SOURCE: Pratolini, Vasco and Paul Tabori. “An Interview with Vasco Pratolini.” Contemporary Review 217 (1970): 253-57.

[In the following interview with Tabori, Pratolini touches on his belief in the social responsibility of “critical realism” and explains his views on current literary trends, the future of Marxist theory, and youthful rebellion.]

A stocky man with a huge dome of a forehead, horn rimmed glasses and an expression of general suspicion, Vasco Pratolini, the leading Marxist writer of Italy, lives far from his native Florence in a modern, sunny and noisy apartment house in Rome. The somewhat forbidding expression softens when he begins to talk—he becomes Southern in his gestures, in his spluttering eagerness to transform the rush of his thoughts into words. Highly articulate, he is constantly seeking for the mot juste in speech as he does in writing.

Born of a working class family, he grew up in the Florence that knew little about art and nothing about tourists; the business of every day life was too harsh for intellectual or aesthetic luxuries. His literary career began with an article he contributed to Letteratura when he was twenty-four. In 1938 he founded, together with Alfonso Gatto, the literary magazine Campi di Marte which had a short but distinguished career. He survived the war more or less in hiding, having little liking either for the Fascist regime or for its martial adventures. When it was over, he found himself teaching at the Neapolitan Institute of Art. But when his Cronache di Poveri Amanti won the Libera Stampa prize in 1947 he abandoned teaching for literature.

One of the most-honoured Italian writers, he has been awarded the Viareggio Prize for his Metello in 1955 and two years later the Accademia dei Lincei conferred on him the Premio Nazionale Feltrinelli—the Italian equivalent of the Nobel Prize—for the whole body of his work. In 1960 he won the Charles Veillon International Prize for Le Scialo.

‘The chronicler of the poor’ rarely moves outside the working class milieu in which he seems to find inexhaustible material. Three of his novels have been filmed and his work has been very widely translated. Two of his plays—La Domenica della povera gente (with G. D. Giagni) and Lungo Viaggio di Natale have had successful runs and he has translated Bubu of Montparnasse and other French fiction into Italian.

I interviewed Pratolini in his functional Roman apartment with the shouts of playing children drifting through the open windows. He is a highly peripatetic speaker whose gestures are sweeping and expressive and who is sometimes so passionately eager to put his thoughts into words that he splutters and stammers in his impatience.

[Tabori]: Recently three attitudes defining the relationship of the creative writer and the world have been formulated. One was expressed by Arthur Koestler who said that the choice is between total lack of freedom and relative freedom; the other maintains that though the ivory towers have become badly battered, they are still the most natural and logical dwelling-places for the writer. Finally, a little while ago, Graham Greene stated that though he found a great deal of stupidity among the Communist leaders, if he were faced with the choice of living either in America or in the Soviet Union, he would prefer to reside in Moscow. Which of these three conceptions are the closest to your views, Signor Pratolini?

[Pratolini]: None, I am afraid. I certainly think that the writer should travel as much as possible, absorb the wonderful variety of the world—but he should live and work in his own native country and nowhere else. Not because writers are true to their vocation if they are chauvinists or narrow-minded nationalists—but each writer must work within the disciplines of his own tongue, within his own native land. And the more international and universal he wishes his work to be, the closer he has to stick to his mother-tongue, the deeper roots he must strike in his own soil.

I am afraid you haven't quite answered my original question. Surely to work for his own people, to use his own language, to preserve his roots, the writer must have freedom.

Well, to begin with, I do not believe in the theory of the ivory tower at all. A writer has to carry all kinds of responsibilities—and, above all, social ones. There is absolutely no excuse—neither artistic nor any other—for a writer to refuse to accept these responsibilities. I deny that we have the right to place ourselves above the daily struggle for life. The ivory tower is an aristocratic conception—and I do not allow that the true writer can claim to belong to the aristocracy.

Do you think then that the writer must fulfil a social function? That, in effect he must be a social realist? Some time ago Aragon said that socialist realism was the only possible form of literature—but that each writer must define it for himself. Do you agree?

I agree completely with Aragon. But I do not believe that social realism has anything to do with creative art, even if you accept the directives of Zhdanov. It was something evolved for purely political reasons. Whether it has fulfilled a useful role remains to be seen. But it has nothing to do with literature and I personally have never accepted it as a guiding principle. I think I can offer my books as proof of this rejection.

How would you then define socialist realism?

I never have been a social realist nor has any critic considered me as one. I believe in critical realism; I believe in the presentation and examination of life through the prism of critical intelligence which must be applied to all classes and all conditions.

Would you accept the principle that no one except the writer himself has any authority over the writer's work and that therefore the writer, as a creative artist, must be essentially an anarchist?

I have great respect for anarchists and the principle of anarchy as directed against capitalist society as a utopistic ideal. But as a writer I cannot agree with your formulation—at least not until I know what your definition of anarchy and anarchist is.

What I meant had nothing to do with an anarchistic political theory. Perhaps ‘anarchy’ in this respect is just the shortest way of saying that a writer must not accept any outside authority in his choice of subject, his style, or in his ideas and their expression?

I think the difference between us, my friend, is a simple one. You imagine the writer—or any artist—as being divorced from society, a privileged individual, who has no social responsibilities. My conviction is that it is the acceptance of such responsibilities that make him a creative artist. And as he lives in society so he owes a debt to the people who are his readers or listeners. He cannot annoy or irritate them.

‘Annoy’ is a strange expression to use in this context. Isn't it at least one of the tasks of the writer to be an irritant?

Yes, but not to the point of anarchism.

You indicated that I spoke as an idealist when I claimed that basically all creative artists must be anarchists. But this is, I feel, a totally realistic attitude. For when the writer becomes a conformist, he serves whatever regime—or whatever social organisation he lives under. And by doing so he really destroys himself. Don't you think that this danger exists?

I certainly did not mean to suggest that the writer has to serve any political regime. But he has to have a knowledge of reality. Through this knowledge he will discover and develop his art. Art is not rapture. The writer has to live within and for his own time and not attempt to be a prophet, an explorer of the future or someone who is bent on creating a message for future generations. If he is lucky, he might live to see some of his ideas become reality and find acceptance in his own age. But he cannot fight a future which he has no power to shape.

It seems that we are beginning to agree on my definition of ‘anarchy’ and the writer's role in society. It is an obvious truth that most totalitarian regimes have destroyed literature in their own countries. In such a situation how can the creative writer function?

It is not by a single book or a series of books that one can destroy dictatorship. There are, of course, difficult situations when one has to choose exile—as Dante did in his age, as Silone, Koestler and Thomas Mann did in ours. But there are other possibilities—like the choice made by the majority of Czechoslovak writers who have stayed within their own frontiers to try to work for the restitution of liberty. Today every writer should remain in his own country.

Surely not every writer?

Well, I was actually thinking of the Italian situation. No one has to go into exile from here. As for our Czechoslovak colleagues, their engagement is largely political and not literary. They have made their choice not as writers but as political fighters.

True, but very often in such a situation when the writers are being persecuted their stature increases. One can quote, if you like, the recent Hungarian example where a poet became a far more important person than in ‘normal’ times when there were no pressures.

Oh, I agree and it is exactly in these situations that the writer should not withdraw to an ivory tower. For instance, Balzac prepared eloquent apologies of the Bourbon Restoration; Zola presented visionary tapestries of heredity and decadence, closely linked to the events of his age. I often think of Machiavelli in his exile—during the day he would mingle with the peasants of the little village which was his forced residence. He would drink with them, talk with them, play at their rustic games with them. Then he would go home, take a bath and dress himself in his courtier's dress before he sat down to write.

Thereby retiring into an ivory tower?

Not at all. By putting aside his everyday clothes and donning ceremonial dress he showed respect for his craft and his ideas. He still must have remembered the hours and days he spent with his fellow-villagers. But he also felt that he was, by his writing, serving the interests of these people. Of course, being a gentleman of the fifteenth century, his vision of how these interests could be served was necessarily an aristocratic one.

Let us now take up the other side of the problem. I have mentioned the Koestlerian differentiation between complete lack of freedom and comparative or relative freedom. In the capitalist world the pressures are different. On one side, you have the pressure of censorship—on the other the exigencies of the best seller. How do you see these pressures in the capitalistic countries, including Italy?

Let me get back first to the problem of Marxism. For me this is still important not as a political but as an economic doctrine.

Do you think then that the original Marxist theory—even with its modifications—is still valid? The withering away of the state, the proletarian revolution arising of the growing impoverishment of the working classes, the destruction of capitalism—are these still viable?

Yes, I do believe that the fundamental lines of the original theory must remain unchanged even though the details may not be entirely applicable. For instance, the fight for the establishment of trade unions that continued for so long in England and elsewhere has been won in most countries and so it is no longer a problem. But capitalism only accepted those demands of labour when forced to do so. This was achieved through the fight of the proletariat and there are still a good many tasks to be completed. Thus the Marxist theory remains applicable to future conflicts. If it hadn't been for the stubborn fight of the peasants and workers, we would still be living in the age of the droit du seigneur, the ius primae noctis. And if we have not progressed faster, it is to a large extent the fault of the Social Democrats in the various countries, who were satisfied with minor victories, who adopted gradualism as their policy instead of revolution, thus aiding the survival of capitalism.

Are you familiar with the often-quoted Chinese saying: ‘It is better to light a small candle than to curse the darkness?’

Yes, I know it. But sometimes a small candle isn't enough if the darkness is all-enveloping. Maybe we have to put our small candles all together?

May we move on to another topic? In our age there is an increasing preoccupation with form as opposed to content. Do you think that this is a healthy development?

I certainly think that form is extremely important, for without form a work cannot be a work of art. For me, however, most of the avant garde of the seventies is extremely vieux jeux. But the fact that all these fads and experiments have reappeared is a kind of warning signal that there is something seriously wrong with Art. What seems to happen in all these new movements is that they produce one or two outstanding representatives while the rest climb on the band wagon and are mere imitators. For instance, in the nouveau roman group the truly important figure for me is not Robbe-Grillet but Claude Simon. Michel Butor is an essayist thinly disguised as a novelist; Natalie Sarraute is painfully vegetating rather than creating. But Claude Simon is a major writer. She filled the form with content and preserved the basic values of the novel—thus turning the nouveau roman into a modern classic.

There have been several voices pointing out that very few writers are actively linked to the world-wide revolt of youth. Do you agree with this?

Certainly in Italy youth seems to have turned away completely from fiction. Very few young people bother to read novels, as publishing statistics show. Their interest appears to be the essay and polemics. As for losing contact with youth, I don't think this is particularly a literary problem but perhaps one of the generations. The revolt of youth is certainly world-wide and I have great sympathy for it because I believe that each generation must revolt against the theories of the preceding one.

I have met some of the leaders of revolutionary youth and my impression was that while they have renounced and denounced the beliefs and theories of their fathers, they have singularly few ideas of their own.

I think that's a typical claim—by the fathers! I have myself argued with young people at various conferences and meetings and they have attacked me violently enough. This is so much better than being accepted by them. Nor do I want to truckle to youth or play the part of their uncritical supporter—for that would be a sign of senility. Certainly there is a good deal of confusion in the world-wide movements—but though they may be quoting Marcuse one day and Mao the other, that does not mean that they haven't got their own ideas. They do have them. And whether they are French or Chinese, Czechoslovak or Italian, they all agree on one point; they do not want to accept the world as they found it or their fathers presented it to them.

One final question: what are your present literary plans?

I publish a new book every two or three years, and as I haven't published anything for two years, a new one is due before long. This is about a man of fifty, covering his life from the end of the last war through the next twenty years. It deals with his love-affairs and with his ideological travail. Croce had a famous phrase, posing the question: ‘Why can't we say that we are Catholics?’ thus demanding a clear avowal of faith. In this book the question is posed as a double negative: ‘Why can't we say that we are not Communists?’ I feel that this should be possible for men of the left in to-day's world—and I am trying to show how my very unheroic hero arrives at this conclusion.

I look forward to reading it. And thank you Signor Pratolini …