Some Aspects of Pirandello BOOKS OF THE DAY
By WALTER STARKIE
TIIE death of Luigi Pirandello brings back many memories of modern Italy's greatest dramatist. My first vision of Pirandello goes back to the turbulent days of 1920, when opinions were expressed with a violence which surprised the North European who in matters theatrical is more undemon- strative. The first night of a Pirandellian play at Milan in those days was a most combative affair. The audience would divide up into two camps—the Pirandellians and anti-Pirandellians, and between each act the drama became transferred from the stage to the stalls. In the midst of this welter of excitement and perspirating criticism I can still visualise the sad, apologetic face of the bearded maestro, who had conjured up this double drama of stage and audi- torium. My second vision of ' Pirandello was in a theatre in Barcelona in 1924. I was then a steadfast Pirandellian and I was writing a book on his work. So I listened in rapt atten- tion as he expounded his dramatic theories and faced imper- turbably the shrapnel epigrams fired at him by Spanish in- tellectuals. For in those days Pirandello had turned the theatre into a symposium in which he played the part of a melancholy Socrates. The stage had become an adjunct of the lecture hall and as soon as a dramatist produced a play he rushed off to a lecture hall to tell the public what he meant and to abuse them for misunderstanding him. To one of his interlocutors in Barcelona Pirandello said : "People say that my drama is obscure and they call it cerebral drama. But I say that the New Drama possesses a distinct character from the old ; whereas the latter had as its basis passion, the former is the expression of the intellect. One of the novelties I have given to modern drama consists in converting the intellect into passion."
As time went on Pirandello modified somewhat these theories, for his object was as Victor Hugo said of Baudelaire—de crier an frisson nouveau. When I found him in his Art Theatre in Rome—a brief, ill-starred ven- ture—he was attempting to create a new dramatic tech- nique adapted from Italy's great traditional play the cont- media dell' arte. The last occasion on which I met him was in the Savoy Hotel, London. He had become a world figure through the influence of HollywOod. Greta Garbo in the jazzed-up version of his play, As You Desire Me, had cast a Scandinavian air of mystery over his- Sicilian muse. But Pirandello would talk to me of nothing else but Sicily— of Catania and the literary crusade there, of Giovanni Verga and Lui0 capuana,_ of Giovanni Grasso and the Sicilian actors, of the Hispano-Arabic types of female beauty around Castrogiovanni and Caltanisetta, of the .innate jealousy of Sicilian men and their ceaseless warfare against Don Juan the Playboy of Seville, _ I then came to the conclusion that Pinm- dello was no cosmopolitan dramatist but a traditional Sicilian.
Pirandello all through his works shows the essential Sicilian characteristics. In .the majority of Sicilian plays we are struck by the impression of frenzied rapidity which they give to us, men of the,North whosedleart-beat is slower. There is , something grotesque in this rapidity, these cease- less gestures, these contortions of -countenance which- give us--the impression that the men wear grotesque masks. I What, George Meredith said about Spanish (bums comes to our mind when considering Pirandello : "It is generally in sharp outline, as of skeletons ; in quick movement, as of marionettes." Pirandello's mind has all the tortuousness of Capdana's psychology and much more. He gives us the impression of having At some time in his life absorbed all the works of Freud and Jung entire. And this mental fabulism deformed his vision of natural life. Instead of seeing the castles, the towns, the villages of his fair Sicily With normal eyes, he sees them with warped vision. His humour has not the same quality of balance as Verga, in whom intellect was balanced with sympathy. In Pirandello there is too much intellect. The intellectual portion of his brain evolved out of itself a peculiar type of humour made up of antithesis, of contraries. He can never create any sentiment without immediately creating an opposite one which ends by destroying the former. There is always nearby, an imp ready to poke fun and make the author see his king, if not naked, at least in his shirt. In all the early novels and short stories we get to know the life in the countryside or else in the towns of the island, and they are all the more interesting because we see at work the struggle between old feudal customs and modern life. Pirandello, true to his humour, never fails to show us the antithtsis. In One story he describes the olive harvest, in another the iniquities of the Mafia gangsterdona -(destroyed by the Fascist Prefect Mori). All through those stories Pirandello does not conceal his bitter, sarcastic grin. He has no illusions about the beauty of country life or the pure innocence of the peasant._ It is in the novel ii Fa Mafia Pascal (The Late Matthew Pascal) published in 1904 that we see the characteristic Pirandello. It might be called the basic work of the Master and it is a sad irony to think that it was while super- vising the filming of that work that he was stricken down last week. It Pit Mattia Pascal starts in Sicily, but the scene becomes more cosmopolitan, for Pascal escapes from his narrow provincial life, abandons his nagging wife and crosses to the mainland. His people think he has committed suicide and their suspicions are confirmed when a putrefied corpse is recovered from the mill race. Honours are paid to the supposed Corpse and Pascal in Italy reads his own obituary notice. Henceforth he is free : he will be able to look at life as a spectator from without. So he changes his name to Adriano Meis and he starts off again on a wandering tour. At Monte Carlo he wins a big sum at the gambling tables which enables him to live in luxury, but he becomes wearied Of his lonely, friendless life. Ile finds that he cannot enter society ; he must forever remain a lonely spectator. As Mattia Pascal he had died ; as Adriano Meis he had no existence. Finally he kills the fictional Adriano and returns to his native village in Sicily, but there to his amazement he finds that his wife has married again and has a child by the second marriage. Thus the book ends with the grand climax of the late Mattia Pascal's appearance in front of his frightened family who had thought him safely buried two years before. The theme of II Fa Mailig. Pascal is repeated again and again throughout the short stories and plays of Pirandello. In fact his works all seem to be variations on a central theme. Pirandello is haunted by the obsession of multiple personality. He is also haunted by the mechanism of modern life.
Pirandello was originally a novelist And a writer of short stories following in the :tradition of the Sicilians. His short stories with their crisp dialogue and jerky sentences are dramatic. When, however, late in life he became a devotee of the stage he tried to expand his short story technique into plays. . In many cases the short story which was so moving in its original form loses many of its qualities when padded out with stage dialogue. Pirandello did not seem to have thought of the stage as a means of self-expression until 1913. The period of the Great War brought a change in Italian drama. Up to 1914 the Italian theatre had bowed to the dictatorship of Gabriele D'Aimunzio with his tragedy of the superman, or else it had followed the complacent, bourgeois play with its sentimental heroines. Then came the vogue of the Grotesques in the theatre—a movement due to the efforts of Luigi Chiarelli, the author of the popular The Mask and the Face. Pirandello followed this movement in the theatres and became its master.
Previous page
