poetic.  Nichols matches each poem to a prose selection from elsewhere in Leopardi’s gigantic corpus, from his brilliantly ironic essays and dialogues or his enormous ragbag book Zibaldone.

The latter appeared in English last year, almost 2,600 pages by a team of translators, quite a feat.  A sane reader will want to start with the selections assembled by Leopardi in the (short) book Pensieri, and to the Canti, and the Moral Essays, and then will want to return to them again and again, until he decides to write a monograph on Leopardi, and only then will he want to read Zibaldone, although in Italian, obviously.

You give Zibaldone a try and tell me how it goes.  I’m not going to read it.

Giuseppe Belli was a contemporary of Leopardi’s, but otherwise a polar opposite.  He wrote satirical sonnets, most profane, obscene, or both, in Romanish, the Roman dialect.  You may have noticed that every writer I have mentioned so far has been from northern Italy.  Belli stretches Italian literature to Rome for me.  The rough, crackly Harold Norse translation is a great treat – he moves the dialect into Brooklynese to good effect – but these five poems recently done up by Charles Martin give the flavor of Belli.

Two early novels, both candidates for Greatest Italian Novel.  I have read Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (1827 / 1842) twice and do not plan to revisit it now – someday, I hope – but I recommend it highly.  It is a strange book, a mix of sentimentalism and grit, Catholic apologetics and action.  It’s structure is odd, its characterization is odd.  It is a historical novel, set during a 17th century Austrian invasion of northern Italy.  The plague scenes are horrifying.  With Decameron, this means two of the greatest prose fictions in Italian are about plague epidemics.

The other novel.  I was poking around on the internet trying to find a novel I had looked through in a library.  Success!  The Castle of Fratta by Ippolito Nievo, which I was surprised to discover was only an abridgment of a much longer novel, Confessions of an Italian (1867), which I was even more surprised to see will be published in a complete 928 page translation in the United States in three weeks.  Which I took as a sign that I should take a swing at it.  No idea what I am getting into.  The novel has maps and a timeline and a list of characters.  The list of characters includes a dog.  Is it an Italian War and Peace?  Or an Italian The Count of Monte Cristo?  Or, like The Betrothed, something unique.  Italo Calvino loves the book, but he is not to be trusted, since he, like me, likes everything.

Aside from writing a thousand page novel when he was 27, Nievo was a revolutionary and follower of Garibaldi, a real adventurer, who sadly drowned in a shipwreck, age 29, before he had found a publisher.  There’s some Italian valor.