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CHAPTER 1

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 For this volume he had given me an unpublished account of his own experience as a partisan, and I continued subsequently to seek him out.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.

The Book that I Actually Read (but did not photocopy) 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.

It was a remarkable novel. Just holding it in my hands, recognizing on its pages – yellowed and slightly desiccated by the passage of years – the familiar handwriting of Romano, was a deeply emotional experience for me. I thought about making a photocopy in order to preserve those pages for myself. But my loyalty to Maria prevailed: she had made me promise to return it without duplication so that she would remain in unique possession of the work. It's the only time in my life that I have regretted acting honestly.

'If Romano did not finish it, and didn't publish it, then his intentions should be respected, and his reservations maintained': these were Maria's words when I met with her to return the manuscript. And she had a valid enough point. 'But it's equally true to say', I argued, 'that Romano did not discard the manuscript, did not destroy it, but chose to keep it instead. This seems to me just as significant. Perhaps he meant to take it up again when any potential cause of embarrassment had disappeared, when the people depicted in it were no longer around.'

With emotions similar to my own, the manuscript was read by two other friends of Romano's: the writer Claudio Piersanti and the literary scholar and editorial director Benedetta Centovalli. They had also been sworn to secrecy, and were faithful to the request not to photocopy it. Benedetta even read it in Maria's home. I can't say for sure if anyone else got to hold it in their hands, though perhaps the poet Mario Luzi did.

All three of us were in agreement that it was not possible to publish it separately in its incomplete form as novel, but we were also convinced that it was crucial to any critical reading of Bilenchi's work. It should be included in an edition of his Complete Works, or at the very least be made available for scholars to consult in manuscript.

When we expressed our opinion to Maria she raised no objection, but neither did she indicate any kind of agreement. She kept her own counsel and bided her time. Eventually all mention of it was dropped. For years, almost twenty in fact, I forgot all about it. Or rather I consigned the memory of that novel to a corner of my mind, waiting for the right moment to speak of it again, including publicly.

Then, in the spring of 2010, Maria died. A conference on her husband's work had been scheduled to take place just a few days later at the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence. We wondered how to react, before eventually deciding to go ahead with the event, dedicating it to her.

In my own lecture I dwelt on the great strength of the rapport between Maria and Romano, describing it as a love story that had been lived rather than written, though I also let it be known that there was an as yet unpublished work by him in which, albeit with literary license, he had attempted to give an account of that love.

After I had delivered my paper I was taken aside by Benedetta Centovalli, who told me quietly that the novel was gone.

'What do you mean gone?' I replied. 'Maria kept it in her home. I'm sure that somewhere or other there ...'

But no: before her death she had decided to burn their letters to each other, together with the manuscript of the novel.

'But what about the photocopy that was given to the library in Pavia?' I asked, hoping that at least this facsimile had been saved.

'She'd asked Maria Corti to return it to her, years ago. Even that copy is gone.'

It's difficult to enter into the minds of others, or to judge right from wrong in such situations. No doubt personal letters and diaries are such intimate documents that a husband, wife or child has the right to do with them as they see fit. But a novel that the author has deliberately preserved, if only by shutting it away in a drawer?

Maria rightly considered her husband to be one of the great Italian writers of the last century, and had always respected his judgment, even when she didn't agree with it. Despite her admiration for his first book, The Life of Pisto, for example, she had complied with his own repudiation of it, refusing to allow it to be re- issued as a single volume after his death. So how can I suppose that she would have done anything detrimental to his work, and to literature?

I don't think that her decision to destroy The Avenue was exclusively due to the fact that it dealt with actual events, with existing persons. In the end, only the people involved can recognize in a literary text the traces of actual life: the only person who could have been hurt by The Avenue was her husband's first wife, and she had died decades ago.

If the author had not destroyed it himself, or asked someone else to do so, why make it disappear forever, preventing anyone from reading it in the future?

It's worth repeating: it's difficult to enter into the minds of others.

With affection and admiration, Maria had stayed close to Roberto Bilenchi over many years, including through the long years of the illness that eventually killed him, and after his death she had never assumed the insufferable role of the widow who takes it upon herself to determine the truth about her husband, controlling that which may or may not be said about him. She had always remained reticent and detached, though never indifferent.

Yet she ended up by committing an act which prevented the possibility of reading a novel, albeit an unfinished one, that he had decided to leave to posterity.

Why had she chosen to do this?

I returned to the subject in conversation with Benedetta Centovalli, not in order to apportion blame but to understand the reason behind this drastic act and knowing that, as in the case of a suicide, the explanations we find are almost always banal, partial, and inadequate. What was it that Maria feared, if the manuscript had been allowed to survive? What possible harm to Bilenchi could it have caused?

Benedetta told me about the phone call during which Maria had informed her that she had destroyed the letters and the manuscript just a few months before her death. Benedetta had said to her that she could hardly believe it. But Maria insisted: she had destroyed them. And to this day Benedetta remains convinced that she did indeed act on her decision to do so.

In that decision, arrived at after years of reflection, Benedetta sees an extreme gesture of love, probably prompted by the unfinished state of the novel – a crucial factor for a writer such as Bilenchi, always in search of precision, of le mot juste, of the eminently well written. For him, an unfinished book was probably not a book at all. I tell her that I understand, yet continue to think that Maria did not have the right to destroy it.

We could go on discussing the issue at length, but about one point we are in definite agreement: in all of us, as followers of Bilenchi, there remains a bitterness about a novel that no longer exists, and which is fading irrevocably from our memories of it.

CHAPTER 2

London, 1824: 'Scandalous' Memoirs

This is a story about censorship. Not the kind of censorship engineered by the state against an opponent of a regime, or used by religious authorities to regulate the moral health of a community. But rather a preventive intervention made by friends of the victim in order to avoid, apparently, the outbreak of a scandal and ruinous damage to his reputation. Yet it is censorship, nonetheless, that we are dealing with – of the more furtive and insidious kind, originating as it does in a capitulation to convention and public opinion.

We are in London, in May 1824: George Gordon, Lord Byron, died a month ago in Missolonghi, where he had gone in the hope of adding to his enormous fame as a poet that of a freedom fighter in the cause of Greek independence.

We are in Albemarle Street, in the office of his publisher, the first John Murray. (I add 'the first' since he was followed by an unbroken sequence of other John Murrays, down to the seventh, who after finally giving different names to his sons sold the publishing house and its archive in 2000). In the office with Murray are John Cam Hobhouse, a friend of Byron's since his student days at Cambridge and now the executor of his estate; his half-sister, closest relative and former lover Augusta Leigh, along with another close friend, the poet Thomas Moore. Amongst the few others present is the lawyer representing the interests of Byron's estranged wife, the mother of his only legitimate daughter.

Hobhouse and Augusta Leigh are convinced that it is necessary to burn the manuscript of the Memoirs Byron had written a few years previously and given to his publisher for an advance of two thousand pounds. The text had reached Murray via Moore – and this, as we shall see, was hardly by chance.

The publisher has some qualms, and hesitates – then gives in. He agrees to the destruction of the manuscript on condition that the advance should be returned to him. Augusta Leigh hands over the money necessary to keep him quiet. Only Thomas Moore resists, convinced that even if the Memoirs should not be published immediately it would be wrong to destroy them, to lose those pages in which Byron had used his tremendous prose to reveal so much about himself, his life and his passions. In the days leading up to this meeting the discussions between Moore and Hobhouse had been so heated that they almost ended in blows.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "In Search of Lost Books"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Giorgio van Straten.
Excerpted by permission of Pushkin Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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