HEMINGWAY IN ITALY
-Sono le montagne.
-Si vedono le montagne da Milano?
-Non le vedi? Si vedono.
-Non sapevo che si vedessero.
Thus Hemingway's technique, devised to carry the impression
of actual life by reproducing word by word a dialogue of short sen–
tences, becomes in Vittorini a mannerism, because he is not such an
impas;ive onlooker and listener as Hemingway, but invests everything
with a lyrical mood, or merely with a rhetorical emphasis. The effect
is very curious. Starting from Hemingway, Vittorini comes near cer–
tain effects of Charles Peguy, whose exasperating repetitions give the
impression of a person seized with the symptoms of general paralysis.
Peguy had caught the rhythm of peasants' talk, and tried to couch it
in an artistic pattern; Vittorini does the same with the talk of the
man in the street. But Hemingway never tries to impose a pattern
on his dialogues: hence their impression of freshness, even in mon–
otony. Thus the lesson of simplicity and directness of Hemingway
has been lost on a writer hopelessly predisposed to mannerism. This
does not mean, however, that the lesson is not there. A fake postulates
the genuine thing. Vittorini's tone rings false, affected, childishly
rhetorical, but his model is still recognizable. The whole thing looks
as absurd as an eighteenth-century European imitation of Chinese
art, or as a Japanese picture of Napoleon as a prisoner in St. Helena,
with the English soldiers
in
the garb of samurai. Vittorini's partisans
talk more like the shepherds in Theocritus's
Idyls
than like the men
who fought in Milan against the Germans:
Uomini e no
stands to
For Whom the Bell Tolls
in
the same relation as Callimachus to
Homer,
if
for a moment we could call Hemingway a Homer and
Vittorini a Callimachus.
If
to us the result of Vittorini's effort seems
therefore to be a new preciosity, we may consider with amusement
how far he has traveled from
his
original intention, which must obvi–
ously have been a
proletariani;::ation
of literature, the adaptation of
the technical artistic conscience to the sub-average human conscious–
ness, according to D. S. Savage's definition which I have already
quoted.
The influence of American fiction, particularly of Hemingway,
is also apparent in another Italian war book which has caused a cer–
tain
stir-Giuseppe Berta's
Il cielo
e
rosso.
This novel is the story of
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