In the beginning we spoke of singular books. Adelphi had not yet found a name for itself. Only a few things were certain: the critical edition of Nietzsche was enough to give direction to everything else. And then a series of classics, an ambitious project that sought to do well what had previously been done less well, and to do for the first time what had previously been disregarded. They were to be printed by Mardersteig, along with the Nietzsche edition. At the time it seemed normal, almost obligatory. Today it would be inconceivable (costs multiplied tenfold, et cetera). We liked the idea of these books being entrusted to the last of the great classic printers. But we liked even more the fact that this master printer had long worked with Kurt Wolff, Kafka’s publisher.
For Roberto Bazlen, who had a swiftness of mind I have never since encountered, the critical edition of Nietzsche seemed almost obvious. Where else could we have started? Italy was still dominated by a culture where the epithet irrational implied the severest condemnation. The begetter of all things irrational could only be Nietzsche. In any event, that odd word, unhelpful to thought, became a label that covered virtually everything. And it also included a vast part of what was essential—which had often still not been published in Italy, largely due to that damning label.
In literature, the irrational was fondly linked to the decadent, another word of outright condemnation. Not just certain authors but certain genres were condemned in principle. Now, several decades later, it may seem amusing and hard to believe, but anyone with a good memory will remember that fantastic literature as a genre was considered murky and suspect. From this it can already be seen how the idea of publishing a novel such as Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side, an example of fantastic literature in its purest state, as volume no. 1 in the Biblioteca Adelphi series, might appear provocative. Made so much worse by the proximity, at no. 3 in the series, of another fantastic novel: The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki (and it didn’t matter that this was a book that, by then, could have been considered a classic).
When Bazlen talked to me for the first time about the new publishing house that would become Adelphi—I can give the exact date and the place, since it was my twenty-first birthday, in May 1962, at the villa of Ernst Bernhard at Bracciano, where Bazlen and Ljuba Blumenthal (the Ljuba of the famous poem by Montale) were staying as guests for a few days—he naturally spoke at once about the critical edition of Nietzsche and the future series of classics. He was very happy about both, but what mattered most to him were the other books that the new publishing house would produce: those that Bazlen had come across at different times over the years and had never managed to get passed by the various Italian publishers with whom he had worked, including Bompiani and Einaudi. What were they? Strictly speaking, they could be anything: a Tibetan classic (the life of Milarepa) or an unknown English author of a single book (Christopher Burney) or the most popular introduction to that new branch of science which was ethology (King Solomon’s Ring by Konrad Lorenz) or several fourteenth- and fifteenth-century treatises on Noh theater. These were the names that Bazlen gave for some of the first books to be done. What bound them together? This wasn’t entirely clear. It was then that Bazlen, by way of explanation, began talking about singular books.
What is a singular book? The most eloquent example, once again, is volume no. 1 in the Biblioteca series: Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side. It is a singular novel by a nonnovelist, in which the reader is drawn into a frightening hallucination. A book written in a state of delirium that lasted three months. There was nothing like it in Kubin’s life before that moment; nothing like it after. The novel coincides perfectly with something that happened to the author on a particular occasion. There are two novels alone before Kafka that already breathe the air of Kafka: Kubin’s The Other Side and Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten. Both were to find their place in the Biblioteca series. There was another reason for this: alongside the idea of the singular book, if we had to talk about a singular author for the twentieth century, one name would stand out: Kafka.
In short, a singular book is one in which it is clear that something has happened to the author and has been put into writing. At this point it should be noted that Bazlen had a marked impatience about writing. Paradoxically, considering that he spent his entire life among books, he regarded the book as a secondary result, which suggested there was something else behind it. The writer needed to live through this other thing, he needed to absorb it physiologically, preferably (though this did not have to happen every time) transforming it in style. If this had happened, these were the books that most attracted Bazlen. To understand this, it’s worth remembering that Bazlen had grown up at a time when it was widely claimed that the pure literary word had a right to self-sufficiency, the years of Rainer Maria Rilke, of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, of Stefan George. And as a result he had developed certain allergies. The first time I saw him, as he was talking with Cristina Campo about her magnificent translations of William Carlos Williams, he insisted on only one point: “One shouldn’t hear too much of the Dichter…” the “poet-creator,” in the sense of Friedrich Gundolf and a whole German tradition that came down from Goethe (a tradition, by the way, of whose great significance Bazlen was, moreover, perfectly aware).
Singular books were therefore books that had also run a considerable risk of never having been written. From Zhuangzi (Bazlen’s true master, if we had to name only one) it could be claimed that the perfect work is one that leaves no trace. Singular books were similar to the residue, śeṣa, ucchiṣṭa, about which the authors of the Brāhmaṇas never stopped speculating and to which the Atharva Veda dedicates a magnificent hymn. There is no sacrifice without residue—and the world itself is a residue. Books therefore have to exist. But it must also be remembered that, if the sacrifice had succeeded in leaving no residue, then there would never have been any books.
Singular books were books in which—in very different situations, periods, circumstances, ways—the Great Game was played out, in the sense of Le Grand Jeu, the name of the journal directed by René Daumal and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte. For Bazlen, those two turbulent adolescents, who at the age of twenty had set up a journal compared with which the Surrealism of Breton seems pompous, conceited, and often outdated, prefigured a new, strongly hypothetical anthropology toward which singular books were directed. An anthropology that still belongs, as much if not more than ever before, to a possible future. When 1968 erupted a few years later, I found it irritating at first, like an ungainly parody. Compared with Le Grand Jeu, this was a modest and compliant way of rebelling, as would become all too clear in subsequent years.
Mount Analogue, to which Daumal dedicated his unfinished novel (which would become no. 19 in the Biblioteca series, accompanied by an illuminating essay by Claudio Rugafiori) was the axis—visible and invisible—along which the flotilla of singular books was tacking. But this should not suggest that each of these books was intended to express some kind of esotericism. Father and Son by Edmund Gosse, no. 2 in the Biblioteca series, would be enough to disprove the idea. A detailed, balanced, and harrowing account of a father-son relationship in Victorian times, it is the story of an unavoidable lack of understanding between two solitary beings, a young boy and an adult, who at the same time are capable of stern mutual respect. In the background: geology and theology. Edmund Gosse would later become a distinguished literary critic, but almost without any trace of that boy described in Father and Son, that being to whom Father and Son happens. Father and Son, as a memoir, therefore has something of the singularity of The Other Side.
Among such disparate books, what at this point could be the essential requisite that had nevertheless to be recognized? Perhaps just the “right sound,” another expression that Bazlen sometimes used, as a final argument. No experience, in itself, was enough to bring a book into existence. There were many cases of fascinating and significant events that had nevertheless produced dull books. Here, too, an example comes to mind: many people were imprisoned, deported, and tortured during the last world war. But for a clear and simple account of the experience of total isolation and total defenselessness and how it can yield a discovery of something else, the book to read is Solitary Confinement by Christopher Burney (no. 18 in the Biblioteca series). And the author, after writing that book, would fade back into anonymity. Perhaps because he’d had no intention of writing a work, but that work (that singular book) had gone through him in order to come into existence.
Having chosen the name of the series, we now had to create its look. We immediately agreed on what we wanted to avoid: whiteness and graphic designers. Whiteness because it was the hallmark of Einaudi’s design, which was the finest then in circulation—and not just in Italy. It was therefore essential to try to be as different as possible. And so we focused on color and on matte paper (our Imitlin, which we have used ever since). So far as colors were concerned, those used at that time in Italian publishing were relatively few and fairly awful. There was room to explore whole ranges of intermediate tones.
We also wanted to do without graphic designers. However good they may or may not have been, they all shared one defect: whatever they did looked immediately to be the creation of a graphic designer, following certain rather narrow-minded rules practiced by followers of the Modernist bible. We felt there were other ways. And one day a catalog of the work of Aubrey Beardsley began circulating around the office. At the back were several maquettes for book covers he had designed for the Keynotes series published by John Lane, at Vigo Street, London, in 1895. With a few small adjustments, and replacing the frieze that Beardsley added along the black upper strip with “Biblioteca Adelphi,” the cover was complete. Above all, it provided a template for an element we regarded as essential: the image. And so in homage to Beardsley we decided that no. 2 of the series—Father and Son—should include the frieze that Beardsley had created for The Mountain Lovers by Fiona Macleod.
Many years later, in an antiquarian bookshop, I was surprised to come across the publicity brochure for the Keynotes series. And I could hardly believe my eyes when I found reproduced there the cover designed by Beardsley for Prince Zaleski by M. P. Shiel. What an extraordinary coincidence … Totally forgotten in Britain, M. P. Shiel was the author of The Purple Cloud, which was perhaps Bazlen’s last exciting discovery while he was looking for books for Adelphi, and was also to become one of the Biblioteca’s first immediate successes. Published in 1967, masterfully translated and introduced by J. Rodolfo Wilcock, it was reprinted straight away and soon became one of those books—like The Book of the It by Georg Groddeck—from which and in which the first Adelphi readers became identified.
Name, paper, colors, graphic design: all essential aspects of the series. Still missing was what makes a book recognizable: the image. What did the image on the front cover have to be? The reverse of ekphrasis—that’s how I would describe it today. And of course we never described it in that way, but we proceeded as though it were implicit. Ekphrasis was the term used in ancient Greece to indicate the rhetorical device that translated works of art into words. There are writings—such as Philostratus’s Images—dedicated entirely to ekphrasis. In modern times, the supreme virtuoso of ekphrasis was Roberto Longhi. Indeed, it could be said that the boldest and most revealing aspects of his essays are his descriptions of paintings, far more than his discussion and analysis. But, Longhi aside, the unequaled master of ekphrasis is still Baudelaire, not just in prose, but also in verse. When he described Delacroix as a “lac de sang hanté des mauvais anges” (“lake of blood haunted by bad angels”) or David as an “astre froid” (“cold star”), Baudelaire was showing just how precise and invaluable the word had managed to become in relation to those two painters. So the publisher who chooses a book cover—whether he realizes it or not—is the last, the most humble and obscure descendant in the line of those who practice the art of ekphrasis, but this time applied in reverse, attempting to find the equivalent or the analogon of a text in a single image. All publishers who use images practice the art of ekphrasis in reverse, whether they realize it or not. And even typographical book covers are an application of it, if only in a more limited and underhand form. And this is true irrespective of quality: as an art, it is no less important for a pulp fiction book than for a novel of great literary ambition. But here we need to add one crucial detail: it is an art on which there is a heavy onus. The image that is to be the analogon of the book must be chosen not for itself, but above all in relation to a vague and ominous entity who will judge it: the public. It is not enough for the image to be right. It has to be perceived to be right by a multitude of extraneous eyes, who generally know nothing about what they will find inside the book. A paradoxical situation, almost comical in its ramifications: an image has to be offered that will intrigue and encourage unknown people to pick up an object about which they know nothing except the name of the author (a name they are often seeing for the first time), the title, the name of the publisher, and the words on the cover flap (a text that is always suspect, since it is written pro domo). But at the same time the cover image must look right even after these unknown people have read the book, if only to stop them from thinking that the publisher doesn’t know what he’s publishing. I doubt whether many publishers have thought very much along these lines. But I know that all of them without distinction—the best and the worst—each day ask themselves one question that is more straightforward in appearance only: is this particular image selling or not? When considered closely, the question is more akin to a koan than to anything else. To sell indicates here an equally obscure process: how can you stimulate a desire for something that is a composite object, largely unknown and to an equally large extent elusive? In the United States and in Britain, teams of sophisticated art directors find themselves in this situation every day: they are given an entity (a book, which they haven’t necessarily read), together with several primary and secondary characteristics (expected print run, type of target readership, subject matter and the issues it might raise). Their task is to create the image and the most effective packaging in which to present it. American and British books today are the result. Sometimes ugly, sometimes brilliant, but always following this pattern, so that they become too closely related to each other. It’s as though all the book covers on display in a bookstall came from one same center, in which some departments are highly expert and others fairly inept. This system may or may not appeal. But so far as Adelphi is concerned, a very different system was always applied.
We felt, from the outset, that with a little perseverance we could find something each time from the sea of existing images—whether pictures or photographs or designs—that would be appropriate for the book we were about to publish. So we have never commissioned a front cover. For more than thirty years, Luciano Foà and I have sifted, tried, and retried hundreds and hundreds of images, formats, and background colors. Unfortunately, Bazlen was unable to take part in this game—he died in July 1965, the very same month that the printing of the first volume of the Biblioteca series was completed. But everyone involved in the publishing house took part, and still takes part in various ways. Including the author, when available. And every suggestion from outside is always welcome. For sometimes the choice is quite a headache. And there are plenty of regrets—and regrets about regrets. Just one example: when it came to the second edition of Gosse’s Father and Son we decided to change the front cover by replacing Beardsley’s flowers with a splendid photo of Gosse father and son that, in the first edition, had been opposite the title page. Today I would perhaps prefer to return to the original.
The art of ekphrasis in reverse needs time—a lot of time—to develop, expand, breathe. The aim is to get a web of images that not only respond to a single object (the book for which they are being used) but also resonate with one another, similarly to the way that various books in the series can relate to one another. In this way, strange instances of irresistible affinity were created, so that certain authors attracted certain painters. For example, Georges Simenon and Léon Spilliaert. Spilliaert—a Belgian like Simenon, a still-underrated genius—began to appear on the jackets of Simenon books in 1991, with The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By (in our pocket series). And since then he has appeared there twelve times. Always leaving the impression, in us but also in our readers (as we have been able to confirm), that this was the right image. So each time we publish a Simenon in the Biblioteca series, we instinctively look for the most appropriate Spilliaert. If Simenon has always been celebrated as the creator of atmospheres, it can be supposed that something of those atmospheres filters onto Spilliaert’s canvases or is already there waiting for Simenon the writer to describe them. What they share is something spare, lurid, sinister—a certain bleakness of background. And this might appear from a coat rack, a piece of old furniture, from the reflection in a mirror or from the sandy shore at Ostend.
But Spilliaert is also linked to another, very different author: Thomas Bernhard. Their story might help in understanding the strange resonances created by practicing ekphrasis in reverse. When the moment came for publishing the first of Bernhard’s five-volume autobiography, I remember feeling unsure where to look. Bernhard is a prime example of those authors for whom it is very difficult to find an image to put on the front cover (and in fact Suhrkamp editions of his novels have always had typographic covers). It is as though his supreme idiosyncrasy extended to the realm of figures, repelling them. The choice finally fell on Spilliaert: the picture of a long, low wall, behind which is an expanse of yellowy-red sky and, to one side, the outline of a bare tree with dense branches. I couldn’t explain why I thought that image was right for The Origin, a book centered around Salzburg, a baroque city infected by Nazism and bigotry. But it did not displease me. Two years later, we published the second volume of the autobiography, The Cellar. Once again I settled on a Spilliaert: several bare tree trunks in an empty landscape. Then came the third volume, The Breath—and it was another Spilliaert: a tall tree with many bare branches. A complicity, a secret alliance, had been created by this stage between Bernhard’s autobiography and Spilliaert’s trees. For the fourth volume, The Cold, another Spilliaert was to be seen on the front cover: an avenue in winter, lined by trees with bare branches. Having reached the last volume, A Child, once again I felt great uncertainty. I may not, in the end, have found any more trees by Spilliaert but the choice nevertheless fell on one of his pictures: it showed some colored boxes, stacked one on another. It was a strangely appropriate cover for that book, with something childish and also joyous, without having to refer to the figure of a child.
I met Bernhard a few times, each of them memorable. First in Rome, with Ingeborg Bachmann and Fleur Jaeggy in the early 1970s. Bernhard had given a reading from one of his works at the Austrian Institute. He told us how the director of the institute had been so eager to inform him, with Viennese formality, “The bed in which you will be sleeping is the one in which Johannes Urzidil died a few months ago.” Bernhard remained silent that evening until well after midnight. Then, prompted to say something, he talked nonstop for several hours, telling a series of hilarious and generally macabre stories until dawn. The subject matter? The Irish, cemeteries, sleeping pills, farmers. By the time we had taken him back to the institute it was daybreak. Several years later, in Vienna, I delivered to him a volume of his autobiography that had just been published. He leafed through it, looked carefully at the print, and seemed pleased. Then he said the paper was good. Not a word more. And we began talking about something else. I should add that we never discussed books, least of all his books. That was the last time I saw him.
Shortly after his death, in July 1989, the publisher Residenz sent me a copy of Bernhard’s In der Höhe. The author probably didn’t live to see a finished copy of it. The book struck me as déjà vu. On the front cover: bare branches on a pale background, with a few delicate patches of color. It wasn’t a work by Spilliaert but it could have been. The front cover was not on glossy paper—like that of every other Residenz book—but matte, of the kind we used. The page layout was exactly the same as that of Adelphi’s Narrativa Contemporanea series in which the first volumes of the Bernhard autobiography had appeared. I telephoned Residenz and asked for an explanation of this change, which made it quite unlike all the publisher’s other books. They told me it had been Bernhard’s express wish. Indeed, he had made it a condition that the book should be presented in this way. I took it as a farewell gesture.
* * *
Over the years and through experience—by making mistakes and correcting them—various criteria began to develop in the search for appropriate images for the Biblioteca series: first of all, as a matter of principle, to avoid old masters, painters too identifiable and images too widely used, since some element of surprise—in the image itself or in its context—was an essential requirement (but in this, as in all the rest, there would be exceptions: hence Dürer’s violets for Marina Tsvetaeva); and then to pick out certain painters who, regardless of when they lived, seem to have sensed, for reasons not easily discernible, some sort of vocation to become book covers, of which they perhaps wouldn’t have approved (among these, William Blake); also to make good use of certain great artists who were underrated (such as Spilliaert) or never fully recognized (such as Félix Vallotton) or not yet widely appreciated (such as Vilhelm Hammershøi). Finally: to create a sort of club of kindred spirits, ready to give assistance in the most varied cases: George Tooker (for Milan Kundera, William Burroughs, Reiner Kunze, Vladimir Nabokov, Oliver Sacks, Leonardo Sciascia), Alex Colville (for Álvaro Mutis, Georges Simenon, Christina Stead, Robert M. Pirsig), Richard Oelze (for Gottfried Benn, Sacks, Burroughs, Varlam Šalamov, C. S. Lewis), Meredith Frampton (for Nabokov, Muriel Spark, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Henry Green).
Once these strategies are understood, once the several hundred images that have appeared on the front covers of the Biblioteca series over the course of fifty years are placed side by side, as if on an enormous table (especially if we add the covers of the two parallel Fabula and Gli Adelphi series), it shouldn’t be difficult to see a sequence of lines that overlap with those of canonical art history, or produce a counterpoint or contrast to it. But these things ought not to be emphasized, except in passing. It is for readers to discover them, mentally retracing the paths and reasons that have led to certain combinations.
* * *
Vienna was very different before being discovered as the Grand Vienna. In the sultry summer of 1968 the shop windows were still piled high with ugly objects, together with their prices, like a provincial city still recovering from war. Works by Klimt and Schiele still hung in the back rooms of antique shops. The only people to talk about Karl Kraus were certain gentlemen of exquisite manners who remembered being there when his demon shook the city. One of them told me how he had sold his complete collection of Die Fackel to an American officer for a substantial quantity of cigarettes. But Kraus’s books were nowhere to be seen. They were slowly being reprinted by a publisher called Kösel who specialized in theology—noble editions, invisible among the new publications. Working on Kraus, whom I had the idea of translating, it became increasingly clear that his Vienna was indeed that “cosmic point” of the Sirkecke that he had once described—an astounding galaxy that had emerged with the young Hofmannsthal in the guise of Loris, perfectly mature at the age of eighteen, and which in all probability had been swallowed up when Freud and his family, thanks to the help of Marie Bonaparte, had succeeded in getting out on a train for London, which might have been the last. Between those two moments, a great many questions and forms had passed along those streets that had remained unaffected by time. Indeed they were more apparent than ever before by reason of a certain firm radicalism that hadn’t been reached elsewhere. Schönberg and Wittgenstein, Musil and Gödel, Kraus and Hofmannsthal, Freud and Roth, Schnitzler and Loos: they had all run into one another on the Graben, had brushed past or ignored one another, had often detested one another. But what bound them together was much stronger—and only now did it begin to emerge. Expressed in the most elementary formulation: in no other place than Vienna had the ultimate questions of language been so lucidly posed (which for Kraus could be the language of everyday life and newspapers; or for Gödel the language of formal systems; or for Schönberg the language of the tonal system; or for Freud the mysterious rebus of dreams).
The good fortune of the Biblioteca series began to become apparent when a certain number of readers discovered, book after book, that this constellation was taking form, with no exclusions of genre, within the same series. This phenomenon can be followed from reactions to Joseph Roth. In 1974 we published The Emperor’s Tomb in an edition of 3,000 copies. Roth was a name that at that time meant nothing. The book was immediately reprinted, though still in the order of a few thousand copies. But soon it went beyond that threshold. Flight Without End, two years after The Emperor’s Tomb, was immediately received with enthusiasm by a vast readership. And to our amazement we realized that, at a time when literature had become a dirty word, the novel was being covertly adopted by youth of the far Left. I remember some members of the Lotta Continua extremist party saying that it was the only story with which they could identify—or at least, with which they would have liked to identify, in that moment of turmoil. It would have been good if they had pursued Roth even further. And so, after another two years, in 1978, for a book that wasn’t one of Roth’s greatest, The Silent Prophet, we had to start off with a print run of 30,000 copies because so many bookshops were asking for it. And it was immediately sold out. On the front cover there was a Schiele, which still seemed usable without any second thoughts (it is hard to imagine there was a time when Schiele or Hopper were still not well known and on posters everywhere). The success, the real fashion for Joseph Roth in Italy, was due not only to the recognition of his great fascination as a storyteller, but to the fact that around him—and in the Biblioteca series itself—other stars in the Viennese constellation continued appearing. And the time would also come for more discreet and elusive literary authors, such as Peter Altenberg and Alfred Polgar. Or someone like Alexander Lernet-Holenia, an outstanding inventor of plots against whom his own culture of origin still stubbornly resists.
But it is also worth remembering another point that readers could hardly ignore, of an intensely editorial nature. If Joseph Roth’s prose and phrasing have slipped so easily into the veins of the Italian language, it is thanks not so much to any one of his many translators, but to his single editor: Luciano Foà. Book by book, from The Emperor’s Tomb (1974) to The Ballad of the Hundred Days (1994), Foà kept aside a certain number of weeks each year for editing Roth. For him it was a task that seemed obvious and natural. And the result was that precision of detail and that delicate patina that protected the whole of his writing, without which the peculiarity of Roth could not be understood. There were few writers whom Foà admired unreservedly. First among them were Stendhal and Kafka. And in Roth he recognized the writer who had come closest to Stendhal in the twentieth century.
* * *
The enduring link between Adelphi and Mitteleuropa was established between 1970 and 1980, in particular through a number of titles in the Biblioteca series. It began with Hofmannsthal’s Andrea, followed by Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, Ödön von Horváth, Joseph Roth, Arthur Schnitzler, Elias Canetti, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. And I notice that in 1980 Altenberg, Polgar, and Lernet-Holenia had not yet been published.
But memory plays strange tricks, superimposing images of things that happened at a later time and ignoring details that were then so vivid. It is therefore with some relief that I discovered several sheets of paper on which I jotted down some words of thanks I had given in September 1981 when the Austrian authorities were kind enough to award me the Ehrenkreuz litteris et artibus (and the word Ehrenkreuz, “cross of honor,” immediately brought back to mind one of the most delightful pieces of prose by Kraus, in defense of a prostitute who had dared to pin on her breast that decoration, which had been given to one of her clients). I record these words of thanks here in full because they give some idea of how those events were seen at the time:
“Like all Italian children for about the past hundred years, I came across Austria for the first time as a child, in my primary school textbook that talked about Marshal Radetzky and described him as ‘the beast.’ So the beast Radetzky was the first Austrian I met. Then we learned Giuseppe Giusti’s poem ‘Sant’Ambrogio’ by heart—and there we came across other unnamed Austrians, soldiers with tallow mustaches, poor folk ‘in a country, here, that wishes them harm.’
“Fortunately for me, I have always tended to regard the things I read in history books as unreal. I therefore erased every overly exact image of Austria until one day, in 1957, when I was sixteen, I saw in the Hoepli bookshop in Rome the first volume of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, published by Einaudi. The author was unknown to me, the front cover was a fine picture by Vuillard. Something attracted me immediately to the book: I was won over by the portrait of Leona, Ulrich’s frivolous, gluttonous lover, who at the restaurant always orders pommes à la Melville. And, soon after, I was won over by the chapter that begins to describe Kakania as ‘that misunderstood state that has since vanished, which was in so many things a model, though all unacknowledged.’ In this country, whose name seems to come from an operetta but whose center of gravity was a great criminal called Moosbrugger, I at last encountered Austria, not just as a historical entity but as a place of the mind. And that country gradually became populated for me, in its blend of nations and differences: it was the land of Kafka and Schönberg just as much as that of Loos and Kubin, of Altenberg and Schiele, of Wittgenstein and Freud, of Polgar and Schnitzler.
“For me, that place was also populated by living people, two of whom were crucial in my life: Roberto Bazlen and Ingeborg Bachmann. Through them and through those many invisible friends who are dead writers, I was naturally led to experience those places, those events, that fragile crystallization of civilization. So when Adelphi began publishing its books, for which it will be eternally indebted to Bazlen, we turned to these authors I have mentioned with never a thought of just—as they say—‘filling a gap’ or ‘discovering a new line.’ Adelphi, as its name suggests, is a business based on affinities: affinities between people as well as between books. And it was for reasons of affinity that we often turned to works in that Austrian sphere that I have described.
“Reactions at first were slow and hesitant: not just when we published Kubin in 1965 but even when we published Kraus in 1972. One illustrious figure of the publishing world [this was Erich Linder, at that time the world’s most important and certainly its most cultured literary agent] predicted at the time that Kraus would sell twenty copies. The book has now reached its fourth edition. But the most obvious case of an infatuation for a great Austrian author was that of Joseph Roth, in relation to whom it can be said that Italy is the only country where the surname Roth immediately evokes the name of the Austrian Joseph before that of the American Philip. But I don’t wish here to go back over the fortune that many Kakanian authors have had during these years, and in particular certain books that Adelphi has published. I remember that Alberto Arbasino once published an article in which he said that Adelphi ought to be renamed Radetzky. That day I had the impression of having turned full circle: the beast Radetzky had become one of our totemic ancestors. His army, with their splendid uniforms, is an army now dispersed, literary and invisible, whose last surviving officer, without knowing it, is perhaps Fred Astaire, whose real name was Frederick Austerlitz, the son of an Austrian officer. This cross that I am receiving today is for me, in a certain way, a sign that comes from that invisible army.”
* * *
Then there were certain books that seemed to have been written especially for the Biblioteca series. One day Angelica Savinio sent us an unpublished manuscript written by her father Alberto, who was the brother of Giorgio de Chirico. It was the Nuova enciclopedia. Dissatisfied by all encyclopedias, Alberto Savinio had compiled one himself. The first entry: “abat-jour” (“lampshade”). This would have been enough to win me over. The book meandered on with countless intelligent and witty remarks, in amiable tone, at times aloof and sardonic. Savinio had sought to transform the encyclopedic form—essentially anonymous and collective—into the highest expression of idiosyncrasy: it is difficult to imagine a singular book that more exactly fits the definition. At that time, the only Savinio we had published had been Maupassant e “l’Altro,” an indefinable book, brimming with genius, which Debenedetti had already tried to publish in the Silerchie series. Otherwise, Savinio’s work was not widely known, his name surrounded by a vast halo of silence. It never appeared in the literary annals. And yet he had known everyone, he had written tirelessly for leading newspapers and magazines. But an ancient, deadly spell was working against him. A nameless voice would keep on saying: “Savinio? Too intelligent.” He seemed to lack that healthy obtuseness that some still regarded as the characteristic of a true artist. There were obviously other reasons for rejecting him. First of all, his ability to remain detached from the literary society around him, his unpredictable way of dealing with anything, from the abat-jour to the zampirone (“fumigator”)—the penultimate heading in the Nuova enciclopedia. But these defects were exactly what made him so dear to us. And so Savinio entered full-sail into the Biblioteca series with his Nuova enciclopedia, which could be read as the encyclopedia most suitable for that composite tribe that had preceded him in the series.
* * *
With Joseph Roth we made a clear, decisive correction to our course. Bazlen’s idea of the singular book, in its most radical form, went contrary to the idea of complete works. Bazlen was more interested in the moment, the individual expression, rather than the work in all its ramifications. It was a very bold, far-reaching idea—and one for which the times were not yet ripe. But what should we have done with Roth? The Emperor’s Tomb was one of his greatest novels but, to really understand it, it had to be put in sequence with all the others, some of them no less fine. Roth, like few others, is the author of linked narratives. And so it happened, from 1974 to 1994, year by year, that we published all the narrative works of Roth (then continuing on with his magnificent journalistic articles). And in fact it was an approach that we would also apply, from then on, to other writers as soon as the rights situation allowed: to Blixen, Borges, Nabokov, but also to Maugham—and finally, with an impressive range of titles, to Simenon.
* * *
I was writing my observations about front covers when The New York Times Magazine published a long article by Kevin Kelly, described indeed as “a manifesto.” Its title (“Scan This Book!”) was immediately followed by the question “What will happen to books?” His byline referred to Kelly as “the ‘senior maverick’ at Wired magazine” and therefore authoritative by definition.
At first I thought it was yet another of those doomsday stories, almost comical to read today, that began appearing as soon as one of various, by now obsolete, electronic devices appeared. But in this case there was something more subtle, which could already be seen in the caption of a photo over the main title: “You can’t judge a book from the cover if there’s no longer a cover.” Rather than the book itself, the focus was that strange object about which I was writing: the cover. The beginning of the article was indistinguishable from a thriller: “In several dozen nondescript office buildings around the world, thousands of hourly workers bend over table-top scanners and haul dusty books into high-tech scanning booths. They are assembling the universal library page by page.” These lines already have a whiff of deportation and butchery. And we realize straight away that something very serious is going on, though we don’t know whether it is to be admired or feared. The position becomes clearer with the next sentence: “The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present.” And since when did the old dream become a reality? Since December 2004, when Google announced that it would scan the books of five major research libraries (with Stanford, of course, at the forefront). The article continues, as it had to, with a few figures. “From the days of Sumerian tablets till now,” we are told, “humans have ‘published’ at least 32 million books.” This would be the basis of the “universal library.” But immediately the devil butts in: “And why stop there? The universal library should include a copy of every painting, photograph, film and piece of music produced by all artists, present and past. Still more, it should include all radio and television broadcasts. Commercials too. And how can we forget the Web? The grand library naturally needs a copy of the billions of dead Web pages no longer online and the tens of millions of blog posts now gone—the ephemeral literature of our time.” These last, fanciful words are insufficient to wipe out the sense of terror and paralysis that the earlier words have already instilled. What has been described is perhaps the most advanced form of persecution: life besieged by a life in which nothing is lost and everything is condemned to exist, available always, suffocating. In this context, books seem like a far-off province or the realm of operetta. What are 32 million books in the face of phalanxes of billions of “dead Web pages” exponentially growing? These are the true living dead that besiege us. As I was reading, I thought: is there anyone who has gone farther than that? Yes there is: Joe Gould, the dazzling New York eccentric whose life was brilliantly captured by Joseph Mitchell. Gould was the man who claimed to have written the “oral history” of his time, that unknown history which includes every single word said in conversation in a bar (in all bars) or in a subway car (in all subway cars) or in any other place. In comparison with Joe Gould’s plan, even that of Google is provincial and modest. And Kevin Kelly, in his enthusiasm, reveals the awkwardness of the novice. But precisely for this, for the lethal candor of his words, it is worth following Kelly’s arguments. For example, what does technology want? Answer: “Technology accelerates the migration of all we know into the universal form of digital bits.” The powerful ethnic migrations that are racking the globe are just the shadow of a vaster and all-pervading migration, which aims toward a “universal form.” There is nothing exaggerated or inaccurate in all this. In fact, the world had been digitizing itself for centuries (or rather for millennia), but without knowing it, without saying it, without possessing a word that named what was happening. Digitizing is fundamentally nothing more than saying that a may stand for b. Then the word was formed. Its baptism in thought could be celebrated with The Computer and the Brain (1958) by John von Neumann. Then, in a matter of a few years, the world officially started to become digitized. And finally we came to the Google program, presented as an agent for universal digitization. If such is the focus, every other transformation will be subordinate to it, almost as though it were a secondary application.
But could everything proceed unhindered? Nothing proceeds unhindered. A contrite Kelly explains: yes, it’s true, the digitization of books is proceeding rather slowly, “because of copyright questions and the physical fact of the need to turn pages.” An invaluable observation, from which we find out who are the enemies: first, copyright as a legal limitation, and then the physical nature of the book itself, which demands certain specific gestures—such as, for example, turning the pages. But there is also something about the form of the book that is deeply detestable and old-fashioned: the cover. The cover is the skin of that body which is the book. And this is a serious obstacle for anyone wanting to start off the partouze of the universal library: a partouze that is never-ending and unstoppable, between bodies without skin. This is perhaps the most effective image if we want to cancel out any kind of erotic desire. Indeed, if we want to make eros repellent. But fortunately, continues Kelly, the Swiss have invented a robot that “automatically turns the pages of each book as it scans it, at the rate of 1,000 pages per hour.” It is therefore to be hoped that the partouze will proceed at a faster pace from now on.
Like all American dreams, universal digitization is based on well-meaning sentiment and on a certain benevolence toward poor, distant foreigners—who, at the moment, serve above all to reduce the cost of digitization itself (Kelly, meticulous as ever, tells us that to scan a book today costs ten dollars in China and thirty at Stanford), but will one day have access (this is the magic word) to everything. And here Kelly risks sounding lyrical. Who will be the beneficiaries? “Students in Mali, scientists in Kazakhstan, elderly people in Peru.” From this example it would seem that universal digitization can’t do much to influence preset ideas about ethnic characteristics: Kelly would hardly have spoken about Peruvian scientists and elderly people in Mali. But this isn’t the point. And it would be ridiculous to raise any objection over the lure that the sudden availability of an immense quantity of words and images might have upon someone who has difficulty even just seeing a book, an object that is exotic in so many parts of the world.
The point is that universal digitization implies a certain hostility toward a way of knowledge—and only as a consequence toward the object that embodies it: the book. It is not therefore a matter of being concerned about the survival of the book itself. The book has already encountered difficult times and has always endured. No one, after all, wishes it much harm. At worst, there’s an attempt to treat it like an endangered species, to be corralled in a large natural park.
Instead, a fairly rigorous attempt is being made to get rid of a whole way of knowledge that is closely connected to the use of the book. More precisely, to get rid of a certain way of relating to the unknown. Here everything becomes harder and more risky. But why should the book have these powers? Why does the new digital sensibility find it so irritating, almost offensive as an object? Once again, all we have to do is follow Kelly to find the answer. First of all, books have the nasty defect of being “isolated items, independent from one another, exactly as they are on shelves in your public library” (more accurately in any library, public or private, from time immemorial). From this, Kelly insists that “each book is pretty much unaware of the ones next to it.” This unawareness is already an antidemocratic attitude, a way to avoid sharing with others or envers l’Autre (if we were in France).
Books hadn’t realized they were laden with so many prejudices since they were invented by Gutenberg. Then there is an aggravating factor: the author. “When an author completes a work, it is fixed and finished.” As if to say: dead. In fact, “the only movement occurs when a reader picks it up to animate it with his or her imagination.” Writers are, in essence, producers of corpses, which in certain cases can be subjected to galvanic experiments thanks to the intervention of external agents: the readers—who are, we soon discover, the true heroes of this whole new digital story. And not just certain readers but readers in general, this immense, invisible hive of activity that tirelessly intervenes, corrects, connects, labels. Links and tags are the crucial words here. According to Kelly, who doesn’t like letting irony or doubt creep in, they “may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years.” And, in their impending mass, readers are also those who will prevent books from indulging in their more pernicious tendency, that of being an island. Here Kelly’s tone solemnly echoes John Donne: “In the universal library, no book will be an island.”
The enemy is therefore the isolated, solitary, and self-sufficient existence of books. They are by nature asocial beings that have to be digitally reeducated. But scanning—warns Kelly—is just a first step, similar to the procedures when someone is taken to prison, shaved, and provided with a uniform: “The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before.” Which makes it sound like a bondage manual. The reader—or the anonymous programmer—is the insatiable dominatrix who wants the book to pay penance for all the sins it didn’t know it had committed. But books have long been accustomed to suffering some of these torments, sometimes with a perverse pleasure—for example, those inflicted by indexes or concordances. After all, masochism is a fundamental, inalienable sentiment. Far more worrying, however, is the final operation to which Kelly refers: that of ensuring “every word in every book” is “woven deeper into the culture than ever before.” Into what culture? It is well known that this word is now meaningless due to the excess of meanings given to it. And why should a book be “woven deeper” into it, however it might be construed? And what if that book had wanted to unweave itself from everything? Kelly’s phrase evokes a feeling of asphyxia. We no longer feel protected by the neutral, asemantic whiteness of the paper on which the letters of a book are printed. Letters have now invaded all empty space, stuck like flies on flypaper.
Or, what is more, the whole process tries to circumvent a certain way of relating to the unknown. For someone reading a page of a book, beyond the letters is the whiteness of the page, which is mute and recalls the stubborn muteness of the world that surrounds the book. But in front of a screen everything changes: here a page can also be substituted, modified, extended by another page, and so on, more or less ad infinitum. And one is tempted to ignore the mute background, as if the whole world were made only of letters (or images) substituting other signs. As a result, the role of the unknown is enormously reduced—and this is enough to change the character of knowledge itself. Having reached this point, even the maverick Kelly feels he must pause before the majesty of what he is revealing. The text—any text—is a pretext. What matters is the link, the connection. And there is nothing like numbers to give an idea of this: “There are about 100 billion Web pages, and each page holds, on average, 10 links. That’s a trillion electrified connections coursing through the Web.” At this point I felt a pang: how would those “connections” that Kelly had just mentioned be translated into Sanskrit? They would be the bandhus of which the Vedic seers spoke. The world and the thought about the world—the one and the other—were made, they said, with those bandhus. And the most mysterious bandhu was the one that linked the unmanifest to the manifest, the asat to the sat. I felt a sense of amazement, as if I were trapped in a hallucination. Implicit in all I have written was the conviction that we are experiencing—day after day, and more and more as we move ahead—the inversion of origin. The Vedic view of bandhus is the closest we can get to an origin that has left its trace in words (in this case the Ṛgveda). And now we see it reappear in a sweeping parody in the words of someone who seems unaware of the existence of the Vedic seers—and who at the same time reports accurately on something undeniable, which is all around us. But, of course, the parody involves an inversion of meaning.
With the vision of the trillion connections coursing through the Web, Kelly must have felt he was getting close to “the bottom of things.” Which he describes thus, in a tone of sinister camaraderie: “Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together. The collective intelligence of a library allows us to see things we can’t see in a single, isolated book.” But how does all this happen in practice? Once again, Kelly comes to our aid: “When books are digitized, reading becomes a community activity. Bookmarks can be shared with fellow readers. Marginalia can be broadcast. Bibliographies swapped. You might get an alert that your friend Carl has annotated a favorite book of yours. A moment later, his links are yours. In a curious way, the universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world’s only book.” The more affable his tone, the more terrifying the prospect. What has happened? When he says that “reading becomes a community activity,” it is implied that the secret, impenetrable, separate, discriminating, silent thought of the individual brain that reads has been replaced by society: an immense, all-pervading brain consisting of all brains, whatever they are, provided they operate and speak through the Web. It is a concentrated babble that creates a new kind of unrelenting background noise, unfortunately crowded with meanings.
The fundamental inversion that takes place is exactly this: that-which-is (whatever it may be) is replaced by the society of those who live and speak, pressing buttons and digitizing whatever they say inside that-which-is. The Liber Mundi is replaced by “the world’s only book,” accessible only online. As for the world, it is canceled out, superfluous, in its mute, refractory extraneousness. And the most worrying point of all, a final mark of the parody, is that while he was writing these words, Kelly was assuming the benevolent tone of someone picturing a group of old university friends who exchange notes and photographs and who enjoy helping each other out.
* * *
The legal dispute around the Google plan, started in fall 2005 by the Authors Guild and five American publishing groups, has now reached a first judgment and will presumably not last less than a generation. The legal problems that it raises are of the greatest interest, but all have to be considered as one consequence, among many, of a sort of radical oscillation of the mind, which is due to the process of universal digitization. In comparison to previous shocks in the framework of the mind, this has an entirely new peculiarity. First of all, analog and digital are not historical or cultural categories like so many before them. Analog and digital are primarily physiological categories, relating to the functioning of the brain at every instant. As I write these words and read them at the same time, analog and digital operations are occurring simultaneously in my mind, as in the minds of everyone else. These two poles are in perpetual conflict and are perpetually seeking an equilibrium, a balance, or a way of submitting or avoiding each other. The fact that this conflict has been transferred, for the first time, into an immense prosthesis—the Web, which resembles the maze of connections in the brain—creates an unprecedented disruption that no one is particularly interested in recognizing. Like the millipede, we don’t want to know too much about how these minuscule legs of our mind are moving at this moment. Because we know we’ll end up paralyzed. But a moment will also come when it will be inevitable to think what we don’t want to think. And then perhaps the temporary paralysis may prove beneficial.
It’s time now to return to front covers. In Kelly’s article there’s a phrase that relates directly to them. A phrase that stands out, to the extent that it has been used to caption a large photo: a view from above of an impressive series of shelves filled with books: “What is the technology telling us? That copies don’t count any more. Copies of isolated books, bound between inert covers, soon won’t mean much.”
Words that sound like a death sentence for the book itself. But why pick on the covers, describing them as “inert”? Can a cover be “inert”? No more than any other piece of paper. And we know that certain pieces of paper can develop a lethal energy. Why then so much disdain for the covers? Because they isolate the book from everything else, like the skin of every living being. And they isolate it in a highly analogical way, because the skin and what appears on the skin is the most powerful analogon of the being that it contains. But it is precisely this that cannot be accepted in the world of universal digitization. The cover reminds us that the mind can also act in an analogical way, allowing digitality to grow there with it. The cover is an indication—one of many—of the obstinate, mute, desperate resistance to the process that seeks to make “all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas”: something similar to a paradise from which to escape at once, before being strangled and submersed at the same time in that “liquid fabric.”
* * *
But what is Kelly’s dream—and that of the vast tribe that can be glimpsed behind him? I ask because in America the word dream inevitably crops up at some point. And it is felt that the “dream” has to be something good and fine.
I have had to recognize with a certain shudder that Kelly’s dream ends up in the same two words that I have been writing about: the singular book. Universal digitization should in the end swathe Earth in an impenetrable film of signs (words, images, sounds). And this would no longer be the Liber Mundi of medieval mystics, of Leibniz and Borges, but something much more daring: the Liber Libri, the all-enveloping emanation that, starting from a single digitized page, goes as far as covering everything like a single book. At that point the world could even disappear for being superfluous. And in any event it would be replaced by information on the world. And such information could also be, for the most part, wrong. The most effective and appropriate universal conspiracy in such a situation would be one that compelled its followers to send out on the Web only information that was false. Francis Bacon, champion of progress, spoke of truth being the daughter of time, veritas filia temporis, but—as Hans Blumenberg added—he could equally well have said, as soon emerged from the writings of Pierre Bayle: error filius temporis. The simple abolition of front covers has taken us such a long way.
* * *
What did publishing look like when Adelphi first appeared on the scene? Animated, confused, somewhat irresponsible, gracious. A sense of curiosity prevailed. Italian publishing in the 1950s meant only one thing: Einaudi. High quality, highly selective. But now everyone was tired of being taught selectivity. They wanted to find things out for themselves. And the dominant feeling was that somewhere there was still much to be discovered. “A vast part of what is essential,” I once said. And someone took offense. But that “vast part of what is essential” had been missing in Italy for a very long time. More or less from the time of the early romantics. Il Conciliatore had not been the equivalent of the Athenaeum published by Novalis and the Schlegels. Italy over the past one hundred and fifty years had had a history of great solitary figures—like Leopardi, like Manzoni—trapped in a petty, asphyxiating fabric. Suffice it to compare average nineteenth-century Italian language with the equivalent French, English, or German. The Italian is read with difficulty, with embarrassment, it is overblown and at the same time rigid. The French, English, or German is often hard to distinguish from the prose of a hundred years later. They were languages that aged much better.
Apart from Einaudi (which was rapidly moving ahead in new directions, while maintaining its own codes—though less overtly), there was now Il Saggiatore, run by Giacomo Debenedetti, and also Feltrinelli and Boringhieri. But surprises could come from any quarter, depending on the spirit of the editorial directors: from Garzanti, Longanesi, Rizzoli, Mondadori, or Bompiani. Seen through the eyes of today, it all seems rather idyllic—and it certainly was not. But it’s true there were still entire continents to discover, after having been subject to the Fascist Ministry of Popular Culture for twenty years and Comrade Ždanov for fifteen in the Italian variant of Sovietism. We could read the culture page of Il Giorno, which was far better than any that came after. Here Pietro Citati and Alberto Arbasino lavished their intelligence and insolence unstintingly, and weren’t frightened of showing enthusiasm at times. Sometimes even a story by Carlo Emilio Gadda could land, like a meteorite, on the pages of the newspaper, in tiny print.
* * *
“And politics?” someone is bound to ask. How did Adelphi fit in? Quite simply, it didn’t. There was nothing more tedious and exhausting than the disputes over the cultural hegemony (or dictatorship or enlightened reign) of the Left during the 1950s in Italy. It is an argument over which there ought to be nothing more to say. But it is always useful to set things out, for those whose memory tends to fail them and those born later. And, if possible, to set things out as swiftly and succinctly as possible, so as to avoid becoming tedious.
On a bookstall I happened to find an issue of Nuovi Argomenti that brought back memories of adolescence. It was dated March–April 1957 and bore the title “8 Questions on the Leader State.” The answers were given by Mario Alicata, Antonio Banfi, Lelio Basso, Giuseppe Chiarante, Ernesto De Martino, Franco Fortini, Roberto Guiducci, Lucio Lombardo-Radice, Valdo Magnani, Alberto Moravia, Enrica Pischel, and Ignazio Silone. They range from the head of cultural policy for the Italian Communist Party (Mario Alicata) to the world’s best-known Italian writer of the time (Alberto Moravia), who was also co-editor of the journal. That issue must have been meant as a bold critical initiative by several intellectuals, six months after the Hungarian Uprising.
An innocent reader of today might imagine, under the circumstances, that it would have addressed what had happened in Budapest. But there’s no trace of this in the eight questions. Instead, the first went like this: “In what way do you think the USSR reconciles its role as leader state of international communism with the need for its policy of power?” From the answers it could be gathered that a writer of international fame (Moravia), a philosopher (Banfi), an anthropologist (De Martino, the solitary representative of this profession in Italy at that time), and a poet (Fortini) were all concerned, before anything else, about the health of the “leader state.” They could therefore talk about sedition by troublemakers where this might help to emphasize certain problems and needs of the “leader state.” What is most striking in those pages—apart from the same leaden phrasing shared by the various authors—is the fervor with which all are eager to come to the assistance of the “leader state,” perhaps making a few tacit objections, but always in the end wishing it well in its mission.
It would be easy to pull more or less every paragraph of that pamphlet to pieces. But the eye is eventually led to the page where Lucio Lombardo-Radice (I remember his chubby pink face, like an eternal schoolboy) talks, in relation to the events in Hungary, about “massacres of Communist militants, widely documented (and celebrated!) by the bourgeois press.” As we can see, Lombardo-Radice was not afraid of strong words. And he also spoke of crimes and wrongs. But which—and whose? His allegations were serious: “Too many crimes and too many wrongs of conservative reformism have been committed and are being committed in the name of ‘socialism.’” The crimes and the wrongs were therefore directed against the “leader state.” And an example of this is given soon after, where Pietro Nenni is condemned for having dared to suggest a “verbal separation of responsibility from the Soviet Union” (a significant nicety is the adjective verbal). In short, with manly firmness Lombardo-Radice was exhorting us to close ranks against those slandering the USSR (all reformists, a word that anyone today would be happy to use as a way of describing himself but then sounded like a grave insult). These were still the days when George Orwell’s name was pronounced with a sense of disgust. He was, after all, a renegade.
Was Lombardo-Radice perhaps a crude and boorish Soviet agent? On the contrary, he was a perfect representative of that terribly respectable Italian intellectual elite—I say it without irony—who went from the circle of Benedetto Croce to that of Piero Calamandrei and the Partito d’Azione. Quite a number of the offspring of that family moved to the Italian Communist Party. But this fact had never scandalized anyone. Lombardo-Radice was one of them. He was the son of an eminent pedagogist, married to the daughter of a great Catholic jurist, Arturo Carlo Jemolo, and I remember him as being kind and amiable. But I’m not at all sure how he would have behaved if the followers of the “leader state” had come to power during that period. And as we know, children can be ferocious enough.
* * *
All in all, Adelphi emerged unscathed from the political turmoil of the first fifteen years. Those who disliked us—not so few—simply couldn’t figure us out. The same publishing company that was accused of being elite would be accused a few years later, by the same people, of being too commercial. And the same authors were used as an example in both cases. Joseph Roth was one of these. When anyone, moreover, is accused of being a “Gnostic,” then the fog really has set in. The word gnostic has, for centuries, been used to define everything that eludes current thought. And so foetor gnosticus is an honorable title, like foetor judaicus.
But someone at last appeared whose ideas were clear. He was anonymous, by necessity, like all those who wrote in Controinformazione, the official journal of the Red Brigades. It was a journal sold freely in all kiosks, alongside Espresso and Panorama, with a more limited but faithful readership. These details are worth recalling. In the June 1979 issue, in addition to the usual bulletins and declarations from prison, Controinformazione offered a long article with an ambitious title: “The Avant-Garde of Dissolution.” It also had headings above and below: “Cultural counterrevolution and psychological war” and “Community aggregation, values of scarcity, social consensus in the long march of the everyday spectacle.” Words very much of their time. As always in the writings of the Red Brigades, the starting point was rather remote. But, perhaps to help the reader, the essay was laid out in various sections, preceded by an introductory heading that summed it all up: “‘Refluence,’ return to the past, refuge in the sacred, religious reawakening, return to the country, alternative workshops, naturalist ideologies, false environmentalism, psychological cycle of ‘illusion-disappointment-frustration,’ irrationalism, orientalist fervor, neo-clownist attitudes, body language, discovery of private identity: they are not just fashions, expressions of partiality, least of all ‘deviations’ to be resolved with healthy repractice of militant orthodoxy. On the contrary these ‘deviations’ are the concrete result, ‘transversal,’ endemic of a wider project theorized, promoted, and carried out by the centers of reaction.” Within the limits of a certain vocabulary, it couldn’t be clearer. And the final sentence struck a sorrowful note: “While so many tend toward isolated self-indulgence, the spiral machine of death advances engulfing a notable potential for antagonism.”
The reader immediately felt goaded and wanted to know what were the “centers of reaction” (an updated version of the famous “dark reactionary forces lying in wait”). But the writings of the Red Brigades are always hard going at the start. And so, to reach the revelation, one had to wait until the ninth section, entitled “The Adelphi ‘Case.’”
This is how it begins: “On a cultural level, similar and definitely more refined is the enormous work of other aspects of the counterrevolution, namely of publishing houses, among which Adelphi stands out for its solidity and presence, linked financially to the multinational capital of FIAT.” And, already in the last lines of the previous section, Adelphi had been described as a “golden supporting structure of the superstructural counterrevolution.” There was therefore esteem and respect for the enemy—and this is immediately repeated: “The Adelphi production is learned, its books on offer captivating, its penetration subtle. Disconcerting is its total resilience which spreads over a range of excellent authors—for literary and philosophical depth—to whose fascination revolutionaries themselves yield devotedly.” This was followed by a sentence that left me amazed: “In the Adelphi production chain the individual author is a link, a detail, a segment.” Apart from the grotesque expression—the “production chain” was being operated along a corridor a few meters in length in Via Brentano, in the center of Milan—the anonymous sectarian had grasped something that official critics had not yet noticed: the connection, not immediately visible but very strong, that existed among the Adelphi titles—and particularly among those of the Biblioteca series. And here one immediately reached the nub of the argument, which was expressed like this: the line of the publishing house was said to be “aimed at undermining the principles of social revolt, at the mortification of collective revolutionary hope, at the invalidation of possible concerted subversion.” The subverters discovered themselves to be victims of subversion, like the gardener with a hose who himself gets sprayed in the Lumière brothers’ film. The terrorists felt terrorized—and were complaining of being subjected to a treatment (note the ominous noun invalidation, much used in the language of terrorism at that time) that was similar to what they handed out to their victims. It was necessary here to point out an example of such subversion of subversion. And it was Pessoa: “It will be appropriate to illustrate the observations on Adelphi’s projects and purposes by referring to the latest success of this editorial gang: the publication of the works of Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese writer, translated for the first time in Italy (Una sola moltitudine).” Just a few years later, Pessoa was to be found, with his spectacles and hat, on the Portuguese escudo, the only twentieth-century writer who had succeeded in becoming a banknote. And his name today is passing through that difficult and perverse process at the end of which—as has already happened to Kafka and Borges—he will become a notion used above all by those who have never read his books. But at that time his name was generally unknown. It now seems unlikely but that was how it was: the volume of Pessoa edited by Antonio Tabucchi was greeted by a compact silence when it was published. Only the anonymous Controinformazione had recognized its importance. And it had drawn its own conclusions: Pessoa was the last incarnation of the principal enemy, who distracted and corrupted the last disciples of subversion. And the tone precipitated into that of an epicedium: “Thus, in Pessoa, the struggle draws to an end, the vital subversive energy is buried.” The evil design of the “superstructural counterrevolution” is accomplished through the master of heteronyms.
* * *
Six hundred books in a single series is an enormity if we think how many fewer there were in Montaigne’s tower or Spinoza’s study. Six hundred books are enough to form a vast and varied mental landscape. Perhaps one of those Flemish landscapes where the most significant events are to be seen far in the distance, in marginal areas, where we see minuscule figures wandering about. It is a landscape where it is easy to get lost.
I wonder how readers who have only just learned to read will feel, when their time comes, in that landscape. Perhaps they won’t like it and will want to leave straight away—in which case I’d be very curious to follow them. But I think they couldn’t fail to recognize a certain constancy and recurrence in its features, however disparate. We could do a test, taking the first titles of 2006—the forty-first year of the Biblioteca series.
Elizabeth Bishop had to be one of those about whom Cristina Campo had written in Gli imperdonabili. And she is to be found alongside Marianne Moore, who was closest to her in life. The Confucius of Simon Leys fits in with the Tao Te Ching and The Book of Lord Shang translated by J.J.L. Duyvendak—two completely different Sinologists, one Dutch and the other Belgian, who, with precision and sobriety, seek to interpret immense and complex ancient Chinese texts. Simenon’s Cargo followed upon twenty-three other “non-Maigret” novels by the same author. With him the rule of the singular book was reversed: it is not the individual title that is singular, but the entire corpus of novels, in their multiplicity and range. David Golder by Irène Némirovsky is linked with the painful stories of another Russian in Paris at the same time: Nina Berberova. And the characters from the stories of one could easily be moved into those of the other. And so on, for each title.
In his conversations with Eckermann, Goethe had referred to the idea of Weltliteratur: “universal literature” as the ineluctable prospect for all that is written. “National literature now means little, we are entering the period of universal literature and each must contribute toward hastening the arrival of this period.”
Thus came the period not just of literature, but of universal hybridization. And Borges, through his entire work, would have added: everything can be regarded as literature. This today is the phantom ship that transports all possible combinations of forms and gathers them together on a neutral, impartial basis that is not a screen but a hypothetical mind. And it is perhaps one of the rare privileges of our time that this fact, daring in itself, has penetrated into the general awareness, unhindered. Literature is now either no longer noticed (the normal situation) or is hardly distinguishable from everything else. It is also for this reason that those six hundred titles of the Biblioteca Adelphi could be brought together and their juxtaposition didn’t seem to jar or clash. To move from any one title to all the others became a plausible option for every reader, as it had been for those who helped to bring them together within the same framework. And this, after all, is the hidden purpose behind the idea of a series, and for the Biblioteca series in particular: to be taken literally, so that each bead stays linked to all the others along the same thread.
* * *
It was crucial for the fortunes of the Biblioteca series that a certain complicit relationship was established with its mysterious, composite, and perceptive readership. Various examples could be given, but the most spectacular came with Simenon.
When I went to meet him at Lausanne in fall 1982, together with Daniel Keel and Vladimir Dimitrijević (the first Simenon’s publisher in German; the other the greatest expert on Simenon I have ever met), the situation concerning his books in Italy was as follows: many Maigrets, published in paperbacks and found in station kiosks, but none of the “non-Maigrets,” or “hard novels” as Simenon called them. Many had obviously been published, starting from the 1930s, considering that Mondadori had been Simenon’s first major foreign publisher. But all had gradually gone out of print. Simenon hadn’t realized this was how things were, and he was surprised. I explained that our plan was to publish the “non-Maigrets” in the Biblioteca series, presenting them as the work of one of the finest storytellers of the century.
This was just the beginning, since there were contractual obstacles. I had almost lost hope of finding a solution when Simenon—notoriously drastic in dealing with publishers—finally let me know, two years later, that we could go ahead. And the deciding factor was, I believe, a long letter from Federico Fellini in support of our plan. Between Fellini and Simenon there was a complete understanding. And Fellini knew Simenon’s work like no one else in Italy.
Our first Simenon, published in April 1985, was Letter to My Mother in the Piccola Biblioteca series. We published it not only because it is a passionate, highly intense piece of writing, but for a reason that concerned the author. Simenon was in fact upset that Mondadori had steadfastly avoided publishing that small book, claiming it was “too short.” The Letter did not have an immediate success, even if some—few—recognized it as a revelatory text.
But we knew very well that the success of the Simenon experiment could only be judged on the outcome of the “non-Maigret” novels. If we had been Einaudi in the 1950s, we would have immediately looked for someone to write a preface to justify the operation and to direct the reader toward a proper understanding of the author. But Adelphi had never been inclined toward contextualization and pedagogy, which inevitably went with a certain paternalism toward the reader. We therefore decided to present Simenon as one of the great writers of the twentieth century, taking this for granted. And it can’t be said to have been a widely held view at that moment: Simenon today is found in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, but then—even in France—his name didn’t often appear in the literary annals.
It wasn’t easy to choose which novel to begin with. I discussed it at length with Dimitrijević—and in the end the choice fell on The Window over the Way. Above all because it was one of Simenon’s most perfect novels, almost forgotten in France and unknown in Italy. But there was another reason. Published in 1933 and set in Batum on the Black Sea, it described Soviet Russia in a way that no one had previously managed to do. When he wrote it, Simenon—the master of atmosphere, as he would so often be called—had just had a fleeting encounter with the Soviet Union. His wife, Tigy, in her recollections of the year 1933, noted: “In June we sail toward Turkey: Istanbul, Ankara; then southern Russia: Black Sea coast, Odessa, Yalta, Sebastopol, Batum. The novel The Window over the Way will describe clearly to what point the Russian atmosphere is depressing, distressing, unsafe. Betrayal, mistrust are the rule. We risked being detained and kept at Batum. It seemed our visas were not in order. Fortunately the caviar is amazing. Interview with Trotsky at Prinkipo.”
But that was enough for Simenon. With his formidable antennae, he had felt the air of Soviet Russia, with the pure art of storytelling he had immediately entered into the veins of that overwhelming police and persecutory system that, twenty-four years later, some of the most respectable Italian intellectuals would describe as the “leader state.” It was a case of visionary precision, of which not many would have been capable.
The Window over the Way was published in October 1985 with a print run of 9,000 copies. We were all very curious to see what would be the press reaction. And the crucial signal came immediately. In mid-November, an article by Goffredo Parise appeared in the culture section of Il Corriere della Sera under the heading “Georges Simenon and the ‘Metaphysical’ Crime Story,” which I read with a vague sense of disbelief, for everything I had hoped would be noticed, not just in the book but in the way it was presented, was said with great elegance and incisiveness. The point of departure was the inside flap and the front cover (in this case a picture by Carel Willink, which was not a Black Sea landscape). And by introducing strictly editorial considerations into his comments, Parise went straight to the heart of the book: “Written around the 1930s by a genius, this short masterpiece is a book about police, control, the total annihilation of man under the most powerful, important, and demiurgic police dictatorship that modern man has ever known.” A little later, with a masterly touch, Parise referred to “scenes, customs, and names that appear covered by the powder white of surrealist and metaphysical painting.” The same powder white that covers the buildings painted by Willink in the picture on the cover.
After that article by Parise, I don’t remember anyone daring to question whether Simenon could properly be considered one of the finest storytellers of the twentieth century. And Parise’s enthusiasm must have infected a considerable number of readers since the forty-five subsequent novels were launched on the average basis of an initial print run of 50,000 copies.
In his article, Parise dwelt at length on the curious phenomenon where an ordinary reader in a bookshop, having found and browsed through a book he knows nothing about, reaches the point where, “so greatly attracted by the book, he picks it up and takes it home impatient to read it. He reads it and discovers it’s a masterpiece. Why does everything fit? First of all because the publisher has discovered a genuine masterpiece by reading it himself and not handing it out to be read: and in this way the front cover and the flap follow naturally from the masterpiece, inspired and strengthened by it. And by the same process the reader picks up the book, rushes home, puts everything else to one side, immerses himself in reading it, and discovers for himself that it’s a masterpiece. Simple, isn’t it? And yet it seems to be extremely difficult for the publisher of today, so difficult that when it happens there’s great exultance.”
The process described by Parise implied that there was a relationship of complicity between publisher and reader. A relationship that the marketing experts, in their unfathomable wisdom, define as “added brand value,” an expression they feel to be more appropriate. How can that relationship be established? Complicity with unknown people can be created only on the basis of their repeated experiences of not being disappointed. But how can we be sure not to disappoint? It is practically impossible when dealing with a multitude of unknown people as vastly disparate as those who can pick up a book. It’s better not to try. Or at least to limit ourselves to one basic rule: to think that what has not disappointed us (meaning that minuscule group that forms the mind of a publishing house) will not disappoint others. If this rule is applied, the result (the published book) will be highly idiosyncratic, to such an extent that many won’t even pick it up, purely through lack of interest. And these are exactly the readers who would certainly feel disappointed. The others remain: very few, generally speaking. But those few can also become many. These are like-minded people who are perhaps attracted, Parise would have said, by a cover picture, which provides “a way of re-creating, through the illustration, the atmosphere or Stimmung of the book.” And these will be the ones who are not disappointed, with whom the publisher, over time, can establish a tacit alliance.
One might object, at this point, that Simenon’s work has such intrinsic energy and such a broad penetrative power that certain results should come as no surprise. It is hard to understand, then, why the same effects are not produced—for the “non-Maigret” stories we are describing here—in the United States or in Britain or in Germany, or in France itself. The way in which books are presented and the context in which they appear—which may be denoted by a simple typographical frame—still evidently have some importance. The essential role of the publisher is exactly this. So long as this complicity is successfully established, publishing will remain a fascinating game. But if one day, which many hope will be soon, all this becomes superfluous, for single books as well as single readers, we would indeed be entering another era. We would then also need to find a different way of defining the very act of reading. And certainly other books would be read.
* * *
I remember the first time I met Father Giovanni Pozzi. It was 1976 and a new series of Italian classics, the Ricciardi-Einaudi, was being presented. Discussions proceeded for some time along fairly predictable lines, including the inevitable complaint about the indifference of Italian readers toward their own literature. And here Father Pozzi intervened with a vehemence and passion that seemed to me admirable. It wasn’t a matter, he said, of deploring a general indifference of readers, but of finding out first of all what they are indifferent to. What readers find today on the shelves of bookshops is not Italian literature but one fairly limited section of it, to which such literature has been reduced by the combined efforts of Italianists and publishers. What remains outside this area is enormous. Pozzi then gave various examples. He cited first of all religious literature, which has been part and parcel of Italian literature as far back as its origins and today is largely ignored. It goes without saying that I entirely agreed with him. But I was also struck by another point: standing before me was a great philologist, a great critic, and also a true homo religiosus—and each of the three aspects fitted together in a way that naturally strengthened the others. I thought then, as I do now, that mysticism is after all an exact science, as the Vedic seers well knew—and every other kind of exactitude is derived from it.
Alongside Father Pozzi I would like to place another figure, that of Roberto Bazlen, who devised the first program for Adelphi in the early 1960s. First of all, I would say that Bazlen was perhaps the most religious man I have known and certainly the least sanctimonious. He was immensely well read, but in the end he was fascinated by only one kind of book, in whatever form it was and to whatever period or civilization it belonged: that kind of book that is an experiment in knowledge, and as such can be transmuted into the experience of those who read it, thereby transforming that experience. I realize that in this way I have also defined the animus as well as the anima of the religious books published by Adelphi: works chosen not just in compliance with some cultural obligation, not just because they represent a sort of spiritual UNESCO, which is the exact opposite of all we have always stood for, but because they carry a possibility of knowledge without which our lives would simply be poorer.
I realize I have put the emphasis on the word knowledge without ever referring to that other word faith, which we generally encounter first, even in the dictionaries, when talking about religion. But I certainly don’t wish to ignore the difficulty posed by this theological virtue. The reason for the temporary omission is this: paradoxically the word faith, due to the semantic wear it has suffered, often ends up becoming a hindrance rather than a help in considering religious ideas in the way I intended. To the point where, in order to associate it with the word knowledge, I feel I have to translate it into Sanskrit. The Vedic seers spoke of śraddhā, which means “trust in the effectiveness of ritual gestures.” And here an explanation is necessary: “ritual gesture,” for the Vedic seers, meant first of all “mental gesture.” A mental gesture that was basically perpetual, in the same way that the ritual gesture, in the Vedic vision, occupied the whole of the year, and therefore of time. All of this can be easily retranslated into terms that are closer to us: what in fact is the continuous prayer referred to by an anonymous Russian in The Way of the Pilgrim if not a perpetual mental gesture? And what does this “mental gesture” imply if not the virtue of abandonment to Divine Providence? But I would also like to give another example, which could be described as the “primal scene” of śraddhā, of this singular form of faith. The first book I had the opportunity of translating and publishing for Adelphi, in 1966, was the autobiography of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. A brief, rough text dictated by the saint in his final years to his follower Gonçalves da Câmara and passed down to us in an edition that is half Castilian and half Italian. It is a swift and austere account, which retains the breath of oral narration. We know that in his youth Saint Ignatius was a man-of-arms with a violent character and a passionate reader of the tales of chivalry. One day, while already in the throes of religious conversion, but still racked by various torments, Saint Ignatius was riding a mule on the road to Montserrat. And here I hand over to him: “And so, as he continued on his way, he met a Moor who was riding a mule; and as they talked, they began to speak of Our Lady; and the Moor said it seemed to him that the Virgin had conceived without man; but he could not believe she had given birth while remaining a virgin and, as proof of this, he gave the natural causes that came to mind. The Pilgrim could not shift him from that opinion, however many reasons he gave. And so the Moor continued on his way with so much haste that the Pilgrim lost sight of him, and continued thinking about what had happened with the Moor. He was then overwhelmed by urges that brought unhappiness in his soul, it seeming to him that he had failed to do his duty, and aroused his indignation against the Moor, it seeming to him that he had done wrong in allowing a Moor to say such things about Our Lady, and to be obliged to defend her honor. And thus he was overcome by the desire to go in search of the Moor and to run him through with his sword for what he had said; and persisting much in the struggle of these desires, in the end he remained in doubt, not knowing what he was bound to do. The Moor, who had preceded him, had said he was going to a place a little farther ahead on the same road, very close to the main road, but through which the main road did not pass.
“And then, tired of examining what was the best thing to do, not finding any certain way of resolving it, he decided thus, namely that he would give the mule free rein as far as the point where the roads divided; and if the mule took the road for the village, he would go in search of the Moor and would stab him; and if it did not go toward the village but took the main road, he would let him be. He did as he had thought, and Our Lord determined that though the village was little more than thirty or forty paces away and the road leading there was wider and better, the mule took the main road and left the road to the village.”
After this episode, Saint Ignatius moves straight on without comment. But we know today that this scene of indecision between two roads, one that would have led him to assassinate an unknown Moor, the other that led Saint Ignatius to Montserrat and to all the rest of his life, is a marvelously vivid image of this śraddhā, this trust in some relationship between the mind and the world that touches the life of all of us at every moment. By which I mean: of all of us without distinction, whether or not we belong to a religious denomination. Having arrived at this point, it ought to be clear that religion, understood in this way through its two imperative terms, knowledge and faith (śraddhā), affects every aspect of our experience. In every aspect of our experience we are in contact with things that escape the control of our ego—and it is precisely in the area outside our control where we find that which is most important and essential to us. This, in the end, is the reason why the books I have mentioned so far have been published by Adelphi. Associated with these books—sometimes juxtaposed, sometimes overlaying them—are works of mythology that, as Father Pozzi observed, are “not perfectly synonymous.” Here again there is a relationship with the unknown. If everywhere—in the forests of Brazil and the Kalahari Desert, in ancient China and Homer’s Greece, in Mesopotamia and Egypt just as in Vedic India—the first form in which language manifested itself was the story, and a story that each time told of beings that were not entirely human, then this presupposes that no other use of words appeared to be more effective in establishing contact with entities that are around us and beyond us. And there is no risk of these stories, often immensely remote in time and space, being extraneous or inaccessible to us. All mythical stories, whatever their origin, are to do with something very close to us, though we often fail to realize it. And there’s no better way of showing this than with another story, this time Hasidic, told by Martin Buber and again by Heinrich Zimmer:
“Rabbi Eisik, son of Rabbi Jekel, lived in the ghetto of Cracow. He had remained unbroken in his faith through years of affliction and was a pious servant of the Lord his God.
“One night, as this pious and faithful Rabbi Eisik slept, he had a dream; the dream enjoined him to proceed afar, to the Bohemian capital, Prague, where he should discover a hidden treasure, buried beneath the principal bridge leading to the castle of the Bohemian kings. The rabbi was surprised, and put off his going. But the dream recurred twice again. After the third call, he bravely girded his loins and set forth on the quest.
“Arriving at the city of his destiny, Rabbi Eisik discovered sentries at the bridge, and these guarded it day and night, so that he did not venture to dig. He only returned every morning and loitered around until dusk, looking at the bridge, watching the sentries, studying unostentatiously the masonry and the soil. At length, the captain of the guards, struck by the old man’s persistence, approached, and gently inquired whether he had lost something or perhaps was waiting for someone to arrive. Rabbi Eisik recounted, simply and confidently, the dream that he had had, and the officer stood back and laughed.
“‘Really, you poor fellow!’ the captain said. ‘Have you worn your shoes out wandering all this way only because of a dream? What sensible person would trust a dream? Why look, if I had been one to go trusting dreams, I should this very minute be doing just the opposite. I should have made just such a pilgrimage as this silly one of yours, only in the opposite direction, but no doubt with the same result. Let me tell you my dream.’
“He was a sympathetic officer, for all of his fierce mustache, and the Rabbi felt his heart warm to him. ‘I dreamt of a voice,’ said the Bohemian, Christian officer of the guard, ‘and it spoke to me of Cracow, commanding me to go thither and to search there for a great treasure in the house of a Jewish rabbi whose name would be Eisik son of Jekel. The treasure was to have been discovered buried in the dirty corner behind the stove. Eisik son of Jekel!’ the captain laughed again, with brilliant eyes. ‘Fancy going to Cracow and pulling down the walls of every house in the ghetto, where half of the men are called Eisik and the other half Jekel! Eisik son of Jekel, indeed!’ And he laughed, and he laughed again at the wonderful joke.
“The unostentatious Rabbi listened eagerly, and then, having bowed deeply and thanked his stranger-friend, he hurried straightway back to his distant home, dug in the neglected corner of his house and discovered the treasure which put an end to his misery. With a portion of the money he erected a prayer-house that bears his name to this day.”
What is the point—or at least the first point—of this wonderful story? Certainly not that the real treasure is always right there beside us. This would seem too much of a reassuring commonplace. The treasure beside us, in itself, is inert, as though it didn’t exist. The real point is the journey, or rather: the improbable journey. An improbable journey because it leads far away, to an unlikely place—and above all a journey that relies, through an act of śraddhā, upon something that by definition is elusive and gives no guarantee: upon a dream. But it is the journey alone that makes the treasure exist. And that should be enough of an answer to the question about the usefulness of mythologies. The first virtue of stories, after all, is plainness, an evidence that speaks for itself, from the fabric of the story itself. A good publisher is one who publishes one tenth of the books that he would like to, and perhaps ought to, publish. The religious and mythological works in the Adelphi catalog should therefore be seen as indicating a path along which actual books are accompanied in every direction by many virtual books, like friendly shadows. And I would like to add that a good publisher is also someone in whose books these friendly shadows are naturally and irresistibly brought to life. They communicate to us from remote places, from spaces that are still boundless, waiting once more to be evoked, in the usual form of pages to be read.