LEOPARDI: A STUDY IN SOLITUDE (305 pp.)—Iris Origo—British Book Centre ($4.50).
If the gods gave an Oscar to the mortal who had been most miserable during his earthly course, Italy's Poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) would be seen to have left Cassandra and Schopenhauer at the post and won in a somber canto. History is full of tragic artists, but Leopardi differs from such as Mozart and Keats in that where they were struck by tragedy while in pursuit of happiness, Leopardi was so consistently unhappy that he positively winced when he was struck by joy.
Leopardi: A Study in Solitude is the foremost appreciation in English of the poet whom Italy ranks next to her greatest—Dante, Petrarch, Tasso. First printed in 1935 (but never before in the U.S.), it reappears now containing so much new matter that it is virtually a new book. Or, to put it another way, British-born Marchesa Iris Origo has dredged up so much new misery that Leopardi may now be seen to have been even unhappier than he was in the first edition.
Freed from Trouble. As a future tragedian. Leopardi began life with every possible disadvantage in his favor. His mother, Contessa Adelaide, made piety seem more a crime than a virtue. When children—her own or other people's—were stillborn or died in infancy. Mother Leopardi "experienced a deep happiness . . . inasmuch as [they] had flown to heaven, while their parents had been freed from the trouble of bringing them up." Of Leopardi's father. Conte Monaldo, it is reported that he once took off his pants in the street and gave them to a beggar. It is the only story which suggests that the count had so much as a leg to stand on. No man was ever more henpecked, more terrified of his wife—and yet more eager in his determination to believe himself "master in my own house." Two astonishing examples are enough to illustrate Giacomo Leopardi's total dependence on his parents: 1) he was 20 before he went out of the house unchaperoned; 2) he was 27 before his father let him cut up his own meat at the dinner table.
The Leopardi home was in the Adriatic town of Recanati, where today plaques mark the dwellings of men and women whose only fame is that they figure in Leopardi's poems. The young boy soon developed the habit of observing the life of the old town from upper windows (he scarcely ever left the house) and jotting down his observations in a notebook. At 10, he was turned loose in his father's library and spent the next seven years buried in books—"the happiest time that he had ever known."
In those years, Leopardi studied Latin, Greek, German, English, some Hebrew. When he emerged from the library at 17, he was a skilled philologist, a practiced poet, an authority on classical literature—and a ruined man. His eyes were so damaged that he could not bear the light of day; if he moved rapidly, "his head hammered and his pulses beat"; he was incapable of speaking to a stranger. Worst of all, a "double hump" had appeared between his shoulders—"a curvature of the spinal column."