LIVING //PAIDEUMA// "PAIDEUMA", or a live phase in
the "nation's culture.

I keep trying to make people understand what one means by
the NEW ITALY. I keep trying to make 'em understand what one
means by the simple sentence published here a couple of weeks
ago. "Some of use NEEDED the New Italy to breathe in."

I do NOT in Italy meet a carefully sifted
and selected group of "writers". I meet all sorts of people.
It don't surprise me that one of the most active is
a retired submarine commander. The navy as I have met it;
I mean English or Italian, don't like froust anywhere.

Old Admiral M. is just as lively as Comandante U. but it don't
end there.

Among the most "higbrow" of my Italian *is* acquaintance
is a professor ( seven vol. history of literature, dissertations
of Croce etc.) who spent several years cursing highbrows"
letteratissimi".

The blue china boys in any country are the
last to awake to the present. Perhaps the evolution of
every man has to work through a past ( as Goethe and Frobenius
has argued// contended. )

I am tempted to define POETRY as living in
the present, or at least in A present. The poet's past
is either dead and muttony or it is a very vivid present to
him. It is a form of "private life" in psychoanalysts sense,

To arrive at maturity the writer must, I am inclined to believe, rejoin the PRESENT of his contemporaries, Nobody ever heard of a really A.I writer who wasn't alive IN his own time.

Now the DIFFERENCE between Italy and England for a man who is writing is this:

When I write a live, active, dynamitic article HERE, I don't say people in general, at once understand it, but they minute I succeed in finding the italian EXPRESSION that they can understand they LIKE the ACTIVITY of the thought I have put inside it

WHEREAS in England the WHOLE DEMAND of the public is for DEADNESS, and for inaction. I am not talking from theory. My own publishers are as I write this, and have been for months, rousting about among my essays some of 'em 20 years old) for something that isn't TOO ACTIVE for something that wont "upset" the readers.

England is full of people who think me a lunatic, but none of 'em think me a lunatic for anything I said twenty years ago, they merely think I am crazy because of what I say NOW.

England English

The calmest of my editors remarked about an essay '( on a classical subject ) which I had thought so dull I had chucked it into a trunk where it remained for 12 years : " "yes, that isn't too good for 'em. "

England started to like me in 1909 when I wrote rather like Robert Browning and was concerned with the Middle Ages. They disliked it as soon as they found that what I said about the middle ages wasn't what they had been nursed up to believe. Statements so simple about contemporary art in 1912 and '14 that anyybody ought to have understood 'em, statements so simple that the new generations considers them platitude, at that time stirred up the animals. I am not concerned with autobiography save as proof that the information is at first hand.

I was run out of the Quarterly Review for believe in Lewis and Audier-Brzeska, whose works are now treasured in England's museums.

There is no the slightest danger of my ever having any official approval in either England or my own country, let alone being asked into Academies.

The French Academy hasn't even asked M. Cocteau, nor, more remarkable still has the Academie Goncourt.

I am not arguing about artistic merit, I am considering an OFFICIAL ATTITUDE to Mental ACTIVITY.

The Italian Official position FAVOUR aviti activity and constructivity.

The English official activity is 100% and 1000 per mille for FROUST, fugg, petrifaction.

American "university" activity is for keeping at least 20 years behind Europe, including England.