In this novel (I had better return to my topic: it is too early to start to rewrite the official apologia for ‘Neo-realism’; nowadays I am more inclined to analyse the reasons for my abandonment of it) the signs of the literary age in which it was written are mixed up with the signs of the author’s own callowness. The exaggerated emphasis on the themes of sex and violence ultimately seems rather naive (today’s readers’ palates now tolerate much spicier fare) and forced (the author’s subsequent output confirms that these were alien and transient themes).
Equally naive and forced might appear the urge to graft an ideological message on to the story, particularly on to a story such as this which is set in a completely different key – that of immediate, objective narration both in terms of imagery and language. To satisfy this need for the ideological component, I adopted the expedient of concentrating all the theoretical considerations into a chapter which is different in tone from the others, Chapter IX, the one containing the reflections of the commissar Kim, which almost constitutes a preface inserted in the middle of the novel. My earliest readers all criticized this expedient and advised me to cut the chapter out completely; but despite realizing that it harmed the unity of the work (at that time, stylistic uniformity was one of the few aesthetic criteria that we were sure of), I stood my ground: the book came out as it was, warts and all, with that hint of being something hybrid and artificial.
The other great subject of future critical discussions, the question of dialect versus standard Italian, was also in evidence here in its naive phase: dialect elements gathered together like patches of local colour (whereas in subsequent works I would try to absorb all these dialectal influences into the standard language, like a vital but hidden source of nourishment). The style was very uneven, at times bordering on the precious, at other times just written down as it came, aiming solely at immediacy of expression; it became a kind of documentary archive (including local sayings and songs) which bordered on folklore …
In addition (I shall continue with this list of signs of the novel’s age, since a preface written today is only worthwhile if it adopts a critical stance), there was the manner of depicting characters: they all had exaggerated, grotesque features, twisted grimaces, dark, deep-rooted psychological scars. If Italian literature and art had missed out on expressionism after the First World War, it made up for it at the end of the Second. Perhaps the correct label for that artistic epoch in Italy ought to be ‘Neo-expressionism’ rather than ‘Neo-realism’.
The distortions operated by the expressionist lens in this novel are projected on to the faces of those who had been my closest comrades. I was at pains to turn them into caricatures, to make them unrecognizable, ‘negative’, because I could write poetically only about ‘negativity’. At the same time I felt remorse both because I knew that reality was so much more varied, more emotive and nuanced, and because I knew that the real people who were models for the characters were so much richer and better in human terms. This remorse was to stay with me for years …
This is the first novel I wrote. What effect does it have on me rereading it today? (Now I really have come to the point: this feeling of remorse. This is where my preface should begin.) The unease which this book caused me for so long has to a certain extent subsided, but to a certain extent still remains: it resides mainly in my relationship towards something so much bigger than myself, involving emotions which affected all my contemporaries – tragedies, acts of heroism and of generosity and ingenuity, as well as dark dramas of conscience. The Resistance: how does this book fit into ‘the literature of the Resistance’? At the time when I wrote the book, the problem of creating a ‘Resistance literature’ was still an open one, and we all felt that there was an imperative on us to write ‘the novel of the Resistance’: in fact barely two months after the Liberation Vittorini’s Uomini e no (Men and Not Men) was already in the bookshops, its main theme our central dialectic of death versus happiness. Milan’s partisan groups thus already had their novel, full of fast action ranging over the concentric map of the city. Those of us who had been partisans in the mountains would have liked to have had our novel too, one that reflected our different rhythms of action, our more irregular comings and goings …
But I was not so culturally ill-informed as to be unaware that the influence of history on literature is indirect, slow and often contradictory. I knew perfectly well that many great historical events went by without inspiring any great novel, particularly so in ‘the century of the novel’ par excellence, the nineteenth century: I knew that the great novel of Italian Unification had never been written … We all knew that, we were not that naive, but I believe that when one has lived through a significant historical epoch or taken an active part in momentous events, one feels a particular responsibility …
In my case, this responsibility made me feel in the end that the theme was too demanding and solemn for my abilities. Consequently, in order not to let myself be cowed by it, I decided to approach it not head on but obliquely. Everything had to be seen through the eyes of a child, in a world of urchins and no-hopers. I invented a story that would hover on the margins of the partisan war, tangential to its acts of heroism and sacrifice, but that would at the same time convey its colour, its rhythm, its bitter taste …
This is the first novel I wrote. How can I define it today, as I look at it again after so many years? (I have to start again from scratch. I was side-tracked and ended up showing that the book was born of a strategy aimed at evading commitment; whereas on the contrary …) I can define it as an example of ‘committed literature’ in the fullest and richest sense of the term. Nowadays when one talks about ‘committed literature’ one generally has a mistaken notion of the term, as though it were a kind of writing that is simply an illustration of a thesis already defined a priori, completely independently of any poetic qualities. Instead, what used to be called in French engagement, commitment, can come out at all sorts of different levels: here it is intended to emerge through the book’s imagery and lexis, narrative drive, tone, style, nonchalance, challenge.
My choice of theme already suggests an element of bravado, of almost provocative challenge. But challenging whom? I would have to say that I wanted to conduct a campaign on two fronts simultaneously: to launch an attack both against the detractors of the Resistance and against the high-priests of a hagiographic Resistance that was all sweetness and light.
The first front: barely a year after the Liberation, ‘bourgeois respectability’ was already fully reinstated, and it exploited every socio-economic factor of that period – the excesses of post-war youth, the resurgence of crime, the problem of re-establishing respect for the law – in order to exclaim: ‘See, we told you so all along, these partisans are all the same, don’t let them come talking to us about the Resistance, we know full well what kind of ideals they had in mind …’ It was in this climate that I wrote my book, in which I wanted to answer the bourgeoisie with a paradox: ‘Okay, let’s assume you’re right: I’ll portray not the best but the worst partisans imaginable. At the centre of my novel I will place a division entirely composed of characters who are slightly twisted. Now then, what’s the difference? Even those who threw themselves into the struggle without really knowing why acted on an instinct based on human solidarity, – an urge which made them a hundred times better than you, and made them active participants in the course of history such as you will never be, even in your wildest dreams!’ The significance of this polemic, this challenge is now rather remote from us: and even in those days, I have to admit, the book was read simply as a novel, and not as part of this debate about history’s verdict on the Resistance. Nevertheless, if today the book still creates a little provocative frisson, then it stems from the polemic of those times.
Actually from the double polemic of those times. Even though the battle on the second front, the one inside ‘left-wing culture’, also seems rather distant. At that time the first attempts were just being made to give ‘political d
irection’ to literature: the writer was asked to create the ‘positive hero’, to provide images that were salutary and instructive in terms of social behaviour and revolutionary militancy. All that was just beginning, I said: and I have to add that here in Italy such pressures had very little influence or following even in subsequent years. Still, the danger that the new literature would be required to fulfil a celebratory and didactic function was in the air: when I wrote this book I had just noticed this, and my hackles were immediately raised, my claws unsheathed against any imposition of a new rhetoric. (In those days I still preserved intact my anti-conformist instinct, a legacy that is difficult to maintain, but which – even though it has on occasions been less prominent – is still a standby of mine, in this age which is so much more prosperous but no less dangerous …) My reaction then could be encapsulated in these words: ‘Oh, so you want “the socialist hero” then? You want “romantic revolutionaries”? Well, I’m going to write you a story about partisans in which nobody is a hero, nobody has any class-consciousness. I’m going to portray the world of marginal people, the lumpenproletariat! (This was a new concept for me at the time, and I regarded it as a monumental discovery. I did not realize then that it had been and would continue to be the easiest material for fiction.) And the book will be the most positive and revolutionary work of all! What do we care about someone who is already a hero, someone who already has class-consciousness? What we ought to be portraying is the process by which those two goals are reached! As long as there exists a single person who does not have that awareness, our duty must be to concern ourselves solely with that person!’
That was the way I was thinking, and in this polemical rage I flung myself into the novel and distorted the faces and personalities of people who had been my closest comrades, people with whom for months on end I had shared a mess-tin of chestnuts and the risk of death, people for whose fate I had trembled, whose nonchalance in taking risks and whose totally unselfish way of living I had admired enormously. These were the characters whose features I turned into masks twisted by perpetual grimaces, into grotesque figures, and for whom I invented murky, shadowy pasts – or at least what in my youthful naivety I thought murky, shadowy pasts must be like … Only to be haunted by remorse for this for years …
I have to begin the preface again from the start: I have not got it right yet. What I have said so far would make it seem that in setting out to write this book I had everything quite clear in my head: the polemical arguments, the opponents to defeat, the poetics to defend … On the contrary, even if this was all there, it was still in a confused and shapeless state. In reality the book developed almost by chance: I had begun to write without a clear plot in mind, starting off from the urchin-boy character, that is to say from direct observation of reality – his way of moving, of talking, of relating to adults – and, as a narrative framework for him, I invented the story of the sister and the pistol stolen from the German. After that, his arrival among the partisans turned out to be a difficult transition: this shift from a picaresque story to an epic involving the whole populace threatened to destroy everything, so I had to create a device that would allow me to continue to maintain the story on the same level, so I invented the band of partisans under Dritto.
By this stage, as always happens, the story itself virtually imposed its own plot. But into this structure, into this outline which was developing almost spontaneously, I decanted my own still fresh experiences, a crowd of faces and voices (I distorted the faces and mutilated the characters, as writers always do since for them reality becomes like clay, a malleable medium, and they know that this is the only way they can write, and yet it causes them remorse …), a flood of conversations as well as my own readings which blended in with those experiences.
What you read and what you experience in life are not two separate worlds, but one single cosmos. Every life-experience, in order to be interpreted properly, evokes certain things you have read and blends into them. That books always derive from other books is a truth which is only apparently in contradiction with the other truth, that books derive from practical existence and from our relations with other people. Almost as soon as I had stopped being a partisan I discovered (initially in excerpts in magazines, then as a whole book) a novel about the emish civil war which Hemingway had written six or seven years previously, For Whom the Bell Tolls. It was the first book with which I as an ex-partisan could identify: it was from reading that novel that I began to transform into narrative motifs and phrases what I had seen and experienced, the detachment of Pablo and Pilar was ‘our’ detachment. (Nowadays that book of Hemingway’s is the one which I probably like least; in fact Hemingway became the model for many of us only when we discovered his real stylistic mastery in other books of his, especially in his earliest short stories.)
The kind of literature we liked was that which contained this sense of a seething humanity, of ruthlessness, and also of nature. We also felt that the Russian writers of the civil war period – that is, before Soviet literature was purged and became idealized – were our contemporaries. In particular, Isaac Babel: his Red Cavalry, already translated into Italian before the war, and one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century realism, also sprang from an intellectual’s encounter with revolutionary violence.
But also influential, though to a lesser extent, was Alexander Fadeyev (at least before he became a mere functionary of official Soviet literature). He had written his first book, The Rout, with that particular sincerity and vigour (though I do not remember whether I had already read it when I wrote my novel, and I am not going to check either: that’s not important, since similar situations breed similar books in terms of structure and style). Fadeyev knew how to finish things as cleanly as he had begun them, as he was the only Stalinist writer, in 1956, who showed that he realized the extent of the tragedy for which he had been partly responsible (the tragedy in which Babel and so many other genuine writers of the Revolution had lost their lives). Refusing to go in for hypocritical recriminations, he faced up to the strictest consequence of his actions, and took a pistol to his forehead.
These books, then, form the background to The Path to the Spiders’ Nests. But when you are young every new book you read is like a new eye which opens on to the world and which modifies the viewpoint of the other eyes or book-eyes which you had before, and so in the midst of this new idea of literature which I longed to create, there was also space for a revival of all the literary worlds which had captivated me from childhood onwards … The result was that while setting out to write something like Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, at the same time I also wanted to create a work akin to Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
It was Cesare Pavese who understood this instantly: from his reading of The Path he intuited all my favourite literary texts. He even cited Ippolito Nievo, the nineteenth-century Italian writer to whom I had wanted to pay secret homage by basing Pin’s meeting with Cousin on Carlino’s encounter with Spaccafumo in Nievo’s Le confessioni di un Italiano (The Confessions of an Italian).
It was Pavese who was the first to talk of a fairy-tale tone in my writing. Up until then I had not been aware of this, but from that point onwards I became only to conscious of it, and tried to confirm that definition. The story of my literary career was already beginning to be mapped out, and now I think I see it entirely encapsulated in that beginning.
Perhaps, in the end, it is only your first book that counts, perhaps you should only write that one and stop; you only make the great leap that one time, the opportunity to express your real self happens only once, what you have to say inside you is either said at that point or never more. Perhaps real poetry is possible only at one moment in your life, which for most people coincides with their earliest youth. Once that phase has passed, whether you have expressed yourself or not (and you won’t know whether you have for a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty years: contemporaries cannot be good judges), from that point on the die is cast, all you will do subsequ
ently is imitate others or yourself, you won’t ever manage to produce a single word that is authentic or unique …
I must digress here. Every discourse that is based on purely literary factors, if it is honest, ends up in this stalemate, this failure which writing always entails. Luckily, writing is not just a matter of literature, but of something else. Once more I need to alter the course this preface has taken.
This something else, as I thought then, was a definition of what the partisan war had been like. I and a friend of mine, a contemporary, who is now a doctor, and who was then a student like myself, used to spend the evenings in discussion. For both of us the Resistance had been the formative experience; for him in a much more demanding way than for me, since he had ended up with serious responsibilities: at barely twenty years of age he had become a commissar of a partisan division, the one to which I had belonged as a simple ‘garibaldino’ volunteer. In those days, just a few months after the Liberation, we felt that the way everyone talked of the Resistance was completely wrong, that a new kind of rhetoric was emerging which concealed its real essence, its basic character. It would be difficult for me to reconstruct those discussions exactly; all I remember is our ceaseless polemic against all the romanticized images, our reduction of the partisan consciousness to an elementary instinct, which we had observed even in the most unsophisticated of our comrades, and which became the key to the history of the present and the future.