Italy and Mass Culture

...But the disconcerting possibility is that tomorrow their novels may be subjected to the same publicity treatment and have the same large sales...

...I know that since the War many observers have been warning of Italy's galloping Americanization, yet their forecasts seemed to me premature...

...You may convince this easy-going fellow that his earthly happiness is not complete without a refrigerator and a car...

...Play-acting is a favorite Italian pastime, and right now hordes of Italians are intent on play-acting the part of massmen, complete with transistor radios to disturb their neighbors, disjointed gabble about the latest movie and best-seller, and an ever-mounting incidence of automobile accidents to punctuate the holidays...

...A recent book...

...At the moment, however, prosperity swathes the future enemy camps in a sparkling, sensual haze...

...Indeed, there is a hectic, heady atmosphere in Italy which reminded me of the untrammeled, yearning idealism that characterized the '20s in America...

...places like Caf?© Rosati will be swept away...

...In Italy the convivial, physical delights die hard...

...True modern life, with its morose accompaniment of violence and anonymity, is gathering force for the assault...

...We know that much, or all, has remained as before...

...There is no doubt that in the coming years the cultural battle will become sharper in Italy...

...Since the Counter-Reformation, when society and the church went one way and culture another, this is the first time that Italy's intellectuals and artists have managed to gain their fellow-countrymen's attention...

...But side by side with them the majority of Italians persist in play-acting the ancient roles: a shoemaker is quintessentially a shoemaker, a government clerk quintessentially a government clerk, a judge quintessentially a judge...

...What is being born, or reborn, is the idea of success...

...they have not dropped their convictions at the first cry of panic or prosperity...

...And since Italy has been caught unawares by the cultural wave and has not yet developed its appropriate Herman Wouks and Allen Drurys, the country's best and most serious writers have been called on to fill the gap...

...Sounds familiar, doesn't it...

...and El?©mire Zolla by his brilliant, satiric social essays, "The Eclipse of the Intellectual" and "Vulgarity and Pain," which launch a frontal attack on the foundations of mass culture, condemning it on humanistic grounds that would constitute a revelation to the American critics, who are still busy trying to isolate and channelize the "good" aspects of the mass cultural industry...

...For the moment, the Italians are giving the rigors of modern life their peculiar accent...

...Disillusionment with politics has only strengthened their individual desire to probe to the depths of the social evil...

...The decor of Italian life may finally succumb to the barbarian advance of the real estate sharks and the bull-dozers...

...Everyone knows that mass audiences do not perforce create a subtler, profounder literature yet the special confluence of circumstances in Italyprosperity, an undercurrent of social unrest together with the appearance of a pugnacious generation of young writers and poets-may lead to that muchheralded literary renaissance which the political fervor of the postwar years failed to produce...

...It was not like this 10 years ago: Success was collective, because it was the victory of a class...

...It is impossible to deny that the withdrawal of the possibility of socialism has led to an explosion of vitalism, of avant-gardism, of eclecticism and adventure, etc...

...And these were not the solemn conclaves that used to unfold in Caf?© Greco's velvetpanelled sanctuary...

...I have been subjected to the recrudescence of the bourgeois Western world, and I think I'm not the only one...

...Now, however, there can be no doubt that a fatal transition has taken place...

...The Generation of the Difficult Years, publishes the results of an inquiry among the writers and journalists who came to maturity during and after the War...

...but you will encounter some difficulty on the more immediate, animal levels...

...In Rome, during the summer months, one could see the entire artistic and intellectual colony gathered in one caf...

...they were a much more open, rowdier affair, as though these middle-aged writers and artists were taking a last fling at heedless adolescence...

...I can say that in the last years I have been subjected to the eclipse of socialism and social interests...

...But things have not yet reached this blissful pass...

...it has a long way to go before the last Italian individual is submerged in the viscid tide of stereotypes...

...Why shouldn't they too carry the burden of cars, television sets, expensive, noisy vacations, ready-made clothes, installment buying, housing projects...

...I also think that it sounds extremely hopeful...

...Thus, Alberto Moravia, Giorgio Bassani, Carlo Cassola and Giuseppe di Lampedusa have all had their turn at being best sellers...

...No one can deny them these ecstasies, and they shall eventually have them...

...In the meantime, until that problem has been solved, the Italians seem to be enjoying a kind of Indian Summer of sudden prosperity...

...Why shouldn't they too have their humanist critics standing waist-deep in the sewage of popular culture to fish out the neglected jewel for the delectation of the happy few...

...Lacerating noises rend the air, produced by all those new mechanical contrivances which the newly monied have purchased...

...In any case, some form of Marxism and social concern still provides most of these young men with the backbone and nerve to withstand the mass cultural assault...

...Of course, this will not change the situation, which is fluid, confusing and, for the younger writers, vastly inspiriting...

...And all this against a chattering backdrop of posh movie people, as if to remind the participants where most of the money was coming from...

...In this miraculous transformation, books, together with many other cultural commodities, have suddenly become a recognized appurtenance of all self-respecting middle-class persons...

...nevertheless, I would say that this artistic generation's prime characteristic is a sort of saddened socialism, the result of the disheartening political events since the War-saddened yet still firmly convinced of the creative potential of the Marxist ethic and critical insight...

...Ottiero Ottieri's contribution is typical...

...Why shouldn't they too have their anguished actor-thinkers torn to shreds by a slick but equally anguished producer-thinkers ?  la David Susskind...

...Let him who is not striving for success throw the first stone...

...I could go on with the list, but that is not the point...

...And the pleasure the Italian gets from voluptuously cutting his own bread will never, at least in our lifetime, be wiped out by mass-production packaging...

...I am thinking of writers like Renzo Rosso, Giovanni Arpino, El?©mire Zolla, Giuseppe Cassieri, Ottiero Ottieri and Saverio Strati...

...Others, however, wallow in the trough of public interest, arousing the bitterness of their less fortunate colleagues...

...and also a bewildering one to the literary plug-horses who, for almost half a century, have been accustomed to carrying out their esoteric activities in undisturbed semi-privacy...

...All this happened not because the social problems were solved...

...The heckling voices are heard only on the fringe of the merriment...

...A few juke boxes could hardly be considered the triumph of technological idiocy...

...Perhaps it is due to Italy's perverse backwardness, but then all I can say is three cheers for backwardness...

...Bread is still bread in Italy, brown and with a crust, not the puffy, airfilled mush that adorns our supermarkets...

...I had been away for five years, and when I returned this summer I could immediately see that in the interim the dirty work had been done...

...So prosperity and social peace have succeeded where social strife and cataclysms failed: Italy's provincial somnolence has finally been disrupted...

...After all, why shouldn't Italians have the chance to suffer from the benefits of prosperity, like all the rest of us...

...Today it is the big circulation magazine and money...

...In fact, I think that not having political ties has been greeted as a liberation by these young writers...

...The important thing is the ebullience and excitement one feels in the work of these men...

...And the main subjects are immorality and eroticism...

...But the predominant atmosphere is one of languid, sensual enjoyment...

...All their replies reflect that disillusionment with politics and that dismay in the face of advancing mass culture which are dominant moods in Italy's intellectual circles...

...It is a great occasion...

...The spectacle was gay and colorful, but I sensed an undercurrent of troubled uncertainty...

...It is wrong to try to label a whole generation...

...Remembering the status struggle back home, I was amused to see famous names in Italian literature crowding every table in indiscriminate proximity to nonentities, eager to talk to anyone who had anything to say...

...These young men know where they stand...

...The final foregathering before the crushing onslaught of tomorrow's mass culture hordes...

...A young novelist who has written chiefly about the impact of industrial life on Italy's peasant population, he admits that he has less belief in socialist values than he had a few years back...

...of individualistic, bourgeois values-especially among the so-called bourgeois intellectuals of the Left, who had suppressed them...

...Was this the last huddling together of a superseded creative minority...

...The new scale of values is more colorful, more alluring and glamorous, more widely spread through every class, even the working class...

...Why shouldn't they too stage symposiums on the blighting effects of the comic strips...

...Renzo Rosso by his long short stories, among which the story entitled "The Bait" sums up the Resistance era in European history as fully and poignantly as Joyce's story, "The Dead," summed up the era of 19th century romanticism...

...Raymond Rosenthal writes for Commentary, Partisan Review and the New York Times Book Review...

...My first reaction was vindictive...

...How long it will last is another question...

...I doubt that Italians, though eager for technology, are ready to exchange their traditional pleasures for the grim stoicism demanded by industrial efficiency...

...but it is fragile and at times frivolous and desperate...

...I should imagine that this perversity is currently being examined by a committee of experts...

...Perversely, they balk at the sacrifice of creature comforts which the Americans offer up every day without so much as a second thought...

...To an American, especially, that muted screech of mechanized frenzy is always unmistakable...

...but modernism's battering progress finds a natural limit and dike in the Italian's obstinate selfconcern and independence...

...Because," he answers, "a writer, even the most engag?©, is still just a writer and, like many ordinary men, is subject to history's ebb and flow...

...All of them have undoubtedly been bedazzled for a moment by the new, glittering flood of money and opportunities, but none of them have loosened their grip on their sense of artistic craft or their combative social instincts...

...Prosperity killed friendly artistic gregariousness in America, but in Italy, strangely enough, it has had precisely the opposite effect...

...each day another precious national monument is chipped at or even carted away...

...Ignazio Silone and Enrico Emanuelli recently attacked the literary log-rolling machine which tends to favor a select few among the nation's writers...

...Like great bravura actors who have spent a lifetime perfecting their parts, they throng the streets and piazzas, each man so wholly himself that only artistic concentration and care could produce such impeccable performances...

...Each in his own way has met the challenge: Giovanni Arpino by his series of elegant and moving novels...