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Well... now I want to tell you a story that some of you might already know, a very sad story. In the early 1900s in the countryside of Bologna, there lived a family with two children, a mother perpetually under the influence of morphine because she was ill, and a probably reactionary violent father. One of the two children was named Emanuel, a small, sensitive, introverted boy who, upon his mother’s death, was forced to go to boarding school. His academic performance was indeed good, earning him several scholarships. It was the difficulty in adapting that often led to his expulsion and thus the change of institutions. At the age of 16, he returned home to his father along with his brother... it was here that he decided to leave for America.
After an exhausting journey, he landed in the new continent with very little money, and to earn a living, he was forced into the most humble jobs, such as cleaning offices and the homes of wealthy people, picking up cigarette butts from the ground, and finally serving in Italian restaurants in New York. His living conditions were always on the edge, also due to recurring adaptation problems, which caused his jobs to last a maximum of a week. In the meantime, he wrote, putting on paper his emotions and anxieties. He was a poetry enthusiast, admired the school (if it can be called that) of the French cursed poets, predominantly Arthur Rimbaud, whose shadow is fixed in the poems of our...
His poems were occasionally published in specialized magazines, and of one of these, Emanuel himself also became deputy editor (it would be the greatest satisfaction of his life). He also got married in America, but the marriage was short-lived, due to his form of madness and a particular predisposition to go with many women and prostitutes. In 1922, he was forced to return to Italy, due to encephalitis. It was in a hospital in Bologna that he received visits from many writers and American friends of the period. And it was here that he died. Grotesquely suffocated by a piece of bread.
"The First God" is an autobiographical and reflective novel where he speaks precisely of his life. There is an intensity perhaps unparalleled, spare and sharp words that create unrest and indignation. Sadness is scattered everywhere, but the style with which Em (as he was called in America) begins the novel is more carefree and hopeful. The book gradually becomes increasingly catastrophic. Carnevali definitively buries religion and loses faith in almost all the people who actually wanted to help him. A delirious journey towards destruction told with simplicity and even a touch of irony. But the best are his poems, collected in the volume together with the novel. This, in my opinion, is the greatest Italian poet (or at least my favorite) and it makes one mad to think that he is practically unknown.
Perhaps we will have to wait for some middling filmmaker to write a beautiful adventurous and melodramatic screenplay on it capable of making people burst into tears at the end of the viewing. After all, his biography seems tailor-made for a movie... maybe we’ll also have a hot guy in the cast who can get into the minds of lustful professors dealing culture like cocaine, making them feel fabulous in turn.
No, simply we Italians are not ready for certain things yet...
The houses in a long row
Have wind-burnt red faces
These coffins of motionless air
With a fat silly stare
Beckon at the winds that blow
A joyous insult in their faces -
Old spinsters
Gulping respectably their hate
At the wanton gait
Of scuttling skirts of tall young girls.
They have wind-burnt red faces.
They respectably try
To smile
A red lie
For a while
In a long row
As the winds blow...
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