During the nineteenth century the great prestige form of prose literature in German-speaking Europe was not the novel, but the novella. The best writers of the time were hard at work crafting powerful, rich, narrative prose at lengths that allowed works to be read in a single sitting, works which were of at times incredible quality. Polished, focused, though they often were, the Novelle-tradition was also incredibly varied, ranging from the ecologically-minded ghost story of Theodor Storm’s Rider on the White Horse to the murder mystery of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Jew Beech Tree, from the moral tales of Gottfried Keller to the modernist-inspiring intensity of Georg Büchner’s story of madness, Lenz.
With so much writing in a specific form, there soon came attempts to theorise, classify, exclude and include. Goethe called novellas a “sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit” (an unprecedented, extraordinary event that has nevertheless occurred), which, like his own novella (called Novella) confused as much as it clarified things. For Ludwig Tieck, it was all about the Wendepunkt – the turning point. Theodor Storm, in my favourite definition, called novellas “the sister of the drama and the severest form of prose fiction.” None of these is suitable for every novella, but each gives a sense of how at least some of these stories worked. They were mainly short-to-medium length narratives with a high symbolic charge, focusing on an important event in the life of a single individual.
One other writer whose theory is known to students of the Novelle-tradition is Paul Heyse, one of Germany’s first Nobel Laureates and creator of the “Falkentheorie”. As described by Idara Crespi in the introduction to a new edition of four of Heyse’s novellas translated by Renata Lenz, L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas, this is “a pivot. The point where all the accumulated pressure of the narrative tilts and pours in one direction.” It is also something specific which sets the story apart from all others – a particular thing, or even just a moment that seems utterly unique. In the title story a girl bites the man who tries to seduce her, in another what is special is a work of embroidery.
I had not read Heyse before, so when Crespi’s Espresso publishing house, which aims to focus furnishing unjustly-forgotten European works with new translations, asked me whether I would like a copy I agreed at once. This blog’s own focus is similar, after all. The review, however, comes only from me.
The Stories
Paul Heyse was born in Berlin in 1830, but he spent most of his long life in Munich, where he passed away aged 84, shortly after winning the Nobel Prize in 1912. The time when Heyse was not in Munich he largely spent in Italy. Like many German artists, most famously Goethe, Heyse found in the southern country a wellspring of inspiration. The four novellas collected in L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas showcase the extent of that inspiration. The title story is a drama set in a coastal fishing village. The Embroiderer of Treviso is a historical tale from north Italy, while The Wedding on Capri is a kind of comedy of manners where German tourists come up against Italian mores. The last, Nerina, is a dramatization of a key moment from the life of the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. Each is entirely unlike the others, which does mean that the enjoyment of such a collection is bound to be a matter of personal taste.
For me, my favourites were the first story, L’Arrabbiata, and the last one, Nerina. I liked the The Embroiderer of Treviso as well, while I felt The Wedding on Capri was more like a weak version of the kind of tale Stefan Zweig (or even Henry James) would later perfect.
L’Arrabbiata
Laurella, a poor young woman in Sorrento across from the island of Capri, is “L’Arrabbiata” – the angry one. Her father is dead, her mother ill and unable to survive without her daughter’s support. One day Laurella crosses over to Capri, intending to sell some materials to two women there. The boatman is a young man, Antonino. They avoid one another’s eyes. The only other passenger is a priest. After chatting about her mother’s health, the priest chides her for her reputation as one who will not dance or sing with others, and mentions a suitor who was rejected in the past by her. She explains that she has a private reason for her actions and decision “to be subject to no man who would ill-use me and then caress me”. It is the abuse she witnessed her mother receive at the hands of her father which makes her determined to defend herself as her mother could not.
The priest is to stay the night on Capri to tend to a sufferer there, leaving Antonino to take Laurella back on her own later that day. During the journey they sit “like the bitterest enemies”, before eventually an argument breaks out. The boatman declares “that here you are in my power, and must do what I will” and seizes her, only to find his hand bitten and bloodied. “Must I do what you will?” Laurella asks, then leaps into the open sea. But when Antonino recovers himself and tells her she is too far from land to survive she climbs back in and rows with him back to the shore in silence. Later that night, however, she comes to him with healing herbs and apologises, even breaks into tears. Love, at least of a sort, is admitted, and with that the story draws to a close.
L’Arrabbiata was one of the first novellas Heyse wrote and remains his most famous. That bite is strange and unforgettable. But that does not quite answer what makes it interesting. One way to look at that, as it often is with novellas, is through the idea of determinism. Fate, in other words.
L’Arrabbiata as Tale of Fate
All but the most inventive fiction is determinist by its very form, as the words are fixed upon the page long before we open up the book. But with novellas this feeling is particularly stark. They are simply not long enough even to give the illusion of an alternative, of branching paths. Instead, we often have a sense of characters hurtling towards their doom. So it is, in a way, in L’Arrabbiata. Laurella knows what fate wants for her – a marriage – and fears the violence, the “look in his eyes” that men have when they alternate between abuse and tender words. Her rejection, before the novella begins, of another suitor, seems to indicate her victory in the struggle with her fate. In becoming “the angry one”, she has let herself be defined in a way that makes her safe at a cost of partial isolation from her community.
But she is not safe. Antonino loves her and does not resist his own feelings. At first, he tries to use the weight of society’s judgement to force her into his arms – “one day you’ll grow lonely, and then, wild as you are, you’ll take the first man who comes”. When that does not work, he turns to force. Laurella’s bite seems at first glance like her successfully resisting him, but I read it much more negatively. She gains a moment, but soon enough she has to return to the boat. Like trains in 19th century fiction, the boat of L’Arrabbiata is ultimately a symbol of the limited choices people, but especially women, had in life. Laurella can drown, or she can get back in. She chooses life over principles. But also, I think, because those principles have already been damaged beyond repair.
In reacting with force herself, by drawing blood, Laurella essentially discovers to herself that she is no better than the men. (Though, perhaps she had no choice.) This is reflected too by the tears (another liquid) that pour down her cheeks when she meets Antonino later in the evening. Her surrender to him is, on the one hand, an acknowledgement of her own repressed romantic feelings. On the other, it’s a surrender to the idea that she is, like the men, at base capable of cruelty and violence. That, in a way, they deserve one another. L’Arrabbiata is a love story with a happy ending, but it’s also a kind of tragedy, as Laurella’s idea of herself is crushed by the reality of her feelings and actions. The end result is that the forces of patriarchal society, emphasised by the priest – who gets the final word – are victorious.
Freedom was mere illusion, the woman who tried to be an individual was crushed. But as often happens with novellas, it made for a good story.
Nerina
My second favourite of the novellas collected in L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas was Nerina. This is a tale of a moment from the life of the marvellous pessimist Giacomo Leopardi, an Italian poet of the early 19th century beloved by Schopenhauer. As with L’Arrabbiata, indeed with all the stories here, it’s a love story. Leopardi, returned to his family home in Recanati, meets his neighbours’ daughter, Nerina, much older now than when last he saw her, and like Laurella, an independent spirit. She has even read Leopardi’s poems, even though they have been censured by the Church. Her youthful spirit makes an impression on Leopardi, whose gloom is the overriding characterisation Heyse gives us of him besides his well-known ill-health. At the same time, Leopardi is shocked by the effect he has had on her – “forget the premature and mournful wisdom you have learned from my poems!”
That night, they exchange, from window to window, his latest poem for a bouquet of carnations and some of her hair. But like a miserable figure in a work of Dostoevsky’s, Leopardi is confused and unnerved by his own feelings and resolves to avoid her thereafter. It does not work. Her father wants to enlist Leopardi to convince Nerina to marry a suitor she does not wish to, turning him into the agent of the forces of society he has little respect for. Nevertheless, he agrees, telling her off for “hav[ing] nothing to do with the happiness [the suitor] has chosen for you”. She listens, responds by reciting his own poetry to him with its “bitter joys”, and the two of them end in an embrace. Yet still he goes, encouraging her to ignore his poetry and its messages:
“Promise me – when I am gone – that you will try to find your way into life as thousands do. I am not asking you to do violence to your heart. But you are young, Nerina, and life transforms us in wondrous ways.” Leopardi leaves and, perhaps predictably, a few months later learns of her death. She did not, it seems, find her way into life after all.
Ways into Poetry
As with L’Arrabbiata, we can read Nerina through the lens of fatalism, but here it is less interesting. The novella is trapped not by its form, but by the facticity of at least one of its central figures. (Nerina’s identity and reality remain debated by scholars). The story here can only end one way. Nerina will become a poem; Leopardi will continue being a poet.
Instead, what I liked about Nerina was the how it worked in Leopardi’s poetry. Many 19th century novellas took artists as their subjects, from Grillparzer’s The Poor Musician to Mörike’s Mozart on the Way to Prague, but Nerina, taking as it does a poet as the artist, is able to achieve a better integration of creation into itself. The story begins shortly after Leopardi has finished writing his most famous poem, “L’infinito”, in 1819, and finishes with him considering the lines to Nerina he placed within his later poem, “Le Ricordanze” (Memories), written in 1829 while at home again. But Nerina takes Leopardi’s ideas and tries to integrate them into her own barred, limited life at home. She poeticises her life.
When she meets the poet there’s a shock, because he had not appreciated the impact his own words might have had. That in a way, living, she has become more of a poet than he is. Leopardi is not the hero of this work, as the title should have warned me. He tries to turn her away from the kind of poetically-charged life he allows himself, and acts as an instrument of a society he himself has no belief in. She, meanwhile, dies for beauty. Leopardi’s despairing response, the text argues, is creation. He may have failed to be true to her while alive, but at least he can be true to her in his verse. The outcome is bittersweet, but true enough to my understanding of Leopardi’s pessimism. In his failure before Nerina, we can see an example of the way that his own actions might have fed into his disappointment with life, a disappointment that runs through all his work.
Conclusion
The other stories are all novellas serious enough to handle a blog post’s worth of analysis, especially the The Embroiderer of Treviso, which combines the historical writing of C.F. Meyer and the bloodiness of Kleist, but space is limited and so is our time. I have been glad to get a little acquainted with Heyse even if, at this point, I am still not quite sure how far I like him or even really know who he is. A collection like L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas shows his range, but there seems no solid commonality under all these works, nothing distinctly “Heysian”, in the in the way that I think there is for Storm, Stifter, Kleist, or E.T.A. Hoffmann. This, maybe, makes the collection a good first introduction to the kind of things that were possible for the magicians who wrote novellas, even if, the title story perhaps excepted, I would not say these are the best novellas I have yet read.
Nevertheless, I can easily recommend this book to those who are interested in the craft of writing. I think novellas in particular are incredible teaching devices for writers. More expansive than short stories, they guide us on shape, on prose, on narration, in ways that novels can do but often fail to do, with so much else going on. The inventiveness of the form has not yet been exhausted, as contemporary fiction, in German and not, has shown on this blog. (See Grass, Walser) Reading something like this collection a good introduction to just some of the possibilities on offer, and I hope that the translator, Renata Lenz, is able to translate more novellas from the original. The tradition really is wonderful and thoroughly underappreciated outside of Germany.
Thanks to Chiara and Espresso for the copy. More details on their website, or in the usual places where books are sold online.
The book was provided without an obligation to review or link onwards attached. While I wouldn’t mind continuing to read similar new old texts from time to time as it is in line with what I write about anyway, if regular readers of the blog would much prefer this to be my only foray into Bookfluencing, feel free to reach out privately via the contact form / email.