[In the following essay, Rosengarten places Pratolini in the mainstream of social and historical realism, noting Pratolini's insistence on historical context in realistic fiction.]

In the trilogy Una Storia Italiana, Vasco Pratolini has undertaken the task of describing various aspects and phases of Italian life from 1875 to 1945. The first two volumes, Metello¹ and Lo Scialo,² were published respectively in 1955 and 1960. The third volume, on which Pratolini is now at work, has been tentatively entitled I Fidanzati del Mugnone, and is scheduled to appear in 1964. Metello describes the origin and development of the working class movement in Italy, and covers the years 1875 to 1902. Lo Scialo depicts the rise and triumph of the Fascist movement, and covers the period 1910 to 1930. I Fidanzati del Mugnone will deal with the period 1930 to 1945.

THE CRISIS OF NEOREALISM AND THE GENESIS OF UNA STORIA ITALIANA

By 1950, the year in which Pratolini began the planning and writing of his novel cycle, many Italian writers and critics were already speaking in a disparaging or skeptically detached manner about the artistic merits of post-war Italian fiction, and in particular of the novels and stories rather generically denominated as “neorealistic.” At the very moment when foreign observers were enthusiastically applying the metaphor of rebirth to post-war Italian culture, the Italian literary world was subjecting the products of its own revival to a process of objective, analytical scrutiny. For example, a surprisingly large number of the writers who participated in Carlo Bo's Inchiesta sul neorealismo (Turin, 1951) referred to the neorealist movement as a “phenomenon” of recent Italian cultural history, a phenomenon rooted in a specific set of historical circumstances to be studied in objective terms. Equally indicative of this analytical trend of thought is the fact that, in the April 1950 issue of Ulisse, the critics Leone Piccioni, Arnaldo Bocelli, and Alberto Savinio spoke directly of the “crisis” of neorealism, the causes and character of which they undertook to examine.

In appraising “Italian letters at the mid-century point,” Piccioni, Bocelli, and Savinio came to the conclusion that although neorealism had reawakened energies and passions long dormant, the movement as a whole did not deserve unqualified approval. Piccioni commented ruefully on the prevailing neorealist notion of art as “social document.” He felt that in their “violent reaction” against the roseate descriptions of life during the Fascist epoch, many young writers of “the neorealist school” had forgotten the values of craftsmanship and discipline which skilled prose stylists of the preceding generation, such as Emilio Cecchi and Vincenzo Cardarelli, had stood for.³ Bocelli took note of the declining importance of the “central character” in the modern Italian novel, and described the neorealist tendency “to stress social backgrounds at the expense of well-delineated characters” as one of the most harmful effects of “collectivist” thinking in the realm of art.⁴ Savinio lamented the obtrusive presence of “chronicle” in many post-war prose narratives.⁵

The more strictly ideological aspects of neorealism received the attention of Carlo Falconi in an article entitled “Contemporary Italian literature inspired by Marxism,” which appeared in the May 1950 issue of Humanitas. Falconi began his examination of the influence of Marxist ideology on Pratolini, Vittorini, Pavese, Calvino, and other neorealist novelists by prophesying that “… in a future history of our literature the study of the influence of Marxist ideology at the mid point of the twentieth century will constitute a chapter of considerable interest.” But the main problem considered by Falconi was not the influence of Marxism per se, which he took for granted and did not bother to document, but rather the largely unsuccessful efforts of the neorealists to give their ideological convictions artistically meaningful form. He reached the conclusion that neorealist novelists of Marxist persuasion had not yet produced works of permanent literary value.⁶

Not long after the publication of these articles, the phrase “the crisis of neorealism” began to appear in the critical writings of even the neorealists themselves. By the mid 1950's the phrase had gained widespread acceptance. In July 1957, in response to a series of questions put to them by the critic Franco Mattacotta, Elio Vittorini, Alberto Moravia, Carlo Bernari, and Pratolini all revealed the tendency to raise doubts about the aesthetic value of literature based on mere chronicle and documentation, and, at the same time, a certain impatience with the whole notion of art as a vehicle for social and political protest. “In Italy realism has been understood in a corrupt sense,” Vittorini wrote, “it has never liberated itself from rhetoric, from patriotism, from demagoguery.”⁷ Bernari stated that

… as far as Italy is concerned, I don't think that we can be accused of collective aberrations specifically indicated with the name of Socialist realism, but rather of a corruption of realism in a neorealistic sense, that is, in the sense of a crude and anarchic compromise between the aspiration for truth and populistic velleities.⁸

Moravia, in his customarily cool and detached manner, said that in considering the specific problem of neorealism one must necessarily keep in mind the general psychological dilemma of all modern novelists, a dilemma he ascribed to the fragmentation of the modern world, the disappearance of absolute standards of morality, in short to the variegated, multi-faceted character of twentieth century life.⁹

The crisis of neorealism exerted a direct influence on Pratolini's thinking just before he began working on his novel cycle. Unlike Vittorini and Bernari, Pratolini did not make an all-out attack on neorealism. On the contrary, he was quick to defend its positive accomplishments. But he did recognize that after the liberation, Italian novelists had run the risk of replacing the preciosities of art prose with the possibly more deleterious rhetoric of protest and engagement. In an article published in the February 2, 1958 issue of La Fiera Letteraria, Pratolini pointed out that

… the content, the point of departure, the condition, the attitude of our writers [in the immediate post-war years] were miles away from “verism” and from the Verghian achievement of a prodigiously objectified lyricism. The experiments, the attempts, the results which characterized neorealism were on the contrary, strongly polemical, committed, subjective … Engagement, by its very nature, presupposed a literature of intervention. So many confessions, so many examinations of conscience.¹⁰

This statement leaves no room for doubt as to why Pratolini has often used the term “neoimpressionism” rather than neorealism to describe the Italian novel of the immediate post-war period. Notwithstanding their interest in objective problems, he felt that the neorealists' main concern had actually been themselves, their own personal impressions and experiences. The result had been a “literature of intervention,” a whole series of honestly motivated but inevitably subjective “confessions” and “examinations of conscience.”

But the gravest shortcoming of neorealist novels and films was, in Pratolini's opinion, their lack of historical perspective; and it was precisely his awareness of this shortcoming that helped him to reach a clear understanding of what his literary methods and aims would be in Una Storia Italiana. The effects of war and social disorder had been vividly documented by the neorealists, yet Pratolini saw that they had not concerned themselves directly with the causal nexus linking Italy's present to its past. In an interview published in the June 1960 issue of Epoca, Mino Guerrini asked Pratolini to comment on the genesis of Una Storia Italiana. Pratolini replied:

… the idea first came to me, more or less consciously, at the time of certain polemics about neorealism. The limits of neorealism, in literature and in films, consisted above all in registering certain effects, in describing certain situations, without seeking out their causes. A new problem was being posed: that of rediscovering the effects through the causes. To see, that is, how our fathers were in order to see how we are. These, at least, were the intentions of Metello and Lo Scialo. I am not talking about artistic results; it may be that my intentions have remained only stated and not realized. The motive behind the three volumes of Una Storia Italiana, at any rate, was to see the history of our country as, in my opinion, it ought to be taught in the schools.¹¹

A month later, in a long interview with the critic Carlo Bo, Pratolini again made explicit reference to the fact that the crisis of neorealism coincided with the genesis of Una Storia Italiana:

The crisis of neorealism, which dates back to those years, like the suicide of Pavese and the industrious silence of Vittorini, coincides with my change of direction. Our works of that time endure because of the lyrical impetus and moral commitment with which they are infused … Their limitation is their strength which permits them to endure because they are immersed without reservation in the waters (and in the blood) of a very specific period of our history; because they are the mirror, the voice of our conscience, partisan testimony, a bitter and burning act of exaltation and revelation of the hope and the horror of that particular Italy of that particular era. And precisely of the disasters of war, of our long sickness and of our recovery of health, portrayed at any rate in its visible, tangible effects … But when the investigation of the effects was finished, and when we were overwhelmed by a reality that magnified these effects day by day, our works as writers ran the risk of becoming identified with our daily obligation to oppose and to protest. Now, for my part, I concluded that to go back to the causes, to explain both their character and their significance, represented the first immediate, active, and useful thing that could be done.¹²

This statement to Bo expresses Pratolini's conviction that the neorealists' exclusive involvement in the problems and issues of the war years had prevented them from undertaking the kind of serious reappraisal of Italy's national development which, in 1950, he saw as being “the most immediate, active, and useful thing that could be done.”

PRATOLINI'S CONCEPTION OF LITERARY REALISM

Pratolini's analysis of the shortcomings of neorealism—its lack of historical perspective and its subjective, “impressionistic” character—raises an important question. What, in his opinion, are the fundamental constituents of genuine literary realism? This question must be answered in as precise a manner as the available documents will allow, since at the end of his interview with Bo, Pratolini declared that

I was expecting you to ask me whether I thought that with Metello and Lo Scialo I had gone beyond neoimpressionism and whether I had achieved a dimension of realism. I would have answered that I think I approached it.¹³

The particular “dimension” of realism that interests Pratolini, and that he sought to achieve in Una Storia Italiana, is social realism embedded in historically verifiable fact. The principal characteristic of realism, as Pratolini defined it in an article entitled “Questioni sul realismo,” is that it interprets society in dialectical terms, that is, as a composite of conflicts and contradictions in which the forces of good and evil, progress and reaction, change and stasis are constantly interacting on each other. The purpose of realism is therefore “to investigate reality in its contradictions, in its good and evil, thereby giving us an image, partial but not counterfeit … of the life and society of our time.”¹⁴

Pratolini's conception of the methodology of realism is of course directly dependent on his view of its salient characteristic and purpose. Realism presupposes in the first place an objective study of the dominant social, political, and cultural movements and events that characterize the historical period with which the novelist is concerned. It is also based on the assumption that an organic relationship exists between the private stories of individuals and the important events of the time in which they live. Thus, Pratolini has defined Metello, for example, as

… the story of a man whose life is intertwined with the events of his time … A private story, simple and obscure, which in the Florence of the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of this century, includes the central experiences of an entire category described within the framework of the developmental process of a society.¹⁵

Secondly, since the realist aims to achieve an accurate representation of an historical epoch, he draws many of his characters and episodes, and much of his background material, from real life. In his interview with Carlo Bo Pratolini referred to this aspect of realism in commenting on his treatment of the first years of the Fascist epoch in Lo Scialo. Many of the characters of that novel are drawn directly from life, and in some cases are either called by their real names of by names so close to the original that anybody familiar with the period in question would immediately recognize the character's identity.¹⁶ Certain of the characters and episodes in Metello, too, are taken directly from the pages of contemporary newspapers and from historical texts dealing with the era.

But notwithstanding the copious data that he gathered and included in Una Storia Italiana, neither of the two volumes thus far published is a merely photographic reproduction of reality. On the contrary, Pratolini ascribes great importance to the creative and symbolic components of literary realism. That Pratolini does not conceive of realism only in terms of historical exactitude emerges very clearly in his article “Questioni sul realismo.” The method and purpose of realism, as Pratolini interprets it, are:

… to uncover and reveal historical truth from the confused crisscrossing of daily events in which political man finds his motives; to express this truth through characters, which is to say to reinvent life; to draw from the imagination in such a way as to render this reinvention even less improbable and precarious than life itself; to use a language that, for being the language spoken by everyone, will have to become, in the final analysis, an exemplary language that nobody will ever speak. This is the achievement of Boccaccio, of Sacchetti, of Manzoni, of Verga. Realism consists of this, and as such excludes all mere nomenclature, … all hagiography, and all abstraction. It is the triumph of the conventional, but it is the triumph of the conventional after you have persuaded yourself of the extreme freedom that the conventional affords, and with which it is nourished. Then it will appear to you also as the triumph of imagination.¹⁷

Realism, then, in Pratolini's view, is “the triumph of the conventional,” and excludes, by its very nature, “all hagiography and all abstraction.” In saying that realism excludes all hagiography Pratolini means that the realistic delineation of character can only be achieved by novelists who are conscious of the conflicting and often mutually contradictory ideas, impulses, and aspirations that influence the behavior of all human beings. Realism takes the full measure of a man, and therefore portrays his weaknesses as well as his strengths, his failures as well as his victories. The “hagiographical” idealization of character, whether in the name of a religion or of a political philosophy, is contrary to the essential nature of realism. Readers of Metello will perhaps recall that this concept is particularly relevant to Pratolini's portrayal of Metello Salani, the Socialist “hero of the collective,” whose egotism and vanity nevertheless often seem to overshadow his positive qualities.

The word “conventional” is for all practical purposes synonomous in Pratolini's mind with average, representative, or typical. He reasons that it is through a thorough and imaginative investigation of characters who typify widely prevalent attitudes that the realist creates a truthful image of the society of an historical epoch. The realist's point of departure is the individual, not the type. He proceeds from the particular to the general. He is interested in concrete human problems and situations. Hence realism “excludes all abstraction.” But the novelist does not achieve an authentic “dimension” of realism unless he succeeds in creating characters who embody the typical characteristics of the society, and especially the class, to which they belong. A novel is realistic and historically valid to the extent that its characters are representative, not exceptional, products of their time.

The concept of typicality formed the basis of some explanatory comments Pratolini made in January 1956 regarding the structure and conception of Metello, and in general of Una Storia Italiana. Speaking to a congress of construction workers, Pratolini referred to a letter he had received from a young Sardinian worker:

He maintained that in the course of the novel one wasn't made sufficiently aware of the struggles that other categories of workers had to wage and that necessarily paralleled … the political and organizational battles waged by the construction workers of that time.

It was a seemingly unreasonable observation. I had wanted to tell the story of a bricklayer, not of a ceramist, let us say, or of a mechanic, or of a smelter. Of course my intention was, through describing the experiences of Metello and his comrades, to reveal the typical life condition, the typical feelings, degree of emancipation, and level of class consciousness that animated the Italian proletariat at the beginning of this century. Therefore the story of the bricklayer Metello included ideally the story of a Metello smelter, a Metello ceramist, a Metello mechanic, and so on.

In truth, my intention was not so broadly ambitious; on the other hand, rather than ambition it is a question of a fundamental rule of the art of the novel: if a writer intends to base his work on the investigation and interpretation of reality, and does not want to detach himself, but on the contrary wants to confront directly the social conflicts that reality presents to his consciousness, he must be able to synthesize in the characters of his novel all of the characteristic and typical elements of the society that produces them.

You see, therefore, that in the light of these considerations, the criticism of the young Sardinian worker, instead of being unreasonable, becomes extremely acute; so acute, in fact, that if he were right, his criticism would raise serious questions concerning not the basic conception and structure of the novel, but its artistic result.¹⁸

The last sentence of the passage quoted above indicates that although Pratolini is perfectly willing to concede the possibility that in Metello he may have fallen short of realizing his artistic intentions, he has complete confidence in the correctness of the novel's “basic conception and structure.” He has made similar comments concerning Lo Scialo.

THE CONCEPTUAL AND STRUCTURAL FRAMEWORK OF UNA STORIA ITALIANA

In the course of his interviews with Carlo Bo and Mino Guerrini, Pratolini explained the general structural and conceptual framework of Una Storia Italiana, and indicated in precise terms why he had chosen the particular character types and social classes as protagonists for each of the three volumes:

GENERAL PREMISE OF TRILOGY

It was a simple, yet at the same time a difficult and exciting series of ideas that I had to articulate. The syphilis working in our blood between the two wars, and which from 1919 to 1945 we called Fascism, … had not burst forth either in us or in our fathers; beneath this covering of social injustice, suppression of freedoms, and blunting of the human spirit, there was something we must have inherited. I concluded at that time (and it was not a great intuition, but rather a corollary of the premises) that our ills could be traced back to the years immediately following unification, which signified something on the map, but not in substance, equality of rights and duties.¹⁹

STATEMENT OF METHOD AND AIM

And I became convinced that this was the task I should set for myself: to move from intimate memories to chronicle to history, if you will; to document a reality investigated in and drawn from its strictly human origins more than from texts and oral tradition; to discover through the character investigated in his secret life, in his choral sorties, the most profound secret, perhaps the essential truth, of our national history.

PREMISE OF METELLO

During the Humbertine age, it was not the dominant moneyed classes, and the “historical contribution of the historic right,” that brought Italy forward, that brought Italy into contact with the rest of Europe, but the working class, at its revolutionary dawn, with its first parties and organizations … And not so much the working class in its “Socialist apostles” and in the souls of its libertarians … as in its totality of workercitizens: their shock impact, their mortgage on the future. Even if in the last decades of the nineteenth century the working class did not hold power, it was nevertheless this class which set the dominant tone of the epoch with its leagues and labor unions. The theme of Metello was, more of less, that Crispi was not the representative man of that moment, but rather the young Turati.

PREMISE OF LO SCIALO

Nor, from this point of view, had the preeminent role been played from 1910 to 1930 by the powerful bourgeoisie with its war shouted in the name of irridentism, with its Fascism erected in the name of legality and order …, nor was it the working class, whose evolution and struggles, whose authentic and obscure heroism, had culminated in a terrible defeat, but it was rather the middle and petite bourgeoisie, with its delays and conformism, its quietism, its cult of domestic tranquility, its inextinguishable devotion to the strong, its rejection of its own popular origins and its aspiration to improve not so much its condition as its social status, that had formed the basis, the cowardly but stubborn, obtuse, timorous, calumnious army behind whose domestic bayonets Fascism had established itself.

PREMISE OF I FIDANZATI DEL MUGNONE

Finally, the secret and truest story of Fascism, from Ethiopia to Spain to Dongo, is the story of the generation which grew up under Fascism. I Fidanzati del Mugnone is the story of a generation which grew up under Fascism, and which was therefore educated in a Fascist manner, and of its representatives who wanted to discover a truth, who had to struggle to emerge from darkness into light. All of this rendered, as in Metello and Lo Scialo, through the private experiences of the characters …

This was the way in which the idea of the trilogy took form in my mind.²⁰

Besides being a lucid summary of the major premises and themes of Una Storia Italiana, the passages quoted above also clarify the ideological point of view from which Pratolini writes in each of the three volumes. Metello describes the “authentic and obscure heroism” of the Italian working class movement “at its revolutionary dawn.” Lo Scialo is primarily the story of the petite bourgeoisie from 1910 to 1930, since it was this segment of the middle class which, in Pratolini's view, then moved to the forefront of Italian national life and with its “delays, its conformism, its cowardice and inextinguishable devotion to the strong,” paved the way for the triumph of Fascism. I Fidanzati del Mugnone is the story of the Fascist generation itself, and is not so much concerned with the characteristics of a specific social class as with the moral and spiritual problems of a group of Florentine intellectuals who struggled “to emerge from darkness into light.”

In its scope and structure Una Storia Italiana is, therefore, a novel cycle that belongs to the great tradition of social and historical realism, a tradition to which Pratolini has acknowledged his indebtedness. Limitations of space preclude an extended discussion of influences and affinities at this time, yet a few brief concluding remarks seem in order.

In regard to the question of sources for Una Storia Italiana, Pratolini sent me the following brief but illuminating statement in a letter dated March 5, 1961:

For the “sources” of Una Storia Italiana, why didn't you think of two writers about whom I must have spoken to you and who are not, in fact, any of those whom you mention. I mean Dreiser on the one hand and Roger Martin du Gard on the other. They are, obviously, “cultural” sources, elective affinities if you will. (And you might add, insofar as the “design” of Una Storia Italiana is concerned, and above all in regard to Metello, Sholokhov.) Besides my eternal Balzac, naturally.

Dreiser, Martin du Gard, Sholokhov, Balzac—these are among the novelists with whose literary methods and aims Pratolini felt a deep inward affinity, and whose example he sought to follow in the planning and writing of Una Storia Italiana.

Notes

1. V. P., Metello, (Florence, 1955).

2. V. P., Lo Scialo, 2 vols. (Verona, 1960).

3. Leone Piccioni, “La letteratura del dopoguerra,” Ulisse, April 1950, pp. 528-532.

4. Arnaldo Bocelli, “Morte e resurrezione del personaggio,” Ulisse, April 1950, p. 536.

5. Alberto Savinio, “Compito dello scrittore,” Ulisse, April 1950, p. 533.

6. Carlo Falconi, “La letteratura italiana contemporanea ispirata al marxismo,” Humanitas, May 1950, pp. 512-542.

7. Elio Vittorini, “Questioni sul realismo,” Tempo Presente, July 1957, p. 527.

8. Carlo Bernari, “Questioni sul realismo,” Tempo Presente, July 1957, p. 519.

9. Alberto Moravia, “Questioni sul realismo,” Tempo Presente, July 1957, p. 523.

10. V. P., “La ‘sua’ Napoli,” La Fiera Letteraria, February 2, 1958, p. 3.

11. V. P., in an interview with Mino Guerrini, Epoca, June 1960, pp. 18-20.

12. V. P., in an interview with Carlo Bo, L'Europeo, July 1960, pp. 50-54.

13. It must be pointed out that Pratolini is fully conscious of the problems involved in reaching definitive conclusions as to the nature of realism. When he told Bo that he thought he had achieved a dimension of realism, he meant “a dimension” literally. He understands, of course, that realism is multi-dimensional, that a multiplicity of contents and choices of method are open to the writer who is interested in revealing aspects of reality. As he said in an article published in Tempo Presente in July 1957: “… when has realism pretended to rule out every other experience? That would really be the desert and death, the paradise of the Zhadanovs. Even in the field of realism itself, there is the possibility, I would say the natural manifestation of as many forms of elaboration, of as many “dimensions,” as there are authors. There is Balzac, and there is Stendhal, contemporaries.” (V. P., “Questioni sul realismo,” Tempo Presente, July 1957, p. 525.)

14. V. P., “Questioni sul realismo,” Tempo Presente, July 1957, p. 524.

15. V. P., in an interview with Dario Puccini, Letture per Tutti, February 1953.

16. For example, the character named Lavagnini is Gavagnini, a Florentine Communist leader who was assassinated by the Fascists in 1921; the character named Tarbè is the anagram of Giovanni Berta, the Fascist son of a Florentine industrialist who was killed by the workers of the Pignone in 1921.

17. V. P., “Questioni sul realismo,” Tempo Presente, July 1957, p. 525.

18. V. P., “Metello Salani,” L'Edile, January 1956, p. 3.

19. In the March 1950 issue of Belfagor, the historian Paolo Alatri discusses some facts and statistics concerning the political situation in Italy after unification which substantiate Pratolini's assertion that unification “signified something on the map, but not in substance equality of rights and duties.” Alatri notes in the first place that from unification in 1860 to 1882, 2٪ of the Italian people had the right to vote in national elections and that from 1882 to 1894, 4٪ had this right. Alatri makes the following statement: “Italy was governed, from its birth as a modern state to the first World War, by ‘liberals’ and ‘democrats’ representing an extremely restricted political circle, in its turn elected by a narrow electoral base which, if we keep in mind the number of actual voters with respect to those who had the right to vote, represented at first (1861-1882) 1٪ of the population, then (1882-1913) 4 to 5٪.” Paolo Alatri, “Le origini del fascismo e la classe dirigente italiana,” Belfagor, March 1950, pp. 129-147.

20. The statements regarding the general premise of the trilogy, the statement of method and aim, the premise of Metello, and the premise of Lo Scialo are taken from Pratolini's interview with Carlo Bo, L'Europeo, July 1960, pp. 50-54. The statement regarding the premise of I Fidanzati del Mugnone is taken from Pratolini's interview with Mino Guerrini, Epoca, June 1960, p. 20.