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Carlo Levi (1902-1975) |
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Italian writer, journalist, artist, and doctor, whose first documentary novel, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1945, Christ Stopped at Eboli), became an international sensation and introduced the trend toward social realism in post-war Italian literature. Although Carlo Levi's masterpiece was set in the times of Fascist oppression before World War II, it still has not lost its broad appeal. The book did much to make the world understand the situation of the regions south of Rome, which have long been exploited for economic or political reasons. Christ did stop at Eboli, where the road and the railway leave the coast of Salerno and turn into the desolate reaches of Lucania. Christ never came this far, nor did time, nor the individual soul, nor hope, nor the relation of cause to effect, nor reason nor history. Christ never came, just as the Romans never came, content to garrison the highways without penetrating the mountains and forests, nor the Greeks, who flourished beside the Gulf of Taranto. None of the pioneers of Western civilization brought here his sense of the passage of time, his deification of the State or that ceaseless activity which feeds upon itself. No one has come to this land except as an enemy, a conqueror, or a visitor devoid of understanding. (from Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year, translated from the Italian by Frances Frenaye, New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1947, p. 4) Carlo Levi was born in Turin into an upper middle-class family. His
mother, Annetta Treves, was the sister of Claudio Treves, one of the
leaders of the
Italian Socialist Party. Ercole Levi, his father, was a Jewish doctor.
The first painting Levi exhibited was a portrait of his father. Levi
studied medicine at the University of
Turin but he eventually devoted himself to art, writing, and politics. During his earliest formative years, Levi came into contact with socialist ideology. From 1922 he began to contribute to Pietro Gobetti's review La Rivoluzione Liberale, a bastion of intransigent antifascism, which was closed in 1925 on the orders of Mussolini. After abandoning his medical career, Levi devoted himself to painting and politics. In 1930 Levi joined the anti-Fascist social reform movement 'Giustizia e Libertà.' Its other members included Carlo Rosselli and Primo Levi. As a Jew and for his political activities Levi was exiled from 1935 to 1936 in two isolated villages in the province of Lucania, where his house is now a tourist attraction. The years of his banishment Levi spent in fruitful activity – he continued as a painter and worked as physician to the villagers. Upon his release he went to France, where he lived until 1941 and wrote Paura della Libertà (Of Fear and Freedom), published after the war. In 1939 there appeared Levi's essay 'Paura della libertá,' which constitutes an impassionate demonstration of the
coercive irrationality of dictatorship. During World War II, Levi took
part in the Resistance. He joined the Partito d'Azione and Central
Committee of the National Liberation movement. In Tuscany he edited La Nazione del Popolo and in Rome L'Italia Libera, the mouthpiece of the Action Party. While hiding in Florence in a room for several months in order
to avoid deportation as a Jew by the retreating Nazis, Levi wrote Cristo si è fermato a Eboli,
a meditation of past, time and destiny. On one level Levi chronicled his own life in the village Gagliano,
Lucana, and on the other he gives a gallery of portraits of
individuals, such as the Fascist mayor, Giulia, who had more than a
dozen pregnancies with more than a dozen men, and the town crier. The
narrator, a doctor, is living there as a political prisoner, to learn
obedience. He is occasionally allowed to visit Eboli, the central town
of the region. He helps people who are suffering from malaria, and sees
their daily struggle under totalitarianism. Through his sister he also
receives medicine, and witnesses how the hard conditions drive people
to emigrate to the United States. Levi also paid attention to the town of Matera, where people still lived in caves. "In these dark holes with walls cut out of the earth I saw a few pieces of miserable furniture, beds and some ragged clothes hanging up to dry. On the door lay dogs, sheep, goats, and pigs. Most families have just one cave to live in and there they sleep all together; men, women, children and animals." (Ibid., p. 86) Palmiro Togliatti, the Italian Communist Party leader, called the situation "the shame of Italy." Levi's book was soon translated into more than dozen different languages. The title refers to what the peasants told him of their life: ""We're not Christians," they say. "Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli."" (Ibid., p. 3) When Italy's war against Abyssinia was drawing to its close in 1936, the narrator's detention ends. The documentary report on the archaic life in a society cut off from civilization is skillfully developed into a work of conscious literary art. As a result of his observations, Levi appeals for a new order in which the south would assume a form of autonomy from Rome. "The individual and the State coincide in theory and they must be made to coincide in practice as well, if they are to survive," Levi said. (Ibid., p. 253) After the war in 1946 Levi ran unsuccessfully for Constituent Assembly. He continued exhibiting his paintingts and contributed to major Italian publications, including the Turin daily La Stampa. As a painter he sought to express arcane reality. In the late 1940s the American translator William Weaver arrived in Rome and became friends with a number of writers, among them Carlo Levi, and made their work known in the United States. The Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg met Levi in the early 1960s in Rome, where Levi lived near the Pincio park. He painted Ehrenburg's portrait. "He appears lazy and walks slowly," noted Ehrenburg, but he was impressed how much this seemingly slow author had published, and the amount of paintings he had done. When they were discussing the concept of eternity, Levi absentmindedly stopped in the middle of a busy street. Ehrenburh managed to persuade a policeman not to fine him. From
the 1950s onwards Levi produced a series of books based on his
travels. Il futuro ha un cuore antico (1956) recounts his experiences in Russia,
but rather than to write about the reality of the Soviet life Levi
portrayed the country as a place where ideals could be realized. La doppia notte dei tigli (1959, The Linden Trees), an account of a journey to post-war Germany, examined the roots of a society that
tolerated the rise of Nazism. In 1963 Levi signed an appeal to Italian government to keep Italy out of nuclear arms industry. Politically Levi was active in the socialist-liberal Action Party (Partito d'Azione) and he was one of its most radical thinkers, but he did not get well along with Communist intellectuals. At the Senate he served until 1972. Levi died on January 4, 1975. He never married. Although Levi's first novel gained a
huge success, and made him one of the leaders of Neo-realism, he also published important works of non-fiction. Paura della Libertà
puzzlied critics. It was an introduction to a larger work, about
human beings, slavery, freedom and fear of it. "At the beginning
of time—so we are told—there was a forest upon the face of the earth.
This same primeval forest—shapeless and full of seeds and terrors,
hiding in its blackness the features of every face—we bear in
ourselves; from it began our earthly journey, and again we find it in
the middle of the way, with all its fear; youthful woodland of
unlimited powers. Outside libery, outside creative freedom, every
activity, every definition of this infinite potency is but a
limitation, a distress, an endless pain, and a sense of irretrievable
loss—because every religion is sacrifice and surrender." (Fear of Freedom,
translated by Adolphe Gourevitch, with the essay "Fear of painting,"
translated by Stanislao G. Pugliese, New York: Columbia University
Press, 2008, p. 15) L'Orologio (1950, The Watch), a mixture of memoir and fiction, was set in the disillusioned period after the war. "Now, after seven years of pain and slaughter, the wind had fallen, but the old leaves still could not return to their branches and the cities looked like naked woods, waiting under a modest sun for the haphazard flowering of new buds." (The Watch, translated by John Farrar, New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1951, p. 2) The protagonist works in Rome for a newspaper. He is summoned to Naples to visit the sickbed of a favorite uncle. His friends, family and partisan comrades are all trying to cope with post-war society, the confusion, bitter acceptance of loss after the Liberation, action and hope. L'Orologio was translated into English as The Watch. "Few books have so sorely needed a firm editor," said a reviewer in Time. The watch of the title was an Omega. For further reading: Carlo Levi: lo sguardo della prosa nello sguardo della pittura by Michela Marano (2022); 'Carlo Levi on the Religion of the State,' in Against Redemption: Democracy, Memory, and Literature in Post-fascist Italy by Franco Baldasso (2022); Carlo Levi: tutto il miele è finito: la Sardegna, la pittura, a cura di Giorgina Bertolino (2022) Il custode della soglia: il sacro e le forme nell'opere di Carlo Levi by Riccardo Gasperina Geroni (2018); The Experience of Exile Described by Italian Writers: From Cicero Through Dante and Machiavelli Down to Carlo Levi by David Marshby David Marsh; with a foreword by Fabrizio Ricciardelli (2014); The Voices of Carlo Levi, ed. by Joseph Farrell (2007); Carlo Levi e Umberto Saba: storia di un'amicizia by? Silvana Ghiazza (2002); 'Introduction' by Wiliam Weawer in Open City: Seven Writers in Post War Rome, ed. by William Weaver and Kristina Olson (1999); Carlo Levi by M. Baldassaro (1998); Antifascisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943-46 by David Ward (1996); 'Levi, Carlo' by H.L. [Harry Lawton], in Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature, ed. by Jean-Albert Bédé and William B. Edgerton (1980); 'Structure and Style as Fundamental Expression' by R.D. Catani, in Italica, 56 (1979, pp. 213-29); 'Carlo Levi: The Essayist as a Novelist' by S. Pacifici in The Modern Italian Novel (1979); Galleria XVII 3-6 (special Levi issue, May-December 1967); The Tradition of the New by H. Rosenberg (1959) Selected works:
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