Giovanni Papini

Giovanni Papini
Papini in 1928
Born	(1881-01-09)January 9, 1881 Florence
Died	Florence
Occupation	Essayist, journalist, literary critic, poet, novelist
Nationality	Italian
Period	1903–1956
Genre	prose poetry, fantasy, autobiography, travel literature, satire
Subject	political philosophy, history of religion
Literary movement	Futurism Modernism
Notable awards	Valdagno Prize (1951), Golden Quill Prize (1957)
Signature

Giovanni Papini (9 January 1881 – 8 July 1956) was an eminent Italian essayist, philosopher, poet, and novelist.

A controversial intellectual, but also admired for his writing style and formidable literary and philosophic knowledge, Papini was a scholar of religion, literary critic and ardent polemicist, narrator and diarist, popularizer of pragmatism and historical avant-gardes such as futurism and post-decadentism.

He evolved from one position to another on several fronts, always dissatisfied and restless: he converted from a strong anti-clericalism and atheism to orthodox Catholicism; he went from being a convinced interventionist (before 1915) to having an aversion to war. In the 1930s, after passing from individualism to conservatism, he was for a time closely associated with Fascism, while still maintaining an aversion to Nazism.

Almost blacklisted after his death mainly for his ideological choices, he was appreciated and re-evaluated later. In 1975, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges called him an "unfairly forgotten" author.

Early life

Giovanni Papini's house in Florence

Papini was born in Florence, the son of Luigi Papini, a modest furniture retailer (and former member of Garibaldi's Redshirts) and Erminia (née Cardini), who baptized him secretly to avoid the aggressive atheism of his father. Since the couple were not married, Papini was given the surname "Tabarri" for a period and spent the first months of his life at the Istituto degli Innocenti. On August 10, 1882 he was recognized by his mother, who brought Giovanni into the family. On May 14, 1888, his parents' wedding day, he was legitimized with the surname Papini. In 1887 and 1889, his siblings Mario and Sofia were born.

He lived a rustic, lonesome childhood. At that time he had felt a strong aversion to all beliefs, to all churches, as well as to any form of servitude (which he saw as connected to religion); he also became enchanted with the impossible idea of writing an encyclopedia wherein all cultures would be summarized. Papini spent much of his free time reading books in his grandfather's library and later at the National Library of Florence. He attended Dante Alighieri elementary school, then the technical schools at San Carlo and Via Parione. He completed his secondary studies at the normal school in Via San Gallo. During this period he made lasting friendships: in 1897 with Domenico Giuliotti (he too would become a writer) and the following year with Luigi Morselli, Giuseppe Prezzolini and Alfredo Mori.

Trained at the Instituto di Studi Superiori (1900–2), he taught for a year in the Anglo-Italian school and then was librarian at the Museum of Anthropology from 1902 to 1904.

Title page of the first edition of Il Leonardo (1903)

Il Leonardo

The literary life attracted Papini, who in 1903 founded the magazine Leonardo, to which he contributed articles under the pseudonym "Gian Falco." A tenaciously combative magazine, it contrasted itself with the philosophical and literary positivism of the prevailing era. His collaborators included Giuseppe Prezzolini (co-founder), Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Giovanni Vailati, Giovanni Costetti and Ernesto Macinai. The founders proclaimed "war on all academies within the walls of an academy". They also pursued a "ferocious individualism against the solidarity and socialist frenzy that then dampened the spirits of youth". The magazine's headquarters was located inside Palazzo Davanzati.

Through Leonardo's Papini and his contributors introduced in Italy important thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Peirce, Nietzsche, Santayana and Poincaré. He would later join the staff of Il Regno, a nationalist publication directed by Enrico Corradini, who formed the Associazione Nazionalistica Italiana, to support his country colonial expansionism. Full of curiosity, he learned everything there was to know about the philosophical current called Pragmatism.

Title page of The Twilight of the Philosophers (1906)

Papini met William James and Henri Bergson, who greatly influenced his early works. He started publishing short-stories, novels and essays: Il Tragico Quotidiano ("The Tragic Everyday"), and Il Pilota Cieco ("The Blind Pilot"), represent the birth of the so-called "metaphysical novels", a collection of works that profoundly innovated the novelistic genre. In 1906, Papini publishes Il Crepuscolo dei Filosofi ("The Twilight of the Philosophers"). This work constituted a polemic with established and diverse intellectual figures, such as Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Papini proclaimed the death of philosophers and the demolition of thinking itself. He gave a copy of the book to Arturo Reghini when the latter entered the Scottish Rite Masonic Lodge "Lucifero" in Florence, the following year.

Papini briefly flirted with Futurism and other violent and liberating forms of Modernism (he is the character in several poems of the period written by Mina Loy).

On May 18, 1907 Papini published a short article entitled "La filosofia del cinematografo" ("The Philosophy of Cinematograph") on the front page of Turin's La Stampa. It is considered one of the first articles of film criticism to appear in a national Italian newspaper.

Papini early in life

The gradual detachment from Prezzolini, more inclined to follow Benedetto Croce, and the disagreements with the other collaborators marked the closure of Leonardo in 1907.

He later married Giacinta Giovagnoli; the couple had two daughters, Viola (1908) and Gioconda (1910).

La Voce and L'Anima

After leaving Il Leonardo in 1907, Papini founded several other magazines. First, he and Prezzolini founded La Voce (1908). La Voce was not supposed to be a periodical of literature alone, but it was intended to reach all Italian intellectuals, of any artistic vocation.

In 1911, Papini founded with Giovanni Amendola L'Anima, a publication of theosophical tendencies, which only last for one year. In 1912, he published Le Memorie d'Iddio, the apex of his anti-Christian protest and nihilism, in which he shows a God who wishes the death of faith and therefore his own end, regretful of having created so much evil in the world. The work caused a stir and cost the author a trial for outrage against religion.

Aldo Palazzeschi, Carlo Carrà, Giovanni Papini, Umberto Boccioni, and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1914)

Papini would later in life instruct his daughter Viola to search for remaining copies still in circulation and set them on fire.

Lacerba

In 1913 (right before Italy's entry into World War I) he started Lacerba (1913–15). In the first issue of Lacerba Papini published a verbally violent text in Nietzschean, Marinettian and anticlerical tone. Also in 1913, he published his best-known work, A Man Finished, an autobiographical novel written at the age of 30.

Papini fought vigorously for the Italian intervention in the First World War. In a provocative article, entitled "We love the war", published in Lacerba (1 October 1914), Papini stated: "We are too many. War is a Malthusian operation. There is too much on this side and too much on that side that are pressed. The war puts the game back on track. It creates a vacuum so that you can breathe better. Leave fewer mouths around the same table. And it gets rid of an infinity of men who lived because they were born; who ate to live, who worked to eat and cursed work without the courage to refuse life. [...] We love war and savor it as gourmets while it lasts. War is frightening – and precisely because it is frightening and tremendous and terrible and destructive we must love it with all our male hearts."

Papini, however, was unable to enlist, due to an innate and very pronounced myopia.

Papini circa 1913. Photo by Nunes Vais

In November 1914, his collaboration with Il Popolo d'Italia began. From three years Papini was correspondent for the Mercure de France and later literary critic for La Nazione. His polemical, skeptical and intimately individualistic spirit led him to break with the Milanese futurists.

In his 1915 collection of poetic prose Cento Pagine di Poesia (followed by Buffonate, Maschilità, and Stroncature), Papini placed himself face-to-face with Giovanni Boccaccio, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but also contemporaries such as Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, and less prominent disciples of Gabriele D'Annunzio. Other books came from his pen. His Parole e Sangue ("Words and Blood") showed his fundamental atheism. Furthermore, Papini sought to create scandal by speculating that Jesus and John the Apostle had a homosexual relationship.

"Caricature of Papini", by Carlo Carrà & Ardengo Soffici, from Broom, 1922.

On May 22, 1915, a few days before Italy entered the war, Papini closed Lacerba. He would later retrace the evolution of his works up to his conversion in the posthumous book La seconda nascita ("The Second Birth"; 1958). Describing the positions taken before and after the outbreak of the First World War, he revealed a sincere and intimate repentance for his initial interventionism up to his bitter attacks on Pope Benedict XV (1917). A critic wrote of him:

Giovanni Papini [...] is one of the finest minds in the Italy of today. He is an excellent representative of modernity's restless search for truth, and his work exhibits a refreshing independence founded, not like so much so-called independence, upon ignorance of the past, but upon a study and understanding of it.

He published verse in 1917, grouped under the title Opera Prima. In 1918, he created yet another review, La Vraie Italie, with Ardengo Soffici.

Conversion to Catholicism

After the First World War, Papini spent years of personal spiritual suffering, but the constant presence of his wife, the friendship and benevolent reproaches of Domenico Giuliotti, and others who had always sensed his counter-current and misunderstood genius, accompanied him in his path to the Christian faith.

Papini in 1921

In 1921, he announced his newly found Roman Catholicism, publishing his Storia di Cristo ("The Story of Christ"), a book which has been translated into twenty-three languages and has had a world-wide success.

Papini became acquainted with bishop Pompeo Ghezzi, whom he visited frequently during his summer stays in Pieve Santo Stefano. Papini's conversion from his previous anti-Catholicism was exalted and celebrated in Catholic circles as one of the most famous conversions of the period.

In 1922, following the success of The Story of Christ, the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore offered Papini the chair of Italian literature, which he declined. Papini then publishes Dizionario dell'omo salvatico ("The Wild Man's Dictionary"; 1923), written with Giuliotti, a sort of counter-encyclopedia of European culture, thought and literature, which marked his adhesion to conservatism. The initial project was interrupted at letters A-B and the work was never completed. He also published (alongside Pietro Pancrazi), an important poetic anthology, entitled Poeti d'oggi ("Poets of today").

He later published Pane e vino (1926) and Sant'Agostino (1929). Papini would be viciously criticized on account of this last book by Antonio Gramsci, the founder of the Italian Communist Party. Gramsci, in prison since 1926, wrote in the posthumous Notebooks (1931): "Papini did not converted to Christianity," he asserted, "but to Jesuitism proper (it can be said, moreover, that Jesuitism, with its cult of the pope and the organization of an absolute spiritual empire, is the most recent phase of Catholic Christianity)."

Fascism and the war

After further verse works, he published the satire Gog (1931) and the essay Dante Vivo ("If Dante Were Alive"; 1933).

Drawing of Papini, by Julius Zirinsky.

Only in 1935 did he approach Fascism, but refused the government's offer to be the chair of Italian literature at the University of Bologna. In 1937, Papini published the only volume of his History of Italian Literature, which he dedicated to Benito Mussolini: "to Il Duce, friend of poetry and of the poets". Shortly thereafter he received the nomination to the Royal Academy of Italy and accepted the direction of the Institute of Studies on the Renaissance, as well as the direction of the magazine La Rinascita.

After reading on the brutal persecution of Russian Christians, he attacked the Soviet Union and its gulag system, calling Stalin a tsar and robber.

He appeared among the signatories of the Manifesto della razza in 1938, even if on the pages of the periodical Il Frontespizio, with the article "Razzia dei Razzisti" (December 1934), he had declared himself opposed to all racial discrimination and scientific racism.

In 1942, Papini visited Weimar and was elected vice president of the Europäische Schriftstellervereinigung (i.e. European Writers' League). He gave a speech defending an universalistic and civilizing Catholicism, and the primacy of Italian culture over Germanic one. The speech was ignored by the German press by orders of Joseph Goebbels.

After the armistice of 8 September 1943, in the midst of the Second World War, Papini entered the Franciscan convent in La Verna, in the diocese of Arezzo. In 1944, he became a lay Franciscan tertiary with the name of Fra 'Bonaventura (in honor of St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio).

In April 1944, following the murder of Giovanni Gentile by Communist partisans of the GAP in Florence, he refused the appointment as President of the Italian Academy by the Social Republic of Salò.

Later years

In the early 1950s, Papini continued to write although nearly blind. After the war, even though he was effectively blacklisted from the world of culture for his involvement with Fascism, and was supported only by the most traditional Catholics, Papini founded with Adolfo Oxilia the magazine L'Ultima. The magazine would see the contributions of illustrious personalities, such as Giorgio La Pira, Don Divo Barsotti, Father Ernesto Balducci, Father David Maria Turoldo, Piero Bargellini and the young Carlo Lapucci.

In the same period Papini collaborated with the Corriere della Sera, publishing articles on a fortnightly basis, and continued to carry out brief laudatory analyzes of the work of Giacomo Leopardi, started in the 1930s.

Papini in 1955. Photo by Mario De Biasi

In 1953, Papini was struck by a serious illness, the signs of which had begun in 1952 during a train trip: a progressive paralysis, called Motor neuron disease, according to the diagnosis of his friend Dr. Sante Villani. The disease, a type of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) with bulbar paralysis that deprived Papini of the use of his legs, hands, arms and even, in its terminal phase (1955-56), of speech. Papini also lost his sight (if not for a very slight capacity left in the right eye) due to the weakening that occurred over the years due to age and the nature of his strong congenital myopia.

In 1954, his daughter Gioconda died. Papini devoted himself more and more to prayer and monastic life. His health deteriorated even further, although he did not give up working on L'imitazione del Padre.

In 1955, his candidacy for the Nobel Prize for literature was proposed by the Swiss philologist Henri de Ziégler. Lucid to the last, with the help of his niece Anna Casini Paskowski (daughter of Viola Papini), he wrote Giudizio universale, a project of many years published posthumously in 1957. He recollected his difficult last years in La felicità dell'infelice (1956).

Papini's grave

On 7 July 1956, he received the Extreme Unction, from the Franciscan friar fra Clementino, in the presence of his wife Giacinta, family members and his lifelong friend Ardengo Soffici.

On 8 July 1956, at 8:30 am, he died at the age of 75 in his home in Florence, of respiratory complications following a case of bronchitis. A death mask was made. Giovanni Papini is buried in Florence at the Cimitero delle Porte Sante ("The Sacred Doors Cemetery").

Legacy

The poet Eugenio Montale, a known anti-fascist intellectual, commented in a laudatory manner on the writer's departure with the following words: "A unique, irreplaceable figure, to whom we all owe something of ourselves". Mircea Eliade called him "the most important Italian religious writer after Manzoni."

He was admired by Henry Miller, Piet Mondrian, Bruno de Finetti, founder of a subjective theory of probability, Juan José Arreola, Jorge Luis Borges, and Alberto Manguel, who remarked that Papini was a "a neglected master of Italian literature".

Publications

• La Teoria Psicologica della Previsione (1902).
• Sentire Senza Agire e Agire Senza Sentire (1905).
• Il Crepuscolo dei Filosofi (1906).
• Il Tragico Quotidiano (1906).
• La Coltura Italiana (with Giuseppe Prezzolini, 1906).
• Il Pilota Cieco (1907).
• Le Memorie d'Iddio (1911).
• L'Altra Metà (1911).
• La Vita di Nessuno (1912).
• Parole e Sangue (1912).
• Un Uomo Finito (1913).
• Ventiquattro Cervelli (1913).
• Sul Pragmatismo: Saggi e Ricerche, 1903-1911 (1913).
• Almanacco Purgativo 1914 (with Ardengo Soffici et al., 1913).
• Buffonate (1914).
• Vecchio e Nuovo Nazionalismo (with Giuseppe Prezzolini, 1914).
• Cento Pagine di Poesia (1915).
• Maschilità (1915).
• La Paga del Sabato (1915).
• Stroncature (1916).
• Opera Prima (1917).
• Polemiche Religiose (1917).
• Testimonianze (1918).
• L'Uomo Carducci (1918).
• L'Europa Occidentale Contro la Mittel-Europa (1918).
• Chiudiamo le Scuole (1918).
• Giorni di Festa (1918).
• L'Esperienza Futurista (1919).
• Poeti d'Oggi (with Pietro Pancrazi, 1920).
• Storia di Cristo (1921).
• Antologia della Poesia Religiosa Italiana (1923).
• Dizionario dell'Omo Salvatico (with Domenico Giuliotti, 1923).
• L'Anno Santo e le Quattro Paci (1925).
• Pane e Vino (1926).
• Gli Operai della Vigna (1929).
• Sant'Agostino (1931).
• Gog (1931).
• La Scala di Giacobbe (1932).
• Firenze (1932).
• Il Sacco dell'Orco (1933).
• Dante Vivo (1933).
• Ardengo Soffici (1933).
• La Pietra Infernale (1934).
• Grandezze di Carducci (1935).
• I Testimoni della Passione (1937).
• Storia della Letteratura Italiana (1937).
• Italia Mia (1939).
• Figure Umane (1940).
• Medardo Rosso (1940).
• La Corona d'Argento (1941).
• Mostra Personale (1941).
• Prose di Cattolici Italiani d'Ogni Secolo (with Giuseppe De Luca, 1941).
• L'Imitazione del Padre. Saggi sul Rinascimento (1942).
• Racconti di Gioventù (1943).
• Cielo e Terra (1943).
• Foglie della Foresta (1946).
• Lettere agli Uomini di Papa Celestino VI (1946).
• Primo Conti (1947).
• Santi e Poeti (1948).
• Passato Remoto (1948).
• Vita di Michelangiolo (1949).
• Le Pazzie del Poeta (1950).
• Firenze Fiore del Mondo (with Ardengo Soffici, Piero Bargellini and Spadolini, 1950).
• Il Libro Nero (1951).
• Il Diavolo (1953).
• Il Bel Viaggio (with Enzo Palmeri, 1954).
• Concerto Fantastico (1954).
• Strane Storie (1954).
• La Spia del Mondo (1955).
• La Loggia dei Busti (1955).
• Le Felicità dell'Infelice (1956).

Posthumous

• L'Aurora della Letteratura Italiana: Da Jacopone da Todi a Franco Sacchetti (1956).
• Il Muro dei Gelsomini: Ricordi di Fanciullezza (1957).
• Giudizio Universale (1957).
• La Seconda Nascita (1958).
• Dichiarazione al Tipografo (1958).
• Città Felicità (1960).
• Diario (1962).
• Schegge (Articles published in Corriere della Sera, 1971).
• Rapporto sugli Uomini (1978).

Collected works

• Tutte le Opere di Giovanni Papini, 11 vols. Milan: Mondadori (1958–66)

Works in English translation

• Four and Twenty Minds. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company (1922)
• The Story of Christ. London: Hodder and Stoughton (1923; rep. as Life of Christ. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1923)
• The Failure. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company (1924; rep. as A Man-Finished. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1924)
• The Memoirs of God. Boston: The Ball Publishing Co. (1926)
• A Hymn to Intelligence. Pittsburgh: The Laboratory Press (1928)
• A Prayer for Fools, Particularly Those we See in Art Galleries, Drawing-rooms and Theatres. Pittsburgh: The Laboratory Press (1929)
• Laborers in the Vineyard. London: Sheed & Ward (1930)
• Life and Myself, translated by Dorothy Emmrich. New York: Brentano's (1930)
• Saint Augustine. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. (1930)
• Gog, translated by Mary Prichard Agnetti. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. (1931)
• Dante Vivo. New York: The Macmillan Company (1935)
• The Letters of Pope Celestine VI to All Mankind. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. (1948)
• Florence: Flower of the World. Firenze: L'Arco (1952; with Ardengo Soffici and Piero Bargellini)
• Michelangelo, his Life and his Era. New York: E. P. Dutton (1952)
• The Devil; Notes for Future Diabology. New York: E.P. Dutton (1954; rep. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1955)
• Nietzsche: An Essay. Mount Pleasant, Mich.: Enigma Press (1966)
• "Excerpts from Giudizio Universale." In: LDSF-3: Latter-Day Science Fiction. Ludlow, MA: Parables (1987)
• "The Circle is Closing." In: Lawrence Rainey (ed.), Futurism: An Anthology, Yale University Press (2009)

Selected articles

• "Philosophy in Italy," The Monist 8 (4), July 1903, pp. 553–585.
• "What Pragmatism is Like," Popular Science Monthly, 71, October 1907, pp. 351–358.
• "The Historical Play," The Little Review 6 (2), pp. 49–51.
• "The Weariness of Life," Vanity Fair, 12 (4), 1919.
• "Ignoto," The New Age 26 (6), 1919, p. 95.
• "Buddha," The New Age 26 (13), 1920, pp. 200–201.
• "Rudolph Eucken" The Open Court, 38 (5), May 1924, pp. 257–261.
• "The Philosophy of Cinematograph." In: Early Film Theories in Italy 1896-1922: The Little Magic Machine, edited by Casetti Francesco, Alovisio Silvio, and Mazzei Luca, 2017, pp. 47–50.

Poetry

• Translated and edited by Margherita Marchione. Twentieth-century Italian Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (1974)
• Translated by Roberta L. Payne, A Selection of Modern Italian Poetry in Translation. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press (2004)

Short stories

• "The Debt of a Day," The International 9 (4), 1915, pp. 105–107.
• "The Substitute Suicide," The International 10 (5), 1916, pp. 148–149.
• "The Invalid Gentleman", The Occult Review 25 (1), 1917.
• "Four-Hundred and Fifty-Three Love Letters," The Stratford Journal 3 (1), 1918, pp. 9–12.
• "The Satanic Genius," Vanity Fair, 12 (5), 1919, p. 47.
• "The Beggar of Souls" The Stratford Journal 4, 1919, p. 59–64.
• "Life: The Vanishing Mirror," Vanity Fair 13 (6), 1920, p. 53.
• "Don Juan's Lament," Vanity Fair 13 (10), 1920, p. 43.
• "An Adventure in Introspection," Vanity Fair 13 (10), 1920, p. 65.
• "Having to do with Love – and Memory," Vanity Fair 14 (2), 1920, p. 69.
• "For no Reason," Vanity Fair 14 (3), 1920, pp. 71, 116.
• "The Prophetic Portrait," Vanity Fair 14 (4), 1920, p. 73.
• "The Man Who Lost Himself," Vanity Fair 14 (5), 1920, p. 35.
• "Hope," Vanity Fair 14 (6), 1920, p. 57.
• "The Magnanimous Suicide," Vanity Fair 15 (1), 1920, p. 73.
• "Two Faces in the Well," Vanity Fair 15 (4), 1920, p. 41.
• "Two Interviews with the Devil," Vanity Fair 15 (5), 1921, pp. 59, 94.
• "The Bartered Souls," Vanity Fair 15 (6), 1921, p. 57.
• "The Man Who Could Not be Emperor," Vanity Fair 16 (1), 1921, p. 41.
• "A Man Among Men — No More," Vanity Fair 16 (2), 1921, p. 47.
• "His Own Jailer," The Living Age, December 9, 1922.
• "Pallas and the Centaur," Italian Literary Digest 1 (1), April 1947.
• "The Subterranean Temple," Italian Literary Digest 1 (1), April 1947.
• "Holiday in Sulpizia," Italian Literary Digest 1 (1), April 1947.
• "The Mask Factory"; "The Cloud Maker"; "Madmen's Congress." In: Modern Italian Short Stories. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954.
• "The Sick Gentleman's Last Visit." In: Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature. New York: C. N. Potter, 1983.
• "Death." In: Fantasy & Terror, No. 5, 1985.
• "The Man Who Belonged to Me." In: Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, eds., The Book of Fantasy. London: Xanadu, 1988.

External links

• Works by Giovanni Papini at Hathi Trust
• Works by Giovanni Papini at JSTOR
• Works by Giovanni Papini at Unz.com
• L'Anima Magazine, May 1911
• Petri Liukkonen. "Giovanni Papini". Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi). Archived from the original on 4 July 2013.
• A website about Giovanni Papini in Italian
• A list of Papini's books translated in English
• Giovanni Papini at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database