But drinking habits are no rarity among those who live by the sea. The most characteristic features of Lenin- graders are: bad teeth (because of lack of vitamins during the siege), clarity in pronunciation of sibilants, self- mockery, and a degree of haughtiness toward the rest of the country. Mentally, this city is still the capital; and it is in the same relation to Moscow as Florence is to Rome or Boston is to Washington. Like some of Dostoevsky's characters, Leningrad derives pride and almost a sensual pleasure from being "unrecognized," rejected; and yet it's perfectly aware that, for everyone whose mother tongue is Russian, the city is more real than anywhere else in the world where this language is heard.
For there is the second Petersburg, the one made of verses and of Russian prose. That prose is read and reread and the verses are learned by heart, if only because in Soviet schools children are made to memorize them if they want to graduate. And it's this memorization which secures the city's status and place in the future—as long as this language exists—and transforms the Soviet schoolchildren into the Russian people.
The school year usually is over by the end of May, when the White Nights arrive in this city, to stay throughout the whole month of June. A white night is a night when the sun leaves the sky for barely a couple of hours—a phenomenon quite familiar in the northern latitudes. It's the most magic time in the city, when you can write or read without a lamp at two o'clock in the morning, and when the buildings, deprived of shadows and their roofs rimmed with gold, look like a set of fragile china. It's so quiet around that you can almost hear the clink of a spoon falling in Finland. The transparent pink tint of the sky is so light that the pale-blue watercolor of the river almost fails to reflect it. And the bridges are drawn up as though the islands of the delta have unclasped their hands and slowly begun to drift, turning in the mainstream, toward the Baltic. On such nights, it's hard to fall asleep, because it's too light and because any dream will be inferior to this reality. Where a man doesn't cast a shadow, like water.
1979
In the Shadow of Dante
Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors. The ghosts of the great are especially visible in poetry, since their words are less mutable than the concepts they represent.
A significant part, therefore, of every poet's endeavor involves polemics with these shadows whose hot or cold breath he senses on his neck, or is led to sense by the industry of literary criticism. "Classics" exert such tremendous pressure that at times verbal paralysis is the result. And since the mind is more able to produce a negative view of the future than to handle such a prospect, the tendency is to perceive the situation as terminal. In such cases natural ignorance or even bogus innocence seems blessed, because it permits one to dismiss all such specters as nonexistent, and to "sing" (in vers libre, preferably) merely out of a sense of one's own physical stage presence.
To consider any such situation terminal, however, usually reveals not so much lack of courage as poverty of imagination. If a poet lives long enough, he learns how to handle such dry spells (regardless of their origins), using them for his own ends. The unbearableness of the future is easier to face than that of the present if only because human foresight is much more destructive than anything that the future can bring about.
Eugenio Montale is now eighty-one years old and has left behind many futures—his own as well as others'. Only two things in his biography could be considered spectacular: one is that he served as an infantry officer in the Italian Army during World War I. The second is that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975. Between these events one might have found him studying to become an opera singer (he had a promising bel canto), opposing the Fascist regime—which he did from the start, and which eventually cost him his post as curator in the Vieusseux Library in Florence—writing articles, editing little magazines, covering musical and other cultural events for about three decades for the "third page" of ll Corriere della Sera, and, for sixty years, writing poetry. Thank God that his life has been so uneventful.
Ever since the Romantics, we have been accustomed to the biographies of poets whose startling careers were sometimes as short as their contributions. In this context, Montale is a kind of anachronism, and the extent of his contribution to poetry has been anachronistically great. A contemporary of Apollinaire, T. S. Eliot, Mandelstam, he belongs more than chronologically to that generation. Each of these writers wrought a qualitative change in his respective literature, as did Montale, whose task was much the hardest.
While it is usually chance that brings the English- speaking poet to read a Frenchman ( Laforgue, say), an Italian does so out of a geographical imperative. The Alps, which used to be civilization's one-way route north, are now a two-way highway for all sorts of literary isms! Ghost- wise, that crowds (clouds) one's operation enormously. For any Italian poet to take a new step, he must lift up the load amassed by the traffic of the past and the present; and it is the load of the present that was, perhaps, a lighter thing for Montale to handle.
With the exception of this French proximity, the situation in Italian poetry during the first two decades of this century was not much different from that of other European literature. By that I mean that there was an aesthetic inflation caused by the absolute domination of the poetics of Romanticism (whether in its naturalistic or symbolist version). The two principal figures on the Italian poetic scene at that time—the "prepotenti" Gabriele D'An- nunzio and Marinetti—did little more than manifest that inflation, each in his own way. While D'Annunzio carried inflated harmony to its extreme (and supreme) conclusion, Marinetti and the other Futurists were striving for the opposite, to dismember that harmony. In both cases it was a war of means against means; i.e., a conditioned reaction which marked a captive aesthetics, a sensibility. It now seems clear that it took three poets from the next generation, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Umberto Saba, and Eugenio Montale, to make the Italian language yield a modem lyric.
In spiritual odysseys there are no Ithacas, and even speech is but a means of transportation. A metaphysical realist with an evident taste for extremely condensed imagery, Montale managed to create his o^ poetic idiom through the juxtaposition of what he called the "aulic"— the courtly—and the "prosaic"; an idiom which as well could be defined as "amaro stile nuovo" (in contrast to Dante's formula, which reigned in Italian poetry for more than six centuries). The most remarkable aspect of Mon- tale's achievement is that he managed to pull forward despite the grip of the dolce stile nuovo. In fact, far from trying to loosen this grip, Mantale constantly refers to or paraphrases the great Florentine both in imagery and vocabulary. His allusiveness is partially responsible for the charges of obscurity that critics occasionally level against him. But references and paraphrases are the natural elements of any civilized discourse (free^^r "freed"—of them, discourse is but gesturing), especially within the Italian cultural tradition. Michelangelo and Raphael, to cite only two instances, were both avid interpreters of La Divina Commedia. One of the purposes of a work of art is to create dependents; the paradox is that the more indebted the artist, the richer he is.