December 29, 2008
Vincent Van Gogh believed the night sky to be as alive with color and light as the daytime sky; he loved the sky the end of the day, when the blues turned towards darkness but retained some light, and also the deep night when the stars display light across the universe. His passion for the colors of the night -- and the difficult task of transferring that color and light to canvas -- was translated into what I think are his most beautiful paintings, the famous "The Starry Night" and my favorite, "Starry Night over the Rhone", as well as his other paintings of twilight and nighttime.
The Italian author Massimo Bontempelli ( 1878 -1960) wrote a series of stories entitled "Nights" which I read yesterday in the collection of his stories, The Faithful Lover, (collection published in 2007), along with the novella "Water" and four other short stories from his later years. The best stories were the "Night" stories, for how they evoked the deep containment of the dark night (it surrounds us, confines us, is bewitching and enchanting and terrifying) as well as the light in all that darkness, the luminescence of the stars and the moon. Within the darkness and energized by the starry light ("an enormous joy overwhelmed me"), all kinds of magic can take place in the stories of Bontempelli. He was the originator of "magic realism" in Italy, a kinder, more nature-attuned version of surrealism and the night was his muse. His descriptions of the night sky and the night's smells and sounds, all amplified by the darkness, are a perfect compliment to the night time paintings of Van Gogh. I was lucky enough to see an exhibit of the paintings on the same day that I read the stories: I have always loved twilight and dusk, and I shiver (in a good way) at the word "gloaming" but now I am in awe of the night, and not as scared of the dark as I was before.
Bontempelli has a lovely story and heroine in his "Water" novella but in this story, and throughout all his stories, he keeps us too distant form the characters; they are like insects, stuck to a board for outer-examination but without any insight into the inner-workings. Madina, the water sprite of the novella, is kept mythical in her lack of memory, her constant movement, her instability and beauty and the way she cannot be possessed, and in her final disintegration into the water she embodies. She is a stream, water flashing and never the same, moving and changing and unknowable. I liked Madina but a real woman would have been nice too; in none of Bontempelli's stories did I meet a real woman, only mythical creatures or caricatures.
Men are slightly better represented in Bontempelli's stories, more realistic and at times even deserving of empathy. In one story an old man and his servant seem stuck in a vicious relationship of master/slave, but then the old man finds redemption -- knowing his life is about to end -- he and his servant agree on a state of equality in the moments before death from bombardment. The equality is sealed when they turn to look up at the wondrous night sky above them. I have to agree with Bontempelli on this one: we all share the stars and in their bounty, we are all equal.
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