Guido Davico Bonino the Einaudi Primer

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 collec- tion. 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: 1 THE MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW 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, some- what 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).

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