Journalism and literature, each in their own sphere, and nourished by each other: and a great passion for books, which is also a civil passion. This was Lorenzo Mondo, the beloved signature of de The print, for a long time deputy director (“It is only a matter of learning a trade”, he often told us with a certain encouraging disdain). He brought All books to become the most important literary supplement; and at the same time he remains one of the most significant critics of the second half of the twentieth century (and beyond), one of the “masters”, above all for his long work on Beppe Fenoglio and Cesare Pavese. He immediately sensed the greatness of the former, discovering his major works, all published posthumously, from “A private matter” to the “Partisan Johnny” to the “Partisan Notes”, saved in a rather daring way.
Of the second, to which he dedicated an important and definitive biography which freed him from the ideological and propaganda encrustations that had grown fatally around him, he edited the letters (together with Calvino) and found the famous unpublished war years “. Lorenzo – who died today at 91 – was however also a writer engaged in a “creative” literature, from “The Fathers of the Hills” (1988) to “Happy to grow up” (2020), without forgetting “The unicorn’s step », (1991) and« Il Messiah is tired »(2000), novels suspended between the memorial and historical investigation, always delving into the culture and heritage of a loved and lived land, finding a hidden meaning. If we have a certain image of Piedmont, it is to him that we owe it: as a writer, and also as a journalist.
It had started at Gazette of the Peoplebut it was the long years of The print to make him a fundamental component of what is sometimes called the soul of a newspaper. He taught us a lot. As far as literature is concerned, Giovanni Getto was instead the levator of the future scholar. As he told last year in a video interview of the Pavese prize easily available on Youtube, conducted by the young university teacher Chiara Fenoglio (no relationship with the writer from Alba), in reality he had very little attended the lessons, because he had to work to support himself even in his studies , but at the time of the degree thesis (on Pavese, in fact) a close relationship was born with the great scholar of the Baroque, who welcomed him in his seminars at Palazzo Campana helped him to become the critic and philologist we met. He had him publish the thesis in the series he directed, for Mursia (in 1961, title Cesare Pavese), and the feedback was immediately very positive.
The Pavese di Mondo was much truer than what was then described and interpreted on the basis of his adhesion to the PCI, he was the metaphysical and substantially unpolitical writer. One piece was still missing to complete the picture, but that came later. It was the “Secret Notebook”, a “scandalous” diary kept during the years of the partisan war, where the anti-fascism attributed to the writer was often contradicted. Mondo received it immediately from Pavese’s sister, still fresh out of graduation, when she began to deal with letters. She showed it to Italo Calvino, but her decision was to postpone, if anything, to wait; the anti-fascist icon represented by Pavese and the political climate of the early 1960s led to caution. Calvino kept the manuscript, which then disappeared. Mondo, however, as a good journalist, had made photocopies, which he kept for himself for thirty years until, having lost the hopes of an Einaudian discovery, he published it on The print – it was August 1990 -, obviously with the consent of the family. A few pages, the equivalent of a long article: but ulcerating, because in those notes Pavese, in the midst of the Resistance, seemed to be seduced by the sirens of fascism. It must be said immediately that these notes were “secret”, the sign of a crisis, the dark and very private part of a man. But making them public was an act of courage: also because precisely from there, from that inner book of temptations, began what Mondo always called a “strategy of remorse”, which resulted on the one hand in joining the Communist Party, and on the other in the masterpiece of «The house in the hills». The critic thus returned to us the true image of Pavese, a great writer “who only accidentally lets himself be captured by politics”, the same as in his fundamental biography, “Quell’anticoboy”, released in 2006 and revived in this period. from Guanda.
Lorenzo took his leave perhaps causally in the name of Pavese. He could have done it equally with that of Beppe Fenoglio, a writer whom he could not know in person, but of whom he was not only the most important exegete but also the one who allowed us to really read it. If in his life he had published very little, the author from Alba had left, while dying, his most important works of him in manuscripts in various versions. It was Mondo who “rebuilt” and edited for Einaudi (it came out in ’68) the first edition of “Il Partigiano Johnny”: it aroused discussions and philological contrasts, but it is a fact that it is the one sold, read and studied by everyone, it is Fenoglio that we know and love. And it was not the only lucky discovery: in 1994 he received the “Partisan Notes” (which he published for Einaudi) saved by a gentleman who years earlier, fishing on the Tanaro, had rummaged through a pile of abandoned papers. It was truly a rewarded love, that of Mondo for the two greats. From the two of them “I had these gifts,” he commented with his usual kind contempt. He sounds like a serene epitaph.