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Total Assault on (Fascist) Culture: an afternoon with Fernanda Pivano and
Dan Fante
by Anna Battista
"So, why aren't you married right now? What happened? You don't think it's
worthy anymore?" she asks.
"I like the ceremony, it's what comes afterwards that I don't like…" he
promptly replies, bursting into laughter.
It all starts with a few jokes, as if they had been friends for a long time
and were only rejoicing now after too many years. But, actually, this is
the first time they meet. She's the Italian writer Fernanda Pivano, Nanda
for her closest friends and admirers; he's the American writer Dan Fante.
They're both sitting on a sofa in Nanda's house, in Milan, under an Andy
Warhol Marilyn Monroe painting donated by Andy himself to Nanda many
years ago, a work of pop art that still preserves the magic and madness of
its author and of those times. Dan is in Italy for a small tour, while
waiting for his novel Spitting Off Tall Buildings (Canongate) and his
anthology of poems A Gin Pissing Raw Meat Dual Carburettor V8 Son of a
Bitch from Los Angeles (Sun Dog Press) to come out in America. Dan and
Nanda have something in common, their American publisher: Dan's publisher
Sun Dog Press released a couple of years ago Charles Bukowski: Laughing
with the Gods, a beautiful and touching interview Nanda did with an author
she truly cherished and loved. And a good visit to Fernanda is a way of
relaxing, but also of getting to know better a woman who has spent most of
her life trying to get American authors published in Italy.
Born in 1917 in Genoa, Nanda was destined to understand really soon the
limitations and restrictions imposed by fascism. "When I was a young girl,
I lived in a fascist country where you couldn't publish anything," Nanda
explains, "My grandfather was British, actually he was Scottish, and was
the founder of the Berlitz School. He came to Italy to introduce the school
in the country. I used to live in a way that wasn't really provincial, I
was also taught in a Swiss school and this way of living was against the
fascist provincial rules of life. Then I heard the first ideas of democracy
coming from the States: at the time there was Roosvelt in America and
Roosvelt was very fascinating for us. Somehow, through the underground
Italian anti-fascist movement, I had read the speech he had done on the
fourth liberty, the freedom from fear. This liberty was very important for
us because we had the fear of being arrested all the time. This man was
talking about freedom, so for us, for the antifascists of that time, the
American dream was Roosvelt." "I agree with Nanda," Dan adds, "During World
War II, Roosevelt communicated that anything was possible for the average
man. The world believed him. Today the American Dream is spoon fed to
Americans on TV. Bigger! Faster! More! Win at any cost!"
Nanda started her career as translator in 1943, with a translation of Edgar
Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, but it was in 1956, when she first
went to the States, that a new world opened up for her. She got in touch
with the Beat writers and from then on, her life changed: she started
translating new and revolutionary authors, then brought them to meet
Italian editors and wrote beautiful introductions for their books. When
Nanda speaks it's like seeing many of her American icons coming back to
life: Marilyn, as Nanda remembers with loving affection, was a little
darling, Kerouac a handsome man, Bukowski a man with a temper whom she
fondly admired, with a wife, Linda, who had fallen in love with Nanda's
green shoes.
"What struck me the first time I went to the States was the
space. America was so big, so large to my eyes. We were coming from a small
country and I suddenly found six lines of cars coming from the airport!"
Nanda recollects, "I was really really amazed! I found at the airport
waiting for me Hannah and Matthew Josephson. Hannah was the librarian of
the American Academy and Matthew was a big author, he had written the Zola
biography and he had also published in 1934 The Robber Barons, a
beautiful book, a marvelous book, one of the first denunciation books on
Wall Street. They showed me The New Yorker on which there was an article
about Edmund Wilson talking about an introduction I had written in Italy.
So Matthew said 'This is a welcome for you!' you see, right at that time
Edmund Wilson was very famous. But that wasn't very important for me.
Indeed, one of the most important things that happened to me when I visited
the States was when they took me to meet Norman Mailer. Mailer was very
bold, handsome with his beautiful blue eyes. He was also a little insolent,
but I really liked him and Adele was a very beautiful woman. I remember
Adele telling me 'If you want to get an elegant dress in the States, you
don't have to eat, otherwise you won't find anything and will have to buy
the dresses that they make for the negro women who are big. If you're small
you don't have to, but to be small, you don't have to eat!' She taught me
the real American rule of beauty! Adele was very sweet!"
During her life,
Nanda also worked as research assistant for the Faculty of Philosophy at
the University of Turin, but this experience was probably one of the most
negative of her life. "I think the academic world is horrible," she starts,
"it is conservative, it prohibits, it forbids any kind of new way of
thinking, it is against reality. Young people have to be and are projected
into the future we, old people are projected into the past, we try to
remember and be nostalgic, young people simply don't know what you're
talking about when you talk about the past. And the academics are the
machinery that stops culture, they only speak of the past, they don't know
anything of the present."
"And they have no voice," Dan intrudes, "their
voice is an echo, it is not creative!" "When they ask me what's the
difference between the work I've done and the academy," Nanda nods to what
Dan has said and continues, "then I say that the thing I've done is to work
like an ethnographer, I work on the field, going and trying to meet the
authors and trying to find out who the authors are and what they want.
Authors, writers are so different in reality from the stereotypes created
by the media. I wanted to know who they really were, that was what I was
trying to do, that's why I wanted to see them…naked!" Nanda concludes
laughing, "But, you're going to see ME naked!" Dan suggests, with a broad
smile on his face, "Please don't!" Nanda exclaims, before continuing, "The
professors never try to speak with an author, they don't read the author,
they read what the other professors have written about that author…" "The
author is the conscience of any society," Dan claims, "he tells the truth -
his truth. He is the reflection of his times. While academics only read
what their peers said about that author, and…they are completely anal,
these people have no rectum, no arsehole! Nothing ever comes out of their
back end because they're…" "Sir, behave!" Nanda laughs, but Dan is ready to
remark, "It's true! It's an establishment that is self-perpetuating, that
doesn't allow new talent…this is what the academy is in the States, this is
the publishing business there."
Apparently, the publishing business and the
academy aren't very different in Italy. "You see, at the beginning it was
the fascist movement that was holding Italians back from knowing these
American writers, then it was the academy," Nanda explains, "You don't know
what the academy did to me, professors taught me treating me like a stupid.
It was terrible, I was insulted all the time, but these new books were
beautiful books and these new writers were beautiful writers, damn it! They
had to be published! It was just the presumption, the stupidity, the
ignorance of this bunch of people that was avoiding other people to know
them. That was the story. When I met the Beats they were nobodies, they
were young, they were perhaps 18 years old boys. Once they revealed to me 'We
were really surprised by the fact that such an elegant woman like you had
come to meet us, you seemed to be the only one who knew what we had written
when nobody had ever heard about us'. At that time Allen Ginsberg hadn't
even published 'Howl'. The first time I heard of 'Howl' was when I was in
Puerto Rico with William Carlos Williams, we were at a party and he said
that he was going to do the introduction for a young poet from Patterson,
since he was also from Patterson. He told me he thought that this poet was
intelligent and brilliant. Then, in 1957, I went to Paris and I saw the
second issue of the 'Evergreen Review' and I found 'Howl' inside it. That
was the beginning of the resistance for me: I wrote a letter and in 1960
Gregory Corso came to meet me."
"Gregory was the ambassador of the Beats. He
was completely nuts, my God! He arrived in Milan from Paris, so I asked him
'Do you want to take a shower?' and he roughly said 'What do you mean, do I
smell?' And from then on, while Gregory was staying at my house, all my
rules were completely broken, I really had to change my rules of life. I
decided that offering him coffee wasn't the right thing to do, so I said
'Do you want a joint?' but I didn't have it and he said 'Yes, I think that
would be a great idea!' I had to change my way of thinking and living, the
Beats really changed my life. After Gregory paid me a visit, he met Kerouac
and told him 'She's pretty, she's not a prude!' so Kerouac started calling
me at four o'clock in the morning, you see, you couldn't even think of
explaining the time zone to him, and he asked me 'At what time does the
plane to Milan leave? I want to come and meet you!' From then on we started
talking and building a sort of antifascist movement…" "You might say you
were literary antifascists!" Dan enthuses, "Yes, we were," she admits, "I
think that 'Howl' was a big thing and 'Bomb' was a big thing and 'On The
Road' was a big thing. So this is my Beat Story."
"I think that in those
days things that had never been published before were being published," Dan
points out, "so you had to take the good with the bad. For instance, when
you read Burroughs, some of it is a kind of madness, of pure rambling
madness..." "But Burroughs was the beginning of the postmodernist
movement," Nanda remarks, "I still keep on liking Hubert Selby Jr. best,"
Dan reveals, "he is my favourite writer of those days, he was not widely
regarded as a Beat Writer but he did write at the same time and was
certainly better than any of the so-called Beats." "Well, I miss all the
Beats!" Nanda replies, "but I miss most of all Ginsberg, Kerouac and Corso,
because they were three monsters. You know, I used to work with Ginsberg
for hours on end. He came on purpose to work with me, to assist me in the
translation of his poems and we enjoyed working together. The best thing of
working with such writers was that I could understand them and see how
different they were from the image the media had created of them."
After two seconds of silence Nanda asks us if we want to hear what she
calls "The Story of Hemingway." We nod and she sets to tell us a wonderful
tale: "The story of Hemingway is another thing. The publisher Einaudi gave
me a contract to translate A Farewell to Arms. At that time the book was
forbidden by Mussolini, but Einaudi had already started preparing the book,
because we all knew that Mussolini would have fallen, you see, it was very
easy to understand it! Einaudi and I were very much involved in the whole
thing, but then the Nazis arrived and, while I remained in Turin, Einaudi
ran away to Rome. The Nazis arrested me after an enquiry they made at the
publishing house where they had found my contract with Hemingway. As I said
Hemingway was forbidden, so they had a reason to arrest me. They wanted to
know where Einaudi was and I didn't tell them, I really didn't tell them!"
"The first interrogation started in the morning at 7 o'clock, then there was
another one at midnight. I was playing saying 'How could I have ever done
something like that, I'm so young! A girl like me? It's impossible!' This
went on all day, then the terrible moment came in the morning when they
wanted me to say that I wasn't the translator, but the publisher, they
wanted me to write down that I was the "Herausgeber" and not the
"Übersetzer". I knew the difference between the two words and I refused to
comply. When they found out that I knew the difference between the two
words they said 'We see you know some German, so you don't need an
interpreter anymore' but I didn't know enough German and I was really
frightened because they could have sent me to a concentration camp. It
looked like it was the end. But then they said 'Now you go, but, from now
on, you will have a German officer or a soldier who will check what you're
doing' and they gave a beautiful boy who had to follow me around."
"After the war I started doing other things. In 1948 Hemingway arrived in Italy and
sent me a postcard saying 'I want to meet you, come to Cortina' and I
thought it was an joke, I didn't believe it. But after a week he sent me
another postcard in which he added 'If you don't come to Cortina, I will
come to Turin!' I suddenly found myself on the train to Cortina. It took me
nine hours to reach the place, you also had to take a train that ran
through the mountains, it was really like a sci-fi story, but I managed to
arrive at the hotel. I was dirty because there were no windows in the
train, it was 1948 and the train was coal-fueled. So I was all black and
when I arrived at the hotel I got into the dining room where Hemingway was
having dinner. He liked to have a lot of people at table, he used to say
that he wasn't making presents, he was 'giving out food', for him food was
a present, he had this archaic but very poetic way of talking…yes, I know
that whatever I say about Hemingway is partial! Anyway, he immediately
understood that it was me, he crossed the big room with open arms and I
nearly fainted, he gave me a big hug and said, with his slightly stammering
voice, 'Tell me about the Nazis'. So, I understood that he knew everything,
he always knew everything, I don't know how he could do it, but he did and
I told him all the story about the Nazis. That night he made me sit close
to him at the table throwing away the menu that was there and we spend the
night talking. At that time Mary had rented a Villa named Villa Aprile,
Aprile was the name of the owner not of the month, it was June I think, and
I stayed there for a while in his house. This is when he made me translate
his works in the morning close to him, from 5 a.m. o'clock till 11 a.m., he
was sober, he wasn't drunk and it was a big difference when he was sober.
He was often telling me why he was throwing away a part of what he was
writing, while he was cutting this or that. Working with him was difficult,
but it was like living in a dream, it was really fascinating. Like working
with Ginsberg, but Ginsberg wasn't a genius like Hemingway." Between 1947 and 1965 Nanda
translated Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon, A
Farewell to Arms and Across the River and Into the Trees, but she also
worked on The Old Man and the Sea. "That's my favourite book by
Hemingway," Dan tells Nanda, "Hemingway had a great influence on me as a
stylist. He had great simplicity and power. I also much admire his work
ethic and do as he did: write in the morning before getting drunk
or...whatever."
From the '40s on, Nanda translated a lot of authors, including William
Faulkner, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright, to
mention a few of them, so she is the right person a translator might turn
to for some good advice. "When you translate a text, you have to completely
forget yourself," Nanda underlines, "you must try to mould yourself into
the page that must be translated." "To be a good translator," Dan
intervenes, "a person must thoroughly understand the author's intent, know
all his work, but most importantly, his nuances, his sub-text, what he
really means by what he was saying." Dan is at present working on a
collection of short stories, Short Dog, but he's also thinking about
writing a biography of his dad, the writer John Fante. Meanwhile Nanda,
whose books of essays and articles about American writers Beat, Hippie,
Yippie (Bompiani), Amici Scrittori (Mondadori), Altri Amici
(Mondadori) and Viaggio Americano (Bompiani), to mention the main ones,
are confirmed as the pillars of any bibliography about American literature,
seems to have other plans, "When someone asks me 'What would you like to do
in a next future?' I always answer 'I want to be a whore, but nobody lets
me to be a whore!' I also say this in a movie about me! usually when it's
on the screen there's a big round of applause and people madly clap," she
laughs, then she changes her tone of voice and becomes serious once again,
"but, then, if you ask me what I REALLY would like to do, I'll tell you
that I would like to write three lines that people will remember forever. I
still haven't done it, perhaps I will never write them, but this is what
I'd like to do."
"All I ever wanted was to think clearly enough to put down one sentence,"
Dan admits.
"It was the same for me…" Nanda adds.
"And because I was so mad and so unstable I couldn't do it. When I began, I
completed the draft of my first book after three months and I realised it
was awful. So I started working on it and, you know what? I discovered that
there WAS a good sentence in it and I knew that there was a chance for me…"
"So you've been lucky, you wrote a good sentence! But I still haven't!
Young people write a lot of stuff to me, they love me so much, and they
often tell me: it's as if you had already written those three lines and
they will always be in our hearts forever. And when I read such stuff I
always start crying, I'm so stupid!
"I always answer my readers and young people who write me, they sometimes
write about my father and they write with such love that you must answer.
They often ask me 'How do I write? What should I do? Where do I begin?'"
"It's a terrible responsibility!"
"You know what I tell them? Sit down everyday and write just one hour, then
do it six days a week for one year, because, you see, I never could write
a book, but I could write one page a day. And one page a day in two hundred
days is two hundred pages. I've never been able to write a book, but I can
write a page a day, because I can't think of the scope of a novel I must
think about the moment and what I'm doing now. That's also how I write
poetry, I write one poem a day."
"This is a very good idea, I will copy it! I'll quote you!"
"If I can write one good page a day, I will be king of the world, because
that's what a writer is, he's a builder, he's a stone mason, he puts one
stone on top of another stone and if he sees that the level isn't right he
takes a stone away and puts in another stone."
"Bravo! That's very good! I'll quote you!"
"I'll quote YOU!"
"I have nothing that can be quoted…" Nanda humbly says.
"Oh, STOP it!" Dan rebukes her.
"I have only to quote that I didn't say to the Germans the address of where
Einaudi was! They didn't believe me, they knew that I was lying," Nanda
concludes, a beatific smile on her face. And that radiant smile doesn't
even turn into a nasty sarcastic grimace when she's asked something about
the centre-right wing government ruling Italy right now. "I speak of sex",
she declares, avoiding talking on such a matter. "I speak of peace and love,"
she adds, showing Dan the Yin Yang locket that adorns her neck.
Perhaps she's already written the famous three lines, perhaps she hasn't.
But what Fernanda Pivano has surely done is give her life to
literature, giving Italy the chance to be introduced to great authors
such as the Beats and lately Dan Fante. "His books truly are love and death
ballads, like Charles Bukowski's and like John Fante's," Fernanda wrote in
a recent article in the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera,
about Dan's works. "His novels can destroy everything: marriages, jobs, and
family. He shows us a slow descent into hell. He is persecuted by the
demons of alcohol and madness but at the same time we see a deep search for
salvation … Surely he has written beautiful words, sincere as
heart-rending." And if these words come from such a literary authority as
Nanda we can genuinely believe them.
{www.fernandapivano.it, www.danfante.com}
Issue 11, October 2002 | next article
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