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Il duca di Sant’Aquila

Federica G. Pedriali

Gian Carlo Roscioni, Il duca di Sant’Aquila. Infanzia e giovinezza di Gadda, Milan, Mondadori, 1997, 349pp.

Memento mori. As the pages act out a life, they also consume it: biography, linearity’s obliging servant, must conclude with its subject’s death. Or must it? The beautiful dust-jacket protecting Roscioni’s latest Gaddian contribution against the damage of time does not reply to any such questions. The front cover shows a sombre face, the writer in 1928; the back, the coat of arms drawn by Gadda for the imaginary Duchy of his early holiday games in Brianza: a visual statement (to borrow a well-known line from Una tigre nel parco) «degno d’analisi psichica, della più terrificante analisi», depicting as it does a crowned bird of prey carrying a dagger to a mountain-top where books await. But the motto Justitiam sequamur, nos sequetur victoria! knows nothing about the biographer’s plans, while inside the jacket the excellent Cesare Garboli guides the reader only as far as the specific merits of the present volume.

As we journey through the twenty-two slim chapters, we are busy reconstructing an entire epoch (Milan at the turn of the century, the trenches, Caporetto, the war-camp near Hannover, Italy and South America in the 1920s); we are occupied in cross-examining witnesses and documents otherwise not immediately available (the diaries of Adele Lehr, Gadda’s mother, and Carlo’s own school compositions, for instance), in making newer and even stronger connections between life and literature (as between Adele’s affective hierarchies and the affective injustices deliriously denounced in La cognizione del dolore). While we need no convincing that Gadda’s meta-narratives never outgrew their original autobiographical vocation, the amount of detail to take in, combined with the customary biographical forward thrust, does prevent us, on first impact, from even suspecting Roscioni’s own bid for his subject’s immortality.

But how is it – we may wonder as we still journey from chapter to chapter – that Gadda’s much loved, much resented younger brother Enrico, killed in a freak flying accident during the war, can depart from Roscioni’s biography not only so early, as perhaps he must, but also so neatly, whereas his non-oppositional younger sister Clara (Clara-Carlo, Roscioni notes, are almost anagrammed destinies) is made to play the complex donna dello schermo virtually throughout? Adele’s preference for Enrico, as Roscioni knows only too well, survived the tragic loss as a mournful death-in-life state. Given the circumstances, it is hard to believe that the Oedipal rival par excellence could have rested in peace in Gadda’s mind. How come, then, that even this biographical enquiry, for which all the extant documents are available, can arrange for Enrico to take his leave under the perfectly resolved, sublimated guise of an «immutabile icona» (p. 166)?

Clara, for her part, did in the end suffer from an oblative/adoptive syndrome à la Liliana Balducci (yet another sign of Adele’s extraordinary hold on her children’s psyches?), but, although her brother might have wondered why a potentially phenomenal istinto delle combinazioni should spin such closely matching (therefore subconscious-driven?) plots for his literature and her life, he never really cast her as his protagonists’ «donna quasi velata ai più cupidi». To what end, then, should Clara take centre stage here, as in the pages on Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, and Adele be the more-absent-than-distant «silenziosa deuteragonista della nostra storia» (p. 36)?

Occasionally, that is, we may want to pause, in the margins of the biography, as it were, to reflect on Roscioni’s selection and organisation of the available evidence. Mostly, however, it is preferable to let the biographer nurse undisturbed both his patient’s neurosis and our own undeclared uneasiness as witnesses to it, grateful that he should strike such an attractive balance between revelation and understatement. Of course, «solo se malata [l’ostrica] genera la perla» (p. 88). But the disease, this is Roscioni’s powerful balm, can also be lovingly nurtured by the neurotic subject.

«Malati», as Gadda himself would say, «di quella strana e talora paurosa malattia che è appunto la loro grandezza», the most robust sufferers in any artistic category will in fact display symptoms that owe much of their gravity to obvious concause letterarie. No one doubts (Roscioni, at least, certainly does not) that our author must have felt ab origine, hence his negative birth myth, «loin du regard de Dieu». The line, however, comes from Baudelaire, as «cui non risere parentes» does from Virgil. Hamlet, Raskolnikov, Don Quixote are no medicinal ingredients, but have saved more than one whose unwelcome singularity (the outcome of affective singleness) could cause the persona to be temporarily lost in devastating «crisi di impersonalismo» (p. 51).

When, Roscioni asks, did the little Carlo grow into the awesome Carlo Emilio? When did the documents stop being documents and begin the construction of an aesthetic uniqueness? For, if not even death «voleva la sua persona, perché la sua non era una persona» (this time the words are Gadda’s own), if from the spatial desolation of the descent into the non-persona he could not but climb back into his unlovable oneness, Carlo Emilio soon learnt to exploit a number of elective authors, turning his own life into an imperishable artefact, hence the strange literalness of most of Gadda’s literary gestures.

«Raccontare la propria esperienza equivale per lui a registrare “il deflusso parallelo della sua vita e non vita”» Roscioni argues with Gadda’s support (p. 51). The resulting oeuvre may consist of disiecta membra or, worse, of «poco comprensibili accorpamenti» («terre provvisoriamente emerse» are really all we have, as by Roscioni’s warning against a sense of philological well-being, following the publication of the Isella edition of the opere): but the «prova difettiva di natura», tragicomically thriving on his own destiny’s meagreness, presides, fully executed, over any awful mess in the texts.

Coherently, then, with his biographical thesis as well as with his previous work on Gadda, Roscioni quotes from Cervantes for the closing sugo di tutta la storia: «Che un cavaliere errante diventi pazzo per qualche motivo è cosa che non ci fa né caldo né freddo […] il merito sta nel perdere il cervello senza motivi’» (p. 304). In the past, while abiding by his conviction that to spell out the causes would have meant trivialising the illness, Roscioni successfully defended the intellectual stature of the theoretical causal enquiry conducted by Gadda in Meditazione milanese and Quer pasticciaccio in particular. This time, by enveloping his subject’s neurosis in both mystery and literature (as in La cognizione del dolore Gadda obscures Gonzalo’s mother under Veturia’s veil before having her play the abandoned King Lear and Suetonius’ death of Caesar), Roscioni has given his disparate biographical materials the mythical depth of voices chorally recounting «Una “inesistita giovinezza”» (p. 293): the title of the biography’s final chapter comes, no doubt significantly, from a one-line fable in Il primo libro delle Favole. The scores of anecdotes, the local Gaddian epos which, to the specialist audience’s delight, friends and scholars have recently made available in print in the wake of Giulio Cattaneo’s irresistible Il gran lombardo (1973), have never before so compellingly and so consistently told the tale of the tragic non-youth Gadda could not regret but had nonetheless to construct into the founding myth of his writing.

Like Eugenio Montale, we had perhaps always suspected that the man himself was the one unchanging fiction in an otherwise contradictory progettualità and baffling causality. «Sono dei fatti così strani quelli che riguardano Gadda», the poet and friend would say, «che io mi chiedo se si possa parlare di causa o di effetto, […] se veramente le cause producono l’effetto o è l’effetto che produce le cause». This, perhaps, was already known. Yet, as we leave the valedictory Cervantes for the silent dust-jacket, we realise that it had to take someone as single-minded and as self-denying as Roscioni to contravene temporality’s unforgiving law in order to grant Gadda’s wish; and that playing the no-nonsense but charmed chronicler to our errant knight’s mythomaniac fantasies represents not only quite some feat of scholarliness but also a moving personal homage to potent artistic delusions. In fact, for as long as this biography remains incomplete and makes the readers wonder what was meant by it, the Gadda not even Carlo Emilio managed to write into his myth will not die. The good doctor Higueróa, the admiring/incredulous Sancho Panza this time have indeed put an immense expertise at their subject’s service: human even more than academic.

University of Edinburgh