Why Read the Classics? (32 page)

I will come straight to the point. In an age of generic and abstract words, words that are used for everything, words that are used not to think and not to say, a linguistic plague which is spreading from the public sphere to the private, Montale was the poet of exactness, of justified lexical choices, of sureness in terminology, which he used to capture the uniqueness of the experience described: ‘S’accese su pomi cotogni, / un punto, una cocciniglia, / si udí inalberarsi alla striglia / il poney, e poi vinse il sogno’ (a tiny point, a ladybird lit up on quinces, a pony was heard rearing at the curry-comb, then I fell into a dream).

But this precision is used to tell us what? Montale talks to us of a world like a vortex, spun by a wind of destruction, with no solid ground for our feet to stand on, the only aid being the individual’s morality which teeters over the edge of an abyss. This is the world of the First and Second World Wars, maybe even of the Third. Or perhaps the First is still a little bit outside the frame (in the cinemathèque of my historical memory it is the subtitles of Ungaretti’s spare lines that run under those already rather faded photograms); and it is the precariousness of that world as it appeared to the young men of just after the First World War that forms the backdrop to
Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones)
. Similarly it would be the anticipation of another catastrophe that would make up the atmosphere of
Le occasioni (The Occasions)
, while the catastrophe itself and its ashes would be the central theme of
La bujeta (The Storm). La bufera
is the finest book to have emerged from the Second World War, and even when it is talking about something else it is really talking about the War. Everything is implicit in it, even our postwar anxieties, right down to today’s fears: the atomic catastrophe (‘e un ombroso Lucifero scenderà su una proda / del Tamigi, del Hudson, della Senna / scuotendo l’ali di bitume semi-mozze dalla fatica, a dirti: è l’ora’ (and a shadowy Satan will disembark on the bank of the Thames, the Hudson, the Seine, shaking his bitumen wings half-worn by the effort, to tell you: the time has come)), and the horror of the concentration camps of the past and the future (‘Il sogno del prigioniero’ (‘The Prisoner’s Dream’)).

But it is not Montale’s direct representations and clearly-stated allegories that I want to emphasise: the historical situation in which we live is seen as a cosmic one; even the tiniest presences of nature become reshaped, under the poet’s daily observation, into a vortex. Instead I would stress the
rhythm of the verse, its metre, its syntax, all of which contain this movement in themselves, from the beginning to the end of his three great collections. ‘I turbini sollevano la polvere / sui tetti, a mulinelli, e sugji spiazzi / deserti, ove i cavalli incappucciati / annusano la terra, fermi innanzi / ai vetri luccicanti degli alberghi’ (The whirlwinds raise the dust up on to the roofs, in little sandstorms, and the empty piazzas, where the hooded horses sniff the ground, stationary before the sparkling hotel windows).

I mentioned the individual morality that withstands the historical or cosmic apocalypse that could at any moment cancel the fragile trace of human kind: but it must be said that in Montale, though he is far removed from any communion with others or outburst of solidarity, the interdependence of each person with other people’s lives is always present. ‘Occorrono troppe vite per fame una’ (Too many lives are needed to make one) is the memorable conclusion to a poem from
Le occasioni
, where the shadow of the hawk in flight gives a sense of the destruction and renaissance that pervades every biological or historical continuum. But the help which can come from nature or man is always an illusion except when it is a tiny rivulet which surfaces ‘dove solo / morde l’arsura e la desolazione’ (where only heat and desolation bite); it is only by going up the rivers until they become as slender as hair that the eel finds the safe place for procreation; it is only ‘a un filo di pietà’ (at a thin stream of pity) that the porcupines of Monte Amiata can slake their thirst.

This difficult heroism carved out of the inner aridity and precariousness of existence, this antiheroic heroism was Montale’s reply to the problem of poetry in his generation: how to write poetry after (and against) D’Annunzio (and after Carducci, and Pascoli, or at least a certain side of Pascoli), the problem which Ungaretti solved with the inspiration of the single word in all its purity, and Saba with the recovery of an inner sincerity which embraced also pathos, affection, sensuality: those were hallmarks of humanity that Montale the man rejected, or considered could not be articulated.

There is no message of consolation or encouragement in Montale unless one accepts the consciousness of a hostile, greedy universe. It is on this arduous road that his discourse continues that of Leopardi, even though their voices sound so different. Just as, when compared with Leopardi’s atheism, Montale’s strain of atheism is more problematic, fraught as it is with constant supernatural temptations that are however immediately
undermined by his basic scepticism. If Leopardi dismisses the consolations of Enlightenment philosophy, the proposals of consolation for Montale come from contemporary irrationalisms which he weighs up one by one and then drops with a shrug of his shoulders, constantly reducing the surface of the rock on which his feet rest, the cliff to which Montale the shipwreck obstinately clings.

One of his themes which becomes more and more insistent with the passing of time, is the way in which the dead are present in us, the uniqueness of each person that we refuse to allow to perish: ‘il gesto d’una / vita che non è un’altra ma se stessa’ (the gesture of a life, which is not another’s life but itself). These lines are from a poem in memory of his mother, where the birds come back, the dead, against a sloping landscape: these are part of the repertoire of positive images in his poetry. Today I could find no better frame for his memory than these same lines: ‘Ora che il coro delle coturnici / ti blandisce nel sonno eterno, rotta / felice schiera in fuga verso i clivi / vendemmiati del Mesco …’ (Now that the chorus of rock partridges soothes you in eternal sleep, a broken but happy crowd fleeing towards the freshly vintaged slopes of Cape Mesco).

As well as continuing to read ‘inside’ his books. This will certainly guarantee his survival: because however much they are read and reread, his poems capture the reader at the start of the page but are never fully exhausted.

[1981]

There was a time when for me—and for many others, those who are more or less my contemporaries—Hemingway was a god. And they were good times, which I am happy to remember, without even a hint of that ironic indulgence with which we look back on youthful fashions and obsessions. They were serious times and we lived through them seriously and boldly and with purity of heart, and in Hemingway we could also have found pessimism, an individualistic detachment, a superficial involvement with extremely violent experiences: that was all there too in Hemingway, but either we could not see it in him or we had other things in our head, but the fact remains that the lesson we learnt from him was one of a capacity for openness and generosity, a practical commitment—as well as a technical and moral one—to the things that had to be done, a straightforward look, a rejection of self-contemplation or self-pity, a readiness to snatch a lesson for life, the worth of a person summed up in a brusque exchange, or a gesture. But soon we began to see his limitations, his flaws: his poetics, his style, to which I had been largely indebted in my first literary works, came to be seen as narrow, too prone to descending into mannerism. That life of his—and philosophy of life—of violent tourism began to fill me with distrust and even aversion and disgust. Today, however, ten years on, assessing the balance of my apprenticeship with Hemingway, I can close the account in the black. ‘You didn’t put one over on me, old man,’ I can say to him, indulging for the last time in his own style, ‘you did not make it, you never became a
mauvais maître’
The aim of this discussion of Hemingway, in fact—now that he has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, a fact that means absolutely nothing, but which is as good an occasion as any other for putting down on
paper ideas that have been in my head for some time—is to try to define both what Hemingway meant for me, and what he is now, what moved me away from him and what I continue to find in his not others’ works.

At that time what pushed me towards Hemingway was an appeal that was both poetic and political, a confused urge towards an active antifascism, as opposed to purely intellectual antifascism. Actually, to be truthful, it was the twin constellation of Hemingway and Malraux that attracted me, the symbol of international antifascism, the international front in the Spanish Civil War. Fortunately we Italians had had D’Annunzio to inoculate us against certain ‘heroic’ inclinations, and the rather aestheticising base to Malraux’ works soon became apparent. (For some people in France, such as Roger Vailland, who is also a very nice guy, a bit superficial but genuine enough, the Hemingway-Malraux double-bill was a formative factor.) Hemingway too has had the label of D’Annunzian attached to him, and in some cases not inappropriately. But Hemingway’s style is always dry, he hardly ever gets sloppy or pompous, his feet are on the ground (or almost always: I mean, I cannot take ‘lyricism’ in Hemingway:
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
is for me his worst work), he sticks to dealing with things: all features that are at the opposite extreme from D’Annunzio. And in any case, we should be careful with these definitions: if all you need to be called a D’Annunzian is to like the active life and beautiful women, long live D’Annunzio. But the problem cannot be framed in these terms: the myth of Hemingway the activist comes from another side of contemporary history, much more relevant to today and still problematic.

Hemingway’s hero likes to identify with the actions that he carries out, to be himself in the totality of his actions, in his commitment to manual or at any rate practical dexterity. He tries not to have any other problems, any other concerns except that of knowing how to do something well: being good at fishing, hunting, blowing up bridges, watching bullfights the way they should be watched, as well as being good at making love. But around him there is always something he is trying to escape, a sense of the vanity of everything, of desperation, of defeat, of death. He concentrates on the strict observance of his code, of those sporting rules that he always feels he should impose on himself everywhere and that carry the weight of moral rules, whether he finds himself fighting with a shark, or in a position besieged by Falangists. He clings to all that, because outside it is the void and death. (Even though he never mentions it: for his first rule is understatement.) One of the best and most typical of his tales in the 45
short stories in
The Big Two-Hearted River
is nothing more than an account of every single action done by a man who goes fishing on his own: he goes up the river, looks for a good place to pitch his tent, makes himself some food, goes into the river, prepares his rod, catches some small trout, throws them back into the river, catches a bigger one, and so on. Nothing but a bare list of actions, fleeting but clear-cut images in between, and the odd generic, unconvincing comment on his state of mind, like ‘It was a good feeling’. It is a very depressing tale, with a sense of oppression too, of vague anguish besetting him on all sides, no matter how serene nature is and how caught up he is in his fishing. Now the story in which ‘nothing happens’ is not new. But let’s take a recent example from nearer home:
Il taglio del hosco (The Cutting of the Woods)
by Cassola (all he has in common with Hemingway is his love of Tolstoy) which describes the actions of a woodcutter, against the background of his endless grief for the death of his wife. In Cassola the two poles of the story are the work on one side and a very precise feeling on the other: the death of a loved one, a situation which can apply to everyone, at any time. The format is similar in Hemingway, but the content is completely different: on one side a commitment to a sport, which has no other sense beyond the formal execution of the task, and on the other something unknown, nothingness. We are in an extreme situation, in the context of a very precise society, in a very precise moment of the crisis of bourgeois thought.

Hemingway, famously, did not care for philosophy. But his poetics has anything but accidental connections with American philosophy, linked as the latter is so directly to a ‘structure’, to a milieu of activity and practical concepts. The Hemingway hero’s fidelity to a sporting and ethical code, the only certain reality in an unknowable universe, corresponds to neopositivism which proposes rules of thought inside a closed system, which has no other validity outside itself. Behaviourism, which identifies man’s reality with the paradigms of his behaviour, finds its equivalent in Hemingway’s style, which in its bare list of actions, its lines of brief dialogue, eliminates the unreachable reality of emotions and thoughts. (On Hemingway’s code of behaviour, and on characters’ ‘inarticulate’ conversation, see the intelligent observations in Marcus Cunliffe,
The Literature of the US
(Penguin Books, 1954), pp. 271 ff.)

All around is the
horror vacui
of existentialist nothingness.
Nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada
, thinks the waiter in ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’, while ‘The Gambler, the Nun and the Radio’ ends with the conclusion
that everything is ‘the opium of the people’, in other words an illusory shelter from a general malaise. These two stories (both from 1933) can be regarded as the texts of Hemingway’s loose ‘existentialism’. But it is not on these more explicitly ‘philosophical’ statements that we can rely, so much as on his general way of representing the negative, the senseless, the despairing elements of contemporary life, right from the time of
Fiesta
(1926) with its eternal tourists, sex-maniacs and drunkards. The emptiness of the dialogues with their pauses and digressions, whose most obvious predecessor must be the ‘talking of other things’ by Chekhov’s characters when they are on the verge of desperation, reflects the problematics of twentieth-century irrationalism. Chekhov’s petty bourgeois characters, defeated in everything except their consciousness of human dignity, stand their ground as the storm approaches and retain their hope for a better world. Hemingway’s rootless Americans are inside the storm, body and soul, and the only defence they have against it is trying to ski well, to shoot lions well, establish the right relationship between a man and a woman, and between a man and another man, techniques and virtues which certainly will be useful in that better world except that they do not believe in it. Between Chekhov and Hemingway comes the First World War: reality is now seen as a huge massacre. Hemingway refuses to join the side of the massacre, his antifascism is one of those clear, indisputable ‘rules of the game’ on which his conception of life is based, but he accepts massacres as the natural scenario of contemporary man. The apprenticeship of Nick Adams—the autobiographical character in his earliest and most poetic stories—is a training course to help him tolerate the brutality of the world. It begins in
Indian Camp
where his father, the doctor, operates on a pregnant Indian woman with a fishing pen-knife, while her husband, unable to stand the sight of suffering, silently slits his own throat. When the Hemingway hero wants a symbolic ritual to represent this conception of the world the best he can come up with is the bullfight, thus starting down the road towards the primitive and the barbaric, which leads to D. H. Lawrence and a certain kind of ethnology.