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PARTISAN REVIEW
as Iris Origo writes had "a generosity greater than his means and ...
more enthusiasm than intelligence." In Ranieri Leopardi found his pa–
tron, and through him the last shadow of a vicarious love affair. He
led his patron into a flirtation with Fanny Targioni, the fluttering sen–
sual wife of a Florentine doctor and botanist; to her Leopardi was
il
mio gobbetto;
to him she was the
Aspasia
of one of his last poems. Her
not unkindly name for
him,
since she was both thoughtless and insensi–
tive, was among the horrors that drove him from Recanati where, when–
ever he stepped out of doors, children ran at him crying
«il gobbo."
So far as his life ran its course, none of Leopardi's conflicts were
resolved---only the care of his patron increased the number of years he
was kept alive, and his patron's gifts of pocket money to him were as
erratic as Ranieri's own income. The last glimpses that we are given
of Leopardi are of a hunchbacked, slender figure in a faded blue frock
coat eating ices and sweet cakes. A doctor had forbidden the sweets,
but the ices cooled Leopardi's feverish throat, and the sweets, like a
child's desire for them grown to adult passion, were his last great need.
In one of
his
last letters was the phrase, "if I were a poet." Only
his
poems in their posthumous survival were to clear away that doubt.
A Tamiment Institute Forum:
IS CO-EXISTENCE POSSIBLE?
Chairman:
SEN. RICHARD
L.
NEUBERGER
Democrat of Oregon
F'anelists:
DR. GERHART NIEMEYER
Consultant, Council on Foreign
Relations; formerly PI"n ning Ad·
visor, Bure"u of United N"tions
Affairs, Dept. of State
DR. ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.
Professor of History, H"rvard
University
DR. HARRY SCHWARTZ
Soviet Aff"irs Speci"list, The New
York Times
MR. BERTRAM D. WOLFE
Author, Three Who Made a Revo·
lution; formerly Chief, Ideologi.
cal Advisory St"ff, Voice of
Americ"
At the auditorium of the Museum of
Modern Art, II West 53rd St., N. Y.
Thursday, April 14, 8:30 p.m. Ad–
mission :
$1.
Mail ticket orders to
THE TAMIMENT INSTiTUTE
7 East 15th Street, New York 3
Horace Gregory
LIBERAL PRESS, INC.
printers of
PARTISAN REVIEW
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