Signor Papini has publicly read himself out of the party, but apostasy of one kind or another is almost as necessary to him as food, and most people still regard him as a Futurist, though he refuses to subscribe to the clause in the constitution of the literary Futurists of Italy bearing on love, published by their monarch Signor Marinetti in that classic of Futuristic literature "Zang Tumb Tumb" and in "Democrazia Futurista."
It is now twenty years since there appeared unheralded in Florence a literary journal called the Leonardo, whose purpose in the main seemed to be to overthrow certain philosophic and socialistic doctrines, Positivism and Tolstoian ethics. The particularly noteworthy articles were signed Gian Falco. It soon became known that the writer was one Giovanni Papini, a contentious, self-confident youth of peculiarly inquisitive turn of mind, and of sensitiveness bordering on the pathological, an omnivorous reader, an aggressive debater. He was hailed by a group of youthful literary enthusiastics as a man of promise.
In the twenty years that have elapsed since then he has written more than a score of books, short stories, essays, criticisms, poetry, polemics, some of which, such as "L'Uomo Finito" ("The Played-Out Man"), "Venti Quattro Cervelli" ("Twenty-four Minds"), and "Cento Pagine di Poesia" ("One Hundred Pages of Poetry"), have been widely read in Italy and have known several editions. Save for a few short stories, he has not appeared in English, though there seems to be propaganda in his behalf directed by himself and by his friends of his publishing-house in Florence to make him known to foreigners. Like other Italian propaganda it has not been very successful and this is to be regretted. It is due in part to the fact his advocates have claimed too much for him.
Signor Papini is like Mr. Arnold Bennett in that they both know the reading public are personally interested in authors. From the beginning he and his friends have capitalized his poverty of pulchritude and his pulchritudinous poverty. Signor Giuseppe Prezzolini, in a book entitled "Discorso su Giovanni Papini" has devoted several pages to his person, which, he writes, "is like those pears, coarse to the touch but sweet to the palate," yet I am moved to say that the eye long habituated to resting lovingly upon somatic beauty does not blink nor is it pained when it rests upon Giovanni Papini.
In one of his latest books—it is never safe to say which is really his last, unless you stand outside the door of the bindery of La Voce—in one of his latest books, entitled "Testimonials," the third series of "Twenty-four Brains," he reverts to this, and says that his person is "so repugnant that Mirabeau, world-famed for his ugliness, was compared with him an Apollo."
He does not get the same exquisite pleasure from deriding his qualities of soul, but, as the face is the mirror of the soul, no one is astonished to learn that "this same Papini is the gangster of literature, the tough of journalism, the Barabbas of art, the dwarf of philosophy, the straddler of politics, and the Apache of culture and learning." Nevertheless, no prudent, sensitive man should permit himself to say this or anything approximating it in Papini's hearing, for not only has he a card index of substantives that convey derogation, but he has perhaps the fullest arsenal of adjectives in Italy, and has habituated himself to the use of them, both with and without provocation.
I have been told by his schoolmates and by those whom he later essayed to teach that as a youth he was inquisitive about the nature of things and objects susceptible to physical and chemical explanation. His writings indicate that his real seduction was conditioned by philosophic questions. Early in life he displayed a symptom which is common to many psychopaths—an uncontrollable desire to read philosophical writers beyond their comprehension. In the twenty years that he has been publishing books he has constantly returned to this practice, as shown by his "Twilight of the Philosophers," "The Other Half," and "Pragmatism."
His first articles in the Leonardo, which now make up the volume known as "Il Tragico Quotidiano e il Pilota Cieco" ("The Tragedy of Every Day and the Blind Pilot"), are sketches and fantasies of a personal kind, some of them fanciful and charming, some with a touch of inspired extravagance that recall Baudelaire and Poe, and faintly echo Oscar Wilde's "Bells and Pomegranates," Dostoievsky's "Poor People," and Leonida Andreieff's "Little Angel." Some of the stories have a weird touch. Others are founded in obsession that form the ancillæ of psychopathy. Take, for instance, the man with a feeling of unreality who did not really exist in flesh and blood but was only a figure in the dream of some one else, and who felt that he would be vivified if only he could find the sleeper and arouse him. This idea is not of infrequent occurrence in that strange disorder, dementia precox; take again the man who found his life dull and who covenanted with a novelist to do his bidding in exchange for being made an interesting character; and the two men who changed souls; and the talks with the devil interpreting scripture. All these awaken an echo in the reader's mind of either having been heard before or they bring the hope that they never will be heard again.
Although his early writings had an arresting quality, it was not until he undertook to edit some Italian classics published under the title of "I Nostri Scrittori" ("Our Writers") that they began to take on the features that have since become characteristic and which have been described by his admirers as "rugged, vigorous, virile, rich, neologistic," and everything else the antithesis of pussy-foot. This feature, if feature it can be called, showed itself first in "L'Uomo Finito," a book which is admitted to be an autobiography. It introduces us to an ugly, sensitive, introspective, mentally prehensile child of shut-in personality who is not only egocentric at seven but who loves and exalts himself and despises and disparages others.
This unlovable child with an insatiate appetite for information found his way to a public library and determined to write an encyclopædia of all knowledge. His juvenile frenzy came its first cropper when he reached the letter "B," and he was submerged with the Bible and with God. The task was too big, he had to admit, but his ambition to accomplish some great and thorough piece of work was undaunted. He began a compendium of religions, then of literature, and last of the Romance languages.