A panel from Poem Strip, a graphic novel by Dino Buzzati © 1969 the Estate of Dino Buzzati. Translation © 2009 Marina Harss
Discussed in this essay:
The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories, by Dino Buzzati. Translated by Lawrence Venuti. New York Review Books. 344 pages. $19.95.
The Stronghold, by Dino Buzzati. Translated by Lawrence Venuti. New York Review Books. 216 pages. $17.95.
In 1983, at the height of his international fame as the author of Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979), Italo Calvino published an anthology of nineteenth-century tales of the fantastic, featuring stories from France, Poland, Germany, Britain, the United States, and Russia. There was one conspicuous absence: Calvino’s own country. To include Italian writers “merely for patriotic reasons” would have been pointless, Calvino explained. Supernatural tales, and fantasy in general, were “very much a ‘minor’ field as far as nineteenth-century Italian literature is concerned.” By implication, the same was true of twentieth-century Italian literature—at least until the genre’s resurgence “in our time.”
Calvino’s anthology was modeled on similar productions by Jorge Luis Borges and a French admirer of Borges’s named Roger Caillois. Like theirs, it offered an intellectual pedigree for the anthologist’s own work. Calvino had no real need to bolster his or the stories’ credentials; some of the playful fables he had written in the Fifties had become assigned texts in middle schools, and other serious writers, such as Primo Levi, had been publishing science fiction collections since the Sixties. But letting himself be playful had caused Calvino a lot of heartache. His first published stories were based on his experiences as a wartime partisan, and he spent a long time trying and failing to write realistic novels about the social problems of industrialized Turin. To their credit, his circle of left-wing editors and critics were unfazed when he pivoted to writing about aristocrats being split into good and evil halves or living out their lives in the treetops. All the same, he never quite stopped dreading accusations of putting form over content. Couldn’t he have stuck to writing about Italian life in a more direct and political way?
These sorts of worries weren’t only a personal quirk. Questions about the social utility of what writers did—questions that have plagued many writers, then and now—weighed heavily on midcentury Italian intellectuals, whose experience of recent history discouraged flights of fancy. Mussolini’s March on Rome, in October 1922, the year before Calvino was born, had given Italy the world’s first Fascist government, which lasted just over two decades. Italy had then been plunged, in one historian’s words, into a “war of attrition and destruction that had lasted nearly two years, covered three quarters of the country, and reduced much of the land and its people to near-destitution.” Next it became a front in the Cold War, with the biggest Communist Party in Western Europe, which endured more or less open—and successful—American interventions aimed at keeping it from power. The social changes were dizzying. In a single generation, Italy transformed from an agricultural to a service economy, with mass migration from the countryside to newly prosperous cities.
Italian Fascism had promoted bombast and militarism, and prohibited journalists from reporting bad news, but it also made room for the dreamier side of things. Mussolini spoke approvingly of the “illusion” he wanted Italians to share: “Illusion is perhaps the only reality in life,” he remarked. Figures like the protoabsurdist playwright Luigi Pirandello and his younger associate Massimo Bontempelli—an influential promoter of “magic realism,” as he labeled his own Surrealist-influenced writings—supported the regime, and were supported by it in turn, with varying degrees of enthusiasm on both sides, until things went downhill. Even Elio Vittorini’s Conversation in Sicily (1941), the most celebrated anti-Fascist Italian novel of the war years, operates in a murky, allegorical register; it couldn’t have been published otherwise. Still, writing in a sober, downbeat style and translating Hemingway and Steinbeck, as Vittorini and his fellow novelist Cesare Pavese did, came to be seen in retrospect as acts of resistance in themselves.
As a result, plainness, clarity, and politically committed realism became central artistic virtues in Italy after the Second World War. Neorealism made waves in cinema, but the term was applied to literature too. In their different ways, such writers as Pavese, Carlo Levi, Alberto Moravia, Natalia Ginzburg, and Vasco Pratolini, along with newcomers like Calvino and Beppe Fenoglio, contributed to a golden age of Italian writing. It helped that the Italian Communist Party, with which many of them were associated, was unusually tolerant of artistic types with unorthodox notions. Significant neorealist fiction about the armed struggle against the Germans and their local allies or the lives of the urban poor was still appearing in the early Sixties. If you wanted to make the case that postmodernism grew out of the collapse of leftist hopes, then the later careers of writers like Calvino—who left the party, along with many other European intellectuals, in response to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956—wouldn’t be a bad place to start.
Up close, there was no orderly transition from an age of neorealism to an age of postmodernism (to be followed in due course by an age of autofiction). Writers didn’t just take down their portraits of Hemingway and put up portraits of Borges, as a French critic said Calvino had done. (Calvino’s riposte was that his portrait of Hemingway had always had Borgesian features.) And there were plenty of respected writers in midcentury Italy who didn’t concern themselves with Hemingway or, for that matter, with Marx. Carlo Emilio Gadda, for example, was an old-school modernist, interested in wordplay and dialect and spiraling digressions. Elsa Morante was a neorealist insider—she was married to Moravia and a close friend of Ginzburg’s—but her intense, ornately written, best-selling novels were about as far from terse reportage as possible.
Another figure who doesn’t fit easily into the picture—who existed, in fact, almost completely outside it—is Dino Buzzati, a Milanese writer best known for his 1940 novel Il deserto dei Tartari, “The Desert of the Tartars,” recently translated as The Stronghold by Lawrence Venuti. Buzzati was in some ways a man out of time. In others, he functioned as an older, wearier, somewhat ironic doppelgänger of Calvino in his later role as a melancholy fabulist. Born in 1906 in the strongly Catholic, conservative Veneto region, to a haut-bourgeois family with aristocratic ancestors on both sides, Buzzati started writing dreamlike fables in the Thirties, when Bontempelli’s magic realism helped shape the scene. He carried on writing them until his death in 1972, pouring polite scorn on “politicized literature.” “I don’t like realists who want to change society,” he told an interviewer in 1971. Moravia’s highly sexualized depictions of bourgeois corruption under Fascism in the Thirties were a particular bugbear. That sort of realism had “no real reason to exist,” he declared.
Buzzati had many talents—he was also a painter, a playwright, a poet, a librettist, and a set and costume designer—but he wasn’t an intellectual in the way the term was understood in Calvino’s Turin. In 1928, he’d joined the staff of the conservative-centrist Milanese daily Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most prestigious newspaper. He worked there for the rest of his life, eventually helping run the Sunday supplement and becoming a star correspondent. Too much of a sensitive loner to be a Fascist, but too resigned to the status quo to make trouble, Buzzati got on with his job under editorial regimes installed first by Mussolini and then by the German-run puppet government in Salò. He spent some of the war as a journalist embedded in the Italian navy; a colleague later claimed that Buzzati’s reports of lost battles were the only ones the paper printed, because they were so literary that no one could tell who was fighting, where, or when. In April 1945, though, he wrote a stirring front-page account of the popular revolt that liberated Milan.
This unheroic résumé—it also included the staging of his first play at Milan’s Teatro Nuovo in 1942—wasn’t a black mark against Buzzati after the war. Acquiescing to the way the world works is one of the temptations of being a journalist, and in Italy, for nearly a generation, the way the world worked had been Fascist. If it was now to be democratic instead, then so much the better. Journalism also taught Buzzati—when he wasn’t dealing with naval battles—the value of precise, concrete writing. In the Fifties, Albert Camus, who adapted one of Buzzati’s plays, praised “the studied nonchalance of his language, his disdain for showy surfaces.” Buzzati’s work, swept up in the vogue for existentialism, established him as part of the European literary landscape, with translations into French and Spanish. He still has a substantial presence in Italy, where readers can buy collections of his crime journalism, his amused reporting on paranormal phenomena, and his emotional writings on his experience climbing the Dolomites.
The Stronghold has been translated into English twice: first as The Tartar Steppe by Stuart C. Hood in 1952, and then by Venuti in 2023. (Buzzati had wanted to call it La fortezza—“The Fort”—but his publisher thought a title with warlike connotations wouldn’t be a selling point in 1940.) Some of his other books were translated in the Sixties and Eighties, but most didn’t stay in print, and Buzzati wasn’t easy to track down in English until New York Review Books took the case in hand with new translations of two later novels, The Singularity (1960) and A Love Affair (1963); a first translation of a graphic novel in verse, Poem Strip (1969); Venuti’s The Stronghold; and now, The Bewitched Bourgeois, a generous selection of Buzzati’s short stories, his most admired work apart from his famous novel. Thanks to these translations, English-speaking readers are in a better position to ponder the mystery of how a timid, apolitical newspaperman wrote one of the most haunting novels of the age of Fascism and war.
Giovanni Drogo, the protagonist of The Stronghold, is a young man from a good family, with a widowed mother and brothers who’ve left home. “I knew your father years ago, lieutenant,” a senior officer says when Drogo takes up his duties at Fort Bastiani, a frontier outpost controlling a mountain pass that leads to a vast, featureless desert. “Of course you will bring honor to his memory. Presiding judge of the Supreme Court, if I am not mistaken?” No, Drogo replies, my father was a doctor. “Ah yes, a doctor, my word, I was confused, a doctor, certainly.”
Buzzati—who was fourteen when his own father, a professor of international law, died suddenly in his fifties—had already used the name Giovanni Drogo in an earlier story. In “Our Moment” (from 1936, and included in The Bewitched Bourgeois), Drogo is a prototypical modernist hero: a pale, tired clerk in a ministry, whose job at one point is to copy out judgments involving stillicide, a concept in Roman law concerning rights and duties pertaining to rainwater dripping from the eaves of a roof. (Buzzati hadn’t enjoyed law school.) Like a journalist stuck on the night desk and desperate to escape—as Buzzati himself was between 1933 and 1939—Drogo has been working on a legal manuscript with which he hopes to impress his superiors. His boss tells him to get more sleep instead and counsels patience: Drogo’s moment is sure to come.
“Yes, Your Excellency,” replied Giovanni Drogo in an anguished tone. “But then I think about spending my entire life in here. Two years have already passed. Two years identical in every way. Who knows how many more will pass before I can leave. One fine day I’ll find I’ve become an old man, still at the same table, my life gone by that point.”
That’s what happens to his namesake in The Stronghold. “It often occurred to me that that routine would never end and so would eat up my whole life quite pointlessly,” Buzzati later said. “Transposing that experience into a fantastical military world was an almost instinctive decision.”
The novel’s setup is beguilingly, deceptively simple. “One September morning,” it begins, “the newly commissioned officer Giovanni Drogo set out from the city for Fortezza Bastiani, his first assignment.” (Venuti’s translation uses “fortezza” and, here and there, other Italian words, in order “to situate the narrative in a specific culture.”) When Drogo reaches the unimpressive, rather dilapidated fort—the sight of which, however, leaves a captain who’s served there for nearly eighteen years “almost bewitched”—he immediately requests a transfer back to the city. No problem, a functionary named Major Matti says: you can leave right now if you like—although, to avoid complications, it might be better to wait four months for the routine medical examinations. Drogo is distracted from their discussion of this point by a glimpse of the northern peaks through Matti’s office window, and he puts off the decision until the morning. Would it be possible, he asks, to inspect the ramparts, see the northern desert? Unfortunately, no, Matti replies: “Don’t give the view a second thought. It’s a worthless landscape, I guarantee you, nonsensical.”
In Buzzati’s story “Seven Floors” (1937), which he adapted into the play that impressed Camus, a man with a mild illness gets moved through hospital wards for ever more serious cases, each time on a reasonable-enough pretext, until he finds himself on his deathbed. The story follows the logic of a joke or a comedy sketch: the development consists in finding new ways for the doctors to move their uneasy patient one step closer to the punch line. An analogous logic governs life at Fortezza Bastiani—Drogo’s stay there extends to two, four, fifteen, thirty years—and there are similar touches of dark humor. But the development is less iterative, and not just because a novel needs a different kind of pacing, a need that Buzzati meets with unerring judgment. Although Drogo is initially ensnared by the wily, harried Matti, he isn’t a passive victim. As early as his first night at the fort, he senses he’s being kept there by an “unfamiliar force . . . perhaps originating in his very soul.”
Fortezza Bastiani is a graveyard of military careers. The Tartars have been gone for centuries. “For quite a few years deep resentments have characterized relations with the kingdom of the north,” but an attack, in the unlikely event that one should happen somewhere, surely won’t happen there. (The fort defends the pre-automobile, vaguely nineteenth-century southern kingdom of Pietro III, a ruler unknown to modern history; the northern kingdom doesn’t seem very different, and, apart from the desert, there’s little to evoke a colonial frontier.) Without admitting it, the fort’s men nurse hopes of a war that will let them show their mettle. In the meantime, their service is an empty ritual of parades and passwords and endless watches over the mountains and the desert, where, on the horizon, there’s a permanent wall of mist. A flag hangs limp above the fort’s yellow walls. At night, water drips in the cistern. In time, the dripping becomes an old friend, as does Drogo’s room, with its sagging mattress, its oil lamp, its drawer with a tricky lock.
“Better leave as soon as you can,” someone whispers within weeks of Drogo’s arrival: “Don’t let their obsession take hold of you.” “Go back down to the city,” Major Ortiz advises him four years later: “Return while there’s still time.” “Don’t turn back,” the narrating voice itself urges Drogo as he rides down to the city on leave, only to learn that his would-be fiancée, Maria, is going on a long trip to Holland, and that new regulations mean he’s missed his chance of another posting—the divisional commander is surprised he hasn’t heard about them. Again and again, Drogo sees through the fort’s “facile mystery.” The soldiers’ dreams of military glory are “nothing but a pretext to give meaning to life.” But why has a saddled horse appeared in the desert? Are there lights in the wall of mist? Are northern forces constructing a road? Unfortunately, another new regulation means that any officer in possession of a telescope must now hand it in, “for obvious disciplinary reasons.”
Ever since it first appeared, The Stronghold has been associated with Kafka’s The Castle (1926), which Buzzati read in German in 1935. He couldn’t fill out an income-tax form, he complained thirty years later, without a critic accusing him of “shameless plagiarisms at the Czech writer’s expense.” Buzzati’s theme of endless deferment is indeed Kafkaesque. A fort is a bit like a castle—although less like a schloss, which can also be an unfortified manor house—and the regimental tailor’s gossipy underlings bear a very faint resemblance to the assistants who annoy Kafka’s land surveyor K. But Buzzati doesn’t have what J. M. Coetzee once called Kafka’s “acute feel for the obscene intimacies of power,” which is what Coetzee himself brings to a timeless desert frontier, inspired in part by Buzzati’s, in his 1980 novel Waiting for the Barbarians.
That’s not to say that Buzzati’s masterpiece is a simple fable about lost opportunities. In a way that was “almost instinctive,” perhaps, Buzzati lets elusive, contradictory meanings hover around his allegory. Will Drogo find it in himself to leave? Will invaders come marching across the desert? The two questions that drive the narrative pull the reader’s wishes in opposite directions. It’s possible to read the effects of the fort’s “harsh laws” (“The sentry, however, was no longer Moretto. He was simply a soldier with a hard face who had raised his rifle and was now taking aim against his friend”) as veiled commentary on Italian Fascism. It’s also possible that Buzzati would have written similar scenes under any political system with compulsory military service, which he’d enjoyed even less than studying law. The extra ironies involved in forcing the reader to empathize with the soldiers’ longing for a war can’t have escaped him when he finished the novel in March 1939. But something in Drogo’s world, “beyond his consciousness,” seems to guide the course of outward events.
The novel’s enigmatic quality comes in large part from its setting. In his introduction to a reprint of the Hood translation, Tim Parks explains that memories of the mountain campaign of the First World War—“the one military campaign of modern times that Italians will still refer to as glorious”—would, to Buzzati’s readers in 1940, have informed the soldiers’ obsession. More important, Buzzati’s imaginative landscape was centered on the mountains north of his family’s villa near Belluno, where he took up climbing seriously the year his father died. Mountains are a motif in nearly everything he wrote. There’s nothing good about the fort—it’s like a monster that needs a blood sacrifice to shake off its “mysterious lethargy”—but the spell the landscape casts on Drogo is deeply ambiguous, as though the mountains are charged too strongly with indescribable feeling to find a settled place in the novel’s symbolic system. The echoes of distant waterfalls sound like a “human voice that would speak forever—words that described your life. You were always on the brink of understanding them but you never did.”
In later years, Buzzati tended to emphasize the novel’s origins in his boring job on the night desk. “The philosophical schemata of Fascism” were far from his mind, he said, when he dreamed up Drogo’s role as a hero of the absurd. Still, as he observed while clarifying his distaste for “politicized literature,” an artist “won’t ever even know what effect he’s produced, and maybe thinks he’s composed a Gloria when he’s actually written a requiem.” Buzzati arranged for his ashes to be scattered in the Dolomites after his death.
In another novel about a young man who undergoes a strange dilation of time at an institution in the mountains, there’s a simpler explanation of what’s keeping him there. Hans Castorp spends seven years at the sanatorium in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) partly due to his hope of having sex with Clavdia Chauchat again. Sex, however, doesn’t have much of a presence in Buzzati’s novel, or in his work in general before the Sixties. He disposes of the problem in half a sentence—two hours’ journey from the fort, there’s an inn where there are “girls with whom you could make love”—and Drogo is unable to open his heart in his single scene with Maria, who isn’t much of a presence either. Venuti, in his afterword, points out that parts of the novel can be read as a critique of Fascist machismo. (He has also helped an anti-Fascist reading along, he says, by importing terms with no equivalents in Buzzati’s Italian—“goose-stepping,” “jackboots”—into his translation.) Again, though, it’s possible that, under a different political system, Buzzati would still have chosen to make his hero a diffident young man.
Whether or not Drogo’s arid emotional life is meant to have a political subtext, Buzzati’s biography suggests that it may have had a personal one. His mother “had a very strong personality and managed to keep her sons at home with her until her death,” one commentator writes. Perhaps Buzzati shared Drogo’s feeling that “he had never been handsome.” After his mother’s death, he had a midlife crisis. He wondered if he had only just reached his “real twenties.” He had a turbulent affair with a dancer, then married—in 1966, at the age of sixty—a model thirty-five years his junior. The affair gave rise to A Love Affair, in which Antonio Dorigo, a Milanese architect whose sexual experiences have been confined to paid encounters, becomes infatuated with a dancer who moonlights as a call girl and teaches him some harsh truths. The Singularity, published three years earlier, during the same affair, concerns a scientist who turns a mountain into a supercomputer and gives it the personality of his dead wife, a younger woman who was persistently unfaithful to him. The experiment isn’t a success.
Both books were received poorly by critics at the time, and their reputation hasn’t improved with age. The phantasmagoric Sixties Milan in A Love Affair (and Poem Strip) has a Pop Art charm, but Buzzati’s ironic distance from his hero—“a bourgeois in the bloom of life, intelligent, corrupt, rich, successful”—soon collapses into raw identification. The Singularity is highly readable, but its finale now resembles a heavy-handed parody of Sixties sexism. (The computer exhibits a capricious, passionate nature before developing homicidal rage over not having a body with which to feel a man’s touch—rage triggered by another scientist’s attractive, frequently naked wife.)
The posthumously published stories near the end of The Bewitched Bourgeois—“nightmarish tales of illness, sexuality, and death,” Venuti calls them—are a more impressive sample of late Buzzati. Among the earlier stories, “Panic at La Scala” (1948) stands out. A sardonic study of the haute bourgeoisie under pressure, written after a real-life panic about a possible left-wing revolution, it also touches delicately on war guilt and the Holocaust, maybe drawing on Buzzati’s memories of the liberation of Milan. It’s an uncharacteristic story in some ways, one he wrote on a topical theme suggested by an editor, but it also displays his growing skill at playing off a newspaper voice—the knowing tone of a gossip columnist, in this case—against fantastic or disturbing subject matter.
Venuti, a devout and learned Buzzatian, makes grand claims for his author as “a master of the short story in world literature.” “Panic at La Scala,” “Seven Floors,” and “Something Had Happened” (from 1949, omitted from The Bewitched Bourgeois) are anthology pieces, and stories like “The Seven Messengers” (1939) show Buzzati working in the vein of Borges and late-period Calvino, at a time when Borges wasn’t a name in Italy and Calvino was still in high school. But his stories rarely have the mind-bending qualities of those of the Argentine or the Ligurian writer, as he might have put it. Consumed in bulk, they start to read like reliably polished filler, designed to give Corriere della Sera’s bourgeois readers—the stories were nearly all written for the paper—a tiny jolt of disquiet over coffee or on the tram. Venuti’s fifty choices represent a fraction of Buzzati’s total output in the form, written over a period of forty years. Contemplating Buzzati’s long, heroic service, it’s hard not to think of Giovanni Drogo.
