Occasional Prose (3 page)

Still, if Chiaromonte obstinately resisted the seduction of films, he was genuinely fond of music and poetry and more than fond of painting—he even practiced it a little—and his first long work, lost in France in 1940 during the mass exodus of political exiles fleeing from the Nazis, was a manuscript on Michelangelo. He also had a gift for journalism and might have become, like Victor Hugo (
Choses Vues
) and Dostoyevsky (
Diary of a Writer
), a regular critic of the national life, including crimes of the passionate sort: as readers of his “Notes” in
Tempo Presente
and his “Letters” in
Partisan Review
know, he had a great relish for the “small” human event buried in a news item or spread out in the headlines of a tabloid. Yet with all these capacities and endowments (which were the reflection of an unusual inner activity; his soul had no dead areas, calluses, or proud flesh), not to mention his philosophic interests, centering on history and politics, he elected the theatre as, you might say, his scene of combat, his preferred arena.

It was combat from the very beginning. A note passed on by a friend and Roman contemporary of his informs me that Chiaromonte, as a young man of twenty or perhaps still a boy of nineteen, belonged to a group that called themselves
I Sciacalli
(the Jackals) and went to the theatre to hiss fashionable bourgeois plays and applaud Pirandello and other writers of the avant-garde. The playwrights they were hooting hired “provocative elements” to put on counter-demonstrations, but without much effect. The Jackals prevailed; then gradually young Fascists added their voices to the ensemble, and bit by bit Nicola’s group broke up. It is strange now to think of Chiaromonte playing jackal, i.e., running in a sportive pack to hunt prey, but to come upon the name Pirandello suddenly throws light. Here we may have the clue, finally, to what caused his young emotions to fasten so inflexibly on the stage.

Chiaromonte’s championship of Pirandello never lost its vigor. If he comes back again and again to worry the case of Bertolt Brecht, for him symptomatic of what was basically wrong with the theatre of today, he returns again and again to Pirandello to illustrate what was—or might have been—right. Commenting on current productions, Chiaromonte was not satisfied to praise or condemn. He always saw lessons to be learned, for the director and playwright, and Brecht was the great negative lesson whose anatomy he patiently dissected, while Pirandello he perceived as a model, not of course to be copied but to be studied in depth and understood.

Even Pirandello’s weaknesses are instructive for Chiaromonte in that they show him in the act of misunderstanding his own strength. Or, as he himself puts it in the long review of
Vestire gli’ ignudi
(
Clothe the Naked
), there are times when Pirandello does not accept in full the logic of his own inspiration: seeking a pathetic effect, he falls into the very staginess from which he ought to have set the theatre free with
Six Characters
. For Chiaromonte, it could not be enough to state this. He must make us see it, and, using the same components of character and event (a seduced and abandoned girl tries to kill herself), before our eyes, as if at a drawing board, he brilliantly sketches out the play as it would have been, had the Pirandello of
Six Characters
rigorously thought it through. This careful demonstration, which almost makes us laugh aloud at the ease and simplicity of its means, is an object lesson itself in the
how
of theatre-reviewing.

He did not hesitate to call
Six Characters
a “milestone” of the modern theatre—an assertion that may startle a foreigner. For us, Pirandello has been more of a curious bloom on the tree of modernism that anything as solid and perduring as a milestone on a road leading into the future. Even twenty or thirty years ago, to us he appeared as old-fashioned as the dark suits and widow’s crape worn by the automata that were his characters. His “psychology” or “philosophy” (an extreme relativism or, vulgarly, “It’s all in your mind”) had pasted him for us in a period album of the twenties. Indeed, he seemed a prime example of a writer who had been locked into a set of once-current notions and sealed off from posterity as though in a time-capsule, and the very theatricality of his plays, while it encouraged their revival with period costumes and accessories, identified him as a dramaturge, i.e., an old-time wizard and prestidigitator skilled in theatre magic and particularly in the art of “freezing” actors in a tableau.

Reading and rereading Chiaromonte on him, I have become convinced that we missed the point. But whether the Pirandello he teaches us to see is the real Pirandello or Chiaromonte’s own ideal construct, it is clear that the Pirandello he expounds to us is indeed a crucial and disquieting contemporary figure. A line can be drawn from Pirandello that will pass through Artaud, Ionesco, Beckett, Genet, and skirt altogether Brecht, Sartre, T. S. Eliot, Peter Weiss’s
Marat-Sade
, and the American realists. Strindberg and Shaw have a place in the line, which can be extended backward to Chekhov and Ibsen. Those two (and behind them the Greeks) are the playwrights Chiaromonte dwells on with love, from whom he has learned, to whom he goes back, as if for a refresher course and to reassure himself of his bearings.

On nearly every page of his commentary, however big or small the occasion that prompted it (Genet’s
The Blacks
or a hippie version of Euripides), we find a reaffirmation and testing of principles. And yet what principles, the reader might ask, looking down an inventory of the blessed that embraces Pirandello, Beckett, Sophocles, and Jean Genet? What can they have in common? In fact how can Chiaromonte’s principle of the theatre as reasoning action (
azione ragionante
) accommodate Artaud’s notion of the stage as a concrete physical space to be filled with spectacular violence, sound, and gesture? Is it not capricious, then, a sheer matter of taste, to draw the line at Brecht?

Our wonder has something familiar about it. We are feeling the same mystification as we did at the outset when we confronted the fact of his theatrical “calling” or vocation. Perhaps the two enigmas are bound up together: if we can find a common factor or factors among the objects of his preference, we may be close to the idea Chiaromonte formed for himself of the theatre—the idea he espoused for better or for worse on first meeting it in the work of Pirandello.

Well, one common factor gradually becomes discernible; from the Greeks through Genet, all those figures are non- or anti-realist, or so Chiaromonte argued. He had a bias against realism (which, since I do not share it, I consider a prejudice) and seldom lets pass a chance to vent his feelings on the subject. A good deal of his sympathy with Genet comes from the playwright’s insistence on “an absolute break with representation” and his expressed desire for “a declamatory tone”—in production often denied him by directors. Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty attracts Chiaromonte for a number of reasons, among which he lists first, as a cardinal point, its remoteness from any kind of realism or naturalism. It is no problem for him to find the same virtue in Shaw, whom he cites once as the true inventor of distancing.

Yet at other times Chiaromonte’s reprehension of realism is selective: determined to make his case, he relies on a certain wilfulness, not to say contrariness, of definition. In exculpating Ibsen and Chekhov from the sin, he concedes that in these authors there is something that may look like realism or faithful representation (the telegraph poles in
The Cherry Orchard
, Trigorin’s checked trousers and Uncle Vanya’s splendid neckties, the declared prosaic intention of Ibsen’s great middle works), but, with them, he maintains, it is tempered by something else—lyricism in Ibsen and, in Chekhov, a kind of immateriality. One can agree that there is a lyric strain in the middle Ibsen and that in Chekhov there is a loving perception, filtered through pity, of a world beyond Trigorin’s ephemeral checked trousers but yet comprising them. Still, you and I might call this realism—what else?—in its purest distillate. Or, as Chiaromonte puts it himself, writing of
Hedda Gabler
: “In these dramas of ordinary bourgeois life, destiny strikes through the ordinary, the mean, the petty.”

To come closer to today, Chiaromonte is able to admire Beckett and Ionesco (able to censure them too, on occasion), both for themselves and for the imprint of Chekhov he perceives on them. What other theatre critic would have had the acuteness to notice that “Beckett’s maggot-men seem to come straight out of a sentence in
The Sea Gull
” (in the play-within-a-play, at the opening, when a time 200,000 years from now is foreseen, on an empty cold planet where “all living things have completed their sad cycle”)? In Ionesco he also notes traces of Pirandello. Yet what he may have failed to see is that both Beckett and Ionesco, after their fashion, are latter-day realists. In comparison with Genet’s
The Screens
, Beckett’s
Happy Days
looks like a “slice of life”: if you take the postulate of a fifty-year-old woman buried up to her waist in the sands of time, this is how she would be, down to the last, harshly observed detail of handbag, toothbrush, lipstick—a bundle, to use Chiaromonte’s words, of “small satisfactions, habitual gestures, false triumphs, held together with animal selfishness.”

Something similar could be said of Ionesco’s
Amédéé ou Comment s’en débarrasser
: if you postulate a foot belonging to a corpse in an adjoining, unseen room that keeps growing and inching its way into the family dining room, that is exactly how the family would behave toward it. In both cases, the inability of the characters to “rise” to an enormous exterior fact such as the silting in of the world or the slow intrusion of a dead body enhances the horror and monstrosity of their daily, “realistic” circumstance. Or put it the other way around: representation in an eschatological context (the ever-present doomsday of those playwrights’ vivid metaphors of burial and encroachment) survives, like Winnie’s toothbrush, at the cost of becoming caricature.

In fact, thinking it over, I am not sure that Chiaromonte failed to see the realistic component in Beckett and Ionesco. Perhaps the reservations he felt about them can be attributed to a suspicion on his part that the break with representation there, despite appearances, was something less than absolute—reservations he never felt about Genet. Yet we will not understand his reprehension of realism unless we understand that the term for him meant something less and more than the rules and conventions of lifelike stagecraft. By that standard, Ibsen would be more of a realist, i.e., a culprit, than his epigone Arthur Miller, who violates time sequences, lets his archetypal characters declaim and soliloquize, and embodies dreams and memory fragments on a bare or near-bare stage.

When Chiaromonte anathematizes realism, he has in mind the error of mistaking the surface of life—or lives—for reality. Surface conceals while, in his view, the theatre’s function is to strip and lay bare. In the light of this, we can see his objection to elaborate stage settings, multifarious props, studied costumes—the whole ponderous deployment of illusionist stage machinery, including the machinery of plot. What he held against the illusionist theatre was the naïve or else false importance given to externals, not only of dress and furnishings but of events and happenings. An importance lent these latter by suspense, as though in
The Three Sisters
the question agitating the audience were the same as the one working in the sisters at the curtain’s rise: will they get to Moscow or not? That they will not is for Chekhov a foregone conclusion, and to invite the spectators to “identify” with the sisters in their disappointment would have trivialized the drama, which shows us the irreducible reality they face, of which not-getting-to-Moscow is only the tiniest and most superficial part.

The plots of such plays as
Death of a Salesman
(which treat destiny in terms of averages and statistical expectations) turn on questions of success or failure—realistic questions in that they appear vital to the principals, as they would to us in their place in real life. But not on the stage, Chiaromonte insists, where success or failure in an enterprise—will Romeo get to marry Juliet?—is neither here nor there. Except, I would add, in determining whether the nature of the genre is comic or tragic: comedy has a resolution, a happy wrapping up, usually signified by a marriage or multiple marriages, where tragedy has none—the death of Macbeth, while doubtless a happy solution for Scotland, settles nothing for Shakespeare. This glad wrapping up of an awful tangle of cross-purposes is improbable and often incredible (as people are wont to complain of some of Shakespeare’s darker comedies), but this only means that the characters’ getting together cannot be taken as a permanent resolution of anything; it is a moment of joy and celebration such as reality also contains and on which the play chooses to stop. The pairing off that signals the finale of
Love’s Labour’s Lost
(or
The Marriage of Figaro
) makes us laugh and clap because, among other things, it is so funny, too Noah’s Ark good to be true.

It was not, then, that Chiaromonte wished to see the stage draconically purged of such common objects as easy chairs, kitchen sinks, baby carriages, ironing boards (though, given his bias, an ironing board, stage center, in a contemporary play was likely to provoke a defensive reaction, whereas the baby carriage wheeled across stage rear in Act 4 of
The Three Sisters
entertained him). Nor was it an insistence on ideal types, even if it may be true that, as an Italian, that is a man of the south, he found warty realism of portraiture deeply uncongenial: compare the ugly, grinning peasant bystanders surrounding an Adoration or a Nativity in northern painting with the ideal figures assisting at Italian holy scenes. For him, reality was, above all, sad, even in its humors and extravagances.