Obsession with Truth

...Yet they are such fine examples of the short-story form—satiric, compassionate, shocking, at times even wildly slapstick—that it seems incredible so few of them have been allowed out before now, in any English version, from under the rock of unfashionable oblivion...

...It is perfectly true that Pirandello was fascinated by abstract ideas throughout his writing life, that to his mind and eyes, philosophical enigmas thrust their taunting insolubility out of all human experience...

...In the main, the stories which translator Lily Duplaix chose for this book were written before Pirandello turned his daring and inventive hand to the theater...

...in the natural-ist-cum-realism sense, but complex images of men and women caught in their separate traps of cowardice, self-delusion, corrosive pomposity and deceit, of mistakes made in youth that become the strangle-hold realities of a human being's middle years and drain old age of all dignity and the slightest hope...

...It comes close to this—yet in the great plays like Henry IV, Right You Are and Six Characters, where his dogged pursuit of tricky philosophical hares is indeed part of the action, the miracle remains that their dramatic vitality holds its own...

...He was, as Frances Keene puts it in her admirably succinct and perceptive introduction to this volume, obsessed with the nature of reality—an obsession that led him to incorporate, in the very tissue and marrow of his plays, a great deal of specifically theoretical speculation about the nature of human personality, the elu-siveness of all objective truth, the war to the death between the maddening inconstancy of life and the equally maddening immutability of the forms imposed on life...

...And this new volume of stories demonstrates beyond all argument that he was an equally vigorous and original writer of narrative prose...

...These stories teem with widows and abandoned wives and hysterical spinsters and possessive mothers—some poignant, some absurd, all of them sharply but never cruelly observed...

...It is a grim and frightening story—with a shudderingly effective touch of the grotesque, a pet monkey who tears open his master's throat—about the futile attempt of the farmers to keep their green land out of the mouth of the industrial furnace that is gradually devouring all the surrounding countryside...

...they do it in their sleep...

...The towering exception to all this, of course, is Eric Bentley...

...But the greatest of his plays are...

...Fumes" was written in 1904, and however much Pirandello became tormented later in his career by problematic abstractions, by the ciphers of appearance and reality, when he wrote the story of Mattia Scala...

...With breathtaking economy, Pirandello tells the story of Mattia Scala's revenge on the man who ruined him years before and extracts the genuine resonance of tragedy out of the dim echo of memory...

...A middle-aged Roman office worker (in the story called "Escape"), sunk in a swamp of boredom, poverty, contempt for himself, raging in silence against the smothering-mothering devotion of his mindless wife and daughters, suddenly takes a manic lunge toward freedom and drives off to his death in a milk wagon whose horse goes amuck and careens down the city streets in a slapstick uproar of banging milk cans and clattering hoofs...

...Commentary," New York "Times Book Review" "LAME, DEFORMED, all head and no heart, erratic, gruff, insane, and obscure...

...he answers, "In the endless number of sleeping dogs stretched out on the cobblestones...

...All the grievances, all the petty defenses a man can have against life—loneliness and frustration, self-pity and self-torture—take on an anguished ironic clarity in the bittersweet light of Pirandello's vision...

...Obsession with Truth Short Stories...

...Pirandello was able to bring alive, with an unfailingly bold, sure hand, every corner of the gallery of Sicilian and Italian life we find in these stories—not "slices of life...

...They do not even wake up to scratch themselves...

...Nothing is spelled out, nothing dragged out — precise and almost austerely economical in manner and detail, Pirandello knows exactly where the right touch of dramatic emphasis will exert the greatest force...

...When one turns to these stories, these skillful and moving examples of the use Pirandello could make of "the life which continually seethes within me," the service which Bentley has done, in clearing away the philosophical smoke screen that, admittedly, Pirandello was almost as much to blame for as the critics he mocked at, seems all the more commendable...

...A subject that absorbed Pirandello enormously, one that he approached with the utmost sympathy—a beautiful triumph of sensibility over experience, since he lived with a mad wife for years, tortured beyond endurance by her manic jealousy—was the specifically feminine share of the human burden...

...If this were all one could call unique in his work, however, the plays would never have been performed—except, perhaps, in the more solemn little outposts off Broadway—and would be remembered, if at all, only as inert clumps of pompous closet drama...

...The life Pirandello charges his characters with—in both senses of that verb, but never as a vindictive moralist—is held in a balance of mordancy and compassion that almost never falters...

...the Sicilian reality that was his to use gave him absolutely no trouble at all...

...In an astonishingly short compass—"Fumes" takes up only 32 pages in this collection—Pirandello creates as graphic and tangible a picture of the mines as any documentary novelist of the ‘30s did in ten times that space...

...He was then 69 years old, and in New York—very far away, in every sense of the phrase, from his native Agrigento, on the western slant of the Sicilian triangle—and he had come to this country to discuss with David 0. Selznick some plans for a movie version of "Six Characters in Search of an Author" that, unsurprisingly, came to nothing...

...in point of fact, among the most dazzlingly eloquent, living, actable dramatic masterpieces of the 20th century...

...In "Such Is Life," a priest is trying to persuade a middle-aged woman to be kind to the husband who deserted her years before: "The priest placed his words like beautiful little porcelain vases on the table before him, there, there and there—each one graced with an artificial flower with green tissue paper twisted around the wire stem, charmingly effective at no cost whatsoever...

...And Pirandello then added a defiant volley whose spirit seems much closer to the writer of the superb stories in this new collection than it does to the metaphysics-muddled playwright he is usually made out to be: "I . . . have no conception of what I am and have always refrained from finding out, for fear of offending all the life which continually seethes within me...

...In "The Rose," for example, a man has been trying to convey the quality of boredom in a small Italian village, and when he is asked, "How is it visible...

...who has had the refreshing good sense to consider Pirandello as a playwright, however deeply he was committed to the sirens of thought, rather than as a philosopher who just happened to write some interesting plays...

...It has been pointed out often enough that one of the reasons Pirandello is so infrequently performed and so little read and/or translated these days is the difficulty of getting at the concrete art without being caught in the theoretical, philosophical barbed wire with which he surrounded it on all sides...

...Though Pirandello began as a kind of Verga-esque Sicilian regionalist, making his own powerful use of the world of the peasants and the men of property at home, he was able to move beyond Verga's verismo, later, into the urban modern Italy of Rome with which Moravia has been so exclusively concerned With a few exceptions, like the soap-operatic "The Umbrella," these stories are brilliantly free from the least blurring lapse into sentimentality...

...The renowned and irascible old playwright went on, in this same letter, to reveal much of the exasperated impatience he felt with all the distorting mirrors that claimed to reflect the true essence of his work for the theatre, and he lashed out at the critics who insisted on "showing me masked with the head of an elephant and my heart atrophied by that infernal pump which is the machine of logic...

...The best of the lot, I think, is one of the Sicilian stories—the long one called "Fumes," in which Pirandello looks back to his early years in Agrigento, that dusty city where the ancient past is so immovably present in the great Greek temples standing in the nearby plains, and where, in Pirandello's youth, the present was equally inescapable in the sulphur mines that were Agrigento's main industry...

...In a letter he wrote the year before he died, Pirandello ticked off, with a characteristically mocking hand, the "numerous Pirandellos . . . the world of international literary criticism has been crowded [with] for so long...

...At first glance, this exultant nose-thumbing at the sort of cerebral pur-posiveness that may—or may not—lead to philosophical certainty hardly seems to connect with the more familiar Pirandello, a dramatist so hounded by those metaphysical furies, appearance and reality, that there are moments in the later plays when theoretical speculation comes close to stifling the sound of life onstage as thoroughly as Othello silenced Des-demona...