Fond memories of a friendship with the publisher of Adelphi Roberto Calasso

The sensation of entering an antiquarian bookshop was heightened when the elderly secretary opened the door to Calasso’s room: an accumulation of books, mostly English and German, from publishing houses that had mostly disappeared, with their yellowed covers, and a large window that deflected the light and shadowed the man: wearing a jacket, not tall, with the slight plumpness of the forty-five year old young man he was.

He greeted me with surprise and amusement, saying: «Who is this man who sent me his manuscript», forgetting that he had never been acquainted with this particular friend of mine. And yet he liked the book, a rather sharp but honest critique of economic science and of its methodological and rhetorical abuses. Thirty-five years later, while reading his dissertation on Thomas Browne, I finally understood. He said to me, «We’ll publish it», I believe partly because he saw his youthful self in me, who in the meantime was studying him, not intimidated at all. Was it his curly hair that was familiar to me, or his age, which was the same as the others who had guided me in my reading and beyond, or perhaps was it his voice? Now that I think about it, it was the voice that distracted me from the emotion. I would say that Calasso had an almost episcopal voice, or better: with the monastic resonance of someone who sings in Gregorian chant.

His breath was the tempered enthusiasm of someone who felt the sacred but at the same time was fearful of its sentiment: therefore his voice fluctuated as he said it but without ever getting too involved. He told me that I had to adjust the text here and there and that it should be allowed to decant, repeating: «We’ll publish it». And so it happened, after three years of delays and a collection of letters and autographed notes which I still have. It was certainly brave to publish my book; I was virtually unknown. He had to struggle before publishing it, as his voice fought between caution and sympathy. I remember that he once sent me a playful note with «Roberto Calasso your proofreader» written on it. And just when I had given up hope, the book was published while I was working in Basel, Switzerland. I can still remember how, after an evening with Strehler, at a conference on the economic ideas of Goethe and Faust, Calasso was at his happiest. But he didn’t show it. He was demanding and tried to appear in solemn detachment, sometimes even obnoxious. But there were jokes that revealed him, such as when after a talk of mine, with poor Giulio Giorello and others, at the Teatro Parenti, he approached me and said: «You sounded like a group of lunatics still in prison». But it was a compliment. And yet he did not want to publish my second book. It was an economic history of global finance between 1916 and 1933, between war finance which ruined Germany and enriched the United States, and the lies of Roosevelt. But then, and I mention it only because the story makes the man more understandable, my book was bought, translated and published in France by Grasset and by its editor who hosted me in Paris. When the book was published, it sparked off what I would call the Calasso effect. He bought back the copyright from the French publisher and the book was published under the title of Il secolo americano by Adelphi. Why did he reconsider? I would say for two reasons: the book was beautiful and lighter, but that reason alone would not have been enough. The second really decisive reason was his impulse, I would say acquisitive: Adelphi and its publications were the personal library that Calasso used to collect: he had already missed one of his. The Calasso effect was a morbid drive to build up his own personal and universal library, like Borges’ heroes.

I would say that it explained Adelphi even more than the list of books to be published by Bobi Bazlen, who had left it to him and the elder Luciano Foà. I had entered the collection of bulimic volumes on the walls of the books stored in the badly shaped shelves. After all, my books were very Adelphian: reactionary, but they were fake left-wing books so as not to get into trouble and because Calasso was certainly not right-wing. But he understood me when I told him that no books were as useful to me as the Marxist one by Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason: a catalogue of forbidden books and a perfect list for finding them. A bit like Justin and the first Christian theologians who said all sorts of bad things about the Gnostics but who saved their passages and concepts from destruction. Yet I remember his fury when I told him that I had become an economic advisor at Palazzo Chigi in a recent troubled government. He was irritated by the fact that I was compromising my interests in some adventure that was not topical, or rather, he felt involved, because after reading books with him, I had become a piece of his most precious possession, namely his Adelphi book collection. Only the ignorance of the Italian left-wing was able to transform a publishing house, in the course of the decades, into a fashionable publisher for left-wing snobs, which published books that were often either reactionary or often edited clandestinely by the right. But also, perhaps, the tale of the fourth book of short lives, that I published with Adelphi, and that was quite successful, is a revealing one for understanding Calasso. Years before, I had decided to leave him for Mondadori, which paid much better, and he was not pleased with the gesture; all the more so since he had worked with the newspapers and with Carlo Caracciolo in order to help me find collaborations with La Repubblica. I was ungrateful. But there is also the need to make a better living and I took Calasso for granted: but what happened?

After twenty-five years, the rights of Adelphi lapsed and I went to him to tell him that I wanted to sell them to another publishing house, and I saw his expression. As if at the poker table, I confirmed that he regarded my books as his own through sheer detail and accumulation. And I raised my hand: thanks to the Calasso effect, I obtained some more money, which he did not previously want to give me, and a fourth book. The rest happened during the Covid pandemic. He was very sick. I wrote to him I had chosen a different publisher for my commentary on the Apocalypse. He played along, and replied that it wasn’t suitable for Adelphi, in his very brief message he added a certain word that I shall not say, a word that he used in order to appear cold, when instead he was deeply moved. A month later he died.

Writer, translator, publisher, Roberto Calasso was born in Florence on May 30, 1941 and died in Milan on July 28, 2021. Together with Bobi Bazlen and Luciano Foà, he created the publishing house Adelphi with which he was publishing director from 1971, managing director from 1990 and president from 1999. An outstanding writer, his body of work includes eleven titles: «The Ruin of Kasch», «The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony», «Ka», «K.», Tiepolo Pink», «La Folie Baudelaire», «Ardor», «The Celestial Hunter», «The Unnamable Present»,, «The Book of All Books», «The Tablet of Destinies»