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Quer pasticciaccio brutto... de Carlo Emilio Gadda
Reflections of a damaged author
in his most famous work

Matt Roberts

With works of literature it is frequently necessary to understand the author in order to fully understand the work. This is particularly true of the Italian writer Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973), whose writing is full of very personal references. The critic Gianfranco Contini stated that Gadda «non dispone di vite altrui, ma solo della propria» (Gadda 1997: II, 9).

Gadda’s most famous work, Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, is no exception to this, and perhaps this is why most of it was written uncharacteristically quickly. «As a neurotic», Italo Calvino wrote with reference to Quer pasticciaccio, «Gadda throws the whole of himself onto the page he is writing, with all his anxieties and obsessions». (1) There are several elements that are obviously drawn from Gadda’s own life: the philosophising detective Ingravallo (whose multi-cause theories are very much Gadda’s own) is very similar to the author in many ways; the graphic description of the dead body of Liliana Balducci can be attributed to the author’s experiences in the First World War; the absence of fathers can be linked to the death of Gadda’s own father when he was only fifteen. However, closer examination soon reveals that Quer pasticciaccio contains many less obvious references to four important areas of the author’s troubled life: Gadda’s mother, Adele; his brother, Enrico; his sister, Clara; and his own sexuality.

The victim in Quer pasticciaccio, Liliana Balducci, shares many characteristics with Gadda’s mother, Adele Lehr. In the book, Ingravallo often regards Liliana as a sort of virginal mother figure and competes for her affections with the antagonist figure, Giuliano Valdarena; however he also recognises that he himself is not the favourite son. This is a reflection of reality. Gadda in fact always felt that his mother preferred his perfect younger brother, Enrico (Roscioni 1997: 83). When he was killed during the First World War, Gadda lost the battle for his mother’s affections forever. In the same way, once Liliana is murdered, Ingravallo can no longer hope to become her favourite, while in the interrogation scene of chapter IV Giuliano is more clearly shown as the man Liliana truly wanted. The way that Ingravallo sees Liliana is demonstrated twice in the first chapter: firstly, during dinner with the Balduccis, when Ingravallo looks to the «nobile malinconia della signora Liliana: il di cui sguardo pareva licenziare misteriosamente ogni fantasma improprio» to dampen his ardour after seeing the attractive maid, Assunta; secondly, when Ingravallo visits via Merulana after the robbery, he is told Liliana is in the bath and covers his eyes as if to block out the image of her nakedness (Gadda 1997: I, 14, 29).

The discovery of the secrets in Liliana’s personal life, Ingravallo’s gradual realisation that she was not the perfect, virginal woman that he thought she was, is met with profound shock, particularly the semi-incestuous revelations of Giuliano’s interrogation. It is as if Ingravallo had found out that his own mother was less than perfect. Gadda, on the other hand, had a less than perfect view of his mother for most of his adult life, particularly after the death of his father left him as the man of the family at the tender age of fifteen, and also deprived him of a male role model (Roscioni 1997: 78).

It was his mother who pushed him into studying engineering, (2) and they frequently argued over a number of family matters, such a money, and the issue of whether to keep their country villa (which Gadda himself hated) and a large apartment in Milan once Enrico was dead (Roscioni 1997: 170). There were also disputes over what to do with Enrico’s possessions: Gadda was in favour of keeping them all together in one place, including letters he had written, while his mother wanted to retain everything that Enrico had given her. Roscioni suspects that part of Gadda’s motivation was to deprive his mother of reminders of Enrico, particularly his correspondence (169). Gadda was also angered by his mother’s refusal to let his sister Clara marry the man she was in love with, attributing her opposition to sheer spitefulness: «Ella non ama Clara, il che, del resto, è cosa vecchia» (171). In fact, while talking about his family in a 1969 interview, he remarked that «bisogna che la gente capisca che non tutte le famiglie sono state, come dire?, felici». (3)

As a result, the death of his mother was in many ways a liberation for Gadda, not least because he could finally sell the hated family villa (Gadda 1997: II, 11), and stop being and engineer. It was in 1938, two years after Adele’s death, that he started publishing his first novel, La cognizione del dolore. This was a highly autobiographical, even cathartic work about the strained relationship between a son and a mother who is obsessed with the death of her other son: the mother thus become the focus not just of the surviving son’s love, but also his hate. Similarly, Liliana’s death also liberates in that Ingravallo is released from her hold and gradually becomes an independent person (Bertone 1994/1995: 290). In the end it emerges that Liliana was murdered by one of her surrogate daughters in a kind of matricide (Amigoni 1995a: 123-30), this being one of Gadda’s key obsessions and a recurrent theme in his work. As Albert Sbragia points out, in Quer pasticciaccio Gadda revisits many of the obsessive themes explored in his earlier writing, particularly «the Oedipal/matricidal urge and autobiographical neuroses» (Sbragia 1996: 130).

As has already been observed, the character of Giuliano Valdarena appears to take on a very similar role to that of Gadda’s younger brother, Enrico. Giuliano is presented as Liliana’s favourite, a young, handsome, popular, lucky, virile, reasonably well-off man, with a good career as a salesman; he is, in other words, everything that Ingravallo, the ageing outsider from Molise, is not. During the key night-time interrogation scene in chapter four, it is Giuliano who in the spotlight as always, while Ingravallo is again banished to the shadows of the room to look on with envy, the perpetual outsider. The whole scene is constructed as if to highlight the differences between the two men, and to show where Ingravallo would rather be: in the light.

Equally, Enrico was remembered by a female cousin as bello, intelligente, brillante, pieno di voglia di vivere, simpatico» (Roscioni 1997: 110). A daring aeroplane pilot during the First World War, he was killed when his plane crashed far from enemy lines in April 1918. While certainly jealous of his brother (Pedriali 1994/1995: 271), Gadda was also devastated by the news of Enrico’s death, particularly as he regarded his brother as a part of himself: «Enrico, tu non eri il mio fratello, ma la migliore parte di me stesso». (4) The Gadda brothers were like two sides of the same coin, much as Ingravallo and Giuliano Valdarena are in Quer pasticciaccio. Unlike his more outgoing brother, Gadda was always a solitary figure, even a child, and lacking in social skills (Pedriali 1994/1995: 271). He also thought himself ugly and, in the words of Calvino, was «a man who does not like himself, and indeed detests himself» (Calvino 1996: 108). That Gadda wished to be more like Enrico, if only to gain his mother’s affection, cannot be doubted; indeed he told an interviewer in 1967 that he was always trying to be like other people (Gadda 1993b: 138-39). Arguably, in Quer pasticciaccio Gadda improves on reality, for Giuliano, the rival and antagonist, is indeed in the spotlight, but the light is that provided by the police station. Moreover, being under arrest he has also been separated from all the female characters.

Parts of the life of Gadda’s younger sister, Clara, are also borrowed and reproduced in Quer pasticciaccio as one of the key plot twists. The character of Liliana Balducci is a fairly young, attractive, child-like woman, who has married a father figure over twenty years her senior. Without a child, due to a mixture of maternal instincts and fascist high birth rate propaganda, she begins to cast around for a surrogate.

As a result, she takes in a series of young maids and what she refers to as her nieces, young girls from poor families in the Roman countryside. She becomes obsessed with finding the perfect child for her to adopt and mother, and to whom she can leave her family jewels. At the same time she fantasises about having a baby with her handsome young cousin, Giuliano, with whom she has an intimate but (as far as the reader is told) curiously asexual relationship. When Giuliano reveals that he is to marry a girl from Genoa, Liliana is initially upset, but soon hatches a plan to adopt Giuliano’s firstborn child as her own, in exchange for money and her grandfather’s ring and watch chain. Giuliano is coerced and cajoled into agreeing, but Liliana is brutally murdered soon after giving him the jewellery and money.

As unlikely as it may sound, the above scenario from Quer pasticciaccio has actually a firm basis in reality. Gadda’s sister, Clara, first tried to get engaged as a young woman, to a friend of her brothers’ called Chirò. However, as we have seen, the union was strongly opposed by Gadda’s mother. Clara was devasted by this turn of events, and considered trying to get pregnant by Chirò in order to force the marriage through (Roscioni 1997: 171-72). This whole episode further distanced her from her mother, but drove her closer to Gadda upon whom she soon came to depend. Clara remained single for many years afterwards, until at the age of thirty-three she got engaged to a businessman called Paolo Ambrosi.

Gadda was not particularly enthusiastic about the planned union, and was even slightly anxious about it (Roscioni 1997: 270), given that Ambrosi was more than twenty years older than Clara (with her own father having died when she was so young, it is not a great leap of imagination to presume that Ambrosi was a kind a father figure for her). Despite this the marriage went ahead less than a year later, in March 1929, and the following summer Gadda learnt that Clara was pregnant. A baby girl, Lydia, was born on Christmas day 1930, but died only a few days later (276). Clara remained desperate to have a baby, but when Ambrosi died in 1949 (278) she was still childless and in a fairly fragile state.

There is also evidence that, like Liliana in Quer pasticciaccio, Clara tried to find a surrogate child by turning to a distant cousin, a young girl called Carla Viganò Pozzi whom Clara offered to adopt. As an incentive, the girl was promised the family jewels if she came to live with Clara, in order they would remain in the immediate family, but Carla rejected the proposition. It is also alleged that Clara’s next target was a serving girl and that she was only dissuaded from the idea of adopting her by her concerned lawyer (Roscioni 1997: 279). When laid bare like this, it is clear that these events provided Gadda with the inspiration for the less perfect side of Liliana Balducci. As if further proof was needed about the similarities between the two women, Gadda warned a relative not to show Quer pasticciaccio to Clara when it was first published in 1957, while a the same time maintaining that it was not based on his sister: «Guardatevi bene dal parlarne e tanto più mandarlo a mia sorella… si tratta di un avvenimento reale… che non ha nulla a che vedere con altri casi. Ma mia sorella è in uno stato tale di nervi che sarebbe capace di credere a un’allusione al caso suo» (280).

The question of Gadda’s sexuality, as reflected in Quer pasticciaccio, is a far trickier proposition. The author always remained something of an enigma to his readers, and there was some speculation towards the end of his life that he was secretly homosexual. There is very little evidence either way, but there are some relevant clues.

In Gadda’s war diaries there are sporadic mentions of a woman called Maddalena Marchetti, the sister of one of his friends. She writes to him suddenly, never having been mentioned before, and he carefully analyses every word of her note, as well as transcribing it in full in the diary. Shortly afterwards Gadda posts a reply to her and she writes to him again. However, this is no wartime romance: Maddalena was already engaged to another man at this point, while Gadda’s letters to her have been shown to be full of details of military procedures, rather than sweet nothings (Roscioni 1997: 143). Aside from this, there is no trace of any kind of relationship with other women, apart from Gadda’s own (unsubstantiated) claims in his diary that he had brief flings with several waitresses or maids (145). In fact there a number of occasions in which he writes that he has little desire to make love with a woman or get married (144, 148).

However, it is in relation to Quer pasticciaccio that we find the most interesting clues to the most personal side of Gadda’s life. In Pietro Germi’s film adaptation of the book changes were made to bring the minor figure of the Commendatore Angeloni, often assumed to be homosexual, more to the fore. The alteration sees Angeloni, rather than the Contessa Menegazzi, become the victim of the robbery near the start of Quer pasticciaccio, and it is believed that this was done in order to represent Gadda himself in his middle age.

In the novel, Angeloni is described as a tall, sad, insecure bureaucrat, not very good looking, who lives alone in an apartment in Via Merulana (Gadda 1997: I, 46). he becomes inadvertently embroiled in the investigation of the robbery purely by chance, because one of the delivery boys who regularly bring packages of food to his home was running out of the building at the time of the crime. Ingravallo’s questioning causes the shy Angeloni to appear very nervous and he is unable to answer the detective’s questions satisfactorily. As a result, he comes across as suspicious, a man with something to hide, and the implication is that his secret is connected to the young men who deliver his food.

There are many similarities between the character of Angeloni and Gadda himself: an article on the author written in 1960 mentions in detail how he lives alone in the outskirts of Rome; his house is described as modest, used for working and sleeping, with no telephone, and Gadda as not used to having visitors, always eating out. (5) There are also several physical similarities between the two men: Gadda two was quite tall (182 cm when measured for military service in 1913), something he often obsessed about (Roscioni 1997: 122-23). The interviews collected in Claudio Vela’s book clearly demonstrate that Gadda was also very shy, insecure and nervous, as well as more than little paranoid: journalist after journalist is told that Gadda has to be extremely careful about what he say as he has many unspecified nemici. The implication is that he, like Angeloni, has a secret that he does not wish to have exposed.

The final point on this matter arises if we return to the idea of Ingravallo as Gadda’s mouthpiece in Quer pasticciaccio. Ingravallo is obsessed with Liliana, a married woman who does not return his affections and, indeed, directs them elsewhere. She is the unobtainable, forbidden object of desire. Maddalena Marchetti, as a woman engaged to another man, was also very much out of reach. Whether this is an indication that Gadda saw his own desires as forbidden in 1940s and 1950s Italy is anybody’s guess. Ultimately, of course, Gadda’s sexuality was Gadda’s business. Yet examining his life allows the reader to understand Quer pasticciacio in a completely different way. Instead of being just another giallo with heavy Freudian influences, the book becomes much more personal, almost the author’s confession (though in disguise).

Apart from such obvious elements as the possible connection between the minutiae of the body on the floor and the author’s own war experiences, different characters and scenes are shown to contain large parts of Gadda’s own family and feelings. Liliana Balducci becomes a curious amalgam of his mother and sister, the former as the virginal, pre-oedipal mother, the latter representing the tragedy of a childless woman. Giuliano Valdarena becomes his brother Enrico, both other half and rival, adding a new dimension to the oedipal struggle for Liliana’s affections during the dinner scene at the start of the story. Meanwhile Angeloni and Ingravallo, both repressed men in their own ways, assume many of Gadda’s traits and personal characteristics. The book is far more personal than it initially appears. To sum up in the words of Ernesto Ferrero, «pochi uomini si sono così esplicitamente confessati (e quasi accusati) sulla pagina come Gadda» (Ferrero 1972: 27).

Notes

1. I. Calvino, Six Memos for the next Millennium (London: Vintage, 1996), 106.

2. Interview with Cesare Garboli, Felice chi è diverso, in Gadda 1993b: 137.

3. Interview with Giuseppe Grieco, La mia vita, i miei amici, in Gadda 1993b: 195.

4. Journal entry on learning about Enrico’s death; cited in Ferrero 1972: 31.

5. Interview with Giuseppe Grieco, Gli scrittori italiani del nostro tempo, in Gadda 1993b: 71.