604
PARTISAN REVIEW
even when he was unable-as in
The Conformist-quite
to close with
other levels of their experience. One wonders how he can have been
SO
easily satisfied with these feeble antics in a book which, whatever its
failures, is never otherwise lacking in ingenuity.
Elio Vittorini's early (1935) novel is, by contrast with Moravia's
well-made and somewhat brittle farce, overflowing with rude
life.
The Red Carnation
is a document of adolescence, obviously autobio–
graphical, self-conscious and full of affectations, make-shift devices and
attitude-striking which give it the rough but attractive quality of a boy's
first object made in manual training class. Vittorini has never entirely
lost this awkwardness nor this engaging, open quality-even such vision–
ary work as the knife-grinder episode in
In Sicily
or the powerful
scene with the grandfather and the hungry children at table early
in
The Twilight of the Elephant
is flawed, often sentimental and over–
blown, full of mistakes, but equally full of a kind of fictional vitality
which cannot be valued too highly.
The Red Carnation
is better than merely embarrassing juvenilia.
Two episodes raise it to something near the level of Vittorini's mature
work. One is the three or four day period the young protagonist spends
in the room of the beautiful prostitute Zobeida, a sexual initiation which
Vittorini recounts with honesty and devotion. The other passage is
the wild conversation, which works
as
a counterpoint to this episode,
of the schoolboys in the cafe at the end of the book. They discuss the
nature of love with adult and impressive logic, and set up a code:
"Betrayal as well as prostitution shall be punished by pain of death."
"Dp to how many times shall we allow people to contract a new union?"
"Up to infinity." But "it is a necessary condition for contracting a new
union that five years shall have passed since the dissolution of the
previous one." And
if
someone should do so before? He shall be pun–
ished "by pain of death," of course.
It is a kind of irony too. But the schoolboys' own lives, their fear
of a future in which love will be lacking, or too easily come by, are its
object, and Vittorini was not afraid, even that early, to express it
directly.
Catharine Carver
~
BLOMSHIELD
...
INSTRUCTION
Painting
*
Drawing
*
Private Instruction
*
Small evening groups
for beginners
*
340 E. 63 ST. N.Y. 21, N.Y•
*
TE 8-4149
