PARTISAN REVIEW
bourgeois, or Biedermeier, products. Croce's four volumes of
La
letteratura della nuova Italia
offer a gallery of portraits of typically
Biedermeier artists. Indeed, if one considers the whole of Italian
literature, its representative genius is not Dante, but Ariosto,
"Ludo–
vico della tranquillita":
the bourgeois poet whose uneventful life
culminated in the building of
his
little house in
Ferrara-"parva sed
apta mihi"-who
had no "message," but delighted in a pageant of
fantastic adventures, tempering the superhuman with the humorous,
reducing everything to a golden level of harmony; a writer of tales
which could appeal equally to the courtier and to the gondolier. It
is usual to refer to the provincial character of Italy (where there is
no predominant cultural center) when accounting for the output of
short stories and novels which formed in the twenties, and still form
in the forties, the bulk of her literary production. Books whose best
portions deal as a rule with the childhood of the protagonist (a thin
disguise of the author himself) spent in some little town far away from
the modem world, simple stories of family troubles with a mother
up front; half-yearning, half-melancholy, conjuring up streets and
squares undisturbed by modern traffic--sad experiences made beauti–
ful in recollection, love for concrete detail, no pretence of meta–
physical complications-how many books of this kind, generally
written
in
very good Italian, have been appearing year after year,
enjoying a moderate success and a still more moderate sale, to recede
finally into the background where their features dissolve in the uni–
form Biedermeier color!
To this kind of storytelling, the influence of Proust and, less
evidently, of Henry James, has added a spice of
intimismo,
a precious
intricacy of pattern, stressing a shade of sensibility here, deepening the
sense of the past there, and altogether leaving the imprint of a dulcet
cadence, as in a Petrarchan sonnet. Joyce and Virginia Woolf have
favored a still deeper preciosity, the
stile allusivo,
flights of fancy too
remote to
be
traced by the lay reader, and prose has often vied with
poetry in the
trobar clus,
as the Provenc;al poets used to say, or
"ermetismo,
as modern critics have termed this exquisite, but unso–
ciable tendency, the
ultima Thule
of individualism. I shall only men–
tion one name, in order to make you realize what kind of Italian
story-teller I had in mind when I held up the example of Heming–
way to our writers: Gianna Manzini, born in Siena at the beginning
1090
