Hermit in Paris (4 page)

People talk well also of James Yaffe, who has already written four books, one of which –
What’s the Big Thing?
– is published by Little Brown.

I have heard positive comments about an English novel (published by Heinemann): A. E. Ellis,
The Rack
.

I cannot remember if William Styron has already signed up for a publisher in Italy. Random House will publish his new novel around March:
Set This House on Fire
.

Grove are very keen on a new novelist they will launch in spring, and whom they introduced to me: Alexander Trucchi [
sic
],
Cain’s Book
.

In the bookshops I have seen a very beautiful
abstract
book for children: Leo Lionni,
Little Blue and Little Yellow
(an Astor book published by McDowell).

Random House has had great success with children’s books by a writer who signs himself as Dr Seuss, and who specializes in books for 5–6 year olds which are written using only 300 words.

Instructions for Use

Daniele, this is a kind of journal for use by my friends in Italy. Einaudi receives a private copy of it at home, but this copy is public, except for the strictly publishing details which you can cut out and pass on to Foà;
²²
the rest of it you can keep in a folder, for consultation by all colleagues, and also by friends and visitors who want to read it, so that this hoard of experiences that I am accumulating becomes part of the heritage of the nation.

The Emigrant’s Desires

The emigrant needs someone to write to him, to be kept in touch with the land of his birth, otherwise soon his letters will become fewer and fewer, and he will forget his native tongue. He has not received any post so far, not even from his mother, nor from any of the women he has loved, nor even from the
Eco
della Stampa
for which he took out a subscription before leaving. When he travels into the city centre he goes to Times Square to buy the odd issue of
La Stampa
to read the local news pages, about motorway accidents, pensioners asphyxiated by gas, etc. But this is not enough.

A Nightmare

After four days in New York I dream that I have come straight back to Italy. I cannot remember why I have come back: for some reason or other I wanted to return on the spur of the moment, and here I am once more in Italy and I don’t know what I have come back for. But I feel an urgent need to return instantly to America. In Italy the fact that I have been in America or that I have now come back is of no interest to anyone. I am seized by a mad sense of despair at not being in America, a terrifying sense of anguish, a desire for the USA that is not connected to any particular image but it is as though I had been snatched out of my normal existence. I have never felt such all-encompassing despair. I wake up trembling: finding myself back in the squalid little room in my first American hotel is like finding myself back home.

Yesterday a Day Full of Publishers

With Mr [Victor] Weybright from the New American Library, an old friend from Frankfurt. He recommends two novels just about to appear:

Irving Wallace,
The Chapman Report
, to be published by Simon & Schuster and then by the NAL. The film rights have been sold to Zanuck-Fox for $300, 000. The plot is very funny: a group of university professors carry out a survey along the lines of the Kinsey Report, only it is in a club for ladies of high society and a whole series of complications ensues.

Peter Zilman (or Tilman – I can’t read W’s handwriting very well),
American novel
, published by Coward McCann-NAL; the film rights have gone to Columbia. He says that it is like Alec Waugh’s
Island in the Sun
which was a huge best-seller.

I am not sure how reliable W’s recommendations are. Signet Books’ fiction is on the whole disappointing (and he cannot decide whether to take
The Baron
!), but he is very kind and wants me to choose from the Mentor Books list whatever might be useful to us. As far as I can see, we have already seen all the titles of any interest. I await instructions.

At Knopf: Mr Pick, whom I met at Frankfurt, has been scouting me, and will certainly take the next long novel by Bassani; I will scout Mr Kushland another day. All the Knopf team is very friendly. I await instructions.

Cocktail party at [Kyrill] Schabert’s (from Pantheon) attended solely by publishers. Mr Schabert met Einaudi in Vienna and is very friendly, but as the publisher of
Dr Zhivago
and
The Leopard
, Schabert is becoming an American branch of GGF.
²³
I will see him next week. I await instructions. Old Knopf was there too, as was [James] Laughlin from New Directions, Haydn from Atheneum with whom I am dining this evening, and Mrs Van Doren from
Publishers’Weekly
: she is the aunt of the man involved in the scandal.

The book most talked about this week is Norman Mailer’s
Advertisements for Myself
(Putnam), which contains essays, autobiographical pieces and unfinished fictions.

Colour Television

Yesterday evening I saw some colour television. Perry Como’s show was interrupted every so often by advertisements for a firm that makes food products, and for ten minutes you saw plates of spaghetti with a hand pouring sauce over them, all in colour, and plates of meat and salad, with explanations about how to prepare it all. Wonderful. It should be introduced as soon as possible into underdeveloped countries.

I was with friends of a woman who is an avant-garde choreographer: she was presenting some scenes from one of her ballets on the
Perry Como Show
. But the ballets were terrible. Shortly afterwards, they telephone her. She was already at home, in despair, crying: she ran out of the studios before the end of the programme, and wants to kill herself as a protest against the outrage inflicted by television on her art.

20 November

The UNO

The most interesting thing to do is to go to see the United Nations building with Ruggero Orlando who as soon as he found out that I was in New York often invites me to explore this world which he knows like nobody else. I think that in terms of architecture and interior furnishings the UN building is the great monument of our century; even the meeting rooms are wonderful, apart from the one where the Security Council sits. And the atmosphere one breathes at the UN is also magnificent because you feel the spirit of the United Nations at work in a way that you no longer can in America or Europe, and this is certainly also to the credit of Le Corbusier, because ambience counts, and how. Yesterday evening I was present at the vote on atomic experiments which saw France (and Afghanistan) isolated. Everyone votes by saying ‘Yes’ except the Latin American delegates who say ‘Sí’, I think out of anti-American nationalism. Later at a party held by the Morocco delegation, I meet: Soboleff who congratulates me on my ‘very good timing’ when I tell him that
Italian Folktales
is coming out at the same time in the USA and the USSR; Alí Khan (head of the Pakistan delegation) who congratulates me on the two beautiful girls I am with; the Algerian foreign minister, from the National Liberation Front (here as an observer; they are not optimistic in the short term about the possibility of negotiating), whom I ask to write a book for Einaudi; the only woman who is head of a delegation (Sweden), a beautiful and witty woman; the current president of the UN, old Professor Belaunde from Peru, who in order to please me articulates his admiration for Fogazzaro,
²⁴
Ada Negri,
²⁵
and Papini;
²⁶
Ortona
^27
;
who never misses a party; the Afghan who explains that he voted against the resolution because the motion was too weak; the reverend
^¶
who is fighting against racial discrimination in South Africa and is here as an observer (he has been expelled from South Africa); Mr Mezrick from the American Cooperative Movement who publishes a Bulletin of UN documents and who has now been reported by Senator Eastman to the Committee on Un-American Activities because he ‘publishes a Communist pamphlet’ (the Bulletin publishes all the speeches, even the Russian ones): he will now have major problems (financial above all: he will have to pay a top lawyer to prove, etc.), but in truth Eastman, who is a Southerner, wants to attack his wife who is from the League for the Emancipation of Colored Peoples.

Sunday in the Country

Last Sunday I went for the first time into the country, or rather the wooded hills north of the Bronx, along the wonderful motorways; first to lunch at the house of relations of the woman who was accompanying me, who is from a family of bankers who own all the estates in the area, in one of the few surviving eighteenth-century wooden villas. There was an atmosphere of great refinement, though because it was Sunday the maid was not there; but everything was so well organized that you did not notice. Then to see Giancarlo Menotti
²⁸
who had invited me to his house at Mount Kisco: he lives (with Samuel Barber, but he was not there) in a really beautiful chalet in the woods, which is however full of the bad taste of that kind of building: their real moral defect is the lack of any distinction between the beautiful and the horrible: plates with the photograph of a woman, a magic lantern, a chamber of horrors. Menotti complains that the fame of the Spoleto music festival prevents him from receiving funds from American foundations. Sunset in an American wood is something that is totally unreal. As is the sky in New York at night.

19 November

Wall Street

Naturally the first thing I want to see is Wall Street and the Stock Exchange. I arrange for a visit to Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, which is the biggest stockbroker firm there. They have girls who act as guides and accompany visitors and those hoping to invest to see round all the offices and explain how everything works. A pretty girl explains everything to me in great detail. I do not understand a thing, but at the same time I am full of admiration and also suffering enormously because this New York stock market is the first thing that I have felt is bigger than me and that I will not be able to get my head round. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith operates entirely electronically. Linked to the Stock Exchange, all its offices have the tape with all the stock values printing out continually, and it receives all the requests to buy and sell by telephone and telex from its branches in every city in America, and in Europe too, and every second, with their calculators, they can work out dividends, securities and commodities and all the data recorded and transmitted to the Stock Exchange, and then there are the calculations for the over-the-counter market which are very complex, and from all the offices and the machines in this enormous skyscraper which houses Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, all the data end up on the top floor where the huge IBM 705 machine sits, which in one minute can perform 504, 000 additions or subtractions, 75, 000 multiplications, 33, 000 divisions and can take 1, 764, 000 logical decisions and in three minutes can read all of
Gone With the Wind
and copy it on to a tape as wide as your little finger, because everything ends up on this tape, all written in little dashes, and on an inch of this there are 543 characters. I have also seen the 705’s memory which is like a piece of cloth you would wipe with, all made up of tiny threads. I also went to the Stock Exchange and it is certainly a grand sight but one which we already know well from the cinema. But this Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith is some place: it is a pity I am now too old, but something your children should do first thing is to work with them for a while to learn the trade (there is an enormous students’ office): send them for an apprenticeship with Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, then they can learn philosophy, music, and all the rest, but first of all a man has to know how to work Wall Street. They also do a huge amount of propaganda for investments, with brochures based on the principle that money breeds money, with maxims about money by the great philosophers, and this propaganda for the cult of money is constant in America: if by chance a generation grows up that does not put money above all else, America will go up in smoke.

Now, however, at Columbia University I have met Mario Salvadori, scientist and mathematician, who was with Fermi in the team that worked on the atom bomb: he seems a first-class person, and he says that that 705 is nothing and he will take me to see real electronic brains.

New York Diary

24 Nov.

The Girls’ College

Yesterday I was invited by Mark Slonim (the most famous expert on Russian literature in America, and he also teaches Italian: I had met him in Rome) to the Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville where he teaches comparative literature. Sarah Lawrence College is a very chic girls’ college, where each girl chooses the course she wants, there are no lectures just discussions, no exams, in short everyone has a great time dealing with pleasant and varied cultural topics. Girls in trousers and big socks and multicoloured jerseys, just like in films about college life, flutter down from the buildings where they have their faculty rooms and dormitories. Lunch is very meagre because in any case the girls want to keep their figure (while the starving tutors protest). The students of Italian are waiting for me in the cafeteria: there are about twenty-five of them, of whom at least a couple are very good-looking. Their teacher tells me that they have prepared a surprise for me: they want to sing me a song; one has a guitar; I think it will be the predictable Neapolitan song or something Italian they have heard on the radio; instead they actually sing ‘Sul verde fiume Po’.
²⁹
My surprise is beyond all their expectations. (I later learn that a record brought by the Momiglianos to America had ended up there.) The teacher explains that the song is very useful for learning verbs. The girls ask me questions about my short stories which they know off by heart. Then I go to the seminar on comparative literature: today we are discussing Alesha Karamazov. The girls give their opinion of Alesha, then Slonim intervenes, raising questions and directing the discussion, with great finesse and pedagogical effectiveness, but these young girls are surely as far from Dostoevsky as the moon. Seeing Dostoevsky and Russian religious and revolutionary thought skimming over that gathering of young heiresses in Westchester brings on the kind of astonishment and enthusiasm that would be provoked by a collision of planets. Then I go to the Italian lesson: today the girls have to do
La sera fiesolana
. They translate D’Annunzio’s lines with terrifying ease. The discussion turns to St Francis. And the teacher asks me to read his poem ‘Brother Sun, Sister Moon’. I read, translate and give a commentary on St Francis to the various Beths, Virginias, Joans. And since their teacher has dropped a timid hint that she prefers D’Annunzio, I rebel and produce a lengthy eulogy putting St Francis above all other poets. I realize that this is the first time since coming to America that I have explained anything or defended an idea. And it had to be St Francis. Very appropriate.

The Guggenheim Museum

In the last few weeks the obligatory topic of every New York conversation is the new museum designed by Frank Lloyd Wright to house Solomon Guggenheim’s art collection. It has just been opened. Everyone criticizes it; I am a fanatical supporter of it, but I find myself nearly always on my own in this. The building is a kind of spiral tower, a continuous ascending ramp without steps, with a glass cupola. As you go up and look out you always have a different view with perfect proportions, since there is a semicircular outcrop that offsets the spiral, and down below there is a small slice of elliptical flower-bed and a window with a tiny glimpse of a garden, and these elements, changing at whatever height you are now at, are an example of architecture in movement of unique precision and imagination. Everyone claims that the architecture dominates the paintings and it is true (apparently Wright hated painters), but what does it matter? You go there primarily to see the architecture, and then you see the paintings always well and uniformly illuminated, which is the main thing. There is the problem of the permanently sloping floor which poses the conundrum of how to get the picture straight. They solved the problem by hanging the pictures not on the wall but on iron spars that stick out from the wall to the centre of the painting. In reality the Guggenheim collection is not extraordinary, apart from the powerful collection of Kandinskys which we have already seen in Rome, and there are many pieces that are second-rate. (Unlike the Museum of Modern Art, which is not enormous, but everything it houses is a breathtaking masterpiece; or the beautiful rooms of modern painting in the Metropolitan, spoiled unfortunately by a horrendous Dalí which people queue in order to see.) Everyone is in agreement in criticizing the exterior of the Guggenheim Museum, but even that I like too: it is a kind of screw or like a lathe driveshaft, totally in harmony with the interior.

Laughing at Death

Much has been said about the Americans’ lack of a sense of mortality. The other evening in Harlem, in a night-spot called Baby Grand where jazz is played, a very famous black comic started his piece by joking about the death of Errol Flynn, amid widespread sniggering; then he told a crude joke about Flynn’s death and the funeral, again amid general hilarity. Another continual topic for the black comic’s satire and humour is the racial question, the fight against the segregationists.

Olivetti

Adriano Olivetti has been to New York in the last few days and bought Underwood, which had been in trouble for some time. From now on Olivetti will produce goods in America using the Underwood name, thus avoiding customs problems. Underwood’s shares are not quoted on the Stock Exchange at present but now it seems as though they will come back on to the list. That idiot Segni,
³⁰
when he was here at the press conference, an American journalist asked him what he thought about the infiltration of Olivetti into Underwood’s shares, and he replied: ‘A big firm like Underwood will certainly not have anything to fear from a small concern like our own Olivetti!’

At Prezzolini’s

23 Nov.

At dinner chez Prezzolini
³¹
who had invited me when I was still in Italy to come to his little cell on the sixteenth floor, already described many times, to enjoy his famous skills as cook and host. Also present is Mrs [Sheila] Cudahy, widow of the Marquis Pellegrini, a Catholic and Vice President of Farrar Straus, and a Hungarian count, Arady, if I caught the name right, author of a biography of Pius XI. After days and days of meeting only Jews, this mixing with reactionary Catholics is a not unpleasant distraction. Naturally, alongside Prezzolini, the Hungarian count, who is a Catholic liberal, admirer of the moderate Lombard aristocracy of the nineteenth century, actually seems more like a comrade to me. Extremely interesting conversation in which the count proves the continuity of the line going from Pius XI to John XXIII, a line which however has still not managed to win because Pius XII’s party is still strong. Everyone attacks America’s Irish clergy and Cardinal Spellman, but I notice that their reasons are the opposite of the usual criticisms of the Church’s authoritarian, hierarchical spirit: here they criticize their lack of formality, their ‘democratic’ offhandedness, their ignorance of Latin. Everyone is scandalized here by the fact that they have placed a glass case in St Patrick’s cathedral with a coloured wax statue of Pius XII, of natural size, with hair and everything just like in Madame Tussaud’s; they cannot understand how the Vatican has not intervened against this act of sacrilege, which was surely engineered by Spellman in order to spite Pope John XXIII. They are full of praise for Mencken as the great destroyer of American democratic myths. And the Hungarian in turn is full of praise for Karl Kraus (now adored by Cases,
³²
just as Mencken played the role of master to all of America’s left wing). The way they extol
The Leopard
(which they have no hesitation in putting on the same level as Manzoni), solely for reactionary reasons, confirms – as far as I’m concerned – the enormous importance of this book in the West’s current ideological involution. Many of these discussions were clearly inspired by my presence in their midst, with minimal polemical effort on my part, naturally: I am absolutely fine with those who openly declare themselves to be reactionary, I am on friendly terms with Prezzolini, while with the count and the marchioness (whom I will see later at a business lunch) we have common ground in our knowledge of Bordighera and its society.

N. B. Opinions on [James] Purdy and particularly on
Malcolm
are negative even in the Farrar Straus environment. I have not found anyone who had a good word to say about Purdy (whom I shall meet soon); on the other hand, yesterday evening they were all unanimous in lauding Malamud as the great new writer; an interesting verdict coming from Catholics. Consequently, in this year’s planning, I would say to promote Malamud more than Purdy.

How a Big Bookshop Works

(From the conversation I had with the manageress of Brentano’s.) The American bookshop is more complicated than an Italian one for the simple fact that the number of books published is so great that nobody, on the sales side, thinks it is possible to be on top of all of it. Brentano’s is organized very well: it is a huge bookstore with separate tables for new fiction, history, poetry, and so on, and even including sections for paperbacks (which are usually handled not by a bookseller but by the local drugstore or newsagent or separate paperback shop), periodicals, and of course a Juveniles section which you find in every bookshop. They do not buy on the one-free-copy-per-dozen system; the bookseller receives a discount of 40 percent; on rare occasions the publisher provides one free copy in every ten. Orders are taken when the publisher’s agent makes his monthly call. The staff are just shop assistants as in tie-shops and would not dream of knowing anything about books. The public are not in the habit of visiting bookshops; if for example a mother reads a review of a book on child-rearing she maybe telephones or writes to the publisher asking what she has to do to buy it, but she is not in the habit of going to the bookseller. In short, it is not really interesting: it is exactly as it is in Italy. Now the bookshops are full of small reproductions of famous classical or modern statues, which must be the latest discovery by those engaged in mass reproduction of works of art, after the reproduction of paintings (in other words it is a practice as old as can be). However, it is ugly stuff.

Tail-lights

A study of the American psyche could be carried out by examining in particular the enormous tailfins of their cars and the great variety and elegance of the shapes of their tail-lights, which seem to embody all the myths of American society. Apart from the enormous round lights, which one often sees even in Italy and which evoke chases of cops and robbers, there are those shaped like missiles, like skyscraper pinnacles, like film-actresses’ eyes, and the full repertoire of Freudian symbols.

New York, 7 December 1959

This time I am not going to write much. For the last week I have been living a rather secluded life, writing up my lecture. It’s a real bore because here they know nothing at all about Italy, so you have to start from first principles and explain absolutely everything. I mean you have to construct a whole ethical-political-literary discourse, the kind of thing you would no longer dream of doing in Italy; and even so they will not understand a thing here, since the Italophiles are always the least intelligent. However, when one sees how inadequate the official organs for the spreading of Italian culture are, one feels duty bound to try to compensate as best one can; and this lecture, unless I immediately get bored with it and ditch it completely, might be one of the more important purposes of my journey, if for no other reason than the fact that someone will have travelled throughout the USA explaining who was Gramsci, Montale, Pavese, Danilo Dolci, Gadda, Leopardi. So I have not gone on with the American diary, but it also happens that I have fewer things to say, because New York is no longer a new city to me, and although initially everyone I saw in the street was the occasion for me to offer some particular observation, now the crowd is just the usual New York crowd you see every day, and the people I meet and the way I spend my day all fall under the category of the predictable. However, I have accumulated a number of observations which I will work through gradually, and I have plunged into a more active existence now that I have finished the lecture and handed it in to be translated. I should also be able to find the time to read some books, though this is still in the future and the little wall of books on my dressing-table is by now covering up the mirror without me being able to begin dismantling it.

So, for now, just a few points about publishers.

Fruttero:
³³
I’ve bought the Modern Library anthology of horror stories and I will put it in the post tomorrow (the post offices are shut on Saturday and Sunday). What size of shoes do you wear?

James Purdy

I’ve been to see Purdy, who lives in Brooklyn but in the more residential part. He received me in the rented room he shares with a professor. The kitchen and a double bedroom are all in the one room. Having left his job, Purdy is living for a year on a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation and this has allowed him to finish his novel,
The Nephew
, which he delivered to his publisher today: it is something more like his short stories than like
Malcolm
. Purdy is a very pathetic character, middle-aged, big and fat and gentle, fair and reddish in complexion, and clean-shaven: he dresses soberly, and is like Gadda without the hysteria, and exudes sweetness. If he is homosexual, he is so with great tact and melancholy. At the foot of his bed is weight-lifting equipment; above it, a nineteenth-century English print of a boxer. There is a reproduction of a Crucifixion by Rouault
³⁴
, and scattered all around are theology books. We discuss the sad state of American literature, which is stifled by commercial demands: if you don’t write as the
New Yorker
demands, you don’t get published. Purdy published his first book of short stories at his own expense, then he was discovered in England by Edith Sitwell, and subsequently Farrar Straus published his work, but he does not even know Mrs Cudahy, and the critics don’t understand him, though the book is, very slowly, managing to sell. There are no magazines that publish short stories, no groups of writers, or at least he does not belong to any group. He gives me a list of good novels, but they are nearly all unpublished works which have not been able to find a publisher. Good literature in America is clandestine, lies in unknown authors’ drawers, and only occasionally someone emerges from the gloom breaking through the leaden cloak of commercial production. I would like to talk about capitalism and socialism, but Purdy certainly would not understand me; no one here knows or even suspects that socialism exists, capitalism wraps itself round and permeates everything, and its antithesis is nothing but a meagre, childish claim to a spiritual dimension, devoid of any coherent line or prospects. Unlike Soviet society, where the totalitarian unity of society is totally based on the constant awareness of its enemies, of its antithesis, here we are in a totalitarian structure of a medieval kind, based on the fact that no alternative exists nor even any awareness of the possibility of an alternative other than that of individualist escapism.