1909 ‘We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts.’ Then, a call to action: ‘“Let’s go!” I said. “Friends, away! Let’s go! Mythology and the Mystic Ideal are defeated at last. We’re about to see the Centaur’s birth and, soon after, the first flight of Angels!”’
No sooner were the words out of Marinetti’s mouth than they raced on in their car, ‘hurling watchdogs against doorsteps, curling them under our burning tires like collars under a flatiron’ until made to swerve by two cyclists ‘shaking their fists, wobbling like two equally convincing but nevertheless contradictory arguments’ until the car winds up in a ditch, its wheels in the air:
O maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black breast of my Sudanese nurse … When I came up – torn, filthy, and stinking – from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart!
So much for the preamble – the movement’s birth and baptism, so to speak. As for the manifesto itself, it contained eleven paragraphs hymning ‘the beauty of speed’ imaged in ‘a racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes’ and whose driver ‘hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit’. Paragraphs five and six promised a violent, radical and intentionally misogynist programme:
5. We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
6. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
It was absurd, extreme – deliberately so (the Futurists could be self-mocking as well as self-advertising). What did it all mean in practice? In painting, urban scenes in which nature and artifice – trees, sky, houses, buses – blended into each other, through a ‘divisionist’ medium of dots, stripes and planes of colour. In poetry, forced analogies between nature and the machine (not unlike metaphysical conceits), that perennial modernist chimera, the ‘abolition of syntax’ so as to ‘free’ the word (parole in libertà was both the theme and the method of Marinetti’s own concrete poem Zang Tumb Tumb, which appeared in instalments between 1912 and 1914).
Did Futurism leave a legacy? Fragments of its mood and method could be found in Surrealism, Dada and the vorticism of Blast (see 2 July). But none would survive the First World War, which it no longer seemed so witty to ‘glorify’ as ‘the world’s only hygiene’.