Il Politecnico/Sud

In an article published in Pesci Rossi in 1947, the journalist and writer Michele Prisco presented Sud as a group of young intellectuals, whose spontaneous and radical need for a proactive intellectual engagement with society failed because of its pompously didactic and more insular and parochial imitation of Il Politecnico:

Prisco was, simultaneously, implicitly suggesting not only the isolated position of Sud within the Croce-aligned intellectual circles in Naples,Footnote ⁷ but most interestingly the dependence of the Neapolitan journal on that of Vittorini. By reconstructing through archival materials the genealogy of Sud, we will challenge Prisco’s judgement and reassess the autonomous, yet intersecting, development of the Neapolitan journal in relation to Il Politecnico.

The two journals shared in the long term a continuity of themes, both in terms of content and graphics. In an unpublished project – found in Prunas’ private archive – that was to be released after 1947, Prunas was considering the potential inclusion of sections on architecture, city planning and design, of reports from Italian Southern regions – edited by a young Andrea Camilleri, but also by the neorealist poet Rocco Scotellaro and by Ugo Vittorini, Elio’s brother – as well as reports from North Africa, South America and Mexico. The latter, in particular, would have been in the same tone as the more famous world reportages in Il Politecnico. If it had come to fruition, this format would thus have clearly strengthened the direct and indirect connections with the ‘polytechnic’ approach of Vittorini (Lupo Reference Lupo2011) and the Milanese journal. Furthermore, the use of modern graphics and fonts in the layout, and a sober yet effectively integrated use of photos and cartoons, particularly the caricatural drawings by the German artist George Grosz, and those by Prunas himself – who became a renowned graphic designer in his professional career after the Sud venture – recall the interaction between texts and images that Albe Steiner was fine-tuning in the pages of Il Politecnico.Footnote ⁸

However, Sud’s relationship to Il Politecnico is not as dependent as Prisco suggested in his article. First of all, the unpublished materials found in Prunas’s private archive allow us to date the cultural project of Sud back to 15 October 1944, which was prior to the launch and publication of Il Politecnico. At this time, Prunas was already drawing up the rough outline of the first issue of the journal. This suggests shared affinities instead of a hierarchic relationship between the two publishing ventures. Secondly, despite the different symbolic capital carried by the two journal editors – the unknown and young Prunas on the one handFootnote ⁹ and the more famous writer and intellectual Vittorini on the otherFootnote ¹⁰ – the two editorial staffs engendered a mutual collaboration. Some of the contributors to Sud, namely the journalists Tommaso Giglio and Antonio Ghirelli, moved to Milan, where they both represented the Milanese editorial staff of the Neapolitan journal and contributed with articles and translations to Il Politecnico.Footnote ¹¹

Furthermore, the Neapolitan journal was highly praised by the intellectual networks outside Naples: Giglio himself, a journalist at the PCI’s newspaper L’Unità in Milan and already in touch with Vittorini and Il Politecnico, informed Prunas in 1946 that Sud had gained the esteem of Milanese and Roman intellectuals, such as Libero Bigiaretti, Leonardo Sinisgalli, and Luchino Visconti, for being an innovative publication.Footnote ¹² More significantly, cultural agents operating within the Milanese intellectual circles not only appreciated the graphics and the quality of the articles, but also recognised Sud as a potential ally in the battle for that ‘renewal’ of Italian culture, as suggested by Vittorini in his Politecnico manifesto (Reference Vittorini.1945). This is demonstrated by the proposal for a collaboration between the two journals sent to Prunas by another contributor of Il Politecnico, Giuseppe Trevisani, in October 1947. Although the proposal came in the months of the final crisis of Il Politecnico, when Vittorini’s journal was desperately attempting to find allies, this should not diminish the significance of the letter. Trevisani was not seeking a generic connection, but a closer collaboration in order to strengthen Il Politecnico’s position on popular culture, citing the specific expertise in cinema shown by the Neapolitan journal:

The final consecration of the Neapolitan journal came from another intellectual and contributor to Il Politecnico, Franco Fortini, in October 1947, after the seventh and last issue of Sud was published. In Fortini’s article, Sud was praised as a more radical journal than its Northern counterparts, which were more used to compromise, since Sud combined ‘will to action, pure anarchism, rebellion and concerns against rhetoric’ (Fortini Reference Fortini1947, 21). According to Fortini, if this eclectic attitude was somehow exaggerated, it nonetheless fully revealed the tone of disagreement that Sud was putting forward against those somehow ‘incoherent’ (ibid.), Milanese, Turinese or Florentine ‘myths’ (ibid.) of Resistance elaborated in the aftermath of the Second World War. Notwithstanding the differences between Sud and Il Politecnico, Fortini was here suggesting a shift of perspective to embrace the revolutionary tone of the Neapolitan intellectuals. The implicit reference was most probably to the Vittorini-Togliatti querelle.

What Fortini found most relevant in the journal was indeed the translation of French essays, and in particular those by Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Mounin, Vercors and Emmanuel Mounier, as controversial voices and symbols of the opposition between Marxism and Existentialism that was developing within European culture and the European communist parties. This alternative perspective on French essay writing immediately linked Sud and Il Politecnico within the then current political and literary debates,Footnote ¹⁴ thus offering stimulating elements for our analysis, which I will develop in the last section of this article.

Translations, habitus and networks

As stressed by Fortini, both Sud and Il Politecnico crucially shared a common interest in foreign cultures, as a way to broaden and challenge the Italian cultural scene. Sud’s editors suggested that the Italian literary tradition, particularly Hermeticism, was to be called into question by an interest in political life and a new attention to the social dimension of literature, as collectively and not individually perceived, which characterised the then contemporary French (namely Aragon and Éluard), American and Soviet poetry (Giglio Reference Giglio1946a, 2). However, this cosmopolitan disposition that was to influence the developing Italian literary landscape was framed in different ways, in accordance with the habitus of the editorial staffs of both journals and the extension of the social networks to which they belonged.

The position of Il Politecnico in the literary and political field of post-war Italy was clearly more central and well defined, thanks to Vittorini’s status as novelist and anti-fascist, the support of Einaudi, a politically committed publishing house, and the journal’s initial allegiance with the PCI (Ajello Reference Ajello1979, 134). This allowed a relative ease, drawing on Vittorini’s symbolic capital, in establishing connections with intellectuals within and outside Italy, which placed Il Politecnico in dialogue with many other foreign literary magazines such as Critique, founded and edited in 1946 by Georges Bataille, with American publishers like James Laughlin, with the Cuban revolutionary magazine Orìgenes (1944–1956),Footnote ¹⁵ and, obviously, with Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes (1944– ).

The publication of translations in Il Politecnico had a dual role, since foreign literature appeared to be instrumental in enhancing both the cosmopolitan and anti-fascist narratives that the journal wanted to offer to the readers. On the one hand, as recalled also by Baldini (Reference Baldini2016), in the weekly issues, literary translations functioned as a corollary of the reportages on foreign cultures, providing a sort of literary anthology which graphically complemented the reports. The interest in foreign poems and novels was thus part of a wider plan, aiming to offer the readership a worldwide cultural outlook with which contemporary Italian culture should be in dialogue and within which it should be consequently reassessed.

On the other hand, the publication of foreign authors was generally didactic (Esposito Reference Esposito2015, 224) and notably politically oriented. Firstly, all poets and novelists were presented with a short editorial note as engagés authors, stressing – even misleadingly, when introducing the politically more conservative T.S. Eliot (Eliot Reference Eliot1945, 1) – their alignment to communist and working-class ideals, or their revolutionary actions, such as – for instance – the participation of Stephen Spender in the Spanish civil war (Spender Reference Spender1945, 3). Secondly, their political status attracted more attention than their literary accomplishments, thus implicitly drawing parallels with contemporary Italian intellectuals and their participation in the Resistance movement. In this sense, as suggested by Vittoria (Reference Vittoria1996, 1122), the publication in instalments of For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway was strategic in the development of a collective anti-fascist narrative.Footnote ¹⁶

Although graphically framed in a similar way to the weekly Il Politecnico,Footnote ¹⁷ the use of translations in Sud appears to be somehow less explicit in its political intention, and more controversial and multi-layered. Due to the small relevance of Prunas’s symbolic capital and the major issues and difficulties within even the national distribution chain,Footnote ¹⁸ transnational networks were clearly reduced, but not non-existent. Significantly, Sud declared in its manifesto that Sud (South) should not be understood either as a local and traditionally connoted dimension or as a ‘political geography’ (Prunas Reference Prunas1945, 2), but as an anti-rhetorical stance that involved Naples as well as Europe and the whole world. As such, since the very beginning, Prunas cast the journal in a wider sphere of reception than the traditional Neapolitan one, thus giving Sud an avant-garde horizon beyond the national borders. Hence, in his correspondence, Prunas was actively seeking connections and exchanges with French, Mexican and Anglophone radical journals, and was eventually able to start a mutual exchange with the American political and literary quarterly Partisan Review.Footnote ¹⁹ This transnational attitude is also demonstrated by another project of the journal, entitled Sud giornale europeo, which was to have included – according to Prunas’s sketches – foreign editorial staff, with letters from Paris (Simone de Beauvoir), Berlin (Ernest Wiereck), London (Stephen Spender) and New York (William Weaver).Footnote ²⁰ Interestingly, these letters would have been published in the original language, thus signalling the intention to also address a multilingual readership outside Italy. Finally, the presence of American officers based in Naples after 1944, such as the translator William Weaver,Footnote ²¹ allowed unexpected contacts and publishing opportunities for such an artisan and small magazine, such as the translation of Dylan Thomas’s poems, and in 1946 of one of Eliot’s Four Quartets (‘East Coker’, anticipated by Cecchi’s translation, published in Poesia in January 1945).

Foreign culture played a crucial role for the journal, especially in allowing it to move beyond more stagnant domestic literary contributions, particularly in the field of fiction writing. These were often contributed by the Neapolitan and friends’ circles of the journal, most of whom (e.g. Giuseppe Marotta, Raffaele La Capria) were gravitating, from a thematic and stylistic viewpoint, towards a ‘generic sentimentalism’ and ‘Naples’ pre-packaged emotional appeal’ (Torriglia Reference Torriglia2002, 129). This orientation was also outlined by Giglio in his correspondence with Prunas in December 1945:

However, the actual editing of the translations engendered some controversy, due to the difference of habitus within the editorial group that Giglio’s remark signalled. On the one side of the editorial staff, the Milanese group (Giglio and Ghirelli) shared with Il Politecnico a systematically cosmopolitan and politically charged attitude, with the purpose of creating a geo-political consonance with Italian culture. This was notably the case with the translation in June 1946 of contemporary Greek poets who fought in the Greek Civil War, and of French prisoners of the Second World War, intended to enhance the sense of a humanitarian European brotherhood against a sterile formal conception of literature. In the same pages, there was also space for an unpublished poem by Lenin, focussing on the propagandistic function of poetry for its revolutionary tone: the timing of this publication echoed the translation, only a month earlier, of another work by Lenin in Il Politecnico.

On the other side, the section on foreign literature was more substantially edited by two other contributors, Mario Stefanile and Raffaele La Capria, whose political and aesthetic attitudes were quite distant from the Milanese entourage. Significantly, from a political viewpoint, Stefanile was already a journalist employed by the conservative Neapolitan newspaper Il Mattino and had already contributed to a liberal, literary-oriented weekly, Belvedere (Striano Reference Striano2006, 52), which was initially supported by the Neapolitan Fascist federation. Moreover, Stefanile belonged to an earlier generation than that of Sud; he admired ermetismo, while at the same time appreciating contemporary American literature, read through Vittorini’s Americana. The less radical contribution that Stefanile could have brought to Sud, in accordance with these dispositions and his Fascist militancy, is emblematically suggested in a letter that Giglio sent to Prunas in September 1945:

And this suspicion that Sud might be turned into a conservative voice, far from communist ideals, is reiterated by Antonio Ghirelli from Milan, on 13 September 1945:

Stefanile left the group after the fourth issue, due to a disagreement with one of the editors, Gianni Scognamiglio (De Costanzo Reference De Costanzo1994, 12n), while the collaboration with La Capria started with the second issue (15 December 1945) and lasted until the end of the venture. La Capria’s editorial work, assisted by Giglio and Ghirelli, along with Scognamiglio and Ennio Mastrostefano, was marked by his own idiosyncratic interests in anglophone literature, which were not necessarily in line with the foreign intellectuals (such as Hemingway) who contemporary Italian authors were adopting as both their literary and political mentors.Footnote ²⁵ La Capria’s own perception of the relationship between literature and politics was certainly progressive, but not uncritically ideological. From this perspective, La Capria’s first essay on the English novelist Christopher Isherwood is already significant, as the Italian author analysed Isherwood’s fragmentary representations of political identities (Nazi as well as leftist and communist), thus signalling the search for a more nuanced and not ideologically static literary realism. In reviewing Goodbye to Berlin, La Capria not only praised the novel for the fluid style and the masterly theatrical dialogues, but appreciated in particular the implicit revolutionary tone, which helped to give more cohesion and literary tension to the book than a propagandistic approach would have done (La Capria Reference La Capria1945, 6). This essay needs to be read in parallel with that on Hemingway, in which La Capria criticises For Whom the Bell Tolls, and especially the description of the main character, Robert Jordan, for being too explicitly action- and romance-driven: ‘in a manner different from Joyce, who had described his characters’ inner life, Hemingway focused instead on “organic life”’ (La Capria Reference La Capria1946b, 8). This materialistic characterisation not only generated an entropy of actions which disrupted the soundness of the plot and led to an apocalyptic perspective on history, but more significantly ended in the main character’s political ineffectiveness. According to La Capria, Jordan’s portrait and his ‘generous’ idealism was similar to ‘the destiny of many Communist intellectuals’ (ibid.). In a similar vein, the presentation of contemporary English poetry, namely that of Eliot, Auden, Spender and Day Lewis, reveals an admiration for these poets, for their ability to react against an individualistic aesthetic and to propose progressive social behaviour that called for a more optimistic attitude towards life and an opposition to social injustices (La Capria Reference La Capria1946a, 3). Significantly, La Capria assessed, in not strictly ideological terms, English poetry’s political concerns within the timeframe and exigencies of the Spanish Civil War (before its move towards mysticism), reaffirming, against Marxist critics, the need for a stylistic appreciation of its traditionally bourgeois device of the poetic form.

Looking at the opposing ways that translations of French literature were presented in Sud, we can read this as emblematic of the different cultural and political dispositions, namely the more sentimentalist and the more engagé, which had to coexist within the same editorial staff. With regard to the role of poetry in the Resistance movement, when discussing the participation of Pierre Emmanuel, Scognamiglio (Reference Scognamiglio1945, 3) posits him within a Catholic horizon and comments on his effectiveness in showing neo-romantic empathy for human suffering and collective irrationality. In clearly different terms, Giglio (Reference Giglio1946b) measured the relevance of Éluard as a poet in accordance with the latter’s strictly political salience as a left-wing cultural figure. From a similar perspective, French essays were – as anticipated by Fortini’s remarks – the most relevant of Sud’s translations for our investigation. Through these one can measure the political positioning of the journal, as the next and last section of this article will elucidate.

Translation and impegno

The debate on existentialism was highly topical in 1947. The difficult relationship between Sartre and the French Communist Party also had consequences on the Italian scene, as the PCI was fighting against the perceived subjective individualism of Sartre’s existentialism (see footnote 14). This opposition was crucial in Il Politecnico: as recalled by Tosatti (Reference Tosatti2010, 529–530), the reception of Sartre’s theories in the journal (issue 16, in particular), and the mutual exchange with Les Temps Modernes, were strategic for Vittorini to strengthen his position in the struggle for the ‘new culture’, the journal’s manifesto, and in his debate with Marxist intellectuals. The result of this exchange was an escalation of the debate itself, culminating in the famous polemic between Vittorini and the PCI secretary, Palmiro Togliatti,Footnote ²⁶ in which Il Politecnico’s cosmopolitanism was called into question, while Sartre’s positions were still defended by Vittorini (Reference Vittorini1947, 105).

The publication of Sartre’s essay ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’ in Sud needs to be located precisely in the context of the political and intellectual debates that it had engendered in France and then Italy. The essay, quite tentatively translated by La Capria as ‘Ragioni e verità dell’Esistenzialismo/Reasons and Truths of Existentialism’, was introduced by a short note, probably written by La Capria himself (Reference La Capria1992, 20), outlining how the philosophy was not superficially nihilist, but intrinsically ethical. According to La Capria, the existentialist search for a moral defence reflected nonetheless the picture of an exhausted and bored society. The choice of the translated essay therefore confirmed the typically unorthodox habitus of the journal, always balancing diverse and less conformist perspectives. However, the publication was highly criticised by Communist intellectuals and leftist readers of Sud and was perceived, in line with the PCI’s guidelines, as rather conservative. Prunas had to intervene with an editorial note (1947) to publicly defend his publishing choice. This was the occasion to adopt an indirect strategy that, moving from a virtually transnational perspective, would cast Sud within the national political debate. In line with Vittorini’s response to Togliatti, Prunas began by defending the autonomy of culture, criticising the orthodox and rigid interpretation of cultural expressions by progressive intellectuals (Liberal, Catholic, and especially Communist) – an interpretation he labelled as ‘fascist’ (Reference Prunas1947, 3). Furthermore, in a similar, but strategically different way to Vittorini’s approach to the fifth PCI national congress and its agenda for the inclusion of all intellectuals, Prunas preferred not to engage with national debates. This might have led to a rapprochement with the Italian Communist intellectuals, but Prunas referred instead to Stalin’s speech at the Central Committee, in which the leader of the Soviet Union had claimed that ‘dialectics was key in Marxism’ (Reference Prunas1947, 3). This clearly positioned Sud in contraposition to the guidelines of the PCI and established an indirect connection with Vittorini’s cultural strategy. The importance of Vittorini’s letter to Togliatti in the formation of Prunas’s intellectual identity is also demonstrated by the fact that, in the unpublished project for Sud giornale europeo di cultura, Prunas was planning to publish Vittorini’s ‘Politica e cultura’ as the opening article, and thus in the strategic position of a manifesto. In addition, Prunas widened the perspective of the negative reception of ‘Ragioni e verità dell’esistenzialismo’, by drawing comparisons between Sud editors and foreign intellectuals who had been critical of Marxism, particularly Brecht, Éluard, Dos Passos and Malraux. Hence, through his letter, Prunas elaborated a strategic narrative to establish a connection with foreign intellectuals in order to carve out his own critical position. This would eventually give him some legitimacy within the national debate, too.

Ultimately, this editorial note was also the occasion to defend the journal from the more general criticism that its editors were unclear about what themes and approaches they wanted to adopt, and overly reliant on their non-conformist and continuous – but potentially sterile – questioning. The somehow conflicting dispositions of the two editorial groups that fertilised the Neapolitan journal – as the case of French translations has vividly suggested – inevitably produced multiple perceptions of Prunas’s political positioning. These span the definition of ‘Catholic-socialism’ suggested by La Capria (Striano Reference Striano2006, 149) to that of ‘Communist’ provided by Patroni-Griffi, in an unpublished letter sent to Prunas in 1946. However, as outlined also by Striano (ibid.), Prunas’s reflections did not limit themselves to a traditionally Catholic perspective. More specifically, Prunas was animated by a Christian inclination, but in an endless, non-conformist search for the truth. This search led the journal to become a heterogeneous platform of research, which questioned every orthodox approach and welcomed, amongst others, Sartre’s existentialism as well as Lenin’s poems and Catholic neo-romantic poetry. Sud thus occupied an eccentric position within leftist culture, a position which could not be safely included within the tangles of the Communist Party. Prunas was therefore putting forward in his journal a non-conformist intellectual attitude, which was – considering the different economic and symbolic capital – even more radical than that of Il Politecnico.

A further point to take into account when assessing Sud’s position within the post-war political field is the fact that, while looking for financial supporters for the journal, Prunas and the other editors were approached by Mario Alicata, member of the PCI and editor in Naples of the leftist journal La Voce.Footnote ²⁷ As archival evidence suggests, the issue of establishing broader alliances with Southern intellectuals was being debated within the PCI, and the party leadership believed that it needed to involve progressive intellectuals who were not necessarily members of the party, in order to enlarge its influence in the South.Footnote ²⁸ Yet the extent to which this interaction could take place in autonomous terms needs to be assessed. Alicata proposed some financing for Sud but only if the latter changed its non-conformist attitude with regard to the Party’s guidelines. Prunas’s refusal of the proposal is emblematic for two reasons: first, it demonstrated Prunas’s need to maintain his political autonomy, and second, it ratified the end of the journal. In a similar but more tragic way than Vittorini’s Il Politecnico, Sud became increasingly isolated in local and broader contexts. On the one hand, the refusal of Alicata’s financial offer further marginalised Sud within the leftist Neapolitan intellectual community. On the other, the lack of financial support prevented Prunas from publishing his journal and from distributing it outside Naples, across Italy and abroad. Sud was therefore gradually neglected, thus reaffirming the difficulties of developing alternative ways to the hegemonic power of the PCI in Italian post-war leftist culture.