“Preface to Stories for a Year by Corrado Alvaro”
(“Prefazione alle Novelle per un anno di Corrado Alvaro”)

Translated by Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “Preface to Stories for a Year by Corrado Alvaro” (“Prefazione alle Novelle per un anno di Corrado Alvaro”), tr. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2026.

From their very first encounter in 1923 until Pirandello’s death in 1936, Corrado Alvaro’s relationship with the Sicilian playwright never wavered, as proved by the many writings he devoted to him over the years, from reviews and private letters, to interviews and critical reflections on Pirandellian art and poetics. A tribute to this long-standing and faithful bond is also found in this Preface to Stories for a Year, here translated for the first time in English, which was added to the volumes published posthumously by Mondadori in 1957. In these pages, Alvaro reveals his intimate knowledge of Pirandello both as a man and as an artist, shedding light on private moments of the playwright’s life, such as his marriage to Antonietta Portulano and his emotional bond with his muse, Marta Abba. At the same time, the Preface offers insight into Pirandello’s public persona, glimpsed through a comparison with his fellow intellectuals and his fraught position within the constraints of the Fascist Regime. The Preface remains an important document that powerfully situates Pirandello within the sociocultural fabric of his time.

The text below is translated from the version published in Volumes I and II of: Luigi Pirandello, Novelle per un anno, ed. Manlio Lo Vecchio-Musti, “I classici contemporanei italiani,” directed by Giansiro Ferrata, “Opere di Luigi Pirandello”, Milano, Mondadori, 1957.

ChatGPT-5 was used on September 21, 2025 to help build and structure the initial draft of this translation. The output was then extensively edited, verified, and corrected by Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka for both language and structure to ensure accuracy and to address interpretative issues (such as GPT-5’s suggestion to add new paragraph divisions, which the translators rejected). The final version is the sole responsibility of the translators and editors.

The Editors

We, Pirandello’s friends, began to notice that his health was declining when he read to us, as was the custom of his generation, one of his last plays, No One Knows How (Non si sa come).[1] The page trembled before his eyes, and his seasoned actor’s diction was no longer what it had been; it was confused, lacking the vitality we had known in him. I recall that the performance of that play before an audience that was reverent if not convinced gave me a feeling of unease. The spectators felt obligated to stir themselves at the passage describing a lizard—a fine piece of prose and bravura—and seized the opportunity to applaud loudly. I was in a proscenium box and remember the front rows of seats, the public attentive as though attending a ceremony. I believe it is a sad thing for a writer when the age of struggle is over and the public celebrates him in the very places where once it would have opposed him. I do not know if Pirandello sensed this. But in those days, he was restless. He was thinking of moving to Milan. Instead, he fell ill. I saw him on that very day in November 1936, when he had returned from attending the filming of a movie adapted from one of his novels:[2] he had chills, he paced up and down the studio, impatient as he always was when thwarted. They were preparing his bed. In that bed, a few days later, he died.

I had not even gone to see him during his illness, which was brief, because they told me he was joking about it, mocking the doctor, mocking the medications. One morning, that morning, I had gotten up early, and with my wife we heard a crash in the house, like a piece of furniture splitting from the heat; we searched everywhere, nothing had broken, nothing had fallen. A few minutes later, a tearful voice on the telephone told us that Pirandello had died just moments before. We were certain that crash had been his signal, as if he had knocked forcefully on some unknown door. The one calling was his daughter-in-law, Olinda,[3] with that crying voice one never recognizes in people. She told us to call a priest who was a friend of ours, and a man of letters, so that he might hurry over, and that we too should come quickly.

I had no idea what the death of a great man would be like. But I must say it is a cruel thing, perhaps the last cruelty that greatness must endure. Maybe it is as cruel as the death of the rich, but more so, far more so. For if the great man leaves the living, his works do not leave them. A part of him remains on this earth; indeed, the best part remains, that which was most desired of him, that which is most important in him, that for which the most mysterious of combinations presided over his birth. We entered his study, and it was full of people—agitated people, standing, restless, curious, smoking, calling out, speaking loudly, as if the master of the house had invited them to a reception and was late to appear. There was the bookshelf where he had never bothered to put things in order or to gather his works: twenty copies of one, none at all of ten others. His books did not die. They were there with their titles. It was difficult to keep in mind that he no longer existed, when the spine of a book repeated unchangingly ten times, twenty times Think It Over, Giacomino (Pensaci, Giacomino),[4] Right You Are (If You Think So) (Così è (se vi pare)).[5] There was dismay in many, but as if he had fled. Everyone smoked feverishly. It was truly absurd. I entered the room where he lay. It was as if abandoned. There was a boundless silence upon the sheet that covered him, outlining that body of a “poor Christ” (this phrase came to my mind, one he so often used); and then one noticed that on the side were two nuns praying on their knees, and the priest we had called was giving him absolution. Beyond, in the study, it was as though that reception-like chatter were waiting for him to appear. I imprinted in my mind that face of his beneath the sheet, which could not conceal his forehead and the pointed chin of his beard, and the whole profile of his body, which had so many times suggested to me the image of that Greek amphora he loved and always kept in sight when he returned to Rome, and in which today his ashes rest at the museum of Agrigento.[6]

Back there, among the ever-growing, curious crowd, his son Stefano[7] showed me half a sheet of letter paper containing his last will. The handwriting, for those who knew it, dated back some years; the paper was faded and brittle. It contained those wishes of his that seemed to lack all consolation, ties, or sense of remedy: to depart on the cart of a poor man, to be accompanied by no one, to have his ashes scattered to the wind, or to rest in that little house of his which he called “of Chance,” or “Chaos,”[8] as he used to say, near Agrigento. He went away alone, as he had always been. The government official arrived and read with astonishment that half-sheet, where the handwriting was firm, perhaps as firm as it had only ever been in his youthful manuscripts: steady, peremptory, complete. That the priest was disconcerted was clear. He wrestled with his perplexity: only God could have mercy on this man who dictated that he be burned and scattered. The poor priest did not know; he closed no door, yet he could not open any, either. He was distressed, asking himself why, as though the deceased could answer. We too, those who loved him, were bewildered, as if we had all wronged him by the very fact of being human. We knew he could take offense easily, but we also knew how he could forgive with a kiss on both cheeks, not merely a Sicilian custom of his, but something humble.

At any rate, it was the Government official who was the most unsettled, though for quite other reasons. He read and reread that page, copied it out for himself, and wondered how on earth he could present it to the Duce.[9] A great man, a famous man, departing in such a manner: shutting the door behind him, without a farewell, without a thought, without homage above all—asking only to be covered by a plain sheet, refusing the uniform, refusing the black shirt that custom demanded—going off like a pauper, with no commemorations, no ceremonies.[10] The Government official was a decent sort, and humane, but he would have to answer to his superior; and the superior could not reach a man in death. At least death remained something wholly private, the only thing, then. He said: “He went away, slamming the door.” In the perplexity of that official lay the measure of a human condition; and one could not help but envy the man who had slipped away in this fashion by means of his death, refusing the honors in which vain artists so delight, even in death, and unafraid of the reprisals that might be inflicted upon his memory. In those twenty-four hours,  it was instructive to know that on the desk of the most powerful man in the land fists were being pounded in indignation, that officially the departed was denied any tribute beyond a passing item of news, that one who had once written a story entitled “Someone’s Laughing” (“C'è qualcuno che ride”)[11] now proclaimed nothingness to all glory and all power, and it was he who laughed. At the supreme moment of his earthly fate, Pirandello declared himself free and alone. He declared himself free only in death. It was a fact felt by all, even if they could not explain to themselves the force of reparation it brought for every possible error or weakness.

The next morning, the fog was soaking through the last withered flowers in the little garden behind the gate on Via Antonio Bosio.[12] A gaunt horse, hitched to the poor-man’s cart, stood in the wet street, straining forward so as not to slip. Everything seemed to appear as our dear Maestro would have wanted to see it. The pine coffin, newly stained in a coat of dark earth-brown, was set upon the cart, and the few friends lingered at the gate, watching as it rolled away toward the mist-shrouded trees at the end of the avenue. Someone beside me began to weep, helplessly, like a child. His hair was already gray. The cart disappeared at the corner, the clumsy nag pulling sideways. We made our way back through the city, its noises muffled by the fog, as if we were hearing them in a kind of daze. On the bus, a man sat down in front of us. He did not notice the brown streak of earth on his right shoulder, by which we knew him as one of the bearers. We watched him get off and vanish into the crowd of a working-class quarter, after his first earnings of the day.

On December 28, 1937, the heirs of Luigi Pirandello signed the deed of donation to the State, transferring the furniture and books that had belonged to him and remained in the apartment he had occupied in Rome during the last years of his life, on Via Antonio Bosio—the very same house where he had once lived before, where he returned again, and where he finally passed away. The house itself, the walls, which Pirandello had rented, had already been purchased by the State; and next to that study, with its adjoining bedroom, bath, entryway, and terrace, an office of Weights and Measures had been opened.[13] Pirandello’s apartment lies on the top floor, the door to the right. I have not been back there since, though I could return. I would need to ask for permission from the custodian. On the landing of the outer stair, perhaps there still lingers—on the bare stalk, no more than a damp little knot—the remnants of a blossom from the black locust tree, with its faint, scorched fragrance of youthful tresses and summer. I used to come upon this plant each time I went to see Pirandello, and it would speak to me again of the South, however slight and fragile a reminder it was compared with the great acacia trees of that faraway land.

On the top floor, the door to the right opened easily; the key was always left in the lock. Sometimes it was Pirandello’s servant, who also doubled as his chauffeur, who emerged from a little adjoining room to let one in. He, too, had ended up buying himself a typewriter, on which he had begun composing plays. He would appear with the distracted, tense air of a man who has left a dish simmering on the stove, or a page half-finished on the desk. He had once been in service to a cardinal, and from that he had inherited the calm, deliberate manner of one long accustomed to everything. He drove the car at the pace of a stagecoach. I remember one time we were returning from Ostia:[14] every automobile on the road sped past us. Pirandello began to grow impatient. The man pressed the accelerator, but only a little. Pirandello flew into a rage. Then the chauffeur pushed the speed up to a hundred kilometers, and Pirandello quieted at once, subdued like someone held taut on the thread of speed. In his last years Pirandello bore a scar upon his nose, close to the nostril. It came from a car accident. He had been traveling with a lady when their car collided with another that braked suddenly. As the windshield shattered, Pirandello shielded the woman’s face with his own, and carried that mark from then on.

I would rather not return to that study, but trust instead to memory. I know they have attached a numbered tag to every piece of furniture and every object: to the penholder, the inkwell, the chair, the books, everything. How, I wonder, could they have managed with that drawer crammed with scraps of notes,[15] jumbled together like in a sack, alongside the carefully prepared manuscript of Henry IV (Enrico IV)?[16] By the little table stood his old leather suitcase with its drawstring clasp; on a shelf, the new typewriter he had been given in America[17], never once used. On the wall opposite the door hung a painting by his son Fausto,[18] a Crucifixion. Pirandello was not religious, yet the image of the Passion was his familiar emblem, and when he spoke of a man, or of one of his characters, suffering, he would call him a “poor Christ.” Beneath it, on the shelf, were portraits of friends; and at the center of the room, some ten meters long, rose the figured Greek vase set upon a column, his one tangible remembrance of Sicily. From the ceiling, in the middle, hung a great, splendid Murano chandelier.[19] In the right-hand corner was the writing desk at which he had sat since the days of his earliest literary ambitions: a piece of that pseudo-Renaissance style fashionable at the time, like the shelves, the chair, and the two or three sumptuous high-backed chairs[20] in the so-called Savonarola style,[21] their backs carved with the friar’s likeness. This was Pirandello’s prehistory, his youthful shape: it bore within it the classicism of Carducci,[22] whose influence he had once absorbed, but not the bellowing Renaissance-mania of d’Annunzio.[23] He claimed never to have read d’Annunzio at all. And yet in time he limited himself, amid these surviving furnishings, to a low little table with a small typewriter and a padded stool. Gray, painstaking, he typed with one finger, as if forever learning; and oddly, his labor seemed like play. He would leave the unfinished page in the machine, without the least concern for secrecy or defense. One might even read it there, for he was the sort who read his own work aloud, then listened to your comments as though you were reading his palm, or a pack of cards. Of the critical faculty, which so greatly developed in the generation after his, and which ended by becoming an abstruse language of its own, he had no trace. Perhaps there was in him a certain shyness before the cerebral argumentations of the younger generation; yet also a secret, unshakable conviction of superiority—if indeed it is true that he left not a single page unpublished, gathering everything of his own into the work, one of the most intricate ever made, into which, in the end, no critic has yet dared venture far.

In the middle of the study stood a sofa, its back to a great window that opened, to the right, onto a garden. The garden was a nearby setting of laurels and cypresses. Yet beyond that grave and evergreen hush, tinged here and there with a pale gold in the spring sun, there must have been some broad tree that shed its leaves, a plane or a magnolia. I remember well, in certain seasons, the rustle it made, like the shuffling of papers, when birds searched among the fallen leaves; and then the blackbirds would appear, their yellow beaks shining like kernels of corn they could never quite swallow. It was strange that such a rustling should belong to my memories of that study, and that this sound of pages turning should be transferred to a park rather than to the papers of the man of letters within. But perhaps it was because paper, in those four walls dominated by the deep blue of the great, soft carpet, had nothing of the importance it usually carries in the place that is its kingdom. The half-sheets and quarter-sheets of squared paper on which Pirandello wrote had nothing to do with the age of watermarked rag paper that, like so many other habits of its time, has since fallen into common use, a mere attribute of distinction. Among the things that accompany a writer on the intimate voyage around his own chamber and his desk, there is always paper—its texture, the way it yellows and dries, taking on a human, living hue, a grain-like skin with the passage of years. That sense of a workshop, or a smithy, as the old craftsman-writers liked to say, was absent from Pirandello’s study. There was none of the intoxication of good fragrant ink, none of that exaltation of handwriting which ennobles the sheet, as Michelangelo wrote in a sonnet,[24] making the written word akin to a drawing sprung from the writer’s hand. I know that such a sentiment can lighten the labor of writing; sweeten the path; register, like the tracings of a seismograph, the oscillations of mood; impose discipline of its own accord. One cannot fail to notice, in a page of Petrarch—the prototype of a page composed also in its outward form—or in a page of Leopardi, with its painstaking diligence, the enchantment of manual craft, the beauty of embroidery, the handiwork of human industry. Yet it is rare that we glimpse the writer’s sweat-stained page. Rather, we see only the final sheet, where they present themselves with the smile with which, in every art, effort is concealed—that smile I would call the ballerina’s smile, where only the lips laugh, while the wide eyes mask the strain. Pirandello’s indifference to such outward forms was mostly of his later years. Certain youthful notebooks,[25] fair copies of his early works, bore an aesthetic care and student’s diligence of their own. But at the height of his labors, Pirandello sought the shortcuts born when thought runs too swiftly, when the work is too great, when the faltering traces of pen or typewriter dismay, and one would rather lose all sense of the instrument in use, as ink and paper and thought and expression coagulate into a single knot. At a certain time, Massimo Bontempelli[26] contrived devices to lighten this most unnatural labor of all: the man bent double on a chair before the emptiness of the white page, the one truly antinatural work of human beings. Writing crouched, half-reclining, prone in bed, in a kennel, in an armchair with a board across one’s knees: all tricks to cheat fatigue. Pirandello, too, tried them. He even adopted the drawing-board-like contraption invented by Bontempelli, to write seated in an armchair. But by then Pirandello had come to live so closely with what he had to say that he no longer needed the outward forms of concentration. He had said it to the full: that life is either lived or written.[27]

His apartment, as he had furnished it in his later years, spoke a little of his outward life, but nothing of his inner one. The objects that surrounded him offered no clue to his personality; he felt no attachment to any form, except, perhaps, to that Greek vase. At most, the room might recall a hotel lounge, such as he had seen and lived in during the past twenty years. The old furniture of his youthful patience lay there as though in storage; the books, plundered by anyone and everyone, were scattered in confusion: one might come upon a multi-volume history of Venice, whose presence made no sense, alongside a tiny edition of Boccaccio.[28] He did not even own the whole of his own works. It was useless to search there for any trace of habit or preference. Everything was haphazard, everything estranged from him. When he set about adorning the little chamber next door, he made of it yet another hotel room: a brass bed, and on the walls a certain blue damask. I never heard him speak of furniture, of objects of decoration, but much of men: men with whom he went on dealing, contending, reconciling, and against whom he went on inveighing. The judgments he passed on them were dictated by the moment, the circumstance, his mood; they were never final. A day later he would say the opposite, and at times his judgments were sheer inventions, flights of fancy.

He would let others speak, and he would listen. Most often he seemed dissatisfied, ill at ease. He carried with him an air of solitude; no one could truly keep him company—at best, they could distract him, arouse his curiosity. I remember one evening: the moon was out, and a trellis of roses at Porta Pinciana[29] cast the shadow of a balcony meant for lovers. We were all young then, each with his own sweetheart at his side. There was laughter, teasing, a commotion; it was so lovely it already seemed like a memory. Pirandello walked apart, alone, with that peculiar gait of his, ankles close together, wide-brimmed hat, hands in his pockets. His profile had the same severity as his Greek vase; he muttered something, to himself, alone. Years have gone by. The air that night was sweet, heavy with the scent of roses, like sleep pressing down in the darkness. Another of his traits was waiting: how anxiously he could await a friend, a book, a visit. The key to his study was always left in the lock. A turn of the hand was enough, and you were inside. After searching through the gray-blue room, you would find him there alone, almost always alone. He would come forward: gray, silver, ageless.

It was the artist’s gray season, the same one in which great men find themselves with nothing but a handful of ashes, when, still alive, they are already being pushed into history. And this is the hardest moment to bear: life surges forward, the world begins again, fickle and loquacious, with the natural cruelty of new beginnings. For such a man, already complete, the old measure no longer holds, and the new awaits history. It is the moment when he turns to watch the young advancing with banners unfurled, like a youthful army—never was the world more beautiful, nor destiny more certain. It is the time when, at sunset, the man sometimes stoops to gather the instrument from the uncertain hands of youth and traces his final work in the hues of regret and with the illusory blossoming of autumn. And it is the time when no certain judgment can any longer be made of him. Too much has been said already. The game is played out. What is written is written. I thought I sensed such a moment in Pirandello. But I never heard him utter a single word about it.

“What is written, is written.” Pirandello recalled this phrase by Giovanni Verga. When Verga was named a Senator, Pirandello traveled to Catania to celebrate him and delivered a speech in his honor. Verga listened, and when it was over, said to him: “Dear Pirandello, you have said beautiful things, and I thank you for them. But now, what more is there to do? What is written is written.”[30] Of what Verga felt and thought during more than thirty years of distance from literature, only rare traces remain. It is known that he never again spoke of art, as though he had never been an artist at all. Yet the words he spoke to Pirandello mean something. A sadness at what has been completed, a proud detachment, as if he had acted, in his moments of inspiration, as the instrument of someone greater than himself. Like many true writers, Verga wrote dreadful things beside his immortal works. He was not an “artist”; he was a poet. He had no craft, no technique, no profession. He was one of those great, unhappy souls condemned to say what they must say, utterly the opposite of the literary man. He came to language like a primitive, renewing the birth of a tongue at a moment when literary language was already ripe, or better, overripe. But it was not only a question of language. Italy was a small country, yet its tradition remained that of a world entire. That was the paradox of Italian life. The society of letters spoke from the heights of that tradition, dwelling among its stars, while below, another country was being born. The peasant, the fisherman, the new society rising out of the Risorgimento were the sturdy survivors of a vast ruin.[31] They could not be fitted into the literary categories then in fashion. Italy, which only a century before had been as rich as the richest nation, found itself poor in the century of iron and coal. Upon this new Italian life, literature still propped up the dominion of a language and a style at once grandiose and melancholy, like all great ruins. Manzoni had spoken of the poor, but seen from a Catholic heaven.[32] Verga, though he came out of Naturalism, did not fall into the trap of social commentary. He limited himself to bearing witness to the vitality of the Italian people. Society, already steeped in melodrama, found itself entering the full-blown bourgeois epic, with d’Annunzio as its bard. This too was a will to life, manifesting itself immediately in an avid hunger for enjoyment. The aspiration of that age was to forget one’s origins, to enter the world of the elect, where needs themselves are refined. Even Verga, in his weakest works—the ones that scarcely seem his—yielded to such aspirations. But at a certain point he brought that fertile unrest back to its roots: to the first struggle with the elements and with men. The elements proved the more merciful; men, the more merciless. No one recognized themselves in that muted story. Yet, by one of those ironies so often at play in the fate of writers, from the peasant garments of “The She-Wolf” (“La Lupa”)[33] was born The Daughter of Iorio (La figlia di Iorio)[34] and its lineage of women whose furies still echo in our literature. Pirandello would go on to write the second part of the work Verga had aspired to: the drama of the petty bourgeoisie that emerged from the Risorgimento.[35]

One day, I stepped into Pirandello’s study, and they told me there was a letter from d’Annunzio. It was only a few days after Pirandello had directed The Daughter of Iorio at the Teatro Argentina.[36] He sat in his usual armchair, before a little table cluttered with papers and objects together with letters, pamphlets, a medal[37] struck in his honor by Italians from some country in the Americas, and the empty case of the Nobel Prize medal,[38] all in the familiar disorder. Yes, he was as untidy among his papers and books as he was orderly in his thoughts and memories, and in everything that belonged to his realm of imagination. One grew accustomed to seeing his books on the shelves placed without rhyme or reason, and within that chaos finding everything preserved, everything: a newly arrived book of poems from some remote province kept company with Petrarch,[39] while a propaganda pamphlet stood beside a philosopher; and other volumes, utterly insignificant, claimed a place in full view, taking advantage of the confusion. I will not even speak of certain drawers of his, where once I was entrusted with searching for some documents: there were sheets scattered from at least thirty years of life, all in a jumble.

Pirandello had none of the habits of the man of letters; he possessed, instead, the most natural disdain for the order and the stage set that every writer constructs around himself, almost without realizing it, simply out of the habit of living within four walls. As though forever in transit, the things surrounding him carried the same meaning as objects hastily placed in a suitcase. This stood in sharp contrast with the domestic order of his bedroom.

So, when I arrived at his place that day, they told me there was a letter from d’Annunzio. It was the usual sort of letter, full of talk about emulation, as d’Annunzio so often wrote to his contemporaries: “the rival,” the “elder and younger brother.” It was dressed in all the proper forms, heavy with that rhetorical grandeur of style which, in that room—where the books, scattered as they were, seemed to mock  glory—made no impression at all. For in that room there was not the faintest trace of any cult of writing. One would have found, for an inkwell, only a small bottle of ink and a reed holder with a steel nib, and on a low table, a typewriter littered with ash and threads of tobacco from long hours of work. On the half-sheet rolled into the machine, in its careful typed characters, you could see how far along Pirandello had come with the play or the story he was working on. Beside d’Annunzio’s letter, resting on the table, lay a silver box embossed with one of his devices and a motto. The box was full of cigarettes. Pirandello offered some, lit one, and tossed it away in disgust. They were perfumed with a heavy essence of roses. “Always the same,” he said, referring to d’Annunzio. Both message and gift had arrived through an intermediary, since d’Annunzio seemed not to recognize the existence of the postal service. Pirandello, too, ignored it, but only because he rarely wrote letters at all, and then almost only for urgent matters, to his family or to the woman he loved.[40]

They spoke of d’Annunzio. Pirandello had encountered him in his youth in Rome—seen him more than truly known him—and remembered him with the studied elegance of those Roman days, the kind immortalized in certain photographs: two fingers’ breadth of starched cuff showing beyond the sleeves, a high stiff collar, the narrow tie, and jackets of daring cut. At that time, Pirandello himself dressed like a provincial man of letters, with a great wide-brimmed hat, its edge frayed.

In the final days of his life, Pirandello found himself to be a new writer. To note nothing else, it is enough to mention the predominant theme of his last book, A Single Day (Una giornata):[41] the search for the essential, as if, after so much labor, he had still not managed to pry open that tightly sealed shell we call life. In the end, it was the pursuit of a theme that was immense in scope: the theme of purity. The pages entitled “Effects of an Interrupted Dream” (“Effetti di un sogno interrotto”) were the last he ever wrote.[42] Like only those few, but most profound,  writers, he circled around a theme that has tormented the imagination of all the most restless literature: the theme of guilt, at the very root of life and morality. What are the hidden impulses of our actions? What is purity? What is love? What is woman? What is the demonic power of man?

What struck one so often in Pirandello was his sweeping judgment of “the other half,” which was, frankly, a pessimistic one. One of his last readings had been Boccaccio, who in these matters had peered all the way down to the dregs. And yet, I have seldom seen such delicate attentions toward women as in Pirandello, such a genuine pleasure in their company, in listening to them speak. I do not know how it came about in his own home that, at gatherings, the women always ended up in groups apart from the men. I remember one evening Ugo Ojetti,[43] stranded on a sofa among the men, straining from afar to say something gracious to the ladies on the opposite divan. It had been a long time since I had read phrases like “noble lady” and “noble friend” in the dedications of an author’s books. I saw them flow again from Pirandello’s pen. In him there lived an old chivalric sense, an ancient conception of woman, alongside that deep-rooted pessimism. And of course, in this view, man played the devil, the corrupter. I once saw him return from a meeting with Mussolini, disheveled and indignant. “He’s a vulgar man,” he said, and recounted how Mussolini had reproached him for his reserve, telling him in so many words: “When you love a woman you don’t make such a fuss—you throw her on a sofa.” Pirandello, by contrast, held the ancient reverence for the mother, the wife, the sister, the daughter—the woman in those roles that antiquity alone had dramatized and exalted. Toward the woman as lover, however, he felt a profound skepticism, that figure whom modern literature has tried to raise up to the very same altar and worship once reserved for maternity, filial devotion, and sisterhood. For him, the true drama of woman was precisely that which the ancients had attributed to her.[44]

In his later years, Pirandello pursued this investigation of fidelity and purity using a more poetic register than in his earlier works. I am reminded of “Effects of an Interrupted Dream.”  At the heart of this exploration lay unconscious, unwilled, and unpremeditated betrayal, or perhaps not betrayal at all, but rather the very shadow that a man’s thoughts cast upon a woman: forbidden, unhealthy desires that cloud her image. This was the subject of one of his plays, though not one of his happiest achievements. It revealed the classical side of Pirandello, shown with merciless clarity in that comedy entitled Man, Beast, and Virtue (L’uomo, la bestia e la virtù).[45] And yet for him this theme was always a source of renewed wonder, an astonishment, a marvel almost adolescent in nature—if adolescence means the stunned, bewildered discovery of impurity within a life the imagination has conceived as whole and ideal. This was Pirandello’s youthful side. It marked his sharp opposition to so much literature before and after him, which by comparison can seem the stuff of jaded, wayward boys. His concern with purity was, rather, the concern of a conscience untainted by evil.

Since Pirandello was a man in love until the penultimate year of his life, I saw him more than once, in Berlin and in Rome, with the woman he had placed at the very summit of his thoughts.[46] One day, rummaging through that same famous drawer of his desk, I came upon a yellowed sheet of paper where he confessed the end of youth, a body worn and troubled by the years, and therefore the end of love. He marked the turning point precisely: the close of the season of pleasures, at the very moment when a man can no longer give as much joy as he receives. He never regarded love as a fraud played upon a defenseless body, but in that manly way of giving. And so perhaps, in those last years, he took on the role of one who offers what he knows to be a true gift: friendship, warm admiration and affection, protection, and the wisdom of experience.

I remember in him, alongside the great acts of generosity of which he was capable, the almost childlike miserliness over things as trivial as matches, or a certain water he preferred at table and would never share with anyone. Once, when the woman he loved was dining with us, he poured her some of that water, urging her to drink it because it was “a water that did you good.” That was so perfectly him. Another time, entering his study, I found that same woman stretched out on a divan, her little shoes slipped off, her bare feet exposed. She was tired. It was spring. I thought I sensed Pirandello’s embarrassment. Faced with that springtime weariness, he treated her as he would a child, and as with the small animal he had always glimpsed, primal and cruel, stirring within the woman.

The first time I saw Pirandello was in a small villa near Via Nomentana,[47] not the one where his life would later end, where he had already spent years of intense work before returning in 1932. He had just come back from his triumphs in America[48] and had bought a great carpet from Izmir. That carpet, in deep blues and reds, was one of the very few luxuries I ever saw in his possession. For all that he had once been wealthy, and was at that time comfortable enough, the carpet seemed to mark a renewed encounter with fortune. It was there almost by chance, without any decorative or aesthetic pretension; it was simply the necessity of something warm and soft underfoot. Yet I remember it as the herald of a period well lived and well worked; this is why it looms so large in my memory. And there was Pirandello, seated among his friends, content, as content as he ever was when a piece of work had gone well. In that same posture I remember him again, on his return from the Nobel Prize.[49] It was as though a good season had begun.

Among the furnishings, his writing desk—always the same one—stood too high, and the chair was absurdly low; and though he was tall and well built, I could never imagine how he managed to work there. Then, one day, I saw him: he sat like a schoolboy at a counter too tall for him, the edge of the desk pressing against his armpits; he had to hold himself up with his shoulders. Perhaps this posture, maintained through long hours of work, gave his bearing that upward, gathered quality, an impression almost arboreal. He worked in his honest, precise, nineteenth-century hand, taking delight in certain capital letters, airy and elegant, like the “P” of his surname. In short, if one sought, among the objects around him or in his manner of being, the least hint of the boldness he was capable of in art, it was a wasted effort, or at best, only time spent daydreaming beside him.

But his true treasure was the Greek vase, unearthed in a field in Agrigento—the very one that now holds his ashes.[50] After lying whole for hundreds of years beneath the hardened earth, it had begun, at last, to wear away under the touch of the air. He often spoke of it, pained to see its slow decay. He spoke of it as if it were his homeland, the only land from which I ever heard him recall places, landscapes, moments in time; and yet he had traveled widely across the world. His patriotism was of the Greek sort, or better still, of the southern spirit: that crag, that hill, those temples, those fields, that sea. With the Greeks he shared no sense of nature, except in this alone; the rest of the world he looked upon as a pilgrim. I remember him thus even in Berlin.[51] What truly interested him were people. From his homeland he remembered with precision the colors, the characters, the adventures; and in just the same way he remembered the men and women of every other country. At times, it seemed to me that I grasped his secret in understanding them: the very secret of his art. Like any true pilgrim, the whole world to him was a homeland; he entrusted himself to no feeling of astonishment, nor to any prejudice of race. He saw only the ruling passions, always the same, always few, always strong: the passions that belong to humankind. Of his travels, I never heard him recall landscapes, but often people. And never did I have the impression that these people spoke another tongue. He reduced them all to a single language: the language of moral measure.

For this reason, he came to art by his own path, through human reactions, through character and morality, like one of the ancients. He was wholly, and nothing else but, a man. Never a man of letters. He did not seek stimulants in books, nor did he chase after the latest publications, except those that happened to come his way. These he read almost all, always in search of the revelation of an artist. Lately he had returned to the great writers; he kept company with Boccaccio and Shakespeare.[52] One day, speaking of a tale by Boccaccio—the seventh of the Eighth Day [53]—I heard him recall it, and it seemed something new. The dramatic core, the character, the conflict emerged as though from a story without time. To the student who takes revenge on the cruel widow he added his own words, gestures, and turns, delighting in inhabiting the soul of one character or the other. All the figures, once enlivened, became for him other figures; one was transformed into all, to weave a life dense and adventurous. He read with care, with rigor, as though in the end he wanted to lay bare the secret of art itself. Yet I believe art by then had come to appear to him as too little, nothing more than a human instrument. About this, I never dared to ask him.

But art was the only way to reach him. I don’t know how he managed to know what other writers were working on, but of those he valued, he knew; and he truly waited for their work, as one waits for a miracle, or for a great day. To be welcomed by him as only he knew how, with that penetrating yet kindly gaze, the kind one reserves for the young, all that was needed for a recommendation was a single good page. He told me more than once that he remembered a small book of poems that had been the start for one of our writers. He recalled it lying on a table, that little book, and would make the gesture of piling something up before him. In that gesture, art became something solid, and that beginning radiant. His eyes too were radiant, entirely trusting, whenever he spoke of art, or heard it spoken of. He preferred to listen. For every other conversation—of human matters, of personal affairs—a flash from those clear, piercing eyes seemed to say that he knew it all already, and that nothing was worth much unless it belonged to the realm of the spirit. There was irony there, not aimed at you, but at life’s events; and I believe more than one person, standing before those eyes, felt the futility of struggling too hard. Yet this was not pessimism. It gave the impression that he knew the game, and it inspired trust. Without many words, one left his study better prepared.

And for as little as he might esteem someone, he would speak of them everywhere, whether in Milan, in Paris, or even in America, so that, later, if while traveling you happened upon someone to whom he had once spoken of you, you would find a friend already bound to you by a shared memory. And that memory, dense and weighty as a landscape, as a past, as a man of honor, was Pirandello himself. And then, finding Pirandello again, you felt him brooding over you with those clear, steady eyes. Once, he tilted his head back against the armchair, half-closed his eyes in that habitual pose of his, and said: “Now we must do something good, something true.” He would say “we must”—impersonally, as though speaking to no one in particular—yet he was addressing the person beside him, and at the same time that larger family which, for him, was art. His friendship bound like a pact, like a promise.

It seemed, then, that he belonged to a vast corporation, or a great family, with roots sunk deep and branches reaching far into the future. Whenever someone close to him undertook a new piece of work, it became a collective matter; one had the impression that a hidden universe lay in wait. He would speak of it, ask after it. I never did so myself, but I know of writers who would read their works to him bit by bit: act by act, scene by scene, chapter by chapter. His judgments and suggestions never concerned themselves with questions of aesthetics; his criticism generally began from within, with the character—or better still, from the author, from his stance toward life and toward the problems of invention. An idea, once born, became a force in motion, and had to be carried to its furthest consequences. And so too with a character: once it took on life, it possessed its own necessity.[54] That is why it was so instructive to see what Pirandello could uncover in a single page. Once, about a page of mine that displeased him, he said simply: “Here there is no gathering-in.” He meant that the author’s concentration was missing, his full devotion to the passage, and therefore his whole personality. I felt myself struck in a moral sense by this remark, and I am certain that, at that moment, it was addressed to my very being as a whole. And it was good for me.

Once, he almost took offense when I told him, or perhaps wrote to him, that his more recent stories, which appeared in the Corriere della Sera,[55] bore the influence of the new literature, whose excessive lyricism he himself distrusted. Yet I remain convinced that he had not merely borrowed from it, but rather had enriched it with his own strength as a storyteller. Perhaps I am mistaken, but it seemed to me that Pirandello the poet had never been so inspired in his prose as in those final pieces, among which one, entitled “A Single Day” (“Una giornata”) , became well known. For this reason too, his passing felt untimely. It seemed to everyone that he still had something left to add to the great edifice of his narrative art.

When I spoke to him about this new season of his as a storyteller, I did not have the courage to press the matter or explain myself further. I feared that in speaking of his work to him, I might slip into saying something too tender, and such a human closeness was difficult to establish with a figure like him. My relations with him were simple, almost stark: to speak, to listen as he told his stories, to share a meal, to walk side by side across the grass of the meadows he loved so much in the countryside. And yet he was so attentive, so alert, that once, in the hills near Tivoli,[56] as we sat before a rustic meal and honest wine, a peasant woman nearby—watering her flowers and speaking of carrying them to her dead son, “to my boy,” as she said in her poor dialect[57]—suddenly appeared to me, through his gaze, immense, dramatic, and at the same time too fragile to bear the sorrow of the world. For it was nearly impossible, in Pirandello’s presence, even in those long silences that sometimes fell between us, not to feel his reactions, his judgments on people and things. And so, without realizing it, one found oneself with the chalice raised, the wine nearly brushing one’s face.

But it strikes me as strange that I retain no memory of his judgments, nor of his reflections on art. Pirandello remained instinctive. At times, as in his work, there was in him a certain shadowiness, the darkness of the South; yet just as often he sang like the Greek cicada. Greek—or southern, or Mediterranean—was his way of turning human events into mimicry, as in his rustic scenes, in that comedy Man, Beast, and Virtue, and even in some of his bourgeois dramas. His sense of fate was also Greek or Mediterranean, as was his singular gift for uncovering the appetites and dominant passions of a character.

He told stories like an ancient, and even now I cannot fathom by what act of imagination he could take up a subject that we would regard as obsolete—a theme that might have delighted the author of the Novellino[58]—and make it blaze with life. This was a secret I always longed to learn: a seamless, compact continuity, a solidarity of thought, an attention that never flagged; it was like taking up a venerable science at the very point where countless old hands had once applied their perfect effort in the same direction.

He loved to read his own work, or to have it read aloud as soon as it was written. He also loved to hear his plays performed at the theater. He drank in every line, laughing or frowning at each turn, as though he were hearing them for the very first time. There was not the slightest trace of vanity in this. He listened in the same way to the plays of others, even to old, shabby farces. Often, at a line spoken from the stage, he would instantly imagine a reply, and sometimes it was the very one that was in fact delivered a moment later. It was as though he possessed the mathematics of the theater.

It sometimes happened that one had words with him. He would take offense. Then, left to himself, he would brood over it. He would have you sent for. You entered his study, and there he came toward you with open hands, elbows tucked in, and, bending kindly, he embraced you and kissed you on both cheeks. And so, with him, explanations were never necessary.

I never once heard him speak about the public. When his plays were booed, he stood there as though a natural phenomenon had broken loose upon him: a rainstorm, a hailstorm. Just the same when he was carried off in triumph. He knew how to master it.

His was, in the end, a victory beyond literature: a victory of fame. Audiences and critics alike had been fascinated by the new theatrical modes he had introduced, forms that still shape much of European and American drama, from Shaw, [59] to Barrie,[60] and even to an industrialist like Ford.[61] Yet in Italy, his work as a short-story writer was met with a curt dismissal from the fiercest critics, while his work as a dramatist received little more than a perfunctory review from Croce,[62] perhaps written under the sway of other influences, perhaps colored by a philosophical misunderstanding. As for Adriano Tilgher’s interpretation of his dramatic themes,[63] at first Pirandello welcomed it, but eventually it seemed to him an unbearably narrow prison. A triumph of this kind he surely recognized for what it was; and it would take too long here to unravel the reasons for the dissonance that clung to his fame and popularity, however immense—so immense that his very name became an adjective. To the ruling regime he could never be pleasing, by temperament or by vision of life. One had only to look at him: he had nothing of the mythology then in vogue. I recall one day, after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize, I tried to stir some show of solidarity among his fellow writers. There was a reception at his home; everyone came, but more in the spirit of celebrating a lucky man than of honoring a master. On another occasion, one of his more hostile critics asked me to arrange a meeting with him. The meeting took place, and afterward Pirandello told me the fellow had come only to ask for his vote in the election to the Accademia d’Italia.[64] It is likely that Pirandello himself felt his estrangement from a regime that had heaped upon him honors it lavished on all eminent men, honors it needed to sustain its image as patron of the arts. In such an equivocal atmosphere, amid the widening rift between generations, he found himself unable to gain a hold on reality. His Henry IV (Enrico IV, 1922), as Mario Apollonio observes in his History of Italian Theatre, was a drama of “the idolatry of historical forms that held Italy captive for decades,” the story of a madman who “cannot shake off the worm-eaten splendor of those masks.”[65] And in one of his last stories, “Someone Is Laughing,” he planted a suspicion of the ridiculous in a world gone mad with seriousness. But there was nothing of the conspirator about him. He belonged to that generation of writers who had grown up with the ideal and the mission of speaking to a wide public, in a society not yet fractured, one that still respected a common truth.

In recent years, restless and uneasy, “the man with a suitcase”[66] sought some measure of peace. He had renounced the woman he loved, detaching her from himself and entrusting her to London, to the friendship and protection of J. M. Barrie.[67] Fame did him no good in a society deaf to it, a society that could only sadden him, though he never confessed as much out of his natural sense of dignity. Nor did money serve him, for he had always thought of it as the legacy of a prudent father, something meant for others, and for himself no more than a means to a few small comforts. At the heart of his being, guiding all his actions, there must have lingered the family tragedy that struck him between the ages of forty and fifty. His wife,[68] consumed by jealousy, saw rivals everywhere, even among the servants, so often that Pirandello and his children [69] would take their meals in a tavern rather than at home. To that woman, it was said, Pirandello remained physically faithful, as though branded by an indelible mark. Yet it must have been a sexual wound from which he never recovered, a mystery forever beyond reach. It is a trauma that reverberates through all his work.

Restless, I was saying, he kept returning to the idea of settling in Paris, in an apartment on Avenue Victor-Emmanuel.[70] But Mussolini looked askance at the prospect of so eminent a man living abroad; he suspected in it a veiled condemnation of the regime and warned him to return to the homeland.[71] Then Pirandello considered moving to Milan, though he never did. He had already had a few run-ins with the Party, one of them rather unusual for those times of submission. On one of his tours abroad with his theater company, Pirandello once disembarked in Brazil.[72] There he found himself face to face with Italian exiles, who published their own paper. Questioned by them, he made the curious declaration: “Abroad there are no Fascists or anti-Fascists; we are all Italians.”[73] Back in Rome, he was summoned by the Party Secretary, who laid before him a thick dossier of press clippings documenting Pirandello’s conduct abroad. The dossier had been compiled by Enrico Corradini,[74] who was then aspiring to the mantle of national playwright. Pirandello’s response was startling: he pulled his Party card from his pocket, tore it to pieces, and flung it onto the table under the hierarch’s gaze.[75] He ripped the badge from his lapel and hurled it to the floor, then strode out in indignation. They had to run after him, soothe him, beg his pardon.

Another of his interventions was the commemorative address he gave at the Accademia d’Italia, in a public session, on Giovanni Verga.[76] By way of digression, he spoke of d’Annunzio, drawing comparisons between life and life, between work and work, between teaching and teaching. D’Annunzio was regarded as the regime’s champion. In the hall, among the members of the Academy, sat many of his political allies. Some could no longer keep to their seats; they paced with restless steps through the adjoining rooms while Pirandello spoke on, relentless. The ladies in the audience were left dumbfounded. It was, in effect, an accusation against the whole of contemporary society. At any moment, it seemed, an incident might erupt, and it would have taken very little, were it not for the fear of a greater scandal that counseled restraint. Pirandello himself had no political convictions, save those imprinted upon him by his family’s Risorgimento tradition.[77] One of his grandfathers had lived in exile in Malta.[78] No small number of misunderstandings, and the general inexperience with politics that marked his entire generation of writers, must have led him to confuse nationalism with patriotism.

And then, he was a man of first impressions and sudden impulses, and perhaps of resentments that clashed and shifted without cease, only to subside at last into calm. To judge him from this angle, one must picture a man flung from nearly fifty years lived in near obscurity  into a blinding fame; and the moment of that fame coincided with the rise of a political regime that, out of calculation, bestowed upon him high honors. One must also recall the scorn of that time, felt by many men of letters, toward democracy. It was the legacy of an aesthetic rebellion that had already claimed more than a few victims in Italian culture, and that left the country, in its deepest crisis, bereft of any guide or point of reference. In recent years he had stripped himself of everything dear. He came and went; of the seasons of his life, his room bore only books in many languages, a little figurine of Ibsen given to him in Norway, a medal presented by Sicilians in Argentina: all jumbled together, thrust among a thousand other memories into the bottoms of drawers, or forgotten atop a wardrobe. Never before in Italy had there been a man who cared less for his own image. Likewise, there had never been a poet so far removed from the rigid tracks of literary tradition. His personality, revealed in a vast and sometimes impenetrable body of work, often reached the heights of great art by unknown, wholly unconventional paths. His very name was enough to conjure up the image of an era, a way of being and acting. At times, it took only a trifle to lift him clear of banality; with very little, he could rise to heights known to few of his contemporaries. His right to sit among the immortals of literature was gained more often than not by ways that were anything but simple. His language, crabbed and mannered in its beginnings, became in the best of his works a natural mode of expression; his obsessions at a certain point seized the man himself and turned into regrets, dreams, nightmares, signs of destiny. For in truth, no great poet exists without fixed ideas. Even now, the transmutation of values in Pirandello’s art is not entirely clear; nor is it plain how his provincial figures, clad in black, came to embody the protagonists of a bourgeois world gripped by the shudders of an overturned age. And it is no less mysterious how the broad farce of the provinces, at a given temperature, could return to the model of classical comedy. His secret and his strength lay in what he had believed as a child and young man, in his very prejudices: in short, in the heritage of his bourgeois stock—in the painful dignity of the provincial middle classes, in their hidden sacrifices, their capacity for wonder and belief, even in their share of malice and spite, of rivalry and pride and worship of appearances, of ideals and secret impulses which, once they brought them face to face with the world, drove them back in horror, for they always imagined it loftier, nobler. Pirandello’s revolt in the face of certain facts sprang from nothing else but these reasons and urgings. He belonged to a class still capable of ideals, and of sacrifice.

At first, the very society of which Pirandello was writing the history leapt up in outrage, almost as indignant as his own characters when they suddenly find themselves exposed upon the stage. They believe in truth and honesty; they have divided the world into good and evil and never dreamed of erasing those boundaries. They cling to an absolute, incontrovertible truth, each carrying within himself his own god and his own judge. They struggle against the malice of mankind, which tears away their last veils, their last modest, dignified appearances. At a certain point they confess, with pain; they long to be lofty, noble, pure, even if no loftiness or greatness truly exists. Still, they wish it might be believed in. When the Father, in Six Characters in Search of an Author,[79] begins to tell his story, he does so almost as if in a dream. In Pirandello’s work, whenever a man begins to speak about himself out loud, he discovers what he truly is. Guilt, sin, error—feelings of immense weight in Pirandello’s world—come into focus like a photographic plate under the bite of acid. It is the act of definition that destroys men; the utterance of words becomes a form of confession and atonement. Dramas unfold in the very act of being spoken. So long as everything lies buried in the depths of conscience, it remains uncreated, unjudged, and man remains at peace. But in speaking, man creates and shapes himself; he lays down his destiny. To reach this point required a writer attuned to the obscure recesses of consciousness, one himself wounded by the very prejudices that weave the fate of heroes in ancient tragedies, and that form the bedrock of popular psychology, its rough justice and its shadowy laws. Man invents himself, and discovers himself, through speech.

I have never known an artist more impervious to nature, nor a man less moved by that other fossilized nature which we call the ruins of the ancient world. I first noticed this one evening along the Appian Way,[80] when the wind seemed to drive the road into infinity and bend the cypresses like dark sails. I asked him what he thought of it; he replied that the whole spectacle was sinister. It is in this very insensitivity to natural phenomena that the Greek element in him lies:that haunted, fateful quality belonging to a civilization we can now measure against our own, for it approaches the modern world more nearly than any other, and is far from the serene vision it was once long supposed to be, in the years when the storms of history were still remote. Pirandello transposed every feeling for nature into a fatal law of the heart and the senses. His works are peopled with ancient revenants, and time itself takes on the hues of forgotten solar myths and lunar myths. Hours conspire in dark events, exerting influence over human beings as in the lore of witches, or in that other law by which the moon governs human acts,[81] swells the seas, abets births, and makes certain fish poisonous. At the depths of Pirandello, there is a whole tangle of ancestral superstitions and forces greater than man.[82] After so many years of deterministic literature,[83] in his work once more resounded the shriek of owls and the horns of the moon: the very phenomena that shaped the fabric of Shakespeare’s plays.

In 1932, when several of Pirandello’s plays were revived on stage, it seemed as though the author himself were undergoing a second birth into art. His work is too much a creature of its own time not to reflect the shifting tides of the years, and within them it acts almost like a reagent. Born as a sign of its age, a symptom of custom and a forerunner of human crisis, time itself reshapes its value and meaning. It was curious to see, for instance, how The Rules of the Game (Il giuoco delle parti, 1918),[84] stripped of the polemical charge it carried at its first appearance, returned almost in the guise of a Bernstein comedy.[85] Yet, unlike a bourgeois comedy, there is in it something that transcends convention: the pure framework of an archetypal drama, ancient in spirit, with only faint remnants recalling the drawing-room comedies that Pirandello had encountered in his path and formation. The fact is that in Pirandello the bourgeois comedy becomes something immensely serious. Seen as it was then, bourgeois theater of that period was dominated by a practical unease, revolving around wealth, status, and the struggle to get ahead. Compare it with the world of Ibsen,[86] intended as the world of an ascending bourgeoisie, out of which nearly all modern theater was born, and the difference is clear. In Ibsen we find individuality, the fullest expression of self, of one’s own morality: the shining hallmarks of the bourgeoisie at its rise. In the epigones, those inquietudes dwindle into mere irritations, and the inward conquest of self-expression hardens into greed for external possessions; the struggle for the woman, so powerfully staged in The Master Builder,[87] sinks into the paltry distress of Bernstein’s Samson,[88] which merely repeats the theme. One might continue tracing parallels between Ibsenism and bourgeois theater—between Hedda Gabler,[89] for example, and Wedding March.[90] But by this point, the bourgeoisie as a class was buckling under the burden it had taken on. Drama, like every other form of literature, was shattering on the same rocks, and what remained was nothing more than a matter of appetites.

Pirandello captures this precise moment, before two decades of criticism and events would make it explicit: his arrival on the theatrical horizon carries this prophetic weight. In the face of self-disorientation and crepuscular melancholy, in Pirandello’s hands the weary drawing-room comedy finds a capacity to react; within it, man rises up like a desperate hero. The revision of conventional values, the search for a moral fulcrum, becomes almost unbearably sharp. In the end, the individual (in his modest jacket) might well don the peplos of tragedy: he can once again kill, that is, offend, assert the force of a fundamental truth, of a moral fact, of a conscience. In bourgeois drama everything had fatally ended in suicide.[91] The value of Pirandello’s contribution to the history of manners lies in a kind of intuition of a new society; his characters can be reduced to a single expression, a single stance: a revolt against everything in bourgeois life that no longer holds vital substance, a passage from appetites to instincts. In Pirandello, killing becomes a sanction of instinct, the voice of blood, the return of man to a human fatality and to a law. One of the paths by which Pirandello works is Hamletism; all his characters carry within them something of Hamlet, and among them a direct descendant is Henry IV. Like Hamlet, his figures move within a world of exhausted traditions, bearing within themselves something essential: the taste of death, the demon of thought weighed against the weakness of will. Madness, too, appears in Pirandello as a way of regaining the sense of human personality, and at the same time as something fated that transcends man’s very self and his will.[92] We are, then, in the presence of a truth’s return, of a moral force in feeling that manifests itself with the same violence with which it once erupted in Greek tragedy. At a certain point, moral laws acquire the violence of instinct, striking blindly as fate itself once struck.