Appreciations: Ernest Hemingway’s Tale of Early Fascist Italy

“On the flat road we passed a Fascist riding a bicycle, a heavy revolver in a holster on his back. He held the middle of the road on his bicycle and we turned out for him. He looked up at us as we passed. Ahead there was a railway crossing, and as we came toward it the gates went down.

“As we waited, the Fascist came up on his bicycle. The train went by and Guy started the engine.

" ‘Wait,’" the bicycle man shouted from behind the car. ‘Your number's dirty.’

“I got out with a rag. The number had been cleaned at lunch.

" ‘You can read it,’ I said.

" ‘You think so?’

“ ‘Read it.’

" ‘I cannot read it. It is dirty.’

“I wiped it off with the rag.

" ‘How's that?’

" ‘Twenty-five lire.’

" ‘What?’ I said. ‘You could have read it. It's only dirty from the state of the roads.’

" ‘You don't like Italian roads?’

" ‘They are dirty.’

" ‘Fifty lire.’ He spat in the road. ‘Your car is dirty and you are dirty too.’

" ‘Good. And give me a receipt with your name.’

“He took out a receipt-book, made in duplicate, and perforated, so one side could be given to the customer, and the other side filled in and kept as a stub. There was no carbon to record what the customer's ticket said.

" ‘Give me fifty lire.’

“He wrote in indelible pencil, tore out the slip and handed it to me. I read it.

" ‘This is for twenty-five lire.’

" ‘A mistake," he said, and changed the twenty-five to fifty’

" ‘And now the other side. Make it fifty in the part you keep."

“He smiled a beautiful Italian smile and wrote something on the receipt stub, holding it so I could not see.

" ‘Go on," he said, ‘before your number gets dirty again.’"—American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, and Nobel Literature laureate Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), “Che Ti Dice La Patria?”, in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition (1987)

I had never heard of “Che Ti Dice La Patria?” until I saw it mentioned in the preface to the Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. It is not one of the more anthologized of the Nobel laureate’s tales—nor, based on my experience in high school and college, one of the more assigned titles in American literature courses.

But it is of a piece with some of his other classic fiction—and, given the world’s slide back into revanchist nationalism and authoritarian, more relevant than at any time since World War II.

It’s hard to read its early sentences without thinking of the longer, more symbolic, and more famous first chapter of A Farewell to Arms. It has the same close attention to natural description, and the same sense of wondering what is to come:

“Outside the villages there were fields with vines. The fields were brown and the vines coarse and thick. The houses were white, and in the streets the men, in their Sunday clothes, were playing bowls. Against the walls of some of the houses there were pear trees, their branches candelabraed against the white walls. The pear trees had been sprayed, and the walls of the houses were stained a metallic blue-green by the spray vapor. There were small clearings around the villages where the vines grew, and then the woods.”

The road that the two American travelers, the unnamed narrator and “Guy,” use is “not yet dirty”—an irony that will reverberate at the end of the story, when the road’s cleanliness and maintenance become a point of contention.

The first Fascist party member is anxious to hitch a ride with the Americans because, despite Il Duce’s boast that he “made the trains run on time,” transportation in his regime remains haphazard. His condescension is pronounced enough that the narrator tells Guy, “he will go a long way in Italy.”

The two travelers stop for a meal in the Ligurian city of La Spezia, with the woman waiting on them wearing “nothing under her house dress”—a waitress doubling as a prostitute. Uneasy, Guy asks if he has to allow the woman to wrap her arms around him. “Certainly,” the narrator responds sarcastically. “Mussolini has abolished the brothels. This is a restaurant.”

The shakedown by the bicycle-riding, revolver-wielding Fascist that concludes the quote at the start of this post illustrates the petty abuses that filter down even to the lowest levels of an unaccountable dictatorship.

Readers at the time of its publication in 1927 in The New Republic could have been forgiven for questioning if the piece was fact or fiction. I myself wonder, even now particularly after learning that Hemingway had driven through Spezia with a friend named “Guy” (Hickok, a foreign correspondent for the Brooklyn Eagle), on his way to obtain a record of his baptism after being wounded in WWI—a document that enabled him to wed Pauline Pfeiffer in the Roman Catholic Church.

One thing is for sure, though: with each Italy-related work of Hemingway’s’ in the Twenties, his contempt for the harm that Mussolini was inflicting on the nation was growing apace. He had come to regard the dictator as a strutting liar with a dangerous appetite for power through his stint as a reporter for Toronto Daily Star (including an interview in which the newly installed dictator claimed ominously that “the Fascisti are now a half a million strong” and “have force enough to overthrow any government that might try to oppose or destroy us”).

Mussolini, the young writer noted acidly, had a “genius for clothing small ideas in big words.”

In 1929, with his WWI novel, A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway’s account of the retreat from Caporetto would fly in the face of official propaganda that refused to acknowledge this unmitigated military disaster. In the same chapter, his description of the carabinieri—the country’s arbitrary, vicious military police---seems colored not just by their actions during the war but by their misconduct starting in 1922 as Mussolini’s paramilitary force for suppressing dissent.

Quote of the Day (‘Time,’ on The Star Who Rewrote ‘The Canons of Beauty’)

“By her own description, Sophia Loren is ‘a unity of many irregularities.’ She has rewritten the canons of beauty. A daughter of the Bay of Naples, she has within her the blood of the Saracens, Spaniards, Normans, Byzantines and Greeks. The East appears in her slanting eyes. Her dark brown hair is a bazaar of rare silk. Her legs talk. In her impish, ribald Neapolitan laughter, she epitomizes the Capriccio Italien that Tchaikovsky must have had in mind. Lord Byron, in her honor, probably sits up in his grave about once a week and rededicates his homage to ‘Italia! oh, Italia! thou who hast the fatal gift of beauty.’ Vogue Magazine once fell to its skinny knees and abjectly admitted: ‘After Loren, bones are boring.’”—Time Magazine, cover story on actress Sophia Loren, April 6, 1962

A friend of mine (AND HE KNOWS WHO HE IS!!!!) has been known to exclaim, more than once: “Now what, I ask you, is wrong with appreciating the beauty that is Woman?”  Nothing, I suppose—as long as you don’t write overheated prose like the above, act like a besotted fool.

Yet Sophia Loren, born on this day 80 years ago (could it really be that long?) in Rome, has had those precise effects on men—especially astonishing when one considers that, as a teenager, the woman known for her voluptuous figure had been so thin, because of extreme poverty, that she had been nicknamed stuzzicadenti (toothpick). 

Some years ago, local newscaster Jack Cafferty, beholding a revealing movie still of the actress, mused on the air that it was too bad the whole world couldn’t be in the shape she was. During production of Charlie Chaplin’s last film, The Countess From Hong Kong, the irrepressibly libidinous Marlon Brando withered under her laser glare when he made the mistake of pawing her. In 1983, David Letterman, then early in his career as a talk-show host, walked down to her dressing room with camera crew in tow without advance warning—and you can see, in this YouTube clip, that, beneath the Continental charm, she believed he could use a spanking.

Her five-decade career, determination and talent (attested to by her Oscar for Two Women, the first time an Academy Award was given to an actress in a foreign-language production) have made her a female national symbol for Italy, similar to what Catherine Deneuve has become for France. It has also made her an icon, a force that can outlast old detractors. In Loren’s youth, the Roman Catholic Church threatened her with excommunication for marrying Carlo Ponti, at the time still considered wed to another woman (since his Mexican divorce was not considered valid in Italy). More recently, however, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, in discussing the Vatican’s strictures against cloning, remarked waggishly that “an exception might be made in the case of Sophia Loren.”

Ms. Loren has a new memoir, timed to coincide with her milestone birthday. Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow is not only named for one of the Italian films that lifted her to international fame, but also represents a simple statement of her enduring presence in the popular imagination around the entire world.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Breaking Away,’ on the Joy of All Things Italian)

Dad (played by Paul Dooley): “What is this?”

Mom (played by Barbara Barrie): “It's sauteed zucchini.”

Dad: “It's I-tey food. I don't want no I-tey food.”

Mom: “It's not. I got it at the A&P. It's like... squash.”

Dad: “I know I-tey food when I hear it! It's all them ‘eenie’ foods... zucchini... and linguine... and fettuccine. I want some American food, dammit! I want French fries!”

Mom: [to the cat, who has jumped up onto the table] “Oh, get off the table, Fellini!”

Dad: “Hey, that's my cat! His name's not Fellini, it's Jake! I won't have any ‘eenie’ in this house!” [to the cat] “Your name's Jake, you hear?”— Breaking Away (1979), screenplay by Steve Tesich, directed by Peter Yates

“Dad” is not, under normal circumstances, such a sputtering zenophobe. He’s merely reacting to circumstances—or, to be exact, a teenage son who, in his overwhelming admiration for the Italian cycling team, has taken not only to riding sleek bikes, but also to shaving his legs, singing opera, exploring Catholicism, and greeting his father with “Buon giorno, Papa!”

Breaking Away, released in American theaters this month 35 years ago, broke away from the pack of bigger-budget films to become a box-office hit and Best Picture nominee at the Oscars. A true sleeper hit, it lacked stars recognizable at the time (though Dennis Quaid made the most of his opportunity), but it was blessed with a host of lines from Steve Tesich that would win him the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

All these years, I had thought that Tesich, a Yugoslav emigrant, had merely slightly exaggerated America’s embrace of the foreigner. But it turns out that his Italophile character, Dave, bears a strong resemblance to a real-life college friend named Dave who also loved bicycling and all things related to Italy.

Dave's comic embrace of the foreign, in a sense, stands for America's embrace of starry-eyed newcomers such as Tesich.  In the screenwriter's Oscar acceptance speech, he remembered:

“Long before I actually saw America, my first glimpses of it were in a movie house in Yugoslavia. It was a western, Stagecoach, and it seemed like a wonderful, endless frontier of a country where these good and evil characters fought it out for the soul of America. And after all these years of being here I am just so grateful to be given an opportunity to send back a film and to tell 'em that I find it very much like the place I had seen originally: The good and the bad still fight it out; the good still tend to win in the end.”

Yet, for all its joy, the film is not all sweetness and light. There has to be something overcome for a plot to cohere, and not just, as in this instance, an example of a generation gap taken to the absurd.

While Tesich’s college friend Dave competed in bicycle races in the middle of the Kennedy administration, the movie Dave and his pals do so in the summer of discontent in the Jimmy Carter era, as the Middle America of the Stollers must deal with uncertainty and gnawing concern that the American Dream has become an empty shell. 

The four friends meet at an abandoned quarry out in the woods. Years ago, Dave’s dad had labored in the same spot, helping to build a gleaming university. Now, Mr. Stoller wonders what it was all for: upper-class frat boys at this institution of higher learning lord it over his son and his friend with the epithet “cutters” (short for “stonecutters”).

At the time the film was released, I felt myself not far removed from the kind of crossroads where Dave finds himself. I also was the product of a working-class background, but had also just finished my first year of college. I didn't want my education ever to leave me with the same condescending attitude that the students in the movie display toward the lower-class "townies."

Just days before the film was released, Jimmy Carter had delivered a controversial address to the nation in which he noted a crisis of the spirit that prevented America from dealing with its serious energy problems, including long lines at the gas pump. Though entirely coincidental (years can elapse between a film’s initial pitch to Hollywood execs and its release in cinemas), it somehow seems appropriate that the climactic race in the film relies not on the squealing auto tires of director Peter Yates’ Bullitt 11 years before, but on low-tech but more impressive feats of skill and teamwork on a simple bicycle.

Quote of the Day (Goethe, on Sicily)

“Caltanissetta, 28 April [1787]. At last we can say we have seen with our own eyes the reason why Sicily earned the title of ‘The Granary of Italy.’ Soon after Girgenti, the fertility began. There are no great level areas, but the gently rolling uplands were completely covered with wheat and barley in one great unbroken mass. Wherever the soil is suitable to their growth, it is so well tended and exploited that not a tree is to be seen. Even the small hamlets and other dwellings are confined to the ridges, where the limestone rocks make the ground untillable. The women live in these hamlets all the year round, spinning and weaving, but during the season of field labour, the men spend only Saturdays and Sundays with them; the rest of the week they spend in the valleys and sleep at night in reed huts."—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, in Selected Works (Everyman’s Library, 1999)