Artists of the Right

by Kerry Bolton

  The Futurist Party

  In 1918, Marinetti began directing his attention to a new postwar Italy. He published a manifesto announcing the Futurist Political Party, the name of which, interestingly, was the Fasci Politici Futuristi. The manifesto, an elaboration of Marinetti’s Futurist Political Manifesto of 1913, called for “revolutionary nationalism” for both imperialism and social revolution. “We must carry our war to total victory.”

  Demands of the manifesto included the eight hour day and equal pay for women, the nationalization and redistribution of land to veterans; heavy taxes on acquired and inherited wealth; the gradual abolition of marriage through easy divorce; a strong Italy freed from nostalgia, tourists, and priests; and the industrialization and modernization of “moribund cities” that live as tourist centers. A corporatist policy called for the abolition of parliament and its replacement with a technical government of 30 or 40 young directors elected form the trade associations.[110]

  The Futurist party concentrated its propaganda on the soldiers[111] and recruited many war veterans of the elite Arditi (daredevils), the black-shirted shock troops of the army who would charge into battle stripped to the waist, a grenade in each hand and a dagger between their teeth. While the program was too extreme for popular appeal, it did win over many of the Arditi veterans,[112] who became the basis of a Futurist political movement. In 1919 the Arditi veteran and Futurist, Mario Carli, founded the Arditi Association, with Roma Futurist as its organ, and the association soon had 10,000 members.[113]

  In December 1919, the Futurists revived the “Fasci” or “groups,” which had been organized in 1914 and 1915 to campaign for war intervention.[114] From these groups, the Fascists eventually emerged.

  Futurists & Fascists

  The first joint post-war action between Mussolini and Marinetti took place in 1919 when a Socialist Party rally was disrupted in Milan, where the Socialist Leonida Bissolati was trying to advocate a program of Italian renunciation of claims to territories of mainly Italian-speakers under foreign sovereignty. Jensen states that this was “the first planned political violence in post-war Italy.”[115]

  That year Mussolini founded his own Fasci di Combattimento in Milan with the support of Marinetti and the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti. The Futurists and the Arditi comprised the core of the Fascist leadership. The first Fascist manifesto was based on that of Marinetti’s Futurist party.

  In April, against the wishes of Mussolini who thought the action premature, Marinetti led Fascists, Futurists, and Arditi against a mass Socialist Party demonstration. Marinetti waded in with his fists, but intervened to save a socialist from being severely beaten by Arditi. (To place the post-war situation in perspective, the Socialists had regularly beaten, abused, and even killed returning war veterans.) The Fascists and Futurists then proceeded to the offices of the Socialist Party paper Avanti!, which they sacked and burned.[116]

  Marinetti stood as a Fascist candidate in the 1919 elections in Milan and persuaded Arturo Toscanini to do so. The result was poor.[117]

  While the foundation of the Fascist party had been the Futurist-led Arditi veterans, the extreme rejection of tradition by the Futurists make for an uneasy alliance with the Fascists, despite their doctrinal foundation of dialectical synthesis. It is clear that Marinetti did not believe in any such synthesis, which he would surely have regarded as a compromise with “pastism.”

  When the Fascist Congress of 1920 refused to support the Futurist demand to exile the King and the Pope, Marinetti and other Futurists resigned from the Fascist party. Marinetti held that the Fascist party was compromising with conservatism and the bourgeoisie. He was also critical of the Fascist concentration on anti-socialist agitation and its opposition to strikes.

  Certain Futurist factions realigned themselves specifically with the extreme Left. In 1922, there were several Futurist exhibitions and performances in Turin organized by the Communist cultural association, Proletkult, which also arranged a lecture by Marinetti to explain the doctrine of Futurism. However, despite the pro-Futurist sentiments of Soviet education commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Leninists soon rejected Futurism, and Futurist elements were purged from the Communist Party.[118]

  Futurism & the Fascist Regime

  When the Fascists assumed power in 1922, Marinetti, like D’Annunzio, was critically supportive of the regime. Marinetti considered: “The coming to power of Fascism represent[s] the realization of the minimum Futurist program.”[119] He alluded to the role Futurists played in founding the Arditi veterans associations and in being among the first members of the Fasci di combattimento.

  Of Mussolini the statesman, Marinetti wrote: “Prophets and harbingers of the great Italy of today, we Futurists are happy to salute in the Prime Minister, not yet 40, a marvelous Futurist temperament.”

  In 1923, Marinetti began a rapprochement with the Fascists, Mussolini now having assumed the Premiership of Italy. On May 1, 1923, Marinetti’s manifesto “Italian Empire” reminded Mussolini of the Futurist agitation for Italy’s imperial revival, and urged Mussolini to reject any alliance with conservatives, monarchists, clerics, or socialists.[120]

  That year he also presented to Mussolini his manifesto “The Artistic Rights Promoted by Italian Futurists.”[121] Here he rejected the Bolshevik alignment of the Futurists in the USSR. He pointed to the Futurist sentiments that had been expressed by Mussolini in speeches, alluding to Fascism being a “government of speed, curtailing everything that represents stagnation in the national life.” Under Mussolini’s leadership, writes Marinetti:

  Fascism has rejuvenated Italy. It is now his duty to help us overhaul the artistic establishment. . . . The political revolution must sustain the artistic revolutions Marinetti was among the Congress of Fascist Intellectuals who in 1923 approved the measures taken by the regime to restore order by curtailing certain constitutional liberties amidst increasing chaos caused by both out-of-control radical Fascist squadristi and anti-Fascists.

  At the 1924 Futurist Congress, the delegates upheld Marinetti’s declaration:

  The Italian Futurists . . . more than ever devoted to ideas and art, far removed from politics, say to their old comrade Benito Mussolini: “Free yourself from parliament with one necessary and violent stroke. Restore to Fascism and Italy the marvelous, disinterested, bold, anti-socialist, anti-clerical, anti-monarchical diciannovista spirit . . . Refuse to let [monarchy] suffocate the greatest, most brilliant and just Italy of tomorrow. . . . Quell the clerical opposition . . . with a steely and dynamic aristocracy of thought . . .[122]

  In 1929, Marinetti accepted election to the Italian Academy, considering it important that “Futurism be represented.” He was also elected secretary of the Fascist Writer’s Union and as such was the official representative for Fascist culture.[123] Futurism became a part of Fascist cultural exhibitions and was utilized in the propaganda art of the regime. During the 1930s in particular, Fascist cultural expression drifted away from tradition and towards Futurism, with the Fascist emphasis on technology and modernization. Mussolini had already in 1926 defined the creation of a “Fascist art” that would be based on a synthesis culturally as it was politically: “traditionalistic and at the same time modern.”[124] However, Futurism never became the official “state art” of the Fascist regime. Roger Griffin states: “In stark contrast to the Third Reich, Fascist Italy accommodated various shades of modernism (including the international movement, Futurism, and abstraction) alongside neo-classical or openly anti-modernist ones.”[125]

  Of the modernist movements other than Futurism, Novecento (Twentieth Century) seems to have been the most significant. Novecento celebrated the dynamism of modern city life and developed a neo-classical architecture.[126] On the other side, there were those prominent Fascists who pursued a more familiar Rightist position in opposing aesthetic modernism as internationalistic, bastardized, foreign, “a racket manipu
lated by Jewish bankers, pederasts, war-profiteers, brothel keepers,” which if adopted would corrupt the Italian race—as Mino Maccari, editor of Il Selvaggio, put it, with a specific reference to Novecento.[127]

  Nonetheless, Futurism retained its position among the other aesthetic schools, modernist and traditional, and Marinetti himself remained faithful to Mussolini to the bitter end.

  In 1943, with the Allies invading Italy, the Fascist Grand Council deposed Mussolini and surrendered to the occupation forces. The Fascist faithful established a last stand in the north named the Italian Social Republic, or the Republic of Salò.

  With a new idealism, even former Communist[128] and liberal leaders were drawn to the Republic. The Manifesto of Verona was drafted, restoring various liberties, and championing labor against plutocracy within the vision of a united Europe.[129]

  Marinetti continued to be honored by the Social Republic. He died in 1944.

  W. B. Yeats

  WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1865–1939), the Irish poet, leader of the Irish literary renaissance, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923, was among the militants in what Julius Evola called “the revolt against the modern world.”[130]

  The rise of industrialism and capitalism during the nineteenth century brought with it social dislocation, the rise of commercial interests, and the creation of an urban proletariat on the ruins of rural life. Smashed asunder were the traditional organic bonds of family and village, rootedness to the earth through generations of one’s forebears and offspring, and attunement to the cycles of nature. With the ascendancy of materialism came the economic doctrines of free market capitalism and Marxism and the new belief in rationalism and science over faith, the mysteries of the cosmos, and the traditional religions. The forces of money had defeated everything of the spirit. As Oswald Spengler explained in Decline of the West, Western Civilization had entered its end phase.[131] Such forces had been let loose as long ago as the English Revolution of Cromwell and again by the French Revolution.

  There was, however, a reaction to this predicament. The old conservatives had not been up to the task. The spiritual and cultural reaction came from the artists, poets, and writers who reach beyond the material and draw their inspiration from the wellsprings of what C. G. Jung identified as the collective unconscious. This reaction included not only the political and the cultural but also a spiritual revival expressed in an interest in the metaphysical.

  Despite his English and Protestant background, Yeats was involved in the Young Ireland movement, much of his poetry celebrating the Irish rebellion and its heroes.[132]

  Yeats wrote of his return to England in 1887 and how the drab modernity of London impressed upon his aesthetic sense the nature of the crisis that was unfolding for civilization:

  I could not understand where the charm had gone that I had felt, when as a school-boy of twelve or thirteen, I had played among the unfinished houses, once leaving the marks of my two hands, blacked by a fall among some paint, upon a white balustrade. Sometimes I thought it was because these were real houses, while my play had been among toy-houses some day to be inhabited by imaginary people full of the happiness that one can see in picture books. I was in all things Pre-Raphaelite.

  . . . I remember feeling disappointed because the co-operative stores, with their little seventeenth century panes, were so like any common shop; and because the public house, called “The Tabard” after Chaucer’s Inn, was so plainly a common public house; and because the great sign of a trumpeter designed by Rooke, the Pre-Raphaelite artist, had been freshened by some inferior hand.[133]

  As a youngster, Yeats had been introduced by his father John, himself a Pre-Raphaelite artist, to the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite school, whose romantic imagery then stood as a rebellion against the encroachments of modernism and industrialism. Having lived in England as a child twenty years before, Yeats was now struck by how much had radically changed under the impress of “progress.” The modern era had even impacted upon the aesthetic of Yeats’ own family, writing of how his father now made his living, and also alluding to the changes being wrought by modernism in art:

  It was a perpetual bewilderment that my father, who had begun life as a Pre-Raphaelite painter, now painted portraits of the first comer, children selling newspapers, or a consumptive girl with a basket of fish upon her head, and that when, moved perhaps by memory of his youth, he chose some theme from poetic tradition, he would soon weary and leave it unfinished. I had seen the change coming bit by bit and its defence elaborated by young men fresh from the Paris art-schools. “We must paint what is in front of us,” or “A man must be of his own time,” they would say, and if I spoke of Blake or Rossetti they would point out his bad drawing and tell me to admire Carolus-Duran and Bastien-Lepage. Then, too, they were very ignorant men; they read nothing, for nothing mattered but “Knowing how to paint,” being in reaction against a generation that seemed to have wasted its time upon so many things.[134]

  Yeats at that time could still see promise in the youth, in a romantic rebellion against modernism, difficult for us to understand now, when the youthful “rebellion” (sic) of our own time transpired to be the highly bogus hippies and “New Left,” and then the present generation of consumers. But at that time Yeats could still say of the youth:

  I thought myself alone in hating these young men,[135] now indeed getting towards middle life, their contempt for the past, their monopoly of the future, but in a few months I was to discover others of my own age, who thought as I did, for it is not true that youth looks before it with the mechanical gaze of a well-drilled soldier. Its quarrel is not with the past, but with the present, where its elders are so obviously powerful, and no cause seems lost if it seems to threaten that power. Does cultivated youth ever really love the future, where the eye can discover no persecuted Royalty hidden among oak leaves, though from it certainly does come so much proletarian rhetoric?[136]

  He had maintained a religious outlook against materialism, rationalism, and the worship of science and “progress”:

  I had made a new religion, almost an infallible church, out of poetic tradition: a fardel of stories, and of personages, and of emotions, a bundle of images and of masks passed on from generation to generation by poets & painters with some help from philosophers and theologians. I wished for a world where I could discover this tradition perpetually, and not in pictures and in poems only, but in tiles round the chimney-piece and in the hangings that kept out the draught. I had even created a dogma: “Because those imaginary people are created out of the deepest instinct of man, to be his measure and his norm, whatever I can imagine those mouths speaking may be the nearest I can go to truth.” When I listened they seemed always to speak of one thing only: they, their loves, every incident of their lives, were steeped in the supernatural.[137]

  It was against this background of resistance to the modern world that Yeats, having already been acquainted with Theosophy in Dublin, sought out Helena Blavatsky who had recently come to England, a woman with whom he was impressed as having a vast knowledge of what is called the “Ageless Wisdom” or “Perennial Tradition.”[138]

  For Blavatsky’s “hidden masters”[139] Yeats provides a relatively plausible explanation, and one that might be as readily accepted by adherents to the theory of the Collective Unconscious and archetypes postulated by Jung:

  I thought that her masters were imaginary forms created by suggestion, but whether that suggestion came from Madame Blavatsky’s own mind or from some mind, perhaps at a great distance, I did not know; and I believed that these forms could pass from Madame Blavatsky’s mind to the minds of others, and even acquire external reality, and that it was even possible that they talked and wrote. They were born in the imagination, where Blake had declared that all men live after death, and where “every man is king or priest in his own house.”[140]

  It was around this time that
Yeats happened to meet MacGregor Mathers, an author and a student of the occult, at the British Museum Reading Room, and to begin studies of occultism under his guidance, writing: “and it was through him mainly that I began certain studies and experiences that were to convince me that images well up before the mind’s eye from a deeper source than conscious or subconscious memory.”[141]

  Mathers was a co-founder and head of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the primary organization around which there was an occult revival. Yeats was initiated in 1890, and was within a few years an Adept in its governing body, the “Second Order.”[142]

  For Yeats the mystical was the basis of both his poetry and his political ideas. He was particularly interested in the Irish mystical tradition and folklore. He saw the peasantry and rural values as being necessary to revive against the onslaught of materialism. He aimed to found an Irish Hermetic Order, an “Order of Celtic Mysteries,” as he aimed to call it, replacing the alien Egyptian gods of Golden Dawn ritual with the Irish gods and heroes.[143]