Modernity and the Use of Fear

Readers of this newsletter are, I think, also interested in the process that brings a book to print. It will probably come as no surprise that it is a pretty haphazard affair. There are a great number of good books out there, and sadly some of them never get published. They are as nothing compared with the avalanche of less than good books. Hence it is not so easy to achieve the first and most crucial task: that of choosing the right novels. There are however things that can be ordered within the chaos of happenchance.

Every year foreign publishers come to Scotland in search of Scottish books to translate and publish. This was how I came into contact with Bompiani, an Italian publisher with an excellent reputation particularly in fiction and based in Milan. Failing in my entrepreneurial duties, I found myself interested in what the potential buyer was publishing and the business transaction went in the opposite direction. I was sent a number of books, which I didn’t always read through to the end, until I came across Corrado Alvaro’s Fear in the World, which immediately caught my attention for many reasons. It is a dystopia, a love story (of sorts), an explicit comment on the high point of Stalinist repression, an extremely veiled comment on Italian fascism, a bleak comment on alienation in modern society (also found in his first novel, The Man in the Labyrinth) and a stylish work of literature couched in a poetic prose full of symbolic references.

My mind was more or less made up, but two factors concerned me: it could be very difficult to translate, and would it sell in a book market that isn’t enamoured of the translated novel? Neither of those concerns held me back for long, and that is probably typical of my approach: the first concern was also an interesting challenge and the second has only ever been an irritant that I largely ignore at this stage of the process. So the process is governed not by economic self-interest, but by the personality of the publisher, and this has been the case since the sixteenth century (I once studied publishing in sixteenth-century Italy and it was highly inventive and completely wild, though everyone was always dreaming of making money like Aretino, but they never did and this didn’t put them off). Having dismissed Milton Friedman (who didn’t invent that miserable lie about free lunches, but merely adopted it), I shall move on to the subject in hand.

Corrado Alvaro was a successful novelist and journalist throughout the fascist period, or as successful as could be expected with a regime that was not amused by his antifascist statements. He emerged from that period as someone who could well have expected great success, but like the talented Sicilian writer, Giuseppe Borgese, his face didn’t really fit in that new world. Both were individualistic writers and often perceived as very similar, though Borgese was more controlled in his narration, whereas Alvaro was bolder in his expressionism, and is generally considered to be one of the founders of magical realism (yes, I too have only recently discovered that it wasn’t invented in the sixties in Latin America). He died in 1956 and by the eighties his star appeared to have fallen, but fortunately it has been rising in recent times. He is mainly known for Gente in Aspromonte (published in English as Revolt in Aspromonte – Aspromonte being the part of Calabria he came from). This successful title (published in 1930, and strangely one of Mussolini’s favourites) led to him being categorised as a “regionalist” author whilst in fact he was a highly cosmopolitan intellectual, as his other writings demonstrate.

 Fear in the World was published in 1938 (a decade earlier than Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four) and written after he had travelled in the Soviet Union during the first show trials. No countries or cities are mentioned by name, but we know that it’s set in Russia because amongst other things they use roubles and kopecks. The man “with a low forehead” and a black moustache is clearly Stalin and he remains a distant figure precisely because Alvaro is fascinated by the quasi-religious nature of the personality cult. The north-south divide seems more appropriate to fascist Italy than soviet Russia which is more of a west-east country. The civil war which is still being waged doesn’t reflect the reality of the Russian civil war, but this is an imagined reality however much his travels may have influenced him. In this fiction, Alvaro is more interested in the meaning of events than historical fact. And of course he was writing against the censors.

 Fear in the World is the original title Alvaro chose; it says exactly what the book is about. But the censors imposed their own title, Man Is Strong, which in spite of its ugliness has stuck and is still the title used for recent editions (to revert to Alvaro’s original one would only confuse people in Italy). The relationship between the explicit and the implicit was better understood by the German censors who simply banned the book.

Alvaro isn’t so much interested in why the politics of fear is used as in how the populace seem to be unable to resist its irrational pull and indeed participate in its allure even when reason tries to steady their nerves. Homo sapiens, in spite of what the fancy name for ourselves implies, is a highly irrational animal, or so Alvaro clearly thinks and current events tend reaffirm his view. Not only the content of the novel but the whole way he goes about narrating this novel (and to some extent not only this novel) is itself an expression of the way we think or the way he thinks we think. A form of free indirect discourse which resembles in some ways the stream of consciousness (that now almost embarrassing term) in one particular way: the narration reflects the inner thoughts of the character currently front of stage. But Alvaro has a varied palette, as he also puts thoughts in inverted commas (these are perhaps the very clear conscious thoughts rather settled prejudices and unconscious thoughts). A translator should be wary of interfering with such devices, because they are clearly carefully thought-out. He also has thematic repetitions that reflect items and obsessions important to the central characters.

 This is particularly true of Dale, the male protagonist and dominant figure, whose hotel room will become very familiar to whoever reads this novel. Its furniture and even more so its ornaments left over from a previous era appear to have a life of their own, though of course it is Dale who confers this inner life on such objects, which have a somewhat judgemental attitude to what they witness (that verb is used occasionally by Alvaro), as do the buildings which are affronted by the way they’re now used and the general “carry-on” that surrounds them.

 Alvaro isn’t interested in the fact that these stately buildings are overcrowded precisely because the Tsarist regime never bothered about the question of housing its population, which had in any case been mainly rural. Fear in the World is a political novel only in the sense that all novels are political novels: he is interested in the psychology and what we so often refer to as the human condition, but really the human condition in the interwar years. This is as true of this novel published just before the Second World War as it is of his first one published in 1921, just after the First World War. If you think that this suggests a degree of nostalgia in the novel, you would be right but it is nostalgia closer to that of Joseph Roth: it is relative nostalgia rather than dreamy nostalgia of a perfect past; perhaps it is not so much nostalgia as a powerful sense of being decidedly unimpressed by the post-war reality and its own self-image.

 I don’t have room here to detail all the merits of this great novel, but I will do so in the introduction I’ll write before it is printed in August or September. For now I will take a little more of your time on Orwell and the translation process. Orwell seems almost obligatory given the way he dominates the history of the dystopia (quite rightly so, although we should also remember Yevgeny Zamyatin, the dapper Bolshevik who tore up his party card in disgust two or three years after the revolution, and whose We was supposedly the first dystopia, though he in turn was influenced by H.G. Wells). Perhaps surprisingly the parallels between Fear in the World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are many: both are anti-Soviet, but not in a particularly informed way. If we want to know about the mechanics of the purges, we turn to Victor Serge, Arthur Koestler and, for a later period, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Our two here are dystopias proper and not witness novels with a very different purpose. Both have a love story at their centre. Both attribute great importance to the interrogator (Orwell’s O’Brien and Alvaro’s Inquisitor, a name that is also outdated in Italian and reflects the religious theme) who delight in philosophical and political arguments with their victims (a little like the philosopher-policeman in Crime and Punishment). Both seem increasingly omnipotent, though in both books the workings of repression are ramshackle and survive principally on the persuasive force of fear and a crowd mentality. In both books the male protagonist is not initially a rebel. They want to be accepted but something innate in their characters makes this impossible. And in both cases, their muddled, half-cocked rebellion is useful to the system. Surveillance and the abuse of language are other common themes. And finally and quite bizarrely (or perhaps not, given that an interrogation must take place somewhere), both books have a room: Orwell’s “Room 101” and Alvaro’s more modest “Room No. 3”.

 These were two very different authors: Orwell was a dedicated political activist first and foremost. He and MI5 agreed on one thing, that he was a communist fellow traveller before Spain. It was the Spanish Civil War that turned him into a ferocious critic of the Soviet Union. Alvaro was a poet and literary figure first and foremost (though both authors were prolific journalists as well). O’Brien could be Beria, but the Inquisitor seems to come from another century. Anyone with a little knowledge of twentieth-century politics could read Nineteen Eighty-Four or Animal Farm and recognise Trotsky and the Bolshevik old guard, but apart from Stalin this is not the case in Fear in the World, and there seems to be little to distinguish the two sides to the civil war. There is a great deal more plot in Orwell’s dystopia, which is a much more conventional novel. In Fear in the World, the same dialogue occasionally recurs in different parts of the book to demonstrate that the novel doesn’t evolve in chronological order. It is a more literary work in the sense that a great deal of thought has been put into its structure and the way the story is told. At the risk of over-defining this work, I feel that I have to say that it is an experimental novel, but one that is surprisingly accessible. A good combination. 

 One relatively minor character, who may be in part the author’s alter ego, makes an interesting statement on literature: “In my opinion writers don’t have to say anything, nor do they have to have any purpose or aim at any particular result. Look at the classics. The business of teaching something to someone was a dismal one – not for artists. Today civilisation and progress offer so many forms of teaching that art could be dispensed with. Art is the artist himself.” If that is Alvaro’s manifesto for this book, then it confirms my hunch that this is an open text designed to make readers think about these matters and come to their own conclusions.

 I have described my feelings when I first read the novel, but when I was translating I started to have second thoughts. Don’t get me wrong, the translation was very enjoyable, but I had doubts about whether the novel would work in English, and even that my assessment of the original had been wrong – that I had missed serious flaws in the work. Translators work through a novel at a slower pace, lingering on every clause as they reimagine it in another language, and they are like painters obliged to be too close-up to the canvass because that’s where they apply the paint. Painters, at least, can take a few steps backwards and assess their work, but this opportunity is not open to the translator who must push on until then end, sometimes unsure whether it is worth the effort (but at this stage there’s no turning back). Only once I was reading through the completed translation did I realise that my fears had been unwarranted. I am now convinced that Fear in the World does work very well in English and that it brings to anglophone readers and writers many possibilities in terms of style, structure and technique that they could enjoy or imitate. Although written at a time when the content was highly topical, it feels like this is the book that puts those terrible years into their historical context. Possibly Alvaro was unaware of the enormity of those crimes, but now this only adds to the power of the work which mainly concentrates on the psychology of fear which has since been repeated elsewhere on various scales. It is perhaps an inherent part of modernity in a world where the technological means of control and manipulation are far more sophisticated. If so, then Fear in the World can continue to make us think.

Allan Cameron, Glasgow, May 2020