Her Husband

by Luigi Pirandello

  A flood of tears leapt to her throat, gushed from her eyes. She restrained them almost angrily with her handkerchief.

  As soon as Giustino, supported by Prever, in the middle of those come to the funeral procession, saw the young journalist walking behind the casket next to Silvia, he realized that after the burial she would never come home again. Then he said to Prever and to the people standing around him: “Wait, wait…”

  He ran upstairs. For him death was not in that little casket as much as it was in Silvia’s appearance, in her definite departure. His child’s death was nothing compared to what was dying with his wife’s desertion. The two sorrows for him were one and inseparable. In putting the boy in the tomb, he was putting something else in her hands: nothing less than the rest of his life.

  A short time later he was seen coming down with a sheaf of papers under his arm. Leaning on Prever, he followed the funeral procession to the church graveyard while holding on to these papers. When the service was over, he let go of Prever’s arm and went unsteadily to Silvia, who was ready to leave in the journalist’s car.

  “Here,” he said, handing her the papers. “Take them… . Now I… what … what can I do with them? They might be useful to you… . They are … they are from translators … my notes … calculations … contracts … letters… . They might be useful to … to keep you from getting cheated…. Who knows … who knows how badly they’ll cheat you. .. . Take them … and … good-bye! Good-bye! Good-bye! …”

  Sobbing, he threw himself into the arms of Prever, who had come to his side.

  AFTERWORD

  Known almost exclusively in the United States for his great contributions to modern European theater, especially Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV, Luigi Pirandello began his literary career as a novelist and writer of short stories. While these works are still widely read and studied in Italy, they have received little attention abroad. Although it is true that his innovations in fiction never made the startling impact of those in Six Characters when that play first appeared on the stage, they nonetheless deserve a place in the canon of early twentieth-century European fiction evolving from naturalism to modernism.

  A Sicilian by birth and by formation, Pirandello began to write under the influence of two prominent fellow countrymen, Luigi Capuana and Giovanni Verga, leaders of the Italian school of naturalism known as verismo. His first novel, L’Esclusa (The Outcast), written in 1893 and published in 1901, realistically portrays aspects of contemporary Sicilian life and mores while recounting the story of a woman banished from her home because of unfounded rumors of her adultery, which threatened her husband’s honor. With the ironic conclusion, however, when the protagonist, Marta, is deemed innocent and allowed to return home (although she has in fact by then committed adultery), Pirandello begins to find new artistic means for depicting the relation between being and seeming, and between illusion and reality, for which he will become famous. This theme, and the fictional innovations it requires, will be more fully developed in his best-known novel, Il fu Mattia Pascal (The Late Mattia Pascal), published in 1904. In this novel, Pirandello experiments with free indirect discourse, restricted points of view, and interior monologues in telling the story of a man who, finding that he has been reported to be dead in his native town, creates for himself a new personage under a new name in Rome, only to discover the impossibility of living out the fiction. Pirandello here reveals the fictional or “constructed” basis of all social existence, a theme he will develop more fully in his theater.

  Her Husband (Suo marito), Pirandello’s fifth novel, has its roots in the “veristic” observation of society, appearances, mores, and character, but betrays a peculiarly Pirandellian modernism in the dialectic between subjectivity and objectivity, the metafictional reflections on language and literature, the use of cinematic close-ups, and especially the portrayal of the evanescent and illusory nature of the self. In 1908, three years before the publication of Suo marito, Pirandello published his most famous treatise on poetics, Umorismo (On Humor), where he studies the process of “decomposition” that certain authors exert on conventional literary forms and expectations. The greatest novelists, in his view, combine comic distance and tragic pathos—thereby revealing the contradictions of existence—by creating characters at whom we laugh and with whom we sympathize at the same time. Pirandello clearly applies his “humoristic” theories to the creation of the character Ely Faciolli in Her Husband, and even to some extent to the title character, Giustino Boggiolo. But the author’s voice becomes heavily satirical, even sarcastic rather than humoristic, in its portrayal of certain elements of contemporary society in what was then known as “the third Rome.”

  The first and the second Rome refer to the hegemonies of the ancient Roman empire and of the papacy. Although Italy was unified in 1861, with its capital first in Turin and then in Florence, the nation only wrested Rome from papal control in 1870. The next year, in an attempt to revive the nation’s past glory and grandeur, as well as to found a new society based on the ideals of Italy’s national movement, the risorgimento, the capital was moved to Rome. Given these expectations, it is hardly surprising that disillusionment would set in. The difficulties of governing a country with regional traditions ranging from the Sicilian to the Milanese and political allegiances from socialist/anarchist to Catholic/royalist did not coincide with romantic aspirations to unity.

  The early twentieth-century Rome in which Pirandello lived was the seat of the government of Giovanni Giolitti, the prime minister who did his best to bring together the divergent economic and political interests of the new nation. Intellectuals, however, considered Giolitti the embodiment of bureaucratic mediocrity, and his efforts at democratization and liberalization evidence of the flaws inherent in parliamentary democracy itself. They accused the liberal state of betraying the glorious ideals of the risorgimento. Pirandello, who subscribed to these criticisms of Giolitti, never wavered in his conviction that democracy, “the tyranny of the crowd,” was not a viable form of government for Italy. Along with mediocrity in government, democracy–and fin de siècle decadence–bred mediocrity in society, individuals, and art. The aristocracy, who no longer exercised any real function in the society of the “third Rome,” took refuge in a kind of sterile aestheticism and preservation of forms without substance, while the bourgeoisie, who did hold power, pretentiously mimicked aristocratic taste.

  One of the major accomplishments of the Giolitti government was a significant rise of literacy in Italy. With this came a surge in publications, primarily journals and magazines, but also popular novels. Thus writers of popular literature, literary bohemians with avant-garde pretensions, would-be aristocratic aesthetes, and serious writers mingled in the society of the new Rome, aware of the newly acquired power of journalists and the publishing establishment to make or break their careers. It is this literary scene that Pirandello satirizes mercilessly in the first part of his novel. At the beginning, where he depicts the encounter of a literary-magazine publisher with a riotous proletarian crowd, he also evokes the reality of the often violent strikes, which were organized frequently by socialist labor unions at the time. Attilo Raceni, however, representative of the new bourgeoisie, understands even less of the significance of the demonstration he witnesses than Stendhal’s Fabrizio del Dongo understood the battle of Waterloo.

  Raceni is not just a literary publisher, but a specialist. Pirandello describes his publication as “la rassegna femminile (non femminista) Le Muse,” which we translated as “the women’s (not the feminist) magazine The Muses.” The brief sentence reflects the facts that early twentieth-century Italy, with a surge in the number of literate women, witnessed not only a proliferation of women’s magazines and fiction, poetry, and drama written by and for women, but also the rise of a small but vocal and influential feminist movement. The distinction between “feminine” and “feminist,” which is still being made today, was even then probably not as clear as it seems to have be
en in Attilo Raceni’s mind. Pirandello, if we can judge from his satirical attitude toward Raceni’s journal and his remarks elsewhere on feminism, had no particular respect either for the new social movement or for the “feminine” literature then being produced for women readers. Why then did he choose to write a novel centered on a sympathetic and penetrating portrayal of a woman writer of great talent?

  While it is by no means primarily a roman à clef, Her Husband was clearly based on Pirandello’s acquaintance with the Sardinian writer Grazia Deledda (winner of the Nobel Prize in 1926) and her husband Palmiro Madesani. Analogies between Deledda and Pirandello’s fictional woman writer Silvia Roncella and between Mandesani and her husband Giustino Boggiolo are evident throughout the novel. Although Silvia is from Taranto, in Apulia, rather than from Sardinia, she, like Deledda, left her provincial southern hometown to come to Rome with her husband to continue the writing she began almost as a child. Grazia Deledda’s lifelong dream had been to live in Rome, a place where she imagined her writing, also begun at an early age, would be better appreciated than in Sardinia. Like Silvia, she published her first stories in a women’s magazine. However, one difference between the real writer and the fictional one becomes immediately apparent. Deledda had the nineteenth-century woman’s determination to achieve what she set out to do through her heavily disguised manipulative skills, and even before Deledda and Palmiro Madesani were married in Sardinia in 1900, she importuned important friends to find her husband work in Rome. Silvia, on the other hand, is brought to Rome rather reluctantly by her husband’s job and wants no part in the marketing of her work. Both the fictional and the real husband hail from northern Italy, and they take upon themselves the business affairs and social contacts necessary for promoting their wives’ work; both women are unusually shy, sometimes morose or sullen, in social gatherings.

  One evening shortly after their arrival in Rome Deledda and her husband, just like the fictional Silvia and her husband, were honored at a dinner hosted by Giovanni Cena, editor of the prestigious Nuova Antologia. One of the guests there was Senator Ruggero Bonghi, another literary editor, who helped to launch Deledda’s career by writing a preface to her novel Anime oneste (Honest Souls) in 1895. He is represented, not particularly kindly, by the character Romualdo Borghi. Another guest at the event was Luigi Pirandello, at that time a comparatively lesser known writer of poetry, short stories, plays, and novels than she, but important enough for Deledda to have included him in her list of those to receive a copy of her novel Nostalgie when it first came out in 1905.1 In 1906 Deledda’s husband referred to Pirandello as a “friend” in a letter to her French translator.2 But at this particular gathering of writers and editors, Pirandello’s disparaging attitude toward the celebrity’s husband had been embarrassingly apparent. All evening Pirandello referred to Palmiro Madesani as “Grazio Deleddo.” By making the final vowels of her names masculine, apparently to show his low regard for Madesani’s supporting role, he succeeded in discomforting everyone present.3

  Used as a vehicle to satirize what he felt was the insensitivity, pretentiousness, and materialism of Roman literati, as well as to express his own particular concerns, Pirandello’s portrayal of the Deledda-Madesani couple is not entirely accurate. He does reflect the fact that “her husband” helped Deledda with the business end of her work. Deledda wrote to an old friend: “I have had many requests for translations, and Madesani is studying English and German and Spanish to keep up with the correspondence.”4 However, a truer picture of Palmiro Madesani would show him as someone who supported her efforts, and who was in no way jealous of or threatened by the public acclaim she attracted. Perhaps it would be fair to say that Madesani, too, like Silvia’s husband, saw there was gold to be mined from his wife’s output, but this did not seem to bother Deledda. She was happy to give him credit for his work on her/their behalf. On one occasion she jokingly referred to their mutual enterprise as the Madesani-Deledda Company.5

  Pirandello had expected that the distinguished Florentine publisher Treves would publish Suo marito, not taking into account the embarrassment it would cause an important author on the publisher’s list–Deledda herself. In a letter to his editor friend Ugo Ojetti, Pirandello wrote: “I will send my novel, Suo marito, to Treves, I hope in April. It’s a takeoff on the husband of Grazia Deledda. Do you know him? What a masterpiece, Ugo—Grazia Deledda’s husband, I mean… .”6 After Treves rejected it out of “delicacy,”7 and probably because of Deledda’s objections, Pirandello blamed the writer. In another letter to Ugo Ojetti (to whom the novel is dedicated), he explains the situation, claiming that he was being persecuted unjustly. Far from writing a novel about the couple, he claimed, he had taken from their reality only a cue (spunto), working freely with his imagination to create a work of art. Deledda’s actions had only made the situation worse. “What spiritual poverty, what narrow-mindedness in that Deledda! Not to understand that acting in this way, she only incites the morbid curiosity of that filthy, petty barnyard of gossips that is our modern literary world!”8 Here Pirandello seems to imply that as an artist, Deledda should be on his side. Perhaps she has been corrupted by her husband? In any case, he delineates in no uncertain terms his opinion of the milieu that is the object of his satire in the novel.

  Suo marito was finally published in 1911 by Quattrini of Florence, a much smaller, less prestigious publishing house. Pirandello would not allow the novel to be reprinted after the first printing sold out. He seems to have eventually regretted his quarrel with Deledda. In his later years, he expressed on numerous occasions his admiration for her work. Yet his views on the business of literature did not change. In 1934, after Deledda’s death and two years before his own, he began to work on a revision of the novel, of which he completed four chapters. In 1941, his son Stefano published the four revised chapters, along with the three unrevised ones, under the new title chosen by his father, Giustino Roncella nato Boggiòlo, thus continuing the name play he started when he called Deledda’s husband Grazio Deleddo. Although the satire seems somewhat attenuated in this new version, the differences are not on the whole significant. Italian publishers have in recent years preferred to reprint Pirandello’s original novel, Suo marito, the text we have translated here.

  It could be argued that one of the sources of Pirandello’s portrayal of Silvia Roncella was his sense of a “feminine” side of his own creativity, or perhaps of all literary creation. Certainly, he put into Silvia’s character important aspects of his own biography and writing. Just a year before the publication of the novel, Pirandello’s first works for the stage, The Vise and Sicilian Limes, based, like many of his one-act plays, on two of his short stories, were performed in Rome. Silvia’s perceptions of the contemporary theater and the effect of writing for the stage are his own; Deledda was not a playwright. Furthermore, the plots of Silvia’s plays, The New Colony and If Not This Way …, recounted in some detail in the novel, are those of Pirandello. Although he did not write The New Colony until 1928, the story line, except for a significant change in the ending, is almost the same. Pirandello published Se non così (If Not This Way) in 1915, rewriting it later as La Ragione degli altri (The Reason of Others). Other Pirandellian texts attributed to Silvia include a page of his treatise on poetics, Oh Humor, published in 1908, in an interior monologue in which Silvia “sees herself living,” and one of Pirandello’s poems, written by Silvia during her sojourn in Piedmont.

  Pirandello was undoubtedly right when he said that his original interests in satirizing Grazia Deledda’s husband along with the literary scene of the new Rome were only points of departure. His real interest lies in exploring the relationship between femininity and creativity, an interest that takes his artistry far beyond his own time and his own prejudices to chart new territory. His intricate and subtle explorations of the mind of the woman writer, of the relations between creation and procreation, and the contradictions inherent in literature as art and literature as business, speak to the preoccupati
ons of the twenty-first century as they did to those of the first years of the 1900s.

  NOTES

  1 Grazia Deledda to Antonio Scano, 25 April 1905, Studi sardi, vol. 19 (Sassari: Gallizzi, 1966). Four unpublished letters from Grazia Deledda to Antonio Scano.

  2 Palmiro Madesani to Georges Hérelle, 5 February 1906. Transcribed by Rosaria Taglialatela from the collection in the Bibliothèque nationale in Troyes for her unpublished dissertation.

  3 Remo Branca, Il segreto di Grazia Deledda (Cagliari: Editrice Sarda Fossataro, 1971), 111.

  4 Grazia Deledda to Antonio Scano, from Rome, 12 November 1902.

  5 Grazia Deledda to Madesani, 13 July 1910, Onoranze a Grazia Deledda, ed. Mario Ciusa Romagna, Nuoro, Sardinia, 1959.

  6 Luigi Pirandello to Ugo Ojetti, 18 December 1908, in Carteggi inediti (Rome: Bulzoni, 1980), 28.

  7 M. Grillandi, Emilio Treves (Torino: UTET, 1977), 590-91.

  8 Letter of 3 August 1911, in Carteggi inediti (Rome: Bulzoni, 1980), 62. Reprinted in Suo Marito, ed. Rita Guerricchio (Florence: Giunti, 1994), 236.

  Grazia Deledda to Antonio Scano, 25 April 1905, Studi sardi, vol. 19 (Sassari: Gallizzi, 1966). Four unpublished letters from Grazia Deledda to Antonio Scano. Palmiro Madesani to Georges Hérelle, 5 February 1906. Transcribed by Rosaria Taglialatela from the collection in the Bibliothèque nationale in Troyes for her unpublished dissertation. Remo Branca, Il segreto di Grazia Deledda (Cagliari: Editrice Sarda Fossataro, 1971), 111. Grazia Deledda to Antonio Scano, from Rome, 12 November 1902. Grazia Deledda to Madesani, 13 July 1910, Onoranze a Grazia Deledda, ed. Mario Ciusa Romagna, Nuoro, Sardinia, 1959. Luigi Pirandello to Ugo Ojetti, 18 December 1908, in Carteggi inediti (Rome: Bulzoni, 1980), 28. M. Grillandi, Emilio Treves (Torino: UTET, 1977), 590-91. Letter of 3 August 1911, in Carteggi inediti (Rome: Bulzoni, 1980), 62. Reprinted in Suo Marito, ed. Rita Guerricchio (Florence: Giunti, 1994), 236.