Continuing Story of Pier Paolo Pasolini- Second Section
Correction: In the previous section I said that it was uncertain who killed Pier Paolo Pasolini's brother named Guido in the second world war. It seems clear to me now that Guido did join the partisans to fight Mussolini's fascist troops and the Nazis.
Yet he was killed by communist partisans who didn't like the more conservative politics of the partisan band that Guido had joined.
Chapter 22, Section Two of 'The Poet as Gay Activist'.
At the end of World war two, Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1945 had completed courses in philology and the aesthetics of figurative art at the University of Bologna. At the university he often went to the cinema club. He graduated from the university and ended up teaching in Friuli. Then in 1947 he came out as a communist. "Only communism is able to provide a new culture," Pasolini said.
Soon his politics and sexuality disrupted his life. He may or may not have had sex with young boys at the school. Whatever happened, he was expelled from the school as the charges said, "for corruption of minors and obscene acts in public places."
Pasolini claimed that the new rulers of Italy, the conservative Christian Democratic Party had targeted him because of his politics. By now the Christian Democrats were launched on their near 50 year rule of Italy. The Mafia, the CIA, the Catholic Church leaders, big business, and landowning aristocrats backed this party. Meanwhile the powerful Communist Party was confined to be the main opposition to the C.D.'s.
The Communist Party expelled Pasolini for corrupting minors. Pasolini's case became famous and he and his mother and father left Friuli to live in Rome. Here they lived for years in great poverty. "I was unemployed for years," Pasolini recalled. "I was ignored by everybody." Pasolini was now living in Rome among the very poor, or the underclass. In this way his life paralleled that of the great Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio. Caravaggio also lived among the Roman underclass in the early 17th century.
Pasolini got a job teaching again, but his wages were pitiful and he and his family remained really poor. Yet in the 1950's, Pasolini's luck changed for the better. He published his first big collection of poems. He made friends with some of Italy's leading literary figures like Alberto Moravia. In 1955 his first novel called 'Ragazzi di Vita' or 'Hustlers' in English was published. The government swooped down on booksellers and tried to have the novel withdrawn from publication. This was the first of over two dozen times that the authorities tried to throttle or censor Pasolini's works.
The government's case was overturned in a court case and Pasolini became famous. Then he got a job with the well-known director federico Fellini in the film 'La Dolce Vita'. He wrote more poetry, acted in a film and then directed his first film called 'Accatone'. It took place among Rome's underclass.
Pasolini wrote poetry throughout his adult life. Most of it leaned to the left. His poem called 'Ballad of Stalin's Mother' indirectly praises Stalin, the Communist dictator of the Soviet Union.
"I who was only life, my son," the poem starts,
have given you the love of death
Because the simple life of us slaves
is a force that in itself holds no dominion :
My son, how many mothers in the world,
are still making sons like you,
in Asia, Europe, Africa..
Pasolini also wrote poems of love to his male lover the actor Ninetto Dari. Dari had a wife and a family and in this poem Pasolini hints at Dari's uneasiness as Pasolini's lover.
"Your place was at my side and you were proud of this," writes Pasolini.
But sitting with your arm on the
steering wheel.
You said, 'I can't go on. I must stay here alone.'
(End of Section Two. To be continued).
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