Another factor which seems to have put him at an angle (as one may mildly call it) to middle-class assumptions was his affiliation with Africa, through his Egyptian childhood. Marinetti deeply wanted to be seen as an exotic, and he played it up. “Vulgare Greciae dictum,” Pliny the Elder had written in his Natural History, “Semper aliquid novi Africam adferre”: “It is commonly said by Greeks that something new is always coming out of Africa.” This could well have been Marinetti’s motto, and it explains the frequent references to the prowess of “Negroes” (as he called Africans, in the usage of the day) in his writings. Africans were imagined as tough, energetic, fearless, and never at a loss when it came to surprising and disconcerting Europeans. They were, in that sense, natural avant-gardists, which was how Marinetti saw himself. Unlike Picasso, Matisse, or Derain, he was never influenced by the “primitive” art of Africa. He was a writer and performer, not a painter. It is quite possible, though, that there was a link between the languages and chants of the Dark Continent, as imagined by Marinetti and other intellectuals, and the nonsense onomatopoeia of “words-in-freedom” that was to become an important part of Marinetti’s poetic strategies. Like some other Europeans who wanted to display their difference from the common herd, he liked the bone-in-the-nose, ooga-wooga picture of African savagery.
His father sent him to Paris to study for his baccalauréat, which he got in 1893. Then he came back to Italy and enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Genoa, from which he graduated in 1899. But he was never to practice law. Instead, he lived the life of a young literary flâneur, writing poems, essays, plays, and, with increasing regularity and skill, practicing journalism in Italian and French. More and more, he gravitated toward literary and artistic circles in Rome, Turin, and Milan.
The movement called Futurism was launched with an essay written in French by Marinetti and published, as befitted its international intent, in Paris in 1909. From then on, the production of manifestos was going to be Marinetti’s chief art form: nobody in the European cultural world, except for D’Annunzio, had a stronger instinctive talent for publicity or could excel him at hectoring.
Certain images recur in his work, and in that of his fellow Futurists. They are almost all mechanical, and polemically modern. “The world’s magnificence,” he wrote,
has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car, whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot, is more beautiful than the
Victory of Samothrace.
For many people, this is now true. At the very least, it is not difficult, more than a century after this manifesto was written, to find both the sculpture and the machine beautiful, though not in the same way. But in 1909, such sentiments seemed, to cultivated Europeans who read them, blasphemous and almost diabolical—they amounted to a contradiction of the “proper” order of aesthetic experience, because the car was not beautiful at all, whereas the sculpture was nothing but beautiful.
The car, object of what one writer called “autolatry,” was the prime Futurist icon, the emblem, the spectacular object of desire. The only thing that compared to it was the airplane, then (in 1910) in its very early, pioneering stage of development, the Wright brothers having achieved heavier-than-air flight under power in 1903. The airplane of early Futurist dreams was merely a Blériot monoplane, of the kind that had recently made it across the English Channel. Trains and fast motorboats also figured, but they never approached the automobile, whose rapid progress under personal control (or lack of it) seemed to Marinetti and other Futurists to confirm the belief of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), one of their favorite philosophical writers, that reality was in constant flux: car travel presented the driver and passengers with one level of experience rapidly overlapping another, so that the total impression had more to do with collage than with a static view. Consequently, Futurist writing and painting, when it turned to cars, was always highly personal—the “I” is in the driver’s seat—and invariably centered on exhilarated feelings of directional energy and rapid change. Needless to say, this arose at a point in history, around the first decade of the century, when the roads were clear of other cars and that emblem of automotive culture, the traffic jam, did not yet exist. What can it have been like to drive a fast car around an Italian city, at night, in those days before the invention of the traffic light? Marinetti’s first Futurist manifesto tells us his version, in a stream of Mr. Toad–like rantings.
It is 1908. He has been up late into the night with two friends, automaniacs like himself, bloviating about life and culture, when they hear “the famished roar of automobiles.” “ ‘Let’s go!’ I said. ‘Friends, away! Let’s go!…We’re about to see the Centaur’s birth and, soon after, the first flight of Angels!…We must shake the gates of life, test the bolts and hinges.’ ” This kind of rodomontade would rank high on anyone’s list of Invocations That Were Probably Never Invoked (though, with Marinetti, it is hard to be sure): in any case, they are soon down at their cars, the “three snorting beasts, to lay amorous hands on their torrid breasts.” Off they go, vroom-vroom, in a sort of mechano-sexual delirium. “Like young lions we ran after Death.… There was nothing to make us wish for death, unless the wish to be free at last from the weight of our courage!” But, alas, some cyclists appear, blocking the road; and Marinetti and his leonine friends have to avoid them. His car plunges upside down into a ditch, baptizing Marinetti in sacramental filth. “O maternal ditch … Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black breast of my Sudanese nurse.… When I came up … from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart!”
There is more, much more, in this vein; no one could accuse Marinetti of terseness. One can have a certain sympathy with the annoyed Italian writer who, when asked if he didn’t agree that Marinetti was a genius, retorted, “No, he’s a phosphorescent cretin,” but in fact he was less than the first but a good deal more than the second. Sometimes he could be perfectly idiotic, as in his call to glorify war, “the world’s only hygiene,” along with militarism, and patriotism; or in his ludicrous exhortations to fill the canals of Venice with the rubble of its demolished palaces. “Let’s Kill the Moonlight” was the title of one of his more famous anti-romantic manifestos. And he positively loathed John Ruskin’s views on art, nature, and (inevitably) Venice. He asked his English audience in a speech at the Lyceum Club in London in 1910:
When, when will you disembarrass yourselves of the lymphatic ideology of that deplorable Ruskin.… With his morbid dream of … rustic life, with his nostalgia for Homeric cheeses and legendary wool-spinners, with his hatred for the machine, steam power, and electricity, that maniac of antique simplicity … still wants to sleep in his cradle and feed himself at the breast of his decrepit old nurse in order to recover his thoughtless infancy.
This must be one of the stupidest diatribes ever launched against Ruskin, but perhaps its defects are ascribable to the limitations of Marinetti’s English. Though he was certainly no feminist, he said he stood for “the semi-equality of man and woman and a lessening of the disproportion in their social rights,” which put him ahead (or semi-ahead) of most Italians. He had an acrid realism, sometimes, which contained some hard nuggets of truth: he wanted to see