A Critic in Italy: An Interview with Geno Pampaloni

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This interview with Italian journalist and critic Geno Pampaloni was originally published in the February / March 1976 edition of The London Magazine, alongside poetry by Derek Walcott and Jaroslav Seifert.

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My interview with Geno Pampaloni was in the offices of Vallecchi, the small publishing company the critic used to direct in Florence. An elegant eighteenth-century building belonging to the Florentine Papi family houses the firm. In its gardens historian Gino Capponi (after whom the street was named) and writer-critic Nicolo Tommaseo once discussed the future of the Risorgimento. Luigi Russo lived here. A disciple of Benedetto Croce, Russo later came to insist that every aspect of a literary creation be judged in relation to the historical context of which it was a product. Ecumenically, the palazzo is also the traditional domicile of the director of Italy’s ultra-conservative newspaper, La Nazione. The well-known journalist Domenico Bartoli, Federico Gentile – son of the Fascist idealist philosopher, Giovanni Gentile – and writer Roberto Papi – a close friend of Eugenio Montale – all live in various parts of this building. It is here that Montale stays when he visits Florence, Pampaloni tells me with satisfaction.

At night Pampaloni leaves the large empty office and administrative paraphernalia for his villa and private library – no less than fourteen walls of books – where he finds his role as one of Italy’s most famous reviewers and essayists. All the Italian writers of the twentieth century have a home on his shelves. Pampaloni moves comfortably among his books. Although he is only about 5 foot 9, his large frame, the respectable corpulence, the calm, broad gestures give the impression of a taller man. The sense of strength is borne out by his enormous output, the long hours at Vallecchi. Were it not for a certain restraint exercised on ‘moral’ grounds this gusto for life would tend to be Balzacian, overwhelming. Yet one feels that writing has never been a deep psychological need for him.

It is important to reach a public – great writer or not – and to realize at the same time that 80 per cent of the population does not yet read novels.

Times have changed. Without emotion Pampaloni confides – to my amazement – that after an intense experience of literature before the war, his real ambition was to become a businessman. Instead, he has written more than 500 essays and reviews – not to mention prefaces and cultural programmes for Italian television. Together with those of Emilio Cecchi and Carlo Bo, an older critic, Pampaloni’s essays fill more than half of Garzanti’s recent ninth and final volume of La storia della letteratura italiana, a monumental work. The reflections on Italo Svevo, Cecchi, Alberto Moravia, Vasco Pratolini, Tommaso Landolfi, Giorgio Bassani, Carlo Cassola and many others are fundamental. They reveal one of the most subtle, refined and, within the limits of a certain moral and religious outlook, accurate critical minds of our time.

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The so-called ‘gap’ between the intellectual and the masses has recently been the subject of much consideration, especially in the United States. There they speak of the necessity to ‘close the gap’. I asked Pampaloni whether this question was under discussion in Italy today.

‘Perhaps in an artificial way, without any relation to concrete reality. The new writers’ union has said the writer must be a cultural worker. While this is an interesting idea, it only ever applies to writers who are on the way up. It doesn’t comprehend the entire image and role of a writer who has “arrived”. He may be a rebel, but he is for the most part an integrated rebel. The Americans are referring to the problem of using a language for the masses of people to understand – as Emilio Gadda, for example, does not. It is important to reach a public – great writer or not – and to realize at the same time that 80 per cent of the population does not yet read novels, even in America. In Italy the situation is paradoxical. It is just those very writers who are most committed and progressive in the best ideological sense of the word who are also the least readable. They exercise on language the criticism they should be reserving for society. The Italian writer, according to Umberto Eco and others, begins the revolution with the language and instead of bringing him closer to the common man, this puts him even further away … No, the first steps towards “closing the gap” have certainly not been taken here.’

‘This has again to do with our cultural elite. Do you agree that the situation deteriorated further as a result of the recent avant-garde movement?’

‘The avant-garde movement in Italy was, in my opinion, absolutely necessary. So one must consider these writers with great sympathy. What we must criticize is their playing intellectual games with real problems. In the introduction to a book by Bontempelli re-evaluating the avant-garde movement of the ’twenties in relation to the current one, the critic Baldacci makes an observation with which I am in agreement. To represent reality in a schizophrenic period they had to use a language that was schizophrenic. That’s how they defeated their own purposes. For the rest, these young (or ex-young) avant-gardes did not possess the cardinal virtue of true “letterati”: patience. They wanted to do everything in three or four years. In power struggles, competition and factionalism they wore out what was probably a false vocation from the beginning.’

‘In a sense the avant-garde movement of the ’sixties spent its prime lamenting the sad destiny of having been born this side of the Alps, or even this side of the Channel. Italian poetry tried to become like Anglo-Saxon models; to imitate their themes and even their syntax. Although this could have been a healthy attempt to break away from our flowery Petrarchan tradition, hasn’t it instead resulted in a “translated style” within which the genius of the Italian language has been lost? And isn’t this attempt to adapt to a different tradition simply another face of our eternal provincialism and even Petrarchism?’

Yes, that is certainly true. During the darkest moments of Italian literature, in Fascist times, Pavese and Vittorini introduced Anglo-Saxon literature into Italy. Coming at such a moment, it left very deep traces. Nevertheless, your criticism cannot be applied to the poets who really count: Luzi, Sereni, Betocchi.’

‘What do you think is behind this constant parroting of other countries?’

‘Although it was less popular, for seventy years the snobbery was French. In the whole of Italian literary life there is no real mode, no point of reference in the society. In recent years we have been unable to express an identity. Hence the constant borrowing: fragments of a Soviet model, an Anglo-Saxon model, etc., with no serious re-thinking of these models. This is reflected at all levels of Italian life and so also in literature. Indeed, contemporary Italian literature is afflicted with some of the basic ills of the society as a whole. Today the writer is more than ever conditioned by external factors – and I am not referring merely to the literary or cultural industry. It is rather a moral climate: mistrustful, opportunist and very manipulable, not to mention the pathological phenomena of corruption, violent corruption. There is a moral lassitude which the literary situation mirrors.’

‘You were speaking a moment ago of the cultural industry. Wouldn’t it be simpler to accept as a fact of life that ours is indeed a consumer society and within it there are novels of good consumption and novels of bad consumption?’

‘The expression novel for consumption originated with Cattaneo speaking of Tommaseo in the nineteenth century. It is rather a curiosity but it gives the sense of just how intransigent the Italian man of letters is. This incomplete consideration of reality.’

‘Would you agree it gave rise to that epithet for any novel that is read and sells? As you know, popularity, sales and international recognition bring down, in Italy, the wrath or even the total silence of the literary establishment. The two most outstanding examples this century are both Nobel Prize winners. Pirandello, returning from Stockholm after receiving the Nobel Prize, was not even met at the station. In his own country his work was attacked or ignored. The great “discovery” of Pirandello took place in France as did the brouhaha about Svevo. Salvatore Quasimodo’s Italian bibliography stops short in 1959 when he received the Nobel Prize. The public continued to buy his books in the tens of thousands but in critical circles envy and betrayal turned to sullen contempt.’

‘Moravia, really, is the great exception in the history of Italian literature. He has never been a novelist for consumption even though he has had enormous success. If anything, he is obsessed with being up-to-date, not with the problem of sales. He wrote I sogni del pigro (Dreams of a lazy man) because he was jealous of Landolfi, just as he tackles certain themes because he is afraid of not being “with it”. But this is an intellectual, a personal problem of the writer. No, Moravia is not dominated by public taste.’

‘After all, the greatest possible number of citizens should be able to read a good book. Dickens and Balzac wrote novels for consumption. Isn’t one a writer only insofar that he writes for the public rather than for his friends and critics?’

‘Indeed, the crisis of the Italian novel stems from the fact that it is not sufficiently “consumed”! Nevertheless, I often see in certain talented middle grade Italian writers the inclusion of elements aimed at a public with a specific turn of mind. These elements are legitimate unless they impede the writer’s spontaneity. When a novel is fabricated to appeal to certain predictable responses in the public, it is condemned at the outset whether as a novel for consumption or as a work of art. To give you an example of what I mean, one of the most striking cases – about which I have also written – is a book that has had a huge success in the last ten years: Il male oscuro by Giuseppe Berto. This is certainly a novel born of authentic, experienced suffering, but constructed in such a slick way, with all the necessary ingredients – sex, psychoanalysis, madness, neurosis – that it becomes a phoney product. And I mention Berto precisely because he is a novelist with fine credentials. But I cease to respect him – even morally – when he becomes an instrument, not of any message, but of a mystifying process.’

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Pampaloni’s villa is perched on a hill in Bagno a Ripoli – a twenty-minute ride from Florence. As we drove out of town in the evening, people were huddling single file, struggling to breathe in streets never meant for automobiles and now ruled by them. These treeless, sunless stone passages, once walked by Dante and Michelangelo when the pace of life like the exquisite medieval façades was conceived for people, have become leaden whirlpools lit obliquely by livid beams from headlamps. Pollution is concentrated, honking horns amplified, heat trapped.

From a little rooftop observation platform at Pampaloni’s villa Giotto’s Tower, Brunelleschi’s Dome, Santa Croce, the Palazzo Vecchio shimmer in the smoggy sunset. An idyllic landscape of hills and vineyards rises gently to the east.

‘When I awake the first thing I see is the little church of Baroncelli to which I belong. This is a typical Tuscan landscape – they even left that little haystack as a special favour to me.’ Behind a fringe of green the Tower of the Galli; beyond that, Arcetri, home of Galileo. ‘They want to build a Hilton there. With luck we may be able to prevent it …’

The house is built on a retaining wall cascaded with green. A hunting dog chained to a tree keeps noisy watch over the lush gardens, patios and vineyard within.

‘The only real antiquity is this Etruscan rooster … It brings me luck. Once when it was broken I fell ill immediately.’

Born in 1918 in Rome, where his mother was teaching in a primary school, Geno Pampaloni grew up in Grosseto, the capital of Maremma in southwestern Tuscany, the landscape dear to Carducci. In due time Grosseto became completely dominated and involved in the Fascist régime and indeed Pampaloni’s first contact with literature was in the library of the Istituto di Cultura Fascista. In his thirteenth year the Anno Dodicesimo (Twelfth Year) directed by Vittorio Mussolini held a short story competition at the Institute. Carlo Cassola was one of the contestants but Pampaloni’s story – a little agricultural piece about the ‘grain battle’ – was awarded the prize. The critic’s broad amiable face beams in amusement as he recalls the triumph. ‘I used to write stories as a boy but I stopped very early – at about 20 – when I realized it wasn’t for me.’

For a long time writing was an ordeal for me … I write very slowly in general … It isn’t boredom, it’s perfectionism.

An anti-Fascist consciousness had begun to form shortly after Pampaloni left Grosseto. Once outside that atmosphere, with access to foreign newspapers, he began to see his experiences in a new light. ‘My arrival in Florence was the determining factor, although even in Grosseto certain friends – Gianfranco Folena, Randolfo Pacciardi, who fought with the Republicans in Spain – demonstrated that the town’s anarchist tradition, suppressed for a number of years, had come to life again during the Spanish Civil War.’

When Giacomo Noventa was thrown out of the University of Florence and barred from all other universities, the students were questioned. The authorities wanted to know who were the anti-Fascists at Pisa University. ‘I had the imprudence to say, “all of them” – innocently – and so they did not send me away!’

The war and four years in the army cut short Pampaloni’s studies at Pisa. More fortunate than many, he passed the first two years in Tuscany, with the invasion force destined to take Malta. For two summers, lit by searchlights he and his companions clambered up and down ladders along the coast near Livorno.

In Sardinia, Pampaloni’s next stop, the winter was bitter. By night near-starving soldiers combed the hills for edible herbs. Mistaking the plants in the dark, four of Pampaloni’s companions died eating hemlock. When the opportunity came to join the liberation army, Pampaloni wrote to the Capo di Stato Maggiore.

‘Joining the liberation army was one way of putting my conscience at rest … The Italians were poorly equipped and ill-treated by the Poles … The forces were crawling with monarchists and profiteers. One colonel, upon reaching a town, would enter all the houses and requisition everything as though we were in Abyssinia …’

A number of bloody battles were fought. But Pampaloni remembers one beautiful moment when they arrived at Iesi. In the gentle countryside of vineyards and undulating hills, streams turn to torrents that flow into the Adriatic. ‘When, from the last of the mountain ridges the inhabitants saw that the Italians were coming, crowds of cheering villagers ran to greet us. Women held up their babies to be kissed. For the battle-weary soldiers this touching moment made some of the trouble seem worthwhile …’

As Pampaloni’s words spiral through the fine dust of youthful memories, forgotten images return to mind: Cassino, the pine-forest of Tombolo, prisoners of all races hanging on to iron gratings of German lorries moving North, the Gothic line. At Colico, Lake Como, at Nuova Olonio, only a few miles up the road, Fascist spies and informers, boys of fifteen in black shirts were shot against telegraph poles, around the football field, inside a vast cave in the rock. For two years, together with Germans and prisoners from inner Russia and Mongolia, they had moved up the paths of Monte Legnone, the great Wooded Mountain overlooking the northern region of the lake. The endless black serpent, green-headed with SS, filed past the mill where my family had sought shelter against the daily bombing of the village. In the early afternoon I could hear the slow fire of machine guns across the valley and with it, a fifth higher, the cracking of submachine guns. At night, the friendly familiar voice of the mill would be shattered by deep explosions and soon columns of smoke marked another area of mountain huts, still blazing by the following morning.

The English came at night, their area of bare rocks past the pine-forest neatly marked out by that ring of fire. They air-dropped weapons and ammunition, medicines, food, chocolate and cigarettes, thus acknowledging the existence of an Italian Resistance later to be ignored in official Anglo-Saxon accounts of the war, and hence by public opinion in this country. On those mountains alone, from 8 September 1943 to the day they stopped Mussolini and the German column at Dongo, 1,800 partisans died.

By 10.45 every morning the Americans machine-gunned or bombed the village. Then, at night, the partisans retaliated for the Fascist explosions and burnings. Barrack walls were riddled with bullets, bridges and power plants blown up, pavements stained with blood and bodies piled like empty sacks behind a window-pane. One Sunday morning the blackshirts roamed the streets and loudspeakers urged the citizens to leave the front door of their houses open and crowd into the main square on the lake. Inside the church children sat tight in the front rows. Then a volley was heard, sharp orders, feet rushing on the flight of steps, nuns whispering: ‘Now you’ll learn how the traitors of their country die.’ Under-fed, black-shirted, the crossed white bands and large shiny brass buckle (an M for Mussolini) on our chests, the colonial fez at a slant on our heads, the children too fled out in ranks that Sunday morning after the service, to see the partisan hanged, a notice on his back in coal and chalk: THUS ARE PUNISHED TRAITORS TO THE FATHERLAND. At night from the thirteen-year-old blackshirts’ barracks came a song I’d never heard before, nor since: ‘evviva la donna piccola che la me ciuccia il bigolo’ – slang hailing small women who reach the groin of boys. Down at the lake for two days the partisan swayed in the sad wind.

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Pampaloni passed the winter of ’44–45 in Rome in desperate and unsuccessful attempts to find literary work. Living on dry figs and caffè latte, he soon returned to his father’s house in Grosseto. When he left again, it was for Milan. After an eighteen-hour train ride he found the city in devastation. People slept where they could.

‘I taught Italian, Latin and even English, although I had never studied it myself. I had picked up a little during the war rubbing shoulders with the British. Once I was called upon to translate a publicity leaflet for a sugar manufacturer. I knew nothing of sugar or English.’

The writer must increase awareness of reality. If he does this he has accomplished his task.

It was in those years that Pampaloni began reviewing for Il Ponte, and when the industrialist Adriano Olivetti needed a man to help with the political organization of his factory, he hired the young critic to build up the company’s library. For the next ten years Pampaloni’s literary involvement gave way to ‘front line’ participation in the dubious process of ‘humanizing’ and rationalizing Neo-capitalism according to certain American models. There was much political organizing, arranging lectures, supervised readings, explications and personal contacts with the workers. But when Adriano Olivetti’s political fortunes crumbled, Pampaloni, as director of the chairman’s office, was fired.

After a brief further collaboration, Adriano Olivetti died in 1960. Pampaloni ‘tried in vain to find a place in the industrial world’ but was forced to ‘surrender’ to literature.

‘I use the word surrender in all seriousness. In my opinion my real talents are administrative. For a long time writing was an ordeal for me … I write very slowly in general. So when pressed to meet a newspaper deadline, I suffered considerably … It isn’t boredom, it’s perfectionism … I do so many drafts along the way. I always feel a responsibility towards the written page … I treat a letter to an author with whom I feel some sympathy as though it were an article for the Corriere della sera. For me, style is sacred – if the word is not a bit exaggerated. I suppose in that respect I agree with Croce – a particular thought can be expressed in one way only …

‘All of my long, complicated story is filled with flights from literature and concludes in the polyphony of administering a publishing firm. Here my love for literature, which is very strong, does not exclude the presence of things that are not literature.’

‘In an essay on Elio Vittorini you quote his famous words: “If you kill a man, he will be more a man. In the same way the sick or hungry are more men. The starving are the most human of human beings.” Does something of this spirit remain alive in contemporary Italian literature? Or in other words what significance, if any, have the tragic injustices of our history: hunger, war, exploitation?’

‘Contemporary Italian literature mirrors these problems very little. For one thing, the hero is inevitably an intellectual. This is true with very few exceptions and these are usually masked – the heroes of Moravia and Pratolini, for example. In his latest book Pratolini clarifies his problem as an intellectual confronting Fascism, hunger, etc., but always as an individual. The “I” of the intellectual is invariably at the centre of all problems and crises.’

‘Does the issue of language have some sense here? Italian, except in Florence where it is also the dialect, is the language of intellectuals. Everyone else expresses himself best in dialect. There is no language of the typical Italian shopkeeper, taxidriver or industrial worker, even region by region. A writer has to invent his hero’s language if that character is not an intellectual.’

‘Yes, the risk for the Italian comes when he deserts the “I” of the intellectual. At that point he easily becomes artificial.’

‘How does the Italian writer resolve this problem?’

‘Historically we have been unable to evade it. A difference exists between the language of literature and the spoken language. As you move away from the literary language the work immediately begins to sound artificial, sketchy, provincial. The novelist is working systematically towards reality, but linguistically his naturalistic novel has gone into reverse.’

‘Shouldn’t we accept this without too much fuss? I imagine the same problem confronts German writers.’

‘Yes. The writer who has had the most success in solving it is again Moravia.’

‘Even so, in the introduction to Woman of Rome Moravia felt obliged to explain why this prostitute speaks in a “borrowed language”. So he, too, is conscious of the difficulties involved.’

‘Moravia has succeeded, in Roman Tales, in using echoes from dialect to create a language which is wholly moravian.’

‘Have society and literature changed roles as compared to thirty years ago? Does literature now seek to determine attitudes and society rather than merely express them?’

‘I do not think literature should aim to “cut into reality” as the Fascist expression went, but should try to reveal aspects of the problems which may affect reality in ways the writer cannot predict. The function of the writer is to help and foster knowledge. His kind of message is not an arrow that will necessarily reach the target. Literature is an awareness of the world. It isn’t an instrument with which to change it.’

‘What about Brecht?’

‘Brecht is able to transform his view of the world into valid artistic symbols. That is why he succeeds as a writer. That he was practical and possessed organizational capacities has not, in my opinion, much importance. The writer must increase awareness of reality. If he does this he has accomplished his task.’

‘Dante’s intention in the Divine Comedy was to change the world. His entire commitment – didactical, political, moralistic – was to justice, even if he understood it in a feudal sense. Justice was his obsession.’

‘But you can’t say that in his descriptions of the cherubims and seraphims of Paradise he was attempting to change the world. He tried to bring to the world the knowledge of a certain destiny.’

‘Poetry has arrived at a form of severe fragmentation, not only in Italy but also in England. This has been given various names but is essentially leading to new forms of Alexandrine poetry. Do you see contemporary poetry inevitably following that path or, with the world shrinking through the mass media, do you think it is possible to speak of a new type of epic poetry, perhaps negative this time? Epic poetry of man’s missed destiny rather than one he has or will achieve. In other words a profane epic which can only hope for a way out.’

‘A negative epic already exists, if only embryonically. Today what is poetry in Europe? A lament for the death of poetry. It is very difficult to establish the precise influences of technological society and the mass media on poetry. In Italy there is a permanent conflict between the aristocratic way of expressing certain ideas and the structural banality of the mass message.’

‘I meant epic in the technical sense of longer poems.’

‘This year there have been several efforts in that direction. Mario Luzi and Attilio Bertolucci, two completely different poets, have tried to write long poems. The poem as illumination has finished its cycle. The discussion that ensues concerns the fate of poetry. Poetry today puts into question its own existence, as in religion they have been discussing the death of God for twenty years.’

‘You have mentioned Sereni previously in connection with writers influenced by the English and the Americans. Where Sereni is concerned this is only true of Gli strumenti umani.’

‘Yes. In Frontiera and Diario d’Algeria there was nothing of this. Those books were in the lyrical-elegiac tradition: very Italian. Then Sereni translated William Carlos Williams and underwent an entirely different kind of literary experience.’

‘Do you think that Gli strumenti umani succeeds?’

‘I don’t know. Bits of it succeed. But in this fragmentation there is a complexity, an attempt to encompass many sides of reality which is very interesting. Sereni is a victim of poetry’s transition from the fragmentary to the longer, lower pitched poem. I see him as a kind of Christ figure in this transition.’

‘The Sereni I always loved best was the Sereni of those first two books. I felt him then as a totally genuine, natural poet.’

‘I know that the process has been extremely tormented. Nevertheless it has taken place, according to me, at a very high level. Poems such as “Mattina”, “Rivoluzione”, etc., truly reflect a new dimension in Sereni’s poetry. Of the poets we have named up to now, Sereni is the one who has paid most dearly, who has the most courage. I see him as a dramatic figure in Italian poetry, one who has abandoned the elegiac vein of his first period to search for a new human dimension. I feel very close to the position he has taken.

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‘[The problem] reached its most acute phase during and immediately after the First World War, as a result of the total destruction, through the war itself, of the traditional scale of values; a destruction which brought about the sudden disruption and the complete collapse of the relationship between man and reality which until then had been based on traditional ethics. Man found himself suddenly incapable of establishing any kind of relationship with the real world; the world became obscure and incomprehensible to him, or, worse still, it ceased to exist …’ (Alberto Moravia)

The perspective, the fundamental attitude in which characters are positioned in modern novel and poetry writing is not only diametrically opposed to the classical view of life, the ancient interpretation of ‘world-wonder’, the feeling of admiration and curiosity at the appearance of life in all its ‘richness’, ‘beauty’, etc.; it is also substantially different from the view of all the great narrative writing of the nineteenth century, up to the period following the First World War. Even Proust and Joyce may still be considered the final flowering at the extremity of the romantic parabola. They had certainly laid open new dimensions for man, but always in the traditional sense of assurance and values, inside the boundaries of a reality that was still controllable. Joyce’s ‘stream of consciousness’ is still an attempt to understand man.

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Carefully I switch on the tape-recorder. The voice of the critic is with me again. His intelligence is subtle almost to a fault; his information factual, precise. He can conquer and take apart any problem, find the essential ingredients and draw the necessary conclusions. With a quick, delicate hand, he extracts for us the essence of what is best and most desirable: an image of the spirit; the rhythmic symmetry of the mind.

Yet, rather than acknowledge our time of crisis, Pampaloni observes its metamorphoses from the vantage point of a modern homme de lettres. His repertoire repels the shock of contrast, the taste for strident dissonance; baroque or heavy strokes of the brush that reflect baroque or stolid life. Chaos is rapidly investigated and dismissed; mistake, bad faith, skimmed over. Like drops of water inside a cloud, ideas melt into their opposites. And behind the most captious weapons of dialectic – the elegant, grave geometry of the mind – the reader senses a second, a third, a fourth layer of silence.

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Geno Pampaloni was an Italian journalist, literary critic and writer.

Giuliano Dego was an Italian writer, poet, translator and literary critic. He published several collections of verse and lectured in Italian at London University.

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