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His Life

Luigi Pirandello

The artist. The man.

Photo of a bust of Pirandello in Palermo, his hometown.

The Man - Attributes of Theater

Pirandello’s life was a tumultuous journey from a traditional young man in feudal Italy to one of the leading modern dramatists of his time. He is known for his exploration of early psychology and metatheatricality as well as adapting his short stories into plays. He wrote some of his early plays following the tenets of naturalism but later rejected this movement to explore illusion and absurdism and ultimately let his life experience permeate all of his work. His fascination with what is real and true and what is a subjective reality shines through in much of his work and is directly influenced by the experiences of his early life. He also explores the strong desires we all have and the deep disappointment that comes from not attaining these desires.

Overview

He grew up in a traditional home in Sicily born to a wealthy family that allowed him to escape the oppression of the feudal systems still in place in much of Italy (Gainor et al. 529). He married a woman as part of an arranged marriage business deal for his father and he lived a traditional and conservative life as a father until the dawning of the 20th century (Gainor et al. 529, D'Amico). Once his life began to unravel Pirandello found solace in his work and became a prolific writer of short stories, novels, film scripts, and plays (Gainor et al. 529). Many of his major philosophies, which he explores in his writing, grew out of this difficult time in his life. Ideas such as the knowledge of the self being limited, the desire for things that only disappoint us when we cannot grasp them, and the belief that yesterday is an illusion and that today will only become an illusion with time. (Vittorini 27). These pessimistic philosophies only grew in Pirandello throughout his life as they were reaffirmed at every wrong turn. His pain in life led to the exploration of humanity in his work and helped him to become one of the leading dramatists in modern theater.

Childhood Encounters

Pirandello had many influential experiences in his early life. Luigi Pirandello was born in 1867 to Stefano Pirandello and Caterina Ricci-Gramitto in Sicily (Gainor et al. 529, D'Amico 6-7). He was the youngest of five children with two older brother and two older sisters (D'Amico). He was raised in a very traditional family amidst the still feudal systems of Sicily (Norton 529). He came of age with his home country that he loved so much as Italy was unified shortly after his birth in 1871 (Vittorini 3). Many of Pirandello’s most formative experiences occurred during the first part of his life. One of these many stories is that of his servant, Maria Stella, telling him ghost stories (Vittorini 12). These stories stuck with Pirandello and allowed his imagination to soar at a young age and continue to expand while those of his peers contracted with age. Another formative experience is that of Pirandello seeing his first dead body. He heard that there was a corpse kept in a tower and, his curiosity getting the best of him, went to see it. He went to the tower and saw the corpse lying in its coffin and then he heard a sound. Thinking he was alone he held his breath and then realized that the sound was that of a woman’s skirt rustling. He looked in the direction of the noise and saw “a woman and a man, entwined together and performing a slow, strange, uninterrupted motion… and the woman’s skirts were raised” (Giudice 10). This encounter is thought to be an influence on the way that Pirandello intertwines love and death in many of his works. These stories from his childhood show the early influence of his life in Sicily and the way that his curiosity and imagination led him through life.

Antonietta Portulano, Pirandello's wife

Education and Married Life

Though Pirandello was exposed to a liberal facet of society in his schooling he remained very traditional in his beliefs and watched as his carefully curated life fell apart. As Pirandello grew he was fortunate to be educated locally in Palermo and then to continue his studies at Bonn with funding from his wealthy father (Gainor et al. 529, Vittorini 17). After his education at Bonn he returned to Sicily to follow the traditional rules of arranged marriage and in 1894 married Antonietta Portulano (Gainor et al. 529). They were happily married for about 10 years, with three children before the turn of the century (D'Amico 78-92). After this brief period of happiness Pirandello’s life began to unravel. In 1904 a mine that his father had invested the family fortune into flooded causing him to loose all of the financial support he had been living on and forced him to find work to support himself (Vittorini 20). He took a job teaching at a women’s college in Rome (Vittorini 20). Also, in the early 1900s Antonietta began to lash out and in 1913 she was committed to a mental institution (Gainor et al. 530). Just one year later Luigi’s oldest son, Stefano, volunteered to fight in the war (D'Amico 131). Stefano ends up in prison, Fausto, his other son, joins the war effort, and Antonietta begins accusing her daughter, Lietta, of trying to take her place in the household now that she is gone (Vittorini 22-23). Pirandello’s life has fallen apart and he is left to try to put the pieces back together. This complete and total loss of the beautiful life he had created in his early marriage provides the inspiration for the bitter, true tragedy found in many of his plays. Vittorini writes, “there is therefore in him and, by way of reflection, in his characters, a constant clash between his longing for the gifts of sensuous life and the sad disappointment experienced when his lips touch a cup that is empty, or a fruit that is withered and bitter” (Vittorini 27).

Italian Fascism and Pirandello's Theater

In this period of war Pirandello turns to theater. In 1918 things begin to look up again for Pirandello and his sons return from the war (D'Amico 162). They create a small artists retreat with Stefano and Luigi writing while Fausto paints (D'Amico 167). Pirandello had always been a writer, specializing in short stories, but during the war he find a new fascination with the dialectic theater of Sicily (Gainor et al. 530). Inspired by the mask work of commedia dell’arte and his favorite playwright, Carlo Goldoni, Pirandello began adapting his short stories into pieces for the stage (Norton 530). Beginning with plays reminiscent of the naturalism of the time he quickly branched out to plays exploring what is real and what is illusion, political and social commentary, womanhood, and how art intersects with life (Vittorini). Shortly after this resurgence in his work he began to express very proudly his support of Mussolini and fascism. Pirandello considered art to be making order out of chaos by imposing a form and therefore he considered Mussolini the “artist of the Italian nation” because he was imposing order onto the chaos of the country (Gainor et al. 532). His support of Fascism only increased with him finally joining the party after one of its most horrific acts of violence, when many other party members began to show less support (Gainor et al. 533). He even turned in his Nobel Prize, won in 1934, to be melted down to help fund fascist programs (Rey). His fascination with violence, and specifically violence as a means to end talking and begin “real action,” show up often in his plays (Gainor et al. 533). However his support of Mussolini was not selfless. Pirandello wanted Mussolini to found a national theater and put him in charge of it. Mussolini never agreed to this but did support Pirandello in creating the Teatro d’Arte which toured around Europe and the Americas as ambassadors for fascism (Gainor et al. 533).

How It All Ends

Young love and loneliness mark Pirandello's later years. His great support of the violent political party taking over Italy made Pirandello unpopular within his home country in these later years of his life even as his own support for the party dwindled (Rey). He still found some success abroad, though he offended many people with his criticisms (Giudice 183). He was lonely in his final years of life, with only his platonic love, Marta Abba, to comfort him (Giudice 186). In 1925 he met Abba, a young actress, working on one of his productions and fell in love with her (Gainor et al. 533). The two exchanged letters until Pirandello’s death in 1937 (Lettere a Marta Abba). During this period Pirandello wrote many plays centering on female protagonists, certainly with Abba in mind (Gainor et al. 533). His final years were lonely and tormented by the difficult journey of his life and when he died he had only a few requests written on a piece of paper 25 years prior to his death:

“1. My death must be passed over in silence… No announcements or invitations to the funeral.

2. Do not dress my corpse. Let me be wrapped naked in a winding sheet…

3. A pauper’s hearse. Bare. No one to accompany me... The hearse, the horse, the driver – that is all.

4. Burn me. And as soon as my body has been burnt the ashes must be thrown to the winds, for I want nothing, not even my ashes, to remain…” (Giudice 207)

 

 

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