Happy Birthday, Giovannino Guareschi (Part 3 of 3)
About five years ago, at the old blog, I decided to explain my chosen online alias (then, "camillofan") with a "Don Camillo & me" post consisting of rhapsodic passages copied from my now-defunct Guareschi tribute site. That material was originally composed in 1997, and every time I re-read (/re-post/recycle) it, I think two things: (1) "Man, this is some seriously overwrought prose!" and (2) "I defy anyone to read this and come away thinking there is a bigger Don Camillo/Guareschi fan than I." The first observation makes me want to edit like crazy; the second makes me loath to change a word.
Here, for those who've never seen it (or haven't seen it in five years), is -- with minimal edits -- the prose in question.
Guareschi and Don Camillo:
The Italian writer and cartoonist Giovannino Guareschi (1908-1968)--better known to his English-speaking readers as "Giovanni Guareschi"--is best remembered for his series of humorous stories about the on-going conflict between the Catholic priest and Communist mayor of a small village in Italy's Po River Valley in the years just following the Second World War. Don Camillo, the big cleric with fists of steel and heart of gold, converses frequently (and colorfully) with the Lord, Who continually challenges him to take the higher path in his dealings with his Marxist adversary, Peppone. The feisty priest, alas, isn't quite able to confine his methods to the purely spiritual... but neither is Peppone always able to toe his Party's line, so that the two often find themselves seeing disconcertingly eye-to-eye.
The stories' universal message of the possibility of "man's humanity to man" is conveyed with a disarming simplicity which has survived translation into almost all of the world's languages (!), and, for the almost 70 years since their debut in Guareschi's periodical Candido, the characters of Don Camillo and Peppone have remained beloved icons. The Cold War that provided their original context has ended, but on the plane of ideas, Guareschi's two combatants continue to vigorously champion their respective worldviews.
Guareschi, whose own little drawings accompany his whimsical tales, was originally presented to his American audience as "an Italian James Thurber." Perhaps today, the comparison (though not perfectly apt in political terms) might be made with another humorist whose satirical pieces have appeared in the New Yorker, Midwesterner Garrison Keillor. For each man has, in short installments over a period of years, created a little world peopled with real "characters," the accounts of whose doings overflow with lessons about Life. But if the Little World of Don Camillo is a kind of Italian "Lake Wobegon," it is one in which the stakes are raised, for its creator speaks with that special moral authority peculiar to those who have persevered though suffering.
###
How I found the Little World:
I bought the book at the secondhand table of a church bazaar, probably 40 years ago; I'll bet I paid a quarter. And I'm still not sure exactly what it was about that relatively plain-jacketed volume that caught the attention of an adolescent girl whose normal reading fare ran to romances and "Nancy Drew." Consider: a collection of translated Italian stories, then a couple decades old, set in an utterly alien "post-war" period and featuring such unusual characters as a hot-tempered Catholic priest, a not-unsympathetic Communist politician, and a talking Crucifix. These were the early 1970s, and I was an unsubtle, 12- or 13-year-old Protestant American kid. A "bookworm," sure, but not even widely-read enough to "get" the cover blurb's reference to the author as "an Italian James Thurber." So I wonder why, after quickly glancing at the inside flap and turning a few pages, I didn't just put it down and head to the cashier with my other, more predictable choice (Anne of Green Gables)?
Maybe it was the pictures.
I don't mean the back jacket photo of that hearty fellow with the great, old-fashioned mustachios; the author with the unpronounceable name. I mean the evocative little drawings made by that big-looking fellow: those tiny, winged figures--sometimes cherubic, sometimes mischievous, sometimes ever-so-serious-- which appeared above each chapter heading. There was just something about them, and something attractive to me about the sort of book I imagined would include them, not to mention a writer who could draw them. And so I paid my quarter, took the book home, and was introduced to The Little World of Don Camillo.
Well, I was as charmed by the book as I had been by the cartoons, but I had no way of knowing that there were other volumes, and it would be a few years before I stumbled across them in the "grown-up" fiction section of the public library. By that time, having lost track (in a family move) of my own secondhand copy of Little World, I was quite eager to re-visit Don Camillo and his neighbors; and I'd say I became regular visitor after that, getting my "fix" (and coming to understand the stories better) every few years by checking out the public library's entire Don Camillo collection at one go (the books were always on the shelf--I was amazed that I didn't have more competition for them) and devouring them all over the course of a week or so.
Eventually (in the early-mid 1980s), I bought my own omnibus edition of the stories. I still found them as delightful as ever, though I did miss the feel of reading them out of those old library books--well-used Farrar, Straus, & Co. editions, with broken bindings and cracking plastic protective jackets which proved that some previous generation of library patrons had known a good thing! Sadly, in the '90s I began to see those volumes turn up in library sales, pulled from the shelves for reasons of age or disuse (now that I wasn't returning periodically to borrow them, I guess). Except for a bibliophile's nostalgia, I had no real reason to purchase them myself, so I mostly left them on the "for sale" racks, perhaps for some other curious adolescent (to whom "post-war" and "Thurber" would, I reckon, mean even less than they did to me) to pick up.
###
The Stories' Appeal:
Though when I found them they felt like my little secret, in fact the Don Camillo books were very popular in the US in the 1950s and '60s: two of them (The Little World of Don Camillo and Comrade Don Camillo) debuted here as Book-of-the-Month Club selections. They were variously marketed as whimsical humor, as "Catholic books," and as political stories... and, on their coat-tails, six other (sometimes referred to as "non-Camillo") books by Guareschi were translated and published in English. The Little World's appeal cut across many demographics-- the most interesting manifestation of this, to me, being the number of people I've met online who say that they (as I did) first read the Don Camillo stories as adolescents. I can't speak for all of those folks, but I can say what it was about the Little World that took hold of this young reader's heart and imagination and never let go:
A big part of the tales' magic, for me, lies in the way in which they inhabit that vague, lovely place between conventional story and parable. On the one hand, Don Camillo is a real character, vivid and flawed; on the other hand, he is a sort of Everyman, and the Christ on the Cross who speaks to him speaks to all of us who wrestle daily with the challenge to love our neighbor as ourselves. Similarly, the Little World's Po Valley setting is thoroughly "rural, post-war Italy," with all its superstition and poverty and peculiar politics; yet the nameless town is also somehow timeless and set apart.
Plus, the stories are really funny. I know them like old friends, and they still make me laugh out loud.
In 1997, through the miracle of the Internet, I "met" via email Alberto and Carlotta Guareschi, the author's son and daughter. When I told them I wanted to create a webpage honoring their father, they kindly sent me a large packet of copies of old newspaper articles -- all in English -- about the man and his work. Included were various American reviews (contemporary with its release in English in 1950) of The Little World of Don Camillo, and reading them reminded me that the stories would have had a certain urgency at the period of their composition-- that is, at the height of the Cold War-- that they simply could not have had for me when I first stumbled across them in the era of detente (let alone as I re-read them in the years after glasnost and perestroika and the collapse of the USSR). In their own time, Don Camillo and Peppone were not just two endearing blowhards with opposing beliefs; instead, they represented what many would have identified as the central conflict of the day, and indeed of Western history: the old order vs. the new; Church vs. State; religion (Christianity, specifically Catholicism) vs. Communism. In an ironic twist that perhaps could not have been easily foreseen back then, it has turned out that neither ideology carried the day (or even the century); but in Guareschi's heyday the battle was raging. And Italy, that passionate land where the two ideologies somehow flourished side-by-side, was the perfect stage on which to see it fought.
But no one I've spoken to from among those who came to know the Little World during the '50s and '60s tells me today that he or she became a fan of Don Camillo for purely political reasons; it's always ultimately personal.
###
Why "camillofan"?:
The "out-of-print" status (in English) of as fine an author as Giovannino Guareschi is a lamentable thing, and it seemed to me when I first stumbled online in 1997 that the creation of a network among GG's readers was precisely the sort of project for which the World Wide Web had been invented. :-) Thus I joined my first literature forum as "camillofan," hoping the peculiar moniker would both attract those who already loved the stories and intrigue those who didn't know them yet. I made my tribute website (indeed, it was the setting in which I first published most of the above text). With others, I helped start a Don Camillo listserve that ended up lasting almost 15 years. A 1998 trip to Italy to meet Guareschi's son and daughter fueled my enthusiasm and provided me with all kinds of resources for my projects.
My career as a webmaster was interrupted in 2001 by a surprise mid-life pregnancy that temporarily put paid to my insanely long on-line sessions, and when I returned to my Internet addiction, part of the model seemed to have changed. For instance, I'd always meant to get a Don Camillo chat room going, and suddenly chat rooms were on the way out, with blogs on the way in. I reckon I will get a Don Camillo blog going just as the Next Big Thing takes over. (Okay, I *did* kind of get that blog going, and I'm sure the Next Big Thing *has* already taken over. Can anyone tell me what it was/is? I mean, is there a Don Camillo app?)
Next up: that 1998 visit to the Little World
Here, for those who've never seen it (or haven't seen it in five years), is -- with minimal edits -- the prose in question.
Guareschi and Don Camillo:
The Italian writer and cartoonist Giovannino Guareschi (1908-1968)--better known to his English-speaking readers as "Giovanni Guareschi"--is best remembered for his series of humorous stories about the on-going conflict between the Catholic priest and Communist mayor of a small village in Italy's Po River Valley in the years just following the Second World War. Don Camillo, the big cleric with fists of steel and heart of gold, converses frequently (and colorfully) with the Lord, Who continually challenges him to take the higher path in his dealings with his Marxist adversary, Peppone. The feisty priest, alas, isn't quite able to confine his methods to the purely spiritual... but neither is Peppone always able to toe his Party's line, so that the two often find themselves seeing disconcertingly eye-to-eye.
The stories' universal message of the possibility of "man's humanity to man" is conveyed with a disarming simplicity which has survived translation into almost all of the world's languages (!), and, for the almost 70 years since their debut in Guareschi's periodical Candido, the characters of Don Camillo and Peppone have remained beloved icons. The Cold War that provided their original context has ended, but on the plane of ideas, Guareschi's two combatants continue to vigorously champion their respective worldviews.
Guareschi, whose own little drawings accompany his whimsical tales, was originally presented to his American audience as "an Italian James Thurber." Perhaps today, the comparison (though not perfectly apt in political terms) might be made with another humorist whose satirical pieces have appeared in the New Yorker, Midwesterner Garrison Keillor. For each man has, in short installments over a period of years, created a little world peopled with real "characters," the accounts of whose doings overflow with lessons about Life. But if the Little World of Don Camillo is a kind of Italian "Lake Wobegon," it is one in which the stakes are raised, for its creator speaks with that special moral authority peculiar to those who have persevered though suffering.
###
How I found the Little World:
I bought the book at the secondhand table of a church bazaar, probably 40 years ago; I'll bet I paid a quarter. And I'm still not sure exactly what it was about that relatively plain-jacketed volume that caught the attention of an adolescent girl whose normal reading fare ran to romances and "Nancy Drew." Consider: a collection of translated Italian stories, then a couple decades old, set in an utterly alien "post-war" period and featuring such unusual characters as a hot-tempered Catholic priest, a not-unsympathetic Communist politician, and a talking Crucifix. These were the early 1970s, and I was an unsubtle, 12- or 13-year-old Protestant American kid. A "bookworm," sure, but not even widely-read enough to "get" the cover blurb's reference to the author as "an Italian James Thurber." So I wonder why, after quickly glancing at the inside flap and turning a few pages, I didn't just put it down and head to the cashier with my other, more predictable choice (Anne of Green Gables)?
Maybe it was the pictures.
I don't mean the back jacket photo of that hearty fellow with the great, old-fashioned mustachios; the author with the unpronounceable name. I mean the evocative little drawings made by that big-looking fellow: those tiny, winged figures--sometimes cherubic, sometimes mischievous, sometimes ever-so-serious-- which appeared above each chapter heading. There was just something about them, and something attractive to me about the sort of book I imagined would include them, not to mention a writer who could draw them. And so I paid my quarter, took the book home, and was introduced to The Little World of Don Camillo.
Well, I was as charmed by the book as I had been by the cartoons, but I had no way of knowing that there were other volumes, and it would be a few years before I stumbled across them in the "grown-up" fiction section of the public library. By that time, having lost track (in a family move) of my own secondhand copy of Little World, I was quite eager to re-visit Don Camillo and his neighbors; and I'd say I became regular visitor after that, getting my "fix" (and coming to understand the stories better) every few years by checking out the public library's entire Don Camillo collection at one go (the books were always on the shelf--I was amazed that I didn't have more competition for them) and devouring them all over the course of a week or so.
Eventually (in the early-mid 1980s), I bought my own omnibus edition of the stories. I still found them as delightful as ever, though I did miss the feel of reading them out of those old library books--well-used Farrar, Straus, & Co. editions, with broken bindings and cracking plastic protective jackets which proved that some previous generation of library patrons had known a good thing! Sadly, in the '90s I began to see those volumes turn up in library sales, pulled from the shelves for reasons of age or disuse (now that I wasn't returning periodically to borrow them, I guess). Except for a bibliophile's nostalgia, I had no real reason to purchase them myself, so I mostly left them on the "for sale" racks, perhaps for some other curious adolescent (to whom "post-war" and "Thurber" would, I reckon, mean even less than they did to me) to pick up.
###
The Stories' Appeal:
Though when I found them they felt like my little secret, in fact the Don Camillo books were very popular in the US in the 1950s and '60s: two of them (The Little World of Don Camillo and Comrade Don Camillo) debuted here as Book-of-the-Month Club selections. They were variously marketed as whimsical humor, as "Catholic books," and as political stories... and, on their coat-tails, six other (sometimes referred to as "non-Camillo") books by Guareschi were translated and published in English. The Little World's appeal cut across many demographics-- the most interesting manifestation of this, to me, being the number of people I've met online who say that they (as I did) first read the Don Camillo stories as adolescents. I can't speak for all of those folks, but I can say what it was about the Little World that took hold of this young reader's heart and imagination and never let go:
A big part of the tales' magic, for me, lies in the way in which they inhabit that vague, lovely place between conventional story and parable. On the one hand, Don Camillo is a real character, vivid and flawed; on the other hand, he is a sort of Everyman, and the Christ on the Cross who speaks to him speaks to all of us who wrestle daily with the challenge to love our neighbor as ourselves. Similarly, the Little World's Po Valley setting is thoroughly "rural, post-war Italy," with all its superstition and poverty and peculiar politics; yet the nameless town is also somehow timeless and set apart.
Plus, the stories are really funny. I know them like old friends, and they still make me laugh out loud.
In 1997, through the miracle of the Internet, I "met" via email Alberto and Carlotta Guareschi, the author's son and daughter. When I told them I wanted to create a webpage honoring their father, they kindly sent me a large packet of copies of old newspaper articles -- all in English -- about the man and his work. Included were various American reviews (contemporary with its release in English in 1950) of The Little World of Don Camillo, and reading them reminded me that the stories would have had a certain urgency at the period of their composition-- that is, at the height of the Cold War-- that they simply could not have had for me when I first stumbled across them in the era of detente (let alone as I re-read them in the years after glasnost and perestroika and the collapse of the USSR). In their own time, Don Camillo and Peppone were not just two endearing blowhards with opposing beliefs; instead, they represented what many would have identified as the central conflict of the day, and indeed of Western history: the old order vs. the new; Church vs. State; religion (Christianity, specifically Catholicism) vs. Communism. In an ironic twist that perhaps could not have been easily foreseen back then, it has turned out that neither ideology carried the day (or even the century); but in Guareschi's heyday the battle was raging. And Italy, that passionate land where the two ideologies somehow flourished side-by-side, was the perfect stage on which to see it fought.
But no one I've spoken to from among those who came to know the Little World during the '50s and '60s tells me today that he or she became a fan of Don Camillo for purely political reasons; it's always ultimately personal.
###
Why "camillofan"?:
The "out-of-print" status (in English) of as fine an author as Giovannino Guareschi is a lamentable thing, and it seemed to me when I first stumbled online in 1997 that the creation of a network among GG's readers was precisely the sort of project for which the World Wide Web had been invented. :-) Thus I joined my first literature forum as "camillofan," hoping the peculiar moniker would both attract those who already loved the stories and intrigue those who didn't know them yet. I made my tribute website (indeed, it was the setting in which I first published most of the above text). With others, I helped start a Don Camillo listserve that ended up lasting almost 15 years. A 1998 trip to Italy to meet Guareschi's son and daughter fueled my enthusiasm and provided me with all kinds of resources for my projects.
My career as a webmaster was interrupted in 2001 by a surprise mid-life pregnancy that temporarily put paid to my insanely long on-line sessions, and when I returned to my Internet addiction, part of the model seemed to have changed. For instance, I'd always meant to get a Don Camillo chat room going, and suddenly chat rooms were on the way out, with blogs on the way in. I reckon I will get a Don Camillo blog going just as the Next Big Thing takes over. (Okay, I *did* kind of get that blog going, and I'm sure the Next Big Thing *has* already taken over. Can anyone tell me what it was/is? I mean, is there a Don Camillo app?)
Next up: that 1998 visit to the Little World