CARNEVALI AND OTHER ITALIANS WHO WROTE IN AMERICANO

The group of people who gathered around my journal, La Voce, myself included, had a friend in Emanuele Carnevali,[1] despite the fact that we didn’t know he existed. I first found out about him in 1950 when I happened to get my hands on a rare publication of his critical writings and poems. The volumes, strangely, were not published in the United States but in Paris, around 1925, by a small house, Contact Editions,[2] located in one of the most beautiful spots in the French capital, the Isle Saint Louis on the Quai d’Anjou. This was the time of the expatriates, a small group of American intellectuals who ran away rather than facing the materialism of their country, and ended up living in Paris. Here they basked in the illusion of the false liberation of American prose; with the promises of the phony Bohème of the Rive Gauche,[3] where they set camp; protected by the fistful of dollars they, for better or for worse, were getting from the materialistic motherland.

The little volume that collects whatever is left of Carnevali’s production is 268 pages long and was edited by Dorothy Dudley.[4] Her meritorious work exempts us from having to rummage through the pages of small journals like Poetry, The Little Review, Others, The Lyric, Youth, The Modern Review and so forth. Carnevali, the introduction tells us, was a very smart child who grew up without a mother and an indifferent, absent father. After leaving Italy, he lived in New York and Chicago for eight years, leading a miserable and rudderless existence, working a variety of jobs: dishwasher in restaurants and private clubs; extemporaneous translator; teacher of Italian language; secretary etc. He always maintained the sense of urgency and entitlement of someone who is forced to do things below his stature but is not sufficiently coward, nor courageous enough, to resign to it. He died in Italy where he had returned after falling ill with tuberculosis. He held Arthur Rimbaud[5] as his life model and, like Rimbaud, was enamored of poetic greatness.

Born in Florence in 1898 he died in Italy in 1925[6] [sic]. After his death Carlo Linati[7] wrote an article in the Sept. 1, 1934, issue of Nuova Antologia: “A very promising rising star (…) He was admired by the latest American poets, the most demanding and critical, the most avant-garde in experimental techniques (…) and received an award from the journal Poetry.”[8] Any American with an average culture who happened to read this article in 1934 would have asked: “How come I have never heard of this person? Who is he? I want to find out more and read more of his stuff.” But his research soon would end up in a blind alley. The American Who’s Who,[9] with a list of thousands of American personages, does not have an entry for Carnevali. The catalogue of the New York Public Library (four million volumes) does not have his book.[10] And it doesn't appear in the catalogue of the famous Library of Congress either.[11] Our American reader could look up Stanley Kunitz’s Authors Today and Yesterday:[12] nothing; or Alberta Chamberlain Lawrence’s Who is Who among Living Authors:[13] same result. He could grab the Cambridge history of American literature: no mention. If he called even the best bookstore in town, the clerks wouldn’t know where to look. After a long and patient investigation he would find five lines hidden in the three hundred pages of a recent history book on American literature by Alfred Kreymborg.[14] In the general index of American periodicals finally he would locate a bibliographical note that would bring him to the obscure journal Poetry with a few of his poems. I don’t mean with this to diminish his value nor dismiss the rare case (or, as Linati puts it, unique) of a young Italian who lived for a short time in America and was able to take possession of the secrets of its language to the point where he could write both original prose and poetry. His fame and success, however, were limited. His works in prose or in free verse have a thin yet lyrical vein, except when they focus on notations of facts and sensations: in theses case images tend to appear and, with them, the hint of a rhythm. It was easier for Carnevali to find a niche in contemporary lyricism which does not protect itself behind the moats of prosody and the defensive walls of metric. The samples I read clearly demonstrate it. From a social standpoint, both Carnevali and our immigrants in general did not have a vision of America as a sweet friend or a gentle host. Speaking metaphorically about the boarding rooms where he lived, Carnevali wrote:

I brought you illness and illness you gave back to me; I brought you poverty and poverty you returned. I brought you joy and you returned disgust, a disgust so powerful I would have broken up in thousand pieces

had I left myself be led by it.

 

As a person he must have been rather difficult, both by nature and by purpose. In America he made lots of friends of both sexes, he fought with them and then made up. Some American writers of the period gave him positive reviews, some with reservations. I am afraid he expected to obtain from his genius more than it could actually produce. However, it is a miracle that in such a brief time he was able to immerse himself so deeply into the language. In one of his first poems, dedicated to clichés, he wrote:

The headwaiter says: “Such nice weather today!”

And flashes a sentimental smile…

But I haven’t slept and have been waiting for sunrise.

One day I would like to be born

With a trumpet as powerful as the wind

To announces to the world

That wonderful cliché, “such nice weather today.”

There were many other days, however, when he was so desperate he wanted to cry and wanted to announce “It’s going to rain today,” to every old lady, every young couple, every scoundrel who came to the flophouse where he lived.

After discovering his poetry I wrote about it in a Turin newspaper. Yet, only in 1950 did I become aware of his work as a critic. He had written in a penetrating way about La Voce and the writers whose works were published in this journal. His observations were much deeper than those of many academics. This means he had the talent to discover new values and not simply accept and analyze them. Far away from Italy, with a modest education (it seems he briefly attended school in Venice,) he discovered the poets of La Voce and Lacerba.[15] Here are some of his notes.

Aldo Palazzeschi: “Simple and naive like a modern Saint Francis of Assisi. A rascal with eyes full of wonder, a quick and luminous artist.”

Giovanni Papini[16]: “After great suffering we all have lots of remedies we can recommend. Yet, after age 20, often after a defeat, most of us shrivel up, become humble. But Papini fulfilled his vow when he was 20 and did not shrivel up (…) He could be 16, 20 or 60. He was born with “Genesis’

 and spoke in the ‘Apocalypse.’”
Scipio Slapater[17]: “Hard, strong, clean young man.”
Corrado Govoni[18]: “Delicate like a young girl, he sings about the filthiest, most obscene affairs of an old Italian city, always with his delicate voice.”
Piero Jahier[19]: “Too many scruples in this man. He must believe that every man perturbed by a punishing conscience is a poet. He works in an office for a living. No dictionary, no grammar book are enough for him. They must expand and stretch in order to contain him. Jahier knows that the poet makes the dictionary and the grammar and many other things.”
Ardengo Soffici[20]: “He is the most avant-garde and, through French influences, he has achieved a jagged form of poetry; free words and lyrical simultaneity, which are accidental like life itself.”
Clemente Rebora[21]: “Very serious, very rich, he overflows with images with an orgy of cold emotions and he consumes himself in a unanimity that is too emotional and vague.”

Now, these critical judgments are not always extraordinary or profound and would benefit from some fine tuning. In my opinion, they also need the support of a cultural background and knowledge that Carnevali did not possess. Yet, if one considers the time when they were written, they are certainly noteworthy. He also talks about me and I wasn't sure whether I should quote it here or not, mostly because I thought my neighbors would think I would do it out of vanity. I hope for myself, however, that at my age there were more important things than other people’s opinions. Therefore, here it is:

Prezzolini: “Amiable[22] critic (!), clean and forceful, he put Marinetti[23] and his gang back in their place with the only intelligent articles on Futurism[24] ever to appear in an Italian journal; where dull and hard-headed academicians waged war against it and disgusting, ignorant Young Turks defended it.”

Certainly I didn't deserve the adjective amabile, and if it came from another source I would consider it sarcastic. I am very committed, though, to “critical cleanliness” and I am happy Carnevali noticed it. Poor Carnevali! I wanted to write this piece because I don’t want anyone to say that I am like one of those critics who keep a notebook with the list of reviews received on one page and, on the opposite page, the list of reviews returned. When one of their creditors dies, they cross out the debt with a deep sigh of relief. I was attracted to writing about him because I thought he was a man who, in many ways, could talk to me; but he was already dying the very moment I set foot in America.

Carnevali is not the only Italian who came here as a teenager and learned English to the point of handling it like a native born. I will mention the cases of Pascal d’Angelo[25] and Arturo Giovannitti.[26] Giovannitti too, like Carnevali, learned political and social hate and rebellion, but went beyond the literary realm. His poetry today feels long on eloquence but short on sensibility, based on rhetorical cardboard cut-outs of “Judges and Accused,” “Rich and Poor,” “Rebels and Wardens,” all generic and abstract. His verses, collected in the 1914 volume Arrows in the Gale,[27] go back to the traditional models of Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde.[28] His language is rich but contrived, like an exercise in oratorical scales that reaches the climax with a sonorous conclusion, like a political speech.[29]

New York, September 13, 1954