The Quiet Before, page 7
There was little question he would be found guilty and sentenced. In many ways, he had been waiting for this moment, the final station in his ascendance as the one and only Chartist leader. He was, he told his followers, innocent of the charges, of course. His persecution was an unjust reaction to the Newport Rising, but he was willing to claim his martyrdom. “This is my last letter for some time,” he wrote in the Star after he’d been sentenced in May. “In a few hours after you shall have read this, I shall be consigned to a gloomy dungeon, not for any particular merit of my own, but in consequence of your disunion. Under these circumstances, you will suppose that I am about to scold and chide you; but no, my friends and companions, the last glimmer of my lamp shall be devoted to lighting you on the road to freedom.”
He was to spend eighteen months in York Castle, behind the imposing stone wall and moat that guarded the complex originally built by William the Conqueror. His cell, though roomier than all the others, was damp and dark, and at first, despite his status as one of the country’s most well-known political figures, he was treated like any other prisoner, his only special privilege the ability to wear his own clothes. But O’Connor being O’Connor—ever the influential and persuasive gentleman—he was soon allowed to bring in some of his furniture and even a few exotic caged birds to keep him company. He had wine and his own food (“His meals are, we understand, served up from one of the inns in the city,” reported the York Gazette). Even the one prohibition explicitly spelled out by the government was flouted: he was back to writing his column for the Star. He could read its pages too, smuggled in weekly. And what he read was gratifying. Chartism, though still far from its goal, was maturing in all the ways he had hoped.
The future looked clearer, too. In July he received news that a Manchester meeting of activists had established the National Charter Association. They had created what was, in effect, the first working-class political party in history. Building up from the canvassing groups, small cells of activists would make up local chapters, with individuals paying a quarterly subscription of one penny, which would earn them the right to elect the national leadership. The collected dues would then be split between these local Chartist councils and the national organization. This was O’Connor’s vision of a movement that was locally rooted but unified nationally in its mission. The founding president, a Manchester mill worker, was the first political leader in Britain of any party to be popularly elected, chosen through the votes of individual members and not in a smoky back room.
O’Connor himself would not live to see the ultimate realization of the Chartist mission. That would take a long time. But he did see many more petitions. In 1842, the movement tried again to assemble signatures for a national charter and outdid themselves, gathering 3.3 million, a third of Britain’s adult population. Weighing six hundred pounds, that rolled-up petition did not actually fit into the House of Commons. The doorframe had to be taken apart, and when this failed, the sheets, six miles long, had to be unfurled and piled in front of the clerk’s desk under the astonished eyes of the members. William Lovett, who watched from the gallery, said it looked as if it were raining paper. It was then rejected by a vote of 287 to 49. There was even a third petition, in the revolutionary year of 1848, that gathered six million signatures, though that number was disputed by the clerk. By then, O’Connor had made it back into Parliament as a member, only to succumb precipitously to drink and depression. He died in 1855.
It took until the Reform Bill of 1867 for the right to vote to be granted to some working men—and even then, not all—and only in 1918 was there a semblance of universal suffrage, including for women. But while this took long to achieve, the immediate impact of Chartism was to elevate petitioning as a political act, one that bound the signers together and amplified their voice. Petitioning reached its height during the Chartist years of struggle. From 1838 to 1848 there was an average of 16,000 petitions every session of Parliament, compared with only 4,498 in the entire five-year period ending in 1815. In 1843 alone there were 33,898 petitions. This new constituency petitioned against unsafe labor conditions. They petitioned to limit the number of hours in a workday. They petitioned against debilitating tariffs that raised the price of grain. They petitioned against the persistence of the Poor Law. They made themselves legible.
Chapter 3
IMAGINATION
Florence, 1913
MORE THAN SIX THOUSAND spectators crammed into the Teatro Verdi that evening, packed like “anchovies in a tin,” reported the Corriere della Sera, “a restless and electrified public” equipped with eggs, dried pasta, and rotten fruit. They would hate what they heard and knew it before they entered the hall. The young men who took the stage were on a never-ending tour of incitement that had begun three years earlier, featuring evenings like this one, a serata, a theater of contempt. The target was their fellow Italians in the audience: for their way of life, their fecklessness and passivity, their old-fashioned habits, and their slavish worship of the past, embodied by their devotion to Florence itself, which the young men spat on, claiming the city was a graveyard suitable only for the living dead.
Squeezed among the theatergoers that night was Mina Loy, a thirty-year-old British artist, who had recently stumbled, by accident, into the passionate circle of these men, the Futurists. She wore flowing dresses and dangling earrings, her long black hair in a loose chignon and a perpetually eager look on her face. Mina had come to Florence five years earlier with a husband who had since abandoned her with two children. Her career as a painter, once promising—she had even exhibited in the Salon d’Automne in Paris—was now foundering. It was a time, she wrote to a friend, “of shilly-shallying shyness—of an utter inability—to adjust myself to anything actual.” The artists onstage—a sculptor, a poet, a painter—were completely unafraid before their public, declaiming their radical visions by reading from manifestos that smashed to pieces all the old pieties. Looking up at them, she felt what she would come to call a “risorgimento”: a resurgence.
She was desperate to extract herself from her creative rut. How else to explain why just a few months before, in the fall of 1913, after meeting all the most prominent Futurists at the Giubbe Rosse, a café on the Piazza della Repubblica, she had found herself emotionally entangled with two of them? They were rivals of a sort, and both present onstage that December night. One was the movement’s ringmaster, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who dubbed himself the “caffeine of Europe,” with his handlebar mustache and bowler hat, like a silent movie villain about to tie a woman to the railroad tracks. The other was Giovanni Papini, the brooding, serious leader of the Florentine faction and editor of the literary journal Lacerba, who self-consciously referred to himself, due to his toady scowl of a face, as the “ugliest man in Italy.”
Mina watched, astounded, as they addressed the roiling theater. Ardengo Soffici, one of the Florentine Futurists, later described the scene from the stage. It looked, he wrote, like “an inferno. Even before any of us opened his mouth to speak, the hall was boiling over, becoming agitated, resonating with savage voices, almost like a piazza full of people awaiting an execution.” This was the enraged catharsis the Futurists had hoped for. And as cauliflower and slices of cake rained down on their heads, they read out their manifestos and proclaimed their utopian (or dystopian, depending on the listener) visions. They hoped their ideas—radical, degrading, terrifying ideas—would wake the sleepy Italian people. It’s hard to know if the audience gleaned anything other than the impression of insult through the deafening boos, the toy trumpets and cowbells and whistles and rattling door keys, but the Futurists persevered. They wanted a modern, youthful Italy and a new sort of Italian, one who would mirror all that was thrilling about the twentieth century’s new machines, which were gleaming, metallic, pulsating, fast. By the time Papini read his manifesto on Florence, a city, he said, “marked by the past as by a disease,” the stage was slathered in food. “Throw an idea, not a potato, you idiot!” yelled Carlo Carrà, the painter in the group.
In spite of herself, Mina found the spectacle exhilarating. The evening ended with a lightbulb smashing against the side of Marinetti’s face as he tried to read out a political statement and a man being dangled by his feet over the balcony. It took the police, jumping to the stage with clubs in their hands, to end the show. If these intellectuals were driving so many people crazy, their art must be of the sort that crushed illusions, she thought. Mina swooned in a letter to a friend that the evening was as restorative “as a fortnight at the seashore.” The manifestos of Marinetti and his merry men were the clearest window into their minds and their aspirations for their movement. Public by nature, the texts also functioned as a sketch pad, an imaginative space where individuals or factions could dream out loud, elaborately.
But for all that was liberating about their ideas, the trashing of convention and tradition that resulted in their being showered with food, Mina found something disturbing there as well. Their ultimate ambition was a war that they hoped would be so cataclysmic it would purify the country and allow them to start from zero. The violence of that night was the point. Pain and blood were the quickest way to revitalize man—and it was men who were their sole concern. Mina found the superpowered machismo that ran through their writings ugly: it came at the expense of women’s humanity (a typical Marinetti taunt at a serata: “I’ve had enough of the femininity of the crowd and the weakness of their collective virginity”). The only real role for women in their idealized future was procreation.
Mina couldn’t deny that the Futurists were having an effect on her—“Personally I am getting very young,” she wrote to a friend—even as she recognized that she might be “the only female” to be so beguiled by them. Was there a way for her to extract all that was invigorating while leaving behind what demeaned and dehumanized her? Marinetti had birthed the movement through his manifestos, and every one that followed added a new dimension to the collective picture, another breath in its existence as a movement. If it was possible to bend their violent impulses toward a vision that might include her, that might ensure her own salvation not just as an artist but as a woman of her time, it was through the sort of writing she heard read at the serata. To begin a conversation with them as an equal, Mina would have to learn to speak the language of the manifestos.
* * *
—
IN 1909, MARINETTI had taken a medium that had lain mostly dormant since 1848, when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote their Communist Manifesto, and revived it to spectacular effect. The manifesto, with its future imperative tense, gave a writer the freedom to exercise his radical imagination, almost demanded it. This is what we will do. This is who we will be. Marinetti’s “Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism,” as he called that original document, was more than just a matter of personal expression. He needed the first-person plural. “We had stayed up all night, my friends and I,” Marinetti began. The form allowed him to speak immediately for a generation and make claims way beyond what was within his power to achieve—yet. “We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap,” he wrote. The manifesto was a perfect medium for conjuring. If Chartists gained from petitions the ability to cohere as a movement, manifestos provided the Futurists with a place to articulate their fantasies, always the first step to making them come true. The manifestos were part of an iterative process, each one instigating another that would build on the boldness of the previous one, expanding and sometimes correcting the vision and the tone they were determining together.
Marinetti set off a chain reaction. His first manifesto would pull in some of the most brilliant and promising young artists and writers then at work in Italy, who would in turn churn out dozens more manifestos over the next couple years, each articulating another aspect of the group’s core principles. After Marinetti’s initial salvo came the “Manifesto of the Futurist Painters” in February 1910, which was signed by five artists—including Umberto Boccioni, creator of some of the most lasting Futurist works. It demanded that artists take on more relevant subjects. In the same way that religious themes had inspired painters in the past, “we must breathe in the tangible miracles of contemporary life.” The proper Futurist subject, in other words, was new technology—factories and trains and airplanes—painted with a reverence once reserved for the infant Jesus. This manifesto was then elaborated on a few months later with the “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto,” which introduced the idea of “dynamism.” Like the newly emerging cubist works, art should capture movement rather than stasis, the experience of shouldering your way through a bustling city. And, in Futurist fashion, the painters laid down some precepts. “We demand, for ten years, the total suppression of the nude in painting,” they wrote—not because it was immoral, but because it was a tired subject best given a break.
And so it went. A manifesto about sculpture pointed back to an earlier one about music, and still another, about the state of architecture, alluded to the previous two. Marinetti was the catalyst, but each imaginative leap stimulated another, with dozens of manifestos landing week after week, each pushing things further. Their typography brought to mind this wild, internal conversation, using capital letters, words climbing and falling all over the page, as disorienting and exciting as the experience of standing amid a gaggle of feverish speakers. Marinetti’s original manifesto set out the structure and pattern, complaint followed by radical prescription, but then the form just reverberated. Each manifesto’s vision might read as far-fetched and nearly impossible to picture (music should do away with the “tyranny of rhythm,” and they wanted sculpture in which “the sidewalk can climb up your table”), but there were steps—here they were—for how to seize modernity. And art was only the immediate target of their sledgehammers. The cracks would spread throughout society, into the very way Italians saw themselves and their destinies.
This will to destruction had roots that were both philosophical and nationalistic. Marinetti was born in Alexandria, Egypt, his father a lawyer who had hoped to make his fortune there. The deracinated young man grew up in Jesuit schools and from a young age wrote a constant stream of poetry. Later, as a student in Paris at the Sorbonne, he was drawn to the most popular and provocative fin de siècle ideas then in circulation—Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion that the world needed supermen who would be “brave, unconcerned, mocking, violent,” and uniquely constituted to lead, combined with Georges Sorel’s anarchism, rooted in disdain for the compromises and incrementalism of liberal democracy. It was a heady and emotional mix, drunk by many young men at the time. Marinetti chased it all down with operatic notions of glory and sacrifice. Predictably, he loved Wagner, the grandiose, myth-obsessed composer, who “stirs up the delirious heat in my blood, right down to the most hidden heartstrings of my very being.”
In 1905, Marinetti founded a journal, Poesia, run out of his apartment on Via Senato in Milan. When his father died two years later, leaving Marinetti an inheritance that suddenly made him a rich man, he started a publishing house and even created a literary prize with a thousand-lira reward. He became a cultural impresario, well known for attracting the most avant-garde and anarchist writers and for needling the stifling conformism of the bourgeoisie. When his play La donna è mobile was received with loud jeering on its opening night in Turin in early 1909, Marinetti jumped on the stage and thanked the audience for “this whistling, which does me great honor.” Their anger enlivened him; it was an emotion he considered healthy for Italians. The next day the local paper, Il Lavoro, had a verdict on the strange man in a bowler hat who had confronted the crowd: “Not all of the nuts are in the nuthouse.”
Marinetti felt that Italy itself had let his generation down. A fairly new nation-state, then only fifty years old, it had yet to achieve greatness in his eyes. To the Futurists, the country was led by cautious, impotent leaders, too reverent of the papacy and paralyzed by a parliamentary democracy that didn’t provide national unity or a sense of purpose to its citizens. What Marinetti and his crowd wanted was something epic, and fast, a patriotic cause that might lift Italy out of its stupor. The cultural annihilation was only a prelude to actual, bloodletting violence, the quickest path to rejuvenation, as he saw it. Marinetti threw around words and images that now sound obscene. “We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene,” he wrote in his first manifesto. “Militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women”—the last point not an afterthought but a prerequisite for the creation of a new man, one not hobbled by what he saw as the crippling effects of femininity.
That initial manifesto, which appeared in newspapers in Bologna, Naples, and Verona, and then, explosively, on the front page of the French daily Le Figaro on February 20, 1909, was Marinetti’s attempt to instigate demolition so that something new might rise. The details about what that would be were still fuzzy. Aside from the incessant call to raze everything to the ground—“We will destroy museums, libraries, academies of every kind,” Marinetti exclaimed—the emphasis was on modernity and youth. “The oldest of us is thirty,” Marinetti, then thirty-two, wrote, “so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts—we want it to happen!” But other particulars were left to later manifestos. The medium, by design, trafficked in yearning. The Futurists were a bunch of struggling artists and, as such, were in no position to impose their prescriptions beyond their small circle. “Manifestos frequently overcompensate for the actual powerlessness of [the writers’] position with theatrical exaggerations, and their confidence is often feigned rather than grounded in real authority,” wrote the literary critic Martin Puchner. But it is in the crafting of these texts, with their wild visions, that manifesto writers come to believe in their own ability to “create points of no return; to make history; to fashion the future.”
