Tuesday, February 28, 2017

"In the mind of this idle writer" - Italo Svevo's Senilità




For a striking example of what else was happening in Italian literature contemporary to Gabriele D’Annunzio, one could hardly find a writer more different than Italo Svevo in his 1898 novel Senilità. Though I read the work two months ago, Senilità proved such a knockout that I’m determined to post about it.

I’ll start with the book’s title, which began as Il Carnavale di EmilioEmilio’s Carnival - the choice of translator Beth Archer Brombert (the book has been previously translated as the lifeless As a Man Grows Older). However, Senilità appears parenthetically on cover and title page to acknowledge Svevo’s insistence that this, the book’s original published title, was indispensable. In the book’s introduction, Victor Brombert argues that “carnavale,” with its etymology rooted in “denial of the flesh,” better conveys the work’s central thematic concerns to English readers on whom the nuances of the curious word “senilità” might be lost. Brombert defines the term, in the context of Svevo’s writings, as a kind of “ironic ennui…a permanent premonition of life as disaster, a deep skepticism concerning one’s own potential, a ceaseless mediation on vulnerability and death, a wisdom that can be put to no use…” – well, his catalogue of approximations goes on.

The word’s seemingly endless and ambiguous suggestions sum up the more or less entrenched psychological state of Svevo’s chief character, 35-year-old virgin Emilio Brentani, both office clerk and fiction writer – “two occupations and two objectives that were quite distinct” - just one of many contrarieties that plague Emilio’s life. Primary among these, however, is his pursuit of Angiolina, an alluring young lower class woman about whom, from the novel’s first line, we know Emilio feels conflicted:  “With his first words to her, he wanted to inform her straight away that he had no intention of getting involved in a serious relationship.” Even as Emilio begins courting Angiolina and taking strolls with her about town (we are in Trieste, still a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, late 19th century), he tries to rationalize his desire by pinging back and forth between two extremities. First is a devotional but condescending Pygmalion-like attitude aimed at elevating Angiolina’s coarser manners and simple intellect:

Would it not have been better to make her less honest and more calculating? Once he asked himself the question, he had the brilliant idea of taking upon himself the education of the girl. In exchange for her gift of her love, he could give her only one thing: an understanding of life and the art of enjoying it.

Emilio thinks of Angiolina as “Ange” while in this mode, yet quickly shifts to an opposing pole of moral indignation and jealousy concerning any attention this young allumeuse gives to other men, whose antennae clearly pick up on the glances that go everywhere, perhaps indicating even her availability.

Emilio’s conflict is amplified by his admiration for and envy of a debonair and worldly friend, Balli, a handsome sculptor, who warns Emilio away from the “vulgar” Giolina though is not himself immune from her pull. Finally, Emilio must also navigate the psychological tensions his new relationship creates with Amalia, the lonely, homely sister with whom Emilio has lived and cared for since their parents’ death.

Between this domestic obligation and the thirst for adventure, the duties of office and aspirations of art, and especially between sexual desire and a compulsion to justify it both morally and socially, Emilio inhabits a solipsistic shadow-land of indecision, impulsiveness, and self-absorption. In thrall to Angiolina, he ignores Balli’s advice. He ignores his sister’s needs, with devastating results. Having written one unpublished novel –  “the story of a young artist whose health and talent had been ruined by…a heroine in the style of the time: part woman, part tigress” – he lets his writing languish, turning all of his attention to making headway with Angiolina while alternately condemning her for not being the woman he expects her to be.

250 pages of such indecisiveness and navel-gazing could test any reader’s patience, but Svevo pulls it off through a darkly comic tone, an especially nuanced and humanizing psychological depiction of his characters, and by shifting points of view and indirect narration that permit the reader to observe his creatures, even the duplicitous Angiolina, with sympathy. Unlike those of Svevo’s other principal characters, Angiolina’s thoughts remain hidden from us, underscoring her objectification. Externally, though, we witness her relative poverty, simplicity, and almost poignant inability to refuse the attentions she attracts. Emilio’s first visit to Angiolina’s home reveals her humble station in a manner that divides the reader’s perception between Emilio’s self-absorption and sympathy for Angiolina’s situation. Despite Emilio’s almost intolerable “senilità,” his flashes of self-awareness illuminate the novel’s psychological landscape such that one longs for him to see the daylight he continually extinguishes, often comically: “Emilio then lamented his sorry fate but with so much self-irony that he cleared himself of all ridicule.”

Further engaging the reader’s interest is a complex set of psychological transferences between Emilio, Angiolina, Balli and Amalia as their “elective affinities” attract and repel under Svevo’s obvious interest in Freud. My reference to Goethe is intended. Svevo’s novel fits awkwardly in the context of other Italian literature from the period, as this Trieste native of German-Italian-Jewish origins (real name Ettore Schmitz) seems aligned more with writers from the north (I thought of Theodore Fontaine and Stefan Zweig, as well as Arthur Schnitzler’s erotically-charged La Ronde, which appeared just a year before, but those of you who’ve read more Germanic literature than I will know better). Senilità is so pared down to the bare bones of the relationship’s psychological underpinnings – what little exists in the way of description functions largely as staging – that one can scarcely believe Svevo and D’Annunzio were contemporaries. Far from D’Annunzio’s indulgence in fin-de-siècle decadence, Svevo already anticipates the claustrophobic psychological novels of Alberto Moravia. Even the conquest of Angiolina, when it finally arrives, is reduced, linguistically, to a comically unadorned fact, brutally stripped of romance and anathema to the fantasies that Emilio has nurtured for more than half the novel: “Then she gave herself to him, or more precisely, she took him.”

In fact, Senilità is so deeply introspective, its scope focused so tightly on Emilio’s ruminating psychological state, that little light from anything else gets through, the narrative being notable for what it excludes. A case in point is a scene during Trieste’s annual carnival in which Emilio learns from Balli that Angiolina may be betraying him with a common umbrella vendor. Where a realist like Zola might have leapt at the opportunity to describe the masks, costumes and revelry in the streets, Svevo shoves all that out of sight to focus almost entirely on Emilio's alternately murderous, alternately forgiving anxiety. The chapter plays out in a void as existential as physical, as Emilio wanders the dark streets hoping to catch Angiolina “in flagrante,” the city appearing to the reader as Emilio must see it: empty unless the object of his elusive search seems to come into view:

In the distance he thought he saw her again. A reflection, a shadow, a movement, everything took on the shape and demeanor of the phantasm that eluded him. He started to run, hoping to catch up with her, not calm and ironic as he had been on the slope of via Romagna, but firmly intent on becoming violent with her. Happily, it was not she. In his misfortune, Emilio felt as through all the violence he had been about to unleash on her was now directed to himself, leaving him breathless and without hope of reason or control. He bit his hand like a lunatic.

In a similar manner, the social and historical context of the novel remains in the margins. One does, though, gain an acute sense of male prerogative in Trieste, a manner of behavior in which sexual mores are codified in ways constitutionally unattainable to the emotionally immature and mercuric Emilio. In that first visit to Angiolina’s home, he feels a pang of both jealousy and envy at seeing photographs of numerous men on her bedroom walls, including one whom, he recalls, had once said to him, “The women I deal with are unworthy of constituting an offense to my wife.”

As one might expect, none of this mental tumult ends well for the parties involved. One would be unlikely to want to read the novel Emilio might have constructed from his experience, as the insipidity of so many of his ruminations, by themselves, would be nearly unreadable. But the authorial distance Svevo imposes upon his poor author allows us to see both how Emilio might have written his own story and how he would have gotten it wrong, an ironic detachment and sentimentality that eclipses an ability to see himself as he is. In addition, the patient arc of Svevo’s vision cements Emilio’s tortured thoughts together at this remove, creating an indelible portrait of a soul wrapped up in illusion, aware of it only in intermittent glints and glimmers, yet unable to achieve the action necessary to surmount his own weaknesses.

Fortunately, Svevo’s exquisite novel triumphs in Emilio’s place. It’s small wonder that James Joyce, who promoted the literary career of Svevo after discovering the writer in one of the English classes Joyce taught in Trieste, admired the novel so much that he could recite its final pages from memory. One can imagine a young Emilio serving as the model for the young boy in Joyce’s “Araby,” burning with shame at having his romantic illusions shattered. Yet he is no young boy, and it would be difficult to imagine any epiphany truly taking hold.

Friday, February 17, 2017

“It is worthless to write a line / if the song proceed not from the heart” - The Troubadour Poets of Proensa




Paul Blackburn’s Proensa may not be the ideal place to start for someone interested in a historical, contextual understanding of the culture of the troubadours of Occitan, but as an entry into the poetry itself – almost surely the best way to start the subject – wow. Blackburn’s enthralling 1978 anthology gives us the glorious thing itself: a chronological arrangement of nearly 100 selections from 30 poets culled from the more than 2,000 works, by over 400 11th – 13th century troubadours, that have survived to the present. Proensa also includes a brief introduction, the vidas (lives) and razos (reasons) that make up the poets’ extant biographical material, a helpful bibliography and some 50 pages of endnotes nearly as entertaining as the poems. For basic knowledge of how the tradition came about, what the troubadours did, as well as definitions of the vers, cansos, tensos, sirventes, partimen, albas, coblas, estampinas and other poetic forms they used, one may need to search beyond the book. But small matter: as an introduction to the poetry, Proensa is exciting, the kind of work that could initiate a life-long interest or ignite a scholarly career.

Blackburn’s selections range across an astonishing variety of the themes, styles, and even personalities of his songsters. The image of the troubadour strumming a lute beneath a beloved’s window goes right out the window as one encounters the timid and the bold, the sincere and flippant, the romantic and the lecherous (often in the same person), kings and orphans, monks and married couples, even the trobairitz, the female troubadours, one of many paths Blackburn leaves for further investigation.

This is one wild and shaggy, vivacious, rich and constantly surprising set of poems. The selections demonstrate a great deal of self-reflexivity, authorial intrusion, experimentalism with style, use of double-entendre and a particular attention to and even debate about poetic construction: a constant reminder that there’s little new under the sun. For example, with Blackburn’s earliest poet, Guillem IX, one turns the page and runs smack into an 11th century Jerry Seinfeld:

                        I shall make a vers about
                                    Nothing,
                        downright nothing, not
                        about myself or youth or love
                                    or anyone.
                        I wrote it horseback dead asleep
                        while riding in the sun.

Guillem goes on to aim his apostrophe, as courtly troubadours are wont to do, to a lady - but to whom exactly?

                        I have a friend, I don’t know who
                        for I have never seen her. So
                        she treats me neither well nor ill,
                        I do not say I blame her.

These are by and large composers proud of their work but who nonetheless don’t take themselves too seriously. One finds a frequent combination of bombast and self-mockery. Marcabru, one of the more renowned of the poets, begins a poem:

                                    Now here this!
                                    HEAR THIS!
                                    How our song
                                    betters itself,
                                    always at thrust
how, following his distinct grasp, Marcabru
                                    knows how to weave
                                    subject and theme,
to so accord the vers that no man can
                                    pluck from the line
                                                a word.

But in a subsequent verse Marcabru views himself more as channeler, suggesting that the poet’s aim lies in the etymological origin of “troubadour” from the verb trobar, or “to find” as much as to create the ideal sound and sense of his composition:

                        He knows not from whence it moves
                        who made the vers and dances it.

                                    Marcabru has made the dance
                                    but does not know who started it.

The wide renown of these poets, the degree to which they played off of one another’s work, as well as the vital way in which the tradition of trobar resulted from such interactions get reflected in many of the poems. The Monk of Montaudon, for instance, offers a series of strophes devoted to assessing (and largely dismissing) the work of each of the Monk’s troubadour rivals, such as the hapless

                        En Tremolet, the catalan who
  makes his tunes so easy and plain
                                    and his songs too, but
                                    he’s nothing: combs
                        his hair on top as if he had some
                        thirty years he’s wanted to make albas
                        and’s made nothing but the grimiest smut.

A playfully competitive awareness of the need for criticism also frequently appears, as in another of Marcabru’s poems:

                          No doubt at all,
                        I’ll take him on as critic,
                        who’ll call the meaning, in my song,
                        of each word,
                        who’s analytic, who
                        can see the structure of the vers unfold.
                        I know it’ll sound absurd, but
                        I’m often doubtful and go wrong myself
                        in the explication of an obscure word.

Arnaut Daniel, another poet, offers his own self-reflexive example of the craft of composition that many troubadours bring within their poems:

On this gay and slender tune I put and polish words and plane
and when I’ve passed the file they’ll be
                        precise and firm.

In terms of subject matter, the poems range widely. While some of the vidas hint at the religious schisms and holy crusades going on at the time, the poems seldom dwell on religious themes, or at least of those that indicate devotion. Guillem IX, in a poem of leave-taking, expresses an ambiguous attitude towards God more concerned with being bereft of worldly pleasures than with any promise of Paradise:

                        Gaily I lived. Now God no longer cares for it:
                        being half-dead, even I no longer desire it.

                        All ceremony quit, all loving habit:
                        if God love me, whatever comes, I welcome it.

                        Friends, at my demise come do me honor:
                        since I’ve taken my pleasure all over the neighborhood.

                        All gracious show I leave, joys of love and table,
                        two kinds of grey fur, also sable.

Even The Monk of Montaudon is not nearly as pious as his name might suggest. Finding himself in Paradise, Montaudon converses with the Lord, who wants the monk to stop wasting away in a monastery and go off to fight in His name. But citing the example of a king who pursued such a course, the monk objects:

                        ‘Why’d You let him be put in prison?
Now the Saracen fleet under full
sail makes headway – you ignore it –
and if it makes rendezvous in Acre
the Turks will make short work of that!
Anyone would have to be an idiot
                                    to follow YOU into battle.’

The great majority of Blackburn’s poets, however, aim their poems at loves near and far, since paying court is central to entire troubadour tradition. Proensa contains no shortage of seductive (and usually hyperbolic) appeals. But by and large, the plaintive and melancholic strains quickly turn, sometimes in the same strophe, to outright lust.

Thus Pere Vidal can write more or less purely:

                                    Lady cure me, don’t
                        stand and watch me die, a Lazarus,
                                                of this sweet sickness.
                                    My running away from it’s no good.
                                                My eyes play tricks.
                                    When I leave
                        I see your beauty before me upon all the roads,
                                    can neither go
                                                nor go back.
                                    May I die accused in hell
                        if I had the whole world, but lacked
you

and things stood well.

The poet Cadenet, more typically, brings things down to earth:

I’ve never seen any
horizontal lover
who liked dawn.

Jaufré Rudel de Blaia may best embody the troubadour’s love from afar by addressing himself to a lady from Tripoli he knows only from descriptions shared by traveling pilgrims. According to his Vida, he managed to secure passage on a ship to Tripoli, became deathly ill, yet regained consciousness just long enough to find himself in his beloved’s arms before expiring. One of his poems written prior to this sad fate begins, like many of these troubadours’ works, by enlisting spring in the service of love:

                        When the days are long in May
                                                it’s good,
                                    soft birdsong from afar
                        and when the melody leaves me
                                    I remember my love afar.
                        I’ve been bent and thoughtful with desire until
                                    hawthorn and flowers & all that song
                        mean no more to me than snow in winter.

Marcabru begins a poem with a similar evocation of spring:

                        In April around Easter the streams grow clear
                        and in the groves, leaves burgeon above the blossoms.
                        Gentle, with gentle pleasure, gently
                        pure love comforts me.

However, Marcabru’s appeal to the season to create an inviting atmosphere is more typical of these poems, which often quickly decline into rough expressions of disappointment when the hoped-for love is frustrated. A mere nine lines later, Marcabru’s tone has changed dramatically:

                        God down and damn eternally pied love and curse forever
                        all that it stands for! The drunk at least takes pleasure
                        in his letch – through if he drink too much
                        it drains his vigor.

Perhaps the most audacious approach is that of Bertrand de Born, a powerful viscount “who had this habit of stirring up war among the nobles.” Though de Born also begins a poem with a paean to spring, he gets right to the heart of things immediately in a way that probably hasn’t been improved upon in 800 years: “SPRING IS A JUICE!” And as though to mock the sentimentality of someone like de Blaia, de Born turns the season into an occasion not for love, but for war and conquest:

                        Pawn your castles, lord,       
                        pawn your towns and cities!
                        Before you’re beat to the draw
                          unsheath those swords!

                        Papiols, rejoice and go
                        with all haste to Oc-e-No
                        and tell him that we’ve got too much
                        damned PEACE down here!

Despite the plethora of proclamations of love, it need hardly be said that women, on the whole, get treated rather poorly in these poems, one moment set upon a pedestal only to be in the next accused of faithlessness, dissembling, and worse, often in the rawest language (as translator, Blackburn does not hold back, observing in a note that “If [raw language] was good enough for the 9th duke of Aquitaine, it’s good enough for you”). Surprisingly, though, several of the male troubadours attempt poems from a woman’s point of view, or demonstrate that women can give as good as they get. Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, for example, offers a back and forth dialogue between a Provençal suitor and a Genoese lady who isn’t having any of it:

YOU THINK you’re being courtly, joglar?
What you think you’re asking for?
Wouldn’t do it anyway, not if I
saw you were going to be hanged and quartered.
A friend of yours? – Look, I’d prefer
better to cut you up instead.
O, very tough luck, Provensal.
Here are some sweet nothings for you:
You cruddy dope, bald-headed asshole!
Think I’d ever love you? Never!
I’ve even got a husband better
looking. Clear off, you swine!
I don’t know you and I’m better off,
I like it fine.

Blackburn, however, reports that the poem may be seen as mocking the woman,  “a joke at the expense of the Genoese dialect” (and adds, in one of his typically wry notes, that he first tried to “do the lady’s stanzas in a kind of stage Italian-American: ‘I’ma goona slitta you throat’ etc., it was too embarrassing, and I settled for a tough New Yorkese tone’”).

Though at least one of the anonymous selections appears to be from a female troubadour, the only definite example of the trobairitz in the volume is Beatriz de Dia. It’s too bad, as more poems like hers would help one from wanting to whack some of these male troubadours over the head with their stringed instruments. In any case, hers is a refreshing perspective:

I have been in heavy thought
over a cavalier I’d had.
I want it clear to everyone
that I’ve loved him to excess,
and now I see he’s left me: pre-
text, I refused him my love.
I seem to be mistaken, then,
as to what was going on,
dressed or in bed.

Needless to say, I found Proensa enchanting, a wonder of marvelous poetic conceits and lines. I’ve conclude with two passages that demonstrate the poems’ tonal range. The first is a rather somber few lines from Aimeric de Belenoi:

                                    The full rich fact remains
that my heart in its clumsiness cannot fulfill.
So I suffer
a pain so great
it should be credited me as feat
having borne, having overborne it.

And finally, I’ll leave off with a passage from Peire D’Alvernhe, who seems to sum up the critical, self-deprecating joy to be found in this rich tradition and this delightful book:

My tune is of troubadours who sing variously,
and the worst believe he chants nobly.
I wish they would go somewhere else:
                                    two hundred shepherds
                                    trying to pipe
and not a damn one knows whether the tune
                                    rises or descends.