Elio Vittorini 1908-1966
KEENE, FRANCES
Elio Vittorini 1908-1966 "The intellectual vitality of the younger and youngest generation [of Italian writers] is not easily discernible behind the smoke screens of censorship, propaganda...
...What does it mean...
...Meanwhile, between books and his travelogue on Sardinia, Vittorini had been translating and editing anthologies...
...Among the partisan groups he visited during the War, he was surprised and happy to find that many men in hiding had taken on the names of his characters...
...While still at the printing plant, Vittorini had begun to publish in the Florentine review, Solaria, and it was there that his short stories, collected in his first book, Piccola Borghesia, appeared in 1931...
...Our time has become Mas hombre thanks to his vital, continuing presence...
...Frances Keene...
...Vittorini, who died in Milan on February 13, had vitality above all, vitality of the heart as well as of the mind and body...
...Pavese, who sometimes admitted jealousy of Vittorini's rising fame abroad, wrote of this period: "Vittorini has been the voice (in anticipation-that is what is so grand about it) of the clandestine resistance, naked, vital love, the abstract ragings, that bring it all to life in an heroic mission...
...He nad understood especially well the place of American literature in world literature, its drama of "corruption, purity, ferocity and innocence...
...Just before he was jailed, he had completed The American Anthology (L'Americana), whose brilliant preface is, in the words of one of his colleagues, "in itself, a great book.' The significant breakthrough to modern Italian from the cadenced and ramified prose of the established style is due in large part to the discovery and absorption by Italian writers of the more muscular tradition of American prose...
...The two preeminent trailblazers in this were Vittorini and Pavese...
...Elio Vittorini 1908-1966 "The intellectual vitality of the younger and youngest generation [of Italian writers] is not easily discernible behind the smoke screens of censorship, propaganda and war," G. A. Borgese wrote from Chicago in 1942...
...Other original works preceded and followed The American Anthology: The Dark and the Light, a collection including novellas dating from 1936 and 1947, and Women on the Road with its echoes of Hardy...
...as a young bridge-builder and road-mender, he spent uncountable days in the broiling sun and in the chilling damps of winter...
...The book finally appeared in its integral form in 1947 with an important introductory preface by the author, Truth and Censorship...
...Women of Messina, first published in 1950 and emended and reissued in 1964, the closest in spirit and content to the unforgettable In Sicily...
...and striding forward having known all of it-the censorship, the jails, fighting in the hills, and the scramble for survival after the war-Elio Vittorini...
...In 1943, Vittorini was arrested by the Fascist police and jailed for this novel, which for a couple of years had been quietly circulating in book form and for almost a decade in serialization...
...While working as a printer's reader, he had been taught English by a colleague who could never have known how great a gift his teaching was to prove-not only to Vittorini, to whom it gave immediate access to work as a translator, but to the whole of contemporary Italian letters...
...Later, as a typesetter and then proofreader in Florence, he contracted lead poisoning and had to leave the plant...
...Men and Not Men and The Twilight of the Elephant, by turn darkly ironic, moving and with flashes of insight...
...It is, however, his most important book...
...In it, he inspired partisans and passive objectors alike to a reappraisal of their relations to each other and to the society and time in which they lived...
...this is what it meant as I was writing the book, In Sicily...
...Giorgio Zampa wrote recently in La Stampa...
...Who knows anyone among the writers of today, whether they are established and in their 50s or among the very young, who does not owe him something...
...In 1934, Vittorini started In Sicily, which did not reach the public until 1941...
...As a boy in Sicily, he had experienced lean times...
...We whose lives have spanned his are richer, more alive because of him...
...Two years later, the editors, Alberto Carocci and Giansiro Ferrata, published the first two installments of The Red Carnation, the second of which was manhandled by the Fascist censorship in Rome...
...From behind that smoke, however, emerged writers of stature-Pavese, Moravia, Berto...
...In Sicily depicts a world of men who have learned "to suffer not for themselves but for the offended world...
...More a man,' I suppose...
...The many who now mourn Elio Vittorini must remember with gratitude what Hemingway wrote of him: "I care very much about his ability to bring rain with him when he comes if the earth is dry " Vittorini has given us the words for his own achievement: " my subjects came out of my needs, as my needs came out of the life I was living and of the increased love I felt for the earth and for men My thought was nothing more than Mas hombre...
...Vittorini and his friends decided to suspend further publication, although he had already sent the complete manuscript to Rome for permission to publish...
Vol. 49 • February 1966 • No. 5
