Pirandello's "Last" Play: Some Notes on The Mountain Giants

Pirandello's "Last" Play: Some Notes on The Mountain Giants JOHN B. REY SINCE LUIGI PIRANDELLO left The Mountain Giants unfinished at his death on December 10, 1936, many people believe that it is his last play. He began to write it sometime in 1929/ early 1930, which was a period of great creative productivity for him; he produced Lazarus, Tonight We Improvise, and As You Desire Me, among others, and all were completed. Pirandello was busy with the composition of the Giants for some six years, up to the penultimate night of his life, according to his son, Stefano. What were the difficulties which prevented him from finishing this play? The two published versions of the drama- the Mondadori edition in the Classici Contemporanei ltaliani collection, and the Marta Abba edition, published by Mursia, Milan- provide contradictory hints toward an answer. Consider, for example, the latter editor: Marta Abba was a favourite actress of Pirandello. She inspired many of his later plays, and there was an intimate relationship between them: "'She is like a daughter to me,'" Pirandello said; "'She is younger than my own children. She is twenty-seven years of age and I am an old man, nearly seventy.' "1 At his death, Miss Abba and Pirandello's children were in dispute about the copyright ownership of certain plays. A court decision gave Miss Abba rights to about nine plays, including The Mountain Giants. More pertinent, when Pirandello read the first drafts of The Mountain Giants to her, Marta Abba confesses that she did not much like the play: "If Luigi Pirandello put aside the Giants continually , it was because I was confused and cold to his first reading. He 413 416 JOHN B. REY felt a bitter alienation from the public. So Pirandello went abroad; his residences in Berlin and Paris became longer. Then in 1930, a Berlin audience felt that his Tonight We Improvise was a gratuitous attack on Max Reinhardt, then an idol of the German public and a man to whom Pirandello personally owed much. The play was a disaster, and Pirandello felt humiliated. From Berlin, Pirandello went to Paris. There he found himself in a headier atmosphere: intellectual as well as political freedom permeated all artistic creation. However, he could not accept the role of expatriate. He had a paranoid, masochistic streak which was evident in his relationship with his mad wife, from whom he had found it difficult to separate. Now he could not break away from Italy, which he deeply loved but savagely attacked for lack of affection and appreciation . His letters to Marta Abba are full of bitter recrimination against his native land: "Italy will never repent of her ferocious ingratitude toward her best sons! You, too ... will weep for having been born Italian.'" When Mussolini made vulgar reference to his relationship with Marta Abba, Pirandello was shocked.' On a South American visit in 1927, the playwright said, "Abroad there are neither fascists nor anti-fascists; we are all Italians.'" Augusto Turati, the Party Secretary, blasted Pirandello for this remark, and the dramatist reacted unexpectedly by tearing the party badge from his buttonhole and shredding his membership card. The fascists apologized to Pirandella . And ten years later, he turned in his Nobel Prize medal and gold objects to be melted down to finance the Ethiopian campaign; he praised Mussolini publicly for having created an Italian "Empire." Yet privately his attitude towards fascism was becoming ambivalent, and as early as 1928, this ambivalence was reflected in his play The New Colony. The characters of The New Colony are social outcasts, the dregs of humanity: La Spera, a prostitute with a child; the smuggler, Currao; thieves; informers, all constantly at war with the forces of order. They are not the sorts whose story the fascists could happily accept. These people dream of fleeing to an abandoned island, a penal colony sinking into the sea. Here, as escapees from their environment, they will create a new society of freedom, justice, and fraternal love. There are unmistakable anti-fascist sentiments. In the prologue alone, these appear: "A fellow may be watching two children at play on the beach or sitting out at the...