Ernesto
Page 15
The short page titled “Almost a Conclusion,” which separates the first four episodes from the three brief chapters that make up the fifth episode, is dated August 31 in the typescript of Ernesto and is therefore included in this edition. Both a justification and anticipated epilogue, its date can be verified by this letter of September 1 to Baldi.
This is what I’ve done: I’ve “isolated” the first four episodes (the last one ends—if you recall—with the confession to the mother): after which I wrote “Almost a Conclusion,” which I’m including. After that in the manuscript come the three short chapters of the fifth episode (concert, woman with her hair up, and meeting on the steps). If the book were to end at “Almost a Conclusion,” it would already be something. After that I’ll see: if I find peace, strength, and proper surroundings, etc. (But I doubt it very much.)
By now Saba is dreaming only about making stylistic changes in what he has written and then of making a clean copy “on lovely lightly colored paper,” but even that “technical” work will not get done, because the “114 tightly filled pages” that he mentions in the letter to Baldi will become, in the second typescript, with variants in our possession, 116 in a later numeration superimposed on the earlier 114, with the insertion of “Almost a Conclusion.”
There were some letters addressed to his friend Nello Stock in September through October, in which the writer repeats that he lacks “not only ‘the joy’ but also the ‘cruelty’ needed to finish the story, to take it along its present path to its ultimate conclusion” (September 1). Creative silence, which didn’t permit the expansion of the novel into the projected seven or nine chapters. “The novel should have had from seven to nine episodes. . . . I wrote only the first four episodes and three short sections of the fifth . . .” Saba once again alludes, in a letter of September 28 to Quarantotti Gambini, to the excessive cruelty it would have required.
However, Saba is narcissistically aware of having put together some good pages in the last episode. “Perhaps the meeting of Ernesto and Ilio on the staircase of the violin teacher’s studio is the best moment of the story up to now; although it’s very difficult to understand why and how it’s beautiful. However, if you’d like I’ll send you those two or three short pages by registered mail.”[5]
In order not to completely abandon projecting himself onto or, perhaps better, regressing into being the boy Ernesto, Saba “read” him an essay on Saba’s Canto a tre voci (Song in Three Voices) by Tullio Mogno, a philosopher and an admiring critic, mentioned in Storia e cronistoria del Canzoniere (History and Chronicle of the Songbook).[6] “Last evening, I read Mogno’s complete essay to Ernesto” (letter to Nora Baldi, September 7), “the poor boy was very pleased; he almost cried. You tell me that Ernesto is stronger than I am; it’s true, but Ilio and Eugenia—perhaps because they’re dead, dead for many years—are stronger than Ernesto.” Not content with Ernesto’s company, the author has him write a letter to Mogno, dated September 22, 1899, which is not part of the novel but which has a strong para-textual relationship to its fictive storytelling. Among other things, it speaks of Ernesto’s poetic vocation, his “destiny to become a poet,” which, had it been made evident in Ernesto, would have been superimposed on the events of the novel, threatening the autonomy of the Songbook. The split personality of “Signor Saba” and his youthful “self” continued even a bit coquettishly in a letter of October 1 to Baldi: “As you know Ernesto wrote a letter to Tullio Mogno. Mogno not only answers my letters but sometimes writes to me twice a day: but to poor Ernesto—nothing. He must be very, very angry with him. It’s true that the letter may have been by a young idiot, but there was nothing in the least offensive in it. But philosophers are . . . philosophers.”[7]
At the same time, Saba’s physical and emotional status was deteriorating and the political conditions were also becoming disagreeable and dangerous to him. The return of his native city to Italian administration, which was expected to take place on October 8, 1953, when the British and Americans announced they would withdraw their troops from Trieste, provoked a reaction by Tito and the threat that Yugoslavian troops would enter the well-known Zone A. Even before the November clashes, Saba agonized about the novel, which he could have entrusted to his daughter, who had returned to Rome, but which instead was still in his possession. “If only I had given you Ernesto; I don’t have the courage to send it now by train or air. So I had to burn the two typescripts at the first alarm” (October 13). On October 18 he wrote to Stock, “Keep those two short pages of Ernesto, they may well be the only two in existence. Things are getting so bad here that I can foresee the necessity to burn the 110 or so pages that I wrote when I was almost euphoric.”
Reversals of health, grief, and all his known psychological problems afflicted Saba in his last years. However, he never stopped thinking of Ernesto; his memory stung with the same apprehensions and anxieties that had troubled him while drafting it so many years earlier. He had known then, as he still did, that the novel would never appear while he was alive, but his concern was not so much about posthumous notoriety as about keeping his secret. He had entrusted the manuscript less than two years earlier to Levi; now on August 17, 1955, he enjoins his daughter to execute the threatened death sentence.
Listen to me, Lucia, I’m very sick, in unimaginably bad shape. In this state, I’d very much hate to leave unfinished things behind, things that need to be completely revised, finished, etc.—and that make no sense the way they are now. And I I [sic] will never have the strength nor the heart to finish the little unfinished novel that I left with [Levi] with explicit instructions to burn it the instant he receives my order to do so. Please send him my order to do it now, without making any fuss; then telegraph me immediately, “Done.”
It is not necessary to repeat here why Saba was so attached to the notion of describing his adolescent biography. In our introduction we have attempted to explain why he was so pessimistic about the possibilities of immediate or posthumous publication.
The subsequent history of Ernesto is neither complicated nor filled with epistolary support as is that of its formulation. It was sealed until 1962 and then kept in Levi’s studio. Linuccia transcribed her father’s novel for the Einaudi edition published in 1975.[8]
—MARIA ANTONIETTA GRIGNANI
NOTES
All notes by Maria Antonietta Grignani
ERNESTO’S LETTER TO TULLIO MOGNO
The reproduced letter is based on the original typescript and incorporates Saba’s handwritten corrections. It carries a fictional date of September 22, 1899 and was sent to Carlo Levi accompanied by the following note:
Trieste, October 4, 1953
Dear Carlo,
Tullio Mogno sent me a lengthy study on Canto a tre voci [Song in Three Voices] that he wanted me to publish for him. I couldn’t help reading it to Ernesto, and the stupid little kid rushed off to write a letter to the eminent Mogno, which I am enclosing for your information. At first, he didn’t want to tell me about it, but it was easy for me to get him to confess the whole thing. He had made a copy of it; that’s what I’m sending you. Right now, he’s pretty depressed because Professor Mogno hasn’t deigned to answer him (he must have been extremely annoyed). But it’s just as well for Ernesto; now he’ll learn not to fool around with philosophers.
Your
U
1.
Oh cameretta, cameretta mia
che mi fosti compagna nel dolor
[. . .]
Ma ricomparve il tramonto sol,
e rinnovo le cose con l’amore.
La farfalletta ha dispiegato il vol
con imperato, ma potente ardore.
Ed a me parve ritonar fanciullo
quando scherzavo tra l’erbetta e i fiori
e d’ogni cosa mi facea un trastullo.
nell’April della vita tutto d’or
Translator’s note: Saba was likely teasing Mogno with this poem. “Oh cameretta” are the first words of a
Petrarch sonnet, which describes the poet’s little room as a harbor for the vicissitudes of life. Saba’s poem, in young Ernesto’s voice, ends with his return to childish joy.
THE HISTORY OF SABA’S ERNESTO
1. Intimacy is analogous to the title Saba’s daughter suggested in 1951 for the poetry in Amicizia (Friendship), which is centered on the world of birds Saba recalled from his childhood memories, and which was finally titled Quasi un racconto (Almost a Story).
2. Saba calls the passages that are separated by spaces within each episode “chapters.”
3. From the August 5 letter:
I’m enclosing the changes that are most important to me—please enter them into the manuscript immediately. . . . Here they are: he told her roughly what to say to his boss to someone who had, for his honored mother’s sake shown so much (no, he suddenly realized) too much “Geduld” (patience). If he weren’t able to walk at his age, he would get himself treated until he felt well again. (Wait, in a minute, Ernesto was almost amused, he’s going to tell me to take the Ischirogeno, maybe even cod-liver oil.) His office etc.
Further down, (but this change is less important): he thought scatterbrained, pretentious boy. That wasn’t true: Ernesto was not in the least pretentious; and contributed etc.
(I made a lot of other corrections, but they’re less important and I’m too tired now. The first is the most important.)
4. Letter of August 12:
Dear Linuccia, if there’s still time, I’d like you to correct page 101, lines 5 and 6 (from the bottom) like this:
So it was because of your father. I was terribly sick. With no one to help me. Your aunt then. . . . You were in the country with the nursemaid you loved. (Paragraph) Oh Mama etc. etc. (That’s in the second part that I sent you today). Thanks and forgive me. But these little details are very important.
Your
Papà
5. These short pages concerning the last section were returned along with some letters to the Saba family and are now part of the Ernesto holdings. They consist of two typewritten pages, numbered on both sides, 113–16, which describe with slight variations the material in the two original pages: the meeting on the steps in the last part of the fifth episode. A letter to Stock dated September 24 refers to these pages:
Dear Nelletto,
You have to forgive me for not writing to you. I had been very ill (nurses day and night). I’ve recovered from that, but now my legs are very weak and my head is worse. So I’m restricting myself to sending you a part of Ernesto: the last I’ve written. I would have sent you more, but you’d have to promise me that after having read it, you would burn it, send it back, or clearly threaten to have copies made [sic] Oh Nello!
Those two pages were never recovered; two typewritten pages of a short part of Ernesto, dated July 25, 1953, Trieste, which were planned as the sixth chapter still far in the future, were, however, inserted with slight changes into the fifth and last episode of the novel. Reported as part of M. Coen, “Diciannove lettere di Umberto Saba a Bruno Pincherle” (“Nineteen letters from Umberto Saba to Bruno Pincherle”), Problems 73 (May–August 1985): 224–50.
6. Tullio Mogno (1905–1984) was “a philosopher, but one who—monstrously for a philosopher, and furthermore, a disciple of Benedetto Croce—had a unique intuition for poetry and Saba’s poetry in particular. One day in 1932 Saba received a letter of more than thirty pages signed with a name that he didn’t know. It was the first letter from Mogno and it was almost completely devoted to the analysis of Song in Three Voices. Many other letters followed that first one, ‘unhappily.’ . . . These letters no longer exist; but were carried off by the Germans with the furniture in which Saba had been keeping them.” Preface to Storia e cronistoria del Canzoniere (History and Chronicle of the Songbook), in Prose, edited by L. Saba (Milan: Mondadori, 1964).
7. The letter to Mogno, which appeared as an afterword in the 1975 edition of the novel, edited by Sergio Miniussi, appears in the backmatter of this edition because of its para-textual character.
8. Saba’s letters to his wife, to Linuccia, and to Stock and those from Linuccia to Levi are held at the Fondo Manoscritti di Autori Moderni e Contemporanei of the University of Pavia. Letters to Baldi appear in Saba’s Lettere a un’amica (Turin: Einaudi, 1966); letters to Quarantotti Gambini are in the two writers’ correspondence, Il vecchio e il giovane, edited by L. Saba (Milan: Mondadori, 1965); those to Pincherle are in Coen, “Diciannove lettere.” Partial quotes from many other correspondents are in Ernesto, notes by S. Miniussi (Turin: Einaudi, 1975). The correspondence between Linuccia and Einaudi is in the publisher’s archives.