Other literary forms

Giovanni Verga (VAYR-gah) was a writer of short stories and a playwright as well as a novelist. “Nedda” is the story of a Sicilian peasant girl who harvests olives and suffers the buffets of bad fortune until at length she thanks the Virgin Mary that her baby has been taken and will no longer suffer on earth. This story, written in 1874, prompted Luigi Capuana to predict that Verga had opened “a new seam in the mine of Italian literature.” In Primavera ed altri racconti (1876; springtime and other stories), Verga attempts a certain realism by occasionally reproducing the Milanese dialect of his characters. Vita dei campi (1880; Cavalleria Rusticana, and Other Stories, 1928; also known as Life in the Country, 2003) contains some of his finest stories, such as “La lupa” (“The She-Wolf”), in which a woman drives her son-in-law to kill her as the result of her continual sexual prodding. Verga transformed this story into the play La lupa (1896).

Also notable in Cavalleria Rusticana, and Other Stories is “Fantasticheria” (“Reverie”), in which a man and a woman compare the merits of the world of high society with the unsullied world of the peasant, and the man in the story argues eloquently for the superiority of the latter. The collection also includes Verga’s “Cavalleria rusticana” (literally meaning “rustic chivalry” but known in English only by its Italian name), the tragedy of Turiddu at the hands of the cuckolded Alfio, each one cooperating with fate to work out the other’s destruction.

Novelle rusticane (1883; translated by D. H. Lawrence in 1925 as Little Novels of Sicily) explores in its twelve stories the peasant’s struggle to survive and his victimization by nature and society. In “La libertà” (“Liberty”), for example, in which the peasants rebel and slaughter their oppressors, they are immediately cowed by the enormity of their vengeance and are soon made into willing victims by those who execute the law. “Pane nero” (“Black Bread”), more a short novel than a story, is striking for the contrast its peasants provide to the idealism of the Malavoglia family; the fear of poverty in these peasants drives them to ignore all scruples in their search for material necessities. In Per le vie (1883; through the streets), Verga writes of the struggles of the urban Milanese poor; these stories seem to lack the brilliance of his stories set in Sicily. In “Camerati” (“Buddies”), Verga takes a dim view of the Socialist ideas that were coming into vogue in Northern Italy on the grounds that they merely complicate the problems that they are out to solve.

All of his life, Verga dreamed of being a successful playwright; although he did not write many plays, some of them were successful. In 1883, he rewrote “Cavalleria rusticana” as a one-act tragedy, which was performed the next year in Turin with Eleanora Duse, Cesare Rossi, and Tebaldo Checchi, the finest actors in Italy at the time. It was published the same year and marks the greatest success of Verga’s career as a writer; in 1889, the play was transformed into an opera by composer Pietroc Mascagni. The play was translated into English and published in 1893. “The She-Wolf,” rewritten into a two-act tragedy, premiered as La lupa in Turin in 1896 with some success, and for a time Mascagni considered using it also as the basis of an opera. In portineria (pb. 1884; the porter’s lodgings) is a stage adaptation in two acts taken from a story in Per le vie; when it premiered in Milan in 1885, it was a failure. La caccia al lupo (pr. 1901; The Wolf Hunt, 1921) and La caccia alla volpe (pr. 1901; the fox hunt) are companion pieces that explore instances of marital infidelity among the poor and among the rich; predictably, Verga is more successful portraying the story set in the world of the Sicilian peasant than the one set in the empty world of high society. Dal tuo al mio (pr. 1903; what’s yours is mine), which deals with a confrontation between sulfur miners and the barons who own the mines, and which puts forth the self-interest motive as the source of all actions, was later reconstructed by Verga as a less effective short novel in 1906. There is no complete edition of the plays of Verga, although the one-volume Teatro, published by Mondadori in 1912, is a valuable collection of the better ones.

Achievements

Giovanni Verga is generally viewed as the second greatest novelist Italy has produced, after Alessandro Manzoni. His objectivity, his efforts to infuse new life into the petrified, tradition-shackled Italian language, his compassion for humanity, and his conception of society as controlled by immutable economic laws have made an indelible impression on the Italian writers who followed him, especially on the neorealists. One of the landmark works of the neorealist cinema is Luchino Visconti’s La terra trema (1948), based on Verga’s novel The House by the Medlar Tree. The tragic vision elaborated in his best novels, however, has less appeal than his short stories.

Abroad, Verga is best known as the source of the libretto Cavalleria rusticana (1884), and his stories, such as “The She-Wolf,” “Conforti” (“Consolation”), “Black Bread,” “Liberty,” and “Cos’è il re” (“So Much for the King”), are frequently anthologized. Furthermore, he is among the few modern Italian writers included with any regularity in textbooks of literature published in the United States.

Although his dramatic works were not many, Verga was the only fully successful writer of tragedy in Italian theater between Count Vittorio Alfieri and Luigi Pirandello. Cavalleria rusticana is a work of monumental importance in the history of Italian theater, for it ushered in a new age of realistic drama dealing with contemporary problems after centuries of plots based on medieval themes.

In his best novels, Verga achieved a perfect synchronization of style and story and created a language capable of conveying the feelings of his Sicilian peasant characters that his Italian readers could understand. Verga steeped himself in the customs and the psychology of Sicily and then proceeded to convert the Sicilian dialect of his characters into a crystalline and “unartificial” Italian. Generally remaining within the bounds of standard Italian, Verga preserved successfully syntactic features of his native dialect, such as the tendency to repeat the verb at the end of a sentence, as in “Per voi tirerei tutta la casa, tirerei” (“For you I would lift the whole house up, I really would”) from “Cavalleria rusticana.” Gabriele D’Annunzio would later imitate this feature of Verga’s language in his own short stories.

Biography

Giovanni Verga was the eldest of five children born to Giovanni Battista Verga Catalano and Caterina di Mauro. The Vergas were upper middle class, descended from a Spaniard, Lajn Gonzalo de Vergas, who came to Sicily in the thirteenth century. The elder Giovanni Verga was cultured and well read, and he dabbled in the occult; Verga’s mother was an intellectual and was a cousin of Domenico Castorina, a local writer. Both of Verga’s parents were cautiously liberal in that they opposed the Bourbon monarchy that held a tyrannical sway over southern Italy at that time. Although born and reared in Catania, Verga spent much of his life in Vizzini, where his father owned considerable property. There the family sought refuge in summers to avoid outbreaks of cholera and political violence.

In 1850, Verga went to a secular school directed by Antonino Abate. There he read Dante, Petrarch, Torquato Tasso, Ludovico Ariosto, Ugo Foscolo, and Manzoni, as well as the bombastic writings of Catania’s own Castorina.

Although Abate favored the union with Italy, unlike some Sicilians, who desired an independent Sicily, he wished to see an Italian republic rather than a monarchy. His student, Verga, on the other hand, was so grateful when the troops of Giuseppe Garibaldi made a unified Italy possible that he accepted the idea of a monarchy easily. A unified Italy, however, did not bring all it had seemed to promise. When the new leaders began to break up the ancient feudal estates, as the land-hungry peasants had hoped, the fragmented estates were purchased by members of the middle class, who by this means were able to elevate themselves, to the total exclusion of the peasants, who no longer had even the rights of use that they had enjoyed under the previous system. There occurred savage attacks on the gentry by an embittered and defrauded peasantry, and although Verga himself had to flee their unleashed wrath, somehow there took root deep within him a remarkable compassion for the plight of this unfortunate class of people, and it was precisely this empathy that led him to greatness as a writer.

To please his father, Verga entered the University of Catania to study law, but he soon was bored and began to apply himself to writing fiction. Because these first literary efforts were mildly successful, he decided to move to the Italian mainland to perfect his Italian and his literary style. Following the tradition of writers such as Alfieri, Foscolo, and Manzoni, who purified their Italian by taking up residence in the country’s linguistic capital, Verga chose to move to Florence, which in 1865 was also the country’s interim political capital. He mastered Italian, as was his goal, but skillfully preserved the rhythms and syntax of the dialects and, although he used outright idioms that had to be italicized within his texts less and less frequently as he matured as a writer, he succeeded in substituting Italian words for dialect in such a way as to preserve even the lexical flavor of the original speech.

In Florence, Verga renewed his acquaintance with Luigi Capuana, from Mineo, and Mario Rapisardi, from Catania; he also became acquainted with Francesco Dall’Ongaro, a respected critic and writer. At the Dall’Ongaro residence, Verga met Giselda Fojanesi, soon to be Rapisardi’s wife and subsequently Verga’s mistress. Verga saw her during his frequent visits to Catania, where she and her husband returned to live, until December, 1883, when Rapisardi discovered the infidelity and sent Giselda back to Florence, whereupon Verga ended the liaison.

Verga published Sparrow in 1871, and in November, 1872, he moved to Milan, where he associated with members of the Scapigliatura literary group, making friends with Giuseppe Giacosa, Giacomo Puccini’s foremost librettist, and with Arrigo Boito, who wrote libretti for Verdi. The scapigliati (the “disheveled,” or those against the establishment) reacted against bourgeois traditions and sought greater originality, subjectivity, and immediacy in their writing. Although Verga probably did not ever consider himself a member of this group, it is in the impulse that they gave to him that much of their own historical importance lies. Verga enjoyed his years in Milan, where he wrote several trivial novels featuring erotic escapades among the rich, usually set in Florence or Milan; only the publication of “Nedda” in 1874 gave an inkling of his potential greatness. The decade 1880 to 1890 was a glorious one for Verga; during this period, he published two great novels, The House by the Medlar Tree and Mastro-don Gesualdo, in addition to a number of masterpieces of short fiction. Still, the critical reception of his works was not enthusiastic, and this depressed him.

In 1889, Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Giovanni Menasci took Verga’s “Cavalleria rusticana” and turned it into a libretto for the then-unknown Pietro Mascagni. Verga was consulted beforehand and gave his consent without specifying what share of the royalties he wished. When the opera proved successful, Verga initiated a lawsuit that ended in 1893 with the court awarding him the onetime sum of 143,000 lire. A few years later, Verga brought suit again, claiming that his agreement to the 1893 terms had been fraudulently induced. The litigation, at great cost to Verga, dragged on until 1915. It was said invidiously that Verga lost interest in his writing because he enjoyed litigating more; if the assertion is untrue, certainly the fact of the litigation served to take his personal focus away from his writing to worldly matters.

Disillusioned by what he viewed as the failure of his literary career and moved by nostalgia for the Sicilian countryside, Verga left Italy for Catania in 1893. From Sicily he continued to travel, especially to Milan, but he no longer maintained an apartment there and stayed instead in hotels. The return home failed to revitalize Verga’s interest in the cycle of five novels that he was planning; although the plot of the third novel, “La duchessa di Leyra” (the duchess of Leyra), was already worked out, he never finished it. In the last decades of his life, he had the consolation of his friendship with the younger Federico De Roberto, author of the historical novel The Viceroys (1894), who came to play Boswell to Verga’s Johnson. De Roberto published a series of newspaper articles on Verga after his death that left no doubt that Verga had been considered the most important person in De Roberto’s life.

In Rome in 1881, Verga had met Dina Castellazzi, wife of the count of Sordevolo, and the relationship that developed between them was to last the rest of Verga’s life. The more than seven hundred letters he wrote to her from Catania serve as the primary sources of information on the last two decades of his life. Although she became a widow in 1891 and wanted Verga to marry her, he was unwilling and remained a bachelor.

As he became more withdrawn in old age, Verga became more politically conservative. His stance against demonstrations that could disrupt the political order of Italy hardened. When Luigi Capuana and De Roberto publicly faulted the Italian government for its inefficiency in handling the aftermath of the earthquake that destroyed Messina and Reggio di Calabria in 1908, Verga, afraid of triggering a secession movement in Sicily, remained silent. His inability to understand the march of time began to interfere with his art. In his play Dal tuo al mio, about the suppression of a strike at a sulfur mine and the turncoat loyalties of the mine’s foreman, his message that greed is the incontrovertible source of evil in a world devoid of idealism had become doctrinaire and boring. Politics as such interested Verga only sporadically, but in 1920, Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti made him a senator of the kingdom, following a tradition begun in 1860 when Alessandro Manzoni was similarly invested.

Verga died on the morning of January 27, 1922, having suffered a cerebral hemorrhage three days earlier. De Roberto scarcely left Verga’s bedside those three days; afterward he made a thorough search for the manuscript of “La duchessa di Leyra,” which everyone expected to appear as a finished product, but he found only the first chapter and a few pages of the second. In a letter in 1899, Verga had complained of difficulties (“May God help me with this Duchess!”) he was having with the duchess’s language, the international, stilted, and pretentious language of the upper classes. For the novelist who had mastered the medium used by the peasants, the medium of his own class was an insurmountable obstacle; whereas in his prematurity novels, he had openly permitted himself to react against the false world of this privileged group, his self-imposed adherence to verism kept him, at this point, from expressing his unutterable disdain and thus from completing a possible masterpiece.

Analysis

Giovanni Verga’s first novels were romantic, predictable, and superficial. His masterpieces of verism were written between 1880 and 1890, and for the last thirty years of his life, though full of good intentions, he produced relatively little. In one of his earliest novels, A Mortal Sin, which could be called an autobiography of wish fulfillment (in the story, a young Sicilian, footloose in the big city, both achieves literary fame and wins the beautiful woman he loves), the author strives for a veneer of realism by claiming that his story comes from authentic documents that have come into his possession. Although Verga in his maturity would disown this novel, the writer’s task to re-create reality is already taken seriously in it. Sparrow tells the story of a young girl forced to become a nun against her will, in the manner of Denis Diderot’s The Nun (1796). For years Verga’s most widely read novel, Sparrow consists of letters allegedly written by the girl herself. The blackcap of the title is a fragile bird Verga claims to have seen once and been reminded of later when he learned the girl’s story.

In the preface to Eva, Verga again asserts the veracity of what he writes, although this time not insisting that it is true, but rather that it could have happened. Although the character of Eva is lost in the bombast of the novel’s conventionalities, Eva’s speech is precise and reflects her personality. Further, Eva’s decision to leave Enrico for a rich lover stems from Verga’s firm belief that love, without the social coercion afforded by marriage or without the nostalgia caused by separation, cannot survive routine when lovers live together. Also emphasized is the incontestable power of financial security to nurture art and love.

Hardly an advance over Eva, Tigre reale (royal tigress) concerns a consumptive Russian lady who lives in Florence and falls in love with a young Sicilian. Despite its title, another early novel, Eros, is the most complex of this group and the one least trammeled by the unreality of the dreamlike eroticism that fascinated the early Verga. The aristocratic Alberto, a type Verga never again explored in his novels, grows up without a family, searches for love, makes many mistakes, and ends his life with a gunshot. Although the often realistic and colloquial language coincides with character, Verga as author obtrudes upon the reader his strong dislike for the aristocratic world he is portraying.

The appearance in 1874 of the short story “Nedda” marked the point at which Verga abandoned his autobiographical theme of aristocrats searching for love and began to seek a commoner world apparently closer to his heart, the world of the Sicilian “primitive.” It was at this point that Verga joined the literary movement known as Verism, the Italian equivalent of the realistic and naturalistic schools in France. Verga had long followed French literary trends closely and admiredÉmile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, and Guy de Maupassant. The views of Maupassant, whose success did much to stimulate interest in the short story in Italy, were especially compatible with Verga’s concept of good writing. In fact, there developed between the two a mutual respect, and Maupassant even offered at one time to write a preface for Little Novels of Sicily when it appeared in French translation.

Verga’s cardinal rules of good writing were in the process of emerging: The story must tell itself without evidence of or interference from the author, and language must coincide in every way with the characters who are speaking. The sparenarrative style that Verga achieved in his best work, however, did much to alienate the critics, who were also put off by his pessimism and the harshness of his vision. The characteristics of the Italian novel had been set by Manzoni thirty years earlier, and it was unacceptable for a novelist to deviate from this norm. Certainly Manzoni had written of the harshness of real-life situations, but the harshness of Manzoni is balanced by his deep religious belief, a feeling absent in Verga’s writing.

Verga’s intent, expressed as early as 1878 and clearly based on the inspiration of Honoré de Balzac’s The Human Comedy (1829-1848) and Zola’s The Rougon-Macquart Family (1871-1893), was to compose a cycle of five novels to be called “La marea” (the tide)—later changed to “I vinti” (the doomed)—that would scrutinize successive stages in people’s struggle for material security. The first novel of the cycle, The House by the Medlar Tree, would involve the struggle of a Sicilian family for minimal needs alone. The search would evolve to outright greed for riches typified by a middle-class character, Mastrodon Gesualdo, in the second book of the series. “La duchessa di Leyra” (begun in 1907), still with a Sicilian setting, would explore aristocratic vanity in Palermo, and “L’onorevole Scipioni” (the honorable Scipioni) would study political ambition in Rome. Finally, “L’uomo di lusso” (the man of wealth) would portray a character who possesses all these desires and is consumed by them. These last two titles were only projected works; Verga never completed his planned five-volume series.

Bibliography