Seventy years of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore

In the meantime, many and well-deserved congratulations: the publishing house founded by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli turns seventy. A courageous publisher, who went where cultural conformism would have advised against treading . Dangerous terrain, even a little sulphurous: and he went there. A publisher who had been able to challenge the hegemonic primacy of Einaudi, even at the cost of going against a part of the intellectual left that was more pompous and full of ideological qualms. He, a left-wing publisher, did not want to have a line to conform to. It was his strength, a constant challenge, which the last, stormy years of his life and his extremist militancy unfortunately overshadowed. And the first challenge, chronologically, was the decision to publish in 1957 “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak, the anti-Soviet par excellence .

A Feltrinelli employee, looking for Russian authors to publish, managed to get the manuscript of the novel, securing the world rights and offering a backer to Pasternak, sure that the Moscow authorities would never allow his novel to see the light. And in fact, as soon as the secret was revealed, the Soviet torturers forced him to write threatening letters to Feltrinelli to get the manuscript back, and then confiscate it. Pasternak, a master of dissimulation, appeared docile, but chose the stratagem of the double linguistic track as an escape route. Through backdoors and clandestine channels he sent this message to Feltrinelli: “If you ever receive a letter in a language other than French, you must absolutely be careful not to follow its instructions; the only valid letters will be those written in French.” Thus began a frenetic exercise in linguistic diversion. In Russian the messages of the lie: I demand that you return to me the shamefully extorted typescript. In French: Please publish the novel as soon as possible, I don't know how long I'll be able to resist the pressure. Feltrinelli too was subjected to overbearing and insistent pressure from the offices of the PCI to stop publishing "anti-Soviet" propaganda. But, as Carlo Feltrinelli recounts in his memoir " Senior Service " (Senior Service was his father's favorite brand of cigarettes), "a friend came across the publisher crouching on the steps, ten minutes before" a party meeting called to force Giangiacomo Feltrinelli to surrender: "'I'm holding out,' he heard him say." And he held out, indeed. The novel was published in the autumn of '57, as an absolute world premiere, and Pasternak wrote to Feltrinelli: "Words are not enough to express all my gratitude. The future will repay us, you and me, for the despicable humiliations that have been inflicted on us."

The novel will have a universal success, made even more sensational by the film by David Lean with Julie Christie, Omar Sharif and the enchanting “Lara’s Theme”. In 1958 Pasternak will be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, even if the leaders of Soviet communism will prevent him from receiving it in Stockholm, leaving his chair of honor empty.

Then, immediately after, another mutiny: the “Gattopardo” case. Francesco Piccolo in his “ La bella piangere ” (Einaudi) recounts in a savory way the vicissitudes and the alternating fortunes of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel in the left-wing cultural and political area and in particular that which revolved around the Communist Party. First came the refusal of Elio Vittorini – who had already broken with the PCI (“Vittorini has disappeared, and left us alone”, was Togliatti’s elegant comment) – to publish the novel with the Einaudi series “Gettoni”. Then, after the book was published by Feltrinelli towards the end of 1958 (more or less in the same days as the Nobel Prize was denied to Pasternak), the accusations against Tomasi’s novel of being right-wing, reactionary, conservative. “Is the representation of that moment in Sicilian (and Italian) life given to us by the Prince of Lampedusa historically valid, that is, is it artistically persuasive? Frankly, we don’t think so”. “We” was Mario Alicata, “we” was the Party that dictated the line by trashing the novel of an author, Tomasi di Lampedusa, who had just passed away without being able to witness the success of his creation . But Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, a decidedly left-wing man, had completely disinterested himself in that peremptory “we”, trusting the opinion of Giorgio Bassani, at the time responsible for the publishing house’s narrative and who had received the manuscript from Elena Croce, immediately arousing much enthusiasm, as Pietro Citati recalled: “Giorgio read it and even though two fundamental chapters were missing, the one about the dance and the finale, he immediately realized he had a masterpiece in his hands”, poor Vittorini who had rejected it. But “we” had to make a humiliating backtrack, also called, in the wooden Third Internationalist lexicon, “sincere self-criticism”. First because the novel had become very popular. Then because it had won the Strega Prize, contradicting the Party’s wishes that were instead banking on the victory of “Una vita violenta” by Pier Paolo Pasolini, perhaps his worst novel. And then because Togliatti could not bear that the PCI was being overtaken by a prestigious intellectual like Louis Aragon, “an intransigent Marxist” writes Francesco Piccolo, who had spent words of boundless enthusiasm on the book previously panned by “we”: “The ‘Gattopardo’ is something more than a beautiful book, it is one of the novels of this century, one of the great novels of all time, and perhaps the only Italian novel”. Piccolo: on Tomasi’s work “Alicata had said that his interpretation was wrong. Aragon says it is right”. Togliatti decided that “we”, that is, the Party with all its heavy ideological armor, had to get closer to Aragon, indeed that it had to go much further than Aragon. He established that “we” had to include a preface of lavish praise to the edition of the novel published in the Soviet Union. And who was “we”? Mario Alicata, who had first panned the book and now had to praise it: the Party demanded sacrifice. Then peace with “The Leopard” came with Luchino Visconti’s masterpiece, but the film version turned out to be decidedly more Visconti-like than Alicata-like (of the first and second manner). In any case, Feltrinelli won by a landslide.

But Feltrinelli did not have a very conciliatory character, and when he met other less conciliatory characters on his path, then fate wanted that meeting to degenerate into a clash . And in fact, in that period between the end of the Fifties, Feltrinelli's bad temper caused at least three epochal clashes and thunderous breakups.

The first. Among his lightning discoveries (or perhaps crushes, infatuations), here again in contrast with the slow circumspection of Einaudi's auctoritas , the one for Gruppo 63 stands out. Fomented by Valerio Riva and Enrico Filippini, the passion for the Italian literary neo-avant-garde (which was never that transgressive, if even Sandro Viola, presenting it in giant format in the Espresso called it "avant-garde in a sleeping car") was fueled even at the cost of breaking with Bassani. That is, together with Carlo Cassola one of the two "Liale of literature" that the rascals of Gruppo 63 mocked and ridiculed without mercy. Now, it is clear that Bassani took it a little, or rather, a lot, badly. But to get his revenge, Bassani chose the wrong target, and vetoed perhaps the most valid and interesting literary work of the entire avant-garde (“in a sleeping car”): that is, “ Fratelli d'Italia ”, the magnum opus of Alberto Arbasino . There was a storm in the editorial office, Bassani, the man who had pushed Feltrinelli to publish “Il Gattopardo”, was accused of “refusing the book because it contained disrespectful judgments towards some of his friends”, who were undoubtedly Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante. The drawers of the director of the narrative section, those that held other manuscripts, were broken into by unknown persons, who however were immediately considered “hit men” of the Group 63. Arbasino’s book was published by the publishing house, and Bassani left Feltrinelli.

But Feltrinelli was a publisher who had such a good nose for books that he could overlook bad moods and friction with those who proposed them, giving greater prestige to the publishing house: in this case, the second, Luciano Bianciardi. Einaudi was decidedly more modest and less unscrupulous, and would have tolerated badly on the side of “high” literature the unconventional, slightly obscene and even lascivious vocabulary of Henry Miller. Instead, Feltrinelli, freer and lighter-minded, more innovative and even daring, less weighed down by the constraints of a more orderly (and more aligned) publishing industry, said yes to Henry Miller in the early Sixties . Luciano Bianciardi had suggested it to him, who, as Pino Corrias wrote in his “ Vita agra di un anarchico ” (Baldini&Castoldi), was literally struck and overwhelmed by reading Henry Miller, “the American in Paris, the destroyer, who talks about boredom, women, reckless living, anger, poverty and destiny that destroys life in just one night, in just one rage”, lost in a drink “between a madness of sex, a whore caught behind a Pernod”. He discovered “Tropic of Cancer” and “Tropic of Capricorn” and gave them to Feltrinelli who welcomed that cursed and disheveled and also a little obscene prose. And he was struck by it in turn, although in the recent past the relationship with that solitary and eccentric, anarchic and unruly character that was Bianciardi had been anything but idyllic, so much so that Bianciardi was even fired from the publishing house where he had been an editor for manifest ineptitude for the rhythms of any regular, routine job, with timetables and everything. Relationships that did not even survive a major scene between the two that Bianciardi's daughter, Luciana, wrote about. The editor who would soon be fired called Feltrinelli "the jaguar". Editors, she says, led a miserable life in the years immediately preceding the boom, eating at dairies, half-portion trattorias, and so "one evening when they were all around a meeting table, the Jaguar arrives fresh from the shower, puts his beautiful camel coat next to Bianciardi's, turned inside out three or four hundred times, and begins to talk about social justice and class struggle. My father can't take it anymore, finally he gets up, looks at his worn coat, takes Feltrinelli's coat, puts it on, struts around for a moment, turns around, then raises his fist and says: long live the class struggle".

Whether this anecdote is true or legendary, it is a fact that Feltrinelli, in order to publish Henry Miller, listens very carefully to his former editor. And it will be a success, another (or rather two, like Miller’s “Tropics”). And he also listens to Valerio Riva, who will also support him in the search for a new trend in the world literary scene: Latin American literature .

Here too, third case, the relationship with Riva will become increasingly tense, because the editor is captured by the epic of the barbudos in Cuba, while the collaborator establishes relationships with the anti-Castro dissidents. But the bulk of Latin American literature (starting with Borges) becomes fertile hunting ground for Feltrinelli. Until the explosion of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez, the third pillar of the trilogy of bestsellers that make Feltrinelli a solid and even fortunate reality editorially. And Feltrinelli will not even close itself to García Márquez's great enemy, Mario Vargas Llosa with “Conversation in the Cathedral” (because of a betrayal and a political dissent Vargas Llosa also punched his rival). If we can speak of the “cultural hegemony” of the left, and if Einaudi is considered the publishing house in which that hegemony found its apex and its most authoritative expression, Feltrinelli, now seventy years old, can be considered its main adversary. Other renowned publishing houses may have applied for the role of “anti-Einaudi” in Italian cultural and editorial history. First of all, Adelphi, owned by Luciano Foà and Roberto Calasso (and inspired by a formidable reader like Bobi Bazlen), which was born and obtained its birth certificate precisely from a resounding editorial refusal by Einaudi: the critical edition of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche edited by the Colli-Montinari duo, now re-proposed in a new and specific series. But after Nietzsche, the authors accused of “irrationalism” arrived at Adelphi, the dissidents of communism, starting with Milan Kundera, the unclassifiable, Mitteleuropa (“decadent”, they excommunicated themselves at the time). And also the works of Sigmund Freud, an author not exactly loved by Einaudi, caused a new split, giving birth to the Boringhieri publishing house. But the seventieth anniversary of Feltrinelli has been a continuous surprise, a manifesto of “irregular” cultural freedom that instead the image of the last trials of the man Feltrinelli, up to his tragic death on a pylon, has decidedly, and unjustly, obscured.

This is how we challenge a “cultural hegemony”, other than Tolkien and fantasy literature.

More on these topics: