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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 February 2022
When Betti's Time of Vengeance was given its off-Broadway production, Harold Clurman wrote (The Nation, Jan. 2, 1960) that the central theme of the play is “evil as a means to satisfy a need for good of which the besmirched mortal does not seem capable.” This is true not only of this particular play but of all the “serious” plays Betti wrote. There is still, however, the task of clarifying the paradox contained in such a statement—a task which until now has been shirked by Betti's critics both in his native Italy and abroad.
The paradox is a faithful reflection of Betti's notion of life's absurdity, or “incongruity.“ In fact, he revealed his own awareness of this paradox and suggested that it stands at the core of his drama:
We are all poor, restless creatures, and we would like at least to understand the tremendous, bewildering incongruity that we see between our existence and what it ought to be according to the aspirations of our soul; to understand why life is the marvelously tranquil iniquity that it is.
1 Betti's life itself is marked by incongruity. The obvious incongruity of dividing his life between the bench and the stage is all the more significant in that Betti is concerned with justice in both areas. As a playwright, he yielded to the higher tribunal of God the very men whom, as a judge, he sentenced to prison. In one of his plays, Corruption at the Palace of Justice, he appears to judge and condemn an entire court of justice which closely resembles the one he served. This same play, which almost cost him his judicial career, was awarded one of the highest literary prizes in Italy.
2 Both this quotation from “Preface to The Mistress” (1927) and the following one from Religion and the Theatre (1953) are taken from the English translation published in the Tulane Drama Review (Vol. 5, Winter, 1960) by Gino Rizzo and William Meriwether.
3 The incongruity which marked Betti's life also characterizes his relation to his audience and critics, both as poet and as playwright. One critic who denied the validity of Betti's plays ranked him second only to Petrarch as a poet. At the same time, Betti's fellow poets praised his drama but belittled his poetry. The plays Betti considered the products of an intellectual holiday were precisely the ones which won the acclaim of his public and most of his critics. The final incongruity is that Betti's success in Paris, marking the international recognition of his drama, came when he was dying and no longer cared.
4 “Freud and the Future” (1936) in Essays of Three Decades, 1948, p. 426. I have gained a great deal of insight into the psychic pattern of “regression-progression,” and its relation to the rebirth theme in literature, from Burke's, Kenneth classic essay, “Freud—and the Analysis of Poetry” (American Journal of Sociology, XLV [1939-40], 391-417)Google Scholar, as well as from the chapter “Meaning and Regression” in his early book, Permanence and Change, 1936.
5 “The Special Phenomenology of the Child-Archetype,” in Essays on a Science of Mythology by Jung, C. G. and Kerényi, C., Bollineen Series XXII, p. 134.Google Scholar
6 By quoting Dante to exemplify the significance which the child-motif has for Betti, I am following the suggestion given by the playwright himself when he wrote, in Religion and the Theatre, “One may go so far as to say that it is above all the theatre which corroborates an observation that is only surprising at first sight: if our epoch has affinities with any other, it is more with the passionate Middle Ages than with the brilliant and tolerant Renaissance. In some respects, our epoch, too, is eager for universal systems, and it is not so much preoccupied with living and prospering in them, as in fighting for them, in asserting that they are universal and absolute: in a word: religious.”
7 La Sicilia del Popolo, July 7, 1950.
8 This and all other quotations from Betti's, plays are from Teatro completo, published by Cappelli, Bologna, 1955.Google Scholar The English translations are mine.
9 To someone interested in a “syntax of feelings” as well as a “grammar of motives,” the titles themselves would seem to indicate the various phases of this development, from the peremptory statement of the problem in The Mistress, to the temporary transition suggested by the choice of prepositional phrases (The House ON the Water and An Inn ON the Harbor); while, outside this pattern falls The Marvelous Island, an escape into exemplary fable. Landslide AT the North Station alerts one immediately by its symptomatic shift from the double-deck arrangement managed through the “on the” in the titles of the two previous plays, to the directional suggestion of the new preposition. Only with this play does the transition reach its conclusive stage and the orientation of rebirth become clear.
10 The following quotation from Betti's introduction to An Inn on the Harbor seems to throw light on his creative processes as I have been describing them: “What I would like to do through my work would be to place certain characters and certain sentiments naked and alone at the very bottom of a ladder, and see if in them, in them alone, without help or props, there is in spite of everything the ability to climb.”
11 The scene in which everyone follows the man who carries Elena's body on stage, “whispering as if in church,” acquires its full religious meaning by the inevitable recollection of Paul's words: “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,
“In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
“For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.
“So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.”
12 I owe this insight into a “distinctive sense of the life of earth in tension with the heaven of the spirit” to Miss Bodkin (Archetypal Patterns in Poetry, p. 285), who speaks of it in connection with the following quotation from D. H. Lawrence's Twilight in Italy: “And the ice and the upper radiance of snow are brilliant with timeless immunity from the flux and warmth of life. Overhead they transcend all life, all the soft moist fire of the blood. So that a man must needs live under the radiance of his own negation.” Of course, Lawrence was far more interested than Betti in depicting, in Miss Bodkin's words, “with more intimate beauty and tenderness, the life of earth and the flesh.”
13 This development is consonant with the psychological process described by Burke, Kenneth in Permanence and Change (pp. 201-202, n.)Google Scholar, “Evangelization is the obverse side of guilt—and when we realize that the new way of seeing often vows one to divergency from his group, we can understand why the founders of a line may often seem not merely to endure persecution, but to court it. The artist is always an evangelist, quite as the religious reformer is. He wants others to feel as he does. And the anguish of an artist whose work is condemned by his contemporaries arises from the fact that his symbolic justification is never completed until his work has been accepted.”
14 “Preface to The Mistress,” Tulane Drama Review (Vol. 5, No. 2)
