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Pasolini Requiem
By Barth David Schwartz The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2017 Barth David Schwartz
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-33502-5
CHAPTER 1
The White Boats of Waxholm
Yes, certainly it is worthwhile knowing poets, but it is not really so indispensable, otherwise how could one ever know those already dead?
· PIER PAOLO PASOLINI
He could not have chosen a better time for the journey north. Only a few weeks before, he had wrapped Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom; only its dubbing into French, the language of its coproducers, needed his supervision before a winter release. He had assembled his recent articles from the daily Corriere della sera and its sister publication Il mondo: his polemics on politics and sex, against television and compulsory schools — scandalous essays that had made him famous throughout Europe and even more than ever, if that were possible, the talk of Italians. His pulpit had been no less than the front page of the Corriere, the semiofficial journal of Italy's ruling class, with a national readership like no other granted an intellectual in living memory. His position was unique: he had power without office, influence without privilege, notoriety in his own country, and respect abroad. Livio Garzanti in Milan, his publisher of twenty years, would soon issue the articles as a book, and then the next inevitable round of outrage and response, of proclamations and rebuttals, would begin.
Pier Paolo Pasolini flew to Stockholm on Monday 27 October 1975. He was welcomed by an attentive public, one perhaps even too respectful. He was their guest of honor, even if they knew only the films (not the poetry, the novels, the criticism) and understood only vaguely what an extraordinary place he held on the Italian scene. His hostess was Lucia Pallavicini, chief of the Italian Cultural Institute in Sweden since 1971, a veteran diplomat. A blond, fine-boned woman who spoke with the elegant French r of the Italian upper class, she was well connected in Stockholm's tight artistic circles. Swedish journalists and her colleagues from other foreign cultural foundations could count on late-night suppers in her Italian Institute of Culture apartment (fig. 1).
Pallavicini believed Pasolini, her latest visitor, to be the sole Italian candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature after the poet Eugenio Montale, who had won just that year. But Pasolini was altogether another type, nothing like Montale, who was an ever-so-bourgeois Milanese — cosmopolitan, double-breasted, ironic, and absolutely comme il faut. Montale and Pasolini were bitter personal enemies, though respectful about each other's work in public. Pallavicini's intention was, in a dignified manner, to expose and promote Pasolini in the right circles: to key literati in the orbit of the Swedish Academy, those critics whose opinions counted in that most intimate of worldly yet provincial capitals. The Nobel Prize may be of the entire world, but it is also only a decision made by a few men meeting in a room in one city.
A public program was needed, several days of events. The cinemateque — the Svenska Filminstitutet — had collected Pasolini's films from the first, starting with Accattone (1961). They had already planned a retrospective of his film work to stretch over two months: ten prints from their own archives, spanning his output up to the last released film, Arabian Nights (1974). It was arranged that the director would attend a screening on 29 October and answer questions afterward about his still mysterious latest film, Salò. The international gossip was that it was deeply shocking, a movie to walk out of.
A coincidence made the schedule right: Pasolini's Le ceneri di Gramsci (Gramsci's Ashes), a book by now part of what Italians call "the canon" of their poetry, had never been translated into Swedish. Somehow, the big Stockholm publishers had dropped the cross-culture ball, "as so often the case, asleep," at least in the opinion of René Coeckelbergh, a Swede of Flemish origin whose new, tiny publishing firm saw its chance to include Pasolini in a line of eight foreign poets, brought for the first time into Swedish (fig. 2). He had bought the translation rights for a pittance and ordered a print run of two thousand copies, something reasonable — even large — in a country of eight million people.
Plans were settled: Le ceneri's Swedish publication date was set to coincide with the days of the visit. Pallavicini handled the mailing of announcements and sold tickets. Coeckelbergh's role was to take the poet-director-journalist-critic to lunch. Pallavicini would deliver the appropriate literary critics. The Italian Foreign Ministry would pay for Pasolini's plane ticket to and from Rome and the guest would stay, as was normal, in the Italian Institute's visitors' apartment. Pallavicini met her honored visitor at Arlanda Airport, but he did not come alone, as invited. He brought along the one person whom, after his mother, he loved most in the world: the actor Giovanni ("Ninetto") Davoli. Italians understood that the lovers had long ago become father and son, and that while Ninetto had reciprocated with a fiercely beautiful devotion — the sort Swedes call "characteristically Mediterranean" — it was not sexual rapture.
For the first night in Stockholm, Pallavicini had arranged an interview for Ulla-Britt Edberg, a cultural affairs reporter and theater critic at the conservative daily Svenska Dagbladet. She sat on a sofa in Pallavicini's salon, sipping a glass of wine (Pasolini only took fruit juice), and confronted a man whose face she would recall more than a dozen years later, even after hundreds of other interviews:
I can usually open people. But he was like a rock, not coming to you at all, no gestures. And those eyes — they were like, well, black marbles, but soft behind the tinted lenses. He never seemed bored. He made it clear that he was not unwilling to answer questions. He was just deeply inside himself.
Edberg noticed his thin lips, and how even at fifty-three he had no "middle-aged softness" about him, "as even Ingmar Bergman now had"; he was "muscular, tight and hard; his body was like a circus tightrope walker."
The results of their brief talk appeared in print the next morning with a photograph of him standing closed-faced in front of the Royal Dramatic Theater near his hotel, wearing a coat with a shearling collar and the striped sport shirt in which he was to die. Under the headline "Enormous and Turmoiled Rings Emanate from Pasolini," Edberg wrote: "When he writes [essays] about politics, as recently in Italian newspapers, they just boil. He makes you worried." Pasolini told Edberg — as he had been telling journalists for years — that he wanted to live in Morocco, not Italy, where "we live in a tragic situation." He said crime was everywhere, worse than ever before, something "pitiless and without rules." The ruling Christian Democrats, he told her, ought to be "put on trial"; he explained that while other countries — presumably including Sweden — had some "antidote" to the "violence" of industrialization and American-style consumerism, Italy was "defenseless," a victim of "what he did not hesitate to call cultural genocide." "As for myself," Pasolini said without smiling, "I've become more humoristic, which means I have become more bourgeois."
The interview done, Edberg stayed to dinner at Pallavicini's renowned table. Other guests included the Filminstitutet's head, Anna-Lena Wibom; the literary critic Bengt Holmquist, writing in the morning paper Dagens Nyheter; Pallavicini's translator for public events, Tom Johannesson; and Ninetto. The Italian Institute's official guest quarters were within the complex, close enough to the director's apartment for easy entertaining; fully furnished, but with their own entrance. After one night there with Ninetto, Pasolini asked to be provided with a hotel room. Pallavicini was not surprised; Pasolini was known for his nocturnal adventures and had described them explicitly in his poetry. Pallavicini thought he just wanted more independence, or that perhaps Ninetto did, and she was happy to provide it.
Pasolini signed the register of the Hotel Diplomat on 28 October, describing his profession as écrivain (in French, writer), not cinéaste (filmmaker); his birth place and date, Bologna, 5 March 1922; and his current address, via Eufrate 9, Rome. Ninetto signed as attore (actor), born in Rome, 11 October 1948; current address, via Titto Lagigno 173, Rome. They shared room 301 for 238 Swedish crowns per night.
The evening of 28 October at Stockholm's Italian Cultural Institute was for Pasolini the writer. Pallavicini piled his books on a table near a microphone. Before a crowd of more than five hundred, an actor read from the new Swedish translation of Le ceneri di Gramsci and Pasolini answered questions from the floor. Pallavicini recalled:
He was incredibly sweet, you really noticed that. If a question was banal, even stupid, he tried to understand what the speaker was driving at. When they were courteous, he was courteous; when someone was a bit provocative, he was also courteous. I've participated in hundreds of such meetings in my life, and he was one of the very best ever. His incredible mitezza [gentleness, or meekness] struck you in his manner: so patient, so in contrast to the violence in his films, like the one that he was then working on, going to Paris from Stockholm to dub. It went very well, his visit — a real success.
Pasolini did not mention Vas (working title Petrolio), the novel-in-progress he had been writing for several years — one that, he told a few friends, would have "everything" in it and would take five more years to complete. No one save Alberto Moravia had read it, but word was that Pasolini had reached six hundred pages already and gone into detail about his intimate life, the life about which every Italian had an opinion. But Pasolini told the Swedish translator of Le ceneri (who later wrote about it in the Göteborgsposten) that he was working "on a novel about consumer society, which in the end sells people and consumes itself. ... It is one, or more, very political novels." When asked, "Will it be an Italian tragedy?" Pasolini answered, softly, "... It will probably be for my heirs to take care of that." And the Swedish translator wrote: "That is one of the few times I see him smile."
The next night was for Pasolini the filmmaker. Wibom's Filminstitutet had borrowed a print of his 1966 Uccellacci e uccellini (The Hawks and the Sparrows; rendered "Big Birds and Little Birds" in Swedish — Snalla faglar och stygga) from the film archives in Helsinki. It would be shown at seven, and a screening of Edipo re (Oedipus Rex; in Swedish, Kung Oidipus), made a year later, would follow at nine. One film of ideology and one of mythology; then questions and answers.
The previous afternoon, 28 October, Pasolini and Ninetto had arrived at the Filminstitutet, punctual as always. They lunched with Wibom and Bengt Holmquist, who was then writing frequently on Italian literature. Holmquist and Pasolini exchanged addresses, and the writer asked the critic to call the next time he came to Rome. Instead, Holmquist would write an obituary in the morning Dagens Nyheter of 3 November:
His was a talent of seldom-seen breadth. ... To get the equivalent, you would have to have Sartre, Böll, Bergman in the same person. To see him in action was an event in itself, how nicely he turned all kinds of questions into something meaningful, how simply and clearly he would clarify the most complicated phenomena. That there was concern under the surface was easy to see, but it didn't seem to be about his personal life or conflicts. His concern for what was happening in Italy was so much stronger. Not that he had given up hope, but for a long time he had seen the evil signs growing.
Before an early dinner in the Filminstitutet's restaurant, the no-nonsense Wibom gave her guests what she calls "a detailed and lengthy tour." During the tour, Pasolini discussed with her the disappearance of traditional cultures: how everything was getting to be the same everywhere, homogenized and evened out. Not one to shrink from animated differences of opinion, Wibom explained how it seemed to her that one could go "a few feet off any main street in Italy and find special things, dialects," and how remarkable it was that after three centuries of mass tourism, the Italians had kept their distinct identity and had changed so little. Wibom wrote later, "He had his own opinions, of course, and I never imagined I would do anything to change them, not that I meant to."
The 29 October screenings went smoothly, with the audience plugged into earphones that provided near-simultaneous translation. Artist Claës Backström thought how "innocent" the questions were, and how disappointingly mild-mannered were the gathered Swedish intellectuals of post-1968, "ignorant of the world, reading about revolution as though something far away, abstract, just an idea." The screenings finished, Pasolini went to the front of the room and invited questions. Surprisingly, they stayed mostly on the level of technique. He answered fully, in rounded responses that were, if not rehearsed, then easy expressions of thoughts he had had before. Occasionally he turned to Tom Johannesson and said, "You know what I would say; go ahead and answer."
Pasolini could hardly explain, then and there, that the subproletariat of the Roman borgate (the working-class suburbs of Rome) shared with the poor at the edges of Europe, and in all of Asia and Africa, a vitality rooted in not obeying the rules; that their living by instinct and impulse — which he so loved — was now being effectively tamed once and for all by what he called the "moralism" of "new capitalism's false tolerance." And that this was the same set of life-denying strictures that condemned him to "marginality" (regardless of "success") because of what he believed to be innate differentness. In another interview on 30 October, he remarked that "the intellectual's role is not to have any role — to be the living contradiction of every role" (fig. 3).
Everyone present seemed satisfied with the question-and-answer session. At one point, in the course of answering an inquiry about public reaction to his newspaper articles against abortion and for a ban on compulsory secondary education and television, he said — matter-of-factly and almost in passing — that he expected to be killed, murdered. This elicited no follow-up from the crowd, no comments.
There had been talk of a gathering at Pallavicini's home after the screenings, but such plans were suddenly called off. It seemed that Pasolini and Ninetto had argued and agreed to go their separate ways. Pasolini asked Wibom to show him some nightlife, some of the then-famous wild Swedish sex clubs, and she was happy enough to do so, but pleased to have along two Frenchmen from that country's cultural institute ("They always invite each other, these institutes"), one of whom would drive. Ninetto went elsewhere.
This tour of Stockholm-by-night seems to have been the only guidance Pasolini sought from his hosts. Every time Johannesson picked him up at the hotel, Pasolini never mentioned where he had been in his free time; the discreet interpreter never inquired. The honored guest did not seem to want to know about shopping, museums, and the like. While he asked about Swedish politics, he was happy to leave matters at the level of light conversation. If he had wanted to learn about cruising in Humlegarden (a park frequented by gay men), the gay bar called the Piper Club, theporn theaters, and the Arab hustlers around the intersection of the streets Klara Norra Kyrkogata and Gamla Brogatan, he could have found out easily enough and without comment. "We assumed he was a skilled hunter," Coeckelbergh said, "and left it at that."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Pasolini Requiem by Barth David Schwartz. Copyright © 2017 Barth David Schwartz. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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