[In the following review, Stille analyzes Pasolini's relationship with Italian society and politics.]

Pier Paolo Pasolini, probably the most famous writer of postwar Italy, is best known in America for his lurid X-rated movies Arabian Nights and 'Salo,' the 120 Days of Sodom. An immensely gifted poet, novelist, film director, literary critic and social commentator, Pasolini was a tangle of contradictions—Communist and Catholic, artist and ideologue, celebrity and outcast, homosexual and rigid traditionalist.

No single work can convey his importance in Italy as a public figure and a national myth: the bête noire of the right (and sometimes of the left) and, for millions of young people, a cult figure whose actions and opinions were the subject of great controversy. Pasolini's murder in 1975, apparently by a teen-age male prostitute, divided the country. For the right it was a fitting end for a man with pernicious habits and violent ideas. For the left it was a martyrdom, perhaps even a political assassination.

Both detractors and admirers agree on one point: Pasolini's death was the moral of a story of deep national significance. He, more than anyone else, embodied the enormous contrasts and dislocations of postwar Italy, a backward peasant nation lurching into the twentieth century, a democracy with a historical memory formed by Fascism.

It is appropriate that Enzo Siciliano's biography Pasolini should be published simultaneously with the first Italian-English edition of Pasolini's poetry. The biography is not merely an aid to understanding the poetry; indeed, it is more likely that the poems will serve as an aid to the biography, for Pasolini's most important artistic creation was his life. A longtime friend and follower, Siciliano has written a book that is more of a contribution to the Pasolini myth than a dispassionate analysis of it. However, he has collected a wealth of material from many sources, including Pasolini's unpublished letters and papers. Despite his worshipful tone, Siciliano does let the material speak for itself, and it is fascinating.

This most political of artists began his career as a lyric poet. Born in 1922 (the year Mussolini took power), Pasolini came of age during World War II. When his father, a Fascist army officer, was taken prisoner, the family moved to his mother's village in the remote region of Friuli near the Yugoslav border. Young Pasolini was fascinated by the ancient peasant civilization and by its dialect: "It was possible in ten minutes by bicycle to pass from one linguistic area to another more archaic by fifty or a hundred years." Influenced by Rimbaud and the decadent poets, he saw the Friulian dialect as a "language of pure poetry"; because of its unfamiliarity to most Italians, it would "prolong the lag between sound and meaning." Some critics believe that Pasolini's early lyrics, published in 1942, are his highest poetic achievement.

Poems omits this early verse. While the Friulian dialect would arguably lose too much in translation to make inclusion worthwhile, one misses a selection from his second book, The Nightingale of the Catholic Church, which was written in standard Italian. Instead, Poems concentrates on the mature "public verse" that Pasolini wrote after moving to Rome in 1949. This is a curious mixture of political and personal confession, of ideological speechifying shot through with flashes of brilliance, with, every now and then, moments of equilibrium when political and personal passions coincide with great force. His first major success, "The Ashes of Gramsci," presents his paradoxical public persona:

     The scandal of contradicting myself, of being
     with you and against you; with you in my heart,
     in light, but against you in the dark viscera …

At his best, Pasolini created an outrageous synthesis of Christian imagery, Marxism and private despair. The suffering of Italy was transformed into his own personal Calvary:

     For one crucified to his tormenting rationality,
     butchered by puritanism, nothing makes sense anymore
     but an aristocratic and alas unpopular opposition.
 
     The revolution is now just a sentiment.
                                ("Plan of Future Works")

Pasolini did not live up to his potential as a poet, and clearly he knew it. "Oh practical end of my poetry!" he wrote. "To this I'm reduced: when I write / poetry, it's to defend myself, to fight, / compromising myself, renouncing / all my ancient dignity; thus / my defenseless elegiac heart comes / to shame me …" ("Reality"). But his early lyric inspiration never entirely left his poetry and redeems even his harsher polemics.

In 1949 Pasolini was forced to flee in disgrace from Friuli. He had been accused of corrupting minors and was expelled from the Communist Party. In Rome, he transferred his fascination with Friulian civilization to the violent and gregarious world of the subproletariat in which he lived during his first desperately poor years there. Pasolini's life among the new rootless underclass of Southern peasants was central to his career. With the ear of a linguist and the sensitivity of an anthropologist, he observed the mingling of the cutthroat ethics of the street with the naïve, easygoing ways of the country. Here he found sexual freedom, friendship, material for much of his work and a laboratory in which he watched Italy's social changes played out before him.

His shocking novel about this world. Ragazzi di Vita, made Pasolini famous overnight. Outraged, the government tried to suppress the book, as it would his first movie, Accattone. The move to Rome also put Pasolini into the mainstream of Italian culture. During the 1950s, he became friends with the best writers of his generation: Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Giorgio Bassani and Italo Calvino.

The beginning of Pasolini's career coincides with the end of Italian neo-Realism—the films of Rossellini, De Sica and the early Fellini (Pasolini wrote the dialogue in Roman dialect for Fellini's Nights of Cabiria). But there is a tough, gritty, unsentimental quality that distinguishes Pasolini from the neo-Realists. Fellini's Cabiria was a whore with a heart of gold; Pasolini's Accattone, the story of an opportunistic, cynical pimp, neither justifies nor condemns its subject.

With Pasolini's growing celebrity in the 1960s, both his work and his life became a source of scandal. The openings of his films were followed by obscenity trials, and their showings disrupted by gangs of neofascist thugs. He was indicted (falsely) for robbery. All this exacerbated his persecution complex, his sense, as a homosexual, of being a pariah; but it also gratified his narcissism and stimulated his need to provoke the public. "By now," writes Siciliano, "Pier Paolo's sense of being alive was inextricably bound up with his provocatory relationship with the public. Irresistibly he ended up coinciding with his public image."

His literary production dropped off; he never completed a novel after 1960. He grew apart from many of his literary friends. His movies were increasingly dominated by his sexual and political obsessions. By the early 1970s he was in a state of crisis. His artistic inspiration was drying up, and he was convinced that everything he loved in Italian life was being destroyed. His one steady lover had left him, and there was a new psychopathic brutality in the life of the Roman slums. He was badly beaten up several times.

Out of this despair, Pasolini forged a second career as a polemicist, writing front-page articles for Italy's largest newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera. With his genius for capturing in a phrase an entire mood or situation, Pasolini, perhaps more than any other intellectual, defined the political vocabulary of the New Left in Italy.

He became the spokesman for Italy's new marginal groups—an entire generation of jobless university graduates, the masses of displaced peasants who crowded the factory towns of the north—a dangerous class, unassimilated by society, which formed the extraparliamentary left. Unlike the perpetually optimistic Communists, Pasolini foresaw that the victory of consumer capitalism and the destruction of traditional Italian culture were inevitable. He also appealed to a conservative nostalgia for agrarian life and old values. He offered rebellion, "pure opposition," rather than social revolution: "I can no longer believe in revolution, but I can't help being on the side of the young people who are fighting for it." He was particularly sensitive to the linguistic, cultural and behavioral shifts that to him were signals of "the new barbarism," and he cleverly pointed out the ways in which fascist cultural and rhetorical patterns had been subtly transformed in the postwar period. In the first years after World War II, "the values which counted were the same as under fascism": church, country, family, obedience, order and morality. The profound changes took place during the economic boom of the 1960s, which he described in a beautiful article, "The Disappearance of the Fireflies."

Consumer society was, according to Pasolini, a new and more insidious form of fascism which had succeeded, where Mussolini's fascism had failed, in unifying Italy for the first time in history. Mass communication and mass consumption were quickly leveling the wide cultural and linguistic differences between the various regions: "No country has possessed like ours such a quantity of 'particular and real cultures,' such a quantity of 'little homelands'—no country, that is, in which there was later such an overwhelming 'development.'" For Pasolini, the new consumer society was characterized by self-indulgence, materialism, sexual license, drugs, conformism and violence, values he termed "cultural genocide."

Pasolini's equation of fascism with the corrupt and inefficient Christian Democratic rule became the stock in trade of the extraparliamentary left. Indeed, Pasolini's Swiftian suggestion that the leadership of the Christian Democrats be placed on trial for cultural genocide was literally carried out by the Red Brigades, with the kidnapping of Aldo Moro. (The Red Brigades skipped the line in which Pasolini wrote that the trial of the Christian Democrats "is only a metaphor.") Much of the ideology of the far-left group Autonomia, with its anti-industrial orientation and its support for "spontaneous" rebellion, also drew on Pasolini's antiprogressive rhetoric.

Such groups overlooked Pasolini's equally sharp criticism of the left, particularly of the student movement. Believing that the students had little to do with the proletariat they claimed to represent, Pasolini insisted that they behaved with the dogmatism, intolerance and hatred of the Fascist Squadri: "So many Catholics, in becoming Communists, bring with them Faith and Hope, while neglecting, without realizing it, Charity. This is how fascism of the left is born." Pasolini's articles on "fascism of the left" and on the horrifying spread of violence among the young seem uncannily prophetic in light of the prevalence of terrorism in Italy today and in light of his own gruesome murder at the hands of one of the ragazzi di vita he had described so often. Pasolini was brilliant diagnostician of Italian diseases because he himself suffered from them: a critic of the far left, he was its unwitting prophet. While he condemned the violence of the Roman subproletariat, he was erotically attracted to it. He was one of those "unconscious Christians" of the left, whose apocalyptic vision could be resolved only through the crucifixion that was his murder.