Hell and Back

by Tim Parks

  Five years before, on almost the last page of the Zibaldone, Leopardi had written: ‘there are two truths which most men will never believe: one, that they know nothing, and the other, that they are nothing. And there’s a third which proceeds from the second - that there is nothing to hope for after death.’ This conviction, and with it a pride in rejecting ‘all the vain hopes with which men comfort children and themselves, all foolish consolations’, remained with him to the end.

  The word “pride’ discreetly registers Origo’s instinctive dissent.

  Why is it that in a world long used to atheists and sceptics, Leopardi, more than any other writer I can think of, is still to be criticised for his negative vision? The answer, I suspect, will be the same as answers to such questions as: Why did the poet’s contemporaries frequently seek to blame his atheism on evil influences, notably his early mentor, the revolutionary Pietro Giordani? Why were people constantly putting about the rumour that Giacomo had converted (to the extent at one point that some pro-papal tracts published by his father were widely assumed to be his own)? Why did a Jesuit priest publish a letter claiming to have led Giacomo to Christ? Or again, why were the Operette morali inscribed in the Vatican’s Index of Prohibited Books and actually hunted down and destroyed after his death, while the Canti which include the same ideas, were not? How can it be that I libri dello spirito cristicmo (Books of Christian Spirit - a religious list within the Rizzoli group) published, as recently as 1996, a collection of the Canti, claiming that they are of Christian inspiration? Finally, how is it that in the still profoundly Catholic Italian education system, an apparent nihilist like Leopardi can be taught alongside Manzoni, the great pillar of Catholic achievement in modern Italian literature? Origo records Leopardi’s meeting with Manzoni at the Gabinetto Vieusseux in 1827. I promessi sposi had just been published to ecstatic praise; an early edition of the Operette morali severely criticised. Manzoni, the handsome libertine turned fervent Christian, was surrounded by admirers; Leopardi, the erstwhile Christian turned atheist, sat alone. “He had no good news to impart,’ observes Origo.

  The answer to all these questions lies, I believe, in the peculiar nature of Leopardi’s achievement in the Canti. Towards the end of her autobiography, Origo apologises for having said nothing about her son Gianni’s death. She ‘cannot bear to write about it, she tells us. Yet in a wealth of reflections on the inextricable psychological tangle between pain and pleasure, happiness and unhappiness, one of Leopardi’s central intuitions was of the way suffering can be transformed, albeit briefly, precisely in the mental construct of language. In a note in the Zibaldom, he thus describes what was clearly his own aspiration as a poet:

  Works of [literary] genius have this intrinsic quality, that even when they capture exactly the nothingness of things, or vividly reveal and make us feel life’s inevitable unhappiness, or express the most acute hopelessness … they are always a source of consolation and renewed enthusiasm.

  Leopardi saw, that is, how it was possible to say two contradictory things, or rather to make two contradictory gestures simultaneously - despair, consolation - thus acting out a paradox he thought central to the core of human experience. But how was this done? Here is his single most famous poem, learned by heart by every Italian schoolboy.

  A Silvia

  Silvia, rimembri ancora

  Quel tempo délia tua vita mortale,

  Quando beltà splendea

  Negli occhi tuoi ridenti e fuggitivi

  E tu, lieta e pensosa, il limitare

  Di gioventù salivi?

  Sonavan le quiète Stanze, e le vie dintorno,

  Al tuo perpetuo canto,

  Allor ehe all’opre femminili intenta

  Sedevi, assai contenta

  Di quel vago awenir ehe in mente avevi.

  Era il maggio odoroso: e tu solevi

  Cosî menare il giorno.

  Io gli studi leggiadri

  Talor lasciando e le sudate carte,

  Ove il tempo mio primo

  E di me si spendea la miglior parte,

  D’in su i veroni del paterno ostello

  Porgea gli orecchi al suon délia tua voce,

  Ed alla man veloce

  Che percorrea la faticosa tela.

  Mirava il ciel sereno,

  Le vie dorate e gli orti,

  E quinci il mar da lungi, e quindi il monte.

  Lingua mortal non dice

  Quel ch’io sentiva in seno.

  Che pensieri soavi,

  Che speranze, ehe cori, o Silvia mia!

  Quale allor ci apparia

  La vita umana e il fato!

  Quando sowiemmi di contanta speme,

  Un affetto mi preme

  Acerbo e sconsolato,

  E tornami a doler di mia sventura.

  O natura, o natura, Perché non rendi poi

  Quel che prometti allor? perché di tanto Inganni i figli tuoi?

  Tu pria che Perbe inaridisse il verno,

  Da chiuso morbo combattuta e vinta,

  Perivi, o tenerella. E non vedevi Il fior degli anni tuoi;

  Non ti molceva il core

  La dolce Iode or délie nègre chiome,

  Or degli sguardi innamorati e schivi;

  Né teco le compagne ai di festivi

  Ragionavan d’amore.

  Anche peria fra poco

  La speranza mia dolce: agli anni miei

  Anche negaro i fati La giovanezza.

  Ahi corne, Corne passata sei,

  Cara compagna del’eta mia nova,

  Mia lacrimata speme!

  Questo è quel mondo? questi

  I diletti, Pamor, l’opre, gli eventi

  Onde cotanto ragionammo insieme?

  Questa la sorte dell’umane genti?

  All’apparir del vero

  Tu misera, cadesti: e con la mano

  La fredda morte ed una tomba ignuda

  Mostravi di lontano.

  To Silvia

  Silvia, do you remember still

  The time of your mortal life

  When beauty shone

  In your fleeting eyes and smile

  While brightly pensive you stepped

  Up to the brink of youth?

  The hushed rooms and Outside the streets hummed

  With your endless singing

  As you bent over girlish tasks

  Quite content with the hazy future In your head.

  It was May, That fragrant month,

  And so you spent the day.

  I’d stand up from the books

  I loved, the pages I slaved over

  Where my early years and the

  Best part of me were spent

  And from my father’s balcony

  Listen for the sound of your voice

  And your fingers’ swift back

  And forth across the heavy loom.

  I looked up at the blue sky,

  The golden streets and gardens,

  There the sea far away, here the high hill,

  What I felt in my heart then

  Mortal tongue cannot tell.

  What happy thoughts, what

  Hopes, what hearts we hadvSilvia! How human life and Fate seemed to us then!

  When all that hope floods back Now,

  I’m overcome, Bitter beyond consolation

  And weep once more my own misfortune.

  Oh nature, nature, Why won’t you honour

  What you promised then?

  Why play Such cruel tricks on your children?

  Before winter had withered the grass,

  Baffled and beaten by secret sickness

  You were dying, dear soul, didn’t see

  Your best years blossom forth,

  Didn’t hear the praise that melts

  The heart, of your jet dark hair

  The soft shy passion in your eyes;

  Didn’t sit with friends on

  Sundays, Brooding over love.

  And soon my dear hopes

  Had p
erished too: my youth too

  The fates denied me.

  Oh How utterly Past you are now,

  Best friend of better times,

  My long-lamented hope! Is this that world? These

  The pleasure, lève, jadventures

  We talked about so much?

  Is this every man’s inevitable lot?

  When the truth dawned

  You faded wretchedly; and raising

  A hand showed me cold death

  In the distance and a dark grave.

  What a strange opening that is: ‘Silvia, do you remember still/ The time of your mortal life … ?’ The girl is dead ten years and more. How can we address her? What would it mean for her to be Silvia if she did not remember her mortal life? Does the word ‘still suggest there might have been a period when she did remember, but now she has forgotten? In the Zibcilàone Leopardi remarked that the mind takes pleasure from situations where it comes up against sensory limitations, intellectual enigmas or merely sensory vagueness, because it is then free to fill in what is empty or inexplicable. His simplest development of the theme comes in the poem ‘L’infinito’ where, with his view of the landscape blocked by a small hill, the poet is free to conjure infinite spaces behind. Imagined immensity then allows for the mind’s ‘sweet shipwreck’, an effect Leopardi was always eager to achieve and is certainly looking for in this poem. At the same time, though, teased as we may be by conundrums, we are never allowed to forget that Silvia is dead, she died young, and that there is no reasonable consolation for such a death.

  Another note in the Zibaldom dwells at length on the curious pleasure generated by anniversaries, however unhappy, or by revisiting places where some important experience, however negative, was had. The fact that the mind rehearses the memory allows the event to relive, albeit as no more than a ‘shadow’, giving us the illusion that not all has been lost. Thus his poems frequently present a complex weave of present, past and above all might-have-been. We look back on Silvia looking forward to the future. She did not grow up and enjoy her lovers’ praises, but here we have all the beauty of imagining her doing so, or, even better, of imagining her imagining. Emblematic of man’s insignificance as a peasant girl’s death may be, Silvia nevertheless becomes, through the poem, one of the most celebrated figures of her time. Likewise the poet achieves the blessing of celebrity, if only for having described his wretchedness so beautifully. It is as if, after all these years, past and might-have-been can almost be made to merge into each other.

  A delicate play of antitheses underpins this mix of lament and celebration. ‘Life is ‘mortal’ (but what else could it be?). The eyes are ‘smiling’, but ‘fugitive’. Silvia is ‘happy’, but ‘pensive’. The word ‘limitare’ sits ominously beside ‘gioventu’, and so on throughout the poem. Meanwhile, lexically and syntactically, Leopardi matches his temporal back and forth with a language, at once disarmingly intimate in its speaking voice and at the same time unapproachably distant in its archaisms and Latinate focusing. These are not archaisms that take us back to any one time, and certainly not to any pre-existing style. Rather they fuse with the voice to create something that is as timeless and as beautiful a might-have-been as Silvia’s prospected amours.

  It is this linguistic aspect of Leopardi’s poetry that has so far defeated, as he himself foresaw, all attempts at felicitous translation. Subjects of great immediate emotion and infinite sadness are allowed to take on a quiescent coolness, as if remembered from some extraordinary and disembodied distance. Not only is youth recovered in the musing limbo of the mind but the whole extension of the Italian language is given a second if shadowy life. After all, as this poem reminds us, where had Leopardi spent his youth if not over archaic texts? The subtle deployment of the archaic is a reminder of youth, of lost youth, for Leopardi.

  It is for this achievement of looking unflinchingly at the very worst and briefly recuperating it in a beautiful and breathless calm - the calm, as it were, of someone who has survived his own decease - that people come to Leopardi, perhaps especially a young woman who has lost her child. Yet Giacomo never allows us to forget that these poems are carefully constructed mental pleasures, short-lived illusions. A spoilsport by vocation, he frequently finishes a poem with Fapparir del veto. (the dawning of the truth), that is, a tomb.

  In ‘Ginestra, o il fiore del deserto’ he offers as an image of his art the scented broom that grows on the lava slopes of Vesuvius above a ruined civilisation. The past passion of human life is immensely, reassuringly distant. The broom flourishes and perfumes the air. But it will be the first to go, Leopardi tells us, when the lava flows again. His claim for the paradoxical effect of ’works of genius’ - quoted above - concludes thus: ‘even if they have no other subject than death, they give their reader back - at least for a little while - the life he has lost’. After ‘the little while’ is over, we are returned, of course, to the present - ‘the least poetic of times’, Leopardi observed. Deprived of the enchantment of the verse, the grim vision of life we have encountered and the death wish that lurks beneath it is once again open to attack. But since the experience of the Canti is so cherished - after all, a poem can be read and reread - the guns are turned on the Operette.

  Irretrievably insomniac, he enjoyed a long acquaintance with the moon. Beneath the cold silver light it spread over so many of his verses, Giacomo is the wakeful shepherd, while the rest of humanity wallows in the stupor of unconsciousness. Servants were infuriated when he demanded breakfast in the afternoon, lunch at midnight. Seeking some form of employment that would allow him to sever the umbilical cord with home, he wandered uneasily from Milan to Bologna, Florence to Rome. There was always a good reason for turning down what was offered. ‘I haven’t even the strength to die,’ he joked. Rejected by women (‘my dear, he stank’), he struck up a passionate friendship with Antonio Ranieri, a handsome young Neapolitan, risking accusations of homosexuality to enjoy a vicarious experience of the man’s tormented love affairs. With astonishing kindness, Ranieri and his sister looked after Giacomo in the last years in Naples. The sister talked to him about deodorants and hung his shirt out in the sun so that the washerwoman’s nose might not be offended. Ranieri fought off a jeering crowd as the small hunchback tucked into one of his extra large ice creams. In 1837, an asthmatic fit ‘took his virginity’ as Ranieri put it, ‘intact unto the grave’. He thus didn’t live to see the happy moment, in 1839, when his mother Marchesa Adelaide would finally declare that she had accomplished her dream and restored the Leopardi fortunes to their former glory. ‘God forgive him,’ she would say when her first-born was mentioned. He had lost both his faith and a great deal of money.

  Some eight years after publishing her biography, Iris Origo’s dreams were shattered once again, this time by the collapse of the Fascist regime and the allied bombings. She took in displaced children, helped escaping British airmen, wrote an exciting war diary. Rut even after the carnage was over, the dream couldn’t be recaptured, for now the collective illusion of communism had replaced that of fascism and the farmers would no longer accept the mezzadrm system. It was distressing that their aspirations didn’t fit in with those of the Origos. In 1952, Iris returned to her biography of Leopardi to make extensive revisions. A considerable amount of new material had come to light, she tells us. But one cannot quite quell the suspicion that she returned to Giacomo to savour once again his miraculous expression of all that she found intolerable to say, but could not sometimes help feeling.

  The Hunter

  [G.W. Sebald]

  In the closing pages of Cervantes’ masterpiece, at last disabused and disillusioned, a decrepit Don Quixote finds that there is nothing for him beyond folly but death. When giants are only windmills and Dulcinea a stout peasant lass who has no time for knights errant, life, alas, is unlivable. ‘Truly he is dying,’ says the priest who takes his confession ‘and truly he is sane.’ Sancho Panza breaks down in tears: ‘Oh don’t die, dear master! … Take my advice and
live many years. For the maddest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die just like that, without anybody killing him, but just finished off by his own melancholy.’

  Centuries later, observing the loss of all illusion that he felt characterised the modern world, the melancholic Giacomo Leopardi wrote: ‘Everything is folly but folly itself And again a hundred and more years on arch-pessimist Emil Cioran rephrased the reflection thus: The true vertigo is the absence of folly.’ What makes Don Quixote so much luckier than Leopardi and Cioran, and doubtless Cervantes himself, is that, as the epitaph on his tombstone puts it, ‘he had the luck … to live a fool and yet die wise’. What on earth would have become of such a sentimental idealist had he returned to his senses, as it were, a decade or two earlier?

  Vertigo - as indeed Sebald’s other works, The Emigrants and the Kings of Saturn - tells the stories of those who reach disillusionment long before the flesh is ready to succumb, men -they are always men - engaged in a virtuoso struggle to generate that minimum of folly, or we could call it love of life, or even engagement, that will prevent them from dying ‘just like that’, ‘finished off by their own melancholy’.

  But perhaps I have got that wrong. Perhaps on the contrary we should say that Sebald’s characters are men who ruthlessly suppress folly the moment it does, insistently, raise its wild head. So wary are they of engagement in life that actually they are morbidly and masochistically in complicity with melancholy and all too ready to be overwhelmed by it. There is a back and forth in Sebald’s work between the wildest whimsy and bleakest realism. One extreme calls to the other: the illusions of passion, in the past; a quiet suicide, all too often, in the future. Mediating between the two, image both of his art and of what fragile nostalgic equilibrium may be available to his heroes, are the grainy black-and-white photographs Sebald scatters throughout his books. Undeniably images of something, something real that is, they give documentary evidence of phenomena that, as we will discover in the text, sparked off in the narrator or hero a moment of mental excitement, of mystery, or folly, or alarm. They are the wherewithal of an enchantment, at once feared and desired, and above all necessary for staying alive. Not even in the grainiest of these photos, however, will it be possible to mistake a windmill for a giant.