View all notes
When I set out for the United Sates, and also throughout my travels there, I swore that I would never write a book on America (there are already so many!). Now, however, I have changed my mind. Travel books are a useful, modest and yet self-contained way of writing literature. These are books that have a practical use, even though, or precisely because, countries change from year to year and in fixing them as you have seen them you record their changing essence; and in such books you can express something that goes beyond the description of places one has seen, a relationship between yourself and reality, a process of knowledge.
Negative aspects of travel? Everyone will say that it distracts you from that horizon of set objects that constitute your own poetic world, it disperses that absorbed concentration which is a condition (one of the conditions) conducive to literary creation. But in the end, even if it is a dispersal, what does it matter? In human terms, it is better to travel than to stay at home. First of all live, and then philosophize and write. Writers above all should live with an attitude towards the world which effects a greater acquisition of truth. That small something which will reflect this on the page, anything, will be the literature of our time, nothing else.
Men always count more than ideas. For me ideas have always had eyes, nose, mouth, arms and legs. Political history for me is above all a history of human presences. Just when you least expect, you realize that Italy is full of wonderful people.
As a child listening to the adults’ discussions in our house, I always felt that it was taken for granted that in Italy everything was going wrong. And during adolescence I and my companions at school were almost all hostile to Fascism. But it is not at all inevitable that just because of this my road towards anti-Fascism was already marked out. At that time I was very far from seeing the situation in political terms, as a struggle of one ideology against another, and from working out perspectives towards a solution for the future. Seeing that politics is an object of contempt and obloquy in the eyes of the best people, the most spontaneous attitude for a young person is to think that it is an area that is irredeemably corrupt, and that one has to look for other values in life. The distance between judging Fascism negatively and having a political commitment to anti-Fascism was so great it could not be conceived of today.
I have insisted on setting down these memories because I see that now many non-believing friends let their children have a religious education ‘so as not to give them complexes’, ‘so that they don’t feel different from the others’. I believe that this behaviour displays a lack of courage which is totally damaging pedagogically. Why should a young child not begin to understand that you can face a small amount of discomfort in order to stay faithful to an idea? And in any case who said that young people should not have complexes? Complexes arise through a natural attrition with the reality that surrounds us, and when you have complexes you try to overcome them. Life is in fact nothing but this triumphing over one’s own complexes, without which the formation of a character and personality does not happen.
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.)
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.
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.
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 would like to point out here at least two things which I have believed in throughout my career and continue to believe in. One is the passion for a global culture, and the rejection of the lack of contact caused through excessive specialization: I want to keep alive an image of culture as a unified whole, which is composed of every aspect of what we know and do, and in which the various discourses of every area of research and production become part of that general discourse which is the history of humanity, which we must manage to seize and develop ultimately in a human direction. (And literature should of course be in the middle of these different languages and keep alive the communication between them.)
My other passion is for a political struggle and a culture (and literature) which will be the education of a new ruling class (or new class tout court, if class means only that which has class-consciousness, as in Marx). I have always worked and continue to work with this in mind: seeing the new ruling class taking shape, and contributing to give it a shape and profile.