LIFE
POETIC
THEMATIC
Life
Vasco Pratolini was born in Florence the 19 th October 1913 in a humble Florentine family that lived in a typical city district, that has often be protagonist of his novels. His father's departure for the war and the death of his mother forced him from childhood to live with his grandparents and despite the return of his father after the war, the family was not recomposed because his father was remarried and the young Vasco did not fit in the new family and preferred to live alone and to work in a typography.
He alternated the job with the study of Dante, Dickens, Manzoni, under the guide of Ottone Rosai, of Bilenchi and of other Florentine friends. Then he direted his studies toward Cardarelli and Campana and toward the prose of art. But the excessive job and the immoderate life ruined his precarious health; doctors diagnosed his illness as pulmonary tuberculosis and he was forced to be hospitalized (the experience done in the conservatories is found in his work Taccuino del Convalescente). In 1936, after his recovery he came back to work and Vittorini gave him the possibility to collaborate with various magazines and stimulated him in having a greater political engagement.
In 1941 he published Il tappeto verde, and in 1942 his second work, Via de’ Magazzini in which he got a more solid narrative homogeneity.
After Amiche the antifascist ideology and the gaining awareness in the partisan struggle matured in Il Quartiere: after all the hardness of his experience of life contributed to the formation of popular writer.
From the publication of Cronache di poveri amanti and Cronaca familiare, two novels that imposed him to the public and the criticism, he has also prevailed several literary prizes, winning the Viareggio Prize, the Feltrinelli prize of the academy of Italy and the Marzotto prize. He is among the Italian writers more translated abroad.
Hedied in Rome in 1991.
Except from the juvenile works Magazzini and Le amiche, gathered in 1956 in the Diario Sentimentale, the book that represents a fundamental moment of his career is Il Quartiere (1944), properly considered one of the novels that has given the start to the Realism. The dramatic experience of the Resistance and the contact with the reality of the war, of the poverty and of the starvation gave a more thoughtful sense of the life to his Florentine boys who in the novel are put in front of the choice of their future. In the years when Pratolini wrote his first novel, the antifascismo and the partisan struggle were identified with the Communism, that continued our Risorgimento fighting against Germans and fascist. Pratolini is a singer of the juvenile vitality more than the scientific communism that wanted him to give a strongest assignment of his possibilities. Il Quartiere was the song of our political liberation, the song of the taking of political conscience of the young people in front of their responsibility.
The political awareness and the demand of a social revolution are born on the base of a collective solidarity, on a feeling of friendship and trust of the man on the man. And the narrative theme of the passage from the infancy to the maturity is also linked to the formation of a political and social awareness in everyone of them, either fascist as Charles or antifascist as George. In this sense Il Quartiere starts to focus the main problems of the Cronaca di poveri amanti and of Cronaca familiare (1947). In the verism of the nineteenth century the description of the poverty brought to the desperation and the rebellion of the defeated, while in the literature as the one of De Amicis happiness could also be reached in the state of poverty; Pratolini is different from both because his characters, even under the most terrible conditions of poverty and exploitation, have the ability to understand that the collective solidarity it is the base of their hope in a better life. Salinari says that "The Pratolini’s optimism coincides with the optimism of the Italian popular movement after its liberation: and to confuse this optimism with the idyll or the aspiration to the peace of class, means just not to know how to estimate the exact historical genesis" (quotation taken from Giacalone,ibidem,pag.905). In fact the heroic vitalism of the popular masses in which Pratolini believed was identified, at least from 1944 to 1947, with the Communist Party.
The characters of Cronache di poveri amanti are of 1922, but actually they feel and they operate with the trust and with the triumph of workers that Pratolini had in 1946; they are real in a pratolinian way of the life after the liberation of the Fascism, but in an objective historical way they are unreal and fantastic creatures. And it is precisely this desire to stay out of the reality that has allowed Pratolini to maintain intact the vital position of his popolanis, to represent their human problems, their confessions, their necessities, their aspirations, This is the reason of the optimism that circulates among the pages of the novel.
In Pratolini the social aspect cannot be separated from the elegiac aspect: in fact the Cronaca familiare is written contemporarily to Cronache di poveri amanti and their plots are intersected, the social bases are the same, only in the first one prevails the elegiac accent. The author "recapitulates in a long dialogue with the died brother the painful sense of his memory, he searches in his family history the origin and the necessity of his lyric feeling" (Pampaloni). after all the Pratolini’s premise is very significative:
This book is not a work of imagination. It is an interview of the author with his dead brother. The author looked for consolation and nothing else. He has the remorse to have just realized the spirituality of his brother, but it is too late. Therefore, these pages are offered as a sterile expiation.
But understanding the spirituality of the dead brother also involved an investigation of social order, it involved the memory of the poverty in which they were born, the necessity to deliver the smallest to a bourgeois gentleman, that would have made him extraneous to his brother and his relatives.
The composition Un eroe del nostro tempo is dated 1947, when Pratolini found around himself a political situation more involved than he had thought during the Resistance and he was forced to give ideological ideas to the two terms, fascism and antifascism. Fascism was felt by the middle class as an illness and Sandrino is the monster of that illness.
Sandrino, child of a wrong education, steals, lies, hates, kills, he also betrays the love according to the inverted nature of all the heroes of Pratolini. At the end Ferruccio is saved by the discovery of love, while Sandrino has betrayed love and without love he will never be able to find a link with the society; Pratolini explains that clearly throught the mouth of the ex partisan Faliero:
I think that we cannot love completely the humanity, that we cannot fight with the necessary science and coldness, if we do not also love physically someone.
Therefore Sandrino is the overthrow of the pratolin’s heroes; his fascism is showed as a psychological illness, as a desperate expression of his irreparable loneliness. Among all the boys that Pratolini has described so vivaciously, Sandrino is not saved because of his incapability to return back; and the sincere love for his mother is not enough to restrain his folly.
Sandrino cannot live in a society founded on the peace and on the liberty; he was educated to the violence and the brutality, he is a mental sick forced to live among the healthy: the opposite of Metello and Maciste.
In Le ragazze di St. Frediano (1949) the writer "turns to his Florentine world, not in term of remembrance, but in an experimental plan with the attempt to insert a contemporary fable following the realist seam that soon lead to Metello. It is a picture of custom with the addition of some novelties compared with the preceding ambientazionis; for instance the choice of St. Frediano: a district that is outside of the geography of the pratolini’s adolescence, and that at the same time is showed in the circle of the Florentine society as a zone with an autonomous and determinant physiognomy, firm in the wish to fight. Therefore from Via del Corno the pratolini’s vein is transferred toward a more advanced popular situation, at least regarding an acquisition of conscience. In this novel he gots concreteness and literary dimensions, and this is the most notable fact that traspare from the book, a figure of populate that prepares and anticipates that of Metello, typical character of the Florentine under-proletariat far from the climate of struggle" (Mauro, quotation taken from Giacalone,ibidem,pag.923/24)
Metello is a positive character and the novel is the story of his maturation in social sense: even if simple and private it reassumes the experiences of the whole category and is inserted in the picture of development of the whole society.
The polemic on Metello was a signal of sure success of the novel and it can be reassumed in the positions of two Marxists critics, Salinari and Muscetta.
Muscetta observed that Pratolini in writing his novel in 1952 under the pressure of the imperialism and during a period of tiredness of the worker movement for the struggle for the peace, he would have assimilated that aspiration to the idyll that had spread in the air in that years of crisis of the working class. On the other hand Salinari specified that the historical situation in which Pratolini wrote was "characterized by the fundamental stages of the historical period (in the case of Pratolini the Resistance, the antifascism and the introduction of the national life of the big popular masses) and by the experiences that a writer completes" (quotation, taken from Giacalone,ibidem,pag.925).
Therefore Pratolini has the merit to have written a left committed novel in the years when started again to prevail a disengaged literature.
Muscetta judges Metello as a character that is more in bedroom than in the workers’ association while Salinari concludes his examination revaluing the novel as the best expression of the Neoralism, but according to Muscetta the novel marks the crisis of the Neorealism.
In fact Salinari concludes: "Metello is perhaps the first postwar novel in which some myths of the Decadentism have definitely disappeared: the sex obsession, the primitive exaltation, the call of the country, the myth of the infancy, the taste for the turbid and for the dirty, the seduction of the mysticism. That myths that in the neorealistic literature of the postwar period was mixed to the necessity to express the events and the experiences of the national situation. It is for this reason that we have spoken and we will continue to speak of realism of Metello. Not in the attempt to make a masterpiece out of it: In fact we can also have a realistic novel full of defects, but because it marks a breakup with the decadent tradition" (quotation, taken from Giacalone,ibidem,pag.926).
After all the love between Ersilia and Metello is one of the most honest and clean love stories of and denies the sex mania of Muscetta; the other love adventures of Metello are marginal elements of the moral formation of the character, that is also built through errors and psychological deviations. Metello must not be considered the new saint of the working class; he is a healthy and a vigorous man, a worker that has understood to be exploited and wants to fight against those who exploits him; the love has strengthened in him the spirit of solidarity toward the companions, it has matured him, also in the delays with Idina, to fight in a better way the bourgeois class and it makes him win. Also here Pratolini prefers to describe young people and perhaps this is due to his predilection for that juvenile vitalism, for that need of hope and solidarity, that in young people are always genuine and sincere quality as the love, the friendship and the game.
Lo Scialo (1960) wants to be the continuation of the history started with Metello; in fact it is the novel of that lower and middle class that had characterized the greatest aspects of the Italian life since 1910 to 1930. Rather It would be better to define the history of the yelding of the lower and middle class from a generic socialism to the real compromise with the Fascism. And that political surrender "approved in bad faith coincides with the moral collapse. It is a book of over 1.300 pages, where Pratolini breaks and exasperates the structures of the novel (full of chronicle and memory, confessions, soliloquys, diaries, coups de théâtre, long and crude visual cinema sequences, […] he pushes on the erotic theme till the pathological limits (the Ninì’s diary), and finally he pays his tribute to the revival of the debate tongue-dialect proposed in that years and reintroduce the vernacular not for a colouristic operation but in order to be more realistic and dramatic. The difference with Metello is very clear. And not only because that was the novel of the good and this the novel of the wrong" (Pampaloni,quotation taken from Giacalone, ibidem,pag.933).
Metello was the novel of the workers’ hopes, Lo Scialo is the novel of the moral undoing of the Italian middle class that surrenders to the Fascism and strengthens it.
The working and farmer class is involved in the dissolution of the old liberal middle class naturally. We have here the reference to Montale’s verses:
Life is this waste--of sad facts, vain--more than cruel. --And life is cruel more than vain.
Undoubtedly the novel shows the situation in which was the author after having seen to fade away the hope for the Communism to take the power.
The picture of the Italian society that he traces constitutes a moral interpretation of the political conditions of that time. It is not that Pratolini is "arrived to write an apologetic novel of the Fascism; or better had considered the good reasons that has brought it to the power, and has presented it disguised as fiction" as Manacorda sustains. Rather the world that interests Pratolini is the human one" included in a period, but always represented in its individualized aspects, so it is always the person that results victorious, in the good or in the wrong, and, in his varied and always unexpected attitude to the life, he differentiates from others in his oneness. It seems that the social affairs of Pratolini are also directed in this direction …" (Mollia, quotation taken from Giacalone, ibidem, pag.933).
In Metello only one protagonist was enough to withdraw the univocal physiognomy of the ascent of the popular class; in Lo sciallo, for the variety and for the ideological and psychological differences inside the society, the real protagonists are around five, with a lot of small characters, that appear through a dialogue or a narrative sign. The social situation is complete; there are besides the principal characters of the story, the representatives of the aristocracy, of the middle class and of the proletariat of the worker and the farmer. There are violent fascist, there are moderate fascist, there are reconciler fascist and then a large team of boys, of cigar sellers, of market-place merchants that serve to animate the action of the novel, the little facts that life is composed, the vain and cruel waste. (Giacalone,ibidem,pag.934)
Certainly the realism of the novel doesn't repeat the technique and the poetic of any naturalists writers of the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries because it has assimilated the psychoanalysis and some features of the Decadentismo. " In Lo sciallo the Pratolini’s language became sensitive to the change of humors of the characters, he has embodied them in order to become their substance. In Cronache di poveri amanti the language is still a literary koine; the vernacular is hardly mentioned and is as filtered through a kind of illustrious language. In Metello there is a more punctual contact with the popular situation of the language, and the story is also closer, in its linguistic context, to one more coherent fusion with the dialog, in which the character is fixed in all his realistic simplicity, and in his social experience. Undoubtedly, we can say that Lo sciallo represents an ulterior and definitive conquest of a realistic language, both for the dialogue, or the monologue, that reveals the vernacular world without being its pure description, and for the story that melt perfectly the literary elements with the soul of the events, of the situations, of the characters" (Mollia, quotation, taken from Giacalone, ibidem, pag.935).
But the Realism of the writer is showed through the relationship that every character establishes between his life and his house. Giovanni, Ninì, Nella are different aspects of a same face: that is the bankruptcy of a society and a historical periode. In fact, the Realism, is only able to record the history that falls or the society that is consumed, or the ideal that are frustrated.
Before writing the third volume of the Storia Italiana, Pratolini published, in 1963, La costanza della ragione. In 1966 he completed the third volume of the Storia Italiana with Allegoria e derisione, with which he reached the years of the Fascism of the world war and of the partisan struggle.
The protagonist faces the decisive test of the death of a beloved person in front of the sense of mystery. Bruno, after many adventures with easy girls, has finally fallen in love. But Lori is destined to a rapid death, and she lets collapse all Bruno’s plans and puts him in front of a test greater than every reason expectations. But he withstands virilely and never abandons himself to the pain; also Lori withstands, facing death bravely, preventing that Bruno or her family see his sufferings.
Allegoria e derisione (1966) it is the novel that completes the third part of the Italian History that he promised to do and initiated with Metello. Subject-matters are the last years of the Fascism, the world war and the partisan struggle. So, subjects contemporary to the author, a testimony of a political and historical crisis, in which he is still inside, but from which he supposes to be ideologically out.
The last novel of Pratolini is La città dei miei trent’anni, Scheiwiller, Milano, 1967. In 1976 he published a remaking of Lo scialo; in 1981 it gathered his unpublished texts in Il marmello di Natascia
Poetic
In Cronache di poveri amanti and Cronaca familiare, the Pratolini’s most human poetry consists of the weeping of the poor men, in the elegy his lost brother, and all the moments of the remembrance reconstruct the personality of his brother that the middle class had brought up without giving him the necessary tools to face the difficulties of the life. That gives a more severe denunciation of the poverty of the poor people, also blackmailed in their purest affections, with the accusation to an incapable class to give a positive and vital education. " It is in the Cronaca familiare that is opened, hidden behind the veil of a private book, the small valve from which appear and riot on the surface the Pratolini’s themes that are not resolved, or wantedly unknown, hold at bay, these are the unsolvable themes of the Italian situation of the first years after the war. In these one hundred eighty pages of that little book is showed the whole Pratolini’s fundamental flaw of that years [...]. Breaking from which appears the missed fusion of the intimate and private motives with the political ones, the dissension between individual hopes and collective hopes, between individual hope and collective hopes, that is, at the end, the missed elaboration and fructification of the social motives on the personal ground. Here the decadent existential motives disclose their mute persistence under the collective enthusiasm" (Longobardi,quotation taken from Giacalone,ibidem,pag.914)
The artistic evolution of Pratolini is Characterised by the passage from the chronicle to the history and from the lyric autobiography to the story. In fact, after the parenthesis of Mestiere di vagabondo (1947), he began a narrative enterprise of great proportions, that clarifies and enriches the experience of the first period, offering us an organic history of the situation of workers in Italy and in Florence, starting with Un eroe del nostro tempo (1949) to conclude with Metello (1955) and Lo scialo (1960). the Pratolini’s Neoralism period is usually thinked to start with Un eroe del nostro tempo. ASOR Rosa wrote: "There is no doubt that the Realism constitutes the deepest substance of the new Pratolini’s ambitions: “typical” is a term that fascinates him, he feels it as the finish of all his story of narrator, harmonious conclusion of the efforts initiated tweenty years before to free himself from the memorial formula, to reach and conquer the heart of the men" (quotation taken from Giacalone, ibidem,pag.922). Obviously this passage to the Realism implicates a careful maturation, an ethical and historical deepening of the treated subject, while "all the merits and the defects of the Neoralism are traceable in the first attempt of the new Pratolini: on one side some morbid and sexual complaisances, the open and declared thesis without offering it to the intuition of the reader, but on other side also the unscrupulousness of judgment, that impassioned sense of breakup and that anxiety of renewal that were the most positive facts of the neoralist season ". (Mauro, quotation taken from Giacalone, ibidem, pag.922).
The picture of the Italian society that he traced in Lo scialo constitutes a moral interpretation of the political conditions of that time. Pratolini did not "arrived to write an apologetic novel of the Fascism; or considered the good reasons that has brought it to the power, and had represented them disguised as fiction" as Manacorda sustains. Rather the world that interests Pratolini is the human one "framed in a period, but always represented in its individualized aspects, so the person results always victorious, in the good or in the bad and in his various and always unexpected life, he is different for his unicity. It seems that the social affairs of Pratolini are also directed in this direction…" (Mollia, quotation taken from Giacalone,ibidem,pag.933).
In Metello only one protagonist was enough to withdraw the univocal physiognomy of the ascent of the popular class; in Lo sciallo, for the variety and for the ideological and psychological differences inside the society, the real protagonists are around five, with a lot of small characters, that appear through a dialogue or a narrative sign. The social situation is complete; there are besides the principal characters of the story, the representatives of the aristocracy, of the middle class and of the proletariat of the worker and the farmer. There are violent fascist, there are moderate fascist, there are reconciler fascist and then a large team of boys, of cigar sellers, of market-place merchants that serve to animate the action of the novel, the little facts that life is composed, the vain and cruel waste. (Giacalone,ibidem,pag.934)
Certainly the realism of the novel doesn't repeat the technique and the poetic of any naturalists writers of the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries because it has assimilated the psychoanalysis and some features of the Decadentismo. " In Lo sciallo the Pratolini’s language became sensitive to the change of humors of the characters, he has embodied them in order to become their substance. In Cronache di poveri amanti the language is still a literary koine; the vernacular is hardly mentioned and is as filtered through a kind of illustrious language. In Metello there is a more punctual contact with the popular situation of the language, and the story is also closer, in its linguistic context, to one more coherent fusion with the dialog, in which the character is fixed in all his realistic simplicity, and in his social experience. Undoubtedly, we can say that Lo sciallo represents an ulterior and definitive conquest of a realistic language, both for the dialogue, or the monologue, that reveals the vernacular world without being its pure description, and for the story that melt perfectly the literary elements with the soul of the events, of the situations, of the characters" (Mollia, quotation, taken from Giacalone, ibidem, pag.935).
But the Realism of the writer is showed through the relationship that every character establishes between his life and his house. Giovanni, Ninì, Nella are different aspects of a same face: that is the bankruptcy of a society and a historical periode. In fact, the Realism, is only able to record the history that falls or the society that is consumed, or the ideal that are frustrated.
Thematic
There have been ample debates on Pratolini that has been considered the neoralist writer for excellence or the author that has definitely put in crisis the Neoralism. There is no doubt that we are speaking about one of the most expressive authors of the neoralist period, the first one in which the bourgeois myths of the Decadentism have disappeared: the obsession of sex, the taste for the turbid passion, the exaltation of the primitive and the country and the myth of the infancy.
In fact, unlike other bourgeois authors formed with regular studies, Pratolini has been substantially autodidactic, he had a hard experience of life that had put him in contact with poor people, with workers, of which he had interpreted the anxiety of friendship and solidarity, and the hope to win and to overcome the barrier of the poverty. Therefore, In Pratolini the themes of the human solidarity are instinctive, and the socialist political ideology that derives is in any things, in the feelings of his characters.
The protagonist of his novels is Florence, not only that contemporary, but also a Florence historically evoked between the end of the nineteenth century and the first years of the tweentieth century, that sets the economic premises of the conditions of poverty of the working class and the people, before and after the Fascism. Also for the constant fidelity in his city and his experiences, the work of this writer clearly belongs to the poetic of the Neoralism.
The Pratolini’s characters are never alone and for this they are not won by life, rather they feel a strong sense of the human solidarity, a strength that lets them suffer, lets them love, lets them triumph. In this way he has overcome the pessimistic lesson of Verga and the mythographic conception of the decadent.
So, the Pratolini’s protagonists appear always positive and they offer a vision of a confident society in the hope of a better future, more aware of the human solidarity.
The critics and politicians have accompanied with their sociological-literary debate his work, and have considered him as protagonist of a radical transformation in the fiction, giving him a political-cultural responsibility stronger than his possibilities.
"In short, beyond his intentions that were sincerely definite to build a new model of novel - but always with a lot of discretion and without sensation of theoretical manifestos - they wanted to load on Pratolini’s shoulders the political and literary responsibility of a new popular fiction type that was realistic-socialist, as anxiously the Marxist criticism of the immediate postwar period wished and contemplated with great hope without having taken into consideration what was the cultural and bourgeois genesis of the so-called neoralists,: Vittorini, Pavese, Pratolini, Moravia". (Giacalone)
Also Pratolini has been a victim of the misunderstanding of the Italian culture, thanks to which many of our literates faced the unique front of the antifascism; the exceptional vitalism that had distinguished them during the partisan struggle, was moved from the Italian Communist Party when, once passed the heroic moment where almost all were united, the Communism openly declared its democratic strategy for the power. After the crisis of the Communism, expelled from the power by the middle class, our culture revealed its bourgeois and decadent origin; but Pratolini maintained himself in the Neoralism in determined way, even if not adequately sustained by a socialist and Marxist culture to fulfil the guide function that communist critics attributed to him.