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Journal of Modern Italian Studies

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Paragone: notes on hegemony and realism in the1950s

Francesca Billiani

To cite this article: Francesca Billiani (2016) Paragone: notes on hegemony and realism in the1950s, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 21:1, 81-96, DOI: 10.1080/1354571X.2016.1112068

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2016.1112068

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Journal of Modern ItalIan StudIeS, 2016Vol. 21, no. 1, 81–96http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2016.1112068

Paragone: notes on hegemony and realism in the 1950s

Francesca Billiani

university of Manchester

KEYWORDS Paragone; realism; PCI; anna Banti; Cultural Commission

The review should come out every two months […]. Its size and dimensions, roughly those of Horizon. […] I want its criticism to be the clearest, […], and the most accessible to an educated but not necessarily specialist public.1

As Anna Banti wrote to Emilio Cecchi on 10 November 1949, Paragone was a Janus that has two souls and two faces: one purely literary and the other about art, in strict alternation ever since 1950. The writer Anna Banti (pseudonym of Lucia Longhi Lopresti, 1895–1985) was at the helm for the literary issues, and her husband, the art historian and university lecturer Roberto Longhi (1890–1970), was editor-in-chief and editor of the art issues (Longi 1962). The single editorial office was in Florence, at via Benedetto Fortini, number 30, and the publisher was the illustrious Sansoni (Guarneri 2006a and 2006b).2

By analysing the internal composition and correspondence between con-tributors of a purely literary review in relation to the records of the Cultural Commission of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), this article will highlight a

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the literary review Paragone and on the debate on realism articulated by the review and by the Cultural Commission of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the 1950s. By analysing the review’s internal composition, correspondence between its contributors, and records of the PCI’s Cultural Commission, this article highlights a series of issues relating to the debate on realism in the 1950s, as a critical time, in both aesthetic and political terms, for the determination of Italian culture’s identity profile. Specifically, the article discusses the key features of the debate on realism that unfolded in Paragone, and relates these to the debate simultaneously developing within the Cultural Commission. This comparison allows us to argue for a close connection between the aesthetic habitus displayed by an independent review and that embraced by a cultural institution with a distinctly political as well as cultural agenda.

© 2016 taylor & francis

CONTACT francesca Billiani francesca.billiani@manchester.ac.uk

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series of issues relating to the debate on realism in the 1950s, as a critical time, in both aesthetic and political terms, for the determination of Italian culture’s identity profile.3 Our particular intention is, therefore, to discuss the key features of the debate on realism that unfolded in Paragone, and to relate these to the debate simultaneously developing within the Cultural Commission. While the review eschewed outright dispute, let alone a strongly antagonistic ideological position, as the editorial of issue 102 in 1958 explicitly stated, it is important to show how it promoted forms of cultural encounter with the ‘hegemonic’ centre represented by the PCI and its Cultural Commission, which had been set up in 1945 but only started to become much more active after the party’s defeat in the April 1948 elections, and throughout the 1950s.4 In other words, using the habitus of Paragone as litmus paper for Italian literary space in the 1950s, its energy fields and symbolic transfers, the main overarching topic under discus-sion in this article is the nature of the contribution of an ‘independent’ review to the debate on realism, a debate that was implicitly central as regards to aes-thetics and cultural matters in the Italian cultural context. To this end, we shall pose a main all-encompassing question: how can we relate Paragone, whose organization displayed the firm stamp of exclusively literary patronage, to the 1950s aesthetic and political debate on realism in Italy?

After outlining the main features of the review, the article will in turn answer two further questions: which aesthetic features of realism are upheld both by Paragone and the PCI? Is there a relationship between the concept of realism as an aesthetic endeavour and that of political impegno, here understood in general as transformative intervention upon reality?

An ‘indirect habitus’

Critical scholarship has often seen Paragone as a traditional and hallowed stand-ard bearer for the defence of national culture and the bastion of a tradition of enduring prestige, but resistant to processes of artistic experimentation or of militancy. Moreover, previous discussion has focused almost exclusively on the figures of Longhi, in relation to art, and Giorgio Bassani in relation to literature (Bandera 2003; Gregori 1997; Tortora 2011 and 2012), neglecting the review’s importance as a textual and aesthetic arena with a cultural intermediary of the calibre of Anna Banti at its centre, and likewise underestimating its ability to generate an important aesthetic and political discourse on Italian culture in the 1950s, with significant implications.

In order to make sense of the methods by which this review with its lasting symbolic capital wove an avowedly apolitical discourse together with one that was distinctly political, we rely on Bourdieu’s traditional definition of ‘habitus’. While Bourdieu’s habitus as a ‘structuring structure as well as a structured struc-ture’ (Bourdieu 1980, 89), modified by Lahire to acknowledge a plurality of social contexts and individual dispositions (Lahire 2003, 343), embedded an analytical

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model that could make sense of the manifold dispositions of agents in the field, we should like to add a further nuance to it. Paragone and Banti participated in the main political debate on realism indirectly and never took up an overtly ideological position: their habitus was an indirect one. But also by ‘indirect’ we mean the lack of explicit dialogue between two domains, in this case the political and the aesthetic spheres, but the implicit sharing of similar views, such as that on realism. If the review always functioned according to its own methods and structures, it did anticipate an indirect sharing of concepts pertaining simulta-neously to disconnected fields, such as literary/aesthetic and political ones. In our specific case, Paragone’s habitus transcended the national field to link up with the European aesthetic and political debate on realism. In this way, while expressed principally as a literary and aesthetic debate on realism in the review, such habitus was, at the same time, indirectly central to both the national and the international political debate.

unlike Società, Nuovi Argomenti or Officina, Paragone did not embrace a posi-tion of explicit impegno that broadly followed Gramsci and Togliatti. Having said that, through its habitus of indirect participation and its central position in the cultural field, as well as the dynamics of transfer of symbolic capital that derived from the connections between its editors belonging to the Florence-based Hermeticist milieu, it did contribute to the determination of a realist aesthetic space that was linked to that officially supported by the guidelines the PCI had formulated.5 As Albertina Vittoria writes about the 1950s until at least 1956, ‘these were no longer the times of Vittorini, requests for independ-ence were respected’ (1992, xvi): the literary field was necessarily becoming a field of less violent but more enduring tensions. And thus, ‘[h]ere was the great importance that Togliatti attributed to reviews, publishers, and therefore to the Fondazione Gramsci, as organs of PCI activity in the specific sphere of culture’ (xxii).6 Paragone could secure oblique participation, as a depoliticized body, in the debate that had become, at least after 1945, a European grand narrative: the debate first on neo-realism and then on realism.7

Anatomy: the spatial dynamics

The point of reference and typological model, as Banti herself stated, was Horizon (1939–49), edited by Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender, and Peter Watson. While Connolly had had in mind a ‘heroic modernism’, this had already been defeated when it first appeared in 1939, as he could not allow himself to fight for inno-vation at all costs but had to retain and promote ‘good writing’; in doing so he returned to an idealistic statement of what could be regarded and accepted as traditional aesthetic criteria (Brooker and Thacker 2009–2013, vol. 1, 857). The Paragone and Horizon projects had their meeting point in the synergy between literary quality and dormant militancy; Banti was to choose to publish authors that she regarded as standard bearers for literary quality, accessible, direct,

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progressive, foreign or Italian. One of the most glaring differences between Paragone and Horizon was the concept of the reader and the composition of the readership. In comparison to the modernist review in a classical mould, the pub-lic and the dynamics of circulation and distribution within the field of Paragone were issues of divergence and friction; Banti knew that she could not exclusively address a learned minority, but had to turn to a public that was educated and aware, if not militant. While the small modernist review shunned the public at large in elitist tones, and in effect continued to propound a concept of artistic autonomy as the only escape from corruption of the truth, Paragone had at least to consider the practical problem of distribution, not just the theoretical one as Connolly had done, and that of networking, often among the Florentine intelligentsia, in order to achieve enough symbolic capital to last.8

In view of its longevity and volume Paragone belongs by right to that group of literary magazines classified as ‘thick’ reviews. These are endowed by the high profile of their contributors with the symbolic and economic capital necessary for publication without interruption for decades, and produced, with little var-iation, in a minimal typographic format and geometrical internal composition. In Paragone’s case, its contributors often were members of the Florence-based Hermeticist côté and university circles; the journal’s literary issues had an ele-gant green cover. All this had the purpose of ensuring Paragone both a central position in the Italian literary field, and a consistent and long-term presence. On 24 November 1959 Nicolò Gallo wrote to Vittorio Sereni from Rome, describ-ing very candidly the advantages and disadvantages for Mondadori’s Milanese entourage of partnership with the ‘Florentine’ grande dame Anna Banti:9

dear Sereni,

So, I saw Banti in Florence. […] First outcome, Banti agreed to do a volume for Il Saggiatore […], collecting her literary essays, articles in Illustrazione italiana, critical notes in Paragone, etc. And I think a good book will emerge, with a certain draw, which could also be of use to us in relaunching her name to a new public, differ-ent to the elite within which it has to date circulated. […] As agreed, I made no reference to financial issues: she raised them, referring me to her interview with you, Feltrinelli’s ‘golden offers’, and so on. […] I would consider the practical aspect of literary policy, later. Focusing on Banti, more than we have done so far, means regaining the Florentine sphere (Contini, de Robertis) plus Cecchi and the young critics of the stylistic school, and possibly allowing ourselves some inevitable drift in the area of quality and finesse without too much harm.

The Mondadori papers, including correspondence with Banti, reveal a series of tensions in the cultural field in respect to the Milanese and Florentine literary worlds. The letters show that on the one hand Banti represented an impor-tant point of reference for the establishment, because of her connections with the Hermeticist movement; on the other, she was explicitly seen in the pub-lishing house as a pawn, a ‘practical issue’, that the Milanese office wanted to manoeuvre once they had arrived in the Florentine environment, inasmuch as she ensured symbolic capital in terms of tradition and formal refinement, but

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also as she guaranteed them a sort of immunity against potential slippage in quality. Although Florentine Hermeticism was certainly the prestigious aesthetic territory to be reconquered by the Milanese publisher, from the perspective of the publishing field these were always aesthetic positions that could not guarantee any attraction beyond the professionals (Contini 1972). Paragone instead aspired to a circulation that was organized on a modern basis for an elevated readership among an uninitiated public, rather than limiting its read-ership and reception.

The anatomy of the review was the standard one for established literary reviews: essays with a wide critical scope, followed by an anthology of literary pieces, and then a densely packed section of ‘appunti’ (notes), which allowed their authors to ignore the structure and form expected of themed articles.10 As for the production itself, Anna Banti was fully involved in the life of the review and determined its manner of engagement with the outside world, to the point of no longer having an editorial committee after the attempt to move from the Florentine publisher Sansoni to the Milanese Feltrinelli.11

On the whole, the cultural agents active in the review’s management were literary figures and critics of diverse, prestigious affiliations such as the university of Florence: among others Alberto Arbasino, Francesco Arcangeli, Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti, Giorgio Bassani, Attilio Bertolucci, Piero Bigongiari, Carlo Bo, Irene Brin, Italo Calvino, Glauco Cambon, Emilio Cecchi, Pietro Citati, Gianfranco Contini, Marco Forti, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Eugenio Garin, Claudio Gorlier, Margherita Guidacci, Mario Luzi, Oreste Macrì, Gianna Manzini, Adelia Noferi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Folco Portinari, Mario Prazi, Angelo Romanò, Adriano Seroni, Francesco Squarcia, Leone Traverseo, Giuseppe ungaretti, Paolo Volponi, and many others, either in the eclectic essays or in the rich and stimulating ‘appunti’.

A careful analysis of the review’s statistics tells us that of 215 contributors prior to 1960, 84.6 per cent were male and only 15.3 per cent female, and indi-viduals born in the 1920s (70) were the most represented, followed by the 1910s (41): thus in the 1950s it was people in their thirties and forties who sustained Banti’s undertaking. Of the contributors, 103 were poets and novelists, while a sizeable number, 81, can be classed as literary critics: Paragone was a literary review on all fronts. Comparisons (paragoni, in fact), when made, were with the arts (10), cinema (8) and music (6). Of 699 articles, 156 were dedicated to foreign literature and culture, and 543 to Italian. Those 156 articles with an inter-national range were above all devoted to critical essays and, significantly, to cinema. The profile of the writers was extraordinarily varied, including some regular authors (Bàrberi Squarotti, Bassani, Bertolucci, Bianchi, Bigongiari, Bo, Forti, Gorlier, Innamorati, Luzi, Macrì, Manfredi, Noferi, Pasolini, Seroni and Squarcia) and others who were more sporadic but of great merit (Tomasi di Lampedusa on Stendhal, Bachelli, Barbaro, Barilli, Bonaviri, Calvino, Cancogni, Caretti, Cassola, Corti, Curtius, Folena, Fortini, Gargiulo, Garin, Isella, Landolfi, Manganelli, Marin, Merini, Melchiori, Moravia, Pavese, Penna, Raimondi, Rea,

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Sereni, Soldati, Solmi, Tecchi, Tobino, Volponi and Zampa). The entire Italian cultural world with its symbolic capital had to reckon with Paragone, which while being a national enterprise also had openings to the international world: among those authors, writers and thinkers published were Adorno, W. H. Auden, Char, Guillén, Kafka, Mann, Orwell, important names in a recognized canon, but also open to experimentation. In this wealth of interpretation, some pieces stand out as trend-setters: Banti’s essays on feminist writers, such as Virginia Woolf, Jane Gaskell, Pamela Moore and Simone de Beauvoir and on the histor-ical novel; a collection of contributions on poetry, such as Bertolucci on Eliot, Bigongiari on Ponge, Constant, Rivière, Pound and Reverdy, Forti on Char, Bo and Tentori on contemporary Spanish poetry, Paoli on Vicente Aleixandre; Macrí on Machado, Cambon on W. C. Williams and contemporary American poetry; a set of timely discussions on ‘world literature’, especially the novel with domenico de Robertis on Conrad, Woolf and Graham Greene; Folena on Julian Greene; Nemi d’Agostino and d’Arzo on Faulkner; Bassani, Gorlier and Russi on Hemingway and Brin on the contemporary American and English novel. The European intel-lectual tradition was less represented but it is worth remembering Macrì writing on Benda and unamuno and Russi on contemporary American critical literature.

If Paragone, with Banti as patron, had in mind the traditional European canon (extended to North America), a brief, and partisan, comparison between Paragone and the Rome-based Botteghe Oscure edited by the Princess Marguerite Caetani di Bassiano (1950–60) brings out some crucial points that assist our understanding of the role of Banti’s review in the national literary field, and the methods that allowed it to pass the test of time (Antonello 2015). When Botteghe Oscure in the 1950s had notoriously excluded authors such as Pavese, Banti was instead willing to give space to neo-realism and the historical novel, or rather realism, and consequently enter into dialogue with debates that were at once political and aesthetic. In other words, Paragone gained a central and less niche position than the small modernist magazines and the elitist La Ronda due to its tangential participation in the aesthetic and political debate of its era. The strength of Paragone lay in its timely programme: in a strategy of local networks (albeit patronage-based) and publishers’ support (Sansoni and Mondadori) revolving around Anna Banti as professional writer, which the artisanally produced Botteghe Oscure and the self-funded Princess did not have. Moreover, while the Roman review was exclusively literary, multilingual and never published essays or reviews, Paragone championed a methodology that examined the arts through an interdisciplinary lens, had a dense review section and welcomed debate and confrontation. While Botteghe Oscure never published translations and believed in a notion of cosmopolitanism, which was not motivated by any moral or social imperative, Paragone dealt with topical Italian issues, such as neo-realism and the critical debate of the day, and pub-lished translations. It did not neglect links with European culture, although it

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looked at this from a dehistoricized perspective, which treated it according to a humanist paradigm of shared sensibilities.12

If the idea of criticism as a form of ‘illumination’ remained a constant for both reviews, for the Florentine review it was based on assumptions of shared feelings, which the multilingual fragmentation of the Roman review could not ensure. In the real world, however, the 1950s were the years of the PCI’s Cultural Commission. While the aristocratic and cosmopolitan Botteghe Oscure took no notice of this, Paragone took up a more ‘pragmatic position’ in the field and published works that had an indirect relation with the political debate and its evolution.

The Cultural Commission: inside and outside Paragone

In one of the PCI’s moments of greater closeness to the Soviet union, and of commitment on the ‘ideological’ front, after the seventh party congress in 1951, a change of direction was made in leadership of the Cultural Commission in order to bolster its efforts in relation to the united Cultural Front: the historian Emilio Sereni was replaced by Carlo Salinari, an intellectual, professor of Italian literature, close friend of Togliatti’s and former partisan. Salinari had a more modern and integrated view of the relationship between intellectuals and cul-ture, as well as cultural policy which, as Togliatti also intended, was used and understood as a tool to build Italy’s road towards Socialism.13 Stephen Gundle has observed that ‘the years between 1951 and 1956 saw the most organic and complete elaboration of cultural policy of the postwar period’ (2000, 51-52), with acceptance of Gramsci’s development of the concept of hegemony extended to cultural practices that could be described as dictated by a habitus structured and constructed by economic necessities, but also by a desire for internationalism. These openings were therefore not simply programmatic and imposed from on high, but originated in a response from below which, specifically, materialized in the reviews in question.

With Togliatti’s blessing, and as documented by Vittoria (1992, xxi), the Cultural Commission played a fundamental role in defining the party’s relationships with intellectuals so that they could serve a purpose in the creation of a united front, even if only initially and at the national level, and subsequently through a free, modern and national culture. Togliatti himself, from 1952, was to attribute importance to publishers and reviews in this constructive moment, in a process that in the 1950s was still to be understood exclusively in terms of Gramscian hegemony, or of col-lective will with an essentialist foundation, but that increasingly gravitated towards forms that could be described as post-hegemonic.14 These post-hegemonic forms are oriented towards building a social order that could be ensured through indi-vidual – even indirectly – habitus and affective drive, not just collective consensus. Such a step could be achieved only by detaching the individual from the state or from any higher authority. during a contribution by Togliatti to the meeting of the

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National Cultural Commission on 3 April 1952, d’Alfonso reiterated the strategic importance of reviews for Italian geopolitics:

In this regard it should be noted that the third force, which also influences many emergent Emilian intellectuals, does not have its offices in Emilia, but rather in Florence (see the Ponte review, and the Paragone review, through which is per-petuated the hegemony of the Longhian group in that fluid and interesting area that lies between the university of Bologna and militant criticism).15

The Cultural Commission held a position of compromise between forms of engagement with mass culture and the legacy of a bourgeois culture, as was stated at a press and propaganda meeting opened up to those responsible for cultural work on 20 October 1952:

It is refined intellectuals who believe, and delude themselves, that a certain culture can develop without a quantitative as well as qualitative development of culture itself. […] And currently, […], we must also battle against those comrades, and in general against those democrats, who, enthused at a certain point with mass culture, believe that all that bourgeois culture can now be reduced to a bundle […] This is also an erroneous position.16

At the Istituto Gramsci, from 1953, the main points of this debate, as regards its possible aesthetic resonance, were: against art as an escape from reality; for, first, the organization of a modern Italian culture to be based on a series of strengthened structures that would enable the widening of the base of culture for the masses, and, second, battles of ideas, both organized within a united front.17 In 1953, Salinari suggested a conference on the theme of realism in Italy to the Istituto Gramsci, in order to lay the foundations for a culture close to the masses; the need to redefine the boundaries of literature and its direction reappeared as pivotal to the linkage between review, party and publishing in accordance with a constructivist framework.18 Culture was required to perform a hegemonic function in the acceptance of the party’s adaptation to class needs in order to resolve internal splits, and not vice versa.

The year 1956 represented a significant watershed: the Hungarian crisis, the Communist Party congress in the Soviet union, the interview with Togliatti in Nuovi Argomenti in June, and the PCI congress in december. Throughout these geopolitical events, however, attention remained focused on the problem of realism as a tool that was as much political as it was aesthetic and cultural, by virtue of a conception of politics as praxis, or rather as a philosophy of deed and positive action, but in a hegemonically organizational style with the purpose (also relevant to the French Communist Party’s position)19 of widening the base of popular participation.20 In 1956 Alicata was to explicitly reject ‘sectarian, closed Marxism’.21

Realism in Paragone

On 5 March 1960, Francesco Leonetti, after the end of his Bologna experience of militancy in Officina with Pasolini and others, wrote to Vittorio Sereni that he was

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delighted to contribute to Paragone, despite it being in the field of bourgeois culture. He admitted to having had a degree of reluctance in accepting this responsibility, as the review in its first ten years had taken an editorial line that was a little too rigid, but now the situation seemed to him to have changed.22 In what direction?

This related to a significant cultural shift in the field of great symbolic impor-tance. Leonetti, who as co-editor at Officina had contributed to redefining not just the issue of impegno but also that of the relationship between aesthetics and politics, and of the renewal of literary language, accepted the invitation by Banti, the patron of the republic of letters, thus implicitly recognizing its centrality. As outlined above, Banti had taken on the task of reawakening the national literary field by offering readers the opportunity to reach national, and international, cultural heights, by means of strategic comparisons between writers, disciplines and disciplinary fields. The essays, and their authors, were not ‘monads’ but constellations to be discovered and connected. What, then, was the role of the critic and his or her analysis? It was a different undertaking to weave together the threads of all this without, however, pursuing missions that were constructivist or militant.23 The task of a non-militant critic in the 1950s was rather to listen to the voices of each historical era through an almost Bergsonian recollection of history and recent events.24

In the second editorial of 1958, after the high point of 100 issues, Cassola’s Il taglio del bosco and Fenoglio’s Un giorno di fuoco were extolled as the review’s ‘diamond points’, as in its early years Paragone made a strong link between the concepts of realism and of national literature. In the same editorial, although stereotyped and hackneyed, a distance from the priests of objectivity was reit-erated. Between 1951 and 1956, in the footsteps of the national and organiza-tional opening of the PCI’s approach to cultural policy, Paragone, too, gave over significant space to confirmation of the importance of the concepts of ‘moral religion’, ‘impegno’ and ‘opening towards history’, for as far as these concepts were concerned aesthetic matters were moments in which objectivity could be fused with subjectivity in an attempt to come to terms with reality. If, for the PCI, the reality to be addressed was strictly contemporary, for Paragone it was not linked to a particular historical time but had a universal appeal.25

1950–58

The August 1950 issue opened with a lucid contribution on the dangers of literature by Carlo Bo, herald of Florentine Hermeticism, who had introduced Garcia Lorca to Fascist Italy but had radically rejected Marxist criticism. In this piece, he reaffirmed literature’s value in the quest for knowledge, in relation to the discovery of the small truths of ordinary life. Bo ranged widely, giving par-ticular attention to France – Gide, Sartre and Malraux – but not conceding real aesthetic agency to political impegno as such. Impegno for him was the search

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for teleological truth motivated by the needs of the particular, and not by the needs of the universal, or political universalism.26 Bo was thus critical of Sartre’s post-war engagement and philosophical novels (Tabanelli 1986). He related the concept of impegno back to that embodied by Gide and the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), which he saw as more thoughtful on the relationship between society and literary experimentation, or to that of Rivière in his quest to focus on the small truths of everyday life rather than the illusion of a total understanding of the real. The concept of impegno had therefore to be tied to the words of the artist trying to make sense, ethically, of his or her reality, while abandoning the idea of literature as detached from the real. In 1951 Adelia Noferi also made some interesting observations on the du Bos–Gide pairing, in relation to the search for truth.27 She asked whether such a search for knowledge ought to be driven by the moral rigour of the former, or the experimentation of the latter.28 This wish to confront the theme of the ‘truth’ of the real and the impegno of the writer recurred frequently, with her as with other writers, but without ever arriving at a hegemonic definition and if anything, in fact, throwing construc-tivist Marxism open to debate: there was no choice to be made between du Bos and Gide because both were possible and necessary. In 1952 Bo also pub-lished another article on Gide, whom he described as a versatile and ambiguous author: loved and rejected, but a figure with a strong link to the French world of the NRF around which the culture of European modernity and of modernism had revolved, and who was far from dogmatic and rigidly moralizing.29

On the same theme, the post-hegemonic shift towards affect, as an emo-tional and not just logical sharing of a world view, was also to be found in Banti’s article on the novel in general and the historical novel in particular. In 1947, Banti herself published a historical novel, Artemisia (daria-Caru' 2003). According to her, neo-realism had been considered a positive phenomenon, which had not destroyed the historical novel; the latter, however, better expressed the universal values of literature, whereas the former described the transitory values of recent events.30 In her defence of the enduring histor-ical novel as against the recent neo-realism – that is, history in a long-term perspective as against the limited range of neo-realism as a poetics of the now – Banti restated the importance of the true and the objective, which should always be the product of a careful process of construction, revolv-ing around a clearly articulated narrative voice (although this statement was meant in humanistic terms). despite the real having played a primary role from the 1930s onwards, what had changed was the immediacy of the perspective (a concept that she was to suggest again in her essay ‘Manzoni e noi’ in 1956 [Paragone no. 78: 33]). In an article entitled ‘Il partito preso di Ponge’, Piero Bigongiari praised the linguistic experiments by the French poet, who had demolished the descriptive requirements of pure realism in order to propose a conceptual work of ideas that would continue to use

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linguistic experimentation as a way of returning to things in their materiality, and not alienation from them (Paragone no. 2: 33).

The need for a non-finalistic sense of history was repeated by Bo in his essay ‘due modi di romanzo, Jacques e Antoine’ (Paragone no. 78: 42–56). As for Banti, for Bo too truth remained an imperative to be sought, but it was the truth of man, as humanity, to consider, rather than that of sheer conquering history. Pietro Citati, in the article that followed, ‘Le figure di cera’, was to return to a similar position in order to question the role of the artist and work of art from a full-blown Marxist perspective (Paragone no. 80: 3–15). In 1954, the year before Metello, Seroni published an introduction to Pavese, in which he restated that in order to understand the Piedmontese writer it was necessary to place him in his historical and geographical context, and encouraged a markedly political interpretation of his work/ideas.

Similar concepts on the relationship between subjectivity and social real-ity resurfaced from the early issues of Paragone onward, including articles dedicated to foreign literature. Francesco Arcangeli, art critic and one of Longhi’s favourite pupils, suggested a possible comparison between Conrad and Faulkner with a moral imperative as its basis. According to Arcangeli, the morality of art was pivotal in describing an objectivity that was to be understood in terms of an elevated subjectivity, which would allow one to ‘join life in its undetermined condition’ (another concept moreover taken up again from the debate on realism in the 1930s; ‘Per un racconto di Conrad’, Paragone no. 4: 3–12). The clash in the field was also between Bassani and Pasolini. The letters in the Vieusseux repository show us an Anna Banti who was keen to collaborate with a Pasolini who was in some ways reluctant.31 The outcome of this exchange was the well-known piece by Pasolini on dialect poets, championing poetry in dialect that was defended by Banti and opposed by ungaretti:32 verses that indirectly detach themselves from a simple imitation of history (or the truth) and turn towards a more subtle rewriting of objective reality.33 Issue 66 of June 1955 marked a staging post on this path between impegno and reality with ‘Il midollo del leone’ as a manifesto and watershed, one could say, for post-hegemonic aesthetics, by a Calvino who was little liked by the staff of Botteghe Oscure.34 In the following issue, Citati responded to Calvino with ‘Fine dello storicismo’, but in this he confused a philosophical position (history/geography/city) with an ideological one. Citati had perhaps not looked with sufficient care how Calvino responded, first in ‘Il midollo’ and later in his contribution to the debate at the July 1956 meeting of the Cultural Commission, to a series of questions on the need for political commitment towards reality. Calvino’s position dismissed a purely rationalistic approach to reality to open up the debate on engagement to be seen for the 1960s to come as a practice linked to affective synergies between cultural and political issues.35

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Where is literature going, 1958?

This question, from Carlo Bo, opened Paragone’s hundredth issue in March 1958 as a new start, despite the fact that from then until the end of 1960 there con-tinued to be very important contributions along the aesthetic and political lines that have been traced.36 Returning to my three initial main questions, some partial conclusions can be drawn.

As far as realism is concerned, Paragone heightened the debate on realism firstly, by linking it to the area of the historical novel and strengthening it on the ‘historicist’ front; secondly, by making space for related arts-based expressions in an interdisciplinary guise; and thirdly, by opening it up to a European dimension, which emphasized realism’s structure, undermining its all-embracing claims, to bring it back – including narratologically – to the world of subjectivity. In brief, with regard to the issue of realism, Paragone proposed a new action that had already been applied to the realism of the 1930s, in presenting, in the manner of Moravia’s Indifferenti, an objectivity that had to pass through the workings of subjectivity.

In addition, Banti’s Florentine review never welcomed the concept of impegno as ideologically characterized action and mental disposition, but it did put for-ward a reflection on the morality of art and on the inter-subjective rather than collective dimension of aesthetics and realism. Compared with its contemporary Botteghe Oscure, for instance, Paragone strengthened an aesthetic structure, not just a political one, following constructivist principles sustained by great intel-lectual sophistication and an attention to reality as subject matter. The shift in the concepts of impegno and realism proposed by the review in the early 1950s is thus in line with the systemic reconfiguration of the PCI, with its 1956 peak, which gradually removed from its infrastructure the strength and determinism that had necessarily been conferred on it until the end of the 1940s.

In summary, while Anna Banti essentially ran the review on the basis of her personal habitus, she simultaneously constructed a direct Florentine and indi-rect national network that was sufficiently varied to be able to take positions in the literary field such that a real strategy based on relational dynamics and sharing could be formulated. The review therefore held a position of indirect rejection or oblique acceptance of the PCI’s guidelines for the cultural sphere. Put another way, in the critical and creative fervour that Paragone embodied in the 1950s, Anna Banti performed a role that was more or less that of a modern literary patron. She knew how to use her own symbolic and cultural capital in terms of transfer with publishers and the intelligentsia, of varying militancy, in order to construct a complex and sophisticated conceptual platform, which not only functioned to support the review as such, but also ensured its ability to contribute both to the present and in the longue durée.

Translated by Stuart Oglethorpe

JOuRNAL OF MOdERN ITALIAN STudIES 93

Notes

1. The letter from which this is taken was later quoted by Banti (2010, 4). Cecchi collaborated sporadically with Paragone: his first contribution was a note on Cesare Pavese and his death, in 1950.

2. Little specific analysis has been written on the review, but for a general picture see Zancan (2005); Antonioni et al. (2004); de Nicola and Zannoni (2003); Bandera (2003); Cavalieri (2003); Ferretti and Guerriero (2011); Gregori (1997); Guarneri (2006); Guida (2004); Spina (2010); and Tortora (2011).

3. In this respect, we shall draw on the documents held at the Fondazione Gramsci in Rome.

4. Explicit reference to this point is made in the ‘documento sul quale si basa discussione della riunione della Commissione Centrale Culturale’ (20–21 November 1954): ‘the struggle to establish the position of realism in contemporary Italian art (cinema, painting, fiction, etc.), a struggle that on the whole has been having remarkable success and which must now be raised to a level of higher quality with an improvement in the position of our artists and critical tools (especially realism)’ (Fondazione Gramsci, Fondo Mosca, Serie Commissioni di Lavoro – Commissione Nazionale Stampa e Propaganda).

5. The party’s position on the ideal role of committed reviews was this: ‘if Società wanted both to improve and clarify its position, and place itself among our publications, it ought to fulfill the task of being a review of high culture, doing this in the way we want without losing contact with current issues, by widening the circle of its contributors among the specialists’ (Fondazione Gramsci, Fondo Mosca, Serie Commissioni di Lavoro – Commissione Nazionale Stampa e Propaganda, 11 February 1952). See also the Commission’s report of 11 February 1953 regarding the cultural and political role of reviews like Società.

6. From 1949 onwards, focused meetings within the Fondazione Gramsci were dedicated to the role of reviews (Vittoria 1992, 16). On this, see also the ‘Relazione sui lavori dell’ufficio nazionale per il lavoro’ (Rome, 14–16 June 1949), Fondazione Gramsci (Fondo Mosca, Serie Commissioni di Lavoro – Commissione Nazionale Stampa e Propaganda, contribution by Manacorda).

7. See for example Carlo Muscetta’s essays on ‘Metello e la crisi del neorealismo’ (1955) and ‘Realismo e controrealismo’ (1958) (in Muscetta 1976) as chronological extremes.

8. Correspondence held in the Mondadori archive in particular reveals: the importance of the Banti–Longhi link as guarantee of prestige and marketability; how the slim sales of Banti’s work were compensated for by her editorial activity with Paragone; and how the review was to be considered an experimental space, but also a space for writers who were to be tried out. On 10 december 1959 Vittorio Sereni wrote to Mondadori that Banti was a writer of nobility, but limited verve, with sales between 1,500 and 2,000 copies (Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori [hereafter FAAM], Segreteria Editoriale Autori Italiani, Anna Banti). Banti’s work with Mondadori was in the first instance as a translator: work on William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair was commissioned in 1943 for a publication in the ‘Romantica’ series, then work on Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (at the suggestion of Emilio Cecchi, with whom she also corresponded on Paragone and Eliot). After the revision of Artemisia, her historical novel, production for Mondadori continued: La monaca di Sciangai, a further collection of stories, revealed the author, busy with drafting the cover material, as shrinking from the self-referential presentation. In a letter to Alberto Mondadori in May

94 F. BILLIANI

1957 she wrote that ‘twenty years of experience have not improved my ability to present myself’ (FAAM, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Banti).

9. FAAM, Segreteria Editoriale Autori Italiani, Anna Banti. Gallo started to work with Mondadori in 1959, overseeing the ‘Narratori italiani’ and ‘Medusa degli italiani’ series, and then, from 1962 to 1965, ‘Il Tornasole’, which he had conceived with Vittorio Sereni.

10. until 1955 the art numbers were priced at 600 lire and the literary numbers at 400 lire, rising to 1,100 and to 500 for the individual issues in 1960.

11. Gallo to Sereni, 23 April 1960 (FAAM, Segreteria Editoriale Autori Italiani, Anna Banti).

12. See, for example, Bassani on ‘Manzoni e Hemingway’, Paragone no. 78: 39–42; Brin’s ‘Appunti’ on the contemporary American and English novel, Paragone no. 42: 82–88 and Paragone no. 94: 101–104; Melchiori, ‘Ortodossia letteraria inglese’, Paragone no. 54: 69–72; d’Agostino’s ‘Faulkner’, Paragone no. 108: 71–79, or Guglielimi’s ‘Il romanzo di Albert Camus’, Paragone no. 116: 28–42.

13. See ‘Promemoria sul lavoro culturale. Invitato Salinari’ (Fondo Mosca Serie direzione Verbali, 20 July 1951. Presenti: Togliatti, Secchia, Negarville, Longo, Berlinguer, Colombi, Noce, d’Onofrio, dozza, Rossio, Roveda, Novella, di Vittorio, Grieco, Spano, Amendola, Terracini, Li Causi. Assenti: Montagnana R, Sereni, Pajetta G.C. 4).

14. Vittoria (1992, 15–22) traces the main lines of this debate and its gradual development from the united front of 1948 until the turning point of the first half of the 1950s.

15. Fondazione Gramsci (Fondo Mosca, Fondo Mosca, Serie Commissioni di Lavoro – Commissione Nazionale Stampa e Propaganda).

16. Fondazione Gramsci (Fondo Mosca, Fondo Mosca, Serie Commissioni di Lavoro – Commissione Nazionale Stampa e Propaganda).

17. See Salinari’s report, ‘Per una cultura libera, moderna, nazionale’, Rome, 3 April 1952 (Fondazione Gramsci, Fondo Mosca, Serie Commissioni di Lavoro – Commissione Nazionale Stampa e Propaganda).

18. Promemoria sul lavoro culturale’, Rome, 11 July 1951, edited by Carlo Salinari (Fondo Mosca, Serie direzione Verbali).

19. See Tarrow (1975, 575) and Tiersky (1974, 194) on the gradual isolation of the party in relation to its base in civil society.

20. See Vittoria (1992, 93–94) on the ‘battle of the book’ and its consequences for the increased literacy and participation of the people in political life.

21. Commissione culturale, luglio 1956, rapporto Mario Alicata’ (Fondazione Gramsci, Fondo Mosca, Serie direzione Verbali). Commissione culturale Nazionale, 23–24 July 1956. Presenti: Alicata, Alatri, Battaglia, Salinari, Manacorda, Negarville, durbè, Jacchia, Pesenti, Gerratana, Trevisani, Rossanda, Calvino, Sansone, Spriano, Spinella, Rago, Natta, Berti, Manacorda M.A., della Volpe, Giolitti, Luporini, Colletti, Zangheri, Alicata (conclusioni).

22. FAAM, Segreteria editoriale autori italiani, Francesco Leonetti. On 31 december 1953, from Rome, Pasolini had explicitly told Leonetti to be patient, because sooner or later he would succeed in getting himself published by Paragone (Pasolini 1986, vol. 1, 626).

23. See the article by Baldini in this issue.24. ‘Prologo’, Paragone no. 2: 4.25. ‘Prologo’, Paragone no. 2: 3.

JOuRNAL OF MOdERN ITALIAN STudIES 95

26. ‘I pericoli della letteratura’, Paragone no. 8: 3–17. Cecchi also returned to the detailed, subjective perspective needed to illuminate history in his article in commemoration of Cesare Pavese in the same issue, pp. 18–22.

27. ‘In margine al diaologo du Bos-Gide’, Paragone no. 14: 37–45, in the same issue as the famous essay by Curtius on Eliot.

28. R. E. Curtius, ‘Charles du Bos’, translated by Adelia Noferi, Paragone no. 42: 19–45.29. Carlo Bo, ‘Riflessioni critiche III – La lezione di Gide’, Paragone no. 18: 41–53.30. Paragone no. 20: 3–7.31. In 1951, Anna Banti had published a chapter of Ragazzi di vita with the title Il

Ferrobedò, and in 1954 La meglio gioventù came out in the series ‘La Biblioteca di Paragone’. Banti to Pasolini, 3 January 1954, Archivio Contemporaneo, Gabinetto G.P. Vieusseux, Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini, IT ACGV PPP.I.65. 14.

32. Banti to Pasolini,19 June 1954, Archivio Contemporaneo, Gabinetto G.P. Vieusseux, Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini, IT ACGV PPP.I.65. 17.

33. Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘I dialettali’, Paragone no. 28: 11–17.34. Paragone no. 66: 31.35. Paragone no. 68: 32–41. See also Calvino’s intervention ‘Riunione Commissione

Culturale PCI’, 23–24 July 1956, 14) (Fondazione Gramsci, Fondo Mosca, Serie direzione Verbali).

36. Paragone no. 100: 3–19. Consider, for example, the debate on the publication of Pasternak.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council uK [grant number H5141700].

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