The Twenty Days of Turin Read online

  In one guise, even the syncopated works of yesterday offered something like this. A divide, similar to the one between screamers and crooners, already existed in the landscape of Italian popular song in the years between 1939 and 1943. That time saw the escalation of polemics between devotees of Rabagliati, Bonino and Natalino Otto—the exponents of the “American style”—and champions of classic “Italian-style” works by Othello Boccaccini and Oscar Carboni, among others. With its jazzy origins, syncopated music came wrapped in an aura of “primitivism,” even if this was rather domesticated. Yet there as well, despite the rhythmic twitches, the tuneful spasms, the frequent restatements of musical phrases, no “unprompted” event overtook the performance. The “frenzy” was limited to skimming across the syncope within the confines of the beat, where the energy was built up and released whenever the time signature was marked and consequently sidestepped. The gestures best suited to express jazz’s effects on mind and body were the mechanical tapping of feet, the hebephrenic wobbling of the head. All the same, there a certain phenomenon of “internal uplift” occurred, which no longer appears in the songs we are examining, where the “paralysis” is almost absolute. Syncopated music, while breaking up the primordial arc into many short, serial convulsions, still allowed its participants the ersatz feeling of free movement within the boundaries of society’s cage, a certain margin of independence at their disposal. And indeed this explains why jazz caught on so deeply in American culture before becoming a more commercialized form of expression: with its innocuous frenzies, it nicely conveyed the limits put aside for individual freedoms by a society set on making human rights coexist beside a program involving the total leveling of tastes and mores. The consumer of syncopated music appears as the model everyman for a world ready to give every guarantee of personal liberty, so long as he keeps to the rules of communal life; he shows how to have fun while remaining in his assigned place. Whatever his area of work or struggle is in reality, in musical terms it translates to the martial beat in 2/2, a rigid barrier that the Italian scions of “jazz” never tried to cross.

  Of course, the champions of jazziness carried a good measure of resignation. No spirit of revolt against their social debasement seeped out of their tunes, which if anything expressed jolly approval. The figure of the U.S. Marine in Korea, who spends his breaks from active combat listening to jazz on his radio while flashing an optimistic smile, has become classic. There could not be a better image to articulate the submission of the individual to the social system into which he is inserted.

  “Before the word became a means to communicate,” says Otto Fenichel,§ “the activities of the organs of speech had a purely libidinous discharge.” That axiom measures well against the spirit of those songs, but perhaps even better against the little cries and gestures that typify certain renditions of today’s screamer tunes. The “scream” isn’t always a re-creation of primordial, barbaric desires. Often enough, when the performers are called Mina or Jenny Luna, their persona appears to the listener’s imagination with the accent and demeanor of a child: a counterfeit nurseling whose gluttony isn’t set on candy bars or lollipops, but the sexual morsels of adulthood. The disciples of the scream, prone as if facing the anonymous altar of Sex, and who seem ready to say that they have found a sort of all-purpose panacea in this deity, fall back on all the tricks and cantrips they can muster so they can worship undisturbed. So the voice of childhood, the epitome of innocence, becomes the screen behind which the listener takes refuge without the hassles of his conscience: a voice that corrupts him and all the while absolves him in a climate of Arcadian debauchery.

  It’s hard to say whether it’s better to remain the serfs of an organized industrial society rather than fall into an anarchy of instincts. Whatever the case, the screamers’ fan base, instead of resigning themselves to their condition of alienation, as fans of syncopated music did in their own time, seem to present themselves as men in revolt, with their hands waving the banner of Sex like a battle standard of freedom. A curious fantasy indeed, seeing that it reduces all of their emancipatory demands to something that, as long as social mutilation continues and no real effort is made to surmount it, they will never reach: the heights of a satisfied love. Yet it’s likely that anyone keen on the screamer genre is only seeking a kind of analytical pleasure out of sex, a voyeuristic sea change from the visual sphere to the auditory. Incapable, due to his unripe spirit, of reaching a full image of love occurring, the consumer of screamer songs shrinks back, centering his attention on specific, fragmentary descriptions of the reality to which he would aspire; and the screams would be an attempt—certainly in vain—to instill heat into those frigid descriptions. Why else spend so much energy, such peristaltic emphasis, on underlining what’s already too easily clear?

  * From a conversation between the author and Tony Dallara, recorded at the Circolo Aurora in Collegno on the seventh of December 1960:

  GIORGIO DE MARIA: Do the lyrics of a song feel important to you?

  TONY DALLARA: Very important. The music and lyrics have to blend well for a good song to succeed.

  GDM: In other words, the lyrics mean something too?

  TD: Today, yes. The public pays attention to the words. But once upon a time, no, because the songs back then were all identical, all copies of each other like they came from the same mold. All the songs spoke about love, about kisses, “my treasure”; and the melodies were all identical, tedious, always the same thing; even the crooners had to sing, all of them, in the same style. But today, no—finally! Because these are songs that come straight from the hearts of young people like us. We’ve adapted them and sung them how we wanted. And now, as things are today, we listen to music and words alike, and they are very important.

  [. . .]

  GDM: What advice would you give to a singer who’s just starting out?

  TD: For a singer who’s just starting out, my first word of advice would be not to imitate anyone—if they want to have a personality, if they want to become somebody. They have to first of all sing what they feel; they shouldn’t let themselves be influenced, but instead they should sing differently from other people. If they don’t do that, they’ll never be anything.

  GDM: Do they have to believe in what they’re singing? If they deliver a song that’s powerfully sad or dramatic, do they have to be sad themselves or does it make no difference if they don’t give a hoot?

  TD: That’s a different case from singer to singer. There’s the singer who wants to make a craft out of singing, and he does it; from the moment he cries or laughs, he does what he has to do. But I, following my own approach, always sing about myself. However I sing, that’s what my feelings are; in other words, I’m not capable of invention. If I have to say something, I sing it. I’m completely sure of what I sing, and if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t sing it.

  † Alan Lomax, “Nuova ipotesi sul canto folkloristico nel quadro della musica ­popolare mondiale,” in Nuovi Argomenti, pp. 17–18, Rome, November 1955–­February 1956.

  ‡ Marshall Stearns, The Story of Jazz, Oxford University Press, New York, 1956.

  § Otto Fenichel, Trattato di psicoanalisi delle nevrosi e delle psicosi, Rome: Astrolabio, 1951, p. 355.

  TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am especially grateful to Luca Signorelli for many months of valued feedback; to Andrea Signorelli for an unforgettable tour of central Turin; to Sonia Gianotti for her help in locating the author’s estate; to Michael Pollak for assistance in checking the novel’s Robert Musil sample against the original German; to the novel’s original publisher, Mr. Stefano Jacini, for a helpful reply to my queries; to John and Katherine Dolan for listening to an early draft; to Mr. Emilio Jona (the original “Attorney Segre”) for his vivid recollections of Giorgio De Maria’s extraordinary life; to the author’s children, Corallina and Domenico, for their hospitality and support; and to my superb editorial team of Katie Adams, Dave Cole and Gina Iaquinta.

  Finally, my commissionin
g editor, Will Menaker, deserves eternal thanks (and infamy) for his part in resuscitating the Library and “connecting it across the ether” to its new, English-speaking audience!

  GIORGIO DE MARIA (1924–2009) was a novelist, pianist, critic and songwriter. Born and raised in Turin, he held the post of theater reviewer for L’Unità—the radical newspaper formed by Antonio Gramsci—from 1958 to 1965. Alongside figures such as Sergio Liberovici, Italo Calvino, Michele Straniero and Emilio Jona, he cofounded the avant-garde music group Cantacronache, without which, Umberto Eco reminisced, “the history of the Italian song would have been very different.” Remembered for his savage humor and astute eye for horror, De Maria authored numerous short stories and theater works alongside a teleplay and four novels, the most acclaimed of which is his cult classic The Twenty Days of Turin (1977).

  RAMON GLAZOV is a journalist, critic and author of fiction. He has written for a range of U.S. and Australian publications, including Jacobin, the Monthly, the Saturday Paper, Overland Literary Journal and Tincture Journal.

  Copyright © by Edizioni il Formichiere s.r.l.

  Translation copyright © 2017 by Ramon Glazov

  Originally published in Italian as Le venti giornate di Torino

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  “Nuova ipotesi sul canto folkloristico nel quadro della musica popolare mondiale,”

  Alan Lomax, Nuovi Argomenti, pp. 17–18, Rome, November 1955–February 1956.

  Used by permission of Odyssey Productions, Inc. o/b/o The Estate of Alan Lomax,

  www.culturalequity.org.

  “Phenomenology of the Screamer,” Giorgio De Maria, originally published as

  “Fenomenologia dell’urlatore,” Il Caffè Letterario e Satirico, a. XVIII, no. 3–4, 1971.

  Used by permission of the Estate of Giorgio De Maria.

  “The Death at Missolonghi,” Giorgio De Maria, orginally published as

  “La Morte a Missolungi,” Il Caffè Politico e Letterario, a. XI n. 2, April 1963.

  Used by permission of the Estate of Giorgio De Maria.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, Liveright Publishing Corporation,

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  Book design by Ellen Cipriano

  Production manager: Lauren Abbate

  Jacket Design by Yang Kim

  Jacket Art by Félicien Rops, Satan Semant L’ivraie, 1906, Engraving Colors by Albert

  Bertrand / Coll. Musée Félicien Rops, Province De Nemur. INV. G E864 / © Musée Rops

  Author Photograph © Estate of Giorgio De Maria

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: De Maria, Giorgio, author. | Glazov, Ramon.

  Title: The twenty days of Turin / Giorgio De Maria ; translated by Ramon Glazov.

  Other titles: Venti giornate di Torino. English

  Description: New York, NY : Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017. |

  “Originally published in Italian as Le venti giornate di Torino” |

  Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016052521 | ISBN 9781631492297 (hardcover)

  Classification: LCC PQ4864.E583 V413 2017 | DDC 853/.914--dc23 LC

  record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016052521

  ISBN 978-1-63149-230-3 (e-book)

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