Hell and Back

by Tim Parks

  The story of Giacomo’s youth spent entirely in his father’s library has assumed legendary status in the history of Italian literature. Rarely emerging to play with brothers and sister, the boy had no companions at all outside the family and no interests outside of books. By the age often he had mastered Latin, Greek, German and French. Hebrew and English would soon follow. Presumably destined for the priesthood, he received the tonsure at twelve and donned a monkish habit. His tutors were outstripped and admitted as much. Left to his own diligent if random devices, he produced philological commentaries, sonnets, tragedies, epigrams, philosophical dissertations, A History of Astronomy, a Life of Plotinus, and any number of translations from the classics. Adolescent self-consciousness was developed to the point that ‘thinking about breathing’, as Monaldo later wrote, “he would have difficulty getting his breath, reflecting on the subtleties of urination he would be unable to pass water’. Much pacing to and fro was required before he could steal from himself “a moment’s inattention’.

  All the same, when beautiful cousin Gertrude made a three-day visit with her much older husband, the boy did manage to fall in love. In a pattern that would repeat itself throughout his life, the lady paid him no attention and left without saying goodbye. Giacomo reacted with A Diary of First Love and a number of Petrarchan sonnets. When the effect wore off, he embarked on a translation of Hesiod’s Theogony.

  It was grotesque and in his late teens Giacomo at last awoke to find the outward sign of that grotesqueness. Under the priest’s habit was a hunch, result of a long-untreated scoliosis. How could he not have seen what was happening? The study that had seemed the passport to his father’s respect and the scholastic glory that must ensue had become his curse and set him apart for ever. Beset by asthma and constipation, insulted by street urchins, already aware that no woman would ever find him attractive, Giacomo was more and more often afflicted by a death wish he had felt since earliest infancy. From the age of eighteen on, his overriding obsession was escape.

  Concomitant with this anguished awareness of lost youth came what Giacomo would refer to as his three ‘conversions: literary, political and philosophical. From the arid erudition of his father he moved almost overnight to an appreciation of the value of beauty in poetry. Immediately, he set out on translations of the first book of The Odyssey, the second of the Aeneid. This at seventeen. A year later, he jettisoned Monaldo’s blind defence of papal dictatorship and declared himself in favour of a united Italy. Immediately, he wrote a number of long, patriotic hymns.

  Finally, at twenty-one, he abandoned his parents’ and above all his mother’s Christianity. Having once walked in superstitious dread of treading on the crosses formed by paving stones, he now discovered a world, as he put it, of ‘solid nothingness’. In the cold light of reason, both religion and youthful illusion evaporated and happiness became ‘forever unavailable’. Thus in 1819, in one of the most backward towns of the most backward state in a decidedly backward and obscurantist Italy, Giacomo Leopardi stepped tentatively into the world of the absurd, a mechanistic universe going nowhere and to no end.

  Despite severe ophthalmia, another lifelong plague, the young man’s busy pen was now occupied on three fronts: lyric poems, invariably as sad as they were beautiful; brief philosophical dialogues of bizarre whimsy and unparalleled pessimism; and finally the pages of his Zibaldone, or day book, a diary of his intellectual and emotional development that would ultimately run to almost three thousand pages. In more and more open conflict with his parents, he was now desperate to leave. But how could Monaldo let this boy with his weak health, great talents and dangerous views out into a world where liberalism and revolution were everywhere in the air? How could Adelaide even contemplate the unnecessary expense of lodging him anywhere but home? Giacomo attempted to acquire a passport and escape north with money stolen from the family safe but was foiled and humiliated. His dream of a ‘land full of marvels’ away from the ‘living burial’ of Recanati would have to wait until he was twenty-four when Monaldo finally relented and allowed his son to visit Adelaide’s brother, Marchese Antici, in Rome.

  Thus far the story of Giacomo Leopardi presents little problem for biographers. The family palazzo and above all the library where he grew up are still there to be visited. They present a small and sharply defined world in which the poet’s youth and the dynamic of those relationships that shaped it are well documented in an abundance of letters and memoirs. Most of all the economy and direction of the story are obvious and our sympathies undivided. The frail, sensitive if, alas, ugly genius will finally escape his monstrous parents to spread his wings in the wider and more generous society of those splendid Italian cities that so inspired his English, French and German contemporaries. It was not to be. Leopardi hated Rome, as later he would never be on anything but the most uneasy terms with Milan, Bologna, Florence and Naples. ‘All the greatness of Rome,’ he wrote to his sister Paolina, ‘has no other purpose than to multiply the distances and numbers of steps you have to climb to see anyone at all.’ The place was dirty and noisy, the people stupid. On his first day he met the elegant and erudite Abbot Cancellieri, a man not only well placed to introduce Giacomo into Roman society, but kind enough to have praised the young prodigy’s philological studies in his own publications. ‘A prick,’ Giacomo wrote to his brother Carlo, ‘an endless stream of gossip, the dullest and most despair-inducing man on earth’. But surely, the envious Carlo replied, in a big city ‘there’s always a pretty whore to look at’. This was true, but would the whores look at a sickly hunchback? ‘The ugliest, crassest Recanati tart was better than all the streetwalkers of Rome,’ came the poet’s improbable retort. Despite winning the unqualified admiration of a number of scholars, and in particular the Prussian ambassador Niebuhr, Leopardi was soon longing to be home. Monaldo was delighted to have him back. Another week or two and the young man was desperate to leave again.

  It is at this point that most biographers, and critics, begin to establish, as if in self-defence, a distance that will ultimately amount to a gulf between Leopardi’s sublime poetry on the one hand and his profound pessimism and capricious behaviour on the other. Thus in Leopardi, A Study in Solitude, the only substantial biography in English, now reprinted after many years, Iris Origo remarks:

  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 a 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.

  In an essay that appeared in the New York Review of Books the scholar D.S. Carne-Ross wrote: ‘much as one must often pity Leopardi, it is hard sometimes not to feel, with a certain exasperation, that he deliberately made bad worse, as though to prove a point about the inevitable wretchedness of existence’.

  One of the consequences of taking this line is that Leopardi’s poetry, and in particular the thirty-six lyric poems of the Canti, is to be elevated to the highest of pedestals (‘English with all its riches has nothing to set beside the best of these poems,’ says Carne-Ross), while the reflections of the prose dialogues collected as the Operette morally or indeed of the quite extraordinary Zibaldone, are to be dismissed, or damned with faint praise. Basing her remarks on an essay by Benedetto Croce, Origo writes: ‘On the problems of life he [Leopardi] bestowed much thought, and he clothed that thought in fine language, but the conclusions which he reached cannot be said to possess any great novelty.’ She then simplifies his vision thus: “The universe, he says, is an enigma and an insoluble one; human life, when weighed in the balance, is an unhappy affair, and the more highly developed a man is in feeling and in intelligence, the less fitted he is to live happily.
Such happiness as men do enjoy is founded upon “illusion”.’

  Albeit with some bet-hedging, Carne-Ross reaches the same conclusion. “I doubt … if too much independent value should be claimed for his “philosophy”. In an entirely honorable sense, it was rigged, as a poet’s thinking often is, to serve his art.’

  How vigorously Leopardi would have disagreed! Indeed he did disagree, for he frequently faced the same criticism during his lifetime. Praising the style of Operette morali as “the finest prose in Italian this century’, his arch-enemy, the supremely Catholic Niccolo Tommaseo nevertheless referred to Leopardi as ‘a frog endlessly croaking “There is no God because I’m a hunchback, there is no God because I’m a hunchback’“. Dutifully, Origo documents Leopardi’s standard response to such attacks: that critics should seek to confute his ideas (which actually are far from simple) rather than blame his deformity. But one has to turn to a very different kind of biography, Rolando Damiani’s AW apparir del vero (sadly unavailable in translation) to find the poet’s most spirited rebuttal: on hearing, in 1834, that an article in a German review had once again ascribed his negative thinking to his desperate state of health, Leopardi wrote: “it seems people have the same attitude to life that an Italian husband has to his wife: he needs to go on believing she is faithful even when all the evidence is to the contrary’.

  The tension and ambiguity that everywhere galvanise Origo’s fascinating biography spring from her attempt to reconcile an honest account of Leopardi’s unhappy existence and corrosive thought with this same, as the poet saw it, banal but absolutely necessary desire to believe that ‘life is a beautiful thing’. The irony she never quite grasps is that both the philosophy she largely ignores and the poetry she loves are inspired by Leopardi’s prolonged meditation on the same contradictory impulses that are driving her pen as she seeks at once to tell her story truthfully and escape its implications unscathed. In short, as Giacomo saw it, Nature has endowed us with a reasoning faculty which inevitably pushes us towards an awareness of the utter insignificance of our existence, yet at the same time, and paradoxically, Nature also offers us considerable resources for putting that reasoning faculty to sleep, and in particular for inventing all kinds of grand ideas - national, religious, romantic and social - to keep the brutal truth at bay. Such ideas and the adventures that sprang from them were to be cultivated at all costs - hadn’t Leopardi himself espoused the national cause, didn’t he fall in love on three occasions, wasn’t his very writing driven by a ludicrous ambition for literary glory? - yet he insisted to the end that such aspirations, and indeed all the fruits of the imagination, whether individual or collective, were ‘illusions’. The bottom line would always be sickness and death. It is as if, sitting beside Coleridge as he wrote his 'Dejection: an Ode’, Leopardi had, yes, encouraged him to rediscover ‘the beauty-making power of imagination’, but then pointed out that whether he succeeded or not, he would all too soon be back with ‘the inanimate cold world’ again, and hence dejection. For ‘nothing is more reasonable than boredom’. And after years of disillusionment and dejection, death could only be welcome.

  Interestingly, it was a death that prompted Iris Origo to write her biography of Leopardi. As she emerges in her engaging autobiography, Images and Shadows this rich and beautiful daughter of Berenson’s Chiantishire is almost the last person you would expect to take a serious interest in Leopardi. True, her father dies young and her mother is neurotic and narcissistic to a degree -not the perfect childhood - but loving grandparents give a sense of solidity, the palatial family villa (originally built for Cosimo Medici) is full of famous friends and lively conversation. To top all, first love, when it comes, is wonderfully and romantically requited: Antonio has an Italian tide, Iris has American cash. Who could ask for more? Together they buy an entire Tuscan valley and set about turning it into productive arable land with a system of farms run on the old mezzadria system where the peasants give half their produce to the padrone. Fascism offered subsidies for such developments. It was still possible at this point to imagine the regime was benevolent. Within the year, a son, Gianni was born. Inspired by a genuine spirit of philanthropy, underpinned by a successful marriage, the Origos’ project progressed to the benefit of everyone and the pages of her account of those years turn to that scent of warm earth and crushed olives that has sold so many books to the idle dreamers of colder climes. Above all, Iris herself was overwhelmingly busy, resourceful, powerful, happy. “I have never in my life found a day too long, she tells us.

  What on earth, you wonder, has such a woman to do with a man reputedly determined to be wretched, a man who never got further in love than holding a beloved’s hand, or collecting autographs for her (how humiliating!), or playing go-between for a rival (even worse!), a man who changed his shirt only once a month, dribbled his food, smelt, ate on his own at ungodly hours, ogled courting couples from his bedroom window, accepted money for jobs he never meant to finish, ridiculed both the liberal vision of progress and the consolations of religion?

  Giacomo refused to read the newspapers, but briefly in the summer of 1832, exactly 101 years before Origo began research on his biography, the poet did toy with the idea of launching a paper himself. It was to be called “Le flaneur’ - the time-waster.

  Its selling point would be its complete lack of any ‘positive ideas’, ‘non-political, non-philosophical, non-historical, non-fashionable, non-artistic, non-scientific …’ Its imagined readership? Those ‘tolerant of all that is futile’. But at the first hint of problems with the Florentine censors, Giacomo characteristically dropped his project. An entertaining daydream, it had served its purpose. What has the busy likes of Iris Origo to do with a man like this?

  The terrible answer comes without warning in a chapter of Images and SAAROW harmlessly entitled, ‘Writing’. After explaining that the big Tuscan farm left little opportunity to pursue adolescent ambitions, Origo tells us, ‘Then, in 1933, after Gianni’s death, in an effort to find some impersonal work which would absorb at least part of my thoughts - I turned back to writing again.’

  Her eight-year-old son has died. No narrative, no explanation. ‘After Gianni’s death … impersonal work’. But how impersonal? For what is Leopardi’s great theme if not death, and in particular the death of young people, which is the cruellest unmasking of life’s illusions.

  nel fior degli anni estinta Quand*è il viver più dolce, e pria ehe il core Certo si renda cornet tutta indarno Uumana speme. A desiar cole% Che dogni affanno il tragge, ha poco andare Uegro mortal; ma sconsolata arriva La morte ai giovanetti …

  (Cut off in the flower of my years When life is sweetest, and before the heart Can know how human hopes are all In vain. It isn’t long before the afflicted Learn to call on she Who can save us from all affliction. But death comes inconsolable to the young …)

  Cruelly, Origo has been dragged from her busy life to join Leopardi where he always was, or imagined himself to be, at death’s door. Embarking for the first time in her life on a sustained project of scholarly research, she thus no doubt shared the experience that had been Giacomo’s since adolescence, that of seeking distraction in reading or translation only to find that the content you were working on brought you inexorably back to the pain that led you to seek distraction in the first place. Of twelve children born to Giacomo’s mother, Origo is bound to record in her opening chapter, only five survived, only one outlived her.

  Impersonal or otherwise as her approach may be, Iris Origo certainly did sterling work. She sifted through a wealth of original sources and above all the vast Zibaldone to give us an account of Leopardi’s life that still holds up today. What she loses to the overwhelmingly meticulous scholarship and acute psychological insight of a more recent biography like Damiani’s, she makes up in the at-once eager but anxious nature of her engagement with the poet. Damiani, who edited and annotated the Zibaldone is clearly at home with Leopardi’s pessimism and entirely familiar with such minds as Schopenhauer and Niet
zsche, Cioran and Beckett, to whom the Italian poet looks forward, familiar in short with that whole strand of negative Western thought that opposes to the enlightenment the simple reflection that “knowledge has not helped us to live’. For Origo, in contrast, coming from a quite different tradition, Leopardi is a risk, indeed a peril, a dark sea she might never have plunged into had it not been for her son’s death. She senses that Leopardi has more to say about that death than perhaps anyone else, but it is not something she is eager to focus on in her own writing. Recreating scenes of Recanati life from fragments in the poetry, she tends to the sentimental and picturesque; she also thrusts upon Leopardi’s mature work a Platonism he entertained only briefly in his teens and attacked savagely in the Operette; and she is clearly relieved to record Giacomo’s happier moments, notably sitting at café tables greedily tucking into ice creams as he watched the world go by. It is at these points that you feel Origo would be more at ease describing the colourful bustle of Italian street life than Leopardi’s torturous lucubration. Yet faithfully she gives us the facts, she quotes the very darkest passages from Zibaldone and even steels herself for the story of Leopardi’s unshriven death, aged thirty-eight.