[In the following essay, Rosengarten defines an important transitional decade in Pratolini's life by examining his literary reviews and essays on political and social questions.]

By reason of his prominent position in contemporary Italian letters, Vasco Pratolini has been the subject of an extraordinarily large number of articles and critical essays. He has been frequently interviewed by the editors and critics of Epoca, L'Europeo, La Fiera Letteraria, and other Italian magazines. His novels and short stories have been translated into many languages, and articles on various aspects of his career have appeared in a host of foreign newspapers and journals.

In examining the critical work that has thus far been done on Pratolini, one is struck by the discovery that although his life and works from 1945 to the present have been studied in great detail, and information regarding his childhood and adolescence in Florence during the 1920's is available in many published interviews and biographical sketches, his career during the 1930's and early 1940's has been almost completely neglected.¹ One finds occasional references to his youthful involvement with Fascism in the early 1930's, to his struggle with tuberculosis in 1935 and 1936, to his editorship of Campo di Marte in 1938, but they generally are fleeting references and reveal little or nothing of the crucial importance that those years had in Pratolini's development.

It is the purpose of this article to fill in the gap: to describe the decade (1932-1942) in Pratolini's life during which he formed the human and literary values that were to inspire his creative work in the postwar years. Pratolini's writings on literary, political, and social questions in Il Bargello from 1932 to 1937, in Campo di Marte from 1938 to 1939, and in various magazines, including Incontro and La Ruota, from 1940 to 1942, form the basis of this discussion.²

IL BARGELLO (1932-1937)

In his preface to Il garofano rosso, Elio Vittorini speaks of the political ideals and aspirations that animated the adolescent characters of his novel during the mid-1920's:

They have heard about Socialism, they have heard about Communism, and meanwhile they see Fascism. These are the days of the Matteotti crime. … Fascism has killed Matteotti; that is to say it has killed someone, and each one of these youngsters has the feeling that he too must kill someone. In the eyes of these boys, who see that the other parties do not kill, Fascism is strength, and as strength it is life, and as life it is revolutionary. But, I repeat, they have heard about Socialism, and of Communist revolutions for Socialism. They know enough about these things to think that every revolutionary change in the world must take place in the direction of Socialism. The world that they would like is as they imagine Socialism wishes it to be. Thus the confessed reasons for which they support Fascism … derive, in most cases, from the idea that Fascism cannot but have a Socialist content.³

This passage precisely describes the political and, above all, the emotional attitude of Vasco Pratolini during the early 1930's. As a member of an impoverished Florentine family, he looked back on the years of the first world war and of its immediate aftermath as a period of unending loneliness and despair. Throughout his childhood he regarded the war as an incontrovertible fact of life that he and his family, like all the poor people of Florence, had been destined to endure; he had understood the meaning of fatalism long before the word itself became a part of his vocabulary. The rise of Fascism, however, symbolized for young Pratolini the beginning of a new and exciting era in Italian history. Indeed, Fascism first presented itself to his consciousness as a movement that would vindicate the rights of the poor and the oppressed through a program of national regeneration.

Pratolini made his initial entrance into Florentine cultural life in 1932, when he was nineteen years old. In that year he began contributing articles of political and literary commentary, short stories, and prose poems to Il Bargello, the official organ of the Florentine fasci di combattimento. Poverty and a fourteen-hour workday were no hindrance to him at this stage of his career, for he was sustained by a sure sense of latent powers and by an ardent faith in Fascism as a purifying and revolutionary force in Italian society. Mussolini's regime represented to him at once the triumph of order and social discipline over capitalist exploitation, the beginning of a new era of imperial splendor, the enfranchisement of Italian youth, and the possibility of a great rebirth of artistic and literary endeavor. For this reason, when Gioacchino Contri, chief editor of Il Bargello, invited him to submit his writings to the paper's terza pagina, Pratolini eagerly accepted. Indeed, the articles he began publishing in Il Bargello in 1932 were often signed: “Vasco Pratolini, a young Fascist from beyond the Arno.”

During the early 1930's Pratolini's literary judgments often reflected the single-minded ardor of the Fascist zealot. For example, in July 1932, he praised d'Annunzio because of his “virile and combative career as writer and patriot.”⁴ In February 1933, he directed some scornful invective against a Florentine theater company whose plays he characterized as “stuff that barely makes one smile because of its comic-stale plots, and that is in complete contrast to Fascist thought.”⁵ In April of the following year, he wrote a characteristically impassioned denunciation of Sem Benelli's play Caterina Sforza. After criticizing Benelli's work for its “spuriousness and disdain for the common people,” Pratolini asserted his belief in the educative value of theater:

Theater is spectacle—agreed!—but it must educate and have an irrefragable moral significance. The people—we! who are the people—we are not educated by such Catherines; we are brutalized by them. There are eight scenes and in each there is the disdainful phrase: ‘the people is dirt’—‘the people is rabble.’⁶

By the mid-1930's, however, Pratolini had begun to shift his emphasis away from doctrine to questions of form and style. In his review of Romano Bilenchi's novel Il capofabbrica, which had been published in the early months of 1935, Pratolini made a number of critical judgments that indicate his move away from a narrowly utilitarian approach to literature.

Pratolini particularly admired Bilenchi's stories of adolescence, which in his view were refreshingly free of bombast and ideological platitudes. In the opening part of his review of Il capofabbrica, Pratolini noted:

Bilenchi, like most of the best young Italian writers today, does not find it necessary to dress his characters in a black shirt, or to vulgarize, by having them make profane gestures, the sacredness of the idea and the cult of the hero.⁷

There are two other aspects of Pratolini's response to Bilenchi's work that deserve mention. The first is his comment on Bilenchi's style:

The word is intended as ‘essentiality,’ without being the fruit of a cerebral or forced virtuosity; Bilenchi's language gives back to the word its representational function by virtue of its Tuscan purity [sana toscanità], which stems from the best tradition.

It is difficult to define precisely what Pratolini meant in saying that Bilenchi's language “is intended as ‘essentiality,’” but undoubtedly this judgment reflects the impact that the poetry of Giuseppe Ungaretti had had on Pratolini's conception of language. The word “essentiality” refers to the qualities of purity and vibrant immediacy that Ungaretti had sought to achieve in his poetry; it signifies the direct emotive impact of words and images, that is, their unencumbered correspondence to the thoughts and feelings of the poet. The reference to the sana toscanità of Bilenchi's language is also significant in that it indicates Pratolini's appreciation of the virtues of his own native literary tradition.

Pratolini also made judgments of a more general and philosophical nature in his review of Il capofabbrica. In praising Bilenchi for his capacity to convey the spirit of his time through the creation of believable and representative character types, Pratolini observed:

… all genuine art transcends the individual and the generations and becomes identified with the historical evolution of a people. Bilenchi will achieve this ‘transcendent’ art with a novel that will be both popular and universal.

What is of primary importance here is that Pratolini, in 1935, was shifting his emphasis away from literature as direct intervention toward the concept of literature as the mirror of its time. He had begun to develop an interest in works that documented the passing of one era and the birth of another and that reflected the change of mores and values in a society's transition from one historical period to the next.⁸

Bilenchi was among Pratolini's closest literary and political associates in Florence. They were both ardent supporters of Fascism until the outbreak of civil war in Spain, when they began evaluating the slogans of the regime in a new light. They also shared a strong, if somewhat abstract, belief in literature as an instrument of social progress. Both strove to adapt their vaguely Socialist sentiments to the exigencies of Fascist policy. Bilenchi, however, had seen much earlier than Pratolini that a one-sided emphasis on ideological dogma was possibly an effective weapon in political warfare, but that it could only injure the writer. The writer's primary function, Bilenchi thought, was to reveal the inner life of his characters, not to make them mouthpieces for political doctrine.⁹

In the mid-1930's, Pratolini became perplexed by the apparent inability of Fascist writers to give genuinely artistic expression to their political convictions. On the one hand, as a critic interested in raising the cultural level of the masses, Pratolini stressed his belief that all art, and particularly literature, should fulfill a moral and educational function. On the other hand, because of his increasingly strong interest in the stylistic and formal values of literature, he often found himself compelled to condemn works that were truly Fascist in content, but whose utter lack of genuine artistry offended his aesthetic sensibilities. His review of Indro Montanelli's autobiographical novel Primo tempo suggests that he resolved this dilemma by being at once moralist and critic, puritan and aesthete. Montanelli belonged to the militant wing of the Florentine Fascists, so that his political orthodoxy was not in question; yet Pratolini found his novel lacking on many counts. The novel had disappointed him, Pratolini said, because it would appear that Montanelli

… is aiming only for a reputation among the semicultured and the pseudo intellectuals instead of working in his sector and with his intelligence, solidly and in a lasting way, for the moral education and social betterment of the masses. His novel does not even possess a narrative or literary personality; the characters, at first fairly nicely sketched, become more and more vague as they enter into the action instead of acquiring features and a physiognomy from it. The story is disjointed, inconclusive, unsuccessful. From all this one can possibly salvage the external attempt at a Fascist idealism, which, however, appears on the margin of the story and is separated from the life of the characters.¹⁰

Pratolini's book reviews during the mid-1930's contain references to a wide variety of authors, from Villon to Balzac, from Verga to Ungaretti. Yet it would seem that writers belonging to his own native Tuscan tradition made the deepest impression on his mind and sensibilities at this time. He was drawn in particular to the works of Aldo Palazzeschi and Federico Tozzi.

Two of Palazzeschi's most skillfully executed books were published in Florence during the period in which Pratolini was forming his literary tastes: Stampe dell'ottocento (1932) and Le sorelle Materassi (1934). The sense of place, of intimate identification with the Florentine landscape, that Palazzeschi manifests in these works struck a deeply responsive chord in Pratolini. But there was another aspect of Palazzeschi's work that Pratolini admired even more, namely, his understanding of the sentiments and attitudes that characterized the social milieu of which he was a part. His humorously ironical vignettes of Florentine bourgeois life at the turn of the century (Stampe) contained precisely the kind of penetrating psychological insight that Pratolini had begun to look for in a work of literature. In February 1937, Pratolini made the following comment on Palazzeschi's art:

Palazzeschi, as a complete artist and mature prose stylist, creates his world with absolute sincerity, … that is to say, he becomes the intimate chronicler of our times—for the purpose of establishing some parallels, Balzac, or better still, Flaubert, were in this sense chroniclers. Palazzeschi reveals to us the most hidden aspirations of men, the most intimate and secret facets of the human heart. He sheds light on feelings that men barely communicate to each other even while their actions suggest and favor the desire for such communication.¹¹

Pratolini's appreciative response to the work of Federico Tozzi stemmed from different motives, more personal than those that had attracted him to Palazzeschi.

In the early months of 1935, Paolo Cesarini published a short biography of Tozzi; Pratolini reviewed it in Il Bargello. After indicating that Ottone Rosai¹² had introduced him to Tozzi's work in 1931, and that he had read Tre croci and Con gli occhi chiusi with a feeling of spontaneous pleasure, Pratolini said that he wanted his “comrades” to know Tozzi for his “strength, humanity, and sincere patriotism.” Yet, in explaining the basic reasons why he had found Tozzi such a powerful and sincere writer, Pratolini suggested that personal rather than ideological motives had drawn him to the Sienese novelist:

… And I who know Tozzi not through vague rumors but directly from his novels, which are of course all autobiographies in the third person (Pietro, Dario, Virgilio, Remigio, Enrico) that reflect his continual tragic suffering, sorrows, disappointments, and his ‘violent need of love,’ I who was already in agreement with Cesarini's premise, after this brief presentation of Tozzi's life, feel an intensification of the love and esteem that I have always had for him.¹³

It would be difficult to cite works that are more fatalistic in conception and more infused with a sense of defeat and disillusionment than the novels of Tozzi. They were not the kind of brightly optimistic literature that could be used to inspire Fascist youth with confidence in a glorious future. In his effort to reconcile Fascist ideology with his instinctive predilection for writers, even the most pessimistic ones, whose emotional sincerity precluded a one-sided emphasis on political themes, Pratolini occasionally allowed incongruous juxtapositions of ideas to obscure his genuine literary insights. Thus, he concluded his article on Tozzi by declaring that Tozzi's political writings of 1918 and 1919 were “the spiritual testimony of a Fascist of the time,” and he added in a final parenthetical note:

We youngsters ought to have clear ideas by now, and when thinking of the novel—along with Palazzeschi—remember Tozzi and Verga. With these peasants and with these fishermen [Podere or Malavoglia] healthy air enters our lungs and makes our spirits thrive. Mussolini will take care of training our muscles and our brains.

There can be little doubt that it was Tozzi's truthful descriptions of his own life experiences, and not his late political manifestoes, that accounted for the “love and esteem” that Pratolini felt for him.

As we have seen, during the years 1932 to 1937, Pratolini gradually acquired literary tastes and values that could not be easily reconciled with the narrowly didactic viewpoint sanctioned by the spokesmen for Fascist culture. While remaining theoretically loyal to Fascism, he was struggling to find his own personal vision, his own way of thinking and feeling about literature. Somewhat the same pattern of development manifests itself in his political writings during the same period, a period which culminates in the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

None of Pratolini's early political writings give any evidence of his having been introduced to Fascist ideology by a particular person or group. Fascism was, so to speak, “in the air,” and Pratolini first responded to the slogans and policies of the regime with the intense fervor that is often characteristic of youth.

Hero worship of Mussolini constitutes one of the fundamental themes of Pratolini's early political writings in Il Bargello. For example, in paying homage to a man who had been attacked and severely injured by anti-Fascists in July 1922, and who had died in 1934, singing a hymn of praise to the Fascist regime, Pratolini wrote: “Today, I, a young Fascist, have paid homage to this unknown fallen compatriot—answering ‘Present!’ for him, and committing myself by his example to serve the Duce and the Fatherland with faith and modesty to death.”¹⁴ In an article published in July 1934, Pratolini asserted that Fascism must make both young and old treasure the purity of the soul, and he cited Socrates as one of the first great thinkers who, like Mussolini, had convinced his disciples that the cultivation of virtue rather than the pursuit of bodily pleasures and material wealth was the key to happiness.¹⁵

Pratolini's clearest expression of faith in Mussolini, youth, and Fascism appears in an article entitled “Funzione spirituale,” in which he drew a parallel between the achievements of the Spartan King Lycurgus and those of Mussolini. The opening sentences indicate that he found no difficulty in reconciling political dictatorship with “spiritual values” and that he was deeply impressed by the combative unity of Fascist youth:

In every enlightened period of history, when a dictatorship or a republic—conscious of its physical strength, nourished by spiritual values, faith, moral discipline—governs an empire or a nation, it sees in the young the cardinal element on which to base its power. … From the Lacedaemonian youth trained by the laws of Lycurgus, whose strength of body and soul is testified by Plutarch, to the Fascist youth of Mussolini, there is a perpetual succession of events and realities that justify us sufficiently … Fascism itself, the work in great part of the youth during the insurrectional period, relies on the youth for its spiritual expansion and inner directives.¹⁶

Pratolini's reaction to a book by Generoso Pucci entitled Coi Negadi in Etiopia, a study of economic and social conditions in Ethiopia, illustrates how completely he accepted the official justification that the Fascist government offered for its violation of Ethiopian sovereignty. Pucci's book, Pratolini declared,

… succeeds in presenting to us a documented picture of Ethiopia's barbarous, anarchic, medieval conditions, and of the necessity, the duty, that impels Italy to undertake an integral and redemptive conquest in the physical and moral interest of the natives themselves.¹⁷

Pratolini was also inspired by Fascism's often-proclaimed intention of building the kind of just social order that, he felt, could not be achieved by bourgeois liberalism, Socialism, or Communism. For Pratolini, as for so many of his contemporaries, Fascism was the equivalent of state Socialism, but of a Socialism with nerve and muscle. The ideal that inspired him was the utopian vision of a nation of workers and intellectuals bound together in indestructible unity. He was convinced that Fascism was an essentially equalitarian movement whose principal aims were the elimination of capitalism and the establishment of a just social order. Fascism, he believed, had closed the gap dividing manual and intellectual labor: “Fascist doctrine re-establishes the intimate and physical equilibrium of the two forces; it creates equal duties and rights, and requires a devoted and reciprocal collaboration from both.”¹⁸

After the victory in Africa, Pratolini praised the soldiers who had chosen to remain in Ethiopia to work the land. He reminded his readers that Fascism, as an essentially equalitarian movement, must not allow speculators and capitalists to exploit the common men who had fought for their country. These men, he said, “must not fall under the burden of indigence or be led to believe that they are still working for a ‘boss.’ The state guarantees them these rights, and the state is the only employer that has a reason for being.”¹⁹

But Fascism had not repudiated capitalism, and Pratolini began to have certain apprehensions about the direction in which the Italian government was moving after the Ethiopian campaign. The corporative system had facilitated rather than impeded the profiteering of capitalist speculators, and Pratolini noted this fact in an article entitled “Industrializzazione corporativa”:

The project of the corporative enterprises, which stipulates that they be financed by the reserves of capital in the possession of those who have state bonds … represents an attempt to create a bourgeois mentality in the workers; it plays on the instinctive egotism of man and encourages his lust for personal gain. This negates the political and moral significance of collective industrialization.²⁰

Several months later Pratolini reiterated, now with more hope than certainty, his belief that Fascism would raise the intellectual and social level of the masses:

We think that it is perfectly orthodox to grant all men the right to perfect themselves; we believe that we have the obligation, as Fascists and as revolutionaries, to give all Italians the possibility of achieving intellectual, social, and moral development.²¹

It is important to note at this point that many of the articles referred to above were written by Pratolini within the confines of a sanitarium in Arco, a town situated in the Italian Dolomites about five miles from Lake Garda. In March 1935, he had discovered that he had tuberculosis, which fortunately was still in an incipient phase. Nevertheless, though his condition was not considered serious, he had to spend the better part of the next two years at Arco, where he had the chance to reflect deeply on his ideals and ambitions. Pratolini himself has spoken of his two years of confinement as a period of decisive importance in his life. In 1954, in his preface to Diario di Villa Rosa, Pratolini confessed that before becoming ill in 1935, he had been a brash, combative young man sure of his Fascist convictions and disdainful of everyone who did not view the world as he did. After his recovery two years later, he was a wiser, more temperate person:

They were two decisive years in every sense. I was violent; I became submissive; I learned to fear death, to respect life—above all, the life of other people, because I had learned to value my own.²²

During a brief return visit to Florence in the summer of 1936, Pratolini was introduced to Elio Vittorini, with whom he formed a close friendship that remains unbroken to this day. Vittorini was among the first in Florentine intellectual circles to make a decisive break with Fascism, and he was responsible for accelerating the process of Pratolini's disengagement from Fascism in 1936. He brought to Pratolini's attention the massive international protests against Franco's rebellion and asked him how it was possible to reconcile Fascism's claim of being a “people's” movement with its military support of the Falangist armies in Spain.²³ The friendship between the two young writers was much more than literary in character, and it proved to be of crucial importance to Pratolini's intellectual and moral development.

In September and October of 1936, Pratolini published two articles in Il Bargello that reflect the crisis of conscience he experienced after the conversations he had had with Vittorini. Both articles deal with the Spanish Civil War, which had thrown him into a state of inner turmoil. In the first article he pointed out that Franco's rebellion was unworthy of Italy's support, since it was being led by “priests and generals whose doctrine was very bourgeois and very little proletarian.”²⁴ In the second article, which appeared two weeks later, Pratolini made the following judgments on the events in Spain:

The piece I wrote two weeks ago has injured many people's sensibilities and has also found many supporters, but all I did was to reconfirm a position taken by our newspaper for some time now: we must not use the word Fascism to describe any movement that seeks to establish itself as a government (to admit the possibility of other imperialist regimes is, in my opinion, tantamount to belying the universal significance of Italy's Fascist empire). Therefore I condemned the Spanish rebels who, with their patriotic veneer, tried to convince us that theirs was a Spanish Fascism. The speeches and program of General Franco have come out after my article, and serve to clarify my affirmation: the talk of social justice on the part of General Franco is a good sign, but we are unable to reconcile it with his former acts and with the speeches of Mola, Cabanellas, and Quiepo, who, it would seem, intend to impose a real military oligarchy on the government and a triumphant revindication of capitalism and clericalism.²⁵

Thus, by the latter part of 1936, despite his proclaimed belief in the “universal significance of Italy's Fascist empire,” Pratolini had already taken a firm stand against militarism, capitalism, and clericalism, and he had closely identified himself with the working classes.

CAMPO DI MARTE (1938-1939)

Pratolini was permanently discharged from the sanitarium in the summer of 1937, and he returned immediately to Florence. He went to work in the makeup room of Il Bargello, a job he held until August 1938, when, in collaboration with the poet Alfonso Gatto, he founded a literary review named Campo di Marte.

Pratolini's disengagement from Fascism, already evident in certain of his articles in Il Bargello, manifests itself even more clearly in his writings in Campo di Marte. In 1938 and 1939, he was still involved in Fascism, but no longer as a partisan. He became an observer and a critic and assumed the responsibility of bringing into focus some of the contradictions in Fascist culture that he felt competent to judge and to evaluate.

The full name of the new review, Campo di Marte: Quindicinale di azione letteraria e artistica, suggests the exclusively literary interests of the young men who contributed to it. With the frequent exception of Pratolini's own writings, the articles of Piero Bigongiari, Mario Luzi, Carlo Bo, Alessandro Parronchi, Enrico Falqui, and others reflected the same concern with questions of form and aesthetics that characterized two other more renowned Florentine literary reviews, Solaria and Letteratura.

It became immediately apparent in the first issue of Campo di Marte that Pratolini and Gatto had no intention of indulging in fruitless, patriotic rhetoric. It was also clear that they had serious doubts about the perfection of the existing social order. After summoning all men of good will to collaborate in his attempt to create an honest, independent publication, Pratolini asserted his right to seek out the defects of the present in order to formulate new values for the future. He assured his readers that the editors of Campo di Marte were neither lackeys nor opportunists:

As men of letters we shall not forget to trust in the intellect; as men we shall try to say something that is not a mere repetition of midnight chitchat. We are in nobody's employ … and we shall not defend any special-interest groups.²⁶

Pratolini was anxious to encourage maximum freedom of expression on a wide variety of topics. His aim was to stimulate debate, not to retreat behind the fortress of accepted dogma.

In the first few issues, Pratolini either discussed or made reference to most of the problems that were to occupy his attention until the beginning of the second world war. The majority of his articles concerned the function of art in modern society. More specifically, he denounced the “Fascist novel,” condemned the “snobbism” and bad taste of the Italian reading public, ridiculed the “bourgeois” and “petit bourgeois” notions of many “popular” novels of the day, exhorted his countrymen to rid themselves of provincialism and chauvinistic prejudices, and, finally, in a series of three articles entitled “Civilization in Crisis,” stated his conviction that only an “economic solution” could resolve “the moral crisis of bourgeois civilization.” By “economic solution,” Pratolini meant the destruction of the capitalist system:

… Let it be said once and for all that the bourgeois phenomenon is not only a mentality but first of all a network of economic interests that determines this mentality. It is necessary to liquidate these interests in order to destroy that mentality.

If this were not so, the French revolution would have taught us very little, and historical materialism would not even have existed in order to be disavowed. The problem remains fixed in these terms, and it is useless to indulge in moralistic anathemas while at the same time avoiding the principal obstacle. Let it be said finally … that an economic solution must be found for the problem.²⁷

The tone as well as the content of Pratolini's writings in Campo di Marte is noteworthy. There is a dispassionate, reflective tone in these later writings that, in comparison with the hyperbolic stridency of most of the articles in Il Bargello, indicates a marked advance in his emotional and intellectual development. A characteristic feature of his writings in Campo di Marte is his frequent use of such words as “clarification,” “revision,” “discrimination,” “analysis.” He was opposed, he said, to the “myth” of the Fascist colossus and to the artificial systematization of doctrine, which, he maintained, was incompatible with truly revolutionary thought:

It seems to us that we are passing through a period that demands a revision of all our ideas, which are numerous and not always orthodox. We shall dedicate our work to a documentation of ourselves, to a more precise examination of that which our faith has caused us to believe. We shall make every effort to clarify our judgments of experiences and ideas belonging to our generation, and we shall deny our generation the right to chauvinism and internationalism, shallowness and pedantry.²⁸

That Pratolini had dissociated himself entirely from the cults of youth and activism is clearly shown in many of his writings in Campo di Marte. With the one exception of Lenin, he said, all modern philosophers have made desperate appeals to the young for their allegiance. But youth needs now, more than ever before, to reflect, to evaluate political and social doctrines:

Because this is a continued pretension of our “teachers”: to impel us toward “solutions,” while there is in us a restless urge to discriminate, to review, to “document ourselves” in regard to doctrines, ideologies, and actions so that we may clarify the basic concepts underlying an enduring truth.²⁹

Pratolini's most interesting writings in Campo di Marte are on literary themes, and it is in this area that his development manifests itself in a striking manner. As coeditor of a widely read literary review, he felt that it was his responsibility to initiate an objective inquiry into the actual literary products of the Fascist era and to take stock of general trends in the arts of the preceding fifteen years.

By 1938, it had become impossible for Pratolini to praise third-rate novelists and poets solely because they apotheosized Mussolini or demonstrated their belief in Fascist ideology. He felt a moral obligation to defend the ideal of literature as an instrument of human communication against the encroachments of propaganda, bombast, and sentimentality. In a review of Gian Paolo Callegari's novel La terra e il sangue, Pratolini expressed his opinion of the “Fascist novel”:

There is a place, on the margin of literary history, for a narrative (and for a poetry) of political propaganda; … However, the degeneration into which this literary genre has fallen today in Italy forces us to reflect on the unfortunate shallowness of the political faith that animates its practitioners and on the problematic competence of its critics. … Therefore, it is extremely important that we reach some agreement as to fundamental literary standards and qualities.

The plethora of “prizes” on the basis of political considerations facilitates the improvisations of opportunists. We are presented with novels in which totally artificial, inhuman, and unimaginative motifs crowd in on the souls of the characters and the milieu in which they move. Thus we have men separated from feeling and normality, forced into making journalistic discourses of the most outworn conformism, discourses that are made in the service of a mythification, rhetorical beyond belief, of the earth, the hero, of Maternity and of the Nation. In addition, all of this is often expressed in a language that is pedestrian, ungrammatical, devoid of inventive resources, falsely mystical, and absurdly fatalistic. Examples [of this kind of writing], and they are not rare, are readily available as soon as a reader in good faith feels himself capable, in regard to those texts, of a calm examination of his own conscience.³⁰

Pratolini reminded his readers that cultural chauvinism had resulted in the erection of a wall of suspicion and fear between Italy and the rest of the world. He asked them to consult their history books and to consider what effects this kind of self-imposed isolation had had on the great civilizations of the past. He referred constantly to the unbridgeable gap separating orthodox zealots from sincere artists and writers. “The extreme orthodox,” Pratolini said, “do not seem to realize that cultural chauvinism can only prevent the Italian people from participating in a more creative literary civilization.”³¹

In his criticism of a recently published anthology of modern Italian poetry edited by Nicola Moscardelli, Pratolini reiterated his conviction that a writer's proclaimed loyalty to a political or social ideal was insufficient justification for praising his works:

There is today a dearth of sectarian interest in authentic poetry, and an excessive amount of opportunistic support for literary cliques. … What is lacking these days is the human courage to commit oneself to one's own values, tastes, and predilections. … There are still those who equate, to the grave detriment of poetry, an individual's private interests and vanity with his right to pursue a literary career.³²

In the one year of its existence, Campo di Marte performed an important function in Italian culture. The review brought many of the contradictions inherent in Fascist society to the attention of its readers, and attempted to make what Pratolini was later to call “a reasoned and responsible revision of ideas and principles.”³³

In August 1939, Pratolini and Gatto were forced to suspend publication of Campo di Marte. The review had not met with the approval of some local Florentine Fascist bureaucrats whose job was to ferret out all manifestations of “subversive” thought. It was reported that Campo di Marte had been suspended by “mutual consent.” But there was a practical motive behind Pratolini's acceptance of the phrase “mutual consent.” He had already decided to leave Florence and to apply for a position with the Ministry of Education in Rome. He had been rejected for military service and was in urgent need of stable employment.

A few weeks after his arrival in Rome in October 1939, Pratolini presented his letters of recommendation to the Ministry. He was soon at work on his first assignment, that of setting up an archive on contemporary Italian art. His job consisted of gathering biographical information on modern Italian painters and of writing short critical studies of their works.

1940-1942

The period from the latter part of 1939, which marked the beginning of World War II, to the end of 1942 was a time of retrospection and deep sorrow for Pratolini. It was also a time of self-exploration during which he sought to understand the central motifs of his own life and to define precisely his aspirations and beliefs. Though still an extremely young man, he began to look back on his childhood years in Florence with a sense of keen nostalgia. Almost all his writings during the years 1939 to 1942, whether exercises in art prose, book reviews, or autobiographical narratives based on his early experiences in Florence, contain references to childhood, as a “lost paradise,” as the “golden age of life,” as a time of “pure feelings” and “happy innocence.” In a critical essay on Piero Jahier, Pratolini referred to Jahier's autobiographical novel Ragazzo as an eminently sincere and truthful evocation of childhood; he then expressed his own feelings about the significance of childhood for men burdened by guilt and sorrow:

Transported to the joyful season of memory, happy by reason of his sudden, intense, and human trust, the mature man folds his hands, turns his glance inward, invokes his own humility, conceals his heart emptied of blood: he protests, protests to God his own sins and the sins of others.³⁴

In the summer of 1941, after his marriage to Cecilia Punzo, a young Neapolitan actress whom he had met in Rome, Pratolini grew anxious to sever his contacts with the Ministry of Education. This did not prove feasible at the time, however, and Pratolini remained in Rome, where he began writing a regular column, entitled “Libri, riviste, giornali,” for the literary review La Ruota. In this column he continued to struggle in as militant a manner as the dictatorship would allow against Fascist standards of art and morality.

Two of Pratolini's writings in La Ruota deserve particular attention, since both foreshadow his complete break with Fascism in 1943. The first concerns Dino Garrone, a Fascist poet who had been killed in Africa. Of Garrone, Pratolini said:

… his human and literary experience remains as the final and exact testimony of an age in which … what counted in a man was his “temperament,” not his culture and intelligence. Garrone was taught by men who, even while claiming to defend culture, indicated their contempt for it in their advocacy of an absolute and sentimentalized form of “Masculinity.”³⁵

In looking back on his experiences in Florence, particularly the year during which he worked for Campo di Marte, Pratolini wrote the following apologia pro vita sua:

Campo di Marte—inadvertently prophetic of war in its name—was the last dispassionate attempt to initiate a dialectical exchange of views on a common and revolutionary level, an exchange that was designed to offer men of letters an opportunity to establish, within the new and eternal framework of a culture in movement, the essential values of poetry—poetry in verse, novels, and critical texts.

I think that Gatto and I can affirm today that we performed an act of faith in literature, welcoming and urging our friends to collaborate personally and autonomously in our enterprise. In the course of our work, however, and in the midst of minor adversities, which it is useless to report now, we were besieged by the blasphemous assaults of all those who in the name of the established order attacked us, not with plausible reasons, but with vulgar invective and insults. Once again it was proved to us that instead of making a reasoned and responsible revision of ideas and principles, one had to register one's preference for the status quo.³⁶

Pratolini's retrospective evaluation of his experiences as coeditor of Campo di Marte marks the end of a crucially important decade in his career. One period in his life had ended, another was about to begin. Only a year later, in July 1943, Pratolini began establishing contact with leaders of the newly reconstituted anti-Fascist Resistance in Turin, Florence, and Rome.

Notes

1. The first chapter of Alberto Asor Rosa's Vasco Pratolini (Rome, 1958) contains a brief discussion of some of Pratolini's writings in Campo di Marte. Giorgio Luti [Rass. della lett. ital., LXVI (1962), 513-20] makes some perceptive observations regarding Pratolini's literary development during the 1930's and early 1940's, but he neglects almost entirely the political, moral, and cultural problems with which Pratolini dealt in Il Bargello, Campo di Marte, and other periodicals of the Fascist era. Of particular relevance is Luti's characterization of the cultural climate in Florence during the decade 1930-1940: “Quelli dal '30 al '40 sono gli anni della estrema cospirazione dell'ermetismo e insieme gli anni in cui Firenze diviene il centro del ‘revisionismo’ della sinistra fascista.”

2. For a discussion of Pratolini's early creative writings, during the period 1932 to 1937, see Frank Rosengarten, Vasco Pratolini: The Development of a Social Novelist (unpublished dissertation, Columbia University, 1962). His later and more important creative writings of this period, Il tappeto verde (Florence, 1941) and Via de' Magazzini (Florence, 1942), have been examined by many critics.

3. Preface to Il garofano rosso (Milan, 1948), p. 37.

4. “Pensieri di giovane,” Il Bargello (July 31, 1932), 3.

5. “Richiamo,” Il Bargello (February 26, 1933), 3.

6. “Caterina Sforza,” Il Bargello (April 15, 1934), 3.

7. “La letteratura del tempo nostro,” Il Bargello (June 9, 1935), 3.

8. This viewpoint was to underlie Pratolini's Una storia italiana, a trilogy of historical novels; the first two volumes, Metello and Lo scialo, appeared in 1955 and 1960, respectively.

9. The critic Luigi Russo [I narratori 1850-1950 (Milan, 1951), p. 297] notes that although Bilenchi went through an early period characterized by a certain “verbal extravagance,” by 1935, with the publication of Il capofabbrica, he had developed into a “mature writer psychologically interested in the inner life of his characters.”

10. “Scrittori rivoluzionari,” Il Bargello (September 13, 1936), 2.

11. “Come esempio,” Il Bargello (February 28, 1937), 3.

12. Pratolini told me that Rosai was his first literary “mentor” and guide.

13. “Vita di Tozzi,” Il Bargello (March 31, 1935), 3.

14. “Omaggio a Beccherini,” Il Bargello (November 25, 1934), 3.

15. “Consegna dei giovani,” Il Bargello (July 22, 1934), 1.

16. “Funzione spirituale,” Il Bargello (October 7, 1934), 1.

17. “Coi Negadi in Etiopia,” Il Bargello (September 22, 1935), 3.

18. “La dottrina fascista,” Il Bargello (March 22, 1936), 3.

19. “Il soldato torna contadino,” Il Bargello (August 2, 1936), 3.

20. “Industrializzazione corporativa,” Il Bargello (September 13, 1936), 3.

21. “Tempo culturale della politica,” Il Bargello (January 31, 1937), 3.

22. Preface to “Diario di Villa Rosa,” in Il mio cuore a Ponte Milvio (Rome, 1954). The diary, which Pratolini kept during his two years of confinement at Arco, contains a series of humorous and sorrowful anecdotes about sanitarium life that have no direct relevance to the purposes of this article.

23. Vittorini gave me this information, later confirmed by Pratolini, during the course of an interview I had with him in October 1956.

24. “Crepuscoli,” Il Bargello (September 27, 1936), 1.

25. “Precisazioni sui fascismi stranieri,” Il Bargello (October 11, 1936), 1.

26. “Calendario,” Campo di Marte (August 1, 1938), 1.

27. “Civiltà in crisi,” Campo di Marte (September 1, 1938), 3.

28. “Calendarìo,” Campo di Marte (August 1, 1938), 1.

29. “Vita e ricerca,” Campo di Marte (October 15, 1938), 1.

30. “Callegari, o del romanzo fascista,” Campo di Marte (August 15, 1938), 3.

31. “Calendario,” Campo di Marte (October 1, 1938), 2.

32. “Poesie del '38,” Campo di Marte (January 15, 1939), 4.

33. “Libri, riviste, giornali,” La Ruota (May-July, 1942).

34. “Per Jahier,” Incontro (February 25, 1940), 4.

35. “Libri, riviste, giornali,” La Ruota (October-December, 1941).

36. “Libri, riviste, giornali,” La Ruota (May-July, 1942).