When I started working at the Press, my predecessor had only just begun “re-keying” Pasolini Requiem. That was in August of 2014. Whenever I finished with my assigned clerical tasks, I opened up the Word file and typed two or three pages before clocking off. In the beginning, my boss told me it was a low-priority job, something to be done when I had nothing else to do, but as the months wore on he pushed me to finish as fast as possible. I began to type for two and three hours at a time, sometimes coming in on weekends to complete chapters. I constructed a special easel on which to stand pages of the manuscript and a special wrist cushion to prevent carpal tunnel.

Pasolini’s life, I learned, was turbulent and lonely. Born in Bologna, he moved with his mother at a young age to her ancestral village in the Friuli region of northeast Italy. After fighting for the Italian fascists in Africa, his father returned to join them and quickly became a drunkard. Pasolini discovered poetry through Rimbaud and went to the University of Bologna to study art history and literature, but World War II forced him to return to Friuli. There he suddenly came to political and poetic consciousness, joining the Italian Communist Party and beginning to write in the local dialect of Friuli, which, during Mussolini’s regime, constituted a political gesture. These Friulian poems soon earned him the attention of prominent literary critics at Bologna and beyond, and at the age of nineteen he published his first book. At the same time he began to cultivate what would be a lifelong infatuation with working-class boys, recording his love for one particular boy in the novels Amado Mio (My Love) and Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebooks). When he was caught and convicted for seducing four boys during a holiday festival, he got expelled from the local Communist Party. In 1950, after his father had sunk into a depression and begun abusing his mother, Pasolini fled with her to Rome, where he lived for the rest of his life.

I did not especially enjoy Pasolini Requiem. The fact that I had to copy the book word by word for four hours at a time probably had something to do with this, but I also felt that the book did as much to obscure Pasolini as to reveal him. The narrative is flooded with digression and historical detail about everything from Mussolini’s cabinet to the various vixens of Italian cinema. In the opening chapter, my first introduction to Pasolini, Schwartz relates in minute detail Pasolini’s interactions with various Swedish literati during his last visit to Stockholm, none of whom ever resurface. Fifteen years of research gave Schwartz a prodigious amount of material to work with, but by the end of the book I felt no closer to understanding who Pasolini was than when I had started.

In August of 2015, a year after I began, I had only one chapter of Requiem left to type. At that point, I left my job to study in Rome.

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“A Desperate Vitality” opens as Pasolini drives toward Rome from the Fiumicino airport, “speeding down the motorways of Latin neo-capitalism … in a sunlight so heavenly it cannot be put into rhymes not elegiac.” When I arrived in Rome and took a taxi from the same airport, I had never read this poem, nor did I see the “papal colossus, huddling with its battlements amid coastal groves of poplar” that the Pasolini of the poem passes in his Alfa Romeo. Even having slogged through the biography, I still felt no connection to the man who drove into Rome feeling “like a cat burnt alive, crushed by a tractor-trailer’s wheels, hung by boys from a fig tree, but with eight of its nine lives still left …”

On my second day in Rome, some classmates and I walked from our house in Trastevere to a large park nearby, the Villa Doria Pamphilj. On the way back home, we passed through the sprawling neighborhood called Monteverde, outside the old city. While we were waiting at the Via di Donna Olimpia, I spotted a plaque on a nearby apartment. “To Pier Paolo Pasolini,” it read in Italian, “for his intellectual creativity and his relationship with the neighborhood of Monteverde.” I had wandered by accident into the neighborhood where Pasolini had lived for seven years in Rome, and where his most famous novel, The Ragazzi, was set.

When my classmates went sightseeing in the historic city a few days later, I took the tram in the opposite direction, back to Monteverde. Passing through the piazza, up Via Federico Ozanam, I discovered an artist’s studio with a façade covered in paintings and articles relating to Pasolini. A row of murals extending up the block showed Pasolini writing, talking to children, posing with his chin in his hand. In one of them, he stood in the posture of the pietà, holding his own disfigured body. Three days later, while walking along the banks of the Tiber, I saw the same mural of Pasolini in the pietà posture on the underside of the Ponte Sant’Angelo. I stopped in the dark and stood face-to-face with him, the man whose life I had plodded through page by page. I saw another mural a few days later in Trastevere, then again while I was drunk in the Campo de’ Fiori. I spotted one when I got lost in Testaccio, then another in the Jewish ghetto and one more while I was drunk with my classmates, again in Trastevere. I walked up to this last mural and looked Pasolini in his peeling eyes until an Australian man tapped me on the shoulder to ask me why I was making bedroom eyes at a piece of graffiti, and whether I wanted the rest of his Jack and Coke.

On the plane to Europe I had written down, in a fit of study-abroad earnestness, a quotation from Samuel Johnson: “A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority.” I was unable, too, to resist the temptation to see the famous haunts and habitations of the writers I loved: Dickens’s home in London, Proust’s in Paris, Keats’s deathbed in Rome on the Piazza di Spagna. Looking back, I can see that I was under the impression that basking in the aura of the writing life could somehow help me achieve it—as though by treading on the floorboards Proust’s slippers had once touched I might inhale the lingering spores that had helped him compose such beautiful sentences. This was more than tourism; it was pilgrimage, hero worship. I never quite determined how a visit to Goethe’s cabin might improve my prose, but I really did believe it could happen.

Pasolini had never been the object of my literary adoration, nor had he figured in any of my grand European plans. Still, he popped up everywhere, even on trips that had nothing to do with him. When I went to see Keats’s grave, I saw another pietà on my way out of the cemetery.

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After I saw my tenth pietà, I bought a copy of The Ragazzi at one of Rome’s few English- language bookstores and found its companion novel, A Violent Life, in my school’s library.¹1. The pietà graffiti, it turns out, are the work of Ernest Pignon-Ernest, one of many artists to pay homage to Pasolini through public art. I wrote down the names of the streets where the protagonists smoked cigarette butts and robbed gas stations. After visiting monuments and churches with my classmates, I took long walks at night to the working-class quarters where these novels take place, first through the nearby Monteverde and Portuense neigh- borhoods, and then farther, to the post-fascist Garbatella quarter and the former shantytowns near the distant Tiburtina station.

In an essay called “The City’s True Face,” Pasolini offers instructions for tourists, showing them how to find the real beauty hidden in the borgate outside the city center:

The ignorant tourist … who covers his eyes can catch a glimmer of this disproportionate city, sunken into thousands of grandiose and disparate pools, if he bothers to look out the window of his train or bus. Before his unseeing eyes, clusters of hovels will fly by, expanses of shacks like Bedouin camps, collapsed ruins of mansions and sumptuous cinemas, ex-farmhouses compressed between high-rise buildings … Beyond all of this, in the burned or muddy countryside, marked by little hills, ditches, old pits, plateaus, sewers, ruins, trash piles, and dumps, lies the true face of the city.

Fifty years after they were first published, I took these sketches as my guidebook to the city. But if Pasolini had been alive to see me, he probably would have told me to drop my quest. At the end of his life, he lamented that the Rome he knew had become tame and Americanized: the government had razed the slums and replaced them with massive government apartment blocks he described as “smaller versions of the City of Dis.” Consumerism and political centrism made Rome a place “full of inauthenticity and neuroses.”

Some of the neighborhoods I visited felt like they were still home to the Rome Pasolini described: there were still the loitering ragazzi, still the mischievous boys who whacked me in the shins with sticks, still the fruit markets teeming with pickpockets (very talented ones, as I learned). The streets I visited were still pungent and full of litter. But it was nonetheless true that much of Pasolini’s Rome had disappeared. The dark piazzas where his hustlers went to rob shops and solicit prostitutes had been cleaned up and filled with chain stores and bright streetlights. I had to take the regional train out to the weed-filled wastes of Magliana to find scenes from the novels that hadn’t been lost to time entirely—and when I got there they were empty except for piles of trash.

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It took me weeks of wandering through fields of garbage and government-issued apartment blocks to discover what anyone who has ever sought “Joyce’s Dublin” or “Dickens’s London” will quickly discover: authors—especially dead authors—make poor tour guides. After I first started to see the pietàs I ordered a bilingual edition of Pasolini’s poems, but by the time the book arrived, I had basically given up on trying to find Pasolini’s Rome. I read the poems anyway, and almost immediately they began to exert a pull on me, one that had less to do with the places they described than with the inner life they expressed. All at once, the private, passionate mind I had searched in vain for in Schwartz’s biography came into view—awed, inconstant and utterly vulnerable.

In long, meandering poems like “A Desperate Vitality” Pasolini switches back and forth between misanthropy and self-loathing, presenting himself as an infant in one stanza and a god in the next. The reader gets the sense that the speaker is circling the drain of his agony, trying and failing with each successive metaphor (“a half-eaten eel,” “a mama’s boy on death row”) to communicate his pain. The through-line of the poem is an interview with a “cobra”-like TV journalist, interrupted by parenthetical expressions of Pasolini’s thought as he becomes more and more anxious: “He’s speaking softly now, as though intimidated, playing the part the interview, which he accepted, has forced him to play…” When the anxiety overwhelms him, Pasolini sinks entirely into his own mind, reflecting on various formative moments in his life: a confrontation with God before his birth, a night spent listening to the sounds of train whistles in Rome, an afternoon in Friuli when he masturbated into a soldier’s grave until he bled.

Many of Pasolini’s other long poems, including “The Cry of the Excavator” and “Persecution” (perhaps his most apt title), show him slipping in and out of self-examination as he wanders around Rome. In the latter, he finds himself in a café on the Via Portuense, “a sad presence among the revelers, flesh among those spirits.” Here as elsewhere, he presents himself as both superior and inferior to those around him—the boys are “crass” but also “precious,” and the “puplike children” are also “savage masses.” But these observations of the outside world are mere prelude to an unbearably intense meditation on his own “atrociously naked” place in that world—he is “weak, exposed,” “a statue within a statue,” “a dead man still not sure he’d really reached the end.” For the speaker in these poems, there is seldom any difference between the emotion he feels and an objective fact about the world. When he is lonely it means he is being persecuted; when he is lovesick it means he has been betrayed.

“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling,” wrote Oscar Wilde (incidentally one of Pasolini’s first heroes). “To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.” But this was a risk Pasolini was always willing to take—his renderings of self-loathing and weakness sometimes seem to resemble the writing of a schoolboy more than that of a poet who has been called the inheritor of Rimbaud and Leopardi. In one poem he tells his mother, “You are irreplaceable … for the soul is in you, it is you, but you are my mother, and in your love are my fetters”; in another he tells his erstwhile lover Ninetto Davoli that “the future had only one meaning in you.” (Ninetto, who starred in several of Pasolini’s movies, eventually got married and had children, a betrayal Pasolini never forgave him for.) The personality that appeared in the poems was too melodramatic to earn my sympathy, but just as his mania repelled me, it also drew me in. Finally I felt I had no choice but to “listen to [his] fate” in a state of “frightened tenderness … an anonymous guest at its consumption.”

In my final weeks in Rome, out of loneliness or boredom or both, I went on long walks in the evenings, sometimes in the middle of the night. As I “turned up the Tuscolana like a madman, or down the Via Appia like a dog without a master,” I found I could not rid myself of his words. It was as if the raw psychic material on the page had seeped into me. As soon as I was alone his sense of things rushed to fill the silence—his loneliness, his anger, his weakness.

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On the evening of November 1, 1975, Pasolini picked up a young boy named Pino Pelosi at the Termini train station, and the two of them drove in Pasolini’s Alfa Romeo out to the beach town of Ostia thirty minutes away. The next morning Pasolini was found dead behind the shipyard, savagely beaten and run over by his own car. Pelosi told the police that Pasolini threatened to sodomize him with a stick and that he had killed him in self-defense, but the wounds on Pasolini’s body indicated that more than one person was involved in the assault. In 2005 Pelosi recanted his confession and the case was reopened; it remains partially unsolved to this day.

Throughout Requiem, Schwartz treats the murder as an integral part of Pasolini’s life story. He writes in the afterword that Pasolini “wanted—needed—to die in the market square,” and that for him “the only way to end the film of his life and make sense of it … was a violent death, seen to be so by the public.” Exactly forty years to the day after Pasolini’s murder, I rode a clattering Roma Lido train out to Ostia. From the train station, I embarked on a final attempt to retrace Pasolini’s steps, though by this time I had given up on the idea of learning much from such trips. I walked thirty minutes to the edge of Ostia, then another thirty down an unpaved road behind the shipyard. At the site of the murder an overgrown fence gave way to a small park filled with benches and plaques bearing quotes from Pasolini’s poems. A few people stood around, talking and drinking wine. An abstract sculpture stood at the center, its base covered by flowers and candles.

“Death lies not in not being able to communicate,” Pasolini writes in “A Desperate Vitality,” “but in no longer being understood.” This line was written on one of the plaques in the park where people paid homage to the poet, testifying that Pasolini’s name lives on in the Italian imagination. But the kind of understanding Pasolini craved can only be accessed through his poems and films, which preserve and transmit the most shameful, private pieces of a life—perversions, defeats, secret fears. I often found Pasolini’s tone and subject matter unpleasant, even repugnant, but his poems still mastered me during my time in Italy. I didn’t want Pasolini to live in my head, but the poet does not have to ask for permission. When we read a poem, we sign up for an encounter with a quality that Pasolini found in himself again and again: una pazza purezza. A crazy purity.