Sergio Solmi. La letteratura italiana contemporanea: Scrittori, critici e pensatori del Novecento.
Singh, G.
Sergio Solmi. La letteratura italiana contemporanea: Scrittori,
critici e pensatori del Novecento. Giovanni Pacchiano, ed. Milan.
Adelphi. 117 pages. L.90,000. ISBN 88-459-1350-3.
If we added the word poet, the subtitle of the present volume would
aptly describe Sergio Solmi, himself a writer, critic, thinker, and
poet, which few Italian critics in this century, after Croce, can claim
to be. In fact, in much of what Solmi has written, all four of these
roles intermingle subtly and fruitfully. From the outset of his career
as a critic, in evaluating literature Solmi was closely involved in
evaluating the thought underlying it as well, and equally involved in
evaluating the literary and stylistic qualities of a thinker, while
examining his thought as such. His earlier books Il pensiero di Alain
(1930) and La salute di Montaigne e altri saggi (1942) are cases in
point. In La letteratura italiana contemporanea, an extremely rich
miscellany of essays, articles, and reviews dating from 1925, Solmi
deals with the diverse aspects of Guido Gozzano, Pirandello, Svevo,
Saba, Vittorini, Ungaretti, Bacchelli, and Croce, among others, as well
as with such general themes as "Letteratura e vita nazionale,"
"Esperienza e teoria," "Stile e romanzo,"
"Neorealismo lirico moderno," "Pseudo-marxismo," and
"Nietzsche e D'Annunzio."
But informing and motivating what Solmi writes on people who were
more or less his contemporaries is his own sense of modernity and
contemporaneity, together with what he attributes to his fellow critic
Giacomo Debenedetti: "appassionata serieta morale," which
eludes "ogni sterile giochetto teorico." Another quality that
distinguishes Solmi from other Italian critics, especially the academic
ones, is the way he combines thought and imagination, critical acumen
and inspired intuition in assessing a writer or the novelty of his
invention and technique. Solmi finds in Pirandello's works
"sempre la solita materia scarsa di significazione, programmatica,
senza sviluppi interiori" and observes that "se Pirandello
insiste sul proprio tema e perche non ha altro da dirci." Apropos
of Svevo we are told that the main secret of his style lies "in una
sostenuta attenzione, in un rifiuto a trascendere il grigio mondo delle
sue creature nella decorazione e nell'approssimazione
letteraria." According to Solmi, Svevo's clairvoyance is not
intellectual like that of Stendhal, nor instinctive and mystical like
that of the Russian novelists. It is instead the result of what Solmi
calls "una sorta di divertita curiosita." In characterizing
the essence of Saba's poetry at its best and maturest, Solmi talks
about "il tono del tutto umiliato e prosastico, privo di qualsiasi
sonorita eloquente e letteraria, di cio che nel Saba permane al di sotto
del canto, elemento greggio e pura materia." Concerning Leonardo
Sinisgalli too, Solmi notes the influence of Ungaretti and Montale and
the way Sinisgalli "l'ha piegata ad espressioni di grazia ben
sue, con un piglio, una fermezza, una giustezza di tocco che hanno
giustamente colpito gl'intenditori."
Being himself one of "gl'intenditori-and, so far as
contemporary Italian poetry is concerned, perhaps critically the most
competent and the most sensitive-Solmi presents himself in this volume,
no matter what poet or novelist he is dealing with, as an ideal reader,
which means a complete critic as different from a specialist, an
academic expert, a philologist, a literary historian, an ideologue, or a
theorist, who are all merely partial critics. Equally pertinent and
stimulating are Solmi's comments on the nature of creative writing
and its autonomy, its freedom from any theory or ideology. The creative
spirit, he tells us, "opera sempre al coperto, per vie segrete ed
imprevedibili." That is why a creative act "non si giustifica
mai come una teoria, per quanto aderente e precisa: ma e sempre
giustificata da se medesima," and poetry obeys its own secret
instinct quite independently of any program or polemics. Thanks to his
knowledge of and familiarity with contemporary poetry in France,
England, Spain, and America (see his two volumes of translations from
foreign poets), Solmi rightly attributes to English poetry, with its
"effetti di discorsivita o di prosasticita a volte sconcertanti, a
volte profondi"-Solmi has especially Eliot, Auden, and Spender in
mind-the merit of "aver richiamato imperiosamente il poeta a una
considerazione piu coscientemente e drammaticamente aperta
dell'uomo d'oggi e del suo destino." But what Solmi says
about contemporary English poetry is more or less true of English poetry
throughout, from Chaucer to Eliot, poetry embodying in various forms and
degrees "the criticism of life": in other words,
"considerazione . . . dell'uomo d'oggi e del suo
destino." No nation, Voltaire observed, has applied moral ideas to
poetry so much as England. In contrast with Eliot's theory of
impartiality in poetry, Solmi suggests that "piu il poeta parla a
se stesso, e piu parla agli altri (s'intende, se la sua voce e
sincera). L'estrema intimita coincide con la maggior
comunicabilita."
Coming to individual writers, Solmi offers a personal critical
evaluation which has nothing academic about it and reminds us of
Leavis's remark that "a judgement is either personal or it is
nothing: you cannot take over someone else's." Thus Solmi
finds Gozzano's poetry not only "una bella opera
d'arte," but also "una parte della nostra coscienza
moderna, scettica e ironica, e nello stesso tempo sentimentale e
appassionata." Another characteristic of Solmi's criticism is
the union between his close adherence to the concrete and particularized
quality of experience as transmitted through words, or through what
Leavis calls "the black marks on the page," and an analytical
exploration of the intrinsic value, artistic as well as moral,
historical as well as perennial, of a given literary work. In examining
certain writers, Solmi pinpoints those qualities in them or in their
works which he himself unwittingly shares: for instance, Arrigo
Crojumi's "istintivo disprezzo per le ideologie," his
"vigile senso delle discriminazioni morali e psicologiche," or
Giovanni Titta Rosa's "perspicuita e limpidezza
stilistica."
In one of his earliest and shortest critical notes, "Pensieri
sull'arte," we come across some of the basic tenets of
Solmi's critical creed. For instance, commenting apropos of the
great classics such as Petrarch and Leopardi, he points out how their
disposition "proprio nei loro momenti piu rapiti, e piu riflessa e
raziocinante di quanto comunemente si crede," and how their poetry
"sembra nascere a un punto stesso coon la meditazione, e sostenersi
ai modi e agli sviluppi di un pensiero che, per quanto musicale, non
cessa dall'esser pensiero." This is because, among other
things, "l'arte non e soltanto un passaggio dall'oscuro
al chiaro, ma anche, come il pensiero, un procedere da chiarezza a
chiarezza."
G. Singh
Queen's University of Belfast
