Silvio D'Arzo

Contenuto

Keith Botsford

Introduction to "The house of others"

"I ask you... will the man who wrote this story, with his incongruities, its faults, its disproportions, one day be able to write something that is truly 'his' ? "

Silvio d'Arzo to Emilio Cecchi, 26 February 1946

Brief life, brief study. it's not always true: see Rimbaud. In the case of the singular Silvio d'Arzo, forget it. here is a man who has only one work, the title story of this collection, that is at all read; a man who didn't quite make it to his thirty-second birthday and lived almost all his life in the provincial obscurity of Reggio Emilia; but a man so dedicated to literature that he managed to produce a fairly considerable ouvre: a half dozen novellas, a small but assured body of poetry, three remarkable fables for children, and a number of highly original literary essays (d'Arzo on Polonius, henry James, or Conrad is a revelation).

What are we to make of him ? Of his willful sorrow, his intransigent personality, the refinement of his style, his evasiveness toward the real world that he was just coming to grasp even as he was dying ?

I have before me just about all of d'Arzo, a pile, say, four or five inches high. Alongside that pile are two thin notebooks containing nearly all the available critical writing on his work, mostly photocopied from italian literary magazines or the "arts" sections of italian newspapers, most dating back to the 1950s, in all totaling maybe fifty articles and fading fast. In English, nothing.

Everyone seems puzzled by him. D'Arzo had his own form of genius; he led a purely literary life (in a way that wpuld be unimaginable now). Yet, curiously, nothing happened. His work had no echo.

Born three years before Italo Calvino, a writer whom he in many ways resebles (a similar taste for the fabular, a like concision and purity of style, an equal devotion to classical literature, and even a number of favorite writers in common, such as Robert Louis Stevenson), d'Arzo had a diametrically opposite fate. Calvino worked in the main-stream, aided and abetted by emilio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese; he was published by Einaudi; he was reviewed, and was himself a reviewer. D'Arzo lived in the dead end of Reggio Emilia, too shy, to melancholic to "connect", too self-absorbed to be readily accessible to a public that, during his lifetime, caught onto almost none of the undercurrent themese that gave Italian Literature a European or international dimension in the immediate postwar period.
Pavese (1908 - 50) and Vittorini (1908 - 66) are in the encyclopedias; d'Arzo and Fenoglio are not. Yet both Pavese's and Vittorini's fiction was published at the same time as d'Arzo's; so was their criticism; and their love of literature in English did not predate d'Arzo's. They all frm part of a miraculous generation. if you need proof of neglect, however, just consider the tone of the letter quoted above, a letter written to a famous critic by a provincial nobody, the work in question being that indisputable masterpiece "Casa d'altri".
D'Arzo was unfortunate, then, in both time and place, which means that the critic writing today is faced with a double difficulty: he is writing of someone unknown and vanishing into the unread, and he is dealing with a body of work that could be viewed - and is so viewed by many, even friendly, critics - as incomplete. the main task is to answer the most difficult literary questions: does the work show achievement or merely promise ?

If What we value in literature is a voice, a way of speaking about life and ideas and human relations quite indistinguishable from anyone else's voice, then d'Arzo is a very remarkable writer indeed, informed by many (he obviously read voraciously) and indebted to none. Again, if we value originality, we should aslo value d'Arzo, for though his themes - solitude, alienation, a sense of "otherness" - are not unknown in European literature, his handling of them is almost unique in its fierce subjectivity and its absolute refusal to use any of the traditional, external trappings of fiction: plot, context, dialogue, analysis, development.

Let me first dispose of his brief and happy/unhappy stay among us.

Italy between 1920 and 1952 was hardly the sunny Italy of our minds. reggio was a place of empty streets, few cars and many bikes, of romantic novels sold door to door, of cheap rooms to let, of toy soldiers in shop windows, of 78-rpm records (which d'Arzo, with characteristic anthropomorphism, describes as "aware of new black shoes"). The first twenty-three years of d'Arzo's life were lived underr Fascism, in Mussolini's curios blend of state socialism and would-be Roman triumphalism. the last seven years were shaped by a political crisis of left and right, barely resolved by the time of d'Arzo's death.

Of all of this, barely a trace in d'Arzo's work. the only evidence we have that he might have gone on to consider this atmosphere as a subject is the èreface to the novel (or novels) he was projecting at his death: the vision sudendly broadens, and we hear of Egypt and Croatia, of newspapers and Marx. But it didn't happen. and in my view, brilliant as the preface is, the novel was not to be; and more's the shame.

His milieu (his own, and that of his subject) is principally, but not exclusively, one of the direst poverty. (When it is not, as in two remarkable stories in this collection, "The old Couple" and "Elegy for Signora Nodier", d'Arzo well understands how the petit bourgeois protects teh very means that he himself did not posses !). It is pricipally, but not exclusively, that of the two Emilias, the city of Reggio and its 'retroterra', its back country. (And when it is not, it is simply faboulous, invented). Uless you yourself have explored these worlds, they are hard to imagine now; they were even harder to imagine in d'Arzo's day. Suffice it to say that when Zelinda, heroine of "The house of others", compares her life, unfavourably, to that of her goat, she is speaking literally; and that for the city poor, the dark inner courtyard in which they hang their bicycles is the most that can be hoped for.

As for d'Arzo's race, it is that of the illegitimate. how he worshipped at the Tomb of the Unknown Father ! And how difficult must life have been with his mother, Rosalinda - born in Ceretto d'Alba, extravagant, gypsylike, reading cards at a market stall, full of tales, insistent, possessive, determined, but all the young Ezio knew of family life and cohesion.

We know very little of his childhood, save what we tell us in a number of stories. There children - strangely like him, mesmerized by fantasy, by acrobats, by the past - figure prominently. As d'Arzo himself notes (he who wrote extensively for children), "We may not like ourselves; bbut we could never fail to love our own childhoods, and all that childhood means".

He seems to have made his friends in adolescence and young manhood. Precocious, his literary ambitions powerfully fostered by his mother, he is described as shut up within himself, unwilling to confide. He has complexes - his missing father, his poverty. Friends rarely, if ever, set foot in his home, though one friend bequeaths us a picture of mother and son in a kitchen that consists of no more than a table, two chairs, and a disorderly cupboard. We have one glimpse of him, at barely fifteen. He is about to publish his firzt book and the publisher sends his agent to meet the author. The agent duly inquires after the "Professor", only to be introduced to a boy shyly sitting in a corner of the room. He has blond, wavy hair and is dressed in a sailor suit. Giannino Degani, later his lawyer, meets him in the Prandi bookshop, where he has on the same sailor suit.

in 1931, having won prizes and scholarships, he enrolls in the Gymnasio-Liceo in Reggio. At thirteen he is reading d'Annunzio and DOstoevsky; in his next to last year, in 1936, he begins working with the admirable Giuseppe Zonta, teacher to a whole generation of young students of literature, who also gives him private essons. No ordinary student this ! He completes his baccalureate as a day student at the liceo in Pavia at sixteen and is already astonishingly well read. He is already familiar with the English and American classics; internl evidence suggests that he also knew German, or at least read E.T.A. Hoffmann, possibly Kleist, and, I would guess, Novalis. His frame of literary reference extends also to the French, for we know he read Stendhal, Proust (he must have read him in French or English, for Proust was not yet translated into italian ), Maupassant, and Villon.

D'Arzo obtained his degree from the university of Bologna at the ripe age of twenty-one witha thesis correctin Scheuermeier's data in the Italo-Swiss dialect map, specifically those relating to the dialects of Montericco and Albinea.

With his university studies completed, d'Arzo's life was normalized. he could now be employed and help his mother financially. He had already been teaching in Reggio while at the university and now took on classes in a girls' middle school and a vocational school. But a year later in July 1942, he was called up for his military service. After a spell at Canzo di Como as a private soldier, he was enrolled in the officer cadets' school in avellino from January to August 1943. About to be sento to the Aegean, he was in Barletta in Apulia when, on 8 September, the Fascist government fell. like most of his regiment, d'Arzo was in the barracks waiting to ship out when he was taken prisoner by the germans and destined for the camps in germany. however, after a day and a night in the train taking him north, and while the train stood in open coutry, d'Arzo, together with another sub-liutenant friend escaped near francavilla a Mare, where he did with peasants until November.

From then on, the literary life - together with the "real" life tat might have been, which was beginning to take form in his mind - took over. The feeling of those times, minus politics, is beautifully reflected in the preface to 'Our Monday', the uncompleted wrok that would have marked his translation into reality, into the 'big novel' he dreamed of writing.

The remainder of his life (he returned to teaching and writing) was much more straightforward. The army had opened him up (though it too was, as he noted, unreal), and he was known among his many friends in Reggio as cordial and open. He and his friends had their appointed places a the Caffè Italia. They sat there for hours among the packages of cigarettes and sugar, or if it was toolate, on the steps of the Piazza del Monte under the statue of Boiard, and when the monument was removed, on the steps of Palazzo Bussetti. D'Arzo, clearly an affectionate teacher, often doted his pupils (in addiction to his regular teaching, he had a large number of private pupils). Veru rarely did he leave his beloved city, except on long walks into the countryside at cockcrow, one or two visits to Rome, a prolonged stay in the Emilian Appennines collecting data on livestock, and a visit to Florence in 1947, during which he fell passionately in love with Masaccio and his 'Adam and Eve'.

By the beginning of the 1950s, however, d'Arzo's cancer was beginning to tire him and necessitate ever more frequent stays in clinics. It was clearly not properly diagnosed. From the window of his clinic he could see the winter mist on the fields and in the distance the first hills, while nearby, at the teato Comunale, There was a grand premiere of a recent Americn film. "If only I could go", he said to a friend, beseeching him to bring him everyday detail, "however unimportant2, of the film and its audience. A few days later he died of a lymphogranuloma. As he was quickly spirited away (his bed was needed), his friends looked for his coffin in church after church. When they did find him, the only mourner presente was his mother.

The rests of d'Arzo's life resides in his books. Here too there are difficulties. The chronology is not easy to fix, for much of his work was published only posthumously. We know that he was fifteen when his first book, 'Maschere' (Masks), was published in 1935 (under the name Raffaele Comparon). Subtitled 'Tales from Town and Country', it contained seven stories, largely based, or so conjecture has it, on stories his mother had told him they are absically oral in nature. like much of his later work, they derive from the stree tradition of narrative, reports of the miraculous and suffering; in mythical power they are somewhat analogous to late-night talk shows and yellow press journalism. that is, they are told from the impoverished margins of society.

Being the work of a teenager, they show their various influences (which run from DeAmicis and verga to Dostoevsky) and are consistent with his later work in that they contain tales of storytellers (or balladeers), bandits, beggars, and other semifantastical creatures, who later reappear, most notably, in his books for children.

In the same year, La Quercia in Milan printed a modest collection of his early poems, 'Luci e penombre' (Lights and shadows). These poems were not included in te 'collected poems' published as part of 'Nostro Lunedì' (Our monday), in 1960. The volume is exceedingly rare, and I have not been able to consult it. But the publication of two books (with whose money ? how ? were these publishers visionary, or did, Rosalinda skimp and scarpe to see her gifted son in print ?) in one's fifteenth year can be see either as remarkable literary precocity or ferocious literary ambition, self-knowledge, certainty. And how could it have been the latter when when d'Arzo's most striking characteristic at the time was an almost impossible hesitation, an indecision about his own talent ?

we must remember that we are dealing with a writer who published visrtually nothing in book form in his lifetime: just these two juvenilia, one novella, ' All'insegna del Buon Corsiero' (At the sign of the noble steed), and an early version of "Casa d'altri" (The house of others), then known as "Io prete e la vecchia Zelinda" (I, priest, and old Zelinda).
It would seem that, by 1939, d'Arzo had already completed 'Ragazzo in città' (City boy), parts of which were later used or adapted for 'Essi pensano ad altro' (These think of something else). This title contains that important darzian word 'altro', 'other'. This play on otherness, on being distant from oneself, on the double nature of being seen from within and without, persists in his private mythology as it does in Rimbaud's. One critic characterizes this early work as "pre-American": that is, as predating Italy's fascination with, and translation of, american literature. It was not until 1976 that garzanti published it. This novella, which in its various versions seems to have shared space in his mind with at least two others, was rejected by publishers in 1942 - not an especially favorable year in Italy for so introspective a tale - along with 'L'Osteria dei ricordi' (Memory Inn, as it is called on the manuscript sent to Vallecchi in 1942, or, to borrow from Stephen Crane, Hotel de dream) and a third novella written before he was twenty, 'Luomo che camminava per le strade' (the man who walked the streets). 'L'Osteria' was finally published in 'Nostro Lunedì' in 1960 by Vallecchi and 'L'Uomo', of which the first eight of twenty-three chapters survive, was finally published in 1981 (in 'Contributi', vol. 9, by the A. Panizzi Library in Reggio Emilia), though a few chapters appeared as a separate short stories in 1940 and 1941.

All of these works contain elements of the postwar d'Arzo; all are simultaneously derivative and highly original (it is possible for a true writer to go through phases of being influenced and yet remain very much himself); and all require the reader's full attention (something that is true of all d'Arzo's work). Ellipsis, the deliberate oblitertion of the 'landmarks' of fiction (such as plot or an intense, realistic context), elements of fantasy, require - and repay - close reading. You have to trat them as if you were reading early kafka, like "The aerodrome at Brescia" or 'Amerika', and seek in these transparent pieces of imaginative 'reportage' the Kafka of 'The trial'.
'L'uomo che camminava per le strade' and 'Essi pensano ad altro' share an urban background, which both is and is not Bologna. The former is the story of Professor Carlo Stresa - a 'moderate Mr. Bloom' in the words of A. Luce Lenzi, who edited the manuscript - and his accumulated peculiarities. Stresa wander from one end of his street to the other and has his 'opposite' (most of d'Arzo's work features incongruous, unrequited pairs and doubles), a dr. lada, blind and superior - the role played in 'Essi pensno ad altro' by the drunken, truth-telling Pìadeni. Stresa's street, as one might expect from d'Arzo, is but a pretext for erring; it does not start at A and end at B. Instead, it is as interminable as the human histories it examines. The latter, which we know to be complete (we cannot be sure about the former, in spite of the fact that d'Arzo signed it at the end of the eighth chapter), is another singular work, based on the earlier 'ragazzo in città'. These two works, as well as the two that follow, can be considered part of one continuous work of literary exploration, which iss self-referrential, sinuous, and infinitely interconnected: characters, style, phrases, definitions recur again and again.
'Essi pensano ad altro' is a suffocating book that explores two sets of doubles living in the same wretched building: one consists of a boy, Riccardo, who has come to the big city to (perhaps) play the violin, and a friend of his father's , Arseni, with whom he lodges and who keeps and stuffs animals; the other consists of the protective nemo (No one) and Enrico, an animal trainer and performer. There is a missing father (powerful and menacing) whose propspective visit to Riccardo looms Thoughout. He does come in the end, reeking of the country, when the animal trainer, himself threatened with failure, falls from their apartment into the courtyard and dies. there is also an unobtainable, matter-of-fact girl, Ernestina, who works in a stationery shop and whose fingers are stained with ink; and a mysterious Settembrini-like figure, Pìadeni, a drunk and a mystic, the purest of nihilists, for whom people are "born by mistake". nemo and Enrico " have managed to discover each other and be together, and perhaps have lived only that they might discover each other and be together ".
It's Beckett's bleakness, one would say, had d'Arzo read 'Waiting for Godot', but d'Arzo hadn't. In d'Arzo's first emergence from within himself, if only into the eighteen century world of the commedia dell'arte. It was published by Vallecchi in Florence in 1942 and had a modest critivcal success. Attilio Vallecchi (1880 - 1946), printer and publisher of of te avant-garde paper 'Lacerba' and a major backer of futurism, asked d'Arzo for a brief autobiography and a picture to use in promoting the book. The text d'Arzo supplied reads: "I was born in Felentino (La Spezia) on January 5, 1917. I read classics and took my degree in law, after which I registered in te faculty of Letters. I have been in Reggio for some time now - some three years... " This dissimulation is accompanied by a picture (black tie, black suit, black plastere-down hair, radical white part, black mustache, heavy eyebrows) that looks like a cross between an Argentine tango dancer and a provincial bank clerk, as though the unknown and unrecognized bastard were invoking his own father as author of his ouvre, aging him thickening him, masculizing him, offering this effigy as a form of propitiatory gesture: yes, you can take this author seriously. It is not entirely unlike the real d'Arzo (it seems to have been posed against the same wall as a picture taken in 1944, and carries the same intensity), but it is deliberately anonymous: not only unidentifiable, but also inscrutable.

The novella, set in mysterious, flat country in the veneto, evokes the imaginative territory of Goldoni and the german Romantics. D'Arzo calls it 'quest'avventura terrena d'altri tempi' ("this earthly tale from other days"), contrasting its real, human backdrop (an inn or posting house peopled with lackeys, scullery boys, cooks, maids, and an itinerant marchesa married to the doge's ambassador to the Porte) with the ill-defined supernaturalism of travelling comedians, a melancholy servant-poet, and its real hero, the tightrope walker, whose rope, strung across the main square, is cut by the jealous Lelio.

We now how d'Arzo felt about 'All'insegna' and its near-contemporary, 'L'Osteria', from a 26 February 1946 letter to Emilio cecchi in which he says, "A few years ago I wrote a poor little book for Vallecchi, and another had just been announced... but it was God's will that my eyes were sufficiently opened for me to prevent him from bringing out a second editio of the first or publishing the second". This self-deprecation is pure d'Arzo, but I don't think we need take it at face value: All'insegna and 'L'osteria' are the fables of a twenty-two-year-old steeped in Robert Louis Stevenson and the "angelism" of Zavattini, perhaps in Rilke and, before Rilke, in Kleist too.

The first is a tale of love gone aour, of a deeply concealed passion in a world where servants, the humble, are not 'seen' in the external world and hardly exist save in their own emotions and imaginings. The tightrope walker, in his antique costume, qith his certainties and his ambiguous smile, his intrusions into the real world; he is seducer, enchanter, the Devil. the novella its faults - its insistently circular style, clause within clause, its suffocating concentration on detail - but remains a remarkable, haunting fable in which he who dares falls and is killed but comes back to life and must, as the story ends, be chased away by those confined to the real world of kitchen and courtyard.

The second, 'L'Osteria', represents a step in a new direction. The "magical realism" that most critics associate with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Latin American nivel prevaded the italian tradition in the years between the two wars. 'L'Osteria', in one sense, is a tale that takes place in Nowhere land, and in a No-Time in which nothing happens. Its most puzzling aspect is its setting: a place called Sivilek, of which we know almost nothing except that it has a river and rain - constant rain - and an inn, where much of the "action" takes place. in such a place the real world (of poverty, of men for whom defeat and silence are natural conditions), a world that strongly recalls "Casa d'altri", combines with the fantastic so that the two are indistinguishable even to the protagonists: a widower, a barmaid whose breasts are "glory", a groom, the innkeeper, a smuggler, a little girl enjoined not to grow.

How did d'Arzo come to invent (and use elsewhere) names - Marek, Gonek, Rovan, Giber, Lepic - that are vaguely Czech ? We do not know, though we do know that part of his last, unfinished novel was to take place across the Adriatic, among Slavs.

The stylistic change is considerable. the key scenes, mysterious as they are, are now in dialogue. Italian critics take this to be the result of the influence of Ernest hemingway; but , if so, d'Arzo choose a peculiar Hemingway as his model. It is a sign of his acute perception that d'Arzo's Hemingway is very much is own, a man who, as he wrote in 1951, is "anythng but primitive, or barbarous", whose sadness is that of an "exceedingly civilized man". hemingway's dialogue, he argues, is one "whose repetitions and pauses produce ineffable meanings and resonances". It is easy, d'Arzo says, "to strike a flame: what is important (and difficult) is to leave no trace of sulphur". It is just this, I think, that d'Arzo was after, just this that he tried out in 'L'Osteria' and brought to fruition in "Casa d'altri".

There is a passage in d'Arzo's wonderful letters to Ada Gorini (wonderful because they are the traces of an elusive and unconsummated passio) that illustrates his peculiar turn of mind. He had just sent her, his "double", Conrad's 'Lord Jim', whose proptagonist is a pasionate and vulnerable as himself. Now, he writes, "I'd like to tell you something".

'The other day, you were talking about the song of a swan. and I tell you, swans sing, yes, but then die: they don't accept being cooped up in a courtyard. For that end, they are ducks. And ducks are ducks. They do not sing. All they have is unending appetite. Nnothing else. We spoke of ghosts: but ghosts don't cry, as you did: and they are lugubriously coherent: whereas you you are a mass of magnificent incoherences. You're an incoherence dresses as a woman. you said, there is nothing nobles than suffering, and that may be so, but "wanting" suffering, "choosing suffering" is to feel real suffering: it is a highly refined form of egotism. you're wild; you seek a cage. you say you're weak, but you impose rules on yourself. you say the flesh does not exist, yet you make your spirit depend on the flesh. (19 May 1950) '

No more and no less than his characters, d'Arzo is cooped up in his courtyard; he and his people are ducks who would be swans. to him, with his terrible, frustrated appetite, it is a thing of wonder that Ada Gorini's spirit depends on the flesh. He himself is a ghost, a fate he examines in his beautifully crafted essay on henry James, for James's characters "Have the discretion of ghosts; and some are as incorporeal as ghosts, and ssometimes make even less noise, and especially love the shade. At first sight, they may see more like presences than men". but he goes on to say:

' The most intimate and essential feature of ghosts, that most attractive or dismaying to us, is not their inconsistency or pallor (and even less their white sheet);what makes them both horrible and pathetic is their exile's condition, the way they are condemned to wander through places and memories that are not their own, their inability to communicate, their lack of roots, theire eternal, absolute extraneousness: to everything and to all; and to themselves. nothing is more casual, more gratuitous than a ghost: and, for this very reason, nothing is more monstruous. they have no history; thus no society. Their obtuse faithfulness to a given place is dictated by necessity... like that of a bat in his belfry. One can't even say they "are"; they merely exist. '

James is not like that, and d'Arzo would like not to be like that.

D'Arzo explores this ghost theme, with its alienated survicors in the real world, in much of his fiction (in some ten stories, in particular "Penny Whirton and his mother") and criticism (now collected, except for his essays on Maupassante and Villon, in ' Contea Inglese' [Palermo: Sellerio, 1987]) written between 1949 and hi death.

It is in this period that a new d'Arzo emerges, one whose preoccupations shift from irreality and fantasy to moral problems situated in a thouroughly real, if still somewaht mysterious and bleak world. Chief of these many brilliant stories is "Casa d'altri", or "The House of Others". This long story was first published as "Io prete e la vecchia Zelinda", in ' Illustrazione Italiana' 29-30 (18 and 25 July 1948) under the name Sandro nedi. in 1952, much reworked, with a different ending and a number of scenes excised for greater dramatic coherence and to bring out Zelinda's moral dilemma in its darkest form (Are there "exceptional" cases in which what is forbidden by the Church iss licit ? can one, if one's life is worthless, put and end to it ?) it was published in 'Botteghe Oscure' (no. 10). A year later, grossly traduced by the director Blasetti, it was one of the eight stories filmed for 'tempi nostri Zibaldone II'; Sansoni published it in a book for the same year that was about as near as d'Arzo got to fame and its accompanying vulgarities.

An earlier English version entitled "Exile", translated by Bernard Wall, was published in 'Encounter' no. 5 (1954) at the urging of NIccolò Chiaramonte, and was reprinted in 'Stories of Modern Italy' (New York 1960).
This is a serviceable translation, but also one that Americanizes (in the wrong sense) and flattens out the elaborate comings and goings, thr repetitions and echoes, in d'Arzo's style. None of the other four texts included in this volume - "Elegia al Signora Nodier", first published in 'Cronache' no. 3 (18 january 1947); "Due vecchi", likewise in 'Cronache' nos. 29 and 30 (19 and 26 July 1947); "Un minuto così", in 'Palatina' no. 6 (April-June 1958); and the preface to 'Nostro Lunedì', in the volume of that name in 1960 - has previously been translated into English.

If we had only "Casa d'altri" and d'Arzo's other late stories to remember him by, that would still be a great achievement. In my view, "Casa d'altri" is as near to "perfect" a story as it is possible to write. Why ? First because of its language, which is attenuated, transparent, subtly rhytmical, exquisitely poised (as Moravia pointed out) between the real and the poetic. Second, because of the subtlety of the characterizations: the priest with his doubts and Zelinda with hers, the pair of them locked together in a eternal and timeless conflict between whatis and what should be. Then, because of its sense of the sacred, a factor that has all but disappeared in twentieth-century literature, its understanding that human beings operate under a divine providence or fatality and must measure themselves not just against each other but against Him. because of its understanding of the enduring context of a mountain people who know themselves to be what they are, and who seek, in art (as in the age-old pageant trated in the story) and in the supernatural, some relief from hte enforced ordinariness of their lives. And because the priest and Zelinda are deeply human, and, as humans, are aware of each other in such startling, obsessive ways, yet are surrounded by the trivial details - wether of burials, pasturage, the weather, or cantakerous old ladies going on pilgrimage - that make up the very monotony of their lives, a depth plumbed elsewhere only by Joyce.

The other stories in this volume, with their attendant horrors when the real world reaches into private lives, are lessere only in scale. Full of ambiguities and ironies, they are rich in life reflected upon, absorbed, and re-created with special art. Not many writers are able to sum up, in as brief a space, a life such as that of the splendidly egotistical Signora Nodier, the mystery of her installation in the province, and her "solemn, yes, too solemn" general with his love of hunting; or to provide a reversal half so surprising as the revelation of the "young girl you once taught to fish". What affection d'Arzo feels for tha Grimaldis in "Due vecchi", whose lives are changed radically by an importunate blackmailer (a semiliterary man). He writes that while "great tragedies leave me indifferent", there are "certain subtle pains, some situations and relationships that move me more than a city destryoed by fire". In 'Un minuto csì' the latest of these stories, the compressio of much of postwar Italia history (the country's "Turkish times") into a single symbolic incident, the finding of a belt buckle that leads to a grave ("the fact is, these are curious times"), is even fiercer. There is in the mutual incomprehension of the guileful peasant Cloanti and the schoolteacher who just wants "to live and to be an old man", a distillation of class warfare as suggestive as any to be found in far more socially conscious and politically "committed" novels.

As for the preface to 'Nostro Luned' ', it is hard to think of an opening chapter so rich in possibilities, or of a narrator so scrupolously honest about himself and his past. We know just a tantalizing bit about what the general line of this novel was to be: a few notes and a few preliminary stories. At d'Arzo's death, they were gathered together under the general title 'Senza bandiera'(Without a flag) or 'Un eroe dei nostri tempi (A hearo of our times) - a title significantly lifted from Lermontov (Lermontov's "time" has become d'Arzo's "times" ).
This can be no accident. Lermontov's pre-existentialist novel, which has found a new audience in our own times, has many affinities, both in style and construction, with d'Arzo's. If you read "Our Monday, A preface", the last text in this volume, you will have an answer to the question posed at the beginning. here is both achievement - a new style,a new perception of reading, a new vigor - and promise. to quote Wystan Auden, with whom I was once discussinh "major" and "minor" writers, "There are no major and minor writers, only different ones".

Poor d'Arzo. no one ever reimbursed him for his ticket to life. it is we who are the poorer for his premature death.

Keith Botsford
Boston, 1 May 1994