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In 1973, shortly after his last novel, like the others before it, was rejected by publishers, the Italian writer Guido Morselli shot himself in the head and died. He left several rejection letters on his desk, and a short note that read, “I bear no grudges.” It was the kind of gesture one of his protagonists might have performed a show of ironic detachment that belied a deep and obvious pain. Morselli was sixty years old. Before returning to his family’s home in Varese and ending his life, he had been living in near-isolation for two decades, on a small property in Lombardy, near the Swiss-Italian border. There he tended to the land, made wine, and wrote books that faced diminishing odds of publication. The last one that he finished tells the story of an apocalyptic event in which all of humanity suddenly vanishes, leaving a single man as the world’s only witness.
Bitte, Ich Spreche Nur Amerikanisch
I’d like to bracket these observations between two half-remembered
New Yorker cartoons. The first shows three people, a woman and two men, each tops in their fields, being interviewed by a man who has asked them to identify three people who’ve influenced them. The woman, a writer, mentions Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, and Chekhov; the golfer names Arnold Palmer, Tiger Woods, and, to everyone’s surprise, Chekhov; finally the physicist rattles off his list: Einstein, Newton, and . . . yes, you guessed it, Chekhov. The importance of translation, anyone?
Now juxtapose this against another
New Yorker cartoon which shows two men and a woman each tied to a separate tree, looks of horror on their faces, while before them stands a primly dressed woman, her mouth open wide as though she were belting out an aria, an open book in her hand. The caption reads:
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