Critical Writings

The Pre-Futurist Years (18761908) Marinetti was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and received an education based on the arts and humanities at a French college. He became entirely bilingual and from an early age was a prolific writer of poetry. In order to see his works published, he founded a magazine, Le Papyrus. The twenty-one issues that appeared between February 1894 and January 1895 also contained his first essays on literary questions, new artistic trends, and political issues. In 1895, Marinetti's father decided that his son should study law at an Italian university and sent him to Pavia. After a transfer to Genoa, Filippo Tommaso graduated, on July 14, 1899, with a thesis titled "The Role of the Crown in Parliamentary Government." Marinetti's commitment to his legal studies was rather halfhearted. He spent most of his time pursuing his true calling, poetry, and published his works in respected literary magazines in France. At that time, Symbolism, inaugurated in 1886 with the publication of Jean Moreas's manifesto in Le Figaro, was the most influential school of literature, and Marinetti converted wholeheartedly to its aesthetics. He also served as a kind of literary agent, getting young French poets published in Italy and placing recent Italian writing in French magazines and anthologies. His name appeared as collaborator in a number of literary magazines, and from 1898 on he functioned as editor in charge of Anthologie-Revue de France et d'Italie. As a result of his activities as a "literary manager," Marinetti became a major force on the Italian literary scene. In 1899 he published an anthology of contemporary Italian poets and voiced his own views on recent Italian literature in essays for La Vogue. As he rightly observed: "Italian poetry has changed very little since Leopardi. To the eye of the observer, it appears most unsophisticated, absolutely unaffected by the modern spirit and contemptuous of the heaving research that animates the soul of our century." This lack of a "modern spirit" he sought to change, both as a writer and as a cultural organizer. Marinetti made a considerable impact with his first poetry collections, La Conquete des etoiles (1902) and Destruction (1904); his play Le Roi Bombance (1905); and his journalistic essays on literary and theatrical matters. He was also a talented musician and served as a regular reviewer of musical concerts and opera productions. At the same time, he made many public appearances as a reciter of French and Italian poetry. Chapter One Self-Portrait I had a strange, colorful, uproarious sort of life. I started off with rose and black, a blossoming, healthy little tot in the arms and between the carbon-coke breasts, of my Sudanese nurse. Which maybe explains my somewhat blackish concept of love and my open antipathy toward milk-and-honey politics and diplomacy. My father's Piedmontese tenacity was passed on to me in the blood. It is to him that I owe the great strength of his willful, domineering, sanguine temperament, but fortunately, I have not inherited his dense tangle of spiritual arguments, nor his fantastic memory which made him, in his time, the greatest civil law lawyer in Alexandria.1 On certain evenings, down there in the witchery of Africa, They would take us onto your dark, deserted beaches, A doleful flock of boarders Who crept along, placid and slow, watched over By our priests, strict and black . . . Little blots Of ink we were against the immaterial SBerghaus, Gunter is the author of 'Critical Writings', published 2008 under ISBN 9780374531072 and ISBN 0374531072.