by Allan Massie
ALLAN MASSIE
The Death of Men
With an Introduction by
Joseph Farrell
First, for Alison,
then for friends of Roman days:
Caitlin Thomas, Colm Thomas, Ses Hine,
and in memory of Al Hine, writer and good friend,
who died Autumn 1974
‘Man at present is a predatory animal … the sacredness of human life is a purely municipal ideal of no validity outside the jurisdiction … between two groups that want to make inconsistent kinds of world I see no remedy except force. I may add what I have no doubt said often enough, that it seems to me that every society rests on the death of men.’
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Introduction
Chapter One: Raimundo
Chapter Two: Tomaso
Chapter Three: Christopher
Chapter Four: Raimundo
Chapter Five: Tomaso
Chapter Six: Raimundo
Chapter Seven: Christopher
Chapter Eight: Tomaso
Chapter Nine: Raimundo
About the Author
Copyright
Author’s Note
IT WILL be apparent to most readers that the central events of this novel imitate the abduction and murder of Aldo Moro, and that the main character resembles Moro, and occupies a similar position in Italian politics. Beyond this, however, characters, relationships and events are purely imaginary. In particular I should like to stress that the Dusa family in no way resembles the Moro family, and that I have used only such aspects of the case as are public property. This is a work of fiction, with all the aspirations of a novel, and not a work of history or reportage. It would be improper were it to be treated otherwise, and it would distress me also if it were regarded as a roman à clef, which it, most emphatically, is not.
Introduction
THERE ARE still many mysteries surrounding the terrorist campaign, or campaigns, which shook Italy in the turbulent years stretching from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. The outrage which can be viewed as the opening act occurred on 12 December 1969, when a bomb exploded in a bank in Milan, killing sixteen people. Anarchists were arrested with suspicious speed, but it has now been established beyond all conceivable doubt that the perpetrators belonged to the Neo-Fascist Right, and that the unfortunate suspects were innocent victims in a police-political frame-up. The official conspiracy in this case provided Dario Fo with his plot for his angry farce, Accidental Death of an Anarchist. If chronologically the Right were first in the field, the Left soon spawned their own response. The publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli became so obsessed, with some reason, by the prospect of a neo-Fascist coup d’etat that he set up his own subversive network, the GAP (Partisan Action Group). The groupmay have provided the inspiration for other leftist formations, but Feltrinelli’s own role was limited. He blew himself up attempting to attach dynamite to an electricity pylon outside Milan.
The most important of the Left-wing groups, the Red Brigades, made their first appearance in August 1970. The first generation of brigatisti showed a certain moral scruple and were not responsible for any killings, but the organisation grew increasingly ruthless, and it was they who on 16 March 1978 carried out the kidnapping of the Christian Democrat statesman, Aldo Moro, an act which provided Allan Massie with the basic material for this novel. Moro was on his way to the Chamber of Deputies to vote for the new government based on the ‘historical compromise’ formula between his own party and the Communists which he had himself negotiated, but his car was ambushed, his five-man bodyguard slaughtered and he himself taken prisoner. Moro was to remain in the ‘people’s prison’ for fifty-five days while the police searched the length and breadth of Italy for his place of captivity. He was finally killed on 9 May, his body dumped in the boot of a car which was left in Via Caetani in Rome, halfway between the headquarters of the Christian Democrats and of the Communist Party.
The symbolism of the terrorists’ choice of place to leave the body was unmistakable, but the overall aims of the campaign remain bafflingly imprecise. Certainly for many militants it was an article of faith in those years that ‘the revolution’ was at hand, and in today’s Italy, with Silvio Berlusconi in power, there are many totally respectable lawyers, accountants, journalists, TV presenters and politicians of all shades who once marched, chanted, demonstrated, threw stones and charged police barricades to advance the revolutionary cause. They debated who would be dethroned and who admitted to power tomorrow, how hegemony would be organised, how the arts and creativity would flourish in a coming age of leisure, but the revolution itself was an innocent concept, not amenable of definition and not subject to analysis or dissection. The problem was that alongside those who occupied university buildings and shouted slogans were those who killed, wounded, kneecapped and abducted fellow humans.
For many, one of the most dismaying moments in those ‘years of lead’, as they were known, came at their close when certain ex-terrorists, already arrested and jailed, were permitted to participate in a television programme designed to analyse their motives, objectives, partial success and final failure. The outcome was disconcerting, leaving the Italian public gawking in disbelief as these figures emerged on the TV screens not as charismatic visionaries, fearless of God, careless of personal survival, heedless of the demands of compassion and resolute in their pursuit of the goals of the liberation of the oppressed proletariat, but as hesitant, semi-articulate individuals, notable for their command of an arcane jargon but incapable of formulating an ethical or political link between ends and means and unsure even of the nature and attainability of the objectives for which they had mounted the campaign. The sheer ordinariness of those who had, without pity or hesitation, shed blood and threatened the Italian Republic was hard to bear, or even credit. Here they were in flesh and blood stuttering that capitalism was systematic exploitation, bourgeois culture soulless, real socialismin Eastern Europe a fraud, the Italian Communist Party a clique of turncoat renegades, and then …? Where was the overall vision, or strategy? If the enemy were not a defined number of powerful individuals but a system which was greater than any total of parts and whose main crimes, in the eyes of late-Marxist theorists, were its dehumanisation and reification of human beings, how did the killing of individuals advance the cause of revolutionary Marxism?
Human judgement prefers solidity, but the imagination adores a vacuum. Allan Massie’s choice of title, from the writings of the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, suggests that his interests range beyond one historical period in Italian life towards the basis of the social contract itself. Trials of strength determine the nature of society, says Holmes, in a dictum as uncompromisingly brutal as any formulated by Robespierre or Lenin, but the course of Massie’s novel demonstrates the cost of strategies based on force. Many will be intrigued by the judgement delivered by Raimundo in this book that modern terrorism is different in kind from any preceding model since it aims not at something measurable or identifiable, like the independence of a people or the toppling of a tyrant, but at something more amorphous, intangible and imprecise, like the betterment of the human condition.
Allan Massie is not the first novelist to take as starting point a state of moral bewilderment, a mixture of uncomprehending awe, fascination and repulsion aroused by those who love their fellow man so deeply that, in the pursuit of universal love and fraternity, they plan in cold-blooded tranquillity to tear apart human flesh. Modern terrorism originated in nineteenth-century Russia, and immediately Dostoevsky and Turgenev were enthralled by the ambiguity
of the terrorist figure. Perhaps the very archetype of the ethical terrorist was Ivan Kaliayev, dispatched to assassinate a member of the Czar’s family but unable to throw the bomb when he saw the prince’s wife and children seated in the car beside him. He had no objection to murder as such, and indeed became one of history’s first suicide bombers when he later trapped the prince on his own. This figure, and the terrorist in general, came to haunt Albert Camus, who made him the hero of his play, The Just, and it may be this work by Camus which Massie’s Bernardo is reading while in hiding in the Abruzzi. Conrad’s The Secret Agent remains the most deep and probing of all novels featuring a terrorist, but later, in 1984, Doris Lessing wrote a novel uncompromisingly entitled The Good Terrorist, while Graham Greene in The Honorary Consul (1973), a work of fiction whose shadow hangs benignly over Allan Massie’s novel, puzzled over the ex-priest who resents being called Father but who was the perfect amalgam of religious believer and revolutionary zealot.
There is no ambiguity in Massie towards terrorism as such, but nor is there any facile division into villains and heroes. It is not the least of the merits of this remarkable novel that it has taken to heart the injunction of G. B. Shaw in his introduction to St Joan that the writer’s duty is to make the Grand Inquisitor not only intelligible but even sympathetic. It is the enigma of motivation which more than any other factor accounts for the fascination which terrorists or violent revolutionaries have exercised over novelists. What drives a person to adopt terror as a tactic, especially if that person is of unusual moral sensibility? No doubt many terrorists are of the stuff of commonplace criminals, or were impressionable individuals intoxicated by the enthusiasms, however warped, of the moment, but others were pure idealists, motivated by beliefs they judge to be ethical, offended by current injustice, swayed by apocalyptic hopes and impatient of calls for prudence or delay. There are many types of terrorist, some being fanatics driven by the faith that moves mountains. The religious vocabulary is almost de rigueur, and perhaps the quasi-religious, morally unbending terrorist is not only the main threat to police forces but also the central enigma to novelists.
There are no explicitly religious figures in The Death of Men but the blurring of boundaries between traditional, essentially Catholic, morality and revolutionary violence is a recurrent theme. Bernardo, the prodigal son of a Catholic statesman, may well be the best of the Dusa family, and certainly his unfortunate father sees him as the only one of his sons worthy of him. He alone is true to core beliefs, and remains immune to the attractions of decadent permissiveness. Tomaso, the arch-terrorist, is described by his comrade Bernardo as ‘a kind of saint, a lay saint’, and indeed no killer could be further from the amoral psychopath. Tomaso’s beliefs, as he formulates them in his final despair, may be closer to millenarian spirituality than to any conventional political doctrine, but in this he resembles several, but not all, of the people drawn to terrorist violence in Italy in the 1970s. Several pundits at the time commented on the strange prevalence in the terrorist ranks of Catholic-educated youth in an Italy by then predominantly secular and post-Christian in culture. The immediate origins of Left-wing terrorism lay in the 1968movement, but the term ‘Catho-communism’ was coined to denote the link of the equal and opposing absolutisms of transcendental Catholicism and secular Marxism.
Allan Massie’s novel is as rooted in the contemporary history of Italy as is Graham Greene’s in the politics of Paraguay. English literature has been enriched by a cluster of great nomadic writers, D. H. Lawrence and Graham Greene at their head, who have been capable of identifying deeply with the countries through which they passed. They are distinct from the larger category of those writers who find other cultures strange and outré, and thus an enriching backdrop for dramas which see politely or arrogantly disorientated Englishmen behave in a way which could scarcely be sanctioned back home. More than any other country in post-imperial days, Italy has provided material, or backdrop, for English-language writers, and it is not the least of Allan Massie’s achievements that he writes about Italy from the inside, as Lawrence did of Australia in Kangaroo. There is a cast of expatriate Brits and Americans – the latter very dismissively treated – who look on with a certain knowing puzzlement, but they and their reactions are not the core of the intrigue. Massie’s is an Italy, warts and all, which did – and does – exist, and which would be recognisable to Italians. This could scarcely be said of novels written even by writers of the stature of E. M. Forster, let alone of the recent wave of Chiantishire fiction. Italian politics, Italian culture, Italian mindsets, Italian religion are portrayed by Massie as if by an Italian novelist.
Although there have been several films on the terror campaign, few Italian novelists have dealt with the topic. Perhaps the subject is too uncomfortable, since there is nothing to be said for the theory that the terrorism was inspired by some unscrupulous force outside Italy, whether in the Kremlin or the Pentagon. Its roots, cultural and physical, are to be sought in Italy. The wave of terrorism which shook Italy was more complex than any comparable movement in Germany or South America, if only because there were two conflicting nuclei, with some sinister intermediaries who seemed at home in any swamp. The curious character of Enzo Fuscolo in this novel, ex-Fascist militant, victim of a botched execution attempt by the partisans but still alive to infect the air and act as an inexplicable link between Left-and Right-wing terror groups, had his counterpart among those who appeared in the pages of official investigations into several of the terrorist outrages, including the Moro kidnapping.
Massie is explicit, although no one could doubt it, in declaring that his novel was inspired by the Moro affair, but denies that the work is a roman à clef. Be that as it may, the parallels between the historical Aldo Moro and the fictional Corrado Dusa are close. Both are southern Italians, both have a gravitas which is easily mocked but which is intrinsic to charisma, both have a gift for tiresomely obscure speech, both were skilled conciliators, both were among the architects of the post-war Italian reconstruction and both are free of the grasping corruption in which many of their party indulged. Moro aroused a baffled respect among his literary contemporaries, however much they hated the Christian Democratic party he represented. Pier Paolo Pasolini mocked Moro for his bizarre turn of phrase, never more than when he proclaimed that his party and the Communists were proceeding along ‘convergent parallels’, but Pasolini also agreed that Moro was the ‘least implicated of them all in the horrible things’ which had been done to Italy. Leonardo Sciascia, author of a masterly probe into the kidnapping and assassination (The Moro Affair, Carcanet, 1987), agreed with Pasolini on both accounts. Sciascia’s semi-factual work was based on the letters which Moro wrote from the ‘people’s prison’ begging for his life, but Massie is as deft as Sciascia in his portrayal of Moro/Dusa, even if the man himself appears only intermittently.
He is equally skilled in the depiction of the inner sanctum of Italian life, the family. The Dusa family might be some kind of metaphor, with the obscure figure of Guido, a once-promising poet now reduced to helpless insanity and locked away in an asylum guarded by Fascists, presented tentatively as some kind of image of Italy. The two brothers, Guido and Corrado, both endure different kinds of detention, but while the vulnerable Guido may be the real heart of the book, it is Corrado’s imprisonment that changes them all. There is a strange, haunting poignancy in the cry of the politician, once accustomed to the flatteries of the corridors of power but now reduced to an impotence as deep as that of King Lear – ‘I did not know the world was like this.’ Perhaps that plea goes to the heart of darkness not of terrorism but of political ambition. Dusa – and Moro? – did not know, it seems, that politics were as Machiavelli had described them, and that appeals to gratitude or humanity were valueless. This realization would not have startled his fellow Christian Democrat, the fictional Gianni Schicchi, who has his counterparts among party apparat-chiks and commissars everywhere, of all political hues. The name is intriguing. For many the firs
t association will be with Puccini’s bubbly comic opera, but the character was originally a medieval Florentine whom Dante put in one of the lowest pits of his Inferno. Of all the sins meriting damnation, Dante regarded fraud as the most grievous, and Gianni Schicchi was, in Dante’s eyes, guilty of fraud against his fellow man, and his place in hell saw him alongside cheats, liars, forgers, quacks and impersonators. The ranks of Christian Democrat politicians contained a goodly sprinkling of swindlers and squalid shysters who involved themselves in the corrupt misuse of power, but who were never keen to be identified. The normally routine warning that this book is a work of fiction and that the characters are not portraits of living people has more than the usual level of urgency.
Schicchi sets his face resolutely against any deal with the terrorists, as did both the Christian Democrats and the Communists at the time. Their reasoning was that expressed poetically by Kipling – ‘if when once you have paid him the Danegeld/You never get rid of the Dane’. It was a pitiless logic, which left the wife of Moro/Dusa baffled and uncomprehending, even if it came as no surprise to Dusa’s brother, Raimundo. In his effete, sensual decadence, this character has his counterparts in other novels by Allan Massie. Raimundo is an observer of keen mind and shrewd judgement, who despises his present style of life and who has never quite renounced the liberalism of his youth. His understanding of the terrorist mind leaves him with no illusions over the hopelessness of Corrado’s situation, but he also understands the blackness of the words from Oliver Wendell Holmes which give the novel its title. Through Raimundo more than through any other character the novel widens out from the description of one episode, however dramatic, to become a meditation on the rules which underlie civilisation, on the poverty of ideologies and, above all, on the feebleness of the restraints which prevent relapse to an age of warlords and a worship of mere strength. But it is also an excellent thriller, of a kind John Buchan would have appreciated.
