The Communist

If ever there were to be a book of neglected writers, then surely Guido Morselli would deserve his place: his seven novels were only published after he died at his own hands, a suicide which was at least partly caused by the endless rejections from publishers. I first encountered Morselli via Jacqui’s review of Divertimento 1889, one of only two of his novels to have made it into English. I soon tracked down the other, Past Conditional, which tantalisingly suggested plans for further translations which never came to fruit. Coincidentally, however, Frederika Randall was translating Morselli’s fourth novel, The Communist, for New York Review of Books Classics around the same time.

The Communist is Morselli’s most realist novel (he was a writer who never settled to a single genre), set in 1950s Italy where communism is a popular political movement, associated with resistance to Mussolini’s fascists. Walter Ferranini, the communist of the title, is a life-long believer – his father was a railwayman and an anarchist – who left Italy in the thirties to fight against Franco in Spain. The Second World War prevented his return and he spent the war years in America instead. As the novel opens, he has recently been elected to parliament, a position to which is attached little in the way of power or responsibility. Not only has he not spoken once in the five months he has been there:

“He had been assigned to a committee that met rarely, the most pacific and least industrious committee in parliament, in which his silence was no more remarked upon than it was in the chamber. The party, too, asked little of him, perhaps because in Rome, where he had never set foot at party headquarters before his recent election, nobody knew him.”

He wishes to propose a bill which will protect workers from accidents at work but he is told, “Communists do not take part in the life of the parliament, they observe and remain outside.” This is perhaps the beginning of his political crisis of faith, though its roots are complex and many. He, first of all, sees corruption, or at least a love of comfort, among his peers, which perhaps reminds him of his own deviation from the party in America:

“I sank into a reified, dispossessed world that completely transformed me. It was the great crisis of my life… A betrayal.”

In America he also married, and the woman in question, Nancy, is still his wife. His lover, Nuccia, is also married though separated; her child looked after by her parents. Ferranini knows the party disapprove of their relationship, and, when an official goes to Nuccia with a request from her husband that they get back together, he points to their own guilt:

“We let ourselves be seen, Nuccia. We were visible. Something had to happen.”

Another factor is the party’s approach to dissent. He is sent by the party with colleagues to speak to a young man, Mazzola, who has broken from party discipline. Ferranini, being a worker rather than an intellectual, is there as an observer, the only one who feels any sympathy for Mazzola’s position, shaking his hand as he leaves “without saying anything. He would have liked to, but couldn’t find the words.” Later he publishes an article that puts him at odds with the party hierarchy concerning a doubt he has had since the beginning of the novel regarding labour:

“…the classics say labour will be reduced to a minimum once communism is established. But the way I see it, labour cannot be reduced, and certainly not abolished.”

The article, in turn, is commented on in the mainstream press:

“The article affirms that the enervation that comes with labour is not merely the consequence of alienation and exploitation but an intrinsic quality of work.”

Ferranini’s theorising relates directly to his concern for the workers, but the party censures him causing him to doubt his unquestioning devotion and take dramatic action. As with Morselli’s other novels, there is a philosophical intention – this is neither satire nor polemic, and Ferranini’s sincerity and seriousness are among his defining qualities. (If Morselli and his character might be criticised for one thing, it is a lack of humour).

The novel is also interesting for its feminism, voiced through the character of Nuccia (“the degree of liberty and progress in a society corresponds to the degree of evolution in the sexual domain”) and the appearance of Alberto Moravia discussing realism. Above all, though, the novel provides a historical snapshot, while at the same time exploring the possibility of political purity.

Past Conditional

What better time than now to contemplate the role of chance in history, and the way in which one moment might change everything. Italian novelist Guido Morselli first came to my attention thanks to Jacqui’s review of Divertimento 1889 over at JacquiWine’s Journal. Not only did the novel sound interesting, but so did the novelist, his work only published after his suicide in 1973, and with each novel seemingly quite different to the one before. Only two have been translated into English (both by Hugh Shankland): Divertimento 1889 and Past Conditional (the latter contains a rather sad announcement that both Roma senza papa and Dissipatio H G will also be translated – sad, because it didn’t happen).

Past Conditional is a counterfactual novel – that is, it proposes an alternate history. The most famous counterfactual novel remains Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, which depicts a world in which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan have won the Second World War. Morselli’s novel takes us in the opposite direction, proposing an outcome to the First World War which renders the Second obsolete. The story begins in 1910 when an Austrian soldier, Major von Allman, discovers a disused mine known locally as the Tunnel. It transpires that this dates back to a plan in the 1870s to construct a railway line joining Austria and Italy through the mountain, as an old man who worked on the project tells him:

“Months and months had been wasted exploring the Roschenen valley, opening up new paths, surveying the passes, and he had been on the other side as well, the Italian side.”

Von Allman later mentions it to the War Minister, only to have his idea dismissed:

“Take it from me, trains are all very fine for troop-carrying purposes and supplying your rear lines… In the strategic phase and context they cease to serve any useful purpose. A single charge of dynamite will put the best railway in the world out of action.”

As the reader is aware that we are only a few years away from the outbreak of the First World War (in which Austro-Hungary and Italy were on opposite sides) and that the novel will not stick to historical events (its subtitle is ‘A Retrospective Hypothesis’) he or she can be forgiven for being certain that, at some point, von Allman’s plan will be put into action. (Whether the plan was ever proposed in reality I do not know). In the meantime, Morselli is at pains to emphasise the role of luck in its eventual adoption. (It is eventually acted on because it is in the right pocket at the right time).

Morselli writes the novel in the style of a history book with a focus on dates and a large cast whose characters are sketched in the manner of a popular historian. Though von Allman features at both the beginning and end, it is not his story, nor does Morselli have much interest in how he might have changed – history is his subject. In fact, I was just beginning to think there was little of the flair or imagination suggested by his oeuvre when, one hundred pages in, we find inserted a conversation between Morselli and his publisher anticipating any criticisms which might be entering the reader’s mind:

“Do you honestly claim that this blatantly apocryphal version of contemporary history which you have submitted, so full of questionable theses and so short on appeal from every angle, can go by the name of a novel?”

Morselli’s style also comes in for some abuse:

“People on the staff who have seen the book find it has a ponderous style. Some have spoken of a ‘bureaucratic style.’… Your story seems not only to run counter to past history, but what is worse, to present-day narrative fashion.”

Of course, pre-empting criticism does not invalidate it, but it does demonstrate that these aspects of the text are intentional. The conversation takes on a less comic note when you know Morselli killed himself after years of failing to get published, and there is the added sadness that it enhances the sense that an appreciation of his work demands acquaintance with all of it – one novel is not representative. What Morselli does demonstrate is a thorough understanding of the period –and of how wars are fought, and politics played.

Nazis winning the war will always be the sexier side of counterfactual fiction, but there is a place for more peaceable outcomes too. Morselli hints at what his small change has achieved by the end of the war when von Allmen, a keen painter, meets Adolf Hitler:

“I volunteered in the war because it was the only way to make politics at the time. My political credo is Germanism in its full might and universality. Today Germanism has won… Therefore I can now pursue my second vocation. Painting.”

Anyone interested in the politics of 20th century Europe – and what might have been – should read this book.