Leopardi: A Study in Solitude

by Iris Origo, Shirley Hazzard (Introduction)

Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) is widely considered the greatest Italian poet since Dante, He was a scholar and philosopher whose out standing scholarly and philosophical works and superb poetry place him in the pantheon of great nineteenth-century writers.

Genres: Biography, Italy, Poetry, Nonfiction, Literature

386 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1999

About the author

Iris Origo was a British-born biographer and writer. She lived in Italy and devoted much of her life to the improvement of the Tuscan estate at La Foce, which she purchased with her husband in the 1920s. During the Second World War, she sheltered refugee children and assisted many escaped Allied prisoners of war and partisans in defiance of Italy’s fascist regime and Nazi occupied forces. She is the author of Images and Shadows; A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939–1940 (NYRB Classics); Leopardi: A Study in Solitude; and The Merchant of Prato, among others.

Reviews

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been reading about marketing in the digital age and brain research, so it was time to step back into the early 19th century... and a step back in time this is! As I read this book, I wondered how probable such a life would be today.

Giacomo Leopari was born in 1798 to noble family of Recanati, a small town in the Papal States. His every motion was monitored by an overly pious mother who felt it her duty to wring any ounce of gaiety from her children. He was so sheltered that he knew no other children than his siblings. His emotionally stunted father (the stories of his two courtships are revealing) was distant but, to his son's benefit, he did amass a large library in which Giacomo educated himself.

Author Iris Origo shows how his childhood, which had all the trappings of a house arrest, gave him neither social skills nor confidence in human interaction. He threw himself into studies. He translated and wrote and was able to publish enough as a teenager to be known by a few scholars whom he hoped might help him obtain a position outside of his home town.

He was able to travel to Rome with an uncle, but his cloistering and his extensive reading gave him a distorted view of the world and of learned society. He was disappointed and miserable, but he knew he could not live the confined life his parents expected of him. Origo shows how he eventually was able to leave and was able to attain respect for his work. Despite poor social skills, his frail health (he had no end of breathing, digestion, teeth and eye problems) and a poor appearance (he was a hunchback) he made a few friends, one in particular, who respected his talent and devoted himself to Leopardi.

This was a sad life. Leopardi was never happy, never had a real romance (with rejection came misogyny) and never had good health. He rejected religion at a time when this made him even more of an outsider.

Would this life be probable today? In modern industrial nations, can children still be completely cloistered? Particularly children of the rich? If so, would they respond by reading books? Outside of those who are taking credit courses, does anyone, today, read romantic poets? Is it possible to have an adult friend (not a lover, or so it seems) who devotes all to the welfare of a friend as Antonio Ranieri did for Giacomo Leopardi?

The book is thought provoking and the small pieces I've found on the internet about the author, Iris Irigo, are intriguing as well. While the book is very well written, you would have to be interested in this person, period of time or romantic poetry to find this of interest.

[Denis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Iris Origo’s Leopardi is a masterwork. Besides offering an illuminating portrait of one of the world’s great poets, it is a delight to read: the author proves herself to be a wonderfully talented wordsmith. Her book is a thorough, in-depth, exhaustive (yet never exhausting) biography of Italy’s most famous poet of the XIX century. It is also an exquisitely written work of literature that opens many doors: it is an erudite but accessible study of Leopardi’s poetry, a sprawling account of his life, and a mesmerizing portrait of Italy and its intellectual elites before the unification of the country. Origo admires Leopardi, and she feels compassion for the many heartbreaks that characterize his life, but she’s very careful to avoid the traps of hagiographies: the man she depicts is complex and contradictory. He is charming and annoying at the same time, he is destroyed by circumstances that are imposed upon him but he is also sometimes self-destructive. He is a tortured man, inhabited by passions that will lead him to write some of the most beautiful poetry of the Italian language. I knew Leopardi to be a sort of symbolic figure of the romantic loner, but all I knew was really a lot of clichés. Because he was born into aristocracy, one would think that Leopardi led a life of privilege and wealth, and that he chose his loneliness. Things are, of course, much more complicated. Origo’s Leopardi, whom she describes with great poignancy, is a tragic man. Afflicted by very real ailments that make his life miserable, and by a deformity that has devastating psychological and physical consequences, he also has to deal with an incredibly stifling social environment that does not want him to be the free poet he aspires to be. His parents may love him in their own way, but they hang on to the conservative rules of their world and their actions have a catastrophic impact on the life of their son (and of their other children too, in fact). Leopardi also comes into his own at a time when Italy’s turmoil creates many obstacles. Everything comes at a high price, for the poet, and engenders sadness, disappointment, and emotional disarray. His rare and tentative love affairs, for example, are all disastrous (it’s apparently unsure if he died a virgin or not). His fierce and possessive friendships are problematic to say the least (his last one is so passionate that rumors of homosexuality have never ceased to float around it). The travels that he finally manages to make, despite the desires of his father to never leave the house, often end up dismayingly. Even his writing, which brings him fame throughout the land, never offers him the financial comfort nor the recognition that he was aspiring to. Leopardi’s ordeals are numerous, and if some are of his own making (he’s an intensely sensitive person, and a lot of things and people offend him when they should not), a lot are inflicted to him by dire circumstances that he certainly doesn’t deserve. Origo eloquently evokes the solitude of the poet, a solitude that never ceases to isolate him, wherever he is, and with whomever he’s sharing his time. Actually, everything that surrounds Leopardi - be it a place, like the town of his childhood, or people - seems to reverberate this solitude and to enlarge it. Origo’s understanding of the history and culture of Italy is fascinating, but, thankfully, she never overwhelms the reader with her knowledge. This book is in fact much more than just a biography: it is also a reverie on her subject’s poetry and on his place in the world, a meditation on the country he was born into. Leopardi was a Romantic in the original sense of the word. There is a sort of purity to him that is admirable. He is a captivating character, and the sadness of his life, that imbues every facet of his destiny, from his childhood to his untimely death, makes for a spellbinding painting of what it means to be an artist and of the realm of melancholy.

[Kevin J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Giacomo Leopardi is still regarded as one of Italy's greatest lyric poets, and remains popular today, though is less known outside the country. Though unfamiliar with his work previously, and I expect not fully appreciable in translation, I find the poems sublime, achingly beautiful and full of wonder and longing.

The life of their author however, is one of tragedy; a man who found little happiness in life and seemed too sensitive for this world. The intensity of emotion can feel overwhelming. Due to a physical deformity (and referred to as a ‘hunchback’) but also great genius, Leopoardi is set apart from others and never breaks from his solitude. He fails to find love, and the friendships he craves are usually thwarted. While finding some success, the potential of his literary career is never truly fulfilled and brings him little joy.

While feeling great sympathy, he can also be exasperating. His sadness and loneliness is unrelenting and at times seems self-willed. On losing his devout Christian faith as a young man, he adopts a pessimistic philosophy; believing life to be essentially meaningless (nothing but pain, unrest and suffering) and it in philosophical and biographical works. It is striking how Leopardi the man could write poems as beautiful as A Silvia and Setting of the Moon. The reader is left with great sympathy for this rather unattractive character, and a sadness that he came to the death he seemed to welcome as a release, without finding any real happiness in life.

Origo writes beautifully and with great empathy or a character so different from herself. In the excellent ‘A Literary Tour of Italy’ (Alma Books, 2016) Tim Parks asks why Origo, with her full and seemingly very happy life, wanted to take on this biography in 1932, even returning to revise it in 1952. He notes the loss of a child, barely mentioned in her autobiography, left a deeper scar than she admits, and suspects she is drawn to Leopardi’s expression of ‘all that she found it intolerable to say, but could not sometimes help feeling’.

[Graychin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is generally considered Origo’s masterpiece, but I got so much more from her WWII diary (War in Val d’Orcia) and her autobiography (Images and Shadows). It’s my fault, probably. I am not a particular admirer of Leopardi’s poetry; it’s hard for me to admire (or even bring myself to read) poetry that’s only accessible to me through translation. And, perhaps thanks to my northern blood and typically Anglo-American character traits, certain aspects of the southern European personality (the emotional intensity, especially) are just incomprehensible to me.

A good book, but not - for me - a great one.

[Caomhghain · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very romantic biographic of Leopardi. As he was the romantic poet par excellence there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that. Here is his life and a sensitive reading of the major poems. There is no great depth to it or huge insights on the poetry but excellent workaday biography.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish I could bring myself to give this four stars.

This is a beautifully written book about a person of limited biographical appeal. I am not a native speaker of Italian, so I take Origo at her word (and acknowledge the poet's reputation) that Leopardi’s art is extraordinary. In translation, his poetry can be deeply moving, but it's also as relentless in its pessimistic themes as his reputation makes one expect.

Some readers may sympathize with Leopardi the man, and that is obviously Origo’s intended goal. But the tragic, artistic loner as a personality type is considerably less appealing when considered from a modern (and more psychology conscious) time. Origo is not attempting a psychological analysis, and if she had it probably wouldn’t have improved the book she did write. Leopardi takes a different path. But Origo’s arguments to the contrary, it’s hard to find much more to Leopardi the man than a case of catastrophically arrested adolescent development accompanied by tendencies that, in a less restrained social environment, would have led to deeply troubling behavior. What Origo describes as ‘love affairs’ seem to deserve a much darker interpretation. And while she does offer much criticism of the oppressive parenting he endured for the whole of his life, it only serves to reinforce a pithy, kneejerk, but nonetheless convincing psychological analysis.

All of which is to say, the triumph of the book lies in Origo’s ability to make his life more interesting than it has any right to be. It doesn’t help when we get glimpses of people who would have made more worthy subjects for her gift. Each appearance by Alessandro Manzoni in particular seems like a missed opportunity, someone whose story might have put a vibrant Italian high society at the center of the book, rather than the fleeting glimpses we get here which are further dimmed by seeing them through Leopardi’s tiresome, despondent eyes. Or Stendhal, whose wonderful description of a glittering, lively, literary and artistic community in Rome left me wondering how Origo could have quoted it without immediately embarking on the story of his life instead.

But Origo obviously had her reasons. Perhaps they had somehow something to do with the death of her oldest child. Perhaps it was something else. Regardless this is a book for anyone who loves the written word and is prepared to give its author the patience required to put up with her chosen subject. I am left in the odd position of wishing I could give this book more praise than it allowed me.

[Vickie · Rating 1 out of 5]

(1953) Biography of Giacomo Leopardi, poet. His poetry and philosophy sounded interesting, so I borrowed the book, which turned out to be factual and rather boring unless one was interested in Leopardi as a person. I wanted to know more about his poetry and philosophy, which did not seem to be well-covered in this book, and I have too many books to read to persevere with this.

[Michael LeClair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zibaldone and I Canti are next.