A Study in Solitude E-Book

Iris Origo

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

An extremely moving account of the lonely life of the unloved and tragic genius - described as "the greatest modern Italian poet" 'Love me, by God; I need love, love, love, fire, enthusiasm, life. The world does not seem made for me' Giacomo Leopardi, considered the greatest Italian poet since Dante, was one of the most radical thinkers of the nineteenth century. He also regarded himself one of the most miserable and unfortunate people to have lived. Born to strict parents in a provincial town in 1798, he had a lonely childhood, and he spent his time largely in his father's library. He suffered from a debilitating illness, and his short life was full of pain. But this pain and misery gave rise to some of the most intense and brilliant poems ever written in the Italian language. In this poetic biography, Iris Origo, author of the bestselling War in Val d'Orcia traces the short and lonely life of this conflicted poet. Written with generosity and understanding, A Study in Solitude is a sharp, moving portrait of a frail and frustrated genius. Iris Origo (1902-1988) was a British-born biographer and writer. She lived in Italy and devoted much of her life to the improvement of the Tuscan estate at La Foce, which she purchased with her husband in the 1920s. During WWII, she sheltered refugee children and assisted many escaped Allied prisoners of war and partisans in defiance of Italy's fascist regime and Nazi occupation forces. Pushkin Press also publishes her war diaries, War in Val d'Orcia, her memoir, Images and Shadows, as well as another of her biographies, The Last Attachment.

Leseprobe

Giacomo Leopardi

A STUDYin SOLITUDE

The Life of Leopardi – Poet, Romantic and Radical

Iris Origo

PUSHKIN PRESS LONDON

For Elsa

Contents

TITLE PAGEDEDICATIONPREFACE  IGens Leoparda IIThe Making of a Poet IIIIn Conte Monaldo’s Library (1812–1817) IVLa Donna Che Non Si Trova (1817–1818) VFriendship and Patriotism (1817–1819) VIAn Attempt at Flight (1819) VIIThe Poet VIIITwo Winters of Discontent (1820–1822) IXRome (1822–1823) XThe ‘Operette Morali’ XIMilan and Bologna (1823–1826) XIIFlorence and Pisa (1826–1827) XIIIRemembrance (1828–1830) XIVRanieri (1830–1832) XVAspasia XVIHope Deferred (1832–1833) XVIITo Naples (1833–1835) XVIIIThe Setting of the Moon (1836–1837)  BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX ABOUT THE AUTHOR COPYRIGHT

Preface

The first edition of this Life of Leopardi, which I have now revised and enlarged, appeared eighteen years ago. Since then the centenary of Leopardi’s death has been celebrated, with much pomp and many speeches, in both Naples and Recanati, and on the 22nd of February 1939, the little that is left of his bones was transferred from the church of S. Vitale to the slopes of the hill above Mergellina, beside ‘Virgil’s tomb’.

A considerable amount of new material—including four more volumes of Leopardi’s Epistolario and many of the papers left in Ranieri’s possession—has either come to light, or has been rendered available. It is listed in the Bibliography at the end of this book. Moreover, two excellent Italian Lives of the poet—by Giovanni Ferretti and by Michele Saponaro—as well as several interesting critical studies and monographs, have appeared, and two new critical editions of Leopardi’s Works have been made by Francesco Flora and by Giuseppe De Robertis.

All this recent material, while it has made me aware of the deficiencies of my first effort, does not, I think, lead to any essentially different conclusions about Leopardi, either as a writer or as a man. My apology for this edition is rather the one I would give if I were asked after eighteen years to describe an old friend: in the interval I have perhaps got to know him a little better.

It is sometimes a good plan, however, to go back to one’s starting-point; and while I was re-reading Leopardi’s works, I thought I would also visit his birthplace again. I arrived there on a grey November evening. In the little square before Palazzo Leopardi a piercing wind was raising little eddies of dust and dead leaves, and an old woman—the only human figure in sight—was hobbling up the church steps, with a little straw chair under her arm, her black shawl drawn tightly around her. I followed. In the centre of the nave, beyond the font where Leopardi was baptized, a bier, draped in black velvet, with a great waxen candle at each corner, was prepared for a funeral. The long wooden bench where I knelt still bore the inscription, gentis Leopardae. I came out and wandered up the long, winding street. The shutters of the palazzi were closed; an unusually high proportion of the people I met seemed to be either crippled or infirm; and another blast of biting wind came with renewed vigour up one of the narrow side streets, at the corner where Leopardi’s hat was blown off, and the little boys jeered, as he wrapped his cape over his head.

I rang the bell of Palazzo Leopardi and was shown into the library; its chill—though it was only November—entered my bones. On the table, in a case, I saw the brown rugs which the poet used to wrap round his shoulders and knees: they seemed thin. Beside his inkstand the petals of the carnation left there by Carducci had shrunk to a pinch of dust. But everything else in the library was unchanged. Still a metal grating enclosed the books forbidden by the Church and among them Leopardi’s own Operette Morali; still the traveller may see the beautiful copperplate hand in which, at ten years old, the poet wrote out his dissertations and his translations of Horace; still he may handle Leopardi’s Virgil, his Tasso, and his great lexicons; and still, across the little square, he may see the window where Leopardi watched Silvia at her loom.

But here, unfortunately, there is a change. For the citizens of Recanati—with belated and perhaps excessive piety—have celebrated the centenary of the poet’s death by putting up, on every site mentioned in his poems, a number of white marble tablets, inscribed with some of his lines, and on Silvia’s little house we may read all too plainly the verse about

                       la man veloce

Che percorrea la faticosa tela.

The whole town is bestrewn with these tablets, white and incongruous on the faded brick walls. They may be seen on the doorway of Palazzo Leopardi, on the torre del borgo, on the tower of il passero solitario, on what was once a lonely country path, leading to the hill of L’Infinito—and, worst of all, on the wall encircling the hill itself, which has now been turned into a trim public garden.

But perhaps, after all, it is not very important. For as I stood on the hill in the fading light, the wind dropped; a pale autumnal gleam caught the far snow-capped peak of the Gran Sasso and lingered upon the long trellises of yellow vine-leaves in the fields below, and on the orange flames of the bare willows. ‘Le vie dorate e gli orti’—there they lay. And suddenly it seemed very easy to understand the mixture of love and aversion that Leopardi had felt for his native city. Bitterly as he railed against it, he never ceased to belong there and to feel the tie that tugged him back. He belonged to Recanati as Flaubert did to Rouen, as Joyce to Dublin. This was the town that in his youth he called ‘horrible, detestable, execrated’, a prison, a den, a cave, an inferno, a ‘sepulchre in which the dead are happier than the living’, and ‘the deadest and most ignorant city of the Marches, which is the most ignorant and uncultivated province of Italy’; this the city of whose 7,000 inhabitants he said that they were ‘only remarkable for their endurance in remaining there’, while he himself vowed ‘never to return there permanently until I am dead’. And yet, and yet—hardly had he got to Rome than he wrote to his brother that life in a big city was only bearable if a man could ‘build himself a little city within the great one’. Hardly had he got to Bologna than he was walking upon the hills, ‘seeking for nothing but memories of Recanati’. When he returned there from Rome, it had become ‘la mia povera patria’; when he published his Canti in Florence, he put the name of his birthplace upon the title-page; and when, in the following year, he felt his strength decreasing, he wrote to a friend that if he got any worse he would return to Recanati, ‘since I wish to die at home’. And certainly many of his greatest poems were either written there or directly inspired by his memories of youth and of home, of the night wind stirring in his father’s garden, and the stars shining above his native hills.

There is, moreover, I think, a more fundamental sense in which Leopardi belongs to Recanati. Many men of genius, perhaps most, have been, in the botanical sense, sports (Shelley is the first instance that comes to mind). But Giacomo Leopardi was a very direct product of his inheritance and environment: he was a very great poet, but he also always remained a provincial aristocrat, the son of Conte Monaldo and Contessa Adelaide. From his stock he derived his fastidiousness, his pride, and his ill-health—the heritage of the fin de race. From his mother, his melancholy, his sense of grievance, his reserve—and, perhaps, some of his sensibility. From his father, his gentle manners, his love of books, more of his mental attitude than he would have liked to admit—and not his genius, but his talent.

There are two Leopardis: the poet and the man. The man, as he revealed himself in many of his letters and his diaries, was a querulous, tortured invalid, mistrustful of his fellow-men, with a mind sometimes scornful and cantankerous, and a heart intolerably sad and lonely. But to this unhappy man was granted the poet’s gift: a capacity for feeling so intense and an imagination so sensitive and lively that he could perceive, in the most common sights of daily life, the ‘heavenly originals’ of which, according to Plato, all earthly objects are but copies. ‘To a sensitive and imaginative man’, he wrote, ‘who lives, as I have lived for a long time, constantly feeling and imagining, the world and its objects are, in a way, double. He sees with his eyes a tower, a landscape; he hears with his ears the sound of a bell; and at the same time his imagination sees another tower, another bell, and hears another sound.’ And it is of these sights and sounds that poetry is made.

The key to Leopardi’s character and to the peculiar flavour of his work lies, I think, in this passage. He saw the whole world and the people in it, as it were, at one remove; his only contact with reality was through his own imagination. Thence his fore-destined unhappiness in love: the only woman he ever knew was the one in his own mind—‘la donna che non si trova’. Thence, too, his unfailing disillusionment with every new scene, his incurable restlessness, and, at the same time, his deep attachment to anniversaries and to familiar places, however unhappy he had been in them, merely because they had become part of the furniture of his mind.

This book does not claim to be a critical study of Leopardi’s work. It is only an attempt to describe rather more fully than before his life and character, and to perceive, through his letters and notebooks, something of the imaginative background of his mind. In some fragmentary notes for an autobiography, which he was planning in 1828—‘before knowing’, he wrote, ‘whether I shall ever do anything that will make men want to hear about me’—he said that he intended to call it The Story of a Soul ‘because I do not intend to tell anything else, and indeed, have no other material; for so far I have experienced no great changes of fortune, nor any outer events that are unusual or worth mention’. This was true then, and remained so until his death, at the age of thirty-nine. But for the story of his inner life, which alone he thought worth telling, he has himself supplied all the material a biographer could desire. ‘Almost all writers of real feeling,’ he wrote, ‘in describing their despair and their total disenchantment, have drawn the colours from their own heart.’ Tedium and disillusion, love unfulfilled and dreams unsatisfied, nostalgia, loneliness and grief—these are the colours of his palette. With them he painted—in his poems, in his notes about his childhood and youth, in his letters, and in the four thousand pages of his encyclopaedic day-book, the Zibaldone—a merciless and tragic self-portrait.

My grateful acknowledgments are due to Dottoressa Guerrieri, the librarian of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples, for permission to reproduce the two holographs of Leopardi’s poems; to Cav. Polverigiani, the archivist of the Commune of Recanati, for permission to photograph the death-mask of Leopardi and the bronze bust by Monteverde reproduced on the jacket; and to Prof. Astolfi, the librarian of the Sodalizio dei Piceni in Rome, for assistance in consulting a number of books and periodicals not easily accessible.

I should also like to thank Duke Antonio Carafa d’Andria for his kind permission to reproduce Domenico Morelli’s portrait of Leopardi, the Contessa Vittoria de Gavardo for her courtesy in allowing me to visit the Villa della Ginestra, and the Contessa Rosita Leopardi for permission to visit the private rooms and garden, as well as the library, of Palazzo Leopardi.

I am most grateful to Mr Julian Trevelyan for allowing me to make use of the translations of Leopardi’s poems by R. C. Trevelyan quoted on pages 269, 340 and 343. All the others are my own.

I can only thank Elsa Dallolio for greater help than can be listed here by dedicating to her a book which, in some ways, is as much hers as mine.

IRIS ORIGO

Rome, January 1953

I

Gens Leoparda

Del mio nascimento dirò solo che io nacqui di famiglia nobile in una città ignobile della Italia.*

The little city of Recanati, in the Marches, stands on a low hill some fifteen miles from the Adriatic. It is, at first sight, indistinguishable from a hundred other hill-towns of provincial Italy, like them presenting an aspect which combines distinction and squalor, dignity and dreariness. One long winding street stretches along the crest of the hill: tall shuttered palaces—Renaissance and Baroque—of faded brick and stone, face each other in a stateliness that has lost all splendour. The narrow, sunless little side-streets come to an end with startling suddenness, framing a view of an astounding beauty: hillsides of olives and of vines stretching down to the Adriatic, with the orange sails of the Venetian paranze far out to sea—and to the west, fold upon fold of blue mountain ranges, rising to the Gran Sasso and the Maiella. The piazza has a great square watchtower, to guard against the pirates; the numerous churches are adorned by a Romanesque portal, a Renaissance façade, the figure of the Virgin or of a patron saint. The palaces mostly belong to a later period, to the prosperous seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through the wide arches of their doorways one has a glimpse of an inner courtyard and of a great stone staircase—occasionally, of a garden beyond: a desiccated palm tree or a bed of dusty geraniums, sometimes a pillared balustrade or a sponge-stone fountain.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Leopardi spent his childhood in one of them, no less than forty of these palaces were inhabited by noble provincial families. They all ‘kept a carriage’; they gave formal entertainments several times a year; they prided themselves on their box at the theatre, on their footmen in liveries, and on being able to afford the maintenance of at least one priest in the house, as the children’s tutor. The Leopardi family, at the time of the birth of their son Giacomo, had four such ecclesiastics living with them—but they were one of the oldest families in Recanati, and their palazzo was the most important in the city. Standing at the edge of the town, where the main street winds into a small cobbled square and emerges as a white country road, it presents a dignified, rather sombre façade of dusty red brick, with a few balconies of wrought-iron, and an arched doorway. Within, a double staircase, adorned with balustrades and classical busts, leads to the main rooms of the palazzo, and to the library in which Giacomo Leopardi spent his youth.

Here we may still see—stretching back to the beginning of the thirteenth century—the documents relating to the gens Leoparda, as well as a great family tree, and a long manuscript narrating the Istoria gentilizia of the family, compiled by the poet’s father, Conte Monaldo. It is a typical record of the clerical noblesse de province: in each generation, down the centuries, we find few men of action, and none illustrious, but a long line of magistrates and city priors, of bishops and canons and knights of Malta, while the women are either mothers or nuns.1 At one time, indeed, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, there were no less than fifteen nuns of casa Leopardi alive at the same time, and nine of them in the same convent, in which some of them dwelled for sixty years.2 And we hear of one of the poet’s aunts, Donna Margherita delle Oblate dell’ Assunta, who, after a great many years of conventual segregation, ‘showed a great passion for the sun, so that once, when its rays reached her cell, she spread a sheet on the spot where they fell, and began to dance upon it’.3

A slight strain of madness, or at least of eccentricity, is to be observed among the male ancestors, too. One, in the eighteenth century, Conte Paolo, went mad—according to his great-nephew Monaldo—‘from excess of scruples. He lived very quietly in perpetual silence, never answering anything but yes or no when spoken to… and spending the greater part of his days in bed.’4 And the poet’s own great-uncle, Don Luigi Bernardino (also a priest), was so anxious to be perpetually at the service of his parishioners that he kept in his bedroom at Palazzo Leopardi a little bell, fastened to a long cord which hung down into the street, so that the faithful might be able to call upon him at any hour of the day or night.

Conte Monaldo, the poet’s father, prided himself on his ancestry, on his palace, and on his town—further than that, he considered, a man’s pride should not extend. ‘One’s patriotism is not due to the whole nation,’ he wrote, ‘not even to the state; one’s true country is only that morsel of the earth in which one is born and spends one’s life. That alone should awaken any interest in its citizens.’ In this view, if there was a genuine local patriotism, there was also a keen awareness that it is pleasanter to be a large frog in a small pond. ‘Being very proud’, he himself wrote, ‘of my abilities and personal independence, I neither want nor need a great town. I would always choose a hut, a book, and an onion at the top of a mountain, rather than hold a subordinate position in Rome.’