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Giovanni Papini (1881-1956) |
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Journalist, polemical critic, poet, and novelist, whose avant-garde polemics made him one of the most controversial Italian literary figures in the early and mid-20th century. Giovanni Papini advocated breaking with tradition and defering to the new generation, but after World War II he lost his influence as an opinion leader. His ideological development was full of paradoxes: he was first an anti-nationalist, then a staunch nationalist; first an agnostic, but then turned to Roman Catholicism. He wrote both a life of Christ and a history of the Devil. Papini published over eighty books on philosophy, theory and literary criticism, as well as novels and short stories. "What, in fact, was that spirit of infuriated anarchy I felt - my brazen disrespect of men and dogmas—if not a reaction against the past, against everything fixed, disciplined, established, regular? What was my love for everything crazy and absurd except a revulsion from the commonplace, from the ordinary, from the safe and sane? Why such contempt for rules of conduct and good manners, for popular idols, for prudent counsel, for all the so-called "bourgeois virtue," if I were not sick of the accursed fact that never changed, sick of wisdom, sick of "obligations," sick of "sure things" and the worship they inspire?" (in The Failure (Un uomo finito) by Giovannu Papini, authorized translation by Virginia Pope, Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1924, p. 129) Giovanni
Papini was born in Florence of lower middle class
parents, the son of Luigi and Erminia (Cardini) Papini. Luigi was
a furniture retailer, who once had been member of Giuseppe Garibaldi's
Redshirts. He was an atheist, but Papini's mother had her son baptized secretly. Of
himself, Papini said, tongue-in-cheek: "Everyone knows, his friends
with even more
certainty than his enemies, that he is the ugliest man in Italy (if
indeed he deserves the name of man at all), so repulsive that Mirabeau
would seem in comparison an academy model, a Discobolus, an Apollo
Belvedere. And since the face is the mirror of the soul . . . no one
will be surprised to learn that this Papini is the scoundrel of
literature,
the blackguard of journalism, the Barabbas of art, the thug of
philosophy, the bully of politics, the Apaché of culture". (Fascism, Anti-fascism, and the Resistance in Italy: 1919 to the Present by Stanislao G. Pugliese, 2004, p. 30) From an early age Papini devoted himself to literature. He read widely from his grandfather's library and at the
age of 15 started to write an encyclopedia. He also frequented the same
Beltrami bookstore on Via dei Martrelli than Ardengo Soffici, with whom
he later edited Lacerba. After attending Norman School in
Florence, Papini earned his teacher's certificate around 1900. He never received an official university degree. Although Papini adopted militaristic views, he was exempted from military service on grounds of health. He urged the establishing in Rome of a new world power, and the abandonment of the "politics of meditation". (Il Leonardo, August, 1906) In 1907, Papini married Giacinta Giovagnoli, a peasant girl. They he had two daughters, Viola and Gioconda. At the age of 22 Papini's writing aspirations led him into
contact with other young writers and artists. As a meeting place they
used the Café Giubbe Rosse in Piazza della Repubblica. With his old school friend Giuseppe
Prezzolini he founded and managed the short-lived
Florentine magazine Il Leonardo (1903-07), while contributing to the nationalist publication Il Regno. Between 1912 and 1913, Papini directed the periodical La Voce.
It attempted to modernize Italian culture, and introduced significant
French, British, and American ideas. As a writer, he often was like Gabriele D'Annunzio,
whom he criticized: "arrogant, exhibitionist, arrogant, sunk in self,
frenetically polemical, not at all emotionally in control of his more
than adequate intellect. As a man, however, he was unlike D'Annunzio:
lovable, devoted to culture, helpful to others." (The New Guide to Modern World Literature by Martin Seymour-Smith, Peter Bedrick Books, 1985, pp. 777-778) Papini boldly argued, that one must write badly, meaning that the artistic form is secondary to the idea. Among his other targets was the positivist philosophy, which was gaining ground in Italy. For Papini, pragmatism offered a liberative tool from orthodoxies. Mussolini once said, that Leonardo and La Voce were lying at the core of his own political-cultural formation. However, when Papini celebrated the Libyan war in 1911, Mussolini was sentenced to imprisonment for his opposition to it. In the 1910s, Papini joined the Futurist artistic movement, which admired the dynamic energy of modern machines. " a roaring motorcar [...] is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace," Filippo Tommaso Marinetti famously wrote in an article in Le Figaro. (Handbook of International Futurism, edited by Günter Berghaus, 2019, p. 907) To further the aims of the movement, Papini launched in 1913 the journal Lacerba in collaboration with the writer and painter Ardengo Soffici. Then, turning against Marinetti's growing influence, Papini made in his journal in February 1914 a distinction between Florentine Futurism and "Marinettism," which stood for ignorance, militarism, chauvinism, and contempt for women. Papini left the movement iwith the manifesto, 'Futurismo e Marinettismo'. The English painter and poet, Mina Loy (1882-1966), had brief affairs with both Marinetti and Papini. Her poem 'The Effectual Marriage' satirized gendered division of work through the characters of "Miovanni" and "Gina"; Miovanni's place in the library and Gina is in her kitchen: "To man his work / to woman her love". (Poetics of the Feminine: Authority and Literary Tradition in William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Denise Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser by Linda A. Kinnahan, 2008, p. 60) Papini had been a severe critic of Christianity in his youth. An article published in Lacerba,
entitled 'Gesù, peccatore' (Jesus, a Sinner), in which he went as
far as to suggest that Christ was homosexual, brought against him
a blasphemy suit. Following a religious awakening, Papini converted to
Roman Catholicism in 1920, and wrote the highly personal novel Storia di Cristo (1921),
which sold more than 40,000 copies in the first year of its
publication.
Papini said in the introduction of the English edition: "The author of
the present book finds—and if he is mistakes he will be very glad to be
convinced by any one who sees more clearly than he—that in the
thousands of books which tell the story of Jesus, there is not one
which seeks, instead of dogmatic proofs and learned discussion, to give
food fit for the soul, for the needs of men of our time." (Life of Christ, freely translated from the Italian by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1923, p. 10) The English translation competited with such bestsellers as The Outline of
History (1920) by H.G. Wells and Babbitt (1922) by Sinclair Lewis. The North American Review wrote:
"Extreme simplicity, a superfluity of exposition, overstrained
rhetoric, a species of denunciation marked by the excess of a kind of
childish passion, that can hardly pass current as "unwordliness",
violent figures of speech (the Deluge is called "a baptism of
annihilation"), passages of exalted or over-exalted poetry filled with
real yearning; now and then an affirmation of strikingly clear, candid,
and courageous—these are traits that mark Papini's Life of Christ as perhaps the most remarkable literary phenomenon of recent years . . . " ('New Books Reviewed', Vol. 217, No. 811, June 1923, pp. 855-856) Among Papini's other popular works is the autobiographical novel Un uomo finito (1912). It draws a portrait of a restless intellectual and his deep dissatisfaction with contemporary philosophical debate and intellectual mediocrity. Also in many of his short stories Papini himself is the main character. In one story the author meets himself as the young man he was and whom he only vaguely remembers; in another he continues to live after his suicide in order to pay a minor debt. The young Mussolini read the book, and found Papini's philosophy of action admirable. "He
must be like the pillar of fire that led the people of Jehovah through
the desert," described Papini his ideal national leader, who for a long
period was Benito Mussolini. "He must light the way and point out the
goal . . . a lynx-eyed pilot with a fist of iron destined to take his
people towards a higher destiny." (Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini's Italy by Christopher Duggan, 2013, p. 11)
During the Fascist rule of Italy, Papini was an official writer for the
party. In 1937 he became a member of the Fascist Accademia d'Italia. His loyalty to Mussolini was recognized again when he was honored with the title "Accademico d'Italia." A few years earlier Papini had published Storia della letteratura italiana (1937), which was dedicated "To the Duce, friend of poetry and poets." The ambitious literary history dealt with the 13th and 14th centuries and never proceeded further. Papini's interest not only in contemporary affairs was already seen in L'uomo Carducci (1918), a sympathetic portrait of the poet-critic Giosuè Carducci (1835-1907). While Italy's popular literature churned out predictable
portrayals of "money grabbing" Jewish businessmen, Papini developed his
own vision of the world Jewish conspiracy, set out to destroy
Catholicism and to undermine the prevailing order of the world system.
This idea permeated even his Dizionario dell'omo salvatico
(1923), jointly authored with the Jesuit thinker Domenico Giuliotti. In
this Catholic dictionary, Jewish figures are treated as enemies of Christians.
Moreover, the Jews themselves are responsible for anti-Semitism: "This
race at once divine and filthy, whose punishment consists in the
obligation to punish Christians, has vanquished all peoples among which
it dwells to such an extent that this race had become one of the
dominat nations of the earth even though it has no land of its own." (The Civilization of the Holocaust in Italy: Poets, Artists, Saints, Anti-semites by Wiley Feinstein, 2003, p. 214) At
a meeting of the Royal Academy in 1939 Papini criticized an unnamed
French Jewish literaryn critic for having questioned the "Italianness"
of Leopardi. According to Papini, Leopardi signifies and represents poetry and youth, and it was "precisely for this that
Fascist Italy has honored and honors the ever young Italian poet
Giacomo Leopardi." (Donatello Among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy, edited by Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum, 2005, p. 196) Papini's notorious satirical novel Gog (1931) was played on radio. "There are no fewer than seventy short chapters of very unequal merit, which hardly qualify the author to be ranked amongst the greatest satirists of the day", said one reviewer in the Evening Post. The central character is an eccentric Hawaiian-American millionaire, Goggins, who moves from one private lunatic asylum to another around the world in search of knowledge. One the Jews in the book, named Benrubi, explains: "As capitalists we dominate the money markests, as thinkers we dominate the intellectual world, carrying on the work of disintegrating the old faiths, both sacred and profane, undermining revealed religion and laic creeds. The two extremes most to be feared are united in the Jew—in the kingdom of matter he is a despot, in that of the spirit he is an anarchist." (Ibid., translated by Mary Prichard Agnetti, 1931, p. 74) In 1935 Papini was appointed Professor of Italian language at the University of Bologna; it was the same chair that the poet and Nobel laureate Giosuè Carducci had occupied. However, because of an eye illnes, he was forced to relinquish the chair. From 1938 he published the magazine La Rinascita. After WW II Papini founded with Silvano Gianelli and Adolfo
Oxilia the avant-garde Catholic review L'Ultima. Papini's
reputation as an iconoclast faded during his last years. In 1952 Papini
was stricken by illness that progressively paralyzed his hands and
voice, but he continued to write. Il Diavolo (1953) showed his
strong Catholic commitment. Il libro nero (1951) was presented in the form of Gog's diary, which contained fake interviews with such figures as Hitler, Dali, and Picasso; Picasso's interview was circulated in some other publications as authentic, including the confession: "I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and exploited as best he could the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries." (Desire and Avoidance in Art: Pablo Picasso, Hans Bellmer, Balthus and Joseph Cornell by Andrew Brink, Peter Lang, 2007, p. 60) Papini died rather suddenly on July 8, 1956. For further reading: Discorso su Giovanni Papini by Giuseppe Prezzolini (1915); Conversazioni critiche, Vol. 4 by Benedetto Croce (1932); La critica letteraria contemporanea, Vol. 2 by Luigi Russo (1943); Storia della letteratura, Vol. 5 by Francesco Flora (1947); Giovanni Papini, 1881-1956 by Gennaro Lovreglio (1973-75); 'Papini, Giovanni' by A. Pao [Anne Paolucci], in Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature, edited by Jean-Albert Bédé and William B. Edgerton (1980); Giovanni Papini. L’anima intera by Carmine di Biase (1999); 'Reflex Action and Pragmatism of Giovanni Papini' by E.P. Colella, in The Journal of speculative philosophy, Vol. 19; Numb. 3 (2005); 'Giovanni Papini (1881-1956)' by Daniela Orlandi, in Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies, edited by Gaetana Marrone (2007); 'Mina Loy, Giovanni Papini, and the Aesthetic of Irritation' by M. Hofer, in Paideuma, Vol. 38 (2011); Italian Reactionary Thought and Critical Theory: An Inquiry into Savage Modernities by Andrea Righi (2015); The Italian Pragmatists: Between Allies and Enemies, edited by Giovanni Maddalena, Giovanni Tuzet (2021) - Futurism: An artistic movement, which began in Italy about 1909 and was founded by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944). Futurism rejected tradition and admired the energy, urbanism, militarism, and the speed of modern machines. Russian Futurism added to its Italian model social and political ideas. In rebel against tradition, poets discarded grammar and syntax and used strings of words stripped from their original meaning. The influence of the movement ended by the time of Mayakovsky's death in 1930. Note: Papini is mentioned in Henry Miller's book Tropic of Cancer and Carolyn Burke's biography of the radical English poet-painter Mina Loy, with whom Papini had also an illicit affair. Suomeksi Papinilta on romaanien lisäksi ilmestynyt käännöksiä Italian kirjallisuuden kultaisessa kirjassa, toim. Tyyni Tuulio, 1945. See other Futurist writers: French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky Selected works:
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