Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
Some of us—for example Oreste Calosso and I, in Turin and Ravenna respectively—survived by writing for the magazines published, for some reason, by the army. And for the newspapers that lost pages week after week until they were just tiny pamphlets, due to the paper shortage and transportation difficulties. No one expected anything of them anymore because the news unfolded at an unprecedented pace and, in any case, it had been years since anyone expected an Italian newspaper to say anything moderately close to the truth, whatever that was. So reading the press meant clinging to habit, in a time when all habits were crumbling. Mussolini had already said that bit about seeing the profile of the new Italian Republic in the air. He must have said it on a very windy day in Salò, since that profile was growing blurrier by the minute. While he was reading—supposedly—Plato’s Republic, we were writing magnificent literary works, the best we’d ever written because they were truly literary. What I mean by that is they were written with a complete disregard for reality, so we would be immune to accusations of defeatism. They announced victories, surprise attacks, resurgences that were not only impossible but also unrealistic, but which we proclaimed with the conviction of those with no other options. Who was it that said “A hungry dog believes in nothing but meat”? Nikolai Gogol? Ivan Turgenev? Take your pick; the point is it’s true.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Some other writers who were invited but didn’t attend the conference: Hellmuth Langenbucher, known as the “Pope” of German literature, who had published two noteworthy books (or that was how it seemed to us) entitled People’s Poetry of Our Time and National Socialist Poetry. He never responded to our invitation. Hans Jürgen Nierentz, who wrote for German television and was one of the few authors with any interest in technological changes, who knew how to sing the praises of the machine the way we did, and who was possibly already dead when we sent him the invitation, although there are those who say he lived in Düsseldorf after the war and worked as a publicist until 1955, when he died, for the first or second time. Georg Oedemann, who had written a novel entitled City of Machines and, before that, a celebration of highways, never sent any reply. Then there was Hans Zöberlein, who usually wrote about his experiences in World War I and became a member of the National Socialist Party very early on, in 1921; in the last weeks of the war he took part in the execution by firing squad of a group of people who wanted to surrender a town near Munich to the Allies. His response to our invitation was a handwritten note informing us that, aware he would be condemned by history, which would transform honorable people into execrable monsters and execrable monsters into liberators, he preferred to add to the list of accusations against him rather than chase the dream of literature.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
I haven’t forgotten a note handwritten by Hans Zöberlein, a German writer who—according to what I was later told—had declined the invitation to the conference by saying: “When this war ends, our invaders will bring with them their languages, which will be the languages of the victor, and they will impose them upon the German nation like Latin was once imposed, but they will also bring a new German language, and that new tongue will make our works illegible, like a dead language.” Pretty true, don’t you think? Our books do seem written in that language; I can assure you that, even if you wanted to, you wouldn’t be able to read them. Anyway, how could you even comprehend the differences of usage, the heights some reached and the abysses others were mired in? Do you understand, for example, Chinese? I don’t. Could I comprehend the stylistic differences in Chinese that exist between a poem and some camera instructions? No, I couldn’t. The same thing happens, and will happen, to you. So why do you want to know about all this? Do yourself a favor: don’t shed your tears for anyone who lives on these streets.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Ah, yes: the Italians. It was no simple task drawing up the list, or it was incredibly simple compared to our other activities during that period, like surviving the bombings and scraping together a little meat, coffee, and sugar. (Some women gifted Pound with a few plums around that time, and he never forgot the kindness.)
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
We—the Germans too, by the way—usually rejected the use of motifs taken from ancient art and mythology, which we considered inappropriate unless they were subjected to major reelaboration. We ruled out any literature that wasn’t, by definition, collective. In that sense, we weren’t particularly interested in ambiguities or they simply seemed bourgeois to us, as did introspection. We considered literary experimentation a maneuver destined to conceal some disagreement with the times and with discourses that we believed should be imitated, because they emerged from the State as a collective voice. We rejected any hint of the fantastical, allegory, parables, and elegy, which reminded us of all we’d managed to defeat with our works. What exactly had we defeated? The bourgeoisie’s absurd, unfortunate recipe for a self-centered, mercenary, cautious peace and avaricious mercantilism. We opted for an aesthetics of violence and a spirit of revolt, and we thought that war was the only way to cleanse the world. We were interested in the beautiful ideas of technological progress and poetry, we were willing to die for them, because they seemed gloriously opposed to all the ugly ideas people lived and live for. Don’t we all believe that at some point in our lives? Don’t you believe it too, “Linden” or whatever your name is?
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
It’s not true: some of us thought the dehumanization provoked by technology was a way to overcome the limitations of the individual subject, and our books spoke to that, about the social order growing stronger through the destruction of certain people—for example, that’s how I understand Franz Kafka’s work, which I believe has been misinterpreted as a manifestation of humanist piety or some such idiocy. A second possibility, in other words, a second line, was documenting our own dehumanization, devoting ourselves to the destruction of subjectivity itself and realizing the losses you confront when destroying yourself: sometimes I think we all pretended to adopt the first alternative but were actually exploring the second; and at times I also believe that the only one who reached the end of that difficult path was the writer you’ve come asking about, who was the most extreme of us all.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
We also invited Carlo Olgiati, who in 1931 published a work in three volumes entitled The Historic Metabolism, which we were all careful not to read, although it was rumored to be some sort of attempt to explain an economic, biological, and social theory, which we all thought sounded quite Futurist. We did not rescind our invitation even when we found out that “La Redentina,” which had published his great work, was none other than Olgiati himself, who had fabricated a publishing house and named it after his candy factory in Novara. Olgiati’s theory seemed to be that history is governed by biochemical laws that would fuse all of life’s components into a single substance or nature called “olgiato”; when that happened, there would no longer be a State, laws, money, hunting, sex, police, salaries, or the transformation of energy into heat and mechanical labor, so I suppose there would no longer be history. I don’t quite remember, but I think some of us were amused by the idea, and that’s why we invited Olgiati, who somehow arrived from Novara. Shortly afterward, he received a telegram that converted the great prophet of the end of history into a quite desperate middle-aged man: his candy factory had been destroyed in the bombing. The fusion of everything that exists into a single magnificent sphere was of no comfort to him in those circumstances, and Olgiati returned to Novara the following day, I suppose to gather up the candies from the rubble, like a Mexican child dealing with a monstrous piñata. He hung himself shortly after that, at home, I think.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
A vision of the social classes that didn’t condemn them
to constant infighting but rather established agreements from alternative positions; the aspiration to full employment; the guarantee of property only if it didn’t become an insult to the less fortunate; the protection of workers, the elderly, and the handicapped, of women and children; a certain idea of morality, always so necessary in Italy; the struggle against ignorance and servility through education; socialism, economic independence, the exaltation of pride in being Italian: that was what we believed in, first of all. Literature came after, not as a belief but rather as an instrument.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Marinetti had died that year, and we thought about inviting his widow, the painter Benedetta Cappa, but we found her style too decorative, in some sense serving a lifestyle we, at that point, still considered extremely bourgeois. Besides, she was a woman, which—as always—wasn’t exactly an impediment, but it didn’t make things any easier either.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Our contact in Salò was Fernando Mezzasoma, the Minister of Popular Culture who was executed on April 28 in Dongo, on the walkway beside Lake Como: the ministry was in Villa Amadei, where Giorgio Almirante also worked, as did Nicola Bombacci, the person in charge of propaganda who’d been an important Communist leader before becoming a fascist. They were both approachable, but our contact was Mezzasoma.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
He combed back what little hair he had, making his forehead—with its crease typical of the lily-livered and the indecisive, contrasting strangely with his sharp jaw—look even bigger; he always wore dirty glasses, and he would take them off and clean them while he spoke, which perhaps was just a trick, a cunning ploy, to observe his interlocutors better, while they thought he couldn’t see them clearly. However, he wasn’t wearing his glasses when the partisans shot him in Dongo, on the twenty-eighth of April of that year.
Michele Garassino, Genoa, March 13, 1978
Ah, yes, Mezzasoma: he used to say that literature is better when it’s the result of a group of conspirators communicating with and inciting each other, and, as such, he used to nurture quarrels and confrontations between writers, which he believed to be healthier for a lively literary scene than consensus and respect, which I suppose is true to a large extent. He would often turn his words over in his mouth before speaking, as if he were savoring them, and he moved his lips a lot when he talked, which gave the impression of a film where the sound and the image were slightly out of sync. His entire existence was an invitation to a calamity, and one day, the invitation was simply accepted.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
We wanted new ruins we could dedicate our poems to, ruins we could sing to like one sings to the Parthenon and other monuments to the glorious past. But soon we had too many, and we ourselves became ruins. And then it was over.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
And Princess Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy, an American-born novelist and playwright almost eighty years old who was married to a Russian. Troubetzkoy published twenty-four books, as well as hundreds of poems and a play in verse, but I can’t remember a single line from her work. She died in June 1945, in Rome, where she lived because she was some sort of convinced fascist and because there was fresher fish there, even in times of war. We also invited James “Giacomo” Strachey Barnes, who called himself the “chronicler and prophet of the fascist Revolution” and wrote various books in English about fascism before disappearing after the war into a not-very-fascist but much more comfortable life. Strachey Barnes, of course, didn’t respond to our invitation, and it’s possible by that point he had already accepted what we later would: the end of everything we had, to varying degrees, believed in.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
It appears the preparations for the conference began in October 1944, around the time the publishing houses and newspapers were nationalized, and the proposed venues shifted as the country shrank. By then the Allies were already south of Bologna, and Milan, Turin, and Genoa were being regularly bombed: which is to say, what was left of Milan, Turin, and Genoa was being regularly bombed, since the bombing had begun more than a year earlier, in August 1943; but almost every Italian city in the Social Republic had already been the target of raids, of aerial attacks—Taranto, Cosenza, Terni, Novara, Foggia, Salerno, Crotone, Viterbo, Avellino, Lecce, Bari, Orte, Cagliari, Carbonia, Civitavecchia, Benevento—and starting in February 1945, Trieste and Pola were also targeted. They bombed some city almost every day; almost every day there were statistics on the dead and wounded that were no longer reported because they were no longer news but rather an alternative form of normality; not just another form of normality, but the most Italian, at that time.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Even though the natural choice would have been Milan or Turin, it was precisely that fact, that plus the bombing, that made us think of some other location for the event. In February 1945 we had already chosen the place, close enough to both cities so that travel wouldn’t be an obstacle and far enough from Salò to make clear to the foreign press that the support for the Social Republic we were expecting from the authors taking part in the conference, which in some way they had already lent us by accepting our invitation, wasn’t the result of any sort of coercion. We chose Pinerolo, a small city some fifty kilometers southwest of Turin, beside the Chisone River.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
“Pinareul” in Piedmontese, “Pineiròl” in Occitan, “Pignerol” in French; set against a curtain—white for a good portion of the year, and an unusual green the rest of the time—of the Cottian Alps and the Monviso Massif, in the Chisone Valley. Before naming Giorgio Almirante as his representative at the conference, Mezzasoma ordered we be given use of the main hall on the first floor of the Palazzo Comunale for the deliberations, and the Palazzo Vittone to house the German authors; the others would stay in San Germano Chisone, a nearby town.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
The Palazzo Comunale? An enormous candle someone had brutally stuck into the cake of a mentally deficient child who could only see cubic shapes.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Our list, Zuliani and I thought as soon as we started working on it, shouldn’t be a list of our preferences; or, better put, it should be made up not only of authors sympathetic to the regime, who were, of course, our favorite authors, but also of writers who, having never declared their allegiances, could, potentially, lean toward our cause. Zuliani and I first thought of establishing a purely literary admissions criterion, related to the quality of their work, but later we understood that was no longer valid, since it was associated with a moral idea—as were all kinds of literary criticism and opinions on literary quality—that was collapsing under the weight of the military defeat and all the enemies assailing the Social Republic. I think that at certain historical moments there has to be some sort of interlude, long or short, doesn’t much matter, in which one morality is replaced by another and, as a result, what was “good” is transformed into “bad” and vice versa: since this happens in the realm of politics, I don’t see why it shouldn’t also happen with literature, which is the artistic discipline most similar and most indebted to politics. So there should be a moment in every catastrophe in which there is no longer moral judgment, or it becomes inappropriate or incidental, or worthless for judging the new the way the old was judged, and in that brief or lasting moment—doesn’t much matter, I repeat—the “good” literary texts must be equal to the “bad” ones, The Iliad must have the same value as the program for a mediocre play, and Dante’s Divine Comedy must be equal to an instruction booklet for an electric toy train. In that moment, I think, one must no longer know what normality is and who the monsters are, and what drives, or hampers, a work’s greatness. I think we found ourselves in that moment, which was why we invited Flavia Morlacchi, a Roman
poetess who emitted some sort of crowing, like a laying hen, when she read her poems, and Cosimo Zago, the rickety, lame poet from Venice who’d lost a leg in World War I, according to him, along with a manuscript in the boot he was never able to reconstruct. We considered both of them ridiculous, but it wasn’t impossible that in the new times ahead they would make it big, which would be a catastrophe for everything we deemed worthy of reading and respect, but, nevertheless, was something we should take into account. I remember a fragment of one of her poems, Morlacchi’s, God knows why, where she compared the ruins of the Palatino with “blind eyes / shaded eyes / of the fierce and glorious Roman specter / still open there in vain / on the hill / to the spectacle of / fascinating green life / of this April of distant times.” Times that made those verses respectable deserved nothing more than contempt, but we were living in contemptible times and, who knows, maybe those were the verses that best reflected them.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
Zago had been poor his entire life except for a brief period when he served as a diplomat, possibly due to an error by the authorities, though it’d been some time since he’d been sent anywhere when Zuliani visited him in Venice. He hadn’t left his home on the Lista Bari for days, and he confessed to Zuliani that he couldn’t attend the conference because he didn’t have any proper trousers. Zuliani went out and bought some, then took them over to his house to try on, so Zago got out of bed and struggled to get into them, hopping on the only leg he had. According to Zuliani, the trousers fit him perfectly but, when the time came, Zago still didn’t come to the conference, and he didn’t even send a telegram.
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