That Awful Mess on the via Merulana

That Awful Mess On The Via Merulana

by Carlo Emilio Gadda

translated by William Weaver

introduction by Italo Calvino

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

Copyright © 1957,1982, 1991,1997 by Garzanti Editore s.p.a. Copyright © 1999, 2000 by Garzanti Libri s.p.a.

English translation copyright © 1965 by George Braziller Publishers. Reproduced by permission of George Braziller, Inc.

Introduction copyright © 1984 by Italo Calvino

All rights reserved.

Published in Italian as
Querpasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gadda, Carlo Emilio, 1893-1973. [Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana. English]

That awful mess on the Via Merulana / by Carlo Emilio Gadda ; introduction by Italo Calvino ; translated by William Weaver, p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

INTRODUCTION

TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD

THAT AWFUL MESS ON THE VIA MERULANA

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       INTRODUCTION

by Italo Calvino

I
N
1946, when he started
That Awful Mess on Via Merulana,
Carlo Emilio Gadda intended to write not only a murder novel, but a philosophical novel as well. The murder story was inspired by a crime that had recently been committed in Rome. The philosophical inquiry was based on a concept announced at the novel's very outset: nothing can ever be explained if we confine ourselves to seeking one cause for every effect. Every effect is determined by multiple causes, each of which has still other, numerous causes behind it. Every event, a crime for example, is like a vortex where various streams converge, each moved by heterogeneous impulses, none of which can be overlooked in the search for the truth.

A view of the world as a "system of systems" had been expounded in a notebook found among Gadda's papers and published after his death. Using his favorite philosophers, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant, as a starting point, the writer had constructed a "discourse on method." Every element of a system contains within it another system; each individual system in turn is linked to a genealogy of systems. A change in any particular element results in a breakdown of the whole.

What matters most is how this philosophy of knowledge is reflected in Gadda's style, in his language, which is a thick amalgam of folk expressions and learned speech, of interior monologue and artistic prose, of various dialects and literary quotations. The same philosophy is also apparent in the narrative, where the slightest details are enlarged until they occupy the entire frame, concealing or effacing the overall design. And so it happens in this novel, where the murder story, little by little, is forgotten. We seem about to discover the murderer's identity and motive when the description of a defecating hen demands our attention more strongly than the solution of the mystery.

The seething cauldron of life, the infinite stratification of reality, the inextricable tangle of knowledge are what Gadda wants to depict. When this concept of universal complication, reflected in the slightest object or event, has reached its ultimate paroxysm, it seems as if the novel is destined to remain unfinished, as if it could continue infinitely, creating new vortices within each episode. Gadda's point is the superabundance, the congestion, of these pages, through which a single complex object—the city of Rome—assumes a variegated form, becomes organism and symbol.

For, again, this book is not meant to be only a detective novel or a philosophical novel, but also a novel about Rome. The Eternal City is the true protagonist of the book, with its social classes ranging from the middle bourgeoisie to the underworld, the voices of its various dialects surfacing in the melting pot, its extroversion and its murkiest unconscious. In this Rome, the present blends with the mythical past, Hermes and Circe are invoked in connection with the most plebeian vicissitudes, and characters who are domestic servants or petty thieves bear the names of Aeneas, Diomedes, Ascanius, Camilla, Lavinia, like the heroes and heroines of Virgil. The ragged, brawling Rome of the neorealist cinema, in its golden age when Gadda wrote the novel, takes on a cultural, historical, mythical dimension that neorealism ignored. And the Rome of art historians also plays a part, in references to Renaissance and Baroque painting, descriptions of the feet of saints and their huge big toes.

A novel of Rome, written by a non-Roman. At the time he wrote
That Awful Mess,
Gadda knew Rome only from having lived there a few years in the 1930s, when he had worked as director of the Vatican's thermoelectric plant. He was in fact Milanese and closely identified with the bourgeoisie of his native city, whose values of concrete practicality, technical efficiency, and moral principle he saw being swept away as another Italy—conniving, raucous, and unscrupulous—prevailed. But even if his stories and his most autobiographical novel,
Acquainted with Grief,
are rooted in the society and dialect of Milan, it is
That Awful Mess
that brought him to the attention of a wider public, a novel written to a large extent in Roman dialect and where Rome is seen and comprehended with an almost physiological penetration, in its most infernal aspects, like a witches' sabbath.

Gadda was a man of contradictions. An electrical engineer, he tried to master his hypersensitive, anxious temperament with a rational, scientific mentality, but he simply exacerbated it instead; and in his writing he gave vent to his irascibility, his phobias, his fits of misanthropy, which in his everyday life he repressed behind the mask of ceremonious politeness belonging to a gentleman of another age.

Critics considered him a revolutionary in his use of language and narrative form, an expressionist, a follower of Joyce. He had this reputation from the beginning in the most exclusive literary circles, and it was renewed when the young members of the avant-garde in the 1960s acknowledged him as their master. But in his own literary taste, he was devoted to the classics and to tradition (his favorite author was the sage, calm Man-zoni), and his model in the art of the novel was Balzac. His own work displayed some of the fundamental gifts of nineteenth-century realism or naturalism in its portrayal of characters, settings, and situations through their physical substance, through material sensations as, for instance, the tasting of a glass of wine at the dinner with which the book opens.

Fiercely critical of the society of his time, animated by a visceral hatred of Mussolini (seen in his sarcastic description of the emphatic set of the Duce's jaw), Gadda shied away from any kind of radicalism in politics; he was a moderate man of order, respectful of the law, who looked back with nostalgia toward the sound administration of an earlier time; a good patriot, he had been a conscientious officer in the First World War, had fought, and had suffered. This was a fundamental experience for him, though he never got over his indignation at the harm done by incompetence, expediency, vel-leity. In
That Awful Mess,
which takes place in 1927, during the early years of Mussolini's dictatorship, Gadda does not confine himself to a facile caricature of Fascism: he conducts a minute, extensive analysis of the effects on the daily administration of justice caused by a failure to respect the separation of powers as envisioned by Montesquieu, to whom there is explicit reference.

This constant desire for concreteness, for verification, this appetite for reality are so strong in Gadda's writing that they create a kind of congestion, hypertension, blockage. The characters' voices, thoughts, and sensations, the dreams of their unconscious, are mingled with the author's omnipresence, his fits of impatience, his sarcasm, and the fine network of cultural references. As in the performance of a ventriloquist, all these voices coincide in a single speech, sometimes in the same sentence, with shifts of tone, modulation, falsetto. The structure of the novel is stretched out of shape from within by the excessive richness of the material and the intensity with which the author charges it. The existential and intellectual dramatic force of this distortive process is implicit: comedy, humor, grotesque metamorphosis are natural means of expression for this man whose life was always unhappy, tormented by neurosis, by the difficulty of relations with others, by the anguish of death.

Gadda did not intend that his formal innovations would overturn the structure of the novel; he envisioned constructing solid novels that observed all the rules, but he never succeeded in carrying his plans through to the end.
Acquainted With Grief
and
That Awful Mess
seem to need only a few more pages to reach their conclusions. In other cases, he dismembered his novels, breaking them into short stories, and it would not be impossible to reconstruct the originals by piecing together the various fragments.

That Awful Mess
recounts the police investigation of two criminal cases, one trivial and the other inhuman. Both take place in the same apartment house in the center of Rome within the space of a few days: a widow, eager to be consoled, is robbed of her jewelry; a married woman, disconsolate because she cannot bear children, is stabbed to death. An obsession with infertility is central to the novel: Signora Liliana Balducci surrounded herself with girls whom she considered adopted daughters, but then, for one reason or another, they become separated. The figure of Liliana, dominant even as victim, and the gynaeceum atmosphere that surrounds her seem to open the prospect, full of shadows, of femininity, a mysterious force of nature in the face of which Gadda expresses his perturbation in scenes where contemplations of woman's physiology are joined with geographical-genetic metaphors and to the legend of the origin of Rome, where the rape of the Sabine women insured the city's continuity.

A traditional antifeminism that reduces woman to a procreative function is expressed with great crudeness: is this merely the method of Flaubert recording
idees regues,
or does the author himself share this view? To see the problem more clearly, we must bear two circumstances in mind, one historical and the other personal to the author. Under Mussolini, the first duty of the Italians, inculcated unremittingly by official propaganda, was to present sons to the Fatherland; only prolific mothers and fathers were considered worthy of respect. In the midst of this apotheosis of procreation, Gadda, a bachelor oppressed by a paralyzing shyness in any female presence, felt like an outsider, and he suffered an ambivalent feeling mingling attraction and repulsion.

Attraction and repulsion animate the description of Liliana's corpse, her throat horribly cut, in one of the most elaborate scenes of the book, like a Baroque painting of a saint's martyrdom. Officer Francesco Ingravallo conducts his investigation of the crime with a special interest: first because he knew, and desired, the victim, and second because he is a Southerner, steeped in philosophy and moved both by scientific passion and by sensitivity toward all that is human. It is Ingravallo who theorizes about the multiplicity of causes that concur to produce a single effect, and among these causes, as if reading Freud, he discerns always
Eros
in one form or another.

If the police officer Ingravallo is the author's philosophical spokesman, Gadda identifies himself with another character on a psychological and poetic level. Angeloni, a retired government official and a tenant in the building where the murder takes place, becomes so embarrassed when questioned that he immediately falls suspect, although he is the most inoffensive of souls. An introverted and melancholy bachelor, Angeloni is given to solitary walks along the streets of the old center of Rome. A man subject to gluttony, and perhaps other temptations, he orders hams and cheeses from food shops which are delivered to his home by boys in short trousers. As the police track one of these boys, a suspected accomplice in the robbery and perhaps also in the murder, Angeloni lives in fear of being accused of homosexual tendencies and, overly protective of his respectability and privacy, he becomes entangled in reticences and contradictions that result in his arrest.

But greater suspicion is focused on a nephew of the murdered woman, who must explain his possession of a gold pendant containing a valuable stone that belonged to the victim. This investigation soon shows every sign of being a false lead. The inquiries about the robbery, on the other hand, seem to garner more promising information, as they move from the capital to the Alban Hills (and thus become the responsibility no longer of the urban police but of the
carabinieri)
in search of a gigolo-electrician, Diomede Lanciani, who had visited the eager widow. In this rural setting we rediscover the traces of various girls on whom Signora Liliana lavished her motherly attentions. And it is here that the
carabinieri
find, hidden in a chamber pot, the jewels stolen from the widow.

The description of the jewels is not simply an outburst of virtuosic writing; it adds to the rich depiction of circumstances—beyond the linguistic, phonetic, psychological, physiological, historical, mythical, gastronomic, and others—yet another level, a mineral, plu-tonic level of hidden treasures, bringing geological history and the forces of inanimate matter to bear on the sordid story of a crime. And it is around the possession of these precious stones that the knots of the characters' psychology or psychopathology are tightented: the violent envy of the poor, along with what Gadda calls the "typical psychosis of the frustrated woman" that led Liliana to bestow gifts on her protegees.

We might have been brought closer to the solution of the mystery by the first version of the novel, published in installments in a literary review in Florence in 1946, but the author suppressed a crucial fourth chapter when the novel was prepared for publication in 1957, precisely because he did not want to show his own hand too clearly. In this chapter, Ingravallo questions Liliana's husband about his affair with Virginia, one of his wife's "adoptive daughters." The sapphic atmosphere enveloping Signora Liliana and her gynaeceum is underlined, and the girl's character reveals lesbian tendencies, as well as amorality, cupidity, and social ambition (she had obviously become the man's lover to blackmail him later); there is evidence of a fit of blind, violent hatred as she utters obscure threats and slices into a roast with a kitchen knife.

Is Virginia the murderess then? Any doubt this raises is resolved by the posthumous discovery and publication of a film treatment that Gadda seems to have written at about the same time as the first draft of the novel. Here, the plot is developed and clarified in every detail, and we learn that the jewel thief is not Diomede Lan-ciani but Enea Retalli, who, rather than allow himself to be arrested, fires on the
carabinieri
and is killed. This treatment was ignored when Pietro Germi made a film from the novel in 1959 without Gadda's collaboration, and it was never considered by producers or directors. Their indifference is not surprising: Gadda had a rather ingenuous notion of writing for film and relied heavily on dissolves to reveal characters' thoughts and further the action. It makes interesting reading as a sketch for the novel, but it creates no real tension either as action or as psychology.