THE AUTHOR OF "PINOCCHIO"

Press, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23131, 21 September 1940, Page 5

THE AUTHOR OF "PINOCCHIO"

The name of Pinocchio has been familiar to children the world over for the last generation; and it may be said that there isn’t a grown-up who has been through school who hasn’t heard the story, either told in his own language or shown on the screen, of the wooden marionette who becomes a boyr Even Soviet Russia has given us a version.

Yet no one ever asks who its author was, and few men, outside of I’a.ly, can tell you anything about him. Collodi is not even the real name of the author but the pseudonym which he adopted from the name ot, the villa where,’ as the son of the chef of the -proprietor, he spent many years of his childhood. This villa —as it lay huddled in the arms of a valley, caressed each evening by the departing sun—was saved from eternal oblivion by the author, Carlo Lorenzini, whose fame spread the name to the four cornels of the earth. As you approached the villa—which was owned by a n ’uscan nobleman of the eighteenth century—on the ■ small road surrounded by low walls, you suddenly came upon a strange architectural structure composed of foliage, a veritable theatre of trees, where was evident the hand of a gardenersculptor who had known how to mould the vegetation to his will, to have it now assume the shape ox a pilaster, now of a column, now of a loggia, now of a niche, within whose branches were housed grandiose and grotesque statues, and fantastic fountains spouting up their :iets to in'ertwine with the air in a most bizarre fashion. The Dissatisfied Clerk Carlo Lorenzini was not born there, but in Florence, in 1826, where he later returned to complete hi« studies. It seems that he never went very far in them, with the result that he remained but a smalltime employee of the Grand Duke. (Tuscany at the time was ruled by

[By GIUSEPPE PREZZOLINI in the "Saturday Review of Literature."]

a good-natured but weary Austrian dynasty; whose “tyranny” consisted in keeping the Italian people in a slate of enforced idleness.)

Yet in that humble employee’s soul there was a spark that could not be dimmed by the monotony of those four walls of his office; there burned in him the desire to write and jest. He busied himself with d matic criticism, he wrote sketches and satires, he even founded a small journal called the “Lamp Post.” Like all Italian writers and youths of the period, he espoused the liberal cause, and hoped some day to see a new and united Italy, free of foreign domination. In 1848 he joined the Tuscan student forces which acquitted themselves well on the battlefields of Curtatone and Montanara in Lombardy. In 1859 he again joined the colours, this time as a member of the cavalry. Finally in 1860, with Italy free and united, he found hims If transferred from the Austrian s employ to that of his own country. He did not, however, rise in office or change his way of life. He still remained that same perfunctory sort of employee, never really interested in his work, barely respectful toward his superiors, always dissatisfied with his salary. In all probability, he preferred writing articles or going to the theatre, to recording in the archives. But even his writings, though they reveal a decided flair for dialogue and scenemaking, never seem to have quite succeeded. They were later collected under the titles “Gay Grimaces” and “Eyes and Noses,” which to-day are scarcely ever read. In them is depicted a middle-class world with a comic moralistic touch, but without profundity or penetration. Birth of Pinocchio it was by accident that he came to write for. children. A modest editor of the day, a certain Felix Paggi, asked him, in 1879. to translate Perrault’s “Three Fairy Tales” from the French. The book was immediately popular. Whereupon the editor invited him to send in something of his own. Lorenzini did. There was current at the time a tradition inaugurated by one Palhavicini, an author of children’s books, known as “teaching by entertaining.” Its basic idea was to have pupils participate in the subject they were being taught; map out a voyage in geography, act out the events in history. These are formulae well known to all writers of children’s books and- have been th germ of a vast literature on the subject in all parts of the world. Thus came into being two of Collodi’s creations, “Little Joe” and “Tiny Morsel,” and with them a raft of Little Joes that went parading up and down Italy learning their reading and arithmetic, and brandishing (what was new in those days) a magic lantern. To-day “Little Joe” and “Tiny Morsel” are no longer in vogue and are relegated to the domain of powdered wigs and carriages. No Italian child will read them now. Their editor has even tried to streamline t em. adapting them to changed social and technological conditions, but all in vain.

But Lorenzini did not stop there. A lother incident occurred, purely arbitrary, which resulted in his one and only masterpiece There had, just started in Rome, in 1881, the, publishing of a “Children’s Journal,’ with Guido Biagi, a friend of Lorenzini, as its secretary. The

former relates that one day he received a batch of papers, carelessly wriltcjn, together with an explanatory note from Lorenzini, whom he had invited to collaborate with him. In this note, he found the following: “I send you this bit of Childishness, do with it what you can, but if you publish it, pay me well for it, so that I’ll have some incentive for following it up.” This bit of childishness was called “The Adventures of a Puppet.” It became very popular, Soon Biagi began pestering him for more. He started to send in chapters every now and then, whenever it struck his fancy, without even rereading what had gone before, content to devote himself to editing and correcting the text. Thus was Pinocchio born, and thus did he grow.

Fame Unknown From the journal he passed into book form. The editor Bemporad, who bought him, made a fortune from the book. It is estimated that in Italy alone the sale exceeded a million copies. Out of it poor Lorenzini made but a few thousand lire. The book then passed from Italy into foreign countries, where it was translated in all languages, including the most distant and remote like Japanese and Irish. But more interesting than its financial was its literary success. Carlo Lorenzini himself died unaware of the fact that he had written a world’s best seller, one destined to become a classic in Italian literature. His contemporaries considered him just another writer of children’s stories. But the trend to-day among the more prominent Italian critics is to see in Collodi not only the Tuscan writer of colour and wit, but also The affirmation of the goodness and realistic teaching of life. Pinocchio is a hei;o of the soul, who, like the characters of the “Divine Comedy” and “Faust,” goes through life finally transformed by experience. It is the story of hope and fear, joy and disillusionment, death- and transfiguration. From a marionette with inordinate instincts and desires, tumbling downward on the road to ruin, Pinocchio emerges from the trials and tribulations of life a real boy. Of greater moment to the foreign reader, however, is the question of how the fame of Pinocchio and the obscurity of its author are to be reconciled; the international success of one of his writings 'and the total oblivion of all the rest. As a matter of fact, all of Lorenzini’s other writings have been buried in their land -of birth—not one succeeding in crossing the Alps or finding its way into the hearts of children of another day and age.

Art without Aim The answer usually given is that Lorenzini did not take his hero seriously; that he sat down to pen “The Adventures of a Puppet” in an indifferent state of mind, with no other end in view than that of being w ‘.l paid. By so doing, however, he unwittingly divested himself of all literary and pedagogic preoccu-

pations. He felt himself at ease, perfectly free to roam the domains o + his imagination for childhood memories and fairy tales told him by his mother in the fantastic garden of Collodi. In such a charmed state of detachment he was able to evoke and give expression to his own experiences as a boy, who perhaps used to play hookey or sneak into a puppet-show, or run from the sight of a policeman. The adventures of Pinocchio fascinated because they recalled echoes' of an unknown world of childhood,' recorded in accents so familiar that every child could‘see'himself reflected' in them. Had Lorenzini thought of moralising or giving out precepts, he would have 'givhh us' 'anbther Little Joe or Tiny Morsel, false artificial creations of his first period. Instead he gave us Pinocchio, a creature unhampered by intellectual and moral considerations, and who by his spontaneous display of life lias endeared himself to the hearts of every man, woman, and child the world over.

Certainly Pinocchio is Italian or, rather, Tuscan, to be more exact. (There are even Italian editions of the work with tiny glossaries of Tuscan expressions in it, to aid children from other regions.) But the Italian or Tuscan atmosphere portrayed there is not the precise historical one of Little Joe and Tiny Morsel, but the vague poetical one of fairyland. Benedetto Croce, Italy’s beloved philosopher and critic, in an essay written to explain Pinocchio’s great, appeal to children and grown-ups alike, has said of it:

It is a human tale which finds Us way to the heart. The author intended to. narrate the extravagant adventures of a marionette to amuse the curiosity and imagination of the child, and at the same time administer, by means of that interest, moral blessings and admonitions; in fact here and there arc still discernible slight traces of that didactic intonation, But soon he began to take interest in the character and in his vicissitudes as in the fable of human life fraught with good and evil, error and atonement, temptation and resistance, rashness and prudence, egoistic concern and generous thought for ethers. The wood out of which Pinocchio is carved is humanity, itself, and he who is its representative marches across the scene of life as one bent upon a'peril-ous-journey: a puppet, to be sure, but thoroughly spiritual.