Many feel they know about American cinema, and their impressions combine those ambivalent feelings of attraction and disgust that have been described as one of our most incurable complexes as Europeans, but which no one has shed light on with the necessary vigor. Now that an enforced abstinence has cured us of its excess of publicity and of the disgust produced by habit, one can perhaps go back to the significance of that educational moment and recognize in American cinema the greatest message our generation has ever received.
Pintor was extraneous to the aristocratic dismissals of mass media that would become typical of the postwar European Left. Nowadays we might say he was closer to Benjamin than to Adorno.
Cinema is thus seen as a revolutionary weapon abolishing all political frontiers. But even on the aesthetic front American cinema teaches us to look at the world with fresh, innocent eyes, and has fulfilled Baudelaire’s prayer by showing us “how wonderful and poetic we are, with our polished shoes and bourgeois ties.” Today, Pintor reminded us, Germany is perpetuating the rhetoric of “the past.” America, on the other hand, does not have any cemeteries to safeguard, her mission is the destruction of idols, while the Utopia of the new man, at that stage still a mere pronouncement in Marxist ideology, can be achieved wherever man learns not to surrender to mysticism and nostalgia, whether in America or in Russia.
Much of what we said about America may be naive and inexact, much may have to do with topics extraneous to the historical phenomenon of the USA and its present shape. But it matters little: because, even if that continent did not exist, our words would not lose their meaning. This America has no need of Columbus, it has been discovered inside ourselves, it is the land that one sets out for with the same hope and confidence as the first emigrants and as all who are determined to defend the dignity of the human condition even though it cost much labor and error.
With the image of this universal America in his heart, Giaime Pintor joined the British army in Naples and died trying to cross the German lines to organize the partisan resistance in Lazio. Where did this image of America come from? Pintor and Vittorio Mussolini, from opposite sides of the barricade, tell us that the myth came via cinema. But novels and stories had also played a role in its spread and its inspiration. And at the origin of this dissemination we find two writers, Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese. Both had grown up under Fascism: Vittorini tried his luck with Primato, Pavese had already been condemned to internal exile in 1935. Both were fascinated by the myth of America. Both would become Communists.
Vittorini collaborated with the publisher Bompiani, who had already in the 1930s started to publish Steinbeck, Caldwell, Cain, and other American writers, though Primato was constantly blocked by the Ministry of Popular Culture (the Minculpop), as is documented in a series of official letters (masterpieces of unintentional humor) that ban or threaten to confiscate this book or that because it expresses a nonheroic vision of life, or represents characters of inferior race, or portrays in too crude a language behavior that does not correspond to the Fascist and Roman ideal of morality. Pavese too worked as a translator, almost clandestinely, since he could not obtain proper permits, having been condemned as an anti-Fascist.
In 1941 Vittorini prepared for Bompiani Americana, an anthology of over one thousand pages, with texts by authors from Washington Irving to Thornton Wilder and Saroyan via O. Henry and Gertrude Stein, all translated by young writers with names like Alberto Moravia, Carlo Linati, Guido Piovene, Eugenio Montale, and Cesare Pavese.
From today’s perspective the collection was quite comprehensive, perhaps a bit too enthusiastic, and certainly unbalanced: it undervalues Fitzgerald, overestimates Saroyan, and contains authors like John Fante, who would not retain such a prominent position in literary chronicles. This anthology was meant to be not a history of American literature, however, but rather the construction of an allegory, a kind of Divine Comedy where Paradise and Inferno were one.
Vittorini had already written in 1938 (in Letteratura volume 5) that American literature was a world literature with a single language, and that being American was the same as not being American, as being free from local traditions, and open to the common culture of humanity.
In Americana the first description of the United States is almost Homeric, with its images of plains and railways, snowy mountains and endless landscapes stretching from coast to coast. There was a lithographic innocence about it, a bit like Currier and Ives, an epic based not on any direct evidence but on pure intertextual fantasy. In it we find the same freedom with which Vittorini had translated and would translate his own American authors, all written in “Vittorinispeak,” where an intense creativity pushed philological precision into second place. But the America that Vittorini draws here is a prehistoric land shaken by earthquakes and continental drift, where instead of dinosaurs and mammoths what dominates is the gigantic outline of Jonathan Edwards waking Rip van Winkle and challenging him to an epic duel with Edgar Allan Poe, who is riding on Moby-Dick. Even his critical judgments are metaphors and hyperboles:
Melville is Poe’s adjective and Hawthorne’s noun. He tells us that purity is ferocity. Purity is a tiger … Billy Budd hanged. He is an adjective. But in the way that happiness is an adjective of life. Or as despair is an adjective of life.
America as chanson de geste. Pound and the blacks singing the blues.
America is today (because of the new legend that is taking shape) a kind of new fabulous Orient, and man appears in it, at different times, as an exquisite uniqueness, whether he is Philippine, Chinese, Slav, or Kurd, because he is substantially always the same: the lyrical “I,” the protagonist of creation.
It was a multimedia book. Not just a book of literary excerpts and critical link passages, but also a superb anthology of photographs. Images taken by the photographers of the New Deal, who worked for the Works Progress Administration. I emphasize the photographic documentation because I learned about young people of the time who were culturally and politically regenerated by the impact of those very images: looking at them, they had the feeling of a different reality, a different rhetoric, or, rather, an antirhetoric. But the Minculpop could not accept Americana. The first edition, of 1942, was confiscated. It had to be republished without Vittorini’s passages, but with a new preface by Emilio Cecchi, one that was more academic and more prudent, less enthusiastic and more critical, more “literary.”
But even this emasculated version of Americana circulated and produced a new culture. Even without the pages written by Vittorini, the very structure of the anthology acted like a speech. The montage was the message. The very (highly debatable) way the American writers were translated produced a new sense of language. In 1953 Vittorini would say that he had influenced young people not by what he had translated but by how he had translated.
Already as far back as 1932, Pavese, writing about O. Henry, had said that America, like Italy, was a culture of dialects. But unlike Italy, in America the dialects had won out against the language of the ruling class, and American literature had transformed English into a new popular language. I remember that Pavese had turned to Piedmontese dialect for translating certain passages in Faulkner. One of his ideas was that there was an affinity between the Midwest and Piedmont. Once more this is Gramsci’s “national-popular” notion, except that now, instead of rinsing his language in the Arno, as Manzoni had said, the writer rinsed it in the Mississippi. We are talking of a case not of simple pidginization but rather of the creolization of a language.
Thus the generation that had read Pavese and Vittorini fought the partisan war, often in the Communist brigades, celebrating the October revolution and the charismatic figure of the people’s Little Father, but remaining at the same time fascinated and obsessed by an America that was hope, renewal, progress, and revolution.
Vittorini and Pavese were adults by the end of the war, nearly forty. The second generation of my outline, on the other hand, contained youngsters born in the 1930s. Many of them entered adult life, at the end of the war, as Marxists.
Their Marxism was not like Vittorini’s or Pavese’s, which was totally identified with the Liberation struggle and their hatred of Fascist dictatorships, more a sense of universal brotherhood than a precise ideology. For this second generation Marxism involved experience of political organization and philosophical commitment. This generations ideal was the Soviet Union, its aesthetic was socialist realism, its myth the working class. Politically opposed to America as an economic and political system, they did sympathize with certain aspects of American social history, with that “genuine America” that was characterized by the first pioneers and the early anarchist opposition movement. The “socialist” America of Jack London and Dos Passos.
It was for this very reason that, even in the fiercest moments of the McCarthy
