Luigi Pirandello

• 1. The Desperate Laugh

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  Luigi Pirandello arrived in Rome on a hard, rainy night and felt, by his own account, that his heart was being crushed. Then he laughed, like a man in the throes of desperation. That desperate laugh became a key to everything he would write. It surfaced first in his earliest verses and never fully left him. This was a man born in 1867 into wealth in Sicily, who would win the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature and end his life under the watch of fascist secret police. The Nobel committee honored him for what it called his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art. But the path there ran through a flooded sulphur mine, a wife committed to an asylum, and a Roman theater audience screaming the word Asylum back at the stage. How does a sensitive moralist from a poor corner of Sicily become a forerunner of the Theatre of the Absurd? And why would a Nobel laureate hand his gold medal to a dictator to be melted down?

• 2. Caos And The Sulphur

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  The place of Pirandello's birth was called Caos, a name drawn from the Sicilian word càusi, meaning trousers, after the shape of a nearby ravine. He was born near Porto Empedocle, a poor suburb outside Girgenti, the town now called Agrigento. The family surname carried a stranger history still. It had originally been the Greek Pirangelos, phonetically corrupted over generations, and Pirandello considered himself of Greek descent, saying so in a 1934 interview with Kostas Ouranis. His father Stefano belonged to a wealthy family tied to the sulphur industry. That industry would shape both his early imagination and his ruin. In 1886, on a vacation from school, Luigi went to the sulphur mines of Porto Empedocle and worked alongside his father. The experience fed later stories including Il Fumo and Ciàula scopre la Luna. The mines were not only material for fiction. In 1903 the flooding of the sulphur mines of Aragona swallowed his father's capital and his wife's dowry alike, and that single disaster would reshape his entire life.

• 3. The Mother And The Father

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  Caterina Ricci Gramitto had hardly reached the age of thirteen when she was forced to follow her father into exile in Malta, banished by the Bourbon monarchy. Both her family and the Pirandellos were ferociously anti-Bourbon, deeply committed to the Risorgimento, the struggle for Italian unification. Stefano joined the famous Expedition of the Thousand and followed Garibaldi all the way to the battle of Aspromonte. Yet the idealism curdled fast, above all in Caterina, into bitter disappointment with the reality unification produced. Pirandello absorbed that sense of betrayal and poured it into poems and into his novel The Old and the Young. Luigi's bond with his mother grew into what was described as profound veneration. The opposite happened with his father. As a young man Luigi found notes revealing Stefano's extramarital affairs, and distrust hardened between them. That fracture echoes in his fiction decades later. When The Old and the Young appeared in 1913, Leonardo Sciascia observed that the father figure in it had been censured in a Freudian sense by his son, who at the bottom of his soul was his enemy.

• 4. Finding The Theatre

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  By the age of twelve Pirandello had already written his first tragedy, though his early imagination was fed less by school than by the fables his elderly servant Maria Stella told him, tales hovering between the popular and the magical. His father pushed him toward a technical school, but he switched to the humanities at the ginnasio. In Palermo, where the family moved in 1880, he read 19th-century Italian poets such as Giosuè Carducci and Arturo Graf and fell in love with his cousin Lina. He registered at the University of Palermo in Law and Letters, then moved to Rome in 1887, then to Bonn after a clash with a Latin professor. Bonn gave him two years thick with German Romantics, from Heinrich Heine to Goethe, whose Roman Elegies he began translating. In March 1891 he received his doctorate in Romance Philology with a dissertation on the dialect of Agrigento. But the deepest pull was the stage. Visiting Rome's theaters, Il Nazionale, Il Valle, Il Manzoni, he wrote of a strange excitement of the blood through all his veins, and vowed he would conquer the dramatic theatre.

• 5. Catastrophe And Madness

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  In 1894 Pirandello married Maria Antonietta Portulano, a shy girl chosen on his father's suggestion, educated by the nuns of San Vincenzo. They had three children, two sons named Stefano and Fausto and a daughter, Rosalia, called Lietta. Then 1903 broke the family. When the letter announcing the financial collapse arrived, Antonietta read it and fell into a state of semi-catatonia, her mental balance permanently shaken. Pirandello, who at first harbored thoughts of suicide, instead multiplied his lessons in Italian and German and demanded payment for writing he had once given away freely. Watching over his ill wife at night after full days of work, he wrote the novel that made his name. Il Fu Mattia Pascal, The Late Mattia Pascal, appeared in episodes and became an immediate and resounding success. Translated into German in 1905, it opened the door to fame. His domestic life only darkened. Antonietta's jealousy turned obsessive and then physically violent. In 1919 he had her placed in an asylum, a separation that caused him great suffering, and as late as 1924 he still believed he could care for her at home. She never left.

• 6. Asylum, Asylum

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  In 1921 the Compagnia di Dario Niccodemi staged Sei Personaggi in Cerca d'Autore, Six Characters in Search of an Author, at the Valle di Roma, and it was a clamorous failure. The audience split into supporters and enemies, and the enemies shouted Asylum, Asylum at the stage. Pirandello, present with his daughter Lietta, slipped out a side exit to escape the crowd. The same play triumphed in Milan, and in 1922 Milan also saw the first performance of Enrico IV, acclaimed universally. His reach grew international, with Sei Personaggi staged in London and New York. The work behind these triumphs had been building for years. In 1908 his essay L'Umorismo opened a long and venomous debate with the philosopher Benedetto Croce. Between 1925 and 1926 his last and perhaps greatest novel, Uno, Nessuno e Centomila, appeared serially. On the 14th of July 1930 a version of his short play The Man with the Flower in His Mouth, produced by Lance Sieveking with John Logie Baird's company, became the first drama broadcast in both picture and sound when the British Broadcasting Corporation showed it to London audiences.

• 7. The Fascist And The Apolitical Man

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  In 1924 Pirandello wrote a letter to Benito Mussolini asking to join the National Fascist Party, describing himself as a Fascist because I am Italian. With Mussolini's help, in 1925 he took over the artistic direction and ownership of the Teatro d'Arte di Roma. The satirical magazine Il Becco Giallo mocked him as P. Randello, since randello in Italian means cudgel. Yet he also called himself apolitical, saying I'm apolitical, I'm only a man in the world, and he clashed repeatedly with fascist leaders. In 1927 he tore his party card to pieces in front of the startled secretary-general of the Fascist Party. From then on the secret police, the OVRA, kept him under close surveillance. His play I Giganti della Montagna has been read as his recognition that the fascists were hostile to culture. Still, during a New York appearance he announced support for Italy's annexation of Abyssinia, and he gave his Nobel medal to the government to be melted down in the 1935 Oro alla Patria campaign during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. He had been nominated for that Nobel by Guglielmo Marconi.

• 8. Alone At Via Bosio

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  Pirandello died alone in his home at Via Bosio, Rome, on the 10th of December 1936. He refused the State funeral Mussolini offered, and only in 1947 were his cremated remains buried in Sicily. His afterlife in the theater proved larger than the man who left through that side exit in 1921. His existential exploration and metaphysical questioning fed playwrights such as Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. His portrayal of fractured identities and the ambiguity of existence reached into philosophy, shaping Jean-Paul Sartre's ideas of freedom, authenticity, and existential angst. He was the last Italian playwright chosen for the Nobel until Dario Fo won on the 9th of October 1997. Across hundreds of short stories, the novels, and about 40 plays, some written in Sicilian, the desperate laugh he first heard on a rainy Roman night kept asking the question that outlived him, whether any single self is one, no one, or one hundred thousand.