Giovannino Guareschi, the ordinary man

Journalistic orthopaedics, a highly fashionable professional discipline that calculates the angle of ‘straight backs’, curiously ignores or barely mentions the old X-ray of their colleague Giovannino Guareschi in its debates. Perhaps this is due to an excessive focus on the present; perhaps memory selects what best serves it; perhaps the aforementioned individual committed a sin from which not even Don Camillo – his most famous literary and later cinematic creation – could have absolved him. Beneath the thick moustache with which we recognise him from photographs and self-caricatures – and which he allowed to grow in a concentration camp – he sinned by openly identifying with a crowded ranks to which almost all of us belong but from which so many would wish to escape: the common man (not to be confused with the cousin-like, marginalised version of the ‘man in the street’). It is a species that stands in contrast to Trilussi’s ‘Caffè’ hero, strutting proudly amidst the trenches of talk shows and on the stages of melancholic September festivals, where the debate begins whilst it is still light and ends as night falls, amidst the applause, mosquitoes and the queue at the book-signing to collect the souvenir book – to be pocketed unread, along with the selfie with the author.

If the everyman Giovannino were to witness this, he would first roll his eyes, then regret not being able to draw further short stories and cartoons from it for his "Candido" to satirise certain contemporary epics by reflecting on his own life story. He would always do so with the Christian forbearance of the deeply devout believer that he was, a faith that enabled him to endure two years in German concentration camps rather than betray his oath to the king by joining the Italian Social Republic. Consequently, he went so far as to ask his well-connected acquaintances, who could have brought him home sooner, to desist, saying, ‘I shall return when the time is right’. He was finally repatriated, but Guareschi had lost almost half his body weight: he weighed ninety kilos on 8 September 1943, and had shrunk to fifty by the time he saw his family again. Forty remained in Germany.

He described himself as a “reactionary” and an “ordinary man”, even as his actions proved him to be anything but ordinary. “It seems to me, when speaking of myself and my own kind, that I am writing a little history of the millions upon millions of ordinary men who, with their sensible mediocrity, keep this world’s shambles afloat. That world that ‘exceptional’ men, ‘out-of-the-ordinary’ men, try to tear apart with their genius.” He wrote this in the introduction to Il Corrierino delle famiglie in 1954, and it was because of his writing that Giovannino Everyman would be imprisoned that very year and remain there for a full 409 days. No one had ever served such a long prison sentence for a press offence since the founding of the Republic. He did not serve it as a result of some lost legal battle with his arch-enemies, the ‘Reds’. No Peppone wanted him in prison. At most, those at Botteghe Oscure might have dreamt of smashing his head in when he began to torment the Partitone with his taunts about stupid and ‘hard-line’ comrades. Even Palmiro Togliatti, at a rally, snapped at him, calling him “the most idiotic man in the world”, and when the issues of Candido were making a crucial contribution to the collapse of the Popular Front in the 1948 elections, Guareschi was forced to leave his home accompanied by readers who even took up positions at the editorial office, because the common man, the reactionary, was certainly not protected by bodyguards as would happen today at the first hint of a threat. He was not intimidated; on the contrary, he relished the triumph in a story from Mondo piccolo, the series set in his native Lower Po Valley, ‘that wretched strip of land between the great river and the great road’, featuring Peppone, the PCI mayor, who, tormented by guilt, is unable to mark the cross next to the Star and Garibaldi on his ballot paper: he confides this only to Don Camillo and feels like killing him. That remorse stemmed from the famous slogan that Giovannino had coined: ‘In the secrecy of the polling booth, God sees you, but Stalin does not.’

It was the Christian Democrat leader Alcide De Gasperi who sent him on that bitter “holiday” in Parma prison, having taken him to court following the publication in Candido of a couple of his apocryphal letters in which, during the war, he was alleged to have urged the British to bomb the capital once more in order to break the morale of the population. Convinced that those documents, having examined them carefully, were genuine, Guareschi stood his ground, but the verdict was already a foregone conclusion: the court even refused to order a handwriting analysis and sentenced him to one year’s imprisonment and a fine of one hundred thousand lire. Ordinary men, when they feel wronged, react like unpredictable hotheads: so he did, and out of indignation he declined to appeal. He remarked in Candido: ‘To remain free, one must, at some point, take the path to prison without hesitation’. A hero of our time, and indeed a politician, might well have acted differently: the former would have apologised, saying that he was in the process of verifying the published documents; the politician, with dignity, would have refrained from taking action against him (as for the public, he would have believed whichever of the two spoke to their gut). Guareschi was unlucky, because following his conviction he also had to serve a previous suspended sentence of eight months for contempt of the Head of State. In a cartoon drawn for Candido by Carletto Manzoni in 1950, he had depicted the President marching between two rows of bottles like cuirassiers, alluding to the label affixed to the Nebbiolo from his estates: ‘Estates of Senator Luigi Einaudi’. A lapse of style for a resident of the Colle, although it was always less remembered than the colourful horns that the Neapolitan Giovanni Leone flashed at the protesters.

A hero of our times: if so much as a single politician responds with a formal legal letter to one of his half-baked investigations, an insult, or let alone satire, he at the very least launches a Facebook live stream to denounce the imbalance between the man in power and the journalist, the intimidating lawsuit, the precarious state of press freedom in the country, whilst proclaiming his firm resolve to stand his ground. Guareschi, on the other hand, much to the delight of the Peppones and quite a few Don Camillos (even La Pira, who was a saint but did get angry, was among his targets), took the extra burden – straight or crooked – upon his shoulders.

This evening, Sunday 20 September, in prime time on Rai 1, a film produced by Anele di Gloria Giorgianni and Rai Fiction, directed by Andrea Porporati with Marco Ferrazzoli as co-screenwriter, celebrates his life: Giovannino Guareschi – Non muoio neanche se m’ammazzano. Giuseppe Zeno is utterly convincing in the lead role, portraying “a radically independent intellectual”, as Rai Fiction director Maria Pia Ammirati recalled whilst presenting the preview on Thursday 16th at Palazzo Madama; the biopic is not merely a contribution to the programming schedule but to “collective memory”, a tribute “to a complex figure” who ought to be emblematic yet, as Giorgianni added, “has been forgotten by the mainstream”, despite the tens of millions of copies his books have sold worldwide and continue to sell almost sixty years after his death. But that Italy of Il Mondo Piccolo – “made up of local realities and contrasts, which ultimately boil down to a positive human relationship – however distant it may seem, has never disappeared”, said the President of the Senate, Ignazio La Russa: “It still exists; you just need to know where to find it”.

Anyone who has read Guareschi finds it irritating to hear him labelled a ‘humorist’, because they know that humour was to him like a bicycle: a favourite means of transport, but one used to lead the reader to glimpse that light of higher humanity which ultimately unites reds and blacks, rich and poor, fools and the intelligent. It was neither do-goodism nor pacifism (of which Don Lorenzo Bedeschi accused him) but trust clad in fustian and coarse cloth, which is why Don Camillo and Peppone have a right old row, yet in the end the priest blesses the mayor’s wretched Soviet tractor, which, after the holy water, finally decides to get moving. In turn, it is Peppone who, under cover of night and in secret, helps Don Camillo to return an old medieval angel to the bell tower, because the new copy ‘holds locked within its metal only the echo of the blasphemies of the foundrymen poisoned by politics’ rather than the hammer blows illuminated by the faith of an unknown 13th-century craftsman. Guareschi was, as Alessandro Gnocchi noted in a 1998 biography (Giovannino Guareschi – an Italian story), “the chronicler of a peasant and village civilisation stubbornly attached to its own identity. A radical antithesis to the city. An enemy of progress and technology that reveal their blasphemous face. That scream their advance like a curse’.”

Today’s heroes rarely laugh, and never at themselves. In 1942, however, the irreverent Giovannino—who, on leave from the army due to an ulcer, was finishing his book Il marito in collegio—witnessed the bombing of his home in Milan and remarked: perhaps the ‘liberators’ had been tipped off by the intelligence service that at number 18 Via Ciro Menotti ‘a humorous romance novel was being written’. For a contemporary hero, to spin a web of conspiracy theories based on certain American plots, all it takes is for a shopkeeper to ask for his health card in order to check his tax number; but unlike Guareschi, who was an ordinary man, he takes the conspiracy theory very seriously.

One pre-war summer, he cycled 1,200 kilometres to report on places and people for the Corriere della Sera, driven by love and nostalgia for his homeland. Among the notes from which his children Carlotta and Alberto (consultant on the film airing on Sunday) compiled the posthumous autobiography Chi sogna nuovi gerani?, there is a personal revelation that both illuminates and leaves a lasting impression. It concerned Marore, the tiny hamlet near Parma where he had lived as a boy: on two wheels he had explored that area inch by inch, right down to the very last lane, but he never wanted to venture down a narrow lane that began at a pink house; nor, as an adult, during his countless returns, did he ever venture there. Hear his reasoning: ‘Because it is a mistake to want to see and know everything: one must leave some room for the imagination. One must complicate life just a little. Humanity’s greatest misfortunes have been caused by those who sought to simplify life by planning the world.’

Born on 1 May 1908, when, three metres beneath his cradle, the socialists of a co-operative were singing the Workers’ Anthem, he was hoisted up to the window in the strong arms of the burly trade unionist Giovanni Faraboli – the future inspiration for Peppone – who predicted a glorious future as a comrade for the newborn. He was spectacularly wrong, but whenever Giovannino heard the Anthem again throughout his life, he was overcome by “heartfelt nostalgia”: perhaps because it was “the first music my ears heard, after the sweetest sound of my mother’s words”.

His funeral, on 24 July 1968 in Roncole Verdi, was largely shunned by the progressive intellectual elite, but also by the Catholic press, mindful of the De Gasperi affair and his attachment to the vetus ordo, vented their bitterness in various obituaries such as that by Don Bedeschi (whereas he, upon learning in his prison cell of the death of the ‘politician’ who had sent him there, had refused to rejoice). A handful of journalists and friends paid their respects to the coffin draped in the tricolour bearing the Savoy coat of arms. Enzo Biagi was there; Enzo Ferrari was there. ‘Petty Italy’ read the headline in La Gazzetta di Parma, the newspaper where Guareschi had taken his first steps as a reporter. A month later, the same pages carried the impassioned tribute paid to him by an already famous colleague: ‘For many, Giovanni Guareschi has “gone out of the way”. In reality, it is more likely that Giovanni Guareschi had simply grown bored. Bored of this drab landscape of souls, of this monotonous Gregorian chant of conformism disguised as ‘commitment’. And with him goes the last brave captain: in this domestic basin of cowards, tell us, who remains?”. Signed Enzo Tortora. Many years later, the misfortunes of life would reveal that empathy of his to have been, in part, a personal prophecy.