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.

While the sun continues shining over human grief - Ugo Foscolo's "Of Tombs"

In 1806, Ugo Foscolo was in exile in London, his dream of Italian unity enacted not by Italians but by the conquests of Napoleon.  The writers who had been alive at the time of The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, Alfieri and Parini, were both dead.  In retrospect, Foscolo was the greatest living Italian writer, although I do think that is how he felt about it.  He wrote a poem, “Dei Sepolcri,” “Of Tombs,” memorializing the great Italian writers, in fact memorializing memorials.

A recent Napoleonic edict had moved burials outside of cities (sensible) and required uniform plain grave markers (totalitarian).  The former does not bother Foscolo; the latter he sees as an attack on his culture.  In Jacopo Ortis, the title character practically identified the tombs of the great writers as synonymous with Italian culture.  “Of Tombs” develops the idea without Ortis’s histrionics.

On the one hand, who cares:

Oblivion draws all things into its night;
A force that never tires wears all things out,
Never at rest; and man and tombs of men,
The final shape of things, and the remains
Of land and sea are all transformed by time.

But Foscolo argues for the importance of tombs at a human scale.  A good anthropologist, he identifies tombs as an advance of civilization, part of the invention of “marriage, laws, and altars” that “[g]ave to the human animal respect.”  Tombs served as

… the cult which, through the rites may vary,
The love of fatherland and family
Transmitted through the long succeeding years.

Jacopo Ortis spent part of his novel visiting the monuments of Dante, Petrarch, and others.  Foscolo revisits them all in the poem, adding Alfieri and the English example of Admiral Nelson, a tribute to his ally and host. 

The urns of strong men stimulate strong minds
To deeds of great distinction; and these urns
Make sacred for the traveller that earth
Which holds them.

To what degree the tombs of the writers are meant to stand in for the works of the writers, and thus to what degree the poem is meant literally, remains a puzzle to me.

The last movement of the poems travels back to Classical Greece, to the Trojan War and the birth of poetry, or at least the poetry we still possess.  It ends with the vision of Homer visiting the Trojan tombs and receiving the inspiration to write his works – but this is not the historic Homer but a future Homer who will

… feel his way
Into the burial place, and clasp the urns
And question them.

This is the Homer who is inspired by our monuments to write the epic of Foscolo’s, and our, lost civilization.  Foscolo’s apocalyptic vision is more cyclical than progressive.

And you, Hector, will have your meed of mourning
Wherever men hold holy and lament
The blood shed for the homeland, while the sun
Continues shining over human grief.

I’ve used the J. G. Nichols translation published in The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis.  Several other translations exist.

He said, rather spitefully, that he did not sell Italian books - Foscolo's apocalyptic literary Italy

Foscolo’s great innovation was to politicize Goethe’s novel, to use the structure of The Sorrows of Young Werther to write a novel about a young man’s desire for a united Italy, free of outside control.  Admittedly I found some of Jacopo Ortis’s rhetoric on the subject to be tiresome.  I am curious how contemporary Italians find it.  Even though Italy has been united for 150 years now, the subject has never gone away.  But I do not read Italian literature for the politics.

Yet Foscolo insists I am wrong.  The argument that runs through Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis is that Italy is literature, that a united Italy already exists in literature and somehow needs to be immanentized.  Over the course of the novel, Ortis visits numerous tombs and monuments to writers, as well as living writers, actual people dragged into the novel.  The tomb of Dante in Ravenna (“On your funeral urn, Father Dante! As I embraced it I became all the more determined,” 115); the tombs of Galileo, Michelangelo, and Machiavelli in Florence (“as I approached them I found myself shuddering,” 84); the last home of Petrarch in the Euganean hills (“I approached the house like one about to prostrate himself on the tombs of his ancestors,” 18).

He visits the poet Giuseppe Parini in Milan.  “He is afraid of being expelled from his professorship and finding himself constrained, after seventy years of studies and glory, to dies begging for his bread” (91).  Ortis does not visit Vittorio Alfieri, who “refuses to make fresh acquaintances, and I would not presume to ask him to break this resolution of his, which is probably the result of the times in which we live…” (85).

Alfieri is mentioned or quoted as many times as any writer, comparable to references to Dante and Petrarch.  Most of the Alfieri quotations are from Saul.  I am mentally addressing anyone who thinks Wuthering Expectations is full of obscure writers.  No, famous writers, only the best known writers.

The living are necessary because there is the paradoxical risk that if Italy is literature then Italy is already dead and entombed.  In a bookshop in Milan, Ortis asks for the Autobiography of Cellini:

They did not have it.  I asked for another writer, but he said, rather spitefully, that he did not sell Italian books.  (91)

In another scene, a nobleman brags about “the prodigious library of his ancestors” (41) but is really only interested in their title-pages, in completing his collection.  Ortis’s vision of history, and thus of the future, is apocalyptic:

Often I imagine this world in chaos, and heaven, and the sun, and the ocean, and all the spheres in flames, in nothingness.  But if only in the midst of this universal ruin I could clasp Teresa once more – only once more in these arms – I would cry out for the destruction of all creation.  (64)

I have no real idea where the author, Foscolo, is in all this.  Maybe he meant the passage as a criticism of Ortis’s deviation from revolutionary fervor.  I doubt it.  There is nothing like this in The Sorrows of Young Werther, that is all I am trying to say.

Tomorrow I will move ahead a few years – more Foscolo, more Italian writers, and more tombs.

So I go on raving - Ugo Foscolo's great Werther ripoff

What seemed logical was to move from Dino Campana back a century to Giacomo Leopardi, the poet who was so good he ruined Italian poetry for a hundred years.  I have already forgotten where I read that.  Not to knock Leopardi, but I have some doubts.

Regardless, first I will go back a few years to a slightly earlier poet, the Romantic and revolutionary Ugo Foscolo.  His poems are hard to find in English.  Ten years ago, or more, I remember finding somewhere on the internet a fine translation of many of Foscolo’s sonnets (c. 1813).  No idea where.  I should have made a copy.

Instead I will start with Foscolo’s derivative yet conceptually ingenious little 1802 novel Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, an unashamed ripoff of The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) that transplants Goethe’s masterpiece to Italy and turns Werther into a nationalist radical.  He is exiled for political activities from his native Venice to the nearby Euganean hills near Padua (an area that is now a national park – seems awfully nice) where he meets a young woman who becomes the new object of his passionate intensity and tendency to go too far.

Like Young Werther, Jacopo Ortis is an epistolary novel composed mostly of the title characters letters to his more level-headed friend.  Otherwise, let’s see:

1.  This time, the love is not unrequited.  The heroine falls for Ortis, but cannot marry him due to money and Italian fathers and so on.  The heroine is a bundle of clichés, nothing close to Goethe’s Lotte, a great character.  This is perhaps because:

2.  Goethe wrote his novel when he was 25, older than his characters; Foscolo wrote his when he was 19, younger than his hero.  More of Foscolo comes from other books, including his characters.

3.  It is amazing how many themes associated with Romanticism Goethe anticipates in Werther.  Foscolo is the genuine thing, which can be tiresome even in a short novel.  “So I go on raving!” writes Jacopo.  So you do, kid, so you do (p. 62).  What if Werther were Italian and had read Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (1761)?  That comes close.

At every step I greeted the family of flowers and plants as they gradually raised their heads which were bent beneath the hoar frost.  The trees, gently rustling, made the transparent drops of dew flicker against the light, while the dawn winds were washing the superfluous liquid from the plants.  You might have heard a solemn harmony spreading confusedly throughout the woods, the birds, the flocks, the rivers, and the labours of mankind, and meanwhile the breathing air was perfumed with the exhalations which the exulting earth sent up from the valleys and hills to the sun, Nature’s chief minister.  I pity the wretch who can awake in silence and coldly regard such blessings without feelings his eyes bathed in tears of thankfulness.  Then it was I saw Teresa in all the glorious trappings of her grace.  (14-5)

Now that is some good pathetic fallacy.  Some readers will sigh, others will guffaw.  I suppose I am somewhere in between.

I read the J. G. Nichols translation published by Hesperus.  Is it the only English translation?  I think I will write one more piece on what is most original about Foscolo’s novel.

one man unworthy of his cowardly age - Alfieri, Goldoni, and Foscolo - 700 words and I can only cover three writers

What is Italian literature?  I ignored the question; it is an important one for this literature.  These judgments are always retrospective: Italian literature is what people interested in the subject treat as Italian literature.  But I am not only working with a conventional contemporary idea, but a central question going back to Dante, at the least.  What is the Italian language?  What is Italy?

Yesterday I glanced at some of the highlights of almost three hundred years of arguing about these questions, the extraordinary run from Dante Alighieri to the visionary poet Tommaso Campanella, who gets us into the 17th century.  Something happens to the literature then; the life sputters out of it.  My glib explanation is the Counter-Reformation.  But around 1609, Claudio Monteverdi perfected and popularized the form of musical theater we for some reason call opera, and if anything the cultural prestige of Italian music only increased.  There was no obvious lack of, to use a dubious metaphor, cultural energy in northern Italian kingdoms and cities.

I don’t know what happened to Italian literature.  Spanish literature caught the same flu about fifty years later and took two hundred years to recover.

My next Italian landmark is the Venetian comic playwright Carlo Goldoni in the mid-18th century, author of The Servant of Two Masters (1743) and dozens of other comedies.  I read a couple over the weekend, including the recent adaptation by Richard Bean, One Man, Two Guvnors (2011) that was such a big hit in London.  That is one funny play.  I’ll write about these soon.

Then there is the proto-Romantic Count Vittorio Alfieri, founder of Italian tragedy, possibly the only Italian tragedian of consequence.  He is a giant in Italian but not in English, and I can guess why – first, English barely has room for its own tragedies, and second, Alfieri’s almost singular dramatic theme was the overthrow of tyrants, which may have more juice in Italy and France than in England or the United States.

I’ve read his best known  play, Saul (1782), about the overthrow of a tyrant, and am now reading his posthumous (1806) Autobiography, about the triumph of a tyrant.  I have gotten to some good stuff, but not to the good stuff, e.g.:

… claiming to be a democrat because he never struck his servants with anything but his open hand, yet stretching out his valet with a bronze candlestick because the valet pulled his hair slightly while combing it…  and then sleeping – or claiming to sleep – with his bedroom door always open so that the valet might come in and, in revenge, murder him in his sleep.  (Ford Madox Ford on p. 655 of The March of Literature, first ellipses mine, second his)

A big personality.  It might make similar sense to read a couple more autobiographies contemporary with Alfieri, the Memoirs of Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte or more temptingly the massive Story of My Life of Giacomo Casanova, but I doubt that will happen.

Finally, the 19th century.  I plan to revisit to major figures from Italian Romanticism.  One is Ugo Foscolo, a genuine revolutionary and  fine poet although with a lyrical gift that has perhaps defeated his translators.  I remember many years ago running across a website with some lovely versions of Foscolo’s Graces (1803-1822) but I cannot find it now.  Foscolo also wrote The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1802), a novella that is a conceptual politicized Italianization of The Sorrows of Young Werther.  I hope to revisit it and see if it is as clever as I remember.  Or impassioned, or propagandistic, or whatever it is.

And then there is Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi.  The title quotation is again from Leopardi, from the same poem I used yesterday (p. 39), and is a description of Alfieri.

                                           He was the first to go
down into the ring alone, and no one followed,
for idleness and brutal silence now own us most of all.

The idea that Leopardi can be described as idle or silent is hilarious.  But look how long I have gone on.  I will start with Leopardi tomorrow.  I gotta pick up the pace.  At this rate – well, pretty soon I’ll get to books I haven’t read.  My ignorance should constrain the babble.