It’s the summer of 1964. A retired university professor, Alessandro Giuliani, and a young factory worker, Nicolò, set out to walk 70 kilometers (about 44 miles) from Rome to the village of Monte Prato. Along the way, musing on his rich and tragic past, Alessandro shares some of his memories and what he has learned with his illiterate and naïve companion. He revisits his privileged youth in a loving family, his university studies in beauty and art, the horrors and hammer blows he experienced in World War I, and his love for the woman Ariane and their son, both now gone to the grave.
This is a barebones sketch of Mark Helprin’s mountain of a novel “A Soldier of the Great War.” Readers who ascend this peak of print and paper receive the reward of a finely told and moving story of a man of great character swept up in the chaos of the 20th century, a septuagenarian who by dint of his intelligence and powers of observation offers his new friend the education of a lifetime.
The Beauty of Nature
Early on in the novel, Alessandro returns in his mind to his university days and recollects a long-ago conversation with his father, a hard-working attorney. They are discussing Alessandro’s future in an offhand way, and at one point the son says: “But what if you were to choose the profession of looking at things to see their beauty, to see what they meant, to find in the world as much of the truth as you could find?”
Long before he enters into such a profession, thrown off by his years in the war and its aftermath, Alessandro displays a natural talent for seeing and expressing aloud his appreciation for the charms and mysteries of the natural world. His vivid, poetic descriptions of mountains, the sea, woodlands, and gardens all reveal a man whose eye for beauty is akin to the genius of Mozart’s ear for music or of Michelangelo’s fingers for marble.
Here, for instance, night has fallen, and Nicolò and Alessandro are watching the rising moon, the light of which Alessandro contrasts with that of the city they’ve left behind: “Rome still looks like catacombs of fire, and will remain this shattered and amber color throughout the night. … But the moon, as it moves, has already run through a number of scenes. First, it was a farmer’s fire, almost dead in the field, ruby red. Then it ripened through a thousand shades of orange, amber, and yellow. As it gets lighter, it sheds its mass, until somewhere between cream and pearl, halfway to its apogee, it will seem like a burst of smoke that wants to run away on the wind.”
The Beauty of Women
After being severely wounded in combat, Alessandro ends up in a hospital and falls in love with a nurse, Ariane. At one point, he sees the women who share Ariane’s quarters preparing themselves for their work with the wounded and the dying. “He longed for the gentleness in the way they lived, the peace, and the safety. Even their fingers were beautiful—their voices, the way they brushed their hair, the way they laced their boots, leaning down with tresses about to tumble forward but held in check as if by a miracle. They were beautiful even in the way they breathed.”
‘La Tempesta’
Beauty, Alessandro reflects at the very end of the book, “was where the truth lay, it was strong and bright.” Because of his lifelong passion for aesthetics, Alessandro naturally makes frequent references to painting, music, and dance. For the most part, he either rejects or remains silent about modern art, preferring the works of the great masters of the past.
This painting runs as a motif throughout “A Soldier of the Great War.” Alessandro speaks of it several times and even believes, as he tells Ariane, that he has deciphered Giorgione’s great work: “He intended to praise elemental things, and to show a soldier on the verge of return. … What does the painting mean? It means love. It means coming home.”
Alessandro’s words become a prophecy fulfilled, for it is “The Tempest” that eventually leads him back to Ariane after the war has separated them. Nearly certain that she is dead, Alessandro visits the painting in a Venice museum and learns from a museum guard that a woman vaguely matching Ariane’s description and carrying a child has wept before this enigmatic picture.
Following different clues, he finally tracks her down in Rome. His description of their reunion would turn a heart of stone to a bed of leaves.
A Home for the Rest of Us
Near the end of their long walk together, Alessandro and Nicolò discuss God. “His existence is not a question of argument but of apprehension,” says Alessandro. “Either you apprehend God, or you do not.”
Alessandro would doubtless say the same of beauty.
I first read “A Soldier of the Great War” when I was in my 40s. Later, in my 50s, I read it again when a priest recommended it to one of my sons before he went off to college. The book offers many gifts, a great story with reflections on how to live, but only on my recent third reading have I recognized yet another level to this story.
In all those descriptive passages that I had once skimmed, or skipped altogether, Helprin is teaching us, as Alessandro taught Nicolò, the techniques for apprehending the beauty of the world and of art: to slow our pace, to pause and appreciate a great painting, to revel in the stars when the night sky is clear as glass, to be overwhelmed, even for a few seconds, by a stranger whose eyes dance like sunlight on a sea. “To see the beauty of the world,” says Alessandro, “is to put your hands on lines that run uninterrupted through life and through death.”
The question, then, is not whether such beauty exists, but whether we have the wherewithal to perceive it along with its comrades—truth and goodness—to seek out and touch those uninterrupted lines. “A Soldier of the Great War” gives us a compass and map to begin that journey.
