Here we are at the 22nd episode of the series of best-selling Italian authors who today say little to many, but was in great dust in the first thirty years of the twentieth century, Luciano Zuccoli. 1929 is the year in which appears, among other innumerable things more worthy of being remembered, the figure of Commissioner Maigret, Moravia publishes The Indifferent and Thomas Mann receives the Nobel Prize for literature. But it is also the year in which a writer dies who in his time had made plenty of things raw, as well as enjoying great success with the public: Luciano Zuccoli.
Today, as happens when talking about commercially successful writers of a century ago, nobody knows who did it anymore; but in his time he made a lot of talk about himself. Of course!
Between two generations
Those were the years in which, on the one hand, the most renowned voices of the generation of successful novelists of the late nineteenth century were dying out, from De Amicis to Fogazzaro, from Rovetta to Barrili and Farina. On the other hand, the next generation had not yet established itself, that of the Da Verona, Mariani, Pitigrilli, Brocchi, Gotta, Milanesi and D'Ambra, which would have been the protagonist of book chronicles from the XNUMXs onwards. Luciano Zuccoli found himself in the middle, acting as a link between these two worlds and playing the role of the universally recognized master of this second generation. He was a successful novelist, by virtue of about thirty works, some marked by an extraordinary fortune, inferior only, and quite closely, to those of Pitigrilli and Da Verona, which at the time recorded the peak of preferences.
Let's say that after their success, which from a book point of view was truly epochal, came that of Zuccoli, who stood as an excellent second, on a par with few other best-selling serial authors.
The long activity of storyteller
His activity as a storyteller began in full D'Annunzio style in 1893, with I lussuriosi; it will end in 1927 with The boys are leaving: 35 years of production punctuated by about thirty books, one a year on average. Among his most loved novels by readers we remember, The arrow in the side of 1913, which in 1945 would have reached one hundred and fiftieth thousand, a respectable figure for the time, L'amore di Loredana of 1908, L'amore non c'è more than 1916, The Drusbas from 1921, Things Greater than Him from 1922.
The ability to portray the brilliant society of the time and the delicate female figure
Of his books, which gladdened the days and the imagination of the readers of the time, not everything is to be thrown away, as we sometimes tend to do when dealing with antiques from the past, given up for death before even knowing what it is exactly. In particular, his ability to represent the brilliant society of the time, the delicate and fragile female figure, the charm he knew how to arouse in the hearts of teenagers should be remembered. One of the themes most congenial to him was precisely that of the troubled sentimental journey from early youth, tinged with images and atmospheres of sensual lasciviousness, to emotional maturity.
Certain descriptions of attitudes, behaviors, sensibilities, especially female ones, revealed a good knowledge of the subject and an equally valid ability to tell it. Perhaps the love stories experienced firsthand since he was a boy helped him, during which, as sometimes happens, he also contemplated suicide with his "in love" due to the misunderstandings and the closure of the family towards them. It even seems that once it was his mother, a woman of the most exclusive and salon aristocracy, who snatched from his hand the revolver with which he and the girl, a young seamstress, wanted to end it all.
The attention of literary criticism
In outlining these glimpses he was able to give the best of himself. And literary critics with a capital "C", who instead snubbed the cheap "consumer literature", fully recognized this characteristic of its own, acknowledging it and selecting it from the rest of its production, which was based instead on love stories as if they read in abundance in those decades at the turn of the twentieth century. And, mutatis mutandis, even today. Renato Serra in Letters of 1911 and Luigi Capuana, in the review of a novel by him, Il maleficio occulto, gave him credit for not despicable narrative skills.
And after them Luigi Russo considered him a worthy heir of late Lombard romanticism and appreciated his ability to outline female figures and the difficult season of the transition from adolescence to youth. Giovanni Papini instead, with the well-known causticity, struck him down with a joke that remained famous and which continued to weigh on his figure for a long time, even if it did not in the least affect the success that the writer enjoyed with readers: "Cavalry officer, he should have remain so forever".
The arrow in the side
The arrow in the side is considered his masterpiece, as well as his greatest best seller, the one where his ability to portray the female soul in the first confused amorous disturbances is best highlighted. It tells the story of Nicla, a beautiful girl from a wealthy bourgeois family, who one day meets Brunello, an eight-year-old boy, remaining attracted by her strong personality, despite the fact that she is ten years older than him. Instead Brunello finds in Nicla that affection and that understanding that he, always tossed here and there in the wake of an inveterate womanizer father, had always lacked.
However, after their first meeting, life divides them and takes them to distant places, each with its own load of stories. After twelve years they meet again, he is twenty, she is thirty. Nicla, who has married in the meantime, has understood that the boy had already planted an arrow in her side, from which she would never free herself, and now, as much as she tries not to betray her husband, she is forced to give in to the assaults of Brunello, and will give himself to him and then kill himself, drowning himself in a lake.
The life
Luciano Zuccoli was born in 1868 in a small village in the Canton of Ticino. He comes from a noble family of German origin. His real name is in fact Luciano von Ingenheim. Zuccoli is the stage name that he will later adopt. After classical studies he enlisted in the army and was a cavalry officer for a few years. After being discharged from the army, he began collaborating with various provincial newspapers, before landing on higher-ranking titles, such as "Il Corriere della sera", in whose columns many of his fiction writings appear. He also devoted himself to the theatre, where, however, he incurred a sensational fiasco which led him to abandon that genre immediately and forever, to devote himself to fiction, in which instead, always in the same 1893, when he was twenty-five, he obtained a discreet success with I lussuriosi, his first success.
He lives in Milan, frequents the worldly and literary circles of the city. His "riotous, overbearing, drinker, player and libertine, mocking and cynical" attitude, as he himself would define himself in an autobiography, gives him challenges and duels, which he never tries to escape from, on the contrary, he almost provokes them with the help of his biting and provocative pen, such as to incinerate the victim on duty. Tall, very elegant, always with a monocle in his eye, he is also very successful in the female world.
A veil of racism and anti-Semitism
He professed ultra-conservative ideas, approved the repression of General Bava Beccaris in 1898, argued violently with the moderate liberals, contemptuously defined Giolitti and his politics. He is unable to bear what D'Annunzio had defined as "today's gray democratic deluge, which miserably submerges many beautiful and rare things...". On the occasion of the war in Libya, he assumed such a radical position, tinged with strongly anti-Semitic tones, that they led the owners to take away his direction of the "Gazzetta di Venezia", which he had directed for about ten years. Among other things, he maintains that too many prisoners have been taken, and that "... at least two-thirds of those prisoners should and could have been shot".
An edgy character
His angular character causes him many difficulties. The first wife commits suicide, unable to face and support an excessively conflicting menage. The writer remarried shortly after with a girl much younger than him, in her early twenties, beautiful and titled scion of one of the most noble Milanese families, and moved to Paris, at the time the center of European society. He seems, also, to misunderstandings with fascism. After only two years of marriage, however, in 1929, the writer died in Paris. He was 61 years old. Upon her death, the young wife runs into a very serious depressive crisis, from which she would never recover.
Hospitalized in a nursing home for psychic pathologies, she would have sadly spent the rest of her existence there, in an absolutely unbridgeable mental and existential void. After the Second World War her fortune decreased rapidly, until it almost disappeared completely, despite some re-editions of her works. In 1975 Giuseppe Patroni Griffi made a film of his, Divine Creature, with Laura Antonelli, Terence Stamp, Marcello Mastroianni and Michele Placido, from his 1920 novel, The Divine Girl, which achieved good success with the public. But today only the last survivors of previous generations could remember her name and her work.
