Eco. Make Your Own Movie. Translator, WilliamWeaver.

  In 1993, with the final, complete adoption of video cameras even in the offices of the national registry, cinema both commercial and underground was in real trouble. The prise de la parole had by now transformed moviemaking into a technique within everyone’s reach, and everyone was watching his or her own film, deserting the movie theaters. New methods of reproduction and projection in cassettes insertable into the dashboard of the family car had made obsolete the primitive equipment of the avant-garde cinema. Numerous handbooks were published on the order of Be Your Own Antonioni. The buyer bought a “plot pattern,” the skeleton of a story which he could then fill in from a wide selection of variants. With a single pattern and an accompanying package of variants an individual could make, for example, 15,741 Antonioni movies. Below we reprint the instructions that came with some of these cassettes. The letters refer to the interchangeable elements. For example, the basic Antonioni pattern (“An empty lot. She walks away”) can generate “A maze of McDonald’s with visibility limited due to the sun’s glare. He toys for a long time with an object.” Etc.

  Antonioni Scenario

  An (x) empty (y) lot. (z) She (k) walks away. (n)

  Variants Key

  (x). Two, three, an infinity of. An enclosure of. A maze of.

  (y). Empty. As far as the eye can see. With visibility limited due to the sun’s glare. Foggy. Blocked by wire-mesh fence. Radioactive. Distorted by wide-angle lens.

  (z). An island. City. Superhighway cloverleaf. McDonald’s. Subway station. Oil field. Levittown. World Trade Center. Stockpile of pipes. Scaffolding. Car cemetery. Factory area on Sunday. Expo after closing. Space center on Labor Day. UCLA campus during student protest in Washington. JFK airport.

  (k). He. Both he and she.

  (n). Remains there. Toys for a long time with an object. Starts to leave, then stops, puzzled, comes back a couple of paces, then goes off again. Doesn’t go away, but the camera dollies back. Look at the camera without any expression as he touches her scarf.

  Jean-Luc Godard Scenario

  He arrives (a) and then bang (b) a refinery (c) explodes. The Americans (d) make love. (e) Cannibals (f) armed with bazookas (g) fire (h) on the railroad. (i) She falls (l) riddled with bullets (m) from a rifle. (n) At mad speed (o) to Vincennes (p) Cohn-Bendit (q) catches the train (r) and speaks. (s) Two men (t) kill her. (u) He reads sayings of Mao. (v) Montesquieu (z) throws a bomb (w) at Diderot. (x) He kills himself. (k) He peddles Le Figaro. (j) The red skins arrive. (y)

  Variants Key

  (a). Is already there reading the sayings of Mao. Lies dead on the superhighway with brains spattered. Is killing himself. Harangues a crowd. Runs along the street. Jumps out of a window.

  (b). Splash. Splat. Wham. Rat-tat-tat. Mumble mumble.

  (c). A kindergarten. Notre Dame. Communist Party headquarters. Houses of Parliament. The Parthenon. The offices of Le Figaro. The Elysée. Paris.

  (d). The Germans. French paratroopers. Vietnamese. Arabs. Israelis. Police.

  (e). Do not make love.

  (f). Indians. Hordes of accountants. Dissident Communists. Crazed truck drivers.

  (g). Yagatan. Copies of Le Figaro. Pirate’s sabers. Submachine guns. Cans of red paint. Cans of blue paint. Cans of yellow paint. Cans of orange paint. Cans of black paint. Picasso paintings. Little red books. Picture postcards.

  (h). Throw rocks. Bombs. Empty cans of red paint, green paint, blue paint, yellow paint, black paint. Pour some slippery stuff.

  (i). On the Elysée. On the University of Nanterre. In Piazza Navona. All over the road.

  (l). Is thrown out of the window by CIA agents. Is raped by paratroopers. Is killed by Australian aborigines.

  (m). With a gaping wound in the belly. Spewing forth streams of yellow (red, blue, black) paint. Making love with Voltaire.

  (n). Loquat.

  (o). Unsteadily. Very, very slowly. Remaining still while the background (process shot) moves.

  (p). Nanterre. Flins. Place de la Bastille. Clignancourt. Venice.

  (q). Jacques Servan-Schreiber. Jean-Paul Sartre. Pier Paolo Pasolini. D’Alembert.

  (r). Misses the train. Goes on a bicycle. On roller skates.

  (s). Bursts into tears. Shouts Viva Guevara.

  (t). A band of Indians.

  (u). Kill everybody. Kill nobody.

  (v). Quotations from Brecht. The Declaration of the Rights of Man. Saint-John Perse. Prince Korzybski. Eluard. Lo Sun. Charles Péguy. Rosa Luxembourg.

  (z). Diderot. Sade. Restif de la Bretonne. Pompidou.

  (w). A tomato. Red paint (blue, yellow, black).

  (x). Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Nixon. Madame de Sevigné. Voiture. Van Vogt. Einstein.

  (k). Goes away. Kills all the others. Throws a bomb at the Arc de Triomphe. Blows up an electronic brain. Empties onto the ground various cans of yellow (green, blue, red, black) paint.

  (j). The sayings of Mao. Writes a ta-tze-bao. Reads verses of Pierre Emmanuel. Watches a Chaplin movie.

  (y). The paratroopers. The Germans. Hordes of starving accountants brandishing sabers. Armored cars. Pier Paolo Pasolini with Pompidou. The Bank Holiday traffic. Diderot selling the Encyclopédie door to door. The Marxist-Leninist Union on skateboards.

  Ermanno Olmi Scenario

  A forester (a) out of work (b) roams at length (c) then comes back to his native village (d) and finds his mother (e) is dead. (f) He walks in the woods, (g) talks with a tramp (h) who understands (i) the beauty of the trees (l) and he remains there, (m) thinking. (n)

  Variants Key

  (a). A young man who has just arrived in the city. A former partisan. A jaded executive. An Alpine soldier. A miner. A ski instructor.

  (b). Overworked. Sad. Without any purpose in life. Sick. Just fired. Overwhelmed by a feeling of emptiness. Who has lost his faith. Who has returned to the faith. After a vision of Pope John XXIII.

  (c). Briefly. Drive a mini Cooper along the superhighway. Is driving a truck from Bergamo to Brindisi.

  (d). To his brother’s sawmill. To the mountain hut. To Pizzo Gloria. To Chamonix. To Lago di Carezza. To Piazzale Corvetto and his cousin’s tobacco shop.

  (e). Another close relative. Fiancée. Male friend. Parish priest.

  (f). Sick. Has become a prostitute. Has lost her faith. Has returned to the faith. Has had a vision of Pope John XXIII. Has left for France. Is lost in an avalanche. Is still performing the humble little daily tasks as always.

  (g). On the superhighway. Near the Idroscalo. At Rogoredo. Through immaculate snow. At San Giovanni sotto il Monte, Pope John XXIII’s birthplace. In the halls of a totally alienated advertising agency.

  (h). With a former Alpine soldier. With the parish priest. With Monsignor Loris Capovilla. With a former partisan. With a mountain guide. With a ski instructor. With the head forester. With the executive of an industrial design studio. With a worker. With an unemployed southerner.

  (i). Doesn’t understand. Remembers. Rediscovers. Learns thanks to a vision of Pope John XXIII.

  (l). Of the snow. Of the work site. Of solitude. Of friendship. Of silence.

  (m). Goes away forever.

  (n). Thinking of nothing. With no purpose in life now. With a new purpose in life. Making a novena to Pope John XXIII. Becoming a forester (mountain guide, tramp, miner, water bearer).

  Angry Young Directors’s Scenario

  A young polio victim (x) of very rich (y) parents sits in a wheelchair (z) in a villa (n) with a park full of gravel. (k) He hates his cousin, (s) an architect (w) and a radical, (q) and has sexual congress (e) with his own mother (b) in the missionary position, (v) then kills himself (f) after first playing chess (a) with the farm manager. (j)

  Variants Key

  (x). Paraplegic. Compulsive hysteric. Simple neurotic. Revolted by the neocapitalistic society. Unable to forget an act of sexual abuse at the age of three by his grandfather. With a facial tic. Handsome but impotent. Blond and lame (and unhappy about it). Pretending to be crazy. Pretending to be sane. With a religious mania. Enrolled in the Marxist-Leninist Union but for neurotic reasons.

  (y). Fairly well off. In decline. Diseased. Destroyed. Separated.

  (z). On cul-de-jatte. On crutches. With a wooden leg. With false teeth. With long fangs on which he leans. Supports himself by leaning against trees.

  (n). Yacht. Garden city. Sanatorium. Father’s private clinic.

  (k). Another kind of paving, provided it makes a constant sound when a heavy vehicle arrives.

  (s). Other close relation, as desired, half brothers and in-laws admissible. Mother’s lover (or father’s, aunt’s, grandmother’s, farmer’s, fiancée’s).

  (w). City planner. Writer. President of Save Venice. Stockbrocker (successful). Left-wing political writer.

  (q). Subscriber to the New York Review. Moderate Communist. Liberal professor. Former partisan leader. Member of WWF board. Friend of Theodorakis, Gary Wills, Jessica Mitford. Cousin of Berlinguer. Former leader of Student Movement.

  (e). Tries to have sexual congress. Reveals impotence. Thinks of having sexual congress (dream sequence). Deflowers with bicycle pump.

  (b). Grandmother, aunt, father, sister, female second cousin, female first cousin, sister-in-law, brother.

  (v). From behind. Inserting a stick of dynamite into the vagina. With an ear of corn (must be preceded by casual Faulkner quotation from radical architect, see s-w). Cunnilingus. Beating her savagely. Wearing female dress. Dressing up to look like father (grandmother, aunt, mother, brother, cousin). Dressed as Fascist official. In U.S. Marine uniform. With plastic mask of Dracula. In SS uniform. In radical dress. In Scorpio Rising costume. In a Paco Rabanne tailleur. In prelate’s robes.

  (f). Sprinkles himself with gasoline. Swallows sleeping pills. Doesn’t kill himself but thinks of killing himself (dream sequence). Kills her (him). Masturbates while singing “Love divine, all loves excelling.” Calls the suicide hot line. Blows up the post office. Urinates on the family tomb. Sets fire to photo of himself as a baby, with savage laughter. Sings “Mira Norma.”

  (a). Chinese checkers. Toy soldiers. Hide-and-seek. Tag. Gin Rummy. Slapjack. Racing demons. Fantan. Snap. Spin the bottle.

  (j). His aunt. Grandmother. Innocent little sister. Himself in the mirror. Dead mother (dream sequence). The postman on his rounds. The old housekeeper. Carmen Moravia. A Bellocchio brother (according to preference).

  Luchino Visconti Scenario

  The Baroness, (a) a Hanseatic (b) lesbian, betrays her male lover, (c) a worker at Fiat, (d) reporting him (e) to the police. (f) He dies (g) and she repents (h) and gives a big party, (i) orgiastic, (l) in the cellars of La Scala (m) with transvestites, (n) and there poisons himself. (o)

  Variants Key

  (a). Duchess. Daughter of the Pharaoh. Marquise. Dupont stockholder. Middle European (male) composer.

  (b). From Munich. Sicilian. Papal aristocracy. From Pittsburgh.

  (c). Her female lover. Husband. Son with whom she has an incestuous relationship. Sister with whom she has an incestuous relationship. Lover of her daughter with whom she has an incestuous relationship, though she betrays her daughter with her daughter’s male lover. The Oberkommandanturweltanschaunggotterdammerungführer of the SA of Upper Silesia. The catamite of her impotent and racist husband.

  (d). A fisherman from the Tremiti Islands. Steelworker. Riverboat gambler. Mad doctor in a Nazi concentration camp. Commander of the Pharaoh’s light cavalry. Aide-de-camp of Marshal Radetzsky. Garibaldi’s lieutenant. Gondolier.

  (e). Giving him wrong directions about the route. Entrusting him a bogus secret message. Summoning him to a cemetery on the night of Good Friday. Disguising him as Rigoletto’s daughter and putting him in a sack. Opening a trapdoor in the great hall of the ancestral castle while he is singing Manon dressed up as Marlene Dietrich.

  (f). To Marshal Radetzsky. To the Pharaoh. To Tigellinus. To the Duke of Parma. To the Prince of Salina. To the Oberdeutscheskriminalinterpolphallusführer of the SS of Pomerania.

  (g). Sings an aria from Aida. Sets off in a fishing smack to reach Malta and is never heard from again. Is beaten with iron bars during a wildcat strike. Is sodomized by a squadron of uhlans under the command of the Prince of Homburg. Becomes infected during sexual contact with Vanina Vanini. Is sold as a slave to the Sultan and found again by the Borgia at the flea market of Portobello Road. Is used as a throw rug by the Pharaoh’s daughter.

  (h). Is not the least repentant. Is wild with joy. Gone mad. Bathing at the Lido to the sound of balalaikas.

  (i). A big funeral. A satanic rite. A Te Deum of thanksgiving.

  (l). Mystical. Dramatic. Baroque. Algolagnical. Scatological. Sadomasochistic.

  (m). Père-Lachaise. Hitler’s Bunker. In a castle in the Black Forest. In section 215 of the Fiat Mirafiori factory. At the Hôtel des Bains on the Lido at Venice.

  (n). With corrupt little boys. With German homosexuals. With the Trovatore chorus. With lesbians dressed as Napoleonic soldiers. With Cardinal Tisserant and Garibaldi. With Claudio Abbado. With Gustav Mahler.

  (o). Attends the entire Ring cycle. Plays ancient songs of Burgundy on a Jew’s harp. Undresses at the climax of the party, revealing that she is really a man, then castrates herself. Dies of consumption, wrapped in Gobelin tapestries. Swallows liquid wax and is buried in the Musée Grévin. Has her throat cut by a lathe operator as she utters obscure prophecies. Waits for the acqua alta in St. Mark’s square and drowns herself.

  1972

Eco. Regretfully, we are returning your. Readers’ reports. Translator, WilliamWeaver.

  Anonymous, The Bible

  I must say that the first few hundred pages of this manuscript really hooked me. Action-packed, they have everything today’s reader wants in a good story. Sex (lots of it, including adultery, sodomy, incest), also murder, war, massacres, and so on.

  The Sodom and Gomorrah chapter, with the transvestites putting the make on the angels, is worthy of Rabelais; the Noah stories are pure Jules Verne; the escape from Egypt cries out to be turned into a major motion picture … In other words, a real blockbuster, very well structured, with plenty of twists, full of invention, with just the right amount of piety, and never lapsing into tragedy.

  But as I kept on reading, I realized that this is actually an anthology, involving several writers, with many, too many, stretches of poetry, and passages that are downright mawkish and boring, and jeremiads that make no sense.

  The end result is a monster omnibus. It seems to have something for everybody, but ends up appealing to nobody. And acquiring the rights from all these different authors will mean big headaches, unless the editor takes care of that himself. The editor’s name, by the way, doesn’t appear anywhere on the manuscript, not even in the table of contents. Is there some reason for keeping his identity a secret?

  I’d suggest trying to get the rights only to the first five chapters. We’re on sure ground there. Also come up with a better title. How about The Rea Sea Desperadoes?

  Homer, The Odyssey

  Personally, I like this book. A good yarn, exciting, packed with adventure. Sufficient love interest, both marital fidelity and adulterous flings (Calypso is a great character, a real man-eater); there’s even a Lolita aspect, with the teenager Nausicaa, where the author doesn’t spell things out, but it’s a turn-on anyway. Great dramatic moments, a one-eyed giant, cannibals, even some drugs, but nothing illegal, because as far as I know the lotus isn’t on the Narcotic Bureau’s list. The final scene is in the best tradition of the Western: some heavy fist-swinging, and the business with the bow is a masterstroke of suspense.

  What can I say? It’s a page turner, all right, not like the author’s first book, which was too static, all concerned with unity of place and tediously overplotted. By the time the reader reached the third battle and the tenth duel, he already got the idea. Remember how the Achilles-Patroclus story, with that vein of not-so-latent homosexuality, got us into trouble with the Boston authorities? But this second book is a totally different thing: it reads as smooth as silk. The tone is calmer, pondered but not ponderous. And then the montage, the use of flashbacks, the stories within stories … In a word, this Homer is the right stuff. He’s smart.

  Too smart, maybe … I wonder if it’s really his own work. I know, of course, a writer can improve with experience (his third book will probably be a sensation), but what makes me uncomfortable – and, finally, leads me to cast a negative vote – is the mess the question of rights will cause. I broached the subject with a friend at William Morris, and I get bad vibes.

  In the first place, the author’s nowhere to be found. People who knew him say it was always hard to discuss any change to be made in the text, because he was blind as a bat, couldn’t follow the manuscript, and even gave the impression he wasn’t completely familiar with it. He quoted from memory, was never sure exactly what he had written, and said the typist added things. Did he really write the book or did he just sign it?

  No big deal, of course. Editing has become an art, and many books are patched together in the editor’s office or written by several hands (like Mommy Dearest) and still turn out to be bestsellers. But this second book, there is much too unclear about it. Michael says the rights don’t belong to Homer, and certain aelian bards will have to be paid off, since they are due royalties on some parts.

  A literary agent who works out of Chios says the rights belong to the local rhapsodists, who virtually ghosted the book; but it’s not clear whether they are active members of that island’s Writers’ Guild. A PR in Smyrna, on the other hand, says the rights belong exclusively to Homer, only he’s dead, and therefore the city is entitled to all royalties. But Smyrna isn’t the only city that makes such a claim. The impossibility of establishing if and when Homer died means we can’t invoke the ’43 law regarding works published fifty years after the author’s death. At this point a character by the name of Callinus pops up, insisting not only that he holds all rights but that, along with The Odyssey, we must buy a package including Thebais, Epigoni, and The Cyprian Lays. Apart from the fact that these aren’t worth a dime, a number of experts think they’re not even by Homer. And how do we market them? These people are talking big bucks now, and they’re seeing how far they can push us. I tried asking Aristarchus of Samothrace for a preface; he has clout, and he’s a good writer, too, and I thought maybe he could tidy the work up. But he wants to indicate, in the body of the book, what’s authentic and what isn’t; we end up with a critical edition and zilch sales. Better leave the whole thing to some university press that will take twenty years to produce the book, which they’ll price at a couple hundred dollars a copy, and maybe a few libraries will actually buy it. Bottom line: If we take the plunge, we’re getting ourselves into an endless legal hassle, the book will be impounded, but not like the one of those sex books, which they then sell under the counter. This one will just be seized and forgotten. Maybe ten years from now Oxford will buy it for The World’s Classics, but in the meantime you’ll have spent your money, and it’ll be a long wait before you see any of it again.

  I’m really sorry, because the book’s not bad. But we’re publishers, not detectives. So I’d say pass.

  Alighieri, Dante, The Divine Comedy

  Alighieri is your typical Sunday writer. (In everyday life he’s an active member of the pharmacists’ guild.) Still, his work shows an undeniable grasp of technique and considerable narrative flair. The book, in the Florentine dialect, consists of about a hundred rhymed chapters, and much of it is interesting and readable. I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of astronomy and certain concise, provocative theological notions. The third part of the book is the best and will have the widest appeal; it involves subjects of general interest, concerns of the common reader – Salvation, The Beatific Vision, prayers to the Virgin. But the first part is obscure and self-indulgent, with passages of cheap eroticism, violence, and downright crudity. This is a big problem: I don’t see how the reader will get past this first “canticle,” which doesn’t really add much to what has already been written about the next world in any number of moral tracts and treatises, not to mention the Golden Legend of Jacopo da Varagine.

  But the greatest drawback is the author’s choice of his local dialect (inspired no doubt by some crackpot avant-garde idea). We all know that today’s Latin needs a shot in the arm – it isn’t just the little literary cliques that insist on this. But there’s a limit, after all, if not in the rules of language then at least to the public’s ability to understand. We have seen what happened with the so-called Sicilian poets: their publisher went around on bicycles distributing the books among the various outlets, but the works ended up on the remainders counter anyway.

  Further, if we publish a long poem in Florentine, we’ll have to publish another in Milanese and another in Paduan: otherwise we lose our grip on the market. This is a job for small presses, chapbooks, etc. Personally I have nothing against rhyme, but quantitative metrics are still the most popular form with poetry readers, and I doubt that a normal reader could stomach his endless sequence of tercets, especially if he comes from Bologna, say, or Venice. So I think we’d do better to launch a series of really popular titles at reasonable prices: the works of Gildas or Anselm of Aosta, for example. And leave to the little avant-garde magazines the numbered editions on handmade paper. “For there neid fære, næning uuirthit …” The linguistic hash of the postmoderns.

  Tosso, Torquato, Jerusalem Liberated

  As a “modern” epic of chivalry, this isn’t bad. It’s written gracefully, and the situations are fairly fresh: high time poets stopped imitating the Breton or Carolingian cycles. But let’s face it, the story is about the Crusaders and the taking of Jerusalem, a religious subject. We can’t expect to sell such a book to the younger generation of “angries.” At best we’ll get good reviews in Our Sunday Visitor or maybe The Tablet. Even there, I have doubts about the reception of certain erotic scenes that are a bit too lewd. So my vote would be “yes,” provided the author revises the work, turning it into something even nuns could read. I’ve already mentioned this to him, and he didn’t balk at the idea of such a rewrite.

  Diderot, Denis, Les bijoux indiscrets and La Moine

  I confess I haven’t unwrapped these two manuscripts, but I believe a reader should sense immediately what’s worth devoting time to and what isn’t. I know this Diderot; he makes encyclopedias (he once did some proofreading for us), and he’s involved in some dreary enterprise in God knows how many volumes which will probably never see the light of day. He goes around looking for draftsmen to draw the works of a clock for him or the threads of a Gobelin tapestry, and he’ll surely bankrupt his publisher. The man’s a snail, and I don’t really think he’s capable of writing anything amusing in the fiction field, especially for a series like ours, which has some juicy, spicy little things like Restif de la Bretonne. As the old saying goes, he should stick to his last.

  Sade, D. A. François, Justine

  The manuscript was in a whole pile of things I had to look at this week and, to be honest, I haven’t read it through. I opened it at random three times, in three different plays, which, as you know, is enough for a trained eye.

  Well, the first time I found an avalanche of words, page after page, about the philosophy of nature, with digressions on the cruelty of the struggle for survival, the reproduction of plants, and the cycles of animal species. The second time: at least fifteen pages on the concept of pleasure, the senses and the imagination, and so on. The third time: twenty pages on the question of submission between men and women in various countries of the world … I think that’s enough. We’re not looking for a work of philosophy. Today’s audience wants sex, sex, and more sex. In every shape and form. The line we should follow is Les Amours du Chevalier de Faublas. Let’s leave the highbrow stuff to Indiana.

  Cervantes, Miguel, Don Quixote

  The book, the readable parts of it, anyway, tells the story of a Spanish gentleman and his man-servant who roam the world pursuing chivalrous dreams. This Don Quixote is half crazy (the character is fully developed, and Cervantes knows how to spin a tale). The servant is a simpleton endowed with some rough common sense, and the reader identifies with him as he tries to deflate his master’s fantasies. So much for the story, which has some good dramatic twists and a number of amusing and meaty scenes. My objection is not based on my personal response to the book.

  In our successful low-price series, “The Facts of Life,” we have published, with admirable results, Amadis of Gaul, The Legend of the Graal, The Romance of Tristan, The Lay of the Little Bird, The Tale of Troy, and Erec and Enid. Now we also have an option on The Kings of France by that promising young Barberino, and if you ask me, it’ll be the book of the year and maybe even a book of the month, because it has real grass-roots appeal. Now, if we do this Cervantes, we’ll be bringing out a book that, for all its intrinsic value, will mess up our whole list, because it suggests those novels are lunatic ravings. Yes, I know all about freedom of expression, political correctness, and what have you, but we can’t very well bite the hand that feeds us. Besides, this book seems a one-shot deal. The writer has just got out of jail, he’s in bad shape, I can’t remember whether it was his arm or his leg they cut off, but he certainly isn’t raring to write something else. I’m afraid that in rushing to produce something new at all costs we might jeopardize a publishing program that has so far proved popular, moral, and (let’s be frank) profitable. I say no.

  Manzoni, Alessandro, I Promessi sposi

  These days the blockbuster novel is apparently the rage, if you have any faith in print-run figures. But there are novels and there are novels. If we had bought Doyle’s The White Company or Henty’s By Pike and Dyke, at this point we’d know what to put in our paperback line. These are books people read and will be reading two hundred years from now, because they tug at the heart, are written in simple and appealing language, don’t try to hide their regional origin, and they deal with contemporary themes like feudal unrest and the freedom of the Low Countries. Manzoni, on the contrary, sets his novel in the seventeenth century, a period that is a notorious turn-off. Moreover, he engages in a very dubious linguistic experiment, inventing a kind of Milanese-Florentine language that is neither fish nor fowl. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it as a model for young creative-writing students. But that’s not the worst. The fact is that our author sets up a lowbrow story, the tale of a poor engaged couple whose marriage is prevented by the conniving of some local overlord. In the end they do get married and everybody’s happy. A bit thin, considering that the reader has to digest six hundred pages. Further, while ostensibly delivering an unctuous sermon on Providence, Manzoni actually unloads whole bundles of pessimism on us (he’s a Jansenist, to call him by his right name). He addresses the most melancholy reflections on human weakness and national failings to today’s public, who want something quite different, more heroic yarns, not a narrative constantly interrupted to allow the author to spout cheap philosophy or, worse, to paste together a linguistic collage, setting two seventeenth-century edicts between a dialogue half in Latin and adding pseudo-folk talk that is hardly proper for the positive heroes the public is eager for. Having just finished that fluent and flavorsome little book, Hewlett’s The Forest Lovers, I read this Promessi sposi with considerable effort. You only have to turn to page one to see how long it takes the author to get to the point. He starts with a landscape description whose syntax is so dense and labyrinthine that you can’t figure out what he’s saying, when it would have been so much easier to write, “One morning, in the Lecco area…” Well, so it goes: not everybody has the narrative gift, and even fewer have the ability to write in good Italian.

  Still, the book is not totally without merit. But I warn you: it would take forever to sell out a first printing.

  Proust, Marcel, A la recherche du temps perdu

  This is undoubtedly a serious work, perhaps too long, but as a paperback series it could sell.

  But it won’t do as is. It needs serious editing. For example, the punctuation has to be redone. The sentences are too labored; some take up a whole page. With plenty of good in-house work, reducing each sentence to a maximum of two or three lines, breaking up paragraphs, indenting more often, the book would be enormously improved.

  If the author doesn’t agree, then forget it. As it stands, the book is too – what’s the word? – asthmatic.

  Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason

  I asked Susan to take a look at this, and she tells me that after Barthes there’s no point translating this Kant. In any case, I glanced at it myself. A reasonably short book on morality could fit nicely into our philosophy series, and might even be adopted by some universities. But the German publisher says that if we take this one, we have to commit ourselves not only to the author’s previous book, which is an immense thing in at least two volumes, but also to the one he is working on now, about art or about judgment, I’m not sure which. All three books have more or less the same title, so they would have to be sold boxed (and at a price no reader could afford); otherwise bookshop browsers would mistake one for the other and think, “I’ve already read this.” Remember the Summa of that Dominican? We began to translate it, and then we had to pass the rights on to Sheed and Ward because it ran way over budget.

  There’s another problem. The German agent tells me that we would also have to publish the minor works of this Kant, a whole pile of stuff including something about astronomy. Day before yesterday I tried to phone him directly in Köenisberg, to see if we could do just one book, but the cleaning woman said the master was out and I should never call between five and six because that’s when he takes his walk, or between three and four because that’s nap time, and so on. I would advise against getting involved with a man like this: we’ll end up with a mountain of his books in the warehouse.

  Kafka, Franz, The Trial

  Nice little book. A thriller with some Hitchcock touches. The final murder, for example. It could have an audience.

  But apparently the author wrote under a regime with heavy censorship. Otherwise, why all these vague references, this trick of not giving names to people or places? And why is the protagonist being put on trial? If we clarify these points and make the setting more concrete (facts are needed: facts, facts, facts), then the action will be easier to follow and suspense is assured.

  These young writers believe they can be “poetic” by saying “a man” instead of “Mr. So-and-so in such-and-such a city.” Genuine writing has to keep in mind the old newspaper man’s five questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? If we can have a free hand with editing, I’d say buy it. If not, not.

  Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake

  Please, tell the office manager to be more careful when he sends books out to be read. I’m the English-language reader, and you’ve sent me a book written in some other, godforsaken language. I’m returning it under separate cover.

  1972