It is almost an epistolary novel. The long friendship between Alessandro Bonsanti and Carlo Emilio Gadda is now told by the correspondence between the two, which at least as regards the latter is also a sort of diary. Bonsanti, despite being the youngest, plays the role of a dry father figure, advises, arranges his friend’s work and existential tangles, carries out the first publications and then assists him without opinion when the great awards arrive. Gadda, who at the time of his debut, in the Thirties, wanted the “big audience”, when he was confronted with the success of the Pasticciaccio (finally in volume in 1957 but started 11 years earlier) and then in the Sixties with La cognizione of pain, he was terrified. «I am the pear and the pumpkin of myself», he confesses, quoting a satire by Ariosto. The pumpkin grows rapidly and is ephemeral, the pear tree is slow, solid, cautious, resistant.
Now, with this metaphorical title, the 300 letters that survived wars and disasters, preserved in the Gadda Fund of the Gabinetto Vieusseux and partly in the Liberati Fund and with the Bonsanti heirs – the latter donated to the Florentine Institute on the occasion of the publication of the volume -, are published for the Olschki publisher (edited by Roberta Colbertaldo) in the “Studies” series of the Gabinetto Vieusseux – which celebrates its two centuries, and for the first time is led by two women: Alba Donati as president, Gloria Manghetti as director. They offer us not only the human story of two protagonists but also a cultural history that concerns the twentieth century and its intellectuals through 40 years of confrontation, of “writers’ life”, through an autobiography with two voices. But not a diary: although they are very private letters, they are in fact all “written” by looking at one’s own idea of literature, today one would speak of a long autofiction.
Gadda tells himself almost as a character of himself, the episodes of his life are transposed and magnified, ironically cut, in a fantastic dimension. There is also talk of extreme hardships, suffered or feared, of real or imaginary diseases, of great irritations, from 1945 onwards, against the politicians of the Republic: certainly less frenzied but just as sharp as those against Mussolini the “Great Ass” delivered to us by Eros and Priapus. It seems to read the schedule of his monumental work. “Life here is incredibly expensive: a meal in a canteen, not to be fed, costs 150-200 lire”, he wrote from Rome in October ’44, where he luckily took refuge leaving Florence still occupied by the Germans, providing a long and detailed price list (dinners, wine, barber shop, bar of soap, clothes), in a minute and a bit delirious vertigo of the list.
The letter is from the years in which the writer-engineer lived on collaborations and advances for commitments that he often did not respect. And exemplary in this regard is the story of Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, destined for 100 thousand copies, but with a very troubled history.
Gadda is unable to deliver it and no longer knows which saint to turn to, thinking of «Garzanti, who is with his rifle drawn and, what is worse, aimed at me. Threat lawsuits for damages, calls me a scoundrel, etc. He is right, after all ». But also significant is the mocking resentment against Benedetto Croce and Crociani in general, in the fulminant post scriptum of ’45: «I have the impression that Don Benedetto feels obscurely that Freud has made discoveries, if discovered they are much more interesting than his».
They are letters of testimony and, more than the other correspondence already published, an epic of friendship: for that “tyrant Bonsanti, a true slaveholder” who had already extracted from him between ’38 and ’41, for the magazine Literature he founded , seven episodes of the Cognition of pain, divining its capital book, the twentieth-century masterpiece. When in 1963 the novel won the Formentor prize with the Einaudian version, conferred by international publishers, at the height of its literary glory, Gadda wrote to his friend not as a winner, but as a castaway, almost still looking, paradoxically, a consolation, as we read in what we publish on this page. Buried, but not tamed, by the “avalanche” of notoriety. –