Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
There was another story they told about Gentilli, according to which one day, years earlier, Gentilli had written in the press about the “execrable” absence of works by the Jesuit priest Pietro Cecchini in bookstores, and how dozens of anxious—even desperate—collectors were willing to pay any price for them; a price, Gentilli figured, that could only rise. Naturally, no one had ever heard of a Jesuit priest named Cecchini, but the article and the subsequent confidence that his body of work was desirable and hard to obtain resulted in greater demand for his book. I don’t have to tell you that economics is actually a certain mood, and the economics of literature even more so: the dozens of people who got a copy of Father Cecchini’s book through relatives or contacts, which is to say, along rather unorthodox paths, paid a lot of money for it. Obviously, all those paths led to L’Aquila, where Gentilli sold Father Cecchini’s books through third parties: just a few weeks before writing his article, he had acquired them all from a recently bankrupted press in Rome.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Haven’t I told you that already? Hrand Nazariantz, the Armenian poet who lived in Bari; Paolo Buzzi, who lived in Milan and who, despite his inscrutable political position, had published a “Radio Waves Poem” that we were big fans of; Enrico Cavacchioli, who was useful, like a huge portrait of an ancestor you can hang to cover up a stain on the wall; Alceo Folicaldi, the young Futurist poet who had gone to war with Marinetti in Africa; Bruno Corra, who in 1916 directed Futurist Life, which was a film of pain and death and luckily has been lost; Rosa Rosà, the Austrian-born Italian writer who had written the novel A Woman with Three Souls; Luciano Folgore, Francesco Cangiullo, Arnaldo Ginna, Bruno Munari, Emilio Settimelli, Mino Somenzi, and Filippo Gentilli. We wrote to Corrado Govoni inviting him, but Govoni declined the invitation because his son, a Communist, had been killed in the Fosse Ardeatine massacre in March 1944: Govoni, who had once composed a tribute to Il Duce, couldn’t get past his pain and astonishment, as if it were Mussolini himself who had slapped him across the face.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
We didn’t invite Enzo Benedetto: we believed him to be among the fallen in Italy and many of us wrote obituaries and texts on his painting and poetry that, inevitably, deemed him a martyr to fascism or, more precisely, one of the few writers among us who had taken his ideals to their extreme. But Benedetto was alive: he had been taken prisoner by English troops and returned to Italy after the end of the war. I saw him shortly after, reading what we’d written about him, perplexed. He never really recovered from the shock, I now believe.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Naturally we also invited the survivors of the Futurist writers’ circle in Perugia that I had been a part of: Espartaco Boyano, Atilio Tessore, and Michele Garassino, about whom I could say so much—and I mean, so, so much—that perhaps it’s better I say nothing at all.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Ezra Pound, meanwhile—typical of him—had disappeared. We never found out where he was and he didn’t attend the conference.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
That face had stuck in me like a black hatchet blade, many years earlier; seeing it again was like some sort of relief, a consolation; but it was also like scratching deep into an old wound. In other words, that black hatchet had split me in two: I had to pull it out, but I didn’t know how to and, as you see, I wasn’t able to. Although, actually, at that moment all I was thinking was that Luca Borrello had come to kill Michele Garassino; that finally, after so long, he was going to kill him.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
Why would they arrest me? Either (a) because of my friendship with Aldo Palazzeschi, who had become an antifascist, and made no effort to conceal it; (b) because, unlike my Futurist colleagues, I had criticized the pact with Nazi Germany and the racial laws, although only in private; (c) because I had supported Marinetti in his effort to get an exemption for Ferruccio Parri’s sentence for antifascist activities, something I did do publicly; (d) because I had opposed the campaign against “degenerate art”; (e) because, in the end, I was alive and it was a time when being alive wasn’t enjoying much popularity. Remember, I’m talking about 1945: by then they had taken everything from us, except our fear.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
The first one to address us was Hanns Johst, who seemed to have taken over completely. Here, somehow, the action stops, as if what we’d experienced was part of a novel that one could put aside; but of course, if this were a novel, Johst’s speech would also be part of it, though possibly a minor and at the same time central part, the kind of thing that one tends to skip—descriptions, for example, whose function in novels I’ve never understood—or just skim over but that are nevertheless key to understanding the book. In this case, it was key to understanding our actions before and after the speech, and to understanding what we believed in, or at least what some of us believed in, or wanted to believe in, or were forced by circumstances to believe in. Despite that, Johst’s speech is impossible to reproduce, as it is lost in the circumvolutions of a memory that is like a room filled with competing echoes. There is nothing more unrealistic, I think, than those novels in which someone is able to remember, word for word, what was said five years ago, or one year ago, or fifty. To be honest, implausibility in literature doesn’t bother me; it only worries me coming from a Nazi fanatic who’s also a bad writer.
Michele Garassino, Genoa, March 13, 1978
Johst, I remember, talked about war and literature, and said that war wasn’t provoking the collapse of Europe, but it was that collapse that had provoked the war, which had come to rescue our world; according to Johst, that collapse was not as a result of our negligence as writers, but rather more likely due to the fact that, even while we battled arduously for our voices to be heard, we’d been ignored for years. It had been the Jewish press and economic interests that kept our voices from being heard, he said; however, we had to be heard then, in Europe’s most terrible hour, there, in the Italian Social Republic, where the battle between usury and economic independence was being fought, the battle between education and the stultification they tried to impose on us by destroying our cities, between the people and an enemy vision that saw everything as class struggle, between the protection of workers, the elderly and the disabled, women and children, and an economic system that plunged into misery those who couldn’t support themselves. We were, declared Johst, men engaged in a mortal struggle against a better-armed enemy sustained by the unjust powers of usury and exploitation, men abandoned by those who should have been our allies and betrayed by those who claimed to be our defenders, and that was the reason our voices had to ring out louder than ever. This was the moment, he said, to set aside purity, which deep down couldn’t satisfy us because it was antihuman, and the weak signs of creative individualism that were nothing more than usurpation, because our words belonged to a community to whom we had to return them revitalized, and adhere to a propaganda whose social need and simplicity of content should be enough for us. Johst said this was our opportunity to defeat Bolshevism and the empire of money; if we won the war but not that particular battle, the war and our lives would have had no meaning, as in the global conflict, what was at stake was not only our right to exist—the Germans and the Italians, brothers in the defense of the European values we ourselves had created—but also the struggle of poetry against the numbers brandished by our enemies and those who profit from usury. Writers, he declared, had to take part in the conflict, and they would do so with metaphors, which only defeatists could consider inconsequential. It’s true, he said, metaphors don’t win battles; however they do last longer.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
There was a tall man standing beside me with a skeptical expression on his face. He gave me a look and then seem
ed to smile to himself while everyone applauded Johst’s speech. The clack of military heels hitting the floor was heard as the Germans stood at attention and shouted in unison, several times, their Sieg Heils and their Heil Hitlers. The man—I later found out he was a Dutch author, Rintsje Piter Sybesma—murmured something as if to himself, that I, despite the clamor, could clearly hear. It was a quote from Pierre Gaxotte that I was already familiar with: “The history of Germany is the history of an unfortunate people.”
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
I didn’t listen to any of what Johst said, and I don’t think I missed much: we were like Achaeans trapped inside a Trojan horse, but the Trojan horse didn’t move and Troy was still out of sight, and almost all of us knew it but pretended not to. At my back, near the entrance to the room, partially hidden by a column, was a man I had known and not forgotten, despite thinking he’d died months earlier. I suppose he wasn’t looking at me—later I found out he hadn’t even recognized me—but at the time I imagined that he was. Johst was speaking, and then Paolo Buzzi—up on tiptoes, looking like a supporting actor, as he always did, even after reaching an age at which one either takes on leading roles or gives up acting completely, but which Buzzi nevertheless seemed to enjoy, seemed to celebrate as if he knew that only supporting actors got the chorus girls and the buxom opera singers. As they spoke I thought of Luca Borrello and the things we’d done together and how it had all ended; I was also thinking, as I mentioned already, that he was going to kill Garassino and I wondered when he would do it, and how, and if someone, me for example, could or would want to stop him.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
“We want to glorify the war—the sole cleanser of the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, beautiful lethal ideas, and contempt for women. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism, and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice,” quoted Buzzi. It was unclear to us why, when he could have, for example, cited the 1939 text “Insecticidal Patriotism” or the 1942 “Song for the Heroes and Machines of the Mussolinian War,” in which Marinetti said approximately the same thing in a similar way: variety wasn’t exactly his forte and he always rejected stooping to what he considered the lowly position of changing his mind. While Buzzi was speaking, some of us couldn’t stop thinking about him—not Buzzi but Marinetti. He had died on December 2 the year before as a result, possibly, of the suffering he experienced while with Italian troops in Russia between 1942 and 1943, and I had attended his burial in Milan along with thousands of others, unable to imagine even for an instant that the hysterical old marionette I’d met had once again, and for the last time, been stored at the bottom of the puppet master’s trunk. There was almost a recognition of defeat in that memory, as I’d thought of the conference as an opportunity to see Marinetti and Pound in action again and neither of them was able to attend: Marinetti because he was dead; Pound because no one could locate him; he was lost somewhere possibly not even he, with all his nervous energy, recognized, with his vertical mass of red hair blowing in the wind, his eccentric attire, and those little bloodshot eyes that made him look like a lively, lewd monkey. We, the Futurists, considered war the “sole cleanser of the world,” as Buzzi recalled, but those in attendance applauded only tepidly, already exhausted by a war that had given us more destruction and annihilation than we could reflect in our works. That war was, as Marinetti said in 1914, an immense Futurist painting. True, but apparently it was painted by an idiot.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
Really, I now think, the best “cleanser of the world” is soap. But that was in short supply in 1945. So we settled for the war. What else could we do.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
The Spaniards also seemed weary of the war; they’d already had quite a long one themselves. Rafael Sánchez Mazas nodded in silence in one corner of the room, but his attitude was more that of someone distractedly listening to a lesson clumsily memorized by a child. Eugenio d’Ors, beside him, had asked for the floor a moment earlier, and was shouting himself hoarse in an imitation of, possibly, Francisco Franco—who, perhaps, was imitating Adolf Hitler, whose rhetorical skills were like those of a silent film actor who found himself in a talkie—in order to tell us that he was in agreement, completely in agreement, with his “friend” Paolo Buzzi and that it was “desolation, the exact, the utmost and the inexorable, the militia and the imperial, impassiveness, clarity, and heroism,” facing off against “the barbaric, the murky, the shrill, and the sterile.” War, he declared, was a “redeeming illumination” that proved (does an illumination “prove”? I’m not sure) that we writers must continue to put literature at the service of a higher cause, which was a nation at war. The prize, he said, was a paradise lost, an authentic, free, strong, meaningful life that can only be realized in death—as all paradises are only paradises once lost—in which “their dead are left alone. Not ours. Our dead are vigilant. They continue in the hot brotherhood of each heart.” D’Ors added that it was precisely this we must laud in our works.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
“That tide of foolishness, of insults, of lies, of heartless mockery, of dirty explosions of resentments is nothing more than the symptom of a fatal desire for dissolution,” erupted Fani Popowa-Mutafowa. The excuse, she said, for making a literature of broad strokes, a literature of propaganda, when really, she declared, what was needed was a literature that forced people to shut their eyes to everything that wasn’t literature. Some nodded, but the voice of Rintsje Piter Sybesma rose among the nay-saying in the Spanish and German sectors, to declare that for a writer there was no greater task—those were his words, I believe—than that of creating propaganda for a nation fighting for its survival, and that…But then Bruno Corra stood up and said that he could be a magician, a dance instructor, a diver, a paratrooper, a rugby player, a singer, a croupier, a jockey, a tightrope walker, a star of the silver screen, a radio commentator, a mâitre d’, a chauffeur, a poacher, or a stock trader, but he would never be a propagandist, because he was against everything serious. His comments were met with some laughter, but then d’Ors stated that there was a misunderstanding of terms, or of opposites, as the difference between us and our enemies was that they said “representative, brother, and repose” and we said “captain, comrade, maneuver.” “They say stupid fanaticism”—he said—“and we say faith. They, I: we, we. We say flag and they say torch, we vigilance and they discomfort, we shirt and they frock coat. They seriousness and we responsibility.” Luys Santa Marina stood up and applauded frantically, but Johst shot him a cutting look and the Spaniard sat back down, while Henri Bruning interjected that, even if it were possible to write literature outside of our nations’ struggle against freedom of enterprise (which wasn’t freedom of expression) and against the government of everyone (which wasn’t the government of everyone fit to govern), if, he said, one could write “pure” literature, literature written outside of the period and its battles, who would publish it, he wondered. Who was going to be interested in reading it. Bruning was accused by Popowa-Mutafowa of acting like a Bolshevik, but Eugenio Montes and Hermann Burte defended him. Despite which, and after a moment of hesitation, none of us was sure why he was being defended and at what point in the discussion we found ourselves. It was Johst who solved the problem by standing up, which meant the conference would be put on hold indefinitely. As I headed toward the exit, Almirante came over and asked me to release the conclusions of the conference’s first session to the press. I have them somewhere around here. They said: “In view of the war, in view of the struggle of our peoples to maintain their national independence as their fundamental right, all that is not against them—all that is not lowly treason in support of capitalism devoid of a fatherland—is today felt in Italy as one and the same confronted with the essential, unquestionable situation in Europe, in the face of which we mainta
in our unshakable faith in victory.” None of us had declared that, I objected. But Almirante shut me up, taking me by the arm and bringing me over to one corner of the room. “The declaration was written by the Germans; if we don’t disseminate it, they’ll shut down the conference and kill us all,” he told me. In fact, while I was preparing the statement, I discovered that it had already been broadcast, by Johst or by one of his lackeys.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
Do you really want to know these things? Isn’t the little mentioned on the subject in the history books and documents of the period enough? All right, I’ll tell you: we had nothing to say to each other, and we spent two interminable hours saying it.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets Page 7
