An Author on Trial: The Story of a Forgotten Writer

Copyright © 2019 Luciano Iorio

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 978 1789019 896

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

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Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

This book is a bridge joining my father

to my children and grandchildren,

to whom it is dedicated.

Contents

About the Author

Author’s Note

Introduction

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

About the Author

Luciano Iorio, the son of Giuseppe and Bruna Jorio, was born in Rome in 1937 and moved to London in 1971. In his native country he gained a music diploma and a degree in law. He decided to become a professional musician, and has enjoyed a busy international career as violist of three distinguished chamber groups, Solisti Veneti, Cummings String Trio and English String Quartet. Since his retirement he has taken up pottery, and has spent five years researching and writing this book.

Author’s Note

A note on the different spelling in father’s and son’s surname, Jorio/Iorio. In the Italian language the letters I and J sound exactly the same, with the J used, for historical reasons, only in a few family names. This does sometimes create bureaucratic confusion, which goes unnoticed in Italy but can create serious problems in the English language, as in the case of the author of this book when he arrived in London with J on the passport and I on the birth certificate. He chose to become phonetically correct rather than being called Jorio, a decision which he has often regretted as it is prone to a variety of spelling misunderstandings.

Introduction

In November 1948 the novel Il Fuoco del Mondo (‘The Fire of the World’), by Giuseppe Jorio, my father, was still in unbound sheets when the Rome police, alerted that it contained ‘descriptions of sexual intercourse’, sequestered it. One month later the public prosecutor decided to prosecute my father for obscenity. A number of copies of the book were hurriedly put together for the trial.

In 1954, after five trials in six years – Tribunal, Court of Appeal, Supreme Court of Cassation, Court of Appeal again and then again Supreme Court – my father’s fight to save his novel and his reputation was lost: he became the first writer in post-war Italy to be convicted for obscenity, and the only one to receive a prison sentence and whose book was censored when not yet published. All copies of the book were destroyed, except for one, saved by the author.

He was fifty-two years old and Il Fuoco del Mondo, based on an extramarital relationship which he had had in the 1930s when his then childless marriage to my mother seemed irreparably broken, was his third novel. His first novel was published in 1939 to great success, and another novel and a collection of short stories had received excellent reviews. He kept on writing into old age, completing in total seventeen novels as well as numerous short stories and a number of stage and television plays. Although five novels were published after the trial, receiving favourable reviews, he became increasingly frustrated by the many refusals by the major publishers and spent his last years in bitter isolation. By the time of his death in 1995, at the age of ninety-three, he was totally forgotten.

When IR, his partner of the last thirty years and the executor of his will, died in 2013, she left me all my father’s surviving papers and documents – diaries, letters, notes of all kinds, manuscripts, reviews – as well as a copy of Il Fuoco del Mondo.

On the front page of this is a note in my father’s handwriting, which says, ‘This is the copy which I used when I spoke at the trial’: the book is full of markings and annotations in the margins as well as on scraps of paper in between pages. On seeing it, my memory went back to my adolescent years, when I saw him addressing the court, holding and reading from that very book. At the time of the trials, however, I hadn’t read the novel and knew nothing about its background. I was eleven years old when the book was sequestered and, during and after the trials, the copy saved by my father was kept under lock and key: he couldn’t run the risk that he was found to be making the book available, especially to a minor.

I took all the papers, several boxes of them, to London, where I have been living since 1971, and started to read. It soon became clear to me that my father had been the victim of a great injustice, one rooted in the complex and turbulent socio-political contrasts in post-war Italy. I also discovered much that I didn’t know about my father and something about myself.

Now that I know all the facts regarding Il Fuoco del Mondo I can say, with no exaggeration, that my father’s extramarital affair of 1935–37 was the beginning of the rest of his life: the affair itself ended tragically, the process of writing the novel based on it was horribly painful, the five trials were unforgiving, and the conviction ruined his career. Our family, as a result, was badly affected.

I

In order to put the events surrounding the novel into perspective I must start from as far back as 1931, when my future parents, Giuseppe and Bruna Jorio, twenty-nine and twenty-seven years old respectively, went to live in Parma, a city in the northern region of Emilia-Romagna, where Giuseppe had been appointed teacher at that city’s upper secondary school. Teaching was his ‘day job’, which he kept until retirement, but he considered himself to be principally a writer: ‘I knew from very early on’ – he said towards the end of his life in an interview with a researcher from the University of Rome – ‘that I was born to be a writer, and I was writing stories already when I was nine years old.’

Giuseppe was born in Salerno, a city in the southern region of Campania, in 1902, and he went to university in Naples, where he studied Italian, Latin, Greek and philosophy. After graduation he started working in Rome as a supply teacher, and in 1927 he married Bruna Grimaldi, also from Salerno. Not satisfied with his job, he gave it up to become a freelance journalist; he travelled widely, and in 1929 he published, under the title Colpi di Sole (‘Sun Strokes’), a collection of impressions and memories of a journey to Greece and Turkey originally written for a national newspaper. He soon realized, however, that if he was going to write novels, which was his great ambition, it would be better for him to become a full-time schoolteacher, which offered him financial stability as well as free time – afternoons and holidays – in which he would be able to do his writing. Teaching at the Liceo Classico in Parma was his first such job.

During the school summer holidays of 1933 he starts writing his first novel, La Morte di un Uomo (‘Death of a Man’). In his diary he describes his life and his feelings at that time. It is July and Parma is extremely hot; he is alone, Bruna has gone to spend the summer with her parents in Salerno, which, being by the sea, offered a more forgiving summer climate. He writes in his diary: I am eating badly and live like a recluse, often without shaving for days. But I don’t care, these and other drawbacks don’t matter: I am happy in my work. I love very much the novel I am writing. I don’t think of it as a masterpiece, nor do I care how beautiful it is and if it is more beautiful than other novels. I know it is beautiful, and that’s enough for me.

At the end of August Bruna is back: Last night, seated in the dark by the open window, I told Bruna, for the first time, the plot of the novel. She liked it very much. Then we turned the light on and she read the first chapter. Apart from criticizing a few details, she liked it. After all the hard and lonely work I had been doing since July, this was a great prize, and now I live a moment of true happiness.

It isn’t long, though, before the marriage is in serious crisis. Some time after that summer Bruna rebels against Giuseppe’s unilateral decision on the question of children: he doesn’t want the responsibilities and distractions of parenthood, which would interfere with his needs as a writer. I have not been able to find out whether this was a condition he put forward before the marriage, one which Bruna subsequently found impossible to fulfil, or something imposed by him afterwards, but I do know, because it was spoken of by close relatives – my mother never said anything to me – that the difference between them was such that Bruna in 1935 had a serious nervous breakdown and attempted suicide. Her health suffered as a result and at the beginning of that summer she went to stay with relatives to recover.

It is while she is away that Giuseppe starts an intimate relationship with a local young woman, Tina. There is nothing about it in Giuseppe’s diary until almost a year later, but the many letters between the lovers (he always insisted that Tina returned his letters, while he kept hers) and the many sheets and scraps of paper on which he jotted down thoughts and comments, most of them meticulously dated, tell us about it.

The first indication of the existence of the relationship is in two letters to Tina (in which he signs as ‘Giù’, a short version of Giuseppe, a name used by them both from now on). The first one, dated Evening of 9 August ’35, starts with Giù telling Tina how happy he is to have found, while out walking with his dog, the right title for his novel, but then the letter becomes intimate: Shortly I am going to bed, and I shall dream of you, I’ll see you, I’ll speak to you,