Villains Between History and Literature The Year in Italy

Two villains, a dictator and a book thief, made their way into popular biographical books published in Italy this past year. They drag along with them a third "villain," the author who dares to cross boundaries between narrative fields: a novelist who writes a history book, and a biographer who leans toward fiction. They represent three very different ways of playing with the fine line between ethics and immorality, legitimacy and illegitimacy, reality and imagination. This dangerous game proves to be a raw topic in Italy, and it is the core of this review essay.¹

The dictator is Benito Mussolini, the protagonist of the biographical novel, M: Il figlio del secolo (2018) by Antonio Scurati. It won the prestigious Premio Strega, and sold more than 120,000 copies. Mussolini is an evil figure of Italian history who established an alliance with Adolf Hitler and drew Italy into the disaster of World War II. This is the first biographical novel dedicated to his life, and the first installation of a planned trilogy.

The book thief is still living: Marino Massimo De Caro, an international criminal who managed to be nominated director of the historical Girolamini Library in Naples, only to rob it of hundreds of its most precious manuscripts and ancient volumes that had been preserved there for centuries. This criminal and forger is the protagonist of the biography written by Sergio Luzzatto, Max Fox o le relazioni pericolose (2019).

The "villains" are the narrators of these two biographical books who have dared to step onto turf that is not their own. Antonio Scurati is a professor of creative writing who more than once has stretched his interest to historical themes, and Sergio Luzzatto is a historian who leaves the safe field of decades past to venture into the slippery roads of the "history of the present."

Fiction and Nonfiction

The debate between these two narrative fields, fiction and nonfiction, is not new in Italian literary history, and the publication of these two books rekindles it. In fact, it is perhaps one of the most interesting and genuinely Italian conundrums. It reached its peak in the nineteenth century, when the father of Italian national literature, Alessandro Manzoni, a devout Catholic and an admirer of the historical novels fashioned by Sir Walter Scott in England, tried to resist the temptation of fiction. Manzoni wrote the seminal historical novel, I promessi sposi. After Italy's unification, this work gave the state its national language and generations of students their compulsory summer readings. However, Manzoni was tormented by the dangers of invention, because for him it reeked of falsity and lies. He had to write an entire essay in self-defense to conciliate the diametrical extremes of truth and fiction: the fiction that enticed him as a novelist, and the truth that handcuffed him as a moralist.

In his apologetic 1845 essay "Del romanzo storico e, in genere, de i componimenti misti di storia e d'invenzione," Manzoni surmised that history and poetry can coexist because they complement each other. History deals with facts, while poetry deals with the internal dimension of individuals, taking account of the emotions that motivate events. The "vero storico" (historical reality) is the job of the historian, while the "vero poetico" (poetic reality) is the job of the poet or novelist. The middle way is the "verosimile": what could have happened. Manzoni formulated an unforgettable metaphor to explain the common ground between historiography and literature. While a history book is a geographical map that highlights rivers, mountain ranges, and main streets, a historical novel is a topographical chart that pinpoints even more details: the minor elevations, the names of small villages, isolated homes, courts, and lanes. This is a great metaphor to describe the recent biographical books on Mussolini and Max Fox. Manzoni ended up abjuring the theoretical weakness that inspired his novel and returning to the orthodoxy of a clear separation between history and invention, refusing any further contamination.

Qualms like this have been put to rest once and for all by the American historical theorist Hayden White. In Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973), White simply accepts the necessary overlap between the two bordering fields of history and literature. He points out that there can be no historiography without textual evidence and without textual communication, and all textual communication employs some figures of poetic discourse. Historical writing is therefore a form of poetic discourse that shares some ground with literature. Peace.

The Novelist and the Historian

Scurati and Luzzatto are children of White's time. They relish the complicated relationship between literature and historiography, and between the history of the past and that of the present. However, they openly admit that these routes are treacherous. Antonio Scurati is a novelist who teaches Creative Writing at Libera Università di Lingue e Comunicazione (IULM) in Milan. He is also the author of two historical novels: Una storia romantica (2007), a love story set during the Italian Risorgimento, and Il tempo migliore della nostra vita (2015), which follows the life of the antifascist intellectual Leone Ginzburg. His last book, M, is a balancing act between historical evidence (a lot) and imagination (a little). The cover shows a large "M" for Mussolini and the distinct definition "novel." A novel? Really? It is difficult to stop doubting this label while reading the 840 pages that comprise this first book of the anticipated trilogy: it is filled with historical documents and direct quotations.

The blurry distinction between history and fiction has an ulterior unwanted effect in this case. Mussolini's dark figure has never been completely demonized and distanced in Italy, as Hitler has been in Germany. While the book description claims that this novel "rifonda il nostro antifascismo" [rekindles our antifascism], critics have doubted the author's intentions.² They have instead emphasized the contrast between the intent of the author—the criticism of a fascist leader by a self-declared antifascist—and the fascination that Benito Mussolini still exercises in the book itself. Exactly because he is the protagonist of a novel, he appeals to the identification of the readers. Some right-wing readers are dangerously latching onto it. The line between history and fiction becomes crucial here, because it needs to separate the real man from the book character. This is particularly hard to do in a novel where the reader is willingly or not sucked into the narration and identification with the protagonist.

The second author, Sergio Luzzatto, is a professor of modern history at the University of Turin, the respected author of several books, including an influential 1998 essay on Mussolini's image, Il corpo del duce: Un cadavere tra immaginazione, storia e memoria. Accustomed to dealing with past history, from which he can safely detach, Luzzatto confesses his uneasiness in treating a living criminal. He accepts the challenge of the "histoire du present," and crosses a prohibited boundary: "Mi attirava la prospettiva di superare quelle colonne d'Ercole della mia vita di zelante, altero, prevedibile studioso di storia: la granitica consegna di stabilire una verità" [I was attracted by the prospect of going beyond the columns of Hercules of my life as a zealous, proud, predictable history scholar, beyond the granite-hard duty of establishing the truth] (33).³ In the first pages, the author appears in the first person and stretches out his hand to create distance from his topic:

Nel mio mestiere di storico, di criminali ne avevo incontrati tanti. Anche troppi e ben peggiori di quello lì […] carnefici di Auschwitz. Da professionista del passato non avevo dovuto incontrarli che in effige, attraverso i documenti di archivio. Adesso era diverso. Quel venerdì 20 novembre 2015, avevo appuntamento con un delinquente in carne ed ossa. Reo confesso. Grande o piccolo, un criminale a tu per tu.

(3)

[In my job as a historian, I have met many criminals. Even too many and much worse that this one (…) Auschwitz perpetrators. As a professional of the science of the past, I have had to meet them only as effigies, through archival documents. It was different this time. That Friday, November 20, 2015, I had an appointment with a criminal in the flesh and blood. A confessed culprit. Big or small, a criminal face to face.]

The mix between history and fiction proves poisonous for the two authors, who risk losing their equipoise in front of the charm of their subjects. Luzzatto is wary of the fascination of a forger, while Scurati is accused of painting an all-too-charming portrait of Mussolini. Two authors, two different ways of dealing with the same dilemma. For both, writing these biographies is a dangerous game, well described by Luzzatto's words: "Un gioco del gatto col topo. Un inseguimento senza fine tra storia e memoria, realtà e finzione, verità e menzogna, onestà e raggiro" [A game of cat and mouse. An infinite chase between history and memory, reality and fiction, truth and lies, honesty and swindle] (4).

The Dictator

The large "M" dominating the cover of Scurati's book may remind readers of M, the killer in Fritz Lang's 1931 film. As imposing as Fascist architecture, the bold letter, occupying the whole space, suggests an arch of triumph for the man who was able to subjugate the country for two decades. Behind this arch of triumph, behind the mountain range, as Manzoni would say, Scurati traces the private landscape of the man Mussolini, a short man, obsessed with his body, who rises to glory, surprising even himself. For example, Scurati shows him in his humanity, the evening of his electoral victory in 1921, in Bologna, left alone, pacing and filling the room with his euphoria. He chases away his many past failures: his political betrayal, his anger as an immigrant in Switzerland, his walks to school as a barefoot child. The author highlights Mussolini's private defeat: "È diventato l'uomo che odiava da ragazzo" [He has become the man he hated as a boy] (399–400).

In moments such as this, the author becomes a novelist and puts flesh on the bare events of history. But all his archival research does not disappear, and the original documents are inserted into the pages of the novel where they stick out like bones: newspaper clippings, letters, and scripts of political speeches. Evidence is woven into the narrative, and verbatim sentences are put into characters' mouths. For example, the chapter on socialist Nicola Bombacci ends with these words: "La rivoluzione finisce nell'ombra di un'ombra" [The revolution ends in the shadow of a shadow] (201). On the next page, the source appears: the words "La rivoluzione diventa un'ombra …" [The revolution becomes a shadow] in Palmiro Togliatti's March 1920 article in the paper L'ordine Nuovo.

This balancing act is admirable, but history wins. As readers of a novel, we do not find a secondary character with whom to identify, a go-between that could make us enter history through the back door. Instead, all the characters are enslaved to historical truth. We meet the man Mussolini in detailed descriptions of rooms, floors, wallpapers, in embarrassing behind-the-scene meetings between his wife and his mistress, in details such as his sick child's bad breath, in minor moments in a foggy Venice, or in the backstreets of Milan and Bologna. But it is always a "documentary novel." As the epigraph states:

Fatti e personaggi di questo romanzo documentario non sono frutto della fantasia dell'autore. Al contrario, ogni singolo accadimento, personaggio, dialogo o discorso qui narrato è storicamente documentato e/o autorevolmente testimoniato da più di una fonte. Detto ciò, resta pur vero che la storia è un'invenzione cui la realtà arreca i propri materiali. Non arbitraria, però.

[The facts and characters of this documentary novel are not the fruit of the author's imagination. On the contrary, every single episode, character, dialogue, or discourse narrated here is historically documented and/or testified to with authority by more than one source. Having said this, it is true that history is an invention to which reality brings its own material. However, not an arbitrary invention.]

Hayden White would love this.

Scurati's game with history inspires a peculiar style. The narration is in the present tense. The chapter titles resemble stage directions, as they offer character names, dates, and places. They are all familiar historical characters: enter (the tightjawed) Benito Mussolini, enter (the faithful) Margherita Sarfatti, enter (the evil) Amerigo Dumini, and so on. Often, the author plays with historical irony, knowing much more than his protagonist. Twice, the narrator winks at the reader at the expense of his characters, by hinting at the horrible fate awaiting them in 1945, the carnage of Piazzale Loreto where Mussolini, his cronies, and his lover Margherita will be hung upside down, defiled, and insulted by the mob. In the first instance, Mussolini walks quickly in the winter night, straight to the place where he will meet his end, literal and metaphorical: "Benito Mussolini si incammina verso piazzale Loreto" [Benito Mussolini takes the road to Piazzale Loreto] (167). The second time, the narrator revels in dramatic irony. The chapter starts in Piazzale Loreto with a corpse that belongs to Ugolini, a policeman lynched by the mob for killing a worker on strike. Mussolini comments on the episode in an article in Il popolo d'italia: "La storia italiana non ha episodi così atroci come quello del piazzale Loreto. Nemmeno le tribù antropofaghe infieriscono sui morti" [Italian history has no atrocities like this one of Piazzale Loreto. Not even the cannibal tribes defile their dead this way]. Here, the narrator cannot repress a comment: "Si ha l'impressione che l'autore dell'articolo veda il cannibalismo all'orizzonte del futuro" [We have the impression that the author of the article sees cannibalism waiting on the future horizon] (214).

M ends with the assassination of the opposition leader Giacomo Matteotti by the secret police in 1924. He is kidnapped in the street and abandoned in the woods. This horror is the formal beginning of the dictatorship: "L'incubo è finito, la fine è iniziata" [The nightmare is over, the end has begun] (801). Scurati dramatizes the most famous of Mussolini's speeches when his challenges to the Parliament are met with silence, and he emerges as a free and uncontested dictator. Those minutes of silence altered the destiny of the whole country, and they are made thick and visible in the text by the change in paragraphs:

È sufficiente che parli uno solo e lui sarebbe perduto. Tra i capi delle opposizioni […] ci sono uomini di coraggio. […] Nessuno si alza.

[It is enough for only one to speak and he would be lost. Among the opposition leaders (…) there are men of courage. (…) Nobody gets up.]

The Book Thief

Marino Massimo De Caro is a larger-than-life forger. He produced hundreds of counterfeit historical books, from astronomical treatises by Galileo to obscure dialogues by Cecco De Ronchitti, printing them in Argentina. He faked his curriculum vita. He never graduated from the University of Siena, but was able to become a professor at the Interamerican Open University of Buenos Aires, and received a laurea ad honorem. Ironically, the book thief was hired to teach intellectual property and print legislation at the University of Verona. He was given the directorship of the prestigious, historical Girolamini Library, which conserves the books donated by the eighteenth-century philosopher Giambattista Vico to the city of Naples. "Come mettere un piromane a capo della Forestale" [It was like making a pyromaniac the head of the park rangers], commented art historian Tomaso Montanari, who exposed De Caro's wrongdoing in 2012 (qtd. in Luzzatto 16). In only a few months the library was half emptied of its treasures, which were packed up in the night and sold to antiquaries and collectors. The thief explains that the books needed a loving home, not a musty closet: "un libro abbandonato in biblioteca è un bambino abbandonato" [a book abandoned in the library is an abandoned child] (72).

The interesting spin that Cesare Luzzatto, as a historian, gives to the biography of Marino Massimo De Caro, or Max Fox (his Skype username inspired by the name of the stockbroker Bud Fox in the movie Wall Street), is positioning him as a representative of a generation, the "Bim Bum Bam" generation, which grew up watching that popular children's show in the 1980s. Entering adulthood between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tangentopoli scandal (a major anti-corruption operation in the early 1990s), this generation grew up amid the "crisis of ideologies" and the glittering consumerism of Milan's jet set, witnessing what Francis Fukuyama defined "the end of history." In the hands of the historian Luzzatto, De Caro becomes the charming and sick inhabitant of a world of relativity and wobbly borders where ethics has no place.

The turning point in this loss of innocence is the 1984 Modigliani joke. According to legend, the sculptor Amedeo Modigliani used to throw into the river sculptures that did not satisfy him or his critics. Inspired by this story, in the summer of 1984 three twenty-year-olds faked the recovery of three busts in the elongated Modigliani style from the waters of Fosso Reale in Livorno. The boys' exploit aimed to challenge the knowledge of experts and expose their incompetence. It spread seeds of doubt, blurred the lines between real and virtual, and tested the power of fake news: "Come l'estemporaneo assaggio di un mondo a venire. Più che un mondo post-moderno o post-ideologico, già un mondo post-verità: il mondo di Marino Massimo De Caro" [It was a surprising taste of the world to come. More than a post-modern or post-ideological world, already a post-truth world, the world of Marino Massimo De Caro] (123). As Luzzatto suggests, the career of De Caro, alias Max Fox, embodied the spirit of the Modigliani escapade.

Conclusion

Scurati and Luzzatto plunge their pens into the brackish waters of fiction and history, rekindling basic questions of truth and honesty. Unapologetically choosing two more or less dangerous scoundrels, both aim to paint a portrait of Italy today. The insolence of a faker and the stamina of a dictator are chosen for specific reasons that have to do with present-day Italy. Sergio Luzzatto sees Max Fox as a symbol of the world of "post-truth and post-honesty," where "la biografia del ladro di biblioteche partecip[a] di un'autobiografia della stazione" [the biography of a library thief becomes the autobiography of a nation] (29); while Antonio Scurati's M is publicized as the story of Mussolini, "il figlio di un secolo che ci ha reso quello che siamo" [the son of the century that has made us what we are]. This is a daunting perspective that leaves us with a question: is Italy best represented by its villains today?