The fiftieth anniversary of his death, which took place on May 21, 1973, and the one hundred and thirtieth anniversary of his birth, which took place on November 14, 1893. 2023 is an important year for Carlo Emilio Gadda, one of the most difficult writers to read and understand and, perhaps for this reason, the most fascinating of our twentieth century literature.
The celebrations for Carlo Emilio Gadda
Le celebrations have been brought forward, among others, last December by Carocci editore with the publication of a useful and interesting work, the "Gaddabulary", real dictionary consisting of 219 words, such as the house number of via Merulana, the place of the famous “mess”, elaborated by the philologist Paola Italia, with the help of 61 other scholars.
On January 24, it will be the turn of Adelphi which proposes the new enlarged edition of the “Journal of War and Prison", again edited by Paola Italia, with a note by Eleonora Cardinale.
It is six notebooks hitherto unknown and unpublished: eighty pages accompanied by beautifully autographed plates that enrich the first edition published in 1955, by Sansoni.
A Gadda in hell
Lo writer kept the diary between August 24, 1915 and December 31, 1917, i.e. more or less from the time he enlisted until his defeat of Caporetto. But many notebooks had been lost, especially those concerning '17. Now a void is being filled.
È a Gadda in Hell what we find in the unpublished notebooks, as explained to Adelphi. And Dante returns many times in the found pages.
The spirit that feeds the days of the writer in trenches of the Great War he is depressed, funereal, angry. And it emerges immediately from the passages that are chosen to present the volume. “Our stupid, slutty, bitchy, bastard, superficial, asinine soul holds for professional dignity the saying: 'I do what I want, I have no masters'. This is called pride, freedom, dignity. When your superiors tell you to shave yourself so that lice don't populate your head and body, you, Italian thief, say: "I don't shave, i am a free man".
When a general passes to the front line, as Bloise passed, and rightly complains of the shits scattered everywhere, you, Italian excrement, say that the general deals with shits: (a phrase I heard on the lips of an officer). If the general stays at his house, you say he's an ambush, etc. Down with freedom, down with pride, he meant him in this sense. I know nothing more trivial than these hairdresser feelings. What is the extent of the incident between Musizza and the Captain? This: that if tomorrow in combat the Captain told Musizza to advance with his section in an exposed place, Musizza would say: 'He goes there and gets himself killed: I'm not going there to please him.'
For second lieutenant Gadda, left for the last war of the Risorgimento in May 1915, employed in the second section of the 89th machine gun department of the 5th Alpine regiment, the disappointment is burning.
War is not “necessary and holy”as he had hoped. And the enemy is not the worst encounter he has in the toughest battle. Gadda is overwhelmed by pettiness of the “swampy life” of barracks; by the incompetence of the great generals; from the "cretinous egotism of the Italians", to which the selected passage refers; from the moral indignity of the cowards, the ambushes, the profiteers, those who forced the Alpini to march with broken shoes.
“If yesterday I had had a shoemaker in front of me, I would have provoked him into a fight and stabbed him to death”, he writes at one point in his diary.
And yet – explain the editors of Adelphi – the most heartbreaking and founding clash is that which Gadda engages with himself: with the horror and sadness of loneliness, a "nervous system" spoiled by "a morbid sensitivity", with an insufficiency in acting that prevents him from implementing the treasures of technical preparation, sense of sacrifice, spirit of discipline who dwell in him.
“I lack the energy, the severity, the self-confidence of the man who… acts, acts, acts by dint of spontaneity and willful expression”, he writes.
The greatest Italian prose writer of the 900s
The defeat of Caporetto and the captivity in Germany they will do the rest. They will weigh like a ton on the budget of the Gadda's participation in the war, but they will also mark the birth of greatest Italian prose writer of the twentieth century showing in the "Journal" his first painful act of knowledge of the world and his own psychic reality.
Gadda was done prisoner at the foot of Mount Krasji, near Ternova d'Isonzo, in October 1917 and deported to Celle, near Hannover, in Germany. He lived in barrack 15c, nicknamed the "poets' barrack". Here he made friends with Bonaventura Tecchi, an expert Germanist, Camillo Corsanego, a well-known jurist, and Ugo Betti, poet and playwright. Later he will tell about them in the book "The castle of Udine", in the chapter "Fellow prisoners".
The best description of the writer Gadda is, in our opinion, the one that makes him Italo Calvino (also an anniversary for him this year, the centenary of his birth) in the fifth of his "American lessons".
He represents – Calvino writes – the “Contemporary novel as encyclopedia”. Gadda - he continues - "tried throughout his life to represent the world as a tangle, or tangle, or ball of yarn, to represent it without at all attenuating its inextricable complexity, or rather the simultaneous presence of the most heterogeneous elements which combine to determine every event".
The yellow of via Merulana is the brightest example, but newspapers" I am certainly its leaven.
The works of Carlo Emilio Gadda are all being published by Adelphi and the most recent title is "I Luigi di Francia", released in 2021.
