Context

Reading Elio Vittorini
Alane Mason

Untitled document

"Vittorini is that kind of one-book author, like Rabelais and Cervantes, who adds a new artistic dimension to the history of literature."

Donald Heiney, Three Italian Novelists

Italo Calvino wrote of Conversations in Sicily as "one of the great unique books of our literature." In his monograph on the work of Elio Vittorini, published a year after Vittorini’s death in 1966, Calvino went on to describe Conversations as "a promise that continues to promise, a prophecy that continues to speak to us as prophecy." He envisioned it as a work of art parallel to Picasso’s Guernica, "the book-Guernica."

Vittorini himself, however, saw the aim of the novel as art form neither in terms of painting nor of prophecy, but in terms of music and motion—the opera. As a critic, he thought the novel needed to be brought closer to its origins in poetry, theater and music, to be recovered from a European tradition of "intellectualism" in which it had developed into a branch of philosophy. Yet to the extent that he achieved such an opera in Conversations in Sicily, it was not out of the theories of literature he developed as a critic—which only came afterwards. As he explained it some ten years later, in an essay he wrote as a preface to another novel, Conversations arose both out of his need to be "the person I had become," and out of his need "to say a certain something which one could only risk saying in front of the public, in front of the king, in front of il duce, during the reign of fascism in Italy, by saying it in the way that music says things, in the way opera says them, the way poetry says them."

Thus fascism made Conversations in Sicily, a work of literature, into an act of politics; while the novel’s resistance took the form of an intensified poetry of language, an incantation—an "opera." Vittorini was a man of political and ideological passions, and his writing was born in political journalism and commentaries on current affairs. Yet he always resisted the idea that art is a vehicle for politics; even in 1945, at a high point of political zeal, he wrote that "In art, aims do not count. . . . nothing new and alive can emerge unless art is pure and simple human discovery. . . ." He was a man of conscience, continually revising his ideas about how such a conscience might be expressed in the world. His emphasis was not on the righteous nobility of "the writer as conscience of the state," as others have had it, but on the faulty, weak, ambivalent, entirely human conscience of the storyteller. The power of Conversations in Sicily is not that of the writer speaking to us as "conscience of the world"; it is that of the world—the sensual and suffering, beautiful and wronged world—speaking to the conscience of the narrator.

Vittorini’s obsession with conscience did, at times, make him pedantic, especially in works like his Men and Not Men. But in Conversations in Sicily lyric and lesson, the earthly and the abstract, are for the most part held in a tremulous and radiant balance.

* * *

Elio Vittorini was born in 1908 in Siracusa, Sicily, the eldest of four brothers. Like the father of the narrator of Conversations, Vittorini’s father worked for the railway, and throughout Vittorini’s childhood, his family moved around the island. Between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, he used his father’s free railway passes to run away from home "to see the world." At home he collaborated with anarchist groups and student protests (he was frequently suspended from school), corresponded with writers on politics, and began writing his own political essays. When he was nineteen, he married and moved to Venice, where he worked for a construction firm and began writing stories, criticism, and social satire for numerous newspapers and magazines. In 1929, he created a stir with an article accusing Italian literature of "provincialism."

He and his young family spent the next several years in Florence, living with an uncle. Vittorini worked as an editor for Solaria and as a proofreader and type corrector for the daily paper La Nazione, where during work breaks, an elderly typesetter taught him English using an old copy of Robinson Crusoe. He went on to publish translations of works by Edgar Allen Poe, D. H. Lawrence, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Daniel Defoe, W. Somerset Maugham, Erskine Caldwell, and others; no doubt translation work became essential to his livelihood after lead toxicity and subsequent lung complications forced him to leave his typesetting job. He also published Piccola Borghesia, a collection of short stories, and a travel book about Sardegna; and he wrote a first novel, The Red Carnation, some of which saw print in serial installments but which the fascist censors blocked in book form.

Two events of 1936 contributed to the gestation of Conversations in Sicily, which Vittorini began drafting in the fall of 1937: he was expelled from the Fascist Party for an article supporting the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and he saw his first opera, a production at La Scala of Verdi’s Traviata.

Of the effect of the Spanish war on his thinking at the time, he later wrote:

My thoughts came out of my need, just as my need came out of the life I was living then, out of the love I was feeling ever more powerfully for the things of the earth, for men . . . for the children who were mine, for children who weren’t mine, and for a woman who, unfortunately, wasn’t my woman. . . . Mas hombre, I thought. I believed I’d picked up these two Spanish words from the war in Spain, and from nights with my worker friends listening to Radio Madrid, Radio Valencia, Radio Barcellona; and at bottom my thoughts were nothing more than mas hombre; nothing other than mas hombre, nothing more articulate or rational than mas hombre, yet nothing less blaring than mas hombre; mas hombre was a drum, a cock’s crow, it was like tears and like hope. What does mas hombre mean? I imagine it means, if the expression exists, "the more a man." It does exist in my history; certainly it exists in the book which later became Conversations. . . .

Of his experience at the opera, he wrote:

In those days there was a special way of going to the opera, with one’s heart full of expectation for Teruel, for the battles in the ice fields of the Spanish mountains near Teruel, just as I imagine Verdi’s contemporaries, as they listened to so much of his music, were full of the Risorgimento, just as Verdi himself had been when he composed it. But the opera in itself, with everything surrounding it of the time in which I was watching and listening to it, made me realize that, in its combination of elements, the opera has the potential of expressing grand universal feelings, a potential denied to the novel. . . .

Through its music, Vittorini went on to reflect, the opera was able to go "beyond the realistic references of its action to express the meanings that are a larger reality," while the novel, "such as it is today among the conformists of literary realism, doesn’t manage to foster meanings which can transcend the novel’s own engagement with a minor reality, without becoming philosophy."

Thus the extraordinary lyricism of Conversations in Sicily: a language which like memory is "twice-real," existing in two worlds at once: both word and music, concrete and intangible, it is the sing-songy language of childhood and a melancholy poetry of adulthood, the language both of modernism and of the pre-modern fable, of the particular and the universal, of fact and significance, reality and the "something-more" of imagination (a "larger reality") existing not side by side, but simultaneously.

Striving both to emulate the opera and to rescue words themselves from the lock step imposed on them by dictatorship, Vittorini’s language in Conversations in Sicily is an antidote to propaganda. Full of echoes, and extraordinarily attentive to expressive sounds that are not words, exactly—from the doleful fife of the opening, to the disembodied "heh"s and "ahem"s of the characters, to the mother’s "old tunes without words," sung "in a half moan, half whistle, and warble all at once"—it is a language not of statement but of emotionally resonant suggestion. And as in a musical score, or in an opera, expressive sound and motion are connected—the fife begins the "movement" which is the narrator’s journey in Sicily, a journey which is also a conversation.

* * *

In 1938, Vittorini moved to Milan for an editorial job at the book publisher Bompiani. Conversations in Sicily was appearing in serial form in Letteratura, the work’s subtlety apparently escaping the fascist censors. It first appeared in book form in 1941, under the title of an accompanying short story, "Nome e lagrime," published by Parenti. It sold out and was reprinted by Bompiani a few months later. But Americana, the anthology of American short fiction Vittorini edited for Bompiani, was immediately blocked on publication that same year: the censors demanded the deletion of Vittorini’s notes and commentary

In 1942, he began to collaborate with the anti-Fascist front and the Communist Party, working on the clandestine press. He was arrested, and from jail, watched the bombing of Milan which destroyed his house and all his books and manuscripts. After his release from prison, he redoubled his efforts for the Resistance: editing, typesetting and distributing the underground press, gathering and transporting arms and munitions to Partisan fighters, and organizing a general strike.

After Liberation in 1945, Vittorini founded Il Politecnico, an influential magazine of politics and culture, and continued his editorial work with Bompiani, and later, Einaudi. In 1946 he ran as a Communist Party candidate for the Constitutional Congress, but was reprimanded by the Party for the "heterodox" content of Il Politecnico, and responded in the journal with assertions of the freedom of art. In 1951, he permanently distanced himself from the Communist Party with an article called "The Lives of the Ex-Communists." He continued to run for local political offices as a radical socialist both in Sicily and in Milan, but when elected to the Milan city council in 1960, he immediately resigned, admitting that he was better suited to being a writer. He wrote many more works of fiction and nonfiction and remained a major figure in Italian culture until his death in 1966; his independence of mind, prone to endless revision of ideas, earning him both admirers and enemies in the charged political climate of the times.

In the ideologically intense atmosphere of post-War Europe, it’s possible that Vittorini’s masterwork, Conversations in Sicily, became too strictly associated with the political and historical context in which it was written, and undervalued as one of the century’s great, multidimensional works of literature. Literary fashion moved away from works that troubled themselves with too much meaning, with a "larger reality" or the moral dimensions of human aspiration. Yet now that the ideological conflicts surrounding it have less immediacy, we may be better able to see the engine of Vittorini’s book, the great wheel of his narrator’s voyage and his own artistic exploration, for what it is: an intense humanism as vital for our time as for his own.

I write "humanism" despite the (pointless, to my mind) disrepute into which the word has fallen in academic circles. Vittorini’s is a humanism deeply connected to the physicality of language, which is also its musicality: language not as "signifier" in relation to "sign," but as utterance rooted in the body and emotion, and in an oral tradition as well as in the whole multicultural history of literature—summed up for Vittorini’s narrator in his memories of A Thousand and One Nights.

We’re lucky to have read when we were children. And doubly lucky to have read books about old times and old countries, books of history, books of journeys, and, in a special way, A Thousand and One Nights. You can even remember what you’ve read as if you in some way lived it yourself, and then you have the history of men and all the world inside you, together with your own childhood: Persia when you were seven years old, Australia at eight, Canada at nine, Mexico at ten, and the Hebrews of the Bible with the Tower of Babylon and David, that winter when you were six, caliphs and sultans one February or September, and during the summer the great war with Gustav Adolf et cetera for Sicily-Europe—all in a town like Terranova or Siracusa, while every night the train carries soldiers to a great war that is all wars.

No doubt recalling his passion for Robinson Crusoe, Vittorini wrote in his self-effacing author’s note (which not-quite-convincingly disavows autobiographical content and universalizes the setting as "Sicily only by chance") that he imagined "all manuscripts are found in a bottle." Many will suspect the "all," and yet he did not write, as previously translated, "all manuscripts come from the same bottle"—not encoding language or literature or humanism as enemies of differences and particularities, but language and literature and human sounds and sympathies as the bearers of unexpected messages from survivor to survivor.


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Context Reading Elio Vittorini Alane Mason Untitled document "Vittorini is that kind of one-book author, like Rabelais and Cervantes, who adds a new artistic dimension to the history of literature." Donald Heiney, Three Italian Novelists Italo Calvino wrote of Conversations in Sicily as "one of the great unique books of our literature." In his monograph on the work of Elio Vittorini, published a year after Vittorini’s death in 1966, Calvino went on to describe Conversations as "a promise that continues to promise, a prophecy that continues to speak to us as prophecy." He envisioned it as a work of art parallel to Picasso’s Guernica, "the book-Guernica." Vittorini himself, however, saw the aim of the novel as art form neither in terms of painting nor of prophecy, but in terms of music and motion—the opera. As a critic, he thought the novel needed to be brought closer to its origins in poetry, theater and music, to be recovered from a European tradition of "intellectualism" in which it had developed into a branch of philosophy. Yet to the extent that he achieved such an opera in Conversations in Sicily, it was not out of the theories of literature he developed as a critic—which only came afterwards. As he explained it some ten years later, in an essay he wrote as a preface to another novel, Conversations arose both out of his need to be "the person I had become," and out of his need "to say a certain something which one could only risk saying in front of the public, in front of the king, in front of il duce, during the reign of fascism in Italy, by saying it in the way that music says things, in the way opera says them, the way poetry says them." Thus fascism made Conversations in Sicily, a work of literature, into an act of politics; while the novel’s resistance took the form of an intensified poetry of language, an incantation—an "opera." Vittorini was a man of political and ideological passions, and his writing was born in political journalism and commentaries on current affairs. Yet he always resisted the idea that art is a vehicle for politics; even in 1945, at a high point of political zeal, he wrote that "In art, aims do not count. . . . nothing new and alive can emerge unless art is pure and simple human discovery. . . ." He was a man of conscience, continually revising his ideas about how such a conscience might be expressed in the world. His emphasis was not on the righteous nobility of "the writer as conscience of the state," as others have had it, but on the faulty, weak, ambivalent, entirely human conscience of the storyteller. The power of Conversations in Sicily is not that of the writer speaking to us as "conscience of the world"; it is that of the world—the sensual and suffering, beautiful and wronged world—speaking to the conscience of the narrator. Vittorini’s obsession with conscience did, at times, make him pedantic, especially in works like his Men and Not Men. But in Conversations in Sicily lyric and lesson, the earthly and the abstract, are for the most part held in a tremulous and radiant balance. * * * Elio Vittorini was born in 1908 in Siracusa, Sicily, the eldest of four brothers. Like the father of the narrator of Conversations, Vittorini’s father worked for the railway, and throughout Vittorini’s childhood, his family moved around the island. Between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, he used his father’s free railway passes to run away from home "to see the world." At home he collaborated with anarchist groups and student protests (he was frequently suspended from school), corresponded with writers on politics, and began writing his own political essays. When he was nineteen, he married and moved to Venice, where he worked for a construction firm and began writing stories, criticism, and social satire for numerous newspapers and magazines. In 1929, he created a stir with an article accusing Italian literature of "provincialism." He and his young family spent the next several years in Florence, living with an uncle. Vittorini worked as an editor for Solaria and as a proofreader and type corrector for the daily paper La Nazione, where during work breaks, an elderly typesetter taught him English using an old copy of Robinson Crusoe. He went on to publish translations of works by Edgar Allen Poe, D. H. Lawrence, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Daniel Defoe, W. Somerset Maugham, Erskine Caldwell, and others; no doubt translation work became essential to his livelihood after lead toxicity and subsequent lung complications forced him to leave his typesetting job. He also published Piccola Borghesia, a collection of short stories, and a travel book about Sardegna; and he wrote a first novel, The Red Carnation, some of which saw print in serial installments but which the fascist censors blocked in book form. Two events of 1936 contributed to the gestation of Conversations in Sicily, which Vittorini began drafting in the fall of 1937: he was expelled from the Fascist Party for an article supporting the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and he saw his first opera, a production at La Scala of Verdi’s Traviata. Of the effect of the Spanish war on his thinking at the time, he later wrote: My thoughts came out of my need, just as my need came out of the life I was living then, out of the love I was feeling ever more powerfully for the things of the earth, for men . . . for the children who were mine, for children who weren’t mine, and for a woman who, unfortunately, wasn’t my woman. . . . Mas hombre, I thought. I believed I’d picked up these two Spanish words from the war in Spain, and from nights with my worker friends listening to Radio Madrid, Radio Valencia, Radio Barcellona; and at bottom my thoughts were nothing more than mas hombre; nothing other than mas hombre, nothing more articulate or rational than mas hombre, yet nothing less blaring than mas hombre; mas hombre was a drum, a cock’s crow, it was like tears and like hope. What does mas hombre mean? I imagine it means, if the expression exists, "the more a man." It does exist in my history; certainly it exists in the book which later became Conversations. . . . Of his experience at the opera, he wrote: In those days there was a special way of going to the opera, with one’s heart full of expectation for Teruel, for the battles in the ice fields of the Spanish mountains near Teruel, just as I imagine Verdi’s contemporaries, as they listened to so much of his music, were full of the Risorgimento, just as Verdi himself had been when he composed it. But the opera in itself, with everything surrounding it of the time in which I was watching and listening to it, made me realize that, in its combination of elements, the opera has the potential of expressing grand universal feelings, a potential denied to the novel. . . . Through its music, Vittorini went on to reflect, the opera was able to go "beyond the realistic references of its action to express the meanings that are a larger reality," while the novel, "such as it is today among the conformists of literary realism, doesn’t manage to foster meanings which can transcend the novel’s own engagement with a minor reality, without becoming philosophy." Thus the extraordinary lyricism of Conversations in Sicily: a language which like memory is "twice-real," existing in two worlds at once: both word and music, concrete and intangible, it is the sing-songy language of childhood and a melancholy poetry of adulthood, the language both of modernism and of the pre-modern fable, of the particular and the universal, of fact and significance, reality and the "something-more" of imagination (a "larger reality") existing not side by side, but simultaneously. Striving both to emulate the opera and to rescue words themselves from the lock step imposed on them by dictatorship, Vittorini’s language in Conversations in Sicily is an antidote to propaganda. Full of echoes, and extraordinarily attentive to expressive sounds that are not words, exactly—from the doleful fife of the opening, to the disembodied "heh"s and "ahem"s of the characters, to the mother’s "old tunes without words," sung "in a half moan, half whistle, and warble all at once"—it is a language not of statement but of emotionally resonant suggestion. And as in a musical score, or in an opera, expressive sound and motion are connected—the fife begins the "movement" which is the narrator’s journey in Sicily, a journey which is also a conversation. * * * In 1938, Vittorini moved to Milan for an editorial job at the book publisher Bompiani. Conversations in Sicily was appearing in serial form in Letteratura, the work’s subtlety apparently escaping the fascist censors. It first appeared in book form in 1941, under the title of an accompanying short story, "Nome e lagrime," published by Parenti. It sold out and was reprinted by Bompiani a few months later. But Americana, the anthology of American short fiction Vittorini edited for Bompiani, was immediately blocked on publication that same year: the censors demanded the deletion of Vittorini’s notes and commentary In 1942, he began to collaborate with the anti-Fascist front and the Communist Party, working on the clandestine press. He was arrested, and from jail, watched the bombing of Milan which destroyed his house and all his books and manuscripts. After his release from prison, he redoubled his efforts for the Resistance: editing, typesetting and distributing the underground press, gathering and transporting arms and munitions to Partisan fighters, and organizing a general strike. After Liberation in 1945, Vittorini founded Il Politecnico, an influential magazine of politics and culture, and continued his editorial work with Bompiani, and later, Einaudi. In 1946 he ran as a Communist Party candidate for the Constitutional Congress, but was reprimanded by the Party for the "heterodox" content of Il Politecnico, and responded in the journal with assertions of the freedom of art. In 1951, he permanently distanced himself from the Communist Party with an article called "The Lives of the Ex-Communists." He continued to run for local political offices as a radical socialist both in Sicily and in Milan, but when elected to the Milan city council in 1960, he immediately resigned, admitting that he was better suited to being a writer. He wrote many more works of fiction and nonfiction and remained a major figure in Italian culture until his death in 1966; his independence of mind, prone to endless revision of ideas, earning him both admirers and enemies in the charged political climate of the times. In the ideologically intense atmosphere of post-War Europe, it’s possible that Vittorini’s masterwork, Conversations in Sicily, became too strictly associated with the political and historical context in which it was written, and undervalued as one of the century’s great, multidimensional works of literature. Literary fashion moved away from works that troubled themselves with too much meaning, with a "larger reality" or the moral dimensions of human aspiration. Yet now that the ideological conflicts surrounding it have less immediacy, we may be better able to see the engine of Vittorini’s book, the great wheel of his narrator’s voyage and his own artistic exploration, for what it is: an intense humanism as vital for our time as for his own. I write "humanism" despite the (pointless, to my mind) disrepute into which the word has fallen in academic circles. Vittorini’s is a humanism deeply connected to the physicality of language, which is also its musicality: language not as "signifier" in relation to "sign," but as utterance rooted in the body and emotion, and in an oral tradition as well as in the whole multicultural history of literature—summed up for Vittorini’s narrator in his memories of A Thousand and One Nights. We’re lucky to have read when we were children. And doubly lucky to have read books about old times and old countries, books of history, books of journeys, and, in a special way, A Thousand and One Nights. You can even remember what you’ve read as if you in some way lived it yourself, and then you have the history of men and all the world inside you, together with your own childhood: Persia when you were seven years old, Australia at eight, Canada at nine, Mexico at ten, and the Hebrews of the Bible with the Tower of Babylon and David, that winter when you were six, caliphs and sultans one February or September, and during the summer the great war with Gustav Adolf et cetera for Sicily-Europe—all in a town like Terranova or Siracusa, while every night the train carries soldiers to a great war that is all wars. No doubt recalling his passion for Robinson Crusoe, Vittorini wrote in his self-effacing author’s note (which not-quite-convincingly disavows autobiographical content and universalizes the setting as "Sicily only by chance") that he imagined "all manuscripts are found in a bottle." Many will suspect the "all," and yet he did not write, as previously translated, "all manuscripts come from the same bottle"—not encoding language or literature or humanism as enemies of differences and particularities, but language and literature and human sounds and sympathies as the bearers of unexpected messages from survivor to survivor. "Reading Elio Vittorini" is from Conversations in Sicily, copyright © 2000 by Alane Salierno Mason. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Current issue: CONTEXT # 21 CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community. CONTEXT is available at bookstores nationwide.

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