Ghìsola

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Ghìsola

by Federigo Tozzi

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in Siena, Italy, In the early twentieth century; written between 1910 and 1913, published in Italian (as Con gli occhi chiusi) In 1919, in English in 1990.

SYNOPSIS

A naïve young man falls in love with a precocious servant girl. After much soul searching, he discovers her true nature.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The Novel in Focus

For More Information

Born in Siena in 1883, Federigo Tozzi grew up in an atmosphere of parental abuse, the victim of a violent father. His mother, a deeply religious and longsuffering woman, educated her son as best she could, given the opposition of her husband, only to die suddenly, leaving her 12-year-old boy under the tutelage of his father. In part to escape the oppressive atmosphere at home, Tozzi frequented the local library from the age of 15, reading literary, philosophical, and psychological texts and keeping abreast of the latest cultural trends in such journals as the Revue Philosophique (The Philosophical Revue). He fell in love with a young woman, Isola (thought by some to be the real-life inspiration for Ghìsola), only to find her pregnant with another man’s child. Shortly before this discovery, the author had begun an epistolary exchange with another young woman (who identified herself as Annalena) in response to an ad in the local paper. While she filled an emotional void in Tozzi’s life, he discontinued the letter writing after being stricken with a venereal disease that severely affected his sight. Confined to a dark room with little human contact for six months, Tozzi emerged profoundly changed. He returned to his readings in the library, made some preliminary attempts at writing, and resumed communication with Annalena, who by then had revealed herself to be Emma Palagi. Following an intense courtship marked by parental opposition on both sides, she became Tozzi’s wife in 1908 after the death of his father.

A modest inheritance allowed Tozzi to devote himself to writing. During the formative years of his career (1908-1914), he produced numerous short stories, a volume of poetry, an anthology of early Sienese writers, and critical articles. He wrote his first novel, Ghìsola, between 1910 and 1913, though it would not be published until 1919. Economic constraints and a desire to make a name for himself prompted Tozzi to move to Rome in 1914. Here he met Luigi Pirandello, with whom he worked on the literary supplement of the Roman newspaper ll Messaggero (The Messenger). When Italy entered World War I, Tozzi took up service with the Central Press Office of the Red Cross, while continuing to write and frequent literary salons. He died of pneumonia at age 37, on the threshold of realizing his goal as a writer. Many of Tozzi’s works were published posthumously by his wife, and his son, Glauco. For years his novel Tre Croci (1920; Three Crosses) was regarded as his masterpiece, until Ghìsola displaced it after discoveries in the 1980s of the research that shaped its composition.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

Shifting perspectives

The early 1900s saw conflicting intellectual currents in Italy. Positivism was a philosophical approach that came into vogue in the late nineteenth century and centered on scientific fact and evolution. An opposing current, the anti-positivist school, insisted on the value of intuition, some of its members subscribing to a philosophy known as vitalism, the belief that all living things contain a vital flux or life force that cannot be reduced to scientific or environmental factors. The quarrels between these and other approaches were argued in magazines of the early twentieth century, most prominently the anti-positivist journal La critica (1903-1944), put out by Benedetto Croce. Taking a stand against the positivists, Croce and his associate for a time, Giovanni Gentile, championed a new idealism in Italy, which rejected the notion that reality is determined by scientific conditions. The two instead envisioned reality as the “free self-expression of the ‘spirit’” (Brand and Pertile, p. 510).

In literature, positivism took the form of an objective analysis of the relentless march of progress. Croce, for one, took issue with this view. He conceived of art as a self-sufficient phenomenon, a universal, intuitive form of knowledge that transcends the practical world. Fueling this newfound idealism were Italian translations of the works of such philosophers as Henri Bergson (French), Friedrich Nietzsche (German), and William James (American). These philosophers stressed the value of an individual’s interior or emotional life and ability to impact the world.

Such attitudes inevitably influenced politics. In 1903, the same year that La critica began publication, anti-Socialist elements started to congregate around II Regno (The Kingdom), a journal directed by Ettore Corradini. This group of intellectuals declared themselves against socialism and replaced the more traditional focus on human generosity and community with one centered on the negative human traits of greed and destruction. For these men, the origin of evil could be found in the principles of freedom and the French Revolution. A sense of nationalism, or nationhood, was promoted as a remedy for the rivalry between political classes and the labor strikes then ensuing in Italy. Chief among the first adherents to II Regno were Giuseppe Prezzolinni and Giovanni Papini, the future founders of La Voce (The Voice), a journal launched in 1908 that would set the direction of the Florentine avant-garde.

The Florentine avant-garde

Ghìsola places Tozzi right in step with the Florentine avant-garde represented first by the journal Leonardo and subsequently by La Voce. The founders of Leonardo, Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, felt that modern society had opened a cultural vacuum in Italy. In 1905 Papini declared that the country suffered from a loss of spiritual vitality (Adamson, p. 90). The Leonardini (the writers associated with the journal) therefore proposed a renaissance of sorts, a secular-religious quest for new values through a modern cultural direction. This was to be one built on regional strengths, the autobiographical form, a more lyrical approach to writing, and the rejection of traditional narrative structures. They were primarily inspired by the philosophies of Nietzsche, Bergson, and James and by the new discipline of psychology emanating from France, Germany, and Austria.

Prezzolini and Papini explored these new theories on the pages of Leonardo. They appropriated Bergson’s view of time as a lived experience or “duration” and of the value of intuition, its ability to penetrate to the heart of something and reveal its essence (Adamson, p. 71). Also inspired by William James’s The Will to Believe, they embraced his view that reason alone cannot answer all questions. James, like Bergson, underscored the importance of the interior or emotional life, teaching that belief was fundamental to modifying reality.

Following the demise of Leonardo in 1907, both Papini and Prezzolini became interested in the Catholic modernist movement, which sought to persuade the Church to accept a doctrine that could incorporate science and philosophy. While both men would remain unconvinced by the movement, it nevertheless led to a personal relationship with Alessando Casati, editor of the Catholic journal II Rinnovamento (Renovation), who together with philosopher-critic Benedetto Croce, would go on to finance La Voce.

La Voce advocated a somewhat different perspective than that proposed by the earlier Leonardo. Anti-positivistic, it retained a secular outlook, but it did not completely marginalize religion. Although the Vociani (the circle gathered around La Voce) denounced mainstream religion, they recognized its value in promoting a new spiritual direction. La Voce was, however, most celebrated for its attention to the relations between Italian and European cultures. Readers found information on foreign psychologists, philosophers, and writers, often with commentary by their Italian counterparts. French culture in particular, considered the world’s most advanced by the Vociani, came in for much preferential treatment. Select issues of La Voce also concentrated on individual topics in order to provide readers with an in-depth view of the subject. One such high-profile topic was the sexual question, which would find particular resonance with Federigo Tozzi.

The sexual question

On February 10, 1910, La Voce dedicated its issue to the much-debated question of human sexuality. That same year Florence hosted a congress on sexuality. The city was also home to such journals as Psiche (Psyche), whose editor, Roberto Assagioli, became one of the first to write about Sigmund Freud in Italy. Much of the period’s interest in this area was centered on women’s sexual conduct and its effects on men. Opinions about women had taken a new form in the mid-1800s, after the re-lease of Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871), which appeared to embrace woman’s inferiority to man. Women’s sexual nature under-went a great deal of scrutiny and quickly became the focus of a social crusade of the era. Scientists sought to expose women as “a source of social disruption” and “degeneration” (Dijkstra, p. 3). Female wantonness was regarded as a disease, and promiscuous women stood as the symbol of society’s deterioration as a whole. As a result of these perceptions, women were vilified as akin to beasts or sexual predators, intent on sapping men’s vital energy.

Such animosity was further fueled by the women’s movement. Through the work of early Italian feminists such as Anna Kuliscioff and Anna Maria Mozzoni, the struggle for women’s emancipation gained momentum early in the twentieth century, becoming all the more pronounced after women joined workers’ unions and the Socialist Party. However, the feminist demands were not well received, and they helped inspire a backlash of sorts.

The perceptions and events related to women gave rise to a flood of publications. Max Nordau, a Hungarian doctor, linked women’s immorality to deterioration in his work Degeneration (1893). Prostitution and unrestrained sexual appetite, he claimed, were the inherited markers of female depravity. Not surprisingly, he dedicated his study to the Italian psychologist Cesare Lombroso, author of The Female Offender (1893), who likewise stressed the ancestral roots of the loose sexual behavior of women. Men were thus encouraged in such an atmosphere to curb a woman’s sexuality with the age-old bond of marriage.

Tozzi’s generation of intellectuals was especially influenced by Sex and Character (1903), written by Otto Weininger of Austria. Weininger’s antifeminist views were taken up by Papini, who hailed Sex and Character as a masterpiece in the Italian newspaper, La Stampa (The Press) on December 31, 1912 (Adamson, p. 289n), right about the time Tozzi was writing Ghisola. Weininger contended that women were intellectually and creatively inferior to men, primarily because they were devoted to sexuality and reproduction; they could never attain spiritual transcendence, being tied, as it were, to earth. Men, on the other hand, the true repositories of the intellect, fulfilled their assigned role by aspiring to spiritual transcendence. It followed that men had to fortify their willpower to meet the formidable challenge of women’s sexuality.

Scholars of Italian literature generally credit Gabriele D’Annunzio with having proposed the archetype of young men grappling with women’s sexuality; from 1900 to 1906 many of D’Annunzio’s male protagonists were individuals who sought meaning in sensual pleasure. When a female protagonist shuns the piety deemed appropriate for a young woman and falls prey to sexual desire, as in D’Annunzio’s novella La Vergine Orsola (The Virgin Orsola), she invariably meets with the worst kind of end.

D’Annunzio’s stature as a writer and hence his paradigms naturally came to bear on other narratives. While the Vociani repudiate what they saw as his “feminine” style of writing, his influence was clearly felt by the entire literary milieu, including the then hopeful Tozzi.

The “will to power.”

Friedrich Nietzsche introduced the concept of the “superman” (übermensch), a daring type who continually strives for greatness and a life of creative adventure, cultivating strength and a noble, refined character. From this concept grew the idea that propelling society forward was the task of a minority of men who would be able to move beyond good and evil and impose their will on the masses. In Italy, the introduction to Nietzsche’s philosophy is generally credited to Gabriele D’Annunzio’s article, “La bestia elettiva” (“The Voluntary Animal”), which appeared in an 1892 issue of II Mattino(The Morning). Nietzsche’s theories eventually found their way into D’Annunzio’s most popular literary works, and through these to a wide swath of the population. Though misinterpreted by many, including D’Annunzio, the spread of Nietzsche’s philosophy drew widespread attention to the concepts of the superman and the will to power, the drive, that is, “to enhance [one’s] vitality to act on the world” (rather than reacting to it) (Solomon and Higgins, p. 16). Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-1885) features a prophet, Zarathustra, who speaks of destroying outmoded institutions and beliefs to make way for new ones. His words would inspire many young men of the period.

FROM LA VOCE

Part of a review on Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character:

The fundamental psychological characteristic that distinguishes the typical man from woman is this: man has a soul while woman does not… In not having a soul, woman has a less responsible life: her psychic matter always remains indeterminate and incapable of transforming itself into theory. In not having a theoretical framework, she is unable to judge, she does not have the zeal for truth, any participation in thought process; she lies without feeling guilty about it; she places no value on herself, and is thus vain, or desires becoming an object of appreciation by others…. The woman doesn’t represent anything but coitus to the world…. Consequently she voluntarily takes on the role of a pimp for love. She wants coitus either for herself or for the preservation of the species; she is … instinctually a prostitute or a mother.
(Levi, p. 260; trans. L. Anderson-Tirro)

The will to power and the superman were taken up by Papini, and to a lesser extent Prezzolini, in Leonardo and La Voce. Papini pro claimed Nietzsche the philosopher of masculine power as early as 1906, and afterward called his philosophy the basis of a new morality that would undermine a Europe under the domination of Christianity and the “reign of the weak” (Adamson, pp. 89-90). Both men argued that their generation should address the lax moral atmosphere with a fresh set of values that included forcefulness, courage, and sincerity.

American psychologist and philosopher William James contributed a number of parallel arguments, providing justification for action that promised to “change the world and create truth” (Adamson, p. 76). James argued that powerful beliefs lead to the achievement of one’s convictions by motivating the will to act. With this argument, he satisfied Papini’s quest for a modern religion. Papini maintained somewhat differently, however, that the action itself produced belief.

Tozzi, like many of his compatriots, was fascinated by Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and by James’s Principles of Psychology (1890). His enthusiasm for their ideas was very much in step with the times, especially when it came to the debate about the role of man’s will, which he would turn into the thematic thrust of Ghìsola. However, while Papini and his fellow avant-garde writers pressed for a modern secular religion, Tozzi adapted these new ideas to his own beliefs. He chose instead the more traditional path of Catholicism.

The Novel in Focus

Plot summary

As the novel opens, Domenico Rosi, proprietor of the Blue Fish, a restaurant in Siena, avidly counts the day’s earnings. Married to Anna, an orphan of humble origins similar to his own, he is grateful that God has seen to his good fortune, a result he attributes to hard work. A volatile man given to sexual indiscretions, Domenico has fathered eight children, all of whom have died except for the last, Pietro, now almost 14 years old. A sickly, clinging child, Pietro receives scant attention from his parents, who are too involved in the comings and goings of the trattoria to follow him closely. Anna, how-ever, does show some concern for her son’s education, despite the constant opposition of her husband, who feels that Pietro’s schooling is a waste of time. Domenico would prefer that his son learn the restaurant trade, and eventually take over the family’s business.

Following an altercation between Domenico and a client, Anna, who is given to convulsions, experiences an increase in their severity. Ordered by the doctor to spend more time away from the Blue Fish, she leaves for the family’s farm at Poggio a’ Meli, taking Pietro with her. Here they make the acquaintance of the farm’s latest arrival, Ghìsola, the 12-year-old niece of an unwed servant.

Pietro is attracted to Ghìsola, but also feels un-easy around her. The following year, shortly after his return to the farm and Ghìsola, he suffers a seizure. He grows pale and apprehensive in Ghìsola’s presence, and so distracted that he is unable to study. As their relationship progresses, he experiences feelings and physical sensations around her that he does not understand. Attracted by her singing, among other attributes, he becomes possessive, vying with the neighborhood boys for her attention.

Ghìsola develops into a beautiful but reckless young woman. No longer well-behaved, she disappears from Poggio a’ Meli on Sundays to walk the streets of Siena. The men of the city, attracted by her unseemly conduct, follow her, making suggestive comments and unsuitable proposals. Pietro nevertheless remains captivated by her. His studies continue to deteriorate, and his parents argue about the best course of action. Anna, convinced “that her son is intelligent,” manages to keep him in school despite his poor performance (Tozzi, Ghiso, a, p. 53). One morning, as she prepares to seek out the parish priest for ad-vice, she suddenly dies of a heart attack. Pietro, unable to comprehend the impact of her death feels little emotion until forced to kiss her lifeless corpse. Only then does he react, first recoiling, then denying the reality of her demise.

Anna’s death marks a turning point in the plot, which now fixes on Pietro’s worsening relationship with Domenico, and his search for solace and love from Ghìsola. Domenico disapproves of his son’s intellectual aspirations, his disobedience, and particularly his continuing fascination with Ghìsola, whose conduct Domenico views as dis-graceful. This results in severe beatings for Pietro and in Ghìsola’s eventual banishment from Poggio a’ Meli. When Pietro leaves home to attend technical school in Florence, he learns that she resides nearby. Unbeknownst to him, however, she has become the live-in paramour of a crockery salesman, Signor Alberto. After informing himself as to her whereabouts, and believing that she now is employed as a live-in servant, Pietro pays her a visit.

Though a sense of foreboding permeates their meeting, Pietro cannot contain his joy at once more being reunited with Ghìsola. Her declarations of love convince him of her sincerity, and he resolves to pursue the relationship. When Signor Alberto suffers bankruptcy and Ghìsola must find another means of subsistence, Pietro, believing that she has lost her position, escorts her back to Siena with some expectation that he can convince his father of his intention to marry her. Ghìsola knows full well, however, that Domenico will not accept the match. After a brief stay at Poggio a’ Meli, she returns to her home in Radda to live with her sister Lucia. Pietro visits her here but finds her unkempt and sullen. Appalled at her appearance, he also is disturbed by her attempts to seduce him. Barely managing to control himself, he leaves.

When Pietro finally sees Ghìsola again, she has found employment in an upscale bordello in Florence where she earns a good living. To pre-vent him from discovering her profession, she pays him a visit before he searches her out himself. He is delighted to see her and naively continues to believe in her wholesomeness. The couple spends a few days together, after which Pietro returns to Siena to fritter away the time under the disapproving eye of his father, who by now has given up on ever bringing his son to his senses.

One day an anonymous letter arrives, revealing Ghìsola’s duplicity. Pietro immediately leaves for Florence, where he proceeds to the address indicated in the letter. As he climbs the stairs to the last floor, he encounters prostitutes plying their trade at every angle. Holed up in the lowest type of brothel, one catering to soldiers, Pietro is horrified to see Ghìsola exit from a room, filthy and barely clothed. Once in her room he can no longer deny the truth about the woman he has loved so ardently. When she turns and he sees that she is pregnant, emotion overcomes him. He falls to the floor, and on reviving discovers that he no longer loves her.

The threat of female sexuality

Pietro Rosi’s struggle for control over his sexual inclinations is the primary focus of Ghìsola. While the novel has been described as a fictionalized account of Tozzi’s own experience, it is also a reflection of the cultural mores of the day, particularly with respect to views on female sexuality.

One of the ways early-twentieth-century culture explained women’s sexual misbehavior was by linking it to mental illness, specifically hysteria. Support for this type of explanation came from studies like The Sexual Question (1907) by Swiss sexologist, Auguste Forel (hailed by the editors of La Voce as the one whose views most reflected their own) and Psychopathia sexualis (1889; Sexual Psychopathology) by the Austrian psychologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. At the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, renowned neurolo-gist Jean-Martin Charcot conducted exhibitions of hysterical women, events that were widely publicized in Italy. Tozzi, who consulted both Forel and Krafft-Ebing when writing the novel, identifies its female protagonist as a hysteric: “Ghìsola in a burst of hysteria that made her condition even stronger, was staring at the window, ready to fling herself from it” (Ghìsola, p. 141). He draws on Forel’s phases of female sexual development (from childhood precociousness, through the stages of female moral decline, to prostitution), and Krafft-Ebing’s symptoms of hysteria (mood swings, sexual promiscuity, egotism, and delusions), then widely thought to underlie sexual promiscuity.

KRAFFT-EBING ON HYSTERIA

In hysterical women episodic forms of psychopathology take place that can last hours as well as days. These have a delirious imprint, and this delirium revolves more often than not around an axis of erotic content…. The clinical forms of transitory insanity that one can observe in hysterical women are: morbid passions … very acute mania associated with primordial, erotic deliriums, … states of agitation of an euphoric nature associated with a serious disturbance of the conscience, … forms of terrifying, hallucinatory delirium often coupled to a demoniac-maniacal core and episodic outbursts of hysterical-epileptic convulsions.

(von Krafft-Ebing, p. 315; trans. L. Anderson-Tirro)

It was commonplace to represent promiscuous women as akin to cats, snakes, or birds. Tozzi repeatedly associates Ghìsola with these creatures. Birds were the natural choice for representing the seductiveness of women given their song-like traits: “At midnight [Pietro] woke up. He heard a nightingale…. The call seemed a message that the bird’s mate was answering in a distance. He couldn’t help listening to both birds for a long time, imagining that Ghìsola was out-side trying to catch them” (Ghìsola, p. 12). This association of the character and the nightingale is Tozzi’s nod to a cultural icon of the period, the half-bird, half-woman sirens of mythology (sometimes also depicted as half-fish). Artists such as Aristide Sartorio showed more than a passing interest in these mythological seductresses, as illustrated by his painting The Siren [1895]. Sirens also appeared in literature of the day, in D’Annunzio’s Metrope (1911-1912) and in Giovanni Pascoli’s I poemi conviviali (1904; The Convivial Poems), for instance.

The novel links Ghìsola to flora as well as fauna. As symbols of nature, virtuous women were often pictured as part of a domestic flower garden with their husband as the gardener. Ghìsola however, is represented among “reddish flowers like the wild lilies,” pointing to her exclusion from the cultivated gardens reserved for virtuous women (Ghìsola, p. 52). In the nineteenth century, the French writer Charles Baudelaire, among others, began using the flower to indicate the threat posed by women’s genitalia. It is so used in Ghìsola, when the title character walks through Siena in the guise of a temptress: “If she was wearing a flower she had to stay away from the walls because there were plenty of men standing in doorways ready to reach out and grab at it” (Ghìsola, p. 51).

Pietro’s struggle to overcome his fascination with Ghìsola can be seen as an example of man’s struggle to rise above his physical inclinations, so bound to nature and forever at odds with spiritual transcendence. Man, not woman, was considered the true repository of the intellect. It was thus his role to strive for spiritual transcendence, a formidable challenge for which he had to fortify his willpower. The male intellect, people believed, was affected by seminal fluid. A strong will served as man’s greatest defense in preventing the loss of semen, and with it, reason.

The glorification of masculinity would manifest itself in a number of ways during this period. Much of the so-called Futurist movement (see the Futurist Manifesto , also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times) was bursting with masculine energy, as seen by its allegiance to images of machinery, speed, and violence. An offshoot of this view was the image of a weak male character being “consumed” by the deadly female. In Tozzi’s novel, Pietro Rosi is just such a male; he overcomes his attraction to Ghìsola only by intense effort.

This approach is in keeping with Tozzi’s generation, who set out to reject the sensual pleasures of the human world to gain those promised by spiritual transcendence. For Tozzi, the teachings of the Catholic Church held the key, with marriage offering the only sanctioned escape. Unlike the Vociani, Tozzi did not embrace a “secular” spiritual quest for new values, but he was nevertheless guided by his cultural milieu to similar pronouncements.

Sources and literary context

An absence of background information has until recently resulted in an inadequate assessment of Tozzi’s importance to modern Italian literature. Ghìsola incorporates all the compelling issues of the time. As public library records and Tozzi’s private library (recently made available to scholars) indicate, he was acquainted with the works of many of the opinion shapers named above, including William James (The Principles of Psychology); Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustrd); Henri Bergson (Time and Memory, Creative Evolution)’, August Forel (The Sexual Question); Richard von Krafft-Ebing (Trattato dipsicopatolo&aforense)’, Cesare Lombroso (The Criminal Man); and Max Nordau (Degeneration). This newfound evidence has led to a reassessment of Tozzi’s stature as a writer. He is now seen as a figure of transition. His settings mirror the regionalism associated with Naturalist writing, which focuses so intently on environment and heredity. Tozzi’s heavy reliance on psychological and philosophical studies how-ever, align him with the avant-garde. Whether or not he was influenced by the teachings of Freud remains open to debate. Though Italo Svevo’s The Confessions of Zeno (also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times), published four years after Ghìsola, would garner greater recognition for Svevo’s grasp of Freudian theory, research into Tozzi’s cultural background is still in its early stages and may produce unanticipated results. Tozzi was certainly aware of Freud; La Voce’s 1910 issue included an article by Roberto Assagioli entitled Le idee di Sigmund Freud sulla sessualita (The Ideas of Sigmund Freud on Sexuality), and Tozzi’s private copy of James’s The Principles of Psychology cites Freud.

Tozzi wrote Ghìsola to promote sexual temperance, a value championed by the Catholic Church as well as by a large segment of con-temporary Italian society. He portrays his character Pietro struggling against his own sexual desire, a desire he conscientiously tries to channel into marriage. Tozzi thereby sanctions this Catholic sacrament and its accompanying tenet of coitus for procreation. At the same time, he aligns himself with the prevailing sentiment of his day, which advocated sexual restraint as indispensable to spiritual transcendence. His ambivalence is symptomatic of a general dilemma of the day, whereby men grasped for a spiritual world while doubting its existence. This was Tozzi’s predicament.

Stylistically, there is a breakdown of traditional temporal categories in Ghìsola, in the novel’s many dream sequences, the weaving together of past and present, and the emphasis on the psychological and spiritual dimensions of his characters. This temporal breakdown places Tozzi among such innovative writers as Luigi Pirandello (see Six Characters in Search of an Author , also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times).

Reception

When Ghìsola was published in 1919, it received mixed reviews. The critic Ferdinando Paolieri, though he responded favorably, qualified his response: “more than a true novel, this is a great regional story” (Paolieri in Tozzi, Carteggio, p. 368n; trans. L. AndersonTirro). Other well-known writers, such as the critic Margherita Sarfatti, praised Ghìsola in personal notes to Tozzi, but never revealed her admiration in public writings. Those who did compliment the novel in writing, such as the critic G. A. Borgese, underscored its autobiographical component: “the autobiography is objectified with incisive precision” (Borgese, p. 25; trans. L. Anderson-Tirro). There were indications, however, that Tozzi’s intent was not that of simply writing an autobiography. When the critic Pietro Pancrazi referred to the inspiration Tozzi drew from his own personal experience, Tozzi furiously wrote back: “I can write a book about a delinquent, a forger [or] a prostitute without anyone being able to attribute their moral qualities to my own personal reality” (Tozzi, Mostra, p. 92). These same critics would proclaim Three Crosses, published one year after Ghìsola, Tozzi’s masterpiece, not realizing that it was essentially a reworking of themes already present in his earlier novel. Only Domenico Giuliotti, Tozzi’s closest friend at the time of the novel’s writing, would find Three Crosses inferior to Ghìsola, and would note in 1936 that the sparse attention given Tozzi had more to do with the fact that he “is not an entertaining writer…. For this reason he has had few readers. He is of those who delve in great depth into life’s sorrow. Who are therefore disregarded by their contemporaries and are discovered at a later time” (Marchi, p. 138; trans. L. Anderson-Tirro).

—Loredana Anderson-Tirro