2,000 Years Apart

THE DEATH OF VIRGIL -- Hermann Broch--Pantheon Books ($5.50).

THE PINE TREE AND THE MOLE--Enzio Taddei--Dial ($2.50).

The ships of the imperial squadron were heading for the Adriatic port of Brundisium (Brindisi). The largest ship carried vast purple sails; its prow bore a golden lion's head. Lounging in a tent beneath the ornamented rigging was Augustus Octavian Caesar, Emperor of Italy, Gaul and the lands of the Nile. Lying on a pallet in the next ship was the Roman poet Virgil, coughing 'blood and clutching the manuscript of his unfinished masterpiece, The Aeneid.

Virgil was dying. He would have preferred to die abroad, in peace. But his friend the Emperor had discovered him in Athens and brought him home again. Was it simply because Augustus feared the loss of the epic poem which celebrated his great deeds and the spirit of Rome? Or was it also because fate had ordained that by dying among his own people in Italy, Poet Virgil would learn the supreme lesson of his life?

What the poet learned is the subject of The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch's most important novel since The Sleepwalkers took the intelligentsia by storm in 1932. Author Broch was already at work on The Death of Virgil when he fled to the U.S. from his native Austria in 1938. That same year Novelist Ezio Taddei, an Italian anarchist, climbed the Alps and escaped to France and the U.S., after 18 years in Fascist prisons. His new novel, The Pine Tree and the Mole, is a study of Italian society some 2,000 years after Virgil's death. In both books the theme is the tortured condition of man when the old gods fall before the dictatorship of Caesar.

Through Misery Street. 'At Brundisium, slaves raised Poet Virgil's gilded litter to their shoulders, marched off toward Augustus' palace. The road led through the slum of Misery Street.

Though the people loved and knew by heart scores of the poet's stanzas, they were now massed to acclaim the dictator Caesar in a "howl of joy . . . victorious, violent, unbridled, fear-inspiring, magnificent, fawning, the mass worshiping itself in the person of the One."

Out of fetid dwellings whose floors were littered with "sucklings bedded on rags and tatters" tottered howling greybeards, goats, whores, filthy children, "quadrupeds bleating . . . bipeds screaming." The crowd surged against Virgil's litter, screaming insults. "When you've croaked you'll stink like any other! Litter loafer! Money-bags!"

At last the litter bearers reached a room in the imperial palace. Yellow-faced and bright-eyed with fever, the poet thought of the names the mob had yelled at him, decided that they were appropriate. With death staring him in the face, he looked back over his life.

Success & Failure. Peasant-born, brilliant, energetic, he had won fame as doctor, teacher, mathematician. Then he had entered Augustus' service, and become the Emperor's devoted friend. As poet laureate he had based his epic Aeneid on his master's dazzling victories, had hailed "the Roman spirit" so superbly that even Horace and young Ovid acknowledged him as the supreme poet of the day. But now, as he lay dying, it seemed to Virgil that he had spent his genius on an era that was unclean, unspiritual and doomed. His life seemed like one long act of perjury, and his adored Aeneid the worst lie of all.

But, Virgil asked himself, where was he to find a truth that would be at once an ideal for the poet, a standard for the ruler, and a belief strong enough to turn the howling mob from its adoration of cruelty? And who would have the perception to conceive, the strength to preach such a truth?

Savior Forecast. In a remarkable, 100-page dialogue between Virgil and Caesar, Author Broch imagines the pagan poet predicting the birth of a peasant prophet and the coming of Christianity.

To the horrified dictator. Poet Virgil expounds in searching paraphrase (it is the year 19 B.C.) the yet-unwritten New Testament. When Augustus, unimpressed, merely demands the poem that celebrates his greatness, Virgil makes him a gift of the Aeneid -- prophetically acting out the famed injunction: Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things which are God's.

"[There are] empty spaces between . . . epochs," admits Augustus, "which time tries to bridge over cautiously and on a hair line, [spaces] impervious to molding, impervious to poetry. . . . The people are as uncertain as children . . . fearful . . . inaccessible to consolation or advice . . . unstable, fitful, unreliable and cruel, yet also generous and magnanimous. . . . [But] nothing is so terrible and dangerous as the bewildered madness of this child." Augustus concludes that paternal dictatorship is the only way of ruling these dangerous children.

The Pine Tree and the Mole shows the same idea taking shape and becoming fact in the Italy of the 1920s. Novelist Taddei lived among people like those who pressed around Virgil's litter--urban derelicts who are neither disciplined industrial workers nor sturdy peasants, and who live in the underworld of Misery Street as thieves, pimps, prostitutes, stool pigeons, bomb-throwing anarchists. When youthful, peasant-born Lawyer Michele Pellizzari, Author Taddei's hero, saw these outcasts in the city of Livorno, he decided to become their advocate.

Savior Corrupted. But when Lawyer Pellizzari took up the defense of a sneaking procuress who obtained 13-year-old girls for rich perverts, he found that the judge was only too ready to let her off. Gradually he realized that there was an unspoken compact between the rich decadents' and the poor outcasts. Pellizzari watched the procuress' lover, Rubaciuchi, thief and flophouse inmate, "rise" from the gutter to become a respected police stool pigeon and "hero" of the growing Fascist movement. And Pellizzari found himself caught up in the same way. When the procuress gave him money, he knew she was not merely paying him for defending her, but bribing him to become her associate.

Soon Pellizzari had a foot in each camp. He took his money from the underworld, his mistress from the decadent rich. He worked in Misery Street, .lived in a luxurious villa. Bewildered, he never heard the mole gnawing at the roots of the pine tree of justice; he still imagined he was an honest man. Only on the eve of the Fascist March on Rome did he come to his senses. He gave up his mistress and his practice, returned to the village where he had been born. Like the dying Virgil, he pinned his hopes for the future on the peasant.

Translator Samuel Putnam considers The Pine Tree and the Mole the most important Italian novel to appear in 20 years. Thomas Mann considers The Death of Virgil "One of the most representative and advanced works of our time and destined to endure." Both novels reflect the age in a way that most novels fail even to attempt. But the average reader is sure to have reservations about both books. Author Broch's involved stream-of-consciousness method and philosophical ponderings make The Death of Virgil intensely difficult reading. Author Taddei's cinematic flashes rarely hover long enough to give body & soul to his numerous characters.

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