Guido Davico Bonino the Einaudi Primer

Home , Carlo Cassola, Franco Lucentini, Natalia Ginzburg, Viareggio Prize

guido davico bonino The Einaudi Primer

Translated by Yvonne Freccero

o my newly graduated students , who are preparing for Ttheir plunge into the next century (as we used to say), I always wish the boldest of fortunes. In fact I believe that a young person’s professional future depends as much on the favors of the blind goddess as on natural gifts and advanced studies. I’ve noticed this in many of the people around me — and above all in myself. In 1960 I had written a twenty-page essay on Our Ancestors, the three fairy-tale romances by Italo Calvino, published in the Supercoralli collection. An academic colleague had done me the favor of forwarding it to Giambattista Vicari, the founder and director of the review Il Caffe in Rome. Vicari in turn was kind enough to publish it, but not without a few changes, especially to the conclusion. Calvino, who was working at Il Caffe at the time, read it and called Vicari to ask for the author’s tele- phone number: “But surely you know him? He’s Torinese. I believe he’s one of Getto’s clan of students, like Sanguineti and Bàrberi Squarotti.” Calvino called me and made an appointment to meet at the publishing house. He was very generous (too generous) in his opinion of my essay. Then he made sure that I was indeed Torinese, by birth as well as up- bringing, and without further ado asked me: “Would you like to work here? At the end of the year I will be giving up my role as director; I still have two or three novels I want to write before retiring from literature. Why don’t you think about taking my place? Provided the editor agrees: I can propose, but it is he who disposes.” It was May 1961, I would be twenty-three in August; I had just graduated and was a substitute teacher of Italian and Latin in a grade school. Finding myself suddenly invited to join Einaudi and take the place of someone like Calvino made my head spin: “But I’m not at that level,” I said, and I was being absolutely sincere. “I don’t even know what a managing editor is.” “Let the others decide. As for learning the job, I’ll be staying on another year. I promised the editor to teach the person who’ll take my place, whoever it is. I hope it will be you. In any case, there will be plenty of opportunities for us to meet:

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I spend two or three days in Torino every week.” He got up, indicating that we had talked enough for the time being. And so I started at Einaudi, beginning work on the first of September that year. Calvino, always punctual, was there, and my desk was set at an angle to his, in the same room. I began my year’s apprenticeship with him. It didn’t consist of three hundred and sixty-five calendar days, minus weekends and holidays; Calvino came and went from Rome or other cit- ies. Nonetheless, as proof of Augustine’s saying in The Confessions (time does not exist, it is man’s interior measure), it was the longest period of my life, and certainly the most fruitful. I should also say immediately — regarding work, rather than any other kind of experience — that I’ve rarely suffered as much as I did during that period. In one of the first training sessions Calvino declared, somewhat ironically, “I believe in a strict pedagogy,” and he remained true to that statement. It is extremely difficult for me, forty years later, to write about him and that experience. To be precise, and to explain myself more fully, the criterion that inspired him was that of the third section of Six Memos for the Next Millennium, in which “exactitude” serves as both title and content. Here I will simply recall the three components of exactitude accord- ing to Italo: 1) a precise and thoroughly elaborated outline for the work; 2) the evocation of visual images that are sharp, incisive and memorable; 3) a language that is as precise as possible both in its vocabulary and in its expression of nuances of thought and images. Calvino follows this immediately by a sort of outburst in which he admits his own “hyper- sensitivity and allergy” — in fact he considers “that language is always used in an approximate way, casually, carelessly,” and for him that is “an intolerable annoyance.” Only the technology is different; today it’s a computer, in those days it was a fountain pen. The work called for from the director of a publishing house, then as now, is not a novel nor a tale, but a set of texts we could call functional: the flap copy (or endpapers) of a book, its dust jacket (or wrapper), marketing sound bites, printing instructions, notes for book- sellers and librarians — all of which follow and accompany its launch. Today in a large publishing house this work is diversified, in the sense that it is entrusted to more departments and more people. At Einaudi at that time it was the responsibility of just one person, and Calvino never neglected any of these duties. I had to learn from him the design, the look, and the language for each

2 Guido Davico Bonino of these functions. Design: “In which series will it be published? How many lines do you have? How many do you want to save for the plot? How many for hints to the reader?” That’s how he began with me: with very down-to-earth questions and observations that actually encompassed a whole editorial “theory behind the proposal” that he had developed through years of daily experience (fifteen at that time, to be exact).

Be aware of the fact that we never impose a book, we simply offer it. Similarly we must never judge, but rather suggest one of many possible ways of reading. Never get involved in evaluations. At the very most, you may indicate a path for reading and let it be known that it’s only one of many. The first time the reader meets the book, seated in an armchair, he opens the newspaper and glances at the book notes: the two or three lines he finds under author and title must never put him off. If anything, they should rouse his curiosity and, if possible, put him at ease. Only then will you meet him a second time, wander- ing between shelves in his favorite bookstore. Now you have, not just two lines available, but ten, fifteen, twenty. Don’t think that you will succeed more easily because you have more space at your disposal. During this second approach, which is extremely delicate and of deep importance if the encounter is to succeed, it’s as if the reader is on a second date with a girl he has exchanged a few words with in a streetcar. Would you keep seeing someone who showers you with a bucketful of words on the second occasion you see each other? On the other hand, if she is reserved but not sullen, if she says enough to stir up your curiosity, you usually want to keep going, no matter what. And to keep going in a bookstore means buying the book, maybe even on credit.

This was easy to listen to and understand, but much more difficult to put into practice. Because, at this point, images and language came into play. As far as style is concerned, the university (and by this I mean the humanities, the only faculty I know) plays a really bad joke on its gradu- ates. It teaches you a specialized technical language that’s relevant and useful only on the so-called scientific level, or a language that forces you to mimic unthinkingly the style of the masters who have formed you. Nothing that meets the needs of literary communication, just as the language of diplomats or magistrates or municipal police has nothing in common with the language of daily communication. I was no different from most of my fellow students, but with Italo it was a constant Christian wrangle, as Montale puts it. “I am willing to understand: but ‘con- suming’ — what sort of adjective is that? What does it mean?” “Tell me,

3 THE MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW please, what’s the purpose of an expression such as ‘in a transcoloration of tonality?’ How many more copies will we sell with your ‘transcoloration’? “Haven’t they taught you yet that adverbs in -ly — look, here there are two in two lines: ‘subtly’ and ‘melancholically’ — are off-putting and tiresome to read?” He fought to make me produce incisive images, and I instinctively sought refuge in abstraction and circumlocution, two processes not exactly leading to clarity. One night, on a date with my fiancée, from whom I wasn’t hiding the harshness of this apprenticeship, I almost burst into tears: Italo had made me spend from three in the afternoon until suppertime on ten different drafts of a single backflap. Of the tenth and last version, he had said in a neutral tone: “I think that will do. Tomorrow morning I will give you another reading. . .” Fortunately we didn’t work only in the office. There was Torino, and there were outings and dinners. After working only two days, we switched to the informal tu (I remember it very clearly, because of my as- tonishment and enormous gratitude). Calvino confessed to me that, the previous May, he had insisted on finding out whether I was really from Torino, because for him this city implied a set of gifts that are hard to find except in its “true sons”: “I am Ligurian, so I can say it impartially. When you people do well, you are rational and consistent: and given that this is also a quiet city and not scattered here and there (just think how “noisy” Milan is, though this can be a good thing, and certainly, how “wasteful” Rome is, which can only be a bad one), you Torinesi are capable of being more industrious than many others, more even than we Ligurians, who get called ‘mussels’ or ‘reefers,’ because we always stick to our rocks.” Toward evening we would wander through Torino together along three main paths in the city: from the publishing house, under the por- ticos, to the river; along the river, but on the banks on the hillside; and definitely up the hill. The point was to persuade Italo not to take the car, because he was a terrible driver. Even so, he liked to show off sports cars, the mudguards and sides of which would soon be dented (he would venture into the alleys under the trees, which at that time you could still drive through, unlike now, since they’re filled with parking spaces: or else, when he was making a turn, he would race through the alley, dent- ing a tree trunk to the right or the left. He wouldn’t react to the noise, remaining nobly imperturbable, as if it were a mishap rather than an accident). But on foot (and he was a good walker) the music was different, a music of words and ideas, for which I at my twenty years or so of age

4 Guido Davico Bonino was naturally eager. To get him to talk about delicate topics, it was necessary to tread very lightly: he couldn’t be tired (he often was, after long hours in the office) and he should be in a good mood. For example, he was reluctant to talk about Pavese, and at first I couldn’t get a word out of him; I succeeded only in annoying him. “These days everyone is talking or writing about him: it’s no longer worth it.” “But excuse me, you’ve said and written that he was the person who meant most to you, that for five years you visited him almost every day, that you had him read almost everything that you were writing.” “Exactly, I’ve already said everything that’s necessary. It’s time to turn the page.” But then, a little more confidingly and in a better mood, he went on, “He is the most unity-minded writer in the Italy of the twenty years from 1930 to 1950. Today’s critics, of your age or a little older, don’t accept the idea that in his nine novels he wanted to create a complete series. And yet it is so; his basic theme is simple and solid. He was not to have followers, not even as a poet, but it must be acknowl- edged that he was immensely powerful in constructing a self. And this strength also lay in his wish to make life and literature coincide every step of the way. He would have liked to be a coherent system as a man, and he would have liked his literature to present his readers with the same solid system, and at the same time to help him, through daily practice, to overcome whatever his life lacked in inner, continuous form.” “But then” — I permitted myself to push him off course this once — “he must have suffered terribly.” “Certainly, and everything he did — his assidu- ous study, translating, and constant creative writing, the tough editorial work — provided so many screens behind which he stoically caged his suffering.” “You talk of cycle and system, but then why did some novels succeed and others not?” “That’s a stupid question: the system is simply a structure and the cycle is merely a tension projected forward. Look at Balzac or Zola: the comédies humaines have a unity of plan, but they are not linear like the horizon, in fact they’re one of the most uneven mountain ranges. But if your question is meant to make me name my favorite books by Pavese, as you are always trying to do, like a good little grandson of Croce, whenever we discuss literature, here they are: Among Women Only, The House on the Hill, The Devil in the Hills, where he tries too hard, perhaps, to retrace his steps.” This stubbornness of mine in always wanting him to list titles no doubt stemmed from my own immaturity as a university assistant (which I had become, although “as a volunteer,” — in other words, unpaid and

5 THE MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW useless, since in fact I was entering publishing), but also from my aware- ness that at the time he was going through a period of deep reflection, and I would really have liked to benefit from it in depth (when one is young, one is incredibly shameless), if only at the level of a reading list. He was always advising me about what to read, and, when I showed I was reluctant, he would insist with a kind of obstinate affection. I had read Carlo Cassola’s Il taglio del bosco (The Woodcutting), which I thought was splendid, as I did all the short and long novels by him collected in the 1959 edition of the Supercoralli series, but Belo’s Girl, which appeared the following year in the same collection, I didn’t like at all: “But you must go back to it. It is a magnificent portrait of a woman, Mara. Forget the rest. Just re-read the pages about her. Certainly ‘sub- lime,’ as he thinks she is. In Mara there is a deep pessimism, like Tolstoy’s.” In the summer of ‘61 I had devoured Natalia Ginzburg’s Voices in the Evening, which he had presented as a contestant for the Strega prize, in a cinema in Rome: “You should read all of Natalia. Start at the beginning, with È stato così (The Dry Heart): get the copy that’s archived in the technicians’ office, because we haven’t reissued it. She is a strong and lasting writer; everything is concrete, objective and active. She stands between Maupassant and Chekhov.” This was how I came to read the novel about the wife who kills her husband, with the crime confessed at the beginning (“and I shot him in the eyes”), and right after, I discovered the novel that for me is Natalia’s masterpiece: All Our Yesterdays, little known — regrettably — even to her fans. But I never really understood his reference to Maupassant and Chek- hov. “Maupassant is someone who loves life passionately, who drinks, is popular, plays cards, so much that he dies of syphilis,” he insisted stub- bornly. “Stop once and for all identifying life with literature. Reread Boule de suif, practically his first work: all his cold objectivity is to be found there. Conrad, ‘my’ Conrad, who understood him in depth, said that he had fiercely ‘penetrated’ the furrowed face of existence.” “Even Chekhov isn’t coldly objective; he is gnawed by the melancholy despera- tion of his own and others’ failures.” Then I began retelling a story of Chekhov’s about an impossible love, which fascinated me, even though at the moment I couldn’t remember its title. “It’s The Chorister,” he said, without batting an eyelid, “but that’s not where you should look if you want to discover the authentic Chekhov. The short stories, understand- ably, are beautiful, but it’s in the long ones that he shows the measure of his greatness. There he is truly tragic and profound. I recommend ‘The

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Duel’ to you and I don’t want to tell you why.” He often played this So- cratic game of hide-and-seek. Naturally, I hurried to read it and was dis- turbed by the cruelty, by the almost surgical detail through which Chek- hov, the doctor, outlines the character of a “strong” man who yearns to suppress the weakest ones, one after another. Another writer whom he recommended warmly, almost affectionate- ly, was Raymond Queneau. I hurried to read Zazie in the Metro, published in Einaudi’s Coralli series in 1960, and thanks to the lively translation by Franco Fortini, I enjoyed it immensely. But I probably would have left it at that if Italo hadn’t talked to me about the book, emphasizing the multi-faceted quality of Queneau’s personality as an intellectual: “He’s a writer who’s had an extraordinary career,” he explained to me, in his characteristically precise way. “He seems to be a typical provincial (he is from Le Havre, the son of bookkeeper and a haberdasher); but after get- ting an arts degree from the Sorbonne, he suddenly showed an interest, early for the time (he was born in 1903, and we’re talking about the mid- dle 1920’s), in anthropology, the history of religion, and psychoanalysis. He entered the circle of Breton, then aligned himself with the dissidents (Prévert, among others) and broke with the big boss. He studied oriental thought, the gnostics, Hegel along with the introduction by Alexandre Kojève (who published Hegel’s lectures, which we translated). In other words, he’s halfway to being a genius. He is one of the most open minds in French culture today.” “What should I read of his?” I asked. “I would go in order. Begin with Il Pantano (The Bog), his first novel, written when he was thirty. Nanda Pivano translated it, you can rely on him. Then I would go to Pierrot, which is set in an amusement park. Pierrot is a tenderhearted vagabond in love, who lives in a group of bizarre people.” When he recommended Cassola, Ginzburg, and equally Queneau, he was dealing with friends. But what struck me about him — and I’ve not noticed it in many others — was the generosity with which he recognized talent for writing in those with whom he had no elective af- finity. Late in the spring of ‘62, Paolo Volponi’s Memoirs were published by Garzanti. Two years earlier I had read a beautiful collection of his, Le porte dell’Appennino (the Gates of the Appenines), published by Feltrinelli, which had won the Viareggio prize: and I promised myself to read the two preceding collections, unattainable at that time. But judging from various reviews, I had no wish to tackle the novel. “On the contrary, no, you must read it,” Calvino said to me one evening when we were at a trattoria on the banks of the Po, where we often ate dinner; he would

7 THE MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW look me straight in the face when he made these “recommendations for reading. “It is far from an ‘industrial’ novel: it is the parable of schizophre- nia as an existential condition not of a single individual but of an entire generation. Despite a certain discontinuity, his writing is strong, he has an ability to transform the nature-mother and factory-stepmother op- position into hallucinatory visions and huge nightmares.” He also insisted that I read all of Gadda, whose L’Adalgisa and Il castello di Udine (The Castle of Udine) were being published by our house. His Disegni milanesi (Milanese Designs) had naturally won me over, but faced with The Castle (to my shame now), I was struggling. “Here you are again in the grip of your Crocean distinctions — this is good, this is bad, this is poetry, this isn’t. Gadda’s work, of which we may never see a complete and defini- tive edition, is composed entirely of stories and novels which are scarcely finished or completely unfinished, because reading it is like experiencing a huge neurosis, with its inevitable highs and lows, its sudden interrup- tions, its displacements and repetitions. . . But it is the work of one of the greatest writers of our time.” (When Gadda won the International Prize for Literature with his Acquainted with Grief, this work became, through Italo’s comment in French, “un artichaut,” an artichoke: “What’s impor- tant for us in literary work is the chance to keep peeling it, like an endless artichoke, uncovering ever new dimensions of reading.”) I will stop here, to avoid digressing into further suggestions that he was sometimes generous, sometimes stingy with confessions about his own work. To my indiscreet and insistent questions (“What are you writing?” “Do you have a plan for a new book?”), he would answer evasively and drily: “I don’t know. As always, I’m working on a lot of different ideas.” It seemed to me that he was at a delicate turning point in his journey. That publication of the trilogy [Our Ancestors], with an introduction that seems both a summing up and a second ending, had allowed me and his other followers to perceive that following the path of a “lyrical-philosophical” narrative, in which the real was suggested in the form of “fantastic morality,” no longer made sense to him. So might he be experiencing a moment of crisis? This word had crept into a letter that came to me, certified, with a return receipt requested, from one of our former faculty colleagues, at the time a lecturer at a Swiss university. The sender, apologizing for his delay in writing to me, told me — in a somewhat conspiratorial tone — about a lecture by Calvino that he had attended in Switzerland in March, in which the writer “clearly announced (I cite my alarmed associate) his own state of

8 Guido Davico Bonino profound crisis, referring to a conversation he himself had had — real or imagined? — with his colleague Carlo Cassola.” The crisis, the message continued, seemed “to originate from the massive competition that literature faces from cinema, journalism, and essays in sociology.” I was well aware of my friend’s inclination to dramatize even the most insignificant detail. I kept the letter to myself, carefully refraining from talking to Calvino about it. But the lecture had indeed taken place: I read the text of it when Italo did me the honor of giving me his collection of critical works, Una pietra sopra (A Stone Above). (This was in 1980, and I had not been at the publishing house for several years.) My correspondent’s worry some twenty years earlier had been exces- sive: but the playful squabble between Calvino and Cassola, in a café in Rome on the via Veneto (which he loathed), later recounted with his usual irony, nonetheless revealed a certain anxiety. In this Dialogo di due scrittori in crisi (Dialogue between Two Writers in Crisis) between the “pro- fessor” who lives “his solitary, tranquil, orderly life” in a “small Tuscan town,” recounting “the long afternoons of country girls at home,” and the editorial consultant, who “devours the sea of paper often printed of no use to the world” and who, “in order to express the rhythm of modern life, can find nothing better to do than recount the battles and duels of Charlemagne’s paladins,” the most subtly melancholic of the two would actually seem to be the second, particularly because at the time when Calvino had agreed to speak to the Swiss, he knew that he had put Charlemagne and his paladins once and for all behind him. But was he very clear about what he would find ahead of him? In Spain, in May of ‘61 — he himself told me this — he had gotten to know (and debated) Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor, the nouveau roman’s Gemini twins (I had read the former’s Jealousy with enthusiasm, translated with firm restraint by Franco Lucentini). “I don’t share the poetics of either one,” he confessed to me that autumn. “Robbe-Grillet’s method can only lead to the resetting of the real or to its ever more me- chanical reproduction, to pure stereotype. Butor’s (where the real exists only as an overwhelmingly expanding nightmare, through which one must pass and return in a whirling compulsion) ends in negating reality by means of nebulous allegory. To tell the truth, Robbe-Grillet’s poetics is too thin, and Butor’s is too fat.” He had spent six months of the previous year in the United States, from November ‘59 to April ‘60, as a guest of the Ford Foundation with six other “young” writers from six other countries (he spent four months

9 THE MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW in New York). Then he gathered all his travel notes into a book, An Opti- mist in America, which never saw the light of day; Calvino decided not to publish it when he saw the proofs. I never dared ask him why (he could be very abrupt when he wanted); instead, we often spoke about Ameri- can literature. First, Poe: “Ever since I was a boy, he has been the writer who influenced me most. With the short story he could do anything, and go in any direction: to speak of him as a writer of nightmares is to do him serious harm, greatly underestimating his point of view and ours as readers.” Then, on Hemingway: “I liked him a great deal, I and my generation. I even went fishing with him on one occasion — at Stresa, in ‘48, I believe it was. He was a big man, really likable, constantly shifting from timidity to boasting. Then I became — how to put it? — turned off when I discovered the aestheticism that fed his writing. He disappointed me in the end, somewhat like what happened to me with Malraux.” But he was very critical of American literature in those years: “Today there are few names worth saving. Salinger, obviously, and we can be proud from this year onward of a new, very good translation by Adrian Motti of Catcher in the Rye, which we’ve decided to call Il giovane Holden. The point is to understand what he’ll do — whether he’ll remain isolated from the world. I asked if I could meet him; there was no way. We still have Nine Stories to publish, which Carlo Fruttero has translated with great irony, and two stories about a brother and sister, Franny and Zoe. And after that? Will he write again? Another person who is little prized in his own country but in my opinion a real writer is James Purdy: he is another who was certainly influenced by Poe, a homosexual who speaks of separation as an obsession, but with a gently dazed sweetness all his own. The only book we’ve published, 63: Dream Palace, sold very poorly: let’s hope they let us continue with him. Purdy is not yet forty. Malamud and Bellow are closer to fifty. I hope for a great deal from the former. In the Assistant, his second novel, which I had us buy when I was in the States, there is a delicacy, an underlying compassion which can take him much farther. I hope you’ve read Bellow’s The Rendering of Deeds, a little jewel of bitterness. Unfortunately, we have only a big picaresque novel of his, The Adventures of Augie March; Feltrinelli swiped the rest from us.” But about the younger writers he was outright sardonic: “I don’t believe in the fake avant-garde of the beatniks. And they spoke of nothing else over there. Even a sharp critic like Dwight Macdonald doted on Norman Mailer — who, incidentally, does not have much to do with the beats; they’re the ones who grab onto him. They would ask me all the

10 Guido Davico Bonino time, ‘Pasolini, the one who wrote Hustlers, is he a beatnik?’ ‘No! he is just the opposite!’ I’d get furious, but it was a waste of time trying to convince them. I don’t believe in a literature that is simply ‘outside,’ on the margins. Literature, art in general, consists of antitheses; apart from the negative side of the dialectic, they understand very little. Painting and music have been the only forms of expression that they have to offer: I am speaking of abstract art and of cool jazz.” But my best memory of him goes back to his time in America. At the end of October ‘95, I acquired the two volumes of Calvino’s Essays in the Meridian Mondadori series. It was a weekend; I wanted to savor in solitude the more than three thousand pages organized exemplarily by Mario Barenghi. Out of curiosity, I flipped here amd there through the extremely detailed indices. What were those Appunti per una collana di ricerca morale (Notes for a Book Series on Moral Investigation), dated 1960? I hastened to check, and suddenly, I recognized them. At the time I was no longer in my study, but in our office, Italo’s and mine, at Einaudi’s. I had been employed exactly a year, and I had invited Italo and a group of colleagues to dinner at a restaurant. Italo arrives late in the afternoon, takes a whole pile of papers out of his old briefcase, stretches out over the table, and on the back of the drafts, he writes and writes and writes in pen: in exactly the position that — I don’t know when — Sebastião Salgado captured him, the photo that now appears on the back cover of the books published by Meridiani: his left hand in his hair, his arm bent on the table, silent, and totally absorbed. After a couple of hours he gets up and takes three typed sheets from his case: “I want to show you some- thing. Read it and give it back to me before the others arrive: I can’t leave it with you for long.” These are the Notes which I am now rereading with such emotion in the Meridiani series: beneath are the date and place, “Chicago, 18 January 1960.” It is a plan for a collection of lay ethics, based on the morality of practice, in all the meanings of this word, so vast and so simple: recollec- tions of merchants, and sailors, little manuals of practical morals, testi- monials of explorers or sportsmen in contact with nature, reflections on the experiments (or methods) of scientists, diaries of revolutionaries or witnesses of revolutions, etc. “It seems a great idea to me,” I said with sincere admiration. “As you see, I was in America. We communicated with colleagues every week: I to Ponchiroli, who gathered my messages and made them available to others, who, in contrast, answered me only now and then. Einaudi writes to me in alarm because Saggiatore has issued a

11 THE MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW new collection, Le Silerchie, which is selling well in bookstores: ‘See if you can think of a plan for another “small” collection that will contrast to their spiritualistic cravings.’ After one change and another I jotted down this plan, which I came across by accident today — in tidying up my papers.” “So why didn’t you do it?” “Because Einaudi wasn’t ready, or I wasn’t ready, or the public wasn’t ready. . . Publishing consists of three parts, remember; and only when all three are in perfect agreement does it succeed. And now, give me back the sheets.” He didn’t give me time even to ask for a copy. “By the way”, he added, “I’m not saying this because it’s your anniversary, but it seems to me that you have learned enough. Perhaps you can try doing it yourself . . .”