LIFE and WORKS
POETIC
THEMATIC
Life and Works
Corrado Alvaro was born in St. Luca di Calabria (prov. of Reggio) in 1895, from Antonia Giampaolo, daughter of small owners, and from Anthonio, elementary teacher, from which he received the first education. At nine he was brought to Rome to study at the college of the Jesuits of Mondragone; he attended the last year of the Grammar school in the college of Aurelia (Rome). He achieved the high school licence in 1913 at Catanzaro and in 1919 the degree in Letters at the university of Milan. Fundamental stage of his formation of man and writer was certainly his sharing to the first world war, in which entered with the degree of second-lieutenant of infantry. He was wounded on the Carso to the arms.
While he was composing his first books, La siepe e l’orto and L’uomo nel labirinto, he completed his studies and worked as journalist in the editorial staff of the" Resto del Carlino" directed by M. Missiroli, then in the" Corriere della sera" of L. Albertini and finally in the “Stampa” in Turin. They’re just these years of the war and the postwar period, openly marked by the contact with a different social sphere from that of his infancy, that gives the notes of his formation and that already brings implicit limits and the openings of his mentality and his humanity. While it is being magnified the remembrance of his Calabria earth in his memory, the culture’s dimensions of that years are proposed him with urgency: the relationship between literature and life was offered him, in the authoritative models of Verga on one side, and of D’Annunzio from the other, and he feels and denounces in a first theatre work the contrast that he feels dramatic inside himself, Il paese e la città (1923). But more than models and cultural affairs that he feels to work inside himself, it’s opportune to recognize his wish to fully understand what he considers the substance of our historical age, characterized by the feeling of man’s necessity to uproot from what his world and his life have been for centuries, toward uncertain landfalls of a vaster reality" (Scrivano).
In 1921 he became correspondent from Paris of “Il Mondo” of C. Amendola and the year after he directly collaborated in Italy with his friend Direttore in an antifascist key. But in 1926, having been suppressed the newspaper by the regime, he was invited to go to Paris. He refused putting himself in bump with the regime. Meanwhile he worked as theatre critic of the " Risorgimento " and then as editor of " ' 900", the magazine of Bontempelli, and finally as collaborator of the “Fiera Letteraria” of Fracchia. After 1927 the attacks of the regime recommended him to go to Berlin, where he collaborated to the “Berliner Tageblatt” and, for interest of Romain Rolland, he wrote some articles for the magazine"Europe". He returned from Germany in 1930, year when he published his masterpiece Gente in Aspromonte, that immediately aroused very positive opinions. Previously, he had written Poesie grigioverdi in 1917, in 1920 La siepe e l’orto, in 1926 L’uomo del labirinto; but he had recalled the attention on himself with L’amata alla finestra in 1929. With Gente in Aspromonte he won the prize La Stampa when Curzio Malaparte was its manager, but to this work they were also added La signora dell'Isola and Vent'anni: the jury was also composed of known names as Pirandello and Ojetti. Meanwhile, as correspondent of the " Stampa ", he had to go to Russia, in the Middle East, in Germany, in Turkey, in Switzerland, in France and in Greece. His activity of essayist and journalist starts now. He writes a series of interesting articles, then summarized in volumes: Viaggio in Turchia (1932) and I maestri del diluvio (1935) in which he describes his impressions on Soviet Russia. Neither his impressions on Italy miss, described in Itinerario Italiano (1933), and Terra nuova (1934), first chronicle of the Agro pontino. Meanwhile he didn't give up his activity of narrator, publishing an interesting book on the modern man victim of the dictatorships, L’uomo è forte (1938), that was partly censored. In 1940 the Prize of the Accademia d’Italia was conferred him for the literature. During the fortyfive days of Badoglio’s government he was called to direct" Il popolo di Roma", but the 8th September he had to leave the direction and to shelter in Abruzzo, to Chieti, where he assumed the name of Guido Giorgi to escape the nazi-fascist persecutions. After the liberation of Rome he founded the Sindacato degli Scrittori with Libero Bigiaretti and Francesco Jovine and he formed some years later the Cassa di Assistenza e Previdenza among the Italian writers of which he was Secretary and President. In 1946 he published one of his best books, L’età breve, that gave rise to new interests in the Italian criticism. In 1947 he assumed the direction of the “Risorgimento” in Naples; but, since his attitude of man of left was incompatible with the liberal political inspiration of the newspaper, he preferred to resign the charge of collaborator of the “Corriere della sera”, reserving himself as theatre critic of the “Mondo” of M. Pannunzio. In 1951 he got the prize Strega for his book Quasi una vita. Giornale di uno scrittore (1950). In 1952 he published Il nostro tempo e la speranza. Saggi di vita contemporanea, and in 1955 Settantacinque racconti. He was prepared to complete other novels, when he was struck by an inexorable evil that killed him the 11th of June 1956. On his desire he was buried in the cemetery of Vallerano in province of Viterbo, almost to confirm his need to withdraw from the chaotic life of the city. They were published posthumous: Belmoro (1957), Mastrangelina (1960), Tutto è accaduto (1961). In 1957 a group of friends and of authoritative critics devoted him a series of essays, with the title Omaggio a C. Alvaro: a synthesis of writings of notable value to understand the work and the personality of our poet.
Poetic
Here there are the two poles of Alvaro’s fiction that are the earth and the city only in surface, but that, looking in depth, they are revealed as two ways to conceive the earth, his country, Calabria: the first is real, meat and blood of his historical experience, of his generation; the other is mythical, connected to the cultural suggestions of the decadent symbols. The city is only the negative dialectical term: that has to underline the useless attempt to subtract himself to his own destiny with a purely individual solution of the country youth that, at the price of sacrifices, goes to study or to work, or from the rise to contrast the nostalgia of that and uncorrupted world, to which we can land to find out an equilibrium and a reason for life. Reconstructing in such way Alvaro’s personality we can see with clarity the connection that ties the varied aspects, also contradictory, of his work. It won't be surprised the irreducible cosmopolitan face, but it will be found again , also when he speaks of his earth, in some aesthetical complaisances, in certain abundances of images and colors: in the cinders that Alvaro doesn't succeed to free himself from, even in the more succesfull pages and in his masterpiece Gente in Aspromonte. And the best Alvaro will be found when his Calabria stops to be a romantic and decadent shelter, an oasis of aboriginal innocence, and it becomes the real Calabria with its shepherds and its life of difficulties and poverty (SALINARI).
There is also the lyric aspect of Alvaro narrator’s inspiration, that gains substance of an epic-dramatic sense in the description of the place, of the nature, of the country and of the people that live and suffer: a lyric aspect, that broods inside him an insuperable contrast between the memory’s world, specified in the country of Calabria and in the poor people that has been debated there for centuries in plays of poverty and desperate job and the anxiety of a new world that warns more and more strong the urgency of a better justice , of a renewed society, in which however the fear of a desperate disappointment doesn't disappear. In this sense of explication of his modern poetic, two of his volumes in which the play of contemporary man is synthesized seem us fundamental: L’età breve and Il nostro tempo e la speranza: two volumes in which Alvaro makes the diagnosis of this big alienating crisis and suggests as supreme device the human solidarity and the hope.
Two are the full stops of his formation of writer: Verga or realistic lesson, that he drew from his Calabria, raised in an internal investigation of feelings, nostalgias and memories; and that sense of surrealism and fantastic, that was the direct consequence of his reflection on the time and on the modern civilization.
Thematic
Corrado Alvaro appears above all as the interpreter of the crisis of the man of his time, that general crisis of the historical inheritance’s involution of our Risorgimento. Alvaro has believed for all his life to the Risorgimento’s deal. But, unfortunately, in the bump of the new historical circumstances these ideals were put in crisis. " The first loss came from Fascism, that desregarded that ideals for the triumph of which Alvaro and those of his generation believed to have fought in the Big war for. Then a sense of revolt was formed , that however didn't explode, but that was bitter and smothered, resulting in a state of uneasiness, of amazement, of perplexity; and they were born from that an assiduous withdrawing from the historical reality, a shelter to the comfort of the internal loneliness and an always frustrated anxiety to go out of that exile towards new disappointing discoveries. Alvaro’s work, formed almost all in the fascist twenty years, was substantially born from this state of mind. Opposite to the demagogy of the regime, here is the shelter to his native earth, in the contact with the humbles, with the things and with the feelings preserved in their natural virginity and purity, with the patriarchal world of the infancy, and also with the leading problems, unsolved or unknown, that of the recognition the writer was discovering" (TROMBATORE).
But Alvaro was also a man of European culture in the widest sense of the word, because he nearly knew, as journalist, the culture of almost all the European countries, the political regimes, the liberal and dictatorial customs, the crises of the industrial metropolises’ man, the alienation, the loneliness of the modern man; and in this relationship between infancy’s country and modern alienanting city he foresaw the biggest play of the contemporary man, in which that of his earth Calabria was not but an aspect, perhaps the most desperate.
Alvaro’s characters have always troubled by an incurable internal dissension between the anxiety to live in the city babele and the eternal nostalgia of the idyll of the distant, cruel but beloved country. But also this dissension finds a historical-political justification under the partner-cultural conditions in which Alvaro lived. The first crisis of this writer was the first big world war, that was a cataclysm in which the noble gestures and the sublime sacrifices resulted useless; the war is introduced him as a vast and dramatic theater well more dramatic and larger than the desperate daily job of the Italian people; a kind of more merciless and cruel widening of that brute and disheartening job of his shepherds and of the farmer of his Calabria.
He wrote: “they have invented a war, at the end, for the farmers and the mountaineers, for the constructor of houses, for the miners, the doers of banks, the builders of roads. The war has become a quintessence of the more primitive human work.”
After the war Alvaro was found in front of Fascism. This political regime was introduced to his eyes as the triumph of those social strengths toward which he always had distrust: " the triumph of the rich one on the poor man, of the powerful person on the weak, of the rhetoric on the truth, of the city on the country, of a soldierly arrangement on the individual liberty, of the hypocrisy on the purity. There is, therefore, a dialectical relationship between the circumstances of our history in the first thirty years of the century and the moral and Alvaro’s cultural formation, and I would say of the entire current of Italian intellectuals [...](Salinari)
It concerns an individualistic formation of a radical type, inspired by an ideology of farmer and middle class origin, with an attitude of advanced critics towards Italian society’s structures, but also with the incapability to individualize the real strengths that those structures can modify [...]. But it is a moralistic attitude, that often assumes libertarian forms, that doesn't succeed in overcoming a paternalistic and slightly aesthetic tone towards the Italian popular world. It is not surprising that in this attitude the suggestions and the motives of European Decadentism are easily grafted . Because on one side there is the reality of the country suffering, with its southern regions backwardness, an unfair and cruel relationship between the city and the country, from the other side there is the dreaming of a child world that recalls the memories and the infancy’s innocence of the state of nature that is exalted as calm haven for the anxiety of the man worn out in the cities. The insertion is easy, but it is also artificial, because that Decadentism’s myths had risen on the society’s experience in which the democrat-middle class revolution had been brought to the bottom and in which the phenomens of industrialism, of machines, of urbanism, of the modern alienation of man had assumed monstrous proportions. And they were therefore disproportionate in our Italy, still semifeudal , in which the historically more truth element continued to be that of the declaration and of the push for a further progress.(Salinari)