+ Adelphi 10 BIOGRAPHY Giordano Bruno Dream of drowning OPERE LULLIANE A new critical edition of three essential works by Giordano Bruno. THOMAS MEANEY Roberto Calasso LA FOLIE BAUDELAIRE John Matteson A new edition with 281 images «The most absorbing guided visit that one THE LIVES OF MARGARET FULLER could imagine of the brothel-museum of A biography Baudelaire's dreams». (Marc Fumaroli) 384pp. Norton. £21.99 (US $32.95). 9780 393 06805 4 Cristina Campo IL MIO PENSIERO NON VI LASCIA ity the child born before childhood Letters to Florentine friends. Pwas invented. Raised in Cambridge by Carlo Emilio Gadda an ambitious Massachusetts Congress­ L'ADALGISA man, Margaret Fuller (1810-50) was one of «I'd like to be the Robespierre of the those nineteenth-century daughters who Milanese bourgeoisie: but it's not worth became special projects for their fathers: the effort». Latin at six, Greek at nine, modern languages Tommaso Landolfi at fourteen - Timothy Fuller crammed every­ DIARIO PERPETUO thing he could into her "cherished head". «Landolfi, the connoisseur of ghosts». When he caught Margaret with a copy of (Giorgio Manganelli) Romeo and Juliet at the age of eight, he Giuseppe Gioachino Belli demanded she hand it over - novels and plays SONETTI EROTICI E MEDITATIVI being strict contraband on Sundays in the The most outrageous poems Fuller household. All this Tiger-fathering by the outrageous Belli. may seem harsh, even counter-productive, Manlio Sgalambro but, to paraphrase Duff Cooper, evidence is DELLA MISANTROPIA not yet sufficient to prove it doesn't produce Margaret Fuller, from an original daguerreotype ofJuly 1846 A treatise on denigration. superior intellectuals. In the case of Fuller, as John Matteson tells us in his new biography, In 1838, her translation of Goethe's Conver­ est, wisest, best woman, of the age; and, to Elvio Fachinelli it produced "one of the most talented and sations with Eckermann found its way to that end, she set to work on her strong, heavy, SU FREUD What Freud really said, and how. perhaps the most exasperating American him, and the Great Sage of Concord invited unpliable, and in many respects, defective woman of her generation". her up for a visit. As Matteson frames it, their and evil nature, and adorned it with a mosaic Guido Ceronetti If Emily Dickinson sits at the extreme first prolonged encounter has all the makings of admirable qualities, such as she chose to POEM I DEL GINECEO hermetic end of the nineteenth-century Amer­ of a Tom Stoppard play. The twenty-eight­ possess." As Matteson observes, it was pre­ Poems from an imaginary harem. ican literary spectrum, Fuller comes close year-old Fuller arrives at the house for a two­ cisely this self-constructed aspect of her char­ Letizia Muratori to balancing her at the gregarious end. She week stay and immediately starts pressing acter that Fuller was best prepared to defend. COME SE NIENTE FOSSE travelled widely (Indian Territory, London, Emerson for his innermost thoughts. Emer­ "What a woman needs is not as a woman A bitter, mordant book in which every line Paris, Rome), chalked up an array of love son smiles urbanely at her entreaties, while to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an and every silence have their own interests, and hobnobbed tirelessly with the both of them repair to their rooms to record intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and significance. literati of her day (Edgar Allan Poe, Herman their impressions of each other. "What is unimpeded, to unfold such powers as were Pietro Citati Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George your opinion of me?", demands Fuller. "How given her when we left our common home", IL TE DEL CAPPELLAIO MATTO Sand, Adam Mickiewicz, Thomas Carlyle, rarely can a female mind be impersonal", she wrote in Women in the Nineteenth «A visionary librarian who explores the Brownings). "I know all the people worth declares Emerson. Meanwhile, Emerson's Century. In that book, Fuller not only makes boundless continents in the margins of knowing in America", she once huffed, "and older wife, Lidian, wonders when the indefati­ demands for reform - equal rights for pages already written». (Italo Calvi no) I find no intellect comparable to my own." gable groupie will leave. divorce, custody and suffrage - but attempts Guido Morselli Thomas Higginson, who wrote the first bio­ But some of Fuller's personality must have to rethink gender relations from the ground DISSIPATIO H.G. graphy of Fuller, said her life did "more for got through to Emerson. "You & I are not up. "Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to Morselli's most secret book. the intellectual enfranchisement of American inhabitants of one thought of the Divine Mind fluid", she writes. "There is no wholly mascu­ Alberto Arbasino women than was done by even her book on but of two thoughts", he was to write, "that we line man, no purely feminine woman." Quali­ PENSIERI SELVAGGI A BUENOS the subject". This verdict has set the tone for meet & treat like foreign states, one maritime, ties associated with women - fragility, soft­ AIRES the judgements that have followed. Always, one inland, whose trade & laws are essentially ness, reserve - were to be severed in the inter­ All of Arbasino's Argentina, from Borges to it seems, Fuller's life - and spectacular death unlike." In 1839, he got her to take on the est of new sexual identities which would Evita. - overshadow her writing, including her best­ editorship of The Dial, the house organ of allow men and women to pick and choose Massimo Cacciari known work, Woman in the Nineteenth Transcendentalism, and the two became their qualities. In one of the book's finer DOPPIO RITRATTO Century (1845). As John Van der Zee Sears, friends within the liffiits that Emerson, who moments, she describes how "the sexes Giotto and Dante on Saint Francis. who briefly lived among the Transcendental­ liked to treat his .friends like books on the should not only correspond to and appreciate, ists observed, "[They] read Dante in the origi­ shelf, dipping into them when he pleased, but prophesy to one another". In forging new Andrea Moro nal Italian, Hegel in the original German . .. determined. He never paid her properly as "religious" unions, both partners would make PARLO DUNQUE SONO and perhaps the hardest task of all, Margaret Editor and the work was not always easy for "pilgrimage towards a common shrine". An attempt to understand why only we speak the way we speak. Fuller in the .original English". Matteson Fuller, who complained of "a process so unnat­ Fuller's own romantic life did not bear out strains to make a case for her "pivotal role" in ural as the reading of proofs". Despite this, these elevated precepts, though that may be to Boris Biancheri American literature - the book ends with him she helped make The Dial into the only avant­ her credit. From the beginning, she was LA TRAVERSATA claiming Fuller to be some sort of alternative garde magazine in America. There would be attracted to brainy men, but none of her The story of an absolute passion for swimming. to Karl Marx - but as a storyteller he suc­ nothing like it until Seven Arts more than sev­ prospects in Boston or New York developed ceeds at recapturing the drama of her life. enty years later. The main thing The Dial gave satisfactorily. One of her prissier crushes in Tullio Peri coli It was no easy thing for a woman to break Fuller was less a platform for her own work Cambridge insisted on calling her "Mother". ATTRAVERSO L'ALBERO into the Transcendentalists' boys club. Over­ than an entree into the literary world. More significant was the New York merchant, How great artists have imagined, drawn, and painted trees. And how Pericoli has weight and bolted down in corsets, pock­ This world was never very kind to her. James Nathan, with whom she formed a genu­ reinterpreted them, in his most personal marked, with a nasal voice and a habit of Edgar Allan Poe savaged her in his Literati ine intellectual bond, which he wanted to album. blinking forcefully, Fuller never risked being of New York City (1846), and Nathaniel make physical. He was rebuffed when she their muse. In order to manage a meeting Hawthorne was a good deal nastier. "It was learned he was living with a mistress. In fact, with Emerson, whose sermons in Cambridge such an awful joke", he wrote after Fuller's the only relationship Fuller consummated was had impressed her as a girl, she needed to get death, "that she should have resolved - in all perhaps the least likely. In 1847, outside the his attention on the merit of her work alone. sincerity, no doubt - to make herself the great- Sistine Chapel in Rome, she met Giovanni TLS OCTOBER 12 2012 ";,, + BIOGRAPHY 11 Ossoli, a down-at-heel Italian "marchese", of Genoa on his 1919 European tour: "On the nine years her junior, and no great interlocutor other side of the water we have studied the (on a trip to Italy made after Fuller's death, life of Mazzini with almost as much pride as Hawthorne made a special point of confIrm­ if we shared in the glory of his history, and I ing his boorishness). By all accounts, Ossoli am very glad to acknowledge that his spirit was devoted to Fuller - "with knightly zeal" has been handed down to us of a later genera­ he could take her parasol to be repaired - and tion on both sides of the water." Fuller with him she hit on the passion that had long was the first American to take on and spread eluded her in America.