Michele Garassino, Genoa, March 13, 1978
It’s not the strangest story I’ve heard about him, however: he believed he could speak every language, despite never having studied any of them. Once we put him to the test. “What does Blume mean, Zago?” we asked him. He puffed up his cheeks, as if the word were a wine he was tasting, and finally replied: “Something aquatic.” Some of us laughed out loud; we were finishing up dinner and had been drinking. “Blume means flower,” we corrected him, but Zago thought for a second and responded: “Yes: aquatic flower, like the lily.”
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
Naturally, Cosimo Zago worked for the secret police, as did many others.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
The line from Pisa to Rimini, which we knew as the Gothic Line or the Green Line, was the southern border of the Social Republic until April 1, 1945, like the Arno Line had been before it, and even before that, the Trasimene, which we used to call the “Albert Line” after Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, also known as “Albert the Smiling.” Later we wouldn’t have time to give the borders nicknames, except for the Genghis Khan Line and the Po, because the Allies were advancing so rapidly. It was all over by April 27, when the line reached Garfagnana, but by then we had taken refuge, to the best of our abilities, frightened but perhaps also forewarned by a death, a single death among so many others. Our conference was held on April 20 and 21, although it’d been scheduled to go on until the twenty-third.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
The idea was to break up the isolation that hung over the arts, particularly literature, in the Social Republic; but while that would have been possible in, let’s say, September or October 1944, it no longer was in April 1945, among other reasons because boats no longer headed toward the northern ports and traveling by land was dangerous and, largely, reckless. A handful of writers told us that they couldn’t come, others we could never locate, since they’d abandoned their last addresses and were in hiding or wandering through Europe; some never found a ticket: we could gather all their names into a list of the finest of world literature that you, perhaps, would call “fascist literature” although that term is imprecise or, at least, it shouldn’t carry all the connotations someone of your age, and with what I imagine to be your political ideas, would give it. Those who couldn’t attend the conference included the American Arthur Maddow; Justo Jiménez Martínez de Ostos, a Brazilian writer who loved jokes and had written “Ode to the Braying of Franklin D. Roosevelt,” which consisted solely of donkey sounds and had to be performed in American English, according to Ostos, who was unable to convince any shipping lines to allow him passage from Rio de Janeiro to Europe: Ostos disappeared in Lisbon in 1956; he’d been born in 1897 in southern Brazil on an estate where he’d commissioned a gigantic statue of Mussolini that, according to what I’m told, was devoured by the jungle after his disappearance; Knut Hamsun, whose enthusiasm for the Germans seemed to pale beside his enthusiasm for us Italians, but who chose to decline the invitation and remain at his home in Nørholm, where he was arrested for high treason and died in 1952, seven years after writing an elegy to Adolf Hitler and nine years after sending his Nobel Prize medal to Joseph Goebbels; Juan Antonio Tiben, the Swiss man who had spent his youth in Florence and then in Rome, where he ran various literary journals in the 1930s after losing his money to an Italian film actress, and who never wrote a book but I can still remember part of one of his poems: “You will look through the porthole / at the two houses of God / and nothing will matter / beyond the lost gaze / with which from his two houses / God will be searching for you”; Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who had fled Paris, we couldn’t locate him because he was in Sigmaringen Castle with his wife, a cat named Bébert, and Marshal Philippe Pétain; Robert Brasillach had already been killed on February 6 in Montrouge, but he had left us a letter filled with conviction and personal courage that we tried to read at the end of the conference but no one listened; Pierre Drieu La Rochelle had already committed suicide, though we didn’t know it at the time, just as we didn’t yet know his last words, which are terrible and accurate, and his rivals proved to be unworthy of: “Be as faithful to the spirit of the Resistance as I am to the spirit of Collaboration.” Another one who’d died was Jacques Boulenger—in 1943 he’d written a book about French blood that could have been endorsed, word for word, by an Italian, particularly a northern Italian; Abel Bonnard had already fled, or was just about to, down to Spain, where he planned to hide out until his death sentence as a collaborationist was reconsidered or until he found the man of his dreams, which I think was what finally happened and, of course, was more feasible; Paul Morand, who by then was a representative of the Vichy government in Bern, although the Vichy government no longer existed, did try to come to the conference. He’d committed to attending, but in the end couldn’t get across the Swiss border, which over those weeks seemed to be closed in both directions but particularly if you were trying to enter the country.
Atilio Tessore, Florence, March 11, 1978
Paul Claudel? An enormous Catholic cow, like Georges Bernanos, who was a mustachioed Catholic cow; and like Charles Maurras, a monarchical Catholic cow who’d already been arrested in September 1944. Strangely enough, Maurras was a cow with a goatee. Not Henri Massis, and that’s why he was at the conference; as was Lucien Rebatet, who later wrote Memoirs of a Fascist, which we should have written ourselves and signed with our first and last names; which is to say, with our Italian first and last names.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
A sizable delegation of Spaniards also attended the conference. Not César González-Ruano, suspected by our German friends of having helped some wealthy Jews flee Paris, though more likely he just ripped them off…He also could have been a German spy, who knows. And not Ernesto Giménez Caballero, who at that point was the cultural attaché at the Spanish embassy in Paraguay but also the closest to us: he’d invited Marinetti to Spain in 1928, he’d written about the connections he saw in Italy to Spanish national traditionalism (we took that last part as an insult, of course, but we mostly overlooked it), he’d made an important contribution to a general theory of fascism in Europe, and he was avant-garde, but he couldn’t come. Nor could José María Pemán, whom we met on a visit he’d made to Rome in 1938 with a one-eyed general; nor Rafael García Serrano, even though we sent him money for his train ticket (he kept it and didn’t come); nor Agustín de Foxá, who’d been banished from Rome in 1940 for espionage—although, of course, what else was a diplomat to do?—despite which he wrote some lovely Poems to Italy. But among those who did attend were Luys Santa Marina and Rafael Sánchez Mazas—who knew us well, who’d lived in Italy for seven years, and who was ugly, a horrible, frightful, possible moral ugliness—and Eugenio d’Ors and Juan Ramón Masoliver, who had been Pound’s secretary in Rapallo and knew us well. Also Eugenio Montes, who a couple of years earlier had written Italian Melody and had visited the country on various occasions, with that one-eyed general or with some other one.
Michele Garassino, Genoa, March 13, 1978
The Spanish writers were contemplative: they were with the priests and the farmworkers, and aspired to be like them, in some obscure way. We were indifferent to the priests and the farmworkers, but the Spanish writers were our circumstantial comrades-in-arms, so their friendship was, as happens on so many occasions, inevitable. None of them knew what Futurism was, however: if they had known, they would have been very careful not to attend the conference.
Espartaco Boyano, Ravenna, March 10, 1978
They wrote coplas, from what I understand. Verses to a heroism that they, of course, lacked and to a rural life they probably had little knowledge of. Fortunately, God gave me the talent of not being able to learn Spanish, which—from what I’ve been told by some—has saved me from having to read a ton of garbage.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
A
Bulgarian novelist with the improbable name of Fani Popowa-Mutafowa came, and the Dane Svend Fleuron, and Rintsje Piter Sybesma and Henri Bruning from the Netherlands (Bruning was honored by the Dutch SS in September 1944 for his work as an author and a censor and, when he returned to his country after the conference, he was arrested and jailed for two years and three months), and the Romanians Ion Sân-Giorgiu and Niculae I. Herescu both committed to coming but only the first one actually did. The Norwegian Kåre Immanuel Bjørgen did not attend; he was in hiding, which meant we couldn’t find him (though the Allies did, condemning him to three years of forced labor). Nor did Lars Hansen, the other Norwegian who had taken part in the Weimar conferences, and who died in July 1944. The Hungarian József Nyírö replied that he couldn’t come because he was fulfilling governmental duties, but the following month he fled to Germany with the entire Hungarian cabinet.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
You see, the Allies were our enemies, but the Germans, whom the King had betrayed and who wanted to make us pay for that betrayal, were also our enemies. Everything in the middle was our enemy, but everything in the middle was everything, there wasn’t anything that wasn’t in the middle at that point in time. We organized that conference because we knew all was lost and that we would soon fall, but we wanted to fall honorably and remaining faithful to ideas that still seemed correct to us, or less erroneous than others, than the freedoms the United States offered based on money and usury, which was historically carried out by Jews, although, in that sense, I’ve always thought that our view of the Jews is a result of usury, more than the usury is a result of the Jews and, as such, I don’t believe it was necessary to murder them, particularly not the poor Jews, an idea I argued with Pound over, and which Pound ended up accepting at the end of his life. We also wanted to nationalize the factories, guarantee private property, and eliminate the bourgeoisie, as well as avoid the breakup of Italy, none of which was exactly furthered by bringing foreign writers to speak in favor of our idea, that’s true; but our idea, I now think, was an aesthetic utopia, and those utopias should never transcend the realm of books, maybe they shouldn’t have ever even left the heads of their authors: they had already left our heads, though. So we couldn’t do anything else but organize the Conference of Fascist Writers.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Shortly after being named by Mezzasoma as his representative at the conference, Giorgio Almirante took the liberty of inviting Julius Evola, but, as I expected, Evola replied that we weren’t reactionary enough to benefit from his presence, something that, actually, was true: we were only carrying out the most revolutionary political experiment ever seen. As for the others, Pierre Gaxotte was crossed off our list by our German friends since he was against the Third Reich, and we rejected the Mexican Alfonso Junco, in that case for being against Italian fascism; in his place came the writer Pobre México. We waited for the historian Charles Petrie until the last minute, but he wasn’t allowed to leave the United Kingdom and, from what I understand, he protested by grabbing the cap off of a policeman in the port of Bristol, which got him arrested for a few hours. Pablo Antonio Cuadra, the Nicaraguan, didn’t want to come to the conference because he thought the political and aesthetic problems of the American continent should be resolved using their own cultural elements, which he informed us in a letter written in the European tongue Americans typically use to reject all things European.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Almirante picked me up in an official car in Turin on the nineteenth. Mezzasoma didn’t come with him even though he promised he would, so Almirante was all the official representation we had. It wasn’t much, and he knew it, so he was constantly apologizing. The car headed slowly toward Pinerolo along a highway devastated by bombing, with the remains of cars and dead animals on both sides of the road, and near Volvera we had a strange encounter with a group of Wehrmacht soldiers who stopped us to ask for identification. When we showed them our documents, one of them told us that the day before they’d seen a train passing by and that the train was made of cement and was immune to bombs, which sounded far-fetched, in part because it seemed hard to imagine what kind of a locomotive could have pulled such a train and because we couldn’t conceive of someone wanting to travel through northern Italy in some sort of roving mausoleum. Almirante kept insistently preening his mustache, as if trying to shield his lips, and what might emerge from them, from my eyes, and told me later that he had heard talk of a similar project and also of some secret weapons Germany was about to use to change the direction of the war, which we were clearly losing—although there was no need for him to tell me that last part. He added that he knew because he had recently met with a Sicilian playwright—whose name didn’t mean much to me, I’ve never been too interested in the theater, much less in the North African sort—who’d just returned from Germany. The playwright had been arrested by the Germans due to a problem with his papers in 1943, shortly before the Allied invasion, and he’d been sent to build some antiaircraft shelters in Salerno and later a barracks outside Ancona and then to Germany to work in Wehrmacht arms factories, without any of his attempts to clear up the situation being properly addressed. In Germany, in a factory outside Bochum, the playwright learned about the new weapons and found out about a plan the Germans had: they were going to make two passenger planes fall in the middle of New York City. The anticipated result wasn’t so much human and material loss as it was plunging the United States into decades of paralysis and confusion that would lead the Americans to make successive terrible political errors that would stretch the country so thin it would start to fray, tensing over its empty shell, as had happened with the Roman Empire and all the other empires in history. One day, a few weeks later, the playwright managed to prove his identity to his supervisor, thanks to what we’ll call fate: he’d heard his supervisor talking to someone else about a play he’d seen in the theater the night before and trying to remember the name of the playwright. “I’m the author, me,” he had stammered out. The Germans checked their archives and confirmed the statement, and then sent the playwright on a troop transport train to Italy, to Salò, along with a recommendation letter they’d written as some sort of redress.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
“What are those weapons?” I asked him. Almirante looked at me, and then looked away, as if he were ashamed to tell me: “They’re inside of us. They already put them in there, now they just have to activate them,” he answered.
Michele Garassino, Genoa, March 13, 1978
His name was Emilio Carduccio, and he’d built up some prestige around the Strait of Messina and in Reggio Calabria, not so much in Palermo, where he was considered a regional author. I met him briefly when he was in Genoa accompanied by some local Party authorities. One of his plays was staged for a social excursion among authorities in the Spianata dell’Acquasola, to the east of the city. Maybe the actors were already drunk, or simply exhausted after the long trip they’d made, or perhaps I was the one exhausted, although I hadn’t traveled at all, but I remember the play was a catastrophe. The actors shouted out slogans against the regime, one of them imitated Il Duce’s mannerisms and cut his face and forehead with a knife, afterward they ordered us to sing the “Internationale,” someone ate excrement onstage. Carduccio was the only one laughing, feverishly, as the sun dropped amid the park’s trees and the wives of the local Party authorities tried to herd their children and stunned husbands back home. After the war I learned that Carduccio was secretly a member of the Sicilian Communist Party and that he’d conceived of that performance as an act of revenge and perhaps suicide. Before that Giorgio Almirante told me Carduccio had been captured by the Germans and spent the last months of the war in an underground arms factory in the Ruhr basin, from which he’d also managed to escape. Of course, by then all of us who’d met him thought he was dead. In the area around the Strait of Messina, where his works had been perform
ed with greater regularity though without any success, some sort of local cult had sprung up around him, and the Party had carefully, although secretly, promoted him as a martyr. One of the groups of insurgents who resisted the Allied occupation inland on the island, between Caltavuturo and Polizzi Generosa, had named a battalion after him, and the local section of the Party had already announced, from its—temporary, they claimed—refuge in Salò, that the main theater in Reggio Calabria would bear his name after the south of the peninsula was recovered. Of course, we never recovered the south of the peninsula, but all those gestures, the celebration of Carduccio as a martyr of the fascist cause, and his return to Italy courtesy of the Germans, were enough for the Allies: when they managed to get their hands on him, they condemned him to two years and three months for being a beneficiary of fascism. He died in prison, in 1946 or 1947.
Oreste Calosso, Rome, March 16, 1978
Pinerolo had managed to remain on the sidelines of the war by clinging to what seemed to be an unflappable indifference to everything that wasn’t the nature surrounding it. At the entrance to town we were received by the authorities and a ton of little kids waving Social Republic flags and photographs of Il Duce, as if it were 1926 or 1934. Almirante found the reception as disconcerting as I did, and was about to ask the driver to speed up and pass it by. The formal greetings, of course, lasted for hours, which made clear, as if the flags and portraits of Mussolini weren’t enough, that we were dealing with Italians who were proud to be Italians and had no intention of being anything but Italians, not Swiss, not German, and not American. Finally, when we managed to be led to the room in the Town Hall where the conference would be held in a couple of days, and which was already prepared for the occasion, night had begun to fall. Outside, the town seemed to dissolve into the darkness that came from the mountains.
Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets Page 5