Erin Serracino-Inglott (1904-83), who died 40 years ago this week, is justly remembered for his monumental dictionary, Il-Miklem Malti, and Maltese translation of Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia. But he was also a dramatist and two of his plays explore Maltese predicaments still relevant 80 years after he wrote them.
He did not mean them to be ‘Maltese’, other than in language. The plays each take an archetype central to Western literature – Faust and Judas – and enrich its universal meaning. In this respect, he resembled contemporary writers like Albert Camus and Jorge Luis Borges (even though he couldn’t have known about either of them in the 1940s).
Borges and Camus actively avoided writing stories impregnated with ‘local flavour’, which would have made them parochial. At the same time, the universal significance of their stories emerges from the detailed particulars of, say, a duel between gauchos or disease in a patch of North Africa.
I remember Serracino-Inglott as his grandson; when I listen to his voice, his words ring out like magical spells, demanding to be punctuated with exclamation marks, like the short notes and dedications he wrote in his lifetime. But when I read his plays, a different voice speaks, an unusual combination of Romanticism and modernism.
In a way, this combination was there even in person. He was expressive, explosive, declamatory and larger than life. But he was also methodical, programmatic and focused – with a writing schedule that he kept whether he was setting up a desk at 4pm outside his summer residence or composing in a wartime shelter.
He could gather the teenage friends of his children for carnival parties and parlour games (dances, telepathy and kriegspiel) but also sit them down and expound the elements of music, Maltese or chess. He was an organiser – of both fun and knowledge, with a talent for making the two indistinguishable.
The romantic-modernist sensibility can be compared to Gustav Mahler’s, a favourite of my grandfather’s, who was attracted to the composer’s great genius decades before the ‘rediscovery’ led by Leonard Bernstein and others in the 1960s.
Erin Serracino-Inglott’s Judas is different. His sin is impatience: he can’t bear to be a man who evolves gradually, whose destiny emerges in response to others
This sensibility is in evidence in his treatments of Faust and Judas. Ir-Raġel li Ħadha mal-Mewt (The Man Who Challenged Death; 1945) is the story of a Maltese Faust, the man who makes a pact with the devil, or, rather, Death. She visits him as a woman in black called Clessidra Tewma (her surname is an anagram of ‘death’ in Maltese).
The hero is a Maltese doctor who discovers a cure for heart disease. He is so successful that Tewma visits to warn him that he is disrupting her agenda. She advises him to lower his game; his excellence is showing her up. He refuses.
Then she threatens to take the life of his fiancée. When he can’t cure her, he agrees to give up his miracle cure if his fiancée’s health can be restored.
This is an unusual Faust, who usually sells his soul for superhuman powers. The Maltese Faust, instead, agrees to settle for mediocrity – in return for being left alone.
Unusual. But highly familiar. Peter Serracino-Inglott, Erin’s nephew, believed the play furnished a powerful model of Maltese professional identity. Indeed, Fr Peter’s prescriptions for Maltese education were based on an attempt to break the power of this myth that shaped so many Maltese lives and wasted talent.
The second play, Il-Kerjoti (1942) is a take on the archetypal traitor, Judas Iscariot. What’s unusual about this Judas is that his identity is uncertain – both to the audience and to himself.
It’s unclear if he had a true vocation to be an apostle, perhaps the greatest one, or if his fate was always to be a parody. The play never says if Judas missed his chance or fulfilled his destiny. He is himself tortured by the question.
Around the same time, Borges wrote a story about Judas suggesting he and Jesus were interchangeable. It’s only the spin of the cosmic roulette wheel that decided who was the saviour and who the traitor. Borges believed the universe was a random game.
Serracino-Inglott’s Judas is different. His sin is impatience: he can’t bear to be a man who evolves gradually, whose destiny emerges in response to others. He wants to be a god or a thing, to enslave or be enslaved, but not an equal. He prefers exile to uncertainty.
Like the Gospel’s Jesus, this Judas is a kind of new Adam who rejects his nature. In literary terms, he is born of the same sensibility shared by the 1940s existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Camus (like the latter, Serracino-Inglott wrote a work called The Outsider, Il-Barrani, in the very same year that Camus published his novella).
In Sartre’s hands, a Judas who makes a cult of the will, of choice for its own sake, would have been a hero. For Serracino-Inglott, writing the play in an air-raid shelter under a rain of Nazi bombs, the cult of will for its own sake is demonic not human. It enslaves not frees. It re-enacts the Fall.
Il-Kerjoti is not just a wartime story. In a popular culture whose mythology includes a universe of super-heroes, whose economy includes the market for human bodies and organs and whose politics trades in treating people like things, Serracino-Inglott’s Judas is an Everyman.
Eight decades have passed since my grandfather offered his take on the myths of the Superman and the Traitor and the fine line between them. To me they have as much force today. Whether this is testament to his artistic vision or because our times have an unpleasant resemblance to his, I haven’t yet decided.