Roberto Calasso is a writer who has had too much influence on me: I like knowledge, book reading, broken into a wilderness of mirrors and re-assembled. Many of his books have a little too much gaseous material – and politically, as well, I have always considered him one of those “New Philosopher” types who rejected Marx because of Pol Pot or something – which struck me as showing a very thin knowledge of Marx.
Caveats to the side, though, in certain books – Ka, for instance, and the Ruins of Karsch – he creates a unique sound, a beat.
In his book about being an editor and founder of Adelphi, the Art of the Publisher, a more personal Calasso breaks the surface. Someone who has, evidently, a fund of gossip about the entirety of Europe’s intellectual class from the sixties through the 21st century.
The gem of the book is the chapter entitled, The Singular Book. Simon During has been “unpacking his library” on Facebook for years, a sort of installation piece: I find this chapter a sort of coordinate effort, from the side of the production of books. The history of Adelphi is the history of a particular page setup, matched to a certain constellation of authors (the authors of Mitteleuropa, translated into Italian, for instance), and to a very meditated process of finding the right cover illustration. The Adelphi layout for Thomas Bernhardt’s books so impressed Bernhardt that his last book, published after he died by his Austrian publisher, Residenz, looked, Calasso claims, like a Adelphi book, and not the usual Residenz issue.
“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 Contempora-nea 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 pre-sented in this way. I took it as a farewell gesture.”
It wouldn’t be a Calasso essay if he didn’t mix into it various interesting marginal observations. Joseph Roth was introduced into Italy by way of Adelphi and an editor, Luciano Foa. Foa made the observation, which I made myself when I bought the Radetzky March for a friend who loved the Charterhouse of Parma, that Roth was the spiritual heir of Stendhal. This is what Calasso sez about the translation of Roth’s Flight without End, which features a man who fought for the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War :
“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.”
I hear all too often that tone (“when literature had become a dirty word”) as if there were some golden past when everyone read literature, instead of the real past when illiteracy and a stunted educational system kept literature in the hands of a minority. Literature is an institution, true, but it is also a large part of the mental furniture of even those who aren’t continuously reading the “great books”. I connect Calasso’s comment about the political radicals in the years of lead to Ralph Ellison’s essay, The little man at the Chehaw station, which begins:
“IT was at Tuskegee Institute during the mid-1930s that I was made aware of the little man behind the stove. At the time I was a trumpeter majoring in music, and had aspirations of becoming a classical composer. As such, shortly before the little man came to my attention, I had outraged the faculty members who judged my monthly student’s recital by substituting a certain skill of lips and fingers for the intelligent and artistic structuring of emotion that was demanded in performing the music assigned to me. Afterward, still dressed in my hired tuxedo, my ears burning from the harsh negatives of their criticism, I had sought solace in the basement studio of Hazel Harrison, a highly respected concert pianist and teacher. Miss Harrison had been one of Ferruccio Busoni’s prize pupils, had lived (until the rise of Hitler had driven her back to a U.S.A. that was not yet ready to recognize her talents) in Busoni’s home in Berlin, and was a friend of such masters as Egon Petri, Percy Grainger and Sergei Prokofiev…
“Yes,” she said, “but there’s more to it than you’re usually told. Of course you’ve always been taught to do your best, look your best, be your best. You’ve been told such things all your life. But now you’re becoming a musician, an artist, and when it comes to performing the classics in this country, there’s something more involved..”
“All right,” she said, “you must always play your best, even if it’s only in the waiting room at Chehaw Station, because in this country there’ll always be a little man hidden behind the stove.”
“A what?”
She nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “There’ll always be the little man whom you don’t expect, and he’ll know the music, and the tradition, and the standards of musicianship required for whatever you set out to perform!”
This is to my mind a simple statement of the case. And I suppose my faith in the little man at the Chehaw station is what ultimately separates me from Calasso, who, in spite of the excellent sales of many of the singular books he published, often writes as though all of them went down the drain.
Not to end on a down note: those interested in the how of book publishing should read, if they haven’t read, this book.
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