Biographies and Autobiographies in Modern Italy: a Festschrift for John Woodhouse

Martin McLaughlin

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351195416
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Critical interest in biography and autobiography has never been higher. However, while life-writing flourishes in the UK, in Italy it is a less prominent genre. The twelve essays collected here are written against this backdrop, and address issues in biographical and autobiographical writing in Italy from the later nineteenth century to the present, with a particular emphasis on the interplay between individual lives and life-writing and the wider social and political history of Italy. The majority of essays focus on well-known writers (D'Annunzio, Svevo, Bontempelli, Montale, Levi, Calvino, Eco and Fallaci), and their varying anxieties about autobiographical writing in their work. This picture is rounded out by a series of studies of similar themes in lesser known figures: the critic Enrico Nencioni, the Welsh-Italian painter Llewellyn Lloyd and Italian writers and journalists covering the Spanish Civil War. The contributors, all specialists in their fields, are Antonella Braida, Charles Burdett, Jane Everson, John Gatt Rutter, Robert Gordon, Gwyn Griffith, Peter Hainsworth, Martin McLaughlin, Gianni Oliva, Giuliana Pieri, and Jon Usher. The volume is dedicated to John Woodhouse, on his seventieth birthday, and concludes with a bibliography of his writings."

Chapter 1
Introduction

Peter Hainsworth and Martin McLaughlin

Biography and autobiography are flourishing as never before. Biography in particular is a genre that sells, especially in the UK, and one which supports professional practitioners and which offers academics in the humanities the relatively unusual prospect of producing work that is widely read. At the same time the status of these and other forms of what is now often called life-writing is often felt to be uncertain.¹ Practising biographers plead for academics to take their work seriously. Most theoretical reflection, of which there has been a vast amount since the 1960s, highlights problems inherent in standard practice — the risk of making an individual's life follow the narrative patterns of fiction, the inevitable omission of whole swathes of lived experience, and all the distortions imposed (even in the most honest seeming autobiography) by the retrospective, distanced eye. Not that the questions have impeded the practice. In many cases they have been incorporated into the specific biography or autobiography, so much so that some measure of representation of the biographer or autobiographer engaged in the actual process of writing is now almost routine (see in particular chapters 2 and 3 below).

At least that is broadly speaking the state of affairs in the English-speaking world and in Northern Europe as a whole. Italy is somewhat different. Autobiography and biography have not enjoyed the same widespread success within Italian literary culture or given rise to such theoretical questioning. There are only a few classics of Italian autobiography — those by Cellini, Vico and Alfieri spring to mind — and, compared to England and America, relatively few new ones have been written during the last hundred years or so that have been highly regarded or even widely read. There have been more biographies of Italians of course, and the Dizionario biografico degli italiani is comparable in scope and detail with the Dictionary of National Biography, but it is still unfinished, and in any case the most read and admired biographies inside and outside the country have tended to be by foreigners, mostly American and English scholars, ranging from E. H. Wilkms on Petrarch to Denis Mack Smith on Mussolini.²John Woodhouse's D'nnunzio is the outstanding recent example of work in this tradition, to which should be added his work on Gabriele Rossetti and his recently published biography of General Santi Ceccherini.³

It is a tradition which is characteristically pragmatic in approach and liberal in outlook, and which, while being alert to the risks of fictionalisation, tends to shy away from theoretical debate. Its continuing vitality and the force of John Woodhouse's example is evident in this collection of essays by friends, former colleagues and pupils dedicated to a range of figures from Italian culture from the immediate post-Unification years to the present. Most of these figures are creative writers, though not all; most are well-known, though not all. Some have written autobiographically, though none has produced a full-scale autobiography. Several essays concern themselves with filling out these partial autobiographies, or, in other instances, with teasing out concealed autobiographical sub-texts. Rather than attempting psychological analysis and reconstruction of the individual in isolation, the essays prefer to concentrate on how their subjects respond to and are affected by the wider social and political history of the country, and at times play significant roles within it. This too fits well enough with the tradition. Where the volume goes beyond it to a moderate degree is in giving a definite emphasis to general questions of the sort we mentioned initially, though always in relation to the specific context of Italy and specific individuals.

Such general and theoretical questions are raised most prominently in the first section of this quadripartite collection, a section which offers case studies of two of the most well-known twentieth-century Italian writers. In the first chapter Peter Hainsworth focuses on some of the features that distinguish Italian biography and autobiography. He argues that the constructed public self has tended strongly to predominate over the private, individual self throughout the history of Italian literature, although from Dante onwards it has been normal for the literary work to suggest that the private experiences are essential to its very existence. In the twentieth century political and social pressures have strengthened this tendency, though demands for more information to be disclosed are gradually having an effect. Hainsworth proposes as an emblematic and signally important instance the case of Italy's major poet of the century, Eugenio Montale, who himself actively continued the Italian tradition of self-representation in many ways and whose public image has been largely constructed within its terms.

The second case study here concerns Primo Levi. Levi is one of the few Italian prose writers of the post-war years with a worldwide reputation. Two large-scale biographies of him were published in English within weeks of each other in 2002. Robert Gordon examines the contrasting approaches of the two biographers, each working with the conventions of a different narrative genre, and sets them in the developing, self-aware practice of modern biography. He then shows how their narrative choices and the obstacles and risks they find themselves facing are anticipated in various ways in Levi's own autobiographical writings, not least in their self-consciousness and in moments of subsequent self-commentary. Levi, like other writers examined later in the volume, was all too aware of the prominence of biography (writing about others' lives) in his own work, and the problems surrounding such writing, from questions of privacy and potentially artificial narrative shape, to those of causality and ultimate meaning.

The four studies that follow in the Part II are concerned with the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the period of disorientation for the freshly unified country in which decadence and modernisation, patriotic fervour and social unrest seemed to come together all at once, most flamboyantly in the mesmerising figure of Gabriele D'Annunzio. Drawing on unpublished papers and correspondence, Giuliana Pieri reassesses the critic and essayist Enrico Nencioni, D'Annunzio's mentor, who has often been dismissed as a lightweight late romantic. Pieri sees him as taking advantage of the changing cultural possibilities offered to the intellectual in Umbertine Italy to create a distinctive form of artistic and literary essay. It is one that is studiedly aestheticising after the contemporary English manner and which freely incorporates biographical and autobiographical motifs in an attempt to capture the inner spiritual life of its Subject. The results may be bizarre by modern standards, but they exerted a significant influence on D'Annunzio, who developed his representations of female beauty in his novels from Nencioni's pseudoautobiographical reworking of Pre-Raphaelite typologies. Pieri moves beyond Nencioni's biographers' hyperboles to uncover a writer who found in the genre of biography a medium that blended his own aesthetic and ethical ideals.

D'Annunzio himself comes to the fore in Gianni Oliva's exploration of the mythicized and timeless form that his native Abruzzo, whether past or present, assumes in his work, offering regularly both a point of departure and longed-for goal for himself and for his protagonists. Oliva finds a particular importance in the convent of S. Maria del Gesù hear Francavilla, which was acquired by the painter Francesco Paolo Michetti as a refuge for young writers and artists. Here D'Annunzio created some of his impressive evocations of the Abruzzese landscape, although perhaps the most powerful ones (to be found in II trionfo della morte) stem from a summer spent with his mistress, Barbara Leoni, at some distance from Francavilla. Oliva documents the way D'Annunzio's travels in and observations of the Abruzzo landscape and customs are reworked in key episodes of his fiction.

Another figure who emerges from the mixture of Italian and British culture in the early twentieth century is Llewelyn Lloyd. Lloyd was an Italian post -macchiatolo painter of Welsh extraction, the quality of whose work has been increasingly acknowledged by art historians in recent decades. T. Gwynfor Griffith investigates aspects of his life and his antecedents which have remained obscure, beginning with his name. Griffith explores a family history which may be unusual but which is by no means freakish, since it was conditioned by economic and political factors that affected the lives of whole populations in different ways. Writing as a scholarly biographer-detective, he reconstructs piece by piece the fortunes of the family in Wales and the factors lying behind their gradual establishment in Livorno, which began in the second decade of the nineteenth century, before Lloyd's father arrived there in 1859 and a loosening of ties with Wales followed in the next generation.

The cross-cultural theme and this movement between the worlds of commerce and art are continued in Antonella Braida's study of the earlier part of Italo Svevo's career, which she shows is much more coherent and self-constructed than the accepted image of the 'amateur writer' suggests. Opting to review for the Triestine newspaper, L'Indipendente, was a deliberate choice in favour of an irredentist organ with an Italian orientation, but one that was also open to English and other European writing which literary journalism in Italy itself largely ignored. Svevo seized the chances he was offered to develop his interest in scientific writers such as Darwin and in literary Naturalists like Zola, writers ignored by the contemporary Decadent movement. This crucial phase of Svevo's career allowed the writer to develop also his ideas about the need for truthfulness as a basic criterion in fiction in opposition to the aestheticism of D'Annunzio. Braida shows that these early articles and reviews form a crucial stage in his self-construction as a writer.

The two essays that follow and make up the third Part of the volume are concerned with two different forms of autobiographical writing under Fascism. D'Annunzio remains a strong presence in Jon Usher's examination of Massimo Bontempelli's forging of his self-image as a writer in the 1930s. Part of the process was a polemical assault, at some personal risk, on D'Annunzio's status and significance at a time when Fascism had made him into one of its major cultural icons. For Bontempelli and his generation D'Annunzio was a figure who belonged to their youth and had been superseded by Marinetti's Futurism. But by the 1930s Bontempelli had rejected Futurism as well, just as he claimed to have rejected all his past selves in his search to find a new self and a new culture that would be appropriate to the changing times. Bontempelli deploys parodistic strategies to construct an autobiographical commentary on his conversion from the D'Annunziali and Futurist modes as well as on broader shifts in Italian culture.

The second essay in Part III turns from literary individualism to cultural conformism. One of the episodes that was a prelude to Italy's disastrous misfortunes in World War II was its intervention on the Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War. Charles Burdett examines the responses of some reporters for major newspapers to the events they witnessed. Most of these were highly rated at the time, though only the future novelist Guido Piovene is at all well known today. Their despatches show them conforming, enthusiastically it seems, to the regime's propaganda needs, even though one or another might write at some moment about recognising tragically that a dead Communist had also been a human being. Burdett points out that they were almost certainly sincerely committed to the Fascist cause and had the approval of most of their readers. Nor does it seem that many seriously changed their minds later. Certainly after the war only Piovene claimed that he felt compromised by what he had written about Spain. Burdett's account illustrates how nuances of autobiographical introspection can be discerned in what was primarily a propagandistic genre of writing.

The final three chapters, which form Part IV, consider three major recent authors, each quite different from the others, but all raising or engaging with problems of writing about the self in the context of the modern world. Italo Calvino holds personal experience at a distance in most of his many-sided oeuvre and was generally ambivalent about revealing information about himself. Martin McLaughlin looks at those stories (written mostly at moments of personal crisis) in which he does undertake a disguised recreation and reassessment of his past, especially of his formative years and the complex feelings surrounding his memories of his mother and father. In these stories and in the few that he wrote about his partisan experiences, Calvino's quite distinctive emphasis falls on the processes of remembering and forgetting rather than on precise recollection, in other words, on the past as it lives on in the present self, and, in the case of the partisan stories, of the significance of shared historical experience when the world seems to have moved on.

Jane Eversola explores autobiographical traces in an author who was born just too late to be part of the partisan war. She examines Umberto Eco's second novel, Foucault's Pendulum, one of only two of his fictions to be set in our own times, and shows how its protagonists are embodiments of the author at different phases of his life, especially in terms of his experience of Italy and of the country's political history from the 1960s to the 1980s. She also demonstrates how the intellectual and linguistic interests which Eco explores in the almost contemporary lectures that make up In Search of a Perfect Language, resurface in the novel. However, if the playfulness is still evident, there is also a greater sense of the serious dangers that arise when the pursuit of absolute order is not just linguistic but social and political. The combination of the three ingredients of fictional elements, scholarly interests and the author's own lived experience, combine only in this, Eco's darkest novel, dealing as it does with the violent years in Italy between the late 1960s and the mid 1980s, the 'anni di piombo'.

The political sphere comes back with a vengeance in Oriana Fallaci's denunciation of Islam in all its forms in her controversial La rabbia e l'orgoglio, written soon after the attack on New York in September 2001. John Gatt-Rutter shows how the adoption of a speaking voice which proclaims itself as that of the author hectoring an ill-defined 'you' (at different moments Fallaci's editor, figures within Islam, the Pope, Western intellectuals and so on), leads not to sincerity but to a kind of monologic theatre. The actual reader and addressee is a spectator, though one the rhetoric of the text aims to convert and incite, whilst those addressed actually have no voice with which to reply. Here first-person writing is anything but a game or literary conundrum; Gatt-Rutter observes that La rabbia e l'orgoglio along with all of Fallaci's other works constitutes one enormous autobiographical macrotext, and although here the autobiographical persona exists in exile and in silence, Fallaci's pamphlet is autobiography in the service of invective. Gatt-Rutter concludes with a statement of the need to undertake in reality the kind of dialogue which Fallaci effectively disallows.

This volume offers perspectives on the inflections of biography and autobiography in Italian culture from the late nineteenth century until the dawn of the twenty-first century. It is not, of course, intended to represent a comprehensive survey of the period but it does chart the modulations of life-writing in some of the major literary figures of the time, from D'Annunzio, Svevo and Montale to Primo Levi, Calvino and Umberto Eco. At the same time it shows how biography and the construction of a 'bella (auto-) biografia'⁴ remain key concerns in less canonical figures such as Nencioni and Bontempelli, as well as in writers who stand between journalism and literature such as Piovene and Fallaci.

These essays are dedicated to John Woodhouse as a mark of warm friendship and esteem. Not all of them keep to the pragmatic parameters of his own work, flexible though these are, but they all share his deep conviction that the life and work of an author are mutually illuminating and that the literary work is impoverished by being seen solely within terms of a textual universe. John held firmly to that belief at a time when many of his colleagues, especially those a few years younger, thought that the opposite was self-evident. As a dedicated individualist, he may be surprised — we hope pleasurably so — to find that in his pioneering work on D'Annunzio and Calvino, as well as in his work on Renaissance culture, he has pointed the way for much current research in Italian studies.

Notes to Chapter 1

1. For just one instance of the use of the term and its scope, see Encyclopedia of Life Writing, ed. by Margaretta Jolly, 2 vols (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001).

2. Ernest Hatch Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961); Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1981).

3. John Woodhouse, Gabriele D'Annunzio. Defiant Archangel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); II generale e il comandante. Ceccherini e D'Annunzio a Fiume (Bologna: Gedit, 2004).

4. Ungaretti's phrase — 'L'autore non ha altra ambizione [...] se non quella di lasciare una sua bella biografia' [the author has no other ambition (...) than to leave behind a fine biography] — is to be found in the preface to L'allegria, now in his Vita d'un uomo. Tutte le poesie, ed. by Leone Piccioni (Milan: Mondadori, 1992), p. 528.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• Tabula Gratulatoria
• 1 Introduction
• PART I: GENERAL ISSUES AND SIGNAL CASES
• PART II: D'ANNUNZIO AND OTHER FIN DE SIÈCLE FIGURES
• PART III: SELF-IMAGES IN FASCIST CULTURE
• PART IV: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL STRAINS IN CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN WRITING
• Bibliography of Publications
• Index