Four and Twenty Minds/Chapter 17
XVII
CAROLINA INVERNIZIO
I
No: this indefatigable woman shall not disappear from the literary scene without a word of farewell, without an expression of deep gratitude. For once, at least, I will play the cavalier, unworthy though I am. I alone will be mourner, critic, and eulogist. I will sacrifice myself. I shall have no rivals, but my tribute will not be venal or ready-made.
Not one of the all too many archimandrites of that historical, anecdotal, impressionistic, pure, impure, or philosophic criticism who are to be found in the generous breadths of this our Italy will take pen in hand and dispense ink and judgment to glorify the prolific and industrious novelist recently borne off by pneumonia from the affection of her family, the curiosity of movie audiences, and the faithful admiration of the multitude. Such silence is unjust; and I, like Cato the Younger, have a liking for lost causes. Though the critics hold their peace, I will glorify thee, O Carolina Invernizio, lost forever!
A certain serious periodical, the ne plus ultra of serious periodicals—suffice it to say that it is printed in my sweet city, only a few steps from that fair San Giovanni in which Dante and the undersigned were baptized—this ultra-serious periodical, to which Carducci once contributed, deigns to inform its readers, at the end of the few lines in which the death of the novelist is reported, that “the productivity of Carolina Invernizio was enormous, and brought a fortune to her publishers, but will certainly not suffice to win a lasting fame for the deceased, who was, however, an excellent wife and a woman of simple ways.” Oh, the envious certainties of the anonymous! Who gave thee the right, thou scornful prophet, to foretell literary fortunes? Who, save God above, can pledge the memories of the future? If Carolina Invernizio had been merely an excellent wife and a woman of simple ways, wouldst thou have deigned to speak of her, even to commemorate her? There be millions of excellent and simple-hearted women in Italy: thou couldst scarce register all their holy and devout deaths. But how many canst thou find among them that have won the hearts and the imaginations of all Italy and half America? that have created so many angels of glistening perfection and so many microcosms of black wickedness?
Enough of these questions, to which the poor anonymous necrologist could not possibly reply. Let us mount to better air, to the realm of feeling. No man who has not devoured Accursed Loves, who has not shuddered at Souls of Mire, who has not been stirred by The Miscreant, who has not quivered under The Eternal Chain, who has not sympathized with A Woman’s Heart, who has not wept for The Heart of the Laborer, who has not trembled for Dora, the Assassin’s Daughter, who has not shivered at the Dramas of Infidelity, who has not turned pale before Thieves of Honor, who has not been absorbed in The Crime of the Countess, who has not been terrified by The Kiss of the Dead, who has not been entranced by The Illegitimate Daughter, who has not followed in suspense the fate of The Accursed Woman—no such man has the right to judge Carolina Invernizio. Nor must we forget the hair-raising Memoirs of a Grave Digger, the pathetic Victims of Love, the supremely piteous Orphan of the Ghetto, the atrocious satire of Faithless Husbands, the spectral synthesis of Paradise and Hell, the sentimental epic of Rina, The Angel of the Alps, the terrible fantasy of Satanella, or The Dead Hand.
J’en passe, et des meilleurs. For our Carolina certainly had at least one of the signs of genius: productivity. The lines and the novels traced by that tireless hand are more than the Alexandrines of Victor Hugo, more than the autos of Calderón. We may call them “flowers and hay,” to use Manzoni’s term; but hay—and if you don’t believe it, ask any peasant—is no less precious than flowers. It has its own fragrance, and it feeds beasts who would not touch lilies and roses. You may say that her French rival Xavier de Montépin had an equal abundance of inventive imagination. But he was a man, and a Frenchman; Carolina a woman, and an Italian.
Among the women writers of other lands the only one to whom she may fairly be compared is Ann Radcliffe, authoress of the terrible Mysteries of Udolpho—and she, though she died in 1823, is still unforgotten. Among Italians, Mastriani alone can rival the fertility of her unrestrained genius. And yet I would swear that her modern sisters in fiction regarded her with that arrogant scorn of which women alone are capable. Certainly they said that she did not know how to write or to psychologize. But how can you ask, my dear ladies, that an Italian woman should write good, pure, strong Italian prose? Since the time of Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi, who wrote for her children and not for print, since the time of St. Catherine of Siena, who wrote for Paradise and not for this foolish and sinful earth, since the time of Sister Celeste Galilei, who wrote for her blind father and not for the publishers, I have never heard of any Italian woman who knew how to write Italian. Surely you would not give the name of true Italian prose to the thin broth of Matilde Serao, the surreptitious delight of boarding-schools? Or to the honest camomile in which the venerable lady who hides under the pastoral name of Neera sets forth her chaste narratives? Or to the colorful swoonings of that pretentious literary dialect which Grazia Deledda manipulates with a Sardinian frankness.
Leave her in peace then—poor Carolina. She wrote just as the words came, to be sure, but she was always intelligible, and, what is more, she was always readable. She too, like her fellow-citizen Alfieri, like her colleague Manzoni, came in her youth to Tuscany to steep herself in the idiom of the Arno. But the Arno, so clear and resplendent when it gushes forth amid the chestnut trees of Falterona, is so muddy and greasy and turbid when it reaches Florence that the beauty of its idiom is gone. And the Academy of the Crusca in its Medicean palace is too high and mighty a lady to receive or help a humble schoolma’am, such as Signora Invernizio then was.
So then you must not seek in her books the full-blown flowers of choice speech that may be gathered from the hopper of the dictionaries. There are too many people in Italy, from Captain d’Annunzio down, who write by dint of fingering Tommaseo-Bellini. Nor must you seek art. Who now, indeed—save for eight or nine desperate lunatics—really insists on pure art? The bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the people who patronize the movies and the circulating libraries, the infallible and sovereign people, demand homicides, infidelities, gendarmes, and swoonings in the moonlight—they demand Carolina Invernizio. They may not give her a place among the approved classic texts. What of it? Neither did Balzac and Zola have the satisfaction of sitting under the dome of the French Academy.
The poverty of her psychology might seem to be a more serious matter. But in this connection it may not be amiss to sketch a brief theory of the novel. Today, amid the squalor and decay of so many literary forms, the novel is nothing more than a stake that serves to uphold all sorts of vines. Rousseau began by putting into the novel the philosophy of sentiment; Walter Scott and Manzoni threw in raw chunks of political and civic history; Dumas fils, the mulatto, added social theses; Flaubert, archæology; Weisman, Sienkiewicz and Fogazzaro, Christian apologetics; Zola, treatises on medical science and sociology; Bourget, the psychological problems of souls with an income of fifty thousand francs; Barrès, the battles of contemporary politics; d’Annunzio, æsthetic exegeses, lyric descriptions, and the history of art. It is too much. The novel should be a novel; that is, a narrative of strange and curious events, a story of unusual happenings. The novel of adventure is the only genuine, legitimate novel. Let him who wants the history of art write books on the history of art; let him who wants religion write on theology; let him who wants psychology turn to psychological studies and manuals. Why should the novel, the very type that has least right to bore the reader, be compelled to serve as the receptacle, the vehicle, the substitute for all these other sciences, arts, and disciplines, beautiful in themselves, no doubt, most worthy and most useful, but utterly unrelated to romance? There is no psychologizing in the Tristan, the best and most popular novel of the Middle Ages. The favorite novel of modern times, the Don Quixote, is wholly a story of adventure, and does not pause for the analysis of souls. The first European novel, the Odyssey, is an unbroken sequence of events, without a trace of introspection. The department-store novel is a discovery of modern times. The novel which seeks to inform, instead of bringing pleasure, is an outcome of the corruption of the genre. The knowing, overladen, mixed and composite novel is faithless to its ancestry and its purposes. The great narrators—let us say Boccaccio and Maupassant, to keep the ancients and the moderns on even terms—did not betray their art. They tell of events, sad or ridiculous, and seek no further. They do not spin psychology. That they leave to their readers or their critics or the professional psychologists.
This simple truth seems to have flashed upon the simple mind of Carolina Invernizio when in her early youth she undertook the writing of her first novel. She was well aware that a novel is written to amuse, and is read for the sake of amusement. So then it calls for many facts, for surprising and intricate combinations, for fancy unrestrained, for plenty of action, for a clever plot in which the splendor of virtue and the shadow of vice shall find their place. Her readers, and especially her feminine readers, have been completely satisfied by novels so composed, and her success is a proof of the intrinsic and undeniable excellence of the method. Her novels have been sold and are still sold by the hundred thousand wherever women’s hearts beat for the misfortunes of innocence and the Italian tongue is read and understood. Before the war her publisher, Salani, sent whole shiploads of her novels to South America. And they were sold and were read far more than the works of her superior colleagues, far more than the volumes of De Amicis or d’Annunzio. The editions of her most famous books are as numerous as those of the Reali di Francia (the one truly Italian romantic epic) or those of Bertoldo (the one truly Italian comic hero). So long and so vast a success cannot be without its reasons, nor can all its reasons be to the discredit of the writer or her devotees.
Her success was obtained honestly, without the trumpeting of newspapers or the fanning of critics, without even the aid of mystery or a poetic pseudonym. She did not call herself the Countess of Lara, nor Phœbe, nor the Sphinx, nor the Queen of Luanto, nor lolanda, nor Cordelia, nor Fate. She was content—being a woman of simple ways, as our friend the paragrapher has it—with the modern and homely name of Carolina Invernizio. And though she married a certain Colonel Quinterno, she died as Carolina Invernizio—at Cuneo, in that sturdy Piedmont where she was born, I believe, in the fateful year of 1860. Her ashes are to be brought to Florence, where first the ways and the hopes of art opened before her. In the half century that witnessed the final resurrection of her fatherland, it was she who rendered Italy independent of foreign importations in the one branch of literature that is so necessary to the mass of the nation—the novel of intrigue and villainy.
Lest it be said that I am too partial to this woman, who has been too much blamed and too much praised (as they said of Voltaire), let me close with the testimony of a keen and disillusioned writer who, though a friend of mine, has exceptionally good taste. Ardengo Soffici relates in his Logbook that on a certain occasion he and a companion were both reading novels by Carolina Invernizio. His was The Villain’s Joy; his companion’s was Mortal Passion:
Every now and then we stopped reading to compare notes.
“How many killed off so far?”
“Two.”
“Three in mine.”
“What’s the heroine like?”
“Periwinkle eyes, golden hair, pale face, sad mouth.”
“Same here.”
And the rest was what you might expect to find in Zuccoli or Ojetti or Angeli. Nor was it notably inferior.
And that is exactly my opinion, except that I would omit the “notably,” and would not hesitate to say the work of Carolina Invernizio is superior at least in that it does not bore one. But a modern Italian novelist who realized that he was interesting would think himself dishonored. I, free from prejudice and from Arcadian austerity, admire and salute in the deceased Carolina the first and only Italian rival of the immortal Ponson du Terrail.[1]
- ↑ The perception of real values is so rare among us that soon after this essay was first published I received a letter of thanks from the husband of the deceased—and her publisher, Salani, asked my permission to reprint it as a preface to a posthumous novel.