Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (3 page)

Outstanding examples in themselves of the novella form, one or two of the stories in
Vita dei campi
are the original sketches for I
Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree,
1881), the first of the series of five novels,
I Vinti (The Defeated Ones),
to which Verga had initially intended to give the collective title
La Marea (The Tide).
I Malavoglia
is prefaced by a brief introductory note in which Verga explains that the work is intended as the first in a series of five novels that will explore people’s fruitless struggle for immortality (‘the only true happiness’) at different levels of the social order.
In
I Malavoglia,
the characters are the poor and simple-living inhabitants of a Sicilian maritime community.
The setting of the novel, the picturesque fishing village of Aci Trezza, with its characteristic features such as the beacon rock
(il fariglione)
and ‘the tiny group of cottages lying huddled up asleep on the shore’ had first appeared in ‘Picturesque Lives’.
So, too, had the prototypes of several
of the novel’s major figures – the grandfather Padron ‘Ntoni, his son Bastianazzo who perishes at sea, his grandson Luca who dies for king and country at the naval battle of Lissa (1866), and his granddaughter Lia who drifts into prostitution in Catania.
There are parallels also between the young ‘Ntoni, another of the characters in the novel, and Turiddu from ‘Cavalleria rusticana’, a tale which Verga had originally intended as part of the novel itself.
Both are headstrong young men whose lives take on a different and ultimately fateful direction after being torn away from their Sicilian village community to serve as conscripts in the new Italian militia on the mainland.

Verga wrote two other collections of tales based on Sicilian village life:
Novelle rusticane
(1883) and
Vagabondaggio
(1887).
Whilst the second could be classified as more of the same, the first contains some of Verga’s finest and most original short stories.
¹⁴
The collection stands out for the variety of its themes and for characters that are sharply and memorably observed.
‘Black Bread’ is especially interesting as a study of the strains placed upon human relationships in a primitive rural society where the ceaseless struggle for daily bread subverts traditional concepts of love and honour.
In ‘Malaria’, the reader is presented with an almost tangible sensation of the disease and its consequences in a rural community whose way of life is adversely affected, also, by the advent of the railway era.
The effects of natural phenomena on people’s livelihoods, such as drought or a volcanic eruption, are graphically described in other stories with the same painstaking eye for detail.
The church and the law are prominent elements in several of the tales (‘The Reverend’, ‘Don Licciu Papa’, ‘Bigwigs’), more often than not as adversaries of the poor, being depicted in a vein that is fiercely satirical.
A lighter note is sounded in ‘Getting to know the King’, where the sense of humour that Verga displays intermittently in most of his stories is broadened, as in ‘War of the Saints’ from the earlier collection, into pure comedy.
‘Property’, with its brilliant portrayal of the tale’s self-made, ruthless and single-minded protagonist, is of special interest as the initial sketch for
Mastro-don Gesualdo,
the second (and, as it turned out, the last that Verga completed) of the projected series
I Vinti.

Mastro-don Gesualdo
first appeared in instalments in 1888, and was heavily revised before being published in its definitive form in 1889.
Like Mazzarò, the main character of ‘Property’, Gesualdo Motta is a self-made man, a person of humble origins, who at an early age swears to make himself rich and eventually, by dint of his native wit and tireless energy, amasses a staggeringly large fortune.
He moves up the social ladder by marrying into an aristocratic but penniless family, then finds that he is despised not only by the society into which he has moved but also by the one he has abandoned.
When he dies, he has been even more thoroughly defeated by life, despite his riches, than the poverty-stricken fisher-folk of
I Malavoglia.
In Verga’s estimation, all people are ultimately
vinti,
irrespective of their material wealth or poverty, or the position they occupy in society.
The main theme of
Mastro-don Gesualdo,
as of the earlier novella, is the myth of property.
Verga accepts the validity of the scriptural warning against the laying up of treasures upon earth, but as his other novels and short stories make abundantly clear, he believes the laying up of treasures in heaven to be no less improvident.

Verga’s stories do not, for the most part, have happy endings, but it would be a mistake to think of him as a sombre pessimist.
He harboured no illusions about human society, but, at the same time, he was acutely aware of the comic side to our daily lives; even in the midst of catastrophe his characters never lose their capacity to smile at their misfortunes.
It is this which endears them to his readers, stirring our compassion and demanding our participation in their joys and sorrows.
Verga’s great merit lies in his ability to arouse compassion whilst avoiding completely all traces of sentimentality, and this is because he presents life as it is, free from the distortions of idealistic perspectives.
His narratives are an unfailing source of interest, not only to those who care about good literature, but also to the historian, for whom his novels and short stories provide an invaluable record of social conditions at a critical stage of modern Italian history.
In his style and language he was far ahead of his time, and it is only in comparatively recent times that his true nature as the greatest Italian short-story writer since Boccaccio has been acknowledged in his own country.
Outside Italy, he remains grossly underrated, largely because of the extreme difficulty of translation to which D.
H.
Lawrence referred.
¹⁵

Mastro-don Gesualdo
was the crowning achievement of a literary
career that had offered vivid and memorable accounts of the society of the Italian mainland cities and the Sicilian countryside in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
In addition to the works already referred to, Verga wrote other novels
¹⁶
and collections of short stories.
¹⁷
He also wrote a number of plays, based for the most part, like
Cavalleria rusticana,
on his own earlier narratives.
The last thirty years of his life were relatively unproductive.
In December 1894, he returned for the last time from Milan to Catania, where he settled in the house of his birth in the Via Sant’Anna.
He died after suffering a cerebral thrombosis on returning from one of his regular visits to his club, the Circolo Unione, on 27 January 1922.

G.
H.
McWilliam

Professor McWilliam can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected]

1.
Introduction to
Little Novels of Sicily
reprinted as ‘Note on Giovanni Verga’ in
Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished and Other Prose Works
, London: Heinemann, 1968, p.
277.

2.
The Letters of D.
H.
Lawrence
, vol.
IV (June 1921–March 1924), edited by Warren Roberts, James T.
Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield, Cambridge (1987), p.
186.

3.
Ibid., pp.
105–106.

4.
Ibid., p.
115.

5.
Ibid., p.
188.

6.
Many reference books, including
The Oxford Companion to Music
, mistakenly claim that the opera was based on the short story, but every schoolboy knows it was based on the adaptation of the story that Verga prepared for the theatre.
Confirmation of this is easily obtained by a comparison of the play with the opera libretto.
In his introductory note to
Little Novels of Sicily
, D.
H.
Lawrence wrote (p.
33) that ‘Verga made a dramatized version of “Cavalleria rusticana”’, and… this dramatized version is the libretto of the ever-popular little opera of the same name.’

7.
‘Edoardo Sonzogno… instituted a prize competition for one-act operas – the
Concorso Sonzogno
.
At first no outstanding work was discovered in these
concorsi
– until in 1889 “Cavalleria rusticana” was brought to light in this way.
It is interesting to mention that, before Mascagni entered the work for this competition, Puccini had shown the score to Giulio Ricordi, who rejected it because “I don’t believe in this opera”… (Mosco Carner,
Puccini: a critical biography,
second ed., London (1974), p.
36).

8.
‘il mito dell’ amore, così come si presenta alla fantasia giovanile, nei suoi urti con la rcaltà’
(L.
Russo,
Gli scrittori d’Italia
, Florence (1951), vol.
II, p.
753).

9.
In his introductory note to
Little Novels of Sicily
, Lawrence writes (p.
27) that ‘the moment Verga starts talking theories, our interest wilts immediately.
The theories were none of his own: just borrowed from the literary smarties of Paris.
And poor Verga looks a sorry sight in Paris ready-mades.’

10.
An example of this technique is the reaction of Turiddu, in ‘Cavalleria rusticana’, on hearing that Lola has become engaged during his absence to Alfio, the carter: ‘When Turiddu first got to know about it, Christ in Heaven!
he wanted to tear the guts out of that chap from Licodia, he really did!’

11.
See
D.
Woolf,
The Art of Verga
, p.
111.

12.
The title given by Verga to this novella was ‘Fantasticheria’, for which the nearest English equivalent, ‘Daydreaming’, inadequately conveys the ironic contrast between appearance and reality that provides the story with its
raison d’être
.
Lawrence’s version of the story is entitled ‘Caprice’.

13.
‘They’ve killed Turiddu!’

14.
In the introductory note to his own translation of
Little Novels of Sicily
, D.
H.
Lawrence remarks that ‘most of the sketches are said to be drawn from actual life, from the village where Verga lived and from which his family originally came.
The landscape will be more or less familiar to anyone who has gone in the train down the east coast of Sicily to Syracuse, past Etna and the Plain of Catania and the
Biviere
, the Lake of Lentini, on to the hills again.
And anyone who has once known this land can never be quite free from the nostalgia for it, nor can he fail to fall under the spell of Verga’s wonderful creation of it, at some point or other.’

15.
See
p.
xii.

16.
Il marito di Elena
(1882) and
Dal tuo al mio
(1905).

17.
Per le vie
(1883),
I ricordi del capitano d’Arce (1891), Don Candeloro e C.
^I
(1894).

A.
Alexander,
Giovanni Verga: A Great Writer and his World
(London, 1972)

T.
Bergin,
Giovanni Verga
(New Haven, 1931.
Reprint Westport, Conn., 1983)

L.
Capuana,
Verga e D’Annunzio,
a cura di M.
Pomilio (Bologna, 1972)

G.
M.
Carsaniga, ‘Realism in Italy’ in F.
W.
J.
Hemmings (ed.),
The Age of Realism
(Harmondsworth, 1974), pp.
323–55

G.
Cattaneo,
Giovanni Verga
(Turin, 1963)

G.
Cecchetti,
Giovanni Verga
(Boston, 1978)

G.
Cecchetti, Il
Verga maggiore
(Florence, 1968)

B.
Croce,
Giovanni Verga
(Bari, 1964)

F.
De Roberto,
Casa Verga e altri saggi verghiani
(Florence, 1964)

G.
L.
Lucente,
The Narrative of Realism and Myth: Verga, Lawrence, Faulkner, Pavese
(Baltimore, 1961)

A.
Momigliano,
Dante, Manzoni, Verga
(Messina, 1944)

S.
Pacifici, ‘The tragic world of Verga’s primitives’ in
From Verismo to Experimentalism: Essays on the Modern Italian Novel
(Bloomington, 1969), pp.
3–34

L.
Pirandello, ‘Giovanni Verga’ in
Saggi, Poesie, Scritti Varii
(Milan, 1960), pp.
389–428

G.
Raya,
Vita di Giovanni Verga
(Rome, 1990)

L.
Russo,
Giovanni Verga
(Bari, 1966) G.
Viti,
Verga verista
(Florence, 1974)

D.
M.
White (ed.),
Pane Nero and Other Stories
(Manchester, 1962)

J.
Wood, ‘Like a Mullet in Love’,
London Review of Books,
22, 15, 10 August 2000, pp.
9–12

D.
Woolf,
The Art of Verga: A Study in Objectivity
(Sydney, 1977)

Little Novels of Sicily (Novelle rusticane),
translated by D.
H.
Lawrence, with an Introduction and Glossary by Andrew Wilkin (Harmondsworth, 1973)

Cavalleria rusticana and other stories
(from
Vita dei campi),
translated by D.
H.
Lawrence (London, 1928.
Reprinted Westport, Conn., 1975)

The She-Wolf and Other Stories,
translated with an Introduction by Giovanni Cecchetti (second ed., revised and enlarged, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1973)

The House by the Medlar Tree (I Malavoglia),
translated by Raymond Rosenthal, with new Introduction by Giovanni Cecchetti (second ed., Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1983)

Mastro-don Gesualdo,
translated by D.
H.
Lawrence (Harmondsworth, 1970)