Even as We Speak (20 page)

This is a standard pattern for revolutionary intellectuals and can’t usefully be called hypocrisy, since if there is such a thing as a proletarian consciousness then it is hard to see how
any proletarian could escape from it without the help of the revolutionary intellectual – although just how the revolutionary intellectual manages to escape from bourgeois consciousness is a
problem that better minds than Pasolini have never been able to solve without sleight of hand. On this point Pasolini never pretended to be analytical, or even consistent. He was content to be
merely rhetorical, in a well-established Italian tradition by which political argument is conducted like grand opera, with the tenor, encouraged by the applause or even by the mere absence of
abuse, advancing to the footlights to sing his aria all over again,
da capo
and
con amore
.

Another aria Pasolini kept reprising was a bit harder to forgive. Mr Schwartz could have done more to disabuse the unwary reader of the notion that Pasolini might have had something when he not
only awarded himself credentials in the wartime resistance but claimed the resistance as the
alma mater
of the postwar revolutionary struggle. Pasolini’s resistance activities were
confined mainly to writing obscure scholarly articles that the censors would have had to go out of their way even to find, let alone interpret. Again, there is no dishonour in this: people were
shot for less. As in France, there was an understandable tendency in Italy after the war for people who had been helpless civilians during it to award themselves battle honours retroactively.
Pasolini was just another schoolboy raised under the Fascist system who had the dubious luck to become a questioning adolescent at the precise moment when Fascism fell apart, and was thus able to
convince himself that he had seen through it.

A more serious piece of mental legerdemain – and one that Mr Schwartz doesn’t do half enough to point out – was Pasolini’s lifelong pretence that the resistance was the
prototype of the future Communist state, and for that very reason had been throttled by the ruthless forces of capitalism, bourgeois democracy, etc. Again as in France, most of the first and many
of the bravest resistance fighters in Italy were indeed Communists. But the resistance movement soon became too broadly based to be called revolutionary; a better parallel is with Yugoslavia,
Poland, or those other East European countries where not even opposition to the Nazis could unite the partisan movement, whose Communists regarded its bourgeois democrats as the real enemy, to be
wiped out when the opportunity arose. This actually happened to Pasolini’s brother, an active partisan who was liquidated by a Communist kangaroo court busily anticipating the postwar
Socialist order. In most respects ready to concede that Pasolini was so cold a fish that even his passions were impersonal, Mr Schwartz seems not to have fully grasped that Pasolini was callous
about his brother, too, claiming his death as a sacrifice in a historic struggle that, since it existed only in the minds of intellectuals, was never truly historic but always, and only,
literary.

It could be that Mr Schwartz, for all he undoubtedly knows about Italy now, doesn’t know quite enough about what it was like then. He is especially shaky in the crucial area of
Italy’s messy emergence from the war. A reference to German ‘Junker 25 transports’ might just be a misprint for what they ought to be, Junkers 52 transports, but his apparent
belief that a German bomber could be called a Macchi – famously an Italian aircraft company – undermines confidence in his knowledge of the period, especially since he is making such a
parade of specific references in order to evoke it: ‘On April 6 [of 1944] Klaus Barbie’s Gestapo in Lyons arrested fifty-one Jews . . .’ etc. If this is meant to be an ironic
comment on the terrible bedfellows Mussolini had acquired when he agreed to set up the Republic of Salò under German tutelage, it scarcely seems adequate. Why is there nothing about the Nazi
assault on the Jews of Italy? It would not only have been more pertinent to the subject; it would have created a more realistic context against which Pasolini’s later vapourings about the
revolutionary resistance could have been judged. That the Nazi attempt to render Italy
judenrein
was a comparative failure was due at least partly to the historic reluctance of the Italian
people to follow fanatics of any stamp further than the parade ground. There were plenty of bourgeois elements, including the rank and file of the Church, who risked their lives to save Jews. Mr
Schwartz might have made more of this, especially since Pasolini himself made so little.

Pasolini’s theatrical fantasies about a formative period of his own and his country’s history were not casual. Like Sartre’s quietly misleading suggestions
that he had been a Resistance fighter in the thick of the action, they were fundamental to a political career of posturing histrionics. Pasolini never went as far as Sartre, although Mr Schwartz is
kind to believe his claims of having escaped from the Germans in a hail of bullets. Pasolini’s story was that when the regiment into which he had been drafted was ordered by the Germans to
surrender its arms he and a friend threw their rifles into a ditch ‘and then, in a burst of machine-gun fire, dove in after them’. The story continued, ‘We waited for the regiment
to march off, and then made our escape. It was completely an instinctive and involuntary beginning to my resistance.’ Thus Pasolini, quoted by the English journalist Oswald Stack in 1970, and
reprinted by Mr Schwartz without comment.

Well, it
might
have happened: German machine gunners missed, occasionally. A more plausible version is that Pasolini, like many others, managed to desert unnoticed in the confusion.
Sartre let people believe that he had escaped from prison camp. In fact he had been allowed to go home. The heroism came later, in the telling of the tale. So it does for most of us. The best
reason for not believing that there was any machine gunner, however, is that Pasolini said so little about the incident later on. If it had really happened there would have been essays, epic poems,
movies, operas. A fabulist on Pasolini’s scale could never leave unexploited a fact that had actually occurred.

Pasolini respected facts. He just didn’t respect their context. You couldn’t take his word about the meaning of things. But in his early days in Rome he was unbeatable at pointing
out things that other people – bourgeois people – preferred to ignore. For a while, he had the only game in town. Propelled by the postwar economic recovery, Roman high life regained
all its old extravagance. Out at its edge, in the
periferia
, Roman low life grew ever more malodorous, and for the same reason: the wealth that fuelled the party had drawn the poor people
to the glowing window. Pasolini’s mission was to remind the high life that the low life existed, to tell the
dolce vita
about the
malavita
.

He did it first as a novelist. His 1959 novel
Una Vita Violenta
has just been republished, by Pantheon, as
A Violent Life
, in the 1968 translation by William Weaver, of whom it
should be said that the international reputation of modern Italian literature wouldn’t be the same without him. Like Max Hayward with Russian, Weaver has been vital to the job of transmitting
the cultural force of an off-trail language into the world’s consciousness. (It remains a terrible pity that Weaver didn’t find time to translate all of Primo Levi’s books instead
of only a couple of them.) But not even Weaver could translate the full impact of
Una Vita Violenta
, because the book depends on the shock effect of being written ugly in a beautiful
language. Though Weaver’s translation is rendered in the most faithfully squalid English, it is no more horrifying than
Last Exit to Brooklyn
, whereas it ought to turn the
mind’s stomach like the invective of the damned in Dante’s Hell. Pasolini went searching for boys among the rubbish dumps and came back with a picture of how they lived. His Roman
borgata
was like a Rio
favela
without the flowers. In
Black Orpheus
, Marcel Camus’s film about Rio, which was a worldwide art-house hit at about the same time,
unquenchable poetry steams out of the garbage to meet the rising sun. In Pasolini’s novel there is just the garbage, and human beings are part of it. When a flood comes, one of the characters
finds it within himself to punctuate a career of theft by acting selflessly. But that is the only note of hope. The book was designed as a kick in the teeth for Pasolini’s hated bourgeois
enemy. It worked. His reputation as a teller of the awkward truth was rapidly established, and not only among the radical intelligentsia. After all, the awkward truth was true. You didn’t
have to be a Marxist to spot it.

Pasolini, however, did have to be a Marxist. Though never much concerned with elaborating a coherent social analysis, he never gave up on the class war. That became part of his tragedy, because
the class he championed finally realized its only ambition, which was to be absorbed by the class he attacked. But at the time he was a recognized type of radical intellectual, valued even by the
nonradical because of his dazzling verbal bravura, forgiven his excesses because he was such an adornment to the scene – a word hard to avoid, considering the theatricality of Italian
political discussion. Again, Mr Schwartz might have made more of just how much forgiveness was required: ‘He knew nothing about Stalin’s purges’ is a needless concession to
Pasolini’s wilful obtuseness. Italian Communist intellectuals knew all about Stalin. The best of them were trying to establish a brand of Communism that left him out – the hope that we
later learned to call Euro-Communism, or Socialism with a Human Face. The best possible construction to put on Pasolini’s polemical writings is that he was trying to do this, too. He had a
promising model to follow – Gramsci, about whom Pasolini wrote the most sustained of his many remarkable poetic works,
The Ashes of Gramsci
.

Later on, in the flower-power phase of the nineteen sixties, Gramsci became a hero to thousands of young revolutionaries scattered all over the world; some of them even read a few selected
pages, usually from the letters he had written in a Fascist prison. Pasolini got in early and read everything Gramsci wrote. Pasolini promised his hero’s shade that the struggle would
continue. What he couldn’t promise was a solution to the problem posed by the fact that Communism in practice had turned out to need as much coercive apparatus as Fascism. At least part of
Gramsci’s undoubted charm was that he had died in jail without ever having to take part in the application of those theories he had elaborated with such humane subtlety. There was no
guarantee that had he done so he would not have turned out like George Lukacs, Hungary’s visionary turned cultural commissar – or, to go back to the beginning, Lunacharsky in the Soviet
Union, who in 1929 was obliged to crack down on the same avant-garde artists he had previously encouraged.

Gramsci’s seductive vision of justice could not have been brought about without unlimited state power. Neither could Pasolini’s, and with him there was even less justification for
believing it could. But plenty of Pasolini’s admirers knew that. They knew him to be wrong but still they marvelled.
The Ashes of Gramsci
told them that they were dealing with a
prodigy. Mr Schwartz forgets to mention one of the things that made the message clear:
Le Ceneri di Gramsci
is written in a version of
terza rima
, the same measure as the
Divine Comedy
. Pasolini cast his wild revolutionary document in the most hallowed of strict forms as a guarantee of national continuity. There is more truth than the author seems to
realize in Mr Schwartz’s solemn assurance: ‘At poem’s end, poet and Italy are one.’ (‘Poem’s end’ is an erstwhile
Time
-style construction that our
author has unfortunately resurrected, employing it not quite often enough to reduce the reader to tether’s end, just often enough to arouse the dreadful suspicion that a tin ear for English
might be hearing Italian the same way.)

Pasolini the writer had established himself beyond question, if not beyond criticism. Bourgeois intellectuals who knew that his politics were nonsense still knew that he was a
prodigy. He had ample evidence for his theories about a bourgeois conspiracy against spontaneity and social justice: busted on a morals charge, he was hounded for his perversity by Christian
Democrat politicians and their attendant newspapers. Neo-Fascists joined in with delight. But the more awkward truth, for him, was that there was such a thing as an independent, middle-of-the-road
intelligentsia, which was perfectly capable of recognizing that he was a classic case in the best sense as well as the worst. He himself was no faddist when it came to critical allegiances. When
the name of Roland Barthes came up, Pasolini said that although he admired Barthes’s work he would give it all up for a page of Gianfranco Contini or Roberto Longhi. As a student in Bologna,
Pasolini had sat at Longhi’s feet when the great teacher of art history made a case for the historical continuity of inspiration beyond the reach of any ideology. As for the philologist
Contini, he was Pasolini’s true conscience, as he was for a greater poet, Eugenio Montale, and for almost every other prominent artist in the postwar period. In the first marvellous years of
his career, Pasolini reported to Contini by letter like a truant son to the father he had never had. Contini, the least radical of men, a true cultural conservative for whom learning was the world
– and who mastered more of the world’s learning than any other scholar – understood the tension in Pasolini between the irreconcilable forces of social rage and creative ambition.
But so did many people less qualified. Pasolini was so obviously a star, and stars are on fire.

Pasolini loved stardom, which for a champion of the common man is always bound to present a contradiction. It can be reconciled, but it takes humour, and humour was not
conspicuously among his gifts. If it had been, he might have been funnier about his need for an ever bigger stage. He preferred to believe that it was a political necessity. The movies reached
people who couldn’t read. While his literary reputation was still building up, Pasolini was already preparing to compromise it by contributing to the screenplays of the famous directors,
which in Italy have traditionally been group efforts. In 1957, he wrote scenes for Fellini’s
Le Notti di Cabiria
. Fellini gave him his first car, a Fiat 600, as part payment. The
tiny
macchina
can be seen as the germ of a dangerous taste, but Pasolini didn’t really need much encouragement beyond the thrill of being in on the most glamorous artistic activity
available. The lowlife scenes of Fellini’s
La Dolce Vita
were also written by Pasolini. In that so wonderfully, so
easily
symbolic moment when Mastroianni and Anouk are
shown by the prostitute across the plank in her flooded basement room Pasolini’s harsh knowledge of the periphery underlies Fellini’s humanity.