BOOKS
311
Before his death, in what was for him typical staff recruitment,
Adriano induced a poet, Paolo Volponi, to come to Ivrea and take charge
of a large part of the company's social assistance program. In that
position, which he still occupies, Volponi wrote
Le Porte dell' Appenino,
which won the 1960
Premio Viareggi'IJ
for poetry. In 1962 he finished
his
first novel,
Memoriale,
now published here in Mrs. Sevareid's trans–
lation. Between the opening words, "My troubles began ..."-which
give the book its English title in the fashion of a Papal Encyclical-and
its
final sentence, "I have realized that ·no one can help me now," is
the unbroken · and unrelieved recitation of one Albino Saluggia who,
having abandoned himself to paranoia, recalls moment by moment the
events and fantasies that separated him from reality and carried him
over the edge into despair and madness.
A soldier and prisoner of war who has been brutally treated without
becoming brutalized, Saluggia returns to his mother and to the New Italy
with a tubercular infection he will not acknowledge. He becomes a
mechanic in a modem typewriter factory near his home in the Canavese.
As the factory discovers he is in need of help, it deploys doctors, nurses,
clinicians, social workers, psychologists, therapists, and even the president
of the company himself in Saluggia's behalf. The company is determined
that its almost limitless facilities of rehabilitation and adjustment shall
not fail. But they do fail. These extravagant resources, put to the service
of Saluggia with the most humane of intentions, do in fact destroy him
as
a rational being.
If
he cannot find love, the boon he is unaware that
he seeks, he wants only to be left alone to work and have work be his
solvent. Nor is there to be found outside the factory what Saluggia needs
for sanity and survival as he pleads wildly with bureaucrats, quacks,
priests,
Com~unists
:and whores for succor.
Without the object of his quest ever made explicit in his story,
Saluggia's deprivation makes this almost the pure novel of "love or death"
-not love as sexual freedom, nor as Christian charity, but love as it
confirms the bond of blood that binds brother to brother. With no such
brotherhood for Saluggia, he was separated from all humanity to his
undoing. Only the most fully committed ideologue will find sectarian
political implications in Saluggia's disintegration. The impermeable
characteristics of society, not a system, are the destroyer.
There is as little overt Freudianism in Volponi :as there is in Simone
Wei!, a comparison Claude Mauriac drew when he reviewed the French
edition of this book. Moravia, who led the chorus of critical praise for
Memoriale
in Italy, found its qualities best communicated by reference
to the young Dostoevsky. That true compassion flows only from insights
