UNIVERSITA' DEGLI STUDI ROMA "TOR VERGATA"October 27, 2023
I was not yet 17 when my father died in a car accident in northern California.
That was 60 years ago.
It came at a time when he and I had begun serious father-daughter discussions about life, literature, politics, and other big ideas.
We had always talked a lot about where he and my mother came from, their view of the world, the hateful dictatorship they had left behind and as a child I travelled many times to Italy, and got to know grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins on both sides of my family.
But it’s only recently that I have learned much more about my father’s life –and not just his vast knowledge about literature put also his many political misadventures.
A few years ago, I began diving into his papers – not just his correspondence with colleagues– many of them key literary figures of the 20th century — but also a diary he kept while serving in the US army during World War Two, and a rich trove of letters my parents had exchanged during their six-years-long courtship carried out across the length of Europe.
One of the most surprising new sources of information has been reading the Fascist Secret Police files on my father that I obtained from the National Archives in Rome, and files compiled by the FBI on my father during his first two decades in the United State. I got them through a Freedom of information Act request. Unfortunately, the FBI files are heavily redacted.
Much has been written about my father the scholar of Russian and Comparative Literature and polyglot translator of poetry. His explorations into the great ideas of western thought – decadence, utopia, avant-garde, pastoral, and tragedy.
But what I’d like to do is provide a little background and a few anecdotes about a person who was an ardent militant – both political as well as cultural.
My father was born in Florence in 1907. His father had a desk job at the state railway company and like many Socialists of the time was self-taught, an avid reader and amateur musician. My grandfather encouraged his son’s intellectual curiosity and, with some financial sacrifice, in 1927 he sent 20-year-old Renato to Vienna to learn German.
It was there that Poggioli took part in protest demonstrations against the execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti here in Massachusetts.
While in university, my father started looking beyond his immediate surroundings. With an intense literary curiosity, he reveled in discussions with other young Florentine intellectuals about literature and politics, about European identity and rising authoritarianism.
In 1998, Carlo Bo, the former rector of Urbino University and my father’s classmate, described Poggioli as the “president of an anomalous university, alla boheme, with as many branches as there were cafés in Florence, where, depending on the time of day, writers would gather, some of them already famous, most of them beginners — aspiring writers”.
Every day, Carlo Bo wrote, Poggioli “held lessons on a broad array of humanistic topics. He was an extraordinary reader, and – within the limits set by the Fascist dictatorship — he was informed about everything that arrived in Florence directly or indirectly. When he finished his classes, Renato Poggioli would rush to one of these encounters and inform us scrupulously about his discoveries about what was going on in Europe. And it was there for the first time that we heard the names of all those … poets, as Poggioli …read us his translations”.
Those discoveries were literary movements such as Russian Futurism and French Surrealism, and the poets ranged from Vladimir Majakovsky, Sergei Yesenin and Boris Pasternak to Louis Aragon and Jean Cocteau.
Among his accomplishments, my father taught himself Russian. I remember him telling me that the University of Florence did not offer any Russian courses because Fascism banned the study of the “Bolshevik” language. He must have learned it very well, because I found a 1949 letter from Isaiah Berlin – whose native language was Russian — in which he told Poggioli, “your translation of (Alexander Blok’s) ‘The Twelve’ was the best I had I ever read, and a masterpiece in itself”.
What strikes me in reading my father’s correspondence is how much he knew at a such a young age at a time when access to information was much more limited than today, not just because of technology but also because of ideology.
During Fascism, American Literature was all but banned by the regime and hardly any contemporary literature was translated into Italian. But once outside of Italy, my father made up for lost time. In one letter to my mother n 1935, he mentions some American books he has read — Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt and Main Street and Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones. In another letter he mentions Dos Passos.
I have no idea when or where he learned English.
My parents began their courtship in 1929. They met at the university where my mother was studying Spanish literature.
In 1931 their paths separated as both began lives as expatriates: after teaching Russian literature for a year at his alma mater, my father left Florence for Prague, first, for a year on a scholarship at Charles University, and later to work as Executive Secretary of the Institute of Italian Culture.
My mother went to Madrid to continue her studies and take courses with the philosopher Jose’ Ortega y Gasset.
With their separation, the pace of their correspondence accelerated.
My parents were living in two exciting cities, islands of democracy in an increasingly authoritarian continent. During those inter-war years, the Czechoslovak capital was one of the crossroads of the European avant-garde, a refuge for many intellectual émigrés, its cultural and political scene intense and stimulating.
Spain too was experiencing a heady period of democracy –the civil war and Franco’s dictatorship had yet to come. In one letter in 1933, my mother wrote excitedly to Renato that Spanish women would be voting in elections for the first time. My father often wrote to her about all the interesting literary figures and artists he was meeting — including the surrealist Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico with whom he went bar hopping one night.
My father had often told me about his forays into the theater and his experience as interpreter for Pirandello when the Italian playwright visited shortly after winning the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature. I have hanging on the wall of my office a photograph of Pirandello signed and dedicated to my father.
In Prague, Renato also worked as theater and film critic for an Italian theater magazine, Scenario, and even as an actor himself on the stage of the legendary theater Lanterna Magika.
How it would have pleased him that more than 50 years later, in 1989, I followed his footsteps into the Lanterna Magika, as a reporter observing another playwright, Vaclav Havel, seated on the stage, directing the Velvet Revolution that brought down the Communist regime.
My parents were living in two democratic countries, yet they certainly knew they had to be cautious around Italian diplomatic authorities.
But I now wonder whether they were aware just how intensely they were under Fascist secret police surveillance.
In November 1931, as soon as my father first left for Prague, the Florence police office made an official request to the Foreign Ministry in Rome that the Italian Consulate in Prague keep tabs “on a certain Renato Poggioli”, who, the police office said, has “not shown Fascist sympathies”.
The following February, a Foreign Ministry employee sent the Florence police office a report from an anonymous Italian in Prague that confirmed, “Poggioli had in fact received a scholarship from the Czechoslovak government “, and stated, “he maintains a reserved manner and I have nothing to remark about his political activities”.
But, the note added, “indirectly, I have learned that he does not have Fascist sympathies — not due to any particularly malevolent reason or out of resentment, but simply because this young man — although gifted with a remarkable education and culture — is the typical example of that ‘liberal’ mentality that emerges in every circumstance despite his efforts to hide it”.
While working in Prague, along with theater and movie reviews, my father published numerous essays in Italy on Russian literature, on Kafka and other European writers. But his translation of the satirical dark comedy The Good Soldier Schweik, by the Czech author Jaroslav Hašek was blocked by Fascist censors (the book was not published until 1961). The same happened with his translation of Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March. That book was finally was published in 1953.
When his Prague posting came to an end, my father got a teaching post in Italian literature in Wilno –today’s Vilnius, which was then a part of Poland. And in 1935, my parents finally married.
They had told me that their curiosity about the world inspired them to go out, beyond their borders. They also told me that as critics of the Fascist regime, they believed they would be subject to less scrutiny from Italian authorities if they went abroad.
Little did they know their movements would be so closely monitored.
Their Polish years, 1935-1938, first in Wilno then Warsaw, were marked by the deteriorating situation in Europe.
A file in my father’s dossier dated Rome April 6, 1936, typed on plain paper with no indication of the identity of the author or to whom it was addressed, illustrates the Fascist-racist train of thought process: “In Vilnius…not long ago, A Pole beat up Poggioli because he took him for a Jew. This might suggest that by spending too much time with Jews and in non-national circles” (i.e. not Italian) “he gives the impression of being philosemite or a Jewish internationalist (Sic)”.
My parents had told me several times about the incident that brought their Polish stay to an end and prompted their departure from Europe. In Warsaw, they had met Eva Kuhn Amendola, the Polish-born widow of the Italian antifascist politician Giovanni Amendola, who died after being beaten up by Mussolini’s thugs in 1926 in the Tuscan town of Montecatini. Given that background, my parents had felt free to speak openly with the widow about their opposition to Mussolini.
What they did not know at that time was that after her husband’s murder, Kuhn Amendola had become closely linked to the Futurist and pro-Fascist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and that she had given her wedding ring to the Italian state after Mussolini had asked Italian women to sacrifice their gold rings “for the glory of the Nation”.
Eva Kuhn Amendola also wanted my father’s position as Lecturer in Italian studies in Warsaw, and so, my parents had told me, she reported Poggioli to Italian authorities as an opponent of the regime.
A Fascist Secret Police file dated April 6, 1936 confirms what my parents had told me in the smallest details.
An anonymous spy wrote:
“Eva Amendola has written to the Foreign Ministry numerous times to report that Prof. Poggioli carries out antifascist propaganda and has ties to Russian Bolsheviks”.
The spy added, “up to now her reports were not given much consideration because she had said repeatedly that she wants to replace Poggioli in his teaching post”. However, the anonymous author pointed out, “her accusations against Poggioli are very detailed, including the charge that he does not distribute the propaganda material on the Italo-Ethiopian war that was made available to him and that he maintains constant ties with Jewish members of the FIWO Institute (A Jewish study center in Vilnius with clearly racist and antifascist leanings”. In addition, the Fascist spy continued, “Poggioli’s wife also carries out propaganda against us”, while Eva Amendola “affirms that after her husband’s death she withdrew from political activity and, on the contrary, has always carried out excellent and sincere propaganda abroad on our behalf ”.
My parents told me that some time in 1937 an acquaintance, the correspondent of the regime-run Italian News agency Stefani, tipped them off that Kuhn Amendola had reported them to Fascist authorities.
The message was clear, and they began making plans to get out of Europe.
Argentina, where no visa was required, was a possibility. Otherwise, the US, where my mother’s sister, a militant anti-fascist, had already found refuge. In September 1938, one year before Europe erupted in war, my parents set sail from Naples on board the Rex, the ocean liner glorified years later in Fellini’s movie Amarcord.
To pay for their passage, my father translated, in a furious burst of
energy, a Polish novel into Italian in just three weeks.
After a year-long teaching contract at Smith, in September 1939 my father was at his new post, teaching Romance Languages and Literatures at Brown.
Three weeks after the Third Reich invaded Poland, my father joined forces with several other Italian antifascist émigrés in the US -who were not aligned with the Communist Party — and helped draft the founding charter of The Mazzini Society.
It soon had 50 branches across the US and became the largest antifascist organization outside Italy. Its goals included persuading US authorities to identify Italians and Italian-Americans in the US working on behalf of the Fascist government and to counter the propaganda efforts of Fascist-dominated consular officials over the many Italian-American communities.
And once again, Poggioli became the object of attention of Fascist spies.
In a dispatch on my father’s political activity from the Italian Embassy in Washington to the Foreign Ministry in Rome dated August 21, 1941, an informer disdainfully “underscores the Jewish nature of the Mazzini Society”. Other dispatches lamented the media coverage given the Mazzini Society by “Anglo-Jewish dailies such as P.M. and The New York Post”, as well as financial support to The Mazzini Society from the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union.
After Pearl Harbor and US entry in the war, the US government classified my father a citizen of an enemy state. He was given a choice – either go into an internment camp for enemy aliens or be drafted. The choice was obvious- even as he had already served as required in the Italian army — and Poggioli set off for basic training, in Texas, which he described in detail in his wartime diary. Afterwards, the Army posted him to a Military Intelligence unit in New York City, where he worked with a group writing an Anglo-Italian Military Dictionary in preparation of the Allied landing in Sicily.
My father kept a wartime diary of his US Army service that I found among his papers. It contains many critical analyses not just of the Allies’ plans for post-war Europe, but also of the widespread racism and prejudice he observed in American society.
On Christmas Day, 1943, he wrote:
“In America, despite all the talk about a melting pot, nationalities live in sealed compartments. I had to tell off a Yankee who called a poor Italian American a dago. Those who are not anti-Semitic are very rare exceptions. They tell me that in another platoon there’s a soldier from a Southern state who constantly brags about having taken part in the lynching of a”… and here in his diary he wrote the “n” word.
And again, my father’s political passion caused him problems. While serving in the US army, he officially applied for US citizenship. But he was turned down without explanation. After pressing his captain, he was told he had been turned down following an FBI inquiry that had found his membership in The Mazzini Society suspect. The Captain told Private Poggioli, “you are far from being considered a political enemy”, nevertheless “you cannot be considered — especially in foreign policy — a political friend”.
In a letter addressed to his military superiors, my father wrote “my membership and sponsorship in organizations fostering free European movements, even my activity in the harmless Mazzini Society, and my public statements about foreign policy issues, were cited as reasons for the refusal. In other words, the FBI investigation and the military authorities’ decision tend to prove that an Italian antifascist and a European liberal cannot enjoy the rights of an American citizen, while he nevertheless has the duty to serve as an American soldier”. From the files I obtained from the FBI, despite many entire paragraphs are blacked out, I was able to piece together that someone Renato knew in the army had informed on his “suspect ideas”.
After the war, my father returned to Brown and in 1947, he accepted a joint appointment here at Harvard in Comparative and Slavic Literature.
I have since learned that Vladimir Nabokov was also vying for the post of professor of Slavic Literature.
With the war over in Europe, my father wanted to resume his literary activities in Italy. He and his close friend, the Milan-based writer Luigi Berti,
founded a literary journal, Inventario, whose aim was to introduce Italians, after two decades of Fascist censorship, to some of the best American and European writing.
My father was convinced that the cosmopolitan world of letters could help regenerate the tainted world of Italian politics.
Funding was a problem, and the early issues of the journal, published in Florence right after the war, were printed on poor-quality paper. Nevertheless, my father succeeded in getting support from an enviable list of literary stars:
Inventario’s international board of directors included, at different times, Nabokov, Robert Lowell, T.S. Eliot, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn
Warren. The journal ran contributions from writers such as Thomas
Mann, Paul Éluard, Saint-John Perse, and Pedro Salinas. And from my father’s correspondence, I learned that a wide array of others were eager to participate:
Isaiah Berlin, William Carlos Williams, John Crowe Ransom,
Richard Wilbur, Delmore Schwartz, Archibald MacLeish, May
Sarton, Wallace Stevens, and Lionel Trilling, to name but a few.
Among my father’s papers I found Landfall, a handwritten poem sent by W.H.Auden. It was a seminal composition that later became part of The Age of Anxiety, one of the most powerful poems of the mid-20th century
While Inventario is hailed today in Italy as a cultural milestone whose aim was to de-provincialize the literary world after two decades of Fascist censorship, at the time it made little impact.
In fact, after the fall of Fascism, anti-Fascist expatriates like my father had not predicted that a large number of Italian intellectuals would speedily embrace Communism.
While the Cold War kept the PCI – partito comunista Italiano –firmly on the political fringe, the party soon began to wield a very strong influence over Italian arts and culture.
In 1949, a book Renato had been working on for a long time was about to be published in Italy by the prestigious Einaudi Publishing company.
It was a collection of translations and literary criticism of modern Russian poets, with the title Il Fiore del Verso Russo – The Flower – or blossom — of Russian Poetry. Fearful of the wrath of the Italian Communist party, publisher Giulio Einaudi insisted on the inclusion of a counter-introduction in which he distanced himself from my father’s editorial judgements. And, when presenting a copy to Communist Party chief Palmiro Togliatti, Carlo Muscetta, an editor at Einaudi, dubbed it the “poisoned flower”.
What did Communists find so scandalous in my father’s book? Perhaps these words in my father’s introduction: the Soviet revolution, “among other things, marked, with the decadence of art, the twilight of poetry” and of literature, which was made subservient by mediocre writers to “the need to agitate, to make propaganda of the party, the regime, the State”.
My father’s book was troublesome for the party because it included poets Stalin had persecuted as post-revolutionary “enemies of the state” — such as “Alexander Blok, who died of a broken heart, Gumilev was executed, Yesenin and Majakovsky committed suicide, Pasternak was persecuted, Anna Achmatova was banned, Osip Mandelstam died in the gulag”.
The “damned” Poggioli Affair reached a climax in 1950 when the same publisher suddenly announced he would no longer print my father’s manuscript, La Teoria dell’Arte dell’Avvanguardia (The Theory of the Avant Guarde), as had been agreed previously.
The dominant Communist cultural ideology held that the artistic avant garde was a product of bourgeois decadence and that the only real avant guarde was the working class. Einaudi’s leading editor, the writer Cesare Pavese, accused my father of ignoring the contemporary Italian situation: “today, in Italy your refusal to be either red (Communist) or black (Fascist), means to be suspended between the sky and earth, neither in nor out, neither clothed nor naked…”, he wrote in a letter.
My father’s reply to Pavese was equally tough. He declared his absolute independence from both the right and the Communist left, saying that if this were not possible in Italy or in Europe, he would have more reasons to continue to observe from the other shore of the ocean. Years later, in 1960, while we were living in Rome during my father’s sabbatical year, the writer Italo Calvino, who had taken over from Pavese at Einaudi, came to visit one afternoon to apologize to my father for the publishing company’s ideological rigidity.
(In any case, despite the Communist intelligentsia’s fierce denunciations, Il Fiore del VersoRusso was reprinted in Italy four times over five decades)
And La Teoria dell’Arte dell’Avvanguardiawas published by another company in 1962. It has been translated into many languages, including Japanese. Harvard University Press continues to publish the English translation in paperback, The Theory of the Avant-Guarde, and it’s on the reading list of several courses in American academia.
My last anecdote about my father took place here at Harvard:
While Poggioli was being treated as a pariah in Italy’s Communist-leaning literary world, in the US, McCarthism was at its peak and the academic world was enflamed by the debate whether university professors should be obliged to sign a loyalty oath… that they had never been members of the Communist Party.
During a Harvard faculty meeting my father caused quite a stir with a daring and colorful remark. McGeorge Bundy, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, said signing a loyalty oath was just like licking a stamp.
As Adam Ulam, the late director of the Russian Research Center described it to me years later, my father jumped in, saying “let me point out, you begin licking stamps, and you end up licking something else”. My father, though, had told me chuckling, that the word he had used was very explicit and totally inappropriate in the academic environment of the time. And that words starts with an “a”…
So, wrapping this up, the world of my parents—the world that I grew up in — here in Cambridge was filled with European expatriates, all of then polyglot, people who had fled places like Franco’s Spain and Hitler’s Germany as well as Fascist Italy, and had found refuge here from persecution and repression. They were citizens of the world with a passion for democracy and freedom and love of political debate. As a teenager, I was enthralled by those intellectuals who had fled totalitarian Europe.
Many years later, covering the collapse of Communism, I found the name for what I had witnessed in my parents’ living room: the last remnants of a world which no longer existed in Europe, wiped out by the Holocaust and Stalinism.
I had experienced what I call Mitteleuropa on the Charles.
At the same time, my parents embraced that key American passion of hitting the road – I spent several summers in the back seat as we drove across the US Midwest to California or to the South-West and through much of Mexico. Those road trips were as much a part of my education as what I studied in school and college. I doubt my classmates had seen as much of the US as I had by the time I turned 16 and it was those cross-country journeys, with my European-born parents behind the wheel, that allowed me to get out of the strict confines of my hometown at an early age and see and experience a vast and diverse expanse of America and Americans.
Including the blatant manifestations of racism and discrimination that I saw up close in the segregated south of the 1950’s.
My father and mother’s journey transcended borders – cultural as well as political and geographical. That was the Poggioli legacy – that it’s possible to belong to many different worlds, to be part of societies whose cultures contrasted with each other and that a constant switching from one language to another can be an enrichment, not a state alienation.
My father, the non-aligned intellectual, is only now being discovered by a new generation of young Italian scholars who are organizing a two-day conference at Rome’s Biblioteca Nazionale – the national library – in early December.