The Communist
Page 1
GUIDO MORSELLI (1912–1973) spent his youth in Milan, where his father was an executive with a pharmaceutical company. When he was twelve his mother died from Spanish flu, an event that devastated the reserved child. After attending a Jesuit-run primary school and a classical secondary school, Morselli graduated from the Università degli Studi di Milano with a law degree in 1935. Instead of practicing law, however, he embarked on a long trip around the Continent. Though he wrote consistently from the remote town in the lake region of Lombardy where he lived alone, Morselli succeeded in publishing only two books over the course of his life: the essays Proust o del sentimento (Proust, or On Sentiment, 1943) and Realismo e fantasia (Realism and Invention, 1947). His many works of fiction, journalism, and philosophy were repeatedly rejected by publishers, and, frustrated by his perceived failures, he committed suicide in 1973. Hanging in his library was the motto Etiam si omnes, ego non (Though all do it, I do not). In fact, Morselli’s nine posthumously published novels, among them Roma senza papa (Rome Without the Pope, 1974), Divertimento 1889 (1975), and Dissipatio H.G. (The Dissolution of the Human Race, 1977), enjoyed considerable critical success. Morselli left his farm and lands to the town of Gavirate in his will, and today Parco Morselli looks south onto Lago di Varese and north toward the Alpine foothills.
FREDERIKA RANDALL is a writer and a translator of Italian literature. Her translations include Luigi Meneghello’s Deliver Us; Sergio Luzzatto’s The Body of Il Duce, Padre Pio, and Primo Levi’s Resistance; and Ippolito Nievo’s Confessions of an Italian, named among the best books of 2014 by The New Yorker and the New Statesman. Among her awards are a Bogliasco Fellowship, a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, and, with Sergio Luzzatto, the Cundill Prize. She lives in Rome.
ELIZABETH McKENZIE’s novel The Portable Veblen was longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for fiction. She is the author of the novel MacGregor Tells The World and story collection Stop That Girl. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and other publications. McKenzie is senior editor of the Chicago Quarterly Review and the managing editor of Catamaran Literary Reader.
THE COMMUNIST
GUIDO MORSELLI
Translated from the Italian by
FREDERIKA RANDALL
Introduction by
ELIZABETH MCKENZIE
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1976 by Adelphi Edizioni S.P.A., Milan
Translation copyright © 2017 by Frederika Randall
Introduction copyright © 2017 by Elizabeth McKenzie
All rights reserved.
Cover image: Edward Hopper, Tables for Ladies (detail), 1930; photograph ©
The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Morselli, Guido, author. | Randall, Frederika, translator. | McKenzie, Elizabeth, 1958– writer of introduction.
Title: The communist / Guido Morselli ; translated by Frederika Randall ; introduction by Elizabeth McKenzie.
Other titles: Comunista. English
Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2017. | Series: New York Review Books classics
Identifiers: LCCN 2016059772 (print) | LCCN 2017017105 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681370798 (epub) | ISBN 9781681370781 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Communists—Fiction. | Labor—Philosophy—Fiction. | Meaning (Psychology)—Fiction. | Belief and doubt—Fiction. | Italy—Fiction. | Soviet Union—Fiction. | Political fiction. | Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Political. | FICTION / Psychological. | FICTION / Literary.
Classification: LCC PQ4829.O714 (ebook) | LCC PQ4829.O714 C5713 2017 (print) | DDC 853/.914—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016059772
ISBN 978-1-68137-079-8
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
THE COMMUNIST
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
Notes
INTRODUCTION
IN THE aftermath of World War II the Italian Communist Party found itself in a position of significant power and prestige. With the third-largest membership of any Communist Party in the world, surpassed only by those of the USSR and the People’s Republic of China, the Partito Comunista Italiano, or PCI, had survived repression under Mussolini to play a central and decisive role in the partisan resistance to the German occupation. Under its charismatic leader Palmiro Togliatti, it went on to contest elections in the newly founded postwar republic, and though it never succeeded in gaining control over the national government, it did over many of Italy’s regions and towns, especially in the industrial heartland of the north.
The “good Fascist” is taken to be a contradiction in terms, but in Italy on the local level the “good Communist” truly existed, organizing workers’ cooperatives and sponsoring art festivals that were enjoyed by many people other than the party faithful. Divided from the Eastern Bloc by the iron curtain, Italian Communists pledged themselves to Marxist/Leninist ideology without having to endure totalitarian control, while dismissing news of the gulags and other barbarities as so much capitalist propaganda. Stalin helped to fund the PCI and remained an inspiration to its members. When he died in 1953, the party paper l’Unità published the following panegyric:
GLORIA ETERNA A GIUSEPPE STALIN!
Fellow citizens, comrades! A grave, irreparable disaster has struck us all. Joseph Stalin, the man upon whom millions of Italian workers, peasants, and intellectuals looked with trust and affection as their leader and their hope, is dead. Our sorrow is deep. The powerful of the earth bowed before Stalin’s immortal genius. The people cry for him as they’d cry for the loss of a father . . .
Fascism’s defeat was the beginning of our national redemption . . .
Eternal glory to Joseph Stalin!
Long live the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!
Long live the Italian Communist Party!
Long live the indestructible friendship of the Italian and Soviet peoples!
(translation by Mitchell Abidor)
Three years later came Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in which he denounced the Stalinist cult of personality and disclosed some of Stalin’s many crimes. For many committed Communists in Italy and elsewhere, the subsequent de-Stalinization of the party was bewildering, a fertile time in which to set this novel.
•
The Communist begins in 1958. Its central character, forty-four-year-old Walter Ferranini, is a devoted party member. The son of an anarchist who revered Sacco and Vanzetti, Walter pores daily over Avanti! and l’Unità, content to be participating in the “Marxist picture of reality.”
As a deputy in parliament he represents the region of Emilia-Romagna, which, with the highest per capita party membership in Italy, is a model of cooperativism, arguably the most successful adaptation of Communism anywhere, ever. As a young man Walter had worked tirelessly as an activist, forming the Reggio Coo
perative League and Inter-Agraria. But now as a bureaucrat, he’s mothballed: “In five months he had not opened his mouth . . . he, once so combative in Reggio, so inclined to take responsibility.” A labor organizer at heart, Walter is eager to draft a bill for worker safety, but his friend and fellow deputy, the union leader Reparatore, reminds him that such action is incompatible with party policy: “Communists do not take part in the life of the parliament, they observe and remain outside!” Walter feels more and more separated from the hands-on work that gave his life meaning in the past, with less and less room to maneuver. The threat of punishment in the unforgiving, hierarchical party always looms.
The only things that do still give Walter pleasure are his “pastoral visits,” when he goes out to meet his constituents and hear their concerns and complaints. They are the fabled “base” and their “petty, combative, concrete” experiences were “part of his life.” Visiting a factory that produces rosaries, he notes that the circular saws have no safety devices, and must scold the owner for taking short cuts: “To be a Communist means to be willing to make sacrifices, not play the gangster. Do you understand? This comes to you from Comrade Ferranini, someone who still makes sacrifices himself.” He is proud to think that “Communism was something he had earned. Temptations, large and small, had presented themselves, but he had resisted.” Nevertheless Walter remains troubled by the inside dealing and political favoritism that are turning the activity of the cooperatives into business as usual.
In spite of his Marxist piety (“Humanity’s bible, Marx, his guide, and a guide for all mankind”), his disenchantments begin to pile up. Walter is ordered by his superiors in the party to travel to Turin to question a young comrade accused of “deviationism (easy to say, but it was a serious charge, something that could sink a man).” The visit confirms the comrade’s claims that the local deputy is “corrupted by the bourgeois leprosy” and “rotten with personalism.” In this idealistic young deviant Walter sees himself, and he begins to wonder how he has gotten to this point.
•
Walter is stubborn, earnest, self-critical, and increasingly isolated. There is something heartbreakingly lonely about Comrade Ferranini as he circulates among the parliament in Rome, his favorite trattoria, his stark room in a pension, moving from his daily duties into the vaults of the past, troubled by pessimistic thoughts: “We’re keeping death at bay from the moment we enter this world.” He suffers from a heart condition—possibly psychosomatic—that fills him with existential dread, and he sees his life’s path as resembling a parabola: “A sharp uptick loaded with hope and initiative, then the inevitable plunge? The downstroke of the parabola went deep into despair, but then came charging out for another ascent, in turn condemned to reverse into another dive.”
Unbeknownst to himself, Walter is also a romantic, though he works hard to suppress his urges. He maintains an ambivalent relationship with a “lady friend,” Nuccia Corsi, a single mother who has long been separated from her husband. Nuccia, kindly, intelligent, tolerant of Walter’s foibles, is an editor at a publishing company who, during the war, joined the partisans and distinguished herself with her bravery. (Partisan stories are legendary in Italy to this day; for instance, tourists can follow “partisan resistance itineraries” in the north.) Nuccia’s tenderness for Walter softens the man, opens him up. He tells her about his disappointing pilgrimage to Spain in the 1930s to fight Franco and his subsequent exile to the United States, where, notwithstanding his unrepentant leftism (“The Central Command of Capitalism, not just Chicago but America itself, had failed to tame him”), he found himself marrying Nancy, his boss’s daughter and an all-American beauty with that most bourgeois of attributes, a family property—Old Laurel Farm, a place he grows to love.
The descriptions of Walter’s unexpected American idyll in The Communist are gorgeously youthful, conveying the initial ecstasy of Walter’s marriage. The tone of the novel is generally precise and pragmatic—the tone of a good Communist—but it grows lyrical when Walter succumbs guiltily to the illicit pleasures of remembering times past spent in the heartland of capitalism, especially since the marriage did not last, and he now sees his whole American foray as a temptation barely escaped. Reminiscing about those days, he tells Nuccia: “Nature is an enemy reality I must struggle against. . . to keep it from prevailing, from subjugating us. . . . I would abandon myself, allow myself to be enchanted. And then at Old Laurel there was something else, something worse: the countryside, the sly weapon of a bourgeois world intent on dominating me.”
Walter scours his motives for ideological indiscretions at every turn. Nuccia teases him a bit: “You do go in for self-criticism. . . . Such a dedicated Communist. Can’t you just say you were in love?” Well, how can he, he who loved America so much, while his friends and colleagues at home were “starving, getting shot at from every side.”
Walter is a seriously lonely man whose only outlet for his loneliness is the party, a person trying to understand himself and play a role in the world, to make sense of things, but what he believes in gives him no language with which to understand his loneliness, and his efforts to square the circle of the personal and the political will leave him ever more dissatisfied with the party and the party ever more dissatisfied with him. This predicament will pose an increasing threat to his relationship with Nuccia and, before the end of the book, will lead Walter to take the strangest of adventures.
•
Born in Bologna in 1912 and raised in Milan, Guido Morselli, the author of The Communist, would have been familiar from an early age with what it means to be a “party man.” His father, a scientist and executive at one of Italy’s largest pharmaceutical companies, was a member of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party, serving two terms in parliament.
Morselli was by all accounts a lonely, antisocial child who struggled at school but found a world to his liking in writing and books. At age eight, no less, he started his first novel, La mia vita (My Life), and wrote prolifically ever after. The death of his mother in 1924, when he was twelve, devastated the boy and his three siblings, who were then raised by a housekeeper in a period of acute national flux. In the fifty-odd years that Italy had existed as a nation-state, it had been host to zealous throngs of Fascists, anarchists, syndicalists, reformists, interventionists, socialists, and Communists, ever splintering into yet more polarized subgroups and unexpected new formations. Walter’s near-religious allegiance to Marxism can be seen both as a manifestation of this situation and as a psychological refuge from it, a way of surviving the constant political convulsions of the era in which he, and Morselli, came of age.
Morselli, as a young man, sought to please his father by studying law and taking a marketing job at a chemical company, but eventually he asserted his natural bent by writing reviews, essays, and a study of Proust, which came out in 1943. During World War II, he served in the Italian army; after the war, his father provided him with an allowance to support his intellectual pursuits.
At first he holed up in the family summer home in Varese, but in 1952 he bought a parcel of land and built a house near the Swiss border, just outside Gavirate, where he would live alone for the next twenty years. He collected a large library (in addition to Proust, he favored Flaubert, Musil, Kafka, and Svevo). He had intense liaisons with women, proposed to one who refused him, never married. He also wrote nine novels in all. None of them was published in his lifetime.
The Communist, written between 1964 and 1965, was his fourth full-length work of fiction, and it was soundly rejected by Italo Calvino for lack of verisimilitude when Morselli submitted it to the publishing house Einaudi. (Calvino had been a member of the PCI for years, but resigned in 1957. His collected letters reveal the extent to which his membership consumed him.) The Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies describes “Italo Calvino’s letter of rejection, dated 5 October 1965 . . . as one of the most embarrassing documents of shortsighted literary judgment.” Further: “According to Calvino, one does not wri
te a good political novel by demystifying the untouchable reality of the Italian Communist Party.” Shortly thereafter, the publisher Rizzoli accepted The Communist, but a change in management led Morselli to pull it and return to his solitary discipline.
There’s a great comic scene toward the middle of The Communist, when Walter pays a visit to his friend and doctor, Amoruso, an educated and cultured man with a sophisticated wife. While Walter’s there, Amoruso’s friend Alberto Moravia drops by. Moravia of course is the author, then at the height of his fame, but Walter doesn’t have the least idea who the great visitor is, the one asking him what he thinks of “socialist realism.” Walter replies that “realism is not confined to socialists. Everyone, socialist or not, has relations with reality. It can’t be eliminated from life. Whether it can be eliminated from literature, I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem to me a requirement for literature.” Moravia, who knows that Walter’s views are unorthodox, not to say positively heretical, asks Walter to write a piece for the journal he edits. Walter, exhilarated, obliges by turning in a piece in which he wonders whether the Communist Party shouldn’t seek to liberate the working class from the burden of labor, an even more heretical proposition. It will be the source of many problems for him afterward.
It’s hard, in any case, not to hear Walter’s reply to Moravia as Morselli’s own retort to the gatekeepers of Italian fiction. Italian publishers could not appreciate any of the veins he worked in, not speculative and dystopian fiction (Rome Without the Pope, written in 1967; Dissipatio H.G., written in 1973), not counter-history (Past Conditional, written in 1970), and certainly not the naturalistic, astute, psychological portraiture of The Communist.
Then again, Cosimo Stifani has noted in his paper “Morselli Antimoderno”: “Morselli’s intellectual isolation allowed him to explore different directions. . .an otherwise difficult task to achieve within the Italian literary milieu, so rigidly driven by Marxist mythologies.”