We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think

by Shirley Hazzard

  The surviving children, unloved and uncaressed, knew their predicament. Companions in adversity, they shared affection among themselves; saw that their father would indulge them if he dared, and that their mother’s severity was unnatural. Monaldo had chosen his bride from a neighboring noble family already intermarried with his own, and there were cousins to play and bicker with, and relatives who occasionally attempted—fruitlessly—to intercede on behalf of the Leopardi offspring. The second son, Carlo, and the first daughter, Paola, were, enduringly, Giacomo’s dear companions and confidants. Solidarity was clandestine, within a huge solitude.

  Monaldo defied his wife in one matter only: the acquisition of books. For that, the world is his debtor. Books came into the house from pushcarts, from provincial booksellers, from libraries of the defunct, from friends and bibliophiles: the classical authors, the poets, philosophers, and theologians; books on the natural sciences, on astronomy, on jurisprudence; lexicons and commentaries, erudite works in diverse languages and from all literate eras, together with some useless pedantry and sheer nonsense. A shy, tractable child, Giacomo sat to his studies among 25,000 volumes in the library that Monaldo had put at the disposal of the townsfolk. The Recanatesi made little use of it, but the child made it his own, delightedly, and in a way that would illuminate the world, likening his discoveries to the state of falling in love.

  Mastering Latin, teaching himself Greek, Leopardi soon eclipsed his priestly tutors—who included an émigré abbé who taught him French. He taught himself English and German. From Monaldo, we learn that the boy conversed in Hebrew with a visiting group of learned Jews. Philology was his first intellectual passion, and the theme of his early monographs—an outpouring of erudition that Iris Origo justly calls “truly terrifying.”2

  Great sensibilities are born into exile. As he came to an understanding of his powers, and of the cruel seclusion of his existence at Recanati, Leopardi was not the first to feel homesickness for a setting he had never known—for the stimulus and sympathy of kindred spirits to whom art and thought, and the heart’s affections, were supreme: a country that he had inhabited in books. The image of the youth bent over his worn papers—le sudate carte—in the freezing library, writing late into the night, brings to mind the mature Machiavelli in tormented exile near Florence, where, seated among his books at evening to write The Prince, he “entered the courts of the men of past times,” posing questions as to the nature and motives of humanity. And those great minds of other centuries, “out of their magnanimity answer me. And for four hours I feel no tedium, I forget every anxiety: I no longer dread poverty, nor does death hold any terror for me. I immerse myself in them completely.”3

  So, too, the adolescent Leopardi, through the ancient masters, consoles his sadness and draws toward his vocation. Reading Homer and Virgil, “I tried to find a means of making mine, it if were at all possible, that divine beauty…. I begin to translate the best passages; and their beauties, thus examined and recollected, one by one, take their place within my mind, and enrich it, and bring me peace.”4

  The conjunction of spiritual and actual, transcendent in Leopardi’s poetry, was within him from infancy. The solitary child counting the stars, peering from little Recanati into infinity, was subsumed into the boy reading Ariosto while youths in the street below sang of love. Sounds and songs of an outer world haunt his greatest poems, emphasizing his own exclusion. The coachman’s young daughter, seated before her loom, sings in the window across the way, and the boy rises from his ancient books to watch and listen:

  I saw the clear sky, the sunlit streets, the orchards;

  Here, the far sea; and, there, the farther mountains.

  No mortal tongue can utter

  What then was in my soul.5

  Paradox of art: in telling us that his feeling is inexpressible, the poet makes it felt, unforgettably.

  Into adolescence he was sustained by a passion of expectation—that bright promise, which he would later call illusion, deception, “my mighty error, ever at my side.”6 In imagination he conjured from the world an eventual response worthy of his own ardent humanity and implicit in the glory of the universe: a response to be embodied in the tenderness of a woman yet unknown. Almost nothing of this would ever sweeten his existence; he would never know a requited or consummated love. The inward romances of boyhood—his idealization of a girl glimpsed at a window or greeted in the street, the charm of a fleeting visitor—were blighted by transience and early deaths. They were mocked at last, and terribly, by the revelation of his own affliction. In late adolescence, Leopardi woke from his dreams and infinite desires to the realization that he was deformed. A curvature of the spine—probably scoliosis, presumably aggravated by the years of sedentary study that had also damaged his sight—would never leave him. Already misshapen, he would become a hunchback. Lest he should delude himself, the urchins of Recanati flung snowballs and pebbles, jeering at his frailty. In the celebrations of a feast day, a girl turns from him, oblivious, to smile on other admirers. Nature had marked him out for sorrow:

  I deny all hope to you, she said—yes, even hope.

  And your eyes shall not be bright for any cause,

  Except with weeping.7

  Desolation “hurt him into poetry.”8 When he was nineteen, Leopardi’s translations from Virgil drew the attention of learned men in Italy. A year later, his Canzoni, exalting Italy’s past and inciting his contemporaries to restore her independence, fired the insurgent youth of his country, restive under foreign dominion. The greatest poems, the Canti of longing and mortality, were in gestation; but the “political” themes of the Canzoni are themselves charged with intimate fellow-feeling and with a compassionate fatalism for helpless lives eternally mauled by power and persecutions:

  Dear souls, in as much as your tragedy is infinite,

  Be at peace. And may this comfort you—

  That comfort none shall have

  In this or future ages.9

  All the inner life of the years at Recanati is now at the service of his later experience and his genius. Renown, he thinks—for he is beginning to be noticed—may compensate a little for lack of love. It never does. In the great world, there may be women who, disregarding his infirmities, will love him for his qualities. He never finds them. To his parents’ horror, and, in part, to his own regret, religious faith deserts him. Losses and deprivations, and the disappointment of unattainable dreams, are the stern stuff from which Leopardi will now fabricate beauty. He knows that even if he is to carry his birthplace with him all his life, as a burden and a precious lode, he must leave Recanati.

  When Leopardi arrived in Rome in 1822, he had fifteen years to live. Subsequently, in Florence and Pisa, Bologna and Milan, he would meet with kindness and esteem; and, in spite of physical and mental suffering, take some pleasure in daily life. In Rome, too, he would be valued by some discerning minds. Rome, however, was the first city he knew outside his native habitat, and the goal in which he had placed his hopes. He reached it in November, over his parents’ bitter opposition, and spent the winter there. Rome, then, was active not only with intellectual, clerical, and scholarly life but also as a gathering place for gifted foreigners—artists and antiquarians, poets and novelists who arrived with eager curiosity and marveled at what they found. We might have imagined the young Leopardi exclaiming, as the classicist Winckelmann had said of all Italy: “God owed me Rome, for I had suffered so much in my youth”;10 or with Goethe, “I, too, am in Arcadia.”11 Instead, our own hopes that have gone with him to Rome are baffled by his obdurate disappointment. And we begin to understand that for Leopardi there will be no rescue, and to sense the fateful course of his life.

  Ill and ill-clad, penniless, naturally shy, and miserably sensitive of his affliction, the poet felt to the full the anonymity of city life. The grand, busy spaces and great monuments of Rome recalled to him not merely his own exclusion but the contrast of power and magnificence with what he held most dear: the innermos
t humanity of the singular spirit. Women, from whom, in that larger world, he had hoped for understanding, passed him with indifference or aversion. At the tables of learned men, he found vanity, rivalry, self-assertion, and obsession with theory and explication. Even while we wonder at Leopardi’s aloofness from the magic of his surroundings, much of this will strike a chord in the modern city-dweller, for whom such conditions are today grossly magnified. He perceived the trend toward volume, velocity, novelty, abstraction; the blunting of insight and intuition, the incapacity for wholeness, the denial of mortality: an infatuation with system that would generate its new chaos. He saw culture without simplicity or profundity—much less that rare convergence of the two, which was his own surpassing distinction. It is Leopardi’s ability to weigh these losses within infirmity, and yet as private pain, that makes his voice unique.

  W. H. Auden, writing of Cavafy, observes that such a gift leaves “nothing for a critic to say, for criticism can only make comparisons. A unique tone of voice cannot be described.”12 Leopardi, by contrast, appears at first accessible to comparison with a number of great poets: with Poliziano, or with his own fellow Romantics, or above all, with Keats; or with the inexorable clarity of Thomas Hardy. Leopardi’s mighty, uncompromising poem La Ginestra—“The Flower of the Broom”—which, set on Vesuvius, contrasts Nature’s infinite indifference and tenacity with the ephemeral works and aspirations of humankind, offers curious parallels, also, with A las Ruinas de Itálica, a work by the seventeenth-century Spanish poet Rodrigo Caro.13 While themes and sentiments will frequently coincide in literature, however, genius rarely strikes the same note or the same lightning. Leopardi, to my mind, is utterly and instantly distinctive. My own connection with him was formed when I was seventeen: standing in a bookshop ten thousand miles from Recanati, I opened a blue volume of new translations by John Heath-Stubbs. A little later, the revelation of Leopardi’s life was supplied by the present work: Iris Origo’s admirable and deeply felt biography.

  Leopardi spent his last years at Naples, a city that had never lost its millennial roots in Greek civilization and which even yet remains an arcane theater to its familiars; where, far from shunning his deformity, passers-by might touch him for luck, for he had been honored by the attention of the gods. As, indeed, he had. He had been drawn to Naples by the affection of Antonio Ranieri, the younger friend who became his companion. The Neapolitan Ranieri shared Leopardi’s penurious existence, cared for the captious invalid in his decline, and solaced his final sufferings. It was he who, in a time of plague, retrieved Leopardi’s body from interment in a common grave. To the unsatisfactory figure of Ranieri, much is owed—one wishes it were less. But Ranieri alone, in Leopardi’s life, provided the loyalty and attachment of which the poet had once so differently dreamed.

  Leopardi’s grave—cared for, now, and visitable—lies on a slope near the Naples shore, in a small park that shelters one other memorial, a Roman tumulus long claimed, and still venerated, as Virgil’s tomb. It is marked by an austere column of pale stone, bearing emblems of wisdom and immortality. The end of Leopardi’s impassioned life is prefigured in one of his last poems, “The Setting of the Moon,” which includes the line “Desire still alight, and hope extinguished.”14

  WILLIAM MAXWELL

  In his eighties, William Maxwell told me, “I love being old.” By then, Bill Maxwell had recurrent and sometimes serious bodily infirmities. His mind and spirit were perhaps at their ripest power and would remain so until his death, ten years later. Those years were blessed by his long and luminous marriage, by his love for his daughters, and by the birth of the grandson who so resembles him. Bill had long since been delivered from the burden of what had been to him, in earlier years, an incapacitating sensibility: the “difficulty of being” no longer held terrors;1 “Fear no more the heat of the sun.”2 His advancing age was as yet no hindrance to new work, and was enriched by the close affection of friends and by the homage to his art and his character that, having come rather late in his writing life, was now overwhelming and worldwide.

  William Maxwell’s life, considered in outline, might seem quite divided. The childhood he would look back on as enchanted in its security—of place and family life, and through his mother’s tender love—had been sundered by excruciating loss and loneliness. His mother’s early death haunted Maxwell’s life and work, and played its powerful part in the making of a writer. He understood this very well: few men have understood themselves as deeply.

  The transformation came through his chance meeting with Emily Noyes, and the development of their great, reciprocated love. The ground, however, had been in some ways prepared. There had already been a measure of rescue by language and literature, and by the discovery and exercise of talent: the painful rescue, as it often is, through self-expression, intelligence, imagination. Maxwell was not drawn to intellectualism. His gift lay in acute humane perception. His response to existence derived from vulnerability and from intensity of observation.

  I don’t seek here to “explain,” only to give impressions from an unclouded friendship of forty years. Bill Maxwell took my first writing from the slush pile of the New Yorker and published it. He then took the trouble to get in touch with me and asked me to come and see him at the magazine. His encouragement, his genius, and his generosity transformed my own experience—as they did the lives of other writers. When I met Francis Steegmuller, who became my husband, we found an immediate, talismanic bond in the discovery of shared friendship with the Maxwells. Francis had known Bill since their youth at the infant New Yorker.

  The human encounter came always fresh to Maxwell. Singularity was intrinsic to his own nature and to his sense of other lives. He knew the world deeply, yet remained accessible to it, detached from the contemporary trend toward exposition and pronouncement. That he kept faith with the wound of his early knowledge helped him, I think, to become a happy man.

  Alec Wilkinson has splendidly written that Maxwell, in conversation, considered the effect of his words on the person whom he addressed. This does not, I feel, suggest that Bill’s responses were always acquiescent or uncritical—although indeed he was an embodiment of the sympathy and tolerance apparent in his very being. But disagreement was, with him, a reasoned matter: he was free of mere self-assertion. His views were large, but firm. Inauthenticity, calculation, and underhandedness drew his testy dismissal. He would not praise writing that he found spurious, no matter how expertly presented.

  I believe that Bill would have felt the validity of Graham Greene’s remark that the novelist conserves a splinter of ice in the heart.3 He had the writer’s need to defend the secret writing mind, where objectivity and syllables must alike be nurtured and weighed, and the deeper, unshared self explored and plundered for treasure.

  The rescue that came to him in the middle of his life was favored also by the climate of the New Yorker, where Bill worked for forty years—with Harold Ross, the first editor, and at length with William Shawn. Both Ross and Shawn, in contrasting ways, were oddballs and had a feeling for the talents of fellow oddballs. Ross had a reputation for cryptic humor and a brash attitude for creativity. Shawn, unprecedented and unreproducible, remains an irreducible figure in the cultural story of New York or any other city. In late years, Maxwell had his differences with Shawn. But the decades during which they worked closely and cordially together were a period of rich literary achievement that, I imagine, no prominent magazine will ever enjoy again. To have been associated with the New Yorker during that period was revelatory, fascinating, and fun. Maxwell brought his generosity of spirit to the work of others. His feeling for one’s work was never, in my experience, intrusive. He respected the creative intention. He loved fiction and loved the stories of our lives. His relations, of trust and tact, with authors are finely attested in his published correspondence with Frank O’Connor.

  Maxwell paid tribute, in conversation and interviews, to another phase of his emergence from the griefs of his early years, saying th
at the psychoanalyst Theodor Reik had given him “a life.” Two of Bill’s comments on Reik’s interventions seem at variance with Maxwell’s temperament, although he relates them in a favorable sense. Reik felt that Maxwell should more actively seek recognition in his writing career, should be more ambitious for winning prizes. Yet it is precisely Bill’s characteristic restraint in these matters that, viewed from the perspective of his long life, appears to have deepened the wide recognition that eventually came to him and, in retrospect, even seems to have mysteriously compelled it. Maxwell’s instinct in this was appropriate and true. Bill also cites, again seemingly with approval, Reik’s prohibition: “No remorse, no remorse.” In both these correctives, it is hard to recognize Maxwell, and it seems possible that the analyst was seeking to reverse an excess of diffidence or self-accusation. A remorseless person is not an attractive phenomenon. Through responsibility and regret we come to know ourselves, and Maxwell’s personality and writings attest to these qualities in their consideration for the sensibilities of others. Bill told me that he had, in latter middle age, written to each of several persons whom he thought he had wronged in earlier years: an exercise in apology and—one would have thought—remorse. On this theme, one thinks of Yeats: