Who had the right recipe.
When she came out of the oven
They had gutted, peeled
and garnished her.
They called her theirs.
All this time I had thought
She belonged to me most.
However sensitively I have tried to proceed in this chapter, perhaps I too have joined the hordes of cannibals. Now I’m beset by doubts. If Double Exposure were to resurface, would it be right to publish it? To publish an unfinished novel by an author who worked with such rigour on her poems, and her other texts too, constantly revisiting and revising them, striving after the exact words, forms and rhythms? Would its publication not result in further gossipmongering, focusing attention on the parallels between the fiction and the life, further preventing Plath from emerging in her true light, giving her over again to morbid scrutiny and the persona that has been constructed around her? Placing her yet again in the fluorescent light of that kitchen in the flat in Fitzroy Road?
Maria Grazia is smiling. If the novel were found, she says, it would be her words above all that were restored to us: the words of a poet. And then she gives me a glimmer of hope. Amongst the papers that the enigmatic Hughes deposited at the University of Georgia are some that may not be consulted until 2022, sixty years, that is, after the death of Sylvia Plath. The possibility cannot be ruled out that the lost manuscript of Double Exposure will be found there.
I smile too. I am prepared to wait and see.
WORKS CITED
Introduction
The children’s books I allude to are The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and La teleferica misteriosa by Aldo Franco Pessina (Salani, 1937).
The quotation from Proust can be found in Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (Chatto & Windus, 1982).
The Anne Michaels quotation is from Fugitive Pieces (Bloomsbury, 1997).
ROMANO BILENCHI, The Avenue
All of Bilenchi’s books are available from Rizzoli, in editions published with the following titles: Anna e Bruno e altri racconti; Il Conservatorio di Santa Teresa; Gli anni impossibili (La siccità, La miseria, Il gelo); Il bottone di Stalingrado; Amici.
Vita di Pisto is published as an appendix to Opere complete, ed. Benedetta Centovalli (Contemporanea, 2009).
Two of Bilenchi’s books are available in English: The Conservatory of Santa Teresa, trans. Charles Klopp and Melinda Nelson (Firenze University Press, 2005) and The Chill, trans. Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions, 2009).
GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON, Memoirs
The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford, 1986).
Franco Buffoni, Il servo di Byron (Fazi, 2012).
ERNEST HEMNGWAY, Juvenilia
A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition (Scribner, 2010).
‘Up in Michigan’ is included in The Collected Stories (Everyman, 1995).
The letter to Pound is from Selected Letters 1917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker (Scribner, 1981).
BRUNO SCHULZ, The Messiah
The stories in Cinnamon Shops and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass are included in The Collected Works of Bruno Schulz, trans. Jerzy Ficowski (Macmillan, 1998).
David Grossman See Under: Love (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989).
Ugo Riccarelli, Un uomo che forse si chiamava Schulz (Mondadori, 2012).
Cynthia Ozick, The Messiah of Stockholm (Knopf, 1987).
Simha Guterman, Il libro ritrovato (Einaudi, 1993).
Francesco M. Cataluccio, Vado a vedere se di là è meglio (Sellerio, 2010).
NIKOLAI GOGOL, Dead Souls
Dead Souls, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Vintage, 1997).
The quotation from Marina Tsvetaeva, Il poeta e il tempo, ed. Serena Vitale
(Adelphi, 1984).
Leo Tolstoy, Diaries Vol. I: 1847–1894, trans. R.F. Christian (Faber, 2015).
MALCOLM LOWRY, In Ballast to the White Sea
Psalms and Songs, ed. Margerie Lowry (Meridian, 1975).
The Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, eds. Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry (Jonathan Cape, 1967).
In Ballast to the White Sea (University of Ottawa Press, 2014).
The Voyage That Never Ends, ed. Michael Hofmann (NYRB, 2007).
WALTER BENJAMIN, The Contents of the Black Suitcase
Many of Benjamin’s most celebrated essays can be found in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (Jonathan Cape, 1970).
Bruno Arpaia, L’Angelo della storia (Guanda, 2001).
Lisa Fittko, Escape Through the Pyrenees, trans. David Koblick (Northwestern University Press, 1991).
SYLVIA PLATH, Double Exposure
Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963, ed. Aurelia Schober Plath (Faber, 1982).
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (Faber, 1977)
Complete Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (Faber, 1982)
Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters (Faber, 1998)
Frieda Hughes, Wooroloo (Bloodaxe, 1999)
INDEX OF NAMES
Adorno, Theodor, 1, 2
Akhmatova, Anna, 1
Arendt, Hannah, 1, 2
Arpaia, Bruno, 1, 2
Bataille, Georges, 1, 2
Baudelaire, Charles, 1
Beiderbecke, Bix, 1
Benjamin, Dora, 1
Benjamin, Walter, 1, 2,
Bilenchi, Romano, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Bonner, Margerie, 1, 2
Buffoni, Franco, 1, 2, 3
Bulgakov, Michail Afanas’evič, 1
Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 1
Byron, George Gordon, 1, 2, 3
Calandrone, Maria Grazia, 1
Cam Hobhouse, John, 1, 2, 3, 4
Cataluccio, Francesco, 1, 2
Centovalli, Benedetta, 1, 2, 3, 4
Chagall, Marc, 1
Chalandritsanos, Lukas, 1
Corti, Maria, 1, 2
Tsvetaeva, Marina, 1, 2, 3
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich, 1, 2
Edleston, John, 1, 2
Ferrara, Maria, 1
Ficowski, Jerzy, 1, 2, 3
Fittko, Hans, 1
Fittko, Lisa, 1, 2
Fogg, Phileas, 1
Gabrial, Jan, 1, 2, 3
Geremek, Bronisław, 1, 2
Gogol, Nikolaj, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Gombrowicz, Witold, 1
Grieg, Nordhal, 1, 2, 3
Grossman, David, 1, 2, 3
Guiccioli Gamba, Teresa, 1
Gunther, Karl, 1
Gurland, Henny, 1, 2
Gurland, Joseph, 1
Guterman, Simha, 1, 2
Guterman, Yakov, 1
Hemingway, Ernest, 1
Hendrix, Jimi, 1
Horkheimer, Max, 1, 2
Hughes, Frieda, 1, 2, 3
Hughes, Nicholas, 1
Hughes, Ted, 1, 2
Joplin, Janis, 1
Kafka, Franz, 1, 2
Konstantinowski, Matvej, 1, 2
Landau, Felix, 1
Leigh, Augusta, 1
Lowry, Malcolm, 1, 2, 3, 4
Luzi, Mario, 1
Machado, Antonio, 1
Marchand, Leslie, 1
Michaels, Anne, 1, 2
Milbanke, Anne Isabella, 1
Moore, Thomas, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Murray, John, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Nessi, Edoardo, 1, 2
O’Brien, Edward, 1
Ozick, Cynthia, 1, 2, 3, 4
Parker, Charlie, 1
Pasternak, Boris Leonidovič, 1
Pavolini, Lorenzo, 1
Peacock, Thomas Love, 1
Pessina, Aldo Franco, 1
Piersanti, Claudio, 1
Plath, Sylvia, 1, 2, 3
Pound, Ezra, 1
Proust, Marcel, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Pushkin, Alexander Sergeyevich, 1, 2
Riccarelli, Ugo, 1, 2
Richardson, Hadley, 1, 2
Rivière, Jacques, 1
Sandauer, Arthur, 1
Sc
hulz, Bruno, 1, 2, 3, 4
Smirnova, Alexandra, 1
Stein, Gertrude, 1, 2
Szelinska, Josefina, 1
Tolstoy, Leo Nikolayevich, 1, 2, 3
Truchanowski, Kazimierz, 1
Vargas Llosa, Mario, 1
Veronesi, Sandro, 1, 2
Vitale, Serena, 1, 2, 3
Wevill, Assia, 1
Wilde, Oscar, 1
Witkiewicz, Stanisław Ignacy, 1
Yeats, William Butler, 1
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Original text © 2016 Giorgio van Straten
English translation © 2017 Simon Carnell and Erica Segre
Copyright © 2016 Gius. Laterza & Figli, all rights reserved
In Search of Lost Books was first published as Storie di libri perduti in Italy 2016
First published by Pushkin Press in 2017
ISBN: 978–1–78227–373–8
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