The ideas regarding the political struggle already taking place in the world did not reach me, only its external images, which simply lay beside one another as in a mosaic. The most read papers in San Remo were from Nice, not Genoa or Milan. During the Spanish Civil War L’Eclaireur supported Franco; Le Petit Niçois was for the Republicans, and at a certain point it was banned. In our house we read Il Lavoro, a Genoa paper, as long as it remained – as it did well into the Fascist period – the only paper whose editor was an old socialist, Giuseppe Canepa. Canepa was an old friend of my father’s, who I remember sometimes coming to lunch at our house. But this must have been around 1933, since my parents enjoyed enormously its anti-Hitler column signed by ‘Stella Nera’, who was Giovanni Ansaldo.51 Once a Zeppelin passed overhead, full of Nazi brownshirts, and the boy next to me, Emanuel Rospicicz, who was a Polish Jew, said: ‘If only it would crash and kill them all.’ I was in the fourth year of primary school, at the Waldensian School: it must have been 1933. In my house there were always comings and goings of young people from all over – Turks, Dutch, Indians – who had grants to attend the institute that my father directed; once a heated argument arose between two Germans, a Nazi and a Jew. My mother’s best friend, from Switzerland, often went to France and attended the international peace and anti-Fascist demonstrations at the Salle Pleyel: she did not tell us, but (we later found out) she secretly tested their passwords on us. At the time of the Popular Front in France, at afternoon snack-time our mother would make us stand to attention facing east and say: ‘Pour le pain, pour la paix, pour la liberté.’
At the same time, of course, I attended the assemblies and parades of the Fascist armed scouts, the Balilla Moschettieri, and later of the Avanguardisti. The pleasure in missing these, of being suspended from school for not attending an assembly or not putting on your uniform on call-up days, became more intense around the time of going to high school, though even then more than anything else this was simply a bravado display of student disobedience. But what it was like living through this period of Fascist demonstrations I have already tried to represent in three stories which are set in the summer of 1940; there is no point in going back over that here.
In short, until the Second World War broke out, the world seemed to me to have a range of different gradations of morality and behaviour, not opposites but placed alongside each other. At one extreme was the stern anti-Fascist or even pre-Fascist rigour which was incarnated by my mother with her moralistic, secular, scientific, humanitarian, pacifist, animal-loving austerity (my father was another response on his own: a solitary walker, he lived more in the woods with his dogs than among other humans: hunting in season, and looking for mushrooms or snails in the other months). After that one gradually moved through various levels of indulgence towards human weakness, approximation and corruption which became more and more marked and cloying as one went through the Catholic, military, conformist and bourgeois vanity fairs, until you reached the opposite extreme of total vulgarity, ignorance and bluster which was Fascism in its smug sense of triumph, devoid of scruples and sure of itself.
This kind of picture actually did not impose on us categorical decisions, though it might seem like that today; a boy then saw open to him various options, including that of rejecting his parents’ world as a nineteenth-century sarcophagus out of touch with reality, and of choosing Fascism which seemed much more solid and vital; in fact my (younger) brother, from the age of thirteen to sixteen, called himself a Fascist just to rebel against our family (but as soon as the German occupation began the rebellion stopped and the family was united in support of the partisan struggle). I at that same age – the time of the Spanish Civil War, which seemed a clear sign of the defeat of the values my parents believed in – accepted their world of values as a tradition and defence against Fascist vulgarity, but I was heading down the road of pessimism, an ironic and detached commentator, someone who wanted to keep himself aloof: any progress was an illusion, things could not be worse in the world.
2) The summer in which I began to enjoy my youth, society, girls, books, was 1938: it ended with Chamberlain and Hitler and Mussolini in Munich. The Riviera’s belle époque was over. There was a year of tension, then the war on the Maginot Line, then the collapse of France, Italy joining in the war, and the dark years of death and disasters. I do not think that my memories can be very different from those of the average contemporary of mine: neither as regards our anxiety for the events of the war, nor as regards our reading and our discussions of that time.
I would like to flag here an environmental change which took place around me and was not without consequences. With the war, San Remo stopped being the cosmopolitan crossroads that it had been for half a century (stopped for ever: in the post-war period it became part of the suburb of Milan–Turin) and what came back to the fore were its characteristics as an old Ligurian provincial town. Imperceptibly this was also a change of horizons. It came naturally to me to immerse myself in this provincial atmosphere, which for me and my contemporaries, who almost all belonged to the old middle-class families of the town, the children of upright anti-Fascist or at least non-Fascist professionals, acted as a defence against the world around us, a world by now dominated by corruption and madness. As for my own family, what counted now for me was not so much their exotic experiences as my father’s old heritage of dialect, rooted as it was in places and property. This was a kind of local ethics, which orientated our choices and friendships and was made up of diffidence and scornful superiority for everything that was beyond the range of our crude and ironic dialect, our brusque common sense.
In 1941 I had to enrol in university. I chose the Agriculture Faculty, concealing my literary ambitions even from my best friends, almost concealing them from myself. A few months spent in Turin, reluctantly attending the university, gave me the mistaken notion that city people thought about nothing besides supporting either Torino or Juventus or supporting one of the two radio orchestras, and this confirmed my enclosure in my provincial shell.
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.)
But this enclosed attitude (which nowadays we could define as ‘political indifference’, by analogy with the attitude that prevailed after the war in those on the opposite side) did not last long, as it soon came into conflict with everything that was in the air. And in any case this phase of provincial isolationism was never total. For instance, one of the school friends I was closest to was a boy from the South who had come from Rome, Eugenio Scalfari.52 By now Eugenio was at the University of Rome and would come back to San Remo in the holidays: it could be said that my
‘political’ life began with my discussions with Scalfari who at first belonged to the fringe groups of the Fascist University Youth, but then was expelled from the GUF, and became involved with groups that had very confused ideologies at the time. Once he wrote to me asking me to join a party that was being formed: the name they proposed was ‘the aristocratic-social party’. So, gradually, through the letters and the summer discussions with Eugenio I found myself following the reawakening of clandestine anti-Fascism and developing a sense of direction in my reading: ‘Read Huizinga, Montale, Vittorini, Pisacane’; the new publications that came out in those years marked so many stages in the disordered literary-ethical education we had.
We also talked a lot about science, cosmology, the fundamentals of knowledge: Eddington, Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein. Our provincial town was in those days full of unusual cases of individual cultural advances: a young man from San Remo, who was a fanatic for English and American culture, managed in the middle of the war to acquire an at that time legendary knowledge in epistemology, psychoanalysis and jazz and we listened to him as though he were some sort of oracle. One summer day, Eugenio Scalfari and I created an entire philosophical system: the philosophy of the élan vital . The next day we discovered that it had already been invented by Bergson.
At that time I was writing short tales or apologues with a vaguely political (anarchoid-pessimistic) message. I would send them to Scalfari in Rome who managed to have one of them published in the GUF’s broadsheet: it seems it caused a few problems but nobody knew who I was. At that time my political ideas and my writings were oriented towards an anarchism that was not bolstered by any ideological underpinning. In the summer of 1943, after the fall of Mussolini on the 25th of July, we found a common platform with Scalfari and other friends, calling ourselves ‘liberals’ (a major influence here was the reading of De Ruggiero’s Storia del liberalismo ), which was something as vague as my anarchism. Sitting around in a circle on a huge flat stone in the middle of a stream near our land we met to found the MUL (University Liberal Movement). Politics was still a game, but not for long. They were days of frenzy, subsequently known as the ‘45 days’. The Communists came back from exile; we plied them with questions, requests, discussions, objections.
Then came [the armistice of ] the 8th of September. Eugenio went back to Rome. After a few months I joined the undercover Communist organization.
3) On the 25th of July I had been disillusioned and offended that a historical tragedy such as Fascism should finish with an act of routine administration like a motion of the Grand Council. I was dreaming of the revolution, the rebirth of Italy in the struggle. After the 8th of September this dream became reality: and I had to learn how difficult it is to live out and live up to one’s dreams.
My choice of Communism was not at all dependent on ideological motivations. I felt the necessity to start with a clean sheet, so I had defined myself as an anarchist. As for the Soviet Union, I had the full array of the usual objections and diffidence, but I was also influenced by the fact that my parents had always been unswervingly pro-Soviet. But above all I felt that at that juncture what counted was action, and the Communists were the most active and organized force. When I learnt that the main partisan leader in our area, the young doctor Felice Cascione, who was a Communist, had fallen fighting against the Germans at Monte Alto in February 1944, I asked a Communist friend if I could join the party.
I was immediately put in touch with comrades who were workers, and had the job of organizing students in the Youth Front, and one of the things I wrote was cyclostyled and sent round secretly. (It was one of those semi-humorous apologues, like many I had written and would continue to write, and it concerned the anarchist-type objections which conditioned my support for Communism: whether the army, police, bureaucracy would survive into a future world; unfortunately I have not kept a copy, but I always hope I’ll find an old comrade who has.)
We were in the most peripheral fringe of the chequer-board of the Italian Resistance, devoid of natural resources, of Allied help, of authoritative political leadership; but this was one of the most fierce and ruthless trouble-spots for the whole twenty months, and it was one of the areas that had the highest casualty rate. It has always been difficult for me to recount in first person my memories of the partisan war. I could do it in several narrative keys, all of them equally truthful: from the re-evocation of the various emotions in play, the risks, anxieties, decisions, deaths, to an emphasis on the heroic–comic narration of the uncertainties, mistakes, blunders, misadventures which befell a young middle-class lad, who was politically unprepared, with no real experience of life, and who had lived at home with his family until then.
I cannot omit to record here (especially as this person has already appeared in these notes) the role my mother played in my experience of those months: she was an example of tenacity and courage in a Resistance which she saw as being one with natural justice and family virtues, exhorting her two sons to join the armed struggle, and behaving with dignity and firmness before the SS and the Fascist militia, and in her long detention as a hostage, not least when the blackshirts three times pretended to shoot my father in front of her eyes. The historical events which mothers take part in acquire the greatness and invincibility of natural phenomena.
But here I am meant only to trace the history of my political ideas at the time of the Resistance. And I would distinguish two attitudes which were both present in me and in the reality surrounding me: one was the Resistance as a highly legal act against Fascist subversion and violence; the other was the Resistance as a revolutionary and subversive act, as something passionately identified with the rebellion of the eternally oppressed and outlawed. I was alternately sensitive to one or other of these attitudes, depending on the events in which I found myself involved and on the harshness of the struggle, and on the people whom I found myself close to: the friends of my usual middle-class anti-Fascist environment, or a completely new stratum of society, which was more sub-proletariat than working-class, which was my major discovery about humanity, because up until then I had always thought of anti-Fascism as a tendency among cultured élites, not amongst the poor masses.
Communism too was these two attitudes together: depending on the psychological situation I was in, the unified legalistic party line, and Togliatti’s speeches which I happened to read in cyclostyled sheets, sometimes seemed the only word of calm wisdom amid the general extremism, at others they seemed something incomprehensible and remote, beyond the reality of blood and fury in which we were immersed.
After the Liberation, the first Marxist theoretical text I read was Lenin’s State and Revolution, and the prospect of the ‘withering away of the State’ was enough to absorb my originally anarchist, anti-State and anti-centralizing aspirations into the ideology of Communism. This is where the prehistory of my ideas ends, and the conscious history begins, at the same time as my participation in post-war political life, which for me took place mostly within the workers’ movement in Turin, and in tandem with my participation in the world of literature. In order to say something new about my subsequent experience (which was articulated above all in the works I published and in my public activity on behalf of the party) I should have to go down deeper, beyond the limits of time and space at my disposal. There will be plenty of opportunity to continue the account or to start it again from scratch. One sees one’s past more and more clearly as time goes by.
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.
These two terms or orders of needs and risks have been to varying degrees co-present in my way of considering political ideas and actions, in the years when I was part of the Communist party, just as they were before that and as they have remained since. Placing an emphasis on one or other of the two elements, or one or other of the two definitions I have given of each, has been the way in which I followed the historic experiences of these years.
Today my main concern is to see that the positive definition of the two terms, the one I gave first, can come true by paying the lowest possible of the costs I outlined in the second. The problems that are now troubling the world seem to me to be contained in this crux.
II. The Generation that Lived through Difficult Times
1) and 2) For those who were sixteen at the outbreak of the war and twenty at the armistice of 8 September 1943, the reply to the first two questions in the survey cannot involve a genuine exposition of ideas but rather a series of memories of childhood and adolescence, selected according to the way they impinged upon what was only a potential political awareness. This was what I tried to do in the replies published in Il Paradosso, 5:23–24, but the more I think about it the less satisfied I am with that lyrical–moralistic account of my ‘prehistory’. Political development proper begins when will, choice, reasoning and action come into play: that is to say, it is already a part of adult life. Consequently, in republishing this survey in book form, I think it is more useful to develop my replies to questions 3 and 4, which in the journal I had merely sketched out; and for questions 1 and 2 just to summarize what I had written then.
Before the war, I can speak not so much of a set of ideas as a conditioning – by my family, geography, the society we moved in and also my own psychology – which led me spontaneously to share anti-Fascist, anti-Nazi, anti-Franco, anti-war and antiracist opinions. This conditioning and these opinions would not have been enough on their own to make me commit myself to the political struggle. Between a negative judgment of Fascism and active anti-Fascist commitment there was a distance then which perhaps today we are unable to appreciate. When you see that politics is an object of obloquy and ridicule in the eyes of the best people around you, the most spontaneous attitude for a young person is to conclude that it is a field that is irredeemably corrupt, something you must avoid, and that you must look for other values in life.
Hermit in Paris Page 14