US President Joe Biden brands Republican backers of his predecessor as ‘semi-fascists’; his Brazilian counterpart lambasts as ‘vandals and fascists’ the pro-Bolsonaro mobs who invaded the Congress in Brasilia on 8 January 2022; the mayor of Tel Aviv warns that Israel is sliding into a ‘fascist theocracy’; Modi’s Hindu-supremacist citizenship legislation is deemed the offspring of a ‘fascist vision’; while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – grotesquely advertised as a ‘denazification’ programme – is seen to signal the regime’s accelerating fascisation.

Faced with the worldwide proliferation, consolidation and ascendancy of far-right political movements, regimes and mindsets, many leftists, liberals and even some conservatives have reached for the fascist label. The term is now bandied around with ease verging on abandon, particularly in the United States, but its resurfacing does speak to the urgent challenge of diagnosing the morbid symptoms that populate our present. My book, Late Fascism, is an attempt to contribute to a collective discussion about our reactionary political cycle. To write it, I turned to the archive composed by the theories of fascism produced in the past century, testing their capacity to shed light on our moment. What I found challenges many of the ruts, reflexes and commonplaces that debate on this extremely charged notion can and does devolve into.

The principal temptation for any contemporary thought on fascism is historical analogy. Faced with a toxic brew of social crisis, political violence and authoritarian ideology, the common sense reflex is to identify similarities between our present and the European catastrophe of the 1930s and 1940s, so as better to prevent its repetition (usually by reanimating liberalism as the sole antidote to illiberalism). Fascism is indeed a matter of returns and repetitions, but it is not best approached in terms of steps and checklists dictated by a selective reading of the Italian ventennio or the Third Reich.

Rather than treating fascism as a singular event or identifying it with a particular configuration of European parties, regimes and ideologies, for the purposes of thinking in and against our own day we need ‘to see fascism within the totality of its “process”’ This also entails approaching fascism in the longue durée, to perceive it as a dynamic that precedes its naming. It means understanding fascism as intimately linked to the prerequisites of capitalist domination – which, albeit mutable and sometimes contradictory, have a certain consistency at their core. W. E. B. Du Bois gave this core a name, still usable today: ‘the counter-revolution of property’. For all their deep differences and dissimilarities, the Ku Klux Klan terrorism against Black Reconstruction, the rise of squadrismo against labour organising in Italy, or the murderous codification of neoliberalism in Chile’s constitution can all be understood under that heading.

I do not intend ‘late fascism’ to operate like an academic brand, in competition with other names for our dire present. It is there to name a problem. At its most basic, like ‘late capitalism’ or ‘late Marxism’, it gestures toward the fact that fascism, like other political phenomena, varies according to its socioeconomic context. More provocatively, perhaps, it underscores how ‘classical’ fascist fixes – so intimately bound to the capitalist crises of their time, but also to an era of mass manual labour, universal male conscription for total warfare and racial imperialist projects – are ‘out of time.’ Ironically, many intellectuals and agitators leaning toward fascism today are actually profoundly invested in fantasies of a white, industrial, patriarchal modernity that have the post-fascist, post-war period as their seedbed. To recognize fascism’s anachronism is cold comfort, especially when liberal and neoliberal fixes to planetary crises – especially to disastrous anthropogenic climate change – are themselves criminally late and inadequate, leaving much room for manoeuvre to the radical right, which is able to reinvent its fantasies of domination directed at ‘women, nature and colonies’ in profoundly destructive ways.

An unreflexive struggle against fascism runs the risk of becoming sclerotic, self-indulgent or complicit with the very processes that body forth reaction, the lesser evil lending a hand to the greater one. When it does not question its own theoretical frameworks, its own habits of naming or indeed the pleasures of innocence, heroism and righteousness that may arise from these, anti-fascism can be its own lure.

Fiercely, viciously identitarian, fascism evades exhaustive identification. It repeats, but with differences, scavenging the ideological terrain for usable materials – not uncommonly from its antagonists on the left. It can flaunt its relativism while trading in absolutes. And for all its Cold War association with the hyper-statist logic of totalitarianism, it breeds its own forms of pluralism and its own visions of freedom. My wager has been that it is possible to think cogently about the elements of fascism as an anti-emancipatory politics of crisis without equating theory and definition, avoiding the checklist of tell-tale features or the streamlined schedule of the steps to fascist victory. A critical theory of fascism need not take the form of a diagnostic and statistical manual of political disorders. The radical theorists of racial and colonial fascism that have anchored my own reflections, as well as my criticisms of historical analogy, can attune us to four interlocking dimensions of the history and experience of fascism.

The first is that the practices and ideologies that crystallised, more or less laboriously, into Italian fascism, German Nazism and their European kin were presaged and prepared by the dispossession and exploitation of ‘lesser breeds without the Law’ wrought by settler-colonialism, chattel slavery and intra-European racial capitalism (or internal colonialism). I believe that our ‘late ’ fascism cannot be understood without the ‘fascisms before fascism’ that accompanied the imperialist consolidation of a capitalist world-system.

Second, fascism has been differentially applied, experienced and named across axes of race, gender and sexuality. As we learn from the writings of incarcerated revolutionaries of color in the United States, political orders widely deemed liberal-democratic can harbor institutions that operate as regimes of domination and terror for ample sectors of their population, in something like a racial dual state. This means that both in their political origins and their strategic imperatives, abolitionism and contemporary anti-fascism cannot be disjoined.

Third, fascism is grounded in a modality of preventive counter-violence, its desire for ethnonational rebirth or revanche stoked by the imminence of a threat projected as civilisational, demographic and existential. The epochal panic about the ‘rising tide of color’ and the ‘colored world revolution’ that seeded the rise of fascism after the First World War has morphed (barely) into narratives of replacement, substitution or cultural suicide shared by mass shooters and European prime ministers alike.

Fourth, fascism required the production of identifications and subjectivities, desires and forms of life, which do not simply demand obedience to despotic state power but draw on a sui generis idea of freedom. Whether in the guise of decentralized and deputized power or psychological wages, the fascist – as the phantasmatic synthesis of the settler and the soldier (or the cop) – needs to imagine him or herself as an active shareholder in the monopoly of violence as well as an enterprising petty sovereign, with race and nation serving as the affective and ideological vectors of identification with power.

If we keep these dimensions in mind – the longue durée of colonial racial capitalism, the differential experience of domination, political violence pre-empting an imagined existential threat, the subject as deputy of sovereign violence – we can begin to comprehend how contemporary fascist potentials converge and crystallize into forms of ‘border fascism.’ Whether that border be a physical demarcation to be walled and patrolled, or a set of fractal fault lines running through the body politic and multiply marked and policed, there is no circumventing the fact that, as ‘the cycles of capitalism driving both mass migration and repression converge with the climate crisis’ and a racial-civilizational crisis is spliced with scenarios of scarcity and collapse, the extreme and authoritarian right will map its politics of time – and especially its obsession with epochal loss of privilege and purity – onto the space of territory. It will also, like its twentieth-century forebears, seek to gain control over the borders of the body, to patrol the demarcations between genders and sexes.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore has encapsulated the idea of racial capitalism in the formula ‘capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it.’ Fascism, we could add, strives violently to enshrine inequality under conditions of crisis by creating simulacra of equality for some – it is a politics and a culture of national-social entrenchment, nourished by racism, in a situation of real or anticipated social catastrophe. As a politics of crisis, it is a limit case of ‘capitalism saving capitalism from capitalism’ (sometimes even creating the mirage of a capitalism without capitalism). Countering the fascist potentials and processes that traverse the global present therefore cannot mean subordinating the practical critique of capitalism to watered-down (un)popular fronts with liberals or conservatives. A ‘progressive’ neoliberalism – the one that lies in the back of most mainstream denunciations of fascism – is defined by the production and reproduction of inequalities and exclusions inconsistently accompanied by formalistic and formulaic commitments to rights, diversity and difference. Those who make common cause with it will have to do so in the awareness that they are ‘manning the imperial gates,’ allying with the cause to ward off its effects. Whoever is not willing to talk about anti-capitalism should also keep quiet about anti-fascism. The latter, capaciously understood, is not just a matter of resisting the worst, but will always be inseparable from the collective forging of ways of living that can undo the lethal romances of identity, hierarchy and domination that capitalist crisis throws up with such grim regularity.

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Excerpted from Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis by Alberto Toscano. Copyright (c) 2023 Alberto Toscano. Used by arrangement with the Publisher, Verso Books. All rights reserved.

Featured image courtesy of The National World War II Museum

Have you ever heard of a woman named Lee Miller? She was a renowned model for magazines like Vogue in the 1920s. She learned photography from Man Ray, became his lover and was perhaps his muse. (In fact, she is also the inspiration for the main character of my own novel, The Paris Orphan.) Miller then had a third career as Vogue’s photojournalist, reporting from the frontlines of Europe during WWII. Her life was a bittersweet combination of the extraordinary and the terrible.

Lee Miller documented the US army’s first use of napalm in Saint-Malo, France; she was one of the first women to photograph the horrors of the concentration camps; and she set up a famously denunciatory photograph of herself in Hitler’s bathtub in his apartment in 1945.

You’d think that after having reported so brilliantly on one of the largest and deadliest conflicts of the twentieth century, Miller would have been able to take her pick of journalistic positions once the fighting stopped. Instead, she was sent to Saint Moritz to report on the social season. She was asked to write recipes. The men had returned from the war and stepped back into their accepted roles as workers and providers. As a woman, Miller was confined to writing about things that interested women, no matter that she’d been one of the first photojournalists to march into newly-liberated Paris just a year before.

How must Miller have felt, after photographing on the frontlines for four short years, to then be told she was only needed to write about socialites or how to roast a chicken? Her photojournalism wasn’t only a meticulous documenting of history—her images were those of an artist. But her work was buried so deep beneath a collective amnesia about women’s wartime accomplishments that, when she died, even her son didn’t know what his mother had done during the war.

Miller’s atrocious treatment by the world made me realize that I wanted to write about the way women were permitted to accomplish so much during WWII but were then told to give it all up—their independence, their careers, their legacies—as soon as the hostilities ended. I couldn’t fit that story into The Paris Orphan, but I also couldn’t let it—her story, the stories of women like her—go.

I soon stumbled upon advertisements targeted at women over the war and postwar periods. You might have seen some of the war office recruitment campaigns from the time, including the famous Rosie the Riveter “We Can Do It” posters, and others exhorting women to “Be a Marine,” or with headlines stating “So Proudly We Serve.” And women did serve proudly. In those posters and advertisements, they’re depicted holding their heads high, standing tall and confident, looking as if they could do anything. Because they did do everything. They worked in factories. They took photographs on the frontlines of the war. They spied. They were imprisoned and tortured and killed by Nazis.

But as soon as the men came home, governments the world over ran propaganda campaigns encouraging women to give up their jobs. It was the start of a cultural shift that continued for decades, reflected in advertisements showing women on their knees, serving their husbands breakfast in bed beneath slogans such as, “It’s a Man’s World,” as per a particularly egregious Van Heusen necktie example. See also: an Alcoa Aluminum advertisement of a surprised woman holding a ketchup bottle. The headline reads, “Even a Woman Can Open It.” Or a cigarette billboard from 1967 that says, “Cigarettes are like women. The best ones are thin and rich.”

How did women go from being able to join the marines to being on their knees in a man’s world, praised like little girls when they managed to do something as basic as opening a ketchup bottle? How did it hurt women like Lee Miller, who marched across the frontlines in Europe, and who were then told the only jobs they had to do were to keep themselves slim and to write recipes?

Did it make them rage?

It makes me rage. And that’s why I invented the character of Alix in my latest book, The Three Lives of Alix St Pierre. Alix represents all of the bold, talented women whom the postwar world tried to conquer. She works as a spy for the American government during WWII and then takes a job as the Director of Publicity for the not-yet launched House of Christian Dior. It’s a bold move—she’s twenty-seven, unmarried and, as Nancy White, niece of the infamous Carmel Snow said, “It wasn’t easy working back then…It wasn’t right to work.”

Right through the 1960s, women who wanted to work had to get permission from their husbands to keep their jobs. Banks simply made women resign once they tied the knot, and certainly after they had children.

That wasn’t the worst of it. Did you know it wasn’t until the 1960s that women in America gained the right to open a bank account? It actually wasn’t until 1974 that the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in the US. In simple terms, that means that, before 1974, single women—including those who were divorced or widowed—had to bring a man with them to the bank to sign their credit applications, no matter how much money they made. If you were a single woman, you couldn’t get a credit card in your own name.

In my novel, Alix St. Pierre might be the Director of Publicity at the House of Christian Dior, but she can’t get a loan. If she gets married, she has to beg her husband for the right to continue working. If she has children, and if they are girls, will she have to remind them that their dreams are limited in this world?

After serving her country during the war and putting her life on the line, it’s a disquieting future to contemplate. But so many women were made to not just contemplate that future, but to live through it. I salute them all.

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The Three Lives of Alix St. Pierre by Natasha Lester is available from Forever, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group.

Translated from Italian by Minna Zallman Proctor

1.

Through the years, there’s one story from my grandmother’s life as a girl that’s been repeatedly brought up. My grandmother, it’s said, went to Piazza Venezia to hear Mussolini speak from his balcony. There’s hardly any need to say more. Mussolini and the adoring crowd—old newsreels and archival photographs, have turned that scene into recorded history. It doesn’t take much effort to insert my grandmother’s face among the others.

Il Duce on the balcony, gazing out manfully over the heart of Rome, his jutting jaw, puffed-out chest, hands on his hips—a sea of people below him, waving flags and chanting Du-ce! Du-ce! Among them, my mother’s mother as a young girl. Her face emerges into this moment and disappears, leaving in its place the gentle woman who made fresh pasta for everyone, and prepared it and served it to her four children, then, in time, her five grandchildren.

It was always my father who’d bring up the image of my grandmother standing under Mussolini’s balcony in Piazza Venezia—though she was the one who’d probably first shared the memory with him, being the only witness to her own childhood. My father would parade that anecdote in front of me and my sister when we were little by way of explaining the difference between us—the righteous, the antifascists—and them, by which I mean “them,” the fascists. He did it every time there was some tense situation he’d provoked with my mother’s family.

The source of these tense episodes—at times ending with our sudden departure for home and then followed by weeks, even months, of silence between the two sides of the family—was never political in nature. It was, instead, rooted in my father’s congenital impression that he was being excluded, which made him aggressive, like a wounded animal. His fear of being left out, often manifesting itself in front of my mother’s parents, swept over our family through the years, an avalanche. What caused it? Maybe it was that my mother’s family was big, tightly knit, and loving, the complete opposite of my father’s family, which he often said, as if he were talking about a vendetta, would determine the destiny and unhappiness of our own.

So, in the absence of anything better to argue about, he kept coming back to the image of my grandmother going to Piazza Venezia every Sunday to clap for Mussolini and wave the fascist flag. The image was proof that we needed to keep our distance from them, at least for a while.

2.

To be clear, my grandmother was a gentle person. She lived with my grandfather in a modest yet very dignified rental apartment on the road to Fiumicino, southwest of Rome. We’d visit them twice a year when we travelled south, down to Rome, for Easter and summer vacation. Theirs was the kind of home with a constant coming and going of people: mostly relatives, but also neighbors, who’d come by to sit for a bit in the living room and visit. If I’m remembering correctly, the front door was seldom fully closed. It was at the end of a long hallway, and someone would call out, “Anyone home?” and then come in, chatting as they did, as if they were already in the middle of a conversation that had been going on for ages.

What did I ever know about my grandmother? Very little to be honest. She lost both her parents (I think it was both), and she and her sister were raised in a convent. I know more about the convent than about her being an orphan, because she wasn’t the kind of woman who made misfortune the bedrock of her life story. From her time in the convent and the exigencies of orphanhood, she kept that bond with her sister, who lived just a few bus-stops away and was a constant presence in my grandparents’ house.

Together they had survived the death of their parents and together they would remain for their whole lives. My grandmother’s sister was a woman of few words, who I remember sitting in the living room sewing for everyone. Both my grandmother and her sister had a strong and simple devoutness, a fatalistic belief system that was evidenced by the way they automatically and purposefully inserted, “God willing,” at the end of every sentence.

My grandmother and grandfather went to mass on Sunday, arm in arm. Even though she’d been married for some time, my grandmother’s sister went alone; I don’t remember the slightest thing about my so-called “uncle.” In my memory, she’s always a figure in mourning, a widow, an orphan, with her bent spine and her tender devotion to her sister. She must have been standing under Mussolini’s balcony too—I realize that now as I write—but no one ever mentioned her presence. Even in his paranoia, my father couldn’t seem to place the entire burden of Fascism on her back.

My grandmother had married a quiet man who we knew little to nothing about. He’d fought in East Africa during World War II and been taken prisoner there and sent to America. In other words, he fought in the fascist army—yet that was never considered shameful. What he talked most happily about was the great, epic adventure of his life: his time in the American POW camp. He spoke of it as if it were a wonderful holiday. My overall impression is that it was all free cigarettes and long showers. The shower, actually, was the heart of the story about his American sojourn. This was the detail he always came back to. Prisoners were issued enormous bars of soap to take into the shower with them. They were only allowed to leave the shower after they’d used up all the soap—at least, this is how I remember it.

My grandfather was a man of few words, who for most of his life worked in a small factory that (if memory serves) assembled mailboxes, then he retired early. He went out to the countryside to pick chicory and came home and cleaned it at the living room table—the same table where all the visitors sat. In the afternoon, he’d go play cards with his friends at the coffee bar. He was inoffensive. My father claimed that my grandfather was reduced to silence by the five women surrounding him. I remember him as a happy man who was devoted to his wife and four children. And this, I think, was the crux of the matter—my grandmother was the backbone of the family. My grandfather came next; he followed her. He was the man, but he wasn’t in charge. My father found this intolerable.

3.

What was my grandmother doing standing under Mussolini’s balcony? I don’t know; we never discussed her motivations. Naturally for my father it meant that even if she wasn’t a real fascist, she’d at least contributed to the momentum that first brought Mussolini to power, that made him Il Duce, a dictator, the man who signed off on Italy’s racial laws, the man who formed an alliance with Hitler’s Nazis.

There are a few instances I remember when he brought up the history of Mussolini’s rallies in her presence. She said that, yes, she’d gone. But she didn’t say it to either vindicate or provoke my father. She was a strong woman, whereas he was the estranged heir of a fractured family, which was why he was inclined to verbal aggression. All she wanted though was for her relatives, whether by blood or marriage, to all get along.

When she agreed that yes, she had gone to Piazza Venezia to hear Mussolini, she said it like it was a given. Did she go once, twice, ten times? I don’t know. But there she was, in that crowd with her sister. They’d been babies when they were left without a mother or father, and they went to hear this gentleman in a uniform speak about God, Country, and Family—what they most aspired to. Go to mass, be orphans, stand under a balcony and applaud—three things that went together.

When my father threw her presence at those rallies in her face, he was trying somehow to say that behavior like hers led directly to the Holocaust. My grandmother had a concrete kind of intelligence, and she understood that he was talking about historical debts, but she didn’t recognize them. Mussolini was wrong to form an alliance with Hitler—but that was a different Mussolini from the man she went to hear speak in Piazza Venezia, not the same man who made the mistake of allying himself with Hitler.

More than that, she believed in God and she believed in family, and my father was the man her daughter had married. However argumentative or not he was, she loved him like a son. Which was why even after a disastrous meal at my grandparents’ house, ending with my father telling them all they should go to hell, she never stopped telephoning to ask how we all were. To check in on her daughter, her grandchildren, and her son-in-law.

4.

My father never hid that he’d had fascist sympathies when he was young. He associated it with a bad phase, born of reading the wrong things and a general disarray that he blamed, like almost all his mistakes, on his mother. But later he distanced himself from those far-right ideas and began to think of himself as, not quite a communist, but most assuredly a leftist.

This is the very same version of my father’s self-propagandizing that we, his family, got. It consisted of a boxed set of Gramsci’s diaries on the shelf in the foyer, a hatred for anyone who had more money than us, and a moral system that left no room for anyone not to his taste.

Everything else belonged to the cult of manliness—sports, machismo, and a completely paternalistic notion of male-female relations. Except for a brief interlude, my mother never held a job. My father told her there was no need and she accepted it. Beyond that, I was permitted to bring girls home to sleep over in my room. My sister, one year older than me, was not. About girls, he advised me to “get some practice,” by which he meant I should use them to learn how to have sex and nothing more.

Obedience was the foundation for him. As long as he had total obedience, everything moved along peacefully, especially with regard to me, the male child, with whom he sought a kind of camaraderie. In the case of dissent, he turned to weapons of intimidation and the threat of physical consequences (“I’ll beat you to a pulp…”), or psychic ones (“you and me, we’re over”). His more or less explicitly fascistic wording was an aspect of every oppressive maneuver: “Talk is worthless.” “A bridge of gold for the enemy in flight.” “More enemies, more honor.”

When, at around eighteen, I stopped trying to hide how uncomfortable all this made me—when I began tearing away chunks of my beard from my cheeks and chin, and shaking every time he raised his voice—he told me I was certifiable. That, to him, was the ultimate dishonor.

5.

My grandmother took what she needed from those days spent standing under Mussolini’s balcony, and she left the rest. Didn’t she understand that the words shouted out by that man with the jutting jaw were saturated with violence and had the sole intention of generating allegiance? Wasn’t it obvious that when Mussolini invoked God, calling on him to witness his imperialist plot, it had nothing to do with the nuns who’d taken her and her sister in when they’d been left without a father or mother?

I don’t know and it doesn’t even matter. What matters is that they decided to extricate God, to hold God dear like the nuns who had saved them and to whom they would always be grateful. Beyond that, she married a man who, baldness aside, was nothing like Il Duce. She went for a teaching certificate and was able to find work. She taught technical drawing at a middle school for as long as I can remember.

She actually made a career of it, becoming assistant principal at her school and retiring after my grandfather did. Every morning he drove her to school and then headed toward the shore to pick chicory, and then he picked her up on the way home. He aged faster than she did, he got even quieter.

When she retired, her former students, now grown, started coming to visit. Her whole life, my grandmother voted Christian Democrat because she had the impression that it was a party of pious and dignified people. In 1992, when Italy was shaken by the corruption scandal that started with the Christian Democrats and exposed connections between the politicians and the mafia, resulting in the wiping out of all the traditional parties, she just stopped believing in politics.

When an industrialist with a media empire, named Silvio Berlusconi, rode to power on this landslide, she decided to just stick with the pope. Which is to say, stick with the representation, to her mind, of those same nuns to whom she owed her good life. After that, I believe she voted based on the solid, albeit naïve, criteria of whether or not someone seemed to her like a good person.

Then my grandfather died, as quietly as he had lived. There was a funeral held in a neighborhood church that I didn’t go to so that I wouldn’t upset my father who was staying outside, technically because of atheism, but in truth, so he wouldn’t have to feel excluded from that united and loving family. If I’d gone in, according to his paranoid logic, it would have been a betrayal of him. I was the only one who carried out his orders. But not entering the church because I feared him was a greater betrayal, one I committed against myself.

6.

I don’t believe my grandmother ever felt like a fascist, or that deep down, my father ever really suspected her of being one. But it is a fact that the approval my grandmother and her sister demonstrated by standing their two orphaned bodies under Mussolini’s balcony, played some role in legitimizing the Fascism of the future. They were seeking something and found it there: that yelling man with his fists on his hips offered them something even bigger than a mother or father. They were two lonely girls in search of God, of a Country, of a Family.

As for my father, like millions of other Italian men, he rejected Fascism but kept Mussolini as an internalized model, without ever even recognizing it as such. He banned dissent in the household, he promulgated a domestic dictatorship based on terror, he propagandized the idea of virile masculinity, and a residual brand of patriarchy. His frailty and fears, his loneliness, desperation, and discomfort—all played a decisive role.

Like millions of other Italian men, he chose without being, I think, completely aware, to cling to an inner Mussolini. And he delegated to this internal Mussolini the very shape of himself as a man—his conduct at home, his posture when driving, his relationship with the opposite sex, how he managed his role at work, even how he took care of us.

7.

September 25, 2022, twenty-six percent of the Italian electorate voted for a party whose identity and symbolism have been tightly connected since its founding to that of the original Fascism. Seventy years exactly after rebuilding the Partito Fascista in any form was outlawed, a fascist party now governs the country of my birth.

Almost eight million people voted for the Brothers of Italy , whose logo could be seen to represent the flame that, in a historical context, alludes to the torch burning over Benito Mussolini’s tomb. President of the Senate of the Republic, Ignazio La Russa, is the son of an official in Mussolini’s National Fascist Party. And before this, he was an exponent and secretary for two consecutive parties born from the ashes of Fascism that preceded the founding of the Brothers of Italy.

The Prime Minister of the Republic of Italy, the first woman in the history of Italy to hold this post, was born from those same ashes. She refers to Italian citizens as “Patriots.” Her Deputy Prime Minister, Matteo Salvini, has appeared at election rallies brandishing a rosary, invoking family values, and the Virgin Mary.

The millions of Italians who voted in the alliance led by the Brothers of Italy—among whose ranks Silvio Berlusconi appears—don’t fill piazzas any more. They don’t gather under the balconies in Piazza Venezia. They are less visible, dispersed in the solitude of the twenty-first century—in apartments, condominiums, under the artificial glow of the Internet. Among those millions, there are not merely two orphan sisters, but rather millions of citizens who’ve been orphaned of almost everything, and there are just as many men whose inner Mussolini still has the right to vote.

The first of January, 2021, I dreamed of a hot, small meteor that came zooming in over my right shoulder, picked up the Trump family and carried them—WHAM—into a black marble wall and installed them there, bronzed forever in a shining Roman coin. But maybe it was a small round window through which to peer at them in their tiny, circumscribed future. This struck me as funny and I woke up laughing. Happy New Year! I said aloud.

The following Tuesday, January 5, was the day of the Senate runoff election in Georgia. Congress was arriving back in D.C. A third of those congresspeople had begun a steady, disguised attack on the states’ certi- fied counts of the electoral votes, and thus on the Constitution. Proud Boys and their friends were gathering in the hotels and streets. Mike Pence was going to have to choose whether to follow the law or follow his boss—there was no way he could do both.

Meanwhile, I’d recently read Literchoor Is My Beat, Ian McNiven’s 2014 biography of James Laughlin, Ezra Pound’s longtime publisher at New Directions, and in the wake of that had picked up an old friend,

What Thou Lovest Well Remains: 100 Years of Ezra Pound, Rick Ardinger’s anthology of essays, anecdotes and poems that came out of a Pound conference in Hailey, Idaho in 1985 on the 100th anniversary of Pound’s birth. What, I wondered, would Pound have thought of Donald Trump?

The extreme events of January 2021 completed a flip in my feelings about Pound that began earlier; I want here to trace those feelings over several decades.

The Pound I wanted to quiz about Trump was not the same Pound I’d so loved and absorbed way back in my twenties. That Pound was the poet who “broke the back of the iamb,” as he put it, reminded poets everywhere to “Make it new,” re-made ancient Chinese poetry in English, led us through Provence with the troubadours, prodded us to read Dante and Villon and was so kind, helpful and generous to writers of his own time—Eliot, Joyce, Hemingway and Yeats among them. The old Pound was still very much the Pound of the always perplexing Cantos, but the Cantos of my 1972 New Directions edition that left out Cantos 72 and Pound wrote those two in Italian. They are blatantly pro-fascist and anti-Semitic.

This new Pound I’d finally confronted only three years earlier, over another New Year’s when, on a warm vacation by a condo pool, I began reading The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics and Madness of Ezra Pound, Daniel Swift’s book about Pound’s years in St. Elizabeth’s, the federal mental hospital outside Washington. This is the Pound whose name is now a touchstone for a splinter of the Italian far right, who have named for him not just their headquarters in Rome but their movement and, for a time, political party: CasaPound. Pound’s house. The movement is CasaPound Italia, or CPI. Their numbers are very small. They are very male, stylish and breathtakingly shrewd in their use of broadcast media. They have made it OK to talk casually about fascism as a real political possibility.

Look directly into your heart, and then act, Pound told us Confucius said. That seems to be what these young men have done. They’ve taken Pound’s words to heart, and acted. And from time to time, they beat up people in the streets.

So, I was wondering that Jan. 5, 2021, would Pound see Trump as a fraud who never read a book or thought a useful thought? Or would he see him as a new Mussolini? Pound loved to tell the tale of how The Cantos pleased Mussolini. “Ma quaesto,” the boss said, “è divertente.” It’s pleasant, it’s fun.

*

During World War II Pound made a series of anti-American, pro-Fascist, sometimes virulently anti-Semitic broadcasts on state radio in Fascist Italy. Federal prosecutors indicted him for treason in 1943 around the time the Germans invaded the north of the country. He ran for it, often walking alone, 450 miles from Rome to Gais, the village in the Italian Alps where his daughter Mary lived. After partisans captured him and turned him over to American forces in April 1945, the Army held him in a prison camp near Pisa for six months, the first three weeks of that time in a six-foot-by- six-foot cell in a roofed, open-air cage.

At the camp Pound wrote his Pisan Cantos, his best ones and best-known. Meanwhile, in Washington, friends provided Pound with a good lawyer.

Four psychiatrists testified at a competence hearing, and the federal court ruled him insane and thus unable to stand trial. He was held in St. Elizabeth’s, the mental hospital, for 12 years.

Swift’s book builds its story through Pound’s visitors, most of them poets, among them Charles Olson, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop and Pound’s old friend and rival, William Carlos Williams. Early on, Swift outlines two ways to read Pound. First, sympathetically, as Swift says he always had and I liked to think I had: There’s value here, I believed, threading my way through the maze.

If I keep after it and don’t keep expecting straight narrative, there will always be beautiful, stunning passages and eventually, meaning will emerge.

The opposite, second way is an attitude of what-the-fuck-is-all this, which was more or less the attitude of the Justice Department at the time of Pound’s indictment and of some of his doctors at St. Elizabeth’s.

Eventually, however, Swift finds his sympathy wearing thin. “It is hard to convey bad poetry in quotation,” he writes. “This is why Pound has tended to fare well in the hands of his critics. Anyone can find a good line or two but the grand, bad faith of the Cantos—its pomposity, its anger—is a constant, running line after line.” Out of that question, good faith or bad? comes the question—did he mean it? And really, was he sane or not?

Swift contrasts Robert Lowell’s mental illness with Pound’s. For a few years Lowell visited Pound often, and they corresponded. Lowell was bipolar; in those same years he rolled several times from lows to highs to crackups to hospitalizations to medicated releases and a more subdued life. Pound’s madness was much more ambiguous; there were no such plain opposites.

During his hospitalization and since, the suspicion circulated that he was faking it, that he was only pretending to be insane to escape the consequences of his treason. Circulating also, then and since, is the idea that “despite it all—the broadcasts, Pound’s allegiance to Fascism, his badness—here was a truly great poet,” Swift writes, “one who cannot be judged by mere human standards.” Certainly, until very recently, I was in that camp.

To sympathize with Pound, Swift continues, you have to agree that he was crazy. But if he was crazy, can all that great advice about who and how to read, how to write and what to write about, be worth anything? Conversely, if you assume that the things he says are sound, then that means he was sane—which makes Pound a cynic and a coward, who went along with the diagnosis to avoid a death sentence.

In the early 1950s, the great poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald was working on his translation of the Odyssey and corresponding with Pound about it. But by 1954 the contradictions overwhelmed him. “You are in St. Elizabeth’s because you and your lawyer chose to plead insanity rather than stand up for a trial,” Fitzgerald wrote to Pound. “If there was something you wanted to fight for aside from yourself you could have fought for it then. If your mind was sick then you belonged in St. Elizabeth’s. If it wasn’t, then you were craven not to stand trial on your indictment.”

Pound’s frequent visitors included many poets just beginning to build their careers. They also included his wife, Dorothy, who took an apartment near the hospital to see to his needs. Pound’s mistress, Olga Rudge and their daughter, Mary, stayed in Italy. His publisher, James Laughlin, also visited often—as did many fans, critics, admirers and would-be biographers.

At New Directions, Laughlin published The Pisan Cantos in 1948, and the following year the book won the Bollingen Prize, a new, $1,000 annual award funded by the Mellon family of Pittsburgh. In 1951 New Directions brought out a volume of Pound’s Confucius translations, The Great Digest and Unwobbling Pivot. In 1955 Harvard published the Confucian odes: The Great Anthology Defined by Confucius. Yet in the breeze of all this admiration and accomplishment, Pound’s fascist sympathies did not blow away. Quite the opposite: he was at the same time writing and publishing Jew-scorning articles and scraps of articles in tiny  magazines, hundreds of pieces, nearly all under pseudonyms.

Most prominent among his fringe admirers was the segregationist, white supremacist and unindicted suspect in terrorist school and synagogue bombings John Kasper. From his Make It New bookshop in Greenwich Village, Kasper published a number of Pound’s economic and anti-Semitic writings as part of the cheap-paperback Square $ Series.

But finally, thanks to the efforts of Archibald McLeish, Laughlin and others, Pound got a new lawyer, the former deputy U.S. attorney general and New Deal trustbuster Thurman Arnold, who negotiated a deal with the Justice Department. The charges were dropped. Pound returned to Italy. There’s a photo of him in Naples, on his arrival. It must have been a hot day; Pound’s white shirt is deeply sweat stained under the armpits. He beams with joy. And he’s raised his right arm in a fascist salute.

*

I doubt I ever would have read much Pound if it weren’t for Sam Hamill, founder, publisher and editor of Copper Canyon Press.

In the summer of 1975 I hitchhiked from Wyoming to Port Townsend, Washington, to the writer’s conference at the Centrum Foundation at Fort Worden, where Copper Canyon is still located. I returned to the conference the following summer. Later that summer Barb and I were married and moved to Missoula, where I entered the MFA program and she finished her bachelor’s degree. For the summer of 1977, Sam landed an NEA fellowship for us to work at the press as interns. Barb and I got to learn to make books, the old fashioned way.

Sam was always talking about Pound. Sam was a lot of things then, his frizzy hair grew in all directions, he was gruff, he was loud, pompous and deeply generous. He was an orphan and a westerner, raised in Utah; like Pound he was a strong autodidact who revered learning and scorned universities. One of Copper Canyon’s first books, his long poem Heroes of the Teton Mythos, ends with the image of a mountain man standing beside his word—sincerity—a Chinese ideogram Sam learned about from Pound.

I was a former English major with an expensive education behind me, but beyond “petals on a wet, black bough” I’d read very little Pound. “Start here,” Sam said, and handed me a copy of ABC of Reading. But wasn’t he, well, a fascist? “Just read this,” said Sam, “and see what you think.” It changed my life. The book is an anthology, with commentary.

Swift notes that Pound had been handing people reading lists since he was a teenager; this book is an extension of that impulse. It sent me reading down all the Pound roads—troubadour Provence, Cathay, Renaissance Tuscany and of course the view from Odysseus’s ship of all the Mediterranean shorelines: “Periplum,” Pound called it. Back in Missoula, there were no Pound experts in the English department, so I arranged for an independent study one trimester and read the Cantos straight through, meeting now and then with a professor who was often late for the appointment.

For biography and context I relied heavily on Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era. Thank god for that book. To chase Pound’s languages and allusions I had only some distant classroom French and Latin, plus a battered U. of Montana library copy of the Annotated Index to the Poetry of Ezra Pound, by John Edwards and William Vasse, which glossed many of the cantos but only up through number 85, the end of the Pisan Cantos. After that, you were on your own. But that was OK, right? Figure it out! Pound was an autodidact. Sam was an autodidact. Surely, I could be one too. Weirdly, it felt like an exclusive club. I was glad to be allowed in.

All I had to do was keep reading.

*

In January 1941 Pound made the first of the hundreds of radio broadcasts, first from Rome and later, after Rome fell to the Allies and the Germans invaded the North, from Bergamo. He attacked Churchill, Roosevelt and Jews; he praised Mein Kampf; he demanded bookstores be required to stock The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “I think it might be a good thing,” he said on the air in April 1943, “to hang Roosevelt and a few hundred thousand yidds IF you can do it by due legal process.” The following month he said, “Until England and America delouse, and get rid of their Jew gangs, there is no place for either England or the United States in the new world at all.” The Pound archives at Yale contain receipts for 195 payments to Pound for the broadcasts totaling around 250,000 lire, about $207,000 today.

*

“Fuck biography,” said an old friend of our daughter’s when visiting her and us in Casper last year. We’d been talking about that old, old question of whether, when you learn of a poet’s meannesses and failings it should change how you read the poem. “The art’s what’s important,” she said. “The art needs to stand on its own.” Does it? I wondered.

During the time of Pound’s long silence and depression after his return to Italy, Allen Ginsberg visited Pound and Olga Rudge in Venice. This was the fall of 1967. Conversations stretched over many lunches; Ginsberg wrote long journal notes afterward. When he tells Pound that Pound’s work provided “[p]raxis of perception, ground I could walk on,” for himself and so many other young poets, Pound replies that his own work is “a mess . . . stupidity and ignorance all the way through.”

Ginsberg brings up an exchange about prosody he’d had with Williams in 1961, “and anyway, Williams said, ‘Pound has a mystical ear’—did he ever tell you that? ‘No,’ said Pound, ‘he never said that to me,’ smiling almost shyly but pleased—eyes averted, but smiling almost curious and childlike.”

The Cantos, Ginsberg tells their maker, are a “record of mind-flux consciousness,” and their “irritations against Buddhists, Taoists and Jews— fitted into place” in that record and its drama. “The Paradise is in the desire” to set the world right, “not the imperfection of accomplishment.” But Pound quickly flips Ginsberg’s compliment on its head:

“‘The intention was bad—that’s the trouble—anything I’ve done has been an accident—any good has been spoiled by my intentions—the preoccupation with the irrelevant and stupid things.’” Pound, Ginsberg adds “looked directly into my eyes while pronouncing the word ‘intention.’”

Finally, Ginsberg—as a “Buddhist Jew,” as he puts it, asks Pound to accept his blessing. Will he accept it? “He hesitated, opening his mouth like an old turtle. ‘I do,’ he said, ‘but my worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism, all along, that spoiled everything.’”

Sometime later Pound adds “‘I found out after seventy years I was not a lunatic but a moron.’” And as for Williams, “‘Williams was in touch with human feelings . . .’ [Pound] said, nodding his head slightly in disgust with himself.”

One wonders if Ginsberg, with his peculiarly expansive, hairy kindness might have been the only interlocutor who could have elicited such frank and intimate confessions. The “suburban prejudice” remark has been quoted since by biographer after biographer as evidence of Pound’s remorse late in his life: Everyone seems to want to forgive him his madness and forgive him for his viciousness.

But when I read Ginsberg’s account again in the wake of The Bughouse, Pound’s remarks seemed not sad, pitiable, lovable and depressed; they were just accurate. His stupid intentions did ruin what was good. And, we now see better than ever, the stinking residue they left continues to matter in the world.

*

The Bughouse was published in the fall of 2017. In August of that year, well past when the book must have gone to press, white supremacists with tiki torches marched past Confederate statues in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us,” and our president said their number included many fine people. In January 2018,

I read the book by the condo pool, and my very old, very longstanding feelings about Pound began to flip.

The Guardian, in February 2018, ran a long piece headlined “The fascist movement that has brought Mussolini back to the mainstream.” The article traces the history of Italian fascism since World War II and details the origins of CasaPound. The casa of CasaPound was a long-unoccupied state-owned building in Rome, taken over by squatters in December 2003. Posters of Mussolini, Nietzsche, and Oswald Mosley, the British pre-World War II fascist, went up inside, along with odder, intentionally confusing choices: Che Guevara, George Orwell, Kerouac.

The movement included a punk band whose fans whipped each other with belts during shows, gained friends in its gritty neighborhood by serving the poor—as long as they were ethnically Italian. In 2013 and again five years later, CPI fielded a single candidate in parliamentary elections. The second time around the party won a portion of the vote six times as high as the first, but still less than one percent.

The Washington Post ran a story in May 2019, “Why Italy’s media fixates on CasaPound, an extreme-right party with a racist agenda.” Partly because its agenda is not only racist, is the answer—the group also offers “disability assistance and health counseling”—and partly because they’re just so good at “complying with the logistics of news production” and are thereby able to “ensure that fringe or extreme ideas drift into the mainstream.”

The most recent reporting in English I’ve been able to find about CasaPound is a Reuters piece from June 2020, which notes that a judge had ordered the seizure of the six-floor building and the eviction of the dozen or so families living there. The mayor of Rome declared the decision a victory, but there was no word on when or how the order would be enforced. Bureaucracy in Rome moves slowly

The leafy Pittsburgh neighborhood where I grew up looks very much the same as it did sixty years ago. But the world beyond continues to shift. Just a quarter mile away at the Tree of Life synagogue on a sabbath morning in November 2018, Robert Bowers, a Jew-hating white supremacist terrorist from Ione, Pennsylvania, murdered 11 people and wounded six more.

And on Jan. 6, 2021, a right-wing crowd of 20,000 or so laid siege to the U.S. Capitol and 800 of them invaded it, chasing a terrified Congress out of its chambers, roaming the halls and hallways with big U.S. and Confederate flags and calling for the blood of Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence. Congress to its great credit came back into session that evening and voted to accept the states’ counts of the electoral vote: Yes, Trump lost. But too many of them, including one of our two senators from Wyoming, voted the against that acceptance.

These events completed the flip in my feelings about Pound. We talk about fringe ideas, but we forget that even fringe ideas have consequences. Before learning of CasaPound, I could leave the old man’s politics in the dust and not think more about it. January 6 raised that zombie corpse up out of the dirt again in American politics, waving its bloody rags. Fascism likes to appear to be on the march when in fact it’s on the creep—and harder to see. Our job is to make sure we don’t allow Pound’s great poetry to obscure our sight.

__________________________________

This essay has been adapted from The Limberlost Review: a Literary Journal of the Mountain West. The 2022 edition is available at its website.

Several years before the United States officially entered World War II following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Black Americans were tracking the international spread of fascism closely. News relating to the Spanish Civil War, in particular, was especially captivating for them. In the pages of influential Black newspapers like the Chicago Defender and the Baltimore Afro-American, prominent Black journalists opined on the significance of the war for African Americans.

Among such writers was Langston Hughes. Already internationally renowned at age thirty-five, Hughes followed the news in July 1936, as the Spanish military organized a coup against the popularly elected left-wing Republican government. General Francisco Franco, who viewed Nazi Germany as a model for Spain and went so far as to keep a framed picture of Adolf Hitler on his desk, emerged as the leader of the Nationalist forces. He appealed for military support from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.

Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini both quickly obliged, sending airplanes, tanks, troops, and supplies that gave Franco’s army a decided military advantage over the Republican forces. Hitler and Mussolini saw Spain as a valuable ally. They were eager for their militaries to gain battlefield experience in preparation for a larger war in Europe, one that looked increasingly likely with each passing day. By August 1936, a headline in the Chicago Defender read WORLD WAR SEEN AS DUCE, HITLER AID FASCIST IN WARTON SPAIN.

For Langston Hughes, the coup was of interest not solely for what it signified for the progression of the war, the import of which was plain enough, but for the personnel it had drawn to resist it. Over thirty thousand international volunteers had come to the aid of the embattled Republican government. Three thousand of these volunteers were Americans, who, with many others, had risked their lives to serve in a civil war thousands of miles from home. And of this group, more than eighty men and women were Black.

The Americans became known collectively as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and fought side by side in racially integrated units that stood in stark contrast to the segregated U.S. military. While they were ultimately on the losing side in Spain—the Nationalists would win the war two years later—the Lincoln Brigade volunteers were clear-eyed about the threat Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini posed, and they were the first Americans to take up arms to stop the spread of fascism in Europe. Hughes wanted to tell their story.

But before he could write about the Lincoln Brigade, Hughes had to find a way to get to Spain. He had spent much of the 1930s traveling the globe after earning acclaim during the Harlem Renaissance a decade earlier. Eager for the attention his byline might draw to their paper, the Baltimore Afro-American hired him as a war correspondent. Assuming that press credentials would be a sure ticket to Spain, Hughes was disappointed to learn that the U.S. State Department did not think writers for the Afro-American merited them.

Further complicating the matter, the State Department was not issuing passports for citizens to visit a war zone, so he could not travel directly to Spain. Instead, he planned to reach the country via France, following the path of like-minded writers, including Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, John Dos Passos, and Hughes’s friend Nancy Cunard, who were flocking to cover the civil war. He boarded an ocean liner called the RMS Aquitania in New York on June 30, 1937, and sailed for Paris, a city he’d fallen in love with a decade earlier.

In the City of Light, Hughes walked the cobblestone streets of Montmartre, the “little Harlem” of Paris. Nights were filled with jazz, drinks, and gossip; days were consumed with talk of the war in Spain. Hughes gathered with writers at the Second International Writers’ Congress to debate what would happen if the military revolt in Spain was successful. Black people were intimately familiar with fascism in America, he argued, and proceeded to describe Jim Crow segregation in schools, theaters, and concert halls; dozens of horrific lynchings in the prior decade; and innocent Black defendants sentenced to jail or death by all-white juries.

Hughes was not a bombastic speaker, but rather spoke in an even, assured tone. He could sometimes appear bored while reading his older poems for audiences, but when discussing contemporary events, his understated and direct speaking style conveyed passion and urgency. “Yes, we Negroes in America do not have to be told what Fascism is in action,” he said. “We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.”

Hughes was building on a chorus of Black voices who recognized that the German Third Reich saw the American system of race law as a model and that Nazi ideology was not solely a foreign problem. “The racial policy of the Hitler movement is strikingly similar to that of the neo-Ku Klux Klanism of America,” sociologist and public intellectual Kelly Miller noted three years prior, in 1933. Two years later, a New York Amsterdam News editorial argued, “If the Swastika is an emblem of racial oppression, the Stars and Stripes are equally so.” Hughes received a rousing ovation in Paris for saying what many Black Americans were thinking at the time—that fascism was Jim Crow with a foreign accent.

After nearly a month in France, Hughes boarded a train from Paris to Barcelona with Cuban poet and journalist Nicolás Guillén. Crossing the border between France and Spain, the two men changed trains in the seaside town of Portbou. It was a quiet, sunny morning when they arrived. Children were swimming in the shimmering blue water of the Mediterranean. The view was idyllic.

As Hughes looked around, however, the idyll was disturbed. The walls of the small customhouse were pocked by machine-gun bullets. Nearby, several houses lay in ruin, destroyed by aerial bombs. Signs reading REFUGIO pointed to mountain caves where people hid during the frequent air raids.

Leaving Portbou, they arrived in Barcelona in darkness, just before midnight. The train cars, station, and city were blacked out so fascist planes would not have easy targets. Hughes and Guillén followed the crowd as they departed the station, inching slowly in the dark toward the single lantern flickering at the end of the long platform. Guillén traveled light and helped Hughes carry his bags, books, records, and typewriter. They boarded a bus, and as the bus drove through pitch-black streets from the train station to the hotel, Hughes wondered what he had gotten himself into.

He’d barely managed to unpack and settle in for his first night in Barcelona when the realities of war were thrust upon him. In the middle of the night, he heard the low wail of an air-raid siren warning that fascist planes—German-made Junkers and Heinkels, as well as Italian-produced Savoia-Marchettis and Capronis—were approaching from Majorca across the Balearic Sea. Several loud explosions shook the walls of the hotel, and the lights went out. He jumped out of his bed, flung open the door to his room, and stumbled down a dark, crowded hallway.

He descended the staircase to the lobby, where the flame of a candle provided the only light and cast shadows on the walls. The other hotel guests were in various stages of undress. Children cried while adults spoke frantically in Spanish, English, and French. His hands trembling, Hughes struggled to put his trousers on over his pajamas and light a cigarette. Outside, ambulance sirens wailed, and antiaircraft guns fired in loud, percussive bursts, driving the enemy planes away. Hughes did not sleep that night.

Two weeks later, venturing west to Madrid, Hughes arrived to find the city on edge, besieged by fascist batteries shelling nearly every day. “The crack of rifle fire, the staccato run of the machine guns, and the boom of trench mortars and hand grenades can be heard so clearly that one finally realizes the war is only a few blocks away,” Hughes wrote.

Despite being close to the front lines in Madrid, Hughes’s accommodations were palatial. He was welcomed by the Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas (Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals), a group that formed out of the International Writers’ Congress. Led by Spanish poets Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León, the group occupied a house with dozens of rooms formerly owned by a marquis whose family had earned a fortune from the slave trade.

The home was well appointed with antique furniture and medieval tapestries. Paintings by Francisco Goya and El Greco adorned the walls. Sometimes the writers and artists raided the closets for matador jackets and flamenco dresses. Hughes’s jazz records provided the soundtrack for what became impromptu costume balls.

The meals were far less lavish. With no trains running into Madrid, all supplies came in on a single road, and food for the city’s one million people was strictly rationed. Hughes and the other guests subsisted on two meals a day. Breakfast was a scant roll and coffee made from burnt grain. The cook worked what magic she could to make dinner appetizing, with meager rations of beans, onions, olive oil, and bread.

On the rare occasions when there was fish or meat, each guest would get a thin slice in their soup. Between air raids, Hughes searched Madrid for bars serving tidbits with drinks. Hunger pains never abated, and Hughes lost fifteen pounds during the six months he was in Spain.

Hughes navigated between the different war zones in Spain based on reports from soldiers on leave from the front and leads from other journalists, such as Chicago Daily News correspondent Leland Stowe. One tip led him to the outskirts of Madrid, a couple of miles from the front, where Hughes finally caught up with the Abra-ham Lincoln Brigade. Their camp, hidden under trees, was barely visible from the road. Several hundred men were briefly at rest, but there was a rumble in the air.

Near a camouflaged tent painted zigzag green and brown, Hughes met Thaddeus Battle, a twenty-one-year-old who had paused his premed and political science studies at Howard University to volunteer. Battle was bespectacled and mild mannered, and his helmet and brown fatigue jacket fit awkwardly on his slight frame.

As the two men smoked cigarettes in a tent on a chilly fall afternoon, they reminisced about how much they missed the street-corner diners in D.C. and Harlem with their steaks, hamburgers, and ice cream. Battle said he was not eager for war but felt that he had to leave school for Spain. “When we see certain things happening in Europe and Asia that may involve America in another world war, then . . . we see clearly the need for combatting such tendencies at home and abroad,” he told Hughes. Battle’s family had raised him to view books as precious and he was particularly outraged to witness Franco’s fascist troops destroying schools and libraries.

As the afternoon faded, Hughes followed Battle to the cook tent for dinner. Among the Irish, English, and white American soldiers waiting for rabbit stew, Battle introduced Hughes to another Black volunteer, Bernard “Bunny” Rucker, the twenty-five-year-old son of a Christian minister. Rucker was good with his hands and worked on road construction projects during the Great Depression.

Like Battle, Rucker now served as a truck driver in the Lincoln Brigade, transporting men and supplies to the front lines. It was dangerous work. Drivers often faced machine-gun fire and were sometimes strafed by German Condor Legion planes, Rucker explained. During the bloody Battle of Brunete in July, where Lincoln volunteers suffered more than three hundred casualties, Rucker was caught in heavy bombardment and a plane crashed into flames near his truck. This same man, who only a year prior had been living an ordinary life in Columbus, Ohio, was now having close brushes with death in a war zone. Hughes took notes.

With the temperature falling into the thirties, Hughes was shivering in a lightweight jacket, cursing the thoughtlessness with which he’d packed. When Rucker offered Hughes his wool overcoat, the poet was reluctant to take it, feeling the acute shame of being so underprepared, but the young truck driver insisted, saying that he could get another coat back at camp. And so Hughes wore the jacket during his winter in Spain and for years afterward.

Once the men finished dinner, Rucker borrowed one of the brigade trucks to give Hughes a ride back to his makeshift hotel in Madrid. Hughes was up late that night working on an article for the Baltimore Afro-American when he felt an artillery bombardment that was even more unsettling than the air raid he experienced in Barcelona. A shell whistled by his window and struck a building at the end of the block. Hughes’s room shook so violently that his typewriter fell off his desk. “Sounded like the devil’s 4th of July!” he wrote to a friend.

Days after Hughes met Battle and Rucker, the Afro-American started publishing his stories from Spain. “The Spanish situation is but a prophecy of what all Europe is approaching,” the newspaper read, “and from this angle colored men and women here in America and throughout the world will be interested.” Hughes’s wartime articles did not disappoint. Each dispatch warned that a life-and-death struggle against fascism was under way in Spain and that Black Americans were among the first to try to stop Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler.

__________________________________

From Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad, by Matthew F. Delmont, published by Viking, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Matthew F. Delmont.

In last weekend’s national elections Italians overwhelmingly chose to make Giorgia Meloni the country’s first far-right leader “since the Second World War.” That’s the way most foreign commentators put it and I wonder why they don’t just say it straight: “since Benito Mussolini,” or—better—“since Mussolini’s Fascist government, which banned opposition and murdered its own citizens.”

It has been coming for some time, this “resurgence,” another word we use when we talk about the far-right. Many would argue it has been coming since the very day Mussolini was shot dead by Partigiani resistants and strung up for all to see in Piazzale Loreto in the center of Milan: for some, the slaughtered leader, hanging upside down with his clothes torn and bloody, was a symbol of freedom and justice at last; for others, of martyrdom and a brave vision abruptly curtailed. Or deferred.

In Italy, there was no great post-war reckoning with Fascism, of the sort seen in Germany with Nazism; no significant trials or cultural initiatives designed to confront the people with what had been done in their name. In Germany, a coordinated effort mounted by the Allies soon after the fall of the Reich produced documentaries and broadcasts to determinedly shape the collective memory when it was at its most fragile.

At the blunter end, national newspapers carried photographs of the concentration camps with the message “YOU ARE GUILTY OF THIS!” In Italy, however, after a spate of killings and amnesties, attempts to rid the country of fascism ran out of steam: the scale of collaboration was simply too large to begin to unpick from the social fabric. Public opinion turned against the purges. Things quietened down; it was easier for people to go back to work and get on with their lives. Things were forgotten or misremembered. Challenging questions were left unanswered, or were never asked at all.

In the war’s aftermath, a constitutional ban on reforming the National Fascist Party (and the Republican Fascist Party, which Mussolini himself had created in the desperate final days of the war) only led members to launch a succession of populist alternatives. The Italian Social Movement gave way to Tricolour Flame and National Alliance, which in turn gave way, in 2012, to Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. New name, same condition, same promised panaceas. To set themselves apart leaders have used words like “neo-fascist” and, Meloni’s favorite, “post-fascist,” but any doubt about continuity of vision should be dispelled by the virulence of these parties’ conservative, xenophobic, racist policies, and by the image of the tricolour flame, which burns in the emblem of each. Burns fiercely; burns like a fever.

After the spectacle of Piazzale Loreto in 1945, people moved on; the collective memory fragmented and so faded easily. Disease became confused with cure. Could it have been any other way? Fascism, fires, fevers: these things are more persistent than we tend to allow. More persistent than memory even, which distorts down the years, becoming discolored and fainter with every new generation.

So that an elderly person, alive when Mussolini was at the height of his powers, can now turn to someone, as casual as anything, and say “Oh, but he did good things too, you know? He cleared the swamps! He gave us jobs! The trains always ran on time!;” and the other person—young, perhaps on the eve of casting their first vote—can answer “Yes, I know he did. I’ve seen it online.” An ember can reignite, a new viral strain or infection can take hold, a fresh buzzword or slogan can capture the people’s imagination. And it may feel like the lucidity of morning, but in fact the cool restorative night never came in the first place.

–September 2022

*

We are plague people, prone to fevers, false lucidity and amnesia. A history of rampant recurrent disease appears to have imprinted the Italian consciousness and conditioned the population to think always in terms of threat, contagion, eradication and return. And barriers. Natural ones: a mountain range, seventh-century plague doctors thought, would protect Florence from the worst of it; islands were a gift; soil, if the pit was deep enough, would protect the living from the mass of infected dead. And man-made ones: walls; doors; policed borders.

And lazaretti, quarantine centers built of stone and mortar—geometry set against chaos—or ships at anchor, a safe distance from the shore; strange temporary homes for people deemed dangerous. It took a new pandemic to remind the world that the Italians—or, rather, the Venetians—gave us the word “quarantine,” from quarantena, denoting a forty-day isolation period considered, for reasons steeped in Christian belief, to be sufficient for the purification of the body.

Through history, prayers, penitence and trinkets of devotion have been the first line of defense. During the plagues that ravaged the peninsula from the mid-1300s to the final major outbreak, the Great Plague of Milan, which lasted three years from 1629, the churches organized frequent processions that wound through crowded towns and cities, doing the disease’s job for it. Early on, the Black Death saw a resurgence in flagellantism, whereby sins were atoned for through public acts of self-inflicted pain.

Cities regularly saw their populations halved. The fever struck, followed by aches that began in the head and reached the entire body. Then came chills, rashes, the relief of death. In the late 1470s, the Republic of Venice lost some 300,000 people. If the private prayers of the survivors had been spoken aloud, the cumulative sound would have been deafening. But still bodies piled up in the streets, every death the will of God. (And yet—people said—someone must have brought it in?)

Grocers, apothecarists and resourceful cooks, marrying faith and ancient learning, tried to alleviate the physical symptoms of a disease otherwise out of human control. Pomanders, pungent fumigants, pills, tinctures and syrups proliferated. Theriacs, advocated by Galen and revered as cures for snake bites and other poisons, were considered the most powerful, with lists of ingredients often running into the hundreds. Each item was weighed and blended carefully: rose water, sage, ground snake flesh, rapeseed, balsam, saffron, black pepper, cinnamon, parsley. Easy solutions for difficult conditions. Some recipes recommended soaking the mixture in wine for a time, before finally incorporating honey, which would allow the paste to stick to the patient like a second skin. It was most effective, physicians advised, when concentrated on the chest, close to the heart.

Before long, the pastes were being imported into Britain. They were known as Venice Treacle. But strict regulation of foreign goods fueled domestic production, too. An advertisement placed in a London newspaper in 1670, touted a “Famous and Effectual MEDICINE TO CURE THE PLAGUE”: a powder was to be mixed with liquid for the patient “to drink freely in their sweat,” a posset “with Sage, or Sorrel, and Dandilion.”

*

In early March 2020, my parents were on a cruise off the coast of Brazil and following news from home closely. The whole of Lombardy was in “lockdown” as were provinces in the Veneto and other northern regions. The world was watching Italy struggle and fail to contain the virus. And soon my parents started to notice that people onboard, with whom they had previously been friendly, were now politely, persistently avoiding them. If they struck up a conversation with anyone new, the moment they mentioned that they had come from Italy the atmosphere changed. Excuses were made and my parents found themselves alone. After a while, they started to tell people they were from England, and that helped, for a time.

When just a handful of infections had been confirmed in Italy, the attacks on people of east Asian descent began. Newspapers reported a case in Bologna, where a Chinese-Italian teenager was beaten up by a group of four men. “What are you doing in Italy?” they shouted, “You’re bringing us diseases? Get lost, you and your virus.” The scene was witnessed by a man, sitting on a nearby bench, who stepped in to help the boy. A report on Bologna Today says he was a Moroccan, and this reminds me that until recently “marocchino” was a catch-all term for any dark-skinned immigrant, a label akin to vu cumprà, whose mock pidgin Italian—”you buy?”—conjured desperate and untrustworthy street hawkers, pests.

There were other attacks. Chinese businesses were boycotted. The Chinese embassy expressed serious concern. A national poster campaign was deemed necessary: “The virus is the enemy, not the Chinese people.” In Naples, La Repubblica reported, a bus driver departing from Piazza Garibaldi saw a man with a suitcase—“un uomo orientale,” an “oriental” man—waiting to board and accelerated away from the bus stop. A passenger is quoted as saying, “He did the right thing, we don’t want the virus here.” Calls for a ban on all travel from China were soon followed by calls for a ban on all boats coming from Africa, where no cases of the virus had been reported. As one virus spread around the world, it awoke this old one, too.

Perhaps this is muscle memory. We have always grafted diseases onto select groups of people. During the fourteenth century, the Italians were gripped by the idea that certain people might be intentionally spreading plague. They accused local Jewish communities, which had, they reasoned, always wanted to eradicate Christianity. Men, women and children were burnt alive. In the fifteenth century, syphilis, meanwhile, was, for the Germans, the “French Disease”; for the French, it was carried by Neapolitans (who said it was French). In Turkey, it was the “Christian disease.”

In the nineteenth century, British colonists considered cholera to be inherently Indian, a product of an uncivilized way of life. Around the same time, the Americans were blaming it on the Irish and the Italians—destitute, filthy migrants who clambered off ships into crowded harbors looking for work. Their clothes were said to be saturated with sickness. In 1916, Italian immigrants were accused of causing an outbreak of polio in New York and on much of the East Coast, and two years later, along with Jews, they were shunned as bringers of influenza. We have forgotten what it is to be blamed, to be the scapegoat of a society’s ills.

“When I was a girl it was malaria everyone was scared of,” Nonna told me one day, when I had called to update her on my parents’ predicament.

“It was very common,” she said, “and very dangerous. You would get a fever and twenty-four hours later you were dead.”

I asked if it was malaria that took the first baby Manlio or the twins, but she didn’t know. “It’s possible. You prayed it wouldn’t happen but there were cases. The marshes were not far from here.”

Malaria, a sickness in the blood, is ancient but with us still—a historical constant, like the famous mosquito preserved in amber. Though it was eradicated across Europe decades ago, it is rife in Africa. Medicine has not yet found a solution; vaccines work, for a time, and then they don’t.

This shapeshifter has gone by many names: camp fever, ague, intermittent-, swamp- or marsh-fever. Until the turn of the twentieth century, when the female Anopheles mosquito was identified as the cause of infection, the marsh air itself—heavy with the smell of stagnant water and rotting vegetation—was assumed to be poisonous. Mala aria, bad air. Paludismo, swampism, or, I suppose, swampitis.

The beggars and brigands who hid out in these inhospitable water-lands, whose hair and rags were thought to be impregnated with the “seeds” of contagion, were viewed with fear and revulsion. Like Caliban, they could summon “all the infections that the sun sucks up from bogs, fens, flats.” Their touch was the kiss of death.

Since Roman times, the plan had been to drain the swamps, to render them inhabitable and agriculturally useful. But successes were few and short-lived. Some say the fall of the Roman Empire can be linked to a particularly bad outbreak of malaria, or “Roman Fever,” as it was then known. (I write this a few months after the Italian government collapsed in disagreement over how to handle our own pandemic; the country is now on its sixty-ninth government since the end of the Second World War.)

The Sisyphean struggle against the waters continued for centuries, but the Fascist era into which Nonna was born brought an intensification. The aftermath of the First World War had seen a steep rise in cases of malaria, especially in the Veneto and the Friuli, where fighting had made it impossible to carry out routine maintenance of dredged lands. Quinine tablets were widely distributed, at great cost to the administration.

In 1923, a year into his reign, Mussolini put his characteristic spin on an edict from the late 1800s and declared war on the putrid waters. I wonder if he didn’t feel a particular outrage because malaria was a disease that contaminated good Italian blood.

The bonifica delle paludi—the reclamation of the swamps—was the propogandists’ dream come true. It was, they said, Italy’s panacea: once these wastelands were rendered fertile and buildable, people would no longer need to emigrate in search of a better life. Because, in a sense, the loss of thousands of fine, strong Italians had, for at least half a century, been the nation’s most debilitating illness. Not only was the constant population drain a source of embarrassment for the government—not to mention concern: Italians abroad were Italians out of control—but all too often the migrants themselves suffered great indignities. So, a promise was made: Italy’s total livable, farmable land would be increased by a third.

Returning to land south of Rome, partly drained by Augustus centuries earlier, a workforce of former soldiers put in place a system of levees and pumps, and, in 1932, on the soil that emerged, Mussolini’s architects built Littoria, whose pale stone architecture, simple but ostentatious, with a tall clocktower at its heart, shone like a beacon of cleanliness and renewal.

A few years later, Pontinia was erected nearby, and people, primarily from the Veneto and the Friuli, flocked to the area to make their homes afresh. Strange that this proud Christian nation should forget so readily God’s admonishment against building on soft ground.

“That was a good thing he did, you know?” Nonna said. “People don’t like to admit it, but it’s true.”

I say nothing when Nonna says such things. He was let down by those around him. He lost control of the generals. He was misled, people forget. These lines, residua of her formal education, I think, don’t seem to fit with the other things I know about her, so mostly, I let them wash over me and try to forget. I can’t bring myself to engage because, I confess, I’m frightened of what else might come out.

Sometimes I think of zio Gioacchino and imagine him showing Dirce and Leo around his garden in Sheffield, not long after the end of the war, once everything that happened had happened, with heaps of bodies across Europe to prove it. And those photographs of Mussolini and the others bloated and hanging upside down from the roof of the petrol station in piazzale Loreto. Was there talk of good things then, or is it the passage of time that has allowed such expressions to emerge, like gaudy winter blooms?

Ma Mussolini ha fatto anche cose buone, “But Mussolini also did good things”: a common phrase in Italy, increasingly so as distrust in democracy grows and social media creates fertile ground for historical revisionism. Spend enough time in the country and you will hear the words spoken, sometimes by the person you least expect. A good, kind person. Imagine it being slipped into conversation casually, muttered wistfully, like the refrain of a half-remembered hymn. Think of it bobbing up to the surface like a cork in water, or a body—it startles you that way—and consider the heft of that opening “but,” and all that lies bound and weighted below.

There’s a book with precisely that phrase as its title, in which Francesco Filippi, a historian of mentality, unpicks the most (let’s say) misremembered claims made in favor of the Fascist regime. I bought a copy a couple of summers ago, while I was staying at Nonna’s, in the old bookshop in Maniago’s main piazza. Its black spine punctuated a row of pastel-colored romance novels near the shop’s till, where someone must have discarded it at the last minute, and the familiarity of its title—as intended—struck me. I took it home, half thinking it would be good to have some quick statistics to hand should Nonna and I end up having that conversation. The other half of me knows we never will.

I carried the book around the house with me, meaning—I think—to read it between meals, chats and games of briscola. I left it lying about—a lazy, inchoate provocation, perhaps. And as usual, I scribbled notes in the margins and underlined more of the text than not, especially sentences that state the blatantly obvious, as if in preparation for an exam. For example:

The foundation of a possible totalitarian future also relies on the rehabilitation of the totalitarian past. To show the reality of that past is a first step in preventing that past from becoming future.

And:

In the following pages you will drown in ‘facts’, reconstructed with unassailable and almost maniacal precision, even if it must be said that yes, of course, fascism also did ‘good things’ … It would be science fiction if, in twenty years, it hadn’t, right? Even a broken clock, wise men say, tells the right time twice a day.

Double-underlining denotes loud agreement or, I suppose, relish. I mark-up books like other people write diaries: performatively, with future readers in mind.

The bonifica delle paludi, I read, was not a success. Of the millions of hectares promised, only a fraction was delivered. There was not enough viable land for everyone, and what there was tended to be physically and economically exhausting to maintain. During the Second World War, channels were neglected again. Some, especially in the north, were a gift to retreating Weimar soldiers, who flooded them on purpose, surrounding the partigiani with filthy, malaria-infested waters. Much of the work of reclaiming the land then fell to future administrations or was abandoned altogether.

Pontinia and Littoria, renamed Latina after the war, are still standing, though. Hundreds of thousands of people live there now, among an extraordinary number of non-indigenous eucalyptus trees, planted to absorb the soil’s excessive moisture. One of Italy’s tallest skyscrapers, the Torre Pontina, was erected in Latina in 2007. Residents go about their daily lives, travel to and from work, pick up the children, drop them at their grandparents’, and forget how this place came to be built.

They forget that where they stand was once water; they forget about the deadly swamps. But the soil remembers and the stones of some of the buildings, too. Metal surfaces are acutely susceptible to red rashes. The canals and dikes require constant attention. And in the centre of the town, the pale clocktower ticks, marking time until the waters return, and their war ends, properly this time.

Il Duce did not eradicate malaria, either. (I dog-ear this page at the top and bottom and run a thick wavy pencil-line the length of the text.) It took the Marshall Plan and vast quantities of American DDT before the World Health Organization could declare the country free of the Anopheles mosquito and, so, of the disease, in 1970. The ecosystem was devastated for decades.

The spectre of malaria won’t be dispelled so easily, though. I read about a case a few years ago, when a four-year-old girl died in a hospital in Lombardy. Some worried that the death signaled the return of an old problem. The girl had not been abroad, only to the Venetian coast for a brief holiday. The infection’s provenance was a mystery. Some Italians thought they knew how this had happened: African migrants, coming off boats, had brought malaria with them and passed it on to the child.

The day after the death, the conservative daily Il Tempo ran the frontpage headline: Ecco la malaria degli immigrati. “Here is the malaria of immigrants.” In fact, while it’s true that two children from Burkina Faso were being treated for malaria on the same ward, it was human error—the re-use of an infected needle—that was responsible for transmission. But that’s a detail, a different story even, and not everyone is interested in hearing it.

Header image via Il Laboratorio di Malariologia.

_________________________________

‘

Excerpt adapted from Dandelions by Thea Lenarduzzi. Available now in the UK and on May 2, 2023 in the US via Fitzcarraldo Editions. 

“And there they stand, affectless, like twenty-four calculating machines at the gates of Hell.”
–Éric Vuillard, The Order of the Day
*

The invitations, sent by telegram four days earlier, left no doubt. The capital was calling. On Monday, February 20, 1933, at 6 pm, about two dozen of Nazi Germany’s wealthiest and most influential businessmen arrived, on foot or by chauffeured car, to attend a meeting at the official residence of the Reichstag president, Hermann Göring, in the heart of Berlin’s government and business district.

The attendees included Günther Quandt, a textile producer turned arms-and-battery tycoon; Friedrich Flick, a steel magnate; Baron August von Finck, a Bavarian finance mogul; Kurt Schmitt, CEO of the insurance behemoth Allianz; executives from the chemicals conglomerate IG Farben and the potash giant Wintershall; and Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, chairman-through-marriage of the Krupp steel empire.

Three weeks earlier, Adolf Hitler had seized power in Germany after concluding a backroom deal that led the Reich president, Paul von Hindenburg, to appoint Hitler as chancellor. Now the leader of the Nazi Party wanted to “explain his policies” to the group of industrialists, financiers, executives, and heirs, or at least that’s what he’d led them to believe. The businessmen were hoping for reassurance concerning the direction of Germany’s economy under this new government. They would not get it. Hitler had his own plans for the meeting, and the country.

The businessmen arrived on time at Göring’s palatial sand-red residence on the south bank of Berlin’s Spree River, next door to the Reichstag. But they were kept waiting — not something that the impatient tycoons were particularly used to or fond of. Göring, their host, didn’t greet them until fifteen minutes after the scheduled start time. In tow was Walther Funk, the dumpy and balding chief press officer for Hitler’s government.

The new chancellor arrived even later, accompanied by Otto Wagener, his main economic adviser. The master of ceremonies was Hjalmar Schacht, formerly president of the Reichsbank. (As it turned out, Funk, Schacht, Göring, and Schmitt, four of Hitler’s future ministers of economic affairs, were all present.) The meeting was the culmination of years of careful groundwork laid by Hitler’s officials—years of cultivating relationships with the tycoons to build up enthusiasm for the Nazi cause.

After shaking hands with the businessmen, Hitler launched into a rambling ninety-minute speech, delivered without notes or pauses. But instead of the policy talk that had been promised, Hitler gave a sweeping diagnosis of the current political moment. The year 1918 had been a catastrophic turning point in German history, with the defeat of the German Empire in World War I and the revolution in Russia, during which the Communists came to power. In Hitler’s eyes, the time had come to settle the struggle between the right and the left once and for all.

Hitler didn’t speak about abolishing labor unions, rearmament, war, or the removal of Jews from German life. But he did provide a glimpse of what was to come: “We must first gain complete power if we want to crush the other side completely.” Hitler argued that, in supporting his rise as führer, the moguls would in effect be supporting themselves, their firms, and their fortunes. “Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy,” the forty-three-year-old chancellor said. “It is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality. Everything positive, good and valuable, which has been achieved in the world in the field of economics and culture, is solely attributable to the importance of personality.”

Near the end of his speech, Hitler laid out how that would happen. In only two weeks, on March 5, the people of Germany would determine the country’s future by casting their votes in the national election—“the last election,” according to Hitler. One way or another, democracy would fall.

Germany’s new chancellor intended to dissolve it entirely and replace it with a dictatorship. “Regardless of the outcome,” he warned, “there would be no retreat. There are only two possibilities, either to crowd back the opponent on constitutional grounds or a struggle will be conducted with other weapons, which may demand greater sacrifices.” If the election didn’t bring Hitler’s party into control, a civil war between the right and the left would certainly erupt, he intimated. Hitler waxed poetic: “I hope the German people recognize the greatness of the hour. It shall decide the next ten or probably even hundred years.”

The arms and steel tycoon Gustav Krupp, as chairman of the Reich Association of German Industry, was first among equals in the group of businessmen and its designated spokesperson. The sixty-two-year-old industrialist had prepared an extensive memo on economic policy for this meeting, his first encounter with Hitler. But given that the new chancellor had just called for the dissolution of German democracy, Krupp thought it best not to initiate a dialogue on the boring details of policy.

Instead, he meekly thanked the chancellor on behalf of the gathered men “for having given us such a clear picture of the conception” of his ideas. Krupp wrapped up with anodyne general remarks about the need for a swift remedy to Germany’s political troubles and for a strong state, which would help the “economy and business develop and flourish.”

After listening to Krupp’s remarks, the Austrian-born chancellor didn’t take any questions from his audience, nor did he reveal the true purpose of the meeting. He left that to the host, Göring. Hitler departed.

Göring opened the topic with a welcome promise of stability. He assured the giants of industry and finance “that with political pacification, [the] domestic economy would also quiet down.” No economic “experiments’’ would be conducted, he said. But to guarantee a favorable climate for business, Hitler’s new coalition had to emerge victorious in the coming election. The Reichstag president got to the main point: the Nazi Party needed money for the election campaign. Because taxpayers’ money and state funds couldn’t be used for political ends, “other circles not taking part in this political battle should at least make the financial sacrifices so necessary at this time.”

Göring’s conclusion echoed Hitler’s: it was more than reasonable to request “financial sacrifices” of these industry titans, given that “the election of March 5th would surely be the last one for the next ten years, probably even for the next hundred years.” After these remarks, Göring exited the room, leaving his guests stunned, with much to ponder.

Then the mustachioed economist Hjalmar Schacht took the floor. Unlike the previous two speakers, Schacht got right down to business and suggested raising an election campaign fund of three million reichsmarks (about $20 million in today’s money) for the benefit of the Nazi Party and its nationalist coalition partner, the German National People’s Party, which it still needed, in order to rule the country. But not for much longer.

Right on the spot they allocated the sums. One million reichsmarks were to be paid by the black coal and iron industries from the Ruhr area, and 500,000 reichsmarks each by the potash mining and chemicals industries. The remaining million would be drawn from the brown coal industry, car-makers, and mechanical and electrical engineering firms. The men agreed that 75 percent of the money would go to the Nazi Party. The remaining quarter would proceed to its coalition partner. In conclusion, Schacht uttered the shortest and most expensive line of the evening: “And now, gentlemen, to the cash register!”

Hitler’s invitation to a discussion of economic policy had been, in truth, little more than a pretext for requesting millions to build up an election campaign slush fund. Hitler and Göring had conveniently left out an important detail: the dire financial state of the Nazi Party. It was more than twelve million reichsmarks in debt, and the little cash on hand was far from enough to stage a national election campaign. But this issue would be quickly resolved.

In the days and weeks following the meeting, many of its attendees, through their companies and industry associations, wired large amounts to a trust account that Schacht had opened at a private bank, Delbrück Schickler, in Berlin. The tycoons clearly had no qualms about funding the demise of their democracy. The largest donations to the Nazis came from IG Farben (400,000 reichsmarks), the mining industry association (400,000 reichsmarks), and Deutsche Bank (200,000 reichsmarks).

The day after the meeting, February 21, 1933, thirty-five-year-old Joseph Goebbels, who led the Nazi propaganda machine from Berlin as the capital’s Gauleiter (regional leader), wrote in his diary: “Göring brings the joyful news that 3 million is available for the election. Great thing! I immediately alert the whole propaganda department. And one hour later, the machines rattle. Now we will turn on an election campaign Today the work is fun. The money is there.” Goebbels had started this very diary entry the day before, describing the depressed mood at his Berlin headquarters because of the lack of funds. What a difference twenty-four hours could make.

_________________________________________________________

From NAZI BILLIONAIRES by David de Jong. Copyright © 2022 by David de Jong. Reprinted by permission of Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

When Elizabeth Bowen visited Rome in 1934, she had an audience with the Pope. “And,” as she wrote to Virginia Woolf, “I was given a seat in the Facist [sic] stadium to watch, a few feet away, Mussolini on a white horse reviewing police-dogs, bands, tanks—that was awful.” But every aspect of the regime was not so repulsive. Bowen was fascinated by the architectural recovery projects that Mussolini imagined would create a link between a contemporary civic identity and an historical past. In her letter to Woolf, Bowen described what she saw happening around her: “They have opened and flattened-out and dug up a great deal of Rome since I was last there, ten years ago.” The results impressed her:

I like ruins to look as large as possible and the Colosseum looks more volcanic without grass [….] I wish the Renaissance had not been such robbers, chipping and stripping [marble] off everywhere for somewhere else. It seems hard on Roman Rome to have to look picturesque.

Mussolini’s projects were having their desired effect, making ancient Rome feel more immediate, relevant, and appealing:

Before when I was in Rome I was so ignorant that I took a distaste for the Romans as rather bleak people who preferred to live in big nubbly buildings of brown brick. It has certainly taken me a long time to learn anything at all.

Unsurprisingly, Bowen didn’t write about any of this in her travelogue A Time in Rome (1960). Like so many other Irish, British, and U.S. writers who were in Italy in the early years of the regime, she was retrospectively covert, eager to disguise her proximity to the toxic politics of the 1930s. Famously unrepentant, of course, was Ezra Pound, who gathered a surprising array of writers around him in the small town of Rapallo, near Genoa on the Ligurian Sea. W. B. Yeats, Richard Aldington, Thomas MacGreevy, Basil Bunting, and Louis Zukofsky were all in Rapallo, some for short visits and others staying for months on end. They engaged to varying degrees with the cultural politics of the regime and with one another, all orbiting around Ezra Pound who manufactured disagreements as often as he forged friendships.

The legacy of Rapallo in the work and lives of these men is discreet but discernible. It’s far more difficult to trace the importance of Rapallo for the women who were there—George Yeats with W. B., Brigit Patmore with Richard Aldington, Marion Bunting with Basil, Dorothy Pound (sometimes) with Ezra.

Woolf’s 1938 treatise Three Guineas proposes that the Totalitarian Man, “called in German and Italian Führer or Duce; in our own language, Tyrant or Dictator” is the product of the inequality of the sexes and the dissociation of the ethics of literature from the ethics of other spheres of life. Woolf argues to the contrary, “the public and private worlds are inseparably connected”; if men “forget the private figure, or if we [women] in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world,” then “such will be our ruin.”

But if the public and private are regarded as “one world, one life,” and men and women work in partnership, the “evil” can be defeated. She reasons that this can only be achieved with a respect for women’s difference: “we can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.”

The different ways that Brigit Patmore, Dorothy Pound, Marion Bunting, and George Yeats spent and accounted for their time in Rapallo demonstrates Woolf’s argument about the inseparability of private and public spheres. Dorothy Pound’s sympathies for the fascist regime were not explicitly addressed in her art but are encoded in the aesthetics of her architectural drawings and watercolors. Long before the publication of her only book Etruscan Gate (1971), which is a tribute to Ezra, she actively established her reputation as subservient wife rather than take credit for her work as an independent artist or even as Ezra’s collaborator.

In 1955, when the Pound scholar Douglas Hammond asked Dorothy if she would meet him, she replied that “Americans” were ‘‘rather stupid” when it came to understanding Italy, the war, and Mr Pound’s activities. She said that her one purpose right now is to keep “Ezra happy and reasonably well” so that he may complete the cantos on which he is presently working.

Brigit Patmore’s disapproval of Dorothy’s wifely devotion slips through in her memory of dancing with Ezra, whom Patmore describes as moving “with extremely odd steps [….] [It was] easier to waltz with a robot.” But Dorothy, “sweet, faithful Dorothy said innocently: ‘Ezra has a wonderful sense of rhythm.’ Yes indeed.” Even in Patmore’s private, unpublished journals, she seems reluctant to give her outright opinion of Ezra and Rapallo. In an undated notebook, she reflects on how her gender affected her capacity to write:

I resist my own desire to expression in every way; I do useless things—clean a couch, tidy a drawer, think out letters and messages even darn stockings, a loathsome depressing job rather than bring out my thoughts imaginations & life-reactions. Is it a childish distrust & suspicion, & dislike, fear of ridicule or is it female secretiveness—the life inside sufficient—also because I have always been reduced to silence through living with people who were not interested in my interests?

Pamore’s relationship with Aldington was symptomatic of what she perceived as a lack of respect and support. His constant need for her approval of his work meant that she was always reading his writing, leaving no time to focus on her own. When their liaison ended, Patmore re-entered life as a writer and began to process, in a very public forum, what she had experienced in Italy.

In 1930, Patmore wrote an essay for the British women’s weekly, The Sphere, which offered political commentary that was often thinly veiled by “feminine” concerns. Patmore’s article takes the guise of a piece on European travel, but it also speaks to her complicated private life with Aldington, her impressions of the poets of Rapallo, and her ideas about the fascist regime, a subtext indicated by her provocative title “A traveller’s lament on things one is never told.” She describes Italy as:

one of these plaguey spots on the map for me; first, because to be British and not know Italy is not to know your own father, and yet never to hear the end of that paragon of parents; and secondly, because everybody’s been there. This last reason is a nasty, envious one, but it’s difficult to be a prisoner against your will and noble all the time.

Privately, Patmore confessed that only two people “could influence [Ezra] intellectually, & they, Ford Hueffer & Wyndham Lewis, were not in Italy.” While “Yeats was someone he honoured & I think, loved,” Pound “looked for no guidance from him: indeed I doubt if he would accept direction from anyone, his confidence & courage & self-will were enough.”

In Patmore’s account in The Sphere, she makes it clear that she is not sympathetic with the Italian fascist regime or its aesthetics:

I was confused by the innumerable Roman remains. Remains is a dreary word—suggests crumbs from a feast, left-overs—it rhymes with drains. Unattractive. And broken columns, forums, Roman roads (always going straight where they wanted, drat them!), Julius Caesar (a feeling that there’s some uncollected tax owing to him still!), busts of men awfully like the nicest elderly men I knew, but without their stiff collars.

For Patmore, Roman ruins did not signify a latent, spiritual state awaiting resurrection; her Italy is haunted by the specter of an unsatisfied dictator, waiting for the settlement of old debts. There was nothing pleasing to Patmore in the straight lines and hard edges that Dorothy Pound found so compelling.

*

George Yeats was an extensive collaborator in her husband’s work, and after W. B.’s death she was an attentive editor and a vigilant administrator of his literary estate. In her biography Becoming George, Anne Saddlemyer draws a parallel between Dorothy’s life in the 1950s and George’s in the 1930s, “when she too was trying to keep her husband’s poetry alive.” Saddlemyer asserts that it was not until W. B.’s brother Jack Yeats’s death in 1957 that “ ‘our rock George’ was freed at last from attendance on Willy’s generation.”

Saddlemyer goes to great lengths to show how George Yeats was instrumental in W. B.’s creativity, but to imply that George was never fully herself during the marriage is to neglect the ways that the couple’s collaborations spoke to their shared political and philosophical views and the ways that these ideas relate to aesthetic concerns. Margaret Mills Harper’s book Wisdom of Two, about the making of the esoteric book A Vision, illustrates the multiple and important ways that George was a progenitor of the books’ aesthetics.

Although the 1937 iteration of A Vision shows Yeats’s disillusionment with the idea of the Italian fascist state (‘only dry or drying stick scan be tied into a bundle’), as Paul Corner demonstrates in his work on “Collaboration, Complicity, and Evasion,” this kind of disillusionment was common in the late 1930s, when “even confirmed fascists were reduced to complaining about the ‘little Mussolinis’ who, strutting in their ‘Napoleonic uniforms,’ dominated many Italian provinces.” While W. B. Yeats’s writing from the mid-1930s illustrates his disagreement with the Italian incarnation of fascism, this does not indicate a rejection of the fascist ideal or aesthetic fascism as artistic practice.

Most of the other poets of Rapallo regarded W. B. and George Yeats’s mysticism as absurd. Aldington wrote to MacGreevy in 1958,

I kept up correspondence with Ezra in that dreadful captivity (the C. of E. instructs us to succour captives) and he offended me by writing that ‘of course Yeats was a gargoyle’. I re-read him [wby] down here in this damp little hamlet smelling of cows and cabbages, and he seems more than ever a great and noble spirit. I can’t follow him into that Vision book—remember? How right you were at Rapallo when you made me see that he and George looked like witches. They did. But that makes no difference to the great and soaring spirit he was. ‘It was the bananas that levitated, and not the lady.’

But Basil Bunting identified a sinister aspect to the Yeatses’ spiritualism: he detected in their use of magic a mechanism for exerting “power”: Yeats “thought of himself as one of a governing class, with obligations, but with privileges too [….] Yeats felt he had a right to power that he did not share with the greater part of mankind. If you have none of the real power of armies and police and huge fortunes, magic is an unsatisfactory, but often irresistible way of pretending to yourself that you have an equivalent.”

Bunting only considers W. B. in his letter—presumably relegating George to domestic irrelevance—but she was the medium for (and, most critics agree, the inventor of) the spirits who communicated the philosophy. Scholars have acknowledged the timely revelation of George’s mediumship, coming into fruition just as W. B. was struck by post-wedding cold feet. If George’s spiritualism was a means of obtaining or retaining power in her domestic life, then it is equally true that her ideas enforce the assertion of power in the public sphere.

In his remembrance of George Yeats, “Hours with the Domestic Sybil,” Donald Pearce writes, “As I think back about George, it is surprisingly Ezra Pound, of all the people making up her husband’s literary circle, whom she most resembled. They had the same down-to-earth, no-nonsense directness […] each, moreover, preserved a kind of private inner mysticism.” Pearce relates George’s admiration for Pound’s “gifts,” “his art,” and “his endless sense of fun and wonderful irrepressibility,” and her somewhat odd comparison of Pound and D’Annunzio; she told Pearce, “If you put your hand on Gabriel D’Annunzio’s hair—he had a great shock of silver hair—and pressed down, it would stay flat.

But if you pressed down on Ezra’s hair—poof!—it would spring right up again!” This observation was followed by a “hearty, slightly wheezy laugh, head tipped back, eyes twinkling, but engaging me fixedly, as if an important confidence had just been imparted. As, of course, it had.” Pearce presumes George wanted him “to realize and enjoy that side of Ezra,” not pursuing—or at least not disclosing—the occasion of George’s proximity to D’Annunzio, who was known as “the first Duce,” or its implications.

During the Second World War, George Yeats “listened secretly to Pound’s broadcasts from Italy to America that began in January 1941”; Saddlemyer concludes, “no matter what he said, the sound of Ezra’s voice brought a lost world somewhat closer.” Daphne Bush’s recollection of George’s listening to the broadcasts makes it clear that George understood fully the illicit nature of Pound’s ideas and her own act of listening in: Bush was “shocked” when after dinner one evening, George suggested “in a humorous, half-conspiratorial sort of way ‘Let’s listen to Ezra.’” After the Second World War, George was concerned about what had happened to Ezra, as were so many of his friends who agreed or disagreed with his opinions.

She enlisted the young scholar Richard Ellmann to investigate and was relieved to hear that Pound was in the United States, having escaped “the custody of un-intelligent military officials who think poets are punk.” But when George heard about his confinement in St Elizabeth’s, she “raged” to David Clark, “It’s like caging a tiger” to lock up someone “so completely alive, so bursting with splendid energy.” Ten years on, George asked Paul de Man (who would be posthumously outed, in 1988, as a Nazi collaborator) to visit Pound in hospital and to send her news of his condition. Pound wrote to George in 1947 asking for news of other people that could distract him from his surroundings, and after his release from St Elizabeth’s, he corresponded with her from Italy. In 1965, after Pound attended T. S. Eliot’s memorial service in London, he went to see George in Dublin. The record of their meeting is as sparse as the silence that surrounds George’s politics; Ellman describes them as two friends, sitting beside one another, unspeaking.

The silences and obfuscations—deliberate and unintentional—about Rapallo that were propagated by the poets themselves and by the generations of scholarship that followed have only recently begun to be broken: in detailed biographies including Foster’s W. B. Yeats, Moody’s Ezra Pound, and Burton’s Basil Bunting, alongside Paul and Harper’s extensive studies of W. B. and George Yeats’s A Vision that situate those books in their historical and philosophical contexts.

The Poets of Rapallo shows the extent of the network that reached out from the small, unassuming town on the Ligurian coast. The creative work that occurred in Rapallo and that was undertaken afterward in response to private conversations and public events there demonstrates late modernism’s outward turn; their experiments with everyday speech and demotic forms were sometimes—but not always—democratic. The poets of Rapallo have in common a change in literary style that was an attempt to create publicly engaged works of art that would not stand apart from the world, as high modernism had done, but would actively shape it.

Thanks to Julia Parry for bringing the letter from Bowen to Woolf to the author’s attention.

__________________________________

Excerpted from The Poets of Rapallo by Lauren Arrington. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Oxford University Press. Copyright © 2021 by Lauren Arrington. 

My Grams was one of those people I loved to make laugh. She was a mighty woman who left an indelible mark on the women in my family. Myself included. I think of her when I fold a fitted sheet or make “Gramma eggs,” our family’s name for “egg in a basket.” Her atoms can be felt in every one of my and my sister’s films and was a huge inspiration for the Oracle in the Matrix trilogy. At the very end of her life, one of the things she said that carries wistful weight in our family’s lore was, she wasn’t afraid of dying, she just wanted to know the rest of the story, to know what was going to happen.

As we approach the crucible that is the 2020 election, this moment of our potential unmaking, I am at a loss when presented with the idea of what happens if Trump denies the will of the people and refuses to honor a peaceful transfer of power.

And then what happens?

That is the question that leaves me tossing and turning in bed at the darkest hours of the morning, my brain in free fall reaching out for purchase, grasping. The strange event horizon of this post-election moment in its unknowableness is unsettling.

When I was a kid playing D&D with my pals, there would be some crucial moment in the story of the game where we’d all start chanting, “And then what happens?! And then what happens?!” It was a joke we repeated based on some newly initiated player who didn’t understand the idea that role playing requires participation in the story, but would only ask Lana (the GM) what happened next. We always took the joke to absurdist conclusions. “And then what happens? You get hungry. And then what happens? You collapse from starvation. And then what happens? You die. And then what happens? You decompose and become a skeleton. And then what happens? A pack of wild dogs divvy up your bones and bury them. And then what happens? Dung beetles eat your bones….” Hilarious stuff at the time.

We played endlessly. It was a game that would hone my imagination to create and understand hypothetical situations and how to navigate through them. It helped my young mind in the creation of my own sense of self and my moral universe. It offered a salve to my gender dysphoria with the opportunity to disappear and inhabit other worlds, other bodies, bodies that more closely aligned to the one I yearned to be.

The ability to answer the question “And then what happens,” has served me immeasurably in my career as a filmmaker. To make a film is an impossibly ponderous endeavor, from its inception and ideation, to story, to script, to production, to post production; a film is a flowchart of seemingly infinite variety of decisions. And right now, days before the election, the question nags ominously.

Over the last months, that sense of uncertainty, that hole in our story, had me scouring the abyssal of the internet, ultimately turning to the hard answers offered time and again by sites like Truthout, Gaslit Nation, The Indivisible Project, Stand Up America, and Refuse Fascism. These are folks who have been ringing this alarm for the past four years and succinctly put all of my anger, fear and anxiety into words on the desperate looming cataclysm we face.

The urgency of Refuse Fascism though, is that we cannot wait until after the election. That we have to mobilize now, to take to the streets now, to pre-empt the rolling fascist coup that is taking place NOW. Definitely exercise your right to vote but they posit that this regime will likely have to be forced out under the weight of mass-nonviolent protest in the streets. And though this premise is full of the promise of direct action which I like, I still find my mind wanting, grasping.

And then what happens?

If there isn’t some kind of Frank Capra ending to this nightmare, if there isn’t an overwhelming electoral landslide of the decent, what do we do?

What happens when Trump disputes a close election, then tries to legitimize his coup via his illegitimately packed courts and corrupt DOJ? The evidence is that he’s already doing it.

My pal Aleksander Hemon has written extensively about this, drawing parallels to his experiences in Bosnia, prognosticating about the impending doom we are all facing. Doom is a specialty of his.

“The moment when we cannot in any way connect what is taking place and what we know, is a traumatic one, because the solidity of reality—the belief that its continuity cannot be altered—catastrophically falters.”

This knocks the wind from me. Because the “solidity of reality” is that I can’t see through the murk of this situation that doesn’t end in violence.

Violence. It is the GOP’s go-to. The one substantive piece of their political platform.

And while the Democratic party’s habitual calls for bipartisanship make them accomplices in Republican crimes, violence is the core value of the GOP. The violence of 220,00 dead Americans and counting. The violence of exposing voters to grueling lines in this pandemic. The violence of their economic sanctions against their own populace, sadistically starving those with the least. The violence of their gun-crazy militias and white supremacist thuggery of the fraternal order of police. The violence against immigrants and the xenophobic politicizing of our border. The violence against Black and Brown lives facing more brutality and criminalization on top of a racist carceral state and for-profit industrial prison complex. The violence against my queer and trans brothers, sisters and siblings.

How many more fucking bodies have to pile up?

The truth is, if Trump “wins” this election, I am having a difficult time imagining I am not going to be one of those bodies. This does not make me special. By the inauguration the number of Covid deaths will likely double. “Rounding the corner” to half a million dead Americans. It is a staggering number. A crime against humanity. And is indicative that one way or another the violence of the GOP is going to come for us all.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. The dung beetles don’t have to eat our bones, not if we rise up and participate in this moment. By freeing our radical imaginations we can create that Capra-esque ending for ourselves. The movements around the world have shown us the way. Black Lives Matter has shown us the way. The courageous citizens that are hurling themselves into the ballot blockades have shown us the way. We must come together and end this fanatically violent regime that imperils our lives and the Earth itself. We are the writers of this story and we get to decide how it’s going to end.

So get out there and vote with all your fucking might, rabidly protect your ballot with everything you got and I’ll see you in the streets.

The world will be watching to see what happens next.

“Dear God,” I silently begged, “please no more castles, cathedrals, or churches.”

It was day two of my visit to the Spanish region of Castilla and León—a place where you can’t swing a stick without hitting a turret—and I was fighting a bad case of monument fatigue. When our guide kicked off the afternoon by proudly declaring that the city of Salamanca boasts not one but two cathedrals, I imagined vaulting over a parapet.

Although I have visited Spain frequently, most of my time there has been spent either in the northwestern region of Galicia, where my parents grew up, or points east, where I’ve often traveled for reporting assignments. I had only ever stepped foot in Castilla and León once, for a work conference, and saw very little of the area on that trip, but I was keen to return.

Since my father died in the spring of 2018, I have found myself probing the past in new ways, trying to develop a fuller picture of the country that shaped him and the other members of my family—the ones who left for American shores, and those who decided to stay. Given the central role the region has played in Spain’s long and complicated narrative, I hoped that more time spent there might yield a better understanding of the country as a whole.

The nation’s physical and political heartland, Castilla and León was also home to Miguel de Cervantes for a time, the place where he wrote the prologue for Don Quixote and secured its publication. Although chunks of the novel are set in what is now known as Castilla La Mancha (an adjacent region to the south), the influence of the broader Castilian landscape and its myriad sagas are unmistakable in Cervantes’ magnum opus.

Ringed by mountains, this landlocked plateau is Spain’s largest autonomous region by area but also one of its least populated. The history of this place—and its more than 200 castles—is deeply intertwined with the monarchy and the Catholic Church. In centuries past, Castilla and León’s wide-open vistas demanded the construction of imposing fortresses to protect troops during pitched battles—whether the power struggle in question was precipitated by the Romans, Moors, or Christian kings and queens whose “reconquest” of the peninsula ultimately won them naming rights. The area is teeming with structures designed to honor the influential patrons who made victory possible.

While these monuments are indeed stunning, by the third in-depth guided tour, their imposing majesty was starting to blur in the ramparts. I imagined myself as Don Quixote in reverse: Instead of seeing a castle where a humble inn actually stood, I tried to transform these grand structures into something more accessible—to plot a different route into the past. I did not care to know every last detail of their benefactors’ crushing triumphs. “Yeah, you came and you conquered. Now what?”

Not surprisingly, I found the answer in a classroom.

*

My time in Salamanca began with a wonderful lunch al fresco at Restaurante Don Mauro in Plaza Mayor, the main square. As the sun shone brightly, I felt slightly hypnotized by the interplay of golden light and shadow as they bounced off the city’s signature sandstone buildings—though it’s more likely that my stupor was due to the ungodly amount of bread and local charcuterie I had consumed. This would have certainly pleased my father, who was never happier than when he was feeding people. After a childhood marked by war and poverty, he’d grown into an adult who overcompensated for that lack to an almost pathological degree.

To snap out of my food coma and prepare for the afternoon tour, I did as he would have done and fortified myself with a café cortado, though I skipped the splash of aguardiente, the grappa-like moonshine that Dad would routinely add to our guests’ espressos whenever we had company. While my heart sank at the tour guide’s initial mention of the two cathedrals, I willed myself forward because I knew we’d also be visiting the landmark I was most eager to see.

Founded in 1218, the University of Salamanca is the country’s oldest surviving institution of higher learning and the fourth oldest in all of Europe. Empire does not build itself, and like every world power, which it was for a stretch, Spain has its own ugly résumé—of killing and exiling people for their religion, and brutally colonizing the Indigenous nations it “discovered” in the New World—but that sordid history is precisely why the idea of this university has always meant so much to me. It is a beacon to our better natures, a place where knowledge and ideas have the capacity to eclipse military and state power.

The university’s Historical Library is world renowned, though it remains quarantined from most public contact because of the potential for damage to the valuable manuscripts therein—including books, pamphlets, and maps dating back to the 11th century. (Among these is the earliest extant edition of El Libro de Buen Amor, or The Book of Good Love, a literary masterpiece from the 1340s.)

To safeguard these treasures, visitors must remain confined within a four-foot rectangular indentation that’s surrounded by plexiglass. The day I was there, I spied a librarian up on the balcony level, attired in a long white lab coat that made her look like a doctor on hospital rounds. As she tended to her small patients with gloved hands, I was unexpectedly stirred to see such care bestowed on bound pieces of tree pulp or animal skin marked with ink. Of course, these materials are much more than the sum of their physical components, but in a world that seems to have eschewed old knowledge in favor of the instantaneous tweet, my heart was gladdened by the sight.

Although the University of Salamanca still offers classes on many different subjects, these days it is most widely known as the premier school to study the language named for its region of origin: Castilian, or what much of the world knows simply as Spanish. The same language my mother insisted I learn as a child in New York City, at weekly private lessons after school.

Despite my initial protestations, I grew to love language study—first Spanish, then French, plus a little bit of Galician, Portuguese, and Italian. What I appreciated most was what each language taught me about the culture it represented, its words serving as ambassadors of a particular place, time, and outlook on life. Looking back, I realize that acquiring these new ways of seeing the world was a big part of why I became a writer. And now, here I was, touring a shrine to words and ideas. Few things could make me happier.

*

One of Castilian’s earliest promoters was Luis de León, an Augustinian friar and lyric poet. A descendant of conversos (the term for Spanish and Portuguese Jews who converted to Christianity to avoid being banished or killed), Fr. León went on to become a member of the university’s theology department in the 1560s. The fact of his heritage only came to light later, after he’d drawn unwanted attention for defying the Council of Trent by translating portions of the Bible—including the racy Song of Solomon—from Hebrew into Castilian instead of starting with the church-approved Latin text, which he felt was flawed. Ideas mattered, and he wanted them accurately disseminated.

Statue of Fr. Luis de León, Salamanca.

Even though he was arrested, Fr. León was one of the luckier targets of the Inquisition, avoiding torture on the rack and serving about five years in prison instead. Soon after his release, he returned to teaching and, on his first day back in the classroom, it’s said that he kicked off his lecture with the phrase, “As we were saying yesterday,” as if not a moment had passed.

In homage to the friar’s ability to play the long game, his classroom has been preserved in its original state—a dark and funereal gathering space, which seems a fitting paean to the material austerity of pure intellect. The man himself is immortalized with a statue that commands the Patio de Escuelas, a small plaza located in what used to be the heart of the campus. With his outstretched arm and a gaze that peers down at you from above, he seems to be tsk-tsking the viewer, as if to say, “I may have lost the battle, but if you thought I was planning to lose the war to THOSE fools, you grossly underestimated me.”

Just down the hall from Fr. León’s time machine, we entered the paraninfo (auditorium), another room whose shoulders seemed to sag under the weight of dark wood and bulky drapery. It was here, centuries after the friar’s return to the breach, that a different confrontation took place. That scene unfolded in the fall of 1936, a few months after General Francisco Franco and his Nationalist troops launched their military coup against Spain’s democratically elected republic—sparking a brutal civil war that lasted nearly three years, whose grim sequel was more than 35 years of dictatorship.

In the early days of that war, Salamanca became the de facto headquarters of Franco’s Nationalist army. On October 12th, 1936, the university hosted a celebration of the annual holiday that commemorates Columbus’ voyage to America. The event drew a range of personalities to the auditorium, including a Spanish cardinal, Franco’s wife, and General José Millán Astráy, the head of the Spanish legion and the Generalísimo’s propaganda chief. When someone in the crowd yelled out the legion’s necrophilic battle cry, “¡Que viva la muerte!” (“Long live death!”), Millán Astráy echoed the sentiment and launched into a diatribe about fascism’s power to exterminate the metaphorical cancers that were plaguing the country.

Also present in the paraninfo that day was the university’s rector: the famed novelist, poet, and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. Although Unamuno entered the room a Nationalist supporter, he publicly chided Milláy Astrán for his comments, which prompted the general to interrupt him and scream out a call for death to intellectuals (or intelligence, depending on whose version of events you accept). In response, Unamuno rebutted him a second time, speaking some variation of the phrase for which he later became known, “Venceréis, pero no convenceréis” (“You will win, but you will not convince”).

After his riposte, Unamuno was escorted out of the auditorium. Although various revisionist accounts disagree about the intensity of the verbal confrontation between the two men, it is a fact that Unamuno was placed under house arrest not long after and removed from his position as university rector, dying in his home just ten weeks later. For a man like him, knowledge was surely power, but as he also knew full well, cruelty and aggression have the ability to trump it in the short term—a scenario that’s visible all over our world today, including right here in the US.

As I stood in that somber room, I thought about my father’s own brush with the regime in 1948. Even though he had been born in the US and spent the first three years of his life in New York (until his Spanish parents returned to their homeland because of my grandfather’s failing health), Dad was denied an exit visa by Franco’s government, and his only way out of Spain was to escape via the mountain range that borders Portugal, illegally crossing the frontier in the dead of night with the help of a smuggler he’d paid off. Like so many who fled the country during the diaspora of that time, my father chose to abandon the dictatorship’s suffocating cruelty and head toward the promise of a better future. It wasn’t easy for him to leave behind his entire family—in fact he later helped to bring over his sister, brother, and their families—but during the subsequent 70 years he spent in New York City, he never once expressed the desire to live in Spain again.

The author’s father, passport circa 1948.

For most of his life, Dad avoided talking about his feelings, a true product not only of his generation and gender, but also of life in Spain under the Generalísimo—particularly during the first two decades after the civil war, when it was possible to disappear in the middle of the night, never to be seen again, simply because a neighbor or cousin had reported you to the authorities for expressing an unpopular opinion.

Following the onset of dementia in my father’s final years, however, the veil of silence gradually began to lift, and he grew more emotionally expressive. Increasingly, he would verbalize his profound love for my mother and me, pulling us into frequent hugs, clutching our hands tightly, and communicating the happiness that our presence brought him. But even as he shared his joys, he also revealed the intense sadness that he’d kept bottled up inside for so long—most notably, the intolerable challenge of saying goodbye to his mother, who had already been widowed for six years when Dad left Spain at the age of 20. My entire life, I had heard him address my mother using the term of endearment “mami,” but during the final months of his life, he would often call out for “mamá,” and there was something unmistakeable about the way that he said it that made it clear to us it was my grandmother he was summoning.

Looking around the university’s paraninfo, at row upon row of empty wooden seats, I started to see my father’s story from a different perspective. There is no doubt that his experience, and those of so many others like him during that same period, have lived on as dramatic tales of exile and abandonment, a momentous leaving behind, but each one of those individuals was also a line item in the huge ledger of losses that a country accrues as it drives out or silences a significant chunk of its population—the sum total of the potential that disappears with them.

*

Although I had not planned the trip with this in mind, my time in Salamanca coincided with my birthday. That night, I was fêted in good company, and the celebration was punctuated with tapas, wine, and gin-and-tonics at various cafés and bars in and around the Plaza Mayor. One of the establishments we visited was a famed literary hangout called Novelty, founded in 1905. As the oldest surviving café in the city, its name has since taken on an ironic cast. Still, the concept of novelty is a relative one, and on this day, my year was as new as it gets, so I figured that it couldn’t hurt to start the next chapter of my own personal story by tracing the footsteps of writers past.

As I later discovered, the café’s moniker is oddly fitting, considering how many times the place has reinvented itself. Before the civil war, it was where Miguel de Unamuno regularly met with other writers, professors, and intellectuals, including the philosopher and essayist José Ortega y Gasset. Although Novelty also welcomed businessmen, ranchers, and merchants, these two groups often self-segregated, with liberals sitting to the left of the entrance and conservatives to the right. (It’s said that Unamuno usually avoided the choice, opting for the outdoor terrace instead, even in winter.)

After Salamanca became the headquarters for Franco and his Nationalist army, Novelty was rechristened Café Nacional—proof that tyrants everywhere feel the ceaseless need to colonize even buildings—and the name held until 1964, when the owner’s son took over the business and reverted to the original. In the early 1970s, Novelty became a hub for those interested in plotting the demise of the Generalísimo’s dictatorship, a site for clandestine gatherings in the back rooms, where manifestos were drafted and copied on the hand-cranked machines that were hidden there. Finally, in the late 70s, the local government reclaimed a chunk of the property, which it owned, to create its new city hall, but the rest of the space remains a café-bar that has welcomed presidents, kings, and a range of leading literary figures, including Mario Vargas Llosa, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, and Juan Benet.

Accompanied by my friends, I headed back out into the plaza to continue the birthday festivities, leaving behind thoughts of Novelty’s circuitous biography. As my small group of revelers ambled from one tapas bar to the next—happily grazing and drinking like the free-range ibérico pigs that are raised just outside of the city—the magical surroundings elevated our celebration. Salamanca’s Plaza Mayor is one of the most picturesque central squares in all of Spain, and it is at its loveliest in the evening, when the Baroque architecture is illuminated by the soft glow of the incandescent lamps. The quality of the light lent an almost timeless aspect to the scene, turning it into a kind of photo negative of daytime’s glaring sun and devouring shadows.

Earlier that day, after lunch in this same square, the tour guide had called our attention to the top edges of the arcade that forms the plaza’s perimeter, pointing to a series of medallions carved in stone that feature busts of famous figures in Salamanca history—from Unamuno, Cervantes, and a slew of Spanish kings, to the Duke of Wellington and the mystic and poet St. Teresa of Ávila. If you were to scan the entire colonnade, however, you’d notice that several of the medallions are empty. This is no accident, the guide explained. They were left that way on purpose, to allow space for new faces to be added in the future. I smiled at the wisdom of the city planners, for they understood that the people and stories we choose to commemorate reveal as much about our present as they do about the past.

*

After my tour of the region ended, I headed north to Galicia to visit with my mother’s family for a week. When I arrived, the national news programs were bleating frequent updates on the imminent plans to exhume Franco’s body from the Valley of the Fallen—the mausoleum and monument just south of Castilla and León that he had ordered built in the 1940s and 50s, its construction relying in part on the slave labor of political prisoners.

Although the monument was originally conceived as an homage to the Fascist war dead, the regime was later pressured by the Vatican to dedicate the site to all combatants killed during those three bloody years, regardless of which side they represented. Franco’s government even went so far as to disinter the bodies of veterans buried in cemeteries all over the country—in many cases without notifying their families or obtaining permission—and transporting their loved ones’ remains to the Valley of Fallen. Later, the site became a meeting place for right-wing sympathizers who arrive on the anniversary of the Generalísimo’s death, kitted out in their Fascist and Nazi regalia.

In the 2000s, the debate on historical memory entered the mainstream, as the children and grandchildren of those lost during the civil war and dictatorship called for their ancestors’ remains to be exhumed from mass graves across the peninsula. (According to a report by Amnesty International, Spain has the world’s second largest number of disappeared, after Cambodia.) Much like what we are now seeing here in the US—with the push to remove statues and other paeans to Confederate leaders and high-profile slave owners—the descendants of those who were tortured, raped, and murdered during and after Spain’s civil war have called for the addition of historical markers in locations where firing squads and other atrocities once occurred, as well as the renaming of streets christened after Franco and his most sociopathic lieutenants.

With a contentious national election looming last fall, the back and forth over when Franco’s remains might be extracted from the Valley of the Fallen and where they were to be moved was surely an exercise in political theater, even as it simultaneously represented another skirmish in the conflict that has raged since the civil war’s end 80 years earlier. While it’s ridiculous to say that the government’s performative gesture of restorative justice was carried out for the purest of reasons, or that it might come anywhere close to compensating for the extreme damage of the intervening years, it was still impossible for me to listen to those news reports without recalling the subversive words of Unamuno and Fr. León—or without thinking of my father.

What my visit to Salamanca taught me is that history is not written just by acts of war and feats of conquest, nor should it be commemorated only in the monuments erected by its victors. History is also shaped by absence and a thousand quiet acts of resistance. By the people who leave, disappear, are forced out, or endure punishment and injustice for having the audacity to speak truth. By the ones who are muted or those who must mute themselves as a means of survival.

If we think of history as a river, those individuals are the stones that line a waterway. Like the knight-errant at the heart of Cervantes’ work, they are often worn down by the relentless pressure of the current even as the overall flow continues on its course; but knock one of those stones hard enough, and its position might shift, causing a tiny amount of water to detour in an unexpected direction. Dislodge enough of them, and soon you’ve moved the river. Their quests may have a touch of the quixotic about them, but they are never futile.

I am grateful for their acts of defiance, for the small brakes they exert on the headlong rush of blind certainty, and I celebrate the ways they bind us to a truer, fuller view of human history—one that’s ultimately cyclical, like the seasons of the land upon which it is wrought. And I am forever indebted to my father for the capacity to endure his own jarring displacement in order to establish himself in an entirely new place.

About a week after I returned to New York City, Franco’s remains were finally removed from the basilica at the Valley of the Fallen and loaded onto a helicopter for transport to a family crypt. As I watched the news footage that day, I couldn’t help but think back to the intentionally empty medallions that line the colonnade in Salamanca’s Plaza Mayor. They are a fitting reminder that there is still much more history that needs to be written.

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Featured image: Miguel de Unamuno leaving Salamanca University after disavowing the fascist coup. October 1936.