Alberto Savinio didn’t strike one as the mysterious type. He didn’t hint at some great secret or inaccessible hidden depths, nor did he spin woolly tales about his life. On the contrary, his temperament was one of exuberance, radiating optimism, good humour and creative joy from every pore (he loved to describe himself as a ‘creative powerhouse’: alluding to his many talents, of course, but first and foremost to the ethos of always putting them to good use, with a tireless élan never clouded by excessive spleen or melancholy). And yet it is impossible to sum up in any formula or slogan who Savinio really was. One need only consider his ‘dual talent’: was he a painter who wrote or a writer who painted? Examples in the 20th century abound of one or other such secondary passion (for instance, there are a great many writings – mostly essays and polemics, but also specifically literary works – by Savinio’s brother, Giorgio de Chirico, who was three years his senior, and who has, however, gone down in history as a painter – ‘Pictor Optimus’, as he liked to call himself); far rarer, by contrast, are the cases of figures who devoted equal energy, and achieved equal results, in both fields. And that is not to mention that Savinio’s first vocation, in truth, had been music, which he studied with great dedication in Milan and Munich during his adolescence: his first public appearances, in Paris where he lived from 1910 to 1915, were concerts in which he smashed the pianos he played (‘I believe that within two years’, wrote Guillaume Apollinaire in 1914, ‘he will have broken every piano in Paris, after which he will be able to go out into the world and break every piano in the universe. Which will perhaps be a welcome relief’). But of those Dionysian compositions of his, mostly improvised directly on the unfortunate keyboard of the moment, little or nothing remains.

A clue to this mystery, now brought into the open, may perhaps be found in the pseudonym adopted by Savinio, originally born Andrea de Chirico in Athens in 1891 (to an Italian family that had moved to Greece in the 18th century; his father Evaristo was a railway engineer in Thessaly), upon the publication of his first literary works (though still conceived for music), such as Les Chants de la mi-mort [Songs of the Dying], which appeared in 1914 in the magazine Les soirées de Paris, edited by Apollinaire. Why did he choose to call himself Alberto Savinio from that point onwards (passing on the nom de plume to his children Angelica and Ruggero, whose first names, in turn, were taken from Orlando Furioso by that quintessentially luminous poet, Ludovico Ariosto)?

First and foremost, he certainly did so to distinguish himself from his brother Giorgio who, although only recently having made his public debut, had soon distinguished himself – again thanks to Apollinaire’s intellectual energy and critical generosity – among the most innovative and admired painters in the cosmopolitan and roaring Paris of the early 1910s (the same reason, one might suppose, for which his brother would not take up the brush until at least 1925). And yet, at least at that stage, not a shadow seemed to mar the bond – the almost telepathic rapport – between the two brilliant brothers (in the preface to Casa ‘la Vita’ [The House of Life], 1943, Savinio would later recall the time, twenty years earlier ‘when nothing yet divided us and the two of us were of one mind’; the reasons for the rift that had subsequently driven the two apart remain unclear). Savinio explained that he had been inspired by a publisher, polymath and translator with a turbulent past, now forgotten but then at the height of his career, Albert Savine (1859–1927); another hypothesis refers to the figure of a seventeenth-century adventurer, the poet-swordsman Cyrano de Bergerac, made famous in 1897 in a play by Edmond Rostand, whose forenames were Hercule Savinien. But in his books, the protagonist – representing the author whose name appears on the cover – each time is an avatar with a different name: from the eponymous character in The Childhood of Nivasio Dolcemare, 1941, (where ‘Nivasio’ is an anagram of ‘Savinio’, as is clear, as is the case with ‘Commendatore Visanio’, his father; but can further transform into ‘Nìvulo’ in Anima, in Tutta la vita [A Whole Life], 1946) to ‘Signor Dido’, who lends his name to a series of short stories published in book form only in 1978, but which appeared in the Corriere della Sera between 1949 and 1952 (in May of that year Savinio died suddenly, at just over sixty years of age, after delivering his final work: the sets and costumes for Rossini’s Armida, staged at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino with Maria Callas in the lead role).

The de Chirico brothers’ origins contributed to this aura of uncertainty, if not of mystery. Greece, of course, whose sublime mythology is immediately evident in Giorgio’s paintings and Andrea-Alberto’s writings (though, in both, it is variously infused with references to the more prosaic present of an equally corrupt and unrecognisable metropolitan and industrial civilisation); but also the Germany of Savinio’s student days, the France of his early adulthood, and who knows what other places besides. In the 1970s, when he was somewhat unexpectedly ‘rediscovered’ by publishers who had completely forgotten him for some twenty years (to the point of making him, in the following decades – thanks largely to the publisher Adelphi – an author very much in vogue), his distance from the most obvious ideological and stylistic coordinates of Italian literati was succinctly summarised, in what might be called anthropological terms, by one of his greatest admirers, Leonardo Sciascia: ‘There is no Italian writer more “foreign” for Italians than Savinio.’ But that sense of being from elsewhere was also a historical circumstance. This is how Giorgio Manganelli, a long-time reader of his, described him in 1969, long before his renaissance:

Manganelli was wittily alluding to the ‘monsters’ – theriomorphic beings with human bodies and animal heads – that Savinio loved to paint (his self-portrait at the beginning of Casa ‘la Vita’, for example, has a cat’s head). But that mixed, meticcia (or hybrid) origin (metics, a word derived from the same etymological root, was used for foreigners who, in the city-states of ancient Greece, had to pay additional taxes and serve in special army units for a certain period of time before being granted citizenship) was, in his early days, criticised in tones that were even racist. A certain Ferdinando Palazzi, for example, wrote a scathing review in early 1919 of Savinio’s debut work Hermaphrodito [Hermaphrodite], which had been published the previous year by the ‘Libreria della Voce’ belonging to the young Florentine publisher Vallecchi (a collection of material that had appeared over the previous three years in the leading magazines of Italy, where, together with his brother, Savinio had returned upon Italy’s entry into the war in May 1915 in order to avoid being declared draft dodgers, and thus traitors): ‘Instead of Hermaphrodito, it might just as well have been called ‘Assorted Shades of Vanilla’. For it is a volume without rhyme or reason, written partly in a French with a Spanish Basque flavour, partly in an Italian as perhaps spoken by our settlers in Somalia.’

It was precisely to this linguistic mix (which in his subsequent writings would never again achieve such heterogeneity) that Savinio attributed the book’s title, with ‘an allusion to the bilingual nature of the stories’, as he would tell the French translator Jean Chuzeville. For him, even more so than for his brother (who had, in fact, helped edit that first book), the Italian language had first been the object of a passionate love from afar, and then of a hard-won and belated conquest. In The Childhood of Nivasio Dolcemare he would say that ‘the birth of an Italian outside Italy’ compelled him to ‘achieve a style’: an ‘Italian more Italian than Italian, because the “Italian” in him was not a “local state”, but a chosen, discovered, acquired condition’ (Paola Italia has documented the lexical exercises, derived from the sparkling, artificial language of Leopardi’s Operette morali, symbolically transcribed by Savinio on the verso of his military documents during his brief military service as an interpreter with the Italian expeditionary force in Greece in 1917). Indeed, in Hermaphrodito he confesses: ‘I feel drawn to a land, a city, a home – probably because I possess neither land, nor city, nor home’ (significantly, both de Chirico brothers would trace the existential choices and literary themes of their shared mentor, Apollinaire – born Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apollinaris de Wąż-Kostrowicki in Rome in 1880, the illegitimate son of a Swiss father and a Polish mother – back to his own equally uncertain and precarious biographical and linguistic origins).

But, unlike similar cases in Italian literature of those years (such as that of Giuseppe Ungaretti, the quintessential poet of the Great War who was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in the same year as his future friend Savinio, to parents who had emigrated from the most provincial and impoverished parts of Tuscany), this lack of a home – that is, of a predefined and reassuring identity – was not a source of anguish for Savinio. Very early on, indeed, he made this his conceptual – not to say philosophical – creed: again in Hermaphrodito he writes that ‘there are so many truths, that the absolute does not exist, that truth is precisely such because it contradicts itself’, thereby remaining faithful to the thinker who most stirred the blood of both him and his brother, Nietzsche (The Gay Science, § 372: ‘the world has […] once again become “infinite” for us: inasmuch as we cannot escape the possibility that it contains infinite interpretations within itself’).

It is not merely a question of multilingualism, then (which, in fact, will never be repeated to this extent in the writings following his debut work). In Greek mythology, as recounted by Ovid in Book IV of Metamorphoses, Hermaphroditus is a being of extraordinary and perfect beauty, endowed as he is with the sexual attributes of both male and female. Hermaphroditus is the offspring of Aphrodite and Hermes, god of Passage and Exchange. And indeed, it was Hermes – whom Savinio preferred to call by his Latin name, ‘Mercury’ – whom he chose as his ‘guardian deity and protective angel’ (as de Chirico put it when presenting his brother’s paintings in 1940). Not Ulysses – despite his eternally wandering spirit (‘passionate pilgrim’, as his other mentor Giovanni Papini had called him) – whose figure he portrays in a parodic and desublimated form in the play Capitano Ulisse (staged in 1925 by Luigi Pirandello’s Teatro d’Arte, with sets and costumes by de Chirico, and published in book form in 1934): for unlike Ulysses – as Manganelli would summarise – Savinio ‘does not wish to arrive’. Commenting on the Dialogues of Lucian of Samosata, of which he produced a splendid, illustrated edition in 1944, Savinio in fact suggests that, compared to the telos represented by Ithaca and his faithful wife Penelope, he is rather inclined towards the seductive ambiguities of Ogygia and the nymph Calypso. In Italian, the adjective mercuriale refers to the archetype of Hermes, denoting the irrepressible and explosive mutability of matter, its utter resistance to acquiring a stable form (in his most representative book, the aforementioned Casa ‘la Vita’, Savinio goes so far as to add alternative endings, which convey entirely different meanings, to the two major stories in the collection, Il Signor Münster [Mr. Münster] and the one that lends its name to the title of the book).