Born: Rome, Italy, 17 March 1917. Education: Educated at the University of Rome, 1935-39, degree in law 1939. Military Service: In Spoleto, 1937. Family: Married Giuseppina Rabage, one daughter. Career: Journalist after World War II; lived in Grosseto, Tuscany, from 1950, where he was a teacher of history and philosophy; contributor, Il Contemporaneo, Il Mondo, Nuovi Argomenti, and other publications. Awards: Prato prize, 1955; Salento prize, 1958; Marzotto prize, 1959; Strega prize, 1960; Naples prize, 1970; Bancarella prize, 1976; Bagutta prize, 1978. Died: 29 January 1987.
Publications
Fiction
Allaperiferia (stories). 1942.
La visita (stories). 1942; enlarged edition (includes Alla periferia), 1962.
Fausto e Anna. 1952; revised edition, 1958; as Fausto and Anna,translated by Isabel Quigly, 1960.
Ivecchi compagni. 1953.
Il taglio del bosco (stories). 1954; edited by O’Neill, 1970; as The Cutting of the Woods, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, in Six Modern Italian Novellas, edited by William Arrowsmith, 1964.
La casa di via Valadier. 1956. Un matrimonio del dopoguerra. 1957.
Il soldato. i958.
La ragazza di Bube. 1960; as Bebo’s Girl, translated by Marguerite Waldman, 1962.
Un cuore arido. 1961; as An Arid Heart, translated by William Weaver, 1964.
Il cacciatore. 1964.
Tempi memorabili. 1966. Storia di Ada (includes La maestra). 1967.
Il soldato e Rosa Gagliardi. 1967.
Ferrovia locale. 1968.
Una relazione. 1969.
Paura e tristezza. 1970; as Fear and Sadness, translated by Peter N. Petroni, in Portland Review, Fall-Winter 1981.
Monte Mario. 1973; as Portrait of Helena, translated by Sebastian Roberts, 1975.
Gisella. 1974. Troppo tardi. 1975.
L’antagonista. 1976.
La disavventura. 1977.
L’uomo e il cane. 1977.
Un uomo solo. 1978.
Il superstite. 1978.
Il paradiso degli animali. 1979.
La morale del branco. 1980.
Vita d’artista. 1980.
Ferragosto di morte. 1980.
Il ribelle. 1980.
L’amore tantoper fare. 1981.
La zampa d’oca. 1981.
Gli anni passano. 1982.
Colloquio con le ombre. 1982.
Mio padre. 1983.
Other
Viaggio in Cina. 1956.
I minatori della Maremma, with Luciano Biancardi. 1956.
Poesia e romanzo, with Mario Luzi. 1973.
Fogli di diario. 1974.
Ultima frontiera. 1976.
II gigante cieco. 1976.
Conversazione su una cultura compromessa, edited by Antonio Cardella. 1977.
La lezione della storia. 1978.
Letteratura e disarmo: Intervista e testi, edited by Domenico Tarizzo. 1978.
Il mondo senza nessuno. 1980.
Il romanzo moderno. 1981.
Cassola racconta (interview), edited by Pietro Poiana. 1981.
La rivoluzione disarmista. 1983.
Critical Studies:
Letteratura e ideologia: Bassani, Cassola, Pasolini by Gian Carlo Ferretti, 1964; Carlo Cassola by Rodolfo Macchioni Jodi, 1967, revised edition, 1975; Carlo Cassola by Renato Bertacchini, 1977; Invito all lettura di Cassola by G. Manacorda, 1981; Existence as Theme in Carlo Cassola’s Fiction by Peter N. Pedroni, 1985; Il realismo esistenziale di Carlo Cassola by Vittorio Spinazzola, 1993.
Although born in Rome in 1917, Carlo Cassola chose Tuscany and the Maremma as the background against which he placed much of his early work, including the autobiographical novel Fausto e Anna (Fausto and Anna), based on his experiences as a partisan in 1944. This choice of a topographical setting that is neither city nor countryside but a twilight zone between the two—it is significant that one of his early works was in fact called Alla periferia [On the Outskirts]— provided Cassola with the possibility of exploiting to the full his predilection for an understated, almost colourless style of writing such as that used by Joyce in Dubliners, a book that Cassola admitted influenced him profoundly. More significantly, however, the peripheral setting of much of Cassola’s early—and best—work underlines his attitude to life and the transformation of life into art. In other words it gives him the possibility of expressing his fascination with a life lived on the margins of society, a life that does not have any precise or easily defined characteristics or outlines. Hence Cassola’s adoption, at the beginning of his career, of the word sublimare to describe his poetics, which he saw as the translation of the subconscious emotions of the artist into a language that was divested of all overt ideological, ethical, or psychological attributes. This early understated style adopted by Cassola reached its highest point artistically in the short novel Il taglio del bosco (The Cutting of the Woods), written shortly after the death of his wife.
In the novels published after The Cutting of the Woods, and in particular in Fausto and Anna, I vecchi compagni [The Old Companions], La casa di via Valadier [The House in the Via Valadier], and Un matrimonio del dopoguerra [A Post-War Marriage], there emerges a rather polemical tone, as the author seeks to investigate the disappointed hopes and aspirations of the partisans. His often ambiguous attitude to the achievements of the Resistance movement as expressed through the dialogue and through the protagonists’ attitudes characterizes this second phase of Cassola’s writing, and has been criticized by the Italian Left, including such writers as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Giorgio Bassani: when, for instance, the prizewinning La ragazza di Bube (Bebo’s Girl) was published in 1960.
From 1961 onwards, with the publication of Un cuore arido (An Arid Heart), Cassola may be said to have returned, more or less, to his early style in which the rhythm of the narration seems to coincide with the rhythm of life itself—the humble, usually uneventful life of unsophisticated characters who nevertheless impart dignity to that life by virtue of their calm and stoical acceptance of the odds against them, mostly of an economic kind. It must be added, however, that it is only in such works as Ferrovia locale [Local Railway] that Cassola manages to recapture the high artistic tone of his best work. For the most part, unfortunately, in this last phase, the reader is made increasingly uneasy by a sense of aridity in the lives of Cassola’s protagonists—a sense of lost opportunities and in the last analysis, of an inability to live life in any full or meaningful human sense of the term.
