In Search of Lost Books
Giorgio van Straten
TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY SIMON CARNELL AND ERICA SEGRE
PUSHKIN PRESS
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
INTRODUCTION:
THE RISK OF AN IMPOSSIBILITY
FLORENCE, 2010:
THE BOOK THAT I ACTUALLY READ (BUT DID NOT PHOTOCOPY)
LONDON, 1824:
‘SCANDALOUS’ MEMOIRS
PARIS, 1922:
MEMORY IS THE BEST CRITIC
POLAND, 1942:
THE MESSIAH HAS ARRIVED IN SAMBOR
MOSCOW, 1852:
A ‘DIVINE COMEDY’ OF THE STEPPES
BRITISH COLUMBIA, 1944:
IT ISN’T EASY LIVING IN A CABIN
CATALONIA, 1940:
A HEAVY BLACK SUITCASE
LONDON, 1963:
I GUESS YOU COULD SAY I’VE A CALL
WORKS CITED
INDEX OF NAMES
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
COPYRIGHT
IN SEARCH OF LOST BOOKS
Introduction:
The Risk of an Impossibility
THIS IS MY JOURNEY in search of the traces of eight lost books as legendary as lode-bearing mines during the Gold Rush: everyone seeking them is convinced that they exist, and that they will be the one to find them, though in reality no one has certain proof of their existence, or reliable maps. In this case too, the clues are fragile, the hope of finding these pages scarce. And yet the journey is still worth undertaking.
Lost books are those that once existed but are no longer here.
They are not those forgotten books that, as happens to the majority of the works of mankind, gradually fade from the memories of those who have read them, slip from the histories of literature and then vanish, together with the existence of their authors. Books such as these can always be unearthed in some obscure corner of a library, or be re-printed by a curious publisher. Perhaps no one knows anything about them any longer. But they are still there.
Nor are they those books that were not even born: conceived, expected and dreamt of, but prevented for one reason or another from ever being written. In such cases we are also confronted by a lack, by a void that cannot be filled. But it’s one created by notional works which never actually materialized.
For me, lost books are those an author did in fact write, even if they might not have been brought to completion: books that someone has seen, or even happened to read, but which were subsequently destroyed, or vanished leaving scarcely a trace.
The factors leading to their disappearance are extremely diverse. These texts may have fallen under the guillotine of the author’s dissatisfaction, in pursuit of a kind of perfection that was impossible to achieve. No doubt it could be argued that if the author was so dissatisfied then perhaps we would have been so too – and that if certain contemporary writers were to experience such dissatisfaction with their own work, well, then we might all benefit from it. But then we find ourselves reading those books that someone has courageously rescued from the destructive will of an author – works by Kafka, for instance, in the most well-known case of this kind – and immediately realize how fortunate we have been that the writer’s intentions were not respected.
In other cases the void was created by circumstantial and historical factors – above all during that conflict which spread everywhere without distinguishing between the battlefield and the home front, between combatants and civilians. Attempts to safeguard unpublished manuscripts during the Second World War, as we shall see, did not always turn out well.
In other instances it was censorship that intervened, including self-censorship, because the books involved seemed both scandalous and dangerous – and not only in a metaphorical sense, since in certain European countries in the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries, homosexuality was a crime severely punishable by law.
It has also happened that some act of carelessness or forgetfulness caused a fire, or led to a theft (one that hardly profited the unwitting thieves: what, after all, was all that used paper good for?), resulting in the loss of years’ worth of work and obliging an author to start all over again, if only they had the will and could muster the energy required to do so.
And then there are the wishes of the heirs and executors. In particular, those of an author’s widow or widower determined to protect themselves or their children, or to safeguard the reputation of their husband or wife from incomplete as well as unpublished works, or to shield those persons still living who were recognizably portrayed in them.
In the eight cases that I will give an account of, there are examples of each of these factors leading to the disappearance of books. But the conclusion reached is always the same: the work searched for seems lost for ever, even though there is always a chance that someone, somewhere, at some time in the future…
Every time I have chanced across the story of a lost book I have experienced something like the feeling that gripped me as a child when reading certain novels which spoke of secret gardens, of mysterious cable-cars, of abandoned castles. I have recognized the opportunity for a quest, felt the fascination of that which escapes us – and the hope of becoming the hero who will be able to solve the mystery.
In those novels for children, the solution would invariably emerge towards the end of the book, obviously suggested by the author himself – though it seemed to me at the time to have resulted from my own concentrated attention, from my own imagination.
Of these eight lost books I have not managed to find a single one, or at least not in the conventional sense of the word ‘find’. Only in the case related in the first chapter have I been in the position of actually being able to read one of these works before it was lost. Though even then I was not able to prevent its subesquent destruction.
Perhaps it is precisely because of this particular failure that I have decided to follow the clues towards other lost books, and to tell their stories, as if they were adventures. I first did this in a series of radio broadcasts, assisted by a few friends who were as passionate as I was about the authors and books chosen.
Together we explored the paths leading to their disappearance, consoled at least by the pages that had survived and that we could continue to read.
Later I decided to go back and retrace these same routes alone, as we do sometimes with places in which we have been happy, in the hope of recapturing the same feeling again – as well as to see if some clue that we had mistakenly overlooked might offer new insight into what had really occurred there. I have no doubt continued to stumble in the dark. Yet as frequently happens when travelling alone, I have indeed noticed things I had failed to see when walking in the company of others.
Each lost book has its own unique story. Yet there are also certain details that establish peculiar connections between them – between, for example, the cases of the Italian writer Romano Bilenchi and Sylvia Plath (an unfinished novel and a spouse who makes a fateful decision in the author’s name); between Walter Benjamin and Bruno Schulz (born in the same year, both Jewish, both disappearing along with their last books during the Second World War), or between Nikolai Gogol and Malcolm Lowry (both wanting in their own way to write a Divine Comedy, both failing in the attempt). But what recurs most, with disturbing regularity, is fire. The fact that most of the lost works of which we are speaking were burnt reminds us of their essential fragility. For we are dealing here with a period – the two centuries before our own – during which it was only paper that permitted the preservation of words written by men and women. And as we know only too well, paper burns easily.
We might think that today it is rather more difficult to lose a book, and that t
he numerous virtual supports we rely on to preserve them precludes the risk of anything being definitively destroyed. Yet it seems to me that this very immateriality may in certain cases prove to be as precarious as old-fashioned paper, and that those vessels freighted with words, which we launch onto the waters, in the hope that someone will notice them and receive them safely into their own harbour, can disappear into infinite space like spacecraft at the edge of the universe, receding from us at increasing velocity.
But these losses, anyway – are we sure that they are merely and exclusively just losses?
A little while ago I stumbled across an old notebook of mine in which I had written out certain passages I’d been struck by. There was one from Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past:
One can feel an attraction towards a particular person. But to release that fount of sorrow, that sense of the irreparable, those agonies which prepare the way for love, there must be – and this is, perhaps, more than a person, the actual object which our passion seeks so anxiously to embrace – the risk of an impossibility.
What if the passion by which I am seized, by which we are all seized when encountering these lost books, had the same origin as this amorous one described by Proust? What if it were this very risk of an impossibility which justified that combination of impulse and melancholy, of curiosity and fascination, which develops with the thought of something that existed once but that we can no longer hold in our hands? Could it be the void itself which fascinates us, since it is possible to fill it with the notion that what is missing might be something crucial, perfect, incomparable?
These books also serve as challenges to our imagination, spurs to other writings, to the development of passions nourished by their very intangibility. It is no accident that many of these lost pages have ended up by prompting the writing of new books, of further ones.
But this is not all. There’s something more besides.
In a novel from the end of the last century, Fugitive Pieces by the Canadian Anne Michaels, there is this:
There’s no absence, if there remains the memory of absence. […] If one no longer has land but has the memory of land, then one can make a map.
So this book is my own personal map, drawn from the memory of absent books which, with one exception, I have not been able to read. And since mapping was involved, when I was deciding in what order to relate these stories – whether to proceed chronologically, or alphabetically, or through internal links that would connect for the reader one case history with another – I decided in the end to choose geography: to chart a journey around the world in eight volumes rather than in eighty days. I started with the book that I failed personally to rescue, in my own home town of Florence, since its author also lived there – and went from there to London, the city to which like Phileas Fogg I also returned, after a circular journey passing through France, Poland, Russia, Canada and Spain.
By the end of the voyage I had realized that lost books possess something that others do not: they bequeath to those who have not read them the possibility of imagining them, of telling stories about them, of re-inventing them.
And if on the one hand they continue to elude us, to move further off the more we try to seize hold of them, on the other they come back to life in us – and ultimately, as in Proustian time, we can lay claim to having found them.
Florence, 2010:
The Book that I Actually Read (but did not photocopy)
THIS IS THE STORY OF A LOST BOOK about which I can give a direct testimony, since I am one of the four or five people who read it before it was destroyed.
No one will ever be able to do so again, and even the handful of those fortunate enough to have done so preserve only a memory of it that is destined, like all memories, to gradually fade and vanish with the passage of time.
But the story needs to be told from the beginning.
It is more than twenty-five years since the death of Romano Bilenchi. Though not widely recognized as such today, he was one of the great Italian writers of the twentieth century. I knew Romano and was very fond of him. We first met at the beginning of the 1980s when I was editing a collection of memoirs of the Italian Resistance for the Gramsci Institute in Tuscany. For this volume he had given me an unpublished account of his own experience as a partisan, and I continued subsequently to seek him out. I had also persuaded him to read my first immature attempts at fiction, and it was due to his encouragement that my first short story was published in a magazine called Linea d’ombra.
I only mention this personal connection to account for the fact that when his widow Maria Ferrara had regained the strength to begin putting her husband’s papers in order, several months after his death in 1989, she called me to come and look at what she had discovered at the bottom of a drawer.
It was the manuscript of an unfinished novel. Its title was The Avenue. More than just unfinished, it had been left in an intermediate state between a first and second draft, and in the passage between them it had undergone significant, even contradictory changes. Maria was keen for me to read the work, and to discover what I thought of it.
I know that two other friends also read it at more or less the same time, and that a photocopy was given to the Manuscript Centre at the University of Pavia. Or rather to Maria Corti, who had collected there such a trove of works and letters by twentieth-century writers.
Reading it proved to be one of the most moving experiences of my life. Not least because I was discovering new writing by an author I loved, and one who had produced relatively little in his lifetime. These were the words of a friend and mentor whom I greatly missed. But there were other less personal reasons that served to make that reading so unforgettable.
Romano Bilenchi had published almost nothing between the appearance in 1941 of one of his masterpieces, The Drought, and the publication of The Stalingrad Button in 1972. Between these works there was a thirty-year hiatus, a period during which it seemed that he had been prevented from further creative writing not just by his professional activity as a journalist (until 1956 he was the editor of Il Nuovo Corriere, and was subsequently in charge of the cultural pages of the Nazione in Florence), but perhaps also by the contradiction between his own concept of literature – so deeply tied as it was to the process of memory, the psychological dynamics of interpersonal relationships, and especially to the period of transition between childhood and adulthood – and the hardline neorealist aesthetic propounded by the Communist Party to which he belonged until 1956.
He had returned his Party membership card immediately after the closure of the daily newspaper he was editing, a closure that was officially justified on economic grounds, but which was due in reality to the independent line it had always taken, and which became unambiguous during the summer of 1956 when the troops of the Warsaw Pact engaged in a bloody repression of protests by Polish workers. In an editorial, Bilenchi had come out in support of those protests and against the Soviet intervention, and it was this that had cost the Nuovo Corriere its existence.
In any case, whether due to his journalistic commitments or the clash between his own literary aesthetic and the prevailing tendencies of the official Left, it seemed certain that for thirty years he had not produced anything new, even though he had continued to write by repeatedly returning to earlier works such as Anna and Bruno and The Conservatory of Santa Teresa, almost obsessively recasting entire sections of them. Nothing of his had surfaced publicly, except for the odd short piece of prose published here and there, in magazines and in pamphlets for friends.
It was as if his desire to write fiction and his political commitment could not converge and be reconciled, and he had harboured a vision of literature so exacting and absolute that he was unable even to consider writing anything that was not entirely convincing in his own eyes.
To further justify this silence he had also alluded to drafts of works lost during the war, and in particular to an almost completed novel, the disappearance of which had blocked him for years
. That novel was called The Innocence of Teresa, and though I obviously couldn’t recognize the similarities at the time, there were many elements in his descriptions of this other lost work in common with The Avenue.
Roberto Bilenchi was a terse writer of marvellously lean prose, never given to a single excessive adjective. But as a teller of tales he was really loquacious, and the stories he told would often change over time, becoming embellished, transformed into literature. Consequently, it was difficult to take at face value everything he said, or many of the things he wrote in his highly imaginative letters. But when he talked about that lost novel, perhaps he was also thinking about the manuscript actually lying, unknown to us, at the bottom of a drawer in a cupboard in that very house where he was speaking, and where his friends and disciples were listening to him.
So here is the principal reason that made the existence of that novel so important: it had been written in the years 1956–57 (the dates were recorded on its last page), and was therefore situated at the heart of the thirty-year silence, a period everyone had assumed to have been sterile ground as far as the writing of new works was concerned.
Furthermore, it was a love story of the kind he had never told in any of his previous works, or in any subsequent ones: the transposition of an actual clandestine affair, of his relationship with Maria which began when she was an editorial secretary at the Nuovo Corriere and his first wife was still alive. And it was maybe because of this that instead of coming to light it had remained shut away in that drawer.
There was also a third point of interest. As mentioned, Bilenchi’s work had always been and would continue to be based – in The Stalingrad Button and Friends – on the process of memory: on narrative in which a long interval of years had been interposed between the moment of writing and the period referred to. In this case, on the contrary, the narrative was almost akin to live reportage, and could be directly compared to something that had just happened or was still happening, even if the affair between the two lovers (called, perhaps, Sergio and Teresa, though I can’t be sure) was probably also being conflated in part with the memory of the novel that was lost during the war.
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