In Search of Lost Books Page 2

  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.

  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, t
he 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.

  There can hardly be any doubt that Moore was right to defend the work. Not least because it could be argued, with hindsight, that whilst some of his poetry has become difficult to appreciate (especially the longer poems, with the notable exception of Don Juan), his direct and spontaneous prose, graced by an extraordinary rhythm, can be readily enjoyed even by contemporary readers. And so to have saved the Memoirs (their original title) would have been to bequeath that considerable pleasure to future generations.

  But apart from poor Moore, sadly, everyone was in agreement that such scandalous and dangerous pages as these were should be made to vanish forever.

  I do not suppose that Byron needs much introduction as the personification of one type of Romantic figure: precocious, tenebrous (satirically represented by Thomas Love Peacock as ‘Mr Cypress’, after the tree most typical of cemeteries), bursting with talent and vital energy; recklessly profligate with himself and a great serial seducer; both sentimental and heroic; determined to leave his mark not just on literature but on the history of humanity itself. A man whose charm had for years proved irresistible – to both men and women alike – even if at the time of his death, at just thirty-six years old, he was overweight, almost completely bald and had bad teeth, with little remaining of the outstandingly handsome figure that has been handed down to us in the portraits.

  So what did these Memoirs contain, so very scandalous that it was not enough merely to conceal them, that made it necessary to destroy them altogether, erase them as if they had never been written?

  Perhaps it was an account of his short-lived and ill-fated marriage to Anne Isabella Milbanke, the marriage that had given him a daughter but which had foundered after only eleven months, ending in acrimony and recrimination. Perhaps it was his incestuous love for his half-sister Augusta, which according to the gossip that circulated in London (and was apparently stoked by Byron himself) had been the real reason for the failure of his marriage.

  Either subject would have sufficed, especially the first, since it is not difficult to imagine with what magisterial malice Byron might have depicted a wife who had been so little loved, and who since their separation had resorted to every means possible to take her revenge.

  Yet it seems that the real source of potential scandal lay elsewhere. And that the unpardonable shame that would have emerged from those pages, in a more or less explicit way, was that of Byron’s homosexuality: the monstrous vice, the crime that could not be confessed, however widely it was practised in England at the time. Despite the fact that homophobia continues to manifest itself in so many forms and contexts, it is difficult to conceive of the views that were held in nineteenth-century Britain regarding consensual sexual relations between two adults of the same gender. Those found guilty of committing such acts were liable to be pilloried, and subsequently hanged, though only if the first punishment – exposure in the stocks to ‘public opprobrium’, but also to any object which that public saw fit to fling in the face of the condemned – had not already had a conclusive effect. And although in 1861 it ceased to be a capital offence, it was still punished severely for many years to come, as notoriously demonstrated on the threshold of the twentieth century by the case of Oscar Wilde.

  The scandal caused by the exposure of homosexual relationships led to suicides, flights abroad, and cases which at best would culminate in complete and irrevocable ostracism from public life, and from all social relations, with the guilty exiled to the countryside to find consolation in some clandestine rural relationship. The more well-known the transgressor, the greater the scandal that was generated.

  Byron was at the time of his death one of the most famous, well-loved and most highly paid of English poets. Ever since the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, his literary and worldly success had been phenomenal. But in parallel to the growth of his fame as a poet, the rumours about his alleged homosexual relations had multiplied and grown louder. Precisely because of this, following advice from his half-sister Augusta, he had entered into a marriage of convenience: one which not only failed to silence the rumours but which, on account of if its brief nature, actually ended up fuelling them – thanks largely, it seems, to a neglected wife and a frustrated lover.

  And so Byron had eventually been obliged to resort to something very like a flight into exile: when he left England in 1816, he already knew that in all likelihood he would never return.

  After a long pilgrimage through continental Europe he stopped in Venice, where he found tolerance and openness – an atmosphere possible only where there was no substantial English community to contend with. (The presence of this community, by contrast, had curtailed his stays in Florence and in Rome.) In Venice he began a period of intense poetic productivity and started working on the Memoirs – they were for the most part written during this stay, between 1817 and 1818, and subsequently expanded between 1820 and 1821 – and all of this industry from a man with a renowned facility with the pen makes one suspect that, when completed, they must have amounted to a work of considerable substance and length.

  In all of Byron’s works it is possible to detect traces of his personal experience: journeys, thoughts, acquaintances and encounters – but with the Memoirs it was a case of putting his experience down more directly onto the page, of revealing himself as he had never done before. Because of the very nature of the form, he had probably ended up revealing his homosexuality.

  I say ‘probably’ because here, as in the rest of this book, I am referring to something that has disappeared. But the eyewitness accounts of it, however reticent, are nevertheless all in basic agreement on this point.

  So perhaps we should be asking instead how Byron might have chosen to disclose this side of himself, and this aspect of his life. He was fully aware of the fact that it was difficult to broach the subject in a work intended for publication in England. He may have been thinking if not of a posthumous edition then of one intended for some indefinite future date. But he cannot have failed to consider the prospect of publication: why else would he have sent the Memoirs to his publisher, and have secured from him an advance of two thousand pounds?

  Because if it’s true that despite earning vast sums Byron was constantly in need of money and therefore willing to hand over any of his writings in exchange for a fee, I doubt whether John Murray, who I do not take for any kind of philanthropist, would have been willing to countenance such a large advance for a work that was not deemed publishable even by its author.

  How can we reconcile the idea of a homosexual Byron with the image that we have inherited of him as a kind of irresistible homme fatale, an irrepressible serial seducer of women?

  There’s no doubt that he was a relentless seducer – of women, with whom he had innumerable affairs – but also of men, especially very young men, as had been the case amongst his Cambridge companions of old. From the days of his studies and travels abroad, the first of these with Hobhouse, Byron’s relationship to sex was always characterized by excess and abundance. His true orientation, or most prevalent tastes, might therefore have been hidden amongst his kaleidoscopic adventur
es with the opposite sex.

  Hobhouse himself had been one of Byron’s lovers in his early youth, as had the Trinity chorister John Edleston. Despite the fact that Edleston died young, having met the poet only once after their time at Cambridge together, he would always remain Byron’s favourite

  So it is understandable that in mid May of 1824, when the news of Byron’s death reached London, Hobhouse was more than a little concerned about the Memoirs that were in the hands of his publisher. Concerned, that is, not just for his friend’s reputation but also about his own. Perhaps primarily about his own, since by now he had entered politics and become a Member of Parliament.

  After all, it had been Hobhouse who had convinced Byron, on returning from their first trip abroad, to destroy a diary in case someone might cast an eye over it at the English border. Precisely at that time in fact, John Edleston, one of those who figured prominently in Byron’s diary, was arrested during a police raid in Hyde Park. Yet Byron would later deeply regret his decision to destroy the diary – surely a factor in his choice of Moore rather than Hobhouse to deliver the Memoirs to Murray. Given such a precedent, he could hardly have relied on Hobhouse to do so.

  Aware of the sensitive material they contained, as he relates in his Detached Thoughts, the Memoirs had in any case already undergone a ‘cleansing’, so to speak, by Byron himself. But perhaps this authorial intervention did not go nearly far enough, and almost certainly would not have done from Hobhouse’s point of view.