Prof. Lina Unali
Programma del corso di Letteratura Anglo-americana Specialistiche LLEA
Modulo A+B
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, “I. The Burial of the Dead”
Prime note che T.S. Eliot appose alla Terra Desolata
Brano iniziale dell’articolo "E.U. Fines Microsoft $732 Million Over Browser", New
York Times, 6 marzo 2013
Note relative a T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, “I. The Burial of the Dead”
Brano iniziale dell’articolo " Endangered or Not, but at Least No Longer Waiting", New
York Times, 6 marzo 2013
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, “II. A Game of Chess” (testo inglese e traduzione italiana)
Note di Eliot al II libro della Terra desolata
Brano dall’Antonio e Cleopatra (Atto II, scena ii) di Shakespeare a cui Eliot si riferisce
nella prima metà di “A Game of Chess”
Testo delle pagine 2 e 3 di J.L. Weston, “From Ritual To Romance”
Brano iniziale da The Golden Bough di J.G. Frazer relativo al Tempio di Diana a Nemi
Appunto 1 relativo a Maria Maddalena che tiene in mano il Graal nella Chiesa di Santa
Maddalena a Roma
Appunto 2 relativo al cerchio di divinità femminili nell’antica Roma nei dintorni del
Pantheon
Brano iniziale dell’articolo "Judge Blocks New York City’s Limits on Big Sugary
Drinks", New York Times, 11 marzo 2013
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, “III. The Fire Sermon”
Note di Eliot al III libro della Terra desolata
F.S. Fitzgerald, “Love in the Night”
1
Lina Unali, Presentazione di “Love in the Night”, racconto breve di Francis Scott
Fitzgerald pubblicato nel 1925 sul Saturday Evening Post
Lina Unali, Introduzione a Mente e misura. La poesia di William Carlos Williams,
Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Roma, 1970, pp. 11-48.
Lina Unali, “6.5 Cina e America”, in Rapporto sulla Cina, Editori Riuniti University
Press, Roma, 2012, pp. 261-276
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, “IV. Death by Water” e “V. What the Thunder Said”
Note di Eliot al V libro della Terra desolata
Dispensa sul Free Verse
The New Yorker, “An Unfinished Woman. The desires of Margaret Fuller”, brani
dell’articolo e copertina del 1 aprile 2013
Dispensina fotografica dei luoghi abitati dagli artisti americani espatriati (Foto: Rapallo,
Albergo Europa; Hotel Riviera di Rapallo al tempo di Hemingway; Cannes vecchia)
Lina Unali, Le note alla Terra desolata, il mondo psichico e metamorfico presente nel
poema
Ernest Hemingway, “Cat in the Rain”
Ernest Hemingway, “On the Quai at Smyrna”
Ernest Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
Notizie del New York Times in tempo reale relative al cosiddetto Boston attack e
all’esplosione in Texas (19 aprile 2013)
Lina Unali, Nota su un aspetto di “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” di Ernest Hemingway
J.M. Roberts, “European Revolution”, in The Penguin History of Europe, Penguin
Books, Londra, 1997, pp. 512-513
T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
T.S. Eliot, “Aunt Helen”, “Cousin Nancy”
Lina Unali, Note su “Aunt Helen” e “Cousin Nancy”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night (1934), BOOK 1, Chapter I
2
Brano dell’articolo “The Talk of the Town”, The New Yorker, 8 maggio 2013
Brano iniziale di The Old Man and the Sea di Ernest Hemingway (Charles Scribner’s
Sons, New York, 1962, pp. 1-2)
Brano tratto da Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (Charles Scribner’s Sons,
New York, 1962, pp. 9-10)
F.S. Fitzgerald lavora in un’agenzia pubblicitaria a Manhattan negli anni venti (articolo
del New Yorker, 6 maggio 2013)
Lina Unali, Nota sulla comunicazione letteraria nel primo mezzo secolo del ’900: T.S.
Eliot (1888-1965), I.A. Richards (1893-1979) e Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)
T.S. Eliot, Assassinio nella Cattedrale (traduzione di Giovanni Castelli, revisione di
Raffaello Lavagna), citazione dall’Introduzione e dal testo
Brano dell’articolo “Laptop U. Has the future of college moved online?”, The New
Yorker, 20 maggio 2013
Brano dell’articolo “Søren K.’s Two-Hundredth Birthday”, The New Yorker, 21 maggio
2013
3
Prof. Unali
Dispensa Letteratura americana LLEA 7-9 marzo 2013
T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). The Waste Land. 1922.
The Waste Land
I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
4
5
10
15
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
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25
30
35
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Öd’ und leer das Meer.
5
40
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying “Stetson!
You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
6
45
50
55
60
65
70
75
Dal momento che l’interpretazione della Terra Desolata si baserà anche sulle note che
T.S. Eliot appose alla Terra Desolata, si trascrivono qui le prime note.
Eliot's original notes have been supplemented by additional notations, which
appear in green like so. I have taken several notes directly from M. H. Abrams et
al., eds., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th ed., vol. 2 (NY: Norton,
1993). I have also drawn heavily on A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot
by B. C. Southam.
The title probably originates with Malory's Morte d'Arthur. A poem strikingly
similar in theme and language called Waste Land, written by Madison Cawein,
was published in 1913.
Eliot's original title for the poem was He do the Policemen in Different Voices, a
reference to Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, and is a comment on the skill
of Sloppy in reading out Court cases from the newspapers.
Epigraph I have seen with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the
boys asked her "What do you want?" She answered,
"I want to die."
Petronius, Satyricon
The Cumaean Sibyl was the most famous of the Sibyls, the prophetic old women
of Greek mythology; she guided Aeneas through Hades in the Aeneid. She had
been granted immortality by Apollo, but because she forgot to ask for perpetual
youth, she shrank into withered old age and her authority declined.
Dedication The better craftsman.
(Purgatorio xxvi, 117)
Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the
poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend: From
Ritual to Romance (Macmillan). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston's
book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do;
and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who
think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another work of
anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation
profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes
Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will
immediately recognize in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.
Si trae poi spunto dalle note per analizzare l’opera citata da Eliot di Jessie L. Weston
intitolata From Ritual to Romance, fondamentalmente basata su una sua analisi del
Santo Graal: “Some years ago, when fresh from the study of Sir J.G. Frazer's epochmaking work, The Golden Bough, I was struck by the resemblance existing between
certain features of the Grail story, and characteristic details of the Nature Cults
described”.
7
Business Day
Technology
E.U. Fines Microsoft $732 Million Over
Browser
By JAMES KANTER
Published: March 6, 2013
BRUSSELS — The European Commission on Wednesday fined Microsoft €561
million for failing to live up to a settlement agreement offering consumers a choice of
Internet browsers.
The fine, equivalent to $732 million, is first time that E.U. regulators have punished a
company for neglecting to comply with the terms of an antitrust settlement, and it could
signal their determination to enforce deals in other cases, including one involving
Google, where such an agreement is under discussion.
8
Prof. Unali
Dispensa n. 2
Letteratura americana LLEA
Note relative a T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, The Burial of the Dead
Line
12.I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, I am a real German
18.Eliot derived most of the ideas in this passage from My Past by the Countess Marie
Larisch.
20. Cf. Ezekiel 2:7.
23. Cf. Ecclesiastes 12:5.
30. Cf. Donne's Devotions. Evelyn Waugh took this phrase for the title of his novel, A
Handful of Dust .
31. The wind blows fresh
To the Homeland
My Irish Girl
Where are you lingering?
V. Tristan und Isolde, i, verses 5-8.
42. Desolate and empty the sea
Id. iii, verse 24.
43. A mock Egyptian name (suggested to Eliot by 'Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana',
the name assumed by a character in Aldous Huxley's novel Crome Yellow who dresses
up as a gypsy to tell fortunes at a fair).
46. I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I
have obviously departed to suit my own convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of
the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind
with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in
the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V. The Phoenician Sailor and the
Merchant appear later; also the 'crowds of people', and Death by Water is executed in
Part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I
associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself.
55. On his card in the Tarot pack, the Hanged Man is shown hanging from one foot
from a T-shaped cross. He symbolizes the self-sacrifice of the fertility god who is killed
in order that his resurrection may bring fertility once again to land and people.
60. Cf. Baudelaire:
Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,
Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant.
9
63. Cf. Dante's Inferno, iii. 55-7:
si lunga tratta
di gente, ch'io non avrei mai creduto
che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta.
So long a train of people, that I should never have believed death had undone so many.
64. Cf. 63. Cf. Dante's Inferno, iv. 25-27:
Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare,
non avea pianto, ma' che di sospiri,
che l'aura eterna facevan tremare.
Here there was no plaint, that could be heard, except of sighs, which caused the eternal
air to tremble.
68. A phenomenon which I have often noticed.
69. Some have taken 'Stetson' to be a reference to Pound, who wore a sombrero-stetson.
Eliot, however, denied that it had any connection to an actual person.
74. Cf. the Dirge in Webster's White Devil.
76. Hypocrite reader! - my doppelganger - my brother!
V. Baudelaire, Preface to Fleurs du Mal.
10
Environment
Endangered or Not, but at Least No
Longer Waiting
Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times
The Oregon spotted frog has been waiting for 22 years for federal protection as an endangered species
By MICHAEL WINES
Published: March 6, 2013
Perhaps it does not seem cause for celebration that the Oregon spotted frog, a four-inchlong amphibian that prefers the Pacific Northwest’s dwindling marshy spots, is to be
considered this year for federal protection as an endangered species.
Tell that to the frog. It has been languishing for 22 years — since 1991 — awaiting its
day in the bureaucratic sun.
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Prof. Lina Unali Dispensa n. 3
Letteratura americana LLEA 14-16 marzo 2013
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, II. A Game of Chess
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II. Una partita a scacchi
Il Seggio sul quale sedeva, simile a un trono brunito,
Risplendeva sul marmo, ove lo specchio
Sorretto da colonne lavorate con tralci di vite
Fra le quali un Cupido dorato spiava
(Un altro sotto l'ala nascondeva gli occhi)
Raddoppiava le fiamme ai candelabri
A sette braccia riflettendo sul tavolo la luce
Mentre lo scintillio dei suoi gioielli si levava
A incontrarlo, da astucci di raso versato
A profusione; in fialette d'avorio e vetro colorato
Dischiuse, i suoi profumi stavano in agguato, sintetici e strani,
Unguenti, polveri, liquidi - turbavano,
Confondevano e annegavano il senso nei profumi; spinti dall'aria
Che entrava fresca dalla finestra, ascendevano
Alimentando le fiamme lunghe della candela,
Soffiavano il loro fumo nei laquearia,
Animando i motivi del soffitto a lacunari.
Un bosco enorme sottomarino nutrito di rame
Bruciava verde e arancio, incorniciato dalla pietra colorata,
Nella cui luce mesta un delfino scolpito nuotava.
Sull'antico camino era dipinta,
13
Come se una finestra si aprisse sulla scena silvana,
La metamorfosi di Filomela, dal re barbaro
Così brutalmente forzata; eppure là l'usignolo
Empiv a tutto il deserto con voce inviolabile
E ancora ella gemeva, e ancora il mondo prosegue,
« Giag Gíag » a orecchi sporchi.
E altri arbusti di tempo disseccati
Erano dispiegati sui muri a raccontare; forme attonite
Si affacciavano chine imponendo silenzio nella stanza chiusa.
Scalpicciavano passi sulla scala.
Alla luce del fuoco, sotto la spazzola, i suoi capelli
Si spiegavano in punte di fuoco,
Splendevano in parole, per ricadere in una cupa calma.
"Ho i nervi a pezzi stasera. Sì, a pezzi. Resta con me.
Parlami. Perché non parli mai? Parla.
A che stai pensando? Pensando a cosa? A cosa?
Non lo so mai a cosa stai pensando. Pensa."
Penso che siamo nel vicolo dei topi
Dove i morti hanno perso le ossa.
"Cos'è quel rumore?"
Il vento sotto la porta.
"E ora cos'è quel rumore? Che sta facendo il vento?"
Niente ancora niente.
E non sai
"Niente? Non vedi niente? Non ricordi
Niente?"
Ricordo Quelle sono le perle che furono i suoi occhi.
"Sei vivo, o no? Non hai niente nella testa?"
Ma
0 0 0 0 that Shakespeherian Rag...
Così elegante
Così intelligente
"Che farò ora? Che farò?"
"Uscirò fuori così come sono, camminerò per la strada
"Coi miei capelli sciolti, così. Cosa faremo domani?
"Cosa faremo mai?"
L'acqua calda alle dieci.
E se piove, un'automobile chiusa alle quattro.
E giocheremo una partita a scacchi,
Premendoci gli occhi senza palpebre, in attesa che bussino alla porta.
Quando il marito di Lil venne smobilitato, dissi Non avevo peli sulla lingua, glielo dissi io stessa,
SVELTI PER FAVORE SI CHIUDE
Ora che Albert ritorna, rimettiti un po' in ghingheri.
Vorrà sapere cosa ne hai fatto dei soldi che ti diede
Per farti rimettere i denti. Te li diede, ero presente.
Fatteli togliere tutti, Lil, e comprati una bella dentiera,
Lui disse, lo giuro, non ti posso vedere così.
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E io nemmeno, dissi, e pensa a quel povero Albert,
E' stato sotto le armi per quattro anni, si vorrà un po' divertire,
Se non lo farai tu ce ne saranno altre, dissi.
Oh è così, disse lei. Qualcosa del genere, dissi.
Allora saprò chi ringraziare, disse, e mi guardò fissa negli occhi.
SVELTI PER FAVORE SI CHIUDE
Se non ne sei convinta seguita pure, dissi.
Ce ne sono altre che sanno decidere e scegliere se non puoi farlo tu.
Ma se Albert si sgancia non potrai dire di non essere stata avvisata.
Ti dovresti vergognare, dissi, di sembrare una mummia.
(E ha solo trentun anni.)
Non ci posso far niente, disse lei, mettendo un muso lungo,
Son quelle pillole che ho preso per abortire, disse.
(Ne aveva avuti già cinque, ed era quasi morta per il piccolo George.)
Il farmacista disse che sarebbe andato tutto bene, ma non sono più stata la stessa.
Sei davvero una stupida, dissi.
Bene, se Albert non ti lascia in pace, ecco qui, dissi,
Cosa ti sei sposata a fare, se non vuoi bambini?
SVELTI PER FAVORE SI CHIUDE
Bene, quella domenica che Albert tornò a casa, avevano uno zampone bollito,
E mi invitarono a cena, per farmelo mangiare bello caldo SVELTI PER FAVORE SI CHIUDE
SVELTI PER FAVORE SI CHIUDE
Buonanotte Bill. Buonanotte Lou. Buonanotte May, Buonanotte.
Ciao. 'Notte. 'Notte.
Buonanotte signore, buonanotte, dolci signore, buonanotte, buonanotte.
Note di Eliot al II libro della Terra desolata
II. A GAME OF CHESS
77. Cf. Antony and Cleopatra, II. ii. 190.
This passage is reminiscent of the description of Imogen's bedroom in Cymbeline,
which also mentions Cupids.
92. Laquearia. V. Aeneid, I. 726:
dependent lychni laquearibus aureis incensi, et noctem flammis funalia vincunt.
Laquearia means a "panelled ceiling," and Eliot's note quotes the passage in the Aeneid
that was his source for the word. The passage may be translated: "Blazing torches hang
from the gold-panelled ceiling [laquearibus aureis], and torches conquer the night with
flames." Virgil is describing the banquet given by Dido, queen of Carthage, for Aeneas,
with whom she fell in love.
98. Sylvan scene. V. Milton, Paradise Lost, iv. 140.
99. V. Ovid, Metamorphoses, vi, Philomela.
100. Cf. Part III, l. 204.
115. Cf. Part III, l. 195.
118. Cf. Webster: 'Is the wind in that door still?'
126. Cf. Part I, l. 37, 48.
128. Hamlet's dying words in the Folio text - either a corruption, or actor's revision, of
the speech in the Quarto.
138. Cf. the game of chess in Middleton's Women beware Women.
172. Ophelia's last words in Hamlet, IV v.
15
Brano dall’Antonio e Cleopatra (Atto II, scena ii) di Shakespeare a cui Eliot si
riferisce nella prima metà di A Game of Chess
Il riferimento di Eliot è all’atto II, scena ii, di Antonio e Cleopatra di Shakespeare,
quando Enobarbo, reduce dall’Egitto parla di Cleopatra nel modo seguente:
ENOBARBUS. I will tell you.
The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burn'd on the water. The poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar'd all description. She did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold, of tissue,
O'erpicturing that Venus where we see
The fancy out-work nature. On each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-colour'd fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.
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Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). The Golden Bough 1922.
I. The King of the Wood
§ 1. Diana and Virbius
WHO does not know Turner’s picture of the Golden Bough? The scene, suffused with the golden
glow of imagination in which the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest
natural landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland lake of Nemi— “Diana’s Mirror,”
as it was called by the ancients. No one who has seen that calm water, lapped in a green hollow of
the Alban hills, can ever forget it. The two characteristic Italian villages which slumber on its
banks, and the equally Italian palace whose terraced gardens descend steeply to the lake, hardly
break the stillness and even the solitariness of the scene. Diana herself might still linger by this
lonely shore, still haunt these woodlands wild.
In antiquity this sylvan landscape was the scene of a strange and recurring tragedy. On the
northern shore of the lake, right under the precipitous cliffs on which the modern village of Nemi
is perched, stood the sacred grove and sanctuary of Diana Nemorensis, or Diana of the Wood. The
lake and the grove were sometimes known as the lake and grove of Aricia. But the town of Aricia
(the modern La Riccia) was situated about three miles off, at the foot of the Alban Mount, and
separated by a steep descent from the lake, which lies in a small crater-like hollow on the mountain
side. In this sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and
probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn
sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an
enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to
murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate
for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he
retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.
The post which he held by this precarious tenure carried with it the title of king; but surely no
crowned head ever lay uneasier, or was visited by more evil dreams, than his. For year in, year out,
in summer and winter, in fair weather and in foul, he had to keep his lonely watch, and whenever
he snatched a troubled slumber it was at the peril of his life. The least relaxation of his vigilance,
the smallest abatement of his strength of limb or skill of fence, put him in jeopardy; grey hairs
might seal his death-warrant. To gentle and pious pilgrims at the shrine the sight of him might well
seem to darken the fair landscape, as when a cloud suddenly blots the sun on a bright day. The
dreamy blue of Italian skies, the dappled shade of summer woods, and the sparkle of waves in the
sun, can have accorded but ill with that stern and sinister figure. Rather we picture to ourselves the
scene as it may have been witnessed by a belated wayfarer on one of those wild autumn nights
when the dead leaves are falling thick, and the winds seem to sing the dirge of the dying year. It is
a sombre picture, set to melancholy music—the background of forest showing black and jagged
against a lowering and stormy sky, the sighing of the wind in the branches, the rustle of the
withered leaves under foot, the lapping of the cold water on the shore, and in the foreground,
pacing to and fro, now in twilight and now in gloom, a dark figure with a glitter of steel at the
shoulder whenever the pale moon, riding clear of the cloud-rack, peers down at him through the
matted boughs.
The strange rule of this priesthood has no parallel in classical antiquity, and cannot be explained
from it. To find an explanation we must go farther afield. No one will probably deny that such a
custom savours of a barbarous age, and, surviving into imperial times, stands out in striking
isolation from the polished Italian society of the day, like a primaeval rock rising from a smoothshaven lawn. It is the very rudeness and barbarity of the custom which allow us a hope of
explaining it. For recent researches into the early history of man have revealed the essential
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2
3
4
similarity with which, under many superficial differences, the human mind has elaborated its first
crude philosophy of life. Accordingly, if we can show that a barbarous custom, like that of the
priesthood of Nemi, has existed elsewhere; if we can detect the motives which led to its institution;
if we can prove that these motives have operated widely, perhaps universally, in human society,
producing in varied circumstances a variety of institutions specifically different but generically
alike; if we can show, lastly, that these very motives, with some of their derivative institutions,
were actually at work in classical antiquity; then we may fairly infer that at a remoter age the same
motives gave birth to the priesthood of Nemi. Such an inference, in default of direct evidence as to
how the priesthood did actually arise, can never amount to demonstration. But it will be more or
less probable according to the degree of completeness with which it fulfils the conditions I have
indicated. The object of this book is, by meeting these conditions, to offer a fairly probable
explanation of the priesthood of Nemi.
I begin by setting forth the few facts and legends which have come down to us on the subject.
According to one story the worship of Diana at Nemi was instituted by Orestes, who, after killing
Thoas, King of the Tauric Chersonese (the Crimea), fled with his sister to Italy, bringing with him
the image of the Tauric Diana hidden in a faggot of sticks. After his death his bones were
transported from Aricia to Rome and buried in front of the temple of Saturn, on the Capitoline
slope, beside the temple of Concord. The bloody ritual which legend ascribed to the Tauric Diana
is familiar to classical readers; it is said that every stranger who landed on the shore was sacrificed
on her altar. But transported to Italy, the rite assumed a milder form. Within the sanctuary at Nemi
grew a certain tree of which no branch might be broken. Only a runaway slave was allowed to
break off, if he could, one of its boughs. Success in the attempt entitled him to fight the priest in
single combat, and if he slew him he reigned in his stead with the title of King of the Wood (Rex
Nemorensis). According to the public opinion of the ancients the fateful branch was that Golden
Bough which, at the Sibyl’s bidding, Aeneas plucked before he essayed the perilous journey to the
world of the dead. The flight of the slave represented, it was said, the flight of Orestes; his combat
with the priest was a reminiscence of the human sacrifices once offered to the Tauric Diana. This
rule of succession by the sword was observed down to imperial times; for amongst his other freaks
Caligula, thinking that the priest of Nemi had held office too long, hired a more stalwart ruffian to
slay him; and a Greek traveller, who visited Italy in the age of the Antonines, remarks that down to
his time the priesthood was still the prize of victory in a single combat.
Of the worship of Diana at Nemi some leading features can still be made out. From the votive
offerings which have been found on the site, it appears that she was conceived of especially as a
huntress, and further as blessing men and women with offspring, and granting expectant mothers
an easy delivery. Again, fire seems to have played a foremost part in her ritual. For during her
annual festival, held on the thirteenth of August, at the hottest time of the year, her grove shone
with a multitude of torches, whose ruddy glare was reflected by the lake; and throughout the length
and breadth of Italy the day was kept with holy rites at every domestic hearth. Bronze statuettes
found in her precinct represent the goddess herself holding a torch in her raised right hand; and
women whose prayers had been heard by her came crowned with wreaths and bearing lighted
torches to the sanctuary in fulfilment of their vows. Some one unknown dedicated a perpetually
burning lamp in a little shrine at Nemi for the safety of the Emperor Claudius and his family. The
terra-cotta lamps which have been discovered in the grove may perhaps have served a like purpose
for humbler persons. If so, the analogy of the custom to the Catholic practice of dedicating holy
candles in churches would be obvious. Further, the title of Vesta borne by Diana at Nemi points
clearly to the maintenance of a perpetual holy fire in her sanctuary. A large circular basement at
the north-east corner of the temple, raised on three steps and bearing traces of a mosaic pavement,
probably supported a round temple of Diana in her character of Vesta, like the round temple of
Vesta in the Roman Forum. Here the sacred fire would seem to have been tended by Vestal
Virgins, for the head of a Vestal in terra-cotta was found on the spot, and the worship of a
perpetual fire, cared for by holy maidens, appears to have been common in Latium from the
earliest to the latest times. Further, at the annual festival of the goddess, hunting dogs were
crowned and wild beasts were not molested; young people went through a purificatory ceremony
in her honour; wine was brought forth, and the feast consisted of a kid cakes served piping hot on
plates of leaves, and apples still hanging in clusters on the boughs.
20
5
6
Appunto 1 relativo a Maria Maddalena che tiene in mano il Graal nella Chiesa di Santa
Maddalena a Roma
[…] it was severely criticized by the Dutch writer Jacob van Maerlant, in 1260. In his
Merlin he denounces the whole Grail history as lies, asserting that the Church knows
nothing of it—which is true.
Nel brano che vi ho riportato dal libro di Jessie Weston, From Ritual to Romance si
afferma che non esiste una tradizione cristiana o legata alla Chiesa del mito del Graal.
Questa affermazione è almeno in parte negata dalla presenza di una statua di Maria
Maddalena (presente nella Chiesa secentesca nota come di Santa Maddalena, in piazza
della Maddalena a Roma) che tiene in mano la coppa del Graal.
(Foto L.U.)
21
Appunto 2 relativo al cerchio di divinità femminili nell’antica Roma nei dintorni del
Pantheon
È stato notato come nell’antica Roma, nei pressi del Pantheon vi fossero un certo
numero di divinità femminili di diversa provenienza: un tempio a Minerva, vari templi a
Iside, successivamente la Chiesa di Santa Maddalena.
Nella Terra desolata, nel primo libro, ci sono una serie di figure femminili di
carattere diverso: esse sono la sibilla, Marie, Madame Sosostris, ma mentre quella zona
dell’antica Roma è ricca di terme e di acque, quelle figure femminili anticipano
l’infertilità e la morte.
22
23
Prof. Lina Unali
Dispensa n. 4
Letteratura americana LLEA
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, III. The Fire Sermon
III. THE FIRE SERMON
The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;
180
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept…
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear 185
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse.
190
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year. 195
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter 200
They wash their feet in soda water
Et, O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!
Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc’d.
205
Tereu
Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C. i. f. London: documents at sight,
210
24
175
21-23 marzo 2013
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a week-end at the Metropole.
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back 215
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
220
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at tea-time, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,
225
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—
I too awaited the expected guest.
230
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house-agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses, 235
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
240
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
245
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronizing kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit…
She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover; 250
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, 255
And puts a record on the gramophone.
“This music crept by me upon the waters”
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City City, I can sometimes hear
25
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.
The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
270
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
275
Past the Isle of Dogs.
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
Elizabeth and Leicester
Beating oars 280
The stern was formed
A gilded shell
Red and gold
The brisk swell
Rippled both shores 285
South-west wind
Carried down stream
The peal of bells
White towers
Weialala leia 290
Wallala leialala
“Trams and dusty trees.
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.“
295
“My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart
Under my feet. After the event
He wept. He promised ‘a new start.’
I made no comment. What should I resent?”
“On Margate Sands. 300
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken finger-nails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.”
305
26
260
265
la la
To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest
310
burning
La posizione di Eliot è antitetica rispetto a quella dei simbolisti che, come Verlaine
pensavano che nell'espressione poetica la propria soggettività costituiva qualcosa di
irrinunciabile e consideravano che i "terrori o orrori nascosti" della personalità, rive-lati
al lettore, potevano sublimarsi in un simbolo universale, comunicabile a tutti. Infatti
Eliot dichiara, nel saggio giovanile Tradition and Individual Talent (1919), in contrasto
con la posizione simbolista:
"Quel che avviene è una continua rinuncia a se stesso, come egli è al presente, per
qualcosa che è più prezioso. Il cammino di un artista è un continuo sacrificio di se
stesso, una continua estinzio-ne della personalità."4
Note di Eliot al III libro della Terra desolata
III. THE FIRE SERMON
176. V. Spenser, Prothalamion.
192. Cf. The Tempest, I, ii.
196. Cf. Day, Parliament of Bees:
“When of the sudden, listening, you shall hear,
“A noise of horns and hunting, which shall bring
“Actaeon to Diana in the spring,
“Where all shall see her naked skin…“
197. Cf. Marvell, To His Coy Mistress.
199. I do not know the origin of the ballad from which these lines are taken; it was reported to
me from Sydney, Australia.
202. V. Verlaine, Parsifal.
210. The currants were quoted at a price “carriage and insurance free to London”; and the Bill
of Lading, etc. were to be handed to the buyer upon payment of the sight draft.
218. Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a “character,” is yet the most important
personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants,
melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of
27
Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias
sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem. The whole passage from Ovid is of great
anthropological interest:
…Cum Iunone iocos et maior vestra profecto est
Quam, quae contingit maribus’, dixisse, ‘voluptas.’
Illa negat; placuit quae sit sententia docti
Quaerere Tiresiae: venus huic erat utraque nota.
Nam duo magnorum viridi coeuntia silva
Corpora serpentum baculi violaverat ictu
Deque viro factus, mirabile, femina septem
Egerat autumnos; octavo rursus eosdem
Vidit et ‘est vestrae si tanta potentia plagae,’
Dixit ‘ut auctoris sortem in contraria mutet,
Nunc quoque vos feriam!’ percussis anguibus isdem
Forma prior rediit genetivaque venit imago.
Arbiter hic igitur sumptus de lite iocosa
Dicta Iovis firmat; gravius Saturnia iusto
Nec pro materia fertur doluisse suique
Iudicis aeterna damnavit lumina nocte,
At pater omnipotens (neque enim licet inrita cuiquam
Facta dei fecisse deo) pro lumine adempto
Scire futura dedit poenamque levavit honore.
221. This may not appear as exact as Sappho’s lines, but I had in mind the “longshore” or
“dory” fisherman, who returns at nightfall.
253. V. Goldsmith, the song in The Vicar of Wakefield.
257. V. The Tempest, as above.
264. The interior of St. Magnus Martyr is to my mind one of the finest among Wren’s interiors.
See The Proposed Demolition of Nineteen City Churches: (P. S. King & Son, Ltd.).
266. The Song of the (three) Thames-daughters begins here. From line 292 to 306 inclusive they
speak in turn. V. Götterdämmerung, III, i: The Rhinedaughters.
279. V. Froude, Elizabeth, Vol. I, ch. iv, letter of De Quadra to Philip of Spain:
“In the afternoon we were in a barge, watching the games on the river. (The queen) was alone
with Lord Robert and myself on the poop, when they began to talk nonsense, and went so far
that Lord Robert at last said, as I was on the spot there was no reason why they should not be
married if the queen pleased.”
293. Cf. Purgatorio, V. 133:
“Ricorditi di me, che son la Pia;
“Siena mi fe’, disfecemi Maremma.”
307. V. St. Augustine’s Confessions: “to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy
loves sang all about mine ears.”
308. The complete text of the Buddha’s Fire Sermon (which corresponds in importance to the
Sermon on the Mount) from which these words are taken, will be found translated in the late
Henry Clarke Warren’s Buddhism in Translation (Harvard Oriental Series). Mr. Warren was
one of the great pioneers of Buddhist studies in the occident.
309. From St. Augustine’s Confessions again. The collocation of these two representatives of
eastern and western asceticism, as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not an accident.
28
Prof. Lina Unali
Dispensa su F. Scott Fitzgerald
6 aprile 2013
Short Stories, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Love in the Night
Saturday Evening Post (14 March 1925)
I
The words thrilled Val. They had come into his mind sometime during the fresh gold April
afternoon and he kept repeating them to himself over and over: “Love in the night; love in the
night.” He tried them in three languages — Russian, French and English — and decided that
they were best in English. In each language they meant a different sort of love and a different
sort of night — the English night seemed the warmest and softest with a thinnest and most
crystalline sprinkling of stars. The English love seemed the most fragile and romantic — a
white dress and a dim face above it and eyes that were pools of light. And when I add that it was
a French night he was thinking about, after all, I see I must go back and begin over.
Val was half Russian and half American. His mother was the daughter of that Morris Hasylton
who helped finance the Chicago World’s Fair in 1892, and his father was — see the Almanach
de Gotha, issue of 1910 — Prince Paul Serge Boris Rostoff, son of Prince Vladimir Rostoff,
grandson of a grand duke — ‘Jimber-jawed Serge’ — and third-cousin-once-removed to the
czar. It was all very impressive, you see, on that side — house in St. Petersburg, shooting lodge
near Riga, and swollen villa, more like a palace, overlooking the Mediterranean. It was at this
villa in Cannes that the Rostoffs passed the winter — and it wasn’t at all the thing to remind
Princess Rostoff that this Riviera villa, from the marble fountain — after Bernini — to the gold
cordial glasses — after dinner — was paid for with American gold.
The Russians, of course, were gay people on the Continent in the gala days before the war. Of
the three races that used Southern France for a pleasure ground they were easily the most adept
at the grand manner. The English were too practical, and the Americans, though they spent
freely, had no tradition of romantic conduct. But the Russians — there was a people as gallant
as the Latins, and rich besides! When the Rostoffs arrived at Cannes late in January the
restaurateurs telegraphed north for the Prince’s favorite labels to paste on their champagne, and
the jewelers put incredibly gorgeous articles aside to show to him — but not to the princess —
and the Russian Church was swept and garnished for the season that the Prince might beg
orthodox forgiveness for his sins. Even the Mediterranean turned obligingly to a deep wine
color in the spring evenings, and fishing boats with robin-breasted sails loitered exquisitely
offshore.
In a vague way young Val realized that this was all for the benefit of him and his family. It was
a privileged paradise, this white little city on the water, in which he was free to do what he liked
because he was rich and young and the blood of Peter the Great ran indigo in his veins. He was
only seventeen in 1914, when this history begins, but he had already fought a duel with a young
29
man four years his senior, and he had a small hairless scar to show for it on top of his handsome
head.
But the question of love in the night was the thing nearest his heart. It was a vague pleasant
dream he had, something that was going to happen to him some day that would be unique and
incomparable. He could have told no more about it than that there was a lovely unknown girl
concerned in it, and that it ought to take place beneath the Riviera moon.
The odd thing about all this was not that he had this excited and yet almost spiritual hope of
romance, for all boys of any imagination have just such hopes, but that it actually came true.
And when it happened, it happened so unexpectedly; it was such a jumble of impressions and
emotions, of curious phrases that sprang to his lips, of sights and sounds and moments that were
here, were lost, were past, that he scarcely understood it at all. Perhaps its very vagueness
preserved it in his heart and made him forever unable to forget.
There was an atmosphere of love all about him that spring — his father’s loves, for instance,
which were many and indiscreet, and which Val became aware of gradually from overhearing
the gossip of servants, and definitely from coming on his American mother unexpectedly one
afternoon, to find her storming hysterically at his father’s picture on the salon wall. In the
picture his father wore a white uniform with a furred dolman and looked back impassively at his
wife as if to say “Were you under the impression, my dear, that you were marrying into a family
of clergymen?”
Val tiptoed away, surprised, confused — and excited. It didn’t shock him as it would have
shocked an American boy of his age. He had known for years what life was among the
Continental rich, and he condemned his father only for making his mother cry.
Love went on around him — reproachless love and illicit love alike. As he strolled along the
seaside promenade at nine o’clock, when the stars were bright enough to compete with the
bright lamps, he was aware of love on every side. From the open-air cafés, vivid with dresses
just down from Paris, came a sweet pungent odor of flowers and chartreuse and fresh black
coffee and cigarettes — and mingled with them all he caught another scent, the mysterious
thrilling scent of love. Hands touched jewel-sparkling hands upon the white tables. Gay dresses
and white shirt fronts swayed together, and matches were held, trembling a little, for slowlighting cigarettes. On the other side of the boulevard lovers less fashionable, young Frenchmen
who worked in the stores of Cannes, sauntered with their fiancées under the dim trees, but Val’s
young eyes seldom turned that way. The luxury of music and bright colors and low voices —
they were all part of his dream. They were the essential trappings of Love in the night.
But assume as he might the rather fierce expression that was expected from a young Russian
gentleman who walked the streets alone, Val was beginning to be unhappy. April twilight had
succeeded March twilight, the season was almost over, and he had found no use to make of the
warm spring evenings. The girls of sixteen and seventeen whom he knew, were chaperoned
with care between dusk and bedtime — this, remember, was before the war — and the others
who might gladly have walked beside him were an affront to his romantic desire. So April
passed by — one week, two weeks, three weeks —
He had played tennis until seven and loitered at the courts for another hour, so it was half-past
eight when a tired cab horse accomplished the hill on which gleamed the façade of the Rostoff
30
villa. The lights of his mother’s limousine were yellow in the drive, and the princess, buttoning
her gloves, was just coming out the glowing door. Val tossed two francs to the cabman and went
to kiss her on the cheek.
“Don’t touch me,” she said quickly. “You’ve been handling money.”
“But not in my mouth, mother,” he protested humorously.
The princess looked at him impatiently.
“I’m angry,” she said. “Why must you be so late tonight? We’re dining on a yacht and you were
to have come along too.”
“What yacht?”
“Americans.” There was always a faint irony in her voice when she mentioned the land of her
nativity. Her America was the Chicago of the nineties which she still thought of as the vast
upstairs to a butcher shop. Even the irregularities of Prince Paul were not too high a price to
have paid for her escape.
“Two yachts,” she continued; “in fact we don’t know which one. The note was very indefinite.
Very careless indeed.”
Americans. Val’s mother had taught him to look down on Americans, but she hadn’t succeeded
in making him dislike them. American men noticed you, even if you were seventeen. He liked
Americans. Although he was thoroughly Russian he wasn’t immaculately so — the exact
proportion, like that of a celebrated soap, was about ninety-nine and three-quarters per cent.
“I want to come,” he said, “I’ll hurry up, mother. I’ll — ”
“We’re late now.” The princess turned as her husband appeared in the door. “Now Val says he
wants to come.”
“He can’t,” said Prince Paul shortly. “He’s too outrageously late.”
Val nodded. Russian aristocrats, however indulgent about themselves, were always admirably
Spartan with their children. There were no arguments.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Prince Paul grunted. The footman, in red and silver livery, opened the limousine door. But the
grunt decided the matter for Val, because Princess Rostoff at that day and hour had certain
grievances against her husband which gave her command of the domestic situation.
“On second thought you’d better come, Val,” she announced coolly. “It’s too late now, but
come after dinner. The yacht is either the Minnehaha or the Privateer.” She got into the
limousine. “The one to come to will be the gayer one, I suppose — the Jacksons’ yacht — ”
31
“Find got sense,” muttered the Prince cryptically, conveying that Val would find it if he had any
sense. “Have my man take a look at you ‘fore you start. Wear tie of mine ‘stead of that
outrageous string you affected in Vienna. Grow up. High time.”
As the limousine crawled crackling down the pebbled drive Val’s face was burning.
II
It was dark in Cannes harbor, rather it seemed dark after the brightness of the promenade that
Val had just left behind. Three frail dock lights glittered dimly upon innumerable fishing boats
heaped like shells along the beach. Farther out in the water there were other lights where a fleet
of slender yachts rode the tide with slow dignity, and farther still a full ripe moon made the
water bosom into a polished dancing floor. Occasionally there was a swish! creak! drip! as a
rowboat moved about in the shallows, and its blurred shape threaded the labyrinth of hobbled
fishing skiffs and launches. Val, descending the velvet slope of sand, stumbled over a sleeping
boatman and caught the rank savor of garlic and plain wine. Taking the man by the shoulders he
shook open his startled eyes.
“Do you know where the Minnehaha is anchored, and the Privateer?”
As they slid out into the bay he lay back in the stern and stared with vague discontent at the
Riviera moon. That was the right moon, all right. Frequently, five nights out of seven, there was
the right moon. And here was the soft air, aching with enchantment, and here was the music,
many strains of music from many orchestras, drifting out from the shore. Eastward lay the dark
Cape of Antibes, and then Nice, and beyond that Monte Carlo, where the night rang chinking
full of gold. Some day he would enjoy all that, too, know its every pleasure and success —
when he was too old and wise to care.
But tonight — tonight, that stream of silver that waved like a wide strand of curly hair toward
the moon; those soft romantic lights of Cannes behind him, the irresistible ineffable love in this
air — that was to be wasted forever.
“Which one?” asked the boatman suddenly.
“Which what?” demanded Val, sitting up.
“Which boat?”
He pointed. Val turned; above hovered the gray, sword-like prow of a yacht. During the
sustained longing of his wish they had covered half a mile.
He read the brass letters over his head. It was the Privateer, but there were only dim lights on
board, and no music and no voices, only a murmurous k-plash at intervals as the small waves
leaped at the sides.
“The other one,” said Val; “the Minnehaha.”
“Don’t go yet.”
32
Val started. The voice, low and soft, had dropped down from the darkness overhead.
“What’s the hurry?” said the soft voice. “Thought maybe somebody was coming to see me, and
have suffered terrible disappointment.”
The boatman lifted his oars and looked hesitatingly at Val. But Val was silent, so the man let the
blades fall into the water and swept the boat out into the moonlight.
“Wait a minute!” cried Val sharply.
“Good-by,” said the voice. “Come again when you can stay longer.”
“But I am going to stay now,” he answered breathlessly.
He gave the necessary order and the rowboat swung back to the foot of the small
companionway. Someone young, someone in a misty white dress, someone with a lovely low
voice, had actually called to him out of the velvet dark. “If she has eyes!” Val murmured to
himself. He liked the romantic sound of it and repeated it under his breath — “If she has eyes.”
“What are you?” She was directly above him now; she was looking down and he was looking
up as he climbed the ladder, and as their eyes met they both began to laugh.
She was very young, slim, almost frail, with a dress that accentuated her youth by its blanched
simplicity. Two wan dark spots on her cheeks marked where the color was by day.
“What are you?” she repeated, moving back and laughing again as his head appeared on the
level of the deck. “I’m frightened now and I want to know.”
“I am a gentleman,” said Val, bowing.
“What sort of a gentleman? There are all sorts of gentlemen. There was a — there was a colored
gentleman at the table next to ours in Paris, and so — ” She broke off. “You’re not American,
are you?”
“I’m Russian,” he said, as he might have announced himself to be an archangel. He thought
quickly and then added, “And I am the most fortunate of Russians. All this day, all this spring I
have dreamed of falling in love on such a night, and now I see that heaven has sent me to you.”
“Just one moment!” she said, with a little gasp. “I’m sure now that this visit is a mistake. I don’t
go in for anything like that. Please!”
“I beg your pardon.” He looked at her in bewilderment, unaware that he had taken too much for
granted. Then he drew himself up formally.
“I have made an error. If you will excuse me I will say good night.”
He turned away. His hand was on the rail.
33
“Don’t go,” she said, pushing a strand of indefinite hair out of her eyes. “On second thoughts
you can talk any nonsense you like if you’ll only not go. I’m miserable and I don’t want to be
left alone.”
Val hesitated; there was some element in this that he failed to understand. He had taken it for
granted that a girl who called to a strange man at night, even from the deck of a yacht, was
certainly in a mood for romance. And he wanted intensely to stay. Then he remembered that this
was one of the two yachts he had been seeking.
“I imagine that the dinner’s on the other boat,” he said.
“The dinner? Oh, yes, it’s on the Minnehaha. Were you going there?”
“I was going there — a long time ago.”
“What’s your name?”
He was on the point of telling her when something made him ask a question instead.
“And you? Why are you not at the party?”
“Because I preferred to stay here. Mrs. Jackson said there would be some Russians there — I
suppose that’s you.” She looked at him with interest. “You’re a very young man, aren’t you?”
“I am much older than I look,” said Val stiffly. “People always comment on it. It’s considered
rather a remarkable thing.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-one,” he lied.
She laughed.
“What nonsense! You’re not more than nineteen.”
His annoyance was so perceptible that she hastened to reassure him. “Cheer up! I’m only
seventeen myself. I might have gone to the party if I’d thought there’d be anyone under fifty
there.”
He welcomed the change of subject.
“You preferred to sit and dream here beneath the moon.”
“I’ve been thinking of mistakes.” They sat down side by side in two canvas deck chairs. “It’s a
most engrossing subject — the subject of mistakes. Women very seldom brood about mistakes
— they’re much more willing to forget than men are. But when they do brood — ”
“You have made a mistake?” inquired Val.
34
She nodded.
“Is it something that cannot be repaired?”
“I think so,” she answered. “I can’t be sure. That’s what I was considering when you came
along.”
“Perhaps I can help in some way,” said Val. “Perhaps your mistake is not irreparable, after all.”
“You can’t,” she said unhappily. “So let’s not think about it. I’m very tired of my mistake and
I’d much rather you’d tell me about all the gay, cheerful things that are going on in Cannes
tonight.”
They glanced shoreward at the line of mysterious and alluring lights, the big toy banks with
candles inside that were really the great fashionable hotels, the lighted clock in the old town, the
blurred glow of the Café de Paris, the pricked-out points of villa windows rising on slow hills
toward the dark sky.
“What is everyone doing there?” she whispered. “It looks as though something gorgeous was
going on, but what it is I can’t quite tell.”
“Everyone there is making love,” said Val quietly.
“Is that it?” She looked for a long time, with a strange expression in her eyes. “Then I want to
go home to America,” she said. “There is too much love here. I want to go home tomorrow.”
“You are afraid of being in love then?”
She shook her head.
“It isn’t that. It’s just because — there is no love here for me.”
“Or for me either,” added Val quietly. “It is sad that we two should be at such a lovely place on
such a lovely night and have — nothing.”
He was leaning toward her intently, with a sort of inspired and chaste romance in his eyes —
and she drew back.
“Tell me more about yourself,” she inquired quickly. “If you are Russian where did you learn to
speak such excellent English?”
“My mother was American,” he admitted. “My grandfather was American also, so she had no
choice in the matter.”
“Then you’re American too!”
“I am Russian,” said Val with dignity.
35
She looked at him closely, smiled and decided not to argue. “Well then,” she said
diplomatically, “I suppose you must have a Russian name.”
But he had no intention now of telling her his name. A name, even the Rostoff name, would be
a desecration of the night. They were their own low voices, their two white faces — and that
was enough. He was sure, without any reason for being sure but with a sort of instinct that sang
triumphantly through his mind, that in a little while, a minute or an hour, he was going to
undergo an initiation into the life of romance. His name had no reality beside what was stirring
in his heart.
“You are beautiful,” he said suddenly.
“How do you know?”
“Because for women moonlight is the hardest light of all.”
“Am I nice in the moonlight?”
“You are the loveliest thing that I have ever known.”
“Oh.” She thought this over. “Of course I had no business to let you come on board. I might
have known what we’d talk about — in this moon. But I can’t sit here and look at the shore —
forever. I’m too young for that. Don’t you think I’m too young for that?”
“Much too young,” he agreed solemnly.
Suddenly they both became aware of new music that was close at hand, music that seemed to
come out of the water not a hundred yards away.
“Listen!” she cried. “It’s from the Minnehaha. They’ve finished dinner.”
For a moment they listened in silence.
“Thank you,” said Val suddenly.
“For what?”
He hardly knew he had spoken. He was thanking the deep low horns for singing in the breeze,
the sea for its warm murmurous complaint against the bow, the milk of the stars for washing
over them until he felt buoyed up in a substance more taut than air.
“So lovely,” she whispered.
“What are we going to do about it?”
“Do we have to do something about it? I thought we could just sit and enjoy — ”
“You didn’t think that,” he interrupted quietly. “You know that we must do something about it.
I am going to make love to you — and you are going to be glad.”
36
“I can’t,” she said very low. She wanted to laugh now, to make some light cool remark that
would bring the situation back into the safe waters of a casual flirtation. But it was too late now.
Val knew that the music had completed what the moon had begun.
“I will tell you the truth,” he said. “You are my first love. I am seventeen — the same age as
you, no more.”
There was something utterly disarming about the fact that they were the same age. It made her
helpless before the fate that had thrown them together. The deck chairs creaked and he was
conscious of a faint illusive perfume as they swayed suddenly and childishly together.
III
Whether he kissed her once or several times he could not afterward remember, though it must
have been an hour that they sat there close together and he held her hand. What surprised him
most about making love was that it seemed to have no element of wild passion — regret, desire,
despair — but a delirious promise of such happiness in the world, in living, as he had never
known. First love — this was only first love! What must love itself in its fullness, its perfection
be. He did not know that what he was experiencing then, that unreal, undesirous medley of
ecstasy and peace, would be unrecapturable forever.
The music had ceased for some time when presently the murmurous silence was broken by the
sound of a rowboat disturbing the quiet waves. She sprang suddenly to her feet and her eyes
strained out over the bay.
“Listen!” she said quickly. “I want you to tell me your name.”
“No.”
“Please,” she begged him. “I’m going away tomorrow.”
He didn’t answer.
“I don’t want you to forget me,” she said. “My name is — ”
“I won’t forget you. I will promise to remember you always. Whoever I may love I will always
compare her to you, my first love. So long as I live you will always have that much freshness in
my heart.”
“I want you to remember,” she murmured brokenly. “Oh, this has meant more to me than it has
to you — much more.”
She was standing so close to him that he felt her warm young breath on his face. Once again
they swayed together. He pressed her hands and wrists between his as it seemed right to do, and
kissed her lips. It was the right kiss, he thought, the romantic kiss — not too little or too much.
Yet there was a sort of promise in it of other kisses he might have had, and it was with a slight
sinking of his heart that he heard the rowboat close to the yacht and realized that her family had
returned. The evening was over.
37
“And this is only the beginning,” he told himself. “All my life will be like this night.”
She was saying something in a low quick voice and he was listening tensely.
“You must know one thing — I am married. Three months ago. That was the mistake that I was
thinking about when the moon brought you out here. In a moment you will understand.”
She broke off as the boat swung against the companionway and a man’s voice floated up out of
the darkness.
“Is that you, my dear?”
“Yes.”
“What is this other rowboat waiting?”
“One of Mrs. Jackson’s guests came here by mistake and I made him stay and amuse me for an
hour.”
A moment later the thin white hair and weary face of a man of sixty appeared above the level of
the deck. And then Val saw and realized too late how much he cared.
IV
When the Riviera season ended in May the Rostoffs and all the other Russians closed their
villas and went north for the summer. The Russian Orthodox Church was locked up and so were
the bins of rarer wine, and the fashionable spring moonlight was put away, so to speak, to wait
for their return.
“We’ll be back next season,” they said as a matter of course.
But this was premature, for they were never coming back any more. Those few who straggled
south again after five tragic years were glad to get work as chambermaids or valets de chambre
in the great hotels where they had once dined. Many of them, of course, were killed in the war
or in the revolution; many of them faded out as spongers and small cheats in the big capitals,
and not a few ended their lives in a sort of stupefied despair.
When the Kerensky government collapsed in 1917, Val was a lieutenant on the eastern front,
trying desperately to enforce authority in his company long after any vestige of it remained. He
was still trying when Prince Paul Rostoff and his wife gave up their lives one rainy morning to
atone for the blunders of the Romanoffs — and the enviable career of Morris Hasylton’s
daughter ended in a city that bore even more resemblance to a butcher shop than had Chicago in
1892.
After that Val fought with Denikin’s army for a while until he realized that he was participating
in a hollow farce and the glory of Imperial Russia was over. Then he went to France and was
suddenly confronted with the astounding problem of keeping his body and soul together.
38
It was, of course, natural that he should think of going to America. Two vague aunts with whom
his mother had quarreled many years ago still lived there in comparative affluence. But the idea
was repugnant to the prejudices his mother had implanted in him, and besides he hadn’t
sufficient money left to pay for his passage over. Until a possible counter-revolution should
restore to him the Rostoff properties in Russia he must somehow keep alive in France.
So he went to the little city he knew best of all. He went to Cannes. His last two hundred francs
bought him a third-class ticket and when he arrived he gave his dress suit to an obliging party
who dealt in such things and received in return money for food and bed. He was sorry afterward
that he had sold the dress suit, because it might have helped him to a position as a waiter. But he
obtained work as a taxi driver instead and was quite as happy, or rather quite as miserable, at
that.
Sometimes he carried Americans to look at villas for rent, and when the front glass of the
automobile was up, curious fragments of conversation drifted out to him from within.
“ — heard this fellow was a Russian prince.” . . . “Sh!” . . . “No, this one right here.” . . . “Be
quiet, Esther!" — followed by subdued laughter.
When the car stopped, his passengers would edge around to have a look at him. At first he was
desperately unhappy when girls did this; after a while he didn’t mind any more. Once a
cheerfully intoxicated American asked him if it were true and invited him to lunch, and another
time an elderly woman seized his hand as she got out of the taxi, shook it violently and then
pressed a hundred-franc note into his hand.
“Well, Florence, now I can tell ’em back home I shook hands with a Russian prince.”
The inebriated American who had invited him to lunch thought at first that Val was a son of the
czar, and it had to be explained to him that a prince in Russia was simply the equivalent of a
British courtesy lord. But he was puzzled that a man of Val’s personality didn’t go out and
make some real money.
“This is Europe,” said Val gravely. “Here money is not made. It is inherited or else it is slowly
saved over a period of many years and maybe in three generations a family moves up into a
higher class.”
“Think of something people want — like we do.”
“That is because there is more money to want with in America. Everything that people want
here has been thought of long ago.”
But after a year and with the help of a young Englishman he had played tennis with before the
war, Val managed to get into the Cannes branch of an English bank. He forwarded mail and
bought railroad tickets and arranged tours for impatient sight-seers. Sometimes a familiar face
came to his window; if Val was recognized he shook hands; if not he kept silence. After two
years he was no longer pointed out as a former prince, for the Russians were an old story now
— the splendor of the Rostoffs and their friends was forgotten.
39
He mixed with people very little. In the evenings he walked for a while on the promenade, took
a slow glass of beer in a café, and went early to bed. He was seldom invited anywhere because
people thought that his sad, intent face was depressing — and he never accepted anyhow. He
wore cheap French clothes now instead of the rich tweeds and flannels that had been ordered
with his father’s from England. As for women, he knew none at all. Of the many things he had
been certain about at seventeen, he had been most certain about this — that his life would be
full of romance. Now after eight years he knew that it was not to be. Somehow he had never had
time for love — the war, the revolution and now his poverty had conspired against his expectant
heart. The springs of his emotion which had first poured forth one April night had dried up
immediately and only a faint trickle remained.
His happy youth had ended almost before it began. He saw himself growing older and more
shabby, and living always more and more in the memories of his gorgeous boyhood. Eventually
he would become absurd, pulling out an old heirloom of a watch and showing it to amused
young fellow clerks who would listen with winks to his tales of the Rostoff name.
He was thinking these gloomy thoughts one April evening in 1922 as he walked beside the sea
and watched the never-changing magic of the awakening lights. It was no longer for his benefit,
that magic, but it went on, and he was somehow glad. Tomorrow he was going away on his
vacation, to a cheap hotel farther down the shore where he could bathe and rest and read; then
he would come back and work some more. Every year for three years he had taken his vacation
during the last two weeks in April, perhaps because it was then that he felt the most need for
remembering. It was in April that what was destined to be the best part of his life had come to a
culmination under a romantic moonlight. It was sacred to him — for what he had thought of as
an initiation and a beginning had turned out to be the end.
He paused now in front of the Café des Étrangers and after a moment crossed the street on
impulse and sauntered down to the shore. A dozen yachts, already turned to a beautiful silver
color, rode at anchor in the bay. He had seen them that afternoon, and read the names painted on
their bows — but only from habit. He had done it for three years now, and it was almost a
natural function of his eye.
“Un beau soir,” remarked a French voice at his elbow. It was a boatman who had often seen
Val here before. “Monsieur finds the sea beautiful?”
“Very beautiful.”
“I too. But a bad living except in the season. Next week, though, I earn something special. I am
paid well for simply waiting here and doing nothing more from eight o’clock until midnight.”
“That’s very nice,” said Val politely.
“A widowed lady, very beautiful, from America, whose yacht always anchors in the harbor for
the last two weeks in April. If the Privateer comes tomorrow it will make three years.”
V
All night Val didn’t sleep — not because there was any question in his mind as to what he
should do, but because his long stupefied emotions were suddenly awake and alive. Of course
40
he must not see her — not he, a poor failure with a name that was now only a shadow — but it
would make him a little happier always to know that she remembered. It gave his own memory
another dimension, raised it like those stereopticon glasses that bring out a picture from the flat
paper. It made him sure that he had not deceived himself — he had been charming once upon a
time to a lovely woman, and she did not forget.
An hour before train time next day he was at the railway station with his grip, so as to avoid any
chance encounter in the street. He found himself a place in a third-class carriage of the waiting
train.
Somehow as he sat there he felt differently about life — a sort of hope, faint and illusory, that
he hadn’t felt twenty-four hours before. Perhaps there was some way in those next few years in
which he could make it possible to meet her once again — if he worked hard, threw himself
passionately into whatever was at hand. He knew of at least two Russians in Cannes who had
started over again with nothing except good manners and ingenuity and were now doing
surprisingly well. The blood of Morris Hasylton began to throb a little in Val’s temples and
made him remember something he had never before cared to remember — that Morris
Hasylton, who had built his daughter a palace in St. Petersburg, had also started from nothing at
all.
Simultaneously another emotion possessed him, less strange, less dynamic but equally
American — the emotion of curiosity. In case he did — well, in case life should ever make it
possible for him to seek her out, he should at least know her name.
He jumped to his feet, fumbled excitedly at the carriage handle and jumped from the train.
Tossing his valise into the check room he started at a run for the American consulate.
“A yacht came in this morning,” he said hurriedly to a clerk, “an American yacht — the
Privateer. I want to know who owns it.”
“Just a minute,” said the clerk, looking at him oddly. “I’ll try to find out.”
After what seemed to Val an interminable time he returned.
“Why, just a minute,” he repeated hesitantly. “We’re — it seems we’re finding out.”
“Did the yacht come?”
“Oh, yes — it’s here all right. At least I think so. If you’ll just wait in that chair.”
After another ten minutes Val looked impatiently at his watch. If they didn’t hurry he’d
probably miss his train. He made a nervous movement as if to get up from his chair.
“Please sit still,” said the clerk, glancing at him quickly from his desk. “I ask you. Just sit down
in that chair.”
Val stared at him. How could it possibly matter to the clerk whether or not he waited?
“I’ll miss my train,” he said impatiently. “I’m sorry to have given you all this bother”
41
“Please sit still! We’re glad to get it off our hands. You see, we’ve been waiting for your inquiry
for — ah — three years.”
Val jumped to his feet and jammed his hat on his head.
“Why didn’t you tell me that?” he demanded angrily.
“Because we had to get word to our — our client. Please don’t go! It’s — ah, it’s too late.”
Val turned. Someone slim and radiant with dark frightened eyes was standing behind him,
framed against the sunshine of the doorway.
“Why — ”
Val’s lips parted, but no words came through. She took a step toward him.
“I— ” She looked at him helplessly, her eyes filling with tears. “I just wanted to say hello,” she
murmured. “I’ve come back for three years just because I wanted to say hello.”
Still Val was silent.
“You might answer,” she said impatiently. “You might answer when I’d — when I’d just about
begun to think you’d been killed in the war.” She turned to the clerk. “Please introduce us!” she
cried. “You see, I can’t say hello to him when we don’t even know each other’s names.”
It’s the thing to distrust these international marriages, of course. It’s an American tradition that
they always turn out badly, and we are accustomed to such headlines as: “Would Trade Coronet
for True American Love, Says Duchess,” and “Claims Count Mendicant Tortured Toledo
Wife.” The other sort of headlines are never printed, for who would want to read: “Castle is
Love Nest, Asserts Former Georgia Belle,” or “Duke and Packer’s Daughter Celebrate Golden
Honeymoon.”
So far there have been no headlines at all about the young Rostoffs. Prince Val is much too
absorbed in that string of moonlight-blue taxicabs which he manipulates with such unusual
efficiency, to give out interviews. He and his wife only leave New York once a year — but there
is still a boatman who rejoices when the Privateer steams into Cannes harbor on a mid-April
night.
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fitzgerald/f_scott/short/chapter8.html
42
Lina Unali, presentazione di
“Love in the Night”, racconto breve di Francis Scott Fitzgerald pubblicato nel 1925 sul
Saturday Evening Post
La narrazione è ambientata sulla Costa Azzurra e precisamente a Cannes.
I primi paragrafi riportano alla mente la Terra desolata di T.S. Eliot per la menzione
che vi si fa dell’Aprile, ma il valore simbolico attribuito al mese torna temporaneamente
a essere quello che è tradizionalmente: mese di rinascita e di amore. Sembrerebbe
comunque che nella mente del narratore vi sia, anche se in modo vago, il ricordo della
poesia di Eliot e la negativa visione della realtà sociale e umana che essa contiene.
Il narratore presenta la Costa Azzurra come un luogo di delizie che si riveleranno
fittizie, in cui viene posta in rilievo la presenza della nobiltà russa in vacanza che
conduce una vita spensierata tra feste e lussi di vario genere. Ancora una volta viene in
mente la prima strofa della Terra desolata per la menzione che vi si fa del termine
arciduca (in staying at the Archduke’s my uncle).
In particolare il narratore presenta il personaggio di un giovane di nome Val di cui
apprenderemo che ha solo 17 anni, figlio di padre russo e di madre americana. L’umore
del ragazzo è completamente teso verso la realizzazione di un sentimento d’amore, che
non ha mai vissuto e che desidera ardentemente realizzare. Le parole Love in the night
fluttuano nell’aria e Val si rende conto che love significa cose diverse a seconda che la
parola sia pronunciata in francese e in inglese. Egli dice di preferire l’amore così come
la parola viene usata in inglese. Il tema internazionale viene così annunciato
linguisticamente e si direbbe semanticamente tramite un sistema di opposizioni che sarà
presente in tutta la narrazione.
Dalla madre, il cui rapporto col padre non sembra molto felice, Val apprende che i
genitori stanno andando a una festa in una delle barche ormeggiata nel porto. Non
riuscendo ad accompagnare i genitori si reca da solo nella zona dove presumibilmente si
terrà la festa. In uno scambio tra madre e figlio apprendiamo il motivo dell’abbandono
di lei dell’America dove è nata:
“What yacht?”
“Americans.” There was always a faint irony in her voice when
she mentioned the land of her nativity. Her America was the
Chicago of the nineties which she still thought of as the vast
upstairs to a butcher shop. Even the irregularities of Prince Paul
were not too high a price to have paid for her escape”.
Si noti l’uso del termine escape che potrebbe applicarsi a tutta una
generazione di espatriati e al motivo dell’espatrio.
43
Lei ha pagato un alto prezzo per lasciare una terra diventata materialista e volgare,
condizione questa che si potrebbe dedurre dalla descrizione della Chicago degli anni
novanta che viene qui fatta.
Da una delle imbarcazioni una voce femminile lo chiama e lo invita a salire, ma
questa non è la barca della festa, perché è completamente silenziosa. La ragazza, si
verrà a sapere, ha anche lei 17 anni e i due cominciano ad amoreggiare. Alla fine lei gli
dice che l’indomani deve tornare in America e poi aggiunge che è già sposata. La figura
di un uomo anziano compare al suo fianco. Da questo punto in particolare si entra in
atmosfera di infelicità e frustrazione. D’altra parte, i villeggianti russi stanno per
chiudere le loro ville perché la stagione è finita, stanno per tornare in patria con l’idea di
fare ritorno alla Costa Azzurra l’anno successivo. Ma questo non accadrà più. Lo
scoppio della guerra e l’inizio della rivoluzione russa faranno si che i nobili e i ricchi
russi non torneranno più in Riviera e se torneranno, lo faranno solo per fare i servitori
nei lussuosi alberghi da loro un tempo abitati.
Con questo si chiude la prima sezione del racconto.
Così sarà per tutti i suoi connazionali e così è anche per Val. Ma per lui, in
particolare, ci sarà un riscatto, anche se in forma molto più prosaica, nell’invito che la
ragazza gli farà ad andare con lei in America, assicurandogli così una parte del
benessere perduto.
Accade che Val si arruola, i suoi genitori vengono ammazzati (per riscattare gli errori
dei Romanoff, come viene spiegato) e, povero in canna, decide di tornare nell’unico
luogo dove era stato felice e fortunato. A Cannes qualcuno credeva addirittura che lui
fosse figlio dello Zar perché così veniva spiegato il suo titolo di principe. Nella città
francese è costretto dapprima a vendere la sua uniforme per avere un po’ di denaro, poi
fa l’autista e porta i ricchi americani a visitare le ville da affittare. In seguito riuscirà a
trovare un posto in banca.
Tutto il racconto si muove sulla doppia polarità tra l’America e la Russia, ma è
sempre l’America a fornire il proprio sostegno economico all’altra nazione (così fu
anche prima della Rivoluzione).
Poi Val viene a sapere che la nave Privateer, di proprietà della ragazza americana,
ogni aprile ormeggia a Cannes. C’è qualcuno che l’aspetta sul molo. Egli viene inoltre a
sapere al Consolato che lo stanno cercando. La storia finisce con il viaggio in America
di Val, rampollo della nobiltà russa, ma di madre americana.
L’amore originario tra lui e la sua coetanea è in qualche modo preservato. E il
giovane ormai diventato povero riesce a superare la condizione di decadenza e di morte
a cui tutta la nobiltà russa è stata condannata dalla Storia.
Che un particolare significato venisse attribuito al mese di aprile è dimostrato dal
fatto che anche gli ultimi eventi narrati avvengano in Aprile. È questo il mese dell’anno
in cui la nave americana con a bordo l’innamorata di Val ormeggerà sulla costa di
Cannes sempre risuscitando il loro amore. Aprile è il mese dell’anno in cui la terra
rinasce.
Si ripete il concetto espresso da chi scrive, anche oralmente, che non è possibile che
Fitzgerald non abbia tenuto presente la parte iniziale e il significato della Terra desolata
44
di Eliot. Anche la decadenza della nobiltà russa fa parte di quella atmosfera che Oswald
Spengler aveva descritto negli stessi anni nel suo celebre volume Der Untergang des
Abendlandes (Il tramonto dell’Occidente) pubblicato per la prima volta a Vienna nel
1918.
45
Lina Unali, Mente e misura. La poesia di William Carlos Williams, Edizioni di Storia e
Letteratura, Roma, 1970
“Introduzione”, pp. 11-48
46
INTRODUZIONE
Nel periodo in cui Williams sviluppò la propria
disposizione poetica, e cioè nella prima decade di questo
secolo, Whitman appare certamente come l'unico poeta
della tradizione americana a cui ci si possa riferire per
spiegare la formulazione di nuovi canoni compositivi.
L'esperienza di Poe ritornerà in America attraverso il filtro
della poesia francese, e quindi non si può dire che egli abbia
esercitato un'influenza diretta. La Dickinson fu, come si sa,
scoperta molto tardi e la sua opera servì semmai a
confermare direzioni che erano state già fruttuosamente
seguite. Whitman significò per l'avanguardia principalmente
verso libero. Sentito consono alle nuove esigenze, le
possibilità che esso offriva per la creazione di una nuova
poesia, furono uno degli argomenti centrali di discussione.
Anche se dopo molti anni, Williams prospetterà una
soluzione esponendo il proprio concetto di misura di cui si
parlerà più avanti. Qui diremo soltanto che esso risolse il
problema della libertà del verso, proponendo un verso non
libero, ma misurato liberamente. Non si trattò
semplicemente di una sfumatura, come i risultati concreti
della teoria hanno già dimostrato e forse ancora
dimostreranno.
Il concetto di misura, anche se elaborato in polemica
con il free verse di Whitman va però visto come una sua
derivazione. Il motivo di tale polemica può essere
sintetizzato da queste parole che Williams scrisse quando
ormai la sua opera poetica era pressoché compiuta:
He didn’t have the training to construct his versus after
a conscious mold which would have given him power over
47
them to turn them this way, then that, at will. He only knew how
to give them birth and to release them to go their own way1.
Questo brano ricorda, a quasi mezzo secolo di distanza,
verso quale fine tendessero tanti artisti di maggiore o
minore talento, forse per la prima volta nella storia delle
lettere americane legati insieme da una comune
appassionante ricerca: la creazione di un verso nuovo
(persino prima che in esso venissero convogliati nuovi
contenuti) che non obbedisse a vecchi canoni metri, e che,
d’altra parte, al contrario del verso di Whitman, dimostrasse
d’essere sotto un più diligente controllo lessicale, metrico e
ritmico da parte dell’artista. Lo spirito polemico che animò i
poeti della generazione di Williams mise così in discussione
il valore della poesia che aveva aperto la strada, attraverso
la frattura col verso tradizionale, ad ogni successivo
esperimento stilistico. Se da un lato si cercò di mantenere la
naturalezza e libertà proprie del verso di Whitman,
dall’altro i numerosi esperimenti metrici a cui molti poeti si
accinsero, fornirono nuovi strumenti di misurazione del
verso, mezzi inconsueti di fusione armonica tra diverse
unità ritmiche e una più profonda nozione dei caratteri
distintivi della lingua parlata (ad es. frequenza delle pause).
Si deve anche notare che rispetto alla poesia di Whitman,
la nuova apparirà come compressa. La nostra terminologia
deriva da quella di Marianne Moore (si legga la poesia
intitolata «To a Snail» dei Collected Poems), ma
può essere più facilmente illustrata riferendoci a quel
che Pound scrive in The ABC of Reading:
I begin with poetry because it is the most concentrated
form of verbal expression. Basil Bunting, fumbling about
with a German-Italian dictionary found that this idea of
poetry as concentration is as old as the German language
1
W.C. WILLIAMS, Leaves of Grass. One Hundred Years After, Oxford
1955, p. 23.
48
…………………………..
«Dichtung» meaning poetry, and the lexicographer has rendered
it by the Italian verb meaning ‘to condense’2.
Parlando di compressione come termine opposto a
dilatazione, non ci riferiamo più soltanto alla struttura
metrica, ma anche alla selezione dei materiali che la nuova
poesia sentiva di dover attuare in modo più rigoroso di
quanto non avesse fatto Whitman. Diversamente da questo,
più incline ad accogliere che a selezionare e condensare,
ci si orientò verso una composizione compressa, attraverso
il taglio del materiale superfluo, compatta e organica.
Fu l’esperienza europea di Pound a decidere l’indirizzo
che la poesia doveva seguire. Egli era stato, infatti, è
curioso notarlo, l’entusiasta portavoce di una rivoluzione
prima ancora di divenire consapevole della strada che
questa avrebbe imboccato:
Ezra Pound’s introduction to the Eiffel Tower group was
characteristically dramatic. Dressed like the hero of an Italian
Grand Opera, with his canopy beard waving, he read aloud his
poem ‘Sestina’ standing on a table... Pound could
hardly have known that this kind of flamboyant behaviour
was unlikely to impress a group of poets dedicated to restraint
and decorum. He soon learnt however to restrain his rethoric and
under Hulme’s influence, began to experiment with haiku and
short lyrics and altogether to adopt a more modest poetic tone. He
began to talk less about ‘beauty’ and ‘ecstasy’ and more about
‘precision’ and ‘directness’3.
La poetica imagista, in gran parte il risultato di questi
incontri, tenderà a frenare una tendenza alla dilatazione
che ci sembra fosse l’unica via aperta ai poeti americani
dopo Whitman.
Ma per avere un quadro meno parziale della posizione
di Williams e dei contemporanei nei riguardi di Whitman,
non dobbiamo dimenticare che il poeta si prestava, forse
2
E. POUND, The ABC of Reading, Londra 1951, p. 36.
Cfr. The Diction of American Poetry, a cura di J. R. BROWN e B.
HARRIS, Londra 1965, p. 121.
3
49
più di ogni altra figura nella tradizione delle lettere
americane, a divenire il simbolo di una rivolta contro
schemi e strutture retrive, sia nella società americana che
nella letteratura. Cyril Connolly scrive in The Modem
Movement:
The Modern Movement began as a revolt against the
bourgeois in France, the Victorians in England, the puritanism
and materialism of America4.
Se la nuova poesia nacque dalle regole di una poetica che
la allontanavano da Whitman, pure gli fu molto vicina nello
spirito. Si può dire anzi che in suo nome aprì la lotta contro
molti falsi valori della società contemporanea che possono
essere definiti con una frase del White Mule di Williams:
«It’s because everybody wants to beat the next one …
That’s the American way. Unless you have more than
anybody else you have to feel ashamed of yourself »5.
Le obiezioni alla linea Whitman non coinvolsero dunque
la personalità del poeta, e ciò di cui essa si era fatta
portavoce, ma il suo stile, la sua scelta ed organizzazione
del materiale, l’uso del metro, e (lo si vedrà meglio in
seguito) i limiti stessi che l’arte doveva porsi
nell’esplorazione della realtà.
Parlando di nuova misurazione del verso e vedendo nella
compressione uno degli elementi caratteristici della nuova
poesia non abbiamo indagato sul perché di una simile
scelta stilistica ed abbiamo invece soltanto guardato ai
risultati. Essi vanno spiegati riferendoci più che ad Ezra
Pound ad uno dei più importanti teorici d’arte del periodo,
T.E. Hulme. L’influenza di T.E. Hulme su Ezra Pound
è stata più volte riconosciuta e studiata6. Vogliamo qui
4
Londra 1965, p. 1.
White Mule 1937, Bristol 1965, p. 131.
6
Cfr. ad esempio, S.K. COFFMAN Jr, imagism (University
of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1951, p. 143): «Pound knew Hulme’s
ideas enough to have introduced them into his own doctrine».
Sui rapporti personali tra Pound e Hulme il Coffman riferisce
5
50
giungere a comprendere, attraverso una lettura dell’opera
postuma di Hulme, raccolta sotto il titolo di Speculations,
l’antecedente teorico della poetica imagista. E la ragione
principale del nostro risalire a Hulme è che Pound dà
raramente ragione delle sue scelte, teso com’è verso
l’attuazione pratica di un programma.
Speculations è principalmente un’indagine sul carattere
della sensibilità moderna e sui nuovi orientamenti in campo
filosofico e artistico che il filosofo vede in sviluppo
nel proprio tempo. Analizzandoli egli si mostra convinto
che interpretino profonde esigenze della realtà
contemporanea, e come tali vadano compresi e seguiti. Uno
dei punti centrali dell’opera e forse il più ricco di
conseguenze, analizza i concetti antitetici di romanticismo e
classicismo:
They had been taught by Rousseau that man was by nature
good, that it was only bad laws and customs that had
suppressed him. Remove all these and the infinite possibilities of
man would have a chance. Here is the root of all romanticism:
that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities;
and if you can rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive
order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get
Progress.
One can define the classical as quite clearly the opposite
to this. Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal
whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition
and organization that anything can be got out of him7.
Incline a risolvere anche il problema della conoscenza
alla luce della visione classica, Hulme afferma che la realtà
non può essere conosciuta che parzialmente, per settori
limitati e circoscritti, con la mente diretta all’apprensione
dell’oggetto e del fatto particolare. Bandisce così ogni
(in nota, p. 144) un commento di Jacob Epstein: «Someone
asked Hulme how long he would tolerate Ezra Pound, and Hulme
thought for a moment, then said that he knew already exactly when he
would have to kick him downstairs». Su Pound pesò spesso l’accusa di
essersi appropriato delle idee di Hulme senza averlo debitamente
riconosciuto.
7
Speculations, pubblicato per la prima volta nel 1924, Londra 1960, p.
116.
51
aspirazione alla conoscenza totale della realtà,
considerandola vuota di contenuto, o impossibile.
Spostando poi la sua attenzione al campo dell’arte, egli
contrappone al poeta romantico, felice nell’infinito, la cui
posizione di fronte al mondo sembra cristallizzarsi
nell’immagine del volo («flying over abysses, flying up into
the eternal gases. The world infinite in every other line»)8, il
poeta classico che ha sempre presente l’ambito conoscitivo
e intellettuale entro cui deve muoversi:
The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit
of man. He remembers that he is always mixed up with
earth. He may jump but he always returns back; he never
flies away into the circumambient gas9.
Il predominio esercitato nell’Ottocento da una letteratura
fondata su una visione romantica dell’uomo, starebbe,
secondo Huhne, cedendo il passo ad un nuovo
classicismo10, uno dei cui segni premonitori è la preferenza
per un certo tipo di vocaboli volti a cogliere i tratti
essenziali degli oggetti che vengono presi in esame e
descritti, stringendo così al massimo lo sfumato:
The change of attitude betrays itself by changes in the
epithets that a man uses, perhaps disjointedly, to express his
admiration for the work he admires. Instead of epithets like
graceful, beautiful, etc., you get epithets like austere, mechanical,
clear-cut and bare, used to express admiration11 .
I risultati di un’analisi storica divennero prescrittivi per
il presente: per Hulme, non solo la realtà era ad un certo
modo, ma doveva esserlo. Nel suo pensiero trovarono il
loro fondamento ideologico gran parte delle proposizioni
della nuova poetica. L’esigenza di compattezza come
metodo compositivo, la ricerca di una misura, contro il
8
Op. cit., p. 120.
Ibidem.
10
Cfr. l’interessante esposizione del pensiero di T. E. Hulme in
RUGGERO BIANCHI, La poetica dell’imagismo, Milano 1965, in
particolare pp. 47-52.
11
Speculations, cit., pp. 95-6.
9
52
«verso libero» di Whitman, la teoria dell’aderenza
all’oggetto del primo principio dell’imagismo, il rifiuto di
ogni elemento superfluo nella descrizione dell’oggetto 12,
si collegano all’idea del poeta classico, quale il filosofo
inglese l’aveva definito e proposto.
L’analisi di Hulme sulla differenza tra poeta classico e
poeta romantico, per quanto in parte insoddisfacente, per
il suo essere forse troppo generale e schematica, diventò
operante nella poesia americana. Notiamo, ad esempio, che
Pound, nelle poesie della raccolta A Lume Spento13, scritte
prima dell’incontro con il filosofo, usava con una certa
frequenza proprio quelle immagini che Hulme riteneva
proprie del poeta romantico. Si legga in «Anima sola», «I
fly on the wings of an unknown chord»; oppure in
«Cino», «I will sing of the white birds / In the blue waters
of heaven». Altri passi si trovano in «Aegupton», «in
Tempore Senectutis», «That Pass Between the False Dawn
and the True».
In «What are Years»14 di Marianne Moore, ci sembra,
invece, che la poetessa abbia voluto creare, usando
proprio l’immagine del volo, la materializzazione poetica
di quella visione classica che Hulme aveva proposto. La
conoscenza dei limiti è espressa diversamente da «accedes
to mortality», «continuing», «behave», «captive»:
He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment, rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
12
Il secondo dei tre principi formulati da Pound in «A
Retrospect» ripubblicato in Literary Essays (New York 1954, p. 3) è:
«To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the
presentation».
13
Il volume venne pubblicato per la prima volta a Venezia nel 1908, da
A. Antonini in un’edizione di 100 copie. Fu ristampato con il titolo A
Lume Spento and Other Earlier Poems, Londra 1965.
14
Collected Poems, New York 1961.
53
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering finds its continuing.
So he who strongly feels behaves.
Questa poesia fu scritta molti anni dopo la prima fortuna
dell’imagismo in America ed è perciò ancora più importante
constatare come l’esperienza intellettuale che ne era il
presupposto sia rimasta un abito mentale e una fede.
Riesce più facile ora indicare un altro elemento di
avversione nei riguardi di Whitman. Lo si poté a ragione
considerare, vedendo la sua poesia nel complesso, quasi il
prototipo del poeta romantico in senso hulmiano. Il «Myself
I sing» era capace di accogliere ogni cosa e abbracciare
l’universo:
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your
[self.
………………………….
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none
[shall be less familiar than the rest.
………………………….
And limitles are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them
………………………….
I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents,
I am afoot with my vision15.
Nella quarta strofa di «Salut au Monde!»
What do you see Walt Whitman?
Who are they you salute, and that one after
another salute you?
I see a great round wander rolling through space,
I see diminite farms, hamlets, ravins,
graveyards, jails, factories, palaces, hovels,
huts of barbarians, tents of nomads upon the surface
………………………….
15
W. WHITMAN, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, Cambridge,
Mass. 1959; cfr. strofe nn. 2-3-5-33 di «Song of Myself».
54
I see plenteous waters
………………………….
I behold the mariners of the world
………………………….
My spirit has passed in compassion and determination
upon the whole earth16.
È proprio il desiderio di fusione con la totalità uno dei
punti centrali dell’analisi che D.H. Lawrence fa della
poesia di Whitman, nel suo Studies of Classical American
Literature:
This awful Whitman. This post mortem poet. This poet
with the private soul leaking out of him all the time. All
his privacy leaking out in a sort of dribble, oozing into the
universe.
Walt becomes in this own person the whole World, the whole
universe, the whole eternity of time17.
Whitman aveva scritto nella prefazione a Leaves of
Grass del 1855, usando la parola «details», tanto utile
per indicare i contenuti principali della nuova poetica, in
senso tutt’altro che favorevole:
Here at last is something that corresponds with the broadcast
doings of day and night. Here is not merely a nation but a
teeming nation of nations.
Here is action untied from strings and details, magnificently
moving in vast masses.
L’espansione e la dilatazione dell’opera di Whitman
sembrano modellate sull’ampiezza della natura e del
mondo: i lunghi elenchi sono una continua appassionata
apertura di orizzonti. Le dottrine di Hulme fecero sentire
l’esigenza di muoversi in una direzione contraria a quella
seguita dal poeta americano, quasi per liberarsi dal peso
della sua immaginazione sovrabbondante. Ciò aiuta a capire
meglio l’ostilità per il suo stile, sempre adatto a seguire da
16
17
Ibidem, pp. 101, 102, 107.
New York 1951, p. 178.
55
vicino i moti espansivi di quella personalità poetica e di
quella visione.
Si è già più volte parlato di un’altra esperienza
intellettuale che fu molto fruttuosa nella poesia americana:
la più approfondita conoscenza della letteratura cinese e
giapponese che risale ai primi anni del secolo. Vogliamo
accennarne subito dopo aver parlato dell’importanza del
pensiero di Hulme perché le due influenze si intersecano in
maniera chiarissima e anzi appaiono spesso come
dipendenti una dall’altra. Da noi il Bianchi ricorda
nell’introduzione a La Parola e L’immagine che «Negli
anni in cui Pound scopriva l’arte dell’Estremo Oriente e
maturava la poetica dell’ideogramma che sta alla base dei
Cantos, il Fenollosa lavorava con alacrità a quella preziosa
ars poetica che è The Chinese Written Character as a
Medium for Poetry; e la “Poetry Review” ospitava nelle sue
pagine alcuni saggi del Prof. T. G. Komai sulla poesia
giapponese … offrendo tra l’altro precise ed esaurienti
informazioni su tanka e haikai, ai quali anche il cenacolo
hulmiano aveva dedicato la propria attenzione»18. A
proposito del Fenollosa è interessante quanto scrive Nemi
D’Agostino in Ezra Pound: «Fenollosa aveva affermato che
i giovani poeti inglesi avrebbero potuto trovare, nel
linguaggio ideogrammico cinese o giapponese, una miniera
di suggerimenti per l’invenzione di un nuovo stile poetico.
Per le sue qualità di concretezza (l’ideogramma è fondato
sulla grafia stilizzata di oggetti concreti) e di plurivalenza,
di magica ambiguità, l’ideogramma per il Fenollosa era lo
strumento ideale dell’espressione poetica...»19.
Un’osservazione di F. I. Carpenter contenuta in Emerson
and Asia ci offre un’altra possibilità di paragonare la
sensibilità dell’Ottocento, questa volta nella persona di
Emerson, alle nuove tendenze letterarie rappresentate da
Pound. L’interesse per le letterature orientali prese in
18
NEMI D’AGOSTINO, Ezra Pound, Milano 1968, pp. 14-5.
RUGGERO BIANCHI, La Parola e L’immagine, Roma 1960, pp.
142-43.
19
56
Pound direzioni diverse che in Emerson. Il Carpenter nota
che il confucianesimo ed il buddismo furono gli unici
due sistemi orientali verso cui Emerson non provò simpatia:
«Buddhism epitomized for him the quietism of the
East and its passiveness. Chinese literature epitomized its
formalism and its lack of the progressive element . . . He
always shied away from the merely practical quality of the
Confucian precepts feeling a lack of religious enthusiasm
in them»20. I motivi della rispettiva attrazione e rifiuto
da parte di Pound e di Emerson, possono essere ancora una
volta, come nel caso di Whitman, chiariti in termini
hulmiani: da una parte vi è il bisogno di una visione
oggettiva del reale alla base della creazione poetica, che
trova soddisfazione nella concretezza propria della poesia
cinese e giapponese, dall’altra uno slancio di tipo
romantico, sempre volto al superamento del dato obiettivo.
Se Hulme aveva creato la base intellettuale su cui poteva
fiorire la nuova poesia, la letteratura orientale favorì
soprattutto possibilità di rinnovamento nel campo della
composizione poetica, in piena corrispondenza con i
principi hulmiani. In The Influence of the Japanese Poetry
on British and American Letters il Miner vede nella
concisione21 uno dei risultati principali di quell’influenza.
Come si sa il metro più comune — l’haiku (o haikai) — è
composto da una stanza triadica di 7.5.7 sillabe22. Essa
20
F. I. CARPENTER, Emerson and Asia, Cambridge, Mass, 1930, pp.
234-5.
21
In The Japanese Tradition in British and American Letters,
p. 101, E. MINER nota: «Flint’s calling haiku by the alternative name
haikai, which was exclusively used by the French shows that the group
had problably discovered Japanese poetry from the French and in
French translations…».
22
Il MINER, op. cit., p. 115 scrive: «haiku are written in three “lines”
(usually not separated as such, when written by the Japanese) of five,
seven and five syllables, and frequently are divided by a ‘cutting word’
(kireji), or caesura, into seemingly discordant halves. That Pound
perceived this can only be appreciated properly when one realizes that this
structural division was not perceived, or at least not discussed in print until
57
attua una concentrazione massima di parole, in verità
difficilmente imitabile in una lingua occidentale. Ne è prova
il fatto che raramente colui che traduce lo haiku riesce a
mantenere un così limitato numero di sillabe nello stesso
verso. Ma furono proprio queste lezioni di brevità ad
indicare quale tipo di controllo dovesse essere esercitato
sulla composizione poetica.
Riferendoci ad Hulme non è dunque difficile ricostruire
un nucleo omogeneo di esperienze e di idee che spiega
anche la durata e la solidità dell’imagismo. Poeti come
Williams sembrano sempre tenere presenti nel corso della
loro carriera artistica i contenuti essenziali di quella poetica,
e sarebbe anche interessante vedere come proprio
l’irrigidirsi di un gusto, con il conseguente pericolo della
stilizzazione e della maniera, abbia in seguito provocato un
impulso altrettanto forte in direzione contraria che condusse
alle dilatazioni di un Roethke (si veda in particolare
la sua «North American Sequence»), o all’esigenza stessa
dimostrata dal Paterson di Williams di esplorare con minore
senso del limite più ampie zone di realtà.
Per antipatia verso ogni tipo di vaghezza, ampollosità, o
astrattezza, il termine classico, così com’esso era stato usato
da Hulme, poté quasi divenire equivalente a
scientifico. Pound, sulle orme di Fenollosa23, parlò di
metodo scientifico nella creazione poetica:
By contrast to the method of abstraction, or of defining
things in more and still more general terms, Fenollosa emphasizes
1953, when Mr. Donald Keene discussed the matter in nearly the same
terms, in his excellent little handbook, Japanese Literature».
23
Pound non ebbe modo di attingere agli scritti del Fenollosa fino al
1912 («Fenollosa’s papers were ‘a ball of light’ in Pound’s hand,
leading directly to Cathay, and “Noh” and on into the “Cantos”; cfr. L.
CHISOLM, Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture, New
Haven e Londra 1963, p. 215). Come si sa Fenollosa morì nel 1908 e fu
la moglie di lui incontrata da Pound a Londra a fornirgli gran parte del
materiale raccolto dal marito nel corso dei suoi numerosi soggiorni in
Giappone.
58
the method of science «which is the method of poetry, as distinct from
that of ‘philosophic discussion’ . . . »24.
Crediamo che Pound avesse dopotutto una nozione
vaga di cosa fossero i metodi delle scienze (nel chiamare
in causa la scienza si deve anche vedere, soprattutto nei
poeti americani, il bisogno di definire la propria posizione
nei riguardi dei problemi preminenti della realtà
contemporanea ed anche un certo senso di inferiorità nei
riguardi del sapere scientifico e tecnologico)25; nondimeno
il suo prendere a modello gli scienziati vale a confermare il
bisogno di oggettività della nuova poesia. Così scrive il
Pearson, tirando le somme del rapporto unidirezionale
scienza-poesia:
Science has performed an inestimable service to modern
poets in forcing them by a redefinition of physical reality to
search out a revitalized manner of expression. The poetic
diction and the syntax of the past were worn out and
exhausted. Science gave in her new terms a fresh beginning
to poets26.
Per inciso dobbiamo dire che il metodo scientifico
applicato alla poesia, o il cosiddetto stile scientifico, si
procurò nemici acerrimi. Si Veda ad esempio in Francia
l’opera di Julien Benda Du Poétique. Il passo che citiamo è
interessante perché l’autore dimostra di capire bene i
termini del problema a cui Hulme e Pound avevano dato
una soluzione contraria a quella che egli auspica:
On pourrait dire en ce sens que le sentiment du poétique
ne nous est pas donné par l’idée de la chose limitée à elle
mème (comme le veut le stile scientifique) mais au contraire
de la chose laissant entendre plus qu’elle n’énonce, comme
24
E. POUND, ABC of Reading, cit., p. 20.
H. H. WAGGONER scrive in The Heel of Heloim (Science and
Values in Modern American Poetry, Norman, Oklahoma, 1950): «Now
the poets have been concerned with this problem — the place of value
in a world of fact — all through the last fifty years while scientism has
been riding the wave». (Cfr. pp. 9-10).
26
Cfr. NORMAN PEARSON, «The American Poet in Relation to
Science», in The American Writer and the European Tradition (a cura di
M. DENNY and W. H. GILMAN), Minneapolis 1950, p. 166.
25
59
s’étendant au delà d’elle même; il ne nous est pas donné par
l’arrêté, mais par le prolongé, par ce qu’on a excellement
appellé (Peguy) 1’«extratexte»27.
Ma né nell’opera di Hulme e tanto meno in quella teorica
di Pound, troviamo spiegazioni atte a farci realmente
comprendere la svolta nella sensibilità poetica della
generazione che stiamo considerando. È in effetti soltanto
la poesia dei migliori, di Eliot, di Williams, della Moore o
di Cummings che offre spunti per una tale spiegazione.
Il culto dell’oggetto e tutta la teoria poetica che è alla
base di esso, possono essere visti essenzialmente come fuga
dall’angoscia propria di una «age of anxiety». Il coraggio
di esistere, per dirla con le parole di un filosofo
esistenzialista contemporaneo, il Tillich, dà importanza
all’oggetto per sfuggire alla condanna di quello stato vago,
indefinito ed allo stesso tempo terrorizzante che è l’angoscia
del non essere. Williams parlò nel Paterson di «that
nul that defeats all equations», ma anche di tutti gli oggetti
a cui l’uomo può spiritualmente legarsi per continuare ad
esistere. Ci sembra che il Tillich chiarisca i termini del
rapporto angoscia-oggetti:
(. . .) l’angoscia non ha oggetto, piuttosto, per dirla con una
frase paradossale, il suo oggetto è la negazione di ogni oggetto…
Nell’angoscia si è impotenti in quanto l’angoscia è assoluta.
L’impotenza nello stato di angoscia è visibile tanto
negli animali quanto negli esseri umani. Essa si esprime in
perdita di direzione, in reazioni inadeguate, in mancanza di
intenzionalità… La ragione di questa condotta a volte
sorprendente, è la mancanza di un oggetto su cui il soggetto
(nello stato di angoscia) possa concentrarsi. Il solo oggetto è la
minaccia stessa, ma non la sorgente della minaccia, perché
la sorgente della minaccia è il «nulla»28.
27
J. BENDA, Du Poétique («Selon l’humanité non selon les poètes»),
Ginevra-Parigi 1946, p. 134.
28
PAUL TILLICH, Il Coraggio di esistere, trad. ital., Roma 1968, p. 32.
60
Ritorneremo sull’argomento soprattutto a proposito del
Paterson che tocca in modo diretto e indiretto i problemi
più gravi dell’uomo contemporaneo.
Se è vero che le idee filosofiche di Hulme non potevano
lasciare inviolato il campo della filosofia morale — il
temperamento del filosofo è in senso lato quello di un
moralista29 —, è pur vero che in nessun luogo più che in
America l’artista era predisposto ad intuire le possibilità di
una completa integrazione tra valori estetici e valori morali.
La poetica poundiana che noi possiamo ricostruire ora dai
Literary Essays fornì oltre ad un canone estetico,
suggerimenti utili a definire sulla base di esso una moralità
consona ai tempi, articolata nei suoi punti essenziali.
A dimostrare questa tesi la poesia e gli scritti in prosa
di Marianne Moore possono, per una qualità quasi
paradigmatica, essere convenientemente trattati per primi.
Non stupisca il nostro considerare poesia e prosa alla stessa
stregua. Come scrisse Lombardo su Williams critico, in
Realismo e Simbolismo:
Sia che si tratti di Pound o di Eliot, di Marianne Moore
o di Sandburg, il problema critico si pone essenzialmente come
problema soggettivo, personale dell’autore, e questi scritti
pertanto altro non sono, in diversa forma, che l’espressione
della ricerca stilistica e umana che sostanzia l’opera propriamente
creativa di Williams.
………………………….
E anche questa critica di Williams, può, in verità, essere
pienamente caratterizzata, come Eliot fa di quella poundiana
come tutt’uno, «a single oeuvre», con la sua poesia30.
29
Si veda a riguardo una delle prime recensioni di Speculation in
America, su «The Dial» (Febbraio, 1925), ripubblicata in A Dial
Miscellany, Syracuse University Press, 1963: «His opinions resolve
themselves into a positively ferocious statement of two opposed sets of
antipodal ideals; the first to be denounced in terms of opprobium... the
second to be commended in terms of emphatic praise... The two sets of
ideals are applied to art, ethics, religion and politics…».
30
Cfr. il saggio dal titolo «Saggi e liriche di William Carlos Williams»
in Realismo e Simbolismo, Roma 1957, pp. 85-6.
61
Innanzitutto si osservi come la Moore usi la stessa
terminologia critica di Pound: esamineremo in seguito la
carica di significati morali che essa è capace di accogliere. Il
poeta scrive in «The Serious Artist» (1913): «The
touchstone of an artist is its precision. This precision is of
various
and
complicated
sorts…»31.
Parlando
dell’attenzione al dettaglio dell’artista serio, egli diceva in
«How to Read»: «It may be urged that authors like Spengler
who attempt at synthesis, often do so before they have
attained sufficient knowledge of detail . . .»32. E ancora in
«The Serious Artist»: «We might come to believe that the
thing that matters in art is a sort of energy, something more
or less like electricity or radioactivity, a force transfusing,
welding and unifying»33. Nella prima citazione Pound parla
di precisione, nelle due successive di attenzione al dettaglio,
invece di sintesi concettuali maestose, e di energia. Siamo
intorno ai punti principali su cui si articolò la poetica
dell’imagismo. In Predilections la Moore adopera con
arguta efficacia il vocabolario di Pound: «Instinctively we
employ anthitesis as an aid to precision»34. E si noti pure
come la poetessa, movendo da Pound, svolga ed elabori la
poetica da lui proposta, additando all’artista strumenti anche
più raffinati: «With regard to unwariness that defeats
precision, excess is the common substitute for energy»35. In
Idiosyncrasy and Technique la Moore cita da Howells di My
Mark Twain mostrando la propria approvazione per quanto
egli dice: «It is in vain that I try to give a notion of the
intensity with which he compassed the whole world»36.
Circa l’importanza conferita al dettaglio, la stessa poesia
della Moore è l’esempio più convincente che si possa
offrire. Lo stile frastagliato nasce infatti da un’attenzione
31
Cfr. Literary Essays, New York 1954, p. 48.
Ibidem, p. 21.
33
Ibidem, p. 49.
34
New York 1955, p. 5.
35
Ibidem, p. 9.
36
Berkeley e Los Angeles 1958, p. 9.
32
62
quasi scientifica per gli oggetti che colpiscono
l’immaginazione e da una descrizione minuta dei movimenti
che essi eseguono intersecandosi l’uno con l’altro:
«The Fish»
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
Adjusting the ashheaps
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the
sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices —
in and out, illuminating
the
turquoise sea
of bodies — the water drives a wedge
of iron through the iron edge
of the cliff; whereupon the stars,
pink
rice-grains, inkbespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
lilies, and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.
………………………….
Se si esamina anche soltanto l’aggettivazione, non si
può fare a meno di notare quanto sia scrupolosa. Niente è
lasciato nel vago, perché la mente è attenta, non a fenomeni
di carattere generale, ma a quello che è specifico ed atto
63
a distinguere una proprietà, un oggetto, un momento dagli
altri. Non potremmo essere più lontani dalla poetica del
Poe del «Poetic Principle» e «The Philosophy of
Composition». Ma ciò che a noi preme mostrare è come
siffatto modo di guardare le cose implichi nella poetessa
una posizione morale, ben definita, valida sia per se stessa
che per gli altri. Quell’attenzione dello sguardo è infatti la
stessa che 1’uomo pone nel produrre le sue cose migliori.
Viene chiamata «care», sollecitudine, nella poesia «Virginia
Britannia»:
(. . .) Care has formed among unEnglish insect
sounds
the white wall rose (. . .)
………………………….
Care has formed walls of yew.
La lode per le cose che l’uomo crea, o modifica, è basata
sulla consapevolezza che l’azione umana abbia sempre di
mira una qualche forma di perfezione37. Quel che in altro
contesto poteva essere solo un luogo comune, acquista valore
soprattutto come riscoperta: nasce qui da un malcelato
sconforto e scoraggiamento; tra la confusione ideologica e
intellettuale che la poetessa sente caratteristica dei suoi tempi,
acquista valore soltanto ciò che l’uomo può fare di buono,
con entusiasmo e disciplina paziente, nel mondo in cui vive.
La parola «care» addita quale agire sia da ritenersi giusto.
Esso comporta senso di direzione, passione, precisione e
mira ad un fine sulla cui bontà e utilità ci sia l’accordo
degli uomini38. La lezione di Pound e Hulme non valse
37
Nei «Reading Transcripts», M. Moore trascrisse dal New York Times
(l’articolo porta il titolo di «Skill Hunger»): «Bodily hunger has driven
man to find ways of getting food... Prof Jacks has called attention to
another kind of hunger which is general in mankind — an urge for
something even beyond what one has achieved, a craving for skill». Cfr.
Studi Americani, n. 9, Roma 1963, p. 417.
38
Questo spiega la posizione favorevole della Moore sia nei
riguardi della scienza che dell’industria, un aspetto della sua
opera che ci sembra non sia stato finora preso in considerazione.
64
dunque soltanto nel campo della creazione artistica; rifiutare
le immagini del volo sugli abissi che il filosofo inglese
considerava tipiche dell’atteggiamento del poeta romantico,
non è che un aspetto esteriore. In poeti come la
Moore quel rifiuto significa soprattutto aver capito
profondamente una lezione, per andare al di là del terreno
limitato di una poetica: la sua controparte morale sembra
mirare ad un ritorno a virtù, considerate tali per tradizione,
quasi come un figliol prodigo, non come il figlio che non si
è mai staccato dal padre.
Tornando ora ai concetti di concentrazione e brevità,
che si sono più volte usati per indicare la linea di una
ricerca stilistica, si deve notare come il campo per l’esplicazione
____________________________
La «cura» che ha fatto crescere la rosa rampicante e il tasso è contenuta
in ogni forma di perfezione sia possibile conseguire.
È assai frequente nella poetessa l’ammirazione per il procedimento
rigoroso del pensiero matematico. Nel passo che segue
c’è la leggerezza di tono che contraddistingue il suo modo di
persuadere: «Progressive forms in mathematics have structure and
it means something — you may not like arithmetics; my aplomb
suffers a trifle when a bank-teller says «yes»; it’s all right;
I just changed a six to seven».
Si sa della corrispondenza tra la poetessa e la fabbrica di
automobili Ford circa l’attribuzione del nome ad una macchina
di recente costruzione. Ci sembra che nell’atteggiamento della
Moore ci fosse da una parte l’ammirazione per la grande industria
dispensatrice di bene (si veda a questo proposito anche il passo
su John D. Rockefeller in A Marianne Moore Reader, New York
1961, p. 274), dall’altra, ed è quello che più ci interessa in
questo momento, l’interesse per la costruzione di un bell’oggetto che
aveva impegnato per il disegno e la messa in opera menti capaci
e macchine perfette. Questa posizione favorevole era anche convalidata
dalla tradizione cristiana e puritana in America. Tra i
serious books nella casa del nonno materno della poetessa c’era
Christianity and Social Problems di Lyman Abbot che così scriveva nel
capitolo Christianity and Communism: «self-esteem is the
backbone of the soul — without it a man is a worm and no man,
and acquisitiveness, if the root of every manner of evil, is also
the root of every form of productive industry»; «Christianity
then puts no discouragement on industry. It recognizes the
ambition and guides it to right ends» (Cfr. pp. 68-81, Boston,
New York, 1896).
65
della moralità che la Moore propone sia anch’esso
volutamente ristretto e limitato. Tranne che nella poesia
«In Distrust of Merits» dove le glorie e le pene del «D.
Day» e della guerra impongono un respiro più vasto e
qualche generalizzazione, i significati che la Moore mira ad
estrarre dall’osservazione della realtà sono minuti, a volte
potremmo dire, microscopici. La funzione dell’artista
sembra essere per la Moore quella che Richards additava
nei Principles of Literary Criticism: «L’artista è un esperto
di ‘minuti particolari’, e in quanto artista considera ben
poco, o addirittura trascura le generalizzazioni, che in
pratica gli si rivelano troppo sommarie per distinguere ciò
che ha valore da ciò che non l’ha»39. È il tessuto dei
significati e delle moralità minime che il lettore deve
costruire per capire la poesia, affidandosi a parole come
«care», rare, ma sempre presenti, che costituiscono la
chiave di quella visione del mondo. La Moore non cade mai
nell’errore che, secondo Pound, Spengler aveva commesso
con le sue sintesi del reale; la sintesi semmai è affidata al
lettore, che leghi, se riesce, o se lo ritiene opportuno, figure,
oggetti, giudizi brevi e isolati, pronunciati quasi senza
parere.
La Moore differisce dai predicatori puritani, che pure
molte volte i suoi componimenti riportano alla mente, per
una meravigliosa leggerezza di tono e per aver imparato
attraverso la lezione dell’estetismo europeo40 quella qualità
di cui Williams lamenta l’assenza in Whitman, l’artificiosità
propria dell’arte, la sua posizione di intermediaria, il
distacco che le dà vita autonoma.
Pur scegliendo gli animali come modello per l’uomo come
fa Whitman, la Moore non avrebbe affrontato l’argomento
39
Cfr. trad. italiana, Torino 1961, con un saggio introduttivo di ELIO
CHINOL, p. 48.
40
Cfr. quanto scrive NEMI D’AGOSTINO, in Ezra Pound, Roma 1960,
p. 21: «la penetrazione della cultura francese in America è stata così
pervasiva e capillare che davvero uno studioso della letteratura
americana contemporanea non può non avere una conoscenza seria
dell’altro campo».
66
mento in modo diretto come fa il poeta, a costo di riuscire
meno convincente, o addirittura di non essere compresa. In
«Myself I Sing» il poeta scrive:
I think I could turn and live with animals, they’re
[so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for
[their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty
[to God.
Se Williams ha ottenuto tanto seguito di consensi
nelle generazioni più giovani è perché egli, più della Moore,
ha saputo attingere a piene mani dalla vita americana nella
sua inquietudine e sofferenza. Di lui dice D. Donoghue nel
suo Connoisseurs of Chaos41:
Williams had no interest in the lonely towers of the
imagination. He was never afraid that direct contact with the
unimaginative would soil his own imagination. He lived a life of
contact ... Nothing human was alien to him. He was a great
anthologist of human action and he knew that the
contribution of middle-class men to human life did not end with
a taste for amplified music. There was more to be said and
he said some of it.
………………………….
He stands for all the possibilities implied in such words as
sympathy, action, suffering, person, love, place, time, America,
fact, speech, truth42.
Ma non è difficile scorgere un nesso strettissimo tra
le esperienze umane e artistiche dei due poeti. Recensendo
Observations di Marianne Moore, Williams afferma,
mettendo implicitamente in risalto una comunione d’idee e
aspirazioni tra sé e la poetessa:
41
Connoisseurs of Chaos: Ideas in Modern American Poetry, Londra
1965, p. 199.
42
Ibidem.
67
Surely there is no poetry as active as that of to-day, so
unbound, so dangerous to the mass of mediocrity, if one
should understand it, so fleet, hard to capture, so delightful
to pursue. It is clarifying in its movements as a wild animal
whose walk corrects that of men43.
La poetica poundiana che abbiamo esposto nei suoi
punti essenziali, costituì anche per Williams il fondamento
per una ricerca di valori morali, oltre che un credo estetico.
Come abbiamo fatto per la Moore, soffermiamoci
innanzitutto sull’uso di una stessa terminologia. In «Tribute
to Painters» (da Pictures from Breughel) egli diceva in tono
quasi irato, fermandosi poi a guardare con meraviglia:
you cannot be
an artist
by mere ineptitude
the neat figures of
Paul Klee
Anche nelle opere teatrali o in romanzi come White
Mule (1937) il valore della precisione è più volte
sottolineato. L’arte viene ad essere concepita come una
sorta di artigianato perfetto, a cui può arrivare anche la
paziente cura del tipografo (tale è il protagonista di White
Mule):
But the art was not really in the writing, that was just
the show of it. The meat as well as the art was in the
accuracy of the figures.
All estimates originated from that corner — nothing was
done, nothing accepted without that44.
In «The Orchestra», «order»45 è la parola-guida
invece che precision, malgrado la «nota sbagliata»,
l’elemento incontrollabile dell’esistenza: «The purpose of the
43
Cfr. in A Dial Miscellany, cit., «Marianne Moore by William Carlos
Williams», p. 233.
44
Op. cit., p. 51.
45
Anche «order» è un tema caro a Pound: «Each man [Jefferson and
Mussolini] was mastered not by «will to power» but by «will to order»;
citato da OSCAR CARGILL, in Intellectuals in America (New York
1959, p. 237) da «Jefferson and/or Mussolini» di E. POUND (1935).
68
orchestra/ is to organize these sounds/ and hold them/
to an assembled order/ in spite of the wrong note/»46.
Si veda nella poesia «The Crowd at the Ball Game»
come la stessa terminologia critica di Pound serva a dare
significato ad un’esperienza. Le parole-chiave sono «detail»
(ripetuta) e «beauty»:
The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly
by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them —
all the exciting detail
of the chase
and the escape, the error
the flash of genius —
all to no end save beauty
the eternal —
So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful.
Le prime parole del Paterson sono «Rigor of beauty is
the quest»47. In quest’opera la bellezza che il poeta intuisce
è qualcosa di rigoroso e preciso che ingemma il caos
della storia e della vita di Paterson ed esce a mostrarsi da
quel caos48:
from mathematics to particulars —
divided as the dew,
floating mists, to be rained down and
regathered into a river that flows
and encircles:
shells and animalcules
generally and so to man,
to Paterson.
E si noti che il Paterson è un’opera tarda di Williams
dove ci sono chiari segni di una poetica più ampia e
meno schematica49 (come Desert Music, Paterson è inoltre
46
Cfr. Desert Music, New York 1959.
Paterson, New York 1963, p. 11.
48
Cfr. E. ZOLLA, «Quadri da Breughel», Corriere della Sera, 13
ottobre 1962: «Williams fissa... sprazzi improvvisi di rapimento alla
vista di un fiore (o di altra fugace bellezza) nel mare di sensazioni
confuse».
47
49
Cfr. L.W. WAGNER, The Poems
Williams, 1964, Middletown, Conn. pp. 14-17.
of
69
William
Carlos
ricchissimo di elementi soggettivi e personali50), ma
la terminologia dell’imagismo, carica come nella Moore
di significati morali, conserva intatta la sua vitalità. Nel
primo dei cinque libri di cui consiste il poema, c’è la
reiterazione della famosa frase «no ideas but in things»: in
qualsiasi contesto essa è usata come strumento di
persuasione e il problema dell’espressione viene sollevato
— attuando una completa integrazione di valori —, sia da
un punto di vista artistico, sia da un punto di vista morale
ed umano:
Who because they
neither know their sources nor the sills of their
disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly
for the most part
locked and forgot in their desires — unroused
— Say it, no ideas but in things —
…………………………….
They may look at the torrent
in their minds
and it’s foreign to them.
They turn their backs
and grow faint — but recover!
Life is sweet
They say: the language!
— the language
is divorced from their minds —
the language … the language51.
50
Come nota Agostino Lombardo in Realismo e Simbolismo, cit., p. 93:
«Ora il fatto nuovo in The Desert Music è... nella comparsa, piena,
impetuosa, appassionata, del poeta e dei suoi sentimenti... anche là dove
il tono dovrebbe essere più impersonale».
51
Paterson, cit., pp. 14 e 21.
70
Sembra evidente che Williams si sia allontanato da un
problema esclusivamente compositivo e veda il problema
dell’espressione e l’alienazione della persona comune dalla
realtà come fondamentale. Per Williams «no ideas
but in things» non è più soltanto un canone estetico,
non dissimile nella sostanza dal «correlativo oggettivo» di
Eliot, ma è anche, e soprattutto, norma vitale. Nasce dalla
constatazione della disumanità del mondo moderno in cui la
mente umana, separata dalle cose, muove degli automi.
Nell’età delle macchine, egli scrive in Jacatqua, il vangelo è
«tu non toccherai». «No ideas but in things» prescrive
invece il ritorno alle cose e certamente non soltanto
nell’ambito della creazione artistica («non conoscono le
loro origini, né superano le soglie della loro amarezza,
camminano fuori dai loro corpi, la maggior parte di essi»).
In «The Red Wheelbarrow» la redenzione viene da quel
che si può vedere, una combinazione felice di oggetti
semplici. La parte più significativa è posta proprio
all’inizio: «so much depends upon». Sono le parole che
tradiscono il predicatore, anche se le brevi cadenze e la
delicata struttura della composizione possono far sì che non
sia facile accorgersene ad una prima lettura:
So much depends
upon,
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Che l’interpretazione data a «so much depends upon»
— e più in generale all’arte di Williams — non sia
arbitraria, ci sembra dimostrato da un gruppo di versi di
«Work in Progress»: «It is difficult/ to get news from
poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack of what
71
is found there/ »52. In una lettera a Louis Zukowsky (del
26 gennaio 1947) il poeta scrive: «. . . the good in poetry
is a common good, not a sentimental one and not a
proprietary one for any of us. At least science has nothing
of that. I am glad that in your own way you should point
out that poetry should not have it either . . . »53. Williams
pensava che l’arte potesse aiutare l’uomo e la società a
redimersi. Perciò esprimeva la propria ira contro la rivista
«The Dial» che egli non credeva stesse assolvendo i suoi
compiti: «you are not discovering new worlds, but helping
to ruin the beauty in this. You ought to be suppressed and
shamed». Il Wasserstrom commenta: «William’s fury was
the more heartfelt because he was a leading spokesman
for one of the leading principles of art in his time, the
doctrine that man and civilization could be in fact reformed
and redeemed, that our world could be rediscovered,
by imagination»54.
Attraverso un esame della reazione dei poeti americani
a quella che dopo la pubblicazione di The Waste Land
venne definita la poetica della terra desolata, potremmo
ulteriormente spiegare la posizione di poeti come Williams,
la Moore e Hart Crane. The Waste Land fu sentito come
qualcosa di non americano, «against the grain»55. In una
lettera di Hart Crane (ad Allen Tate, in data 16 maggio
1922) leggiamo:
The poetry of negation is beautiful — alas, too dangerously
so for one of my mind. But I am trying to break away from
it. Perhaps this is useless, perhaps it is silly — but one does
have joys — the vocabulary of damnations and frustrations
has been developed at the expense of these other moods, so
that it is hard to dance in proper measure56.
52
Desert Music, cit., p. 58.
Cfr. il brano di una lettera di Williams riportata in A Creative Century
(The University of Texas), 1964, p. 65
54
A Dial Miscellany, cit., p. XIV.
55
Titolo di un capitolo di American Poetry, cit.
56
Cfr. The Letters of Hart Crane 1916-1932, a cura di BROM WEBER,
New York 1952, p. 88.
53
72
E ancora su Eliot citiamo quella che ci sembra la parte
più interessante delle lettere al riguardo, dove Crane
manifesta apertamente il desiderio di seguire una direzione
contraria a quella indicata da The Waste Land.
I take Eliot as a point of departure toward an almost
complete reverse of direction. His pessimism is amply justified,
in his own case. But I would apply as much of his erudition and
technique as I can absorb toward a more positive and ecstatic
goal
…………………………….
I feel that Eliot ignores certain spiritual events and possibilities as
real and as powerful now, as say in the time of Blake. Certainly
he has dug the ground and buried hope as deep and direfully as it
can ever be done57.
Con Crane, Williams prenderà posizione contro
l’elemento di morte nell’opera di Eliot. Nel 1922 la
rivoluzione poetica che si fa di solito cominciare nel 1912
(anno della prima pubblicazione di «Poetry») aveva preso la
via dell’affermazione dei valori vitali e tra tentennamenti
continuerà a seguirla.
Paterson, con gli automi che la abitano, l’instabilità e
l’ansia che vi si leggono, non è una terra desolata perché chi
scrive vuole redimerla attraverso la scoperta di un terreno
ancora vergine e ignoto, la mente umana:
These were the years before the great catastrophe. The
appearance of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. There was heat
in us, a core and a drive that was driving headway upon the
theme of a rediscovery of a primary impetus, the elementary
principle of all art, in the local conditions58 .
Trattando il tema della primavera sembra che Cummings,
in polemica con Eliot, voglia cogliere tutta la gioia che
essa può offrire. Il tema della primavera ancora felice
57
Ibidem, cfr. lettera a Gorman Munson, 5 gennaio 1923, p. 113. Circa
la reazione di Hart Crane a T.S. Eliot cfr. lo studio di PIETRO
SPINUCCI, «T.S. Eliot e Hart Crane» in Studi Americani, n. 11 (Roma
1965) pp. 213-250.
58
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, Autobiography, New York 1957,
p. 11.
73
e rigeneratrice, contrapposto all’infelicità di «April is the
cruellest month», è molto frequente nei suoi Collected
Poems:
In just —
Spring
when the world is mudluscious59 . . .
(While you and I have lips and voices which
are for kissing and to sing with
who cares if some oneeyed son of a bitch
invents an instrument to measure Spring with?60
A questo punto parlando della poesia americana
potremmo introdurre il termine vitalismo. Fu il concetto che
questa parola esprime a servire da antidoto al pessimismo
della terra desolata. I poeti che ci interessano svilupparono
ognuno qualcosa che era già in nuce nell’ottimismo
di Leaves of Grass. Al massimo dell’intensità, vitalismo
è accelerazione del ritmo vitale fino all’estasi e fino a toccare i limiti dell’esprimibile. Sarà la linea Crane-LowellRoethke. In Cummings, Williams e Marianne Moore lo
slancio mistico è sempre tenuto a freno dalla fiducia nei
mezzi ordinari dei procedimenti intellettuali e soprattutto
dalla sensibilità per l’oggetto: l’amore e ogni altro
sentimento restano per loro nell’ambito dell’esperienza
quotidiana e comune, senza estenuazioni della sensibilità,
seppure ad alto livello di consapevolezza.
Abbiamo cercato di delineare lo sfondo culturale su cui
nasce la poesia di Williams. Siamo passati dall’esame del
nuovo interesse per la struttura del verso e dell’intera
poesia (interesse che accomuna tutta una generazione di
poeti), ad un tentativo di analisi del perché di quelle scelte
stilistiche. Esse vanno considerate come gli unici mezzi che
il poeta americano ha trovato, atti ad esprimere il desiderio
di superamento di una crisi che Williams, ad esempio,
59
60
E. E. CUMMINGS, Selected Poems, 1923-1958, Londra 1960, p. 1.
Ibidem, p. 18.
74
soprattutto negli anni della maturità — quelli in cui scrisse
Paterson — sentì molto profondamente.
Il nostro passare da un argomento all’altro, stabilendo
connessioni a volte tenui tra essi, ci sembra giustificato
dalla convinzione che un fenomeno poetico vada sempre
affrontato e spiegato in modo indiretto perché non si perda
quel senso di imprevedibilità che sempre ne accompagna la
nascita e crescita. Un approccio più diretto alla materia
corrisponderebbe forse a ciò che Williams ha combattuto
nel corso di tutta la sua carriera artistica, gli schemi che
l’intellettuale crea, irrigidendo la realtà, per comprenderla
attraverso di essi. Per Williams si deve parlare di plasticità
vitale ed attiva nella recezione di una cultura e nella
trasmissione di essa.
***
William Carlos Williams nacque a Rutherford nel New
Jersey il 17 settembre 1883. La famiglia paterna era di
origine inglese, quella materna proveniva dalla Martinica.
Il nonno materno era con tutta probabilità ebreo. Il Pound
scrisse sulle origini del nostro autore, con entusiasmo:
Carlos Williams has been determined to stand or sit as an
American. Freud would probably say ‘because his father
was English’ (in fact half English, half Danish). His mother,
as ethnologists have before noted, was a mixture of French
and Spanish; of late years (the last four or five) Dr. Williams
has laid claim to a somewhat remote Hebrew connection,
possibly a rabbi in Saragossa at the time of the siege. He
claims American birth, hut I strongly suspect that he emerged
on shipboard just off Bedlock’s Island . . . . .
……………………………..
At any rate he has not in his ancestral endocrines the arid
curse of our nation. None of his immediate forebears burnt
witches in Salem, and attended assemblies for producing
prohibitions61.
61
Cfr. EZRA POUND, «Dr. Williams’ Position» in Literary Essays of
Ezra Pound (Norfolk, Connecticut, 1954) ristampato in William Carlos
Williams, A Collection of Critical Essays, a cura di J. HILLIS MILLER,
Prentice Hall, N. J. 1966, p. 28 (il saggio fu pubblicato per la prima
volta in The Dial, novembre 1928, pp. 395-404).
75
Sappiamo che la madre ebbe un’educazione cattolica,
mentre il padre fu istruito nella chiesa episcopale. Più tardi
divennero unitariani. Un sentimento religioso sarà
riscontrabile in vari passi dell’opera del nostro autore anche
se non risulta che egli frequentasse alcuna chiesa.
Si sposò nel 1912 con Florence Williams, donna che
gli fu devota per tutta la vita e da lei ebbe due figli
maschi. Alcuni eventi della vita coniugale visti sempre
sotto una luce di gioia e di ottimismo, come pure la felicità
di due destini paralleli, sono presenti nella sua opera
e spesso costituiscono mirabile tema poetico.
Si laureò in medicina all’Università di Pennsylvania
e successivamente studiò pediatria per un anno presso
l’Università di Lipsia.
Cominciò ad ottenere riconoscimenti pubblici a partire
dal 1926 quando gli fu conferito il «Dial Award». In
seguito vinse il «Poetry’s Guarantor Prize» (1931), il
«Loines Award of the National Institute of Arts and
Letters» (1950), il «Bollingen Prize» (1953), a pari merito
con Archibald Mac Leish. Nel 1952 fu eletto «Consultant
in Poetry to the Library of Congress», ma non occupò
mai il posto, perché attaccato a causa di precedenti posizioni
politiche ritenute eterodosse.
Negli ultimi anni della sua vita ottenne la laurea ad
honorem dall’Università di Buffalo (1946), dalla Rutgers
(1950), dal Bard College (1950) e dall’Università di
Pennsylvania (1952), dove, come si è detto, aveva studiato
medicina. Morì a Rutherford nel 1963.
Il mondo della poesia appare completamente ignoto a
Williams prima dell’incontro con Pound all’Università di
Pennsylvania. Questi indirizzo la sua intelligenza. V’era
fermento nel giovane Williams e la ricerca di una direzione.
76
L’amicizia dei due poeti durò per tutta la vita e fu
sincera. La critica di Williams al pensiero di Pound è
frequente e senza riserve. Allo stesso tempo sembra che
Williams abbia sempre letto l’opera di Pound con la
speranza di trovarvi luce, senza alcuna invidia di mestiere,
assimilandone le teorie principali, ma non portandole mai,
come Pound fece, alle loro estreme conseguenze. Williams
risultò tra le due personalità umane la più stabile ed
equilibrata.
La pratica di medicina a cui egli si dedicò subito dopo
la laurea, gli dette quasi una seconda natura. Fu il suo
mestiere per tutta la vita, a volte odiato come possono
esserlo taluni ostacoli e impedimenti che sono insiti in noi
stessi. Nella poesia convogliò la maggior parte delle proprie
energie intellettuali e morali.
Williams visse modestamente, non cercò mai di avere
più denaro di quello che gli fosse strettamente necessario
e a volte non ne ebbe a sufficienza. Non poté abbandonare
la professione anche quando ne sentì il bisogno per
dedicarsi completamente alla lettura e alla poesia. Fu così
che come ostetrico aiutò duemila bambini a venire alla luce.
Un giorno scrisse di essere rimasto pieno di orrore e di
meraviglia dinnanzi ad un feto di cinque mesi con il cuore
che batteva ancora.
I due mestieri, quello di medico e di poeta, trovano il
loro punto d’incontro e di fusione armonica nella nascita
della vita, nella speranza per questa nascita, e nella lotta
contro la morte: ostetricia e maieutica in senso socratico.
Nella madre egli riconobbe l’origine del proprio
temperamento ardente. Annunciandone il decesso seppe
parlarne in una lettera ad un amico come di «my frivolous
mother», testimoniando così della vitalità ed allegria che
ella aveva saputo conservare fino agli ultimi giorni. Si
domandò perché avesse sempre tenuta nascosta l’esistenza
del premio che aveva vinto in una scuola di disegno, perché
fosse stata così segreta nei riguardi delle proprie gioie e
aspirazioni. Il problema si estese nella sua mente al perché
della paura che ci fa tenere segreta persino la gioia, per
difenderla dall’aggressività umana.
77
Le lettere che egli scrisse ad amici e conoscenti (oltre
alla sua opera naturalmente) ci portano a non credere a
quell’immagine di artista incolto che molti sembrano avere
tanto cara. La verità è che lesse più che poté, nel tempo che
aveva a disposizione e che desiderò sempre leggere ancora
di più. Marianne Moore osservò maliziosamente: «Despite
his passion for being himself and his determination
not to be at the mercy of «schoolmasters», it is only one
who is academically sophisticated who could write:
‘fatigued as we are, watch how the mirror sieves out the
extraneous’»62.
Con gli scrittori contemporanei impostò rapporti di
affettuosa amicizia: consigliò Pound a non turbare Robert
Lowell nei suoi intenti, vide forse in Allen Ginsberg un
continuatore della sua opera, o comunque una personalità
poetica affine alla propria. Marianne Moore fu l’artista della
stessa generazione che poteva meglio capire i
suoi sforzi e seguire più da vicino il suo sviluppo poetico.
Le linee di ricerca di Pound e di Williams sono raramente
convergenti, mentre quelle di Williams e della Moore
si incontrano sempre nella tenacia con cui a dispetto di
tutto vollero affermare il valore dell’esistenza umana in
un mondo che si mostrava quasi incapace di sopravvivere.
Di T. S. Eliot non fu mai amico anche se negli ultimi
anni Williams dimostra di rispettare una personalità che
egli ha così spesso criticato e combattuto63.
62
MARIANNE MOORE, «Kora in Hell by William Carlos Williams»,
pubblicato per la prima volta in Contact, n. 4, estate 1921, (pp. 5-8),
ristampato in William Carlos Williams, A Collection of Critical Essays,
cit., p. 38.
63
Circa l’atteggiamento di Eliot nei confronti di Williams, invece
leggiamo in una nota a piè di pagina del saggio «The Unicorn in
Paterson» di Louis Martz (in William Carlos Williams, A Collection of
Critical Essays, cit., pp. 76-77): «Eliot was somewhat more generous in
his attitude towards Williams. On February, 15, 1958, he wrote to the
young American poet and critic A. Macksey … ‘Poetry’ said Eliot of
Williams, ‘springs from the most unexpected soil… He continues to
split rocks and find poems’».
78
La sua vita si mosse su direzioni univoche, senza
dispersioni. Anche l’attrazione che egli sentì per le donne
fu nei limiti del possibile convogliata nel matrimonio come
ricchezza ed esperienza comune. Ogni cosa che lo illuminò
nell’amore non fu comunque mai ricacciata, ma è
presente e palpitante nella sua opera.
Pur essendo un carattere fondamentalmente estroverso
conservò sempre una sana reticenza nei riguardi della
propria vita personale e dei propri studi. Essa fu forse
dovuta alla semplicità della sua persona, al rifiuto di
sovrastrutture intellettualistiche e della chiacchiera
mondana.
Crediamo sia stato un uomo che fece il meglio che poté
di se stesso.
Il successo di critica è giunto piuttosto tardi per
Williams, ma è crescente: la sua opera è sempre più di
frequente oggetto di studi critici, corsi universitari e tesi di
laurea; varie riviste gli hanno dedicato un intero numero,
etc. Egli viene considerato ormai un classico della poesia
americana e tra i più interessanti poeti di questo secolo.
Ma non è tanto del successo di critica che vogliamo qui
anche se brevemente occuparci, quanto di coloro che hanno
visto in Williams un maestro e che dalla sua opera hanno
tratto spunto per la creazione.
Si accennerà a proposito delle lettere contenute nel
Paterson alla reazione di Dahlberg e Ginsberg alla sua
opera. Al contrario di Eliot e Pound, Williams non ebbe che
scarsa influenza sui poeti della sua stessa generazione. Egli
anzi si formò alla loro scuola, in particolare a quella di
Pound e ad essa dobbiamo la nascita del poeta. Ciò è dovuto
principalmente al lentissimo evolversi della sua personalità
e al fatto che, sembra curioso notarlo, forse il suo
stesso destino di artista è stato agli inizi tutt’altro che
chiaro.
Ci sembra che l’autore che si è più avvicinato alla
comprensione di Williams sia Edward Dahlberg. Pur facendo
una critica assai severa del Paterson in Truth is more
Sacred, egli ne colse il vero intento. Ma se vogliamo parlare
79
di vera influenza dell’autore più anziano sul più giovane,
essa va rintracciata principalmente nella lettura che questi
fece di In The American Grain e assai meno nella poesia
vera e propria da cui si attendeva forse qualcosa di più, e
soprattutto qualcosa di più consono al suo ideale di stile.
Allen Ginsberg colse a nostro avviso soltanto alcuni
aspetti dell’opera poetica di Williams e li fece propri. Né
Eliot, né Pound, né la Moore, né Wallace Stevens potevano
essere da lui visti come maestri, forse anche per la
stessa difficoltà e chiusura della loro opera. Da Williams
egli trasse spunti per la comprensione poetica dell’America
contemporanea e fece sua la fede nelle nuove possibilità
umane di conseguire bellezza. Ma a paragone con l’opera
di Williams quella di Ginsberg ci appare assai meno
profonda e originale, più impaziente di giungere a
conclusioni, più frettolosa e non sostanziata da quello studio
continuo che Williams fece per elaborare la propria tematica
e per ottenere una visione quanto più possibile completa
delle cose.
E di fatto pochi reali passi avanti sono stati fatti, anche
non tenendo conto di Ginsberg: finora nessuna personalità
di quel livello ha realmente portato avanti la sua opera.
Se vogliamo quindi rintracciare un’influenza di Williams
ci dovremo limitare a considerare alcune spiccate affinità
di tematica (per poeti come Charles Olson, Robert Creeley,
o Gary Snyder e alcuni tra i giovanissimi come, ad esempio,
Allen Katzman [n. 1937] nei suoi The Comanche Cantos),
di struttura metrica e il tentativo, spesso del tutto riuscito, di
applicare il suo concetto di misura. Il projective verse di
Charles Olson e la organic form di cui più recentemente
parla la Levertov64 vanno visti come elaborazioni e sviluppi
del concetto williamsiano di misura e per nulla discordanti
da esso.
Il massimo risultato a cui potrebbe portare lo studio
dell’opera poetica di Williams, soprattutto in America,
64
Cfr. in New Directions n. 20, New York 1968, DENISE LEVERTOV,
«Some Notes on Organic Form».
80
sarebbe, a nostro avviso, un nuovo Paterson, un lavoro di
grandi dimensioni che di nuovo fondesse dati e miti. Questa
opera soddisferebbe l’esigenza espressa nel poema di una
rivoluzione continua nella visione delle cose e sarebbe epica
nel senso che Pound dava a questa parola.
81
Prof. Lina Unali
Dispensa n. 5
Letteratura americana LLEA 11-12 aprile 2013
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, IV. Death by Water and V. What the Thunder
Said
IV. DEATH BY WATER
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
315
320
V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID
After the torch-light red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and place and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
82
325
330
335
340
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mud-cracked houses
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
345
350
355
360
365
370
375
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
380
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
83
385
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the roof-tree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
390
395
400
405
410
415
420
425
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
84
430
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
Note di Eliot al V libro della Terra desolata
V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID
In the first part of Part V three themes are employed: the journey to Emmaus, the approach to
the Chapel Perilous (see Miss Weston’s book), and the present decay of eastern Europe.
357. This is Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec
County. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds in Eastern North America) “it is most at home in
secluded woodland and thickety retreats.… Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume,
but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequaled.” Its “waterdripping song” is justly celebrated.
360. The following lines were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I
forget which, but I think one of Shackleton’s): it was related that the party of explorers, at the
extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than
could actually be counted.
366–76. Cf. Hermann Hesse, Blick ins Chaos: “Schon ist halb Europa, schon ist zumindest der
halbe Osten Europas auf dem Wege zum Chaos, fährt betrunken im heiligem Wahn am
Abgrund entlang und singt dazu, singt betrunken und hymnisch wie Dmitri Karamasoff sang.
Ueber diese Lieder lacht der Bürger beleidigt, der Heilige und Seher hört sie mit Tränen.”
401. “Datta, dayadhvam, damyata” (Give, sympathise, control). The fable of the meaning of the
Thunder is found in the Brihadaranyaka—Upanishad, 5, 1. A translation is found in Deussen’s
Sechzig Upanishads des Veda, p. 489.
407. Cf. Webster, The White Devil, V, vi:
“…they’ll remarry
Ere the worm pierce your winding-sheet, ere the spider
Make a thin curtain for your epitaphs.”
411. Cf. Inferno, XXXIII, 46:
“ed io sentii chiavar l’uscio di sotto
all’orribile torre.”
Also F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 346.
“My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my
feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the
outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which
surround it.… In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole
world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.”
424. V. Weston, From Ritual to Romance; chapter on the Fisher King.
427. V. Purgatorio, XXVI, 148.
“‘Ara vos prec, per aquella valor
‘que vos guida al som de l’escalina,
‘sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor.’
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina.”
428. V. Pervigilium Veneris. Cf. Philomela in Parts II and III.
429. V. Gerard de Nerval, Sonnet El Desdichado.
85
431. V. Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy.
433. Shantih. Repeated as here, a formal ending to an Upanishad. “The Peace which passeth
understanding” is a feeble translation of the content of this word.
86
Prof. Lina Unali
Dispensa sul Free Verse
12 aprile 2013
Free Verse
Poetry that is based on the irregular rhythmic CADENCE or the recurrence, with variations, of
phrases, images, and syntactical patterns rather than the conventional use of METER. RHYME
may or may not be present in free verse, but when it is, it is used with great freedom. In
conventional VERSE the unit is the FOOT, or the line; in free verse the units are larger,
sometimes being paragraphs or strophes. If the free verse unit is the line, as it is in Whitman, the
line is determined by qualities of RHYTHM and thought rather than FEET or syllabic count.
Such use of CADENCE as a basis for POETRY is very old. The poetry of the Bible, particularly
in the King James Version, which attempts to approximate the Hebrew CADENCES, rests on
CADENCE and PARALLELISM. The Psalms and The Song of Solomon are noted examples of
free verse. Milton sometimes substituted rhythmically constructed VERSE paragraphs for
metrically regular lines, notably in the CHORUSES of Samson Agonistes, as this example
shows:
But patience is more oft the exercise
Of Saints, the trial of thir fortitude,
Making them each his own Deliver,
And Victor over all
That tyranny or fortune can inflict.
Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass was a major experiment in cadenced rather than metrical
VERSIFICATION. The following lines are typical:
All truths wait in all things
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon.
Matthew Arnold sometimes used free verse, notably in "Dover Beach." But it was the French
poets of the late nineteenth century --Rimbaud, Laforgue, Viele-Griffln, and others--who, in
their revolt against the tyranny of strict French VERSIFICATION, established the Vers libre
movement, from which the name free verse comes.
In the twentieth century free verse has had widespread usage by most poets, of whom Rilke, St.John Perse, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, and William Carlos Williams are
representative. Such a list indicates the great variety of subject matter, effect and TONE that is
possible in free verse, and shows that it is much less a rebellion against traditional English
METRICS than a modification and extension of the resources of our language.
87
15 aprile 2013
II term anno 2013 invio articolo del New Yorker del 1 aprile
Avendo avuto quest'anno il progetto di leggere anche un po', nei limiti del possibile, qualche
articolo presente nella stampa americana, aggiungo a quei due o tre pezzi da me a suo tempo
inviati e tratti dal New York Times, l'inizio di questo bell'articolo (purtroppo lunghissimo)
pubblicato sul New Yorker del 1 aprile 2013.
Tratta di una figura decisamente opposta a quella della Dickinson che so a voi già nota.
Ve lo riporto fino al punto in cui si parla del naufragio della "Elizabeth", causa della mortedella
scrittrice, di quella del suo compagno mazziniano conte Ossoli e del loro bambino (di nome
Nino).
Lina Unali
P.S. Lo stile del New Yorker è insuperabile. Lo dimostrano le copertine. Vi copio quella del 1
aprile.
88
89
90
91
15 aprile 2013
Dispensina fotografica dei luoghi abitati dagli artisti americani espatriati in relazione alle
lezioni dei due sabati passati
Vi invio due immagini della città di Rapallo dove Hemingway andò sembra su suggerimento
di Pound.
La prima è l'albergo Europa, al cui interno si trova un bar chiamato Hemingway Bar e
qualche documento da me visto in passato circa la presenza dello scrittore in quei locali.
Però egli, diversamente da quanto vi ho detto in classe, non si riferiva all'albergo Europa nel
racconto "Cat in the Rain", ma all'Hotel Riviera, a un 400 metri di distanza e a circa 100 metri
di distanza dalla casa di Pound che si trovava in via Marsala.
Nel racconto di Hemingway si parla di un giardino pubblico che si vede dalle finestre, ma in
questo momento il giardino è troppo attraversato da vie diverse per essere considerato tale.
Approfittando di questo invio, vi mando due foto della vecchia Cannes nella parte francese
della riviera di ponente (Costa Azzurra) a cui si riferisce il racconto di Fitzgerald, "Love in the
Night".
Come vedete, Parigi e Londra erano i centri intellettuali di questa cosiddetta lost generation
e la Riviera era il luogo della loro incantevole diaspora.
Rapallo, Albergo Europa
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Hotel Riviera di Rapallo al tempo di Hemingway
Cannes vecchia
93
94
17 aprile 2013
Lina Unali
Le note alla Terra desolata, il mondo psichico e metamorfico presente nel poema
1 Le citazioni che Eliot appone a quasi tutti i Canti hanno una funzione differente da
quella propria di qualsiasi testo scientifico. Non sono come di consueto citazioni vere e
proprie nel senso di riferimento preciso a luoghi e ad autori, ma appaiono introdotte
come fonti generali di ispirazione e di creatività che fanno da sottofondo al
componimento poetico.
Sono estensioni del poema. Indicano che l’ambito in cui esso si muove non si
esaurisce nel testo, ma si estende al di fuori di esso.
Le citazioni suggellano inoltre una sorta di partnership tra il poeta, gli altri poeti e
scrittori che l’hanno preceduto. Una delle note più interessanti, interpretabili in questo
senso, è quella che si riferisce al brano (riportato in tedesco dal testo di Hermann Hesse)
in cui si parla del fatto che metà dell’Europa stia precipitando nel caos. In questo caso
come in altri, quello che Eliot ottiene è una continuazione e amplificazione del proprio
discorso poetico.
2 Chi cercasse dunque un’esatta corrispondenza tra il testo della Terra desolata e le
note da Eliot apposte commetterebbe un errore. La maggior parte delle note che
sarebbero richieste non sono di fatto presenti e fanno parte di uno sfondo culturale non
precisato nel dettaglio. Per assurdo si potrebbe dire che Eliot non mette note a piè di
pagina dove dovrebbe farlo, ma le mette solo per suggerire l’idea di una composizione
più estesa, di uno spazio di creatività non limitato ai soli versi che costituiscono il
poema.
3 Come esempio di quel che Eliot non cita e magari sarebbe stato giusto citare c’è il
titolo stesso della composizione The Waste Land che, se si esplora con sistemi moderni
Le Morte Darthur (1485), si trova presente al plurale presente più di una volta. Ciò a cui
invece Eliot fa riferimento sono i nomi e le azioni dei due cavalieri della Tavola
Rotonda, Tristano e Parsifal. Quindi l’intera opera Le Morte Darthur è lungi dall’essere
assente nel tessuto della Terra desolata, ma non viene menzionata direttamente.
4 Sia l’andamento del testo sia le citazioni indicano un interesse marcato per quello
che potrebbe definirsi il mondo psichico, l’esoteria, lo spazio interiore dell’uomo. Il
poeta rifugge da ciò che è scolastico, istituzionalmente riconosciuto, dogmatico,
limitato.
5 Se scorriamo i nomi menzionati nel testo e nelle note, ci accorgiamo che potrebbe
essere identificata qualcosa come una fascia meridionale della cultura del mondo in cui
prevale l’idealizzazione della Grecia antica, soprattutto con i suoi modelli metamorfici,
ma in cui figurano ampiamente i territori antichi della Fenicia, Roma, la letteratura
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italiana, soprattutto in riferimento a Dante e alle visioni infernali della Commedia, la
letteratura inglese, soprattutto in bocca di Shakespeare che sembra quasi essere stato
introiettato dal poeta e divenire espressione a lui propria. A ciò si aggiungano i
riferimenti alla poesia francese, soprattutto a Baudelaire, la musica di Wagner,
soprattutto nel Parsifal, mitizzata dalla generazione a cui Eliot appartiene (vedi Virginia
Woolf).
A tutto ciò si aggiunga l’India dal Ganga (Gange) al Himavant (the Himalayas), le
parole tipiche del rituale dei morti Shantih shantih shantih (ma ripetute in altri riti
come quello del matrimonio secondo quanto udito a Delhi da chi scrive). Poi ci sono
quattro parole Da, Dattha, Dayadhvam, Damyata che indicano una linea etica antica e
allo stesso tempo scritturale in quanto provenienti dalle Upanishads.
6 Per quanto riguarda l’interiorità dell’uomo, quel che si è definito lo psichico e
l’esoterico, non è un caso che, cominciando con la menzione della Sibilla che alla
domanda “Cosa preferisci?”, risponde: “Scelgo di morire”, si continui con la più
mediocre Madame Sosostris che a sua volta rimanda a quel gruppo di artisti e poeti (es.
William Butler Yeats, Aldous Huxley e Eliot stesso) che cercavano alternative alle
religioni ufficialmente riconosciute e apprezzavano quella tendenza che si definirebbe
oracolare (dalla Sibilla all’indovino Tiresia).
7 È proprio questo ambiente (psichico, esoterico e oracolare) che viene
costantemente tratteggiato a permettere lo sviluppo del tema metamorfico che appare
come una caratteristica precipua di tutta la narrazione poetica. Questo aspetto
metamorfico è presente già all’inizio del poema, dopo l’epigrafe relativa alla Sibilla,
quando a una figura maschile del poeta si sostituisce quella di Marie che abitava
dall’Arciduca. Seguono le metamorfosi tratte da Ovidio, riguardanti la trasformazione in
usignolo di Filomela, la donna stuprata da Tereo, Tiresia che in fasi alternate è uomo e
donna, e altre. Il processo metamorfico porta a mettere l’accento sulla mutevolezza del
reale, sul passare del tempo e anche sulla morte, trasforma un esperimento poetico,
quale la Terra desolata in fondo è, in una visione metafisica della condizione umana
con i suoi caratteri di impermanenza.
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Prof. Lina Unali
Disepnsa su Hemingway
18-20 aprile 2013
Ernest Hemingway
Cat in the Rain (1925)
There were only two Americans stopping at the hotel. They did not know any of the people
they passed on the stairs on their way to and from their room. Their room was on the second
floor facing the sea. It also faced the public garden and the war monument. There were big
palms and green benches in the public garden.
In the good weather there was always an artist with his easel. Artists liked the way the palms
grew and the bright colors of the hotels facing the gardens and the sea.
Italians came from a long way off to look up at the war monument. It was made of bronze
and glistened in the rain. It was raining. The rain dripped from the palm trees. Water stood in
pools on the gravel paths. The sea broke in a long line in the rain and slipped back down the
beach to come up and break again in a long line in the rain. The motor cars were gone from the
square by the war monument. Across the square in the doorway of the café a waiter stood
looking out at the empty square.
The American wife stood at the window looking out. Outside right under their window a cat
was crouched under one of the dripping green tables. The cat was trying to make herself so
compact that she would not be dripped on.
‘I’m going down and get that kitty,’ the American wife said.
‘I’ll do it,’ her husband offered from the bed.
‘No, I’ll get it. The poor kitty out trying to keep dry under a table.’
The husband went on reading, lying propped up with the two pillows at the foot of the bed.
‘Don’t get wet,’ he said.
The wife went downstairs and the hotel owner stood up and bowed to her as she passed the
office. His desk was at the far end of the office. He was an old man and very tall.
‘Il piove,1’the wife said. She liked the hotel-keeper.
‘Si, Si, Signora, brutto tempo2. It is very bad weather.’
He stood behind his desk in the far end of the dim room. The wife liked him. She liked the
deadly serious way he received any complaints. She liked his dignity. She liked the way he
wanted to serve her. She liked the way he felt about being a hotel-keeper. She liked his old,
heavy face and big hands.
Liking him she opened the door and looked out. It was raining harder. A man in a rubber
cape was crossing the empty square to the café. The cat would be around to the right. Perhaps
she could go along under the eaves.
As she stood in the doorway an umbrella opened behind her. It was the maid who looked
after their room.
‘You must not get wet,’ she smiled, speaking Italian. Of course, the hotel-keeper had sent
her.
With the maid holding the umbrella over her, she walked along the gravel path until she was
under their window. The table was there, washed bright green in the rain, but the cat was gone.
She was suddenly disappointed. The maid looked up at her.
‘Ha perduto qualque cosa, Signora?’3
‘There was a cat,’ said the American girl.
‘A cat?’
‘Si, il gatto.’
‘A cat?’ the maid laughed. ‘A cat in the rain?’
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‘Yes, –’ she said, ‘under the table.’ Then, ‘Oh, I wanted it so much. I wanted a kitty.’
When she talked English the maid’s face tightened.
‘Come, Signora,’ she said. ‘We must get back inside. You will be wet.’
‘I suppose so,’ said the American girl.
They went back along the gravel path and passed in the door. The maid stayed outside to
close the umbrella.
As the American girl passed the office, the padrone bowed from his desk. Something felt
very small and tight inside the girl. The padrone made her feel very small and at the same time
really important. She had a momentary feeling of being of supreme importance. She went on up
the stairs. She opened the door of the room.
George was on the bed, reading.
‘Did you get the cat?’ he asked, putting the book down.
‘It was gone.’
‘Wonder where it went to,’ he said, resting his eyes from reading.
She sat down on the bed.
‘I wanted it so much,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why I wanted it so much. I wanted that poor
kitty. It isn’t any fun to be a poor kitty out in the rain.’
George was reading again.
She went over and sat in front of the mirror of the dressing table looking at herself with the
hand glass. She studied her profile, first one side and then the other. Then she studied the back
of her head and her neck.
‘Don’t you think it would be a good idea if I let my hair grow out?’ she asked, looking at her
profile again.
George looked up and saw the back of her neck, clipped close like a boy’s.
‘I like it the way it is.’
‘I get so tired of it,’ she said. ‘I get so tired of looking like a boy.’
George shifted his position in the bed. He hadn’t looked away from her since she started to
speak.
‘You look pretty darn nice,’ he said.
She laid the mirror down on the dresser and went over to the window and looked out. It was
getting dark.
‘I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back that I can
feel,’ she said. ‘I want to have a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I stroke her.’
‘Yeah?’ George said from the bed.
‘And I want to eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles. And I want it to be
spring and I want to brush my hair out in front of a mirror and I want a kitty and I want some
new clothes.’
‘Oh, shut up and get something to read,’ George said. He was reading again.
His wife was looking out of the window. It was quite dark now and still raining in the palm
trees.
‘Anyway, I want a cat,’ she said, ‘I want a cat. I want a cat now. If I can’t have long hair or
any fun, I can have a cat.’
George was not listening. He was reading his book. His wife looked out of the window
where the light had come on in the square.
Someone knocked at the door.
‘Avanti,’ George said. He looked up from his book.
In the doorway stood the maid. She held a big tortoiseshell cat pressed tight against her and
swung down against her body.
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‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘the padrone asked me to bring this for the Signora.’
1
‘It’s raining.’
‘Yes, yes Madam. Awful weather.’
3
‘Have you lost something, Madam?’
2
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Ernest Hemingway
On the Quai at Smyrna (1925)
THE STRANGE thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight. I do not
know why they screamed at that time. We were in the harbor and they were all on the pier
and at midnight they started screaming. We used to turn the searchlight on them to quiet
them. That always did the trick. We'd run the searchlight up and down over them two or
three times and they stopped it. One time I was senior officer on the pier and a Turkish
officer came up to me in a frightful rage because one of our sailors had been most insulting
to him. So I told him the fellow would be sent on ship and be most severely punished. I asked
him to point him out. So he pointed out a gunner's mate, most inoffensive chap. Said he'd
been most frightfully and repeatedly insulting; talking to me through an interpreter. I
couldn't imagine how the gunner's mate knew enough Turkish to be insulting. I called him
over and said, "And just in case you should have spoken to any Turkish officers."
"I haven't spoken to any of them, sir."
"I'm quite sure of it," I said, "but you'd best go on board ship and not come ashore again
for the rest of the day."
Then I told the Turk the man was being sent on board ship and would be most severely
dealt with. Oh most rigorously. He felt topping about it. Great friends we were.
The worst, he said, were the women with dead babies. You couldn't get the women to give
up their dead babies. They'd have babies dead for six days. Wouldn't give them up. Nothing
you could do about it. Had to take them away finally. Then there was an old lady, most
extraordinary case. I told it to a doctor and he said I was lying. We were clearing them off
the pier, had to clear off the dead ones, and this old woman was lying on a sort of litter.
They said, "Will you have a look at her, sir?" So I had a look at her and just then she
died and went absolutely stiff. Her legs drew up and she drew up from the waist and went
quite rigid. Exactly as though she had been dead over night. She was quite dead and
absolutely rigid. I told a medical chap about it and he told me it was impossible.
They were all out there on the pier and it wasn't at all like an earthquake or that sort of
thing because they never knew about the Turk. They never knew what the old Turk
would do. You remember when they ordered us not to come in to take off any more? I
had the wind up when we came in that morning. He had any amount of batteries and
could have blown us clean out of the water. We were going to come in, run close along
the pier, let go the front and rear anchors and then shell the Turkish quarter of the town.
They would have blown us out of the water but we would have blown the town simply to
hell. They just fired a few blank charges at us as we came in. Kemal came down and sacked
the Turkish commander. For exceeding his authority or some such thing. He got a bit above
himself. It would have been the hell of a mess.
You remember the harbor. There were plenty of nice things floating around in it. That was
the only time in my life I got so I dreamed about things. You didn't mind the women who
were having babies as you did those with the dead ones. They had them all right. Surprising
how few of them died. You just covered them over with something and let them go to it.
They'd always pick out the darkest place in the hold to have them. None of them minded
anything once they got off the pier.
The Greeks were nice chaps too. When they evacuated they had all their baggage animals
they couldn't take off with them so they just broke their forelegs and dumped them into the
shallow witer. All those mules with their forelegs broken pushed over into the shallow
water. It was all a pleasant business. My word yes a most pleasant business.
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Ernest Hemingway
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936)
Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in
Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai "Ngaje Ngai," the House of God. Close to the western
summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was
seeking at that altitude.
THE MARVELLOUS THING IS THAT IT’S painless," he said. "That's how you know
when it starts."
"Is it really?"
"Absolutely. I'm awfully sorry about the odor though. That must bother you."
"Don't! Please don't."
"Look at them," he said. "Now is it sight or is it scent that brings them like that?"
The cot the man lay on was in the wide shade of a mimosa tree and as he looked out past the
shade onto the glare of the plain there were three of the big birds squatted obscenely, while in
the sky a dozen more sailed, making quick-moving shadows as they passed.
"They've been there since the day the truck broke down," he said. "Today's the first time any
have lit on the ground. I watched the way they sailed very carefully at first in case I ever wanted
to use them in a story. That's funny now.""I wish you wouldn't," she said.
"I'm only talking," he said. "It's much easier if I talk. But I don't want to bother you."
"You know it doesn't bother me," she said. "It's that I've gotten so very nervous not being
able to do anything. I think we might make it as easy as we can until the plane comes."
"Or until the plane doesn't come."
"Please tell me what I can do. There must be something I can do.
"You can take the leg off and that might stop it, though I doubt it. Or you can shoot me.
You're a good shot now. I taught you to shoot, didn't I?"
"Please don't talk that way. Couldn't I read to you?"
"Read what?"
"Anything in the book that we haven't read."
"I can't listen to it," he said." Talking is the easiest. We quarrel and that makes the time
pass."
"I don't quarrel. I never want to quarrel. Let's not quarrel any more. No matter how nervous
we get. Maybe they will be back with another truck today. Maybe the plane will come."
"I don't want to move," the man said. "There is no sense in moving now except to make it
easier for you."
"That's cowardly."
"Can't you let a man die as comfortably as he can without calling him names? What's the use
of clanging me?"
"You're not going to die."
"Don't be silly. I'm dying now. Ask those bastards." He looked over to where the huge, filthy
birds sat, their naked heads sunk in the hunched feathers. A fourth planed down, to run quicklegged and then waddle slowly toward the others.
"They are around every camp. You never notice them. You can't die if you don't give up."
"Where did you read that? You're such a bloody fool."
"You might think about some one else."
"For Christ's sake," he said, "that's been my trade."
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He lay then and was quiet for a while and looked across the heat shimmer of the plain to the
edge of the bush. There were a few Tommies that showed minute and white against the yellow
and, far off, he saw a herd of zebra, white against the green of the bush. This was a pleasant
camp under big trees against a hill, with good water, and close by, a nearly dry water hole where
sand grouse flighted in the mornings.
"Wouldn't you like me to read?" she asked. She was sitting on a canvas chair beside his cot.
"There's a breeze coming up.
"No thanks."
"Maybe the truck will come."
"I don't give a damn about the truck."
"I do."
"You give a damn about so many things that I don't."
"Not so many, Harry."
"What about a drink?"
"It's supposed to be bad for you. It said in Black's to avoid all alcohol.
You shouldn't drink."
"Molo!" he shouted.
"Yes Bwana."
"Bring whiskey-soda."
"Yes Bwana."
"You shouldn't," she said. "That's what I mean by giving up. It says it's
bad for you. I know it's bad for you."
"No," he said. "It's good for me."
So now it was all over, he thought. So now he would never have a chance
to finish it. So this was the way it ended, in a bickering over a drink. Since
the gangrene started in his right leg he had no pain and with the pain the
horror had gone and all he felt now was a great tiredness and anger that this was the end of it.
For this, that now was coming, he had very little curiosity.
For years it had obsessed him; but now it meant nothing in itself. It was
strange how easy being tired enough made it.
Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to
write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could
never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would
never know, now.
"I wish we'd never come," the woman said. She was looking at him holding the glass and
biting her lip. "You never would have gotten anything like this in Paris. You always said you
loved Paris. We could have stayed in Paris or gone anywhere. I'd have gone anywhere. I said I'd
go anywhere you wanted. If you wanted to shoot we could have gone shooting in Hungary and
been comfortable."
"Your bloody money," he said.
"That's not fair," she said. "It was always yours as much as mine. I left everything and I went
wherever you wanted to go and I've done what you wanted to do But I wish we'd never come
here."
"You said you loved it."
"I did when you were all right. But now I hate it. I don't see why that had to happen to your
leg. What have we done to have that happen to us?"
"I suppose what I did was to forget to put iodine on it when I first scratched it. Then I didn't
pay any attention to it because I never infect. Then, later, when it got bad, it was probably using
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that weak carbolic solution when the other antiseptics ran out that paralyzed the minute blood
vessels and started the gangrene." He looked at her, "What else'"
"I don't mean that."
"If we would have hired a good mechanic instead of a half-baked Kikuyu driver, he would
have checked the oil and never burned out that bearing in the truck."
"I don't mean that."
"If you hadn't left your own people, your goddamned Old Westbury Saratoga, Palm Beach
people to take me on " *'Why, I loved you. That's not fair. I love you now. I'll always love you
Don't you love me?"
"No," said the man. "I don't think so. I never have."
"Harry, what are you saying? You're out of your head."
"No. I haven't any head to go out of."
"Don't drink that," she said. "Darling, please don't drink that. We have to do everything we
can."
"You do it," he said. "I'm tired."
Now in his mind he saw a railway station at Karagatch and he was standing with his pack
and that was the headlight of the Simplon-Offent cutting the dark now and he was leaving
Thrace then after the retreat. That was one of the things he had saved to write, with, in the
morning at breakfast, looking out the window and seeing snow on the mountains in Bulgaffa
and Nansen's Secretary asking the old man if it were snow and the old man looking at it and
saying, No, that's not snow. It's too early for snow. And the Secretary repeating to the other
girls, No, you see. It's not snow and them all saying, It's not snow we were mistaken. But it was
the snow all right and he sent them on into it when he evolved exchange of populations. And it
was snow they tramped along in until they died that winter.
It was snow too that fell all Christmas week that year up in the Gauertal, that year they lived
in the woodcutter's house with the big square porcelain stove that filled half the room, and they
slept on mattresses filled with beech leaves, the time the deserter came with his feet bloody in
the snow. He said the police were right behind him and they gave him woolen socks and held
the gendarmes talking until the tracks had drifted over.
In Schrunz, on Christmas day, the snow was so bright it hurt your eyes when you looked out
from the Weinstube and saw every one coming home from church. That was where they walked
up the sleigh-smoothed urine-yellowed road along the river with the steep pine hills, skis heavy
on the shoulder, and where they ran down the glacier above the Madlenerhaus, the snow as
smooth to see as cake frosting and as light as powder and he remembered the noiseless rush the
speed made as you dropped down like a bird.
They were snow-bound a week in the Madlenerhaus that time in the blizzard playing cards in
the smoke by the lantern light and the stakes were higher all the time as Herr Lent lost more.
Finally he lost it all. Everything, the Skischule money and all the season's profit and then his
capital. He could see him with his long nose, picking up the cards and then opening, "Sans
Voir." There was always gambling then. When there was no snow you gambled and when there
was too much you gambled. He thought of all the time in his life he had spent gambling.
But he had never written a line of that, nor of that cold, bright Christmas day with the
mountains showing across the plain that Barker had flown across the lines to bomb the Austrian
officers' leave train, machine-gunning them as they scattered and ran. He remembered Barker
afterwards coming into the mess and starting to tell about it. And how quiet it got and then
somebody saying, ''You bloody murderous bastard.''
Those were the same Austrians they killed then that he skied with later. No not the same.
Hans, that he skied with all that year, had been in the Kaiser Jagers and when they went
103
hunting hares together up the little valley above the saw-mill they had talked of the fighting on
Pasubio and of the attack on Perticara and Asalone and he had never written a word of that.
Nor of Monte Corona, nor the Sette Communi, nor of Arsiero.
How many winters had he lived in the Vorarlberg and the Arlberg? It was four and then he
remembered the man who had the fox to sell when they had walked into Bludenz, that time to
buy presents, and the cherry-pit taste of good kirsch, the fast-slipping rush of running powdersnow on crust, singing ''Hi! Ho! said Rolly!' ' as you ran down the last stretch to the steep drop,
taking it straight, then running the orchard in three turns and out across the ditch and onto the
icy road behind the inn. Knocking your bindings loose, kicking the skis free and leaning them up
against the wooden wall of the inn, the lamplight coming from the window, where inside, in the
smoky, new-wine smelling warmth, they were playing the accordion.
"Where did we stay in Paris?" he asked the woman who was sitting by him in a canvas chair,
now, in Africa.
"At the Crillon. You know that."
"Why do I know that?"
"That's where we always stayed."
"No. Not always."
"There and at the Pavillion Henri-Quatre in St. Germain. You said you loved it there."
"Love is a dunghill," said Harry. "And I'm the cock that gets on it to crow."
"If you have to go away," she said, "is it absolutely necessary to kill off everything you leave
behind? I mean do you have to take away everything? Do you have to kill your horse, and your
wife and burn your saddle and your armour?"
"Yes," he said. "Your damned money was my armour. My Sword and my Armour."
"Don't."
"All right. I'll stop that. I don't want to hurt you.'
"It's a little bit late now."
"All right then. I'll go on hurting you. It's more amusing. The only thing I ever really liked to
do with you I can't do now."
"No, that's not true. You liked to do many things and everything you wanted to do I did."
"Oh, for Christ sake stop bragging, will you?"
He looked at her and saw her crying.
"Listen," he said. "Do you think that it is fun to do this? I don't know why I'm doing it. It's
trying to kill to keep yourself alive, I imagine. I was all right when we started talking. I didn't
mean to start this, and now I'm crazy as a coot and being as cruel to you as I can be. Don't pay
any attention, darling, to what I say. I love you, really. You know I love you. I've never loved
any one else the way I love you."
He slipped into the familiar lie he made his bread and butter by.
"You're sweet to me."
"You bitch," he said. "You rich bitch. That's poetry. I'm full of poetry now. Rot and poetry.
Rotten poetry."
"Stop it. Harry, why do you have to turn into a devil now?"
"I don't like to leave anything," the man said. "I don’t like to leave things behind."
***
It was evening now and he had been asleep. The sun was gone behind the hill and there was
a shadow all across the plain and the small animals were feeding close to camp; quick dropping
heads and switching tails, he watched them keeping well out away from the bush now. The birds
no longer waited on the ground. They were all perched heavily in a tree. There were many more
of them. His personal boy was sitting by the bed.
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"Memsahib's gone to shoot," the boy said. "Does Bwana want?"
"Nothing."
She had gone to kill a piece of meat and, knowing how he liked to watch the game, she had
gone well away so she would not disturb this little pocket of the plain that he could see. She was
always thoughtful, he thought. On anything she knew about, or had read, or that she had ever
heard.
It was not her fault that when he went to her he was already over. How could a woman know
that you meant nothing that you said; that you spoke only from habit and to be comfortable?
After he no longer meant what he said, his lies were more successful with women than when he
had told them the truth.
It was not so much that he lied as that there was no truth to tell. He had had his life and it
was over and then he went on living it again with different people and more money, with the
best of the same places, and some new ones.
You kept from thinking and it was all marvellous. You were equipped with good insides so
that you did not go to pieces that way, the way most of them had, and you made an attitude that
you cared nothing for the work you used to do, now that you could no longer do it. But, in
yourself, you said that you would write about these people; about the very rich; that you were
really not of them but a spy in their country; that you would leave it and write of it and for once
it would be written by some one who knew what he was writing of. But he would never do it,
because each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability
and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all. The people he knew now
were all much more comfortable when he did not work. Africa was where he had been happiest
in the good time of his life, so he had come out here to start again. They had made this safari
with the minimum of comfort. There was no hardship; but there was no luxury and he had
thought that he could get back into training that way. That in some way he could work the fat
off his soul the way a fighter went into the mountains to work and train in order to burn it out of
his body.
She had liked it. She said she loved it. She loved anything that was exciting, that involved a
change of scene, where there were new people and where things were pleasant. And he had felt
the illusion of returning strength of will to work. Now if this was how it ended, and he knew it
was, he must not turn like some snake biting itself because its back was broken. It wasn't this
woman's fault. If it had not been she it would have been another. If he lived by a lie he should
try to die by it. He heard a shot beyond the hill.
She shot very well this good, this rich bitch, this kindly caretaker and destroyer of his talent.
Nonsense. He had destroyed his talent himself. Why should he blame this woman because she
kept him well? He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he
believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by
sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and by crook. What was this? A
catalogue of old books? What was his talent anyway? It was a talent all right but instead of
using it, he had traded on it. It was never what he had done, but always what he could do. And
he had chosen to make his living with something else instead of a pen or a pencil. It was
strange, too, wasn't it, that when he fell in love with another woman, that woman should always
have more money than the last one? But when he no longer was in love, when he was only
lying, as to this woman, now, who had the most money of all, who had all the money there was,
who had had a husband and children, who had taken lovers and been dissatisfied with them, and
who loved him dearly as a writer, as a man, as a companion and as a proud possession; it was
strange that when he did not love her at all and was lying, that he should be able to give her
more for her money than when he had really loved.
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We must all be cut out for what we do, he thought. However you make your living is where
your talent lies. He had sold vitality, in one form or another, all his life and when your
affections are not too involved you give much better value for the money. He had found that out
but he would never write that, now, either. No, he would not write that, although it was well
worth writing.
Now she came in sight, walking across the open toward the camp. She was wearing jodphurs
and carrying her rifle. The two boys had a Tommie slung and they were coming along behind
her. She was still a good-looking woman, he thought, and she had a pleasant body. She had a
great talent and appreciation for the bed, she was not pretty, but he liked her face, she read
enormously, liked to ride and shoot and, certainly, she drank too much. Her husband had died
when she was still a comparatively young woman and for a while she had devoted herself to her
two just-grown children, who did not need her and were embarrassed at having her about, to her
stable of horses, to books, and to bottles. She liked to read in the evening before dinner and she
drank Scotch and soda while she read. By dinner she was fairly drunk and after a bottle of wine
at dinner she was usually drunk enough to sleep.
That was before the lovers. After she had the lovers she did not drink so much because she
did not have to be drunk to sleep. But the lovers bored her. She had been married to a man who
had never bored her and these people bored her very much.
Then one of her two children was killed in a plane crash and after that was over she did not
want the lovers, and drink being no anaesthetic she had to make another life. Suddenly, she had
been acutely frightened of being alone. But she wanted some one that she respected with her.
It had begun very simply. She liked what he wrote and she had always envied the life he led.
She thought he did exactly what he wanted to. The steps by which she had acquired him and the
way in which she had finally fallen in love with him were all part of a regular progression in
which she had built herself a new life and he had traded away what remained of his old life.
He had traded it for security, for comfort too, there was no denying that, and for what else?
He did not know. She would have bought him anything he wanted. He knew that. She was a
damned nice woman too. He would as soon be in bed with her as any one; rather with her,
because she was richer, because she was very pleasant and appreciative and because she never
made scenes. And now this life that she had built again was coming to a term because he had
not used iodine two weeks ago when a thorn had scratched his knee as they moved forward
trying to photograph a herd of waterbuck standing, their heads up, peering while their nostrils
searched the air, their ears spread wide to hear the first noise that would send them rushing into
the bush. They had bolted, too, before he got the picture.
Here she came now. He turned his head on the cot to look toward her. "Hello," he said.
"I shot a Tommy ram," she told him. "He'll make you good broth and I'll have them mash
some potatoes with the Klim. How do you feel?"
"Much better."
"Isn't that lovely? You know I thought perhaps you would. You were sleeping when I left."
"I had a good sleep. Did you walk far?"
"No. Just around behind the hill. I made quite a good shot on the Tommy."
"You shoot marvellously, you know."
"I love it. I've loved Africa. Really. If you're all right it's the most fun that I've ever had. You
don't know the fun it's been to shoot with you. I've loved the country."
"I love it too."
"Darling, you don't know how marvellous it is to see you feeling better. I couldn't stand it
when you felt that way. You won't talk to me like that again, will you? Promise me?"
"No," he said. "I don't remember what I said."
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"You don't have to destroy me. Do you? I'm only a middle-aged woman who loves you and
wants to do what you want to do. I've been destroyed two or three times already. You wouldn't
want to destroy me again, would you?"
"I'd like to destroy you a few times in bed," he said.
"Yes. That's the good destruction. That's the way we're made to be destroyed. The plane will
be here tomorrow."
"How do you know?"
"I'm sure. It's bound to come. The boys have the wood all ready and the grass to make the
smudge. I went down and looked at it again today. There's plenty of room to land and we have
the smudges ready at both ends."
"What makes you think it will come tomorrow?"
"I'm sure it will. It's overdue now. Then, in town, they will fix up your leg and then we will
have some good destruction. Not that dreadful talking kind."
"Should we have a drink? The sun is down."
"Do you think you should?"
"I'm having one."
"We'll have one together. Molo, letti dui whiskey-soda!" she called.
"You'd better put on your mosquito boots," he told her.
"I'll wait till I bathe . . ."
While it grew dark they drank and just before it was dark and there was no longer enough
light to shoot, a hyena crossed the open on his way around the hill.
"That bastard crosses there every night," the man said. "Every night for two weeks."
"He's the one makes the noise at night. I don't mind it. They're a filthy animal though."
Drinking together, with no pain now except the discomfort of lying in the one position, the
boys lighting a fire, its shadow jumping on the tents, he could feel the return of acquiescence in
this life of pleasant surrender. She was very good to him. He had been cruel and unjust in the
afternoon. She was a fine woman, marvellous really. And just then it occurred to him that he
was going to die.
It came with a rush; not as a rush of water nor of wind; but of a sudden, evil-smelling
emptiness and the odd thing was that the hyena slipped lightly along the edge of it.
"What is it, Harry?" she asked him.
"Nothing," he said. "You had better move over to the other side. To windward."
"Did Molo change the dressing?"
"Yes. I'm just using the boric now."
"How do you feel?"
"A little wobbly."
"I'm going in to bathe," she said. "I'll be right out. I'll eat with you and then we'll put the cot
in."
So, he said to himself, we did well to stop the quarrelling. He had never quarrelled much
with this woman, while with the women that he loved he had quarrelled so much they had
finally, always, with the corrosion of the quarrelling, killed what they had together. He had
loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.
He thought about alone in Constantinople that time, having quarrelled in Paris before he
had gone out. He had whored the whole time and then, when that was over, and he had failed to
kill his loneliness, but only made it worse, he had written her, the first one, the one who left him,
a letter telling her how he had never been able to kill it ... How when he thought he saw her
outside the Regence one time it made him go all faint and sick inside, and that he would follow
a woman who looked like her in some way, along the Boulevard, afraid to see it was not she,
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afraid to lose the feeling it gave him. How every one he had slept with had only made him miss
her more. How what she had done could never matter since he knew he could not cure himself
of loving her. He wrote this letter at the Club, cold sober, and mailed it to New York asking her
to write him at the of fice in Paris. That seemed safe. And that night missing her so much it
made him feel hollow sick inside, he wandered up past Maxim's, picked a girl up and took her
out to supper. He had gone to a place to dance with her afterward, she danced badly, and left
her for a hot Armenian slut, that swung her belly against him so it almost scalded. He took her
away from a British gunner subaltern after a row. The gunner asked him outside and they
fought in the street on the cobbles in the dark. He'd hit him twice, hard, on the side of the jaw
and when he didn't go down he knew he was in for a fight. The gunner hit him in the body, then
beside his eye. He swung with his left again and landed and the gunner fell on him and grabbed
his coat and tore the sleeve off and he clubbed him twice behind the ear and then smashed him
with his right as he pushed him away. When the gunner went down his head hit first and he ran
with the girl because they heard the M.P. 's coming. They got into a taxi and drove out to
Rimmily Hissa along the Bosphorus, and around, and back in the cool night and went to bed
and she felt as over-ripe as she looked but smooth, rose-petal, syrupy, smooth-bellied, bigbreasted and needed no pillow under her buttocks, and he left her before she was awake looking
blousy enough in the first daylight and turned up at the Pera Palace with a black eye, carrying
his coat because one sleeve was missing.
That same night he left for Anatolia and he remembered, later on that trip, riding all day
through fields of the poppies that they raised for opium and how strange it made you feel,
finally, and all the distances seemed wrong, to where they had made the attack with the newly
arrived Constantine officers, that did not know a god-damned thing, and the artillery had fired
into the troops and the British observer had cried like a child.
That was the day he'd first seen dead men wearing white ballet skirts and upturned shoes
with pompons on them. The Turks had come steadily and lumpily and he had seen the skirted
men running and the of ficers shooting into them and running then themselves and he and the
British observer had run too until his lungs ached and his mouth was full of the taste of pennies
and they stopped behind some rocks and there were the Turks coming as lumpily as ever. Later
he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he had seen much worse. So
when he got back to Paris that time he could not talk about it or stand to have it mentioned. And
there in the cafe as he passed was that American poet with a pile of saucers in front of him and
a stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada movement with a Roumanian who said
his name was Tristan Tzara, who always wore a monocle and had a headache, and, back at the
apartment with his wife that now he loved again, the quarrel all over, the madness all over, glad
to be home, the office sent his mail up to the flat. So then the letter in answer to the one he'd
written came in on a platter one morning and when he saw the hand writing he went cold all
over and tried to slip the letter underneath another. But his wife said, ''Who is that letter from,
dear?'' and that was the end of the beginning of that.
He remembered the good times with them all, and the quarrels. They always picked the finest
places to have the quarrels. And why had they always quarrelled when he was feeling best? He
had never written any of that because, at first, he never wanted to hurt any one and then it
seemed as though there was enough to write without it. But he had always thought that he
would write it finally. There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the
events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the
subtler change and he could remember how the people were at different times. He had been in it
and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.
"How do you feel?" she said. She had come out from the tent now after her bath.
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"All right."
"Could you eat now?" He saw Molo behind her with the folding table and the other boy with
the dishes.
"I want to write," he said.
"You ought to take some broth to keep your strength up."
"I'm going to die tonight," he said. "I don't need my strength up."
"Don't be melodramatic, Harry, please," she said.
"Why don't you use your nose? I'm rotted half way up my thigh now. What the hell should I
fool with broth for? Molo bring whiskey-soda."
"Please take the broth," she said gently.
"All right."
The broth was too hot. He had to hold it in the cup until it cooled enough to take it and then
he just got it down without gagging.
"You're a fine woman," he said. "Don't pay any attention to me."
She looked at him with her well-known, well-loved face from Spur and Town & Country,
only a little the worse for drink, only a little the worse for bed, but Town & Country never
showed those good breasts and those useful thighs and those lightly small-of-back-caressing
hands, and as he looked and saw her well-known pleasant smile, he felt death come again.
in.
This time there was no rush. It was a puff, as of a wind that makes a candle flicker and the
flame go tall.
"They can bring my net out later and hang it from the tree and build the fire up. I'm not going
in the tent tonight. It's not worth moving. It's a clear night. There won't be any rain."
So this was how you died, in whispers that you did not hear. Well, there would be no more
quarrelling. He could promise that. The one experience that he had never had he was not going
to spoil now. He probably would. You spoiled everything. But perhaps he wouldn't.
"You can't take dictation, can you?"
"I never learned," she told him.
"That's all right."
There wasn't time, of course, although it seemed as though it telescoped so that you might
put it all into one paragraph if you could get it right.
There was a log house, chinked white with mortar, on a hill above the lake. There was a bell
on a pole by the door to call the people in to meals. Behind the house were fields and behind the
fields was the timber. A line of lombardy poplars ran from the house to the dock. Other poplars
ran along the point. A road went up to the hills along the edge of the timber and along that road
he picked blackberries. Then that log house was burned down and all the guns that had been on
deer foot racks above the open fire place were burned and afterwards their barrels, with the
lead melted in the magazines, and the stocks burned away, lay out on the heap of ashes that
were used to make lye for the big iron soap kettles, and you asked Grandfather if you could
have them to play with, and he said, no. You see they were his guns still and he never bought
any others. Nor did he hunt any more. The house was rebuilt in the same place out of lumber
now and painted white and from its porch you saw the poplars and the lake beyond; but there
were never any more guns. The barrels of the guns that had hung on the deer feet on the wall of
the log house lay out there on the heap of ashes and no one ever touched them.
In the Black Forest, after the war, we rented a trout stream and there were two ways to walk
to it. One was down the valley from Triberg and around the valley road in the shade of the trees
that bordered the white road, and then up a side road that went up through the hills past many
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small farms, with the big Schwarzwald houses, until that road crossed the stream. That was
where our fishing began.
The other way was to climb steeply up to the edge of the woods and then go across the top of
the hills through the pine woods, and then out to the edge of a meadow and down across this
meadow to the bridge. There were birches along the stream and it was not big, but narrow,
clear and fast, with pools where it had cut under the roots of the birches. At the Hotel in Triberg
the proprietor had a fine season. It was very pleasant and we were all great friends. The next
year came the inflation and the money he had made the year before was not enough to buy
supplies to open the hotel and he hanged himself. You could dictate that, but you could not
dictate the Place Contrescarpe where the flower sellers dyed their flowers in the street and the
dye ran over the paving where the autobus started and the old men and the women, always
drunk on wine and bad mare; and the children with their noses running in the cold; the smell of
dirty sweat and poverty and drunkenness at the Cafe' des Amateurs and the whores at the Bal
Musette they lived above. The concierge who entertained the trooper of the Garde Republicaine
in her loge, his horse-hair-plumed helmet on a chair. The locataire across the hall whose
husband was a bicycle racer and her joy that morning at the cremerie when she had opened
L'Auto and seen where he placed third in Paris-Tours, his first big race. She had blushed and
laughed and then gone upstairs crying with the yellow sporting paper in her hand. The husband
of the woman who ran the Bal Musette drove a taxi and when he, Harry, had to take an early
plane the husband knocked upon the door to wake him and they each drank a glass of white
wine at the zinc of the bar before they started. He knew his neighbors in that quarter then
because they all were poor.
Around that Place there were two kinds; the drunkards and the sportifs. The drunkards killed
their poverty that way; the sportifs took it out in exercise. They were the descendants of the
Communards and it was no struggle for them to know their politics. They knew who had shot
their fathers, their relatives, their brothers, and their friends when the Versailles troops came in
and took the town after the Commune and executed any one they could catch with calloused
hands, or who wore a cap, or carried any other sign he was a working man. And in that poverty,
and in that quarter across the street from a Boucherie Chevaline and a wine cooperative he had
written the start of all he was to do. There never was another part of Paris that he loved like
that, the sprawling trees, the old white plastered houses painted brown below, the long green of
the autobus in that round square, the purple flower dye upon the paving, the sudden drop down
the hill of the rue Cardinal Lemoine to the River, and the other way the narrow crowded world
of the rue Mouffetard. The street that ran up toward the Pantheon and the other that he always
took with the bicycle, the only asphalted street in all that quarter, smooth under the tires, with
the high narrow houses and the cheap tall hotel where Paul Verlaine had died. There were only
two rooms in the apartments where they lived and he had a room on the top floor of that hotel
that cost him sixty francs a month where he did his writing, and from it he could see the roofs
and chimney pots and all the hills of Paris.
From the apartment you could only see the wood and coal man's place. He sold wine too,
bad wine. The golden horse's head outside the Boucherie Chevaline where the carcasses hung
yellow gold and red in the open window, and the green painted co-operative where they bought
their wine; good wine and cheap. The rest was plaster walls and the windows of the neighbors.
The neighbors who, at night, when some one lay drunk in the street, moaning and groaning in
that typical French ivresse that you were propaganded to believe did not exist, would open their
windows and then the murmur of talk.
''Where is the policeman? When you don't want him the bugger is always there. He's
sleeping with some concierge. Get the Agent. " Till some one threw a bucket of water from a
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window and the moaning stopped. ''What's that? Water. Ah, that's intelligent." And the windows
shutting. Marie, his femme de menage, protesting against the eight-hour day saying, ''If a
husband works until six he gets only a riffle drunk on the way home and does not waste too
much. If he works only until five he is drunk every night and one has no money. It is the wife of
the working man who suffers from this shortening of hours. '
"Wouldn't you like some more broth?" the woman asked him now.
"No, thank you very much. It is awfully good."
"Try just a little."
"I would like a whiskey-soda."
"It's not good for you."
"No. It's bad for me. Cole Porter wrote the words and the music. This knowledge that you're
going mad for me."
"You know I like you to drink."
"Oh yes. Only it's bad for me."
When she goes, he thought, I'll have all I want. Not all I want but all there is. Ayee he was
tired. Too tired. He was going to sleep a little while. He lay still and death was not there. It must
have gone around another street. It went in pairs, on bicycles, and moved absolutely silently on
the pavements.
No, he had never written about Paris. Not the Paris that he cared about. But what about the
rest that he had never written?
What about the ranch and the silvered gray of the sage brush, the quick, clear water in the
irrigation ditches, and the heavy green of the alfalfa. The trail went up into the hills and the
cattle in the summer were shy as deer. The bawling and the steady noise and slow moving mass
raising a dust as you brought them down in the fall. And behind the mountains, the clear
sharpness of the peak in the evening light and, riding down along the trail in the moonlight,
bright across the valley. Now he remembered coming down through the timber in the dark
holding the horse's tail when you could not see and all the stories that he meant to write.
About the half-wit chore boy who was left at the ranch that time and told not to let any one
get any hay, and that old bastard from the Forks who had beaten the boy when he had worked
for him stopping to get some feed. The boy refusing and the old man saying he would beat him
again. The boy got the rifle from the kitchen and shot him when he tried to come into the barn
and when they came back to the ranch he'd been dead a week, frozen in the corral, and the dogs
had eaten part of him. But what was left you packed on a sled wrapped in a blanket and roped
on and you got the boy to help you haul it, and the two of you took it out over the road on skis,
and sixty miles down to town to turn the boy over. He having no idea that he would be arrested.
Thinking he had done his duty and that you were his friend and he would be rewarded. He'd
helped to haul the old man in so everybody could know how bad the old man had been and how
he'd tried to steal some feed that didn't belong to him, and when the sheriff put the handcuffs on
the boy he couldn't believe it. Then he'd started to cry. That was one story he had saved to write.
He knew at least twenty good stories from out there and he had never written one. Why?
"You tell them why," he said.
"Why what, dear?"
"Why nothing."
She didn't drink so much, now, since she had him. But if he lived he would never write about
her, he knew that now. Nor about any of them. The rich were dull and they drank too much, or
they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered
poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The
very rich are different from you and me." And how some one had said to Julian, Yes, they have
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more money. But that was not humorous to Julian. He thought they were a special glamourous
race and when he found they weren't it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that
wrecked him.
He had been contemptuous of those who wrecked. You did not have to like it because you
understood it. He could beat anything, he thought, because no thing could hurt him if he did not
care.
All right. Now he would not care for death. One thing he had always dreaded was the pain.
He could stand pain as well as any man, until it went on too long, and wore him out, but here he
had something that had hurt frightfully and just when he had felt it breaking him, the pain had
stopped.
He remembered long ago when Williamson, the bombing officer, had been hit by a stick
bomb some one in a German patrol had thrown as he was coming in through the wire that night
and, screaming, had begged every one to kill him. He was a fat man, very brave, and a good
officer, although addicted to fantastic shows. But that night he was caught in the wire, with a
flare lighting him up and his bowels spilled out into the wire, so when they brought him in,
alive, they had to cut him loose. Shoot me, Harry. For Christ sake shoot me. They had had an
argument one time about our Lord never sending you anything you could not bear and some
one's theory had been that meant that at a certain time the pain passed you out automatically.
But he had always remembered Williamson, that night. Nothing passed out Williamson until he
gave him all his morphine tablets that he had always saved to use himself and then they did not
work right away.
Still this now, that he had, was very easy; and if it was no worse as it went on there was
nothing to worry about. Except that he would rather be in better company.
He thought a little about the company that he would like to have.
No, he thought, when everything you do, you do too long, and do too late, you can't expect to
find the people still there. The people all are gone. The party's over and you are with your
hostess now.
I'm getting as bored with dying as with everything else, he thought.
"It's a bore," he said out loud.
"What is, my dear?"
"Anything you do too bloody long."
He looked at her face between him and the fire. She was leaning back in the chair and the
firelight shone on her pleasantly lined face and he could see that she was sleepy. He heard the
hyena make a noise just outside the range of the fire.
"I've been writing," he said. "But I got tired."
"Do you think you will be able to sleep?"
"Pretty sure. Why don't you turn in?"
"I like to sit here with you."
"Do you feel anything strange?" he asked her.
"No. Just a little sleepy."
"I do," he said.
He had just felt death come by again.
"You know the only thing I've never lost is curiosity," he said to her.
"You've never lost anything. You're the most complete man I've ever known."
"Christ," he said. "How little a woman knows. What is that? Your intuition?"
Because, just then, death had come and rested its head on the foot of the cot and he could
smell its breath.
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"Never believe any of that about a scythe and a skull," he told her. "It can be two bicycle
policemen as easily, or be a bird. Or it can have a wide snout like a hyena."
It had moved up on him now, but it had no shape any more. It simply occupied space.
"Tell it to go away."
It did not go away but moved a little closer.
"You've got a hell of a breath," he told it. "You stinking bastard."
It moved up closer to him still and now he could not speak to it, and when it saw he could
not speak it came a little closer, and now he tried to send it away without speaking, but it moved
in on him so its weight was all upon his chest, and while it crouched there and he could not
move or speak, he heard the woman say, "Bwana is asleep now. Take the cot up very gently and
carry it into the tent."
He could not speak to tell her to make it go away and it crouched now, heavier, so he could
not breathe. And then, while they lifted the cot, suddenly it was all right and the weight went
from his chest.
It was morning and had been morning for some time and he heard the plane. It showed very
tiny and then made a wide circle and the boys ran out and lit the fires, using kerosene, and piled
on grass so there were two big smudges at each end of the level place and the morning breeze
blew them toward the camp and the plane circled twice more, low this time, and then glided
down and levelled off and landed smoothly and, coming walking toward him, was old Compton
in slacks, a tweed jacket and a brown felt hat.
"What's the matter, old cock?" Compton said.
"Bad leg," he told him. "Will you have some breakfast?"
"Thanks. I'll just have some tea. It's the Puss Moth you know. I won't be able to take the
Memsahib. There's only room for one. Your lorry is on the way."
Helen had taken Compton aside and was speaking to him. Compton came back more cheery
than ever.
"We'll get you right in," he said. "I'll be back for the Mem. Now I'm afraid I'll have to stop at
Arusha to refuel. We'd better get going."
"What about the tea?"
"I don't really care about it, you know."
The boys had picked up the cot and carried it around the green tents and down along the rock
and out onto the plain and along past the smudges that were burning brightly now, the grass all
consumed, and the wind fanning the fire, to the little plane. It was difficult getting him in, but
once in he lay back in the leather seat, and the leg was stuck straight out to one side of the seat
where Compton sat. Compton started the motor and got in. He waved to Helen and to the boys
and, as the clatter moved into the old familiar roar, they swung around with Compie watching
for warthog holes and roared, bumping, along the stretch between the fires and with the last
bump rose and he saw them all standing below, waving, and the camp beside the hill, flattening
now, and the plain spreading, clumps of trees, and the bush flattening, while the game trails ran
now smoothly to the dry waterholes, and there was a new water that he had never known of. The
zebra, small rounded backs now, and the wildebeeste, big-headed dots seeming to climb as they
moved in long fingers across the plain, now scattering as the shadow came toward them, they
were tiny now, and the movement had no gallop, and the plain as far as you could see, grayyellow now and ahead old Compie's tweed back and the brown felt hat. Then they were over the
first hills and the wildebeeste were trailing up them, and then they were over mountains with
sudden depths of green-rising forest and the solid bamboo slopes, and then the heavy forest
again, sculptured into peaks and hollows until they crossed, and hills sloped down and then
113
another plain, hot now, and purple brown, bumpy with heat and Compie looking back to see
how he was riding. Then there were other mountains dark ahead.
And then instead of going on to Arusha they turned left, he evidently figured that they had
the gas, and looking down he saw a pink sifting cloud, moving over the ground, and in the air,
like the first snow in at ii blizzard, that comes from nowhere, and he knew the locusts were
coming, up from the South. Then they began to climb and they were going to the East it seemed,
and then it darkened and they were in a storm, the rain so thick it seemed like flying through a
waterfall, and then they were out and Compie turned his head and grinned and pointed and
there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the
sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.
Just then the hyena stopped whimpering in the night and started to make a strange, human,
almost crying sound. The woman heard it and, stirred uneasily. She did not wake. In her dream
she was at the house on Long Island and it was the night before her daughter's debut. Somehow
her father was there and he had been very rude. Then the noise the hyena made was so loud she
woke and for a moment she did not know where she was and she was very afraid. Then she took
the flashlight and shone it on the other cot that they had carried in after Harry had gone to sleep.
She could see his bulk under the mosquito bar but somehow he had gotten his leg out and it
hung down alongside the cot. The dressings had all come down and she could not look at it.
"Molo," she called, "Molo! Molo!"
Then she said, "Harry, Harry!" Then her voice rising, "Harry! Please. Oh Harry!"
There was no answer and she could not hear him breathing.
Outside the tent the hyena made the same strange noise that had awakened her. But she did
not hear him for the beating of her heart.
114
19 aprile 2013
Notizie del New York Times in tempo reale relative al cosiddetto Boston attack
e all'esplosione in Texas
115
20 aprile 2013
Lina Unali
Nota su un aspetto di “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” di Ernest Hemingway
Il racconto di Hemingway “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1938) è incardinato intorno
a due figure che si trovano rispettivamente in apertura e alla fine della narrazione,
entrambe collocate vicino al monte Kilimanjaro, in Kenya. Il racconto si apre con un
epigrafe in corsivo in cui si legge della carcassa irrigidita e ghiacciata di un leopardo
che giace ai piedi del Kilimanjaro: “Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710
feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called
the Masai “Ngaje Ngai”, the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the
dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was
seeking at that altitude”.
La storia si conclude con la presentazione dello scrittore che vola in aereo nei pressi
della cima del Kilimanjaro. Le due figure possono essere associate sia per la loro
posizione nello spazio sia per lo stato di decadenza e di morte che le caratterizza.
Hemingway è ferito a una gamba e c’è pericolo che la ferita si trasformi in cancrena.
Qualcosa di anti-vitale, negativo, persino mostruoso apre e chiude il racconto che
potrebbe essere definito come una proiezione autobiografica che si svolge accanto alle
nevi del tozzo rettangolare Kilimanjaro:
“And then instead of going on to Arusha they turned left, he evidently figured that they had the
gas, and looking down he saw a pink sifting cloud, moving over the ground, and in the air, like
the first snow in a blizzard, that comes from nowhere, and he knew the locusts were coming up
from the South. Then they began to climb and they were going to the East it seemed, and then it
darkened and they were in a storm, the rain so thick it seemed like flying through a waterfall,
and then they were out and Compie turned his head and grinned and pointed and there, ahead,
all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the
square top of Kilimanjaro”.
116
J.M. Roberts, The Penguin History of Europe, Penguin Books, Londra, 1997
“European Revolution”, pp. 512-513
117
118
119
2-3 maggio 2013
T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). Prufrock and Other Observations. 1920.
1. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza più scosse.
Ma perciocché giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question….
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
5
10
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
120
15
20
25
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
30
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
35
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
.
. . . .
.
. .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
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40
45
50
55
60
65
70
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
.
. . . .
.
. .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.”
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
.
. . . .
.
. .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
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75
80
85
90
95
100
105
110
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
115
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
120
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
125
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
130
T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). Prufrock and Other Observations. 1920.
7. Aunt Helen (1915)
MISS HELEN SLINGSBY was my maiden aunt,
And lived in a small house near a fashionable square
Cared for by servants to the number of four.
Now when she died there was silence in heaven
And silence at her end of the street.
The shutters were drawn and the undertaker wiped his feet—
He was aware that this sort of thing had occurred before.
The dogs were handsomely provided for,
But shortly afterwards the parrot died too.
The Dresden clock continued ticking on the mantelpiece,
And the footman sat upon the dining-table
Holding the second housemaid on his knees—
Who had always been so careful while her mistress lived.
Lina Unali, Note su “Aunt Helen” e “Cousin Nancy”
123
5
10
Si riportano qui di seguito brani di un intervista che T.S. Eliot concesse a Donald Hall e che
fu pubblicata a New York nel 1963 da Viking Penguin (“Intervista con Thomas S. Eliot”):
Da “Intervista con T.S. Eliot”: l’onestà del poeta
“Nelle prime poesie c’è un problema di inesperienza – avere da dire più di quel che si sa
dire e volere rendere in parole e ritmo qualcosa, ma non avere abbastanza controllo sulle
parole e sul ritmo per renderlo in una forma immediatamente accessibile.
Questo tipo di oscurità si presenta quando il poeta sta ancora imparando a usare il
linguaggio. Sei costretto a dire le cose in maniera difficile. L’unica alternativa è non
esprimerti affatto, in quella fase.
Credo però sia terribilmente pericoloso dare consigli generici. La cosa migliore che si può
fare per un giovane poeta è analizzare dettagliatamente una sua poesia: discuterne con lui se
necessario, dargli la propria opinione e, se ci sono conclusioni generali da trarre, lasciare che
lo faccia da sé. Ho capito che le persone hanno un diverso modo di lavorare a seconda dei
casi e percepiscono la realtà in modo diverso. Non si sa mai se quella che si sta facendo è
un’affermazione universalmente valida per tutti i poeti o una che puoi applicare solo a te
stesso. Credo non ci sia nulla di peggio che cercare di plasmare la gente secondo la propria
immagine. (…)
Per me è stato molto utile esercitare altre attività, lavorare in banca, o anche fare l’editore.
E penso anche che la difficoltà creata dall’avere meno tempo a disposizione di quanto ne
avrei voluto mi abbia dato una grande urgenza di concentrazione. Il pericolo che si corre,
quando non si ha niente altro da fare è, di norma, quello di scrivere troppo, invece di
concentrarsi e perfezionare piccole porzioni di testo. (…)
Nessun poeta onesto può mai essere sicuro della validità di ciò che ha scritto. Potrebbe
aver perso il suo tempo inutilmente”.
Per il lettore che sia anche americanista la lettura di queste prime poesie potrebbe essere
particolarmente gradita poiché esse riportano a consuetudini di vita e paesaggi prevalentemente
New Englander differenti da quelli che si trovano sullo sfondo di “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock” e The Waste Land, in cui prevale il paesaggio urbano di Londra. Per i motivi indicati
le poesie qui trascritte contribuiscono a tracciare il percorso del poeta dall’America
all’Inghilterra.
T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). Prufrock and Other Observations. 1920.
8. Cousin Nancy (1915)
MISS NANCY ELLICOTT
Strode across the hills and broke them,
Rode across the hills and broke them—
The barren New England hills—
Riding to hounds
Over the cow-pasture.
Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
And danced all the modern dances;
And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,
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5
But they knew that it was modern.
Upon the glazen shelves kept watch
Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,
The army of unalterable law.
125
10
4 maggio 2013
Tender is the Night (1934) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
BOOK 1
Chapter I
On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the
Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose- colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed
façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of
notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele
went north in April. Now, many bungalows cluster near it, but when this story begins only the
cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed pines between Gausse’s
Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes, five miles away.
The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant
image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy,
were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants
through the clear shallows. Before eight a man came down to the beach in a blue bathrobe and
with much preliminary application to his person of the chilly water, and much grunting and loud
breathing, floundered a minute in the sea. When he had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an
hour. Merchantmen crawled westward on the horizon; bus boys shouted in the hotel court; the
dew dried upon the pines. In another hour the horns of motors began to blow down from the
winding road along the low range of the Maures, which separates the littoral from true
Provençal France.
A mile from the sea, where pines give way to dusty poplars, is an isolated railroad stop,
whence one June morning in 1925 a victoria brought a woman and her daughter down to
Gausse’s Hotel. The mother’s face was of a fading prettiness that would soon be patted with
broken veins; her expression was both tranquil and aware in a pleasant way. However, one’s eye
moved on quickly to her daughter, who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a
lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the evening. Her fine
forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into
lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet,
and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong
young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood — she was
almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.
As sea and sky appeared below them in a thin, hot line the mother said:
“Something tells me we’re not going to like this place.”
“I want to go home anyhow,” the girl answered.
They both spoke cheerfully but were obviously without direction and bored by the fact —
moreover, just any direction would not do. They wanted high excitement, not from the necessity
of stimulating jaded nerves but with the avidity of prize-winning schoolchildren who deserved
their vacations.
“We’ll stay three days and then go home. I’ll wire right away for steamer tickets.”
At the hotel the girl made the reservation in idiomatic but rather flat French, like something
remembered. When they were installed on the ground floor she walked into the glare of the
French windows and out a few steps onto the stone veranda that ran the length of the hotel.
When she walked she carried herself like a ballet- dancer, not slumped down on her hips but
held up in the small of her back. Out there the hot light clipped close her shadow and she
retreated — it was too bright to see. Fifty yards away the Mediterranean yielded up its
126
pigments, moment by moment, to the brutal sunshine; below the balustrade a faded Buick
cooked on the hotel drive.
Indeed, of all the region only the beach stirred with activity. Three British nannies sat
knitting the slow pattern of Victorian England, the pattern of the forties, the sixties, and the
eighties, into sweaters and socks, to the tune of gossip as formalized as incantation; closer to the
sea a dozen persons kept house under striped umbrellas, while their dozen children pursued
unintimidated fish through the shallows or lay naked and glistening with cocoanut oil out in the
sun.
As Rosemary came onto the beach a boy of twelve ran past her and dashed into the sea with
exultant cries. Feeling the impactive scrutiny of strange faces, she took off her bathrobe and
followed. She floated face down for a few yards and finding it shallow staggered to her feet and
plodded forward, dragging slim legs like weights against the resistance of the water. When it
was about breast high, she glanced back toward shore: a bald man in a monocle and a pair of
tights, his tufted chest thrown out, his brash navel sucked in, was regarding her attentively. As
Rosemary returned the gaze the man dislodged the monocle, which went into hiding amid the
facetious whiskers of his chest, and poured himself a glass of something from a bottle in his
hand.
Rosemary laid her face on the water and swam a choppy little four- beat crawl out to the raft.
The water reached up for her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped in her hair and
ran into the corners of her body. She turned round and round in it, embracing it, wallowing in it.
Reaching the raft she was out of breath, but a tanned woman with very white teeth looked down
at her, and Rosemary, suddenly conscious of the raw whiteness of her own body, turned on her
back and drifted toward shore. The hairy man holding the bottle spoke to her as she came out.
“I say — they have sharks out behind the raft.” He was of indeterminate nationality, but
spoke English with a slow Oxford drawl. “Yesterday they devoured two British sailors from the
flotte at Golfe Juan.”
“Heavens!” exclaimed Rosemary.
“They come in for the refuse from the flotte.”
Glazing his eyes to indicate that he had only spoken in order to warn her, he minced off two
steps and poured himself another drink.
Not unpleasantly self-conscious, since there had been a slight sway of attention toward her
during this conversation, Rosemary looked for a place to sit. Obviously each family possessed
the strip of sand immediately in front of its umbrella; besides there was much visiting and
talking back and forth — the atmosphere of a community upon which it would be presumptuous
to intrude. Farther up, where the beach was strewn with pebbles and dead sea-weed, sat a group
with flesh as white as her own. They lay under small hand-parasols instead of beach umbrellas
and were obviously less indigenous to the place. Between the dark people and the light,
Rosemary found room and spread out her peignoir on the sand.
Lying so, she first heard their voices and felt their feet skirt her body and their shapes pass
between the sun and herself. The breath of an inquisitive dog blew warm and nervous on her
neck; she could feel her skin broiling a little in the heat and hear the small exhausted wa-waa of
the expiring waves. Presently her ear distinguished individual voices and she became aware that
some one referred to scornfully as “that North guy” had kidnapped a waiter from a café in
Cannes last night in order to saw him in two. The sponsor of the story was a white-haired
woman in full evening dress, obviously a relic of the previous evening, for a tiara still clung to
her head and a discouraged orchid expired from her shoulder. Rosemary, forming a vague
antipathy to her and her companions, turned away.
127
Nearest her, on the other side, a young woman lay under a roof of umbrellas making out a
list of things from a book open on the sand. Her bathing suit was pulled off her shoulders and
her back, a ruddy, orange brown, set off by a string of creamy pearls, shone in the sun. Her face
was hard and lovely and pitiful. Her eyes met Rosemary’s but did not see her. Beyond her was a
fine man in a jockey cap and red-striped tights; then the woman Rosemary had seen on the raft,
and who looked back at her, seeing her; then a man with a long face and a golden, leonine head,
with blue tights and no hat, talking very seriously to an unmistakably Latin young man in black
tights, both of them picking at little pieces of seaweed in the sand. She thought they were mostly
Americans, but something made them unlike the Americans she had known of late.
After a while she realized that the man in the jockey cap was giving a quiet little
performance for this group; he moved gravely about with a rake, ostensibly removing gravel
and meanwhile developing some esoteric burlesque held in suspension by his grave face. Its
faintest ramification had become hilarious, until whatever he said released a burst of laughter.
Even those who, like herself, were too far away to hear, sent out antennæ of attention until the
only person on the beach not caught up in it was the young woman with the string of pearls.
Perhaps from modesty of possession she responded to each salvo of amusement by bending
closer over her list.
The man of the monocle and bottle spoke suddenly out of the sky above Rosemary.
“You are a ripping swimmer.”
She demurred.
“Jolly good. My name is Campion. Here is a lady who says she saw you in Sorrento last
week and knows who you are and would so like to meet you.”
Glancing around with concealed annoyance Rosemary saw the untanned people were
waiting. Reluctantly she got up and went over to them.
“Mrs. Abrams — Mrs. McKisco — Mr. McKisco — Mr. Dumphry —
“We know who you are,” spoke up the woman in evening dress. “You’re Rosemary Hoyt
and I recognized you in Sorrento and asked the hotel clerk and we all think you’re perfectly
marvellous and we want to know why you’re not back in America making another marvellous
moving picture.”
They made a superfluous gesture of moving over for her. The woman who had recognized
her was not a Jewess, despite her name. She was one of those elderly “good sports” preserved
by an imperviousness to experience and a good digestion into another generation.
“We wanted to warn you about getting burned the first day,” she continued cheerily,
“because YOUR skin is important, but there seems to be so darn much formality on this beach
that we didn’t know whether you’d mind.”
(http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fitzgerald/f_scott/tender/chapter1.html)
128
129
130
9-10 maggio 2013
Ricordo che i riferimenti letterari presenti nell'articolo del New Yorker del 8 maggio sono:
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, pp. 1 e 3
131
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter, p. 2
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, p. 3.
132
Sabato 11 maggio 2013
Brano iniziale di The Old Man and the Sea (1952) di Ernest Hemingway (Charles
Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1962, pp. 1-2)
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone
eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with
him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man
was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy
had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It
made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he
always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and
the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and,
furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.
The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The
brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the
tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his
hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of
these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.
Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the
sea and were cheerful and undefeated.
"Santiago," the boy said to him as they climbed the bank from where the skiff was
hauled up. "I could go with you again. We've made some money."
The old man had taught the boy to fish and the boy loved him.
"No," the old man said. "You're with a lucky boat. Stay with them."
"But remember how you went eighty-seven days without fish and then we caught big
ones every day for three weeks."
"I remember," the old man said.
doubted."
"I know you did not leave me because you
"It was papa made me leave. I am a boy and I must obey him."
"I know," the old man said. "It is quite normal."
"He hasn't much faith."
"No," the old man said. "But we have. Haven't we?"
"Yes," the boy said. "Can I offer you a beer on the Terrace and then we'll take the
stuff home."
"Why not?" the old man said. "Between fishermen."
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Brano tratto da Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (Charles Scribner’s Sons,
New York, 1962, pp. 9-10)
"When I was your age I was before the mast on a square rigged ship that ran to
Africa and I have seen lions on the beaches in the evening."
"I know. You told me."
"Should we talk about Africa or about baseball?"
"Baseball I think," the boy said. "Tell me about the great John J. McGraw." He said
Jota for J.
"He used to come to the Terrace sometimes too in the older days. But he was rough
and harsh-spoken and difficult when he was drinking. His mind was on horses as well
as baseball. At least he carried lists of horses at all times in his pocket and frequently
spoke the names of horses on the telephone."
"He was a great manager," the boy said. "My father thinks he was the greatest."
"Because he came here the most times," the old man said. "If Durocher had
continued to come here each year your father would think him the greatest manager."
"Who is the greatest manager, really, Luque or Mike Gonzalez?"
"I think they are equal."
"And the best fisherman is you."
"No. I know others better."
"Qué va," the boy said. "There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But
there is only you."
"Thank you. You make me happy. I hope no fish will come along so great that he
will prove us wrong."
"There is no such fish if you are still strong as you say."
"I may not be as strong as I think," the old man said. "But I know many tricks and I
have resolution."
"You ought to go to bed now so that you will be fresh in the morning. I will take the
things back to the Terrace."
"Good night then. I will wake you in the morning."
"You're my alarm clock," the boy said.
"Age is my alarm clock," the old man said. "Why do old men wake so early? Is it to
have one longer day?"
"I don't know," the boy said. "All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard."
"I can remember it," the old man said. "I'll waken you in time."
"I do not like for him to waken me. It is as though I were inferior."
"I know."
"Sleep well, old man."
The boy went out. They had eaten with no light on the table and the old man took off
his trousers and went to bed in the dark. He rolled his trousers up to make a pillow,
putting the newspaper inside them. He rolled himself in the blanket and slept on the
other old newspapers that covered the springs of the bed.
He was asleep in a short time and he dreamed of Africa when he was a boy and the
long golden beaches and the white beaches, so white they hurt your eyes, and the high
capes and the great brown mountains. He lived along that coast now every night and in
his dreams he heard the surf roar and saw the native boats come riding through it. He
smelled the tar and oakum of the deck as he slept and he smelled the smell of Africa that
the land breeze brought at morning.
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F.S. Fitzgerald lavora in un’agenzia pubblicitaria a Manhattan negli anni venti
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Lina Unali
Nota sulla comunicazione letteraria nel primo mezzo secolo del ’900: T.S. Eliot (18881965), I.A. Richards (1893-1979) e Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)
Desidero fissare alcuni elementi relativi ai rapporti accademici, intellettuali e
culturali tra T.S. Eliot e I.A. Richards da una parte e Marshall McLuhan, di circa venti
anni più giovane, dall’altra.
Marshall McLuhan, intellettuale, studioso e professore universitario di origine
canadese, fu allievo nel 1934, a Trinity Hall, Cambridge, di I.A. Richards, colui che
formulò le teorie del New Criticism. Erano gli anni in cui Richards pubblicò il volume
intitolato The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) nel quale scrisse ampiamente sul concetto
di metafora (termine che dà il titolo a un intero capitolo), in cui egli dimostra che la
metafora non è un ornamento estraneo o sovraimposto, ma che il parlare stesso, come
esso si formula, è metafora. Produrla fa parte delle dinamica della lingua.
*
Traduco dal testo di Richards:
Attraverso tutta la storia della Retorica, la metafora è stata trattata come una
specie di felice extra trucco fatto di parole, un’opportunità di usare gli accidenti
della loro versatilità, qualcosa di occasionalmente azzeccato ma che richiedeva
insolita abilità e attenzione. In breve, una grazia o un ornamento o un potere
aggiunto della lingua, non la sua forma costitutiva. Qualche volta, è vero, uno
*
I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, Conferenze tenute a Bryn Mawr College nel 1936,
Conferenza V dal titolo “Metaphor”, Oxford University Press, New York, 1936, p. 90.
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scrittore si avventurerà su riflessioni che vanno più a fondo. Io ho semplicemente
riecheggiato le osservazioni di Shelley secondo cui “La lingua è vitalmente
metaforica; cioè, essa segna le relazioni delle cose precedentemente non apprese e
perpetua il loro apprendimento, fino a che le parole, che le rappresentano, non
diventino, nel tempo, segni indicanti porzioni o classi di pensiero invece che
quadri di pensieri integrali: e allora se nessun nuovo poeta nascesse per creare di
nuovo le associazioni che sono state in tal modo disorganizzate, la lingua sarebbe
morta per tutti i più nobili scopi delle relazioni umane.”
Nel Canadian Journal of Communication (vol. 26, n. 4, 2001), proprio sul tema della
metafora leggiamo:
metaphor is also a message in the work of Marshall McLuhan. Inspired by the
views of Cambridge luminary I.A. Richards, McLuhan identified metaphor as a
basic operating principle of communication technology: “All media,” he
proclaimed, “are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new
form” (McLuhan, 1964b, p. 64). “The spoken word,” for instance, wrote
McLuhan, “was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his
environment in order to grasp it in a new way” (p. 64). McLuhan believed that the
spoken word in effect performs a metaphorical operation by translating sensation
into utterance.
Se poi vogliamo stabilire una relazione tra Richards e T.S. Eliot, apprendiamo da uno
strabiliante articolo di John Constable del 1990 intitolato “I.A. Richards, T.S. Eliot and
the Poetry of Belief” che nella biblioteca del Magdalene College di Cambridge, tra le
carte di Richards, vi sono ben 140 lettere di T.S. Eliot, generalmente ignorate dai suoi
biografi.
Si deve dire però che, nonostante la loro abbondante corrispondenza, è difficile
stabilire una relazione tra i contenuti di essa e le opere pubblicate.
Di I.A. Richards si segnala in modo particolare il volume intitolato Principles of
Literary Criticism (1924), precedente di circa 10 anni al periodo di cui si è trattato
sopra. In esso le opere letterarie maggiori sono viste costituire una specie di reservoir of
vision che serve all’umanità per attingervi perennemente e su cui basare la propria
azione. Etica e estetica si fondono. È la tradizione di Coleridge.
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Prof. Lina Unali, Dispensa del 18 maggio 2013
T.S. Eliot, Assassinio nella Cattedrale, 1935 (traduzione di Giovanni Castelli, revisione
di Raffaello Lavagna)
Citazione dall’Introduzione
È necessario per questa nuova edizione italiana di “Assassinio nella
Cattedrale” fare un po’ la cronistoria, a riguardo della prima traduzione (anni
1950) in Italia del testo, fatta da un Eccellentissimo Vescovo Giovanni Castelli –
traduzione usata nella prima rappresentazione realizzata alla Festa del teatro di
San Miniato, con la stupenda regia di Giorgio Streheler, e la magistrale
interpretazione, nel personaggio dell’Arcivescovo di Canterbury da parte di un
eccezionale Gianni Santuccio.
Dovendo riprendere per una edizione da realizzare a Roma, nel
prestigioso Cortile del Palazzo Pontificio del Laterano, mi sentivo un po’ a
disagio, perché la traduzione la sentivo un po’ datata, per cui chiesi agli Eredi di
Monsignor Castelli, di poter un po’ ritoccare la sua traduzione, dandole un ritmo
recitativo più snello e più scorrevole, per accostarsi un po’ di più allo stile
poetico eliottiano.
Avendo poi la fortuna di poter avere come interprete un altro prestigioso
attore Carlo d’Angelo, una delle più belle voci del teatro italiano, nella edizione
che andò poi in tournée per la stagione seguente estiva, dopo il successo delle
recite al Laterano, allora gentilmente concesso dal Cardinale dell’Acqua, Vicario
per la Diocesi di Roma del Papa, e che abitava proprio nel Palazzo.
Citazione dal testo di Assassinio nella Cattedrale
CORO DONNE – O Tommaso Arcivescovo salvaci, salvaci;
salva te stesso, perché noi ci possiamo salvare;
distruggi te stesso, e noi saremo distrutte.
(ENTRA L’ARCIVESCOVO)
TOMMASO – Ora, la strada mi è chiara; ora, il significato m’è ben evidente.
La tentazione, in questa maniera,
non potrà più venire a tormentarmi.
L’ultima tentazione è il più gran tradimento:
compiere una retta azione, per uno scopo sbagliato.
La naturale energia nel commettere i peccati veniali
è la via nella quale la nostra vita comincia.
Trent’anni or sono cercai tutte le strade
conducenti al piacere, all’onore, alla lode.
Cercai il diletto:
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nel puro pensiero, nella scienza, nei sensi,
nella musica, nella filosofia, nella curiosità
nel purpureo fringuello che,
sull’albero di lillà, felice gorgheggia,
cercai nella lizza destrezza
la strategia negli scacchi,
nel giardino la passione amorosa,
il cantare accompagnato da dolci strumenti:
tutte cose desiderabili, tutte quante ugualmente.
Ma, quando il primo vigore s’è spento,
ecco l’ambizione s’avanza;
quando impariamo che, non tutte le cose
sono possibili, ormai: ecco l’ambizione,
inavvertita, che viene da tergo.
Sempre più cresce il peccato,
quanto più cerchi di fare il bene.
Quando, in Inghilterra, imposi la legge del Re,
e con lui mossi guerra contro Tolosa,
al loro stesso giuoco vinsi i Baroni.
Io, allora, gli uomini potevo anche sprezzare,
pur essendo, da loro, fatto segno al più basso disprezzo.
Potevo anche sprezzare la rozza nobiltà,
le cui unghie s’accordavano bene con le loro maniere.
Ma, mentre mangiavo nel piatto del Re,
non fu mai mio desiderio diventare servo di Dio.
Il servo di Dio è sempre in più frequenti occasioni:
di maggiore peccato, di maggiore dolore,
di chi serve soltanto il Re.
Poiché, coloro che servono una causa più grande di loro,
possono far servire la causa a se stessi,
pur servendo con tutta giustizia la causa;
contendendo con la politica umana,
possono politica far diventare la causa;
non per quello che essi vanno facendo,
ma per ciò che sono essi stessi:
poveri esseri umani.
Io so che quanto ancora rimane
da mostrare, della mia storia,
sembrerà, nella migliore delle ipotesi,
alla maggio parte di voi, sembrerà
la migliore delle umane futilità,
l’insensato suicidio d’un lunatico…
o forse l’arrogante passione d’un fanatico…
Io so: che la storia, in tutti i tempi,
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trae le conseguenze più strane
dalle cause più remote e distanti.
E che, per ogni male, per ogni sacrilegio e delitto,
per ogni oppressione, per ogni colpo di scure,
per ogni indifferenza dinnanzi al male,
per ogni sfruttamento di uomini, e popoli:
(AVANZA AL PROSCENIO, E CON L’INDICE SU OGNI “TU” CERCA
UNO SPETTAORE, DAL PIU’ DISTANTE SINO A PUNTARE L’INDICE
DELL’ULTIMO “TU” PROPRIO SU UNO SPETTATORE IN PRIMA FILA!)
tu – e tu – e tu, - dovrete essere,
tutti, puniti…
ed anche tu.
Io non agirò, né soffrirò più a lungo:
sul filo della spada s’avvicina la fine.
Ora, mio Angelo buono,
Angelo che Dio destina ad essere mio celeste guardiano,
Angelo mio, librati
sulla punta della spada.
(Testo elettronico completo:
http://www.google.it/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CDkQFjAC&url=http%3A
%2F%2Fwww.raffaellolavagna.it%2Fbooks2%2FASSASSINIO%2520IN%2520CATTEDRALE.DOC&
ei=QeiRUZzhO8GItAbE4YDgAw&usg=AFQjCNHiMR1pSvp9j5kUswz5h3LMm72Weg&sig2=XLUdo
DwlmL8ynRajKKiOTg)
140
18 maggio 2013
Ho visto che l’articolo del New Yorker annunciato in classe sul futuro online
dell’università si trova in rete al completo, al di là di ogni abbonamento (naturalmente
nel sito del New Yorker). Ne invio la parte iniziale. Il seguito può essere consultato
direttamente in rete. Per maggiore facilità potreste tralasciare i primi paragrafi relativi al
curriculum di un professore e continuare con quel che si dice sul MOOC (Massive Open
Online Courses) e il suo funzionamento.
Annals of Higher Education
Laptop U
Has the future of college moved online?
by Nathan Heller May 20, 2013
Élite educators used to be obsessed with “faculty-to-student ratio”; now schools like
Harvard aim to be broadcast networks. Illustration by Leo Espinosa.
Gregory Nagy, a professor of classical Greek literature at Harvard, is a gentle academic
of the sort who, asked about the future, will begin speaking of Homer and the battles of
the distant past. At seventy, he has owlish eyes, a flared Hungarian nose, and a tendency
to gesture broadly with the flat palms of his hands. He wears the crisp white shirts and
dark blazers that have replaced tweed as the raiment of the academic caste. His hair,
also white, often looks manhandled by the Boston wind. Where some scholars are
gnomic in style, Nagy piles his sentences high with thin-sliced exposition. (“There are
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about ten passages—and by passages I simply mean a selected text, and these passages
are meant for close reading, and sometimes I’ll be referring to these passages as texts, or
focus passages, but you’ll know I mean the same thing—and each one of these requires
close reading!”) When he speaks outside the lecture hall, he smothers friends and
students with a stew of blandishment and praise. “Thank you, Wonderful Kevin!” he
might say. Or: “The Great Claudia put it so well.” Seen in the wild, he could be taken
for an antique-shop proprietor: a man both brimming with solicitous enthusiasm and
fretting that the customers are getting, maybe, just a bit too close to his prized Louis
XVI chair.
Nagy has published no best-sellers. He is not a regular face on TV. Since 1978, though,
he has taught a class called “Concepts of the Hero in Classical Greek Civilization,” and
the course, a survey of poetry, tragedy, and Platonic dialogues, has made him a campus
fixture. Because Nagy’s zest for Homeric texts is boundless, because his lectures reflect
decades of refinement, and because the course is thought to offer a soft grading curve
(its nickname on campus is Heroes for Zeroes), it has traditionally filled Room 105, in
Emerson Hall, one of Harvard’s largest classroom spaces. Its enrollment has regularly
climbed into the hundreds.
This spring, however, enrollment in Nagy’s course exceeds thirty-one thousand.
“Concepts of the Hero,” redubbed “CB22x: The Ancient Greek Hero,” is one of
Harvard’s first massive open online courses, or MOOCs—a new type of college class
based on Internet lecture videos. A MOOC is “massive” because it’s designed to enroll
tens of thousands of students. It’s “open” because, in theory, anybody with an Internet
connection can sign up. “Online” refers not just to the delivery mode but to the style of
communication: much, if not all, of it is on the Web. And “course,” of course, means
that assessment is involved—assignments, tests, an ultimate credential. When you take
MOOCs, you’re expected to keep pace. Your work gets regular evaluation. In the end,
you’ll pass or fail or, like the vast majority of enrollees, just stop showing up.
Many people think that MOOCs are the future of higher education in America. In the
past two years, Harvard, M.I.T., Caltech, and the University of Texas have together
pledged tens of millions of dollars to MOOC development. Many other élite schools,
from U.C. Berkeley to Princeton, have similarly climbed aboard. Their stated goal is
democratic reach. “I expect that there will be lots of free, or nearly free, offerings
available,” John L. Hennessy, the president of Stanford, explained in a recent editorial.
“While the gold standard of small in-person classes led by great instructors will remain,
online courses will be shown to be an effective learning environment, especially in
comparison with large lecture-style courses.”
Some lawmakers, meanwhile, see MOOCs as a solution to overcrowding; in California,
a senate bill, introduced this winter, would require the state’s public colleges to give
credit for approved online courses. (Eighty-five per cent of the state’s community
colleges currently have course waiting lists.) Following a trial run at San José State
University which yielded higher-than-usual pass rates, eleven schools in the California
State University system moved to incorporate MOOCs into their curricula. In addition
to having their own professors teach, say, electrical engineering, these colleges may use
videos by teachers at schools such as M.I.T.
But MOOCs are controversial, and debate has grown louder in recent weeks. In midApril, the faculty at Amherst voted against joining a MOOC program. Two weeks ago,
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the philosophy department at San José State wrote an open letter of protest to Michael J.
Sandel, a Harvard professor whose flagship college course, Justice, became JusticeX, a
MOOC, this spring. “There is no pedagogical problem in our department that JusticeX
solves,” the letter said. The philosophers worried that the course would make the San
José State professor at the head of the classroom nothing more than “a glorified
teaching assistant.” They wrote, “The thought of the exact same social justice course
being taught in various philosophy departments across the country is downright scary.”
Nagy has been experimenting with online add-ons to his course for years. When he
began planning his MOOC, his idea was to break down his lectures into twenty-four
lessons of less than an hour each. He subdivided every lesson into smaller segments,
because people don’t watch an hour-long discussion on their screens as they might sit
through an hour of lecture. (They get distracted.) He thought about each segment as a
short film, and tried to figure out how to dramatize the instruction. He says that
crumbling up the course like this forced him to study his own teaching more than he had
at the lectern.
“I had this real revelation—I’m not saying ‘epiphany,’ because people use that word
wrong, because an epiphany should be when a really miraculous superhuman
personality appears, so this is just a revelation, not an epiphany—and I thought, My
God, Greg, you’ve been spoiled by the system!” he says. At Harvard, big lecture
courses are generally taught with help from graduate students, who lead discussion
sessions and grade papers. None of that is possible at massive scales. Instead,
participants in CB22x enroll in online discussion forums (like message boards). They
annotate the assigned material with responses (as if in Google Docs). Rather than
writing papers, they take a series of multiple-choice quizzes. Readings for the course are
available online, but students old-school enough to want a paper copy can buy a sevenhundred-and-twenty-seven-page textbook that Nagy is about to publish, “The Ancient
Greek Hero in 24 Hours.”
Read more:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/20/130520fa_fact_heller?printable=true&current
Page=all#ixzz2TuijSFhp
Nel New Yorker del 21 maggio 2013 c’è un articolo sul duecentesimo anniversario
dalla nascita di Søren Kierkegaard, “grande filosofo danese della soggettività”. L’autore
dell’articolo scrive che “tramite uno sguardo retrospettivo, noi possiamo accorgerci che
la letteratura moderna, ironica e dominata dall’ansia, comincia con lui. Strindgberg,
Ibsen, Nietzsche, Kafka, Borges, Camus, Sartre e Wittgenstein sono tra i suoi eredi e
senza di lui dove sarebbe Woody Allen?”. Abbiamo già notato in altro numero del New
Yorker questo passaggio dai più alti luoghi della cultura europea alle citazioni di
maggiore attrazione popolare, come ad esempio, da Henry James a Harry Potter.
Buono studio, praticate quello che in inglese si potrebbe chiamare il close reading,
lettura ravvicinata che coglie anche il particolare.
Ci rivediamo agli esami!
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