Mario Praz
HEMINGWAY IN ITALY
I must apologize
if,
speaking of the influence of modern
American authors on Italian fiction, I
begin
by quoting myself. The
first article that ever appeared in Italy on Hemingway was published
in the Turin daily paper
La Stampa
in June, 1929, with my signature.
Hemingway's first important book,
In Our Time,
had been published
five years before, in 1924, so the Italian press was not doing badly
this time
in
keeping the public informed of literary events
in
the
Anglo-Saxon world. I won't say that twenty years is the usual time
the light
of
a foreign star takes to travel as far as Italy, but literary
vogues usually did take more than five years to reach us in the
twenties, and usually came via France. There was no question of a
French intermediary this time. The circumstances in which I came
to know of Hemingway rob my "discovery" a little of its glamour.
At that time I was teaching in an English university, and, whenever
I was in London, I used to see T. S. Eliot and the people of the
Criterion,
of which I was a contributor, and I think I owe to Eliot
my first acquaintance with Hemingway's work. My reaction was
immediate, and the article I wrote in
La Stampa,
with the title
«Un giov·ane narratore americano,"
contained a challenge which
was not left unanswered by the Italian literary press. This was what I
said:
Our present period seems to mark the triumph of narrative art. I
do not only speak of France and England, where the traditions of the
novel and the short story can
be
traced back to a distant date, but even
Italy teems with skillful storytellers. Nowadays, nearly everybody in
Italy seems to know how to write a plausible story. It is the gold reserve
of narrative genius accumulated during the last century which allows
so much paper currency in our time. Because, after all, we live on the
crumbs of the banquet of the great French, Russian, and English novelists
of the nineteenth century; and today's stories are well contrived, and
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