abandon fiction and poetry. Two or three years later appeared his Harlequin, a collection of miscellaneous articles which had been published in the Voce or in the Riviera Ligure. This volume and the Logbook show Soffici at his best, and are among the most precious works of recent literature.
Even today, perhaps, there is more of Soffici in the Harlequin than in any other book. It has an extraordinary felicity and limpidity and solidity in color, word, and image—life, novelty, a spontaneous power, a clearness that seems profound by virtue of its very transparency.
But Soffici’s greatest success began in the review Lacerba. Still moved by his old eagerness for the fragment, the brief note, the registration of autobiographical experience, Soffici began to publish a sort of diary, sentimental and philosophic, pictorial and poetic, which he called his Logbook. At first it attracted little attention, but in the course of a few months competent and sensitive readers began to look for it and to enjoy it. Renato Serra was one of the first to discover its great beauty, and had the courage to state his admiration publicly. Soffici, who in his painting had recently turned to futurism, became popular, at least among connoisseurs and radicals. People began to read his other books as well; and within a year’s time he had come to be the fashionable writer, the favorite both of
