“In a play, if more than one person speaks at the same time, it’s just noise. No one can understand a word. But with music, with music you can have twenty individuals all talking at once, and it’s not noise – it’s a perfect harmony. Isn’t that marvellous?” says Mozart to Joseph II in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus (1979). Five years after its premiere at the National Theatre, Amadeus shape-shifted into a critically acclaimed film, under the direction of Miloš Forman and with a screenplay written by Shaffer himself. I was eleven when the cinematic adaptation – now arguably more famous than the play – was released, and I must have been twelve when I watched it, on television. It made a huge impression on me: the thought that one could be a genius and earthy was nothing short of thrilling. The soundtrack wasn’t bad either.

Poster for the opera ‘The Hours’

Mozart’s pronouncement that “only opera can do this”, weaving together multiple narrative strands in a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, has come back to mind on many wonderful musical occasions over the years. Its truth hit me again, paradoxically at my local cinema, during a live relay from the Met last December. I was watching The Hours, composed by Kevin Puts to a libretto by Greg Pierce, and based on Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel of the same name. The unique dramatic potential of opera has never felt more congenial to transposing a work of fiction into a different artistic medium than in this commission. Exploiting the gift for simultaneity of musical theatre, Puts can bring to the fore with unprecedented intensity the resonances between the three parallel stories first charted by Cunningham, and subsequently by Stephen Daldry, whose 2002 film adaptation of the novel is also credited as inspiration for this new work.

In every (re)telling, this rich, layered tale charts one day in the lives of three women, separated in time and place, and yet linked by material and thematic connections. At the heart of the piece is Virginia Woolf, in her home in Richmond, in 1923, absorbed in the early stages of writing The Hours, which will be published two years later as Mrs Dalloway, a novel spanning the course of one day. Then there is Laura Brown, pregnant with her second child in 1949 Los Angeles, a housewife stifled by domesticity and seeking refuge in the pages of that very same book. And finally, Clarissa Vaughan, Cunningham’s late 20^th-century reimagining of Clarissa Dalloway: a successful literary editor, living in the West Village with her partner Sally, she is about to throw a party for her friend and former lover Richard, a poet who is dying of AIDS.

Like Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa embraces the role of the consummate hostess, with all the superficial interactions that it entails, but is also a deeply introspective character, conscious of her frivolities and contradictions, and vaguely embarrassed at the prospect of being perceived as a socialite. The two women’s days encompass mundane tasks and thoughts, and far-reaching events and reflections; the membrane between the quotidian and the extraordinary always porous, especially when powerful memories collide with, and colour, the here and now or, conversely, when the present moment in time summons the past.

Their parties too bridge different spheres, as private acts of caring for the significant men in their lives, for whom the public limelight is ostensibly reserved: Mrs Dalloway’s hostessing oils the wheels of her husband’s political connections – the Prime Minister himself may pay a visit – while Clarissa’s celebration marks a prestigious literary accolade awarded to Richard, the prize that ought to cement his reputation as a writer of note for posterity. Death lurks at the edges of Clarissa’s preparations for the party then, instead of turning up as a wholly unexpected guest as it does when Dr Bradshaw, on arriving at the Dalloways, announces that one of his patients has taken his life by jumping out of the window earlier that evening.

The spectre of mortality is present in the other two storylines in The Hours. It is there in Woolf’s grappling with the composition of her novel, when her thoughts move from that elusive first sentence to reconsidering key events in the narrative; the initial idea that her main character should die gives way to the revelation that it will be Septimus Warren Smith, the shell-shocked veteran whose day unfolds in tandem with Mrs Dalloway’s, to kill himself, as will be casually recounted by his physician at the party, when the two plots intersect at last.[1]

Virginia Woolf 1939

We also see Woolf battling with her demons, afraid of a relapse in her mental health condition and yet bristling against her husband Leonard’s solicitous ministrations, and the suburban quiet of Richmond, an exile from the intellectual and social stimuli of London’s bustling artistic scene. The only heralds from that world, invited for tea at four, are her sister and her three children. Their contingent is both bohemian and somewhat conventional. Vanessa, an artist in her own right, turns up a full hour and a half before expected, dispensing with formal niceties without second thoughts. To Virginia, however, she appears as the epitome of domestic competence: here are two middle-aged married women, the younger sister observes, but she will never have children, and is ill at ease in dealing with servants, whereas Vanessa is fully in command as a mother and as a housekeeper.

While Virginia is engaged in a perceived power struggle with her maid Nelly, Vanessa effortlessly disabuses her offspring of the notion that they will be able to save the thrush they have found, ill, in the road. In a matter-of-fact manner, the children are instructed to make the bird comfortable and let her die in the garden, where they arrange a flowery funeral bed. “It could be a kind of hat. It could be the missing link between millinery and death”, thinks “bird-sized” Virginia. The episode is one of many prefigurations of ideas that will find their way into Mrs Dalloway where Clarissa and Septimus are frequently associated with avian imagery, and Septimus’s wife Rezia is a milliner.

Unlike Septimus, Laura Brown’s husband Dan has returned from the war unscathed; in fact, he has come back from the dead, having believed to have been one of the casualties at Anzio, to make a devoted and contented family man.[2] In Laura, however, these loving bonds increasingly induce the sense of being oppressed, particularly by her little boy Richie, whose boundless need for her is overwhelming. The role of hostess is incumbent on her too, as on Clarissa and Virginia. It is Dan’s birthday, and the task of baking a cake for him, instead of being a joyful activity and an opportunity for complicity between mother and son, engulfs Laura with disappointment in her circumstances, and with the guilt she experiences for feeling this way.

On an impulse, Laura leaves Richie with a babysitter, and checks into a hotel for the freedom to carry on reading Mrs Dalloway undisturbed; in this room of her own she contemplates a different, irreversible escape. This is the second transgression of the day for Laura; the first had been kissing her neighbour Kitty, when she had dropped by to share some troubling news. Kitty, who has been struggling to conceive, has been diagnosed with a uterine growth in need of further medical investigation and – Laura reflects while pondering her own demise – may be dying of it.

Laura and Kitty’s kiss is an echo of young Mrs Dalloway and Sally Seaton’s, at Bourton, recalled by the former as the most exquisite moment in her life. In The Hours, Clarissa Vaughan feels much the same about a kiss with Richard, the summer when she was eighteen and they had been lovers. In the present day, she finds a sudden, unexpected pleasure when she kisses, on the cheek, Barbara, the woman she has been buying flowers from for years. In 1923 Richmond, “Virginia leans forward and kisses Vanessa on the mouth. It is an innocent kiss, innocent enough, but just now, in the kitchen, behind Nelly’s back, it feels like the most delicious and forbidden of pleasures”.

Bust of Virginia Woolf, Tavistock Square

What is shown by this rhapsody of kisses – passionate, casual, chaste, provocative, the sign of acknowledged and unacknowledged desires – is the fleeting nature of grace, but also the ordinariness in which it manifests itself, often in unplanned gestures and unremarkable situations that somehow find us, or even make us, ready to perceive it and bask in it. The preciousness of these breakthroughs is intensified by reminders that time is passing: Woolf punctuates Mrs Dalloway with the chiming of Big Ben, the “leaden circles dissolv[ing] in the air”, a motif referenced by Cunningham in the first chapter in Mrs Brown’s subplot, and incorporated musically by Puts in his score.

Against the ticking of the hours, Laura decides not to end her life, but returns home with a new self-awareness that will lead her to take a delayed, drastic decision in future; half a century later, Richard drops to his death from his apartment window in Clarissa’s presence, telling her: “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we’ve been”. These parting words are a quotation from Woolf’s last note to Leonard on 28 March 1941, before she walked into the river Ouse, her overcoat pockets filled with stones. Said note is cited verbatim in the Prologue of The Hours, which captures the scene of Woolf’s drowning. Even those oblivious to the manner of Woolf’s death must engage with Cunningham’s novel in the knowledge thereof, and are thus encouraged to approach Mrs Dalloway through that lens, though its composition precedes the suicide by nearly twenty years.[3]

The foregrounding of Woolf’s fate continues to trouble me, even if at every rereading of The Hours – and I have clocked two and a bit since December – I find that I love the novel more and more. The evocation of Woolf’s death, however sensitively and compassionately handled, can take us down a simplistic reading of this amazing, groundbreaking artist as a tragic figure. Virginia the victim. Virginia the troubled genius. Virginia the self-immolating martyr. Is it not enough to focus on her literary legacy? Isn’t that what we do, say, for Ernest Hemingway, that other master of (a very different kind of) modernism, who was a similar age to Woolf’s at the time of her death, when he shot himself in 1961? (Granted, with Papa Hemingway we’re generally too busy peddling biographical myths of another kind.)[4]

I am being deliberately polemical here and, I realise, unjust to Cunningham: The Hours speaks to Mrs Dalloway through meaningful connections that are never pedestrian or predictable, and open up new vistas on that work. But it’s also more than a homage, or a tricksy rewriting; it doesn’t simply sit on the shoulders of its source of inspiration, but speaks of its time (the AIDS crisis, or our obsession with celebrity culture) in a way that Woolf spoke of her own (the aftermath of WWI, or the weakening of those anchoring beliefs that had held fast through the Victorian age, such as religious faith, for example).[5] And it picks up from where Mrs Dalloway had paved the way in its multifaceted exploration of queer identity.[6] It is imbued with admiration for Virginia Woolf’s work, and Cunningham’s portrayal of her mental illness is prescient in raising awareness of an issue we are now much more used to discussing openly.[7]

What niggles me is the danger inherent in framing an entire life, and its creative output, in the context of suicide, a move that seems to occur more commonly in the case of female artists – Sylvia Plath is another case in point – and not so much for their male counterparts. And, yes, no doubt patriarchal attitudes have compounded these women’s suffering and mental health struggles, but there is something potentially, inadvertently reductionist about The Hours opening on 28 March 1941. Woolf’s suicide casts a shadow on what follows, presenting her entire life as a slow building up to that final gesture, with Mrs Dalloway itself becoming the symptom of a disease or, inexplicably, an achievement that flies in the face of that tragedy: “How, Laura wonders, could someone who was able to write a sentence like that – who was able to feel everything contained in a sentence like that – come to kill herself?” (More on the sentence in question anon.)

Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman in ‘The Hours’

The opera handles this more subtly. Its first scene sees the chorus singing Mrs Dalloway’s famous opening, placing Woolf’s novel, rather than her drowning, front and centre. When Kelli O’Hara sings Laura’s heartache that a genius like Woolf could have killed herself, her lines blend into a duet with Joyce DiDonato’s Virginia, each declaring her determination to read in one case, write in the other “one more page” of Mrs Dalloway. For Laura, this is a losing oneself, for Virginia a finding oneself. In this evocation of Woolf’s suicide, the emphasis lands on the writer’s agency, and on her ability to reach out through time to generations of readers.[8]

The fact that Virginia/DiDonato can finish the sentence begun by Laura/O’Hara is an illustration of my initial point about the strength of opera, unconstrained by the inescapable linearity of the novelistic or the cinematic medium.[9] The converging and collapsing of different narrative strands regales us with an absolute gem of an ending, when DiDonato, O’Hara and Renée Fleming come together in an exquisite trio: “This is the world / And you live in it / And you try to be / And you try / And you try…”.

Having created three distinctive dimensions, musically and visually, as is fit for the specificity of these women’s experiences, the opera’s finale brings about a marvellous communion that transcends their individual circumstances: the singers sit holding hands, inhabiting the same physical and metaphorical space. It’s a space we are invited in as they move to the front of the stage for the final bars, the “you” of their shared reflection doing double duty as an interpellation of the audience. Joined in our humanity, in that unique and yet common endeavour that is the act of being in the world, we are not alone.

For me, this opera really captures the life-affirming quality that is the miracle of Mrs Dalloway. I used to teach Woolf’s novel for an undergraduate course on British writing between 1918 and 1939 called “Literature between the Wars”. One of the most underlined passages in my well-thumbed copy – a passage that I would parse with my students – is the one where Mrs Dalloway thinks of her own mortality, and which my marginal annotation in pencil describes as “Clarissa’s epiphany”: “Like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower, she went upstairs, paused at the window, came to the bathroom. There was the green linoleum and a tap dripping. There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel. At midday they must disrobe. She pierced the pincushion and laid her feathered yellow hat on the bed. The sheets were clean, tight stretched in a broad white band from side to side. Narrower and narrower would her bed be.”

Clarissa then considers her feelings for other women, and the sexual attraction she sometimes experiences, like “a sudden revelation”. I can see myself skipping a few lines to talk with my students about the striking image with which Woolf describes these epiphanies: “Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over – the moment.” The seminar discussion would seek to explore the connections between Clarissa and Septimus, his trauma, the medical establishment’s failure to support him, indeed the several failures in communication in the novel. I could go on. Mrs Dalloway is inexhaustible as a source of aesthetic, affective and intellectual riches.

What has lingered with me after my most recent encounter with the novel – twenty years after those classroom discussions, in the wake of my vicarious visit at the Met to see The Hours – is Clarissa Dalloway’s wonderful ability to give herself to life, her receptiveness to those instants of contentment, her alertness to the present, what feels to me like an openness – a hunger even – to the possibility of joy. Even, especially, because of the awareness that time is passing. I know I am projecting. I have just turned fifty myself. But then I think of the sentence that makes Laura wonder about Woolf’s genius, and I know I am not the only one to see that: “In the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.” Have you ever read anything more exhilarating than that?

The Hours premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City on 22 November 2022, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. It will return to the Met stage, with Renée Fleming, Joyce DiDonato and Kelli O’Hara reprising the roles they have originated, next May. Meanwhile, the recording of the performance I saw as a live relay at the cinema on 10 December 2022 is available to stream via the Met Opera on Demand service.

Those interested in learning more about this opera may wish to watch this Met Talk with the creatives and the cast, or they may wish to listen to Episode 210 of The Met Opera Guild Podcast, in which musicologist W. Anthony Sheppard offers an insightful analysis of this piece. Spoiler alert: both the talk and the podcast mention a key connection between two of the subplots which I have left undiscussed.

[1] There are other instances in the novel when various subplots cross paths, such as when Clarissa and Septimus hear the same car backfire, or when Peter Walsh, the suitor Clarissa rejected before marrying Richard Dalloway, sees Septimus and his wife Rezia in the street, or when Peter hears the sound of the ambulance that is carrying away Septimus’s body after his suicide.

[2] Dan is a veteran of WWII, of course; Septimus of WWI.

[3] Woolf did incorporate autobiographical elements in her novel: for example, Septimus hears a sparrow singing in Greek, a hallucination experienced by Woolf herself during one of her breakdowns. In The Hours, Virginia recalls having heard a flock of sparrows outside her window singing in ancient Greek; Richard too hears voices singing in Greek. In the opera, Vanessa’s children reprise in ancient Greek some key lines that Laura and Virginia had sung earlier: “This is the world, and you live in it, and you try to be grateful”. A variation on these lines occurs in the final trio, as I will discuss presently. These thoughts originally occur to Clarissa Vaughan in Cunningham’s novel; in my opinion, they capture an essential aspect of Woolf’s novel.

[4] For a brief, incisive discussion of Cunningham’s recontextualization of Mrs Dalloway within a biographical frame, see Michael H. Whitworth’s Virginia Woolf in the Oxford World Classics ‘Authors in Context’ series (2005). Much like the novel and the film The Hours, Wayne McGregor’s 2015 ballet Woolf Works, whose revival I saw at the Royal Opera House in February, foregrounds Woolf’s drowning. Even Neil Bartlett’s 2022 theatrical adaptation of Orlando, which I saw at the Garrick Theatre in January, manages to reference the author’s suicide.

[5] On her way to buy flowers from Barbara, Clarissa Vaughan notices a movie being shot in a nearby street. A while later the two women hear a “huge shattering sound” coming from the film set and, when they see a “famous head emerg[ing] from one of the trailers”, they wonder who the celebrity may be. (Funnily enough, one of the hypotheses is Meryl Streep, who will play Clarissa Vaughan in Daldry’s film.) In Woolf’s novel, Mrs Dalloway, Septimus and other passers-by are startled by a car backfiring; the vehicle’s mysterious passenger is speculated to be royalty, or maybe the prime minister. The glamour of showbusiness is the late 20^th century counterpart of the power of the ruling classes. Meanwhile, an aeroplane is writing an advertising message in the sky; technology and marketing seem to have replaced God above. Interestingly, Miss Kilman, the older woman to whom Mrs Dalloway’s daughter Elizabeth looks up, is presented – through Clarissa’s perspective – as a religious zealot. In Cunningham’s novel, Mary Krull – Miss Kilman’s equivalent – is an academic, “lecturing passionately at NYU about the sorry masquerade known as gender”. Both Clarissa Dalloway and Clarissa Vaughan are at odds with the religious / intellectual intransigence of their respective antagonists.

[6] As already mentioned, in Mrs Dalloway, we read of Clarissa’s kiss with Sally, and of her attraction to other women. Septimus’s devotion to his commanding officer Evans, who had been killed in action, can also been interpreted as underpinned by homoerotic desire.

[7] The focus on mental health in The Hours has come up in interviews with the cast of the opera as giving a topical edge to this work in our post-pandemic world.

[8] The suicide is also evoked in the costumes of the chorus, which are streaked with what look like ripples of water. The chorus accompany Woolf, stones in their overcoats, in what is the most overt allusion to her drowning. However, this final scene in the narrative strand specifically devoted to Woolf does not close the whole opera. The film adaptation instead ends with Woolf’s suicide: Nicole Kidman’s voiceover as Woolf accompanies rapid cuts between her story, and Laura Brown’s and Clarissa Vaughan’s, played by Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep. In the voiceover, Woolf is mentally expressing her gratitude to Leonard for the life they have spent together. We then see Kidman walking into a river, in what is inevitably a much more realistic rendition of the suicide than what is possible on stage. Daldry’s The Hours thus comes full circle, since it also opens with the suicide, in what is effectively a cinematic representation of the Prologue in Cunningham’s novel.

[9] Director Phelim McDermott has talked of the challenge of staging The Hours as having to put on three different operas at the same time. (McDermott and his collaborators pull this off with flair, through movable sets and a signature colour palette and recurrent images for each of the women: Virginia’s world is full of books, Laura’s full of domestic objects, and Clarissa’s full of flowers.) On the other hand, opera must condense, more than film, in adapting even a short novel like The Hours. The result is something more pared down than Cunningham’s work but, like all successful distillations, more intense too. For example, Clarissa’s daughter Elizabeth is completely excised by the narrative; in fact, Clarissa doesn’t want to have children, while her partner Sally does. This creates a further connection between Clarissa’s and Laura’s story.

Main image: The Metropolitan Opera House, New York City. Credit: Russell Kord / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Renee Fleming, Joyce Didonato and Kelli O’Hara on a promotional poster for The Hours

Image 2: Taken at Virginia Woolf’s last formal photography session in 1939, taken by Gisèle Freund and the only pictures of Woolf in colour. Credit: Album / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 3: Bust of Virginia Woolf in Tavistock, near the house where the above photograph was taken. Credit: Robert Evans / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 4: Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman in the film version of The Hours.  Credit: TCD/Prod.DB / Alamy Stock Photo

Our paperback edition of Mrs Dalloway, for £3.99, can be found here, and our Collector’s Edition hardback for £8.99 here

The post Listening for the leaden circles dissolving in the air appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

I remember the first time I read Wuthering Heights. I remember it for all the wrong reasons. I was still in high-school, and the long summer holidays afforded me ample time to read. With classes over from mid-June to mid-September, I would decamp to my grandparents’ house at the seaside – three whole months to swap the rhythms, and the constraints, of city life for a more relaxed routine that included plenty of iodine and swimming and hanging out with friends. But bookworms will be bookworms, and my summers also entailed epic reading sessions, especially at the controra, the afternoon curfew when everybody in the household would doze away the hottest part of the day.

Not me. Even as a much younger child, I’d waged a battle of the wills against the grown-ups, refusing to take a postprandial nap, my stubborn resistance fuelled by a genuine inability to nod off that continues to plague me to this day. My mother had had to concede to my nervous energy, though going out was not allowed – the whole neighbourhood was deserted and silent, the sun merciless – and letting the nonni rest was non-negotiable. I would keep my quiet vigil in the company of comics and books, sometimes lying on the floor, the coolness of the tiles much preferable to the soft warmth of my bed. Of the two sofas downstairs, one had the most terrible heat-generating upholstery, and the other was usually taken – a prime siesta spot, in the line of a feeble breeze.

With those hours of stillness stretched ahead of me, no literary encounter seemed too ambitious. I always had more than one book on the go and would intersperse the heftier tomes with less demanding material. In amongst going through the entire Agatha Christie canon, I made some interesting choices and, overstretched rather than precocious, came a cropper a number of times. Crime and Punishment took me three attempts to get started, though eventually I got to the end (I think). Undaunted, the following summer I soldiered on through War and Peace only to run out of holiday time, and stamina, with about fifty pages to go. I am not sure where exactly in this reckless sequence came Wuthering Heights. I suspect it preceded my Russian literature phase, but it was an equally ill-fated experience, for I remember taking the book with me to the beach, and floundering in the complexity of the narrative structure and of the family connections.

I don’t think I knew much about Wuthering Heights before picking it up, other than it was a classic, with an intriguing, atmospheric title. It can’t have occurred to me that the sweltering Calabrian heat and blinding sunshine might make for an uncongenial milieu from which to approach the dark, tempestuous landscape of Emily Brontë’s imagination. Luckily, this youthful folly has not prevented me from re-treading my steps to Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange several times since and take in all that I’d missed on that first, bungled visit. My latest journey there was a spur-of-the moment decision, on the final day of the National Theatre run of Emma Rice’s adaptation of the novel, last March.

Emma Rice

I felt compelled to go the minute I clicked on Rice’s account of what drew her to tackle Wuthering Heights, back in 2016: “I was also really inspired, and moved, and angry about what was happening in the Calais Jungle at the time, and watching politicians argue over how many unaccompanied children we would give safe passage to, and that was when I had the revelation that Heathcliff was an unaccompanied refugee child. He was found in the Liverpool docks. He was speaking a different language. Nobody knew where he came from.”

Six years on, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused the largest refugee crisis in Europe since the second world war. A month into the conflict, roundabout when I went to see the play, half of all Ukrainian children had been displaced. At the curtain call, the company’s parting words to the audience were a plea for donations to the DEC Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal, voiced by Liam Tamne, who, in the last week of the National Theatre run, took over from Ash Hunter the role of Heathcliff. Hunter had played the character with a Caribbean accent; Tamne reprised this signifier of difference by giving it a South Asian flavour.

Heathcliff’s outsider status is marked throughout. In the scene when Mr Earnshaw (Craig Johnson, later doubling up as Dr Kenneth) finds him in Liverpool, and brings him back home to meet Hindley (Tama Phethean) and Catherine (Lucy McCormick), the three children are represented on the stage by puppets, and Heathcliff is the one with sparkly eyes – their light to be dimmed by the hostile environment in which he’ll grow. “You go back. Go back to where you came from.”, Hindley growls at him in the following scene.

I appreciate that puppets are not everyone’s cup of tea, and that they have become almost a cliché in productions aimed at a crossover audience, but the inherent uncanniness of their mechanical presence works very well here. It manages to convey widely contrasting states and emotions, from unspeakable fragility – of which in a moment – to the unthinking, ferocious violence of Hindley’s early quarrel with his father’s protégé or, later in the story, the savage attack on McCormick’s Catherine by the Lintons’ dog, terrifying in its skeletal appearance, an animal skull appended to a scythe-like wooden contraption.

To begin with, instead, the puppets’ bodily spareness had acted as a visual shorthand for vulnerability. At least that’s what I saw in the tender embrace between fleshy Mr Earnshaw and bony, homeless Heathcliff. It was one moment in the play when I welled up, my customary response to the nakedness of the theatrical artifice and our collective make-believe – as I have written elsewhere – compounded by the thrill of having returned to enjoy live performances, and by a lingering sense of precarity. The thought that, as we were tentatively emerging from the pandemic, the world had already plunged into another catastrophe was never far from my mind.

This production of Wuthering Heights offers escapism in the exuberance of the acting, in the creativity and energy of the musical pieces and ensemble dancing, as well as in the liberal lashings of in-your-face comedy. But it never forgets, or lets us forget, its premise: that violence begets violence. “Be careful what you seed” is its strapline, as well as the insistent admonition that opens and closes one of the songs threaded through the story to accompany the action. This running commentary is provided by the Moor, conceived by Rice as a protean Greek Chorus which named characters emerge out of and disappear into.

Headlined by the anchoring figure of the Leader (Nandi Bhebhe), this primordial force is the real beating heart of the play, its introductory chant a rousing leitmotif and a defiant celebration of immutability against the violence of the elements: “I am the Moor / Ravaged by the stabbing rain, / Wizened by the rascal sun, / Tormented and mighty. / I hold fast. //  […] My story is bigger than passing fancies / Bigger than cruelty. / My story turns the planet. / And it’s turning now. / But I hold fast. / I am the Moor.”[1]

More prosaically, the Moor stands in for Nelly Dean as the mediator and prime interpreter of the events to Mr Lockwood (Sam Archer) and the audience. As intended by Rice, replacing a notoriously unreliable, human narrator with a collective manifestation of the wilderness adds to the epic dimension of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. However, along with this compelling resonance, the Moor / Chorus augments the more pedestrian quality of mythical narratives: their tendency towards didacticism and moralizing. Where readers are alert to Nelly’s partiality, or downright sceptical of her trustworthiness, it’s hard not to take the Moor’s pronouncements as objective and imbued with good judgment.

Besides, it’s not just that the Moor knows best. The Moor knows it all, and expects us to keep up. When Lockwood struggles with his induction into the intermingled family lines and complains “This is all too difficult. Far, far too difficult. How is anyone expected to follow this?”, the Moor’s reply is an impatient “Try harder!”. Now, as borne out by my adolescent experience, if there ever was a text in need of judicious signposting, Wuthering Heights may well be it. Rice runs with this idea, and errs on the side of generosity when it comes to providing explanations and recapitulations, flaunting the instructional function of some of the scenes.

On a couple of occasions, for example, we are reminded of the tally of characters who have shuffled off their mortal coil: members of the cast each hold a small blackboard bearing the name of one of the dearly departed. The knowingness of this moment bestows levity onto the lesson, but the pop-up graveyard also establishes an uncomfortable connection between formal teaching – presumably the opposite of what we are being subjected to – and death. Speaking of which, every time somebody dies, a flock of black birds takes flight on the big screen at the back of the stage. It’s not the best use of this visual narrative aid, which more than earns its keep when it shows striking images of the mutable sky, windswept clouds chasing each other at speed, and oozing pathetic fallacy, along with the other assorted unruly natural elements that punctuate the proceedings.

Thunderclaps abound at the end of Part II, in the fateful scene when Heathcliff, having overheard Catherine say that it would degrade her to marry him, misses the crucial corrective to this statement: “My love for Linton is like foliage in the woods: time will change it. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath. I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, but as my own being.”[2] Lots of emoting follows: Heathcliff rages, calls for vengeance and storms away; then Catherine takes to the stage in ‘hard-rock chick’ guise, dark make up, dishevelled hair, heartbreak spat out in a furious song that is half curse, half proclamation of her earthy power.

If these set pieces are conceived to underscore the strength of the passion that the two characters feel for one another, I’m afraid they have the opposite effect. The hot-blooded drama comes across as a bit performative, a show of adolescent solipsism rather than the vehement outpouring of an all-consuming love that is as doomed and destructive as it is necessary. What this also means – and it may be no bad thing, considering the aura of glamour that surrounds the figure of the Byronic anti-hero – is that we are never in any danger of romanticising Heathcliff. For all the emphasis on the contextual circumstances that make him who he is, he is not sanitized into a desirable, brooding leading man, worthy of conditional pity and in with a chance of redemption.

There is no glossing over his cruelty and facility for violence, nor over the taboo-breaking extremes of his obsession with Catherine: we know that Heathcliff rapes Isabella (Katy Owen) on their wedding night, and we see his necrophilia acted on stage. This monstrous quality of his is foreshadowed early in the play by a rather clunky comparison to Nero, idolized by young Catherine as a one-of-a-kind individual, unbound by conventional morality.

Where Catherine’s mythologizing reads like rebellious teenage posturing, the contradiction at Heathcliff’s hollow core is an intensity of purpose coated by cold, steely indifference. The problem in this production is that, more often than not, we don’t really care either, even when we are directly called upon to do so. After the (mercifully off-stage) brutal consummation of their marriage, Isabella pleads: “Remember my name please. I am Isabella Linton. No. I forgot. I am Isabella Heathcliff. I don’t want to disappear.” It could have been a devastating petition, but it doesn’t quite land emotionally with the audience, and that’s because the Lintons are rendered as caricatures.

At one point, still unaware of the poisonous power dynamics at Wuthering Heights, Edgar (Sam Archer again) and Isabella (Katy Owens) literally pirouette on stage, foppish, mannered and fey. The doubling up of Edgar with Lockwood highlights that they are both out of their depth. What saves Lockwood is that he is always at one remove from the action; if the deerstalker lends him a vaguely Holmesian air, the practical heft of his tweeds and wellingtons anchor him to solid ground.

In contrast, Edgar Linton’s lithe balletic display is suggestive of flightiness, as well as ridiculous: an ethereal, insubstantial character, he’ll die in the knowledge of having failed to keep his daughter from the magnetic pull of Wuthering Heights, and safe from Heathcliff’s scheming. Meanwhile, Katy Owen threatens to steal the show as the comically petulant, needy, inane Little Linton. The boy is a manipulative weakling, terrified of his father and self-entitled in his relationship with Young Cathy but, as in Isabella’s case, psychological complexity plays second fiddle to chasing laughter.

The comedy works much better when it undercuts the didacticism of the play. After the interval, Heathcliff returns to the stage looking like a ringmaster, brandishing a whip. “Well what did you expect? / This man was found in loss, / Grown in hate / And hardened in revenge. / If you want Romance? Go to Cornwall.”, the Moor taunts the audience. A glutton for punishment, Lockwood instead returns to Wuthering Heights in the epilogue, where he is needed for dramatic purposes to instigate the denouement. We are “almost back where we started”, with the hapless tenant of Thrushcross Grange knocking on his neighbours’ door, struggling against violent gusts of wind.

This second visit is met with a warm welcome by an aproned Hareton, the new homeowner after Heathcliff’s death three months hence. And so to the final temporal shift in the action, when we loop back to the thawing of the young man’s relationship with his cousin Cathy, and their improbable courtship. Tama Phethean’s is the standout ‘doubling-up’ performance: with the Hindley-Hareton combo, he must plumb the depths of neglect and degradation, and then soar to paradisiacal levels of bliss. Hareton’s transformation from despised brute to tender lover shows that we didn’t have to go to Cornwall for romance after all. The Leader of the Moor concedes: “[Love] must have bubbled up from a spring while we looked away.”

The mention of a buried source of goodness surfacing in the lives of these characters made me balk, bringing to mind the speculation that the Brontës’ chronic ill-health may have been connected with the water from their well, contaminated by its proximity to the local churchyard. In a broader sense, however, the renewed reference to the power of nature is apt. Singing its theme tune one last time – “softly” stipulates the stage direction – the Moor ostensibly mellows: “My story turned the planet. / And it’s turning now. / But I let go… / I am the Moor.” The release heralds the happy ending through the union of Catherine’s and Linton’s descendants, and the erasure of Heathcliff’s line. But, don’t be fooled, it’s not the nub of this Wuthering Heights. The Moor endures.

It has done so in Emily (2022), Frances O’Connor’s fictionalized treatment of Brontë’s life, which I enjoyed much more than Sally Minogue did, partly because I was asking less (or something different) of it. Of course, O’Connor has the rugged Yorkshire and Cumbrian landscape to feature so vividly in her film. As we have seen, Rice breathes life into the natural environment by personifying it, and giving it an epic stature. In this, her play is a triumph. But there are consequences. Against its perennial surroundings, and the constant presence of the ensemble cast, the tormented love story between Catherine and Heathcliff is diminished. It is further side-lined by the younger generation’s domestic idyll, which doesn’t portend to move heaven and earth and, lacking bombast, is more touching.

The displacement of the central romantic relationship is a big deal for some reviewers. Writing of the original production at the Old Vic in Bristol, Arifa Akbar uses the word “sacrilegious”. I am not so sure that it is. We’ve got to gloss over a lot of nasty, complicated stuff to see Catherine and Heathcliff as an ideal couple. And, in any case, with Nature posited as permanent in contrast to our mortality and the fickleness of our emotions, what does it matter? The epilogue really is an interlude. There’ll be other dramas, they’ll pass, they’ll be forgotten.

Perhaps my receptiveness to this theme in the play has been heightened by the experience of lockdown. This was my first trip to the theatre after the pandemic. About a week later, I managed to bag a Friday Rush ticket to Deborah Warner’s landmark new production of Peter Grimes at the Royal Opera House, and this too has coloured my thinking about Wuthering Heights. There are so many parallels: both are about outsiders, morality, the puniness of humankind against the elements. Conversely, the comparison throws into relief a dimension of the Moor I have been at risk of overlooking: vibrant, wise, nurturing, in its role as Choir it is the opposite of Britten’s brutal mob, and of the sea too, indifferent to the unfolding tragedies.

Allan Clayton’s visceral interpretation of Peter Grimes has been by far the theatrical gem of 2022 for me; in fact, the whole production is one of the most powerful artistic revelations I have ever had. As my initiation to Britten – another first – it’s had a Damascene effect, opening my eyes, and heart (and ears!) to his amazing legacy, as a musician and as a believer and promoter of the accessibility of the arts to all. That democratic, inclusive spirit animates the work of many arts organizations we are so lucky – at least for the time being[3] – to have in this country. It is the ethos that inspires what Emma Rice does with her company ‘Wise Children’. As for her Wuthering Heights, of course I didn’t mind the larger-than-life, epic, operatic canvas. Bold, brash, and galvanizing, it’s a superior kind of playing to the gallery.

Stefania has donated her fee for this article to DEC Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal 

A list of companies that continue to trade in Russia can be found here: https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/companies-boycotting-russia/

Emma Rice’s Wuthering Heights is currently on tour in the United States of America. A recording of the performance is available in the UK (check the Wise Children website for details).

[1] For a flavour of the Moor’s indomitable spirit, see this trailer.

[2] Here and elsewhere I am quoting from the play, published by Methuen Drama (2021), rather than the novel.

[3] I am thinking here of the current plight of the English National Opera, where I enjoyed another terrific first, in a work where our relationship with Nature is once again key: Leos Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen. Jamie Manton’s new production drew on a supporting cast of twenty-four children and young people recruited from local schools via the ENO Engage scheme. To find out more about ENO’s work, and how to support it, see here. #LoveENO

Main image and pictures are publicity shots of the stage production.

Image of Emma Rice credit: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo

The post Wuthering Heights: Emma Rice’s production reviewed appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

“I am afraid I shall not write till I get home, for all I do is scribble odds and ends as notes, and dawdle round without an idea in my head. Alice says no one does anything in Italy, so after another six months of idleness, I may get back and go to work,” predicted Louisa May Alcott in a letter to her family from Vevey, on Lake Geneva, on – do bear this date in mind – 20 September 1870. The acclaimed author of Little Women (1868) had been travelling through Europe for four months, on what she hoped would be a year-long vacation with a dual remit, encompassing both her creative life and her familial responsibilities.

On the latter front, Alcott achieved what she’d set out to do: help her youngest sister May make the most of her stay in Europe, where she had been invited to join her friend Alice Bartlett – she of the cheeky remark about Italy – on the Grand Tour. May had made a condition of her going that Louisa should also travel with them; while Alice paid for May’s expenses, Louisa was on hand as self-appointed duenna and provider of further financial support for her sister, a talented painter keen to take in the artistic riches of the old continent.

Louisa understood that yearning; equally, she appreciated the importance of congenial society, for that was what she had lacked on her first trip to Europe, in 1865, as a companion to the invalid Anna Weld and her half-brother George. Back then, when she couldn’t have afforded the journey on her own, attending to “the Weld incumbrances” had been a disagreeable necessity.[1] Four years later, she would mine her memories of this experience abroad as inspiration for Amy March’s voyage through Europe in Good Wives (1869), Part Two of Little Women.

This second volume had confirmed the extraordinary popularity of the adventures of the March sisters, further catapulting its author into the literary stratosphere, notwithstanding her own reservations about the quality of her work. Alcott would continue to hold ambivalent feelings about writing for the audience who had decreed her success, noting in her diary – nearly a decade since her commercial triumph – that she was “tired of providing moral pap for the young.”[2]

She had an even more conflictual relationship with fame; besides the constant pressure to produce new material came the invasive demands of her adoring public. As early as 1869, she had to contend with encroachments on her privacy and the other pitfalls of celebrity culture: “People begin to come and stare at the Alcotts. Reporters haunt the place to look at the authoress, who dodges into the woods […] and won’t be even a very small lion.”[3]

Alcott thus seized on May’s entreaty that they should travel to Europe together as a chance for a break from prying eyes, as well as from “the [publishing] treadmill”, even though “requests from editors to write for their papers or magazines” followed her across the Atlantic. [4] She declined these offers but, in spite of her prediction to the contrary, she did pick up the pen before her return to the United States, and she did so in Italy of all places. At the time of her letter from Vevey, Alcott had been chomping at the bit to leave for the next stage of the journey, which had been delayed by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870.

Bizarrely, especially since Alcott had cut her teeth with Hospital Sketches (1863), a semi-autobiographical volume inspired by her service as a nurse during the American Civil War, the political and human dimension of the Franco-Prussian conflict hardly gets a mention in her journal, barring a reference to the arrival of French refugees in town. In her letters too, the war features primarily as an impediment to her plans. Alcott found Switzerland dull, and had her heart set on reaching Rome, May’s most coveted destination. “Little Raphael” would not be alone in finding inspiration in the eternal city; it is there that Louisa started writing again, spurred by two very different tragic events.

In December 1870, the Tiber burst its banks causing a catastrophic inundation; this natural disaster rounded off a very turbulent year for Rome. Only three months earlier, to be precise on – wait for it – 20 September, the troops of Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy had stormed the ancient Aurelian walls, conquering the city and freeing it from papal rule, thus completing the unification of the Kingdom of Italy. As we know, Alcott missed the “breach of Porta Pia”, which is memorialized in Italian toponomy in the presence of Via XX Settembre in every major city. She did, however, witness the flood, as well as the King’s fleeting, unofficial visit to bring relief to the population; she wrote about these historic events in a letter to an undisclosed recipient, most likely the editor of the Boston Evening Transcript, where it was published on 3 February 1871.

At the end of 1870 Alcott had other, more personal misfortunes on her mind: a matter of days before the river had brought destruction to Rome, she had read in a newspaper of the death of John Pratt, her brother-in-law and the model for John Brooke, Meg’s husband in Little Women. She had just hit her stride with the composition of Little Men when a letter from home confirmed that Pratt had died suddenly on 27 November.[5] She intensified her work on the manuscript, so “that John’s death may not leave A. [her eldest sister Anna] and the dear little boys in want.” True to character, Louisa stepped into the role of the absent pater familias, turning to the creative effort as a source both of financial security and of emotional solace: “In writing and thinking of the little lads, to whom I must be father now, I found comfort for my sorrow.”[6]

Little Men pays tribute to Pratt in the account of his fictional counterpart’s legacy to the younger generation; the chapter devoted to his untimely demise ends with his ten-year-old son relinquishing his childhood nickname in order to embrace his adult identity as his father’s heir: “Don’t call me Demi anymore. I am John Brooke now.” In fact, the whole volume can be read as a homage to another paternal role model, the towering male figure in Alcott’s life: her father Bronson, whose progressive educational principles inform the boys’ school set up by Jo March and Professor Bhaer.

Little Men, or Life at Plumfield does what it says in the subtitle, in that it is essentially a school story. It is also – no two ways about it – the weakest instalment in the tetralogy. There is only so much that Mother Bhaer’s “wilderness of boys” can do both plot-wise and in terms of psychological development, not least because they are generally younger than Jo and her sisters were at the beginning of the March family saga – witness John Brooke Jr.’s maturation above, which is more of a promise of things to come than the thing itself. Unlike its predecessors, this is not a coming-of-age novel; it’s Plumfield’s ‘character arc’ we are following, and not quite its pupils’.

Reprising the metaphor of the harvest, which had brought Part 2 of Little Women to a close, the final chapter of Little Men focuses on whether the Bhaers’ pedagogical experiment has yielded any fruits. The signs are promising, but we’ll have to wait until Jo’s Boys, and How They Turned Out (1886) to have a full measure of the success of this enterprise. By comparison, the cyclical structure from Christmas of absence and want to Christmas of togetherness and plenitude had provided an overarching narrative tightness already in Part 1 of Little Women to counterbalance Alcott’s tendency to write in self-contained sketches. In Little Men, this signature episodic style remains unchecked, and is accentuated by the presence of a large cast of characters.

Jo’s extended household comprises no fewer than twelve boys, a sizeable proportion of whom are biological family members: her own children Rob and Teddy, Professor Bhaer’s nephews Franz and Emil, and the above-mentioned Demi Brooke, whose twin-sister Daisy gets the total for this initial crop up to a baker’s dozen. The arrival of orphaned street musician Nat Blake allows Alcott to (re)introduce the whole bunch to her readers, who are thus neatly positioned as newcomers in need of familiarizing themselves with the unorthodox pedagogical ways of Plumfield.

The opening also revisits the tried-and-tested trope of the outsider looking in and yearning to belong. In Little Women that role had been Laurie’s, who still thinks of himself as the first of Jo’s boys. It is fitting that the young Mr. Lawrence should be making the case, and footing the bill, for Nat’s enrolment at Plumfield. Nat’s musical talent is another trait that endears him to his sponsor. I trust it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that the protégé will follow in Laurie’s footstep by marrying into the family, having outperformed his benefactor in the pursuit of an artistic career.

Mind you, Laurie never needed to earn an honest crust, musically or otherwise. In Little Men, he comes into his own as a munificent patron of the arts, and of Jo’s worthy schemes. Not that we see a lot of him, or of the adult Marches. The focus is on their charges, whose sheer number does not leave room for anybody else, nor – in some cases – for much depth either. Several chapters suffer from Alcott’s ‘completist instinct’ and read a bit like lists: in one we are told about what everyone grows in their small plot of land; in another everyone gets to tell a story. I’m not sure we need these meticulous accounts of twelve or more variations on each individual theme, usually an exemplification of the Bhaers’ educational methods, but there you go. This is Alcott’s narrative method. Take it or leave it.

In case we hadn’t noticed, she is very upfront about it: “As there is no particular plan to this story, except to describe a few scenes in the life at Plumfield for the amusement of certain little persons, we will gently ramble along in this chapter [VIII, ‘Pranks and Plays’] and tell some of the pastimes of Mrs. Jo’s boys.” It’s worth pausing here to remember how radical this attention to the ordinary and the quotidian was, particularly in writing for children. Alcott’s young readers could see themselves in the pages of her books. And so the passage goes on to explain: “I beg leave to assure my honored readers that most of the incidents are taken from real life, and that the oddest are the truest; for no person, no matter how vivid an imagination he may have, can invent anything half so droll as the freaks and fancies that originate in the lively brains of little people.”

The one catalogue that is quite handy comes in Chapter II, where we get a brief description, one by one, of all the children at Plumfield at the time of Nat’s arrival, including the seven pupils not hailing from the extended March clan. Some of these characters are mono-dimensional and clearly there to make up the numbers. Alcott needs them – and needs the variety they represent in ages, abilities and aptitudes – to show that everybody deserves a chance and can flourish, if only they identify the right vocation and cultivate their talent. The wonderfully named Tommy Bangs stands out head-and-shoulder from this lot, as “the scapegrace of the school, and the most trying scapegrace who ever lived.” As for the rest, I challenge you to read the chapter for yourself and guess who makes the cut and who instead will be dispatched in Jo’s Boys.

Still, there is much to enjoy in Little Men. Loveable rogues like Tommy Bangs provide the richer narrative material, of course. Another five years, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer will perfect the type in its eponymous protagonist and his companion Huck Finn. Like Alcott, Mark Twain is at pains to point out that the incidents in Tom Sawyer are drawn from life.[7] Children fight, get lost, get into scrapes. But while Twain portrays an almost exclusively masculine domain, Alcott mixes things up by exploring the potential of a co-educational approach, and by showing that traditionally feminine qualities do not always match the gender they are ascribed to: for example, Franz is “domestic”, Demi is not “a manly boy” (much to his father’s – and nobody else’s – chagrin), whereas Nat is “as docile and affectionate as a girl”, so that Professor Bhaer refers to him lovingly as “his ‘daughter’”.

Conversely, the girls’ games are full of violence and mayhem, as “poor Teddy” finds out at his expense, “for the excited ladies were apt to forget that he was not of the same stuff as their long-suffering dolls. Once he was shut into the closet for a dungeon, and forgotten by the girls, who ran off to some out-of-door game. Another time he was half-drowned in the bath-tub, playing be [sic] a ‘cunning little whale.’ And, worst of all, he was cut down just in time after being hung up for a robber.” None of the imagined scenarios pertain to the domestic sphere, contradicting the notion – entertained by Jo – that the girls would have a refining influence on the boys.[8]

In concocting a whole range of different personalities, Alcott doesn’t forget to nod to family resemblances; take the youngest female additions to the brood: Bess (a.k.a. Goldilocks or the Princess), Laurie and Amy’s daughter, is angelic and precious, while Josie, the Pratts’ new baby, promises to be unconventional as the aunt she’s named after. Or, to put it bluntly, Bess is an absolute bore in her nauseating perfection, a distillation of her parents’ graces without any of their redeeming qualities, and Josie one to keep an eye on. All will be revealed in Jo’s Boys. Sneak preview: while her sister Daisy has inherited Meg’s home-making streak, Josie takes after her mother in her passion for acting. Theatrical shenanigans are bound to ensue.

If you’re already familiar with Little Men, you’ll know that I’ve left out from the roll call the two characters with the greatest narrative impact: Dan and – the name itself’s a promise – Naughty Nan. With each of them, Alcott could have easily developed enough material for two separate spin-off series, and more’s the pity that she didn’t do so. Somebody ought to. It won’t be me (there’s a thought, though!). What I can offer instead is a spin-off blog post. Meanwhile, I hope the present one has done enough to pique your curiosity about the new generation of little men and women, and what they did next.

Quotations from Alcott’s letters and journals are from the following two volumes respectively:

The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott, ed. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987).

The Journals of Louisa May Alcott, ed. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989).

[1] Letter to Abigail May Alcott, Geneva, June 29 1870, Selected Letters, p.139.

[2] ‘January, February 1877’, Journals, p. 204.

[3] ‘April 1869’, Journals, p. 171.

[4] Letter to Mr. Thomas Niles, Bex [Switzerland] August 7 1870, Selected Letters, p. 144. Alcott had written part one of Little Women in about two and a half months, between May and July 1868, only to gain speed (!) when Thomas Niles had asked for a sequel, which she started in November 1868 and dispatched to the publishers on 1 January 1869. This punishing schedule had left Alcott feeling “used up”, and in two minds about the wisdom of carrying on in this fashion: “Roberts wants a new book, but am afraid to get into a vortex lest I fall ill” (‘April 1869’, Journals, p. 171).

[5] Alcott’s already mentioned letter to an unknown recipient, containing sketches of the flood of Rome and the King’s visit, closes with this brief, personal section: “I hope the New Year opens well and prosperously with you. I was just getting well into my work on ‘L.M.,’ when sad news of dear ‘John Brooke’s’ death came to darken our Christmas and unsettle my mind. But I now have a motive for work stronger than before, and if the book can be written, it shall be, for the good of the two dear little men now left to my care, for long ago I promised to try and fill John’s place if they were left fatherless”, ‘Rome, December 29 1870, Selected Letters, p.158.

[6] ‘1871 – Rome’, Journals, p.177. The new novel opens with the following inscription: “To Freddy and Johnny, the Little Men to whom she owes some of the best and happiest hours of her life, this book is gratefully dedicated by their loving ‘Aunt Weedy’”.

[7] From the ‘Preface’ of Tom Sawyer: “Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred; one or two were experiences of my own, the rest those of boys who were schoolmates of mine.”

[8] The quoted paragraph begins: “No pen can describe the adventures of these ladies, for in one short afternoon their family was the scene of births, marriages, deaths, floods, earthquakes, tea-parties and balloon ascensions. […] Fits and fires were the pet afflictions, with a general massacre now and then by way of change.”

Image: Orchard House, Concord, Massachusetts, home of the Alcott family from 1858 to 1877. Credit: Brian Jannsen / Alamy Stock Photo

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I was eight years old when my paternal grandfather died, my first experience of loss in the family. I don’t have many memories of him, and those I have probably been layered with stories I’ve since heard about him. I remember nonno Ettore as a tall, lean and very serious man. The perceived tallness, it turns out, was definitely in my child’s eye. My unreliable recollections measure him up against my other grandfather, nonno Alberto, who was twelve years younger and whose loving presence in my life I got to enjoy for much longer. Alberto was tall, but he was also broader, and larger than life in other ways: always telling jokes, fond of banter, on first name terms with all the shopkeepers in the neighbourhood. Grandma was a homebody, so he was in charge of daily foraging trips for bread from the baker’s rudimentary counter (the heart of the operation was backstage, in the oven), fresh fruit from Mimmo the greengrocer, and the sports newspaper. En route he would often stop at the local coffee bar, not so much for an espresso, but for a bit of good-natured teasing with the all-male staff, who supported a rival football team to his own.

He wore his heart on his sleeve, nonno Alberto: easily moved to tears, gregarious and easy-going. Nonna Gina (short for Regina, a queen in name and in deed) was the disciplinarian in the family, a ‘carabiniere’, the no-nonsense matriarch ruling the household. She wasn’t expansive in her demonstrations of affection, but she’d turn a blind eye when my brother and I would help ourselves to a piece of fried artichoke, still hot from the pan, as a cheeky advance of the lavish Sunday lunch to come. I’d never taste again carciofi fritti like those, stolen while still soaking with oil on their bed of kitchen roll, and seasoned with nonna Gina’s indulgence.

The good-cop / bad-cop roles were reversed with my paternal grandparents. Nonna Anna was kindness personified, gentle and genteel, infinitely patient with my brother and me. She must have read us our favourite stories ad nauseam, impervious to the repetitiveness of the task, happy to share in our childish enthusiasms. One of them was the ritual of playing with the ‘scatoloni’, big cylindrical containers of bumper quantities of laundry powder. My Mum had repurposed a couple of them – duly covered in colourful wrapping paper – as boxes for our miscellaneous plastic toys, which would tumble out loudly and with a faint smell of detergent. That noisy incipit was the best bit, an opener more exciting than any game we could play with the giant construction blocks and other knickknacks, my brother and I on the big Tunisian rug, and nonna Anna watching the whole performance from the green sofa.

Nonno Ettore was still alive then, but babysitting was not his bag. He was made of sterner stuff, the Homeric name alone conjuring up notions of heroism, integrity and zeal. To this day I associate him with his two abiding passions, though I was probably only aware of the one way back when: opera. He played it often, and he played it loud, because music was best appreciated at the volume at which one’d listen to a performance at La Scala. Never mind that he and grandma lived in an apartment, and not in a theatre. Luckily for the neighbours, nonno Ettore’s other great love was The Divine Comedy, which could be enjoyed more quietly. He had several copies of it, including a massive volume with Gustavo Doré’s illustrations, and a tiny pocket edition, printed on onionskin paper. We still have it at home in Italy. I’ve often looked at it, fascinated by the minuscule annotations in pencil in nonno Ettore’s neat handwriting.

I must ask if I can have it next time I visit Dad, who is very unsentimental about such things. He is also a contrarian, which must be the reason why he has grown up with with a visceral dislike both of opera and of The Divine Comedy. The former aversion does sadden me a bit now. Nonno Ettore’s passion skipped a generation, with some delay and variations on the theme; I got the operatic bug later in life and, by all accounts, my tastes are different from my grandfather’s. My gateway to opera was Giacomo Puccini who, according to Dad, was a bit too modern for nonno Ettore, a Verdi man through and through. My Dad can’t stand either composer, which is a shame because I’d love to swap notes with him on my belated musical enthusiasms.[1]

As to Dad’s antipathy for Dante, I find it amusing, a lesson in earthly contrappasso (the Dantesque concept of retribution): cajoled as a child to learn passages from the Commedia by heart, Dad is now completely allergic to it. I like to think that Dante would have understood. In my previous blog, I mentioned his extraordinary ability to engender sympathy for those very same characters he confines to Hell, and I promised to return to this subject. It seems appropriate to be writing this piece during Holy week, since that’s when the pilgrim Dante goes on his journey through the three realms of the afterlife. The beginning of the poet’s otherworldly adventure is usually understood to be 25 March 1300, and on that day this year – renamed Dantedì to mark the 700^th anniversary of his death – there have been many celebrations in Italy and around the world.

The Italian festivities have been marred – or livened up, depending on points of view – by an alleged slight on Dante by the German literary critic Arno Widmann who, in an article in the Frankfurter Rundschau, has accused our national poet of being a social-climber and a plagiarist, while arguing that his writing is not as readily accessible to contemporary Italian readers and as influential on our language as Shakespeare’s is on Anglophone culture. The claim about Dante’s relevance and literary stature would have been enough to get my compatriots up in arms; in the predictable ensuing media storm, various public figures have reinvented themselves as literary experts. The prize for best intervention goes to Dario Franceschini, the Minister of Culture, who tweeted “Non ragioniam di lor ma guarda e passa” (“Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass”, Inf. III, 50), a line from The Divine Comedy so famous to have become a common saying in Italian (so much for Dante’s irrelevance, Signor Widmann).[2]

I love the irony of uttering this line while essentially keeping the diatribe going. Nobody likes a controversy and does outrage quite like us Italians. It’s part of our national character to enjoy a good argument, the more pointless the better. It can never be said that we’d let an opportunity to make noise go to waste. It’s all part of the fun. And in that sense the article in the Frankfurter Rundschau is the gift that keeps on giving, because the bone of contention has morphed from Widmann’s alleged claims to the way in which they have been reported, and possibly mistranslated, by the Italian press. Needless to say, my father has remained singularly unbothered by the whole kerfuffle, with or without this meta-dimension. Or rather, he has been bothered only in so far as Dante has clogged up the airwaves on a week when there was more than enough of him already for Dad’s liking.

With apologies to my father, I’d like to offer here my own modest homage to The Divine Comedy by highlighting a couple of its most moving passages. The place to start from is Canto V of Inferno, the second circle of Hell, where the lustful are swept around by an eternal whirlwind, just as in life they were prey to uncontrollable passions. Dante and his guide Virgil spot a number of mythological and historical figures in the storm – Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Tristan, and Dido, amongst others – but the pilgrim’s curiosity is stirred by a couple who “seem upon the wind to be so light” (75). They are two near contemporaries of Dante’s, Paolo and Francesca. He asks to hear their story, and the woman obliges, providing an eloquent exposition of the doctrine of courtly love in three tercets of such stunning beauty that I wouldn’t dream of paraphrasing them:

“Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende,               “Love, that on gentle heart doth swiftly seize,
prese costui de la bella persona.                             Seized this man for the person beautiful
che mi fu tolta; e ’l modo ancor m’offende.          That was ta’en from me, and still the mode offends me.

Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona,                 Love, that exempts no one beloved from loving,
mi prese del costui piacer sì forte,                          Seized me with pleasure of this man so strongly,
che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona.             That, as thou seest, it doth not yet desert me;

Amor condusse noi ad una morte.                          Love has conducted us unto one death;
Caina attende chi a vita ci spense.”                         Caina waiteth him who quenched our life!”
Queste parole da lor ci fuor porte.                          These words were borne along from them to us.[3]

Profoundly touched by this speech, Dante wants to know how the two fell in love. This further request prompts from Francesca the very human consideration that there is no greater pain than to remember happiness in time of sorrow. Nonetheless, she recounts that she and Paolo had been reading together of how Launcelot had been enthralled by love (for Guinevere, King Arthur’s wife – another touchstone of courtly passion). Alone with each other, they had been following the story, without malice, until the point when Launcelot kisses his beloved: “Galeotto [a go-between] was the book and he who wrote it. / That day no farther did we read therein” (137-38). While Francesca is talking, Paolo weeps. Dante is so affected by the scene that, he says, “I swooned away as if I had been dying, / And fell, even as a dead body falls” (141-42). Thus ends the canto, with a double affirmation of the intensity of emotion that storytelling can provoke in us.[4]

The power of words is reiterated in Dante’s later encounter with Pier delle Vigne, Frederick II’s closest counselor, who lost the emperor’s trust when he was targeted by false rumours. He is one of the sinners in the second ring of the seventh circle of Hell, where those who have committed violence against themselves have been turned into barren, knotted trees.[5] Dante finds out about this transformation abruptly because, when he cannot fathom the source of the moans and cries in what looks like a deserted forest, he is invited by Virgil to tear a twig from a branch.[6] “Why dost thou mangle me?” (Inf. XIIII, 33) complains the tree, bleeding from the cut and ill-disposed towards his unwitting offender. Virgil intervenes to sweet-talk Pier delle Vigne into telling his story, suggesting that it might restore his reputation. The damned is won over by Virgil’s kind entreaty and explains how he came to his doom: “My spirit, in disdainful exultation, / Thinking by dying to escape disdain, / Made me unjust against myself, the just” (70-2). After this revelation, Dante is once more lost for words. He – and we – must rely on Virgil to continue the conversation with the soul who had once “both keys had in keeping / Of Frederick’s heart” (58-9).

In these two episodes, words exculpate and accuse, seduce and injure. An even greater contrast is to be found between Dante-the-character and Dante-the-writer: the one, overwhelmed by pity, is rendered incapable of speech, while the other bestows literary immortality through his epic poem. And so it is that Pier delle Vigne gets his posthumous rehabilitation, and Paolo and Francesca ascend to the pantheon of legendary lovers that includes those famous figures who had preceded them in their canto. The story of Paolo and Francesca has been celebrated by several artists, including the pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriele Rossetti, the Romantic poet Leigh Hunt and the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninov.

The most glorious case of artistic redemption based on The Divine Comedy, however – sorry, Dad – is in one of Puccini’s later, and lesser-known, works, Il Trittico, a tryptic of one-act operas which takes us from the dark, hopeless tragedy of ‘Il tabarro’ (‘The cloak’) through the heart-wrenching, redemptive melodrama of ‘Suor Angelica’ (‘Sister Angelica’) to the uplifting, life-affirming comedy of ‘Gianni Schicchi’. The twist in the tale is that the eponymous protagonist of the final part of the sequence is taken straight from the depths of Hell, where he makes a brief appearance in Canto XXX. Schicchi is amongst the fraudulent for his most egregious crime: impersonating the deceased Buono Donati in order to forge his will. We barely see Schicchi in Inferno, and we don’t hear from him at all; he is too busy fighting with a fellow sinner to talk to us.

Puccini takes this minor, silent character in The Divine Comedy, and turns him into a lovable scoundrel, who does defraud the Donatis but for an extremely good cause. The Donatis are a venal, self-interested, hypocritical bunch, who have been waiting eagerly for Buono’s demise in order to cash in the inheritance. Florentine born-and-bred, they look down on the likes of Schicchi, a self-made man from the Tuscan countryside; the matriarch, Zita, won’t grant Rinuccio, her nephew, permission to marry Lauretta, Schicchi’s dowry-less daughter. Schicchi will save the day by turning Buoso’s most precious possessions over to himself, making it possible for the young lovers to marry. In this delightful light opera Puccini gives us a picture of Italian families at their worst and at their best: the Donatis’ cacophonous squabbling, the love-birds’ dreams of a spring wedding and Schicchi’s ingenuity, fuelled by paternal affection, yield vibrant ensemble singing, sweet duets and an all-time favourite aria in Lauretta’s ‘O mio babbino caro’.

At the end of the opera, Dante himself gets a playful tribute. In a brief spoken epilogue, Gianni Schicchi breaks the fourth wall, asking the audience whether Buoso’s money could have ended in better hands. Then he adds: “For this prank, I’ve been sent to Hell…and so be it; but with our great father Dante’s permission, if this evening you’ve had fun, I entreat you to grant me [he claps] extenuating circumstances”. I know I’m biased, but isn’t this the most joyous, immersive example of redemption through art? Minutes earlier, in the last exquisite duet of the piece, Rinuccio and Lauretta have seen their future and its possibility spreading ahead of them. They look over Fiesole, on the outskirts of the city, where they had their first kiss. Together, they reminisce: “Florence, from afar, looked like Paradise to us”.

I have always loved this final duet, so full of youthful hope and innocence. That, and Puccini’s sublime orchestration, are enough to bring tears to my eyes, but of late that final line opens the floodgates. The pandemic has exiled me from Italy, and from my Italian family. In entwining my private passions and personal reminiscences with my literary reflections, I hope to have entertained you; but if I have digressed too much, dear readers, consider my nostalgia for Italy, and grant me extenuating circumstances.

Dr Stefania Ciocia is a proud immigrant, who made a home in the U.K. twenty-odd years ago. She is a Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University. You can find her on Twitter as Gained in Translation @StefaniaCiocia.

Main image: Gustave Doré, Dante and Virgil in the Ninth Circle of Hell, The Divine Comedy painting, 1861 Credit: Incamerastock / Alamy Stock Photo

Top Left: Alberto e Gina Top Right: Anna e Ettore Middle Left: Nonno’s Libretto and mine Middle Right: Doré’s Pier delle Vigne from Ettore’s copy of the Commedia  Bottom: Lucio Gallo as Schicchi in the Royal Opera House 2011 production of Il Trittico

[1] Dad enjoys classical music provided it involves no singing, with the sole exception of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. I have no formal musical education to speak of, and it took me years to branch out beyond Puccini, who remains a firm favourite of mine. My other great operatic love is Handel, whose back catalogue will keep me busy for a while longer. I wonder what nonno Ettore would make of his grand-daughter’s patchy, self-taught musical knowledge. I operate on instinct alone, in pursuit of that ecstatic feeling that certain compositions trigger in me. I know it when I hear it. I can honestly say that this ongoing journey of discovery is a marvellous source of pleasure in my life.

[2] Virgil utters these words to Dante – a cue for him not to ask any more questions on the matter – as a sign of his contempt for the pusillanimous, those “who lived withouten infamy or praise” (Inf. III, 36; another phrase that has entered common parlance). They are the first group of damned whom Dante and Virgil encounter in Hell. Those guilty of moral apathy are not even worthy of Hell proper; they are not assigned to one of its nine circles but can be found just beyond the infernal gate. They will spend eternity running naked after a flag (contrappasso for being unable to commit to a cause in life) while being stung by wasps and hornets. The translation I am using for this blog is Henry Wadsworth Longefellow’s.

[3] Inferno, V, 99-108. The anaphora (repetition of “Love” at the beginning of each stanza) is but the most obvious sign of Francesca’s rhetorical skills; it is often noted that she is careful to emphasise her role as innocent victim of external forces: love, Launcelot’s story, Paolo’s passion, her husband’s revenge. Although it is Francesca who speaks, line 108 attributes her words to Paolo too, for even in death they are as one. Francesca da Rimini was forced into a marriage of convenience with the much older, unattractive Gianciotto Malatesta, Paolo’s brother. On his death – yet to happen at the time of composition of The Divine Comedy – Gianciotto will end up in Caina for killing the adulterous lovers. “Caina” (after Cain) is the place in the ninth circle of Hell reserved for those who betrayed their family members, as Gianciotto did with the murder of his wife and brother.

[4] I love the reversal of traditional gender roles: Francesca tells us of the strength of her feelings, Dante shows us by fainting.

[5] Although the historical sources are far from unanimous on the matter, according to Dante Pier delle Vigne was driven to suicide. The punishment for violence against oneself is meant to reflect the sinner’s lack of respect for the human form. Pier delle Vigne’s gnarly trunk also reflects his elaborate, tortuous syntax, as befits a man of law.

[6] Virgil’s cruel suggestion is Dante-the-poet’s opportunity to pay homage to his guide’s famous epic poem. In Book III of the Aeneid, blood comes out of a shrub whose branches Aeneas has been gathering for a sacrifice. The shrub has grown on the place where Polydorus, Priam’s youngest son, was treacherously killed, as the voice of the dead Trojan prince explains to Aeneas, while begging for a proper burial. When Dante is shocked by the talking-and-bleeding tree, Virgil tells him off for not remembering Polydorus’s story from the Aeneid.

The post Private passions and Italian families appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

After the initial shock at the new restrictions, the panic-buying and the logistical challenges of working from home, there was a point during the first lockdown in March 2020 when the creeping realization that we would be in this for the long haul sparked a resurgence in interest in books about real and fictional epidemics. Sales of Albert Camus’s 1947 novel The Plague boomed, and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron expanded its reach beyond the Italian school-system, and world-literature syllabi. It’s not often that a late-medieval masterpiece starts trending as a go-to topical read, but Boccaccio’s collection of a hundred tales told by ten young people who are self-isolating at the outskirts of Florence in 1348, while the Black Death is ravaging the city, seems ready-made, structurally and thematically, for virtual literary get-togethers. It is also exactly the kind of big, bold reading ‘project’ for the endless, groundhog days of these pandemic times.[1] (My own big reads of 2020 have been Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, and they’ve both bountifully spilled over into 2021.)

If 2020 has been good to Boccaccio, 2021 promises to thrust into the limelight his precursor and unsurpassed master of Italian literature: Dante Alighieri.[2] On the 700th anniversary of his death, Dante (the surname is surplus to requirement) remains a towering figure in the western canon, comparable to Shakespeare in the way he has left his mark on his native language, and in the cross-cultural influence of his powerful imagination. The epic vision of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise in the The Divine Comedy is at the root of a conception of the three realms of the afterlife as physical spaces, mapped out according to rational and just principles; we resort to this idea in the common expression – usually uttered from a sense of having been sinned against – that “there is a special place in Hell” reserved for every particular kind of sinner.

The rhetorical power of this turn of phrase has a bipartisan appeal, as evidenced in the invocations of a special place in Hell for “women who don’t help each other”, for “any foreign leader that engages in bad-faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump”, and for “those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan for how to carry it [out] safely”. We owe these additions to Dante’s infernal topography to former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (speaking of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential candidacy), Republican economist Peter Navarro and former European council president Donald Tusk, respectively. Their soundbites are a catchy opener for BBC Europe editor Katya Adler’s ‘Dante 2021’, a three-part exploration of how The Divine Comedy speaks to our present moment from across the centuries.

The first weekly episode was broadcast on Radio 4 on 11 January, and the whole programme is now available on BBC Sounds. A self-confessed Italophile (extra brownie points), Adler goes to town in arguing for Dante’s relevance. His anguished journey into the depths of Hell, followed by the difficult yet hopeful ascent through Purgatory into Paradise chimes with the experience of loss and the apocalyptic mood of the past year, which has forced us into a collective reconsideration of our values and priorities, as well as private soul-searching for reservoirs of resilience and faith in the future.

The broader parallels between then and now are not always on target, though. Adler is good at emphasizing Dante’s keen sense of social justice, his unrestrained contempt for the fat cats of his time, and his suspicion at the morality of a banking system that makes money out of money. The analogies wear thin when we are invited to think of the snaking of Minos’s tail as a demonic algorithm, programmed to match every damned soul to the appropriate circle of Hell.[3] “I know this is silly”, Adler admits. With that remark she almost gets me on side, even as I don’t quite follow where she goes next, with the idea of The Divine Comedy as an early example of virtual reality. Isn’t that true of any act of imagination? Isn’t the very act of opening the pages of a work of fiction a stepping into a virtual reality? Perhaps I’m being harsh.

The thing is, by the time the first episode concludes with Dante and the world of gaming, I’m already lost in a dark wood of outrage. For me, Adler oversteps the mark – the irony! – in her reading of Ulysses as a populist demagogue. In one of the most famous passages of Inferno, as I have written in greater detail here, Ulysses reminisces about the “folle volo” (“mad flight”) he took with his comrades, when he convinced them to sail with him past the pillars of Hercules, the limits of the known world and, as it turns out, literally the end of the earth. To reduce Ulysses’s impassioned, rousing appeal to one of the noblest human instincts – our thirst for knowledge and discovery – into the manipulative, self-interested rhetoric of petty politicians really is a sin deserving of its special place in Hell.

And yet, there is much to like about ‘Dante 2021’, especially when it stops trying so bloody hard. A few final points on this score: the tripartite division is a no-brainer, as is Adler’s canny choice of guides for each realm of the underworld, in an echo of the Comedy where Dante has Virgil and Beatrice to rely on during his journey. (And, anyway, who am I to pass judgement on lame nods to the poem when I’ve put two in the previous paragraph?) But the numerological framework – the programme aims to offer twenty-one reasons to read Dante in the twenty-first year of the twenty-first century – lands a bit flat.

I’m sure Dante would have appreciated the homage. His poem plays on the pregnant significance of numbers, beginning from its very structure. Each of the three canticles contains thirty-three cantos (an additional one in Inferno serves as an introduction to the whole work and brings up the total to a round one-hundred) written in terza rima (the rhyme scheme is aba, bcb, cdc, etc.), for three is a symbol of perfection and of the Christian divinity. Adler’s enthusiastic reprisal of numerology gets top marks for effort, but is too flimsy even to be rescued by her knowingness. It diminishes the enterprise, boiling it down to a list rather than adding an extra dimension to it, because it’s too close to the lazy journalism of “Top ten…” articles that have become ubiquitous fodder against the demands of 24/7 content production.

Leaving the framework aside, things pick up in the discussions about Purgatorio and Paradiso, which I found more insightful, and a reason for persevering with this series. The second episode made me see Purgatorio in a new light, as the most interesting of the canticles, rather than the neither-fish-nor-fowl intermediary realm, a place we must slog through on the way to our heavenly destination. Adler’s guide here, Professor Matthew Treherne from the Centre for Dante Studies at the University of Leeds, talks about the connection between dubious financial practices in the present day and in Dante’s time, when the banking industry was in its infancy. But what got me thinking was another comment of his, said half in jest, about the truism that Inferno has the most compelling characters. As Treherne points out, you wouldn’t want to be stuck with them for eternity: after ten minutes in their company, you’d find that they are bores, self-obsessed, mono-maniacal.

I see what he’s getting at. Dante’s damned are memorable because the enormity of their sins is the large canvas they are painted on – the colours bold and vivid, but from a limited palette. They are not interested in interacting with one another, unless the connection is part of their punishment, as in the case of Count Ugolino della Gherardesca. Guilty of treason, he is locked up to his neck in ice – a symbol of the hard-heartedness inherent in this crime – and gnaws for eternity on the skull of archbishop Ruggiero, the man who betrayed him in turn. Ugolino’s perpetual act of revenge on his enemy is contrappasso (retribution) for the terrible fate to which he was condemned by Ruggiero: imprisoned in the torre Muda, Ugolino starved to death, having witnessed his children perish one by one to the same fate.

The story of Ugolino and his young sons folds horror upon horror; when, in despair at the slow inevitability of their demise, the count bites on his hands, his children mistake the gesture as a sign of hunger and offer themselves to him: “…Father, we should grieve / Far less, if thou wouldst eat of us: thou gav’st / These weeds of miserable flesh we wear, / And do thou strip them off from us again.” (Inf. XXXIII, 58-61). Days later, Ugolino – rendered blind by starvation – gropes for his dead children: “Then fasting / Got the mastery of grief” (73-4), he tells Dante, concluding his account. These parting words contain a chilling ambiguity. Ostensibly they refer to the manner of his death, but they also hint at an unspeakable act of cannibalism which might have preceded it. And, just like this, Ugolino returns to his “fiero pasto” (“fell repast”).

Treherne is right: Hell is rife with solipsism. The spotlight on the damned is for our benefit, not theirs. In this sense, their exchanges with Dante are never genuine, because they lack the foundation for reciprocity. With the exception of Dante himself, nobody’s getting anywhere. And yet. And yet, the poet is repeatedly moved to pity in his encounters with the damned. If they have lost the capacity to connect, Dante – and, by extension, us readers – haven’t. In fact, this is the greatest triumph of Inferno: that it invites us to see the spark of humanity in the monstrous. But I’ll have to save fuller treatment of this point for another time.

Professor Treherne’s observation that Purgatorio is about change stands. There is no movement, no character development, in the other two realms. And, having left behind the ineffability of sin in the likes of Ugolino, once we get to Paradiso we must face the ineffability of grace. This poses something of a narrative problem, arguably more acute in the last canticle than in the first. Adler tackles it head on when she greets her third guide, Dr Vittorio Montemaggi, with the provocation that Paradiso is a hard sell, because the devil has the best tunes. Montemaggi’s interpretative key to Paradiso is an invitation to latch on to its definition of love as the first principle, the energy “that moves the sun in heav’n and all the stars”, in the poem’s famous closing line.

The focus on love as connection, as our essential need for connection – so evident at this time when we cannot physically be with one another – makes Paradiso accessible, even without an in-depth understanding of medieval theology and of Dante’s religious beliefs (and prejudices, which are rightly taken to task in the third episode of the programme). The corollary to the compelling power of “l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” is that if Inferno shows us the humanity in the monstrous, Paradiso unveils the divinity in the human. This is why it’s worth embarking on this journey. But there’s worth and there’s worthy. Dante’s idea that in seeing God, we become God is ribbed as a “such a wonderful thing, so simple to understand, so simple!” in an exuberant, affectionate exegesis by Roberto Benigni, the Oscar-winning Italian actor and director of Life is Beautiful. It is a hard sell.

Or is it? As I was pondering this, I thought of a similar call, a call we’ve heard much more recently, from a young poet, on one of those very few public occasions when we still turn to poets to tell us where we are, remind us how we got here, and show us the way forward. In revisiting Dante, in the twenty-first year of the twenty-first century, my mind goes to Amanda Gorman’s impeccable rendition of ‘The Hill We Climb’, her powerful poem for the inauguration of President Biden, a work that manages to be life-affirming without embroidering reality.

Gorman too charts a difficult ascent, the continuation of an arduous journey during which we’ve already stumbled and fallen, and are bound to do so again. We’re in a different context from Dante, of course. The hill we climb with Gorman is less a vision of Purgatory (though it is that too), and more obviously a reference to John Winthrop’s ideal of America as the “City upon a Hill”, a beacon of hope and a moral example for the rest of the world. The shared metaphor of the ascent is inevitable, built into our way of conceptualizing what is good, whether we hail from a Christian background or not.

But Gorman’s call to action so that “Love becomes our legacy” takes me back to Dante with greater firmness, as does her insistence on our agency.[4] Both writers return to these concepts at the end of their poems. As he basks in the light of God, and in a blissful sense of unity and harmony, Dante experiences a revelation that leaves him speechless: “Here vigour fail’d the tow’ring fantasy: / But yet the will roll’d onward, like a wheel / In even motion, by the Love impell’d, / That moves the sun in heav’n and all the stars” (Par. XXXIII, 132-35). Gorman too concludes on a luminous vision where we become that which inspires out of the dark: “The new dawn blooms as we free it. / For there is always light, / if only we’re brave enough to see it. / If only we’re brave enough to be it.”

Dr Stefania Ciocia is a Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University. You can find her on Twitter as Gained in Translation @StefaniaCiocia.

Image: Eugene Delacroix The Barque of Dante (Dante and Virgil in the Underworld) Credit: Artepics / Alamy Stock Photo

[1] Also inspired by Boccaccio is the Decameron Project: 29 Stories from the Pandemic, commissioned by The New York Times Magazine. This all-fiction issue – featuring, amongst others, Margaret Atwood, Edwidge Danticat, Téa Obreht, Kamila Shamsie, and Colm Tóibín – was published on 10 November 2020, with the strap-line “When reality is surreal, only fiction can make sense of it”. For pandemic-free book recommendations, see Sally Minogue’s blog on lockdown reads.

[2] Boccaccio (1313 – 1375) admired Dante (1265 – 1321) hugely, and wrote the first commentary to the Comedy. In fact, he is credited with giving it the qualifier Divine. For a taster of what the Italian literary critic Francesco De Sanctis called Boccaccio’s “hearthly comedy”, see my own piece on the Decameron.

[3] The eternal punishment of each sinner is determined by the number of times king Minos coils his tail around his body.

[4] Dante celebrates it openly in Paradiso: “Supreme of gifts, which God creating gave / Of his free bounty, sign most evident / Of goodness, and in his account most priz’d, / Was liberty of will, the boon wherewith / All intellectual creatures, and them sole / He hath endowed” (Par. V, 18 -23).

The post Dante 2021 and the hills we climb appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

The pleasure of revisiting cultural favourites has been one of my coping strategies against the uncertainty of these strange, scary times. Stuck at home, with no immediate prospect of seeing my family in Italy, and still counting my blessings, I find that I have little to no mental energy to be adventurous in my artistic pursuits. I cling to the comfort of old friends – books and films and live performances – which I am sure will repay my attention with the special solace of treading well-known and much-loved paths, with the added pathos that I was last there in less anxious circumstances.

In the past few weeks alone, I have been back to Italy more often than in the twenty-odd years since I left it: I have taken in the fragrance of the Ligurian lemons in Eugenio Montale’s poetry, felt the harshness, and the life-giving power, of the Mediterranean in Giovanni Verga’s I Malavoglia, clung on to the hope against hope in the last line of Eduardo De Filippo’s Napoli milionaria (“Adda passa’ ‘a nuttata”: “this night too shall pass”). I have basked in the innocent energy of a country poised on the brink of modernity, the post-war “Italian miracle”, captured by Vittorio De Sica’s The Gold of Naples and Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, and Mario Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street. I wish these jewels were all better known outside Italy.

Turning away from my native shores, I have continued to self-medicate with abundant helpings of a slightly different kind of nostalgia, tuning in to the online streaming of performances that I was lucky enough to see live at the theatre. Recent highlights include Inua Ellams’ vibrant Afropolitan The Barber Shop Chronicles at the National Theatre, a groovy Glyndebourne production of Le nozze di Figaro (which I’d first caught on tour here in Canterbury about a decade ago), and the absolute rollercoaster of emotions that is Puccini’s Il Trittico, in its Royal Opera House staging.[1] Yet as I burrow deep into the familiar, I remind myself that there’s a unique joy to be had in serendipitous encounters and discoveries, happiness augmented by magical thinking, by the conviction that the planets must have aligned for a certain book or film or show to have landed into one’s lap.

Last summer I experienced a delicious mingling of these two pleasures – the warmth of reacquaintance and the thrill of the unexpected – with an intensity that floored me. I had been travelling through Tuscany, following an itinerary that I’d uncharacteristically plotted with great care before setting off from the UK. I’d wanted to cram a bit of everything into that visit: the clear seaside of the Maremma, the rolling hills around Siena, before heading north to pay homage to Puccini in his home town of Lucca, and proceed on a whimsical cultural pilgrimage to Volterra in the footsteps of Hema and Kaushik, the protagonists of the narrative triptych at the close of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth.

My travel companion had been happy to go along with my recommendations: he hadn’t been to Lucca before, and the mysterious Etruscan past of dour Volterra appealed to him. Besides, you can’t really go wrong in Tuscany: dove caschi, caschi bene. You’re bound to end up somewhere good. As it happens, I owe my most enduring memory from that trip to one impromptu contribution to the itinerary made by my partner, who suggested that we should stop en route to see for ourselves “the utopian city” of Pienza.

Perched on a hilltop in the Val d’Orcia, it was the site of a famous experiment of urban redevelopment executed by Barnardo Rossellino in accordance with the symmetrical patterns and ideal proportions propounded by Leon Battista Alberti, the father of Renaissance architecture. The works were carried out under the patronage of the humanist Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who had been born there in 1405 and had become pope Pius II in 1458. The year after his election marked the beginning of the transformation of Corsignano, as the village was then known, into Pienza, thus renamed to celebrate its most illustrious citizen and benefactor. The city of Pius remains to date one of the best-preserved examples of fifteenth-century urban planning. Its luminous cathedral dominates the relatively small main square, but the beauty of the Duomo is no match to the showstopper that is discreetly in store for the visitors of the adjacent Palazzo Piccolomini.

The entrance to the building is through a square inner courtyard surrounded by an elegant portico, but I challenge any visitor to head straight indoors before walking into the “back” garden to which this space also leads. It is an exquisite, perfectly proportioned Italian garden, with box hedges and citrus plants in huge terracotta pots; you look around, fit to burst with the harmony of the setting until your gaze turns to an arch that reveals a breathtaking view of the valley. And that’s the coup de grace, a full assault to the senses: you are in a Renaissance painting. Ambushed by such a surfeit of beauty, I burst into tears. It was an instant, the suddenness of the discovery, that made it so affecting. Later on, gorging more fully on the same landscape, from the loggia on the second floor of the building, still felt amazing, a gift from the gods, but not as miraculous as that first, electrifying impression.

The older I get, the easier I well up. I wouldn’t have thought this is uncommon. I have long stopped thinking of myself as a tough cookie, unsentimental, the serious, studious, cerebral girl, the role allotted to me in my extended family when I was growing up. In my mid-forties, I enjoy being overwhelmed by things of beauty. I think I am lucky to feel so strongly, though it does occasionally embarrass me, this crying in public for no apparent reason. So I skulked around in the Piccolomini garden, trying not to be seen by fellow tourists. We were mercifully few on that intemperate summer day, brandishing our mobile phones and audio guides, timing our photographs with the sunny breaks from the rain. I might have just about held it together, had it not been for the music piping through the courtyard, on a loop: the love theme from Nino Rota’s soundtrack to Romeo and Juliet.

For, you see, Palazzo Piccolomini is cast as the Capulets’ house, while Pienza passes itself off as Verona, in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 cinematic take on Shakespeare’s play. A giant photograph of Olivia Hussey as Juliet had greeted me in the inner courtyard of the building, part of a temporary exhibition about the making of the film, telling me that I had been there before, in my travels on celluloid. After the holiday, I rushed to get a copy of the film to go back to Pienza. I have recently watched it again, for much the same reason, and as a memorial of sorts for the great Italian director, who died a year ago today.

His Romeo and Juliet has aged remarkably well, even if it has been surpassed in popularity by Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 extravagant modern-day reimagining of the star-crossed lovers’ tragic tale. The earlier film broke new ground for Zeffirelli’s bold decision to cast two unknown teenagers in the title roles: Olivia Hussey was only sixteen and Leonard Whiting seventeen when the film was released. Their youth is as dazzling as their beauty, but I disagree with those who see it as giving a topical edge to the story at a time of student protest, political activism and rebellion all over the world. Zeffirelli reclaims the main characters to adolescence, but their transgressions – such as they are – are in the personal rather than the public sphere, their actions fuelled by self-absorbed desire rather than a generational conflict about values, or the more indistinct dissatisfaction with the status quo that is the prerogative of our teenage years.

“Romeo was your first ‘rebel without a cause’”, according to Luhrmann. Not so for Zeffirelli: his Romeo is an innocent, with the impetuosity of youth in his volatile affection for poor Rosaline, in the tender, all-consuming passion for Juliet, in his naïve goodwill towards quarrelsome Tybalt, in the accidental role he plays in the killing of Mercutio, and the instinctive violence he unleashes to avenge him. One would think he hadn’t just witnessed the mortal consequences of sword-fighting, judging from his horrified reaction at his own murder of Tybalt.

Juliet too is a child, schooled by her mother to accept her engagement to Paris as an honour, and petted and teased by the Nurse. The older woman has other, more carnal joys in mind than the prestige of the husband-to-be when she congratulates her charge for her impending nuptials. Her bawdiness highlights the otherworldly purity that Juliet retains throughout her relationship with Romeo: from her concerns about propriety in the balcony scene, to her demure piety during the marriage ceremony, and her immaculate, doe-eyed appearance when she wakes up next to her husband after the wedding night. The thing about Romeo and Juliet is that their constant reaching for one another is both utterly convincing and strangely asexual as if they were playing at being grown-ups, engrossed in a game – a dress rehearsal for an imperfect life they will never get to live – with the sincerity of inexperience.

When dawn breaks on their marital bed, and the camera pans on their naked bodies, we are treated to an exquisite sight, white sheets carefully draped as if sculpted in marble, the recumbent forms impossibly good-looking and composed. It is a celebration of beauty so idealized that it looks almost incorporeal, and chaste, despite the amount of flesh on display. The two newlyweds are a picture of edenic grace, their mutual attraction an aesthetic inevitability more than the by-product of raging hormones. The knowledge that this is the last time they’ll see each other alive is heartbreaking.

In no other Shakespearean play is there such an abrupt change from comedic possibilities to tragic doom. Mercutio’s death is like the flicking of a switch: from courtly revels and love at first sight, from the trusting expectancy of youth and the delight of secret rendezvous, we plunge headlong into a nightmare.[2] Romeo and Juliet respond to this about-turn as the children that they are: they bawl their eyes out. Theirs are not silent tears, but full-blown, dramatic tantrums, wringing of hands and rolling on the floor included, a literal rendition of the “Blubbering and weeping, weeping and blubbering” with which the Nurse describes Juliet’s distress.

And if Friar Laurence’s stern reprimand of Romeo is a call for the disconsolate lad to pull himself together (the “There are thou happy” speech a proper telling off), the Capulets’ response to their daughter’s anguished refusal to marry Paris is shocking in its psychological violence. Added to the coercive behaviour of Juliet’s parents, the Nurse’s pragmatic advice that the girl may well find happiness in her second marriage is the final betrayal perpetrated by one generation against another. It will find an echo in the Friar’s repeated, cowardly “I dare no longer stay”, when he abandons Juliet to discover that Romeo lies dead next to her in the vault. Against their elders’ dereliction of duty, the young are all alone.

And, in a nutshell, this is the fundamental difference between Zeffirelli’s and Luhrmann’s vision. One expects no better of the gaudy, seedy, morally-decadent Verona beach, with its gun-toting, drug-taking, hedonist characters. In that highly performative world, where even Miriam Margolyes’s Nurse is a wallflower against her riotous, colourful surroundings, the protagonists’ innocence is relative, and comes pre-packaged in their fancy-dress costumes: Claire Danes’ Juliet as an angel, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Romeo as a knight in shining armour. Capulet’s rage towards his daughter is in keeping with his mobster persona, as is the parental void left unfilled by Lady Capulet: her perfunctory administering of maternal advice while getting trussed up as Cleopatra in the opening scene with Juliet tells us everything we need to know about the domestic priorities in this household.

But in Zeffirelli’s traditional staging, under the Tuscan sun, against glorious Renaissance architecture, with sumptuous costumes, and plangent madrigals, the death of the beautiful innocent young couple is the ultimate irruption of chaos into order. Of course, Mercutio, played with dark energy by John McEnery, knew of the horror lurking beneath the surface of things all along. After the intermission (remember those?), Zeffirelli shows us McEnery seeking shelter from the heat, his face shrouded by a handkerchief and turned into a grotesque by his babbling. It’s an arresting image, a foreshadowing of ingenious simplicity from a director better known for the lavishness of his productions. Compared to Luhrmann’s, Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet is positively understated. It is well-worth rediscovering though. Especially if, like me, you enjoy racking up frequent flier’s miles with your armchair travelling.

Dr Stefania Ciocia is a Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University. You can find her on Twitter as Gained in Translation @StefaniaCiocia.

Main image: Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting in Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet 1968
AF archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Blog images courtesy of Stefania Ciocia
[1] Allow me a shout out for Giorgetta’s ‘È ben altro il mio sogno’ as being on a par with Puccini’s most famous arias. It’s a distillation of yearning into music, a visceral expression of homesickness.

[2] After Romeo is exiled to Mantua, the narrative hurtles towards its conclusion: no killing of Paris, no mucking about with the apothecary, the latter perhaps a cut too much. Does Romeo always carry a vial of poison in his doublet?

The post Under the Tuscan sun with Romeo and Juliet appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

“I’ve decided. I want to own my own book”, says Jo March to her publisher, settling the question of who will hold the copyright to Little Women. With this pronouncement, she draws to a close her bargaining with Mr Dashwood, not only over advances and royalties but over the very soul of her manuscript. Her logic is impeccable (“If I’m going to sell my heroine into marriage for money, I might as well get some of it”) and the mood of the scene is quietly triumphant. The young writer has come a long way from her first visit to the office of the Weekly Volcano, seven years – and two hours’ worth of deeply satisfying film-watching – earlier.

She is also recognizably the same person, ambitious and pragmatic, only more sanguine about compromises and canny about the returns she can expect for getting things right. Back in the opening scene, she had winced through Mr Dashwood’s savage editing of her short story but had accepted both the money and the advice doled out to the ‘writer-friend’ on whose behalf she had claimed to be acting: “Tell her to make it short and spicy. And if the main character’s a girl make sure she’s married by the end. [Pause.] Or dead, either way.”

Mr Dashwood’s glib suggestion that marriage and death are interchangeably suitable destinations in a woman’s life is a pointed departure from the “make it short and spicy, and never mind the moral” in Louisa May Alcott’s original text. Greta Gerwig’s screenplay gets straight to a recurrent concern in her adaptation of Little Women, where the tensions between creative, emotional and financial independence are explored overtly, especially as they unfold in the first-hand experience, and observations, of the female artist and inform, by choice as well as expediency, her professional output.

Alcott shared with Jo a familiarity with the need for ruthless editorial interventions: on 4th February 1864, she had left the manuscript of her first novel, Moods, with her publisher, who had promised: “to have it out by May”. Her journal note continues: “The next day received [sic] a telegram to come down at once & see the printers. Went & was told the story was too long for a single volume & a two-volume novel was bad enough, to begin with.” Alcott refused to shorten the text, feeling that she had made enough cuts to it already. She would revisit her decision, at the request of a different editor, before the year was out.

Tussles over the length of a manuscript are one thing. Feisty discussions – and the tactical capitulation – over marrying off one’s heroines are another. This detail belongs entirely to Alcott’s career, rather than her character’s, though of course, it refers to Jo’s fate and that of her sisters in Part 2 of Little Women.[1] In this case, too, the author complied with what her editor and her readers demanded, but she still managed to make mischief by marrying Jo to the unglamorous Professor Bhaer, and not to his younger, richer, heart-throbbier rival Laurie. It is to Gerwig’s credit that has drawn attention to the marriage question, she proceeds to tackle it and disentangle her narrative from it at the same time, in a way which Alcott would have surely approved of. But more on that later.

The blending of Alcott and Jo as authors of Little Women – a metafictional twist was already seen in Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 adaptation – is reprised when Jo declares to bride-to-be Meg “I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe”, words which the cognoscenti recognise from Louisa May’s journals. It’s a brilliant line, and a delicious titbit for Gerwig to throw at fellow Alcottian nerds. But even as I enjoyed every little reference to the connections between the character and her author when it came to the scene where Jo lays out the pages of her manuscript on the floor what leapt out to me was the dramatization not so much of Alcott’s writerly act but of Gerwig’s own creative vortex.

The jumbled-up chronology of her film is the most immediately distinctive element of this version of Little Women, which begins on the eve of the publication of the novel in 1868, backtracks to the Gardiners’ New Year’s party, and to the famous “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents”, in 1861 and afterwards interweaves the two unfolding storylines throughout, until they meet and (possibly?) merge at the end. This narrative structure has not found universal approval. Some people have complained that it is confusing and hard to keep track of; instead of adding anything of value, it distracts us from following the development of the characters.

These naysayers are wrong. Not only does the dual timeline keep the story – so well-known even to people who have never read the book – fresh, but it gives it a new pace, great energy and liveliness which the original lacks on those occasions when Alcott succumbs to didacticism or to what I think of as her ‘completist’ instinct.[2] The carefully judged juxtapositions of past and present highlight particular themes or links between various episodes in the lives of the four girls. For example, we see Jo’s nurturing side, and her sense of responsibility, as she moves from fretting by Amy’s bedside after the ice-skating incident to looking after Bethas if she could affect her recovery through sheer strength of will. This feat works once but not twice, for the second panicked rush from Beth’s empty bedroom to the kitchen leads to a heart-stricken Marmee instead of a convalescing patient. It is a coming-of-age moment for Jo who, in a reversal of roles, must console her own mother for Beth’s loss.

The two scenes at the beach also mark significant changes brought on by the passage of time. They encapsulate respectively the golden glow and promise of childhood – the happiness of Amy’s self-assured first encounter with Fred Vaughn when Beth is still rose-cheeked when the rough-and-tumble friendship between Jo and Laurie is emphasised by its contrast with Meg’s budding romance with John Brooke – and Beth’s intimations of mortality. Beth and Jo’s facing up to the reality of their imminent parting feeds into the elder sister’s discovery of her true vocation as a writer of simple, unaffected domestic stories, a role whose political implications will be teased out towards the end of the film by Amy.

Much has been said of how Gerwig’s script, and Florence Pugh’s scintillating interpretation, have finally given Amy her due, rescuing her from Jo’s long shadow and getting us to see her less as a book-burning brat and more as a confident young woman with a clear-eyed sense of self and of her own worth. Amy’s rehabilitation is a triumph, not least for the part it plays in Gerwig’s reframing of the novel’s romantic plots. The film, however, also shines a light on Meg, arguably the most neglected sister in film adaptations where she tends to slip into oblivion more quietly than Beth, whose death marks the climax of solemnity and sentimentality in the story.

Having met Jo as an aspiring writer in bustling New York, and Amy as a lady-in-the-making in Paris, where she divides her time between art classes and social engagements, we encounter Meg perusing luxurious fabrics on a shopping trip with her rich friend Sallie Moffat. Meg gives in to the temptation to buy the silk she cannot afford when Sallie suggests that John won’t mind the extravagant expense for the pleasure of having “the prettiest wife in Concord”. The next scene takes us to Brookes’s modest dovecote, capturing the mixture of bliss and struggle that is Meg’s lot in being a young mother at home alone with two toddlers. I don’t recall the silk-buying episode being featured in previous film adaptations of Little Women, certainly not in the sustained way in which it is used by Gerwig to give the lie to the rose-tinted myth of love-on-a-shoestring.

The whole storyline about Meg explores the gap between her girlish dreams of domestic fulfilment and the reality of married life under the strain of reduced economic circumstances. It offers a convincing portrayal of how hard it is to make relationships work when the first flush of romance has worn off. We return to what happens after the happily ever after when Meg’s heady experience as the belle at the Moffats’ ball concludes with a prophetic plea to Laurie: “Let me have my fun tonight. I’ll be desperately good for the rest of my life”. Cut to the dark kitchen of the dovecote where, in the course of the marital discussion over the cost of the silk, Meg lets slip that she is “tired of being poor”. Meg and John are worn out by hard work and thrift, and equally distraught: the one by the realization of her unwitting cruelty, the other by his failure to provide his wife with the luxuries that people in her circles take for granted.

Gerwig’s account of the Brookes’ courtship and marriage is deliberately muted. Meg doesn’t need Aunt March’s disapprobation in order to make up her mind over John, nor are we regaled with a close look at the drama and excitement of childbirth, as in the 2017 BBC three-part adaptation. The focus moves quickly from fuss and feathers and parties to the sacrifices, and eventually to the rewards, of domestic bonds made all the stronger once the young couple has come through this admittedly minor adversity together. It’s refreshing to see Meg’s resentment for not having an easy life (it’s all relative) out in the open, without the judgment and – dare I say it – without Alcott’s moralising commentary. Meg loves John in spite of his poverty, not because of it, as the novel would have us believe.

This brings me back, in a roundabout way, to my main beef against the 1994 adaptation of Little Women: the fact that it adds to, rather than eschews, the novel’s sentimentality. I have no problem with sentimentality perse, nor with the sentimentality of Alcott’s novel. It’s of its time in a text that is so far ahead of its time in many other ways. What I cannot get over in Armstrong’s self-declared feminist take on Little Women is the sense that when all is said and done – and against Alcott’s protestations – the nub of the story is who the sisters are going to marry. The 1994 film begins as a tale of sisterhood, and of a young writer finding her voice, and ends up as a schmaltzy double rom-com. The kind of rom-com that you do give into, half despising yourself for doing so. (Guilty as charged.)

Not so here. I love the love scenes in this new adaptation. They feel true to the spirit of the text even when Gerwig makes explicit what Alcott leaves unsaid, or perhaps never even dreams of implying. Laurie’s proposal to Jo plays out with a doomed air of inevitability: Timothée Chalamet and Saoirse Ronan look so young, his dishevelled anguish matched by her despair at the impossible conversation he’s dragging them both through, in the full knowledge – for these two know where they stand – that it cannot possibly end well.

Ronan and Chalamet are casting gold. They convey the camaraderie between Jo and Laurie in the ease of their interactions, and by bringing to life the nuances in their fundamental similarity. In fact, at the moment when Jo reveals her cropped hair, it’s hard not to see her as Laurie’s twin. If Ronan’s vulnerability has a streak of steeliness about it, while Chalamet’s is more languid, they share the coltish nature that Alcott ascribes to her characters on the page. Their playfulness has a conspiratorial quality about it, as in the scene when they dance on the Moffats’ porch, alternating mock seriousness and gleeful abandon in perfect synchrony. Even the Pickwick Club, with these two at the helm, looks like proper fun.

Rescued from his loneliness by a whirlwind of March girlhood – see the invasion of the Laurence mansion in the aftermath of Amy’s caning – of course, the dear boy mistakes affection for romantic love for the sister who has facilitated his inclusion in the family. As for the future Mrs Laurence, the first time I saw the film I was taken aback by her declaration that she had loved Laurie all along and that she would not be his consolation prize in the marital stakes. On second viewing, Amy’s outburst no longer struck me as unnecessarily didascalic, but as the sign that she has now surpassed him – and Jo – in maturity, self-awareness and emotional bravery.[3]

Amy’s expression of her feelings about Laurie – along with a few harsh facts about their respective artistic aspirations – shows that she is no longer the baby in the family, the little girl seeking comfort after Mr Davis’s reprimand, the wicked incendiary fairy meting out petty punishments when she doesn’t get her own way. It falls to her, the most worldly of the March sisters, to articulate the difficult truth that the narrative wrestles with: marriage is the most promising career for a certain class of woman.[4]Jo will echo this sentiment in her final discussion with Mr Dashwood, conceding to his key editorial request with the remark that “marriage has always been a financial proposition. Even in fiction”.

And so to the matter of Jo’s own marriage. Louis Garrell’s Professor Bhaer is too handsome, too young, and unencumbered by children, compared to Alcott’s creation. He and Jo are ‘into’ one another from the moment they meet on Mrs Kirche’s doorstep and cross paths living the bohemian life. Beyond that, he is soon relegated to being a footnote in her story, not before having got her inordinately angry. Voicing the defensiveness of the fledgling artist who is giving all of herself to her writing, a bruised Jo takes her to leave of the Professor for the best part of the film in very belligerent tones. She will remember the manner of their exchange, not its content, and will come into her own, as a writer, by herself, with the support of her sisters: a nudge from Beth, and a vindication of the import of her call from Amy, who explains to her that representation matters, that the world needs more stories about ordinary women.

How fitting, then, that Jo must be egged on by her sisters when the time comes to go after Professor Bhaer. It’s a small corrective to that most cliched of romantic clichés, the chase against the clock, the crowning glory of any self-respecting rom-com, as heightened by the quick montage of two different shots of – Gerwig’s words – “one of those epic perfect kisses” under the umbrella. Does this dual scene belong to Jo March’s reality, or to her fictional invention? It could belong to either. Or both. (And if the whole thing is fiction, then we may well have Professor Bhaer look like M. Garrell).

The first time I saw it, I really wanted the film to end on this note of oh-so-clever ambiguity. In fact, Gerwig’s conclusion is cleverer than this. To end here would have returned pride of place to the marriage plot. Better to show the first edition of Little Women being put together at the printer’s, with Jo looking on, and then go back to Alcott’s final chapter, at Plumfield, a school for boys and girls, where each of the main characters has a place and an important role to play. After all, the focus of Little Women is on community. It’s also on becoming, as signposted by Jo’s early running along the streets of New York, towards her dreams of authorship and independence, always inflected in the service of her extended matriarchal family. The final scene dwells on the fulfilment of these dreams, as the sisters, arm-in-arm, stride confidently on to celebrate their collective achievements, under the guise of Marmee’s sixtieth birthday party. Capital.

[1] At least Alcott was spared the battle over the copyright to Little Women. The editor who had commissioned her girl’s book– Thomas Niles of Roberts Brothers (theirs, in a lovely cinematic touch, is the name on the Weekly Volcano’s office) – had also recommended that she should not sell it outright for a flat fee. “An honest publisher and a lucky author, for the copyright, made her a fortune, and the ‘dull book’ was the first golden egg of the ugly duckling”, Alcott wrote in her diary in 1885, annotating the entry where in August 1868 she had recorded the sale of her manuscript.

[2] On this score, see, for instance, sections of Chapter 10 where Alcott expatiates on the Pickwick Club and the Post Office: reading a sample of the March sisters’ Pickwick Paper is less fun than being assured, as concisely as possible, that it’s very amusing indeed. Having to plough through it is a bit like being buttonholed about somebody else’s dreams: these accounts are never as interesting to the listener as they are to the teller.

[3] Speaking of departures from the novel, Gerwig’s elaboration on Jo’s change of heart about Laurie is a welcome fleshing out of Jo’s loneliness, accentuated by her grief at Beth’s loss. It’s entirely credible that she should feel disappointment at the discovery that her Teddy has married Amy, the sister who “has always had a talent for getting out of the hard things in life”.

[4] A woman’s need to marry well is Aunt March’s mantra. Gerwig reimagines her as an impenitent spinster, rather than a widow, precisely to underscore this point. When Jo remonstrates that she does not practice what she preaches, Aunt March does not miss a beat: “[I’m not married] Because I was rich and made sure to keep my money”.

Image: BFA / Alamy Stock Photo

The post Stefania Ciocia looks at Little Women appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

This production opened at The Bridge on 11 June 2019 and ran until 31 August. It will be broadcast as part of National Theatre Live on 17 October 2019. If you are planning a trip to the cinema for the occasion, you may want to read this blog after you have seen the play, so as to avoid spoilers about this specific production. Below is an account of how much I enjoyed the show when I saw it on 23 August.

While members of the audience are still walking into the theatre – some to take their seats, others to mill about in the round, wondering where best to station themselves – they may be forgiven for thinking they’ve stumbled into a Midsummer Night’s Nightmare, rather than the Dream they’d bargained for. The warm-up for the performance is an unnerving, solemn rendition of several hymns: led by a severe percussive rhythm, Nicholas Hytner’s cast are arranged in rigid formation, their gaze fixed straight ahead to avoid eye contact or any hint of recognition of human fellowship with the spectators. At the end of each tune, they stride away, with collective purpose, until they’ve sung from the middle of each of the four sides of the pit in turn. It’s a grim, robotic procession. The stiff-limbed, even brain-washed, vibe is compounded by the choir’s austere outfits: the men in grey suits, the women in grey dresses and white veils. There’s a whiff of The Handmaid’s Tale in the air.

The dystopic atmosphere gets ramped up with the arrival of Hippolyta (Gwendoline Christie), encased in a glass box, wearing her own sombre outfit. It’s a stark visual illustration of how the Queen of the Amazons and Theseus (Oliver Chris), the Duke of Athens and her groom-to-be, have come together. Theseus’s claim that their nuptials will turn over a new leaf after their martial courtship rings hollow: “Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword, / And won thy love doing thee injuries; / But I will wed thee in another key: / With pomp, with triumph, and with revelling”. Keeping the bride in her transparent cage, a prisoner on display, for the entire first scene is not a good start, though it’s a perfect introduction to the similar dark undercurrent in the lovers’ subplot.

The facts are well known: Hermia (Isis Hainsworth) wishes to marry her beloved Lysander (Kit Young) but has been promised to Demetrius (Paul Adeyefa) who is himself pursued in vain by Helena (Tessa Bonham Jones). Theseus sides with Hermia’s father Egeus (Kevin McMonagle) and throws his weight behind the custom of Athenian law: a refusal to comply with the parental diktat will mean “Either to die the death, or to abjure / Forever the society of men”. It’s a testament to the efficacy of the joyless costumes that Theseus’s caution to Hermia about having to “endure the livery of a nun” turns my mind to sartorial matters first, and romantic ones second: that does not sound like half as bad a threat as it is meant to be, given that the alternative is equally dour.

This is no country for young (or old) women, and I wish Hermia would flee with Helena, rather than Lysander, whose barely contained rage (shades of Young’s performance of Octavius in the 2018 Julius Caesar?), though justified, is too testosterone-fuelled for my liking. Hippolyta’s restraint is more compelling. While she is being wheeled off stage, the Queen places her hand on the glass as if to reach out to Hermia. This dignified, powerless gesture of solidarity endows the predicament of the reluctant brides with added gravitas. It’s a highly charged opening. The shambolic preparations for the play-within-the-play to be performed by the rude mechanicals cannot come too soon.

It’s with the troupe of amateur actors, of course, that Shakespeare shifts the Dream into comedic gear, but what I love about this production is the affectionate characterization of Mistress Quince (Felicity Montagu) and her motley crew. Quince is gentle, patient, and super-organized in distributing the parts and briefing her players about The most lamentable comedy and the cruelest death of Pyramus and Thisbe. She responds with great equanimity to Bottom’s (Hammed Animashaun) over-enthusiastic suggestions that he should take on more than one role. My hunch is that she’d happily accommodate him if his requests were at all practicable. And while, as is right, Animashaun hogs the stage with his irresistible boisterousness, the smaller parts are also individualized: timid Flute (Jermaine Freeman), no-nonsense Snout (Ami Metcalf), obliging Starveling (Francis Lovehall) and – my personal favourite, for her bags of attitude and fighting spirit – Snug (Jamie-Rose Monk).[1] All six lower-class characters are brought to life in the guise of loveable innocents rather than preposterous simpletons. I feel encouraged to laugh with them, not at them – a sensation which carries through well into their play-within-the-play and puts me decidedly at a distance from the male lovers’ mockery of the company’s dilettantism in the final act.

Still, the gendering and characterization of the rude mechanicals, and attendant considerations, are small fry in light of the real twist sprung on us in Act II. The customary doubling up of Theseus with Oberon and Hippolyta with Titania is retained, but this production sees the King and the Queen of the Fairies swap roles. It is Titania who has a grudge against Oberon,[2] and it is she who enlists Puck (David Moorst) to carry out her plans for revenge. Moorst’s Robin Goodfellow is worth the price of the ticket in itself. In fact, I fear he may have ruined all future Dreams for me, so close has he come to being the definitive Puck. At first glance, his punk sprite, with rainbow tattoos, spiky hair and customized jeans, looks like a forest-dwelling long-lost member of the Sex Pistols. But the edgy garments and the piercings alone go only so far. It’s how Moorst embodies his character that is utterly mesmerizing.

His ability as an aerialist is impressive, and I can’t take my eyes off the extraordinary mobility of his face: the squinting, the open-mouth wonder, the mischievous look of curiosity, the irrepressible, anarchic cackling. There’s something feral about him – on his haunches, fidgeting, prowling, moving like nobody else around him – and not a cutesy bone in this Puck. He is of fairyland and a creature unto himself, a lone agent set apart both from the stately King and Queen, and from their other fantastical subjects, much more benign in their playfulness, with their sparkling glitter and sequins.

Moorst’s interactions with the audience are in keeping with his capricious, unruly personality. I pity the woman who gets repeatedly berated for not standing aside as Puck travels from one side of the pit to the other: “You’re in the way!” escalates to “You’re still in the way!” and the international sign for “I’ve got my eye on you”, until a final, exasperated “Londoners!” – delivered in Puck’s Mancunian accent – tells us all off. Nobody’s safe from his intemperate straight-talking: interrupted by Titania, he retorts “I’m not finished!”; at the prospect of watching the rude mechanicals’ in theatrical action, he complains “Plays are boring!”. Not with him around, that’s for sure.

Before I realize it, it’s the end of the first half of the play and I’m joining a parade to celebrate the coup de foudre between Oberon and donkey-eared Bottom. I don’t know what it feels like for the seated spectators, but here in the pit the unbridled joy on display has flooded me with dopamine. During the intermission, the fairies – indefatigable – come back to perform their aerial feats: the fabulous Chipo Kureya (Peaseblossom) [pictured left], Jay Webb (Cobweb), Charlotte Atkinson (Moth), Lennin Nelson-McClure (Mustardseed) and Rachel Tolzman (Bedbug) are self-absorbed in their gorgeousness one minute, playing at different degrees of flirtatious the next. It’s impossible not to smile back – and, Chipo, if you are reading this: I left a little piece of my heart with you that evening.

This magical, festive mood couldn’t be further apart from the hymn-singing opening. We’re being nicely prepped for more carnivalesque, all-the-colours-of-the-rainbow revels. Playing up the comedic potential of their gorgeous love affair, Oberon and Bottom return on stage sharing a luxurious bubble bath and champagne. Again, it’s worth emphasizing how this scene manages to be funny and yet keep us entirely on the side of the characters. Yes, it’s cheeky and camp and over-the-top, but in a heart-warming, come-play-with-me, exhilarating way.

Chris’s one-hundred-and-eighty from authoritarian “what-I-say-goes” ruler to kittenish lover is also rather marvellous. The fact that both parties are slightly surprised, and amused, by this unexpected turn of events is life-affirming, and adds to the sexual frisson of the scene. I’m rooting for the two of them, for the egalitarian nature of this new relationship built on playfulness and mutual desire. Bottom is more than a match for his royal partner, and even the line “Not now, babe: I’ve got a headache”, despite its trading on stereotypes for easy laughs, sounds fresh in Animashaun’s delivery.

Against this brilliant homosexual awakening, the development of the lovers’ subplot feels a tad like an overegged pudding. As in the original text, Puck mistakes Lysander for Demetrius, and ends up getting both men to fall in love with Helena, while Hermia is cast aside. In the ensuing, frantic multiple chase, Hytner inserts interventions from Puck and Titania to trigger further momentary pairings. Lysander and Demetrius go from being sworn enemies to having a passionate kiss to enjoying – a trite male heterosexual fantasy – the titillation of watching Helena and Hermia doing the same. The production’s emphasis on sexual fluidity would have worked just as effectively without these touches, but in immersive productions of Shakespeare at The Bridge more is always more. Take it or leave it.

As for the swap between Oberon and Titania, it had initially perplexed me. Given the ultra-patriarchal society of Theseus’s Athens, isn’t it too facile to have a queer fairy world where things operate differently? I am brought around by the suggestion that Oberon/Theseus and Titania/Hippolyta are two incarnations of one man and one woman. When Oberon emerges from his ‘dream’, his confusion gives way to shared laughter with Titania, which intimates that he is in on her joke, and has learnt her lesson. Later on, the sly conspiratorial look that Hippolyta gives the audience when Theseus drop his chauvinist act and relents about Hermia’s choice of spouse, confirms that this is the story of male, masculinist ruler(s) tamed by their Queen(s). Theseus/Oberon will be guided by Hippolyta/Titania in future.

The problem with this reading is that the end of the ‘dream’ smacks of a return to compulsory heterosexuality, and it risks bracketing queerness as a magical parenthesis and making the celebration of fluidity contingent on re-establishing heteronormative standards. It is to the production’s credit that queer is not played as temporary madness; a final, silent exchange between Demetrius and Lysander hints that they haven’t quite forgotten their brief encounter and would not be averse to repeating it. I would dearly love for Bottom to have a similar understanding with Oberon or, even better, with Oberon and Titania in an open menage a troi.

No such luck. Instead, there’s the business of the play-within-the-play to be attended to. The wedded couples’ choice of entertainment is presented as a sort of Athens’s Got Talent, featuring the rude mechanicals as worthy winners with their interpretive dance rendition of Pyramus and Thisbe to Barber’s adagio. Their full performance of the “most lamentable comedy” chucks every possible gag – noisy light-sabre, despondent brick-wall, wrestling lion, and in-jokes about “immersive plays” – in the finale of this super-charged Dream.

My main reservation about it is that it often corners the actors into one-note performances, especially in the second half. This strategy pays off in terms of entertainment value, but it obscures the poignancy of the lovers’ predicament. It is only during the ominous, dystopian first scene that I really feel for Hermia and Helena. By the final act, I remain unconvinced that they have made the right choice of spouses – the younger men are way cockier than mellow Theseus – but I also don’t have the emotional investment to care. Titania’s bound to sort them out.

After the rude mechanicals’ moment of theatrical glory, it’s the spectators’ turn to chip in in the festivities: our merry-go-round dance is less spontaneous than the parade just before the intermission because the fairies, stage-hands and movement stewards need to direct us and, more importantly, stop us in time for Puck’s closing address. In the whole general hubbub, the epilogue gets rather lost. Not so the lovely touch when Puck, dangling upside down as a trapeze artist, reaches to hold the hands of two very lucky members of the audience. Beyoncé’s ‘Love on Top’ plays us all out, and while in the pit we are busy bouncing not one but two giant moons over our heads, the actors get a chance to slink away unobserved.

If you are after low-key performances, then these no holds barred, everything but the kitchen sink productions are probably not your things. But if you love fun, energy, and a chance to re-engage with old favourites from an accessible and fresh perspective, then join me in calling for the next immersive production of Shakespeare at The Bridge. Can they go for the hat trick, I wonder?

[Picture right: Your own fairy correspondent]

Dr Stefania Ciocia is a Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University. You can find her on Twitter as Gained in Translation @StefaniaCiocia.

[1] It’s only in writing this piece that it occurs to me that the two rude mechanicals played by young women are – in common contemporary parlance – “fierce”. They talk back, show impatience with the absurdity of their roles and, in the case of Snug, relish how frightening their part – go Lion! – is meant to be.

[2] In the original text, Oberon demands that Titania should hand over the “little changeling boy” she has taken custody of. Titania refuses, not least out of loyalty to the mother of the orphan, who had been in life “a votaress of my order”. Michael Billington writes in The Guardian that “the great speech where the fairy queen laments the death of her votaress sounds odd coming from a man”. I don’t entirely agree, but I have to admit that that was the point in the scene where my confusion about what had been happening with the roles cleared up. Until then, I’d been doubting my memories of the play.

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“I have always lived (with involuntary interruptions) in the house where I was born; so my mode of living has not been the result of a choice. I believe that I represent an extreme case of the sedentary person, comparable to certain molluscs, for example limpets, which after a brief larval stage when they swim about freely, attach themselves to a sea-rock, secrete an outer shell and stay put for the rest of their lives”.[1] Primo Levi’s brief essay on his family house in Corso Re Umberto in Turin – house where he was born a hundred years ago today – opens with a matter-of-fact remark and an extended self-reflection articulated with the dispassionate objectivity of the scientist.

The parenthetical clarification appears to be prompted by a desire for accuracy; it might go unnoticed were it not for our knowledge that one of those “involuntary interruptions” encompassed the period between Levi’s deportation to Auschwitz on 22 February 1944 and his return to Turin on 19 October 1945, nine months after the liberation of the camp. If This is a Man, Levi’s account of his imprisonment, will be brought out by the small publishing house De Silva in 1947. Despite its good critical reception, the original sales were disappointing: only 1,500 copies from an already modest print run of 2,500. It will take until 1956 for the book to find the audience that it deserves, re-issued by Einaudi, who had rejected the manuscript a decade earlier. In 1959 the volume is translated into English, reaching readers in the UK and the USA; the French and German translations will follow in 1962. It has been never been out of print again.

If This is a Man is an essential read in both senses of the word: spare, precise, lucid, but also necessary and important. As Levi explains in the foreword, the conceptual genesis of the book can be traced back to Auschwitz, the urge to tell inherent to the experience of the concentration camp, connected to the need for “interior liberation” (15) and to the imperative to bear witness – though the very ability to offer his testimonial account marks the author as an unusual case in the story of the death camps. Of the six-hundred-and-fifty Italian Jews – or “Stücke”, i.e. “pieces”, as they were referred to by the SS – deported with Levi, only twenty-four survived. “Among the forty-five people in my wagon only four saw their homes again; and it was by far the most fortunate wagon” (23-4).[2]

Much has been made of Levi’s professional training as a chemist, which remained his life-long occupation until his retirement in 1975. It played a key role in his survival in Auschwitz, where being chosen as one of “die drei Leute vom Labor” (“the three laboratory people”) towards the end of 1944 meant access to a warm working environment and more food than for the other prisoners. Levi’s technical background is also generally seen as an influence on his writing style, so exact and controlled, and on his analytical attitude towards his subject matter. He is remarkably restrained in passing judgment. The facts speak for themselves, and readers are asked to draw their own conclusions: the book “has not been written in order to formulate new accusations; it should be able, rather, to furnish documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind”, most notably the pernicious conviction, held deep down by some people, that “every stranger is an enemy” (15).

Consider the final paragraph of the chapter entitled ‘This Side of Good and Evil’ (an allusion to Friedrich Nietzsche’s attack on traditional morality in Beyond Good and Evil): “We now invite the reader to contemplate the possible meaning in the Lager of the words ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘just’ and ‘unjust’; let everybody judge, on the basis of the picture outlined and of the examples given above, how much of our ordinary moral world could survive on this side of the barbed wire” (93). In the following chapter, ‘The Drowned and the Saved’, Levi goes on to set out the two fundamental categories into which human beings can be properly divided, since “other pairs of opposites (the good and the bad, the wise and the foolish, the cowards and the courageous, the unlucky and the fortunate) are considerably less distinct, they seem less essential, and above all they allow for more numerous and complex intermediary gradations” (93-4) than the stark distinction between those who make it and those who don’t. It’s important to note that these two groups are not envisioned as part of a providential plan, or the recipients (or otherwise) of divine grace, notwithstanding the reference to salvation.

The word “saved” is used in pure factual terms, as a matter of physical survival, made particularly pressing and arduous in a place where “the struggle for life is reduced to its primordial mechanism” (94). Levi’s clear-eyed rejection of the rhetoric of predestination and deliverance, in a religious and secular context alike, is tied in with the realization that arbitrariness is the one principle at work in the concentration camps: “hier ist kein warum (there is no why here)” (35) is the reply that Levi gets from a fellow prisoner, more well-versed in the ways of the Lager, to a question about the reason for his small act of gratuitous cruelty.

The grotesque lack of logic of the concentration camp is almost subliminally highlighted by the many textual allusions to The Divine Comedy, a vision of the afterlife as witnessed by Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321) in the course of his miraculous journey of discovery of God’s eternal justice, travelling through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. Dante’s Hell is therefore governed by the rule of contrappasso: a manifestation of divine wisdom, rationality and fairness, it loosely translates as “counterpoise” (H. W. Longfellow) or “retribution” (H. F. Cary), whereby the punishments imposed on the damned are connected, either in similarity or opposition, with the unforgivable sins of which they were guilty of in life. Levi’s infernal concentration camp, by contrast, is geared towards the systematic dehumanization of people, before their physical annihilation: “the demolition of a man” (32) is effected also through sanctioning the absurd, the senseless, the incongruous, the petty.

Like Dante, Levi resorts to the trope of the journey; unlike Dante, who will eventually ascend to see the glory of God, Levi traces an exclusively downward trajectory, as befits the exploration of the first of the three otherworldly realms.[3] If This is a Man begins with an account of the prisoners’ transportation to Auschwitz, “goods wagons closed from the outside, with men, women and children pressed together without pity, like cheap merchandise, for a journey towards nothingness, a journey down there, towards the bottom” (23). On their arrival, they are approached by one of the German guards who, instead of “shouting threats of damnation”, asks them “courteously” (27) whether they have any money or watches to give him.

Levi calls this soldier “our Charon” (27), after the ferryman who carries the souls of the dead across the river Acheron into Hades, a figure co-opted by Dante from ancient Greek mythology to perform a similar function in Inferno. The German guard is but a bathetic version of Dante’s awe-inspiring reinvention, who greets the damned with the terrifying admonition: “Woe to you wicked spirits! hope not / Ever to see the sky again. I come / To take you to the other shore across / Into eternal darkness” (Inferno, Canto III, 78-81). The second chapter of If This is a Man, ‘On the Bottom’, opens with another warped reference to Canto III of Inferno: the sign above the large door of the camp reads “ARBEIT MACHT FREI” (work gives freedom, 28). This haunting detail brings to mind the inscription on the gates to Hell, whose renowned final line has long shed its Dantesque origins to take on a proverbial resonance: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” (III, 9).

[Pictured right: ‘Charon, demoniac form, With eyes of burning coal, collects them all, Beck’ning, and each, that lingers, with his oar Strikes. (III, 109-111)]

Levi’s reliance on these canonical textual echoes is measured: he resorts to the metaphor of Hell without mythologizing or aestheticizing the abject horror of the experience of the Holocaust, without letting the literary images subsume the unspeakable reality of the concentration camp. “This is hell. Today, in our times, hell must be like this. A huge, empty room: we are tired, standing on our feet, with a tap which drips while we cannot drink the water […] We are not dead” (28), Levi remarks as if to underscore the fact that this place is nothing like Dante’s grandiose, monstrous creation, though we instinctively reach for the comparison in the absence of any adequate words.

Levi’s considered engagement with The Divine Comedy – a classic ingrained in the cultural DNA of every Italian with a modicum of literary education – reaches its high point in chapter 11, entitled ‘The Canto of Ulysses’ after one of the most celebrated passages of Dante’s epic poem. We are in the eight bolgia (trench) of the eighth circle of Hell, where fraudulent counsellors are enveloped in tongues of fire. Sharing a “horned flame” (XXVI, 68) are Ulysses and Diomede, punished together for the very feats of ingenuity which led to the Greek conquest of Troy: the famous stratagem of the wooden horse, but also the wily recruitment of Achilles to the war effort and the theft of the Palladium.[4]

At the heart of the canto, however, is Ulysses’s narration of his final enterprise, well after his return home to Ithaca where, he admits, no familial affections “Could overcome in me the zeal I had / T’ explore the world, and search the ways of life, / Man’s evil and his virtue” (XXVI, 97-99). Now “[t]ardy with age” (XXVI, 106), Ulysses sets off with his most loyal companions on a mission to cross the earth’s boundaries; his passionate exhortation to steer the ship beyond the pillars of Hercules plunges him and his entire crew to their death: “And over our heads the hollow seas closed up” (XXVI, 152).[5] Against this display of intellectual pride, Ulysses’s earlier deceptions pale in their gravity as capital sins. Although Dante is forced to condemn him in the light of Christian doctrine, his admiration for the Greek hero is crystal clear – not least because Dante knows a thing or two about overreaching.

From the moment he begins his story, Ulysses speaks, uninterrupted, for the remainder of the canto in verses of supreme eloquence and depth about how the spark of intellectual curiosity makes us human. Rather than narcissistically hubristic, his rousing speech to his sailors is a compelling invitation to all humankind to live up to their status as creatures made in God’s image: “Call to mind from whence we sprang: / Ye were not form’d to live the life of brutes / but virtue to purse and knowledge high” (XXVI, 118-20). It is a defiantly anthropocentric view, of course, and a masculinist one too, since “virtue”, as the original Italian “virtute”, comes from “vir”, the Latin for “man”.[6]

But it is the “fatti non foste a viver come bruti” of line 119 – one of the most perfect sequences of eleven syllables in the Italian language – that takes on a whole new resonance in the context of the concentration camp. “Who knows how or why it comes to my mind” (118), says Levi of the canto of Ulysses. His readers understand why. He is with an Alsatian student called Jean, who has risen to the role of Pikolo, the “messenger-clerk” (115), of their Kommando. Amongst the privileges of the position is the task of fetching the big vat of daily soup from the kitchens; on the morning in question, Pikolo chooses Primo to accompany him on the long walk there and back.

In conversation, the two men reclaim their common humanity: “We spoke of our houses, of Strasbourg and Turin, of the books we had read, of what we had studied, of our mothers: how all mothers resemble each other!” (117). Pikolo asks Primo to teach him Italian, picking up words he hears him exchange with a prisoner from Rome: soup, field, water. It’s at this point that Primo turns to The Divine Comedy. The impromptu language lesson turns into something else altogether: an urgent attempt to communicate something impossibly profound, hard to translate – nay, to put into words – as fleeting as it is meaningful.

While struggling to recall the exact lines of the canto, to explain the medieval theological foundations of Dante’s view of the afterlife, to gloss his own clumsy translation (“how sad, I have to tell it in prose – a sacrilege!”, 119), Primo is touched by Ulysses’s plight like never before. Pikolo gives him his full attention; he asks Primo to repeat that crucial tercet: “Call to mind from whence we sprang: / Ye were not form’d to live the life of brutes / but virtue to purse and knowledge high”. He might be acting out of compassion or perhaps, hopes Primo, “he has received the message, he has felt that it has to do with him, that it has to do with all men who toil, and with us in particular; and that it has to do with us two, who dare to reason of these things with the poles for the soup on our shoulders” (120).

Then suddenly, even as Primo seems to come close to some kind of epiphany, quick as it had come, this moment of respite passes, and the two men join the queue for the soup:

“‘Kraut und Rüben? Kraut und Rüben.’ The official announcement is made that the soup today is of cabbages and turnips: ‘Choux et navets. Kaposzta és répak.

‘And over our heads the hollow seas closed up’” (121).

Dr Stefania Ciocia is a Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University. You can find her on Twitter as Gained in Translation @StefaniaCiocia.

[1] Primo Levi, Other People’s Trades, Trans. Raymond Rosenthal, London: Abacus Books, 1989, p.1. First published in Italian in 1985, the volume is a collection of articles which had originally appeared in newspapers and magazines, most notably in the Turin daily La Stampa.

[2] Primo Levi, If This is a Man, Trans. Stuart Woolf, London: Abacus Books, 1987. All subsequent references are to this edition.

[3] According to medieval cosmology, Hell is a conical chasm spiralling down, underneath Jerusalem, towards the centre of the Earth. It is divided into nine concentric circles, each reserved to a different group of sinners. The severity of their transgressions – and of the attendant punishment – increases the closer we get to the bottom, where Lucifer gnaws for eternity Brutus and Cassius (Caesar’s assassins, therefore the supreme traitors of secular power) and, even more viciously, Judas, the apostle who betrayed Christ.

[4] Prompted by his mother Thetis, who didn’t want him to leave for Troy, Achilles had been hiding in Skyros, at the court of Lycodemes, disguised as one of the king’s daughters. Odysseus (the Greek name for Ulysses) unmasked the young warrior by tricking him into thinking that the court was under attack: amongst the more feminine gifts that Odysseus had presented to the princesses, Achilles immediately picked up a weapon to defend himself, thus giving his identity away. Together with Diomede, Odysseus managed to steal the effigy of Pallas Athena from Troy; according to legend, the city wouldn’t fall so long as the Palladium remained within its walls.

[5] Ulysses’s final journey in Dante, who had not read the original Homeric text, departs from what we are told in the Odyssey, where in Book XI Tiresias prophesises that Odysseus will die far from the sea. See also Mia Forbes’s excellent blog on the Odyssey.

[6] In other English versions of these lines, “virtute” is sometimes translated as “excellence” or “manliness”; the original meaning combines the two.

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