Opinions

Truth and Fiction in Italy

There is in most contemporary Italian fiction a limpness, flaccidity—I hardly know what to call it—which at its least offensive expresses a feeble despair, and at its worst becomes a whine. It is not the expression of a rugged pessimism; there is nothing rugged about it. Rather, it reveals a lack of vitality, a thin-bloodedness, the spirit one is accustomed to think of as ‘womanish,’ though, as a matter of fact, the women writers of Italy appear less guilty in this respect than the men. Grazia Deledda and even Annie Vivanti show more virility than most of their confrères, and there is gusto in the slap-stick prose of Matilde Serao, despite its appalling sentimentality. But Marino Moretti, a fine and sensitive writer, is only too clear an exponent of the fault, Panzini himself often succumbs to it, and even the late Federico Tozzi, cut off by early death from what promised to be real achievement, was far from guiltless.

Clear as the fault appears to me, and arousing, as it does, an exasperated distaste, it is difficult for me to make it clear to any one else. This is because it is at bottom the result of an attitude of mind, a conventionally accepted attitude of mind, rather than anything more definite. It is easy to lay an accusing finger on the concomitants, the specifically annoying tricks and habits that go with it (more obviously, of course, in third-rate writers, such as Teresah or Luciano Zuccoli): the tender mournful contemplation of something small and helpless, the employment of pity for its own sweet sake, the abuse of diminutives (‘he took her poor, emaciated, little hand in his’), etc., but the thing itself, the spirit behind all this, remains elusive, and will remain so until we have got at its source.

Whatever this may turn out to be, the characteristic is doubly obnoxious: it is obnoxious not only in itself, but also because it grossly misrepresents Italian life and the Italian spirit. It is true that there is a vast deal of sentimentality loose in Italy, always readily on tap, as it were, but this national sentimentality is a hearty thing, a wasted by-product of exuberant life, like the sticky yellow foam churned up by a tumultuous sea; not thin-blooded, careful, and mauve-coloured, like that of the printed page.

Italy is overflowing with life, perhaps even lawless with it; for the race is too much alive, individual by individual, to permit of successful organization, still less of being standardized either in behaviour or thought. The foreigner who has come to know Italy will have encountered various national traits that displease him as conflicting too much with those of his own country, but nowhere in the whole peninsula will he have found the grey devitalized dullness of Anglo-Saxon suburbia or the poetic musical languor popularly ascribed to the Italian race—why, I have no idea, unless because Neapolitans frequently sing at night and because dolce far niente is the one Italian phrase with which all foreigners are acquainted. Misled in advance by a prolific and incredibly wayward literature, the foreigner, like a reversed Columbus, expects to find Cathay and instead discovers the New World. There are in Italians old, old traits that suddenly crop out at unexpected moments, there are roots that go down into an unfathomable past, but the spirit of the race is young, vivid, almost raw. Foreigners unacquainted with Italy were surprised by the phenomenon of Fascismo. No one with any knowledge of Italy can have been surprised either by Fascismo or by the sturdy opposition to it.

Nothing, in short, can be falser than the conception of Italy as a country of dreamers and idealists. On the contrary, the people, by and large, are matter-of-fact, hard-headed and practical; they like American bathrooms, central heating and the early operas of Verdi; I often wonder that no American business-man has had the acumen to open a branch five-and-ten-cent store in Italy. A full-blooded corkscrew at two lire, a hearty can-opener at one lira, would sell and sell and sell. Italians of my acquaintance fairly pore over the advertisements in the Saturday Evening Post; they would love the Sears-Roebuck catalogue.

Then, in the name of consistency, why this mournful emasculated prose?

Well, it is a long story. I think at bottom it goes back to the schools. At Harvard I went through a number of courses in English composition, in each of which I had to write a one-page theme every day and a three-page theme once a fortnight. It took me years to recover from the discipline, and I have an almost guilty feeling that even now when I have learned to write in my own way a Harvard professor would still cover my pages with red marks; but at least we were urged to write simply. Our rhetorical passages were ruthlessly stricken out; we were held down, even contemptuously, to a positive bareness of expression. ‘Say what you have to say, if anything, in as few words as possible’ was the message (only the word would never have been allowed) dinned into our ears. I still think it an excellent training.

In Italian schools, beginning with the most elementary, training in composition is diametrically the opposite. There is a model (and such a florid model!) for everything. Shall a sunset be described? (‘No!’ they would have said in an American school). Manzoni (who is never forgotten for a moment) has done this in just the right way on page 9007 of I Promessi Sposi. Base your description on his. Never, so far as I can learn, is the child told to describe, as well as he can, exactly and only what he sees. If Manzoni, however, were the only model, imitative Italian prose might be less rhetorical than it is and might contain some reflected vigour; but there are, to mention only two others, Silvio Pellico (who had a love affair in prison with a spider) and De Amicis, who wrote some tolerable books but who also wrote Cuore. Cuore is given to every child as soon as the unfortunate creature is able to read, and as soon as he is able to write he is taught to copy its sentiments and style. There are more, and more nauseating, tears shed in Cuore than in all the Elsie books put together. Compared with it, Immensee, which, I am told, no German can, or anyway could some years ago, read without weeping, is as stony as the dictionary. I know of no other book so obscene as Cuore. No, I withdraw that statement. There is one worse book. It was written by some Englishwoman, is called The Story of Pigling Bland, and is about a dear little pig who fell in love with a dear little girl-pig, and gave her peppermints, and watched over her when she fell asleep; but I do not think that it is used as a text-book in English schools.

There are models even for letters to be written by a child to its parents. These are the sentiments the child should have; this is the way they should be expressed. I know a charming and intelligent woman who has a daughter of eighteen—like most Italian young girls, almost indistinguishable from American girls of her generation: hard, chic, slangy, fast, but without ever losing her head, not an ounce of tenderness in her. ‘See what a delightful letter Elena has written me from her school,’ said the mother proudly to me one day. I read the letter, aghast. ‘Beloved Mamma... I think of you always, always... I dream of the hour when we shall be reunited and I can press you again to my heart.’

Given this methodical corruption of minors, it is not strange that the prose style of the average mature Italian and of Italian journalism should be hopelessly verbose and weighted with rhetorical emotional platitudes that do not express the genuine feelings of the writer. For example, boxing matches have become very popular in Italy of late, and there is little perceptible difference between the Italian crowd at one of these and the crowd at an American fight. There is the same doggy masculine smell, the same blue haze of smoke drifting across the glare of the arc-lights above the ring, the same fierce excitement—nothing, in short, that could possibly have come out of Cuore. Such was the audience at a recent match in Milan when Bruno Frattini, the Italian champion, was defeated on points by Ted Lewis. But the newspaper account in the Ambrosiano next day! ‘Could it be that Bruno, our Bruno, was defeated? For a moment we were silent, dazed. Our eyes were full of tears.’ I wish I had kept that reporter’s story. It was worth translating in full—only it would have demanded ten pages.

Here in this absurd instance, perhaps because it is so absurd, we somehow get a flash of insight into the origin of the problem. For even with a comment on school training I did not go deep enough. The real problem is to discover why mature, fairly intelligent Italians permit that kind of training to continue, and approve of its results. This, I think, is the answer: to an Italian life is pragmatic, art academic. The Italian takes life as it comes, with no theories about it, with no belief in its having a meaning; but for the printed word he has hard and fast rules. He does not think of art as an interpretation of life; he thinks of it as something quite separate. (But if you ask me why this should be true, I confess that I am beyond my depth and do not know—unless it is simply that the average Italian is too sceptical and matter-of-fact to believe any interpretation of life possible). Nowhere—not even in the America of ten years ago, where the majority of people struggled, as they must always struggle everywhere, to make a difficult living, but read sunny fairytales by Myrtle Reed and Eleanor Porter—nowhere have life and art been kept so distinct as they are still kept in Italy. It is grateful (especially to a writer) to discover that in Italy more esteem is felt for an author than for a millionaire, but it is saddening to discover, a little more gradually, that this is not because the author is held to know more about life than the millionaire, but that, instead, he is worshipped as the priest of an esoteric cult with a well-established ritual.

Here, however, it becomes necessary to point out a significant contrast between the Italian and the American attitude toward the arts. However far from considering them an interpretation of life, Italians have for the arts neither contempt nor kindly toleration, but a genuine reverent love. Literate Italians are passionately devoted to all the arts, and illiterate Italians to at least one—music. So that, in a sense, the arts do form an important part of virtually every Italian’s life—but a shut-off separate part. From this derives a tyranny over the arts, that could not possibly exist in America or England, where people do not feel strongly enough about them to desire to tyrannize over them. An American or an Englishman will listen timidly to music that he does not understand, or timidly read (or claim to have read) a book that he finds incomprehensible, or timidly and gravely walk through the halls of a picture show which, so far as he can see, reveals only insanity. For ‘people who know’ may presently announce that all these things are works of genius, and then where would he be if he had laughed at them or protested? And, anyway, what does it all matter? The Italian will throw aside the book with a curse, laugh with uproarious contempt at the pictures, and hiss the music into silence. He ‘knows what he likes.’ It is what he was brought up on; and that, and nothing else, is art. And it all matters to him very much indeed.

Now, intelligence averaging no higher in Italy than elsewhere, the result of this condition upon the arts is disastrous. It compels them to retain outworn forms that may be in themselves as good as newer forms, or even better, but that cannot be employed to-day for the fresh expression of emotion or thought. A deadly imitative conservatism crushes the arts in Italy. In painting hardly any influence later than that of the French Impressionists is apparent; in music almost none later than Debussy; in stage-setting and lighting none, positively none, later than Belasco. The staging of operas in the remodelled Scala is magnificent; the detail is elaborate and costly; the costumes are impeccable; real stars twinkle in a purple night-sky indistinguishable from that of Rapallo. But of the interesting experiments in non-realistic stage-setting that are being made in Germany, America, and to a lesser extent in France, there is no trace. There daren’t be. Just one such stage-set was attempted at the Scala last season—a timid one, at that; but the public would have none of it. Perhaps it is better for the arts not to have too many people care much about them, and undoubtedly it is better for the artists. Composers like Malipiero or painters like Ferrazzi must either be neglected or attain, and be content with, a reputation abroad; but they may get a wry satisfaction from the knowledge that if their work is good enough to endure until it ‘dates’ as something perfect out of a dead past, their pictures will then (but not until then) be hung in every gallery, and their music performed at every theatre, of their native land.

The tyranny over literature is not quite so great as that over music, for the obvious reason that a book is read in solitude by an individual, not performed before a very articulate audience, and also because the reading public is smaller than the opera public. Nevertheless, if small, it is of the same kind and only a little more alert to new impressions. It, too, knows what it wants and that this is art. The result is to weaken and emasculate literature. Not, of course, that a writer of integrity will deliberately seek to give the public what it wants, but he can hardly avoid being discouraged by the knowledge that it wants only a repetition of something that has already been done. Moreover, the writer is, after all, himself an Italian, with the Italian’s thorough early grounding in verbosity, rhetoric and sentimentality, and with his instinct to keep life and literature separate. He attempts, even desperately, to write about life, but somehow the attempt does not often succeed. The result is thin and tired. Some spark is lacking. The stuff does not ring true. It remains ‘literary.’

But have not writers, and other artists, in all countries had to struggle with difficulties, from which they have emerged more or less triumphantly? Surely English literature has sprung from a milieu hostile to all the arts, and is but the more vigorous for that? True, and so do they struggle in Italy; but it is as though they must start from farther back and overcome elementary handicaps that they should surely be spared. Even to nullify that persistent early training in opulent rhetoric and that in verbosity must demand heroic effort; yet most of them have conquered the former, and some the latter. It is a triumph that they do actually write freshly. But that attitude toward literature as a thing in itself is hard to overcome. And there are other dangers and difficulties.

For example, the literary clique. In Italian life the individual is strong, the organized group weak; which is a splendid and sane condition of affairs. In Italian literature, as in the other arts, the group flourishes disastrously and frequently submerges the individual. Let a man write a few books that reveal talent, and immediately a group forms about him, with a cult of its hero and a critical estimate of his work to which he will thereafter find himself attempting to conform, thus, hedged about by a wall of literary ideas, growing less and less capable of an individual interpretation of life itself. Or perhaps there are three or four men about whom the group forms, either because they resemble one another in thought or in manner of expression, or perhaps only because they happen to live in the same city. Then the result is even more harmful, since the various individual writers also react upon one another. Witness the young Florentine group—Soffici, Palazzeschi, Papini, etc.—all once writers of promise, all fallen into premature decay. Panzini has suffered perceptibly from this kind of thing; lesser writers have suffered even more. When G. A. Borgese was writing his first novel, Rubè, the reverent clique about him heralded the yet unfinished book as a masterpiece, the first genuine synthesis of—I forget what, but the word ‘synthesis’ must certainly have been used. Any one who has read Rubè is aware that it is very far from being a masterpiece. That is not Signor Borgese’s fault. What is his fault, however, and of great detriment to the novel, is his obvious determination throughout to make it a masterpiece.

Ah, well, cults exist in other countries than Italy. One recalls the well-known scene in Victor Hugo’s salon, where the Master sat on a kind of pontifical throne, and uttered occasional maxims to the worshippers grouped about his feet. ‘Je crois en Dieu,’ he announced once, after a long silence. Another and reverent silence followed. Then a woman spoke. ‘Chose étrange!’ she murmured. ‘Un dieu qui croit en Dieu.’

No enumeration of the handicaps under which an Italian writer must struggle would be complete without mention of the prolonged baneful influence on both prose and verse, but especially on prose, of D’Annunzio. D’Annunzio himself is what he is, and I have no intention of discussing here the merits and defects of his own important achievement; I am only glancing at the influence his work has for thirty years exerted on minor writers—an influence bad almost without qualification. It has led scores of writers away from simplicity, away from life (by which I do not mean only away from realism), into a deliberate tortured complexity, beneath which was nothing, a blank emptiness. Even to-day Italian prose has not shaken itself quite free from that appalling influence. It corrupts the work of Virgilio Brocchi oddly, since there is at bottom nothing ‘Dannunziano’ in its spirit, and it pervades that of Antonio Beltramelli, to mention only two contemporary novelists of some talent. It is greatly to the credit of Panzini that there is no trace of it in his work, though he has been subjected to it all his life, being of precisely D’Annunzio’s age.

(One firm exception must be made to all that I have said about the thinness and flaccidity of Italian prose. Side by side with literary prose, there has always existed in Italy a polemical prose which has never lacked vitality. To-day it is stronger than ever. It is, in fact, terrific in its vigour, insolence and scurrility. This is probably because it is not considered a form of art; so that in it people let themselves go, and express with unrestrained violence their fiercely partisan hatreds. At any rate, to find really living, breathing, Italian prose you must turn to-day to the polemical editorials of the press—the bitter stinging attacks on political adversaries that you will find in the Popolo d’Italia, the Giustizia, Cremona Nuova, and the Genoa Lavoro).1

Although I have enumerated a good many obstacles to the achievement of anything really significant in contemporary Italian fiction, I am still dissatisfied. Given sufficient strength, sufficient vitality, writers should have surmounted even these difficulties.

Given sufficient strength. Perhaps that is the real point. The men striving are not strong enough.

Poets come from wherever God put them, but, almost without exception, the prose writers of Italy spring from the bourgeoisie. From the ‘popolo,’ none; from the aristocracy, ‘Black’ and provincial (even when residing in Rome itself), occupied only with religion, the retention of its rights and the adequate marriage of its children, or from the cosmopolitan aristocracy, occupied only with diversions, there have come but one or two names. No, the writers come from the bourgeoisie. And the bourgeoisie, in England far stronger than any other class, is in Italy the weakest, the least full-blooded.

Despite the fact that my own intimate Italian friends and close acquaintances are perforce members of the middle and upper classes, it is of that vast third class, the ‘popolo,’ that I think first when I think of Italy. Pardon the foreign word. ‘The common people’ is too superior, ‘the People’ obscured by demagogic connotation. Also, before continuing, I must beg you to believe that I am not being sentimental, that I have no parlour belief in the Nobility of Labour, but that I base what I have to say on what I personally know (and I wish it might be more) of a great many individuals belonging to this class.

The virtues that make the ‘popolo’ in the main so lovable—cheerfulness, sturdy patience, kindliness, self-sacrifice, great generosity, ready active pity for suffering—are of course released through the difficult laborious existence the ‘popolo’ leads and has always led. Potential vices lie darkly awaiting their chance in the heart of every man. Not class, but only the circumstances of class prevent their unfolding. The second generation of a peasant family that has been promoted (if you can call it that) to the shop-keeping class is apt to be as harsh and greedy as any family of Sicilian absentee landlords. The vices so long crushed down have come into their own with a vengeance. No matter. Greed and selfishness may be less common in the Italian ‘popolo’ than elsewhere merely because there is scant nourishment for them in poverty, but that the virtues I have mentioned are so apparent there is a tribute to the race. Poverty can release them; it cannot create them.

The point is, however, that the virtues I have mentioned as roughly characteristic of the Italian ‘popolo’ are the warm-blooded virtues of life. A generous or a self-sacrificing man is more alive than a greedy or a selfish man. And life really seems to be richer, fuller and more exuberant in this class than in any other. There is nothing stolid or dull about these people. Their passions are strong, but not of the body alone; they flow over into the mind. An Anglo-Saxon day-labourer or a Finn or a Swede has his recurrent moments of terrific passion, sexual or other, but between times appears to relapse into a state of blank mental non-existence. This is, at least, the impression he makes on an outsider. Of course, behind his inarticulateness a broad silent stream of thought may be flowing; but, frankly, I doubt it. Nothing that he says when he does occasionally break his silence justifies the assumption. The Italian of a similar class is, if friendly toward you, immensely communicative; and I submit that if a person is communicative it is because he has something to communicate.

The Italian of the ‘popolo’ surely has a great deal. His mind is alert, his curiosity unbounded, and, best of all, his fancy exuberant. More often than not, he has a strong sense of humour. His mind is as robust as his body. And, though he interlards his conversation with proverbs (his share in the racial curse), it consists otherwise of vivid, unhackneyed, often magnificently ungrammatical turns of phrase, that convey freshly his own direct sensations.

Now this last is characteristic only of the ‘popolo.’ In polite conversation Italians of other classes mostly talk like books. That appalling education of theirs has been too much for them. Oh, not that there is any radical difference between them and the Italians of the ‘popolo’! The education has been too much for the latter also—when it exists. Such letters as I received during the war from slightly educated Italians of the ‘popolo’ at the front! Letters in the style of Manzoni, letters in the style of Cuore, letters whose rhetoric could not possibly bear any relation to the sights and sounds and emotions the writers were experiencing. I felt like crying: ‘Evviva l’analfabetismo!’

But how different it was when these same men talked of what they had experienced! Neither war-correspondence nor imaginative writing has ever given me the illusion of actual presence on the battlefield that I received from their words. They would describe, quite simply, some small homely fact, some unimportant episode, because it was what had struck them, and at once the whole scene would spring into sharp life. Nor was it always merely straight description. Sentiment and even character analysis were hidden underneath. Of the new raw officers rushed without sufficient training to the front after Caporetto, one soldier said kindly: ‘Poveretti! they didn’t even know the difference between the sound of an Austrian shell and an Italian.’ ‘When I shot I never aimed at any one. I didn’t want to kill,’ said another man (who had received the Bronze Medal for going out with two companions and capturing a machine-gun). ‘We didn’t like the shocktroops; they frightened us,’ said the same man. ‘They looked wild. They went out, half drunk, with their long knives in their teeth, and they never took any prisoners.’

My hope for Italian literature is that sooner or later it may come from the ‘popolo,’ and that it may come uncorrupted by the kind of education at present in vogue, and corrupted as little as possible by any education at all save that in life itself, which the ‘popolo’ already possesses. If such a revolution in literature ever does take place, it will be like that in the Middle Ages when writers forsook Latin for the vernacular. Nor does it seem to me improbable. The condition of the labouring class is considerably better than before the war; a little leisure may presently be achieved. And at the same time the old education is weakening, growing decrepit. Professors are dying out, or at any rate becoming scarcer, since their salaries are not high enough to support life in the social condition to which they are condemned. By its stiffening of standards the Riforma Gentile results in cutting down drastically the number of young men who can attend a university. And the salaries of teachers in the elementary schools are so inadequate to the present cost of living that the ranks must be filled from among the ‘popolo.’

Since the war the pace of life itself is swifter and fiercer than ever, while literature grows weaker, more anaemic. Presently the water will rise too high; surplus life will be too strong; with a rush it will flow over and submerge the old literature with a new rich wave.

It would be unfair not to add that for years the desire for such a renovation has been cherished by many Italians. What else but a reaction against the debility of Italian literature was, and still is, the whole Futurist movement? Consciously it was, among other things, a passionate protest against verbosity, rhetoric and sentimentalism; less consciously perhaps, with its demand for velocity, a protest against the separation of literature from life. And, though Futurism has not itself created any work of importance, it has had an important influence on Italian writers, an influence which perhaps did more than any other to overcome that of D’Annunzio. Even to-day Futurism is still to be reckoned with. But it, too, is a conscious movement, and thus tends, as Marinetti himself half admits, to become academic, to crystalline in the forms with which it reacted against other forms.

Once again, it is not to movements, but to individuals that one must look—to individuals who care nothing for groups and less than nothing for tendencies, either to follow or to combat them, but who carve out unaided their own conception of life. Of such was Giovanni Verga, who died a few years ago more than eighty years old, neglected and almost forgotten, but with a magnificent achievement behind him that throws a bleak pitiless light on the tawdriness of his contemporaries and successors. Now that he is dead, appreciation of what he accomplished is growing; people are reading him more. Imitation of Verga will not be Verga; you cannot create a race of giants without giant blood; but it cannot be quite profitless to turn at last to an author who built literature out of life.