The Mother E-Book

Grazia Deledda

• Herausgeber: NOR
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

"The Mother" is an intriguing and marvellously written book. Its note of worthiness lies in the psychological study of the three main characters: the mother, Maria Maddalena, of the young parish priest; Paul, the priest himself; and Agnes, the rich lonely woman who irrupts into the lives of both mother and son. The actual plot takes place in a very short time - barely two days - it is so interwoven with the mental conflicts, and so forced by circumstances, that the novel may be compared to an ancient Greek tragedy. Throughout the story, Paul fights his human desires and desperately tries to cling to the convened rule of celibacy in the priesthood despite the fact that such a condition has not been appointed by God in any way. He lacks the ambition to be a good priest because the choice was not his own but his mother’s. His oath was taken before he really knew his ambition in life; his role was vested on to him by others and conditioned by society. He realises that he loves Agnes and does not want to serve the Church but cannot decide in front of his mother’s distress. The story is quite believable and the ending comes as a not so unlikely surprise. In what is probably her greatest masterpiece, the 1926 Nobel Laureate tells us in this novel that avoiding one’s true call in life may have consequences and that the disposing of the aberrant conditions that cause people to sin is perhaps the greatest misdeed of all.

Leseprobe

Grazia Deledda

The Mother

(La madre)

a Novel

Content

Preface

Introduction

The Mother

Character names

The Author

The Series "Le Grazie"

Colophon

PREFACE1

Novelists who have laid the scenes of their stories almost invariably in one certain country or district, or amongst one certain class of people, or who have dealt with one special topic or interest, are apt to be called monotonous by a public which merely reads to kill time or is always craving for new sensations in its literature. But to another and more serious class of reader this very fidelity to scene and steadfastness of outlook is one of the principal incentives to take up each fresh work of such writers, for it is safe to assume that they are writing about what they really know and understand and their work may be expected to deepen and develop with each succeeding book.

Amongst such writers Grazia Deledda takes high rank. One of the foremost women novelists of Italy, if not the very first, she has been writing for some five and twenty years, and though almost always utilizing the same setting for her novels, each succeeding one has shown a different leading idea, a new variation upon the eternal theme of more or less primitive human nature.

Madame Deledda is a Sardinian by birth and parentage. She was born at Nuoro, the little inland town that figures so often in her books, and there she spent her first youth amongst the shepherds and peasants and small landed proprietors such as live again in her pages. On her marriage to a young Lombard she left Sardinia and went with her husband to Rome, where she still lives and works, with the steadfast aim of yet further perfecting herself in her art.

As may be expected, the action of her numerous novels takes place principally in her native island of Sardinia, with its wild and rugged background of mountain, rock, and wide tracts of thicket and shrub. The people of Sardinia, chiefly shepherds, agriculturists, and fishermen, differ considerably from those of the mainland, and a graver and less vivacious demeanour than most other Italians, a strict sense of honour, and hospitality regarded as an actual duty, makes them more resemble the ancient Spanish race with which indeed they are probably distantly akin.

The life of the poorer islanders is usually one of great privation, and ceaseless hard work is required to win a subsistence from the soil in the mountain uplands, exposed alternately to the scorching summer sun and the fierce gales and icy winds of winter. The native dress is still worn, though the fashion is dying out, and the old traditional superstitions and half pagan beliefs in witchcraft and the evil eye survive side by side with a profound and simple religious faith, a combination only possible in the islands, as in the remoter parts of the mainland, where the people never go far from their native districts and seldom come in contact with outside influences.

Nowhere, perhaps, has Grazia Deledda better portrayed this mingling of inbred superstition with Church-directed religion than in The Mother. Here the scene is laid in the remote and only half civilized hill village of Aar, and while the action of the story is dramatic and swift (it takes place all within the space of two days), the chief interest lies in the psychological study of the two principal characters, and the actual drama is so interwoven with the mental conflict, so developed by outward circumstances, that it is almost Greek in its simple and inevitable tragedy.

We meet here many of the inhabitants of the mountain district; the old hunter who has turned solitary through ­dread of men, the domineering keeper and his dog, the wholly delightful boy sacristan and his friends. But the figures in whom the interest centres are, first and foremost, the mother of the young parish priest of Aar (hence the title La Madre in the original Italian), Paul, the priest himself, and Agnes, the lonely woman who wrecks the lives of both mother and son.

The love story of Paul is doubtless common enough. As is generally the case, especially with priests promoted from the humbler ranks of life, he made his vows whilst still too young to understand all that he was professing and renouncing. He had been taught that divine love was all-sufficing, to the exclusion of any other kind, and when human love overtook him he was too inexperienced and too weak to have any chance in the struggle for victory – and he desperately trusted to the hazard of events to save him when his own self-deception and cowardice had failed – when confronted with the greater strength and moral honesty of the woman.

It is the fine and consistently drawn character of Maria Maddalena, however, that claims the reader’s whole sympathy. Poor, ignorant, able neither to read nor write, she has brought up her boy by her own hard work and has achieved the peasant’s ambition of seeing him admitted to the priesthood and given charge of a parish. For a time all goes well, until the inevitable woman appears on the scene, and then suddenly she finds her son gone beyond her reach and exposed to perils she dare not contemplate. In her unquestioning acceptance of the Church’s laws her simple mind is only filled with terror lest Paul should break those laws. But while she is inexorable with the priest her heart yearns over the young man, tender with his grief, and, spurred on by a phantom, a dream, her love and her intelligence begin for the first time to regret the natural happiness he is denied and to question the Church’s right to impose such a denial. And at last the struggle and the suspense grow more than she can bear and live.

It should be stated emphatically that the book is written without the least offence to any creed or opinion whatsoever, and touches on no question of either doctrine or Church government. It is just a human problem, the revolt of primitive human nature in distress against man-made laws it suffers from and cannot understand.

Mary G. Steegman

1) Preface to the 1923 edition by The Macmillan Company, New York. The translator’s note of the 1922 London edition was also included but the title changed:

«The Mother* (The Woman and the Priest*) is an unusual book, both in its story and its setting in a remote Sardinian hill village, half civilized and superstitious. But the chief interest lies in the psychological study of the two chief characters, and the action of the story takes place so rapidly (all within the space of two days) and the actual drama is so interwoven with the mental conflict, and all so forced by circumstances, that it is almost Greek in its simple and inevitable tragedy.

The book is written without offence to any creed or opinions, and touches on no questions of either doctrine or Church government. It is just a human problem, the result of primitive human nature against man-made laws it cannot understand.

* Translated from the Italian novel La madre».

Introduction2

Grazia Deledda is already one of the elder living writers of Italy, and though her work does not take on quite so rapidly as the novels of Fogazzaro, or even D’Annunzio, that peculiarly obscuring nebulousness of the past-which-is-only-just-gone-by, still, the dimness has touched it. It is curious that fifteen or twenty years ago should seem so much more remote than fifty or eighty years ago. But perhaps it is organically necessary to us that our feelings should die, temporarily, towards that strange intermediate period which lies between present actuality and the revived past. We can hardly bear to recall the emotions of twenty or fifteen years ago, hardly at all, whereas we respond again quite vividly to the emotions of Jane Austen or Dickens, nearer a hundred years ago. There, the past is safely and finally past. The past of fifteen years ago is till yeastily working in us.

It takes a really good writer to make us overcome our repugnance to the just-gone-by emotions. Even D’Annunzio’s novels are hardly readable at present: Matilde Serao’s still less so. But we can still read Grazia Deledda, with genuine interest.

The reason is that, though she is not a first-class genius, she belongs to more than just her own day. She does more than reproduce the temporarily psychological condition of her period. She has a background, and she deals with something more fundamental than sophisticated feeling. She does not penetrate, as a great genius does, the very sources of human passion and motive. She stays far short of that. But what she does do is to create the passionate complex of primitive populace.

To do this, one must have an isolated populace: just as Thomas Hardy isolates Wessex. Grazia Deledda has an isolated island to herself, her own island of Sardinia, that she loves so deeply: especially the more northerly, mountainous part of Sardinia.

Still Sardinia is one of the wildest, remotest part of Europe, with a strange people and a mysterious past of its own. There is still an old mystery in the air, over the forest slopes of Mount Gennargentu, as there is over some old Druid places, the mystery of an unevolved people. The war, of course, partly gutted Sardinia, as it gutted everywhere. But the island is still a good deal off the map, on the face of the earth.

An island of rigid conventions, the rigid conventions of barbarism, and at the same time, the fierce violence of the instinctive passions. A savage tradition of chastity, with a savage lust of the flesh. A barbaric overlordship of the gentry, with a fierce indomitableness of the servile classes. A lack of public opinion, a lack of belonging to any other part of the world, a lack of mental awakening, which makes inland Sardinia almost as savage as Benin, and makes Sardinian singing as wonderful and almost as wild as any on earth. It is the human instinct still uncontaminated. The money-sway still did not govern central Sardinia, in the days of Grazia Deledda’s books, twenty, a dozen years ago, before the war. Instead there was a savage kind of aristocracy and feudalism, and a rule of ancient instinct, instinct with the definite but indescribable tang of the aboriginal people of the island, not absorbed into the world: instinct often at war with the Italian government; a determined savage individualism often breaking with the law, or driven into brigandage: but human, of the great human mystery.

It is this old Sardinia, at least being brought to heel, which is the real theme of Grazia Deledda’s books. She is fascinated by her island and its folks, more than by the problems of the human psyche. And therefore this book, The Mother, is perhaps one of the least typical of her novels, one of the most “continental”. Because here, she has a definite universal theme: the consecrated priest and the woman. But she keeps on forgetting her theme. She becomes more interested in the death of the old hunter, in the doings of the boy Antiochus, in the exorcising of the spirit of the little girl possessed. She is herself somewhat bored by the priest’s hesitations; she shows herself suddenly impatient, a pagan sceptical of the virtues of chastity, even in consecrated priests; she is touched, yet annoyed by the pathetic, tiresome old mother who made her son a priest out of ambition, and who simply expires in the terror of a public exposure: and, in short, she makes a bit of a mess of the book, because she started a problem she didn’t quite dare to solve. She shirks the issue atrociously. But neither will the modern spirit solve the problem by killing off the fierce instincts that made the problem. As for Grazia Deledda, first she started by sympathising with the mother, and then must sympathise savagely with the young woman, and then can’t make up her mind. She kills off the old mother in disgust at the old woman’s triumph, so leaving the priest and the young woman hanging in space. As a sort of problem-story, it is disappointing. No doubt, if the priest had gone off with the woman, as he first intended, then all the authoress’ sympathy would have fallen to the abandoned old mother. As it is, the sympathy falls between two stools, and the title La Madre is not really justified. The mother turns out not to be the heroine.

But the interest of this book lies, not in plot or characterisation, but in the representation of sheer instinctive life. The love of the priest for the woman is sheer instinctive passion, pure and undefiled by sentiment. As such it is worthy of respect, for in other books on this theme the instinct is swamped and extinguished in sentiment. Here, however, the instinct of direct sex is so strong and so vivid, that only the other blind instinct of mother-obedience, the child-instinct, can overcome it. All the priest’s education and Christianity are really mere snuff of the candle. The old, wild instinct of a mother’s ambition for her son defeats the other wild instinct of sexual mating. An old woman who has never had any sex life – and it is astonishing, in barbaric half-civilisations, how many people are denied a sex life; she succeeds, by her old barbaric maternal power over her son, in finally killing his sex life too. It is the suicide of semi-barbaric natures under the sway of a dimly-comprehended Christianity, and falsely conceived ambition.

The old, blind life of instinct, and chiefly frustrated instinct and the rage thereof, as it is seen in the Sardinian hinterland, this is Grazia Deledda’s absorption. The desire of the boy Antiochus to be a priest is an instinct: perhaps an instinctive recoil from his mother’s grim priapism. The dying man escapes from the village, back to the rocks, instinctively needing to die in the wilds. The feeling of Agnes, the woman who loves the priest, is sheer female instinctive passion, something as in Emily Bronte. It too has the ferocity of the frustrated instinct, and is bare and stark, lacking any of the graces of sentiment. This saves it from “dating” as D’Annunzio’s passions date. Sardinia is by no means a land for Romeos and Juliets, nor even Virgins of the Rocks. It is rather a land of Wuthering Heights.

The book, of course, loses a good deal in translation, as is inevitable. In the mouth of the simple people, Italian is a purely instinctive language, with the rhythm of the instinctive rather than the mental processes. There are also many instinct-words with meanings never clearly mentally defined. In fact, nothing is brought to real mental clearness, everything goes by in a stream of more or less vague, more or less realised feeling, with a natural midst or glow of sensation over everything, that counts more than the actual words said; and which, alas, it is almost impossible to reproduce in the more cut-and-dried northern languages, where every word has its fixed value and meaning like so much coinage. A language can be killed by over-precision, killed especially as an effective medium for the conveyance of instinctive passion and instinctive emotion. One feels this, reading a translation from the Italian. And though Grazia Deledda is not masterly as Giovanni Verga is, yet, in Italian at least, she can put us into the mood and rhythm of Sardinia like a true artist, an artist whose work is sound and enduring.

D.H. Lawrence

2) From Grazia Deledda, The Mother, with an Introduction by David Herbert Lawrence; London: Jonathan Cape, 1928.

The Mother3

Tonight again Paul was preparing to go out, it seemed. From her room adjoining his the mother could hear him moving about furtively, perhaps waiting to go out until she should have extinguished her light and got into bed.

She put out her light, but she did not get into bed.

Seated close against the door, she clasped her hands tightly together, those work-worn hands of a servant, pressing the thumbs one upon the other to give herself courage; but every moment her uneasiness increased and overcame her obstinate hope that her son would sit down quietly, as he used to do, and begin to read, or else go to bed. For a few minutes, indeed, the young priest’s cautious steps were silent. She felt herself all alone. Outside, the noise of the wind mingled with the murmuring of the trees which grew on the ridge of high ground be­hind the little presbytery; not a high wind, but incessant, mono­tonous, that sounded as though it were enveloping the house in some creaking, invisible band, ever closer and closer,trying to uproot it from its foundations and drag it to the ground.

The mother had already closed the house door and barricaded it with two crossed bars, in order to prevent the devil, who on windy nights roams abroad in search of souls, from penetrating into the house. As a matter of fact, however, she put little faith in such things. And now she reflected with bitterness, and a vague contempt of herself, that the evil spirit was already inside the little presbytery, that it drank from her Paul’s cup and hovered about the mirror he had hung on the wall near his window.

Just then she heard Paul moving about again. Perhaps he was actually standing in front of the mirror, although that was forbidden to priests. But what had Paul not allowed himself for some considerable time now?

The mother remembered that lately she had several times come upon him gazing at himself in the glass like any woman, cleaning and polishing his nails, or brushing his hair, which he had left to grow long and then turned back over his head, as though trying to conceal the holy mark of the tonsure. And then he made use of perfumes, he brushed his teeth with scented powder, and even combed out his eyebrows.

She seemed to see him now as plainly as though the dividing wall did not exist, a black figure against the white background of his room; a tall, thin figure, almost too tall, going to and fro with the heedless steps of a boy, often stumbling and slipping about, but always holding himself erect. His head was a little too large for the thin neck, his face pale and overshadowed by the prominent forehead that seemed to force the brows to frown and the long eyes to droop with the burden of it. But the powerful jaw, the wide, full mouth and the resolute chin seemed in their turn to revolt with scorn against this oppression, yet not be able to throw it off.

But now he halted before the mirror and his whole face lighted up, the eyelids opened to the full and the pupils of his clear brown eyes shone like diamonds.

Actually, in the depths of her maternal heart, his mother delighted to see him so handsome and strong, and then the sound of his furtive steps moving about again recalled her sharply to her anxiety.

He was going out, there could be no more doubt about that. He opened the door of his room and stood still again. Perhaps he, too, was listening to the sounds without, but there was nothing to be heard save the encircling wind beating ever against the house.

The mother made an effort to rise from her chair, to cry out “My son, Paul, child of God, stay here!” but a power stronger than her own will kept her down. Her knees trembled as though trying to rebel against that infernal power; her knees trembled, but her feet refused to move, and it was as though two compelling hands were holding her down upon her seat.

Thus Paul could steal noiselessly downstairs, open the door and go out, and the wind seemed to engulf him and bear him away in a flash.

Only then was she able to rise and light her lamp again. But even this was only achieved with difficulty, because, instead of igniting, the matches left long violet streaks on the wall wherever she struck them. But at last the little brass lamp threw a dim radiance over the small room, bare and poor as that of a servant, and she opened the door and stood there, listening. She was still trembling, yet she moved stiffly and woodenly, and with her large head and her short, broad figure clothed in rusty black she looked as though she had been hewn with an axe, all of a piece, from the trunk of an oak.

From her threshold she looked down the slate stairs descending steeply between whitewashed walls, at the bottom of which the door shook upon its hinges with the violence of the wind. And when she saw the two bars which Paul had unfastened and left leaning against the wall she was filled with sudden wild anger.

Ah no, she must defeat the devil. Then she placed her light on the floor at the top of the stairs, descended and went out, too.

The wind seized hold of her roughly, blowing out her skirts and the handkerchief over her head, as though it were trying to force her back into the house. But she knotted the handkerchief tightly under her chin and pressed forward with bent head, as though butting aside all obstacles in her path. She felt her way past the front of the presbytery, along the wall of the kitchen garden and past the front of the church, but at the corner of the church she paused. Paul had turned there, and swiftly, like some great black bird, his cloak flapping round him, he had almost flown across the field that extended in front of an old house built close against the ridge of land that shut in the horizon above the village.

The uncertain light, now blue, now yellow, as the moon’s face shone clear or was traversed by big clouds, illumined the long grass of the field, the little raised piazza