XV
ARDENGO SOFFICI[1]
I
Ardengo Soffici, born in 1879 at Rignano on the Arno, now a second lieutenant in an infantry-battalion, is one of the most singular, most novel, and most perfect writers of the present day. In 1905, when he came back from France to become again an Italian and a writer, I was alone in recognizing his excellence. There are many to-day who share in that recognition, and the number will steadily increase.
Soffici did not find himself till he was nearly thirty, but he will endure the longer—as is the case with all those who have not wasted their energies in the disordered precocities of youth. He has already won a place, and a high place, in painting and in poetry.
He is extraordinarily versatile. I have seen him cover walls with frescoes, paint earthenware vases, carve wood, emboss leather, help a printer to set up difficult passages in his “lyric compounds,” imitate still-life groups on sheets of cardboard with bits of newspapers, scissors and paste, dash off newspaper articles and pages of a diary while at the café, and explain the mysteries of difficult poems and paintings, with a witty eloquence, to the hardest heads.
At times he is the most refined lyrist who has ever interwoven foreign and Italian words; at times he is the brilliant painter who with a few strokes on a sheet of blue paper creates for you a world of pure metaphysical form; then the exact and brilliant raconteur who compresses a whole romance into half a column or enlarges a village anecdote to the dimensions of an epic; then the clear, lucid, persuasive interpreter who plays with theories as a Japanese entertainer plays with fans, who condenses the most paradoxical abstractions into transparent paragraphs; then at last the elegant jongleur who between one breath and the next fuses the marvels of earth, sky, and sea in a pyrotechnic display of brilliant magic.
Thus in appearance he seems at first sight a disdainful and distinguished gentleman balancing the pyramids of the absolute on the smoke of his cigarettes; then he reveals the drawn and clouded face of a Baudelaire; then you take him for a substantial Tuscan countryman deeply rooted in his flowery soil, hale and hearty with a festive sobriety; and all of a sudden he turns out to be a cosmopolitan dandy, expert in all the refinements of many capitals. There are days when his serious, clerical face gives you the impression of a fanatic friar ready to die for his faith; and there are days when he suggests a gay and acrobatic Pierrot. He may play the subverter of tradition, mocking old ways more cruelly than any futurist; and the next day he will make you see the beauty and the fineness of a sentence of Manzoni or a line of Leopardi as no professional man of letters will ever do.
The secret of his charm lies in the changing wealth of his many aspects. He is at the same time an aristocrat and a man of the people, a Tuscan of the Valdarno and a Parisian, a theorist and a lyrist, a devotee and a libertine, a fanatic and a dilettante, profound and transparent. Like the clear water of the Ambra which runs by his home, his polytheistic sensitiveness mirrors the infinite variety of the world, and renders it more delicate and more beautiful.
II
But in all this lively transformation of the spirit one quality remains dominant. Ardengo Soffici is at all times, and beyond all else, an artist. An artist when he tells of others, when he tells of himself, when he amuses himself by firing verbal rockets or playing practical jokes, when he paints or criticizes painting or philosophizes about painting. He may take part in politics—he was active, for instance, in the campaign for intervention—but he always sees the map and the war with an artist’s eye, and his affections go out to the land that has given him the richest spiritual and artistic gifts.
Deep in the heart of this skeptic there is one faith: art. Behind the melancholy of this pessimist there is one joy: art. In other men he esteems only intelligence, and for him intelligence means the achievement of art or at least the understanding of art. Even in life he seeks that intellectual or physical refinement which after all is art. Even in poverty and in hunger you would find him ready to see and to catch the picturesque or the comic or the colorful aspect of his ill luck, and to turn it into a marvelous page in his memoirs.
This characteristic, the very spinal column of his being, is rarer nowadays than Philistines think. For the Philistine is prone to believe that every man who breaks the rectangular habits of Philistia is an artist—every drawing-teacher, every dauber with disheveled hair, every third-rate journalist. But the true and complete artist—the lyrist, in short, whether he expresses himself in signs, in colors, or in words—is the rarest creature in the whole world. Few, indeed, are those who live from morning to night ready to see impartially and to express with utter truth.
Among these few Soffici is one of the most fortunate. Free and alone, a man of few needs, accustomed to a simple, wandering life, poverty has not defeated him, obscurity has not discouraged him. He has always found as much love and friendship as he needed, and the world is so large, so complicated, so magnificent, so variegated, warm, and sonorous, that he has never lacked for pleasure. A bit of crayon and a bit of paper, and he is content. He trained himself little by little, grew silently, stored up his gains, was willing to wait and meditate, extracted the essence of countryside and of metropolis; and set forth at last fully confident, armed for any combat, strong enough for any conquest. He came slowly, and late. He came from Paris, and looked as if he came from the country. He came late, but he has advanced beyond his fellows. It is a pleasure and a good fortune to be by his side.
III
I will not speak of his work as painter; it would take too long to trace the stages of his development, from his first Giottesque ventures down to his recent fusion of popular art with the discoveries of cubists and futurists—a fusion which has given him a novel physiognomy of his own, at once Tuscan and cosmopolitan.
As a writer he began to express himself in French in the Vagabondages lyriques which came out between 1904 and 1906 in the Plume and in the Europe artiste. Toward the end of his long stay in France, he sent to the Leonardo (under the name of Stefan Cloud) two or three essays in art criticism, in which, under the rust of lingering ideologies, one could already perceive the vigorous apostle of modern art who was so soon to reveal himself. In a brief polemic entitled Rentrée there appeared already the bright color and the impressionistic freshness which were later to develop in full consciousness in the most successful pages of the Harlequin and the Logbook.
In his first book, a tiny volume of a few score pages, printed (and badly printed) in 1909, the influence of Foscolo, Leopardi, and Carlyle is too apparent. The Unknown Tuscan is indeed dedicated to Didimus Clericus, Filippo Ottonieri, and Dr. Teufelsdröckh. The contents of this book are but the floating fragments of a shipwreck, the remnants of a great pessimistic work which was to have been called Tragedy.
When the publication of the Voce began, Soffici set out with a will to acquaint Italy with foreign art, and with French art in particular. His essays on Cézanne, Dégas, Gauguin, Renoir, Rousseau, Picasso, and Braque are marvelous examples of loving intelligence and effective evocation. To the same period belongs his generous and successful campaign on behalf of the great Italian sculptor, Medardo Rosso, which culminated in 1911 in the Florentine Exposition of the works of Rosso and of the French impressionists.
At the same time his literary activity was increasing. His book on Rimbaud does not content the latest connoisseurs, though it was Soffici who made known to them the existence of the prodigious creator of the Illuminations; but it is none the less one of the best intellectual biographies of an exceptional figure, and it served to reveal the name, the work, and the greatness of the first pure lyrist of France and of Europe.
In Lemmonio Boreo Soffici began a sort of satirical romance of adventure in which a contemporary and indigenous Don Quixote sets out, accompanied by force (in the person of Zaccagna) and astuteness (in the person of Spillo), to chastise the rabble and to speak his mind to fools. But the critics did not like the beginning of the work; and the moralists failed to see the beauty of certain pages, and spun theories as to a thesis which did not exist. Soffici was discouraged, and poor Lemmonio’s career was cut short at the end of the first volume.
This partial defeat did not lead Soffici to abandon fiction and poetry. Two or three years later appeared his Harlequin, a collection of miscellaneous articles which had been published in the Voce or in the Riviera Ligure. This volume and the Logbook show Soffici at his best, and are among the most precious works of recent literature.
Even today, perhaps, there is more of Soffici in the Harlequin than in any other book. It has an extraordinary felicity and limpidity and solidity in color, word, and image—life, novelty, a spontaneous power, a clearness that seems profound by virtue of its very transparency.
But Soffici’s greatest success began in the review Lacerba. Still moved by his old eagerness for the fragment, the brief note, the registration of autobiographical experience, Soffici began to publish a sort of diary, sentimental and philosophic, pictorial and poetic, which he called his Logbook. At first it attracted little attention, but in the course of a few months competent and sensitive readers began to look for it and to enjoy it. Renato Serra was one of the first to discover its great beauty, and had the courage to state his admiration publicly. Soffici, who in his painting had recently turned to futurism, became popular, at least among connoisseurs and radicals. People began to read his other books as well; and within a year’s time he had come to be the fashionable writer, the favorite both of experts and of beginners. When the Logbook appeared as a volume, it proved to have lost nothing in interest or in freshness. Its last sections foretokened the complicated structure of the later “lyric compounds.”
The Logbook was not his only contribution to Lacerba. As in the Voce he had been the champion and the theorist of impressionism, so in Lacerba he was the apostle and the exponent of cubism. His limpid, axiomatic articles, now published in book form, are the best European treatment of the most daring experimental schools of painting.
In Lacerba too, from 1914 on, and in the Voce, he published the greater part of those “lyric compounds” and “lyric simultaneities” which have recently come out, under the strange title Bïf§zf + 18, in a strange sort of album which has for its cover a medley of posters colored by Soffici in the brightest blues, greens, yellows, and reds that are to be found in Italy now that the importation of German dyes has ceased.
IV
The book is limited to three hundred copies, costs five lire, and is published in war-time: consequently few will read it. And yet this bizarre volume, which even in the extravagances of its typography expresses the modernist and mechanistic will of Soffici at play with the most sumptuous poetic counterpoint, will remain one of the most significant and vitally important works of our literature.
This poetry of Soffici, which seeks to bind with the invisible silk of an intense and nervous Pindarism the impressions which from all the universe converge to a brain as luminous and as fiery as a lens of Archimedes—this poetry did not come into being all at once. It had been prepared for slowly and gradually by Soffici himself and by others. But it is only in this book that Soffici reaches full self-consciousness and affirms himself in clear and definitive utterances which give him the right to be listened to, discussed, and recognized. Like all the true poets of this blasé and exacting age, Soffici demands and seeks the pure lyric, the lyric freed from anecdote, from narrative, from external motives, from eloquence, from description. Baudelaire and Rimbaud are the starting point, but the terminus is Soffici. No longer the proud and dolorous Parnassianism of the Fleurs du mal, no longer the psychological and fantastic mythology of the Saison en enfer. Here at last poetry is sound, color, form, word, a complex reflected image, an immense net of suggestions and reminiscences—freedom within an infinite wealth of forms and shadows. Soffici, with the sensitive spirit of the liberated lyrist, sets himself in the centre of the world, and so manipulates rays and gems and lights as to construct a super-universe more spiritual, more compact, more subtle, and more gorgeous than the real universe. From one single point issue rays which on numberless paths meet memories and beauties, and imprison and illumine them with a sense of totality deeply realized and enjoyed: just as a ray of sunlight turns the base dust of the street into a whirl of golden points. Without recourse to isolated words, without availing himself, save rarely, of typographical trickery, Soffici succeeds in rendering the transparent and tremendous enigma of the visible world with expressions and suggestions which are absolutely novel to Italian poetry.
To understand these “lyric compounds” one must read and reread them; to realize their importance we must wait for years, perhaps for decades. I am not a literary critic by profession, and no interpretation of mine could take the place of direct examination. I have been a friend and comrade of Soffici for a dozen years; and I am glad to have borne witness for him here as a man who admires him because he understands him.
- ↑ Written à propos of Soffici’s Bïf§zf + 18, Florence, 1915.