Hell and Back

by Tim Parks

  Flawed as it is, the novel is fascinating for the contradiction at its core. Maria yearns with all her heart for society, company, love. Her essential experience is that of isolation. But the society she longs for is supremely cruel and only united in its exclusion of the individual it has no time for. Maria is poignantly attractive in her need for others, but it is this that destroys her. The reader can only conclude that she needs to get tougher. Always ready to have his work travel with forged papers, Verga allowed the first volume edition to be published with a preface by the proto-feminist Caterina Percoto who presented it as a protest against the exploitation of women. It was a big success.

  But is Verga straightforwardly on the side of the victim? A few years later the short story ‘Spring’ would tell the simpler tale of a love affair between an ambitious but indigent young musician and a shop assistant. When the man finally gets a valuable contract, he drops the girl, who is heartbroken. The cruelty is now presented as an inevitable part of life; the man’s interest in career, artistic fame and money are entirely natural. This is his destiny. One can no more quarrel with it than with a mother’s desire to marry off her own child rather than her stepdaughter. Is there a sniff of justification in the air here? Or rage at life itself?

  One of the few salient events in Verga’s hardworking life would be his affair with a woman married to a wealthy man in Sicily. In embarrassingly naked first person, the story ‘Beyond the Sea’ tells of just such an affair and of the woman’s return, despite all the love that has been sworn, to Sicily, and to her husband. The lover is appalled, betrayed, but, like Nino in the earlier novel, does nothing to keep her, and so he also betrays love. Verga wrote the story before his mistress, Giselda Fojanesi, in fact went back to her husband. He knew this would happen. He had a career to think of. He must ‘work at his literature’. How fascinating all this must have been to Lawrence whose presence in Sicily in 1919 and consequent discovery of Verga was largely due to his having made the opposite gesture: he had run off with the married Frieda and abandoned society altogether.

  In any event it seems only appropriate that when Verga at last found his voice, money was the stimulus, together with the felt need to maintain a social façade. It was 1874. His publisher had just turned down not one but two novels. Verga considered giving up, then fought back. A literary magazine invited him to contribute a story, something he was not in the habit of doing. But “in order to resolve economic problems resulting from his desire to cut a fine figure in Milanese society’, writes critic Carla Riccardi, he accepted. In three days he wrote “Nedda “The merest trifle,’ Verga remarked, and made a point of insisting he had only written it for money.

  To come to ‘Nedda’ after reading the earlier works is to savour the surprise of seeing the competent craftsman transformed into the great artist. Something has happened. But what? The story is simple. Nedda is a young Sicilian peasant girl travelling the countryside for work to support a dying mother. Verga, it seems, has gone back, not so much to his own childhood, but to the poverty-stricken world that surrounded it, that threatened it, a world at the furthest remove from fashionable Milanese society, and somehow a rebuke to it too, as the poor left behind to die of cholera while the rich flee the city might well present themselves to a child as a silent rebuke, and a warning.

  Verga now proceeds to torture his character, and does so all the more ingeniously for the complete lack of that elaborate plotting and melodramatic language that had characterised the earlier books. In the end it takes very little to torture a Sicilian peasant girl of the mid-nineteenth century. The cards are stacked against her.

  The mother dies. Nedda has exhausted her resources paying for medicines. She is criticised by the villagers for going to work immediately after the mother’s death. Clumsily courted by the poor but honest Janu, she becomes pregnant. He works hard to get the money to marry her. But the most fertile fields below Etna are also those damp areas where malaria is rife. Janu falls ill. Fruit picking with a fever, he falls from a tree, dies. The girl goes through with her pregnancy, winning the scorn of the village. Refusing to give her baby to the nuns, she nurses it in the most abject poverty. As the story closes, she has a corpse in her arms: “Oh blessed you who are dead, she cried, “Oh blessed the Holy Virgin who has taken away this creature so as not to have her suffer like me!

  So many elements recall “Storia di una capinera’. The lonely individual dreams of access to society. Society is ugly and cruel. Religion is a sop and a whip. Love is sweet but always imprudent and quite unequal to economic forces and illness. Even the landscape is an enemy. Yet the story never becomes forced or formulaic. Overnight, it seems, Verga has learned the secret of narrative dispatch, of naturalness, and above all of a swift and terrible irony:

  The next day being Sunday there was the doctor’s visit, since he conceded to the poor the day he couldn’t devote to his farms. And what a sad visit it was! for the good doctor wasn’t used to beating about the bush with his customers, and in Nedda’s poor cottage there was only the one room and no family friends to whom he could announce the real state of the invalid.

  The sudden shift of viewpoint within an apparently spoken narrative would be a staple in Verga’s armoury from now on. ‘And what a sad visit it was!’ We expect this to be followed by some compassionate remarks about the sick mother or Nedda’s grief, only to be invited to sympathise with the ‘good doctor’ and his distaste at having to deal with patients who have neither spare rooms nor friends. The reader’s reaction can only be one of protest. And so much is left unsaid. Has the doctor told Nedda the truth or not? And the mother? It doesn’t matter. Knowing he has got his effect, Verga moves directly to extreme unction, the next paragraph ending: “The priest left and the sexton waited in vain by the door for the usual offering for the poor.’

  The success of the story, and of those that would follow, clearly has to do with its fusion of setting and voice. It is not that Verga is writing in Sicilian dialect, for that would be incomprehensible to his readers. But he has put together a weave of dialect inflections and colloquial mannerisms that at least suggest the speech of the poor and above all, through the narrator, the voice of a peasant community. A comparison of Lawrence’s recently republished translation and McWilliam’s new one will suggest how central the effect is to delivering Verga’s vision and how difficult it is to reproduce.

  Usefully, McWilliam’s introduction quotes Lawrence as observing that a translation of Verga would ‘need somebody who could absolutely handle English in the dialect’. ‘Probably I shall never do it,’ Lawrence says. ‘Though if I don’t, I doubt if anyone else will - adequately at least.’ Remarking on the acuteness of observation, McWilliam then lists four or five howlers Lawrence made as evidence that his ‘immodesty’ was misplaced and his version not ‘adequate’. But there are few translators, McWilliam included, who do not make occasional mistakes, and in any event, what matters here is that the voice be consistently and convincingly integrated with the characters; in short, the handling of ‘English in the dialect’. The wonderful story ‘Black Bread’ opens thus in Lawrence’s version:

  Neighbour Nanni had hardly taken his last breath, and the priest in his stole was still there, when the quarrel broke out between the children as to who should pay the costs of the burial, and they went at it till the priest with the aspersorium under his arm was driven away.

  McWilliam gives:

  No sooner had Nanni closed his eyes for the last time, with the priest standing over him in his stole, than his children were at one another’s throats over who should foot the bill for the funeral. The priest was sent packing empty-handed, with the aspergillum under his arm.’

  Lawrence stays with the original by trying to find some solution for the Sicilian Compare Nanni (compare is a southern Italian term of address and respect) and above all by keeping the paragraph down to one loosely articulated sentence. But he also makes various departures with ‘the last breath’ being introduced for ‘the
closed eyes’ of the original and the priest being driven off more by the quarrel than by direct command.

  McWilliam also makes changes. He has the priest standing over Nanni, and introduces both ‘for the last time’ and ‘empty-handed’ neither of which are in the original. But the main difference is in the handling of idiom, and here, perhaps surprisingly, we see McWilliam using idiomatic expressions more frequently than Lawrence. We have ‘at one another’s throats’, ‘foot the bill’ and ‘sent packing’ in just a couple of lines. At this point perhaps I can offer the nearest thing to a literal translation of the original.

  No sooner did Compare Nanni close his eyes, and the priest still there in his stole, than war broke out between the children over who should pay the costs of the funeral, so that the priest was sent off with his aspersorium under his arm.

  It’s breathless stuff, colloquial, immediate, delivered by a narrator who is so much part of the scene that he explains nothing. Despite some reservations as to whether this is the kind of milieu where the implied context of’foot the bill’ is appropriate, one has to say that McWilliam’s idiomatic approach makes sense. The next sentence reveals all its dangers: Tor Nanni had been sick a long time, with the sort of illness that costs you an arm and a leg and the family furniture too.’

  Here the idiom ‘costs you an arm and a leg’ collides with the so far mysterious illness creating one of those alarmingly comic effects Beckett liked to produce to show just how ridiculous language can be: ‘I have no bone to pick with graveyards’ is the example that comes to mind. Needless to say it isn’t what Verga was after here. Lawrence hugs the original and gives us: Tor Neighbour Nanni’s illness had been a long one, the sort that eats away the flesh off your bones and the things out of your house.’

  The illness is malaria. Flesh, bones and eating are the subject of the story. Peasant fare. ‘Furniture’ sounds like an extravagance.

  Nanni caught malaria because, like Janu in ‘Nedda’, he needed money and went to work on the most fertile ground where the mosquitoes are. His neighbours had warned him. McWilliam gives: ‘The neighbours told him over and over again “You’re bound to snuff it, Nanni, on that Lamia farm.’“

  Of course everyone has his idiolect, but for myself the expression ‘snuff it’ recalls the films or playground talk of the 1960s. Again Lawrence stays close to the original, doing no more than to substitute the standard idiomatic Italian ‘lasciare la pelle’ (‘leave your skin’) for ‘leave your bones’: ‘In vain the neighbours said to him, “Neighbour Nanni, you’ll leave your bones on that half-profits farm.”‘

  Less than a page into the story, then, it’s evident that the problem is one of finding a credible voice. McWilliam does some excellent work, but his ear lets him down and we regularly find words and expressions that are out of place. A few lines further on, when the eldest son Santo goes to live in his dead father’s house, we hear that he ‘shifted in his movables’. Lawrence gives, ‘carried across his things’. Verga wrote ‘robe’, ‘stuff, belongings’.

  Meanwhile, as far as the younger son is concerned, McWilliam tells us, ‘if he wanted to eat, [he] would have to go and find work for himself away from home’. Lawrence, whose Italian was sometimes shaky, nevertheless knew well enough that Verga had written something rather different: ‘Carmenio, if he wanted to have bread to eat, would have to go away from home and find a master.’ One finds a ‘master’ in nineteenth-century Sicily, not work. The implications are considerable.

  But the most amusing moment comes two pages later. With great delicacy, the narrator is telling us how it came about that Santo made the terrible mistake of marrying a penniless woman, thus compounding his family’s woes. It was of course because she was beautiful, with red hair and full breasts. These features are mentioned more than once, above all at the crucial moment just before Santo declares himself, when, as McWilliam effectively puts it, the girl tucks ‘in her chin above those gently heaving breasts’.

  At this point nature becomes complicit with romance, the air is seductive with the scent of herbs, the mountainside red in the sunset. McWilliam finishes the description: ‘She then turned to listen to the great-tits singing merrily in the sky.’

  Now, it’s true that the dictionary gives ‘great-tit’ for 'cinciallegra', but chirping up as the creature does just seconds after the description of those ample breasts there’s a problem here. Great tits indeed! Is it a howler, then, on Lawrence’s part that he gives: ‘Then she stood listening to the night crickets rattling away’? After all, Verga’s 'le cinciallegre facevano gazzarra' does not mean they were ‘singing merrily’, but that they were ‘making a racket’. These stories are never pretty.

  More than just a question of conviction, Verga’s choral narrative voice, as Italian critics came to call it, is central to the peculiar pathos behind his stories. He writes in an age now well aware of the atomising and alienating nature of a modern industrial society, an age already deep in its dream, at once nostalgic and futuristic, of the ‘good community’, the place where the individual would no longer feel alone, just another contender in a capitalistic free for all. What was the nation-building enthusiasm that had taken Garibaldi to Catania if not part of a growing desire to establish a community based on race where ties would be strong and a shared identity recovered?

  By setting his stories in the Sicily of his youth and adopting this ‘choral voice’, Verga might appear to be making the double gesture of yearning for the past and at the same time helping to forge a united Italy in the present by bringing the Sicilian experience into the national consciousness. But ironically it is precisely the voice of traditional community that turns out to be the most cruel, the most resigned to the fact that a doctor is a busy man with no time for people who can’t pay, that to marry a girl without a dowry is madness, that if having sex with your master will allow a servant girl to get the money she needs to marry her boyfriend and help her poor relatives, it’s not a bad idea. While in the earlier work, reader and victim at least have the narrative voice of modern compassionate consciousness on their side, here the voice itself excludes all hope. To use Cioran’s terms, Verga has found a new way of persecuting his characters.

  This chorus of cruelty would ultimately be heard at its most consistently callous in the novel I Malavoglia: ‘You have to be friends with everyone and faithful to no one,’ remarks one of those who remain entirely unmoved by the catastrophe that overwhelms the Malavoglia family when their boat is shipwrecked, ‘that’s why each of us has his own soul and everyone must look after himself Never perhaps has the word ‘soul’ been used in such an unchristian and uncharitable sense. Indeed one of the central ironies of Verga’s work is that a society so steeped in biblical vocabulary and church tradition could have remained so impervious to Christ’s message of compassion. The usurer who lent the Malavoglias the money to buy the cargo they were carrying (which he knew to be rotten), and whose insistence on being repaid despite the family’s imminent ruin and despite the fact that he has no legal right, is generally known in the community as ‘Zio Crocefisso’ (Uncle Crucified). He constantly remarks, ‘They’re doing to me what they did to Christ,’ even when it is evident to everyone that the real victims are the Malavoglias. Disquieting as ever is the absence of any serious opposition to this kind of inhumanity. Although knowing that they are not legally bound, the Malavoglias nevertheless feel that Zio Crocefisso is right to demand his money at once. They take pride in upholding a vision of honour so crude that it hardly bears inspection. And thus are ruined.

  Like a child at a computer game who finally clicks on the secret door that leads to a higher level, Verga, in writing ‘Nedda’, had blundered into a new world, a place at once of reality and imagination, as Wessex for Hardy, or Yoknapatawpha for Faulkner. Yet before he could explore it, he needed an alibi. For the implications of what was flowing from his pen now were scandalous indeed. It is at this point that verismo or realism, comes to his aid.

  Zola was in vogue. Litera
ry circles were chattering about an objective, documentary narrative style, that might help bring about progress and social change. So in the wake of the French writer’s Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire Verga now announced that he was planning not one but five novels, each covering a different social class, in a cycle’ to be called I vinti The Defeated. This was a worthy and most ambitious project. Meanwhile, the short stories he was putting together for money, in the wake of ‘Nedda’ ‘s success, could be considered mere studies for the great epics to come. In fact they are his finest work. ‘Rosso Malpelo’, a story assigned to my adolescent children at school in Verona as an account of the unhappy conditions of working children in the nineteenth century, shows how acutely Verga understood the tragic contradictions that still tense our modern experience today.

  A boy with red hair, and hence known as Malpelo (evil-haired), works in a sand mine on the slopes of Etna. He has no other name but a great reputation for violence and surliness. His father, a dogged labourer, known as ‘the donkey’, dies in a mining accident. The engineer in charge, a theatre enthusiast, is watching Hamlet when it happens and reluctant to leave his seat. The mother remarries and has no time for her difficult son who will get his first decent clothes when his father’s body is unearthed some months after his death.