Bianciardi, a sad Garibaldian, on a Milan-Corriere.it tram

In one of the latest Rai movies (they weren’t called video yet) you can see it Luciano Bianciardi sitting on a culture tram, set up by the Aniasi administration for self-magnifying, with some court intellectual to celebrate the event. The reporter – we are in July 1971 – recalls the tradition of garlanding the cars by letting important people get on for a ride in the most significant points, where they were greeted loudly. On the tram filmed by Rai – in a still spartan drinking Milan – one pours great wine, extracting it with a rubber tube from an enormous demijohn, cuts pieces of cheese, while an excited, but always very elegant, Roman Battle look into the camera, standing in the tram: Among the passengers, the writer Castellaneta, Bianciardi, Mastronardi and the painter Bruno Cassinari. A brief statement by Castellaneta follows: This tram seems to me a very nice idea, outside the staid Milanese tradition. At that point Bianciardi intervenes, his face swollen, gloomy, but with an urgent and always proud, always venomous voice: I meant this, that this trip by tram concludes a truly disastrous cultural season in Milan.

Disastrous. Battaglia pretends nothing has happened and the floor is given to an ironic man Lucio Mastronardi, who says he appreciates not so much the municipal administration as the tram – beautiful, then with salami, hams, melons. They close the service Nanni Svampa with Lino Patruno (half of the Owls) who sing in Milanese Circonvallazione: La stare in Montenero at nummer 23; she used to go to work with the tucc i d tram.

Truly disastrous. How would you comment today on the celebrations for the 100th anniversary of your birth? These days everyone feels compelled to tell an anecdote and magnify the likeable rebel who was Bianciardi. But he wasn’t likeable at all, he might have been at first, but he soon turned morose, livid, indignant. The magnificent irony of the anger trilogy – La vita agra, Integration, Cultural work – got lost in the mists of alcohol, in the desperation of a life that derailed until you find a perfect cemetery in Rapallo, a sad niche where there are no more dry secretaries to irritate him with their heels and there is no more diurnal hooker

day some translations to comfort his hours.

Bianciardian anger had collided with reality. In the Agra life there was even a terrorist attack against the big tower (the Galfa Tower, headquarters of Montedison), in those days Bianciardi really believed in it, he thought he could shake up society and politics. But then everyone cheered him on, surrounded him with praise and took him on a triumphal tour of the book, which confused and dejected him. The Milan he hated looked at him with admiration. His anger rebounded against the rubber smiles of his victims, not at all offended and indeed happy to be able to participate in the festival of indignation because, as we know, there is always someone else to blame, to blame, to pass on to. the witness.

He was not a cynical Bianciardi, as Liborio Conca rightly notes on Minima&Moralia, his was not even exhibitionist rage, like certain sad figures of the contemporary entertainment society, which was then being born but was still repressed in the grids of hypocritical conveniences, from the servant commendation to the councilor on duty . Now it is fashionable to say, as Conca does, that Bianciardi had understood everything. And she instead she didn’t understand anything, she simply looked, she knew how to see and she told, she told everything. She saw what was happening around him, and told it with brutal sincerity, with peevish irony, she spat at advertising, at Milan which left those who were sick on the ground, at the jaguar Gian Giacomo Feltrinelli who acted as a revolutionary in a camel coat (and Bianciardi brushed it off, raising his fist: Long live the class struggle).

He hadn’t figured out how to live with the individualism of modern life, with the consumerism of progress, with the alienation of cities. He had discovered that society had become an assembly line and that in order to survive one had to accept becoming a cog, because then everything else too, the superstructures, religion, politics, vocation, didn’t work, were useless, didn’t they could provide relief. And so he advised young people what he would never have done, at the cost of his life. In a piece on Avantiwrote: To young people who are preparing to enter modern life, no other advice can be given: before a religion, before a vocation, before a party, before a trade choose a function; choose it complex, exclusive, rare, dig a niche into it, never talk about it with anyone. And you work.

It was the final outcome of a process begun in 1952 with his first article, in La Gazzetta di Livorno, dedicated to Social lies: Social lie means that things in the world must always go as they do now, that substantial changes are not needed, that it is not even possible to change something, precisely because human nature cannot be changed. […] Underlying the lie, obviously, is the social lie, precisely, which we have criticized and which served, in essence, to command passivity, the acceptance of a state of things declared immutable: don’t rebel, there’s nothing to be done .

Instead, he rebelled and continued to do so. At the beginning of everything there was literature, where he had serious intentions: I will sing you about indifference, disobedience, conjugal love, conformity, drowsiness, spleen, boredom and pain in the ass. But it hadn’t worked, that is, for us yes, he had given us all that and much more, but all he had left was disobedience, pain in the ass and the obsession with the Risorgimento and so he had holed up at Rapallowhere he wandered around with the air of a sad Garibaldian in the library that his last companion had set up, Maria Jatosti. Antonio Moresco won the first edition of the prize that they finally dedicated to the writer from Grosseto and recalled in the Corriere of their fleeting encounter in Rapallo and the sense of guilt felt for having ordered a book and never picked it up: I love to think that he, with his good-natured gruffness that I had seen on his face as a boy, has kept an eye on me all these years and that, in the end, opened my arms and forgave me.

But she hasn’t forgiven him, it’s hard to think she has forgiven him, that she has forgiven someone, and It’s hard to think now that he appreciates a solemn award instituted in his honourhonor of what then, what can one do with a prize who in life refused the offer of good money and glory with the collaboration of Corriere della Sera proposed by Indro Montanellione who rather preferred to write in erotic magazines such as Playmen, Le Ore, Abc, one who, having obtained a divorce, wanted to abolish marriage. Bianciardi, as he writes in bel In Milan with Luciano Bianciardi Gaia Manzini, been an icon, a bohemian, a geek, an angry. I’ve always imagined him walking with his fists in his pockets and his dark coat with the collar turned up.

Bianciardi could not like the Milan celebrated in that cultural tram, because it was a city that was growing in height, with the Pirellone designed by Gio Ponti, 127 meters high: Height for Bianciardi was power, verticality was what brought progress and the new economic boom. Below, underground, were the miners destined to die and be forgotten. Above, industry; the governance of the economy. He couldn’t like him and he wouldn’t like medals, prizes, monuments.

Perhaps he would be more pleased, and naturally also angry, to re-read the pleadings just republished by ExCogita (edited by Luciana Bianciardi and Federica Albani), when he was accused of indecency for a story – The usual soup – in which he imagined a free and backwards society, with masturbation time at school and the obligation to eat only semolina. He was acquitted but as he writes Giancarlo de Cataldo in the preface, little changed since then, there are still spirits among us who tell us this word yes, this word no. And perhaps it is useless to rebel, but it is necessary all the same and this is the tragic meaning of Bianciardi, who ends his life returning to Milan because, as Manzini writes, in Milan there is noiseeven when a background buzz, a continuous buzz that supports you, without presumption of saving you.

The end at San Carlo, the ethyl coma, death. At the funeral, four people. He had anticipated it, in the Vita Agra, and had imagined it like this, as an old-fashioned, secular, but traditional and solemn funeral: I don’t want priests, but I want ex-priests, I want those who threw away the tunic to the nettles and they became communists, while remaining priests at heart. I want four of those defrocked and togliattised priests, and then I want two black horses with plumes on their heads, two literary critics on the box, at the four strings of the cart I want in order a historian, an art critic, a publishing house official and a third page editor. Must be a nice funeral. Whoever wants to come behind, except dry secretaries. They don’t. Then they forget about me too.

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