Between Two Cultures
This essay was originally published on 27 November 2021 for subscribers to our newsletter.
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I listen to the radio a lot, and I am indebted to Radio Four for inspiring the novel I’m currently writing and close to finishing with around 130,000 words. It was a programme on the Tuva of southern Siberia (for a few years they had an independent state following the October Revolution). They were mostly reindeer herders, and their nomadic lifestyle had been maintained under the Soviet state, with a few compromises, such as settlements and schools with the herders working two weeks on and two weeks off (like oil-workers in the North Sea). Under a very short period of capitalism, much of the forest has been destroyed, land (whose land?) sold off to the Chinese for mining, the huge herds of reindeer reduced to about a thousand head and the herders to a mere dozen, one of whom provided us with very useful advice: “Never sleep in a sleeping-bag in the forest, because you’re just a sandwich for a passing bear.” These kinds of programmes, often just half-an-hour long or even quarter of an hour, are almost always propaganda-free, and you can acquire a great deal of very interesting information. My novel, A Woman’s War against Progress, is not about the Tuva, as that would have involved a great deal of ethnographic study for which I have neither the time nor the inclination, but about a not-entirely different people I have called the Surelikud, who have been invented by me and represent minority peoples around the world. I shouldn’t attribute too much credit to the BBC because it fitted neatly into some of my various obsessions and the novel could be considered in part a fictional version of my book on language, In Praise of the Garrulous (2008).
For the last three months I have been listening to a great deal of Italian radio or more specifically its state-run Radio Tre, which unsurprisingly is in some ways very similar to Radio Four and Radio Three put together and in some ways very different. The news and some of the cultural programmes reflect the propaganda currently being produced around Europe and all of it is pretty similar, particularly in terms of the unremitting attacks on Russia and China. This does concern me because it is very similar to the irresponsible propaganda that led to the First World War, but on the whole I just switch off to it. I remember in a previous visit listening to an interview with a Russian director who had won a prize at the Venice International Film Festival for one of his films in the sixties. The journalist asked what it was like having to deal with the Soviet censors. The director’s unexpected answer was that it was no trouble at all, because all they did was read the script beforehand but never in his experience wanted to change a single word, and after that they let him get on with it. They didn’t care whether the film filled the cinemas or not; they just wanted it to be a great work of art. Nowadays, he complained, the producers were constantly interfering with the work and forcing him to make changes. He wasn’t making any statement about which regime was better, but merely commenting on his own situation and the yardstick he used was very simple: the more they allow me to do what I want and fund me too, the happier I am as an artist. What he thought as a citizen was not part of the interview. In fact the interviewer, audibly upset by the direction the interview had taken, may have steered clear of the director’s views on more general matters. I tried to find out who he was, because I forgot to write his name down. He was close to Tarkovsky and with these few bits of information I thought I had discovered him on the internet, but if it was him, he spent a few months in prison, which I thought could have disqualified him from being the man I was looking for. Later I decided that this was not necessarily the case. Some of my favourite writers have been arrested by diametrically opposite regimes, with Yevgeny Zamyatin in pride of place. It may be that the director was just irritated with the interviewer’s Manichaean oversimplification of Russian history, and decided not to meet his expectations.
But the fun starts when we move to the output on Italian radio that is made up of one-offs or very short documentary series. There is a programme on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in a series of half a dozen episodes. It is quite stunning that this book was first published in the fifties and banned in Italy until the late sixties. They read out chunks of the book and it is quite breathtaking in its content. What surprised me was not that, in spite of being bisexual, she clearly found men more than a little repulsive, as I spoke of these things to my lesbian sister half a century ago, but that she did so in this mix of rational, philosophical and even literary language. It is peculiarly powerful and I think that every man should read it or at least these particular extracts. I was born in 1952, so the book belongs to the previous generation and has perhaps been viewed as dated, but I think that the time has come for dusting it off as the Italians are doing. I also listened to the first episode in a two-episode investigation into the lives of two women who became close friends: one was an Italian Jew who reported a significant number co-religionists to the SS during the war, none of whom survived, and a German interpreter working in occupied Italy who reported officers in the Carabinieri who were directing the “monarchist resistance” after Italy had changed sides. She was almost definitely a spy who had infiltrated this group and she was harbouring their leader at her home. Single-handedly she destroyed the monarchist resistance before it had even started. The former was sentenced to prison for twelve years after the war (but only served eighteen months – make of that what you will) and the second was put on trial but somehow managed to be absolved, much to the anger of the Carabinieri, which demonstrates that protection must have come from very high up. They lived their lives in a network of horrendous lies and acquired more support by both converting to Catholicism. I now know that they are setting off on prosperous lives in post-war Italy, and look forward to next Sunday when I’ll find out how they did it. Just one more example to give you an idea of the range: there was a programme on David Graeber whose Bullshit Jobs I was reading at the time – by a very strange coincidence. In fact, that is one of the most striking differences between the two radio stations: the incredibly cosmopolitan nature of the Italian one.
These documentary programmes in Italy are in a sense series, but they use experts on each subject who, as it were, temporarily take over the programme obviously with the backing of a professional production team. In other words they are like In Our Time, but without the interviewer. Melvyn Bragg clearly mugs up on the subject of the week, but his thoroughness is not typical of the BBC. I always remember how Michael Palin boasted that his series of documentaries on Eastern Europe were on Eastern Europe solely because he had insisted on somewhere close to home so that he could get back to see the grandchildren at the weekend. Personality cult trumped professionalism, and it showed. I’m no expert on Eastern Europe but I was struck by the lack of understanding of such things as how much moving around had been going on in the twentieth century. These countries are recent creations. My Polish daughter-in-law’s grandfather lived in what was about to become part of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Byelorussia and was told that if he wanted to remain Polish he had to catch a train leaving at midday to take him and other Poles to the new Poland. He left. Often small towns had three languages (one of them being Yiddish), and very often cities had a different language from the countryside (Vilnius is an example of that; before the war only 3% spoke Lithuanian, and it was then part of Poland). The Rai 3 programmes on Beauvoir are fronted by an expert on Beauvoir and Sartre, and the story of the two women collaborators is a dialogue between two feminist academics who wanted “for once” to look at two women who were decidedly odious (I was going to say “rogues”, but that doesn’t cover it). And the greater depth shows.
At this stage in writing this essay, I made myself lunch and Wiki-Radio, whose name does the programme a disservice as it is much more in-depth than Wikipedia, decided to give us a life of Nikos Kazantzakis, thus lengthening my essay. Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptations of Christ were not in the foreground which mainly embraced his mammoth work, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel. They interviewed a Greek intellectual who spoke perfect Italian, and he said that even for a Greek it was very difficult to read because of the huge vocabulary. When the interviewer suggested that the author was inventing words, the interviewee replied, “Not a single word.” Kazantzakis constantly travelled Greece – particularly its remote areas – in search of words to enrich the language. In one village he discovered a flower that had no name in Greek, so he asked the locals and none of them knew the word either, but they suggested that there was an old lady a few kilometres away who would almost definitely know. So off they went but when they arrived, they found that the old woman had died the day before. Amongst the grieving, Kazantzakis was heard saying that not only had the woman died but also the name of a flower. I could go on, but I’m already way off my intended path, so I will only add that I am now determined to read the works of Kazantzakis and some books about him. He is undoubtedly a writer, thinker and translator of great importance, which many of you probably know, but I did not.
Although there are still marked differences between Italian and British culture, we cannot doubt the truth in Ortega y Gasset’s assertion that the cultural difference between two generations in the same country is greater than the cultural difference between two European countries in the same generation. Truer today than when he was writing, I think. However, Italy puts greater faith in the public’s ability to understand complex matters, and is less nationalistic and far more open to the world as a whole. It discusses such matters as a wealth tax and a citizen’s salary (which I originally thought might be a form of Universal Basic Income, but I now understand it to be extra Covid assistance to the unemployed; you can quickly become disconnected from a country’s political debate). Most of these are discussed but never happen, but the citizen’s salary is at least temporarily in force. I notice little things like the politeness with which everything is discussed, in spite of often marked differences of opinion: almost every interviewee (except foreign ones of which there are many) thanks the interviewers for being invited on the programme and thanks are immediately exchanged in the opposite direction (“Ma no, grazie a Lei per …”), but this doesn’t stop the interviewers from thanking the interviewees for coming on the programme at the end of the interview, which usually happens in Britain too.
When last year I translated Alessandro Barbero’s excellent life of Dante which goes under the admirably unadorned title of Dante, I came across this cultural difference on a much grander scale. In some ways, the republics, city states or comuni of Italy were closer to the ancients than they are to us, at least in two important areas: their attitudes to violence and their attitudes to women (I realise that puts women in a very passive position, but that is exactly where they were). We know from the famous story of Oedipus, that murdering a traveller because of an argument over who had the right of way was an unremarkable event, but if that traveller turns out to be the assailant’s father then it is a horrendous crime. When Dante encounters but unintentionally ignores Geri del Bello, the cousin whose murder by one of the Sacchetti family had not yet been avenged, Dante expresses his guilt and argues with Virgil who adopts a more Christian approach and advises Dante to forget the matter (years later one of the Sacchettis would eventually be killed, and these feuds could cross generations). Some see this as demonstrating that Dante still believed in feuding, and others that Dante the character travelling through hell does, but not Dante the writer some years later. I’m no classicist, but I suspect that Dante’s understanding of the classical world was relatively limited, even though he knew Latin and had read an enormous volume of texts (all explained in Barbero’s book). Virgil is not so much a representative of the past as the guide to the Christian universe as Dante now perceives it, so he surely is providing the correct moral interpretation. Dante’s world by this stage has been turned upside down and he has had a long time to study and reflect often in solitude on the difference between how the world is and how it should be. Barbero’s thorough examination of the wretchedly limited archive, most of which consists of business transactions recorded by notaries (a curious band of people who, especially in Bologna, write down poems they’ve heard of in the blank spaces left in notarial documents, many of the poems are Dante’s), does reveal some of the violence which appears to have been not beneath the surface but in the light of day. From puberty, women were strictly segregated from men, and married women had to wear a wimple when they left their home. Their marriages could be the product of diplomacy between rival families, though not very binding and quite often only for temporary peace. One of the most fascinating of Barbero’s clarifications is the word “consort”, which is very far away from today’s narrow meaning of a monarch’s spouse. It comes from “con + sorte” meaning “with [shared] fate”. In other words, the consorts were all the members of a group consisting mainly of relations but not exclusively. This was the moral basis for the feud, because you all belonged to the same body – the same destiny. A slight against one was a slight against all. If you like, it was a society in which everyone belonged to their own familial freemasonry.
And yet late thirteenth-century Florence was also something else: a complex and remarkably modern polity in which different interpretations of class and the associated attributable rights dominated its political life. On the brink of one of the most remarkable and long-lasting cultural flowerings in history, Florence at the time was something of an intellectual backwater, but it was the most vibrant of the commercial cities of which there were many in Italy (and as the exiled Dante works his way round Italy, Barbero grasps the opportunity to introduce the reader to them, and it is absorbing stuff). The fact that Barbero is a historian (that he is also a prize-winning novelist is not relevant here) means that we get a much better idea of the economic, social, political and cultural backdrop, and how Italy differed from the rest of Europe, which remained solidly feudal in this period (and of course included England, Wales and quite a bit of Scotland which like most of Ireland had some pre-feudal societies). I won’t say any more at this stage, as I want to avoid overplaying some kind of Marxian interpretation which would require so many ifs and buts to be meaningful that it could fill another book. So I recommend Barbero’s, which is written in his trademark style characterised by the knack of getting complex ideas over in well-written and accessible prose. I also noted as I translated it that his style is even more chatty with ironic asides than it was when I translated his book on Charlemagne back in the late nineties. He is still recognisably the same author, but the text must run from his pen with even greater ease, if his productivity as a historian and a novelist (and a TV personality) is anything to go by.
At different points in history, different European countries emerge as something distinctive which often points to future developments in other countries later. Their cultural dominance often comes later than their economic one: in the case of Italy the latter continued to assert itself more forcefully after an Italian navigator moved the principal trading routes from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and King Charles VIII of France invaded Italy and defeated the republics with “a piece of chalk” (King Charles’ army was so vast that no republic could challenge him in the field, and so all he had to do was take his men into their cities and mark the doors where they were to be billeted with a chalk). Italian then became the “second Latin”, the dominant vernacular across Europe (to be replaced by French from the mid-seventeenth century).
In any given moment, the nations of Europe are different but not that different, and from the outside probably don’t look different at all. The post-war division down the middle has left some significant differences, but whether they will survive the next two or three decades is questionable. I like differences, and when I go back to Italy – particularly to Florence where people speak quite a few decibels more loudly than is common elsewhere – I say to myself, “Thank God it is still different. Thank God it is still itself.” And the homogenising force is not principally coming from Europe, but from America – and as its power wanes, it too may continue to increase its cultural influence for quite some time to come.
Allan Cameron, Pitigliano, November 2021