The Quiet Before, page 9
The Futurists wanted war for war’s sake and so the question of which side to support wasn’t as important as whether to jump in. The Italian government, acting exactly as the Futurists feared, declared itself neutral, neither joining Germany and Austria (its allies since 1882) nor opposing them. For the Futurists, and all fervent nationalists, the choice was made simpler because they had long sought to wrench the Italian-speaking cities of Trento and Trieste away from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Burning Austrian flags was a regular feature of Futurist serate. Marinetti and his friends wanted to back the entente, led by France and England, and take by force land they believed belonged to them. The Italian government’s tentativeness on this matter was another sign of a liberal order in decay.
There were other reasons that France appealed. The home of the avant-garde, it was where Marinetti’s original manifesto was printed on a front page. The country seemed more primed for the upheavals of modernity. As Papini saw the debate, it was the choice of “invigorating wine against indigestible beer.” In a new sort of manifesto, “Futurist Synthesis of War,” which doubled as a wall poster, the argument for the entente was presented as a free association of adjectives divided by a giant “greater than” sign pitting the future against the past. On one side were the Central powers, Germany (“sheepishness,” “crudeness,” and “heaviness”) and Austria (“idiocy” and “filthiness”). And on the other, France (“intelligence,” “courage,” “speed,” “elegance,” and “explosiveness”), alongside England (“practical spirit” and “sense of duty”). It was manifesto as reductive schematic and evidence that all the creativity the medium had opened up—so attractive to Mina—was closing. This manifesto literally resembled an arrow dumbly pointing in one direction.
The outbreak of war found Mina summering with the children in Vallombrosa, a village in the mountains to the east of Florence, home to a monastery turned resort surrounded by a forest of tall pine trees. She was annoyed at the absence of news from the front (the Italian press was censored) and the general complacency and lack of interest among the expatriates and rich Italians sunning themselves around her. War, the consensus went, would end fast, and there was no reason to think it would affect them. Among the poems she began writing at the time was one that captured the atmosphere: “While round the hotel / Wanton Italian matrons / Discuss the better business of bed-linen / To regular puncture of needles.” Most days Mina spent walking through the woods, still dressed stylishly in dramatic woolen cloaks, long beaded necklaces, and oversized hats trimmed with flowers and feathers. She was anxiously waiting for mail—particularly for news from Marinetti or Papini.
Her affairs seem to have precipitated open conflict between the two Futurist leaders. Now fully aware they were rivals, they came to hate each other, with Papini taking to the pages of Lacerba to denounce Marinetti as a domineering force who had harmed the movement. After his trip to Rome with Mina in March, Marinetti had been on the road constantly. He had spent a few weeks in London, releasing his long poem Zang Tumb Tuuum, a war epic composed in a style he called “words-in-freedom,” which, as he had explained in a recent manifesto, did away with syntax, grammar, and punctuation (“These weights thicknesses noises smells molecular whirlwinds chains webs corridors of analogies rivalries and synchronisms”). Papini was also far from Florence for most of the first half of 1914. When Mina did briefly see him, he acted distant and fixated on Marinetti, as if testing her allegiances.
The war, when it came, slowed down the growing rift. All these thinkers, whatever their slight political and artistic arguments, were firmly on the side of intervention and obsessed with the challenge of bringing it about. It diminished the small differences and even, momentarily, some of the personal clashes.
For Mina, too, the war in its first months seemed exciting and galvanizing, a prophecy fulfilled. It allowed her, if not to ignore Futurism’s misogyny, then to get swept up in the intensity of the approaching conflict. She began fantasizing about going to the front to see battle up close. Marinetti, she soon learned, was busy secretly organizing a volunteer legion to fight alongside the French until Italy gave up its neutrality. He was so eager to experience combat that he was willing, he wrote to a friend, to offer himself up “as a volunteer or as an ordinary bullet to be placed into an enormous, long-range cannon.” It was overwhelming to suddenly see before them the war they had always wanted, and Marinetti and his comrades went into a frenzy of activity to try to take advantage of the moment. In the middle of all this, though, he took time that August to drive up to the mountains and surprise Mina with a visit, their first reunion since their trip to Rome in the spring.
They walked underneath the canopy of pine trees, and Mina felt the usual push and pull in his presence. He was as obnoxious as ever. “You’ve got a wonderful brain,” he told her. “But it’s like a gimlet. I wonder it doesn’t hurt you!” It would do you a lot of good, he told her, “if only you could stop thinking.” He had arrived with an offer to her: himself, “as a poor thing but a genuine article,” she wrote. He promised even that he’d been faithful since Rome—a claim she found laughable. All his gestures, his proclamations—he was impossible to trust. “I have quite a few sympathies with my sex,” she said to him by way of explaining why aligning with him would force on her a sort of betrayal.
She immediately regretted it. All her expatriate friends were making plans to board ships heading for America before transatlantic sea travel became too dangerous. There was little solid ground beneath her feet. Her connection to the movement had at least thrust her into the middle of a drama, one she wished to sustain. An American in Vallombrosa even overheard her say that she was going to go to Milan and have a child with Marinetti before he headed off to war. This momentary delusion ended up as a piece of gossip that made its way to a columnist for The Chicago Evening Post who, a month later, published the story of Marinetti, “a manifesto writing painter,” and Papini, a “pragmatist philosopher,” and Mina, “the woman who split the Futurist movement.” The column described Mina as having caused the two bohemians “to attack each other in their periodicals.” This woman “who loves Marinetti voiced, albeit a little theatrically, the august desire, so marked in ancient Hebrew literature, to ‘preserve the seed’ of valued men.”
She returned to Florence that fall, a year now since she had first met the Futurists and they had shaken up her creative life. The children would stay in Vallombrosa with their nurse. She was now almost entirely devoted to poetry, a highly abstract free verse, which she used to deconstruct her feelings about Marinetti (rendered “Raminetti”) and Papini (“Miovanni,” a man “outside time and space”). Some of her poems even appeared that year in The Trend, a small New York City journal, in which she was cited in the contributor notes as someone who “has interested herself in the Italian Futurists, led by F. T. Marinetti, and for them has renounced the brush and taken up the pen.” She was amused by this description, which made it seem as if she were part of the movement when in reality, as she wrote to her agent, correcting the record, she was “in no way considered a Futurist by Futurists….If you like you can say that Marinetti influenced me—merely by waking me up.” But to what, she still wondered, had she awoken?
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AS THE WAR ground on, the manifestos became manic, even more outlandish, panting at the chance to meet a world-changing moment when the Futurists, sanctified by battle, would emerge as the first men. How to make this renewal happen? How to imagine it? Above all, how to push their countrymen toward the necessary war, how to raise patriotic spirits and steel the nation? Their treatises now zoomed in on the logistics of reengineering society—the subtext of the earlier manifestos now became text—starting with the most trivial, superficial elements of everyday life.
There was Giacomo Balla’s “Futurist Men’s Clothing: A Manifesto,” which railed against attire that was “tight-fitting, colourless, funereal, decadent, boring and unhygienic.” He got more specific in his second manifesto, written the month after war broke out: “The Antineutral Suit: A Manifesto,” which demanded clothes patterned with bright, geometric shapes. Marinetti walked around in one of these garish “anti-neutral suits” in Italian red, green, and white. There was the jointly signed “The Futurist Synthetic Theater,” from early 1915, which prescribed how to use theater “to influence the Italian spirit in favor of war.” One manifesto, issued in March 1915, was simply called “The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe” and covered a range of reforms, large and small, including the form and purpose of children’s toys. The Futurist toy must lead the child to “completely spontaneous laughter,” must have “maximum elasticity (without resorting to thrown projectiles, whip cracking, pin pricks, etc.),” must be centered on his “imaginative impulses” and the “continual exercise and sharpening of his sensitivity,” but must also prime him for “physical courage.” A proclivity for fighting and war was best encouraged with “gigantic, dangerous and aggressive toys that will work outdoors.” The manifestos could still be a fertile sketch pad.
Marinetti was no longer onstage dodging vegetables. The serate had been, in retrospect, dress rehearsals for the combat now taking place in the streets. The first demonstrations against neutrality happened in Milan at his urging, and in September he was locked up for six days. Mina followed his exploits and after he got out of jail wrote about “the Brute,” who is “probably…dreaming of becoming Emperor of Italy.” Many more protests followed. The fight between neutralists and interventionists was taking place not on a grand scale but between groups of elites and intellectuals, students and political cadres. Marinetti’s skill at goading and rousing an audience made him particularly influential.
On April 11, 1915, after months of protest, Marinetti was arrested again at the Piazza Barberini in Rome at the head of a demonstration of thousands. Alongside him was Benito Mussolini, the dynamic Socialist activist who had recently been expelled from his party after he embraced the interventionist cause. The two men, both charismatic, both pushing for war, had praised each other in the lead-up to the rally. A few weeks before their arrests, Marinetti even claimed Mussolini as a follower, saying that “his recent actions, his attitudes and his rebellion are clear demonstrations of a Futurist consciousness.” The next day, Mussolini in his paper, Il Popolo d’Italia, said, “We are sympathetic to Futurism and understand what it stands for and its strength.” And in Mussolini’s speeches, one could hear what sounded very much like the tenor of a Futurist manifesto: “We want to act, produce, dominate matter, enjoy the kind of triumph that exasperates illusions, that multiplies life’s energies, and reaches toward other ends, toward other horizons, toward other ideals.”
As war approached, Mina still struggled to understand what she had gained from the movement. She was alone, watching Marinetti frantically egg on the fighting (“he’s getting fat & his eyes are brutalized,” she wrote to a friend) and feeling distant from Papini. She was starting to realize that Futurism’s greatest impact on her was in opening her eyes to her own exclusion. Even in these intellectual spaces of unfettered thinking, in the cafés where all was permitted—where you could even say “vagina”—the most exciting vision of the future these men could conjure demanded the relegation of women to the home. There was Papini and his sick fantasies of destruction or Marinetti telling her that even if women did one day get the vote, the average woman would still continue to exist only within the limited boundaries of femininity “as a mother, as a wife, and as a lover.”
The manifesto still appealed to her in this moment of crisis. One could say she had so internalized the syntax and semantics of the movement that, even in opposition to it, she could only stake her claim by using its language. But it was more than that. She saw the manifesto as a medium that gave her some freedom, a way to think through what she really wanted and then assert it, to let loose the urgent and fantastical. Even if she couldn’t move the men toward what she sought from Futurism, her attempt to do so, to remain part of this dialectic, was exhilarating to her. After all, it had given the men a tool for pushing each other and eventually the entire nation toward a previously unimaginable war. Maybe it could help her, too, to achieve things yet unseen and unknown. So one day in November 1914, she pulled out a sheet of white paper and in an emphatic cursive wrote “Feminist Manifesto” at the top.
The conflict that mattered to her now was the “sex wars.” The manifesto begins with a declaration: “The Feminist movement as at present instituted is Inadequate. Women if you want to realize yourselves you are on the eve of a devastating psychological upheaval, all your pet illusions must be unmasked—the lies of centuries have got to go….There is no half-measure—NO scratching on the surface of the rubbish heap of tradition will bring about Reform, the only method is Absolute Demolition.” This was insistent and direct and much less opaque than her earlier manifesto, and her audience was, explicitly, women.
The categories of “mistress and mother” needed to be discarded, Mina wrote. But this was just the beginning. A feminism centered simply on achieving equality was misguided. There would never be any. The two sexes were in a state of permanent war, and this was the most important fact to see. “Men & women are enemies, with the enmity of the exploited for the parasite, the parasite for the exploited,” she wrote. “The only point at which the interests of the sexes merge—is the sexual embrace.” Women needed to stop “looking to men to find out what you are not,” and instead “seek within yourselves what you are.”
She insisted that women grab liberation with their own hands and stop waiting to be seen by men. In her eagerness for independence, she let the manifesto and the freedom it permitted take her to some radical conclusions. Women were being deprived of the chance to cultivate themselves, partly because they leaned on their “physical purity” as a source of value. Her solution? “The unconditional surgical destruction of virginity throughout the female population at puberty.” (Mina later discovered she wasn’t even the first woman to propose this—testament to just how desperate feminists of the period were to free themselves from the confinement of their circumscribed roles.) This was undoubtedly a Futurism-inflected approach—brutal, revolutionary means, sapped of human feeling—but it was also her own take, a way for women to recapture power over their bodies and self-worth. She also asserted the right to enjoy sex and motherhood regardless of whether it was outside or inside the institution of marriage. For a woman, children should be “the result of a definite period of psychic development in her life—and not necessarily of a possible irksome & outworn continuance of an alliance.”
If Marinetti had used the manifesto to heap “scorn” on women, she had taken the form, bent it, and then used it to hurl her own scorn back on his limited, sexist vision of their potential. The manifestos were in conversation with one another. They could be used to modify old ideas, or even negate them—this was the process. And it’s what Mina had done with hers, signaling her indebtedness to Futurism while definitively breaking with the movement and all it represented to her.
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BY THE TIME Italy had entered the war in May 1915, Mina no longer had anything to do with the Futurists. Papini had finally split from Marinetti the year before, writing in Lacerba a series of articles denigrating him and his ideology as “juvenile, crowd-pleasing, propaganda…amateurism.” Mina, too, had come to realize how little her two lovers had ever recognized her as a full person; she was simply a conduit for their jealousies and hatred of each other. “Don’t ever live to see the day when the man you want sobs out the other one’s name in the ultimate embrace.” In the depths of her initial sadness, she expressed a sentiment that could not be more anti-Futurist: “The future has ceased to be as a future. One can only know that for the present one’s heart continues to beat.”
Mina volunteered as a nurse at a local surgical hospital in order to prepare herself to serve in the Italian Red Cross. She spent her days assisting doctors and feeling, strangely, animated by the dramatic scenes, an inkling of what she expected the men would see on the battlefield. “You have no idea what fallow fields of psychological inspiration there are in human shrieks & screams,” she confided to a friend in New York. “I’m so wildly happy among the blood & mess for a change & I stink of iodoform—& all my nails are cut off for operations—& my hands have been washed in iodine—& isn’t this all a change.”
Italy finally joined the European battle in response to a crescendo of interventionist agitation, including the return to the country of the alluring poet and nationalist Gabriele D’Annunzio, who toured cities and towns rallying the people, as well as secret negotiations with the entente powers to grant Italy the land it wanted from Austria. The Futurists felt as if they had achieved a great victory. In that hinge, after war was declared but before the troops began heading off to the reality of battle (to experience genuine bloodletting), there was the sense that an aspiration, imagined and hoped for, was being realized. The manifestos seem to have manifested it all. In the next issue of Lacerba, which Papini declared would be the last, a banner headline cried, “We Won!”
Marinetti, then thirty-eight, two years away from his self-imposed expiration date, hurried to enlist in early May, as soon as war seemed imminent, but he was deemed unfit because of a hernia. He had a rushed surgery, and then another for an attack of phlebitis, all so he could get into uniform—the thing he’d most lusted after. When Italy entered the war, he was convalescing in bed, and his followers had to carry him over to his balcony, where a crowd below yelled out the news.
