The Improvisatore
1
On 27 December 1833 Andersen wrote in his diary:
People are saying here there was a complete eclipse of the moon last night. Suddenly everything turned dark, and the moon looked like a big mushroom. – Went for a stroll with Hertz to S. Pietro in Vincoli and saw the statue of Moses. There was almost no one in the church, but lovely music. Was up at S. Maria in Aracoeli. Portraits of nuns and monks were hanging between each pillar. The Christ Child was displayed in cloth-of-gold. It's taken around to the sick, and soldiers shoulder their arms in honour of it. – On the stairs people were selling pictures of it; I bought one for four baiocci. Was in the church of S. Maria degli Angeli – it is a veritable picture gallery. Began this evening on my novel The Improvisatore. Today, and I was comparing Italy with back home, Hertz said: ‘God only knows how it will go for us when we get back home. There, it is much too different, indeed.’1
This entry tells us more about the novel begun that day than perhaps even its writer at the time appreciated. The total eclipse of the moon – which apparently he himself did not witness – must have recalled recent news that had turned everything temporarily dark: on Monday 16 December he got a letter from Jonas Collin telling him his mother had died. ‘My first reaction was,’ he'd noted, ‘Thanks be to God! Now there is an end to her sufferings, which I haven't been able to allay. But even so I cannot get used to the thought that I am so utterly alone without a single person who must love me because of the bond of blood.’2 Both his mother, divided between two characters, and the de facto father who informed him of her death will appear in the book now under way.
Andersen writes up his diary in Rome very much as he'd done in Germany, as a tireless, intellectually curious sightseer always glad of instructors, especially if they were also practising artists. Of the Roman buildings mentioned above, S. Pietro in Vincoli displays the chains that allegedly shackled the founder of the Church himself, St Peter, perhaps in Jerusalem, perhaps in Rome. But most visitors, like Hertz and Andersen here, go there to see Michelangelo's great horned statue of Moses. Into its bearded face the sculptor incorporated a likeness of himself – just as Andersen put himself quite unmistakably into his novel's protagonist/narrator, an Italian though he be. The third church cited, S. Maria degli Angeli was actually designed by Michelangelo. But it is S. Maria in Aracoeli which has the decisive role to play in the novel. Before its image of the Christ Child the hero, aged nine, will give public testimony to his faith. His entrancing performance is eclipsed by that of only one other child, a little girl who will grow up in confused circumstances and become the famous singer Annunziata, and the hero's first love. Of this great church, on the site of which the Emperor Octavian/Augustus supposedly had a prognostic vision of the Virgin and her son, Georgina Masson, architectural historian of Rome, writes:
The Aracoeli is perhaps the most typically Roman of all Roman churches. Rising above the ruins of a temple dedicated to a pagan mother-goddess and now consecrated to the Madonna – a transformation which is far from rare in Italy – its interior provides a perfect illustration of the continuity of Roman life, with its magnificent columns that once graced classical temples and palaces. … Simply to walk round the church is like turning the pages of a history of Rome. … Before leaving the Aracoeli we must pay our respects to the ‘Santo Bambino’, that curious little figure said to have been carved out of the wood of one of the olive trees of the Garden of Gethsemane, which is so revered and loved by the Roman populace. Except at Christmas, he stands in a glass case above the altar of a small chapel of the sacristy when he is not out bringing comfort to the sick and dying in the hospitals of Rome.3
The Improvisatore begins and ends with a blessed child.
But the most interesting item in the diary entry is Andersen's name for his novel. This shows that the figure of an improvisatore (an Italian improvising performance-artist) was part of its very inception. Here again the diary entry for 16 December is illuminating. Andersen also heard that day from J.L. Heiberg who, always equivocal and sometimes dismissive about Andersen's work, expressed misgivings about the two singspiels submitted to him. To him, thought Andersen, ‘I am just an improvisatore’.4 Not for the first time in public or private history the recipient of an adverse judgement converted a disparaging term into an honorific one. Andersen knew from Goethe's Italian Journey and Madame de Staël's novel Corinne (1807) that improvisatori were not to be despised, were inventive, lively entertainers worthy of the name ‘artist’. If this was what he was thought to be, then he would celebrate his identity by writing as though a member of this fraternity. Paradoxically The Improvisatore could scarcely be less of a work of improvisation. On the contrary, it is outstanding in its original and meticulously executed design, which in itself is meaningful.
In truth nothing in Andersen's previous productions – even the most touching of the poems or the most imaginative of the Shadow Pictures – prepares us for The Improvisatore. In addition to its structural beauty, this is a first-person narrative frankly and singlemindedly concerned with the narrator's successive stages of development. It takes us through the gamut of psychological states: security and severance, grief and solace, fear and trust, despair and happiness, rejection and fulfilment, identifying with each but seeing them as contributing to a larger whole. The author, through the medium of Antonio, has attempted, and at a time of personal crisis, nothing less than an operation on his own life. Prolonged separation from a Danish milieu (the Collins and their circle), to which he was at once too close and vulnerably ambivalent, must have assisted inestimably. As did the sheer force, both sensuous and intellectually stimulating, of Italy's impact on him. He was far from alone among artists of northern provenance; all those he consorted with on a virtually daily basis would have felt similarly re-educated. With hindsight we can see that, only by recasting himself as an Italian, by allowing his sojourn in Rome and Naples and his journeys through the Italian peninsula to penetrate and be absorbed into his psyche, could Andersen have arrived at that level of understanding – of himself, of other people and their motivation, and the physical world in which they have their being – so essential for the creation of serious literature. The willed indulgence in emotions supposedly suitable for a poet, the over-ardent local-colourism, the slightly arch facetiousness and taste for whimsicalities that can mar poems and whole passages of Journey on Foot and Shadow Pictures have all gone. Now in his novel he can discover – and concentrate on – what had so far eluded him: satisfactory correlatives in people and predicaments for difficult truths of existence to which he had already faced up.
The Improvisatore presents itself as its central figure's autobiography. Antonio informs us in the very opening paragraph of his birthplace's precise location: Rome, the corner of Piazza Barberini and Via Felice, in full sight of one of Bernini's masterworks, the famous Triton Fountain. And in its last pages he relates what occurred on a specified, recent date, 6 March 1834: his return to the Blue Grotto of Capri with the woman now his wife and the mother of his daughter, whom he had first encountered there, living in poverty. The Improvisatore covers therefore three decades of experience, and if it ends with Antonio happy in marriage and fatherhood, this return to Capri is evoked so that we may appreciate – as the narrator himself does – that we should take nothing for granted. Nature holds sway over life and administers death. Human beings are emphatically not in control of their destinies, even though, for the most part, they have it in them to make the best of their natural attributes and gifts. The dangerous waters can always rise and inundate the grotto, as the final paragraphs warn us. But this stark truth has already been brought home by the many tragedies, unanticipated, distressing and sometimes violent, in the novel's course, beginning with the cruel death, in Antonio's childhood, of his widowed mother, killed by a cart pulled by runaway horses during the Flower Festival at Genzano. Yet the recovery of the past through artful narrative can soothe, if not heal, experiential sorrows. Like Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805 and 1850), The Improvisatore is the history of the ‘growth’ of a ‘mind’, one shaped by external events and persons but also by its own reception of these; Antonio's narrative establishes points of reference, associations, concordances, as motifs to reassert themselves, in one form or another, later on.
Antonio strives for complete honesty with his readers about his personal make-up. He records criticisms of himself made by others, and supplies (usually) qualified agreement; here Andersen is answering all those admonishing voices back in Copenhagen. He admits to vulnerability to particular temptations, starting with vanity from his earliest years, and to limitations of capability; he confesses to errors made. Yet he is also concerned to demonstrate the fluidity of personality as he describes his own constant adaptation to the movement of time and to the unheralded varieties of situations this inevitably brings. He addresses us in a voice which takes mutability as a given. So while it rises to those occasions which dramatically manifest this truth – the bewildering moments after his mother's death, his first excursion to Capri, his last sight of his once beloved Annunziata – it never relinquishes its hard-earned maturity, its sense of happenstance or of the unsought exigencies of place, each with its own complexity of connections. In these two last respects Andersen surely learned from Scott's The Heart of Midlothian, with the reverses faced by the Deans family and Reuben Butler, and the apparent coincidences that disrupt Jeanie's journey from Edinburgh to London, all testifying to a universal truth: that even while venturing into the new, one encounters the past, and often in its most recalcitrant and troubling shapes. As he sought analogues for his own almost thirty-year-long journey, Andersen found himself gaining in a self-confidence that (as diary entries admit) had become bruised by too much anxiety to conciliate the Collins, Edvard above all. He was becoming ever more his own man, an assurance intimately bound up with his sense of himself as artist. Regular association in Rome's Scandinavian circle with others similarly dedicated fostered this, and in particular his growing friendship with Thorvaldsen whose phenomenal mind was able to do justice to Andersen's own, to an extent that so far only Ørsted had managed.
Andersen's belief in his novel as purveyor of truth is evidenced in the sui generis construction referred to in its subtitle ‘Roman i To Deele’ (‘Novel in Two Parts’): two mutually reflecting entities, presenting incidents and encounters both complementing and inverting each other. Its strict adherence to this patterning – like a two-movement symphony wrought from intimately related thematic material – renders the literary terms most often favoured for it – Bildungsroman, Künstlerroman – less than satisfactory. Yes, of course, its subject matter parallels that of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (1795–96 and 1821–29), Antonio undergoing both the apprenticeship and the necessary wanderings chronicled in that mighty sequence. But it is on Antonio's authority that we rely for their presentation. He it is, the final evolved individual, who selects for us what to him appears really important in his history; he it is who determines what should be emphasised or explained, who assesses the quality of particular experiences, becoming more personally confidential when the subject matter requires this. And here we arrive at a second paradox. While, as stated above, the art of The Improvisatore is severely and knowingly under authorial control so that there are no superfluous episodes or characters, these more intimately revelatory passages do in literal fact recall the medium at the novel's symbolic centre and honoured in its title: the improvisatore's. And they make Antonio's own triumphs in it both credible and imaginatively engaging. Also, with our minds still on Wilhelm Meister, it doesn't seem frivolously obvious to point out that while Goethe's is a work of monumental proportions, The Improvisatore, though certainly a novel and not a novella, is, by most nineteenth-century standards rather short, the length – to move ahead to Dickens who, as we shall examine, was surely influenced by it – of the more concentrated Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities rather than, say, of its nearer relation, David Copperfield. Andersen's knowledge right from the start of what his book was called shows he thought of it as an organic whole unified by the profession named in the title and vividly described in the second chapter.
One moon-bright evening, Antonio and his mother have made their way homewards from a visit to the Trastevere quarter of Rome and come to the square of the Trevi Fountain. Street-vendors are still offering their goods; noisy conversation is in spate. Then a country fellow arrives with a guitar improvising a song in celebration of his surroundings. He is, little Antonio is told, an improvisatore, and such is the man's impact on the child – whose own disposition has already been revealed to us through his splendid performance in S. Maria in Aracoeli – that he then and there emulates him, singing inspirationally of the wares in the grocer's shop opposite.
It is not hard to understand the fascination, stoked by his readings of Goethe and Madame de Staël, felt by Andersen – the wunderkind in Odense so given to recitation, so incurable an addict of vaudeville and theatre – for the phenomenon of the improvisatori (sometimes spelt improvvisatori). With medieval and Renaissance ancestry and increasingly popular in the later years of the eighteenth century, they enjoyed a heyday in the first three decades of the nineteenth, appealing hugely to the Romantic imagination so enamoured of spontaneity and folk art, and peaking around 1840.5 Antonio, at the applauded height of his own improvisational powers, is specifically likened to the most famous virtuoso of them all, Tommaso Sgricci (1789–1836) whose gifts impressed Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron and Madame de Staël herself, not least for the libertarian sentiments he expressed. To the Andersen who had applauded France's July Revolution this would have been a point greatly in his favour.
Frequently improvisatori performed in a street or marketplace with a ready-made audience of passers-by and shoppers. But they also gave demonstrations at private salons, or (usually after having built up a reasonable public reputation) in proper theatres, as Sgricci himself did, or, in the novel's second part, Antonio, in the renowned San Carlo, Naples, playing to a packed, clamouring, rapturous house. The usual procedure followed is conveyed accurately enough by Antonio in the chapter on his own Neapolitan debut. Members of the audience would write on slips of paper words or phrases they wanted the artist to use as starting-point for his improvisations. As a rule – as in San Carlo in the novel – these would be vetted by a representative of the police force to ensure that nothing too seditious or inflammatory was being requested (especially in view of Sgricci's known radicalism). The improvisatore himself would then make his choice. Antonio, for instance, is stumped by the invitation to speak on ‘il cavalier servente’ (he hasn't yet enjoyed a love-life) and ‘Capri’ (which he has not visited), but ‘Fata morgana’ appeals to him, almost instantly arousing from mental depths long-dormant ideas and images.6 Once he has embarked on the improvisation, he (like his peers in the art) simply cannot stop the flow of verbal pictures, anecdotes, associations and rhetorical exclamations, speaking not so much ad-lib as under the possession of his chosen (but ramified) topic. In Antonio's case the audience is ecstatic, and he in turn is moved by both its response and by his own ability to have brought this about.
It was a brilliantly appropriate art form in which to make Antonio excel, in the first place because it was peculiar to Italy and therefore related to traditions and practices – emotive and inclusive Catholic ceremonial, rococo architecture, bel canto opera – which had already struck Andersen as representing a pronouncedly different outlook on life from that dominant in Protestant Northern Europe, one characterised by Mediterranean expansiveness not Danish reticence and concomitant horror of the exhibitionistic. (We recall: ‘I was comparing Italy with back home, Hertz said: “God only knows how it will go for us when we get back home. There, it is much too different, indeed.”’)7 But, for all its encouragement by some ambitious hostesses, this improvisation was emphatically demotic, a quality Andersen would later attribute to The New Century's Muse (who, he says, inherited it from her father). It therefore awoke in Andersen memories of the conversations, lore and improvised stories of a less convention-bound and guarded section of his own Danish people: Odense's variegated, superstitious, promiscuous working class. More importantly, it served as a metaphor for his own boundless-seeming creativity so prone to overwhelm himself and overpower others.
Andersen never really resolved (as how could he?) the questions raised by the lavishness of his own talents, as we shall see when we come to the ambiguities of ‘The Ugly Duckling’. Is everybody au fond an improvisatore (or a beautiful swan), if in need of some external force to draw out what's already present but occluded? Or is the artist an exceptional being, operating under different laws from everybody else, capable of producing, and for the enrichment of others, perspectives, colour combinations, sounds, unions of words, even hypotheses and ideas that ordinary people could never have arrived at on their own? And it has to be admitted that in the case of Antonio, while we see and believe in the enthusiasm accorded his performances, and can enjoy the flights of fancy responsible for these, we do not end up knowing just how remarkable an artist he is. (As remarkable as his creator or merely an interesting brother of the Italian countryman who improvised by the Trevi Fountain?) The sharp-tongued Francesca reminds Antonio that there is a world of difference between a successful evening and serious, consistent creativity. Members of the Collin family (Ingeborg, Edvard, Louise) had repeatedly reminded Andersen likewise, and perhaps he faced these doubts deliberately implanted in him too often and too disconcertingly for him to make any reasonably objective assessment of his own gifts.
The doubts spill out into Andersen's presentation of Antonio's experiences outside performance art. He is accused – particularly by the friend most important to him, Bernardo – of being so different from other young men that he scarcely knows what the genus is like. His abilities, his values, his aspirations, even his temptations are not theirs; they are more exalted, more spiritual. Often this does seem to be the case, but not always; Antonio enjoys company, travel, the jollities of festival and street-life, and increasingly the sight of a pretty girl, all pleasurable mainstays of normal young males. And yet … he himself knows in his heart that he does stand apart from them, that deep within but indestructible are psychic regions they could not, and would not care to, enter. So the novel is informed by hesitancy over any pronouncement of exceptionalism, a hesitancy we shall encounter in subsequent work; it is equally there in O.T. and in Andersen's last novel, Lucky Peer. However, our doubts on this matter do not detract from this novel's impact. Rather we realise its ambivalences come from genuine, honestly admitted irresolution.
2
Part One of the novel takes us through the vicissitudes of Antonio's early life until that moment when his youth comes dramatically to an end. Its first two chapters constitute a wonderful fusion of the exterior and the interior, of a child's responsive, often uncomprehending yet ever-enlarging view of the land- and cityscapes all about him and his incorporation of them into his sense of self. In Part Two, Antonio forsakes Rome and its environs for another region, another Italy, another life. And yet what he has learned in his first years never ceases to be of the greatest assistance to him. With Wordsworth in The Prelude Antonio could truly say ‘Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up/Foster'd alike by beauty and by fear,’8 the beauty lying initially not so much in the splendours of Rome itself as in the affection given him by his widowed mother, a seamstress (there is a conspicuous absence of interest in his paternity) and by her lodger, a young Dane known as Federigo.
Federigo has a young girl as model, the warm-hearted Mariuccia, a great help to Antonio at a key juncture in his life. But as a child he is repelled by her, as indeed he is, he confesses, by all the girls and women he meets. This obvious antipathy on his part gives rise to a general idea that he has a priestly vocation, and while Antonio explicitly exempts his mother from his aversions, the reader questions whether she might not be a principal cause of them. She does not stay in the novel long, a fact revealing in itself. Andersen then transfers her maternal virtues to the countrywoman who takes his narrator in after her sudden death. Many women calling themselves seamstresses had in bleak reality less respectable-sounding occupations, and what exactly was an easy-going young Danish artist doing living in this small artisan apartment (though he and Antonio's mother, we are told, actually sleep in separate rooms)? One thinks of the trouble the cramped quarters of his mother and her second husband had brought Andersen as a youth. For much of the novel's first part, and indeed in important pages afterwards, Antonio recoils from the female sex, especially when members of it approach him with overt sensuality (conspicuously Santa, so transparently and unkindly based on Headmaster Meisling's propositioning wife). Perhaps Andersen is remembering here that image of his earlier self as a tallow candle dirtied by worldly experience integral to the fairy tale written in his schooldays. An important measure of Antonio's education in The Improvisatore does indeed relate to effective relationships with women – with Annunziata (whom he has met, at the age of nine, as the wondrously accomplished little girl in S. Maria in Aracoeli), with Flaminia destined to be a nun, with the girl in Amalfi as drawn to him as he to her, and, to conclude, with Lara/Maria with whom the novel rewards him. But we may well feel in this last case that she is not substantial enough a figure to elicit belief as an autonomous, and therefore lovable, human being, deriving as she does a little too palpably from Marie in Tieck's Franz Sternbald's Wanderings.9
If Antonio endows his whole native neighbourhood – beyond which his mother rarely strays – with the warm intimacy of her own person, he also learns fear here, every bit as durable a lesson: through the neighbourhood church with the metal crucifix on its door, through the convent with its secret colonnaded garden, and through what leads off this, a gallery crammed with skulls and skeletons among which the little boy is told he will one day, like every other mortal, take his place. Here too is his detested Uncle Peppo, of the two withered legs, who sits on the Spanish Steps begging passers-by and molesting rival supplicants. Federigo also takes Antonio on expeditions outside the city gates, unforgettably to the solemn subterranean labyrinth of the Catacombs, where they become, to their alarm, temporarily entrapped. Afterwards the proximity of another (spiritual) domain, challenging all comfortable conventions, is conveyed in the scenes in Genzano before Antonio's mother is killed. An old wise-woman, Fulvia virtually wills into physical existence a terrifying contest on the legend-hallowed lake of Nemi: an eagle swoops down on to a fish, the two creatures struggle fiercely, then both disappear into the waters where they perish. Both the old woman and the alarming scene will recur in Part Two of the novel, having been assimilated into that inner world of images and subconscious intimations which plays so determining a role in Antonio's as in all our life stories.
After the death of his mother the pattern of Antonio's life is irrevocably broken, and nothing shows the radically interior preoccupations of this novel more vividly than the very first sentence of Chapter IV: ‘Hvad skulde der nu egenlig gjøres ved mig, det var Spørgsmaalet. …’10 ‘What should really now be done with me, that was the question…’ Such a question would be entirely in place in Jane Eyre or David Copperfield, both of which this novel, thirteen years their senior, frequently brings to mind. What follows takes us to the lowest point in Antonio's life, informed not only by his grief but by desolation, helplessness. To share the sordid, dishonest lifestyle of Uncle Peppo would be terrible, though the account of the beggars' mores contributes to the novel's overall meaning: the true artist – an Antonio, a Bertel Thorvaldsen, a Hans Christian Andersen – will always turn out to have had a particular empirical as well as imaginative relation to the unfortunate, the disinherited. He is not limited to the bland, prosperous society of the Collins' circle, and his knowledge of the world's human varieties is – for all his apparent innocence – far greater than theirs.
Antonio is happily delivered out of the mendicant life, but his time with the humble of this earth has not come to an end. Mariuccia arranges for him to go to the Campagna, to her parents; he must honour them as his mother and father. It is possible surely to link Mariuccia, from whose easy femininity Antonio has recoiled but who proves a sterling character, with Andersen's sister Karen Marie, and so to see this episode as a righting of the emotional/social wrongs he had done her in his heart. Andersen always declared Domenica to be a portrait of his own mother (with, though this he did not say, her character defects removed), and Domenica was, after all, Mariuccia's flesh-and-blood mother as well as his hero's adoptive one.
Before he leaves for the Campagna, Antonio has an extraordinary vision of the Roman past, of representative figures haunting the Capitoline Hill and the Colosseum, gladiators, soldiers, tormentors of beasts and unfortunate humans. Nothing in The Improvisatore is there by accident; these scenes, evidence of Andersen's basic meliorism, of those values to be purveyed later in ‘The New Century's Muse’ are given us as a warning. What was fine in the past must be respected, but it must never obscure its darker aspect. The artist's duty is primarily to serve the present, to make way for a brighter future. This tenet is, if you like, a complete and essential antidote to the prevalent Romantic tendency to worship all that lay furthest from what they regarded as the mounting worldliness of their age.
We can find something of the same fidelity to realities of existence in the two chapters concerned with Antonio's rural life with Domenica and her husband, Benedetto. Painter after painter had honoured the Campagna on canvas, and even in his reflective, ambiguous poem of 1855, ‘Two in the Campagna’, Robert Browning was moved to apostrophise:
The champaign with its endless fleece
Of feathery grasses everywhere!
Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air –
Rome's ghost since her decease.
Such life there, through such lengths of hours,
Such miracles performed in play,
Such primal naked forms of flowers,
Such letting nature have her way
While Heaven looks from its towers.11
‘Letting nature have her way …’ It is a ruthless, uncaring way according to Andersen/Antonio who, passing through these ‘champaigns’, burned up by unremitting sun and crowded with thistles, looked out at a harsh landscape imposing on people equally harsh means of eking out a livelihood. Andersen had little to no extended experience of country living, he had never depended on the weather or worried about what it did to natural resources or how it affected sheep and buffalo; his would always be essentially an urban life. Nonetheless, he looked at the Campagna not with a tourist's or an amateur painter's eyes but with a realist's, and saw the difficulties existence there would entail and their effect on a burgeoning sensibility such as Antonio's. In the two months of high summer the boy feels, in the isolated peasants' house, as though aboard a ship wrecked on the world's sea. He and his foster-parents are the scorching heat's captives, able to carry out tasks only at night, when they fervently pray for rain. Not until November do these circumstances change. And in these altered conditions an accident brings to the remote croft a stranger, clearly from a noble family, who is soon entranced by young Antonio's abilities – to read and understand what he has read, to draw, and to make improvisations. This man, the Eccellenza, goes on to summon the unusual youngster to Rome, to the Palazzo Borghese to meet his family, which includes a daughter Francesca and the man who becomes her husband, Fabiani (sic). So struck are they by Antonio that it is agreed with Domenica that they should adopt him and pay for his education at a leading (Jesuit) school.
The concurrence of Antonio's and Andersen's lives will be obvious to all, and who among Denmark's cultured class reading of a stuck-up, self-inflated school principal jealous of his more gifted pupils, holding preposterous intellectual views, and mockingly named Habbas Dahdah, could have failed to spot Dr Simon Meisling? Or to identify Eccellenza with Father Collin and the Palazzo with the Home of Homes, and Francesca and Fabiani with Ingeborg and Adolph Drewsen, hospitable, virtuous but (truer of Ingeborg than her husband) censorious too? Yet we are persuaded – through a wealth of convincing details about church and city life – that these individuals are Italians, with behind them a more ceremonious, tradition-steeped culture than the Danish. This is evidenced above all in the treatment of the daughter born to Francesca and Fabiani, Flaminia, dedicated from the cradle as a Bride of Christ. Antonio, who gets to know her well and becomes fond of her, initially resents this imposition of a destiny on her, but comes not only to accept it, but to feel its moral beauty, its intrinsic rightness for this particular girl.
The emotional dynamics of the novel derive from Antonio's relationship with Bernardo, a Senator's nephew and thus a privileged pupil at Habbas Dahdah's elitist school, and with the girl Bernardo falls for, the singer Annunziata, supposedly Jewish and an acquaintance from Antonio's childhood: she had been that wondrously accomplished little girl of obscure provenance in S. Maria in Aracoeli whose art surpassed his own. Bernardo is a galvanising, commanding presence in Part One, and a palpable absence in Part Two; glimpses of him fail to lead to direct confrontation until the very last chapter of all. The dashing young man, with his aura of conscious Byronism, his jubilant flirtatiousness, his high-class impertinence, his cavalier social manner as befits one who knows he is of high rank and arresting appearance, does not, it must be admitted, in the slightest suggest the solid, respectable, industrious Edvard Collin, as we have come posthumously to know him. But Antonio's attitudes to Bernardo – his open admiration, his anxiousness to stand in his good esteem, his insistence that they are profoundly, eternally, uniquely friends (and as members of the same academy-school they, unlike their prototypes, use ‘Du’ to each other quite naturally, from the start) – are unmistakably those of Andersen to Edvard. Were we in any doubt on this matter we have only to turn to his letters to his friend, and to diary entries, extracts from which have already been quoted. In such passages as the following, significant to plot development, we can hear echoes not only of Andersen himself but of Edvard's responses to him:
‘Vi ere meget forskjellige, Bernardo!’ sagde jeg, ‘og dog hænger mit Hjerte forunderligt ved Dig, tidt ønsker jeg, at vi altid kunde være sammen.’
‘Det vilde være daarligt for Venskabet,’ svarede han, ‘… . Venskab er som Kjærlighed, det bliver stærkest ved Skilsmissen …’12
‘We are extremely different, Bernardo,’ I said, ‘and yet my heart clings strangely to you, at times I wish we could be always together.’
‘That would be bad for [our] friendship,’ he answered ‘… Friendship is like love, it becomes strongest with separation.’
With yet greater exasperation Bernardo rebuffs his friend's imploring confessions of feeling:
‘Og hvad din Hengivenhed angaaer, den Du altid omtaler, saa forstaaer jeg det ikke; vi give hinanden Haanden, vi ere Venner, fornuftige Venner, men dine Begreber ere overspændte, mig maa Du tage, som jeg er.’13
‘And as regards your devotion which you are always talking about, I don't really understand it; we give each other the hand, we are friends, sensible friends, but your notions are overstretched, you must take me as I am.’
It was surely in just this spirit that Edvard wrote his never-forgotten, never-forgiven letter of June 1831 refusing the intimate second person that here Bernardo actually employs.
Yet Andersen, I feel, conflates Edvard with two companions of his Italian residence: Henrik Hertz and the Norwegian painter Thomas Fearnley, who by both precept and example endeavoured to make their friend less sexually diffident. In the following passage Bernardo has noted that his bashful, virginal friend looks with decided interest at the opposite sex:
‘Du begynder jo alt at blive et Menneske,’ sagde Bernardo, ‘et Menneske, som vi Andre, og har dog endnu kun nippet til Bægeret. … Du er jo ogsaa af disse aandelige Amphibier, man ikke veed, om de egenlig høre Legem- eller Drømmeverdenen til.’14
‘You're beginning to become a man,’ said Bernardo, ‘a man like us others, and yet have only just now sipped from the cup. … You are also one of these spiritual amphibians, one doesn't know whether they belong to the body or the dream world.’
Bernardo and Antonio fall in love with the same woman, Annunziata, which, in his Byronic superiority, causes the more sophisticated of the pair some amusement:
‘Jeg kunde have Lyst at see, hvor rødt dit Blod er, Antonio; men jeg er et fornuftigt Menneske, Du er min Ven, min oprigtige Ven! Vi ville ikke slaaes, selv om vi mødtes paa samme Elskovs Eventyr.’15
‘I have a longing to see how red your blood is, Antonio; but I am a reasonable man, you are my friend, my sincere friend! We will not fight, even if we are bound on the same love adventure.’
Antonio's blood, however, is red enough for him to take on Bernardo in a duel, during which the pistol given him for the purpose by the young Byronist himself goes off, wounding his adversary (fatally, it is mistakenly and briefly thought). The visually compelling snappiness of this scene – learned, one suspects, from similar climactic scenes in Scott – is sufficient to make it acceptable. More acceptable still, because animated by strong currents in the author's own emotional personality, is Antonio's horrified supposition that he has killed his greatest friend. And with this duel Antonio's virginity can be said to end. Despite his understandable reputation for belonging more to the spirit than to the flesh, he proves his manhood in the very testing-ground traditional for the young male – for the sake of love, self-defence and honour. As a consequence he is forced to flee Rome – and in doing so finds himself in lonely marsh country, as pertinent symbolically as it is challenging physically. Marsh is an in-between realm where water and earth meet in uneasy, often treacherous union, where fugitives can disappear for ever. It is also a second womb, but safe rebirth, even once the waters have broken, cannot be guaranteed. Andersen declared himself ‘a swamp-plant’, and, from now on in his oeuvre, marshes will persistently recur. The haunting rendering here of the Pontine Marshes marks their first appearance.
Antonio's successful struggle to get out of them opens Part Two of the novel. Once he has the marshland behind him, and can take the road again thanks to the help of social outcasts in the form of a robber band, Antonio can begin Part Two of his life. Temporarily in forced exile from Rome, he has been provided with a new passport for frontier guards. And so, accompanied by his old friend, the Danish painter, Federigo, his mother's former lodger, he bids goodbye to his native part of Italy, the Papal States, in favour of the very different Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Here he makes his way to its capital, Naples, then the Italian peninsula's largest city and indeed the third largest in Europe.16
To what extent can Antonio, adventurous as he now appears, still be thought a ‘swamp-plant’, an amphibian? Even in the novel's second part there is agreement that he is not like other men, and the episodes connecting Antonio to the blind girl, and to the beautiful Maria whom she grows into, never sufficiently escape from the Tieck-inspired romantic glow cast over them to become serious scenes of man–woman love.
As an improvisatore Antonio's only peer, we are told, is the great Tommaso Sgricci himself. It is hard to believe that Andersen and his more sophisticated readers (such as members of the artistic circles he frequented in Rome) did not know Sgricci's sensational reputation.
In the words of Byron, his most famous admirer, he was ‘a celebrated Sodomite’.17 Great fame and influential patrons protected him from getting into trouble for his most flagrant antics – cruising the streets of Florence at night flamboyant in gait and attire – but the Italians were generally easy-going about erotic matters, unlike Europeans further north. Were Antonio's ecstatically received improvisations – like those of Sgricci himself – charged with androgynous exuberance, expressive of the artist's release of all his frustration at his uncertain socio-sexual identity? (For it is clear from those exchanges with Bernardo that, when not giving lively rein to his inspirations, Antonio is aloof, even asexual in manner.) Yet to offset this one has to say that, at the height of his fame as an improvisatore, Antonio is both more attracted by and attractive to women than when in Rome as a protégé of Eccellenza and his family. Only too tragically late does he learn that Annunziata was in love with himself and not Bernardo, whom she proceeded to take as second best. The later Antonio would have not been so imperceptive about women's feelings.
And one cannot but feel that Antonio is more confident of his masculinity after separation from his overweening, arrogant friend, and that his creator, knowing this to be so, simply dared not risk writing confrontation scenes for fear of diminishing this quality. When at last the old friends do meet again, in the concluding chapter – in Milan, by Napoleon's triumphal arch, the Porta Sempione, with Bernardo heading for Switzerland and Antonio turning in the opposite geographical direction, towards marriage and life on a small country property, and with neither mentioning the woman they both loved – we sense that no subsequent rapprochement is psychologically necessary to either man, that rapprochement indeed may well never occur.
Bernardo, once a Papal Rider, belongs essentially to Rome, wherever his destiny finally delivers him, while Antonio is permanently changed by experience of the very different Naples. When we turn to the first Eventyr (fairy-tale) we shall find a successful analogue for this.
3
Entering Naples, Antonio is delighted by the hugger-mugger of its street life: the card game played by two scantily clad men crouching by a brazier, the barrel-organs, the hurdy-gurdies, all the singing and shouting and rushing round, and a contest for the crowd's attention between a monk and a puppet -theatre inside which Punchinello jumps about. He defines his reaction thus: ‘Jeg følte mig henflyttet i en ganske anden Verden; et sydligere Liv end det, jeg havde kjendt. …’18 ‘I felt myself transported to a truly other world; a more southern life than that I had known. …’ The woman in the same conveyance as he – the sensually inclined Santa – is delighted to be back here. ‘Signora klappede i Hænderne for sit lystige Neapel; Rom var en Grav mod hendes leende By.’19 ‘The Signora clapped her hands at her merry Naples; Rome was a grave compared with her laughing city.’
Rome is of course not a grave, neither has Antonio presented his birthplace as one, but we can tell from this quotation that he feels the Signora's observation to contain a defensible truth. Rome centres round the Church and those administering it, and this we have felt in both the working-class scenes which open the novel and those dealing with the Jesuit School and the Palazzo Borghese. Assuming his hero to be Andersen's exact contemporary – we can back this up with the 1834 date supplied in the concluding chapter – then from the age of nine, the year in which he first encountered the girl Annunziata in S. Maria in Aracoeli (1814), Antonio would have grown up at the epicentre of the Papal States, handed back to actual Papal control after the Congress of Vienna's dismemberment of Napoleonic Italy. Rome was a highly conservative, not to say reactionary, society. (To this we might add that, very different as Denmark was from the Papal States, Andersen may well have seen and intended a – not derogatory – parallel between the Eccellenza's closeness to Vatican hierarchy and Jonas Collin's to his own country's Absolute Monarchy.) After the defeat of Napoleon Naples became the capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies under Ferdinand I (formerly Ferdinand IV of Naples and III of Sicily). Rigid border control – accurately depicted in the novel – meant that Naples scarcely did any trade with the Papal States, relying on exports to other European powers including Britain. The historian David Gilmour (in The Pursuit of Italy, 2011) feels that its indubitable later shortcomings have obscured some more positive features of the Kingdom in general and of Naples in particular:
Naples in fact enjoyed a number of industrial ‘firsts’. It possessed the largest shipyards in Italy, it launched the first peninsular steamboat (1818) and it enjoyed the largest merchant marine in the Mediterranean; it also built the first iron suspension bridge in Italy, constructed the first Italian railways [by contrast the Papal States vetoed the railway] and was among the first Italian cities to use gas for street lighting.20
Andersen arrived in Naples on 16 February and didn't return to Rome until 20 March, when he came back for the Easter he evokes so vividly in his novel. The more southern city's palpable erotic appeal (greater than Rome's) he registered extremely quickly. Within three days (by 19 February) he was recording:
In the dusk of the evening I was surrounded by a bunch of pimps who wished to recommend to me a bella donna. I've noticed that the climate is affecting my blood – I felt a raging passion, but resisted. – God only knows what Hertz [who had accompanied him] was up to when I got home! The room was locked, and when I knocked on the door he came out and, speaking to me outside the door, apologized for the fact that I couldn't come in.21
Andersen makes many entries to the effect that he is sexually aroused to the brink of capitulation, then finally succeeds in self-mastery. A man accosts him and asks whether he wants a ragazza or a ragazzo; it is interesting that he troubles to note this down. But even bearing in mind Naples's reputation for homosexual pleasures, Andersen's interests appear to have focused on the other sex. He makes Antonio emerge from the city's pervasive sensuality better able to relate to women than before, more frankly, more personally.
Andersen's own rapt reception of the celebrated Malibran in the title role of Bellini's Norma at the Teatro San Carlo (23 February 1834) convinced him of the vitality of the city's cultural life. And, in truth, that great Spanish diva, Maria Felicita Malibran (1808–36)22 was the direct inspiration for Annunziata, who is, after Antonio himself, even allowing for some melodrama in her eruptions into the narrative, the novel's greatest triumph in characterisation. It contains nothing more moving than the sight (and sound) of her seven/eight years later in a flyblown little theatre in Venice. She is now singing a supporting, not a lead, role and is uncertain in her tonal register. A member of the audience actually compares her as she was in her prime, so different to her present emaciated condition, with Malibran. Antonio seeks her out, and comes to learn of her previous love for him. This situation of a man who once adored a singer seeing her, after years of separation, on stage in an Italian opera house (in this instance La Scala, Milan) will recur in a fine later story inspired by Andersen's friendship with an even greater opera singer, Jenny Lind: ‘Under piletræet’ (‘Under the Willow-tree,’ 1853).23 But there the diva is an acclaimed success about to marry another man, and Knud the hero realises the hopelessness of his emotions and with a heavy heart sets off home to Denmark.
From the very day of their arrival in Naples Andersen and his Antonio are fascinated by Vesuvius, and its magnificent and menacing domination of the city. Andersen's first diary entry from Naples contains this:
While I was sitting in my room at dusk, waiting for the others … I heard all of a sudden a strange sound in the air, like when several doors are slammed all at once, but with a supernatural power. I pricked up my ears; right away the sound came again. It's Vesuvius erupting, I thought and ran over to the square. It wasn't spewing any column of fire, but one side of the mountain was a river of fire flowing downward, and the crater was burning like a bonfire.24
An hour or so later Andersen is given a night-time rooftop view of ‘Vesuvius, which was overflowing with red lava’.
Antonio on his first day in Naples also gazes from his bedroom's balcony through the darkness at the mountain. Watching it, even from this safe distance, is, he at once knows, a spiritual as well as a sensory experience, begging the unanswerable questions of why such an agent of death-dealing destruction exists in a world made by an allegedly benevolent Deity and why this agent appears so tremendous, even ennobling, as to render such doubts redundant: ‘Min Sjæl var greben ved det store Skuespil, Gudsstemmen, som talte fra Vulkanen, som fra den still, tause Nathimmel.’25 ‘My soul was held by the great spectacle, the voice of God which issued from the volcano, as from the still, silent night-sky.’
Such instinctual reverence demands an expedition to the volcano itself, and to the two famed cities destroyed by its violent eruptions, Herculaneum and Pompeii. So Antonio undertakes one with his companions and thus brings about his history's supreme moment of self-understanding. The impact of the once-buried cities has been strong enough – so lively a culture, such low expectation on the part of their inhabitants that their priorities and their everyday business, their pleasures and their civic and domestic achievements would not extend indefinitely into an unmapped future, and that instead a few instants of activity on Nature's part would put a stop to it all for ever. Antonio, unlike his companions, does not concern himself overmuch with the letters of Tacitus and Pliny or with Bayardi's ten folio volumes on the ‘Antique Monuments of Herculaneum’. Instead he prefers to brood on Respice finem ‘Remember the end!’ The party leaves the ascent of Vesuvius until evening, when, in the moonlight, the glowing lava would show to best advantage. In, for me, the most powerful and persuasive prose Andersen had yet composed, Antonio tells of the transforming effect of the volcano on his receptive if inadequately prepared personality. He feels naked terror, for the savage force before him is real, unstoppable, life-threatening, and dangerous, no mere opportunity for aesthetic sensation. But he also cries out to the huge, fierce, active crater:
‘Mægtige Gud, din Apostel vil jeg være! i Verdensstormen vil jeg synge dit Navn, din Kraft og Herlighed. … Digter er jeg; forleen mig Kraft, bevar min Sjæl reen, som din Naturens Præst bør eie den.’26
‘Almighty God, I will be your Apostle. In the world's storm I will sing your name, your power and glory. … I am a poet; give me power, keep my soul pure, as your Nature's priest ought to have it.’
And it is as a result of these exalted moments on the mountain top that the young man gives the most impassioned – and impassioning – improvisation of his life so far, to private friends but of such quality that his next move must obviously be a public performance. This takes place at the Teatro San Carlo itself, and solicits rapture from the audience. It is perhaps the single most discomfiting feature of Andersen both as man and writer – and of his principal character surrogates – that acclaim was so vital to their well-being, so indispensable to identity. Certainly here the applauded Antonio feels he has attained a veritable apotheosis of his own essential self:
Næste Morgen var jeg for Federigo et nyfødt Menneske, jeg kunde udtale min Glæde, det kunde jeg ei Aftenen forud; Livet rundt om tiltalte mig mere, jeg følte mig ældre, syntes at være mere modnet ved den Opmuntringsdug, der var faldet paa mit Livstræ.27
Next morning I stood before Federigo a newborn man, I could express my happiness which I could not do before that evening; the life all round appealed to me more, I felt myself older, seemed to be more mature through the encouragement which had fallen on the tree of my life.
Antonio's experience of Vesuvius has one further, equally significant sequel. A stream of erupted lava flows into one of the outlying urban districts of Naples, and he decides to take a boat to the resonantly named Torre del Annunziata to be out of its molten wake. But even on the far side of the shore there is danger, and a statue of the Madonna is caught by the ensuing fire. A woman rushes to rescue the image, a foolish, potentially lethal act from which she is rescued by the sudden action of a dashing young man – Bernardo himself. But Antonio, even in these extreme circumstances, cannot bear to confront him. He turns and finds himself face to face with members of his adoptive Roman family, Fabiani and Francesca. This omnium-gatherum of characters, executed with a painterly chiaroscuro, has a dramatic vividness once again reminiscent of Scott. These people, all emotionally important to Antonio, have entered his life, not as a result of his conscious exertions, but by their chance placement on his route through time. Likewise the eruption of Vesuvius is an act of Nature not susceptible to human orders. The fiery light it sheds on persons and surroundings illuminates the alarming truth that we all are at the mercy of the non-human. This is the ultimate lesson The Improvisatore, right up to its last scene in the Blue Grotto, has to teach us, and it uses Italian geography – as well as Italian dramatis personae – to bring it convincingly home.28
If the nineteenth century's greatest writer of Danish prose was in Naples in 1834, so was the nineteenth century's greatest Italian poet, Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837). After racking emotional unhappiness, with unrequited love its major component, he moved to Naples on 2 October 1833, to make his home with his friend, Antonio Ranieri who would stay with him until his death just under four years later. In provenance Leopardi could not present a bigger contrast to Andersen: he came from a well-to-do, aristocratic, ultramontane Catholic family in Recanati, in the Marche region of the Papal States. But in other respects – disconcerting precocity, abiding restlessness, essential solitude of spirit, unflagging angst and ceaseless creativity (in the Italian's case exercising itself on philosophic prose as well as on the far better-known poetry) – the similarities between the two are remarkable.
Vesuvius, and the Roman cities its effluence had buried and extinguished, fascinated the poet as much as they did the novelist. In 1836, obliged to leave central Naples because of an outbreak of cholera, Leopardi and Ranieri, together with Ranieri's sister, took a villa at the base of the volcano between Torre del Greco and the Torre del Annunziata of Andersen's novel. From his awed contemplation of the mountainside Leopardi wrote one of his most profound meditative poems: ‘La Ginestra o Il Fiore del Deserto’, ‘Broom or the Flower of the Desert’, broom being, as the poem makes clear, able to flourish in conditions which defy other plants, despite itself being vulnerable.
Del formidabil monte
Sterminator Vesevo,
La qual null' altro allegra arbor nè fiore,
Tuoi cespi solitari intorno spargi,
Odorata ginestra,
Contenta dei deserti …
Here on the dry flank
Of the terrifying mountain,
Vesuvius the destroyer,
Which no other tree or flower brightens,
You spread your solitary thickets,
Scented broom,
At home in the deserts… (translation Jonathan Galassi)29
Like Andersen, Leopardi is moved to think how entire societies, deceived into believing themselves permanent, could in mere instants be wiped out. Though himself inclined to the progressive ideals later espoused by the architects and champions of Il Risorgimento – the title indeed of another of his major poems – the writer feels they cannot, should not constitute the basis of any faith. Don't they ignore the destructive power within Nature conditioning our existence? Nor should religion recite the beauties and benevolence of God's creation. ‘in cura/All’ amante natura’ ‘in the care/Of loving Nature’ is a regrettable, unwise sentiment, because founded on a many-times-proven untruth. Rather Nature is ‘la dura nutrice’, ‘the hard-hearted nurse’ which can turn on those in its charge, ‘Annichilare in tutto’, ‘to destroy everything’. Perhaps however the spectacle and the knowledge of this power could bring people together more closely, more lovingly, for mutual protection's sake. We pause in our thoughts and …
Caggiono i regni intanto,
Passan genti e linguaggi; ella nol vede:
E l'uom d'eternità s'arroga il vanto.
Meanwhile kingdoms fall,
Languages and peoples die; she doesn't see.
Yet man takes it upon himself to praise eternity.30
Better for oneself, for a whole people (for a nation like emerging Italy) to take as its rallying symbol a plant like the beautiful broom growing on the slopes of Vesuvius, its only aim limited self-accommodation, its very being sweetness. The poem concludes,
Ma più saggia, ma tanto
Meno inferma dell’ uom, quanto le frali
Tue stirpi non credesti
O dal fato o da te fatte immortali.
No, far wiser and less fallible
Than man is, you did not presume
That either fate or you had made
Your fragile kind immortal.31
Andersen was always, passionately to cherish a belief in immortality. But in truth the attitude to existence permeating the end of this stupendous Italian poem and that informing the end of the novel (in Capri's Blue Grotto) are the same: an anti-heroic stoicism which is itself a form of heroism.
The Improvisatore came out 9 April 1835 to plaudits. On 8 May there appeared a booklet of four stories by the same author, Eventyr, fortalte for Børn (Fairy Tales told for Children). These were ‘Fyrtøiet’ (‘The Tinder-Box’), ‘Lille Claus og store Claus’ (‘Little Claus and Big Claus’), ‘Prinsessen paa Ærten’ (‘The Princess on the Pea’) and ‘Den lille Idas Blomster’ (‘Little Ida's Flowers’). And on 16 December a second booklet of fairy tales (three in all) was published: ‘Tommelise’ (‘Thumbelina’), ‘Den uartige Dreng’ (‘The Naughty Boy’),32 ‘Reisekammeraten’ (‘The Travelling Companion’). Ørsted, Andersen recorded, in a judgement that has rightly gone down in literary history, ‘says that if The Improvisatore will make me famous, my fairy tales will make me immortal, for they are the most perfect of all that I have written’. He did not at the time agree, and neither did many critics. But posterity has sided with Ørsted. All the same The Improvisatore deserves a much firmer place in literary history than it now occupies. It is a truly European novel, in which a sensibility nurtured in one culture identifies with that begotten and reared in another, and is stimulated by the differences between them to appreciate and then to demonstrate the profundities of kinship.
Even while waiting for the publication of his first novel and his first fairy-tale booklet, Andersen was hard at work on another novel, O.T. (1836). This was duly received with interest as a novel about Denmark and recognisable people there, in distinction to its predecessor with its Italian settings and characters. So, jumping strict chronology, we shall deal with Andersen's second novel in the next chapter.