Renzo

Note: The translations quoted here are from the book Novatore: The Collected Writings of Renzo Novatore. Translations by Wolfi Landstreicher. Licensed under Creative Commons.

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This November will be the one-hundredth anniversary, to the day, of the assassination of famed individualist anarchist Renzo Novatore, who authored reams of poetry and verse, but whose most incendiary and accomplished piece is a multi-part essay called Toward the Creative Nothing. Born on a farm in Arcola, Italy, in 1890, he sprang from the humblest circumstances. Yet his mind, the mind, and will of a ravenous creature, hungry to assimilate and learn the knowledge that might free him from a life he did not want, was already burning like Promethean fire.

An autodidact, he studied Stirner and Nietzsche, Malatesta and Kropotkin, poetry, and Baudelaire, and he dreamed of revolt and escape, refusing traditional schooling, and dispensing with the church and its sanctimonious and hypocritical authority at a young age. Already, inside of himself, the egoism of individual self was growing, creating a force within that would not only pour forth from his pen but would dictate his actions in his short, brutal life, up until the final shots rang out

His initial run-in with the hated law seems to come as early as 1910, with the suspected arson of a church; which could never be proved against him. Later burglary and theft would see him hiding from the authorities, up until the time he was drafted into service.

Italy, gearing up in 1915 for the Great War, expected every young body to carry a rifle in service. This was not for Renzo, who had been schooled that the individual WILL of man was a supreme and unyielding force and that it could not be contained or subsumed by the dictates of a capitalist class that demanded fresh cannon fodder for its wars of aggression. Instead, it was man's innate right to cultivate that spirit that yearned for liberation from within--no sacrifices for church or state, no bargaining with the free individualist spirit of liberty that would move man, in a Nietzschean sense, to the pedestal of mastery of NATURE.

Deserting the Italian military, he was condemned to death in absentia on October 30th, 1918. No matter. By this point, he had decided to live completely outside the law, on his terms.

He became insurrectionary, propagandizing against military service, and the power of the state. He was an accomplished poet and thinker, an autodidact of a ferocious intellectual nature, a true flaming spark of spiritual rebellion.

He famously held off a truck full of Mussolini's blackshirts with homemade hand grenades. As dapper as he dressed, he spent much time hiding in the forests, returning home only to say one last goodbye to a son who preceded him in death.

In all things he was extreme. However, only for the cause of himself. He saw the doom enclosing around him, or felt it instinctively, but decided that, as Nietzsche had dictated, he would go down to his fate loving it, celebrating the destruction as well as the inevitable rebirth. "Amor fati."

"For dying, they have drunk the sun." --Renzo Novatore

His contempt for the socialists, for the bleeding hearts, was as great or perhaps greater than his contempt for the forces of law, order, and fascist control sweeping his country in the wake of WW1. Socialism he appraised as the daughter of democracy, which had been given birth by Christianity. And Renzo Novatore hated the hypocrisy of the priests, the self-abnegation of the Christian dogma that posits dying to oneself and being subsumed into a New Man, one who has relinquished the value of his ego in favor of slavish adoration to a "God"; he quotes Bakunin as commenting upon this: "If he (God) existed, it were necessary to kill him. For man would then be nothing more than a slave." (Not an exact quote, but the general idea is the same.)

Instead, it was the egoistic individualism of Stirner he applied to his thought, and philosophy in which all that matters, all that exists in intellectual consciousness of any relevance to the individual must be, solely, the individual, and his (non-generative pronoun use) egoistic wants and desires. Nothing outside of himself can have any consideration. We may consider this the mark of Nietzche's philosophy of the "Overman," or we may consider it the mentality of a psychopath. But social distinctions and labels are fraught things, and some flames, igniting the soul like wildfire, will burn bright and hot no matter how they are doused by the tepid milk of societal disavowal.

Novatore joined the Santo Polastro gang, engaging in criminal acts and robbery and a failed attack on an armory. All the while, he was writing, writing, writing: essays, poetry, and philosophy, touting the individual ego as supreme in all things. He was a compatriot of the young, slain writer and individualist anarchist Bruno Filipi who died while trying to bomb a meeting of leading war industrialists. His friend, the third of the trio of brilliant Italian anarchists, Enzo Martucci, outlived them both, dying in the early Seventies.

Martucci describes a man that burned like fire, one that famously held off a truckload of Mussolini's blackshirts with homemade hand grenades. Most of this time was spent hiding in the forests, a wanted fugitive. He is described as small but athletic, with a "large forehead," and blazing, indignant eyes-- that anyone could see, the outrage that burned within him was exemplified in his writing for individualist and anarchist journals such as Il Libetario, L'Iconaclasto!, Nichilismo! Here, he exalted the self, exulted in his superiority as a man "beyond good and evil," someone who would hold hands with the anarcho-communist cause--to a point.

"I am with you on your aim to destroy society," he said, "but, as soon as you do, and begin to rebuild a new one, I will go beyond you."

He saw himself as a total and supremely worthy cause--his liberation of the spirit being that of the radical vagabond, the "Expropriator" as he so named him, who could take and burn like a wildfire anything that stood in the path toward his self-realization, his self-aggrandizement, the fulfillment of his indomitable WILL. Leaving in his path, "the burning trunks of old things."

Christian-Pleibian "toads and frogs" might ribbit to the tune ground out by the socialists, by the fascists (of which he had utter contempt for, as simply the socialist and the bourgeois entwined in a mutual death kiss; already a dead thing, lashing out in violence), but it was a futile croak. (Note: It would be another decade before fascism, in its totality, and exemplified by the Nazi alliance with Mussolini's Italy and Imperial Japan, would rise to create the bloodiest and most horrific war in human history.)

Renzo exemplified the exultation of Self hood and the utter redemptive freedom of the pagan spirit. His hero? No weeping saviors for him, but the Antichrist, whom he must have been taught to fear and loathe as a young boy; THAT was instead his model of a Nietzschean God, one willing and able to stand forth, to lead humanity downward, to the resurgent atavism of the pagan past, a time when war, battle, killing and lust were the sacraments with which men prayed to fiery, unpredictable fates, exemplified by the rising sun.

(But the noon, which was the time of exultant power, the halfway point between illumination and darkness, thrilled him more than any sunset, or sunrise.)

The Death at the Inn

It was at the hands of the Carabinieri, the Italian military police, that Renzo Novatore met his fated, tragic end, an end he had foreseen, one which he almost seemed to relish in his poetry:

This is the hour that comes before the divine hour of divine tragedy, which will give us heroic Death and heroic Greatness.

Oh delightful hour which gives me all the feverish intensity of spirit, I love you!

I would not give up all the bitterness you bring me for all the heroic sweetness in the world! I would not give up the fevers that hammer my temple, that burn my temples, for all the tranquility and peace of all the cowardly men.

Oh, Satan! Inspire me! Oh, inspire me, my divine brother!

Give me the hellish potential to set fire to all those virgin spirits that have not yet been buried in the dung heap of deceitful theories; Make it possible for me to draw a handful of lovers of heroic, libertarian greatness and Heroic Death close to me!

And death was, indeed, never far from him. Finally, on November of the 29th, 1922, Heroic Death, or, at the very least, one to be remembered in folklore and ballad and verse, was enacted upon his form. It is perhaps fitting that this poet and philosopher, who was also an outlaw, should die like a Western cowboy, in a shoot-out with the forces of law and order he so roundly and entirely despised.

The Carabinieri, the Italian military police, lay a trap for him, as well as for his comrade Santo Polastro, leader of the gang, dressed as hunters. Renzo Novatore was shot dead, but Polastro managed to escape.

It was at an inn or tavern in Bolzaneto, near Genova, that Novatore met his fate. Also killed in the gun battle was Marasciallo Lempini, a member of the Carabinieri, and a policeman was injured.

So stopped up the ever-flowing stream of Novatore's iconoclastic thoughts, his egoistic rebellion against all the so-called "norms" of a society to which he felt no allegiance, whose icy clutches strangled what he thought of as the true, undefiled, supreme SELF that lurked beneath his bosom. (Or, perhaps, I haven't understood him at all.)

To reiterate, he returned once to his wife, briefly, to see a dying son--one last time. "I am a strange, many-sided man," he quipped in one piece. Indeed, that he was.

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There is a great deal of similarity between Novatore and the pseudonymous author of the infamous, blacklisted book Might is Right, the author calling himself "Ragnar Redbeard" (believed to have been Arthur Desmond). The egoism, uncompromising individualism, and cynical contempt for generally-accepted social mores and conventions, the "vision quest" of the Übermensch, the "Will to Power," as well as the thunderous prose, are very similar. Both seem to exalt the idea of war and conflict as the "threshing floor" of humankind. Both spit at conventional morality as the stuff of pernicious superstitious nonsense.

"Cursed are the believers in Good and Evil, for they are frightened by shadows," says Ragnar Redbeard. Novatore puts it thusly:

"Good and evil, as they are valorized by the vulgar herd, and interpreted by the people and the rulers of the people, are empty--if still frightening--phantoms against which we turn, with full and mature consciousness, all our sacrilegious irreverence made up of Stirnerian logic, along with the roaring, superior, serene laughter of the wise man Zarathustra."

Renzo wished to live at a level of intensity placing him beyond the herd of servile sheep, beyond the decadence and despair of bourgeois servitude, of the ugly stranglehold that society wished to murder that which was within him; yearning, always yearning to break free, at the noontide, halfway between darkness and dawn, as his soul climbed a mountain in his short life, looking toward the stars above.

Was he a brutal Darwinist, then? No. Did he love war? Well, yes and no. "I am a strange, many-sided man." The proletariat in revolt was his passion and pleasure. But did he see them as more than liberated sheep? He realized that, sooner or later, the old order would reestablish itself. The only revolution he could countenance as a "success" freed one from within, that held the SELF as the supreme center of all things, "communalized" wealth notwithstanding.

Of Renzo Novatore, his son said, "Renzo was not a pacifist, but it was because he intensely loved war that he so hated it intensely. And for having given his lordly "NO!" to this, he was condemned to death."

And then he relates Renzo, writing in 1920 about his fugitive years as a war deserter:

And if the green forest clasped a BANDIT in its flowery arms, the stinking barracks and the loathsome trenches didn't shut the soldier in their muddy mouths. But when at times I passed through the endless green prairies and--in Spring--looked upon the whole marvelous feast of flowers that stretched out like a scented, laughing lover along the silent banks of a solitary river, I wasn't able to conceive why other men could search for me with such mindless and brutal stubbornness to bring me death.

Why--I asked myself--shouldn't a bouquet of these fresh and wild roses be enough to disarm the mindless rage of the ones who want to kill me? Why, before so much music, so much poetry, and so much beauty shouldn't everyone born of woman fraternally embrace his like, moved?

Why indeed.

Suggested Reading.

Novatore, Renzo. Novatore: The Collected Writings of Renzo Novatore. Translated by Wolfi Landstreicher. (Berkley. Ardent Press. 2012.)