The Collected Writings of Renzo Novatore

The Collected Writings of Renzo Novatore aabb translated by Wolfi Landstreicher The Collected Writings of Renzo Novatore translated by Wolfi Landstreicher licensed under creative commons 2012 Ardent Press Introduction i Biographical Note iv 19 17 Thoughts and Sayings 1 Cry of Rebellion 4 Intellectual Vagabonds 12 Toward the Conquest of New Dawns 17 Wild Flowers 21 Toward the Creative Nothing 24 Twilight Ballad 59 Weeping 67 19 19 Anarchist Individualism in the Social Revolution 73 The Great(?) Brains... in the Time that Turns 78 Returning 86 The Expropriator 88 Toward the Hurricane 91 19 20 A Life 97 The Anarchist Temperament in the Maelstrom of History 104 In the Circle of Life 110 Black Roses 117 Spiritual Perversity 121 De Profundis and Germinal! 125 My Iconic Individualism 127 I Am Also a Nihilist 137 My Maxims 142 Parabola 145 19 2 1 In the Realm of Phantoms 149 The Revolt of the Unique 153 A Portrayal of Sorts 168 Introduction to the 1st Issue of Vertice 170 The Dream of My Adolescence 171 Beyond the Two Anarchies 176 The Mysterious 182 19 2 2 Black Flags 189 Of Individualism and Rebellion 204 A “Female” 208 With Sincere Pity 213 Noontime Songs 219 Whip 230 19 23 In Defense of Heroic and Expropriating Anarchism 235 Posthumous Eternity’s Song 249 Friendship and Friends 251 Renzo Novatore by Enzo Martucci 254 Renzo Novatore by Renzo Ferrari 259 Introduction In reading through and translating the writings of Renzo Novatore (a task that never felt like work, but always like intense and passionate play), I found not only a poetic rebel- liousness, but also the sort of coherence an egoist perspective can bring to the way an individual confronts life. By the time he was eighteen, he considered himself an anarchist and his practical conflict with the social order was immediately evident in attacks on what society declared sacred. But the earliest writings I was able to find are from 1917, when he was about twenty-seven. Here his egoist and individ- ualist perspective is already evident in his focus on immediate rebellion in the here and now, in his hatred for the variations on the social herd mentality in practice—democracy, socialism, fascism—and in his contempt for those willing slaves, the “bourgeois toads” and the “proletarian frogs.” The way most responded to government orders to go to the slaughter of World War I deserved nothing but such contempt. At the same time, the early writings also reflect the influence that anarchist-communist ideas had on the youthful Novatore. In Toward the Creative Nothing, Novatore expresses his hope for a revolution that will “communalize material wealth” as it will “individualize spiritual wealth.” And in this epic expression of poetic rebellion, as well as in the much briefer “Toward the Conquest of New Dawns,” Novatore imagines the coming of a new dawn of freedom that will then lead to the Great Noon. Here the influences of Oscar Wilde and Nietzsche on Nova- tore are evident. In The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Wilde calls for a form of anarchist-communism on the material level, aib precisely so that individuals could fully live out their unique- ness. And Nietzsche never completely eradicated the idea of a something higher for you and I to achieve... as ambiguous as his “overhuman” (Übermensch) may be, he still seems to refer it to the future, and certainly the Nietzschean “Great Noon” is yet to come. So at this point in Novatore’s life perhaps he still has too much faith in a future, and yet this may simply be a response to social ferment that was stirring elsewhere. This was, after all, the year of the Russian revolution. Through much of 1918 and 1919, Novatore was on the lam, because he had deserted the Italian army after being drafted to fight in World War I and had been sentenced to death. I could find no writings by him from 1918, and he wrote a number of the writings from 1919 under a pseud- onym. It seems that in his writings from this time on, No- vatore stopped talking of any “communalization of material wealth.” Instead, there is “the expropriator,” who is “a child of the distant future fallen into the world by chance,” and for whom “crime is the highest synthesis of freedom and life.” Then in September 1920, when workers all over Italy take over their workplaces in rebellion against their masters, Novatore doesn’t speak of any positive vision of the future. The only “hope” he expresses is for the destruction of the current social order and all its values. What he finds worth- while in this movement is that, at least for the time being, the “stupid and deceitful idea that property is something ‘sacred and inviolable’ has been swept away from the minds of the masses...,” but one shouldn’t take this to mean that Novatore had any faith in the masses. He explains his support of the 1920 rebellion: “The proletariat bowed and resigned under the burden of enslavement disgusts me.... The proletariat in aiib revolt is quite a pleasure for me. And I enjoy seeing the idi- otic bourgeoisie weeping and despairing because the sacred table of the right to property has fallen broken under the re- bellious fist of the new force.” But he recognizes that such large-scale uprisings are moments, and that sooner or later the “proletariat” will “stop to bow its tired head under the lash of a new master or … let itself be ruled by the grotesque and obtuse will of its utterly cowardly leaders...” And when they stop? “... my revolution will continue to blaze even when the collective one is extinguished under the spout of the red pumps made available to the yellow bourgeoisie. But blend- ing my fire a bit with that of the universe ‘when it is in flames’ is a fine caprice for me. Who isn’t aware that individualists of my type are bizarre, capricious and strange?” So says this darkly playful vagabond rebel. If, in Novatore’s earlier writings (and the two or three from the time of the workers’ rebellion and workplace oc- cupations of 1920), hope for a world in which all individuals can spend their life in striving for their own realization rather than serving a master is a major factor, nevertheless, even here, what is central is the immediate expression and fulfillment of oneself here and now in destructive rebellion against everything that makes one a slave. This is the coherent egoist thread that runs through all of Novatore’s writings presented in this volume. There are times when egoists may take joy in a large scale rebellion, times when they may even participate, but always with the awareness that these rebellions will end, if not defeated, then in the creation of new social arrangements, and in those arrangements, those of us who prefer never to be arranged will continue to rebel, and in our rebellion will mock those who let themselves aiiib embrace a new slavery. This was Novatore’s coherent egoist path, which he followed till the day he was killed in a shoot- out with carabinieri at a tavern in Teglio, Italy. Wolfi Landstreicher Biographical Note Renzo Novatore was the penname of Abele Rizieri Ferrari who was born in Arcola, Italy (a village of La Spezia) on May 12, 1890 to a poor peasant family. Unwilling to adapt to scho- lastic discipline, he only attended a few months of the first grade of grammar school and then left school forever. Though his father forced him to work on the farm, his strong will and thirst for knowledge led him to become a self-taught poet and philosopher. Exploring these matters outside the limits im- posed by the educational system, as a youth he read Stirner, Nietzsche, Wilde, Ibsen, Baudelaire, Schopenhauer and many others with a critical mind. From 1908 on, he considered himself an anarchist. In 1910, he was charged with the burning of a local church and spent three months in prison. A year later, he went on the lam for several months because the police wanted him for theft and robbery. On September 30, 1911, the police arrest- ed him for vandalism. In 1914, he began to write for anarchist papers. He was drafted during the first World War. He deserted his regiment on April 26, 1918 and was sentenced to death by a military tribunal for desertion and high trea- aivb son on October 31. He left his village and went on the lam, propagating armed uprisings against the state. On June 30, 1919, a farmer sold him to the police after an uprising in La Spezia. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, but was released in a general amnesty a few months later. He rejoined the anarchist movement and took part in various insurrectionary endeavors. In 1920, the police ar- rested him again for an armed assault on an arms depository at the naval barracks in Val di Fornola. Several months later, he was free, and participated in another insurrectionary en- deavor that failed because of a snitch. In the summer of 1922, three trucks full of fascists stopped in front of his home, where he lived with his wife and two sons. The fascists surrounded the house, but Nova- tore used grenades against them and was able to escape. He went underground one more time. On November 29, 1922, Novatore and his comrade, Sante Pollastro, went into a tavern in Teglia.

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