Page 37 - Studio International - April 1973

time. The relationship of Marinetti to French people . . . going around in search of money, Stéphane Mallarmé, as collaborators. The most
Symbolism is known. It is a matter not only of reached in him the point of exasperation.' This violent anarchist review published Saint-Pol
literary sympathies, but of direct friendships desire was the mainspring of a revolt against Roux and Emile Verhaeren, while the
and collaboration. In the symbolist circles of mediocrity, against unrelieved common sense, newspaper Temps Nouveaux had for
Paris, Marinetti, who arrived there at the age of against the irremediable stinginess of the petty contributors Stuart Merril, Paul Adam and
seventeen after being thrown out of the college bourgeois, and for exceptional behaviour; Laurent Tailhade, famous for the sentence,
in Alexandria in Egypt where he had studied, against philistine morality and for immoralism, `What do the victims matter, if the gesture be
completed his education and received his first against the mortifying monotony of everyday beautiful ?'2
encouragement. His early books, like the first commonplaces and for adventure. In some such The sources of this diffuse cultural anarchism
manifesto, were written in French and issued by framework the 'gesture of the libertarian' were above all and texts by Stirner, Bakunin,
the publishers of the decadents, while his acquires a sense of violent rupture with a Proudhon, Nietzsche, Wagner, Sorel.
enthusiasm for symbolist poetry made him its detestable situation. The last decade of the Anarchism, decadentism, Nietzscheanism,
most fervent propagandist in Italy during the nineteenth century and the first years of the intertwined confusedly and coalesced in
early nineteen hundreds. What are perhaps not twentieth were characterized by a series of such individuals, then very opposed but soon to be
known are the political tendencies of the anarchist gestures by Ravachol, Leauthier, united in common action. In more than one
symbolists, which had an influence on Vaillant, Emile Henry, Caserio, Ortiz, the band respect D'Annunzio hadprefigured Marinetti. In
Marinetti, in many ways decisive. led by Marius Jacob, the Bonnot band. the eleventh point of the first futurist manifesto :
However strange it may appear, the symbolist Outrages, hold-ups, attacks on banks, all `We will sing of great crowds agitated by work,
poets and writers turned, in the majority of created a balance-sheet of tragic negation that by pleasure, by uprising; we will sing of the
cases, to anarchism as the unique solution to all the organized working-class movement had to multicoloured and polyphonic tides in the
problems, as the only possible catharsis. The overcome before giving its own actions a real modern capitals . . .' is the theme D'Annunzio
character of such anarchism was apocalyptic, revolutionary force. had already tackled in 1903 in Laus Vitae where
tending to envisage a radical overturning of But they were precisely the gestures applauded he sang of the confrontation of striking workers
society in a general conflagration, the end of a by the symbolists. Octave Mirbeau considered and charging cavalry, a frequent event in those
world with no reason to exist. It is not just by the explosions provoked by the Ravachol years of harsh social struggle:
chance that one of Marinetti's first works, cavalry charges as 'the roll of thunder preceding We heard the clink
published in 1909, was entitled Destruction. the joy of sun and peaceful skies'. Jean Richepin of the bit in the mouths
Huysmans had perhaps been the first to express spoke of anarchist outrages as 'brutal of restive horses,
fully this need to escape the mediocrity of poetry'. In 1892, Francis Vielé-Griffin changed the gasps of unarmed breasts
bourgeois life. The hero of his novel, A Rebours, his review, Les Entretiens politiques et littéraires, we heard plebeian strength.
brought out in 1884, is typical: 'The desire to into an organ of cultural anarchism with Paul The blasts, the shouts, the gallop,
withdraw from an epoch of worthless vulgar Valery, Henri de Regnier, Remy de Gourmont, the hard whirlwind that passed,

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