Botteghe Oscure: an exception
The literary journal Botteghe Oscure was founded in Rome in 1948 by Marguerite Caetani, Princess of Bassiano, who had already been the leading figure of the journal Commerce in Paris during the interwar years (1924–1932).Footnote 1 In its 25 volumes, issued biannually and distributed internationally from 1948 to 1960, Botteghe Oscure published creative texts in Italian, French, English, German and Spanish,Footnote 2 without any form of criticism or translation to accompany them. Within the Italian context of those years, the Palazzo Caetani in via Botteghe Oscure stood out as the centre of an exceptional transnational network. The list of advisors responsible for each section accounts for the journal’s exceptionality: Elena Craveri Croce, Benedetto Croce’s daughter, was a close friend of Caetani and provided her with contacts with Italian writers, critics and publishers, for example, the Neapolitan Ricciardi; writer Giorgio Bassani became Caetani’s main advisor for the Italian section,Footnote 3 together with Guglielmo Petroni and Ignazio Silone. The German section relied on the young Pietro Citati who, before becoming one of the most prominent critics in Italy, had worked as a lecturer in Munich and succeeded in making contact with Paul Celan, who in turn introduced the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, who lived in Rome from 1953 to her death in 1973. As to the English language section, Caetani’s main and long-term advisor was American writer Eugene Walter.Footnote 4 Relationships with foreign publishers in charge of the journal’s distribution were equally remarkable, ranging from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the United States, to Faber & Faber and Hamish Hamilton in the United Kingdom, to name but a few.
Paradoxically enough, however, while Botteghe Oscure represents an invaluable case study through which to investigate the role of journals within wider processes of international literary transfer in the post-war period, its foreign sections are still comparatively under-researched.Footnote 5 The only thorough study available (Risset, Santone and Tamassia Reference Risset, Santone and Tamassia2007) concerns the correspondence with French authors, while the edition of the correspondence with American and GermanFootnote 6 authors is still in preparation.
In this article, I will focus on Botteghe Oscure’s British networkFootnote 7 to illuminate the journal’s exceptionality within the Italian context of those years. To this end, I will compare Botteghe Oscure with a number of Italian literary and cultural journals, featuring creative texts in English and/or critical essays on British literature in the period 1940–1960, as listed in fig. 1.
I will specifically consider four aspects of Botteghe Oscure’s ‘exceptionality’: (1) the journal’s life span, (2) the amount of texts published, (3) the formation of the journal’s pool of contributors and its composition, and (4) the location of the journal within the Italian literary system. To consider the first two aspects, I will use quantitative analysis to measure and visualise Botteghe Oscure’s impact on the Italian literary field, and to address issues related to the reception of British literature in Italy (and Italian literature in Britain). For aspects (3) and (4), my claims will be supported by archival evidence sourced at the Caetani Foundation in Rome, with particular attention to Caetani’s relationship to authors and publishers.
The four aspects that I have chosen to consider are relevant, especially in their mutual interaction, in addressing the journal’s role as an agent of literary transfer. As clearly emerges from Graph 1, the journal’s longevity is remarkable if compared to the majority of journals featuring contributions of or on foreign literatures. This first aspect, combined with the considerable amount of texts published,Footnote 8 makes Botteghe Oscure the largest long-lasting repository of foreign literature within the Italian post-war literary field. This also holds, of course, for British literature. From 1948 to 1960 Botteghe Oscure published 75 British and two Irish authors, most of them more than once, with British texts making up 17 per cent of the journal’s published output, the fourth most represented literature in the journal.Footnote 9 Thus quantitative analysis can profitably be employed to measure the impact of Botteghe Oscure on the reception of British literature in post-war Italy. The results of this analysis will be qualitatively assessed in order to compare Botteghe Oscure’s role with other journals in the Italian literary field.
The focus on quantity will allow me to illuminate the formation of the journal’s British network. My claim is that network is the feature that accounts for the journal’s uniqueness within the Italian context. Unlike the vast majority of literary journals, Botteghe Oscure was not the expression of a group with a clear and recognisable ideological direction (like, for example, Il Politecnico, Sud, Società and La cittadella) or explicitly promoting an aesthetical stance (i.e. Paragone, and il verri but, earlier on, one could also mention the Modernism-oriented Letteratura and Incontro), but rather a network whose structure emerged through the interaction between its several actors in a transnational environment. I refer here to emergence in its relevance for periodical studies as outlined by Murphy (2014) and Latham (2013). In this work he looks into the difference between groups and networks with special reference to the formation of literary movements (his focus is on Modernism) and their journals, pointing out that a network differs from a group in that its structure emerges Footnote 10 rather than being designed from the start (as in the case of a group or circle with a strong identity). Such a fact, I will argue, has important consequences in terms of Botteghe Oscure’s role for the reception of British literature in English, since the journal did not promote one single ‘critical narrative’ on British literature – for example the Auden generation’s political narrative, High Modernism or the New Apocalypse – but enabled the coexistence, within the Italian literary field, of different authors coming from different backgrounds and experiences.
Furthermore, I will address Botteghe Oscure’s location within the Italian literary system. Jacqueline Risset has stressed the fact that Botteghe Oscure, albeit published in Italy, was not an Italian journal, unlike Commerce which, conversely, was definitely located within the French literary system (2007, xviii). To gain a deeper insight into this question and into its implications for the journal’s transnational character, I will focus on the journal’s periodical codes, as outlined by Brooker and Thacker’s seminal 2009 contribution. Periodical codes describe a range of features including, among others, ‘price […], networks of distribution and sales, modes of financial support, editorial arrangements, type of material published’ (2009, 6). According to the two scholars (2009, 5) periodical studies have highly profited from the ‘materialist turn’ in modernist studies, advocating ‘the importance of “examining modernism in its original sites of production and the continually shifting physicality of its texts and transmissions’”. Anna Antonello (Reference Antonello2015, 139) has recently illuminated the fact that, unlike other journals (Il Politecnico and Officina for example) Botteghe Oscure – or rather, Caetani – decided to seek the collaboration of a publisher only for distribution and not for printing or editing matters: the first volume was published by the Neapolitan Riccardo Ricciardi, while subsequent issues were taken over by De Luca of Edizioni Istituto Grafico Tiberino. The key factor for the journal’s actual diffusion, however, was the choice of what Antonello defines as a ‘publisher-distributor’: after the Libreria Cremonese in Rome, the distribution of the journal passed from Einaudi (vols II-VI) through Mondadori (VII-X), De Luca (XI-XIV), Garzanti (XV-XIX) and finally to Feltrinelli (XX-XXV), which ensured considerable visibility and impact throughout the country. Taking a cue from Antonello’s work and analysing distributing and promotional policies in the United Kingdom, I will argue that the moment of the ‘mediation of publishing’ (Cadioli, Decleva and Spinazzola Reference Cadioli, Decleva and Spinazzola1999) emerges as the key to investigate the transnational character of the journal and its function as an agent of cultural transfer, and that the journal’s identity, its location within each single literary system, was strongly influenced by its publisher and the latter’s publishing agenda.
Botteghe Oscure’s British network
While emergence can be used as a relevant category for all periodicals, in Botteghe Oscure’s case it becomes the ruling structural principle: the journal’s pool of contributors took shape relying on different networks (publishers, emerging and established authors), each with its own operating principle. This finds further confirmation in the princess’s correspondence with her collaborators in the United Kingdom. In order to source copy for the British section, Caetani resorted to her personal acquaintance with established figures in the British literary field; at the same time, she was very keen on making contacts with important publishers. This clearly emerges from the princess’s correspondence with a figure who was both poet and publisher, and a prominent one at that: T. S. Eliot. On 13 May, 1948, upon Caetani’s request, Eliot sent his suggestions on possible contributors for the journal – including Edith Sitwell, W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Dylan Thomas, Cecil Day Lewis and Kathleen Raine – asking the princess whether she would consider established names or younger contributors.Footnote 11 Equally relevant is Eliot’s contribution in his capacity as editor-in-chief at Faber & Faber, an imprint almost synonymous with poetry. Caetani was more than willing to establish a connection with the firm: this would, on the one hand, guarantee the quality and the visibility of published texts and, on the other, place Botteghe Oscure within a safe distribution chain. The fact that the journal’s network was created both through personal contacts and by establishing connections with publishers is further confirmed in another letter from Eliot (1950), in which the names of the poets, both young and established, are divided according to their publisher: Norman Nicholson and Ann Ridler are referred to as ‘our Faber poets’, while Lawrence Durrell, John Heath-Stubbs and Alex Comfort are listed under Routledge.Footnote 12
Caetani, however, did not seek contacts only with established figures. She was very keen on exploiting her relational capital in order to promote young and relatively unknown authors. Among them we find Christopher Logue, a representative of the younger ‘contingent’ of the journal’s contributors and one of the most prolific, with five entries in the journal’s list. As emerges from his correspondence with Caetani, he was one of her most trusted talent-scouts.Footnote 13 For Logue the dialectic between established authors and new entrants was very clear, as confirmed in a letter that he wrote to Caetani when, in 1951, the American publisher Anchor Books offered to issue an anthology of works from the journal:
It is very clear to anybody who reads Botteghe Oscura [sic] that your intention has been to create a ‘free’ (i.e. without strict editorial policy) panorama of young writing in prose and verse. True, you have admitted many ‘established’ writers to the review. These have completed the picture of what was going on, and made the review easier to sell. But the body of the thing is Botteghe Oscura [sic] was your choice from totally unknown or little known writers. This has been your contribution; quite aside from the fact that amongst the many wealthy people of the West, you are the sole example of a persistent and concrete effort to do something.
The proposed anthology limits its choice to the ‘established’ writers. About one quarter of the Review pages. In [sic] can in no just sense be called representative, it is a lie.Footnote 14
On a first reading, Logue’s words seem to present Caetani’s role almost exclusively as the promoter of young writers. Still, Logue, who defined Eliot as ‘The Old Man’, on whom the princess should ‘work her evils’ in order to get the best deals for the publication of Faber’s authors,Footnote 15 was well aware that to remain a magazine that could guarantee a showcase for younger authors, Botteghe Oscure had to preserve its network structure, relying, as it did, on different sources and not promoting a single group, be it a ‘generation’ or a movement.
On the contrary, the majority of other journals (see fig.1) were led by a group interested in promoting ‘critical narratives’ on British literature, often in keeping with their ideological line. This clearly emerges if we make a quick survey of the presence of English literature in Italian journals and magazines of the period 1940–1960: such a survey yields almost the same names. These can be arranged in groups that have become the categories on which British literary historiography is still built: Modernism (Letteratura, Prospettive, Aretusa), the New Apocalypse (Il Politecnico, Sud, and, later, il verri), the Auden generation in its engagé version (Il Politecnico, Sud). Journals like Mercurio and, later, Paragone were more open to contemporary novel writers (Greene, Orwell, Waugh). Only Mondadori’s short-lived Prosa and Poesia featured a wide-ranging selection of creative texts, often as a run-up to their publication in book form. To gain a deeper understanding of the specificity of Botteghe Oscure in Anglo-Italian literary transfer, we shall look more closely at the way in which the journal’s large ‘index of names’ relates to such clusters.
Quantity/quality
The assessment of the journal’s exceptionality is best performed if grounded in a quantitative analysis of the journal’s British pool of contributors based on the journal’s index of names, analysed choosing significant divides (i.e. established figures versus new entrants; authors featured only in Botteghe Oscure versus authors present also in other journals). Only thus can the notion of network really illuminate the journal’s specificity in terms of presence within the Italian context.
Both in Commerce and in Botteghe Oscure the word ‘index’ does not indicate a mere list of names arranged in alphabetical order. This is highlighted by the 1958 publication of a booklet containing both Commerce’s and Botteghe Oscure’s indexes, Commerce Index: 1924–1932 Botteghe Oscure Index: 1948–1957 (Società Grafica Romana, Rome 1958). Besides the complete indexes of both journals, the booklet features four essays on the journals themselves: American poet Archibald MacLeish’s ‘Reader to Readers (a parenthesis)’; French writer George Limbour’s ‘Ode à l’index’ (on Commerce); British writer and critic Alan Pryce Jones’s ‘Twentieth Century Writing’ and Petroni’s ‘La coda di due comete’. MacLeish insisted on the diverse composition of the journal’s pool of contributors, stressing the importance of the co-existence of established and emerging authors. Pryce-Jones (a very authoritative critic, having worked for The London Mercury and being, in 1958, the editor of the TLS) emphasised the role of Botteghe Oscure in reacting to the competition between literature and emerging media and in showing writers ‘in relation to one another’.
Established figures versus new entrants
The first divide, as already suggested in Logue’s letter and further confirmed by MacLeish, is the one between established figures and new entrants, which a graph of the contributors listed by age allows us to visualise more effectively (see. fig. 2):
Besides the obvious predominance of authors born between 1910 and 1920, that is, belonging to Dylan Thomas’s generation, there is a significant balance between the so-called ‘Auden generation’ and authors born between 1920 and 1930. While the former were in part also received in other journals, the latter – even the names that are nowadays definitely canonical like Thom Gunn or Charles Tomlinson – appeared exclusively in Botteghe Oscure. Yet, these were not the ‘young poets who only manage to have some poem published here and there (more often in Botteghe Oscure than in English magazines)’ (Melchiori Reference Melchiori1955),Footnote 16 but authors who found in the journal an international venue to publish, acquire visibility and, above all, to create their own network. The case of Thom Gunn is paradigmatic, since he was featured as early as 1954. All of the 15 authors born between 1920 and 1930 were known in Italy only through Botteghe Oscure: their work was translated and published in book form in Italy at least ten years later. In this sense, the journal was a genuine space for innovation as it anticipated authors and trends, stressing their co-temporality with dominant trends and currents. The journal allowed young writers to ‘find each other and so to find their generation’ (MacLeish, s.d. quoted in Valli Reference Valli1999, 30).
Botteghe Oscure versus other journals: switching voices and identities
Another significant divide in the contributors’ pool is the one between authors who, as far as their presence in Italian journals is concerned,Footnote 17 published only in Botteghe Oscure (75 per cent) and the ones who also appeared in other journals (25 per cent), as shown in graph 3.
The group of authors who published only in Botteghe Oscure can be further subdivided into two subsets. In the first one, we find some less-known names that were clearly co-opted into the journal through networks of friendship (for example the Charles Madge-Kathleen Raine couple). These writers belong to a younger generation (born around the 1920s) who, as mentioned earlier, found their first publication outlet in Botteghe Oscure. In this sense, Caetani was a traditional patron who, thanks to her social position, could afford to promote and subsidise authors who were still outside the publishing circles. A case in point is Muriel Spark, whose first Italian appearance was in Botteghe Oscure, considered a trusted repository of foreign authors by the Italian publishers, and who was later taken over by big publishers such as Mondadori and Bompiani.
The second subset includes authors born before 1900, for example the English novelist Leslie (L.P.) Hartley and Anglo-Irish popular novelist Elizabeth Bowen.Footnote 18 Their case is paradigmatic of how Botteghe Oscure allowed established authors to reshape their Italian (and not only Italian) identity. Hartley was not at all a marginal figure; his novels had already been translated and had found a place in the catalogues of big and medium publishers (Rizzoli and Garzanti). Giorgio Melchiori (who was very close to Botteghe Oscure through his acquaintance with Elena Craveri Croce) devoted an essay to Hartley’s The Go-Between, entitled ‘Il romanzo perfetto’, which appeared in the 1954 issue of Lo spettatore italiano (a journal founded by Elena Craveri Croce). Melchiori began his piece with the phrase ‘Leslie Hartley is no young writer’,Footnote 19 thus underlining the importance of the interplay between generations. He highlighted the novelist’s ‘belated’ success, his ability to fit the formal innovations of more experimental authors, like James, into more traditional and public-oriented novels: such is precisely the case of the short-story ‘Up the Garden Path’, published in Botteghe Oscure in 1952, in which Melchiori detected James’s influence in the handling of elements of suspense and mystery. As to The Go-Between (1953), Hartley’s most famous novel, Melchiori defined it ‘the perfect novel’: what made it such, according to the critic, was Hartley’s ability to blend the tradition of the past (‘the ideal model of the genre “novel” in the very form it had in its moment of full technical development, that is, at the end of the nineteenth century’ [1955]) with a very personal touch that made the novel ‘contemporary’. Melchiori’s opinion on Hartley is relevant inasmuch as it is in keeping also with Botteghe Oscure’s taste, as we find it explained, for example, in Bassani’s Congedo,Footnote 20 when he mentions ‘the refusal of any indulgence towards avant-garde literature’ (Bassani Reference Bassani1960, 434). Hartley’s ‘compromise’ is comparable to what Bassani, a couple of years later, would see in Forster’s Howards End, with which he launched Feltrinelli’s ‘Classici Moderni’Footnote 21 series. This becomes even more significant if we consider that Bassani deliberately released in the same year (1958) both Howards End and Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, another novel that mixes traditional elements with a contemporary sensibility. Botteghe Oscure therefore functioned also as a workshop of a new taste that would be fully developed in the late 1950s and in the 1960s.
The case of Elizabeth Bowen also deserves attention, for it features an established author, who is eager to change her ‘voice’, to reshape her literary identity. By the time she published ‘A Day in the Dark’ in Botteghe Oscure, in 1955, two of her novels – The Death of the Heart (1938)Footnote 22 and The Last September (1929)Footnote 23 – had already been translated into Italian by Mondadori, and her post-war work, The Heat of the Day (1949) was under contract.Footnote 24 During the 1950s Bowen was apparently keen to experiment with a poetic voice, which the short-story genre allowed her. Her intentions are spelt out in a letter to Caetani:
I think my idea is a sort of prose ballad. I mean like a prose form […] of one of the Hardy story-poems. The situation (love for the uncle) seems to me to be too buried in the girl’s mind to be dramatically capable of expansion – or rather buried in the mind of the rather frozen, dulled woman she would have become.Footnote 25
Bowen was particularly interested in the relation between prose and poetry and its realisation within the genre novel (to which Melchiori devoted special attention in his aforementioned article on the Irish writer): ‘A Day in the Dark’, the short story she contributed to Botteghe Oscure can therefore be read as an attempt – right when The Heat of the Day, her ‘spy-novel’ was achieving international success – to find a ‘new voice’. And such it was: among Bowen’s short stories ‘A Day in the Dark’ is one of the few written in the first person (see Christensen [Reference Christensen1997, 299]). And we can guess that the short story was a milestone in Bowen’s career, since ten years later it would give its title to the last collection of short stories published during her lifetime.Footnote 26
Let us now turn to the 25 per cent (18 names) of contributors who also feature in other journals. Graph 4 shows the other venues in which these authors were published in the years 1940–1960.
The largest number of coincidences is to be found with Poesia. Both journals published only creative texts, and on many occasions Botteghe Oscure took over where Poesia had left something off: this is the case with Stephen Spender, Dylan Thomas, Vernon Watkins, W.H. Auden, Brenda Chamberlain, Roy Fuller, Charles Madge, George G. Barker and David Gascoyne. Furthermore, the majority of these writers also appeared in three other journals, Sud and Il Politecnico, in both cases thanks to translator Tommaso Giglio during the late 1940s, and il verri during the late 1950s. For all these authors, Botteghe Oscure meant embracing a different identity, experimenting with new genres. The most interesting cases are those of Auden and Spender: their presence in Il Politecnico and Sud was still very much indebted to their engagé season, the 1930s and to the Left Wing movement, evident in Spender’s ‘Lo scrittore e il mondo reale’, published in Sud (1946, 7). Equally ‘political’Footnote 27 was Sud and Il Politecnico’s take on the New Apocalypse, notably in Tommaso Giglio’s crucial ‘Poesia come apocalissi in Inghilterra’ (1946, 33–34). Paradigmatic is the case of Dylan Thomas, who experimented with the radio play thanks to Caetani’s generous support, which allowed him to publish Llagerub (Under Milk Wood) in Botteghe Oscure (1952, V).
Released from the pressure of literary criticism, Botteghe Oscure could thus serve as a laboratory for authors – old and young – willing to ‘test’ different ways of writing: Dylan’s engagement with the radio play can for instance be read following Pryce-Jones’s suggestion on how Botteghe Oscure reacted to competition with new media. Such an extraordinary opening was also favoured by the fact that the journal was a transnational zone, with different interlocutors – including both publishers and readers – in each country, which released the journal from the burden of relating to a single literary system. The question to address is whether such an enterprise eventually became a mode of literary production or whether its function was bound to remain limited to years of great transformations in literary (and artistic) production, in Italy and abroad.
‘Let me also point out that this magazine is international’: Botteghe Oscure’s transnational social codes
Unlike other Italian literary journals, Botteghe Oscure was widely distributed abroad: as mentioned earlier, Caetani relied, in Italy as well as abroad, on a ‘publisher-distributor’. This shaped the journal’s identity differently in each country, but also the journal’s actual status. As it turns out, despite the vocal refusal to be read as an anthology expressed by Bassani in his Congedo (1960), by Logue and, later, by Risset (Reference Risset2007, xviii), Botteghe Oscure’s success was inevitably bound to its potential as a generator of anthologies. This is not the place to debate the function of anthologies.Footnote 28 Still, at least as concerns Anglo-Italian literary relationships, ‘survey anthologies’ (Korte)Footnote 29 of Italian writing were crucial for the formation of a modern Italian canon abroad.
Such a fact finds confirmation in Caetani’s correspondence with her British publishers, John Lehmann and Hamish Hamilton. With the former, Caetani had established a contact advised by T.S. Eliot, upon the princess’s request that Faber be the British distributor for the journal. Eliot declined the offer to distribute Botteghe Oscure, suggesting that this should be discharged by a small firm specialising in foreign literature, for example that of John Lehmann.Footnote 30 Lehmann had been trained by the Woolfs at the Hogarth Press and had already gained remarkable experience in launching ‘transnational’ literary products, first and foremost Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin novels (see Sullam Reference Sullam2010). The letter was written when, in 1950, Caetani envisaged the possibility of promoting some (then) young Italian writers on the English-speaking market, through an anthology. John Lehmann eagerly accepted and An Anthology of New Italian Writers came out in 1950. Thanks to Lehmann’s relational capital – accumulated in twenty years of successful activity as a middleman – the book enjoyed a fair success, as Lehmann wrote to Caetani mentioning two reviews by no less than Edwin Muir and Margaret Bottrall.Footnote 31 For Lehmann publishing the anthology resulted in a deal with Longanesi for the publication of Mario Soldati’s A cena col commendatore (1950).Footnote 32 The deal came out of a conflict with the Italian publisher concerning copyright: as Lehmann’s letter shows, Longanesi wanted Lehmann to stop the distribution of the anthology but subsequently ‘agreed that I should publish A cena col commendatore as a book, and in view of that waive their objections to my continued sale of your anthology.’Footnote 33
It was Lehmann who eventually refused to continue distributing the journal and who put Caetani in contact with Jamie Hamilton of Hamish Hamilton, a publishing house (founded 1931) that played an important role in the transition from High Modernism (Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Pound) to the literature of the 1930s and 1940s. Hamilton was very happy to take over the distribution of the journal, as his words of praise to Caetani show; he explained that he had chosen to distribute Botteghe Oscure ‘both because I have always admired your courage and enterprise in producing it, and also because I regard it as an important link in the intellectual life of both countries.’Footnote 34 Hamilton had a genuine interest in Italian literature, as witnessed by his frequent requests to further his knowledge of emerging Italian authors.Footnote 35 At the same time, he demonstrated an awareness of differences between the English and the Italian literary fields, showing himself to be, in a word, a real middleman, who each time questioned the potential of a certain author in the United Kingdom. For example, as concerns Calvino, he doubted whether his Visconte dimezzato (1952) would enjoy any success in England:
Il visconte dimezzato couldn’t possibly interest Anglo-Saxon readers, I’m afraid. It has great literary merits, which might or might not be retained in translation. But themes as fantastic as this never appeal here – witness the failure of Tête de chien and other things merely regarded here as far-fetched.Footnote 36
Besides actively fostering Anglo-Italian literary relationships, Hamilton also advised Caetani on publishing matters. Following a partially negative review of one of the journal’s issues,Footnote 37 Hamilton suggested the publisher’s name be printed on the cover, so that potential readers could find a kind of guarantee for the journal’s quality. Hamilton’s suggestion meant that the moment of the mediation of publishing remained crucial and that, therefore, Botteghe Oscure needed to be marketed as a book belonging to a publisher’s catalogue.
Marketing the journal as a book, though, raised the issue of copyright. This deserves further attention, as it further highlights the hybrid nature of Botteghe Oscure and its relationship with the anthological form. In 1953 Caetani was in touch with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, since the publisher had shown interest in Botteghe Oscure and been entertaining the idea of publishing an anthology of its best output. As emerges from a letter written by Roger Straus to one of the house’s editors, George DeKay, Farrar Straus was already seeking to publish an anthology of new writing in collaboration with a literary journal. When the first attempt with the Partisan Review failed, Straus decided to turn to Botteghe Oscure. Writing to DeKay, he pointed out that the distribution of the magazine was international and that it could represent an asset for FSG. In his letter, Straus clearly states that the publication would be an ‘anthology’, a book, with a title of its own, which should not be Botteghe Oscure. Footnote 38 But if it was to be treated as such, the issue of copyright had to be settled. The correspondence held at the Caetani Foundation shows that Straus initially found a solution but later abandoned his publication plans, because they would be too expensive. At a certain point, Eliot too was asked about his opinion on the knotty issue of copyright, and his answer is revealing as to the relationship Caetani entered into with her contributors. Eliot wrote that Botteghe Oscure represented an unprecedented case for the complex handling of copyright; Eliot knew that Caetani had paid generously for her authors’ contributions and that, for this reason, she would not pay copyright fees to publishers. Such a situation could not possibly continue once parts of Botteghe Oscure became a book, subject to a specific copyright legislation.Footnote 39
Eliot’s words highlight the hallmark of Caetani’s enterprise. It is simultaneously emergent and residual (Williams), where the latter defines what ‘has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present’, while the former’s emphasis is on how ‘new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship are continually being created’. (Williams 1977, quoted in Brooker et al. Reference Brooker, Thacker, Bru and Weikop2009, 17). As Brooker and Thacker argue, William’s concepts are particularly useful for the investigation of periodicals, especially if we consider the co-existence of emergent and residual practices ‘within single magazines’ (Brooker et al. Reference Brooker, Thacker, Bru and Weikop2009, 17). In Botteghe Oscure’s case, the co-existence is between the residual practice of a traditional patron and the emergent network structure of the journal, which required a formal engagement with publishers and literary agents in a systematic way. Such a coexistence, however, could not last long; in the end, the journal remained an individual production (Williams in Brooker et al. Reference Brooker, Thacker, Bru and Weikop2009, 18), centred as it was around Caetani’s person, and never managed to become a collective manifestation, defined by Williams as produced by a group agreeing on a set of values (Williams in Brooker et al. Reference Brooker, Thacker, Bru and Weikop2009, 18). This did not happen because the princess and her collaborators were not interested in being perceived as a collective manifestation. Furthermore, as the copyright issue demonstrates, the necessary drift towards the book form necessarily implied the shift to another, more systematic, publishing structure. Such a structure, already present in the United Kingdom when Botteghe Oscure started its activity, took real shape in Italy during the 1950s,Footnote 40 thanks to new publishers such as Feltrinelli and Garzanti or to the first real literary agency of the country, established in 1946 in Milan by Erich Linder. As Eugene Walter once wrote to Linder, however, the princess alone took care of all publishing matters and she did not know what an agent might be.Footnote 41 The dynamics of literary transfer had become too complex and articulated for one single person to handle, which marked the end of the journal’s very function, of its uniqueness as a genuine transnational formation. But Caetani’s network left a significant and long-lasting mark on the literature of the second half of the twentieth century, one that has yet to be fully illuminated.
Graph 1
Graph 2, Contributors divided by birthdate
Graph 3
Graph 4
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Caterina Fiorani at the Caetani Foundation in Rome for granting me access to Caetani’s correspondence. I also wish to thank the heirs of authors whose correspondence I quoted for giving me their permission.
Notes on contributor
Sara Sullam is a post-doctoral fellow at the Università Statale in Milan. She has published on English Modernism in a comparative perspective, free indirect style in English literature, and the reception of English twentieth-century literature in post-war Italy. She co-edited Transits: The Nomadic Geographies of Anglo-American Modernism (Peter Lang, 2010, with Gianni Cianci and Caroline Patey) and Parallaxes: Virginia Woolf Meets James Joyce (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2014, with Marco Canani).
