Waiting tor Gadda
LASKY, MELVIN J.
LETTER FROM CORFU Waiting for Gadda By Melvin J. Lasky Corfu, Greece If men of letters could command at their writing tables a fraction of the drama, eloquence, intrigue and sheer high comic...
...But publishers' doubts gave way to political slogans...
...The Germans supported the Hungarian, Tibor Dery (only recently released from political imprisonment for his role in the Budapest revolt of 1956...
...A happy second thought brought the Formentor jury into magnificent exile here in the Adriatic, where the shipwrecked Ulysses was once washed ashore (and found the Princess Nausicaä) and indeed where the last German Kaiser had a splendid summer palace (and Berlin ditties are still sung by the local boys and girls as if they were Homeric folklore...
...the dancing and gambling in the Kaiser's romantic rococo palace...
...This year's host, Rowohlt of Hamburg, almost headed the jury for the RAF-bombed wastelands in the North Sea...
...The Germans themselves broke the deadlock by voting, with their characteristic ambivalence, in favor of what they had at first found so objectionable...
...He had suffered through a week of "luxurious expensiveness" and could not help, good honest proletarian writer that he was, being "alienated...
...He was too clever, too playful, too elegant...
...Certainly this year's sessions for the two Formentor Prizes—offered by 13 European and American publishers, accompanied by 50 critics serving as jurymen—were as complicated as a book by Vladimir Nabokov, as mysterious as a page in untranslatble argot by Carlo Emilio Gadda, almost as sinister as a message from behind barbed wire by Alexander Solzhenitsyn...
...In a touching act of solidarity nobody decided to return to Cape Formentor...
...The election of this year's chairman hardly hastened the transition from politics to literature...
...Machiavellians, shrewd in strategy and tactics...
...The magniloquent campaign was led by Alberto Moravia who, as one reporter remarked, "strode like Al Capone among the shrinking delegates...
...combined forces on behalf of the polyglot Vladimir Nabokov, the comet of Pale Fire, the displaced person of world letters...
...LETTER FROM CORFU Waiting for Gadda By Melvin J. Lasky Corfu, Greece If men of letters could command at their writing tables a fraction of the drama, eloquence, intrigue and sheer high comic spirits which mark their public performances at international literary conferences, the world would be richer by at least a thousand masterpieces...
...The Anglo-Americans, after effectively ignoring such foreign enthusiasm as there was for their own native sons (John Updike, Richard Hughes...
...The Scandinavian jurymen held the balance...
...The jury maneuvered as a man—on behalf of Carlo Emilio Gadda, a 70year-old compatriot, whose works may indeed have "a universal profundity" but who had been previously pronounced to be an "untranslatable genius...
...Would the uprooted of the world unite...
...and by Italo Calvino, youthful and enthusiastic...
...As in his prize-crowned novel, Speculations about Jakob, we can only . . . speculate...
...Certain is only that he stalked off, broodingly unhappy, his elegant black-leather jacket flashing in the TV lights...
...This generous note of cosmopolitanism was infectious...
...It was seconded by Elio Vittorini, so Sicilian in his sincerity and persuasiveness...
...Johnson, last year's prizewinner, was sitting with the German jury and not very many words were wasted on his contemporaries (Peter Weiss, Guenther Grass, Helmut Heissenbiittel, Heinrich Boll...
...The Italians rose from their seats and cheered and shouted...
...Almost like an organized literary Mafia, they went to work on Nabokov...
...A Swede supported a Finn (Veijo Meri, apparently a most interesting and neglected young writer...
...followers of Dante, the incomparable poet of national pride...
...It was rather wonderful to behold: Even after the preliminaries were over (and it included an illuminating presentation of Indian vernacular literature by Arthur Lall, otherwise Geneva's disarmament chief), the enlightened tone so far beyond any narrow literary nationalism or cultural chauvinism continued to obtain...
...It was all marvellously international and open-minded...
...The island of Mallorca would be welcome for everybody—except the Italians...
...Corsica...
...They were faced with the adamance of the French and the Anglo-Americans, none of whom had read very much, if anything, of Gadda (certainly not in the original Italian which was full of a rich and devious colloquial prose quite beyond the grasp even of experts...
...Rhodes...
...Some of the Germans appeared to be frightened of yet another book about Nazi concentration camps...
...Nabokov, born in Russia, who wrote his first novels in Berlin, his poetry in Paris, his Lolita in America, and now chases butterflies in the Swiss Alps, was clearly a favorite...
...For the grand prize, previously given to Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges and Uwe Johnson, there was a fine day-and-night scramble marked by bursts of German modesty, French rhetoric and English diffidence...
...J. D. Salinger, William Goldingl...
...whereupon the vote promptly went to the British candidate...
...But who sent the telegram...
...Then, when a mysterious telegram arrived from Paris, allegedly from Don Salvador de Madariaga, warning against the author as a "Stalinist pawn," the ranks were closed in a passionate outburst against "outside political interference...
...Everybody else silently, embarrassedly, promised themselves to look into these inscrutable masterpieces, The Awful Events in the Via Merulano and The Knowledge of Sadness...
...and she was rewarded each day by ringingly demonstrative cheers even when she vainly tried waterskiing off the beach or twisting on the dance floor...
...But the whole week had been teetering on the edge of scandal and absurdity, and how like a meeting of men of letters to save the dénouement for the climactic last evening...
...Not a breath was wasted on foreign talents, nor even (as last year) on most of their own (Giorgio Bassani et al...
...Heligoland...
...If it was (as the London Daily Telegraph said in its apology to Don Salvador) "some mischiefmaker misusing Professor Madariaga's name," there was perhaps method in the mischief...
...He was a decadent, a juggler, a comedian...
...It was almost all over when Uwe Johnson rose to accept his handsome check for last year's prize...
...the drink...
...Was it a hoax from the Fascist Right, in a blundering attempt to discredit Semprun, or was it a ruse from the Communist Left, in a clever trick to discredit Spain's leading democratin-exile...
...Not Murdoch but only Maigret could help...
...What exactly was it that he couldn't stand—the food...
...but could one really discuss literature for an entire week so far from the sundrenched beaches of the Mediterranean...
...It was a famous victory, all very honorable, very dramatic, and a little grotesque...
...When the indignation had subsided (and the prize already had been awarded), it was learned that Don Salvador had not been in Paris, had never heard of Semprun, and had never dispatched any kind of telegram...
...Nobody knew, but for a moment the so-called literary life took on the classic form of a detective novel...
...And for a whole week Iris Murdoch triumphantly demonstrated the European importance of the virtues of an Oxford don and very English headmistress...
...Gadda, a modest and retiring man who had said, "If I win the prize, I am ruined," had become overnight a national hero and the talk of the international literary world...
...and on the fifth ballot, in an atmosphere which had the tension of a Sunday afternoon bullfight, they shifted their vote, for reasons as obscure as they were decisive, to Gadda...
...An American supported a Greek novelist (Prevakalis...
...cosmopolitan...
...General Franco rendered the Prizes homeless this year by taking official offense at a book of Spanish resistance songs published by Einaudi in Milan...
...True, he was rich and famous, but almost all of his works (except for one brilliantly naughty book) were neglected, and who among contemporaries could match him for style, ideas and experimental ingenuity...
...Few of the publishers would defend the Einaudi edition (the songs were less significant than salacious), but all of them joined the collective search for another more congenial island...
...And the Spaniards —would they be able to get away with the unorthodox ideology of this book any more easily than with the heterodox morality of last year's prize-winner (which they were able to publish only in a small "export" edition...
...The French proposed, with a touch of Gaullist self-confidence, their "grand old man," Jean Paulhan...
...Nor was the award to the SpanishFrench writer, Jorge Semprun, for a first novel called Le Grand Voyage without its oddities and melodramatic complications...
...Melvin J. Lasky, co-editor of Encounter, was a British juryman at the Formentor Prize Conference...
...It was, for a morning, the Spanish Civil War and the crusade against Hitler all over again...
...Michel Butor confessed in rolling sentences that the French literary scene was "so rich" in remarkable literary talent (Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Alan Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget) that this year the otherwise oh-so-ethnocentric French would actually support a foreign candidate...
...He was not "international" (like Gadda) but (oh horror...
...He was thankful, of course, but it was just a bit too much for him and he brusquely declined to go on as a juryman...
...Alas, we were reckoning without our Italian colleagues...
...Even I, quite unwittingly, introduced an ideologically piquant element in the competition by arguing for Solzhenitsyn and his extraordinary account of Russian prison life in One Day in the Life of Ivan Deniscvich which (as I had not realized) had first been supported by the East German Professor, Hans Meyer (who could not attend for he was currently under attack for "revisionism" in Ulbrichts Leipzig...
...And so they rallied to their cause the Spaniards and the Germans, none of whom had read very much, if anything, of Nabokov...
...As strangely handsome as her novels, as pointedly clever as her philosophical essays, Miss Murdoch took charge and proved herself to be modest, firm, very empirical, very fair...
...the cool shade of the olive trees and the brilliant sun on the pebbled beach...
...After a week of wining and dining, he made a bitter final speech and wept a tear in the authentic interests of "contemporary literature...
...Here were Romans, still dreaming of empires to conquer...
...A British critic spoke on behalf of the Japanese novelists, Mishima and Tanizaki...
...A Spaniard came out strongly in favor of the British writer, Richard Hughes...
Vol. 46 • June 1963 • No. 12
