Gustaw Herling-Grudziński

The Biblical Age and Death

About the Author

Excerpt

In spring 1999 Mr and Mrs Herling were invited to a small place called Pescasseroli in Abruzzo, southern Italy. Mrs Herling, daughter of the great Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, was to grace events celebrating the publication of a book written by Croce in 1921, all about this small village where he was born. The couple decided to spend the following few days sightseeing in the area at their leisure, but they soon came upon the scent of the strange story of Bartolomeo Spada, and the rest of their stay turned into a frantic, fascinating investigation.
Local stories about Spada said that “he wanted to die but couldn’t”. He was born in the early nineteenth century – the records say either in 1809 or 1811 – and he was still alive at the time of the Second World War. When the fascists took power in Italy, Spada became an object of special interest, and was soon a cult figure. As a centenarian who had had six wives, he appeared to the fascist authorities to be an ideal combination of new values: longevity and vitality. By transforming Spada into an iconic image, at one fell swoop the fascists could get everything their propaganda needed: the living incarnation of a tradition that went back to a time before the struggle for independence, and visible proof of a vigour that testified to the revitalising strength of the new regime, a man who by being so old could bridge class and generation divides.
When the doctors discovered that he was ill, Spada entered a phase of doubt about the value of longevity. As he suffered a life of physical pain, he came to regard his longevity as a punishment, not a reward. Soon he was to face his next ordeal: when in 1938 Italy became a racist state and everyone’s lineage was examined, Spada turned out to be the offspring of a Jewish woman. However, Mussolini regarded the hero’s Semitic roots as confirmation of Italy’s claims to a thousand-year-old history. As a result, none of the gods of twentieth-century history was willing to bring Spada death.
But none of them were able to give his longevity any deeper meaning either. Herling did not have time to complete his story about the ancient man before his own death in 2000. However, it would be fair to say he regarded his hero the way Voltaire regarded Candide: in the French novel, the naïve young hero compromises the optimistic philosophy of the Enlightenment, while in Herling’s account the old man turns some twentieth-century notions inside out.

Przemysław Czapliński

Gustaw Herling-Grudziński  (1919-2000) was one of the greatest Polish writers of the twentieth century.