‘My career is to become ‘Me’, I can no longer be content with anything less,’ writes Aldo Busi. In a sense, he has achieved this aim and become a twentieth-century agent provocateur, in the tradition of Sade and Nietzsche. While his early novels Seminar on Youth and Standard Life of a Pantyhose Salesman are fictional representations of a larger-than-life existence, Sodomies in Eleven Point is a personal sounding-off. Here, Busi decadently raps and wriggles his way through the great themes of literature and homosexuality, casually dismissing his predecessors. Gide, Genet and Pasolini are called apologists and Moravia a ‘bourgeois pornographer’. He scoffs at travelogues and books about sex, but then, tongue-in-cheek, hurtles his reader into a torrid sexual exploration of North Africa, Finland and Czechoslovakia.


Outside his books Busi actively lives up to his reputation as a ‘literary Cicciolina’ (Italy’s onetime ‘Queen of Porn’). He appeared naked at the launch of Standard Life and was almost prosecuted for obscenity for Sodomies in Eleven Point, something that caused sales of the book to rocket. Many Italian writers, elbowed out of the literary circus of parties and conferences by the more glamorous Busi, are angry. But this ‘starlet’ status belies some rather sharp writing, or ‘acid aperçus’ as Philip Hensher remarked in The Guardian. Take, for instance, the superb and much-quoted one-liner: ‘Eroticism is the candied cherry on the cake when the cake is missing’.


‘In dissenting, one speaks,’ writes Busi in his last book. Substitute ‘writes’ for ‘speaks’ and you have the essence of Busi. Seminar On Youth, his first novel, tells of Barbino’s mutation from child hip-shaking mambo dancer to young man gratifying the needs of the village youths and, finally, to prostitute in Milan and Paris. Barbino’s sexual encounters with men are often violent and complicated. He is locked in a cupboard for three days, drawn into a sado-masochistic relationship with a rich art dealer, abused by a grouchy old Parisian and his two Arab sidekicks. But on each occasion Barbino’s tenacity and ingenuity provide the escape route.


Like Seminar, Standard Life focuses on a fervid young man who is searching for another way of life, trying to forge his own ‘moral’ code in a quest for personal identity. But identity, Busi points out, is a curious thing: if culture is identity then why can’t we change our identity by moving to Paris?


Both Barbino and Angelo are ‘marginalised’ by being homosexuals but turn their homosexuality into a vibrant and aggressive exhortation of sex. If the traditional stereotype of the homosexual is ‘someone who desires incessantly’, Busi is candidly matter-of-fact about his own promiscuity. ‘I do not make love because I like it, but because I do not know what else to do’. This ‘accountancy of the heart’ is the backdrop to his novels. Angelo, part-time literary translator and interpreter for pantyhose salesman Celestino Lometto, cruises around Europe looking for sex in bars and public toilets and on the banks of Lake Garda. Sodomies in Eleven Point chronicles Busi’s numerous, usually paid-for and often violent sexual encounters. A literary seminar in Finland leaves him sulky and melancholy as he cannot fathom the country’s complete lack of sexual opportunity.


Busi’s sexuality reflects a two-fold aim in life: ‘1. to take part at all costs, 2. to set myself apart by choice’. In Barbino and Angelo he explores these possibilities. Barbino’s strategy is a paradoxical marriage of violence and pacifism ‘to acquire good aim through practice massacres and never to have to fire a single shot’. He strives to unearth people’s motives and the ties that bind them in strange relationships. What truths, for instance, do prim Nougatine and the despicable colonel conceal? And what subtleties underlie the friendship between timid Arlette, aloof careerist Genevieve and the maternal Suzanne? Ultimately, Barbino and Angelo act as subversive catalysts. ‘To invade a person’s existence with my presence, making and unmaking its existence, almost always changing him into one who no longer knows who he is when I take my leave because I never reveal the code word to break the spell’.


Busi’s writing reflects this same push and pull of assertion and withdrawal. He indulges in some wonderfully humorous character sketches: Clementina Gnoccoli, heiress of an underwear empire; pill-popping matriarch Edna Lometto, married to a pantyhose empire; even his mother’s domestic economy, knitting on a bench under a street-lamp to save electricity, is brilliantly set up. But all of it goes nowhere — probably because Busi is astute enough to realise a basic tenet: ‘To attack the platitudes of the world means to remove from beneath it the only piles on which it rests — with this difference, that it doesn’t notice and you are the only one to collapse underneath it’.


Suffering is something so quiet and understated in Busi’s writing that it is easily overlooked, perhaps because the suffering that ostracizes Busi and his protagonists leads them to pluck up their heels and stamp them firmly one step in front. Suffering, in any case, is, according to Busi, ephemeral. For ‘what remains of the pain we thought we suffered when we were young? Nothing’. It serves no purpose, in actual fact, as ‘in pieces or in one piece, don’t we go on living equally split?’


Busi is throwing up all the cards and slamming the door before they land. Despite his pooh-poohing of the Italian literary giants, he remains quintessentially Italian. All his references come from the innards of his Brescian landscape, even Finland — ‘hundreds of kilometres of Lombardy before the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel’. Busi is like Voltaire’s Candide, haphazardly stabbing his fork into a Utopian ideal, though this enfant terrible is probably far from ready to cultivate his garden.

‘Here I am in Milan again, looking for a little luck, like so many others as thwarted as myself....But it will not be for long; if I have to pick up lice they might as well be Parisian lice.

I am working at the very exclusive Bar Pinguino in Via Verri, I am a waiter, or rather I go round the shops and beauty-parlours carrying through the traffic trays piled with ices with their little paper umbrellas and martinis with glacé cherries in them. I have found lodgings just a step away, in Via Bigli, in a ramshackle attic belonging to a tailor: a camp-bed there was already, and with a bit here and bit there I have managed to put together a bed. Hundreds of beetles about — they don’t even wait for the dark; I don’t even squash them. There are so many of them that they squash each other I imagine. Now one is peeping out from this page, who knows what it is trying to say to me.’ p118 Seminar on Youth