Volume 41, Number 9 · May 12, 1994
'When One Is a Somebody'
By Gabriele Annan
Pirandello's Love Letters to Marta Abba
edited and translated by Benito Ortolani
Princeton University Press, 363 pp., $35.00
The Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello fell in love with the actress Marta Abba in 1925, when he was fifty-eight and she not quite twenty-five. He was by then well known for his plays throughout the Western world, Six Characters in Search of an Author having appeared in 1921 and Henry IV in 1922. Even if Abba had been willing, he could not have married her under Italian law: his wife was alive, though she had been confined in an asylum for many years. Pirandello remained infatuated with Abba until his death eleven years later, and the Italian edition of his letters to her runs to more than 1,500 pages of mostly distressing text. The editor and translator of the English edition Benito Ortolani thinks that
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