These are things I have come to believe only recently; up until yesterday I believed that travelling could only have an indirect influence on the substance of what I write. Here what was relevant was that I had had Pavese as my mentor, the great enemy of travelling. He used to say more or less that poetry comes from a germ that you carry in you for years, perhaps for ever; what influence can having spent a day or week here or there have on this incredibly slow maturation process? Certainly, travelling is a life experience, which can mature or change something in us like any other experience, this was what I thought, and a journey can help us write better because it has helped us understand something more of life; someone visits India, for instance, and on returning home will write better, say, his memories of his first day at school. In any case, I have always enjoyed travelling, leaving aside its effect on literature. And it was also in this spirit that I made my recent American trip: because I was interested in the United States, in what it is really like, not to undertake, I don’t know, some ‘literary pilgrimage’ or because I wanted ‘to be inspired by it’.
However, in the United States, I was seized, as never before, by a desire to know and possess fully a polymorphous and complex reality, something Other. What happened was something like falling in love. Lovers, as everyone knows, spend a lot of time arguing; and even now that I have returned, every so often I find myself arguing inside myself with America; but in any case I continue to live inside that experience, I fling myself avidly and jealously on everything I hear or read about that country which I claim to be the only one to understand. Seeing that in this case I was seized by ‘the music of things’, as you said earlier, Carlo, I really ought to hurry and try to put it down on paper.
Negative aspects of travel? Everyone will say that it distracts you from that horizon of set objects that constitute your own poetic world, it disperses that absorbed concentration which is a condition (one of the conditions) conducive to literary creation. But in the end, even if it is a dispersal, what does it matter? In human terms, it is better to travel than to stay at home. First of all live, and then philosophize and write. Writers above all should live with an attitude towards the world which effects a greater acquisition of truth. That small something which will reflect this on the page, anything, will be the literature of our time, nothing else.
What then does the return home represent, what value do your memories have as someone from Liguria?
Ligurians divide into two categories: those attached to their own place like limpets stuck to a rock, whom you could never move; and those who regard the world as their home and wherever they are they find themselves at home. But even the latter category, and I belong to them, as perhaps you do, too, come back home regularly, and stay attached to their land as much as the former. My own area, the Western Riviera, has become unrecognizable in the last fifteen years, but perhaps precisely because of that fact rediscovering behind all this cement the traces of a Liguria of my memory is an operation of patriotic pietas that betrays even more my love and trepidation for the place. It is just like scraping away today’s dominant commercialized mentality to find the old ethical substratum our families used to have, and that in your case, Carlo, must be one of a Catholicism with Jansenist overtones, whereas for me it is a secular tradition, deriving from Mazzinian and free-thinking Masonic roots, all geared towards an ethics of ‘achievement’. What binds me to my home area, above all to the land we had above San Remo, is the memory of my father, which seems to grow deeper and deeper, one of the strangest personalities and existences, yet also one of the most characteristic of the generation that grew up after the Risorgimento, and the last Ligurian to be typical of a Liguria that no longer exists (typical even in the fact of his having spent a third of his life on the other side of the Atlantic).
However, I realize that these are sentimental factors whereas rationally I have always sought to look at things from the point of view of the most advanced standpoint of the world of productivity, the sectors of society which are most decisive for the history of humanity, whether these be in industrial Europe, America or in Russia. When I was younger this contradiction preoccupied me considerably: if I knew that the world that counted was the one that I have just described, why in creative terms did I have to remain bound to the Riviera which survives on a subsistence economy, caught between the false prosperity of tourism and an agriculture which is largely that of a depressed area? And yet, when I wrote stories set in the Riviera, the images came to me very clearly, precisely, whereas when I wrote about the industrial world everything turned out less focused, greyish. The fact is that we write well about what we have left behind, since it represents something finished (though later you discover it is not over at all).
You always have to start out from what you are. Sociological criticism could perform this concrete service instead of moving around in generic terms as it does: define the true essence of every writer from his own point of view, uncover his real social background which perhaps is in total contrast with appearances. In my case they could perhaps discover that deep down they will find the rural smallholder, an individualist, a hard worker, mean, hostile to the State and to the taxman, who, reacting against an agricultural economy which brings no returns, and to the remorse he feels for having left the country in the hands of tenants, proposes universal solutions to his crisis: Communism or the industrial world or the rootless life of globe-trotting intellectuals, or maybe just rediscovering on the page the harmony with nature that has been lost in the real world.
If you had to write a brief account of your political experiences, which points would you want to emphasize? Which friendships helped you become what you are? Did ideas or real people count more?
A few months ago, I was just back from America, there was that series of lectures in Turin on Fascism and anti-Fascism: for each one the Teatro Alfieri was packed, and in the middle of that crowd I recognized the faces of that little big world which makes up anti-Fascism, the people of the Resistance, back together again no matter what road they had taken in the meantime, and in addition very many young people. Well, that was wonderful: we are still here, and we still count; in fact shortly afterwards we had some proof of that.
Men always count more than ideas. For me ideas have always had eyes, nose, mouth, arms and legs. Political history for me is above all a history of human presences. Just when you least expect, you realize that Italy is full of wonderful people.
My generation was a fine generation, even if it has not done everything it could have. Certainly, for us, politics retained for years perhaps an exaggerated importance, whereas life is made up of so many things. But this passion for civic society provided our cultural development with some sinew: if we got interested in many different things it was for that reason. Even if I look around, in Europe, in America, at our contemporaries and those who are younger than us, I have to say that we were sharper. Among the young people who have grown up in Italy after us, the best of them know more than we did, but they are all more theoretical, their ideological passion derives from books; our first passion was action; and this does not mean being more superficial: quite the reverse.
As you can see, I am trying to give an overall outline, to delineate a continuity between the time when I was part of a political organization and now when I am more a ‘free-booter’. Because what counts is whatever is continuous, the positive element that is recognizable in every reality. My political ideas now? Perhaps I don’t have much of a sense of current questions, but I regard myself as an ideal citizen of a world based on an understanding between America and Russia. Of course, that means hoping that many things will change on both sides, it means counting on the new men who are certainly emerging on both sides. And China? If America and Russia can together solve the undeveloped world’s problems, the most painful routes will be avoided. There has been so much pain already. And Italy? And Europe? I don’t know, if we can think in terms that are not parochial but on a world scale (that is the least we c
an ask in this interplanetary era) we can be not passive pawns of the future but its real shapers.
[Interview with IC by Carlo Bo, L’Europeo, XVI, 35, 28 August 1960.]
Political Autobiography of a Young Man
I. A Childhood under Fascism
1) I was sixteen in 1939, so in replying to the question about the ideas I grew up with before the war, I have to beware of generic approximations, I have to try to reconstruct a network of images and emotions rather than ideas.
The danger for those writing autobiographical memoirs in a political key is that excessive weight is given to politics compared to the weight it really has in childhood and adolescence. I could begin by saying that the first memory of my life is that of a socialist being beaten up by Fascist lynch-squads, something which I think few among those born in 1923 can manage to remember; and indeed it is a memory which must probably refer to the last time Fascist squads used coshes, in 1926, after an attempt on Mussolini. The person attacked was Professor Gaspare Amoretti, an old Latin teacher (father of a Communist from the Ordine Nuovo group who later fell in Japan on a mission for the Third International), who at that time was living in the annexe of our villa at San Remo. I remember clearly that we were at dinner when the old professor came in with his face beaten up and bleeding, his bowtie all torn, asking for help.
But to make everything that you will see and hear in your life stem from your first childhood memory is a literary temptation. One’s perspectives in childhood and adolescence are different; disparate impressions and judgments are placed alongside each other without any logic; even for those who grow up in an environment which is open to opinion and information a line of judgment is formed only with the passage of time.
As a child listening to the adults’ discussions in our house, I always felt that it was taken for granted that in Italy everything was going wrong. And during adolescence I and my companions at school were almost all hostile to Fascism. But it is not at all inevitable that just because of this my road towards anti-Fascism was already marked out. At that time I was very far from seeing the situation in political terms, as a struggle of one ideology against another, and from working out perspectives towards a solution for the future. Seeing that politics is an object of contempt and obloquy in the eyes of the best people, the most spontaneous attitude for a young person is to think that it is an area that is irredeemably corrupt, and that one has to look for other values in life. The distance between judging Fascism negatively and having a political commitment to anti-Fascism was so great it could not be conceived of today.
However, now I have to beware of another error or habit typical of those who write autobiographical memoirs: that of tending to configure your own experience as the ‘typical’ experience of a particular generation and ambience, emphasizing the more common aspects and ignoring the more particular and personal ones. Unlike what I have done at other times, I would now like to turn the spotlight on those aspects which most depart from the ‘typical’ Italian experience, because I am convinced that one can gain more truth from the exception than from the rule.
I grew up in a little town which was rather different from the rest of Italy when I was a child: San Remo, which was at that time still populated by elderly English people, Russian grand dukes, eccentric and cosmopolitan types. And my own family was rather unusual both for San Remo and for the Italy of that time: my parents were no longer young, both scientists, lovers of nature, freethinkers, very different in personality from one another, and both opposed to the political climate of the country. My father, who was from San Remo, from a family that supported Mazzini and republican, anticlerical and masonic ideas, had been in his youth an anarchist, a follower of Kropotkin and then a Socialist Reformist; he had lived in Latin America for many years and had not been through the experience of the First World War; my mother, who was from Sardinia, from a secular family, had grown up in the religion of civic duty and science, had been a socialist in favour of intervention in the war in 1915 but with a tenacious faith in pacifism. When they came back to Italy after years overseas they found Fascism establishing its power and an Italy that was totally different and difficult to understand. My father tried in vain to put his skills and honesty at the service of the country, and to consider Fascism along the same lines as the Mexican revolutions he had lived through and with the accommodating, practical spirit of the old Ligurian reformist that he was; my mother, whose brother was one of the university professors who had signed Croce’s manifesto,50 was intransigent in her anti-Fascism. Both were cosmopolitan by vocation and experience and both had grown up under the general urge towards renovation of prewar socialism, and their sympathies were not so much with liberal democracy as with all the progressive movements that were out of the ordinary: Kemal Atatürk, Gandhi, the Russian Bolsheviks. Fascism fitted into this picture as one route among many, but a wrong route, led by ignorant and dishonest people. The critique of Fascism in my family, apart from attacking its violence, incompetence, greed, suppression of freedom of speech and aggression in foreign policy, was directed above all at its two cardinal sins: the alliance with the monarchy and the reconciliation with the Vatican.
Young children are instinctively conformist, so realizing that I belonged to a family that was unusual created a state of psychological tension with the prevailing environment. The thing which most distinguished my parents’ anti-conformism was their intransigence on the question of religion. At school they asked that I be excused from religious instruction and not ever have to attend Mass or other religious services. While I was at a Waldensian primary school or attending an English college as an external pupil, this fact did not cause me any problems: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and Russian Orthodox pupils were all mixed up together in varying proportions. At that time San Remo was a city with churches and priests of all denominations, as well as strange sects that were then fashionable such as Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophists, and I considered my family’s attitude as one of the many gradations of religious opinion I saw represented around me. However, when I went to the state high school, being exempt from religious classes in this climate of general conformism (Fascism was already in its second decade of power) exposed me to a situation of isolation and forced me at times to shut myself off in a kind of silent passive resistance towards my teachers and fellow-pupils. Sometimes the religious lesson was in between two other classes and I would wait in the corridor, causing misunderstandings with teachers and janitors passing by who thought I had been sent out as a punishment. What happened with new pupils was that they always thought I was Protestant because of my surname; I would deny this but was unable to reply to the next question: ‘So what are you then?’ The expression ‘freethinker’, said by a schoolboy, would make people laugh; ‘atheist’ was too strong a word for that age; so I refused to answer.
My mother delayed my enrolment in the Fascist scouts, the Balilla, as long as possible, firstly because she did not want me to learn how to handle weapons, but also because the meetings that were then held on Sunday mornings (before the Fascist Saturday was instituted) consisted mostly of a Mass in the scouts’ chapel. When I had to be enrolled as part of my school duties, she asked that I be excused from the Mass; this was impossible for disciplinary reasons, but my mother saw to it that the chaplain and the commander were aware that I was not a Catholic and that I should not be asked to perform any external acts of devotion in church.
In short, I often found myself in situations different from the others, looked on as though I were some strange animal. I do not think this harmed me: one gets used to persisting in one’s habits, to finding oneself isolated for good reasons, to putting up with the discomfort that this causes, to finding the right way to hold on to positions which are not shared by the majority. But above all I grew up tolerant of others’ opinions, particularly in the field of religion, remembering how irksome it was to hear myself mocked because I did not follow the majority’s beliefs. And at the same time I have remained totally d
evoid of that taste for anti-clericalism which is so common in those who are educated surrounded by priests.
I have insisted on setting down these memories because I see that now many non-believing friends let their children have a religious education ‘so as not to give them complexes’, ‘so that they don’t feel different from the others’. I believe that this behaviour displays a lack of courage which is totally damaging pedagogically. Why should a young child not begin to understand that you can face a small amount of discomfort in order to stay faithful to an idea? And in any case who said that young people should not have complexes? Complexes arise through a natural attrition with the reality that surrounds us, and when you have complexes you try to overcome them. Life is in fact nothing but this triumphing over one’s own complexes, without which the formation of a character and personality does not happen.
Of course I must not make things out to be more exciting than they were. My childhood experiences had nothing dramatic about them, I lived in a comfortable, serene world, I had an image of the world that was varied and rich in contrasting nuances, but no awareness of all-out conflicts. I had no notion of poverty; the only social problem I ever heard mentioned was that of the Ligurian smallholders, on whose behalf my father campaigned, those owners of minuscule pieces of land, tormented by taxes, by the price of chemical products, and the lack of roads. There were of course the poverty-stricken masses from other regions of Italy who were beginning to emigrate to the Riviera: the wage-earners who worked on our land and filed into my father’s study to be paid every Saturday for the week’s work were from the Abruzzi or the Veneto. But these were people from distant lands, and I could not imagine what poverty really meant. I did not find it easy to relate to working people; the familiarity and friendliness that my parents showed towards the poor always made me feel ill at ease.
Hermit in Paris Page 13
