Giovanni Papini swung from atheist provocateur to bestselling Catholic to Fascist
Few writers changed sides as often as Giovanni Papini. The Florentine iconoclast declared philosophy dead, cheered Italy into the First World War, converted to Catholicism, wrote a Life of Christ translated into 23 languages, and ended up dedicating a book to Mussolini. Borges later called him undeservedly forgotten.
Papini was born in Florence on 9 January 1881, son of a modest furniture seller and former Garibaldi volunteer so anticlerical that the boy's mother had him baptised in secret. Largely self-taught, he never took a university degree, and as a lonely child he dreamed of writing an encyclopedia summarising every culture. He worked briefly as a teacher and as a librarian at Florence's anthropology museum.
In 1903 he founded the magazine Leonardo, writing as Gian Falco, and with Giuseppe Prezzolini introduced Italian readers to Kierkegaard, Peirce, Nietzsche and Poincaré. He met William James and Henri Bergson and became Italy's most enthusiastic champion of pragmatism. His 1906 book The Twilight of the Philosophers took on Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and he flirted with Futurism, co-founding Lacerba in 1913. His autobiographical novel Un uomo finito, known in English as The Failure, became his best-known work.
War changed him. An ardent interventionist before 1915, he was shaken into guilt by the conflict and announced his conversion to Catholicism in 1919. His Story of Christ of 1921 became an international bestseller. By the 1930s he had drifted from individualism to conservatism and then Fascism, though he disliked Nazism. The regime gave him a chair at Bologna in 1935, and in 1937 he dedicated his History of Italian Literature to Il Duce. He even served as vice president of a European writers' league founded by Joseph Goebbels.
When the regime collapsed in 1943 he withdrew to a Franciscan convent at La Verna as Fra' Bonaventura. Discredited after the war, he was defended by the Catholic right and kept writing, including a biography of Michelangelo and columns for Corriere della Sera, even as motor neuron disease paralysed him and left him blind. He died on 8 July 1956. One strange afterlife: imaginary interviews with Picasso in his 1951 novel Il libro nero were reportedly used as anti-communist propaganda, and Picasso had them exposed in 1962.
Source: Giovanni Papini
