andy merrifield

And so I went to Sardinia, searching for Gramsci’s phantom. An hour’s fight from Rome’s Ciampino took me to Cagliari, Sardinia’s principal city, to its small airport on the island’s southernmost tip. Then I drove a little Mitsubishi rental one-and-a-half hours northwest, chugging along a largely empty central E25 highway, battling a stiff cross wind, onward toward the twelfth century town of Santu Lussurgiu. Santu Lussurgiu is a labyrinth of narrow cobbled streets, many scarcely wider than my tiny car. With a couple of modest supermarkets, a butcher’s store, a few sad, lonely cafés, a population of around 2,500, it felt more like a large village, the sort of place where any strange car, unfamiliar to locals, provoked incredulous stares, as if an alien had landed from another planet.

I’d come excitedly to Santu Lussurgiu. I’d found inexpensive bed and breakfast accommodation in the same building, Sa Murighessa, where a teenage Gramsci lodged during his junior high school years. With its thick stone walls, wooden beamed ceilings, and granite staircase, Sa Murighessa today is one of a group of beautifully renovated buildings belonging to the Antica Dimora de Gruccione, a so-called “albergo diffuso,” a special kind of traditional inn. Room and board are provided in assorted historic buildings scattered around one another (hence diffuse); an old family house typically forms the heart of the albergo’s hospitality, for guests’ meals and collective conviviality.

Sa Murighessa has a plaque on its outside wall, memorializing Gramsci. He himself, though, remembers it as a “miserable pensione.” “When I attended junior high school at Santu Lussurgiu,” he told Tatiana (September 12, 1932), “where three professors quite brazenly made short shrift of Instruction in all five grades, I used to live in a peasant woman’s house (I paid five lira a month for lodgings, bed linen, and the cooking of the very frugal board) whose old mother was a little stupid and forgetful but not crazy and was in fact my housekeeper and who every morning when she saw me again asked me who I was and how it was that I had slept in their house.”

The actual school, Ginnasio Carta-Meloni, at via Giovanni Maria Angioi 109, was a few minutes’ walk away. It no longer exists. These days, it’s a private residence, smartly maintained with an ochre-colored façade, with another brown plaque on the outside wall, announcing “I passi di Gramsci Santu Lussurgiu” [the steps of Antonio Gramsci Santu Lussurgiu], which, in three languages (Italian, Sard, and English), says: “Here was located the Gymnasium Carta-Meloni during Antonio Gramsci’s Studies, 1905-1907.” Underneath is a citation from Prison Notebooks: “culture isn’t having a well-stocked warehouse of news but is the ability that our mind has to understand life, the place we hold there, our relationship with other people. Those who are aware of themselves and of everything, who feel the relationship with all other beings, have culture…So anyone can be cultured, can be a philosopher.”

Gramsci hated his junior high school; they were wretched years, he said. Even as a young lad he could see through his teachers, didn’t respect them, knew their inadequacies. A precocious intelligence was already manifest. In another letter to Tatiana (June 2, 1930), he writes: “one day I saw a strange little animal, like a green grass snake yet with four tiny legs. Locally, the small reptile was known as a scurzone, and in Sardinian dialect curzu means short.” At school, he asked his natural history teacher what the animal was called in Italian and the teacher laughed, saying it was a basilico, a term used for an imaginary animal, something not real. Young Antonio must be mistaken because what he described doesn’t exist. His school chums later made fun of him, too. “You know how angry a boy can get,” he tells Tatiana, “being told he is wrong when he knows instead that he is right when a question of reality is at stake; I think that it is due to this reaction against authority put to the service of self-assured ignorance that I still remember the episode.” He’d already from an early age developed a nose for sniffing out authority put to the service of self-assured ignorance.

Nino had a set routine in those school years, leaving Ghilarza early Monday morning, on a horse-drawn cart, traveling the twelve-miles over the tanca (pastureland) on a dirt track, returning either Friday afternoon or Saturday morning, often on foot. The area could be hairy, bandit and cattle-thief country. Years later he remembered an incident walking with a friend, coming back from school one Saturday morning, plodding along a deserted spot when, all of a sudden, they heard gun shots and stray bullets whistling by. Quickly they realized it was they who were being shot at! The duo scrambled into a ditch for cover, hugging the ground for a long while, until they were sure the coast was clear. “Obviously,” he tells Tatiana, “it was a bunch of fellows out for a laugh, who enjoyed scaring us—some joke, eh! It was pitch dark when we got home, very tired and muddy, and we told nobody what had happened.”

Back then, getting to and from school on foot would have taken Gramsci most of the day, even without being fired upon, and several hours by horse-drawn cart. In more modern times, on Sardinia’s surprisingly smooth, well-maintained country roads, you can zip along the SP15 in a shade over twenty-minutes. Though if you motor too fast, you’ll miss much of what’s noteworthy about the island’s landscape. Not least its stones. John Berger is right when he says that “in the hinterland around Ghilarza, as in many parts of the island, the thing you feel most strongly is the presence of stones.” “Sardinia is first and foremost a place of stones.” “Endless and ageless dry-stone walls separate the tancas,” Berger says, “border the gravel roads, enclose pens for the sheep, or, having fallen apart after centuries of use, suggest ruined labyrinths. Everywhere a stone is touching a stone.” Berger reckons that stones “gave Gramsci or inspired in him his special sense of time and his special patience.” Stones are silently there, stoic and solid, resistant to time, enduring the passage of time, unmoved, knowing that life on earth goes on over the long durée. This notion was surely not lost on its native radical son.

Under a blazingly hot sun, in the lizard-dry countryside before me, I could feel the presence of stones, thick basalt blocks dramatically stacked up one on top of the other, forming the most archaeologically significant feature of Sardinia: nuraghi—tall dry-stone towers, some over forty-feet high. Throughout the island there are around 7,000 nuraghi remaining, important testimonies of Sardinia’s Bronze Age. Nuraghe Losa, on the Abbasanta plateau, a mile or so outside Ghilarza, has an imposing central rectangular keep, surrounded by outer rings of stone walls. It’s now a UNESCO site of world heritage. Other nuraghi, like Nuraghe Zuras, are off the beaten track, along a narrow grassy path off the SP15. I could tell Zuras hadn’t been visited for some time: the grass beside it was over-grown, full of weeds; some giant stone blocks, centuries old, had collapsed; the brown sign, detailing the site’s history, had broken away from its posting and lay upended on the ground.

Like most nuraghi, Zuras has a single entrance, low and narrow, with an interior staircase. Zuras looked so forlorn that I was reluctant to crouch and enter the pitched darkness. What lay inside? An animal’s lair? A bees’ nest? Masses of cobwebs? Snakes? I didn’t fancy finding out. Nobody knows the precise function of nuraghi, excepting that they weren’t, like ancient Egyptian pyramids, burial grounds, places of the dead: nuraghi were very much structures for the living. Most likely they mixed protective and defensive activities, offering shelter to shepherds during inclement weather, and lookout posts for military surveillance; once ascended, they afford dramatic vistas across the whole countryside.

Stones figure prominently in Sardinian imagination and meant a lot to Gramsci; he’d touched many, collected many scattered around the surrounding tanca. At home, he spent hours with a chisel smoothing those stones down, shaping them into pairs of spheres of commensurate sizes, as big as grapefruits and melons, hollowing out little grooves inside each rock. Once ready, he’d insert into the holes pieces of a broom handle he’d cut up, foot-long lengths. He’d then join the spherical stones together, forming homemade, makeshift dumbbells. Gramsci used six stones to make three sets of dumbbells of varying weights, and with them, every morning, as hard as he could, as disciplined as he was, he did exercises to strengthen his weak body—his arms, shoulders, and back muscles, making himself more robust to confront the great and terrible world he knew lay beyond.

***

The Gramscis lived in the center of Ghilarza, at number 57 Corso Umberto I, still the town’s main drag. The house was built in the early nineteenth century, with two floors, divided into six rooms: three on the ground floor, with an inner courtyard, and three on the upper floor. From the age of seven until twenty, Gramsci shared the abode with his mother, father, and six siblings—Gennaro, Grazietta, Emma, Mario, Teresina, and Carlo. In what would become a life of lodgings, hotel rooms, clinics, and prison cells, the Ghilarza house was the only place he’d ever call home, always remember affectionally; a haven he’d return to nostalgically in his prison letters, cherishing it as a site of Gramscian collective memory. The plain, white-walled stone building, with a little upper-floor iron-grilled balcony, is today fittingly preserved as Casa Museo Antonio Gramsci, exhibiting a small yet significant array of Gramsci memorabilia for public viewing.

Months prior, I’d corresponded with the museum to arrange a visit. They’d welcomed me yet said: “the Casa Museo Antonio Gramsci is closed for major restauration works. But you can visit a temporary exhibition in the premises of Piazza Gramsci, right in front of the museum house. The temporary exhibition contains a chronological journey through the life of Gramsci and preserves a large part of the objects, photos, and documents present within the museum itinerary. The exhibition is accompanied by captions in Italian and English…We await your e-mail to plan your visit. See you soon!”

And now I was parking my car along Corso Umberto I, headed for Piazza Gramsci. To the left, looking spick and span, I recognized from photographs Gramsci’s old house; the adjoining properties, at numbers 59 and 61, were covered in plastic sheeting, concealing the building works going on within, the said renovation of the museum complex. Almost opposite, on the other side of the street, I noticed something that would have doubtless thrilled Gramsci: the offices of a small, independent publishing house, a radical Sardinian press whose name sets the tone of its politics: Iskra Edizioni, after Lenin’s fortnightly socialist newspaper, produced in exile in London then smuggled back into Russia where it became an influential underground paper. Iskra Edizioni, founded in Ghilarza in 2000, tries to keep alive Sardinian folk traditions and dialect, and deals with translations of academic books and reissuing of militant texts “that can no longer be found on the market.”

Around the corner is Piazza Gramsci. Two young women welcomed me into the museum’s makeshift store, full of everything Gramsci: tote bags and tee-shirts, posters and notebooks, magazines and books, modestly for sale, all tastefully displayed. Then I was led into two temporary exhibition spaces where, left to myself, I was alone with Gramsci, overwhelmed because he was everywhere. What initially struck was his bed, a little single divan—a very little iron-framed divan, with two walnut wood panels serving as the head and end boards. It was its size, its smallness, that most affected me. If Gramsci slept here until the age of twenty, you get a sense of his diminutive stature—it was like a kid’s bed, not much bigger than a cot.

Nearby, a pewter washbasin and a glass cabinet containing a red and blue plaid shirt, worn by Gramsci in prison, together with toothbrush, comb, shoehorn, and shaving blade. Another glass cabinet had two grapefruit-sized stones, with two little grooves, the remains of Gramsci’s dumbbells, overlaying a series of family photos, Gramsci’s birth certificate, and a telegram Tatiana sent Piero Sraffa, dated April 26, 1937: “GRAMSCI COLPO APOPLETICO GRAVISSIMO, TATIANA.” [“GRAMSCI SUFFERED SERIOUS STROKE, TATIANA”] Above it something even more disturbing: dressed in a dark suit, a photo of Gramsci on his deathbed, taken by Tatiana.

Tatiana did several things for her dead brother-in-law: besides taking care of his notebooks and arranging his burial, she had two-bronze casts made, one of his right hand, his writing hand, the other a death mask, the most haunting object of all the museum’s exhibits. Gramsci looks unrecognizable—bloated, with puffed up round cheeks, far removed from the youthful images of him with flowing locks of curly black hair and those famous rimless spectacles. It was a far cry indeed from how he was remembered at High School: “he may have been deformed,” old school chum Renato Figari recalled, “but he wasn’t ugly. He had a high forehead, with a mass of wavy hair, and behind his prince-nez I remember the bright blue of his eyes, that shining, metallic gaze, which struck you so forcibly.”

Why bloated? It’s hard to say. Poor prison food? Medication for his illnesses? Sedentary life in a cell? Before incarceration, Gramsci was a great walker, covering vast distances on a foot, as a child and adolescent in Sardinia, and as a student in Turin, where he seemed to know old backstreets intimately; and even immediately prior to his arrest, he’d take long strolls around Rome, encountering comrades in cafés, hoofing around town to attend one meeting or another. Yet now I was looking at the cast of a man who’d aged dramatically, gained weight, and looked well beyond his forty-six years. Maybe Tatiana wanted to retain the image of her brother-in-law, whose metallic, piercing gaze was no more. Maybe she wanted to demonstrate to the world what the fascists had done to him. Lest we forget.

It was difficult not to be stirred by the exhibit, not to be affected; but I knew I had one other thing to do in Ghilarza: I had to go and see his mother, whose remains lay on the edge of town in the municipal cemetery. An attractive arched stone entrance led you into a magnificent Cypress tree paradise, aglow in gorgeous late afternoon light. Giuseppina Marcias Gramsci’s grave has a prime site in the cemetery, with little around it, marked by a horizonal marble headstone, still bearing the flowers of the small commemoration of a few weeks earlier, on April 27. A Gramsci citation is chiseled into the foot of the marble, words taken from a letter he’d written his sister Grazietta (December 29, 1930), expressing concern about his mother’s health: “Ha lavorato per noi tutta la vita, sacrificandosi in modo inaudito.” [“She had worked for us all her life, sacrificing herself in unimaginable ways.”] Gramsci’s actual letter continues: “if she had been a different woman who knows what disastrous end we would have come to even as children; perhaps none of us would be alive today.”

Over dinner that evening, back at my albergo, I leafed through a publication I’d picked up during my museum visit, “Mandami tante notizie di Ghilarza.” Its title is a quote from another Gramsci letter to his mother (April 25, 1927): “Send me lots of news about Ghilarza”; a glossy magazine produced by the Fondazione Casa Gramsci Onlus, centering on “Paesaggi gramsciani: il santuario campestre di San Serafino”—“Gramscian Landscapes: The Rural Sanctuary of San Serafino.” San Serafino was one of his favorite boyhood stomping grounds, in a childhood much more adventurous out of school than in, a little village four miles from home, a journey Antonio would have doubtless made on foot.

The village and its chapel overlook Lake Omodeo. The lake runs into River Tirso at the Tirso River Dam and the magazine reproduces a facsimile of a postcard of the “Diga del Tirso” not long after its construction, one Tatiana had sent Gramsci on August 2, 1935, presumably when she was visiting his family in Ghilarza. Three other large-sized facsimiles feature in the magazine, letters Gramsci sent to his mother. One, from October 19, 1931, is worth citing at length:

“Dearest mamma, I received your letter of the fourteen and I was very glad to hear that you’ve regained your strength and that you will go for at least a day to the San Serafino festival. When I was a boy, I loved the Tirso valley below San Serafino so much! I would sit hour after hour on a rock to look at the sort of lake the river formed right below the church to watch the waterhens come out of the canebrake and swim toward to the center, and the heaps of fish that were hunting mosquitos. I still remember how I once saw a large snake enter the water and come out soon after with a large eel in its mouth, and how I killed the snake and carried off the eel, which I had to throw away because it had stiffened like a stick and made my hands smell too much.”

These lines told me where I needed to head next morning: to San Serafino, to another paesaggi gramsciani. The village was deserted when I pulled up; only a couple of languid dogs greeted me, wandering over unconcerned, not even bothering to bark, showing no signs of malice. They sniffed around me for a while, harmlessly, before lumbering back to where they came from. San Serafino village looked like a small vacation resort, shuttered up, with a series of uniform stone rowhouses, all seemingly unoccupied in non-summer months. The village’s centerpiece is a lovely chapel, pristine and somehow majestic in its understated, white-walled simplicity. In the near distance, below, a picturesque glimpse of Gramsci’s favorite lake. Herein my next mission: get to the lake, try to sit on a rock and look out as Gramsci had looked out.

I went on foot. Crossing a main road bereft of any traffic, the signage reminded me, if I ever needed reminding, that I was in Gramsci country. I took a photo. At the roadside, an old hand-painted sign indicated, in yellow, “Lago,” with an arrow pointing its direction. I followed it, descending a little gravel path. Not a sole in sight. Soon the lake came into view, Lago Omodeo, and finding a rock to sit on at the water’s edge, I wondered whether perhaps I’d discovered Gramsci’s actual rock, where he’d sat for hour upon hour. It was May and baking hot, 100 degrees, without shade. So I knew my visit needed to be brief, imbibing the atmosphere, getting some sense of what Gramsci experienced, of what he’d loved, and what he might have loved again.

***

In truth, I had no real idea what I was searching for, here or anywhere else in Sardinia. I was embarked on a peculiar research project, very unmethodological, impossible to conceive in advance, having little inkling what I’d expect to find, let alone how I would go about trying to find it. And what was this it I sought anyway? I knew that part of it was wanting to see Gramsci’s family house and museum, that I wanted to see some of the more tangible remnants of Gramsci’s Sardinian world, artefacts and documents; but there were other things I was after, too, less tangible aspects of this world, more experiential aspects, things subjective rather than objective, sensory rather than strictly empirical. Or, at least, the sort of empirical that’s hard to qualify and impossible to quantify: a smell, a texturing of the cultural and natural landscape, of Gramsci’s environment, the look on people’s faces, the region’s light and warmth, its dusty aridness, the sun beating down, the sun setting, the sun rising, the faint ripple of the lake below San Serafino, the buzzing of insects, the sound of silence, the presence of stones. 

I suppose I was accumulating impressions, and what impressions I’d accumulated I was now trying to recapture on the page back in Rome, where I write, reconstructing my trip from memory, realizing how much of it seemed to pass in a haze. I remember the day after San Serafino, going to Ales—I had to go to Ales (pronounced “Alice”): it was Gramsci’s birthplace, after all, an hour’s south of Ghilarza, a town of 1,500 people that never lets you forget it is his paese natale; it was home only for a matter of months (the family upped sticks shortly after Antonio’s birth to Sorgono, before permanently moving to Ghilarza). Another scorchingly hot afternoon, a fierce sun beating down. God knows how it’s possible that the thermometer could rise even more in July and August. Little wonder Gramsci always felt cold in prison.

There was no shade in Ales, nowhere open, no place to eat, to buy food, to drink anything—and hot, hot, hot. Yet I was there for Gramsci, and it was endearing how much due care and attention Ales devoted to him. His actual birthplace—a two-story, yellow-façade house at Corso Cattedrale, 14—is now a cultural center hosting talks, book launches, and movie-showings, and still keeps the Gramscian red flag flying: one poster in the window read: “STOP ALL EMBARGO CONTRO CUBA.” Gramsci’s life and thought crops up everywhere in Ales, almost on every street corner, by way of a novel series of plaque-posters detailing his lifeline and different aspects of his work. It had all been lovingly curated and presented, and proclaimed Ales as a “laboratorio di idee,” a laboratory of ideas, inviting visitors “conoscere Antonio Gramsci camminando nel suo paese natale”—“to know Antonio Gramsci by walking in his hometown.”

And I did walk, headed for another landmark, another Piazza Gramsci, with its modern stone sculpture garden that looked weather beaten, worn away by the sun, nicely done but utterly deserted by day because of so little shade. As I strolled, by chance I spotted one of the most interesting signs of Gramsci, an impromptu sign, unprogrammed, indicating that the man isn’t only remembered but that he’s also somehow alive in people: graffiti on a rusty old door of an abandoned building, which piqued my attention and brought a smile to my face: “SONO PESSIMISTA CON INTELLIGENZA,” all of which presumably implies that the daubers were somehow optimists of the will—“ottimista per la volontà,” as Gramsci said, summing up my own sentiment about our post-truth world.

Not far from the graffiti was the loveliest Gramsci homage I’d ever seen, the loveliest and cleverest: a giant mural painted on the side of a whole building, in bright color, huge and stunning, without any trace of desecration, sparklingly clean and vivid. What was so interesting and clever was its blending of reality and fantasy; illustrating some of Gramsci’s childhood adventures with hedgehogs, apples, and snakes; yet also showing him older, smiling, reunited with his two sons, a family portrait, a what might’ve been image if he’d returned to Sardinia, if Delio and Giuliano had somehow made it out of the USSR, come back to Italy to see dad—big ifs. Where was mom Giulia? The mural was so vast that I had a hard time properly capturing it on camera.

To the uninitiated, the hedgehog-apple imagery might be perplexing. For insight let’s invoke a letter (February 22, 1932) from father to son Delio:

“One autumn evening when it was already dark, but the moon was shining brightly, I went with another boy, a friend of mine, to a field full of fruit trees, especially apple trees. We hid in a bush, downwind. And there, all of a sudden, hedgehogs popped out, five of them, two larger ones and three tiny ones. In Indian file they moved toward the apple trees, wandered around in the grass and then set to work, helping themselves with their little snouts and legs, they rolled the apples that the wind had shaken from the trees and gathered them together in a small clearing, nicely arranged close together. But obviously the apples lying on the ground were not enough; the largest hedgehog, snout in the air, looked around, picked a tree curved close to the ground and climbed up it, followed by his wife. They settled on a densely laden branch and began to swing rapidly, with brusque jolts, and many more apples fell to the ground. Having gathered these and put them next to the others, all the hedgehogs, both large and small, curled up, with their spines erect, and lay down on the apples that then were stuck to them; some had picked up only a few apples (the small hedgehogs), but father and mother had been able to pierce seven or eight apples each. As they were returning to their den, we jumped out of our hiding place, put the hedgehogs in a small sack and carried them home…I kept them for many months, letting them roam freely in the courtyard, they would hunt for all sorts of small animals…I amused myself by bringing live snakes into the courtyard to see how the hedgehogs would hunt them down.”

Ales’ mural offered a beautiful pictorial rendering of Gramsci’s beautiful narrative tale of hedgehogs carrying apples on their backs, gathered together, about to chomp away on their harvested feast. The stars twinkle overhead and a glowing moon gives the whole scene a magical milky charm. Gramsci, aged and portly as he was toward the end, is here radiantly alive, neatly attired in suit and tie, a proud father, arms around his two sons either side of him—a what might have been prospect, a Gramsci family romance, a happier epilogue to the tragic story we know really ensued.

That happy image of Gramsci disturbed me for some time. I remember passing a morning in Santu Lussurgiu, strolling around its old center and then around what’s a sort of small outer suburb, a ring of houses built sometime over the past fifty-years, well after Gramsci’s day. I was deep in thought about Gramsci—not about Gramsci the young lad but Gramsci the older man, the person who might have returned to walk the streets where I was walking. In olden times, Santu Lussurgiu was the site of Sa Carrela è Nanti, a folkloric horse race, a tradition held every Mardi Gras. Horses used to gallop through audience-flocked streets at breakneck speeds, with pairs of riders dressed in flamboyant traditional costumes, donned in obligatory Zoro-like masks. The old town’s walls are still adorned with framed photos of this crazy equine event, now defunct, I looked at some showing the spectacle and its crowds as late as the 1980s.

Perched up on high in Santu Lussurgiu, where you get a sweeping vista of the whole town, is a massive white granite statue of Christ, with placating arms stretched out, and a bright red heart that looks slightly ridiculous, like it’s pulsating, beating for the salvation of the town’s residents. (It resembles Jim Carrey’s heart in The Mask, beating for Cameron Diaz.) I negotiated Santu Lussurgiu’s streets, climbed upward to get a close up of Christ, and witness that panorama before Him. All the while, I tried to visualize Gramsci back here, living in Santu Lussurgiu, imagining his niece Edmea finding Uncle Nino a room, probably near to where he used to lodge, in the old quarter, in a little stone house where various relatives could come and go, cater for his needs, help him recover, regain his strength, his zest for life.

He might have taken short walks in the fresh air, got himself some false teeth, eaten healthily again, found peace and quiet and maybe resumed his work, his letter writing, reconnecting with the outside world, with all the people and places he’d formerly known. Maybe he would have taken the odd aperitivo in town, with his father Francesco, who might have lived himself had his son also lived. Gramsci Sr. and Jr. might have tippled with the town folk; son would have enjoyed speaking their language, their dialect. It could have been right out of the leaves of Machiavelli, of Gramsci’s hero’s life in exile. For downtime, while working on The Prince, Machiavelli loved to sneak through the secret underground passageway of his Chianti wine cellar and pop-up next door at a raucous tavern (L’Albergaccio). He’d guzzle wine, chinwag with peasants and wayfarers, play cards and exchange vulgarities with the butcher, miller, and innkeeper. “Involved in these trifles,” Machiavelli said, “I kept my brain from growing moldy.”

Gramsci’s post-prison life might have been no less bawdy, a homecoming dramatic and heart wrenching, like a scene from Cinema Paradiso—when, after a thirty-year absence, Salvatore, the famous film director, finally returns to his Sicilian native village, attending the funeral of the old cinema projectionist, Alfredo, whom he’d adored as a kid. But maybe Gramsci’s return would’ve been less mawkish; he wasn’t one for fainthearted nostalgia, would have probably been harder, followed the words of the island’s poet laureate, Sebastiano Satta: “His bitter heart lurches./ He does not cry:/ Sardinians should never cry.”

On the other hand, we might wonder how long Gramsci’s convalescence may have lasted before he’d gotten itchy feet, yearned for contact with the wider world again—for engaging politically again. Could he really accept, as he’d hinted to wife Giulia in 1936, “a whole cycle of his life definitively closing”? He’d spent a decade of sedentary life, cut-off from life within four narrow walls; it would be hard to imagine, as a free man, him wanting to sit around all day, behind a desk or in a bar, leading a quiet, mediative and contemplative existence. He’d surely have gotten bored after a while, a country boy who’d tasted the forbidden fruits of cosmopolitanism—in Turin and Vienna, in Moscow and Rome—a roving journalist, activist, and intellectual, a man who’d met Lenin and Victor Serge, who read in different languages, who’d prided himself on his internationalist outlook. Wouldn’t village life have soon become too stifling, too parochial?

Another question we might pose about Gramsci’s return to Sardinia is: did he really plan on staying long? Or was it just easier for him to flee Sardinia than mainland Italy—as he’d apparently told Tatiana, and as she’d written to her sister Eugenia in Moscow? A month prior to Gramsci’s passing, Tatiana told Eugenia (March 25, 1937): “Antonio believes it would be a lot easier to escape from Sardinia than from Italy. We can’t mention it, or rumors will start.” From what would he be fleeing? The Italian fascist authorities? The Russian Communist Party and its apparatchik, suspecting Gramsci as a closet Trotskyite? The Nazis, who’d soon be jack-booting across Europe? And where else might he go?

Gramsci never knew anything about the German bombardment of the Basque town of Guernica; it took place after he’d had his stroke, on April 26, 1937, the day prior to his death. And yet, maybe Gramsci had anticipated a darkening of Europe, was fearing the worst, knew something was brewing, that fascism was not only alive and well but would soon brazenly expand its reach, morph into Nazism? Maybe he feared what was in store for his beloved island should war break out. Mussolini saw Sardinia as a stepping-stone for enlarging his Mediterranean empire. Because of its strategic positioning—only 8 miles from French Corsica—and the importance of Cagliari for launching attacks on Allied shipping in the Mediterranean, Sardinia suffered heavy bombing.

At the same time, the island also had a strong anti-fascist resistance movement, which supported the Allies, and played a significant role in eventual Italian liberation in 1943. If he’d stayed in Sardinia, what role would Gramsci have assumed? A leader of the underground resistance movement? A free man yet a communist enemy of the Nazis, a man who would need to battle on three fronts—against the German Nazis, the Italian fascists, and the Russian Stalinists. Whatever the case, it’s clear his Sardinia peace would have been short-lived, lasting a couple of years only.

On the other hand, would he have opted to join the dissident exodus from mainland Europe? It’s fascinating to consider that the northern Sardinian port of Porto Torres had a direct ferry line to Marseille; from Porto Torres Gramsci could have eloped to the southern French city. Although under German occupation, Marseille’s shady underworld of crime and opportunism, its rowdy bars and back alleys around the Vieux Port, its seafaring and immigrant culture, meant it slipped through the tightening grip of the Gestapo. The city’s cracks offered elicit protection for assorted refugees, dissidents, and Jews, while becoming a wartime waystation for the passage out to the new world. (One of Gramsci’s contemporaries, Walter Benjamin, born 1892, famously didn’t make it out, crossing the Pyrenees from Marseille in September 1940 only to find the Spanish border closed. Stranded, without the right exit visa, he preferred suicide to being sent back, overdosing on morphine in a cheap Portbou hotel.)

Might Gramsci have shacked up with the celebrated artists and intellectuals on the outskirts of Marseille, at the Villa Air Bel, before setting sail in March 1941 on Le Capitaine Paul Lemerle, a converted cargo boat, for Martinique? What a mesmerizing proposition that would have been. Onboard were 350 refugees, as well as a glitterati of creative dissents, castaways of old Europe, including anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, photographer Germaine Krull, surrealist painter Wifredo Lam, the “Pope” of Surrealism himself, André Breton, his wife, the painter-dancer Jacqueline Lamba, together with their six-year-old daughter Aube. The anarcho-Bolshevik revolutionary Victor Serge, himself no stranger to political persecution and imprisonment, was another passenger, accompanied by his twenty-year-old son, Vlady, a budding artist.

Serge and Gramsci were kindred spirits, contemporaries who knew each other in Vienna in the mid-1920s. (There’s a touching photograph of them together, a group shot on a Viennese street, with optimism in the air and a grinning Gramsci.) Serge was remorselessly scathing about people he didn’t like or rate—his Notebooks, 1936-1947 are full of selected character assassinations—yet was generous about those he knew and/or admired, like Gramsci.

A few years after his arrival in Mexico, Serge wrote in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary perhaps the nicest portrait of Gramsci ever written:

“Antonio Gramsci was living in Vienna, an industrious and Bohemian exile, late to bed and late to rise, working with the illegal committee of the Italian Communist Party. His head was heavy, his brow high and broad, his lips thin, the whole was carried on a puny, square-shouldered, weak-chested, hunchbacked body. There was grace in the movements of his fine, lanky hands. Gramsci fitted awkwardly into the humdrum of day-to-day existence, losing his way at night in familiar streets, taking the wrong train, indifferent to the comfort of his lodgings and the quality of his meals—but, intellectually, he was absolutely alive. Trained intuitively in the dialectic, quick to uncover falsehood and transfix it with the sting of irony, he viewed the world with exceptional clarity…a frail invalid held in both detestation and respect by Mussolini, Gramsci remained in Rome to carry on the struggle. He was fond of telling stories about his childhood; how he failed his entry into the priesthood, for which his family had marked him out. With short bursts of sardonic laughter, he exposed certain leading figures of fascism with whom he was closely acquainted…a fascist jail kept him outside the operation of those factional struggles whose consequence nearly everywhere was the elimination of the militants of his generation. Our years of darkness were his years of stubborn resistance.”

Amid an atmosphere of fugitive uncertainty and fear—fear of being torpedoed or detained by Vichy-controlled Martinique—Serge and Gramsci would’ve had plenty to talk about aboard Le Capitaine Paul Lemerle, plenty of time to argue, to agree and disagree, to agree about disagreeing. Both had the capacity of conviction, believing in the unity of thought, energy, and life, yet were critical of all forms of fanatism. Both knew every idea is subject to revision in the face of new realities. Both would have agreed that the old world was dying and little was left of what they’d known, of what they’d struggled for (Serge’s own title for his memoirs was originally Memories of Vanished Worlds); both knew the new world had yet to be born and monsters lurked in the interregnum, in the darkness at dawn, in the unforgiving years they were each living out. Both would have shared prison tales of hardship and disappointment, told jokes with an inmate gallows humor they knew firsthand.

They’d have likely discussed the relative merits of anarchism and Marxism, agreed about the disasters of Stalinism, found common ground on the need to rebuild socialism through a Constituent Assembly. (In his Notebooks, Serge said socialists “ought to seek influence on the terrain of democracy, in the Constituent Assemblies and elsewhere, accepting compromise in an intransigent spirit.”) They’d have converged and diverged in their views about Georges Sorel, the French political theorist, agreeing about aspects of his anarcho-syndicalism, particularly on the general strike, about its “mythical” nature, that it was a “concrete fantasy” (as Gramsci called it) for arousing and organizing a collective will; yet would have disagreed about Sorel’s ethical repugnance to Jacobinism, which Gramsci recognized as “the categorical embodiment of Machiavelli’s Prince.” The jury would have been out on Gramsci’s feelings about Sorel’s “moral elite,” which Serge liked, the idea that history depends on the caliber of individuals, on how fit and capable they are for making revolution. Maybe Gramsci might have agreed; perhaps this was just another notion of an “organic intellectual”?

After landing in Martinique, where might Gramsci have gone? Followed comrade Serge to Mexico? Taken André Breton’s route, found refuge in New York? They never let Serge into America; no Communist Party member, existant or previous, was ever granted entry; Gramsci would have experienced a similar fate. Mexico would have been the more likely bet. Serge’s weak heart didn’t last long in high-altitude Mexico City: a cardiac arrest struck him down in the back of a cab in 1947. It took several hours before his body was identified. Vlady recalls finding his father on a police station slab. Son noticed the sorry state of dad’s shoes, his soles full of holes, which shocked Vlady because his father had always been so careful about his appearance, even during times of worst deprivation. A few days on, Vlady sketched dad’s hands, which were, as Serge had described Gramsci’s, very beautiful. Not long after, Serge’s final poem was discovered, drafted the day before he’d died, called “Mains”—”Hands”: “What astonishing contact, old man, joins your hands with ours!”

I know, I know–all of this is idle conjecture about Gramsci, maybe even pointless wish-imaging. It didn’t happen. What really happened happened: Gramsci died, never made it out, was never reunited with Serge. While we can act and should speculate on the future, we can’t change the past, the course of a history already done. That past can be falsified, erased and denied, of course, as people in power frequently do—remember Gramsci’s youthful article from Avanti!, penned in 1917, documenting a common bourgeois trait, prevalent today, of renaming old city streets, of coining new names for neighborhoods where a working class past was vivid. “Armed with an encyclopedia and an ax, they proceed to demolish old Turin,” Gramsci wrote of his adopted city. Streets are the common heritage of people,” he said, “of their affections, which united individuals more closely with the bonds of a solidarity of memory.” 

So we can’t reinvent Gramsci’s past, shouldn’t reinvent that past. But we might keep his memory alive, find solidarity in that memory, keep him free from any renaming, from the encyclopedia and the ax. His phantom, his death mask, can haunt our present and our future. To remember what happened to him is never to forget his dark times, the dark times that might well threaten us again. Victor Serge recognized this, somehow knew it was his friend’s powerfullest weapon. Twelve-years after their Viennese encounter, “when I emerged from a period of deportation in Russia and arrived in Paris,” Serge writes in Memoirs of a Revolutionary, “I was following a Popular Front demonstration when someone pushed a communist pamphlet into my hand: it contained a picture of Antonio Gramsci, who had died on April 27 of that year.” What should we do with this picture in our own hands? Remember it and pass it on. 

 

April 27, 2024 is the 87th anniversary of the death of Antonio Gramsci. Here are some photos of a commemoration event, beside his grave, today at the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome, an annual gathering, organized by the Fondazione Gramsci and International Gramsci Society.

Gramsci saw the whole of the Italian “South” as a kind of goblin, as a character who got and keeps getting a bad rap, like Rumpelstiltskin. In late 1926, a month or so prior to his arrest, he was at work on a long essay about the Italian South, Alcuni temi della questione Meridionale—Some Aspects on the Southern Question. The piece was never completed; it was rudely interrupted; and while there’s a lot left dangling, there’s plenty for us still to glean. Gramsci was addressing his Marxist comrades, notably comrades from the north, in a tone that’s critical, enquiring, taking to task all camps, typically trying to get at the truth—warts and all. Gramsci chastised a Right northern bourgeoisie as well as a Left industrial proletariat, northern Marxists as well as southern liberals, workers from the north as well as a gentry from the south.

Point is that all this is voiced by a lad from the south. Gramsci’s political awakening occurred in the north, yet his cultural allegiances always rested with the south. He grew up in peasant society, spoke local Ghilarza dialect, and probably didn’t hear Italian itself until he reached grammar school; and then, in Turin, through his college professors. As a poor, set-apart kid, encountering official Italian was likely both a source of liberation and a lesson in officialdom, the tenor of a ruling class authority he was out to smash.

So part of Gramsci’s struggle was to invent not only a different kind of Marxism, but also a different kind of language, a different political register that spoke neither raw dialect nor elitist Italian. In a sense, amalgaming the two interested the linguist in him, mixing the language of the countryside with that of the city, reconciling the expressive powers of vernacular with the sobriety of reason, converting a commonsense into good sense; a Marxism neither flaky idealism nor iron-law materialism yet something else again—a concrete, authentic, philosophy of praxis sensitive to place, culture, and tradition. There’s a lot more there there in his Marxism.

We can witness this flowing through “Some Aspects on the Southern Question.” He’s especially skeptical of how his factory council comrades want to resolve southern “backwardness.” By smashing the capitalist factory autocracy, they say, smashing an oppressive state apparatus, a workers’ state would then smash the chains that bind peasants to the land. Taking over industry and the banks would swing the enormous weight of the state bureaucracy behind the peasants, helping them vanquish in their struggle against southern landowners.

Gramsci doesn’t buy into this northern patronage, into the communist “magical formula” (as he labels it). He doesn’t believe the solution to the “Southern Question” lies in the hands of a northern workers vanguard. Northern communists, he says, have more in common with their bourgeois antagonists, a lot more than they consciously appreciate. They’ve been “unconsciously subjected to the influence of bourgeois education, to bourgeois press, to bourgeois traditions.”

“It’s well known,” Gramsci says, “what kind of ideology has been disseminated in myriad ways among the masses in the north, by propagandists of the bourgeoisie: the south is the ball and chain which prevents the social development of Italy from progressing more rapidly; southerners are biologically inferior beings, semi-barbarians or total barbarians, by natural destiny; if the South is backward, the fault doesn’t lie with the capitalist system, but with nature, which has made southerners lazy, incapable, criminal and barbaric.”

Left-wing positivism has often reinforced southern inferiority: “science was used to crush the wretched and exploited, but this time it was dressed in socialist colors and claimed to be the science of the proletariat.” Factory workers and Marxist intellectuals, Gramsci says, have to rethink this approach so that the Left can become politically effective throughout all Italy. Proletarians and their leaders “must strip themselves of every residue of corporatism, every syndicalist prejudice and incrustation,” he says. They need to overcome distinctions between one trade and another, between factory workers and artisans, industrial laborers and toilers on the land, between the city and the countryside—between a north and south embedded in peoples’ heads.

Spatial antagonisms—urban versus rural, north versus south, etc.—tend to occlude basic class questions, says Gramsci, and one of the biggest problems here is organizing. In the south, urban forces are subordinate to rural forces, the city kowtows to the countryside. In the Mezzogiorno, the countryside is less progressive than the city; but southern urbanism, unlike its northern counterpart, isn’t industrial, and can’t be organized in the same fashion as a giant car plant; the culture and history of Naples is different from Turin and Milan. And yet, given the dominance of the industrial north, and the greater leverage of its factory workers and unions, the latter has to convince southern rural and urban working classes that they’re all brothers and sisters in the same struggle.

The schism between city and countryside, in other words, is much more nuanced than crudely meets the eye. Indeed, Gramsci warns about the ideology of appearances. “The relations between urban population and rural population,” he says, “aren’t a single, schematic type.” Figuring out their dialectical specifics, as well as fulfilling an educative and directive role, is the task Gramsci ascribes to “organic intellectuals,” a species of thinker and activist different from “traditional” intellectuals: the latter, he says, operate more conciliatory—lawyers, doctors, notaries, teachers, priests, bureaucrats, and technocrats—professionals who, wittingly or unwittingly, usually prop up the status quo rather than tear it down. Left organic intellectuals, on the other hand, feel the elemental passions of “the people” and become “permanent persuaders.” They critically explain the movement of history, as well as the working class’s interests in that movement. In Italy, as elsewhere, organic intellectuals help forge a “national-popular collective will.”

***

Gramsci’s health worsened toward the end of 1933. Sister-in-law Tatiana and longtime Gramsci friend, Piero Sraffa, a renowned economist at the University of Cambridge, made frequent appeals about getting him moved and better cared for. After Turi’s prison doctor also recommended a transfer, the fascist government eventually authorized Gramsci’s shift to Professor Giuseppe Cusumano’s health clinic in Formia, a coastal town 100 miles south of Rome. Although still under police surveillance, Gramsci could go out for occasional short walks, accompanied by an approved individual. Every Sunday, Tatiana journeyed down by train from Rome, and together they’d walk along the beachfront; sometimes brother Carlo came, and a few times Sraffa himself, from the UK.

Gramsci’s poor health, though, meant he couldn’t fully benefit from his newfound conditional liberty. A cleaner at the Cusumano clinic recalled her initial glimpse of the new patient: “small, hunchbacked, wrapped in a black Sardinian shepherd’s cloak, between two policemen.” “I was disappointed,” she said. “They told me Gramsci was the leader of the communists, a revolutionary, and I’d imagined him tall, imposing, not so small, minute, tired; but his eyes were clear, alive, penetrating, they dug into you. It was clear he was an extraordinary man.”

Significantly, Gramsci was now allowed access to all his notebooks at the same time—at Turi, he was only able to see five in one go. Thus he began recopying old raw notes, modifying them, expanding them here, deleting them there, collating them, grouping them together into “special” single topic themes. In July 1934, Gramsci started to assemble Notebook 25, Ai margini della storia [storia dei gruppi sociali subalterni]—On the Margins of History [The History of Subaltern Social Groups], bringing his scattered writings from Turi together into a 160-page composition notebook, larger-sized than he typically used before, and a different brand—”Ditta CUGINI ROSSI ROMA.”

Evidently, he’d anticipated a bigger project—on slaves and plebians from ancient Roman and medieval Italy, on peasants and proletarians, on subaltern social groups’ connection to history and economics, to commonsense and folklore, to spontaneity and intellectuals—on the potential for them acquiring “hegemony”; developing their own autonomous political consciousness; revolting against the bourgeoisie; taking their subordination out of the realm of civil society and politicking around the state, maybe one day becoming a state themselves. There was enough material here, Gramsci felt, to constitute an extended monograph, kickstarted with that essay on the southern question almost a decade earlier. He’d left the first ten-pages of notebook 25 blank, readied for an introductory text and a summary index that, with ever-failing health, he never managed to create. Hence Tatiana marked Quaderno 25 (XXV) “Incompleto.”

Gramsci was an original, a chip off the old block, the first Marxist ever to mobilize the term “subaltern.” He never knew it, of course, but he single-handedly invented a whole new discipline: “Subaltern Studies,” with its emphasis on the ignored and neglected in western history, as if it were the only History. Now, Gramsci’s southern question has enlarged to embrace the global south, a southern global imagination, those excluded “from historiography of the dominant classes, although protagonists of real history.”

In 2021, Columbia University Press thought Gramsci’s treatment of subaltern social groups sufficiently important to warrant English translation (by Joseph Buttigieg and Marcus Green), and a “critical edition” of notebook 25, combining allusions to subalternity from other Gramsci notebooks. The project would compensate for the short shrift Selections from Prison Notebooks initially afforded the topic—with no index entry for a thematic so personally and politically vital to Gramsci, the dark-skinned, hunchbacked goblin, a pariah from a culture different to the dominant. He empathized with subalterns, knew them, recognized them, because he came from them, recognized himself in them.

“Often,” Gramsci says, “subaltern groups are originally of a different race (different religion and different culture) than dominant groups, and they’re often a mixture of races…The question of the importance of women is similar to the question of subaltern groups… ‘masculinism’ can be compared to class domination.” Subaltern classes, he says, are portrayed “as having no history,” “people whose history leaves no traces in the historical documents of the past.”

Subalterns have to prize themselves free from the subjection dominant forces impose upon them. They also have to prize themselves free from their own passivity. This is hard, Gramsci admits, because “we’re all conformists of some conformism of another, always man-in-the mass or collective man”; we all belong to a particular social grouping that transmits, for better or for worse, its own uniform mode of thinking and acting. To that degree, one needs to be hard on oneself as well as on one’s antagonists; one needs to struggle against the world while struggling against oneself, internalizing at the same time as externalizing rebellion.

“When one’s conception of the world isn’t critical and coherent,” Gramsci says, “but disjointed and episodic, one belongs to a multiplicity of mass human groups.” The trick “is to criticize one’s own conception of the world,” to make “a coherent unity and to raise it to the level reached by the most advanced thought in the world.” “The starting point of critical elaboration,” he says, “is the consciousness of what one really is, and ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory.”

The subaltern, more than anybody else, needs to know themselves connected to the historical process, know themselves as being on the receiving end of this process, know how they’ve been undermined by that process, and sometimes how they’ve undermined themselves in that process. One problem is that even when subalterns rebel, “they’re in a state of anxious defense.” “Every trace of autonomous initiative, therefore, is of inestimable value.” (Gramsci captures here the perennial condition of the modern Left: in a state of anxious defense.)

The other problem is that when subaltern groups aren’t looked down upon, scorned and abused, they’re patronized, treated as “humble.” It’s a characteristic attitude, Gramsci says, of a lot of intellectuals, even well-meaning ones. For the Italian intellectual, “humble indicates a relationship of paternal protection, the ‘self-sufficient’ feeling of one’s own undisputed superiority; like the relationship between two races, one superior, the other inferior; like the relationship between adult and child in old schooling; or, worse still, like the relationship of a ‘society for the protection of animals’ or like that of the Anglo-Saxon Salvation Army toward the cannibals of Papua.”

It’s sensibility in stark contrast to Dostoevsky’s, Gramsci says, as depicted, for instance, in The Insulted and Injured (1861), a novel never terribly well favored by Dostoevsky afficionados, his first after Siberian exile. But Gramsci had spotted something in it that struck a suggestive political chord. “In Dostoevsky,” he says, “there’s a strong national-popular feeling, namely, an awareness of a mission of the intellectual toward the people, who may be ‘objectively’ composed of the ‘humble’ but must be freed from this ‘humility,’ transformed and regenerated.”

Gramsci doesn’t mention it by name, but this idea of “a mission of the intellectual toward the people” emerged in Russia during the early 1860s, expressed most fervently in the “Narodnik” movement. Young progressive urban intellectuals, dressed in simple peasant garb, fled cities and went “to the people,” canvasing across the countryside, inciting revolt against Tsarist rule. They lived amongst the people, merged with the people, taught them, learned from them, and tried to fight for their collective interests. Gramsci saw in the Narodniks a model for catalyzing revolt, a prototypical representation of the organic intellectual, somebody who could help the subaltern speak without ever putting words in their mouths.

***

The Cusumano clinic was a dreadful place for Gramsci. His letters indicate shoddy treatment. Tatiana claimed her brother-in-law’s health went further downhill. He had to endure incompetent medical care, she said, inedible food, and no hot water for bathing. He suffered the “neglect, indifference, indolence” of the clinic’s staff. Tatiana was damning. Adding to existing health woes, Gramsci developed a hernia, requiring the surgery he never got. His nervous and digestive systems were kaput. He was feverish, seized by tremors. Even holding a pen was a chore. Urinal infections meant frequently pissing blood.

And he couldn’t sleep: “The Cusumano family has arrived,” he told Tania (July 22, 1935). “Over my head there’s a continuous to and fro from five in the morning until midnight… I’m a sick person and every slightest rustle agitates me enormously. I will recover from many ailments and precisely from those which at the moment are the most tormenting.” “I am absolutely determined,” he added, “to leave the Cusumano clinic and as soon as possible.”

I was intrigued about this clinic in Formia, long since shutdown. I understood the building still stood, overlooking the beach, and so, one Sunday morning, early March, on an unseasonably blustery, rainy day, I got into my car and made the two-hour trek down from Rome. Waves crashed into Formia’s waterfront wall; walking the half a mile or so from the center of town, along via Appia Lato Napoli, toward number 30, necessitated a salty sea spray drenching. Then the former clinic appeared, a standalone, six-story cream structure, a lot smaller than I’d imagined, with decorative pink cornices, green shutters, and small balconies. Once it would have had a certain grandeur, an architecture suggesting 1920s construction. In Gramsci’s day, it would have felt almost new. In our day, it’s a condo apartment complex, opposite a gas station. Although occupied, most of the windows are shuttered up, maybe for the season, and overall the place strikes as in need of a little care and attention, a rehab and refresh.

I peered through a glass main doorway, into a tired looking entrance foyer, with plant pots and ornately patterned brown tiling. Doubtless the exact same floor once walked upon by Gramsci, wrapped in his Sardinian shepherd’s shawl. A large arched window at the far end, with traces of its former splendor, opens onto sea, offering an impressive view; yet, again, today, everything seems worn and musty, its better days behind. At the upper right of the entrance doorway, on the outside wall, a faded marble plaque, inaugurated on April 27, 1945, the eighth anniversary of Gramsci’s death, commemorates his miserable Formia sojourn.

 

QUI

ANTONIO GRAMSCI

CAPO E FONDATORE DEL P.C.I

VISSE IN PRIGIONIA

PER CRIMINALE PERSECUZIONE FASCISTA

FACENDO OLOCAUSTO DELLA

A SERVIZIO DEL POPOLO E DELL’ITALIA

    27 APRILE 1937                                                                          27 APRILE 1945

HERE

ANTONIO GRAMSCI

LEADER AND FOUNDER OF THE ITALIAN COMMUNIST PARTY

LIVED IN CAPTIVITY

FOR CRIMINAL FASCIST PERSECUTION

MAKING A HOLOCAUST OUT

OF SERVICE TO THE PEOPLE AND ITALY

The surrounding grounds, a parkland full of abandoned olive trees, has fallen into rack and ruin, with overgrown grass and weeds, rotting, upsized paddle boats, and rusty marine equipment. It’s inexplicable how rundown everything is. In other circumstances, it might have been a mini paradise by the sea. Gramsci and Tania would have strolled around this patch sometimes. “I’ve seen some little boys catching fish in the sea,” Gramsci said, in an undated letter to Guilia, one of only a handful written from Formia, “with a hollow brick (filled with air); they filled a small bucket with it.”

The letter is quoted on another plaque commemorating Gramsci, at a park along via Giuseppe Verdi—Parco di Gramsci—a few minutes on foot from the former clinic. The greenspace’s centerpiece is a large marble bust of the man himself, in his younger days, without glasses, looking like a Greek God, dating from April 27, 2000, the 63^rd anniversary of Gramsci’s passing. There are two granite writing tablets below, again Greek-style. One says Gramsci was “locked up by the fascist regime, gravely ill, at the Cusumano clinic in Formia, from December 7, 1933 to August 24, 1935,” concluding with the infamous words of the public prosecutor at Gramsci’s mock trial: “For twenty years we must prevent this brain from functioning.”

The adjacent tablet cites his letter about the kids fishing on Formia’s beach, accompanied with words to son Delio, from a 1936 letter: “I think you like history just as I did when I was your age, because it deals with human beings. And everything that deals with people, as many people as possible, all the people in the world as they join together in society and work and struggle and better themselves should please you more than anything else… I embrace you, Papa.”

Gramsci’s Park, alas, resembles Gramsci’s old clinic: jaded and shoddy, falling apart. Maybe it’s just the inclement weather, but everywhere around seems desolate, uncared for, graffiti splattered. The parks furniture and kids’ playground need an overhaul. By all accounts, the site was in an even worse state of disrepair a decade ago. For a while, back then, it was closed for renewal. But the refurbishment hasn’t worn well, and today the park looks a lot like it did in those former days. One image, published in the local newspaper Latina24, from 2014, shows Gramsci’s bust scarily daubed with a swastika, and it reminded me of the desecration of Marx’s Highgate grave in 2019.

It’s hard to know what was being remonstrated here. Was it that local Nazis didn’t like Gramsci? Or was it that the perpetrators thought Gramsci a Nazi? Both are hard to square. Both disturb with their wanton ignorance—though, of course, Nazis aren’t usually known for their smarts. The other thing that disturbs is that the culprits probably hailed from the subaltern classes that Gramsci singles out; someone excluded, unemployed, alienated, having little going on in their lives, with dismal future prospects, and a present full of discontentment. Their resentment prefers lashing out rightward. You’d have thought we’d learned our lesson from the past.

Walking back into town, dampened by the weather and by what I’d seen, feeling a bit dismal myself, I began reflecting on Gramsci’s subaltern social groups, on what it might mean nowadays. A week or so prior to my visiting Formia, I’d read a piece in The New York Times (February 26, 2024), “The Mystery of White Rural Rage,” by Paul Krugman, about rural America, about the baffling political backlash of rural populations. Agricultural employment has declined and small-town manufacturing has all but collapsed. American farms produce five-times more than they did seventy-five years ago with two-thirds less employment. The US has become richer from agriculture, yet rural areas have become a lot poorer. Employment opportunities have dwindled and a loss of dignity around work sets the tone for many rural dwellers, the majority of whom are white.

Anger is voiced against federal government and urban America. Poor city minorities and immigrants have been favored over hard working white Americans, they say, even though federal programs helping poor rural areas—social security, Medicare, and Medicaid—are disproportionately financed by urban areas. Hence there’s actually a de facto net transfer from urban to rural areas. Paul Krugman wonders why, instead of supporting Joe Biden, who has generally been favorable to rural America, bilious rage gives the thumbs up to Donald Trump—“a huckster from Queens, who,” says Krugman, “offers little other than validation of their resentment.”

It’s a curious reinvention of Gramsci’s “southern question.” Only now the southerners in question are those not only geographical southern, but culturally southern, too, people from the periphery who feel that periphery inside them, their own peripheralization from the core, from the north, from urban areas, as if their history is getting overlooked. Occluded in the process are, as Gramsci had it, basic questions of class, of why poor “southerners” don’t identify with poor “northern” folk, yet instead endorse a rich northern real estate fraudster. It’s beguiling. The other point is how subalternity takes on different skin hues—populations who, to greater or lesser degrees, are now marked by outsiderness, by exclusion and neglect, a feeling that their history and culture isn’t acknowledged by the perceived powers that be.

Gramsci’s southern question essay hoped for a Left turn in southern sensibility. Yet current climes suggests otherwise, that certain subalterns value more the visceral bleat of the Right. Krugman reckons white rural rage “is arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy,” and laments, “I’ve no good ideas about how to fight it.” Meantime, white rural working classes give gung-ho support to politicians who tell them the lies they seemingly want to hear. Gramsci knew about baffling reactionary politics, about how, sometimes, many subalterns end up voting for politicians and programs that go against their better interests. He tried to tell people the truth and got locked up for it.

Marxists once used to talk about “false consciousness,” the obverse of “knowing thyself.” For decades, false consciousness went out of fashion, yet lately it’s well and truly back in vogue, assuming an almost objective status, blurring reality and make-believe, so entrenched has it become in our society, so ubiquitous in our mass and social media, so commonplace in the misinformation sprouted by our politicians. All of it conspires to convey an implicitly distorted sense of reality, handy for vested political and economic interests—like it always did. A form of widespread brainwashing, where it’s easier to be believed for peddling lies than for telling the honest truth.

Gramsci emphasized the need for intellectuals to correct misconception, to persist in telling the truth, to go and voice it to the people. But maybe intellectuals have turned away from the people, just as the people have turned away from intellectuals. Maybe we’ve let the people down, retreated to our college campuses, given ourselves over to management committees and research assessments. We’ve been busier raising money rather than raising a ruckus. We’ve been bought off by the good life or else gotten complacent.

Or maybe a lot of us have simply gotten depressed about a Left always being in “a state of anxious defense,” forever on the backfoot, or more often entirely lame, and we’re happier sitting behind our desks writing stuff like this. Organic intellectuals have gone elsewhere for nourishment, turned traditional. Or perhaps the most effective “permanent persuaders” have been those on the right-flank, relentlessly inveigling people that lying is the winning ticket, that crank demagogues will really make things great again.

Notwithstanding, Gramsci continues to inspire, come what may. He inspires me, at least, and the countless people I’ve seen coming to the cemetery to pay their respects. He especially inspires in these dire circumstances because he was a Marxist who’d made dire circumstances something of a specialty. The idea that things might get better, that people matter, that not everybody is innately bad or a fool, that the truth will prevail in the end, is something he never ceased to endorse. It’s a belief-system that comes without guarantees, and often Gramsci made statements that were positive but then tinged them with doubts and caveats, with criticisms of criticisms. “Everything that deals with people,” we can remember him telling his son, “as many people as possible, all the people in the world as they join together in society and work and struggle and better themselves should please you more than anything else. But is it like that?”

I really hope it is…

It’s easy to miss the Fondazione Gramsci, tucked away off the street in a little building along via Sebino, at number 43A, in Rome’s Trieste neighborhood. Its glass door entrance lies at the end of a discreet courtyard, modestly beyond the gaze of any undiscerning passersby. On the afternoon of my visit–a mild, gray, late January day–things were brightened by the warm welcome I’d received. I said I was a big Gramsci fan, had written a few things about him, and came curious about the Fondazione’s resources. I’d heard about their extensive library, crammed with every Left book under the sun, in scores of languages, which I now saw filling the glass cabinets on the walls of the main biblioteca. I said I wanted to tap Gramsci’s digital archive as well, especially those legendary prison notebooks, whose real thing, I knew, were housed in a special vault somewhere on the Fondazione’s premises.

Those premises reminded me a lot of the long-lost Brecht Forum in New York—the same low-tech shabbiness, a bit worn and grungy. The array of tatty desktops harked back to another age, somehow bygone, pre-Apple. The Fondazione’s young librarian came over to assist me, going out of her way to log me onto the system’s mainframe, telling me in perfect English that she had digitized much of the Gramsci material, all to be scrutinized without cost or subscription, with a clarity that almost lets you smudge your own fingers in Gramsci’s ink. Working so intimately with Gramsci’s writings must have been very exciting, I say to her. She smiled. “Yes,” she said, “it was.” She loves her job.

Now, we can inspect for ourselves Gramsci’s meticulous notebooks, his perfectly legible cursive, his precise crossings-out, done with exactitude, with a ruler, diagonal lines methodically scoring out words, sometimes whole pages; Gramsci added and eliminated text with characteristic calculation. His handwriting is so neat, so error free, that we know it represents ideas and material already worked through, already drafted out in rough beforehand. Here we have “special,” self-copyedited, clean versions of his thought, preserved for immortality.

Gramsci was finicky about the type of notebook he wanted. He wrote his sister-in-law Tania (February 22, 1932), “can you send me some notebooks, but not like the ones you sent me a while ago, which are too cumbersome and too large; you should choose notebooks of a normal format like those used in school, and not too many pages, at the most forty or fifty, so that they are not inevitably transformed into increasingly jumbled miscellaneous tomes. I would like to have smaller notebooks for the purpose of collating these notes, dividing them by subject, and so once and for all putting them in order. This will help me pass the time and will be useful to me personally in achieving a certain intellectual order.”

Each notebook bears on its cover the imprint “Gius. Laterza & Figli”–Giuseppe Laterza & Sons, a Bari-based family business, a stationer and publisher (still around to this day). Some covers are ornately designed, with elaborate art deco patterning; a few have images of ancient Egypt; all have front labelling marked with Gramsci’s prison number, 7047, together with a sentence he wrote, indicating the subject matter inside. After Gramsci’s death, Tania glued another marker on the upper righthand side, deeming each notebook either “Completo” or “Incompleto,” while assigning them Roman numerals. The bulk of the notebooks are 15 X 20.6 cm in size, containing 97 leaves with twenty-one, single-spaced lines on each sheet. The parsimonious Gramsci wasted nothing, filling up both sides of the page.

A few notebooks are larger format, 20.8 X 26.7 cm, and in one, atypical case, Quaderno XXXI from 1932, he used an artist’s sketchpad, 23 X 15 cm, blank-paged, with a beautiful deco Album Disegno frontispiece, marked “Incompleto” by Tania. Gramsci had singled-out here his translation of the Brothers Grimms’ tale about a little goblin called “Rumpelstilzchen” (retaining its original German spelling), copying it out in neat, corrected form for his sister Teresina’s children in Ghilarza. The write-up was never completed, even though Gramsci had finished the translation two-years earlier, appearing in full alongside other Brothers Grimm stories in Quaderno B (XV).

Gramsci told Teresina (January 18, 1932) “I’ve translated from German, as an exercise, a series of popular tales, exactly like the ones we liked so much when we were children and that actually resemble them to some extent, because their origin is the same. They’re a bit old-fashioned, homespun, but modern life, with the radio, airplane, the talkies…has still not penetrated Ghilarza deeply enough for the taste of today’s children to be very different from ours at that time. I’ll make sure to copy them in a notebook and send them to you as soon as I get permission, as a contribution to the imagination of the little ones. Perhaps the person who reads them will have to add a pinch of irony and indulgence in presenting them to the listeners, as a concession to modernity.”

Gramsci gives pride of place to Rumpelstiltskin, labeling the eponymous protagonist “coboldo” and not the “tremotino” used in more standard Italian translations. “Coboldo,” from the Latin cobalus (meaning “rogue”), comes close to the English “kobold,” from pagan mythology, a hobgoblin who haunts households and plays mischievous tricks, especially if it feels neglected or offended; Gramsci says the tale reminded him of the Sardinian folkloric legends that had kindled his own homespun island imagination. If anything, Gramsci physically resembled the deformed goblin–tiny and hunchbacked; both, too, were outsiders and pariahs with mischievous, stubborn streaks. Remember Gramsci refused to plead for clemency, seeing that as a capitulation to fascism, as an implicit admission that he’d recanted his Marxist views. In this sense, the frank, if austere, goblin way spoke personally to the sly and stoic Gramsci, appealed to him as a state of being in the capitalist world.

Rumpelstiltskin said his name was unusual and Gramsci sometimes said his own name was unusual, too. Is your name “Gasparo, Mechiore, Baldassare?” the queen asked the goblin in Gramsci’s translation. “Is it Gatarino, Saltamontore, Tombatore? Giovanni or Giuseppe?” In “my journey through this ‘great and terrible world’,” Gramsci tells Tania (February 19, 1927), “I’m not known outside a rather restricted circle; therefore my name is mangled in the most unlikely ways: Gramasci, Granusci, Gramisci, even Garamascon, with all the most bizarre in-betweens.”

The goblin, like Gramsci, is portrayed as the villain, when the real villains–the miller, his daughter, the king–are presented as good and upright; it’s they who live happily ever after. And yet, Rumpelstiltskin is the only honest soul amongst them, the only character true to his word. The miller is a liar who gives away his daughter to the king. The miller says she can spin straw into gold, which she can’t. The king, who’s nasty and greedy, is impressed. He carts her off and locks her up in a dungeon with a spinning wheel. If she can turn the piles of straw into gold then he’ll marry her; if not, it’s off with her head. The king is excited at the prospect of so much wealth and will stop at nothing to get it. “I’ll be back in the morning for the gold,” he says. As night falls, the girl is at a loss living up to her father’s conceited promise. She starts to cry.

Suddenly, a funny little goblin appears, asking the reason for her tears. He listens with a sympathetic ear. After she explains, he laughs. “Is that all? Why, I can do that in a twinkle,” he says nonchalantly. For him, you don’t have to be very clever to spin lots of gold (they do it all the time on the stock market, spinning yarns all the way to the bank); nor do you have to work particularly hard. Rumpelstiltskin knows that making lots of money is no big deal, that there are other paradigms to life, other less venal and more magical ways to find fulfilment. He spins the gold in return for the girl’s pretty necklace.

Next morning, the king is delighted. That evening, Rumpelstiltskin returns and spins more gold, this time in exchange for the girl’s ring. The king, again, is thrilled. On the third evening, the miller’s daughter has nothing more to give the goblin, so she promises him her first-born child. This time, he fills the whole room with gold, and the king goes wild with excitement and marries the girl that very same day. The kingdom rejoices at the marriage and later at the birth of the queen’s beautiful daughter.

When the goblin hears the news, he comes back for the baby. “Remember,” he says, “there was an agreement, and you’re bound by that.” The queen weeps, goes down on her knees, begs him not to take her baby away. Again, the goblin sympathizes, and says, “All right, my name is unusual, if you can guess it, you’re released from the promise.” He’ll be back tomorrow, he says. But the queen plays crooked and sends a servant to snoop and find out his name. A while later, the servant returns, grinning all over. “I followed him to a little shack, deep in the forest, and there I heard him singing his song, and he bawled out his name.” Next morning, the goblin reappears before the queen. She utters his name and, “spitting and squealing, he vanished out of the window like a balloon when you take your fingers off the nozzle.” Nothing is ever heard of him again. Meanwhile, the king, the queen, and the young princess live happily…blah, blah, blah.

This warped and shallow value system is inculcated in us early. If you follow its rules, you get rewarded accordingly. You’ll live happily ever after, not rot in jail. But the reality of the tale is that its winners do everything we know a ruling class does: it lies and cheats, boasts and breaks deals, spies on you if need be, and always sends others to do its dirty work. Moreover, it rarely keeps its word. The queen breaks her compact. The king has no other interest than accumulating wealth; he doesn’t even love the woman he married. Everybody is duplicitous and conniving. They’re all phony schemers, out to extract something from somebody else–all except the ugly goblin Rumpelstiltskin.

In all, Gramsci translated twenty-four Brothers Grimm tales (actually twenty-three with one unfinished piece). They’ve since been collected together under the rubric Favole di libertà: la fiabe dei Fratelli Grimm tradotte in carcere, implying that if your body is incarcerated, then there are other possibilities to reimagine a liberty of the mind, a liberty of the imagination; and Gramsci seems drawn to fairytales for these motives. He knew the Brothers Grimm’s work was firmly rooted in German folklore, just as his own Marxism was rooted in Italian folklore, in its culture and regionalism, in its “non-official” subaltern tradition.

Some of Gramsci’s translations are done for personal amusement; others to gift to nephews and nieces who never knew Uncle Antonio. Despite the simplicity and naivety of the tales, Gramsci thought there was something here for adults, too, something political about folkloric tales, about their function within a particular oppressed stratum of society; an educative element, which is why, in Quaderno 27 (XI), he devotes singular attention to “observations on folklore” [Osservazioni sul folclore]. Gramsci suggests folklore should be studied as “a conception of the world and life implicit to a large strata of society, in opposition to ‘official’ conceptions of the world.” It has, he says, “sturdy historical roots” and “is tenaciously entwined in the psychology of specific popular strata.”

Gramsci, as ever, is dialectical, conceiving folklore critically and inquisitively, not narrow-mindedly. “Folklore mustn’t be considered an eccentricity,” he insists, “as an oddity or a picturesque element, but as something which is very serious and is to be taken seriously.” And he takes it seriously, even while he sometimes laughs out loud. He acknowledges its ties with religion and superstition, to “crude and mutilated thought.” Nonetheless, with folklore, “one must distinguish various strata,” Gramsci says, “the fossilized ones which reflect conditions of past life and are therefore conservative and reactionary, and those which consist of a series of innovations, often creative and progressive, determined spontaneously by forms of life which are in the process of developing, in contradiction to the morality of the governing strata.” “Only in this way,” says Gramsci, “will the teaching of folklore be more efficient and really bring about the birth of a new culture among the broad popular masses.”

***

As I was leaving the Fondazione Gramsci, the young librarian urged me to help myself to Gramsci paraphernalia on a bookshelf near the door, to books and pamphlets, as well as to wonderful Fondazione-produced postcards of the covers of Quaderni del carcere, in gleaming color. It was a treasure trove of Gramscian regalia. I wasted no time packing my shoulder bag with a big-formatted Fondazione publication called Antonio Gramsci e la grande Guerra, lavishly illustrated with fascinating reproductions of pre-prison Gramsci letters (from 1915-16), on Avanti! (Edizione Torinese) headed notepaper. I also bagged an interesting French booklet entitled Les cahiers de prison et la France, together with a text, Gramsci in Gran Bretagna, discussing the reception of Gramsci in the UK, notably the brilliant reinterpretations of Eric Hobsbawm, Perry Anderson, and Stuart Hall. And, needless to say, I grabbed a stash of those glossy postcards.

Exiting, and reflecting upon what I’d just seen in the archive, I realized how much of what Gramsci wrote was really about self-expression, about collecting and collating his own thoughts, putting them in intellectual order, clarifying his own position often vis-à-vis an antagonist. Before his arrest, Gramsci saw himself as a journalist-activist. He never wrote elaborate tomes, extended monographs, never had any inclination to do so. His writings were short, pithy, quickly drafted political interventions, polemical engagements with the urgency of the moment.

“In ten years of journalism,” he told Tania (September 7, 1931), “I wrote enough lines to fill fifteen or twenty volumes of 400 pages each, but they were written for the day and, in my opinion, were supposed to die with the day. I have always refused to permit publication of a collection of them, even a limited one.” In 1918, an Italian publisher wanted to publish his Avanti! articles, with “a friendly and laudatory preface,” “but I refused to allow it,” Gramsci says. A couple of years on, he apparently had a change of heart, letting Giuseppe Prezzolini’s publishing house convince him to issue a collection of newspaper pieces. But then suddenly got cold feet and told Tania, “I chose to pay the cost of the part of the type already set and withdrew the manuscript.”

Still, a major component of those writings, both inside and outside prison, had an explicit pedagogic intent: that of popularizing Marxism, of trying to communicate socialist ideas with an immediacy that resonated with a wider, lay public, sometimes with an immediacy that resonated with Gramsci himself. Large tracks of the prison notebooks were really thoughts toward Gramsci’s own version of a “Popular Manual of Marxism,” doubtless in mind when musing on folklore and common sense, and certainly in mind when launching his “critical notes” against Bukharin’s “Popular Manual.” The “Popular Manual” was Gramsci’s shorthand for Nikolai Bukharin’s Theory of Historical Materialism: A Popular Manual of Marxist Sociology, published in Moscow in 1921. What disappointed Gramsci most of all here was its missed opportunity: the book’s promising subtitle bore scant resemblance to its contents.

Bukharin’s position expressed the vulgar materialism of the era, Gramsci says, reducing Marxism to a positivist (and positive) science. (In the 1930s, Bukharin himself became a skeptic of Stalin’s regime, opposed the first Five-Year Plan and the collectivization of agriculture. Accused of conspiracy, a show trial found him guilty. He was executed in 1938.) Bukharin, says Gramsci, began all wrongly, and “should have taken as his starting point a critical analysis of the philosophy of common sense.” Common sense, says Gramsci, “is the folklore of philosophy, and, like folklore, takes countless different forms.” Common sense needs transcending, for sure, not wholesale rejection. It’s the breeding ground of good sense, after all, of a materialism much more realistic and a lot richer than Bukharin’s, something both critical and curious, open and ironic, maybe even folkloric—a mischievous “goblin” sort of Marxism that speaks the twisted language of ordinary people, for better or for worse.

One thing surely not lost on Gramsci when translating the Brothers Grimm is how God awful their characters are, how scheming and duplicitous, how untruthful and dishonest. Some Grimm tales are just that: grim, darn right nasty, and their moral message is hard to grasp—if, indeed, there is any moral message to grasp. It’s like reading the daily news. You know, once upon a time there was a nasty ex-President who wanted to seize power again… Maybe that’s Gramsci’s point? That life actually is “great and terrible,” and only by confronting its pitfalls and perils, its terrors and turmoil head on, never capitulating before its nastiness, can we hope to maximize a great that’s increasingly hard to see.

Pessimism or optimism? Gramsci probably wouldn’t have framed it as such, never would have conceived our world nowadays so dualistically, so either/or. This is him talking in 1929, powerfully articulating his position to younger brother Carlo: “humans bear within themselves the source of their own moral strength, that everything depends on us, on our energy, on our will, on the iron coherence of the aims that we set ourselves and the means we adopt to realize them, that we will never again despair and lapse into those vulgar, banal states of mind that are pessimism and optimism. My state of mind syntheses these two emotions and overcomes them.” Gramsci’s fairytales, we might say, spin yarns about the realm of necessity.

“I want to plunge into animality to draw from it new vigor” — Gramsci, New Year’s Day, 1916

One of the central “living” attractions of Testaccio’s Non-Catholic cemetery is its stray cats, a colony of twenty-five or so semi-feral moggies. We know from old paintings of the nearby Pyramid, especially those by the Roman artist Bartolomeo Pinelli, that cats have freely roamed the area for over 150 years. Nowadays, tourists and locals alike come to see the cemetery’s gatti, longtime beneficiaries of well-wisher donations and skilled volunteer caregivers, cat men and women who regularly nourish and tend the cat colony’s veterinarian needs. (The most famous of the cemetery’s felines is the late “Romeo,” a three-legged tabby who passed away in 2006, laid to rest in his own mini-tomb not far from Gramsci’s.)

Many cats have their favorite spots where they’re often seen sniffing the scent of late departed ones, their bones and ashes. Gramsci, too, has a familiar prowler and protector, a big white and gray with an apparent penchant for revolutionary communism. He’s always wandering about the PCI founder’s tomb, oftentimes lying across his casket, or else upright on it, head aloft, proudly standing to attention, on the lookout for reactionary trouble; a mini militia of one keeping a left paw out for old Gramsci. Perhaps we might label this loyal moggie, “The General,” after Engels’s old sobriquet, and our General knows intuitively, like most animals, where his bread is buttered–who is friend or foe. Gramsci, of course, was a dear friend, an animal lover whose humanist life and thought forever embraced non-human comradery.

Prison Notebooks sets the tone with “Animality and Industrialism,” Gramsci’s original work-in-progress header for the section he’d eventually label “Americanism and Fordism.” No metaphor intended. The history of industrialism, Gramsci says, “has always been a continuing struggle against the element of ‘animality’ in man.” “It has been,” he adds, “an interrupted, often painful and bloody process of subjugating natural (i.e. animal and primitive) instincts to new, more complex and rigid norms and habits of order, exactitude and precision which are a necessary consequence of industrial development.” Animality, we might say, is a more instinctive life spirit, something looser, more rambunctious and libertine, potentially more subversive, unsettling for the soberer necessities of workforce obediency. As Gramsci puts it, “the exaltation of passion cannot be reconciled with the timed movements of productive motions connected with the most perfected automatism.”

That’s why the bourgeoisie must constantly wage war against animality, why its “puritanical struggles” get embedded in the state. Gramsci reckons it’s another historical instance of how “changes in the modes of existence and modes of life have taken place through brute coercion, that is to say through the domination of one group over all the productive forces of society.” New forms of productive organization beget new kinds of “education,” new forms of coercion and consent to condition people to industry’s developmental needs. Henry Ford was a classic pioneer, patrolling not only how his workforce labored on the assembly line (deploying F.W. Taylor’s “scientific management” techniques), but also how workers led their private lives, monitoring how they spent their wages, advocating a “morality” more appropriate for the “true” America—at least for a certain stratum of its populace.

With his infamous phrase “trained gorilla,” Taylor threw back in the faces of workers the whole idea of animality. Gramsci calls it “brutally cynical.” Yet, in truth, he also knew that such repetitive, soul-sapping activity–indeed any kind of grinding, contentless work in whatever division of labor…blue-collar, white-collar, no collar or otherwise–is a venture no gorilla would ever likely deign to undertake. “I prefer not to,” they’d probably say, if they could talk human language. Or else they’d become, as John Berger said in his well-known essay “Why Look at Animals?” (1977), like an animal in a zoo, “lethargic and dull. (As frequent as the calls of animals in a zoo are the cries of children demanding: Where is he? Why doesn’t he move? ‘Is he dead?’).” (Berger also reminds us how most modern techniques of social conditioning were first established with animal experiments.)

Gramsci defends animality against the “moral order” of social conditioning–in both its capitalist and communist guises. In Prison Notebooks, he expressed disagreement with a certain “Leone Davidovi,” aka Leon Trotsky, who’d been pro the rationalization and militarization of work under Soviet communism: “every worker feels himself a soldier of labor,” Trotsky said, “who cannot dispose of himself freely; if the order is given…he must carry it out; if he does not carry it out, he will be a deserter who is punished.” Gramsci says this military model was “a pernicious prejudice and the militarization of labor a failure.” The fact that the worker no longer has to think about their work and gets no immediate satisfaction from carrying out its repetitive tasks, means, Gramsci says, that they have opportunities to think about other things, perhaps even leading to “a train of thought that is far from conformist.”

Eight months before the October Revolution, a youthful Gramsci had already mulled over how bourgeois discipline ought to differ from socialist discipline–how the former’s mechanical and authoritarian paradigms are at variance with socialist paradigms. Bourgeois discipline, he wrote in La città futura, “keeps the bourgeois aggregation firmly together. Discipline must be met with discipline.” Everybody obeys in the bourgeois state. Its model, Gramsci says, is English colonialism in India, ironized in Rudyard Kipling’s short story “Her Majesty’s Servants” (from The Jungle Book): horses obey the soldiers riding them, soldiers obey sergeants, sergeants obey lieutenants, lieutenants captains, captains majors, majors colonels, colonels brigadiers, brigadiers generals, and generals the Viceroy who in turn obeys the Queen. Everybody moves in unison, has their role strictly defined, drilled into them, each and all obeying one another in a tight, rigid hierarchy, extendedly reproduced. “Thus it is done,” says Kipling, “because you cannot do likewise, you are our subjects.”

Socialist discipline, by contrast, “is autonomous and spontaneous,” says Gramsci. “Whoever is a socialist or wants to become one does not obey; they command themselves; they impose a rule of life on their impulses, on their disorderly aspirations.” The discipline imposed on citizens by the bourgeois state turns them into subjects. Socialist discipline is counter wise, turning subjects into citizens: “a citizen who is now rebellious, precisely because they have become conscious of their personality and feel it is shackled and cannot freely express itself in the world.” Maybe this is what Gramsci meant by animality: something unshackled, not caged in a zoo.

***

In a letter to Delio from 1936, Gramsci is a little stern, warning his young son of the dangers of “anthropomorphism,” of attributing human traits to animals. In this case, it is elephants Delio has referred his father to. Delio had had the bright idea that elephants might one day evolve and walk on two legs, becoming, like humans, capable of conquering the forces of nature. Yet papa reverses the anthropomorphic hypothesis of Delio’s, querying “why should the elephant have evolved like man? Who knows whether some wise old elephant or some whimsical young little elephant doesn’t from his point of view think up hypotheses as to why man has not become a proboscidiform creature.” Then, a few sentences on, maybe wary that he’s getting heavy with his son, Gramsci softens his tone, and through animals tries to kindle his son’s vivid imagination (rather than dampen it): “in the courtyard,” he tells Delio, “I always see two pairs of blackbirds and the cats who crouch in ambush, ready to pounce; but it doesn’t seem that the blackbirds worry about it and their flitting about is always gay and elegant. I embrace you. Papa.”

Animals help Gramsci connect with his long-lost son. Giuliano is too young to really write to his father, so dad’s focus is on Delio, often desperately attempting to embrace a child he was conscious of losing touch of–going to school, reading books, growing up, becoming Russian, speaking Russian–all of it, slipping away from Gramsci’s grasp; and his letters reveal the frustration and desperation of a father who wanted to know, who tried to cling on. “In truth,” he told wife Giulia (letter dated December 14, 1931), “I’m unable psychologically to establish a rapport with them because concretely I know nothing about their life and their development.”

He tries very hard in many letters, oftentimes too hard, talking to a child as if he were an adult, only underscoring the growing distance–the emotional, temporal, and spatial distance–from him and his family. Gramsci didn’t always know it, but Giulia herself was frequently absent from childrearing, institutionalized with periodic mental breakdowns and bouts of depression, leaving Gramsci’s sons in the care of his other sister-in-law, Eugenia. Once close, over the years mutual resentment grew between Eugenia and brother-in-law Antonio.

“When I was a boy,” Gramsci again writes Delio (February 22, 1932), “I raised many birds as well as other animals: falcons, barn owls, cuckoos, magpies, crows, goldfinches, canaries, chaffinches, larks, etc. I raised a small snake, a weasel, a hedgehog, and some turtles…I amused myself by bringing live snakes into the courtyard to see how the hedgehog would hunt them.” Little wonder, then, does Gramsci recommend to his son Kipling’s story about Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, the intrepid snake-sleighing mongoose from The Jungle Book. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is one of Kipling’s most endearing (and enduring) characters, a featherweight who takes out heavyweights, huge Cobras and Black Mambas. His “business in life,” Kipling says, “was to fight and eat snakes.” A little underdog–or undergoose–who tackles bigger, more powerful foe, brandishing agility and cunning. Perhaps it’s not too difficult to see why Gramsci might be so charmed by the tale.

Kipling, peculiarly, appears as one of Gramsci’s favorite authors. The English novelist, short story writer, poet, and journalist crops up often in Gramsci’s works–in his letters, Prison Notebooks, and cultural essays–sometimes in surprising contexts, reappropriated in unexpected, imaginative ways. (In prison, Gramsci even translated Kipling’s most famous poem “If–,” published in 1910, once Britain’s best loved verse.) Although he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, when Gramsci read him Kipling was scarcely known in Italy. Thus it’s not entirely clear how Gramsci got wind of the colonial scribe, all the more given his right-leaning, anti-communist politics, and racist language–notwithstanding an enormous sensitivity to teeming, poor, Indian street life. (Kipling did make the Italian news in May 1917, when, at the behest of the Daily Telegraph, he visited the Italian front to write a series of first-hand dispatches, later published in pamphlet form as The War in the Mountains: Impressions from the Italian Front; Gramsci would have likely known about such a trip and read Kipling’s five articles in Risorgimento Press’s Italian paperback edition.)

In Quaderno No.3, Gramsci makes a comment on Kipling that reads like a note to self: “Could Kipling’s work serve to criticize a certain society that claims to be something without developing the corresponding civic morality within itself, indeed having a mode of being contradictory with the goals that it verbally sets itself.” “Kipling’s morality is imperialistic,” Gramsci says, “only when it is closely linked to a very specific historical reality: but images of powerful immediacy can be extracted from it for every social group that fights for political power.”

We know from Gramsci’s letters that he’d read Kipling in French. (Kipling himself was an ardent Francophile.) Ironically, Kipling’s poetry was admired by interwar Soviet avant-garde writers, so one might surmise that Gramsci picked up on Kipling through those channels; but that doesn’t quite stack up, because Gramsci had already referenced The Jungle Book well before the Bolsheviks had seized power. In fact, Gramsci sometimes signed off his Avanti! and Il Grido del Popolo [The Cry of the People] articles with the pseudonym “Raksha,” after the formidable she-wolf protector of Mowgli, The Jungle Book’s “man-cub,” whom Raksha adopts as part of her wolf family, fending off the notorious tiger Shere Khan when he tries to eat baby Mowgli. Raksha becomes a kind of animal organic intellectual, clearly inspirational for Gramsci.

Meanwhile, Kipling’s darker tales, like “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” (1885), spoke to Gramsci on a gut level. In the story, men are burned at the stake and then tossed down a deep sandy pit, left for dead but still somehow living; a dwelling place of the dead, says Kipling, “for the dead who do not die but may not live.” An old Indian adage cues the text: “alive or dead–there is no other way.” In prison, in confinement, teeth falling out and health rapidly declining, Gramsci begged to differ, as apparently does Kipling, prefiguring Beckett’s gloomy oeuvre by half a century. “The Strange Ride,” Gramsci tells Tatiana (December 9, 1926), “immediately leaped to my mind, so much that I felt I was living it.” And, again, ten-days on (December 19, 1926), he repeats the message: “you must believe me when I say that my reference to Kipling’s short story was not an exaggeration.” (Remember, too, how Gramsci’s catchphrase that “the world is great and terrible” was borrowed from the Tibetan Buddhist lama who’d starred in Kipling’s Kim.)

Gramsci is keen to share with Delio Kipling’s cheerier tales. The Jungle Book’s mongoose “is eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity. The motto of all the mongoose family is ‘Run and find out’; and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi was a true mongoose.” “I think you know the story of Kim,” Gramsci writes his son (February 22, 1932); “but do you know the tales in The Jungle Book and especially the one about the white seal and about Rikki-Tikki-Tavi?” The latter story’s climatic scene is Rikki-Tikki’s showdown with the cobra Nagaina, who, along with husband Nag, had terrorized Teddy’s household, the boy who’d befriended Rikki-Tikki. (Rikki-Tikki had already seen off Nag.) “Now I have Nagaina to settle with,” the mongoose says, “and she will be worse than five Nags, and there’s no knowing when the eggs she spoke of will hatch. Goodness!” All’s well that ends well, though.

“The White Seal” features another unlikely hero from The Jungle Book, only his domain is the chilly high sea; a cub called Kotick who grows up into a mighty white seal whose sole purpose in life is “to find a quiet island with good firm beaches for seals to live on, where men could not get at them.” Other seals made fun of Kotick, with his crazy ideas of imaginary islands. Everywhere he went, seals told Kotick the same thing: seals had come to islands once upon a time, “but men had killed them all off.” Still, one day, Kotick vowed he’d lead the seal people to a quiet place. At the story’s close, he roared to the seals: “I’ve found you the island where you’ll be safe, but unless your heads are dragged off your silly necks you won’t believe.”

Gramsci’s most famous animal story is now a children’s text frequently read by teachers throughout Italy’s elementary schools: Il topo e la montagna [The Mouse and the Mountain]. In a letter dated June 1, 1931, Gramsci says to his wife, “I would like to tell Delio a tale from my town that seems interesting. I’ll summarize it for him and Giuliano. A child is sleeping,” Gramsci begins. There’s a mug of milk ready for him when he wakes up. But a mouse sneaks in and drinks the milk. In the morning, when the child opens his eyes, seeing no milk, he starts screaming. Then his mother screams.

The mouse realizes what he’s done and, feeling guilty, runs to the goat to find milk. The goat will give the mouse milk if he can get grass for the goat to eat. The mouse goes into the fields looking for grass but, lacking water, the fields are all parched. The mouse goes in search of a water fountain. The fountain, however, has been ruined by war and the water is seeping out into the ground. The mouse goes to the mason, hoping he can repair the fountain, yet the mason lacks stones. The mouse goes to the mountain and then, says Gramsci, “there’s a sublime dialogue between the mouse and the mountain, which has been deforested by speculators and reveals everywhere its bones stripped of earth.”

The mouse recounts the entire story to the mountain and promises that when the child grows up, he’ll replant trees on the mountain’s plains. So the mountain gives the mouse stones, and the child eventually has so much milk that he can bathe in it. And when the child grows up, he does as the mouse had promised and plants trees, and everything changes: “the mountain’s bones disappear under new humus, atmospheric precipitation once more becomes regular because the trees absorb the vapors and prevent torrents from devastating the plain. In short, the mouse conceives of a true and proper five-year plan. Dearest Giulia, I really want you to tell them this story and then let me know the children’s impressions. I embrace you tenderly.”

***

Gramsci felt “very poignant regret” about being an absent father, deprived of the chance of watching his kids mature, of sharing in the development of their personalities. Perhaps he felt this regret even more than his inability to be a political man of action, something he strived to do, vowed, since his student days in Turin. Some Gramsci scholars have pointed out this dialectic tugging away inside him, the perpetual torment between a political man and a family man, poignantly expressed in one of his staple pieces of reading–“Canto X” of Dante’s Inferno, the first book of The Divine Comedy, which Gramsci had studied off and on for more than twenty-years, reading and rereading it, able to recite it from memory.

The late Frank Rosengarten, who edited and introduced Columbia University Press’s wonderful two-volumes of Gramsci’s Letters from Prison (the only complete English edition), highlights Gramsci’s “little discovery” with Canto X, where “two dramas” unfold: the political drama, enacted by the character Farinata, and the personal drama of Cavalcante. Gramsci wrote Tatiana on August 26, 1929 that “I’ve made a little discovery about this canto by Dante that I believe is interesting and in part corrects Croce’s thesis on The Divine Comedy, which is too absolute.” Rosengarten says Gramsci was original and correct in his belief that everyone had overlooked the plight of Cavalcante, who, in hell, was anguished by the uncertain fate of his son, Guido.

Cavalcante’s cameo plays second fiddle to the seemingly more important political tragedy of Farinata. Gramsci suggests that in Canto X Dante wasn’t so much concerned with politics as with the sufferings of a heart-stricken father. Canto X becomes personal as well as political for Gramsci, the double commitment and tussle of a man who fought for his socialist ideals and a husband and father tormented by the forced separation from his wife and sons: “Weeping, he said to me: ‘If through this blind/ Prison thou goest by loftiness of genius,/ Where is my son? and why is he not with thee?’” In a sense, then, we might conclude that animality speaks to both flanks of Gramsci’s personality, to the libertarian thinker and to the father storyteller, protective of his offspring, displaying real gifts for narrating fables in his letters, for telling stories about animals.

That libertarian also knew another animal fable, one we’ve yet to mention, a strictly adult affair about realpolitik, about Machiavelli’s Centaur–the half-human, half-animal figure, with its dual powers. “You must understand,” says Gramsci, quoting Machiavelli’s The Prince, “that there are two ways of fighting: by the law and by force. The first way is natural to men, the second to beasts.” Any successful movement, Gramsci believes, again following Machiavelli, must be able to assume both the nature of humans and beasts, the nature of the fox as well as that of the lion; “for while the latter cannot escape the traps laid for him, the former cannot defend himself against the wolves”; the strategic ferocity of the lion and the tactical cunning of the fox, a blend of force and consent, of coercion and persuasion in the struggle for a popular Left hegemony.

Machiavelli, of course, says nothing about mongooses; yet for Gramsci this sort of animality meant fatherly urging, encouraging his sons to think critically while always keeping their imaginations alive, getting “eaten up from nose to tail,” like Kipling’s Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, “with curiosity,” sniffing about for adventure, always being inquisitive, wanting to know why, forever “running and finding out.” A little lesson in everyday life that one–not only for kids and other animals, but for grown-up humans, too.

***

The General is out and about on patrol today, on duty again, pacing around Gramsci, doing his drills, his rounds of surveillance, ensuring that all’s well. It’s a lovely, bright, autumn morning, cool relief from the summer’s heat. A sweet light strikes upon Gramsci’s tomb, as it so often does. The General–let’s relabel him “Gramsci’s cat”–seems as content as ever as another cemetery day begins its quiet course. Perhaps he won’t mind if I cite to him, gently under my breath, a few lines from Dante’s Canto X, as Gramsci might have liked: “Now onward goes, along a narrow path/ Between the torments and the city wall,/ My master, and I follow at his back.”

I sit on Gramsci’s bench and watch Gramsci’s cat strut back and forth along the narrow path, between his master and the Aurelian city wall, and remember that the drama of Canto X actually takes place in a cemetery. “The people who are lying in these tombs,/ Might they be seen?” Suddenly, Gramsci’s cat leaps onto my lap, rubbing his head against my chest. If you sit here long enough, calmly enough, and are respectful enough toward Gramsci, he will surely do the same for you. I begin to stroke him, ruffling my hands through his thick fur. “Be pleased to stay thy footsteps in this place,” we say to each other, unspokenly. I’m communing with a cat and a dead Marxist in soft Roman sunshine, trying to keep alive our conversation, and thinking that maybe I’m beginning to get what animality might really mean.

A few weeks ago, I was standing under the entrance arch of the Hotel Villa Morgagni along via Giovanni Battista Morgagni, in Rome’s northeastern Nomentano neighborhood. It’s a smart looking mansion-cum-townhouse, built in a turn-of-the-century Liberty style, with some fetching Art Nouveau flourishes. Since the early 2000s, the property has been owned by the Italian businessman Adartico Vudafieri, a former rally car champion, who’d transformed it into a 4-star, 34-room, luxury boutique hotel, equipped with jacuzzies and conference room facilities.

Ninety-seven years back, via Giovanni Battista Morgagni, number 25, was a more modest lodging house, home of a quietly discreet pensionante called Antonio Gramsci. It was here, around 10:30pm on November 8, 1926, that Mussolini’s fascist henchmen, who’d been surveying Gramsci’s every move in the months prior, raided his room, confiscated his documents, and arrested him as an “enemy of the state.” (It wasn’t the first time his room had been ransacked.) He was carted off to Rome’s Regina Coeli penitentiary and immediately placed in solitary confinement. A small plaque on the hotel’s gatepost, with a poignant inscription, commemorates Gramsci’s sojourn at Morgagni, memorializing him as a rare “leader who knew how to listen”:

Gramsci’s landlady, Clara Passarge, a Prussian-born woman, was particularly disgruntled by those evening’s dramatic events, taking it very badly. Gramsci was her and husband Giorgio’s favorite tenant–the “professor” they affectionately called him, on account of his bookish nature, a scholarly-looking little man forever transporting caseloads of texts and papers to and from his rented room. (The professorial assumption wouldn’t have been unreasonable: Sapienza University of Rome was, after all, only a block away down the road from his dwelling.) Gramsci, of course, was no university academic. Journalist, Italian Communist Party’s (PCI) general secretary, he’d already been elected to Italy’s Chamber of Deputies, a position that should have given him immunity from such a politically motivated arrest. But Mussolini had schemed up Special Laws of Defense, rendering illegal any form of anti-fascist activity, depriving Gramsci and hundreds of other progressive deputies of their parliamentary mandate.

For a customarily cautious man, whose careful analysis had seen fascist forces brewing, it was a mystery why Gramsci had left himself so open to arrest. He knew he was being followed, watched everywhere and at all hours; he’d felt “the storm coming,” he told sister-in-law Tatiana (“Tania”), “in an indistinct and instinctive way.” Meanwhile, fearing for the safety of pregnant wife Giulia and infant son Delio, he insisted they return to Moscow, where Gramsci’s second son, Giuliano, who would never see his father, was born on August 30, 1926.

In a way, Gramsci seemed more bothered about the “trouble and inconveniences” he’d caused the Passarges the night of his arrest. The first of his famous Letters from Prison, written in the Regina Coeli penitentiary (undated), addressed to his landlady, is a touching expression of regret: “Dearest Signora, first of all, I want to apologize for the trouble and inconveniences I have caused you, which in truth formed no part of our tenancy agreement.” Gramsci asks her to forward onto him a few of his books, including his beloved Divine Comedy, and “prepare some of my underclothes and hand them over to a good woman called Marietta Bucciarelli, when she comes on my behalf.” “If my stay in this place,” Gramsci adds, “should last long, I think you should consider the room free and do as you wish with it. You can pack the books and throw away the newspapers. I apologize again, dear signora, and offer my regrets which are as deep as your kindness is great. My regards to signor Giorgio and to the young lady [Clara’s daughter]; with heartfelt respect, Antonio Gramsci.” The letter is all the more touching because it never reached its destination.

A few weeks on, Gramsci again wrote his landlady (November 30, 1926), telling her he’d been three days in a Palermo jail. “I left Rome on the morning of the twenty-fifth,” Gramsci said, “for Naples, where I stayed for a few days and was devoured by insects. In a few days, I will leave for the island of Ustica, to which I have been assigned for my confino. During my journey, I was unable to send back the keys to the house: as soon as I arrive at Ustica I will forward them immediately and I’ll send you the precise address and instructions for sending me or having sent to me the things that I’ll be able to keep here and that may be useful to me. My health is fairly good; I’m a bit tired, that’s all. Inform Maria if she comes to see you and ask her to give my regards to all my relatives and friends who still remember me. Kind regards to signor Giorgio and to the signorina, cordially, A. Gramsci.” Again, the letter never found its destination, again confiscated by Mussolini’s political police. (Both letters, incidentally, never saw the public light of day until the early 1970s.)

As it happened, signora Clara didn’t last long after Gramsci’s arrest; likely he’d suspected all wasn’t well. He’d asked Tania (March 19, 1927), “How is my landlady, or did she die?” “I’m afraid the scene of my arrest may have helped accelerate her illness,” he confessed, “because she liked me very much and looked so pale when they took me away.” Gramsci said he’d received a letter from Giorgio Passarge in early January 1927, “who was desperate and thought that his wife’s death was immanent, then I no longer heard anything. Poor woman.” Signora Passarge would pass away on February 19, 1927, aged sixty-five.

***

Not long after my visit to Gramsci’s old lodgings and site of arrest, I discovered something I’d hitherto not known: Clara Passarge is likewise a denizen of Rome’s Non-Catholic Cemetery. I’d spotted her gravestone, looking rather forlorn and untended, on one of my regular inspections of the tombs and their environs. Seeing Gramsci and his former landlady reunited, sharing the same abode again, struck me as a strange quirk of fate, just as my witnessing it strikes me as a strange quirk of fate, finding myself before both of them now, a volunteer at the cemetery.

Clara’s grave prompted me to look her up in the cemetery’s death register, where I managed to track down the original, handwritten entry. Then I did the same for Gramsci, wondering why I hadn’t done so before; sure enough, he’s there, too, registered in the same hand a little more than a decade after the “signora’s” passing.

To say that Clara’s grave looked forlorn and untended isn’t exactly the whole truth. For there’s another story to her being at the cemetery, another connection involving an impressive, far from forlorn, white marble sculpture located just behind Clara’s tombstone, tucked into an alcove of the Aurelian wall. It’s a striking, haunting, structure known as “The Bride,” a life-size (and life-like) reclining young woman, on her deathbed; a rose is sometimes placed in her hand, a gesture said to bring good luck to the giver. The bride in question is Elsbeth Wegener Passarge, none other than Clara Passarge’s eldest daughter, who died in 1902, tragically of typhus, at the age of age 18. She was born in Prussia to Clara’s first husband (Giorgio was Elsbeth’s stepfather), yet grew up in Rome, later engaged to be married to an Austrian sculptor Ferdinand Seeboeck. The couple were deeply in love. But the husband-and-wife pairing wasn’t meant to be, and as a memorial to his late fiancée, Ferdinand created “The Bride,” with, on its base, written in Italian and German, the following words: “She passes from a sweet dream of love to the life of angels.” It took Ferdinand thirty-years to get his sculpture installed in its current site, during which time he’d relinquished his own plot beside his bride, in favor of her mother, Clara, whose remains now lie beside her daughter’s, and not in the marked grave nearby.

***

The day I discovered Clara’s tombstone, Gramsci’s marble casket was adorned with a beautiful red rose. At that moment, sitting close by on what I now like to call “Gramsci’s bench,” was an elderly gent, in his mid-seventies, portly with long, flowing gray hair, clad in scruffy shorts and a stained white undervest. Beside him a shopping bag full of old clothes. Maybe he was homeless or semi-destitute? He looked content next to Gramsci, and, as I passed, taking a photo of the red rose on the casket, I engaged him in conversation. He was an old communist, he said, and Gramsci his hero. He comes here often, to pay his respects. Was it he, I wondered, who’d laid that red rose?

For a while, we spoke about Giorgio Napolitano, a former high-ranking PCI leader, modern Italy’s longest standing President, who died in late September, aged 98, and who’s about to be laid to rest in the Non-Catholic Cemetery. The man in the white vest said Gramsci was better known abroad than in Italy; I was inclined to concur, but knew, too, that plenty of Italians, many young Italians included, visit the cemetery to see Gramsci, and talk about him as if he were still alive and kicking. Then the man in the white vest mentioned Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, two of Gramsci’s interlocutors and antagonists. I said, as a by-the-way comment, that Antonio Labriola, an older generation Italian Marxist, another early influence from Gramsci’s Turin student days, frequently referenced in The Prison Notebooks, is buried not far away, in an impressive, opulent looking grave in the Zona Prima. The man in the white vest seemed to want to talk more about Gentile and Croce and about Gramsci’s views on education.

Croce’s was a liberal, Gentile a fascist. Both started out as vaguely marxisant Hegelian philosophers, before the former drifted toward the center and the latter toward the far-right. Each wrote about education; in the early 1920s, Gentile became Mussolini’s Minister of Education. But Gramsci rejected, on the one side, Croce’s liberal reductionism, which saw civil society as the realm of free individuality, somehow apart from the state, and, on the other, Gentile’s statist reductionism, where civil society got devoured entirely by the state. Gramsci’s line is more subtle. He never makes any “organic” distinction between state and civil society. The separation, he said, is analytical and methodological; state and civil society are conjoined, dialectically intertwined, operative together, yet theoretically distinguishable.

From prison, Gramsci cast a keen critical eye on the so-called Gentile Reform Act of 1923, where, amongst other things, religious education had become compulsory in elementary schools. Letters from Prison frequently ask Tania for copies of Gentile’s texts and speeches, a lot featured in a rather ominous sounding Educazione Fascista. Gentile’s educational reform also introduced an entrance exam for acceptance into middle-school, which, says Gramsci, privileged upper-class kids, relegating their working class and peasant counterparts to technical and training schools.

Gramsci was a bit old school in his educational beliefs. He says Gentile’s education act failed to provide the specific teaching of Italian grammar, thereby excluding “the national-popular masses from learning language, confining them to the ghetto of dialect.” (Gramsci advocates the teaching of Latin, for instance, because it “combines and satisfies a whole series of pedagogic and psychological requirements.”) “Active” schools, he says, aren’t elitist institutions nor sites of rote and factual inculcation. Yet neither should they encourage liberal laissez-faire free-play and voluntarist free-will, where individualities are seen as beyond any conditioning social relations and social institutions. Gramsci calls for a “nexus between instruction and education,” a curriculum that teaches critical, socially aware thinking at the same time as develops students’ creative capacities, accustoming them to reason, to think abstractly and schematically, while “remaining able to plunge back from abstraction into real and immediate life.”

For Gramsci, self-discipline and self-control are vital in learning. Students need to condition themselves to long hours of concentration, he says, to sitting still, developing bodily endurance as well as a lively mind, training their muscles and nerves as well as their brains. Learning can be tough, he says, an ethos likely gleaned from his own history as a lowly youth and studious prison inmate. It isn’t only manual labor, he says, that requires sweat and toil. Indeed, if ever the working classes were to develop their own brand of hardy and smart “organic intellectuals,” with the appropriate attributes and skills to help transform society, they’ll need, Gramsci thinks, an educational system very different from the one Gentile is proposing.

***

The man in the white vest and I shuck hands and we bid each other arrivederci. Wandering back to my duties at the cemetery’s Visitor’s Center, leaving him with Gramsci and that red rose, I realized I’d forgotten to ask if it was him who’d laid the flower there. I never got the chance to talk with him, either, about the significance of roses for Gramsci and how growing them became almost as much a passion as filling his thirty-three scholastic notebooks.

After Gramsci was transferred in July 1928 to the Turi prison for the infirm and disabled in Bari, Calabria, along a sidewall of its courtyard, in a little plot of soil, he began to grow different plants and flowers. His letters to Tania and Giulia thereafter begin to fill up with news of their progress. On April 22, 1929, he wrote Tania: “On one fourth of a square meter I want to plant four or five seeds of each kind and see how they turn out.” He asks his sister-in-law if she can get hold of sweet pea, spinach, carrot, chicory, and celery seeds.

Gramsci says he’s become more patient, “but only by virtue of a great effort to control myself.” He seems to take inspiration from his flowers and plants, from their slow and persistent growth, from the rose he’s trying to cultivate, patiently and persistently–against all odds. “The rose has fallen victim of a dreadful sunstroke,” he says, “all the leaves in the more tender parts are burnt and carbonized; it has a desolate, sad aspect, but it is putting out new buds.” Seemingly referring to himself, he adds: “It isn’t dead, at least not yet.” In Gramsci’s letters, the plight of his dear rose strikes as an allegory of his own dear plight.

“The seeds have been very slow in pushing up small sprouts,” he tells Tania, again maybe referring to himself and to the life of a Marxist radical; “an entire series obstinately insists on living an underground life.” Each day, Gramsci says, he’s seized by the temptation to pull at them a little, making them grow a little faster. “I remain undecided,” he admits, “between two concepts of the world and of education: whether to follow Rousseau and leave things to nature, which is never wrong and is basically good, or to be a voluntarist and force nature, introducing into the evolution the expert hand of humanity and the principle of authority. Until now the uncertainty persists and the two ideologies joust in my head.”

Still, Gramsci’s voluntarist environmentalism–the intervention of human authority and action–doesn’t brutally impose itself on nature. He lovingly cares for his rose, admires its beauty and tenderness, the delicate texturing of its petals, its poetic quality, the radiance of its blossoming, often sounding the way Saint-Exupery’s petit prince would sound a decade on, nurturing his own rose; at the same time, Gramsci marvels at how robust his rose is, how hardy, struggling to survive, persisting on living, sometimes on the point of death, yet pulling through with new buds despite the impending “solar catastrophe.”

Elsewhere, Gramsci says to Tania: “The rose is beginning to bud after it had seemed reduced to desolate twigs. But will it manage to survive the approaching summer heat? It looks puny and run down to be up to the task. It is true of course that, at bottom, the rose is nothing but a wild thorn bush, and therefore very vital.” Again, maybe with himself in mind, we might recall one revealing letter he’d written Tania, earlier on in his incarceration (February 19, 1927), taking the boat with other prisoners to Ustica. One of the banished was an “anarchist type,” Gramsci says, called “Unico,” a sort of superintendent, who upon hearing Gramsci introduce himself to other inmates, “stared at me for a long time, then he asked: ‘Gramsci, Antonio?’ ‘Yes’, Antonio! I answered. ‘That can’t be’, he retorted, ‘because Antonio Gramsci must be a giant and not a little squirt like you’.”

On February 10, 1930, Gramsci writes Tania: “So, then, become more energetic; cure your will too, do not let the southern winds fill you with languor. The bulbs have sprouted already, indeed some time back; one of the hyacinths already shows the colors of its future flower. Provided the frost doesn’t destroy everything. The rose has also borne new buds; it is wilder than ever, it seems a thorn bush instead of a rose, but the vegetal vigor of the thorn bush is also interesting. I embrace you affectionately. Antonio.”

***

Today, October 17, 2023, Gramsci’s grave was covered with brilliant flowers, blooming everywhere, a sight to behold. Who could have placed them all here? Today, as well, I began to think about what it was I wanted to stress in this blog. If last time I spoke of stones and a sense of obligation—obligation to Gramsci, to Marxist politics, to the Left, a sentiment somehow reinforced by the little grapefruit-sized rocks a deformed Gramsci had lifted as a child–now, I think it’s the rose I want to emphasize, a rose for Gramsci, and the notion of resilience. Not just of our intervening to nurture nature, to sustain ourselves ecologically, but of an individual capacity for resilience, a stoicism to resist, to learn and educate oneself, to promulgate a politics of emancipation even in incarceration, even in an inferno resembling Dante’s.

“It seems to me that under such conditions prolonged for years,” Gramsci told his younger brother Carlo (December 19, 1929), “and with such psychological experience, a person should have reached the loftiest stage of stoic serenity and should have acquired such a profound conviction that humans bear within themselves the source of their own moral strength, that everything depends on them, on their energy, on their will, on the iron coherence of the aims that they set for themselves and the means they adopt to realize them, that they will never again despair and lapse into those vulgar, banal states of mind that are called pessimism and optimism. My state of mind syntheses these two emotions and overcomes them: I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”

Today, those Gramsci’s flowers remind me of Elsa Morante’s epic novel called History, on the horrors of Nazism/fascism, and the rape of a young woman by an adolescent German soldier (killed a few days later on the front) and her fierce battle to raise her bastard child in the horror of it all, in a world Gramsci often said was “great and terrible,” and her hope that hope would win out in the end, and her final words, Morante’s final note, borrowing from a Gramsci letter, never mentioning him by name, only his Turi prison number…7047: “All the seeds have failed except one; I don’t know what it is, but probably it is a flower and not a weed.” That’s it, that’s what I want to say: flowers will always outlast weeds.

I’m sitting at the bar of Blackmarket Hall in Rome, a trendy food and drink hang out not far from my new home in Monti. It’s Friday night and the joint is heaving. I’ve had a couple of glasses of wine and a whole world spins around in my head. I’m conscious that I’ve been inactive for a few months now, feeling exhausted, a bit overwhelmed by the practical chores my recent move necessitated. My brain felt dead. Yet sitting here, amid a crowded scene of noisy, young revelers, listening to seventies funk music boom out, tunes I remember first-time around, I knew I had to try to do something creative again soon.

The feeling–a kind of urgency of the moment–was prompted by what I was reading. I had with me a copy of John Berger’s book of essays, The White Bird, from the mid-1980s, taking it along to offset my aloneness. A book is always a good cover for the solitary person in public, an effective disguise. I was in awe at how good these pieces were. White Bird’s most famous essay is “The Moment of Cubism”; but tonight, I guess I was having my “Moment of John Berger.” I remember John once telling me–or else I’d read it somewhere–that he’d hated White Bird; when it first appeared, in disgust, he threw it across the room, launched it like a missile. He never thought it any good. My God, what could he have been thinking? Was he talking about its form or content? Its content, after all, while previously published material, is as brilliant as I recall, maybe even better now than upon my first reading decades ago.

There are bits and pieces on Italy–John was always fond of neighboring Italy; for years he lived just across the frontier in Haute-Savoie, itself once part of Italy, traveling up and down the country extensively, frequently on his motorbike. (One journey is beautifully recreated in To the Wedding.) In White Bird, John talks a lot about Italy, about Danilo Dolci’s Sicilian Lives, about Italian painting and films like Open City and Bicycle Thieves, about having his rucksack stolen in Genoa from the back of his old Citroën 2CV car. There’s also a lovely evocation of the poetry and life of the Roman Leopardi, one of Nietzsche’s favorites, as well as a compelling essay on Van Gogh, called “The Production of the World.” This one wasn’t about Italy, of course; yet on my Italian Friday night, an essay I’d read many times, seemed to speak to me like never before.

John would have been roughly my age when he wrote about Van Gogh here. He confesses to feeling washed out, at a low ebb, metaphysically exhausted. I was feeling washed out intellectually, too, wondering what I’d do next, thinking I’d produced all I could, even talking about going into early retirement. I was still dizzy from my new life, living out a bit part in a Fellini movie, my very own 8_^1/2, thrilling yet surreal, not feeling quite a whole number yet. I was suffering the same sense of unreality that John spoke about.

He’d hummed and harred about going to a meeting in Amsterdam, he says. In the end, he decides to go. And what transpires is a strange encounter with Van Gogh’s paintings, with cornfields and potato eaters, pear trees and peasants dozing under giant haystacks, all of it kindling something inside him, unleashing a rebirth of sorts. “Within two minutes,” he says, “and for the first time in three weeks–I was calm, reassured. Reality had been confirmed. The transformation was as quick and thoroughgoing as one of those sensational changes that can sometimes come about after an intravenous injection.”

“These paintings,” John says, “already very familiar to me, had never before manifested anything like this therapeutic power.” And so, that night, sitting alone at a bar in Rome, John’s own words, already very familiar, had never before manifested anything like this therapeutic power. Reading him was like being hooked up to an intravenous drip: forget the wine. The transformation was immediate. Reality had been confirmed. I snapped out of it, would get writing soon. I’d start that night; in fact, already had started that night, scribbling in my mental notebook, beginning to write this.

After I’d finished dinner and requested il conto, the young man behind the bar, who’d been serving me all night, asked what I’d been reading. I showed him White Bird, enunciating the author’s name, an English writer and critic who died in 2017 at 90, and who, I said, was widely available in Italian. “Never heard of him,” he told me, almost apologetically. “That’s a pity,” I said, “because he’s really something, a knockout read. You should check him out, his novels and criticism.” I added that, actually, I’d written a book about him–a remark I immediately regretted, feeling like a drunken jerk, bragging about former glory days, like in the Springsteen song.

A week or so on, John was still with me, there in spirit. Or, better, I was still with him. When in Rome, I told myself…well, what better thing to do than to visit Gramsci, the great Marxist, whose grave lies in the city’s “Non-Catholic Cemetery” in Testaccio. Testaccio was a popular working-class neighborhood, housing thousands of industrial workers from nearby Ostiense, and probably best-known for Rome’s famous slaughterhouse, at Mattatoio, in its heyday Europe’s largest and most advanced. (Decommissioned in 1975 and partly renovated into an experimental cultural and arts center, with a farmers’ market, the huge complex remains mostly rundown, its old stockyards frequent hangouts for homeless populations.)

The Non-Catholic Cemetery is just a short stroll away. Like Paris’s Père Lachaise and London’s Highgate, it is a grave-spotter’s paradise. The English romantic poet John Keats is its most popular denizen, followed by his famous champion, Percy Shelley. Gramsci, who occupies a secluded southwestern spot, is third on the visitor’s roster. The day of my homage was searingly hot, over 40 degrees, and sitting on a wooden bench facing Gramsci, amid the din of cicadas, squawking birds, and mosquitos chomping at the bit, ancient cypress trees and pink flowers everywhere in bloom, I thought I’d landed on some distant tropical shore. The Aurelian city-walls, towering over one side of the cemetery, made everything feel like a magic kingdom surrounded by a vast moat, cut off from the crazy chaos of the rest of the city; the Egyptian pyramid of Caius Cestius, its 36 meters poking out between the shrubbery, only added to the sense of otherworldliness.

Gramsci had a truly torrid life, rotting in a fascist jail for a decade; yet his final resting place is lovely, serene in its elegance and simplicity. A small, upright stone slab reads:

GRAMSCI

ALES 1891  ROMA 1937

Its base is a marble casket, with a Latin inscription:

CINERA

ANTONII

GRAMSCII

Gramsci’s ashes. Gramsci’s sister-in-law, Tatiana Schucht, a Soviet citizen and sister of Giulia, the revolutionary’s wife, was instrumental in securing him a plot at the cemetery. She’d been a student in Rome, living with her father, Apollo Schucht, who’d fled Tsarist rule. Tatiana was devoted to her brother-in-law; and, in Giulia’s absence (in the Soviet Union), cared for him during his confinement. In 1938, a year after his passing, and with Mussolini’s approval, she managed to get him a three-square-meter plot at the “English Cemetery.”

In 1957, Gramsci’s ashes were moved to another, larger plot, its current location, where I’m sitting now. At the back of Gramsci’s headstone, I can see it if I bend my head round, is the name Apollo Schucht, Tatiana’s father, inscribed as a memorial, as well as Nadine Schucht-Leontieva, her eldest sister, who’d died in 1919. Tatiana is the great unsung heroine in the Gramsci saga, her brother-in-law’s political and emotional lifeline, not only burying him but keeping him alive, too, recovering all of his thirty-three notebooks, one of the most original and prodigious documents of western Marxism.

Next to me that day, sharing the wooden bench, is a man in his mid-twenties, wearing Air Pods, unperturbed about someone sitting so closely. We didn’t say a word to each other; there seemed no point. For a while, I savor the setting, the peace, the moment, my Gramsci moment. Then one of the best essays written about Gramsci comes to mind; no surprises it’s John’s, the “open letter” he’d fired off to Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatista insurgent in Chiapas. John’s letter, featured in his The Shape of a Pocket (2001), is a dispatch of great lyrical beauty, about “pockets of resistance,” about hope and disobedience to the neoliberal world order; it’s also about Sardinia and its stones, and about Gramsci, the island’s radical patron saint.

“The least dogmatic of our century’s thinkers about revolution,” John writes Marcos, “was Antonio Gramsci, no? His lack of dogmatism came from a kind of patience. This patience had absolutely nothing to do with indolence or complacency.” “Gramsci believed in hope rather than promises,” says John, “and hope is a long affair.” Gramsci was born in the village of Ales and between six and twelve went to school in the nearby town of Ghilarza, in central Sardinia. When he was four years old, as he was being carried, Antonio fell, crushed his back; a spinal malformation ensued, as well as permanent ill-health.

All around Ghilarza are stones, piles of stones, massive granite and limestone, others are smaller rocks gathered and stacked on the poor, arid soil. Stones played a crucial role in Gramsci’s life, John tells us. In Ghilarza, in a museum consecrated to his memory, a glass cabinet has a couple of local stones, about the size of grapefruits, which, every day, as a little boy, Gramsci lifted up and down to strengthen his weak shoulders and deformed back. Similar stones line the front of his grave now, perhaps not uncoincidentally chosen, placed there by well-wishers and followers in the know. I photograph some. They’re also about the size of grapefruits. On a few, words are written, in assorted languages: “Vous avez lutté. Nous luttons. Nous continuons à lutter” [“You struggled. We struggle. We continue to struggle”]. Some stones tack down handwritten notes: “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”

It’s a poetic rendering of a famous Gramsci’s passage, written in June 1930, in a translation often attributed to Slavoj Žižek. “The old world is dying,” says Gramsci, in a more literal version, “and the new cannot be born; and in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Gramsci meant a rift between past and future, between a present of great uncertainty, hobbled by morbidity, and a future stymied by monsters lurking around every corner; some, alas, hold office. Still, morbid politics doesn’t reflect a monster’s strength, Gramsci says, so much as belies their weakness, is a condition of their fragility, a crisis of their authority.

Monsters aren’t able to exert their “hegemony” no matter how many Capitols they storm or wars they manufacture. They bully and manipulate, for sure, might even dominate; but they’re rarely leading or in control. What emerges, says Gramsci, is a “form of politics that’s cynical in its immediate manifestation.” Meantime, he says, “the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, no longer believing in what they used to believe previously.” The “physical depression,” Gramsci concludes, might “lead in the long run to a widespread skepticism, and a new ‘arrangement’ will be found.”

In a letter to Tatiana, Gramsci says: “I don’t like throwing stones in the dark; I like to have a concrete interlocutor or adversary.” He was keen to stress the polemical nature of his prison writings, something that would enlarge his “inner life” in a tiny cell. They would constitute a vast intellectual undertaking, we know, begun in earnest in 1928 after the public prosecutor sentenced his brain to stop functioning for twenty-years. Yet incarceration of a sickly body, besieged by uremia, hypertension, tubercular lesions, and gastroenteritis, could never restrain the brilliance of an active, inquisitive mind.

One of this mind’s desires was to overcome the divide between Marxism and everyday experience, between “a philosophy of praxis” and people’s actual consciousness. “The popular element feels,” says Gramsci, “but doesn’t always know or understand.” Demagogues prey on this slippage, stoke up people’s raw feelings and visceral emotions, dislodge them from sound understanding, orchestrate “passive revolutions.” On the other hand, “the intellectual element knows but doesn’t always feel.” Gramsci thinks these are “two extremes” that shouldn’t necessarily be separate. By “popular element,” he meant ordinary people who frequently intellectualize yet don’t function as intellectuals. This isn’t to prioritize one over the other so much as an appeal for knowledge and feeling to mutually interlock, to dialectically fuel each other.

What people feel largely stems from commonsense, Gramsci says, from something immediate in their lives, from gossip and chatter, folklore and faith, vernacular and idiomatic language–from lotteries and tabloid newspapers, Twitter feeds and social and mass media. Gramsci was a steely politico yet generous in his sympathy of popular culture; ambivalent toward it, needless to say, because of its contradictoriness, because of its conservatism, its reactionism. All the same, commonsense could be “part critical and progressive,” he says, something coherent with a “healthy nucleus.”

The latter is the basis of Gramsci’s “good sense,” a commonsense purged of stupidity, relieved of misconception. Good sense is what intellectuals–especially “organic intellectuals”–have to “renovate,” he says, somehow have to “make critical.” To do so, he reckons, “the demands of cultural contact with the ‘simple’ must be continually felt.” I can see John nodding in agreement, hear him saying “yes, yes, yes.” He certainly tried to keep this “organic cohesion” alive, the cultural contact with the simple continually felt throughout his long career of writing and activism. I remember him writing about other figures from Italian popular culture, too, about other artists and intellectuals likewise inspired by Gramsci, and by the cultural contact with the simple. One was filmmaker, poet, and essayist Pier Paolo Pasolini.

John quotes Pasolini in an essay he wrote in 2006 about Pasolini’s 1963 film La Rabbia [Rage]: “For we never have despair without some small hope.” Pasolini also loved Gramsci, even created an affecting poem about him, “The Ashes of Gramsci” (1954), reciting it beside the Sardinian’s tomb (in its old location). It took one to know one: a poem written by a man assassinated by fascists about a man assassinated by fascists.

“Here you lie, exiled, with cruel Protestant
neatness, listed among the foreign
dead: Gramsci’s ashes… Between hope
and my ancient distrust, I draw near you, happening by chance on this meagre greenhouse, in the presence of your grave, in the presence of your spirit, afoot, down here among the free

And, of this country which would not let you rest,
I feel this an injustice: your mental strain

— here among the silences of the dead — what reason — our troubled destiny

Will you ask of me, dead man, unadorned,
that I abandon this hopeless
passion to be in the world?”

John watched Pasolini’s film more than forty-years after its making. It had never been publicly shown in Pasolini’s lifetime. In 1962, Italian TV had an idea to ask Pasolini to make a documentary about why everywhere in the world there was fear of war? He made the film but when the TV companies saw it, they balked, got cold feet. John thinks La Rabbia “is a film inspired by a fierce sense of endurance, not anger. Pasolini looks at what is happening with unflinching lucidity.” And his answer to the original question was simple: “The class struggle explains war.”

John says two anonymous voices are spoken in the film, two of Pasolini’s friends, one of whom was likewise John’s friend: the painter Renato Guttuso, whose artwork was chosen to adorn the first postwar membership card of the Italian Communist Party’s (PCI). Guttuso drew particular inspiration for his neo-realist paintings from two sources: Picasso’s Guernica and Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks.

A little while after my cemetery visit, I had another experience with John in Rome, an uncanny one, this time also encountering Renato Guttuso. I was in a branch of the large bookstore chain Feltrinelli, perusing the art section, looking at images rather than texts I could still barely understand–when, all of a sudden, right in front of me, almost beckoning me, finding me rather than I finding it, was John’s book on Renato Guttuso. It had been freshly put into Italian by a small Palermo press, under the stewardship of journalist, essayist, editor, and translator, Maria Nadotti. Maria has been a dedicated champion of John over the years; and through her books and translations has made his work accessible to Italian audiences. In 2019, she produced a wonderfully quirky collection about John’s passion for motorbikes, Sulla motocicletta, with a translated piece from yours truly, on “Spinoza’s Motorcycle,” my riff on John’s riff on the Dutch philosopher from Bento’s Sketchbook.

Maria’s latest translation, like Sulla motocicletta, is a lovely little work of art in its own right, produced by an independent press that appears less concerned with bottom-line dictates than with creating an object of intense beauty, a labor of love with artisanal integrity, never intending it to be anything commercial. A few years ago, I’d sent Maria an email, congratulating her on Sulla motocicletta, receiving a response: “I miss John enormously,” she’d said. “The only way I find to compensate for his physical absence is to work on his texts, words, ideas, and to keep ‘conspiring’.” And so here was Maria again conspiring with John, resuscitating a book over half-a-century old, with a publisher based in Guttuso’s native Sicily.

What’s fascinating about Guttuso is that it was, in fact, John’s first book, from 1957. And yet, oddly, it was a ninety-page text written in English that never appeared in English, going straight into German under the auspices of Dresden’s Verlag der Kunst, edited by John’s friend Erhard Frommhold. (John says he was always indebted to Frommhold; it was he who’d given John the belief that he could become not only a writer but a writer of books.) Maria had somehow managed to unearth John’s original dog-eared typescript from his British Library archives, with handwritten annotations and missing pages, and set herself the task of reconstructing it, of recreating it in Italian. How thrilled John would have been had he seen it!

At one point in her introduction, Maria’s discusses the link between John and Elizabeth David’s Italian Food, a book of Guttuso’s generation, and how Guttuso had been commissioned to do its illustrations. Apparently, John had a copy of Italian Food when he lived in London, cooking from it often at his flat at 4 Nutley Ter in South Hampstead, without ever realizing that inside was Guttuso’s artwork. One of the book’s most arresting images is of a lone workman, dressed in simple jacket and stripped shirt, eating a pasta lunch, literally shoveling it into his mouth ravenously; a tumbler of red wine lies beside him. Guttuso captures the intense, quasi-religious devotion of a man to an everyday meal, savoring it as if it were his last supper. Elizabeth David quickly realized that “the dangerously blazing vitality” Guttuso invested in the commissioned artwork, became “an integral part of my book.”

A similar image of the pasta-lunching laborer, perhaps the same laborer–the lithograph’s master copy–can be seen tacked to the wall of Guttuso’s studio at Rome’s Villa Massimo, in a photo taken of a wistful painter in 1956. Nearby are Guttuso’s cult heroes, similarly tacked to the studio’s wall: a poster of Picasso’s Guernica, and below it, a couple of tatty photographs of Antonio Gramsci. John writes about Guttuso’s “inherent connection between art and politics: politics being used in the broadest sense of the word to describe that struggle of social forces which underlies any particular social order.” He says that “Guttuso reacted strongly against the neo-classicism being encouraged by the fascists.” On the other flank, his adherence to the Communist Party and avant-garde modernist art, to so-called picassismo, also meant a sometimes fraught relationship to the Party, with its espousal of Socialist Realism, mimicking Gramsci’s own fraught relationship to the Party he’d helped found. The pair’s “cultural politics” was mistrusted by those who saw Marxism as the iron laws of economism.

When Gramsci died, Guttuso would have been a young man of twenty-six. We can assume they never met. But Guttuso would have absolutely encountered first-hand Gramsci’s one-time friend and co-founder of Ordine Nuovo newspaper, Palmiro Togliatti, the PCI’s Secretary, formerly Gramsci’s closest political ally and fellow Party brainchild. (Togliatti and Gramsci fell out not long after the former took the PCI’s helm in 1927, each taking opposing stances toward Stalin’s Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy.) John points out that Guttuso’s own commitment to the Party and to the working-classes was no less resolute because of his expressionist art. “It is the everyday life of Italy,” he writes, “the carrying in of the weight of the harvest, the determination of the miner, the setting up of the telegraph poles throughout the landscape, the terracing of the hills, that Guttuso celebrates.”

Maybe this reflects what John says defines Guttuso’s art: “that it is outstanding because it so obviously implies an ambitious and compelling sense of obligation” (emphasis added). “One can only grow through obligations,” repeats John, in a phrase he attributes to Antoine Saint-Exupéry. “Obligation” is the operative word, a sense of service and commitment, duty-bound, an acknowledgement of a necessary interaction between art and life. John goes to pains to underscore this notion of obligation, and I wonder now, after drafting these words, after working through my thoughts about John, kickstarted by my re-reading of White Bird–whether that night at the bar in Monti, whether it was obligation I felt, an obligation to keep John’s spirit alive, to continue to struggle artistically and creatively as he had struggled, to “conspire” with him as Maria Nadotti had said, and to continue to keep the Red Flag flying; to be obligated to Gramsci, too, a sentiment reinforced by those stones I’d seen at his graveside, stones about the size of grapefruits he’d exercised with as a small boy.

So a strange sense of obligation had come over me at the cemetery as well, compelling me to return there, where I spoke to Tatiana, a good omen maybe, the coordinator of the Visitor’s Center. She’d told me that they were always looking for responsible volunteers to work here, young as well as older people. The cemetery is a private institution, she said, receives no public funding, and survives exclusively off donations and volunteer services. And it is still active, welcoming visitors at the same time as it respects families of the deceased, holding funerals and burials, tending gravestones, ensuring the general upkeep of a magnificent verdant landscape.

In my book Marx, Dead and Alive, I wrote about Marx in London’s Highgate Cemetery, shocked at the desecration of his tomb by vandals; they’d daubed it with red paint and walloped it with a lump hammer; I’d been attracted by the specialness of Highgate, by its peacefulness and tranquility, and dismayed at the demented violence shown toward it and Marx. I guess I felt something similar here in Rome now, felt an allure and fascination, and maybe, in these right-shifting political times, also had a similar concern for Gramsci’s fate, that he was safe, because I decided, there and then, to offer my services as a volunteer at the cemetery if they wanted me.

A few days on, I met Yvonne, the cemetery’s Director, an American who’s lived in Italy for twenty-five years and has a PhD in Art History. She wondered why I wanted to volunteer. I said I had time and wanted to be near Gramsci. Yvonne feels strongly about the contemplative atmosphere of the cemetery, about its slow, “unplugged” ambience. Visitors need to be sensitive, she’d said, that the cemetery is a site of peace, reflection, and remembrance, not another tourist spectacle for Instagram selfies or posting comic videos. She wants to nudge visitors off their cameras and iPhones, get them into “live” experience.

After my “interview,” Yvonne welcomed me to the cemetery, happy to have me onboard, but suggested I continue to learn Italian. Then she admitted that she had used Gramsci in her own studies on the conservation of historic sites in Orte, a town fifty miles north of Rome. Gramsci, she said, was for her the cemetery’s most important person, its special VIP. As I exited, excited about my new parttime role, walking up via Caio Cestio back into the bustle of the city again, I thought to myself that, henceforth, I’m not only going to try to keep Gramsci’s spirit alive–now, incredibly, I’m also going to keep an eye on him dead.

*Coda: Maria Nadotti and John visited Rome’s Non-Catholic Cemetery together on October 12, 2014. “John sat a long while,” Maria told me recently, “beside the grave of Gramsci, then drew a stone in a sketchbook. Finally he put the drawing on the grave among the other stones.”

Maria took three photographs of John. “It was a very intense private moment,” she said, “but I believe that John would be happy to share it and make it public.”

I am very grateful to her for letting me post these images:

 

I know I’m not the only one thinking that our world has lost its mind. It’s not easy being some relatively sane person nowadays. At the best of times, politics is bankrupt. At its worst, it’s toxic, dominated by demagogues, liars and cheats. Their falsehoods fly wholesale, rarely disgruntling masses of people, let alone damaging a demagogue’s political career. On the contrary, it seems to assure this political career, guarantees it somehow, because now there’s a “popular” willingness to believe in falsehoods, falsehoods decoupled from any reality. That’s where the madness resides. In my sixth decade on earth, I can’t ever remember life being so miserable and desperate.

A little while ago, though, I read something that oddly cheered me up, revealing to me that our world has often been miserable and desperate. It was written by one of the pioneers of the Dada movement, Tristan Tzara, an essay called “Some Memoirs of Dadaism,” published in July 1922 in an unlikely Vanity Fair. It’s amazing to think that the now-glossy Condé Nast publication once aired its likes; it’s equally amazing, reading Tzara, how much his time sounds a lot like our time. Listen to him scene-setting the birth of Dada, in Zurich, circa 1916, as Great War carnage raged:

DADAISM is a characteristic symptom of the disordered modern world. It was first inspired by the chaos and collapse of Europe during the war. To the exiled intellectuals of Switzerland, humanity seemed to have gone insane–all order was crashing to destruction, all values were turned upside down–and, in accordance with this spirit, we began a set of wild practical jokes, elaborately silly meetings and fantastic manifestoes which burlesqued, in their violence and absurdity, the absurdity and violence of the life around them.

Tzara was barely twenty years old when absurdity and violence surrounded him. Dada, he said, grew out of disgust for this world, for its war and politicians, for its businessmen and values. “Dada,” he said, “took the offensive and attacked the social system in its entirety, for it regarded this system as inextricably bound with human stupidity, the stupidity which culminated in the destruction of man by man.” A group of young people, Tzara included–exiled painters and poets, draft dodgers and deserters, Bohemian castoffs and plotting revolutionaries–began meeting in Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, an obscure nightclub along an obscure street, across from where an obscure Lenin lived.

For six months, the joint came alive, begat Dada, “the virgin microbe.” Discussions and outlandish performances quickly became legendary, the talk of the town, the talk of all Europe. Nights at the Cabaret Voltaire became “Dada nights,” nights of intoxication, of music and dance, of manifestoes and poems, of paintings and passions, of carnivalesque theatrics. Hugo Ball, the Cabaret’s co-founder, played the piano; partner Emmy Hennings, the other founder, sang, read, and danced; ditto Sophie Taeuber; Richard Huelsenbeck banged a giant drum; a balalaika orchestra struck up the band; Hans Arp, Hans Richter, and Marcel Janco provided artworks, and designed collages, costumes and masks.

Tzara, a small, monocled, intellectually uninhibited young man, recited Dada manifestoes and read poetry in French and Romanian from the scraps of paper he’d pull out of his pocket. His performances were animated by screams, sobs, and whistles. One time Tzara read a newspaper article while an electric bell kept ringing–so loudly that no one could hear what he said. Missiles were often tossed at those on stage; so were eggs and cabbages, together with the odd beefsteak. Exasperated audiences shouted and insulted performers; exasperated performers shouted and insulted audiences. Dada nights meant raucous laughter and frequent barnies. “In the presence of compact crowds,” said Tzara, “we demanded the right to piss in different colours.”

Legend has it that he and Lenin used to play chess together at another favourite Zurich haunt for dissidents, the Café de la Terrasse. (Apparently, Lenin sometimes went to the Cabaret Voltaire, an unassuming presence with a goatee and “Mongoloid features,” sitting on the second row, laughing along at the high jinks.) If we can believe Tzara’s testimonies, this stuff of legend and of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties was actually true. In the late 1950s, Tzara said: “I knew Lenin personally in Zurich, played chess with him. But to my great shame, I have to admit, at the time I didn’t know Lenin was Lenin. I only learnt it much later.”

Tzara probably wasn’t very accomplished at chess. Too many rules, too strict a movement of the pieces, too much cunning strategy–all poorly suited to the impetuous twentysomething’s poetic sensibility. Lenin, on the other hand, already then well into his forties, was likely a savvier player, more formidable: after all, he was always strategizing, always biding his time, coolly planning moves ahead, forever assessing an opponent’s strengths, preying on their weakest links. Tzara, by contrast, would have felt straightjacketed by the game’s mechanics. He’d have wanted his pawns to move sideways and backwards, his bishops to jump like knights, rooks to shift diagonally, his king to be a queen.

And if Lenin was at the board trying to forge a heroic “new man,” Tzara’s archetypal anti-hero was an “approximate man,” a person with a slippery identity, incomplete, stuttering, elusively located between language and nationality, shrugging off anything essential or logical, anything rational or normative, moving in the cracks of those black and white chequerboard squares. “Take a good look at me,” Tzara’s approximate man would taunt his audience. “I am an idiot, a clown, a faker./ Take a good look at me!/ I am ugly, my face has no expression, I am small./ I am just like you all!”

Lenin was discrete, cagily plotting behind closed doors; Dadaists made explicit public nuisances of themselves, reminding the world that there were independent men and women beyond war and nationalism, and who live for other ideals. Tzara said poetry was political because it was anti-literature, a whole way of life, a mode of being-in-the-world, intense and corrosive, a profound scream, a kick up society’s ass. “We repudiated all distinctions between life and poetry,” he said, “our poetry was a manner of living.” Poetry meant scandal, meant “sabotaging the realisation of the exterior world and its unacceptable manifestations.”

One disarming weapon of Dada sabotage was the “sound poem,” with its unsettling noises and auditory sensations, utterances and stammers, fulfilling Dadaists’ insistence that “thought is made in the mouth.” The sound poem was a provocative linguistic experiment, marking a shift away from the meaning of words to the meaning of sounds, freeing words from syntax–indeed, freeing language from language itself. Language had been misused and abused, corrupted and fabricated by politicians and demagogues, whose words manipulated mass audiences. So, said Dadaists, let’s refrain from using words, let’s not enter their linguistic terrain of engagement. Thus, for Tzara, to strip language of meaning was to create new language with fresh meaning. It was to negate ruling class language-games, to say NO to their rules, to their terms of reference, where meaning had lost meaning because it voiced lies.

Tzara wanted to break with modern forms of expression. He liked to recite, alongside Huelsenbeck’s beating drum, his own drum beat, inspired by authentic African chants: “boomboomboomboom drabatja mo gere, mo drabatja boooooooooooo.” Meanwhile, “Toto-Vaca,” repeating the idea of voicing “unknown words,” became Tzara’s take on a Māori poem, which, he said, he discovered in an anthropology magazine. Its verses appear on a recording called Dada Manifesto: Poèmes, Délires & Textes, and we can now hear for ourselves the amazing, haunting sounds that once haunted audiences at the Cabaret Voltaire. “Toto-Vaca” invents sound, Tzara said, and tries to mimic the caws, chirps, and guttural cries of the native New Zealand bird, the Kiwi.

“La Panka” is another Tzara poem with disturbing phonics, literally sounding-out the tumult and seismic tremors of the earth, of our eruptive society, emphasising long, prolonged and rattling enunciations: “De la teeee ee erre mooooooot/ Des bouuuules,” as in “tremblement de la terre,” or “earthquake” in English. To hear La Panka read aloud is to shudder, to shiver at its foreboding: “je déchiiiiiiire la coliiiiiiiiiii/ ine” (“I tear up the hill”); and “iaoai xixixi xixi cla cla clo/ drrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.” It’s a sound that gets under your skin, like the terrifying stuttering of the ghost of Christmas past, or maybe like the sound you’d make if you covered your ears, creating your own background noise, screening out something you don’t want to hear, the sort of thing a child does to avoid hearing, to avoid being scorned. Maybe it’s like drowning out somebody else’s obnoxious noise, some obnoxious ad or message, the ideological white noise that invades our lives.

Decades after his first hearing, the Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre vividly remembered the impact of Tzara’s sound poems. “Dada made a tabular rasa of the past,” Lefebvre impressed, and reconstructed language on the basis of “a kind of stuttering spontaneity,” which “challenged scholarly language and the art of discourse.” Lefebvre’s first published article, in 1924, in the Philosophies journal he helped found, was an insightful and positive review of Tzara’s Dada Manifestoes, and afterwards the two twenty-year-olds got to know one another (Tzara, born 1896, was five years Lefebvre’s senior); later they reconnected, fighting together for the Resistance movement in Toulouse; by then, each man was a card-carrying Communist, a ticket Tzara would never relinquish.

“From its first manifesto in 1918, Dada,” Lefebvre said, “condemned the West’s logocentrism and eurocentrism with a deliberately infantile formula: Dada was the first and final stammer. When Tristan Tzara, young and fiery, proclaimed that Europe–its thought and politics and all it had once been–was nothing but boom-boom-boom, this went very far. It was a puerile term that stunningly evoked the drums of infancy, grand military bands, politicians’ rhetoric, and exploding bombs. Dada was negativity on the threshold of the modern world; three knocks that strike its door are the boom-boom-boom of Tristan Tzara. Period.”

Lately, we might add the boom-boom-boom of assault rifles spraying bullets in public schools and shopping malls across America, and the louder and faster beatings of our hearts under stress. Indeed, our world continues to be punctuated by exploding bombs and military bands, by guns shots and political incantation–by the din of a Trump rally and the anxiety of our economically and ecologically crisis-ridden age. Our airwaves, too, are overwhelmed with explosions, of loud yet hollow words. We’re literally saturated with visceral language: from Twitter feeds and commercial news channels to imbecilic incumbents and political wannabes broadcasting fake facts and bawling insults. People en masse have been dumbed down by words, seduced by their ubiquity, lobotomised by their inanity. Ironically, too few words collectively stack up to saying too much. They over-multiply as they over-simplify. Nonsense goes viral.

Decent people have responded by invoking reason, tempering the tonality of debate and discussion, suggesting that we should try to uphold the truth and correct misconception. But you have to wonder if this modus operandi is really fit for purpose anymore. Maybe progressives need something more radical instead, something more Dadaist, something that drowns out their noise with our noise. Maybe it’s time to kick up a scandal, Dadaist-style, and create a new spirit of negativity, start afresh by creating a tabula rasa, sweeping everything away of this miserable status quo. “Everything?” an older generation of liberal fathers enquired of Turgenev’s young “nihilist” Bazarov. “Everything,” repeated Bazarov, “with indescribable composure.” “At the present time the most useful thing is negation—so we deny … The first thing is to clear the field.”

Tzara said that Dada “was born of a revolt common to youth in all times and places.” Whenever he said “we,” it was this generation Tzara had in mind, an adolescent generation, his own, a generation of twentysomethings who’d suffered during the 1914-18 war, “in the very flesh of its pure adolescence suddenly exposed to life, at seeing the truth ridiculed, clothed in the cast-off garments of vanity or base class interest.” Today’s youth are likewise seeing their pure adolescence exposed to life and liars; they, too, are watching the truth being ridiculed, clothed in the cast-off garments of political vanity and crass class interest. Thus, we might wonder, are there budding young revolters waiting in the wings somewhere now, heirs of Dada, plotting a scandal in the ruins of our society?

Could an avant-garde ever be invented again? A critical, revolutionary avant-garde, neo-Dadaist, pioneered by the many disgruntled young people the world over who know, as Johnny Rotten knew in 1977, that there’s no future? Is there anybody, any group or collectivity that can follow the lead of those youngsters who lit up the night at the Cabaret Voltaire? Dada, the movement the most provocative and most volatile, the most destructive yet most creative… where are its latter-day offspring, prising open a new future?

Maybe what this offspring lacks are sites of incubation, cradles to nurture a new movement, places where young people can congregate, can encounter one another, get politicised, entertain themselves, cafés and bars and youth centres that might mimic the sort of freedoms that neutral Switzerland (and Zurich) supplied during the war years, where outcasts and kindred found comradery, expressed themselves freely, and where Dadaists built a global movement without really recognising it–a movement that reminded us that there are independent young people who reject war and nationalism, and who live for other ideals, still live for them.

A key lesson that Tzara taught Henri Lefebvre remains key: “that a real work of art is lived out, that a written oeuvre subordinates itself to a style of life.” Tzara’s oeuvre was his life, his life his oeuvre, a certain manner of living and being in the world. Creating new Cabaret Voltaires in person is also to create Cabaret Voltaires of the mind, to live out this radical sensibility with others, everywhere, at all times, to bring poetry to life, to sound it out in the streets and in daily life. Guy Debord always said it was modern poetry that led him and the Situationists into the street. “We were a handful who thought it necessary to carry out its programme in reality, and certainly to do nothing else.”

Part of that programme united two prongs that over time have been ripped apart: desire and refusal, a will to live an alternative, authentic, passionate and adventurous life, at the same time as refusing to submit to the unfortunate rules and ideological norms of current society, to its dullness and sadness, to its inauthenticity. It’s a refusal to believe in its beliefs, in its lies; not to be “proud” but indignant, to be disgusted. We could say that it is to be all ears for the three knocks at its door: the boom-boom-boom of Tristan Tzara. Period.