In the Wednesday meetings at Einaudi it was a rhetorical custom to begin a speech on a book with much praise and then pan it at the end, or to start with a series of defects and then bring out the merits in conclusion by proposing its publication. A tradition born perhaps to demonstrate intellectual honesty, or to conceal one’s thoughts until the end, when the Einaudi meetings were more subtle and intricate battles than at the court of Byzantium, or simply for the sake of surprising. At the beginning perhaps, in times well before my Einaudi experience, because then the surprise was no longer there and indeed, from how the speech began we already knew how it would end. It was just an elegant or aspiring form, a wreck whose original stylistic reasons had been lost.
Reading i Editorial opinions for Einaudi by Fortini, recently published by Quodlibet edited by Ricardo Deiana and Federico Masci, seems to capture the noblest and most intimately motivated origins of this attitude. In Fortini, the almost obsessive self-contradictory does not seem to be a rhetorical option but probably summarizes an “intimate disagreement” that must have to do with that always lively and polemical dialectical spirit that has characterized him throughout his history as a critic and intellectual . An internal dialectic that sometimes does not find a decision-making outlet, deferring the final judgment to others.
Some examples. A novel by René Gerhard is «a work of certain literary quality, written with a sense of the word and its sentimental vibration» in the incipit of the entry, but in the last lines it becomes «a weak book, if compared with the equivalent French and Anglo-Saxon problematic ». Of Blanchot he captures «the pathological “literary” cloistering, the superficiality and artificiality of much barely verbal dialectic, the convoluted and oracular writing», but in the end he proposes to have it translated The books to come with the addition of its own selection ofEspace littéraire of around 140 pages, but perhaps even less because «Blanchot is one of the critics who demand uninterrupted discourse; and which therefore can be interrupted almost anywhere without great damage…”.
The card on Lunarium of paradise by Celati is a continuous chiaroscuro: «Very funny but of a kind of fun that quickly becomes monotonous… I like it and I think it should like it… Celati would do well to think about it again, and reduce it to half, and write another story and publish two together… I’m in favor , somewhat reluctantly, to publication.” In the about tab Warm up, the anthology of courtly poetry from the Viking era proposed by Ludovica Koch, Fortini explains in detail how the literary quality of the texts fails to reach the reader, who can only appreciate the philological paraphernalia prepared to bring them to light and make them readable to a culture so different from the original one: «I mean that in practice these texts tend to remain locked and our interest mainly concerns the safe, the locking system and the shape of the keys». And yet, in the end, «I conclude in favor of yes, provided I have a precise index and the commitment to an exhaustive introduction».
And then the most famous card: the one above Life, instructions for use of Perec. It is worth reporting it almost in full: «It is extraordinary in the sense of a systematic ordinary and it is empty in the sense of an absolute and unbreathable fullness. It’s the ultimate dream of being smarter than your classmate. Fun, and witty in detail. Iectatory like a painting by Magritte; boring overall. Perfectly kitsch like his title. Contribution to the creation of subliterature. With all this, my opinion is YES.”
It is clear that the split here must be interpreted in light of the role of editorial consultant, which is very different from that of a critic. So on the one hand Fortini considers Perec’s novel contrary to his own literary taste but on the other hand he understands that a book like this could have a certain success and have some editorial justification. In other entries he says that a book is not suitable for Einaudi, but could very well be published by Mondadori or Rizzoli or Guanda, depending on the case. Vice versa, Life, instructions for use it was a fashionable book, in his opinion, but evidently Einaudi enough not to be diverted elsewhere (in reality, as we know, the book was published by Rizzoli and never entered the Einaudi catalogue).
As you will have seen from the examples given so far, many of these cards are jewels due to the lightning-fast formulas that recall the aphorist Fortini. Many people pay the price for it: from Leonetti, «the intellectual “presentist”, the leggitutto, the quibbling and unnerving fixer», to Cosimo Ortesta, regarding whose poetry Fortini writes, somewhat unfairly: «Nowadays there are many authors who “make” products, which I would call unconventional but subsidized, as they say about clinics that have privileged relationships with certain health insurance companies. This genre has an agreement with a given cultural environment, which I would call “regime””. Another statement, this time completely acceptable, is the one that Fortini makes about a poet in whose verses Fortini detects “something authentic and authentic madness”. To then conclude that «As far as I am concerned and “in principle” I am in favor of the simulation of psychic alterations (Eluard-Breton) but against the managerial cultivation of real alterations».
«Authenticity» is one of the critical categories that occur most often, both in the simple meaning of “originality” and in that of existentialist philosophical discourse. Negative categories are instead “mannerism” and “narcissism”. The references to the type of poetry of the many authors in the verses listed are generally three: neo-curpuscularism, neo-crepuscularism, neo-hermeticism, with the addition of some late symbolism which is generally quickly dismissed. It seems that Fortini, to classify contemporary poetry, needs to see it in continuity with the trends of the past that he knows best.
In neo-hermeticism (to which he affiliates Walter Siti and Milo De Angelis) he still manages to grasp the substantial differences compared to pre-war hermeticism (considered in a broad sense, also including Montale). But, I repeat, it is above all in the ambivalence towards the most important authors (for example Lolini, Baldini, De Angelis himself) that the charm of these files by Fortini lies. In being attracted by something that he hates and in never being completely convinced by what he likes instead. In this we can clearly see the tormented critic, the polemicist who was always at odds with his interlocutors, but could have been, as we see in this book, no less at odds with himself.
A few words about curation. The introduction is convincing, explaining well the two very different phases of Fortini’s collaboration with Einaudi: the first more sporadic from 1947 to 1963, the second more continuous and structured from 1978 to 1983. The cards are put in relation with Fortini’s critical thought and in particular with some essays included in his collections (even if in his editorial opinions the ideological level of his critical practice is minimal), and with the tendencies and movements of thought towards which the cards take a position ( Marxism, Croceanism, structuralism, deconstructionism…). However, the choice to distinguish between reading notes and opinions given in letters addressed to the various Einaudi leaders (the latter placed at the end of the book, in a separate section) is perplexing. Editorial opinions have always been able to be sent in separate forms or be part of letters in which other things are also discussed. But there are no substantial typological differences and it would have been better to present them all together in chronological sequence, as for example Tomaso Munari did in Hundred Readers. Reading opinions from Einaudi consultants. 1941-1991 (2015), a volume that could have been kept as a model.
Some doubts arise about the quality of the transcription of the manuscript texts. For example, in the Collected Poems by Lawrence Durrell it is said in the note that Perosa’s opinion is added by another hand to Fortini’s card: «yes, a turning point». Since Fortini in the fact sheet proposes not to publish the entire collection of Durrell’s poems, but to make a choice, Perosa’s note can only be: “yes, a choice”. And in his opinion on a collection of poems by Giuseppe Goffredo Fortini would write «Goffredo – who is a nice young man – has political prospects?». Obviously it will be «poetic perspectives». And the title of Raffaello Baldini’s collection will indeed be The naïve? Since the book then came out as The naïve (i.e. “the snow” in Romagna dialect). And in the tab for Lunarium of Paradise of Celati, Fortini writes that the book is aimed «at an audience whose laughter and sympathy are wanted, a bit like that Tuscan TV actor does, with the false star and the cows». Between the end of 1976 and the beginning of 1977 (Fortini’s profile is from 1978) Benigni had held his first television programme, which was called Free wave and whose set was set up in a stable complete with cows. Therefore, even without seeing the manuscript, it will not be a “fake star” but a “fake stable”.
A note indicating the allusion to Benigni would perhaps have been appropriate, but the management of the notes is precisely the worst shortcoming of the curatorship. Certain inaccuracies in the bibliographical references can be overlooked (even if assigned to Baldini Al vousiwhich is by Pedretti, seems serious to me), but the many encyclopedic notes for each author named by Fortini, with forms from Garzantina or Wikipedia, sound pleonastic or, in some cases, a little ridiculous: «Angelo Maria Ripellino ( 1905-1980), Italian essayist, critic, poet and translator”, “Polonio, character ofHamlet of Shakespeare», «Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990), theater theorist and scholar, as well as Polish painter, set designer and director» (but not playwright and author of at least the Dead class…).
Instead, where they would be needed, the notes are missing. In addition to that of Benigni, another example: in the entry on Stefano Moretti’s poetic collection, Fortini writes «The names of Moretti’s august patrons were mentioned to me, who would have accompanied the ms., with communicative accents more suited to the dressing rooms of the Regio of Parma or the Rome Opera than at the Casa Einaudi. One Camene Gurgandine is enough every five years. Moretti knows how to walk alone.” This outburst by Fortini against the “recommended” is beautiful… But it might be useful to know that Moretti’s “august patron” was Elsa Morante and that of Sandro Sinigaglia, author of Gurgandine room (a book that Fortini necessarily couldn’t have liked at all), was Gianfranco Contini.
The theme of notes today, beyond this edition, is interesting. What information should be given in an era in which with two thumbs, a telephone and a few seconds available, one can know all the encyclopedic information one needs to proceed with reading a book? We can talk about it on another occasion.
