The roses that weren't our roses: letters of Sibilla Aleramo and Dino Campana

Literary Review, Summer, 2002 by Minna Proctor

   From even more distant silences,
   Golden far-away birds tinted in different colors
   Crossed and recrossed in the powder blue evening: the ship
   Already blind plowing ahead beating against the darkness
   With our shipwrecked hearts

--DINO CAMPANA

On a serene August morning in rural Tuscany in the year 1916, Rina Faccio, a.k.a. Sibilla Aleramo, self-styled feminist, romancer of some repute, and author of the scandalous autobiography, Una donna, met and fell in love with Dino Campana, the impoverished and outcast poet whose self-published book Canti orfici, stands today, seventy-five years after Campana's death in an insane asylum, as a veritable monument of modern Italian poetry. Their explosive, infamous love affair has its only record in a tortured correspondence (an excerpt of which follows) and in the scattered testimony of friends who watched the couple consume each other with destructive passion. Campana, whose verses are stocked with monstrous mother-whore characters and cadaverous virgins, had no real love in his life other than Sibilla Aleramo. Aleramo was a diehard, prodigious romantic in the tradition of Gabriele D'Annunzio. Aleramo's own biographers lament how her stunning beauty and uninhibited love life can often upstage her very important contributions to literature and women's political history. But poetry and love were to Aleramo both equal and urgent expressions of life, and when it came to Campana, her feelings went far beyond the pretty world of lyrics and romance. Campana's violence and madness, into which he descended utterly as the relationship degenerated, conjured up the most potent memories of her own embattled past. His literary genius epitomized her highest sense of worldly purpose.

The letters they wrote to each other and about each other during their year-long affair have intrigued scholars since 1950 when Aleramo released them for publication--in part because the letters are Campana's last biographical testimony before he was permanently institutionalized. No small matter, considering how much apocrypha has accumulated around the poet's extraordinary life, and how little factual evidence there is to correct it. Debate continues over whether Campana, an incurable vagabond, ever traveled and worked in Argentina or Russia; whether his abusive, fanatical mother drove him crazy, or whether it was syphilis or early-twentieth-century medicine. Campana alternatively amused and frightened the Florentine literati, who persisted in taking his eccentricity more seriously than his poetry until he was committed, at which point interest in his verse began to grow. In his introduction to Charles Wright's 1984 translation of Orphic Songs, Jonathan Galassi describes Campana's sensual fragments of prose and free verse as "one of the most radical and pure moments in modern Italian literature." He goes on to cite critic Emilio Cecchi's astute appraisal that Campana had "`passed like a comet' across the firmament of Italian letters, leaving it astonished, though finally more or less unchanged, so idiosyncratic and eccentric was his contribution." This brilliant moment of impact with the atmosphere produced a single book of verse, then Campana met Aleramo, fell in love, and became too sick to write again.

It's possible that the sudden and complete intimacy of their love set Campana off balance. Within months of that first encounter they were fighting and reconciling with such ferocity that if they weren't running from each other, they were being kicked out of boarding houses for disruptive behavior. Friends urged Aleramo to leave Campana, to save herself--while Aleramo begged instead for help: money, treatment, shelter, anything to save Campana. It became apparent that Campana was beyond saving, and Aleramo finally fled for good, though in her heart she "was his, had always been his." The complete correspondence articulates a frenzied narrative arc that neither writer would have plotted: Campana's progression from lyrical inspiration to paranoid fury to madness and desperation; Aleramo's progression from tenderness to panic to supplication--almost going mad herself in the heat of an impossible love--to resignation and flight. The lovers cross paths without meeting at the nadir of their passion and are lost forever to each other.

Sibilla Aleramo, Notes on Dino Campana--Winter 1950, Rome (from the Gramsci Archive, Rome)

... Weeks earlier in Florence, I'd heard talk--perhaps it was Franchi who told me--of a strange little volume: Canti Orfici, shabbily published at the expense of its author, Dino Campana. I brought it with me to the countryside. I read it, and was at once dazzled and enchanted, so much so that I wrote a few admiring lines to the poet. He wrote back: a bizarre postcard. At the time, he was also staying in the Mugello region, in Rifredi where he was born. There was an epistolary exchange, and after that, we met in Barco, a cluster of houses set in a ford of the Apennines of Tuscany.

The love flared, a wild delirium. Campana was already crazy, he'd spent several weeks in asylums on two separate occasions, but I didn't want to believe it, and at the beginning--really, for the whole month we spent together there in this place called Casetta di Chiara--he was peaceful, despite being caught up in a thousand whimsies, he was sweet and in love like a baby.