16 Mai 2007

Publié par Alessandro Zabini

How Love May Be Mirrored in Pulp Writing and in Poetry, or Fulfilled Love in «Isobel», by James Oliver Curwood, and Wasted Love in Giacomo Leopardi and Algernon Charles Swinburne

Il più solido piacere di questa vita è il piacer vano delle illusioni …
… tutto il reale essendo un nulla, non v’è altro di reale né altro di sostanza al mondo che le illusioni …
… tutti i piaceri sono illusioni o consistono nell’illusione, e di queste illusioni si forma e si compone la nostra vita. … non è meglio una vita con molti piaceri illusorii, che senza nessun piacere? … E … non c’è maggiore illusione ovvero apparenza di piacere che quello che deriva dal bello …
… chi conosce e sente più profondamente e dolorosamente la vanità delle illusioni, le onora e desidera e predica più di tutti gli altri …
Tutto è vanità fuorché le belle illusioni e le dilettevoli frivolezze …

As inscription for «To Isobel, or How You Do Not Want To Write a Poem», I prefixed an excerpt from Isobel: A Romance of the Northern Trail

—a novel by James Oliver Curwood, originally published in 1913,

whose Italian translation, entitled simply Isobel, appeared in the «Romantica Mondiale Sonzogno» in 1931.

Courtesy by ladybluestocking.com

Telling of a Royal Canadian Mountie falling in love with a beatiful and inscrutable young woman, married to the same fugitive he should run down, Isobel is a dramatic, adventurous and happy ending love story such as it seems never allowed to come upon in real life

—whatever real life is, that is.

The reader, however, is not attracted to the novel by the happy end, nor is he or she bewitched only by Isobel

—in her own way a femme fatale of the Great North.

The book is still rewardingly readable because it is written in a pulp writing style now irretrievably lost

—a writing path nowadays unwalkable.

Perhaps Curwood’s pulp writing, in its faithfulness to illusion—

And while we look for light of love

Love’s twilight wanes

as Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote—

testified by the happy, if somewhat gloomy shaded ending of Isobel—

is nearest to the inherently comforting and illusory nature of poetry, than those pieces of writing, which flatters itself with the illusion to be able to dissolve delusion to unveil the truth.

Dream and irony have detachment in common, and detachment comforts, or, at least, relieves from sufferings, misery and desperation.

In poetry, love is often illusory and doomed. More akin, perhaps, to the

sogni

degl’immortali … un sogno
In molta parte onde s’abbella il vero
… Sogno e palese error …
Che incontro al ver tenacemente dura

love
—with

vano

D’implacato desio furor—

grips the lover, to which

Spira nel pensier … la bella imago
da cui, se non celeste, altro diletto

he never had, and only from that same image he draws a bit of consolation

Poi che del ver m’è tolto…

Thus Giacomo Leopardi testified the illusory nature of love, while more gloomy are the following verses by Algernon Charles Swinburne…

For both poets love did not flourishes, nor even burst forth.

Loves that are lost ere they come to birth,
Weeds of the wave, without fruit upon earth.
I lose what I long for, save what I can,

as Swinburne did write. Neither poet was reciprocated in his love. Both were instead rejected. Thus love was at best, for both of them, a fleeting joy before death.

In a letter to Joseph Knight, July 8, 1875, Swinburne commented upon the above quoted poem:

in an age when all other lyrists, from Tennyson to Rossetti, go in (metrically) for constancy and eternity of attachment and reunion in future lives, etc., etc., I limit love, honestly and candidly, to 24 hours; and quite enough too in all conscience.

To Swinburne’s verses, from At Parting, echoed the following passage by Leopardi, from Consalvo, a poem inspired to him by the unreciprocated love for Fanny Targioni Tozzetti…

Non vissi indarno,

Poscia che quella bocca alla mia bocca
Premer fu dato. Anzi felice estimo
La sorte mia. Due cose belle ha il mondo:
Amore e morte. All’una il ciel mi guida
In sul fior dell’età; nell’altro, assai
Fortunato mi tengo. Ah, se una volta,
Solo una volta il lungo amor quieto
E pago avessi tu, fora la terra
Fatta quindi per sempre un paradiso
Ai cangiati occhi miei. Fin la vecchiezza,
L’abborrita vecchiezza, avrei sofferto
Con riposato cor: che a sostentarla
Bastato sempre il rimembrar sarebbe
D’un solo istante, e il dir: felice io fui
Sovra tutti i felici. Ahi, ma cotanto
Esser beato non consente il cielo
A natura terrena. Amar tant’oltre
Non è dato con gioia.

A similar feeling or conception seems to be expressed by Tennyson in the first four verses from section LXXXV of In Memoriam:

This truth come borne with bier and pall,
I felt it, when I sorrow’d most,
’Tis better to have loved and lost,
Than never to have loved at all—

Not so suprisingly as it may seem, Swinburne wrote something analogous…

In contrast with this view it may be observed that «Once Is as Good as Never», or thus it was stated by Walter Benjamin in «Short Shadows (I)»:

The truth of this dictum is demonstrated most surprisingly in the realm of the erotic.

Fulfillment can be achieved, Benjamin admits,

But scarcely have your desires been fulfilled […] when a new and unbearable yearning—for naked, bare fulfillment in itself—takes their place in an instant. In memory, the first fulfillment is canceled out […]. It becomes abstract. So this once becomes never, when measured against a naked, absolute fulfillment. Conversely, it can also devalue itself erotically as a naked, absolute event.

Perhaps, in Leopardi and Swinburne, it is exactly the erotic unfulfillment to allow the preservation of memory through poetry, and so to prevent this once from becoming never.

Be this as it may, a reader, whose love life is most probably a painful and dismal failure, is perhaps more eagerly inclined to share a pessimistic detachment and valiant desperation, ensuing from unfullfilled love, such as Leopardi and Swinburne did sing.

For the same reason, however, he or she is perhaps less eagerly inclined to see his or her love experience mirrored by the finally fulfilled love in Curwood’s Isobel. While comforting, that fulfilled love cannot but remind to the reader all his or her failed love stories, perhaps.

Maybe, the illusion of romantic pulp writing continually reminds to the enchanted reader that everyday life is disenchantment, and love stories, outside poetic or romantic illusion, always come to a bad end. Otherwise stated, disillusion turns upside down into consolation, perhaps, while illusion turns inside out into disenchantment, maybe.

Reading and writing in adult life, as plays and games in childhood, are illusions in that they are pleasures, perhaps, or are pleasures in that they are illusions, maybe

—and only as pleasures and illusions they may be considered

serious activities, perhaps.

As pleasures and illusions, reading and writing comfort while deepening the contrast with pain, reminding pain while they soothe it. Disenchanted readers and writers may be conscious that writing is pleasure, illusion, consolation

—and nothing more, perhaps.

… ma il poeta deve illudere, e illudendo imitar la natura, e imitando la natura dilettare …
… Resta perciò che questi potendo illudere come vuole, scelga dentro i confini del verisimile quelle migliori illusioni che gli pare, e quelle più gradite a noi e meglio accomodate all’ufficio della poesia, ch’è imitar la natura, e al fine, ch’è dilettare …
… quel diletto puro e sostanziale ch’è il fine proprio della poesia …
… senza fallo … mi crederei divino poeta se quelle immagini che vidi e quei moti che sentii nella fanciullezza, sapessi e ritrargli al vivo nelle scritture e suscitarli tali e quali in altrui …

Lady Duskrover: Towards a Kung-Fu Magick Fantasy Tale

Blue shade through wind-blended sounds

From where the quotes are drawn, in order of appearance…

Leopardi, Giacomo, «Zibaldone», pp. 51, 99, 271-272, 318, 3990, in Tutte le opere, 2 vols., a cura di Walter Binni ed Enrico Ghidetti, Firenze, Sansoni, 1976.

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, Before Sunset, in «A Century of Roundels», in The Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne: Poems, Philadelphia, David McKay, n.d., p. 583.

Leopardi, Il pensiero dominante, vv. 107-109, 111, 114; Ultimo canto di Saffo, vv. 59-60; Il primo amore, vv. 101-103; Alla sua donna, vv. 43-44, in «Canti», op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 33, 15, 16, 22.

Swinburne, Aperotos Eros, in «A Century of Roundels», op. cit., p. 587.

Swinburne, The Triumph of Time, in «Poems and Ballads (First Series)», op. cit., p. 23.

Swinburne, At Parting, in «Poems and Ballads (Second Series)», op. cit., p. 248.

Swinburne, The Swinburne Letters, 6 vols., Edited by Cecil Y. Lang, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1960, Vol. III, p. 44.

Leopardi, Consalvo, in «Canti», op. cit., Vol. I, p. 21.

Tennyson, Alfred, «In Memoriam», LXXXV, vv. 1-4, in Poems & Plays, London, Oxford University Press, 1968, p. 250.

Swinburne, The Triumph of Time, in «Poems and Ballads (First Series)», op. cit., p. 24.

Benjamin, Walter, «Short Shadows (I)», in Selected Writings, 4 vols., Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, Cambridge (Massachusetts), and London (England), The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, Vol. II, pp. 268-269.

Leopardi, «Discorso di un Italiano intorno alla poesia romantica», op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 917, 918, 920.

#Walking Down Memory Lane