Luigi Pirandello
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Chapter 6: Moderns and Contemporaries Luigi Pirandello |
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Luigi Pirandello
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Luigi Pirandello was born in Sicily in 1867, the son of a prosperous family of sulfur merchants. He resisted his father’s desire for him to enter the family business and attended, first the University of Rome, and then the University of Bonn, where he received a doctorate in philology in 1891; his thesis was on the dialect of his hometown in Sicily. Three years later he entered into an arranged marriage with Antonietta Portulano, the daughter of another family of wealthy sulfur dealers. The marriage gave Pirandello an independent income and allowed the couple to settle in Rome, where he led the life of a leisured man of letters, publishing an occasional volume of poetry and contributing short stories to literary magazines. The marriage produced three children.
In 1903, a catastrophic landslide destroyed the sulfur mines of both the Pirandellos and the Portulanos, plunging both families into poverty. Pirandello had to seek employment teaching Italian in a girls’ school in Rome. His wife, already weakened by a difficult childbirth, reacted to this disaster first with a six-month hysterical paralysis and then with a progressive psychosis. Pirandello cared for her at home for sixteen years, the victim of her paranoia and irrational jealousy, until her increasing violence forced him to commit her to an institution in 1919. Now driven by financial need, Pirandello began to write voluminously. His early career was devoted mainly to fiction; solid success came in 1904 with The Late Mattia Pascal, a novel which anticipated the conflict between being and seeming which dominated his later writing. Other successes followed: several collections of earthy, realistic short stories and several novels, including The Old and the Young (1913), The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator (1916), and One, None, and a Hundred Thousand (1925-1926). Pirandello wrote his first play, The Vise, in 1898, but, discouraged by difficulties in getting it produced, he did not return to the theater until 1915. Right You Are (If You Think So) (1917), an ironic study of the relativity of truth, was a modest success and ignited an enormous burst of dramatic creativity that was to continue through the 1920s. His first major theatrical success was As Before, Better Than Before (1920); immediately after its production, he wrote, within a five-week period, both Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV, his masterpieces. The production in Rome of Six Characters in Search of an Author in 1921 and Henry IV in 1922 brought Pirandello international fame. Productions of the two plays followed in Paris, London, Berlin, and New York, and Pirandello’s subsequent plays were eagerly competed for: To Clothe the Naked (1923), The Life I Gave You (1924), Each in His Own Way (1924), Diana and Tuda (1927), The New Colony (1928), Lazarus (1929), Tonight We Improvise (1930), As You Desire Me (1930), and When Somebody is Somebody (1933). He received the Nobel Prize in 1934. Pirandello committed himself enthusiastically to Fascism and the plays of the Fascist period—especially The New Colony, Lazarus, and The Mountain Giants (1936, unfinished)—have been read as withdrawals into myth in reaction to the rigors of the Fascist state. Pirandello’s later years were marked by a deep, continuing love for the Italian actress Marta Abba. Pirandello died in 1936, leaving instructions for the most private and spartan of funerals: "Dead, let me be not clothed. Let me be placed, naked, in a sheet. No flowers on the bed, no lighted candle…The cart, the horse, the driver, e basta!" Author Links
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Six Characters in Search of an Author
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