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Title: On Renzo Novatore Author: Enzo Martucci Language: en Topics: egoist, individualist, Italy, Renzo Novatore Source: Retrieved on June 6, 2011 from https://sites.google.com/site/anarchyinitaly/renzo-novatore/enzo-martucci-on-renzo-novatore-1 Notes: (revised from a translation by Stephen Marletta)
My soul is a sacrilegious temple
in which the bells of sin and crime
voluptuous and perverse,
loudly ring out revolt and despair.
These words written in 1920, give us a glimpse of the promethean being
of Renzo Novatore.
Novatore was a poet of the free life. Intolerant of every chain and
limitation, he wanted to follow every impulse that rose within him. He
wanted to understand everything and experience all sensations — those
which lead to the abyss and those which lead to the stars. And then at
death to melt into nothingness, having lived intensely and heroically so
as to reach his full power as a complete man.
The son of a poor farmer from Arcola, Italy, Abile Riziero Ferrari
(Renzo Novatore) soon showed his great sensibility and rebelliousness.
When his father wanted him to plow the fields he would flee, stealing
fruit and chickens to sell so that he could buy books to read under a
tree in the forest. In this way he educated himself and quickly
developed a taste for non-conformist writers. In these he found reasons
for his instinctive aversion to oppression and restriction, to the
principles and institutions that reduce men to obedience and
renunciation.
As a young man he joined the Arcola group of anarcho-communists, but he
was not satisfied with the harmony and limited freedom of the new
society they awaited so eagerly. “I am with you in destroying the
tyranny of existing society,” he said, “but when you have done this and
begun to build anew, then I will oppose and go beyond you.”
Until he was fifteen years old, Renzo included the church in his poetry.
After that, freed and unprejudiced, he never planted any roots in the
gregarious existence of his village, but often found himself in conflict
with both men and the law. He scandalized his respectable family, who
wondered what they had done to deserve such a devil...
...Novatore, who was influenced by Baudelaire and Nietzsche, asserted
that we had needs and aspirations that could not be satisfied without
injury to the needs and aspirations of others. Therefore we must either
renounce them and become slaves, or satisfy them and come into conflict
with Society, whatever kind it may be, even if it calls itself
anarchist. Novatore:
Anarchy is not a social form, but a method of individuation. No society
will concede to me more than a limited freedom and a well-being that it
grants to each of its members. But I am not content with this and want
more. I want all that I have the power to conquer. Every society seeks
to confine me to the august limits of the permitted and the prohibited.
But I do not acknowledge these limits, for nothing is forbidden and all
is permitted to those who have the force and the valor.
Consequently, anarchy, which is the natural liberty of the individual
freed from the odious yoke of spiritual and material rulers, is not the
construction of a new and suffocating society. It is a decisive fight
against all societies — christian, democratic, socialist, communist,
etc., etc. Anarchism is the eternal struggle of a small minority of
aristocratic outsiders against all societies which follow one another on
the stage of history.
Those were the ideas expressed by Novatore in Il Libertario of La
Spezia, L’Iconoclasta of Pistoia, and other anarchist journals. And
these were the ideas that then influenced me as I was well-prepared to
receive them.
During World War I Novatore refused to fight for a cause that was not
his own and took to the mountains. Astute, courageous, vigilant, his
pistol at the ready the authorities failed at every attempt to capture
him. At the end of the war the deserters were amnestied and he was able
to return to his village where his wife and son were waiting for him.
I was sixteen years old and had run away from home and my studies,
freeing myself from my bourgeois family, who had done everything they
could to stop my anarchist activities. Passing through Saranza on my way
to Milan, I stopped to get to know Novatore, having read his article “My
Iconoclastic Individualism”. Renzo came at once to meet me together with
another anarchist called Lucherini.
We passed unforgettable hours together. Our discussions were long and he
helped me fill gaps in my thinking, setting me on my way to the solution
of many fundamental problems. I was struck by his enthusiasm.
His appearance was impressive. Of medium height he was athletic in
build, and had a large forehead. His eyes were vivacious and expressed
sensibility, intelligence and force. He had an ironic smile that
revealed the contempt of a superior spirit for men and the world. He was
thirty-one years old, but already had the aura of genius.
After two months wandering around Italy with the police at my heels, I
returned to Arcola to see Renzo again. But Emma, his wife, told me that
he was also hunted and that I could only meet him at night in the
forest.
Once again we had long discussions and I was able to appreciate his
exceptional qualities as a poet, philosopher and man of action even
more. I valued the power of his intellect and his fine sensitivity which
was like that of a Greek god or a divine beast. We parted for the last
time at dawn.
Both of us were existing under terrible conditions. We were in open
struggle against Society, which would have liked to throw us in jail.
Renzo had been attacked in his house at Fresonaro by a band of armed
fascists who intended to kill him, but he had driven them off with
home-made grenades. After that he had to keep a safe distance from the
village.
Despite being an outlaw, he continued to develop his individualist
anarchist ideas in libertarian papers. I did the same and we aroused the
anger of the theoreticians of anarcho-communism. One of them, Professor
Camillo Berneri, described us in the October, 1920 issue of
L’Iconoclasta as “Paranoid megalomaniacs, exalters of a mad philosophy
and decadent literature, feeble imitators of the artists of opium and
hashish, sirens at so much an hour.”
I could not reply because in the meantime I had been arrested and shut
up in a House of Correction. But Renzo replied for both of us and took
“this bookworm in whom it is difficult to find the spirit and fire of a
true anarchist” to task.
More than a year later I was provisionally released from prison, but I
could find out nothing regarding the whereabouts of Renzo. Finally I
received the terrible news that he had been killed.
He was at an inn in Bolzaneto, near Genova, along with the intrepid
illegalist S.P., when a group of carabinieri arrived disguised as
hunters. Novatore and S.P. immediately opened fire and the police
responded. The tragic result was two dead, Renzo and Marasciallo Lempano
of the carabinieri, and one policeman wounded. This was in 1922: a few
months before the fascist march on Rome.
So a great and original poet, who, putting his thoughts and feelings
into action, attacked the mangy herd of sheep and shepherds, died at the
age of thirty three. He showed that life can be lived in intensity, not
in duration as the cowardly mass want and practice.
After his death it was discovered that, together with a few others, he
was preparing to strike at society and tear from it that which it denies
the individual. And in the Assizes Court where his accomplices were
tried, a prosecuting counsel acknowledged his bravery and called him “a
strange blend of light and darkness, love and anarchy, the sublime and
the criminal.”
A few friends collected some of his writings and posthumously published
them in two volumes: Above Authority (Al Disopra dell’Arco) and Toward
the Creative Nothing (Verso il Nullo Creatore). Other writings remained
with his family or were lost.
So an exceptional man lived and died — the man I felt was closest to me
in his ideals and aspirations. He described himself as “an atheist of
solitude” He wanted to “ravish the impossible” and embraced life like an
ardent lover. He was a lofty conquistador of immortality and power, who
wanted to bring all to the maximum splendor of beauty.