UK: Play on Radio 3, Sunday

From           Ianthe <ianthe@duende.demon.co.uk>
Date           Fri, 27 Mar 1998 15:19:01 +0000
Newsgroups     alt.support.boy-lovers
Message-ID     <UsVqFVAlN8G1Ew8T@duende.demon.co.uk>

UK radio listing:

Sunday 29 March

Radio 3
2205-2315 
Sunday Play: The Life and Death of Pier Paolo Pasolini

How much of his boy-loving they will have in it, I 
don't know, but it sounds interesting.

--

The following quotations (which do not do justice to
Pasolini's complex and enigmatic personality) come from:
  
   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
   Siciliano, Enzo.  Pasolini - a biography.  London.  
   Bloomsbury Publishing, 1987.  (435 pages)
   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"In Pasolini the idealistic tension of the teacher was 
very strong - the sublimated form of a homoerotic drive 
[...]  Pasolini [aged 22] opened a school for a handful
of students in his home in Casara.  Along with the 
Italian, Greek and Latin classics, he taught the children 
how to write Fruilian [dialect] poetry; the pure lyric 
and the villota. [...] The pupils were very young [...]"
   [Page 75]

"There in Versuta [1945], Pier Paolo had met Tonuti 
Spagnol, a fourteen-year-old boy, the son of peasants.  He
gave him lessons, taught him to write verses, and Tonuti
wrote a few poems. [...]  Before Ninetto Davoli, Tonuti 
was Pier Paolo's true love, a love that was to end in 
later years when the boy became a man and the 'fragraqnce'
of Versuta a painful memory."
   [Page 85]

"Nineteen fourty-seven.  Valavasone [...]  A group photo:
a secondary school class - boys in short trousers, others 
in long trousers, gym shoes, sandals, with or without 
socks, clothing thrown together as was happening 
everywhere in the impoverished Italy of the postwar period
[...]  This is Professor Pasolini's class [he is now 25]

   [...details of his unorthodox teaching methods...]
  
Such pedagogy certainly had unconscious, psycho-erotic roots - 
the teacher-pupil relationship is in any case a 
relationship imbued with eroticism. [...]  Pasolini
had an inkling that the narrative fable [expressed in his
writing] might help him to escape a tormenting, extremely private 
obsession.  His life was dominated by the unconfessed anguish of 
knowing himself to be _different_.  His teaching colleagues, like 
his friends in Bologna, had glimpsed no trace of this 
difference.  The secret was well guarded, but this did not 
keep it from being demonstrated and expressed.  The spring
of 1948 brought a happy burst of creativity [...The novel...]
'Amado Mio' is a love story.  Desidero, the hero with an all 
too programmatic name, is consumed with passion (a true case of
love at first sight for a young boy, Benito, during a 
village festival [...more plot details...] Everything is told, 
represented.  Pasolini wrote a true Alexandrian idyll, like 
something from the 'Palatine Anthology', on which he 
imprinted the happiness of a season innocently lived among 
the most complete eros."
   [...]
"It is the difference in age between the two characters,
which Pasolini indicates and narrates, that makes love 
bitter and difficult.  Desiderio is an adult, he is carried 
away by the innocence of his 'Iasis'; but that innocence, just 
because it is such, cannot help but defend itself from the 
threat of its own extinction."
   [Pages 106-110]

[In Pasolini's next attempt at a novel] "dated 1948 and 1949, 
and entitled 'La Meglio Gioventu' [...] the priest, Don Paolo,
in his activity as a teacher, conceives a secret homoerotic
passion for a boy [...] especially in Don Paolo, a more
insidiously biographical element comes to the surface.  The 
priest - in a diary whose entries are interspersed in
the narrative - show clearly the extent to which 
homosexuality was capable of arousing conflict and crisis 
in Pasolini's mind."  [Later in the novel...] the young 
priest goes over to politcal action.  He wants the beauty of 
these peasant boys to be kept intact.  At the climax of the 
novel, the demonstration, he is killed by a shot fired by the 
police while sheilding the body of a young demonstrator with 
his own."
   [Pages 119-122]

[Now involved in communist politics, Pasolini's love of boys
becomes dangerous...]  "Between July and August of that year 
of 1949 a priest had tried to blackmail Pasolini.  The priest
had picked up a woman go-between, and told Pasolini that he 
must give up his political life or his teaching career would 
be ruined.  Pier Paolo's reply, also through the go-between, 
must have been a harsh one. [...]  Pasolini was charged by the
magistrate of San Vito al Tagliamento with corrupting minors
and with lewd acts in public.  [...]  The denunciation robbed
him of his teaching position.  Not only did it disgrace him 
in his relationship with his pupils, which had been of the 
fullest and happiest kind, but it also destroyed his economic
security."
   [Page 137]

[Pasolini is forced to flee from the countryside to the 
backstreets of Rome...]  "The literally transfigured 
homosexuality of 'Amado Mio' seems to become raw and real in 
the promiscious Rome of little neighborhood cinemas, the human 
clusters clinging to the hand rails of buses, the busting 
vitality of the little shoeshine boys." [...]  The buses that
cross the centre of Rome from Monteverde to the Termini 
station, the pissoirs [public toilets] along the Tiber - 
Pasolini writes of everything: chestnut vendors and kids 
playing football, boys who go out stealing in order to buy 
themselves a blue sweater, or who descend under the bridges to
play hustler with a 'faggot'.  The sun is 'frothy and shining',
the hair of boys 'fiercely and softly waved,' little boys run 
'lightly, their trousers rubbed by the thirsty air'."
   [Page 156]

[1951 sees him teaching once again, thanks to communist contacts...]
"in a special secondary school in Campino [...] the ruined school 
was on the far outskirts of the city, a violent and 
individualistic world, indifferent to politics.  Pier Paolo's 
pupils were between the ages of eleven and thirteen, children 
from sub-proletarian families living a hand-to-mouth existence."
[Page 163]  "Pier Paolo, at the time, had a look of a premature 
beatnik.  In an effort to attract the boys, he was competing 
with them in his physical appearance.  Their reward was a pizza 
or a pair of shoes, that was all.  And the boys were little rascals, 
or little monsters, whom he found beautiful.  The features they had
in common were curls dangling from their foreheads, a 'rogueish'
smile, a vitality that sprang suddenly out of torpor - the 
specific traits that were to be combined, years later, in Ninetto 
Davoli.  The 'beauty' of these boys constituted an infraction of 
every canon, whether the obviously bourgeois canon or the 
decadent one.  Pasolini's conception of beauty was wholly his own.
It was a beauty made up of dirty ears and necks, of coarse and
tender movements [...]
   [Page 167]

[1963] "For all the despair, there was in Pier Paolo considerable 
room for the joy of life.  This joy became concrete in those 
years, when he met Ninetto Davoli [then 14-years-old, but very soon 15]  
In this young boy, with his slight and skinny build, pimples on his 
face, kinky hair, and incredibly 'merry' eyes, there was a humanity that 
differed from the cynical and relaxed attitude that constituted 
the morality of the ordinary shantytown dweller.  [...]  Pier Paolo 
fell in love with him.  He fell in love as a father, as a friend, 
sweeping away the ties of competitiveness that occasionally tied him to 
boys.
  [Pages 284-285]

[Davoli inevitably grew up, and eventually got married.  He was replaced
(in 1972) by Claudio...]  "In the village of Chia, Pasolini met a boy,
the son of peasants - a curly-haired youth with a pimpled face, almost a
new Ninetto. [...]
  [Page 383]

 
-- 
Ianthe