A Bold and Dangerous Family

by Caroline Moorehead

  He and Nello thought of the Circolo as somewhat like a London club where like-minded acquaintances could meet, read and talk. There were large, comfortable armchairs. Some sixty members gathered every Saturday evening for debates that ranged from syndicalism, Marxism and European federalism to the problems of the south, a subject always dear to Salvemini’s heart. Those who came were not all of the same political views, but they shared a deep revulsion towards the bullying behaviour of the squadristi who haunted Florence’s streets. At all their meetings, it was Carlo who was the organiser, but Salvemini the driving force, ‘a midwife’ wrote Ernesto Rossi later, ‘bringing the truth to light’. Salvemini was ruthless with those who spoke in abstracts or fell back on dogma and he criticised the ‘timorous and the indifferent’ for being complicit with the fascists. ‘Concretismo!’, Be concrete! he kept repeating.

  ‘He was planting a tree,’ Nello explained later, ‘in the hope that it would not be uprooted by the storm, and that one day men who came after him would rest in its shade.’

  It was Salvemini who introduced one of the very few women into the circle. Marion Cave was English and, at twenty-seven, a little older than the Rosselli brothers. She was the granddaughter of a postman, and the fourth child of a self-educated Quaker. Her family, all of them strong and tall, came from Uxbridge near London, where her father, Ernest Cave, was headmaster of a progressive school. Recognised at a young age as very clever, Marion had been sent to St Paul’s Girls’ School in London, where she had been thwarted in her desire to study the sciences – not deemed suitable for young ladies – but excelled in languages, before going on to Bedford College in London to read Italian. She was a keen musician and passionate about Italian opera – she claimed to have been to Madam Butterfly eleven times – and she had come to Florence to write her thesis on the Paduan philosopher Antonio Conti. She had had a bad bout of rheumatic fever, but refused to let it hold her back. To keep herself, she offered to give English lessons at the British Institute, which is where she met Salvemini, who planned to learn English ‘with the help of Miss Cave and her beautiful eyes’. Marion was both romantic and serious-minded; her Quaker father had brought her up in his own socialist mould. To prepare herself for her Italian adventure, she had conscientiously read Avanti! every day for six months.

  Shortly after arriving, while staying in the American YMCA in the San Frediano district, Marion had witnessed a fierce battle between squadristi and a group of local men in the square below. Refusing to join the other lodgers in a safe inside room, she climbed up to the attic and watched the fighting through her opera glasses, until spotted and shouted at by a policeman, whereupon she slipped out into the streets to observe events more closely. She was standing near the river when she saw two lines of men, holding on to each other by either ends of their manganelli, drawing a cart: in it stood Mussolini, waving graciously. Marion had come to Italy, she told her friends later, because she believed in an imminent socialist revolution. She planned to ‘die on the barricades’, not to skulk in the background.

  Marion was not exactly beautiful but her chestnut-brown hair was thick and curly, and her dark-grey eyes gleamed. Anna Kuliscioff called her a ‘ray of sunshine’ in the midst of Salvemini’s intent, earnest young disciples, and soon they all took to calling her Biancofiore, white flower. Salvemini was much taken with her. Like the Rosselli boys, she too addressed him as Father Bear.

  To demonstrate how open-minded they all were, the members of the Circolo decided to invite two local fascists to come one Saturday to debate with them. Alberto Luchini, who had followed D’Annunzio to Fiume, spoke at length about the need for a curb on free speech and tolerance and became very angry when contradicted. ‘At that moment,’ Marion said later, ‘we understood . . . that there was an abyss between them and us, and that nothing would bring us together, not even language.’ To his mother, Carlo wrote: ‘The chains grow tighter, things are proceeding along their fatal course. We will see how, where and when they will halt.’ Three days later, he wrote again, to say how pleased he was that the fascists were becoming visibly more authoritarian, since it would open the eyes of those who had been fooling themselves. In his letters, Carlo was often brisk, jaunty. Nello’s letters were gentler, more ruminative.

  Carlo and Nello completed their theses in the summer of 1923, having accomplished a remarkable amount in a very short time; both received the top marks, summa cum laude. It was clear that they were heading for impressive academic careers, though the direction each was taking reflected their very different natures: Nello, whose research into Mazzini had broken new ground in archival studies, was looking backwards, exploring history and the lessons it could teach. The more impatient Carlo, ever hungry for experience, was setting his sights forwards, to what could be done to shape a better Italian, and European, future. Both of them, along the way, had had bruising encounters with Salvemini, who returned the drafts of their theses covered with question marks and crossings out, repeatedly urging more intellectual rigour. Wherever Carlo used the words ‘I think’ or ‘I believe’, the margins were full of angry lines. Carlo, said Salvemini, was like a ‘volcanic eruption’ and lacked ‘criticism, equilibrium and substance’. The two young men had felt crushed. Carlo slunk away, railed, spent a few days hating Salvemini, then got down to work; Nello licked his wounds and immediately started revising his text. In private, however, Salvemini was delighted with his two young friends. ‘Carlo and Nello’, he wrote, ‘had their own characters. They were modest and they were honest. They knew how to listen and how to learn.’ The future, for both of them, seemed wide and full of promise.

  While in the north, Carlo had met Attilio Cabiati, a friend of Salvemini’s and a distinguished economist working at Milan’s Bocconi University. Cabiati now offered him a post as unpaid assistant for a few months in the Institute of Political Economy, which would give him time to explore his interest in monetary policy and syndicalism, after which he would receive a salary. A part-time lectureship was also coming up at the Istituto Superiore di Scienze Economiche e Commerciali in Genoa, and Carlo accepted both jobs. That spring, Salvemini had been invited to London to meet Labour politicians and give a series of lectures on Italian foreign policy at King’s College. When Cabiati suggested to Carlo that he would do well to go to England to attend the Fabian summer school before taking up his posts in Milan and Genoa, it seemed an excellent idea that mentor and disciple should do so together. And Carlo was restless, looking for something new – not so much a new political order, but a return to fundamental values based on socialism and a ‘doctrine of liberty’, possibly, as he wrote to a friend, ‘a truly enormous front capable in the long term of overthrowing every adversary’. He was in search of inspiration.

  Carlo arrived in Paris, by overnight train from Turin, very early on a fine morning in late July 1923. He had never been to France. His immediate feeling was one of dislike. He hated the architecture, the tall grey buildings, the ‘hideous’ churches, though he was impressed by the speed of the cars whirling round the Place de la Concorde. But once he had visited the sights and been to the theatre and the opera, he began to experience a pleasing sense of the weight of history; and he felt very grateful to his mother, he wrote, for having made him learn French and for the long hours they had spent together reading French literature. He was expecting Salvemini to join him, but Mussolini had refused to grant him a passport – a new form of control over his opponents – and Salvemini was now somewhere on the border, trying to find a way to cross clandestinely.

  When, by the 26th, Salvemini had still not turned up, Carlo caught a ferry across the Channel on his own. A room had been booked for him in a boarding house off Russell Square. London, as he immediately wrote to Amelia, was so ‘immense, grandiose, vertiginous’, so busy and bustling, that he felt ‘stupid’. Though disconcerted by the formality and coldness of officials, he was charmed by the warmth of his new friends. The historian Professor Tawney took him off to meet George Cole, the political eco
nomist and exponent of the guild movement, and L. T. Hobhouse, author of Liberalism. When Salvemini finally arrived, having been helped out of Italy by a friend and a false passport acquired in Paris, teacher and disciple visited the House of Commons together. Carlo was particularly taken by the Underground, which now had eleven stops, and its escalators, which he described in detail to Amelia, marvelling at the men in their top hats and the women clutching packets and babies, as they sank down into the subterranean depths on these ‘rolling carpets’. He was finding England expensive, and, in one of his few lapses of English, told Amelia that ‘yesterday I expensed four shillings’. At twenty-three, Carlo was a strange mixture of boyish excitement and cool, critical reflection.

  Neither Carlo nor Salvemini was at all eager to embroil himself in the political tensions simmering in London’s large Italian community, though it was becoming increasingly difficult to avoid them altogether. The first Italians, pedlars, organ-grinders and jugglers, had arrived in London early in the eighteenth century, and settled in Clerkenwell, turning its narrow, modest streets into a little Italy, where few of the women spoke English. England had been welcoming to these exiles, as it was to the artisans, barbers, asphalters, carpenters, tool-makers, cooks and ice-cream makers who travelled up through France and across the Channel all through the nineteenth century. Arriving in Clerkenwell, they felt at home among the flowering window boxes and the sheets hanging from the windows. Some sold ice from the back of a horse and cart. Others opened boarding houses. Pasta was made at home, then hung from the washing line to dry. During their periods of exile in England, both Garibaldi and Mazzini had promoted the idea of Italian schools and written articles to sway public opinion in favour of the Risorgimento.

  News of the violence in Italy, of the squadristi raids and the manganello, was initially greeted with revulsion. But by 1921 London had also become home to a sizeable number of Italian bankers and industrialists, along with hotel managers and the owners of shops, many of them in touch with the embassy, where a career diplomat and warm supporter of Mussolini, Giacomo De Martino, was ambassador. In June 1920, a weekly Italian paper called La Cronaca had been launched, financed by Fiat and Pirelli. In theory, it proclaimed itself to be above party politics, but since its views were shaped by the staff at the embassy, and by a group of pro-Mussolini lecturers in the Italian department at London university, its tone became gradually more bracing and nationalistic.

  In the winter of 1921, a group of prosperous Italian Londoners – some of them war veterans with experience of fascism at home – together with their friends Sir Rennell Rodd, former British ambassador to Rome, and Camillo Pellizzi, a lecturer at London university, had met to establish the first foreign fascio, a ‘nucleus of vibrant patriots of the purest Italian spirit’, open to men over twenty-one and women over eighteen ‘of excellent morality’. On hearing of its existence, Mussolini called it ‘my first-born abroad’. It was proposed to pull together all existing Italian organisations in London, from the Ice Cream and Temperance Refreshment Federation to the Molinari Sporting Club, under the discipline of squadre d’azione, to ‘tutelare’ the Italians in London in the true path of fascism. The general spirit of good cheer in which they seemed to be living had to be replaced by a more rigorous ‘concordia fascista’, and schools set up for London’s Italian children, since English ones, though good on moral and physical education, lacked a ‘spiritual drive towards nationalism’. It was only a pity that the particularly slow pace of life in Britain, ‘il metodo Londinese’, meant that nothing would happen very fast. At the fascio’s meetings in its new headquarters in Soho, and at its launch at a reception in the Savoy Hotel, many of the men wore black shirts. The manganello made its appearance on the streets of Clerkenwell. At first little interested, the British public took note when, after the March on Rome, a group of young squadristi laid a wreath in Westminster Abbey and raised their arms in the Roman salute.

  In La Cronaca, along with advertisements for Chianti, Asti Spumante, olive oil, alabaster, pearls from Venice, leather bags and the Barbetta Bakery – ‘Specialists in Panettoni’ – on the Hampstead Road were warnings about Bolshevism and how, without a firm hand, Italy could easily sink into ‘Mexican or Balkan-style chaos’. Early in 1923, it reported on the great success of a ‘Black Shirt Gala Ball’, at which Italian and English guests alike had sung ‘Giovinezza’. Socialists were described as a ‘bunch of waiters’, Salvemini as a man who, ‘blind and deaf, denies the light of a truth he refuses to see’.

  Not all the Italians in London were happy with this fascist onslaught. In July 1922, an anti-fascist paper, Il Commento, had been launched. It, too, professed to be truly ‘independent of every group or vested interest’, and said that it intended to inject a ‘disinfecting current of ozone’ into the over-heated Italian community. Soon, however, it began commenting unfavourably on the violence happening in Italy, and filled its pages with cartoons portraying the fascists as toads and flies. Mussolini’s speeches were reported in mocking tones, and fascists referred to as ‘Knights of the manganello’. When, in September, Mussolini announced that ‘sporadic, individual, unintelligent, uncontrolled’ violence had to stop, Il Commento asked: ‘What, then, is intelligent, controlled violence? Is it instructive, kindly, evolved, well-mannered, knowing, perspicacious, courteous, genial?’

  The Fabian Society conference was to be held in Hindhead in Surrey, where a boarding school, empty for the summer holidays, had been taken over. The Fabians were the oldest surviving social group in Britain; their 2,000 or so members, who saw themselves as practical reformers, spoke of reconstructing society ‘in accordance with the highest moral possibilities’. Their motto was ‘Educate, agitate, organise’. By the early 1920s, the Fabians had long been dominated by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who lectured regularly on the state of the world. As Shaw had written, ‘My hours that make my days, my days that make my years follow one another pellmell into the maw of socialism,’ which was precisely what Carlo wanted to learn about. The summer school, now in its seventeenth year, was the highlight of the Fabian calendar.

  On Friday 3 August, Carlo, Salvemini and Carlo Levi, who had joined them in London, caught a train for Hindhead. St Edmund’s School sat on a low hill surrounded by heather and pine trees. It had a nearby tennis court, golf course and open-air swimming pool, as well as a large wooden hall, perfect for the Swedish drill laid on every morning for ladies in bloomers and tunics. Alcohol was forbidden, but glee singing, concerts, fancy-dress parties and excursions on foot, by bicycle and charabanc, were all regarded with as much seriousness as the lectures. The mood was friendly, polite, seldom confrontational; nothing happened in a hurry. It was a far cry from the turbulence and frenzy of Florence and, to the three Italians, a source of marvel and humour.

  The weather was sunny and rather windy, much like Italy on a spring day, noted Carlo approvingly; he did not care for great heat. On Saturday, they joined a party of fifteen and walked to nearby Frensham Ponds for tea. That evening, Salvemini gave an impromptu talk on fascism: Carlo remarked, not without a certain smugness, that his English was ‘improvised’. On Sunday, there was croquet, a discussion on the growth of public ownership, and dancing. Carlo was led round the dance floor by many ‘dear and sympathetic Fabians’, as he told Amelia later, charitably refraining from further comment. The visitors’ book lists a housewife, a number of teachers, a couple of journalists, some civil servants, and a ‘blouse manufacturer’ among those present. Under ‘Publications’, the housewife has written ‘two children’. On Tuesday, a Miss Hawkinson led a party ‘into the wooded portion of the grounds’, where they sang ‘“à la Wolf Cubs” until 11 pm’. Whether Salvemini and Carlo joined them is not recorded.

  During the first week the weather remained dry and fine and lectures were held outside. Sidney Webb gave a talk called ‘Is Civilisation Decaying?’ There was much admiring chat about Mazzini. Carlo intervened in praise of the Bolsheviks, about whom his listeners
seemed strangely ignorant. One day, he joined the swimmers: the water, he reported was ‘freddissima’. He could not quite come to terms with the fact that while no one dreamt of mentioning any embarrassing physical ailment – though someone did once refer to what he called a ‘tommy ache’ – they seemed perfectly happy to go naked into the shower or swimming pool. He put it down to ‘fascinating’ puritanism.

  The visitors’ book records ‘our Italian visitors again entering into the fun’, though what the Fabians made of their exotic guests it does not say. At this point, Carlo, Salvemini and Levi were sharing a room, and for that night’s fancy-dress carnival and ball they came down in their pyjamas, with chains around their wrists and ankles, as Italian prisoners of the fascists. Carlo felt himself drawn still more strongly to Salvemini, who had shown a side of himself Carlo had not seen before, full of unexpected subtlety and refinement. Thunder and the rain drumming on the wooden roof of the hall completely drowned out a lecture entitled ‘Is International Anarchy Curable in a Capitalist Society?’ but it had cleared in time for a farce, in which all joined, called ‘Bananas on Trial Through the Looking Glass’. Italy and its concerns, Carlo told Amelia, had ‘shrunk’. There was something in this mixture of high-mindedness and innocent, unworldly fun that delighted him.

  The three Italians were not greatly impressed by the lecturers: their minds seemed ‘ossified’ and they depended too heavily on facts, though Carlo was struck by their pleasing lack of rhetoric and posturing. What they relished were the long conversations, held over scones and hot chocolate, in which Carlo explored the intricacies of the Anglo-Saxon mind, the ‘very rich interior’ that lay behind these rational, practical exteriors. His English improved dramatically and what he was learning about the guild movement – which called for workers’ control of industry through a system of national guilds – and British Labour Party politics was making him rethink some of his own work on a non-Marxist approach to socialism. He decided to extend his stay, for another week of eurythmics, tennis, cabarets and talk about British parliamentarianism.