Why Read the Classics?

by Italo Calvino

  In his enormous output, published and unpublished, and made up for the most part of works a mere ten or twenty pages long, amongst which is some of his best writing, I will mention a piece written for the radio in which Gadda the engineer discusses modern buildings. He begins with the classical composure of a Bacon or a Galileo describing how modern houses are made with reinforced concrete; but his technical precision gradually gives way to mounting irritation and colourful language when he explains how the walls in modern houses cannot contain the noise; he then moves on to a physiological section on how noises react on the encephalon and the nervous system; and finishes with verbal pyrotechnics which express the exasperation of the neurotic victim of noise in a huge urban block of flats.

  I believe that this piece of prose represents not only the entire range of Gadda’s stylistic capabilities, but also the full gamut of his cultural significance, his kaleidoscopic range of philosophical stances from the most rigorous technical-scientific rationalism to this descent into the darkest and most hellish abyss.

  [1963]

  Carlo Emilio Gadda, the Pasticciaccio

  What Carlo Emilio Gadda had in mind when in 1946 he began writing Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (That Awful Mess on Via Merulana), was a detective novel but also a philosophical novel. The detective plot was inspired by a crime that had recently taken place in Rome. The philosophical novel was based on a concept enunciated in the very first pages: nothing can be explained if one simply looks for a single cause for every effect, since every effect is determined by a multiplicity of causes, each one of which in turn has many other causes behind it; hence every event (for example, a crime) is like a vortex into which different currents flow, each one moved by different springs, none of which can be overlooked in the search for the truth.

  A vision of the world as ‘a system of systems’ was expounded in a philosophical notebook found amongst Gadda’s papers after his death (the Meditazione milanese). The author, starting from his favourite philosophers, Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant, had constructed his own ‘discourse on method’. Every element in a system is in turn a system itself; every single system is linked to a genealogy of systems; every change in an element implies the alteration of the entire system.

  But what counts even more is how this philosophy of knowledge is reflected in Gadda’s style: in the language, which is a dense amalgam of popular and erudite expressions, of interior monologue and studied prose, of various dialects and literary quotations; and in narrative composition, in which minimal details take on giant proportions and end up by occupying the whole canvas and hiding or obscuring the overall design. That is what happens in this novel, in which the detective story is gradually forgotten: maybe we are just on the point of discovering who committed the murder and why, but the description of a hen and the excrement it deposits on the earth become more important than the solution of the mystery.

  What Gadda wants to convey is the boiling cauldron of life, the infinite stratification of reality, the unravellable knot of knowledge. When this image of uni venal complexity, which is reflected in the slightest object or event, reaches its ultimate paroxysm, it is pointless for us to speculate whether the novel was destined to remain unfinished, or whether it could have gone on ad infinitum, opening up new vortices inside every episode. The thing that Gadda really wanted to convey was the congested superabundance of these pages through which one single, complex object, organism and symbol, takes shape, the city of Rome.

  Because we must immediately point out that this novel is not intended to be just a mixture of a detective and a philosophical novel, but also a novel about Rome. The Eternal City is the book’s real protagonist, in its social classes from the most middling of the middle classes to the criminal underworld, in the words of its dialect (and of its variety of dialects, particularly southern ones, which bubble up in this melting-pot), in its extrovert nature and in its darkest subconscious, a Rome in which the present mixes with the mythical past, in which Hermes or Circe is evoked in connection with the most trivial incidents, in which characters who are domestics or petty thieves are called Aeneas, Diomedes, Ascanius, Camilla, or Lavinia, like the heroes and heroines in Virgil. The noisy, down-at-heel Rome of neorealist cinema (which was enjoying its heyday at that very time) acquires in Gadda’s book a cultural, historical and mythical depth that neorealism neglected. And even the Rome of art history comes into play, with references to Renaissance and Baroque painting (like the passage on the saints’ bare feet, with their enormous big toes).

  The novel of Rome, written by a non-Roman. In fact Gadda was from Milan and identified closely with the middle class of his native city, whose values (practicality, technical efficiency, moral principles) he felt were being overturned by the predominance of another Italy, a cheating, noisy, unscrupulous Italy. But even although his stories and his most autobiographical novel (La cognizione del dolore (Acquainted with Grief)) are rooted in Milanese society and dialect, the work which brought him to the attention of the wider public is this book written mostly in Roman dialect, in which Rome is seen and understood with an almost physical involvement in even its most infernal aspects, like a witches’ sabbath. (And yet, by the time he wrote the Pasticciacdo, Gadda had only known Rome from having lived there for a few years in the 1930s, when he had found employment as overseer of the heating systems in the Vatican.)

  Gadda was a man of contradictions. An electro-technical engineer (he had used his professional skills for about ten years, mostly abroad), he sought to control his hypersensitive and nervous temperament by means of a scientific, rational mentality, but only succeeded in making it worse; and he used his writing to give vent to his irritability, phobias, and outbursts of misanthropy, which he tried to suppress in real life by donning the mask of a gentleman from a bygone age full of courtesy and good manners.

  He was considered by the critics as a revolutionary in terms of narrative structure and language, an expressionist or follower of Joyce (a reputation which he enjoyed right from the start even in the most exclusive literary circles, and which was reinforced when the young writers of the new avant-garde in the 1960s acknowledged him as their model). And yet as far as his personal literary tastes were concerned, he was devoted to the classics, and tradition (his favourite author was the sedate and wise Manzoni) and his models in the art of the novel were Balzac and Zola. (He possessed some of the basic qualities of nineteenth-century realism and naturalism, such as the portrayal of characters, milieus and situations through physical details, and through bodily sensations, such as savouring a glass of wine at lunch, with which this book opens.)

  Fiercely satirical towards the society of his day, and driven by a quite visceral hatred for Mussolini (as is proved by the sarcasm with which this book evokes Mussolini’s tough-jawed look), Gadda in political terms was totally alien from any form of radicalism, a moderate law-and-order man, respectful of the laws, nostalgic for the sound administration of yesteryear, a good patriot whose formative experience had been the First World War which he had fought and suffered in as a scrupulous officer, constantly indignant at the damage which can be caused by improvised solutions, incompetence, or being overambitious. In the Pasticciacdo, whose action is supposed to take place in 1927, at the beginning of Mussolini’s dictatorship, Gadda does not simply go in for a facile caricature of Fascism: he analyses in great detail what effects are produced on the daily administration of justice by the failure to respect the division of Montesquieu’s three powers of the state (the reference to the author of L’Esprit des lois is explicit).

  This continual need for something concrete and detailed, this appetite for reality is so strong as to create a kind of congestion, hypertension and even blockages in Gadda’s writing. His characters’ voices, sensations, and the dreams of their subconscious are mixed up with the author’s constant presence, with his bursts of intolerance, his sarcasms and the dense network of cultural references. As in a ventriloquist’s performance, all these voices overlay
each other in the one discourse, sometimes with changes of tone, modulations, and falsetto notes all in the same sentence. The novel’s structure is altered from within, through the excessive richness of the material represented and the excessive intensity with which the author overloads it. The existential and intellectual trauma of this process are all left implicit, while comedy, humour, grotesque transformations all form the natural means of expression of this man who always lived most unhappily, tormented by neuroses, by the difficulty of his relations with others, and by the terror of death.

  He did not set out with plans of innovations in form to revolutionise the structure of the novel: his dream was to construct solid novels obeying all the rules, but he never managed to bring them to completion. He kept them in their unfinished state for years, and would decide to publish them only when he had given up all hope of completing them. One feels that just a few pages more would have been enough to round off the plot of La cognizione del dolore or the Pasticciaccio. Other novels he cut up into short stories and it is no longer possible to reconstitute them by reassembling their various fragments.

  The Pasticciaccio tells of a double police investigation into two crimes, one trivial, the other horrific, which took place in the same building in the centre of Rome: a widow looking for some consolation is robbed of her jewels, and a married woman, who is inconsolable because she cannot have children, is stabbed to death. This obsession with failed maternity is very important in the novel: Signora Liliana Balducci surrounded herself with girls whom she considered her adopted daughters until for one reason or another she would leave them. The figure of Liliana, who dominates even as a victim, and the atmosphere of the gynoecium which she spreads around her opens up a shadowy perspective on femininity, that mysterious force of nature before which Gadda expresses his confusion in pages in which considerations of female physiology are combined with geographical and genetic metaphors and with the legend of the origins of Rome, which guaranteed its continuity through the rape of the Sabine women. Traditional anti-feminism which reduces the woman solely to her procreative function is expressed here in very crude terms: is this to ape Flaubert’s dictionary of ‘idées reçues’, or because the author shares these views? In order to define the problem more precisely we have to bear in mind two circumstances, one historical, the other relating to the author’s psychology. When Mussolini was in power, the Italians’ main duty, hammered home by the insistent official propaganda, was to have children for the fatherland; only the mothers and fathers of many children were considered worthy of respect. This apotheosis of procreation made Gadda, a bachelor oppressed by a paralysing shyness at any female presence, suffer and feel excluded, and left him hovering between attraction and repulsion.

  Attraction and repulsion inform the description of the female corpse with its throat horrifically cut, in one of the virtuoso passages of the book, like a Baroque painting of the martyrdom of some saint. The police commissioner, Francesco Ingravallo, invests a particular interest in the enquiry into the crime, for two reasons: first, because he knew (and desired) the woman; and second, because he is a Southerner brought up on philosophy and driven by a passion for science as well as sensitivity for everything that is human. It is he who theorises about the multiplicity of causes which go to determine an effect, and amongst these causes (since his reading apparently also includes Freud) he always includes sex, in some form or other.

  If Inspector Ingravallo is the author’s philosophical spokesman, there is also another character with whom Gadda identifies at a psychological and poetic level: one of the tenants, the retired civil servant Angeloni, who because of the awkwardness with which he replies to questioning instantly becomes a suspect, even though he is the most harmless person in the world. Angeloni, an introverted, melancholy bachelor, who takes lonely walks through the streets of ancient Rome, is prone only to temptations of gluttony, or perhaps of one other vice: he is in the habit of ordering prosciutto and cheese from delicatessens which are delivered to his door by boys in short trousers. The police are looking for one of these boys, who is probably an accomplice in the robbery and perhaps also in the murder. Angeloni, who clearly lives in fear of being accused of homosexual proclivities, jealous as he is of his respectability and privacy, stumbles under questioning with his omissions and contradictions and ends up by being arrested.

  More serious suspicions fall on a nephew of the murdered woman, who has to explain how he comes to possess a gold pendant containing a precious stone, a jasper which has replaced an opal, though this seems very much a red herring. The enquiries into the robbery, on the other hand, seem to gather more promising clues, moving from the capital to the villages on the Alban hills (consequently becoming the domain of the carabinieri rather than the city police) in the search for a gigolo electrician, Diomede Lanciani, who used to visit the obsessive widow of the many jewels. In this village world we pick up the traces of various girls on whom Signora Liliana lavished her maternal care. And it is there that the carabinieri find, hidden in a bed-pan, the widow’s stolen jewels as well as another jewel which had belonged to the murdered woman. The descriptions of the jewels (as with the previous description of the pendant with its opal or jasper) are not only virtuoso performances by a master of style but they add another level to the reality portrayed: besides the linguistic, phonetic, psychological, physiological, historical, mythical, gastronomic levels, we have this mineral, underworld level, about hidden treasures, involving geological history and the powers of inanimate matter in the squalid business of a crime. And it is around the possession of jewels that Gadda tightens the knots of the psychology and psycho-pathology of his characters: the violent envy of the poor along with what Gadda defines as ‘the typical psychosis of frustrated women’ which leads the unfortunate Liliana to load her ‘children’ with jewels.

  We could have been helped some way towards the solution of the mystery by a chapter which was chapter 4 in the first version of the novel (published in instalments in the monthly Florentine review Letteratura, in 1946), if the author had not eliminated it when he published it as a book (with Garzanti in 1957) precisely because he did not want to reveal his hand too early. In it the inspector interrogated Liliana’s husband about the relationship which he had had with Virginia, one of their ambitious adopted children, whose character was marked by lesbian tendencies (the Sapphic atmosphere around Signora Liliana and her gynecium was stressed), by a lack of morality, greed for money and social ambitions (she had become her adoptive father’s lover only to blackmail him), and by violent fits of hatred (she would utter dark threats while slicing the roast meat with the kitchen knife).

  Is Virginia the murderer, then? Any doubt we might have had is eliminated if one reads an unpublished document which was discovered and published recently (Il palazzo degli ori (The Apartment Building of Riches), Turin: Einaudi, 1983). This is a film script which Gadda wrote at the same time as the first draft of the novel: either shortly before it, or shortly afterwards, apparently. In it the whole plot is developed and clarified in every particular. (We also learn that the robbery was committed not by Diomede Lanciani but by Enea Retalli, who in order to avoid arrest opens fire on the carabinieri and is shot dead.) The script (which bears no relation to the film which Pie tro Germi made from the novel in 1959 and in which Gadda had no part) was never taken up by producers or directors, and no wonder: Gadda had a rather naïve idea of writing for cinema, based on continual fade-outs to reveal characters’ thoughts and background detail. For us it makes very interesting reading as a rough sketch for the novel, but it fails to generate any real tension either in its action or its psychology.

  In brief, the problem is not ‘Who dunnit?’, for already in the novel’s opening pages we are told that what causes the crime is the whole ‘force-field’ which establishes itself around the victim; it is the ‘compulsion on destiny’ emanating from the victim, her circumstances in relation to others’ circumstances, that spins the web of events: ‘that system of force
s and probabilities which surrounds every human being and which is usually called destiny.’

  [1984]

  Eugenio Montale, ‘Forse un mattino andando’

  When I was young I used to enjoy learning poetry off by heart. We studied many poems at school—and today I wish we had studied many more — which have subsequently stayed with me all my life, in a kind of unconscious, mental recital of them which resurfaces many years later. After secondary school, I continued learning some on my own for a few years: poets who were at that time not included in school syllabuses. Those were the years when Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones) and Le occasioni (The Occasions) began to circulate in Italy in the grey covers of Einaudi’s books. So, around the age of eighteen, I learnt several of Montale’s poems by heart: some of them I have now forgotten, others I have continued to carry with me to this day.

  Rereading Montale today naturally takes me back to that repertoire of poems deep in my memory (‘che si sfolla’ (which empties)). An analysis of what has remained and what has been cancelled (or ‘scancellato’, to use the local form of ‘cancellato’ retained by Móntale), and a study of how my memory has varied or even deformed the verses, would lead me to an in-depth exploration of those poems and of the relationship that I have established with them over the years.