Hermit in Paris (13 page)

2) The summer in which I began to enjoy my youth, society, girls, books, was 1938: it ended with Chamberlain and Hitler and Mussolini in Munich. The Riviera’s
belle époque
was over. There was a year of tension, then the war on the Maginot Line, then the collapse of France, Italy joining in the war, and the dark years of death and disasters. I do not think that my memories can be very different from those of the average contemporary of mine: neither as regards our anxiety for the events of the war, nor as regards our reading and our discussions of that time.

I would like to flag here an environmental change which took place around me and was not without consequences. With the war, San Remo stopped being the cosmopolitan crossroads that it had been for half a century (stopped for ever: in the post-war period it became part of the suburb of Milan–Turin) and what came back to the fore were its characteristics as an old Ligurian provincial town. Imperceptibly this was also a change of horizons. It came naturally to me to immerse myself in this provincial atmosphere, which for me and my contemporaries, who almost all belonged to the old middle-class families of the town, the children of upright anti-Fascist or at least non-Fascist professionals, acted as a defence against the world around us, a world by now dominated by corruption and madness. As for my own family, what counted now for me was not so much their exotic experiences as my father’s old heritage of dialect, rooted as it was in places and property. This was a kind of local ethics, which orientated our choices and friendships and was made up of diffidence and scornful superiority for everything that was beyond the range of our crude and ironic dialect, our brusque common sense.

In 1941 I had to enrol in university. I chose the Agriculture Faculty, concealing my literary ambitions even from my best friends, almost concealing them from myself. A few months spent in Turin, reluctantly attending the university, gave me the mistaken notion that city people thought about nothing besides supporting either Torino or Juventus or supporting one of the two radio orchestras, and this confirmed my enclosure in my provincial shell.

So we grew up jealously guarding a cult of individuality which we thought was exclusive to ourselves, despising the youth of the big cities whom we considered a spineless lot; we were ‘hard guys’ from the provinces, hunters, snooker-players, show-offs, proud of our lack of intellectual sophistication, contemptuous of any patriotic or military rhetoric, coarse in our speech, regulars in the brothels, dismissive of any romantic sentiment and desperately devoid of women. Now I realize that what I was constructing was a shell in which I intended to live immune from every contagion in a world which my pessimism led me to imagine would be dominated forever by Fascism and Nazism. It was a form of refuge in an obstinate and reductive morality, but which ran the risk of exacting a high price: refusal to participate in the course of history, in the debate on general ideas, areas which I had given up on as lost for ever, in enemy hands. So we accepted, more through lack of experience than lack of courage, external forms of Fascist discipline which were imposed on us, just so as not to get into trouble, whereas I never became involved – again because of this kind of contemptuous refusal to participate – in the political discussions which I nevertheless knew were happening in the Fascist University Youth (GUF) movement, even in the nearby provincial capital. (And this was wrong, because through that kind of environment I would have entered into contact earlier with the young militants of the anti-Fascist organizations and I would not have come to the Resistance unprepared.)

But this enclosed attitude (which nowadays we could define as ‘political indifference’, by analogy with the attitude that prevailed after the war in those on the opposite side) did not last long, as it soon came into conflict with everything that was in the air. And in any case this phase of provincial isolationism was never total. For instance, one of the school friends I was closest to was a boy from the South who had come from Rome, Eugenio Scalfari.
⁵²
By now Eugenio was at the University of Rome and would come back to San Remo in the holidays: it could be said that my ‘political’ life began with my discussions with Scalfari who at first belonged to the fringe groups of the Fascist University Youth, but then was expelled from the GUF, and became involved with groups that had very confused ideologies at the time. Once he wrote to me asking me to join a party that was being formed: the name they proposed was ‘the aristocratic-social party’. So, gradually, through the letters and the summer discussions with Eugenio I found myself following the reawakening of clandestine anti-Fascism and developing a sense of direction in my reading: ‘Read Huizinga, Montale, Vittorini, Pisacane’; the new publications that came out in those years marked so many stages in the disordered literary-ethical education we had.

We also talked a lot about science, cosmology, the fundamentals of knowledge: Eddington, Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein. Our provincial town was in those days full of unusual cases of individual cultural advances: a young man from San Remo, who was a fanatic for English and American culture, managed in the middle of the war to acquire an at that time legendary knowledge in epistemology, psychoanalysis and jazz and we listened to him as though he were some sort of oracle. One summer day, Eugenio Scalfari and I created an entire philosophical system: the philosophy of the
élan vital
. The next day we discovered that it had already been invented by Bergson.

At that time I was writing short tales or apologues with a vaguely political (anarchoid-pessimistic) message. I would send them to Scalfari in Rome who managed to have one of them published in the GUF’s broadsheet: it seems it caused a few problems but nobody knew who I was. At that time my political ideas and my writings were oriented towards an anarchism that was not bolstered by any ideological underpinning. In the summer of 1943, after the fall of Mussolini on the 25
^th
of July, we found a common platform with Scalfari and other friends, calling ourselves ‘liberals’ (a major influence here was the reading of De Ruggiero’s
Storia del liberalismo
), which was something as vague as my anarchism. Sitting around in a circle on a huge flat stone in the middle of a stream near our land we met to found the MUL (University Liberal Movement). Politics was still a game, but not for long. They were days of frenzy, subsequently known as the ‘45 days’. The Communists came back from exile; we plied them with questions, requests, discussions, objections.

Then came [the armistice of ] the 8
^th
of September. Eugenio went back to Rome. After a few months I joined the undercover Communist organization.

3) On the 25
^th
of July I had been disillusioned and offended that a historical tragedy such as Fascism should finish with an act of routine administration like a motion of the Grand Council. I was dreaming of the revolution, the rebirth of Italy in the struggle. After the 8
^th
of September this dream became reality: and I had to learn how difficult it is to live out and live up to one’s dreams.

My choice of Communism was not at all dependent on ideological motivations. I felt the necessity to start with a clean sheet, so I had defined myself as an anarchist. As for the Soviet Union, I had the full array of the usual objections and diffidence, but I was also influenced by the fact that my parents had always been unswervingly pro-Soviet. But above all I felt that at that juncture what counted was action, and the Communists were the most active and organized force. When I learnt that the main partisan leader in our area, the young doctor Felice Cascione, who was a Communist, had fallen fighting against the Germans at Monte Alto in February 1944, I asked a Communist friend if I could join the party.

I was immediately put in touch with comrades who were workers, and had the job of organizing students in the Youth Front, and one of the things I wrote was cyclostyled and sent round secretly. (It was one of those semi-humorous apologues, like many I had written and would continue to write, and it concerned the anarchist-type objections which conditioned my support for Communism: whether the army, police, bureaucracy would survive into a future world; unfortunately I have not kept a copy, but I always hope I’ll find an old comrade who has.)

We were in the most peripheral fringe of the chequer-board of the Italian Resistance, devoid of natural resources, of Allied help, of authoritative political leadership; but this was one of the most fierce and ruthless trouble-spots for the whole twenty months, and it was one of the areas that had the highest casualty rate. It has always been difficult for me to recount in first person my memories of the partisan war. I could do it in several narrative keys, all of them equally truthful: from the re-evocation of the various emotions in play, the risks, anxieties, decisions, deaths, to an emphasis on the heroic–comic narration of the uncertainties, mistakes, blunders, misadventures which befell a young middle-class lad, who was politically unprepared, with no real experience of life, and who had lived at home with his family until then.

I cannot omit to record here (especially as this person has already appeared in these notes) the role my mother played in my experience of those months: she was an example of tenacity and courage in a Resistance which she saw as being one with natural justice and family virtues, exhorting her two sons to join the armed struggle, and behaving with dignity and firmness before the SS and the Fascist militia, and in her long detention as a hostage, not least when the blackshirts three times pretended to shoot my father in front of her eyes. The historical events which mothers take part in acquire the greatness and invincibility of natural phenomena.

But here I am meant only to trace the history of my political ideas at the time of the Resistance. And I would distinguish two attitudes which were both present in me and in the reality surrounding me: one was the Resistance as a highly legal act against Fascist subversion and violence; the other was the Resistance as a revolutionary and subversive act, as something passionately identified with the rebellion of the eternally oppressed and outlawed. I was alternately sensitive to one or other of these attitudes, depending on the events in which I found myself involved and on the harshness of the struggle, and on the people whom I found myself close to: the friends of my usual middle-class anti-Fascist environment, or a completely new stratum of society, which was more sub-proletariat than working-class, which was my major discovery about humanity, because up until then I had always thought of anti-Fascism as a tendency among cultured élites, not amongst the poor masses.

Communism too was these two attitudes together: depending on the psychological situation I was in, the unified legalistic party line, and Togliatti’s speeches which I happened to read in cyclostyled sheets, sometimes seemed the only word of calm wisdom amid the general extremism, at others they seemed something incomprehensible and remote, beyond the reality of blood and fury in which we were immersed.

After the Liberation, the first Marxist theoretical text I read was Lenin’s
State and Revolution
, and the prospect of the ‘withering away of the State’ was enough to absorb my originally anarchist, anti-State and anti-centralizing aspirations into the ideology of Communism. This is where the prehistory of my ideas ends, and the conscious history begins, at the same time as my participation in post-war political life, which for me took place mostly within the workers’ movement in Turin, and in tandem with my participation in the world of literature. In order to say something new about my subsequent experience (which was articulated above all in the works I published and in my public activity on behalf of the party) I should have to go down deeper, beyond the limits of time and space at my disposal. There will be plenty of opportunity to continue the account or to start it again from scratch. One sees one’s past more and more clearly as time goes by.

4) In defining my youthful ideas I used the terms anarchism and Communism. The first stands for the need for the truth about life to be developed in all its richness, over and above the deadening effect imposed on it by institutions. The second represents the need for the world’s richness not to be wasted but organized and made to bear fruit according to reason in the interests of all men living and to come.

The first term also means being ready to break the values that have become consolidated up until now, and that bear the mark of injustice, and to start again from scratch. The second also means being ready to run risks involved in the use of force and authority in order to reach a more rational stage in the shortest time possible.

These two terms or orders of needs and risks have been to varying degrees co-present in my way of considering political ideas and actions, in the years when I was part of the Communist party, just as they were before that and as they have remained since. Placing an emphasis on one or other of the two elements, or one or other of the two definitions I have given of each, has been the way in which I followed the historic experiences of these years.

Today my main concern is to see that the positive definition of the two terms, the one I gave first, can come true by paying the lowest possible of the costs I outlined in the second. The problems that are now troubling the world seem to me to be contained in this crux.

II. The Generation that Lived through Difficult Times

1) and 2) For those who were sixteen at the outbreak of the war and twenty at the armistice of 8 September 1943, the reply to the first two questions in the survey cannot involve a genuine exposition of ideas but rather a series of memories of childhood and adolescence, selected according to the way they impinged upon what was only a potential political awareness. This was what I tried to do in the replies published in
Il Paradosso
, 5:23–24, but the more I think about it the less satisfied I am with that lyrical–moralistic account of my ‘prehistory’. Political development proper begins when will, choice, reasoning and action come into play: that is to say, it is already a part of adult life. Consequently, in republishing this survey in book form, I think it is more useful to develop my replies to questions 3 and 4, which in the journal I had merely sketched out; and for questions 1 and 2 just to summarize what I had written then.

Before the war, I can speak not so much of a set of ideas as a conditioning – by my family, geography, the society we moved in and also my own psychology – which led me spontaneously to share anti-Fascist, anti-Nazi, anti-Franco, anti-war and antiracist opinions. This conditioning and these opinions would not have been enough on their own to make me commit myself to the political struggle. Between a negative judgment of Fascism and active anti-Fascist commitment there was a distance then which perhaps today we are unable to appreciate. When you see that politics is an object of obloquy and ridicule in the eyes of the best people around you, the most spontaneous attitude for a young person is to conclude that it is a field that is irredeemably corrupt, something you must avoid, and that you must look for other values in life.

It was then that another form of conditioning entered into play: historical conditioning. The war quickly became the daily backdrop to our lives, the only object of our thoughts. We found ourselves immersed in politics, or rather in history, even without any choice of will. What did the outcome of that all-out conflict that bathed Europe in blood mean for the future of the world and for the future of each one of us? And how ought each one of us to behave in those events that were so far beyond the scale of our will power? What is the role of the individual in history? And does history have any sense? And does the concept of ‘progress’ still have any meaning?

These were the questions that we could not but ask ourselves: and that was how I developed the attitude I have never lost, of casting every problem as an historical problem, or at least to winkle out of each problem the historical kernel. If the term ‘generation’ has a meaning, ours could be characterized by this special sensitivity to history as a personal experience; and this applies particularly to Italy, and also more or less to all the countries where there was a rupture caused by the war and the Resistance.

Our experience of history was different from that of preceding generations, and it was in implicit or explicit polemic with them; and reasons for polemics were not hard to find: if there was ever a young generation able to put their parents in the dock, that was us, and this is always a fortunate position. However, it was not a total rupture: we had to find among our parents’ ideas those that we could hold on to in order to begin again from scratch, those which they had not been able to or were not in time to turn into action. Consequently ours was not a nihilistic or iconoclastic generation or a generation of ‘angry young men’: on the contrary, we were precociously endowed with that sense of historical continuity which turns the real revolutionary into the only kind of ‘conservative’ possible, namely he who, in the general catastrophe of human affairs when they are left to biological impulses, knows how to choose what needs to be saved and defended and developed and made to bear fruit.

Alongside the problem of our participation in historical events, I would like to mention another one that was fundamental in our experience: the problem of the means which history – and therefore we ourselves – must use.

For many of us, right from boyhood, rejecting the Fascist mentality meant above all repudiating weapons and violence; so the involvement in the armed partisan struggle meant above all overcoming powerful psychological blocks within us. I had grown up with a mentality which could more easily have led me to become a conscientious objector than a partisan; and yet all of a sudden I found myself in the middle of the most bloody fighting. However – as was said by the man who first defined this position of commitment for us, and who was first to pay for it with his life – ‘this most recent generation has no time to develop inner dramas: it has found a perfectly constructed external drama’. The tragedy of our country and the ferocity of our enemies increased as the settling of scores approached; the logic of the Resistance was the very logic of our urge towards life.

One could have fallen, as a reaction, into extremism, because it seemed to us that there could never be satisfactory revenge for so many outrages; or, in order to discipline this emotional impulse, fall into a cold politicized legalism.

But from all these components fused together into one single burning vitality, what emerged was the partisan spirit, that is to say that ability to overcome dangers and difficulties on impulse, a mixture of warlike pride and self-irony as regards that very warlike pride, a sense of being the real incarnation of legal authority and self-irony regarding the situation in which we found ourselves incarnating it, a manner that was sometimes boastful and truculent but always animated by generosity, an anxiety to make every noble cause our own. At a distance of so many years, I have to say that this spirit, which allowed the partisans to perform the marvellous deeds they did, remains even today a human attitude that is without peer, for moving in the hostile reality of the world.

3) At the Liberation I naturally found myself channelled into active politics, following on from the excitement of the Resistance. Having ‘been a partisan’ seemed to me as it did to many other young people an irrevocable event in our lives, not a temporary condition like ‘military service’. From that point on we saw our civilian life as a continuation of the partisan struggle by other means; the military defeat of Fascism was only the premise; the Italy for which we had fought still existed only in theory; we had to turn it into a reality on so many levels. Whatever activity we wanted to undertake in social and economic life, it seemed natural to us that it should be integrated with participation in political life, that it should derive its meaning from that.

After the Liberation I confirmed my membership of the Communist party, which I had joined during the Resistance primarily to participate in the fight against the Germans and Fascists in the most active and organized units, and the ones that had the most convincing political line.

Communism represented what were (and basically will remain) the two poles of political attraction between which I have oscillated. On one side our rejection of the society which had produced Fascism had led us to dream of a revolution which would start with a clean slate, and build on its own the basic instruments of government, and, triumphing over the inevitable trail of mistakes and excesses that accompanies every revolution, would manage to form a society which was the antithesis of bourgeois society (it was the image of the October Revolution that we had in our heads, that is to say much more a starting point than an end point). On the other hand, we aspired to a civilization that was the most modern and progressive and complex from a political, social, economic, cultural point of view, with a ruling class that was highly qualified, in other words with culture inserted at every level of leadership in politics and productivity. (But maybe we formed this image later than 1945 and now I am backdating it arbitrarily? No, it was already alive then, and was inspired not only by a certain Western progressive climate – Roosevelt’s New Deal, the British Fabian Society – but also by aspects of the Soviet world.)

But for those of us who were members then, Communism was not only a cluster of political aspirations: it was also the fusion of these with our cultural and literary aspirations. I remember when, in my provincial city, the first copies of
l’Unità
arrived after the Liberation. I opened the Milan edition: its deputy editor was Elio Vittorini. I opened the Turin edition: Cesare Pavese was writing on the cultural page. As luck would have it, these were my two favourite Italian writers, about whom I knew nothing up until then except two of their books and some of their translations. And now I discovered that they were in the field that I too had chosen: I thought this was how it had to be. And similarly the discovery that the painter Guttuso was a Communist! And Picasso too! That ideal of a culture that was integral to political struggle appeared to us in those days as part of natural reality. (But in fact it was not like that: we were to bang our head against the brick wall of the relationship between politics and culture for fifteen years, and the problem is still not solved.)

I settled in Turin, which represented for me – and indeed it really was at that time – the city where the workers’ movement and the movement of ideas helped form a climate which seemed to combine the best of a tradition and a prospect for the future. Turin meant both the old workers’ high command of
Ordine
Nuovo
and the anti-Fascist intellectuals who had kept alive a moral and civic line in Italian culture: around both groupings were the young people who had emerged from the Resistance, full of interests and energy. My development followed both paths simultaneously: on the one side I became linked to the Einaudi publishing house, around which there gravitated people of widely differing ideological tendencies and temperaments but always committed to an interest in historical problems, and where there was much debate and everyone kept their eyes open on everything that was being thought about and written about in the world; at the same time I participated in party activity – also collaborating on, and for a certain period editing,
l’Unità
– thus getting the chance to know the majority of the ‘old gang’, those who had been close to Gramsci. (I will always remember the serene clarity, rigour and gentleness of Camilla Ravera, who was for us the model of an intellectual with a humane form of political culture which we would have liked to revive and re-establish in the midst of our reality which was full of contradictions and harshness; and particularly the figures of workers’ leaders, like Battista Santhià, whose rebellious temperament had accepted discipline and patience.)

But I would not like to give a sugary picture of the early years of my political formation, as though the discovery of the tragic aspects of Stalinism only happened later for us. I became a Communist just when the arguments were raging about the Stalin–Trotsky split, the elimination of internal opposition by Stalin, the mystery of the famous ‘confessions’ at the Moscow trials, and the Soviet–German pact. These were all events that preceded my involvement in political life, but still burning questions and the subject of constant polemics between ourselves and our friends/enemies in the non-Communist left. I accepted these facts, in part convincing myself that ‘they were necessary’, in part putting them aside while I waited to be able to explain them better to myself, and in part I was confident that they were temporary aspects of Communism, not justifiable ideologically and consequently destined to be re-debated in the more or less near future (a perspective which turned out to be – at least vaguely – accurate).

So it was not that I was ill-informed on the facts, but I did not really have very clear ideas on what these many facts meant. My ‘class’ of 1945–46 young lefties was inspired above all by a desire for action; the one after us – say about five or ten years after us – is driven above all by a desire for knowledge: they know everything about the sacred texts and collections of old newspapers but they do not love active political life as we loved it.

At that time we were not terrified by contradictions, on the contrary: every different aspect and form of language of that highly complex organism that was the Italian Communist party was a different pole of attraction working also on each one of us; where the call of the ‘new party’, of the ‘working-class government’ ended, one continued to hear the extremist voice of the Italian people’s old love of faction, and the cold watchwords of international strategy smothered the capacity for compromise of
ad hoc
tactics. In that period we had not yet distinguished a clear dialectic of different currents; not that our militancy in the party was ever docile or conformist: we always had particular questions we wanted to see debated, and these were always full of general implications as well, but we were capable of finding ourselves one minute in favour of the workers and ideological rigour, the next minute being more tactical and courting liberalism, depending on the circumstances.

That was how it came about that I found myself admiring alternately one or other of the two major Communist leader-figures in Turin: Mario Montagnana and Celeste Negarville. Both of working-class origin, with a very difficult but glorious past in each case during the twenty years of clandestine operation, prisons and exile, Montagnana and Negarville were so different in psychology and mentality as to incarnate two conflicting souls within Communism. My more strictly party education took place under the shadow at times of one, at times of the other, and I was fond of both men, though in different ways, and I also felt myself in sharp conflict now with one, now with the other. I feel I have stayed close to the memory of both men, and it is for that reason that I want to remember them both together.

Mario Montagnana was the incarnation of the revolutionary rigour typical of the old working-class area of Borgo San Paolo, and had stayed faithful – often in open polemic with the official party line – to a workers’ intransigence which was entirely underpinned by a morality of almost puritanical inflexibility. He was my editor when I worked on the Turin edition of
l’Unità
. He had gone into journalism from the factory floor, as a young man, when Gramsci was editor; and he always had in mind the paper made by workers for workers, with news about the shop-floor and the different departments, news that reflected workers’ opinion on every event. He admitted through clenched teeth that many things had changed in the factory world and the life of the people from the time of his early militancy, and he always tried to place every situation and problem against the ideal image of that proletarian culture of those times, making no concessions to the class enemy, a fierce fighter in the sacrifices and the struggles whether minimal or serious, rigid about party discipline, an ascetic more from a sense of dignity and pride than from necessity.