Man with a Hump

LEOPARDI: A STUDY IN SOLITUDE (305 pp.)--Iris Origo--British Book Centre ($4.50).

If the gods gave an Oscar to the mortal who had been most miserable during his earthly course, Italy's Poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) would be seen to have left Cassandra and Schopenhauer at the post and won in a somber canto. History is full of tragic artists, but Leopardi differs from such as Mozart and Keats in that where they were struck by tragedy while in pursuit of happiness, Leopardi was so consistently unhappy that he positively winced when he was struck by joy.

Leopardi: A Study in Solitude is the foremost appreciation in English of the poet whom Italy ranks next to her greatest--Dante, Petrarch, Tasso. First printed in 1935 (but never before in the U.S.), it reappears now containing so much new matter that it is virtually a new book. Or, to put it another way, British-born Marchesa Iris Origo has dredged up so much new misery that Leopardi may now be seen to have been even unhappier than he was in the first edition.

Freed from Trouble. As a future tragedian. Leopardi began life with every possible disadvantage in his favor. His mother, Contessa Adelaide, made piety seem more a crime than a virtue. When children--her own or other people's--were stillborn or died in infancy. Mother Leopardi "experienced a deep happiness . . . inasmuch as [they] had flown to heaven, while their parents had been freed from the trouble of bringing them up." Of Leopardi's father. Conte Monaldo, it is reported that he once took off his pants in the street and gave them to a beggar. It is the only story which suggests that the count had so much as a leg to stand on. No man was ever more henpecked, more terrified of his wife--and yet more eager in his determination to believe himself "master in my own house." Two astonishing examples are enough to illustrate Giacomo Leopardi's total dependence on his parents: 1) he was 20 before he went out of the house unchaperoned; 2) he was 27 before his father let him cut up his own meat at the dinner table.

The Leopardi home was in the Adriatic town of Recanati, where today plaques mark the dwellings of men and women whose only fame is that they figure in Leopardi's poems. The young boy soon developed the habit of observing the life of the old town from upper windows (he scarcely ever left the house) and jotting down his observations in a notebook. At 10, he was turned loose in his father's library and spent the next seven years buried in books--"the happiest time that he had ever known."

In those years, Leopardi studied Latin, Greek, German, English, some Hebrew. When he emerged from the library at 17, he was a skilled philologist, a practiced poet, an authority on classical literature--and a ruined man. His eyes were so damaged that he could not bear the light of day; if he moved rapidly, "his head hammered and his pulses beat"; he was incapable of speaking to a stranger. Worst of all, a "double hump" had appeared between his shoulders--"a curvature of the spinal column."

Life Is a Prison. The chief conclusion Leopardi had drawn from his classical studies was that hope and love were nothing but fleeting "illusions." Man, he believed, was doomed to struggle through a wretched life until death released him. Leopardi would have liked to speed things up by throwing himself down the garden well, but he was convinced that life and death had conspired to prevent this by making certain that he would "climb up onto the rim again, as soon as I reached the surface" and even "feel some . . . pleasure at having saved myself."

The result of this belief was that when at last Leopardi escaped from home, he only found himself in a larger jail. Totally unfitted for society of any sort, he was disgusted by everything. "All that exists is evil . . . everything exists only to achieve evil, existence itself is an evil . . . There is no other good than non-existence."

"I need love, love, love, fire, enthusiasm, life," Leopardi once exclaimed--but only once did he fall seriously in love. Fanny Targioni was a lively married woman with a large family and four lovers. Her only interest in il mio gobbetto (my little hunchback) was to get him to persuade his best friend to become her fifth. Years later, when Leopardi was long dead and Fanny an old crone, a romantic girl asked her how it could have been possible for her not to love so great a poet. Fanny's answer was very brief: "My dear, he stank."

Sounds of Evening. Fanny's brutal verdict takes some refuting, and it is a tribute to Author Origo that she follows both the man and the poet to the end with unfailing patience and sympathy. For some years longer, Leopardi took a sort of double pleasure in yearning for death and insisting simultaneously that it was too much to hope for. ("My organism," he once said, "has not enough strength left to contract a mortal illness.")

Leopardi had his way at last at the age of only 38, when his "eyes, digestion, kidneys, lungs, heart" joined in an unconditional surrender. Philosopher Schopenhauer hailed the dead man as the prime exponent of "the irony and misery of our existence," but Benedetto Croce has since pointed out firmly that Leopardi cannot be regarded as a philosopher because his views were "not philosophical concepts, but states of mind, born of personal disillusionment and despair." The greatness of Leopardi lies simply and solely in his painfully precise, almost untranslatable poems. Faint whiffs of the stuff of which they are made may be caught from Leopardi's notebooks, wherein countless commonplaces of everyday life may be seen in the process of being captured by the prisoner at his window.

"One evening ... I stood at my window over the square; two young men sitting on the deserted, grassy steps of the church, joking under the great lantern . . .; the first firefly I have seen this year appeared, one of them got up and . . . threw it down, and went back--meanwhile the coachman's daughter rising from supper and leaning out of the window to wash a plate called out . . .: 'Tonight it really will rain--what a night it is!--black as your hat,' and soon after, the light at the window was put out ... I heard a gentle voice, of a woman I did not know and could not see--'Natalino, come on, it's late.' 'For God's sake, it's not dawn yet,' he replied, etc. I heard a child . . . babbling and stammering in a laughing, milky voice . . . The merriment increased, 'Isn't there some more wine at Girolamo's?' . . . and the woman laughing gently, 'Oh, what madmen!' . . . and now and again patiently and laughingly asked them to come away, but in vain, etc. At last a voice, 'Ah, here's the rain!' And a light spring rain, and all of them went in, and I heard the sound of doors and bolts."

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