(Translated by Maurice English)
it sounds like lyricism. Little in these lines recalls Hermet- icism, that ascetic variant of Symbolism. Reality was calling for a more substantial response, and World War II brought with it a "de-Hermetization." Still, the "Hermeticist" label became glued to Montale's back, and he has, ever since, been considered an ""obscure" poet. But whenever one hears of obscurity, it is time to stop and ponder one's notion of clarity, for it usually rests on what is already known or preferred, or, in the worst cases, remembered. In this sense, the more obscure, the better. In this sense, too, the obscure poetry of Montale still carries on a defense of culture, this time against a much more ubiquitous enemy:
The man of today has inherited a nervous system which cannot withstand the present conditions of life. While waiting for the man of tomorrow to be born, the man of today reacts to the altered conditions not by standing up to them or by endeavoring to resist their blows, but by turning into a mass.
This passage is taken from Poet in Our Time, a collection of Montale's prose pieces which he himself calls a "collage of notes." The pieces are excerpted from essays, reviews, interviews, etc., published at different times and in different places. The importance of this book goes far beyond the sidelights it casts on the poet's own progress, if it does that at all. Montale seems to be the last person to disclose his inner processes of thought, let alone the "secrets of his craft." A private man, he prefers to make the public life the subject of his scrutiny, rather than the reverse. Poet in Our Time is a book concerned precisely with the results of such scrutiny, and its emphasis falls on "Our Time" rather than on "Poet."
Both the lack of chronology and the harsh lucidity of language in these pieces supply this book with an air of diagnosis or of verdict. The patient or the accused is the civilization which "believes it is walking while in fact it is being carried along by a conveyor belt," but since the poet realizes that he is himself the flesh of this civilization's flesh, neither cure nor rehabilitation is implied. Poet in Our Time is, in fact, the disheartened, slightly fastidious testament of a man who doesn't seem to have inheritors other than the "hypothetical stereophonic man of the future incapable even of thinking about his o^ destiny." This particular vision surely sounds backward in our track-taped present, and it betrays the fact that a European is speaking. It is hard, however, to decide which one of Montale's visions is more frightening—this one or the following, from his "Piccolo Testamento," a poem which easily matches Yeats's "Second Coming":
... only this iris can I
leave you as testimony
of a faith that was much disputed
of a hope that burned more slowly
than a hard log in the fireplace.
Conserve its powder in your compact
when every lamplight spent
the sardana becomes infernal
and a shadowy Lucifer descends on a prow
of the Thames or Hudson or Seine
thrashing bituminous wings half-
shorn from the effort to tell you: It's time
(Translated by Cid Corman)
Still, a good thing about testaments is that they imply a future. Unlike philosophers or social thinkers, a poet ponders the future out of professional concern for his audience or awareness of art's mortality. The second reason plays a bigger part in Poet in Our Time because "the content of art is diminishing, just as the difference between individuals is diminishing." The pages in this collection that do not sound either sarcastic or elegiac are those that deal with the art of letters:
There remains the hope that the art of the word, an incurably semantic art, wilwil sooner or later make its repercussions felt even in those arts which claim to have freed themselves from every obligation toward the identification and representation of truth.
This is about as affirmative as Montale can be with respect to the art of letters, which he does not spare, however, the following comment:
To belong to a generation which can no longer believe in anything may be a cause of pride for anyone convinced of the ultimate nobility of this emptiness or of some mysterious need for it, but it does not excuse anyone who wants to transform this emptiness into a paradoxical affirmation of life simply in order to give himseU a style . . .
It is a tempting and dangerous thing to quote Montale because it easily turns into a full-time occupation. Italians have their way with the future, from Leonardo to Marinetti. Still, this temptation is due not so much to the aphoristic quality of Montale's statements or even to their prophetic quality as to the tone of his voice, which alone makes one trust his utterances because it is so free of anxiety. There is a certain air of recurrence to it, kindred to water coming ashore or the invariable refraction of light in a lens. When one lives as long as he has, "the provisional encounters between the real and the ideal" become frequent enough for the poet both to develop a certain familiarity with the ideal and to be able to foretell the possible changes of its features. For the artist, these changes are perhaps the only sensible measurements of time.
There is something remarkable about the almost simultaneous appearance of these two books; they seem to merge. In the end, Poet in Our Time makes the most appropriate illustration of the "outer time" inhabited by the persona of the New Poems. Again, this is a reversal of La Divina Commedia, where this world was understood as "that realm." "Her" absence for Montale's persona is as palpable as "her" presence was for Dante's. The repetitive nature of existence in this afterlife now is, in its turn, kindred to Dante's circling among those "who died as men before their bodies died." Poet in Our Time supplies us with a sketch—and sketches are always somewhat more convincing than oils—of that rather overpopulated spiral landscape of such dying yet living beings.
This book doesn't sound very "Italian," although the old civilization contributes a great deal to the accomplishment of this old man of letters. The words "European" and "international" when applied to Montale also look like tired euphemisms for "universal." Montale is one writer whose mastery of language stems from his spiritual autonomy; thus, both New Poems and Poet in Our Time are what books
112 I J 0 s E p II B II 0 D sky
used to be before they became mere books: chronicles of souls. Not that the latter need any. The last of the New Poems goes as follows:
To Conclude I charge my descendants (if I have any) on the literary plane, which is rather improbable, to make a big bonfire of all that concerns my life, my actions, my non-actions. I'm no I.eopardi, I leave little behind me to be burnt, and it's already too much to live by percentages. I lived at the rate of five per cent; don't increase the dose. And yet it never rains but it pours.
1977
On Tyranny
Illness and death are, perhaps, the only things that a tyrant has in common with his subjects. In this sense alone a nation profits from being run by an old man. It's not that one's awareness of one's o^ mortality necessarily enlightens or makes one mellow, but the time spent by a tyrant pondering, say, his metabolism is time stolen from the affairs of state. Both domestic and international tranquillities are in direct proportion to the number of maladies besetting your First Secretary of the Party, or your President-for-Life. Even if he is perceptive enough to learn that additional art of callousness inherent in every illness, he is usually quite hesitant to apply this acquired knowledge to his palace intrigues or foreign policies, if only because he instinctively gropes for the restoration of his previous healthy condition or simply believes in full recovery.