Peopled Complications

THE OLD AND THE YOUNG--Luigi Pirandello--Button ($5.00).

Dramatis Personae. Sicily being a time-honored battleground for radicals and conservatives, its "typical inhabitants" of the 'gos were legion. Not to neglect the least of these, Pirandello has recreated every conceivable type, but luckily his elaborate personnel sorts itself out into groups, and a few unforgettables single themselves out from the groups.

Dominating group, divided against itself, is the Laurentano family, old and young: Don Cosmo, madman or philosopher, is a kindly recluse on the family estate and with him lives Mauro Mortora, an old fanatic Garibaldino. Disgusted with these revolutionists of 1860 another Laurentano, Prince Ippolito, had banished himself for life to a neighboring estate, and manned it with a guard dressed in conspicuously gaudy Bourbon uniform, the joke of the countryside. But his son, Lando, lived luxuriously in Rome, and published, out of boredom, a socialist paper which sympathized from safe distance with laborers in Sicily. An enthusiastic delegation of these laborers, representing half-baked unions called fasci, nevertheless persuaded Lando, against his better cynical judgment, to come to Sicily and co-ordinate revolt.

Lando's resultant activities were most distressing to another family group, headed by Salvo, a wealthy social climber, who prospered on unscrupulous control of Sicilian sulphur mines. Salvo had an insane wife, a jovial old-maid sister, and an invalid daughter, Dianella, of delicate charm. Having married off the old maid, sight unseen, to the prince, Lando's widowed father, Salvo, aspired to bind himself yet closer to the aristocratic Laurentanos by marrying Dianella to Lando.

But in this matter there were still others to reckon with. Aurelio, son of a sulphur miner, had once saved Salvo from a ludicrous death, whereupon Salvo generously awarded the boy with education, and a position as foreman of sulphur mines. Influenced somewhat by her father's high opinion of Aurelio, Dianella fell glowingly in love with the youth. Meanwhile, what with strikes and lockouts at the mines, the situation became so serious that Salvo decided to abandon the project of marrying the girl to Lando Laurentano and to give her instead to Aurelio, if that young man could quell the uprising of laborers. But the insensate miners greeted the representative of their inexorable master with knives and firebrands, and when Dianella heard that Aurelio (and a lady-friend) had been gashed and burned alive she went mad.

The affair reacted upon the Laurentano family in intricate fashion. The prince's vulgar bride eloped with the widower of the murdered lady-friend. Lando barely escaped the island where he had abetted the riots. Sicily was put under martial law, and the old Garibaldino Mauro, frenzied by the impertinence of upstart socialists, fared forth with his medals and pistols of 1860 to assist the state troopers. These unimaginative souls mistook him for a rioter, and shot him in a street fight.

The Significance. Such is the array of Pirandello's characters--the old clinging foolishly to the dead Bourbon issue, the young fasci passionately avowing an unborn issue, and the middle aged fattening themselves on a fast demoding regime of ruthlessness--that one finishes his grand-scale novel with as great a mental confusion as existed in the Sicily in the 'gos. One cannot wonder at the half dozen protagonists that go mad in the course of 764 pages. Not even the main characters have all been mentioned here, to say nothing of the intricate assortment of servants, lovers, cousins, and the churchmen and politicians that run riot through both volumes. With all its exhausting intricacies, this panoramic novel abounds in rich knowledge of Italian nature, and a kindly disparagement of human futilities.

The Author. Pirandello is known here and abroad for the unique informality of his drama technique. Aged 61, he has written prolifically plays, poetry, short stories, though for 30 years he taught in the Rome Normal College for Women. His father was proprietor of just such a Sicilian sulphur mine as Character Salvo's.