[Leo was a leading German scholar of Romance literature. In the following excerpt from an essay that was originally published in Romanistiches Jarbuch in 1963, he compares the short story "Mrs. Frola and Her Son-In-Law, Mr. Ponza" to its stage adaptation, Right You Are (If You Think So), while asserting that Pirandello's short fiction is more artistically powerful than his dramas. ]

. . . In . . . L'uomo, la bestia e la virtù (Man, Beast and Virtue) we [can see] how the poetical sense of a work of narrative fiction vanished once that work was adapted for the stage, to make room for theatrical animation: the play had not grasped in its essence the short story from which it was derived. In . . . "O di uno o di nessuno" ("Either of One or of No One"), we [can see] that the relevant play, confined as it was to the dramatic genre's only form of speech, i.e., direct discourse, could not do justice to the rich expressive resources of narrative fiction, which include silence, though on the other hand, thanks to the unity of time which is more germane to theater than to a tale the play in question managed to fulfill the structural unity of a given theme much better than the source story had.

Now we shall see . . . how the short story—by going beyond its genre limits with no loss of poetical force—has become something like a nonnarrative prefiguration of the play; indeed, that it is already the play, at the potential stage. . . . The story in question is "La signora Frola eil signor Ponza, suo genero" ("Mrs. Frola and her Sonin-Law, Mr. Ponza"), while the play it generated is Così è (se vi pare) (It Is So, If You Think So). We are reminded of the question "Who had it been?" which abruptly opens the short story "O di uno o di nessuno" ("Either of One or of No One"). That question seemed to issue in all likelihood from both male protagonists of the story, though the possibility remained that it was the narrator himself who uttered it. At any rate he was the one that began to tell the story after the short initial paragraph. Instead, in the case of "La signora Frola" . . . we find ourselves from beginning to end in a speech atmosphere which—with the exception of few passages to which we shall return—is no longer that of a fictional narrative in the proper sense of the word: because the narrator, far from occupying the obvious center, is simply "not there." And while in a play the playwright not only does not have to, but actually cannot be "present," . . . a fictional narrative without narrator remains to this day, despite all the transformations this genre has gone through, a contradiction in terms. Let us then consider the literary form as it shows itself here.

What we see here is no narrative—and no I-narrative either—it is a dramatic monologue. And if we ask who is the monologue's persona, everything seems to refute the possibility of its being the author himself. Obviously the subjective participation expressed by the monologue—and in direct discourse, not just in free indirect discourse—is too naïve and immediate for that. Besides, this participation involves a group of what could be defined as "masked people," i.e., a compact mass of average men and women who confront two (or rather, three) "unmasked" ones with a curiosity stubborn and merciless to the point of fanaticism. The "unmasked" ones, on their part, want nothing but to live their own life outside the so-called "normal" sphere, yet they cannot do it in the eyes of the "masked" people (the impersonal, anonymous subject that Heidegger would label "das Man," as in Man sagt, "people say . . ." while Pirandello here says "Tutti" [All]). The "speaker" of the monologue is obviously a member of this group and seems to endorse unconditionally their well-known (to him) viewpoints, prejudices, and ways of conduct. Thus how could this speaker be Pirandello, who, rather, always and everywhere takes the side of the "unmasked," of the defenseless and lonely? Pirandello indeed, who in It Is So, If You Think So will introduce Laudisi (the short story has no character by that name) as a kind of counsel against the busybodies, and patently on the author's behalf?

But even if we did not know that the short story "Mrs. Frola and her Son-in-Law" is by Pirandello and that It Is So, If You Think So constitutes its stage version, we could distinguish the speaker of the monologue, on stylistic grounds, from the author—for the manner of utterance bears the unmistakable mark of the dramatic farce. "But really, can you imagine? all of us will go crazy if we don't manage to find out which of the two is crazy, this Mrs. Frola or this Mr. Ponza, her son-in-law. Things like that happen only at Valdana, unlucky town, the magnet of all eccentric strangers!" Thus it begins, and thus it goes on; and thus quite evidently no author speaks (regardless of which author it may be); this is the voice of an anonymous citizen of a backwoods small town, which to him is the hub of world events (". . . Things like that happen only at Valdana. . . ."); and he is speaking in the tone of carping criticism familiar to his cronies. Yes, the anonymous persona speaks not only in the context of that nameless collective which Heidegger calls "das Man": he represents it, he himself is the voice of that collective. He even emphasizes himself to the point of literal equivalence with it: ". . . we all here looking into one another's eyes, like lunatics? . . ." Irrefutably, the speaker is himself part of the impersonal group. And to whom does he speak? Not to his own group (as Laudisi will do in the play when he tries to convey to the naïve and fanatical mass his skepticism concerning truth, Pirandello's own skepticism). This speaker evidently has nothing to tell or to teach that his fellow gossips do not already know. Those he addresses, instead, . . . are the readers (one might almost say the listeners). To them—almost as a delegate of the nameless collective—he tells with great excitement whatever eccentricities happen to be afoot in Valdana at the moment.

This, then, is our "first reading impression"—after we have noticed that what we read here is, with regard to genre, no story but a dramatic structure. Yet the "second reading impression" modifies the first, without of course canceling it. By listening more carefully we still find something in the "monologue" that cannot be so unquestionably attributed to a naïve member of the "People say .. ." impersonal group. The speaker at some points seems to be half conscious of what will be the basic thesis of Laudisi in the play: that truth is defined just by its being unknowable. This naturally would never occur to any really harmless member of the "Tutti" busybodies: for they actually live on the certainty that the secret of Signora Frola and Signor Ponza can be clarified if one but delves enough; that one can know whether Signora Ponza is the first or the second wife of her husband; and whether, according to the answer, Signora Frola or Signor Ponza is the crazy one. This is how the "Tutti" think. But the speaker of the monologue has a phrase which in the course of his talking becomes an actual leitmotiv, and it expresses something like a first secret doubt on such a naïve certainty: "not to be able to discover . . . where the phantom is, where reality"; "where is reality? where the phantom?" ". . . where the phantom, where reality may be" (the dubitative question is thereby raised to the status of an overall motto). Still another particularly revelatory passage is to be found right at the beginning: "Naturally, in everybody the fateful suspicion rises that, things being so, reality is worth just as much as the phantom, and that every reality may very well be a phantom, and vice versa." This "suspicion" is already almost Laudisi's doctrine; and if it really came to life in "everybody's" mind, then the anonymous "people say" attitude would lose its impact. In this connection it pays to observe that, while the keyword for the anonymous speaker in the short story is "realtà" (reality) (with its negative counterpart "fantasma" [phantom]), Laudisi's keyword in the play is "verità" (truth) (without an antithetical concept; at each act's end, and often elsewhere too). "Truth" stands cognitively above "reality" and "illusion."

These doubts on the possibility of seizing truth (reality), within our "monologue," do modify for us as readers the first impression of the speaker's persona: he appears now less naïve, more thoughtful and independent, spiritually a bit closer to the author Pirandello. Another stylistic trait modifies the genre form we have called "monologue," in that it brings that form closer to an authentic narrative: the speaker, that is, does narrate the antecedents in fragments inserted between his outbursts, instead of just dissolving all the preliminary facts into exclamations, questions, self-objections, addresses to the fictive audience. That he, and not Pirandello, is the narrator may be seen in his initially twice repeated self-admonition to "order": "But no, it is better to relate everything first in an orderly way"; "But let us proceed with order." (In a formally opposite way Pirandello himself, without any such transition, had begun to narrate from the second paragraph of the short story "Either of One or of No One.") When the speaker narrates coherently, then, he himself interrupts his own impressionist speech, whose center is the reaction of "Valdana" to the events described—but not so much the events themselves; he remembers ever anew that his fictive "listeners" (the readers) must be initiated to what he and his familiars already know. Such narrative pieces are to be found all over, shading always into the reflections of the curious people (especially of the ladies), so that it is never easy to distinguish the objectively narrated facts from the subjective reactions to such narration, whether retold or directly uttered by the speaker himself: another proof that we are dealing with one speaker and one and the same monologue. But the very fact of narration does bring the persona closer to the figure of the author (Pirandello), who in a "normal" short story would have been himself the narrator; on the other hand it distances the persona from the undifferentiated crowd, which is generally present in the monologue only insofar as the persona speaks of it ("le signore" [the ladies]; "tutti" [all]; "Valdana"). In the context of these narrative fragments there actually occur the speeches of Mrs. Frola and of Mr. Ponza in the guise of free indirect discourse (on the cue of their visits as reported by the speaker, visits which then are directly enacted in the play). Even a bit of dialogue (between Mrs. Frola and her supposed daughter) is rendered in the form of direct discourse; and there is also a direct discourse by Mrs. Frola. But always from the lips of the monologue's persona, not of the author.

Who, then, utters the monologue? My answer will surprise those who know (as I myself said before) that a character called Laudisi appears only in the play and not in the story. However, I answer the question: the speaker of the "monologue" is neither one of the "masked" people, nor Pirandello: it is rather Laudisi and no one else. Of course not the same Laudisi who in the play will act as mouthpiece of the author against the nameless collective, but his embryonic and still unnamed predecessor in the "short story." I figure for myself the process (which perhaps even Pirandello the author did not consciously realize—we explicators must serve some purpose after all!) somewhat as follows. The cue to the project came—as is known—from a tragic fait divers: the destruction of a small town in the Marsica region of Abruzzi by an earthquake in 1915. In the face of this reality the whole idea developed. Pirandello shows, without introducing them directly as he will later do in the play, the ladies and gentlemen of the small, imaginary town of Valdana in their excitement about the consequences of that event for their town. He does this in perspective, through the words of one of them. This person, while speaking as one of them, starts having his spiritual doubts: since an individual by himself is apter to think things over than a crowd. While he intermittently and fragmentarily recounts antecedents and story proper in his monologue, he gets (as if behind his own back) a broader view of the facts narrated by him than is possible to the thoughtless crowd of busybodies for whom he speaks, and who on their part can only see the fleeting moment. Thus the phase of reflection has penetrated the naïveté that can only experience what is momentary; and it has done this—since it's a matter of investigating reality—in the guise of methodic skepticism, even though in its first dawning. The speaker has, unawares, already distanced himself a bit from his impersonal crowd; and this means that the short story already contains, in a nutshell, the "Laudisi" of the play to come. Comparable in this way to the later Laudisi, the speaker already stands a little disengaged from the nameless collective for which he nevertheless speaks; and this with regard to the writer as well as to the reader. (This of course by no means implies that Pirandello had developed his philosophy right then for the first time. I am describing a literary process, not an ideological one.) The speaker of the "short story" is "a Laudisi avant la lettre." Let us not forget that the wholly developed Laudisi, the skeptic of the play, is also a member of the "crowd": for he is familiar, related, bound to the group of the "masked people" (the busybodies). He is no "unmasked" one, because he knows how to defend himself. He is, besides, no recent arrival, no "Ingénu," "Micromégas," or "Candide": he is from "Valdana" like the others; to that extent he constitutes a legitimate literary descendant of the "short story's" anonymous speaker, who on his part spiritually somewhat prefigures him.

A close examination of the text confirms this from language and style. The expression through which the speaker of the "monologue" finally reveals himself as part of the "Tutti" (". . . a guardarci tutti negli occhi. . . .") recurs almost unchanged on the lips of the play's Laudisi: "Vi guardate tutti negli occhi? . . ." (You all look into one another's eyes?). Yet a basic difference is there. The anonymous speaker said "guardarci," to look into one another's eyes (meaning ours), because he considered himself part of the "Tutti"; Laudisi says "vi guardate," you look into one another's eyes, because he consciously excludes himself from the "Tutti." That speaker of the short story, then, has been organically reshaped into the Laudisi of the play. The latter will be hopelessly split from his erstwhile "peers" by his basically antithetic way of feeling and thinking, while his forerunner in the "short story," despite his spiritual "temptations," does remain a member of the crowd to the very end of the monologue.

If my explication is viable, then "Laudisi"—the singular polemical character of the dramatic piece It Is So, If You Think So, and certainly in his own right one of Pirandello's liveliest creations—is already latently, potentially there in the pseudo-short-story "Mrs. Frola and her Son-in-Law." The same is now true of almost everything that will otherwise go into the three acts of the play. Since the "short story"—as is by now clear—really is dramatic in nature, we can safely call it a one-acter which prepared the matter of the later three-acter by allusion rather than actual execution. This holds even though Pirandello included the work in question among his "short stories"; and it would not be the only case of its kind.

The play is already potentially present in the "short story." It is not a case of the play's having misunderstood the short story and robbed it of its existential sense; nor is it a case of the short story (which here already has dramatic quality and works mainly with direct discourse) being utterly different from the play in the matter of expression. Some tender nuances do of course get lost in the dramatic elaboration: ".. . she concludes with a sigh which on her lips takes the shape of a sweet, utterly sad smile." This is given in the short story by the speaker's narrative report, but in the play could only have been salvaged (or buried) in a stage direction, for the actress to show. Yet such cases are, as we saw, exceptions, because both elaborations of the subject belong to the same expressive sphere, the dramatic one. They effectively relate to each other as a sketch does to a fuller rendering of the same subject.

With such assumptions let us note again the motifs, scenes and acts that are at best hinted at in the "monologue," but constitute structural elements of the play. First of all (to say it once again), the collective "Tutti," who populate the play, are present in the "monologue" only through the mouth of the speaker. The earthquake, natural cause of the whole story, is mentioned only once in the "monologue," and only as "a grave mishap," while in the play it becomes the object of the "people say" group's discussions, and what's more, documents are sought in the devastated small town with a view to unveiling the "secret"—this being one of the two main motifs of Act III (especially scene 1 and 2 with foreshadowings in Act II, scene 1). The attribution of evidential power to documents, which is holy dogma to the "masked" ones, will be one of Laudisi's arguments against the knowability of "truth." In the "monologue," the documents hardly come up, even by way of allusion. The play on its part needed a "third act," and thus there was a reason to extend the action by introducing motifs which the psychologically oriented model had not used. But, unlike the earlier cases, this time the new motifs grow organically from the central idea by which the model was determined in its turn; they do not obscure, they develop it.

As for the other leading theme of Act III and great climax of the whole piece—the personal appearance of the controversial Mrs. Ponza—the very end of the "monologue" suggests just the possibility of questioning her as a last resort to solve the riddle; but the lady herself does not show up, even in the speaker's narrative. Such is the difference between the genre requirements of a dramatic monologue taking the place of the short story on the one hand, and of a full-fledged theatrical piece on the other, however little aimed at extrinsic effects. Act III, the climax of the play, is mainly missing from the "monologue," save for a few hints. Even the prefetto, a prominent figure of the "people say" group in Act III of the play, is only mentioned in the "monologue." And the three great scenes in which both "unmasked" persons pay visits to their tormentors, the "Tutti", in an attempt to save something of their secret from the fury of the busy bodies, appear as "scenes" only in the play, effectively offsetting each other (I, 4-6). In the "monologue," as we earlier saw, these visits have already taken place and appear only retrospectively in the recollective talk of the speaker, partly in narrative form, partly in free indirect discourse, at times even in reported direct speech; and therefore they are much less sharply divided into contrasting scenes, for they rather make up phases of the development, in a general recapitulation of Valdana's "eccentricities."

I have endeavored to define something like a new genre by means of this "dramatic narrative monologue" disguised as "short story," from which later a three-act play was to emerge. That in the end, however, the author stands behind the speaker (though at quite a distance); that it is after all Pirandello who makes himself heard through the mouth of this anonymous and still naïve group spokesman, need not be doubted. It is not only the identity of "reality" and "phantom" (i.e. the unknowability of "truth"), as sensed by the "speaker," that betrays the author hiding behind him. The excitement, the perplexity of the speaker as such, who means to report just the group opinion, indirectly mirror the first shock of the author at the "tragic fait divers" to which he owed his inspiration. Into the scurrilous petty-bourgeois group language of his "Laudisi before the fact" the author translates his own first reaction as man and poet: "What shall I do with this process that reality is throwing at me?" In this sense (but then quite indirectly) one might call our pseudo-short-story, in the end, an "author monologue": different in genre from an I-narrative, different from a journal of the kind published by André Gide and Thomas Mann in connection with the writing, respectively, of the Counterfeiters and of Dr. Faustus, different as well from a personal letter. It is in fact a little genre unto itself. .. . At any rate I must count myself among those who say Pirandello went astray when he left narrative fiction for the drama . . . Pirandello's short stories and also his novels comprise a wealth of poetical gems, while in his plays the search for effect only too often has overruled the spiritual thoughtfulness and the voice of poetry. . . .