Giacomo Debenedetti

He met Piero Gobetti, with whom he developed a brief but intense friendship, and began a fruitful collaboration with the magazine "Il Baretti", in which he published important essays on Raymond Radiguet, Umberto Saba and Marcel Proust.

In the 1930s he also began to work in cinema as a scriptwriter for Cines, under a false name because of the racial laws issued by the Fascist regime, and was forced to go into hiding even after moving to Rome, during the most acute moments of repression, before and during the Second World War.

Debenedetti is, with Silvia Forti Lombroso and Luciano Morpurgo, one of the first witnesses to tackle the problem of Jewish persecution in Italy in an autobiographical account, not from the perspective of those who were deported to extermination camps but of those who were forced into hiding during the war years.

Also in 1944, he published the short story Otto ebrei, an episode of the trial of Quaestor Pietro Caruso, during which the Commissioner of Public Security Alianello declared that he had eliminated eight names of Jews from the list of hostages designated for execution at the Fosse Ardeatine.

The richness and novelty of his readings translate into an activity as a critic who does not want to close himself off within a method; ready to analyse, together with the symbols and myths of the authors, as they were dropped into the reality of the works, also his own subjectivity as a reader, especially when faced with his best-loved texts (Giovanni Pascoli, Italo Svevo, Federigo Tozzi, Umberto Saba).

Years earlier, in an interview that was never collected in a volume, Debenedetti had focused his attention on the need that drove the narrator in our century to "chase" the character, to know his secret motivations, and the obvious ones, and then dissolve all ties with him:"Today it is clear that the early novels of our century gave out a distorted, suffering image of man, that this image had to "open like a peel" (I use Proust's words), "epiphanise" (I use James Joyce's), reveal the person behind the spirited and protean contortions of the character (I am referring to Pirandello) in order to get to the head of a protesting and gagged human nucleus, kept in mora, prevented from expressing itself by a world, by a society no longer in agreement with itself".

This sort of perpetual intervention in the imagination of others ended up clashing with the unhappiness and neurosis of modern man, and led the writer and critic to hone a particular aptitude for recognising in the destiny of fictional characters their insecurity and crisis of identity.