[A longtime editor of the leftist magazine Dissent and a regular contributor to The New Republic, Howe is one of America's most highly respected literary critics and social historians. He has been a socialist since the 1930s, and his criticism is frequently informed by a liberal social viewpoint. In this review of the 1959 collection Short Stories, Howe relates Pirandello's work to nineteenth-century realism. ]

About half a year ago, when a collection of Pirandello's stories appeared in English, I began to read them casually and with small expectations. Like other people, I had once looked into a few of his plays and been left cold; had accepted the stock judgment that he was clever theatrically but lacking in literary range and depth; and had disliked him because of his friendliness to Italian Fascism.

Two or three stories were enough to convince me that here, beyond doubt, was the work of a master. Not all the stories in[Short Stories by Pirandello] are first-rate; some show the marks of haste or fatigue, others are finger-exercises in which Pirandello plays with his main themes yet does not fully release them. But even in the slightest of these twenty-two stories—only one had previously been translated into English—there is that uniqueness and assurance of voice which is the first sign of a major writer. And in the best of them there is writing which can bear comparison with the masters of the short story, Chekhov and Joyce.

Now this is not an estimate for which modern criticism has prepared us. Outside of Italy, there is little Pirandello criticism; the books about him in English range from Italianate rhapsody to American academic, but none provides enough material or adequate criticism. A good but too brief essay by Eric Bentley helps one find direction in the labyrinth of Pirandello's vast production, and equally helpful are some incisive reviews by Stark Young, written in the twenties for The New Republic and reprinted in his Immortal Shadows. But for the most part, in America Pirandello is a name, not a force. He has seldom been welcomed to the pantheon of modernism, and those of us raised on modernist taste have suffered a loss.

Nor is this true in regard to Pirandello alone. Taste can be a tyrant, even the best or most advanced taste. Literary people who reached maturity two or three decades ago often felt zealous in behalf of writers like Eliot, Stevens and Joyce, for they, in Harold Rosenberg's phrase, had established the "tradition of the new" and it was this tradition which roused one's excitement and loyalties. Soon, however, the tradition of the new was being shadowed by a provincialism of the new.

The avant garde impulse was the most vital in the literary life of our century, but by now we might as well admit that it also exacted a price in narrowness of interest, sometimes in smugness of feeling. Because its spokesmen told us so forcibly which poets and novelists were relevant to an age of terror and war, we assumed a little too quickly that other writers could be left to molder in darkness. Now, by way of penance, middle-aged writers regularly—and if they have any humor about themselves, ruefully—announce literary "discoveries" based on reading with pleasure the writers whom they had felt free to dismiss in their youth.

So here are some notes—inexpert, rueful—on Luigi Pirandello.

Pirandello's stories are in the main tradition of 19th Century European realism. Except for those set in Sicily, which have a distinctive regional flavor, they often seem close in manner and spirit to the writings of the French realists and naturalists. Ordinary social life forms their main setting. The frustrations of the city, the sourings of domesticity, the weariness of petty-bourgeois routines, provide their characteristic subjects. Like Flaubert, though with less fanatic insistence, Pirandello cuts himself out of his picture. His prose is neither elevated nor familiar; it is a middle style, denotative, austere and transparent, the style of an observer who achieves sympathy through distance rather than demonstration.

Far more than we have come to expect in the modern short story, the impact of Pirandello's stories depends upon their action, which sometimes contains enough incident to warrant a good deal of expansion. There are rarely Joycean epiphanies of insight or Chekhovian revelations through a massing of atmosphere. The function of Pirandello's style is to serve as a glass with a minimum of refraction or distortion; and whatever we may conclude as to his purpose or bias must come not from a fussing with details of metaphor but from a weighing of the totality of the action. In this respect, Pirandello the story writer is not quite a "modern" writer.

He is not quite "modern" in still another way. Though Pirandello in his plays would break with the psychology and epistemology of 19th Century realism, abandoning the premises of both a fixed individual character and the knowability of human relationships, his stories were still accessible to educated people of his generation who had been brought up on rationalist assumptions. Such readers may have found them excessively bleak—one does not leave Pirandello in a mood to embrace the universe—but they had no difficulty in grasping them, as later they might with his plays.

The stories deal with human problems, but do not threaten the reader with a vision of human lot as beyond comprehension or as open to so many meanings that there follows a paralysis of relativism. Pirandello has a sharp eye for absurdities, but this is still far from the view that life is inherently absurd. One can find anticipations of existentialism in these stories, as one can find them in many writers of Pirandello's day who were oppressed by the collapse of 19th Century certainties; but precisely those writers, like Pirandello, who seem to have anticipated the existentialist posture of an affirmed insecurity are the ones, in the end, who resist its full display. They stopped short, often at a depressed stoicism, a sense of life as weariness. And this, in turn, has some relation to their having been raised in a more or less Christian culture: for if they no longer had a radiant or sustaining faith they preserved from it a feeling for duties, burdens, limits.

Fantasy, playfulness, sexual pleasure, religious emotion, any sort of imaginative abandon or transcendence—these seldom break through in Pirandello's stories, though some of them can at times be heard pulsing quietly beneath the surface. A full tragic release is rare. Much more characteristic are stories in which the final sadness arises from the realization of characters that they will have to live on, without joy or hope. In a five-page masterpiece, "The Soft Touch of Grass," a bereaved, aging man is mistakenly suspected by a girl of having lewd intentions; overcome by a sense of the hopeless entanglements of life, he returns to his lonely room and "turned his face to the wall."

In "Such Is Life," a masterpiece that would do honor to Chekhov, a hopeless marriage, long broken, is hopelessly resumed. This story, written with a repressed austerity and unrelieved by a rebellious gesture or tragic resolution, stays terribly close to life; in a sense, its power depends upon Pirandello's scrupulous decision not to allow either his emotions or imagination to interfere with what he sees. At the end, the central figure is left with "an ever-present torment... for all things, all earthly creatures as she saw them in the infinite anguish of her love and pity, in that constant painful awareness—assuaged only by fleeting peaceful moments which brought relief and consolation—of the futility of living like this. . . ."

There are humorous stories too, such as "The Examination," in which a good-tempered glutton studying for a state examination is regularly deflected from his work by friends tempting him to share their pleasures. One smiles at the end, for Pirandello manages it with suavity and tact. But it is a humor of sadness, a twist upon the idea of incongruity as the very heart of life, and it brings little gaiety or relief. Of the pleasure that can come from simply being alive Pirandello's stories have little to say, certainly nothing to compare with his one marvellously lighthearted play Liola, in which youthful energies bubble without restraint or theory.

Stark Young, in a review of the play Henry IV, has described the Pirandello theme as

.. . the dualism between Life on one hand and Form on the other; on the one hand Life pouring in a stream, unknowable, obscure and unceasing; on the other hand forms, ideas, crystallizations, in which we try to embody and express this ceaseless stream of life. Upon everything lies the burden of its form, which alone separates it from dust, but which also interferes with the unceasing flood of Life in it.

This description, partly drawn from Pirandello himself, is an excellent one, though some amendment is required in regard to the stories, for there the stream of Life is much weaker than the barrier of Form. In Young's version, the Pirandello theme is concerned with constants that apply to any moment in history, and there is plenty of evidence in both the stories and plays that Pirandello sees it this way. But I think that a sharper focus can be had upon the stories if one also regards the Life-Form theme as closely related to the stresses and tensions of late 19th- and early 20th-century life in Europe.

To all of this, one group of Pirandello stories is something of an exception. Those set in Sicily are comparatively buoyant and combative, not because Pirandello, himself a Sicilian, glosses over the misery of his homeland or indulges in peasant romanticism, but simply because here the human drama plays itself out with quick violence. Men rise, men fall; but they do not know the dribbling monotonies of an overly-rationalized mode of existence, as do so many characters in Pirandello's urban stories. In "Fumes," the best of the Sicilian group, a decent hardworking farmer, to frustrate the local money-lender, agrees to sell his land to a sulphur-mining company, appalled though he is at the thought of the fumes that will now blight the whole region. The spectacle of a man being pressed beyond endurance is a familiar one in Pirandello's stories; but the farmer, while hardly a Promethean figure, does cry out at the end, "Neither he nor I!"

Behind Pirandello stands his master in fiction, the Sicilian Giovanni Verga, from whom he learned to disdain rhetoric and grandeur. Reading Verga's stories one feels they are not so much "made-up" fictions as communal fables, the record of a people born to catastrophe. Reading Pirandello's stories, one feels they have been wrought by a man increasingly estranged from a world he knows intimately. Pirandello does not achieve the virile spareness of Verga; no one does. In Verga everything is subordinated to the decisiveness of the event; in Pirandello one must always be aware of his psychological motives, even if these seldom appear on the surface of the story, and then mainly as a film of melancholy. Verga's happenings are much more terrible than Pirandello's, yet are easier to take, since in Verga men scream and howl as they suffer. Only a few decades separate the two writers, but the distance between them reflects a deep change in the spiritual temper of European life, a certain loss of zest and will.

Writers, like the rest of us, do not choose their moment of birth, and it would be absurd to relate Pirandello too closely with the depressing qualities of his stories. So quick an intelligence must have been aware of the difference in the literary possibilities open to Verga and himself, and realized that most of the advantage did not lie with him. But no serious writer chooses his subject; he can only choose whether to face it. And that Pirandello did with exemplary courage and honesty.