Il labirinto

Scrittori dimenticati:Lautreamont

Uruguayan-born French writer, called the grandfather of surrealist poetry. Isidore Ducasse's fame rests on his notorious masterpiece, Les Chants de Maldoror (1869, Maldoror), a series of dreamlike and bizarre prose fragments, which he published under the pseudonym of Comte de Lautréamont. Ducasse died at the age of twenty-four, during the Siege of Partis in November 1870.

"I will state in a few lines that Maldoror was good during the first years of his life, when he lived happily. That is that. Then he noticed that he had been born evil: an extraordinary fatality!" (from Maldoror and Poems, translated by Paul Knight, 1978)

Comte de Lautréamont was born Isidore-Lucien Ducasse in Montevideo, Uruguay. His father, François Ducasse, worked Deputy Secretary at the French Consulate. Jacquette-Celestine Davezac, Isidore's mother, was seven months pregnant on her wedding day. She died in December 1847.

Little is known of Ducasse's early childhood, or his life. Apart from certain allusion in Maldoror and Poésies (1870), the only biographial material consists of a birth certificate, half a dozen letters, his death certificate, and a studio photo of a long-legged young man in a frock coat, leaning against a pillar. At the age of thirteen, Ducasse was sent to France to acquire French education and training in engineering. He entered in 1859 the Imperial Lycée at Tarbes in the Hautes-Pyrenées, probably spending his school holidays with his relatives in Bazet, his father's birthplace. Three years later he left the school, and in 1863 he entered the Lycée at Pau (now the Lycée Louis-Barthou).

At school Ducasse distinguished himself in arithmetic and drawing, but he was also noted for his extravagances of thought and style. One of his schoolfellows recalls that Ducasse's "own brand of madness revealed itself definitively in a French essay in which with a dreadful profusion of adjectives he'd seized the opportunity of accumulating the most horrible images of death." Gustave Hinstin, Ducasse's teacher, put him on detention for this essay. "Ducasse was deeply hurt by Hinstin's reproaches and this punishment." (from Maldoror & the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautréamont, translated by Alexis Lykiard, 1970)

After spending some years probably at Tardes, Ducasse visited Montevideo. According to Albert Lacroix, Ducasse's first publisher, he settled in Paris in 1867 intending to study at the Polytechnic or the College of Mining. He lived first in a hotel on Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. Financially he was still supported by his father. With the help of his generous allowance, Ducasse was able shut himself off from bourgeois society and devote himself entirely to writing. "He wrote only at night, seated at his piano," said Léon Genonceaux, who publishedLes Chants de Maldoror in 1890. "He used to declaim, would coin his phrases hammering out his tirades with the chords."

Ducasse's career lasted only two years. During this period he invented himself as an author and created his own aesthetic universe, by becoming in the beginning a published writer and self-confident breaker of taboos, and then a literary theorist and philosopher.

The first canto of Les Chants de Maldoror was published anonymously in Paris in 1868. It contained several references to Georges Dazet, Ducasse's friend at the lycée in Tarbet in 1861-62. In the second version of the canto, reprinted at Bordeaux in Evariste Carrance's anthology, Parfums de l'Ame (1869), his friend is simply "D..."

When the complete work was printed in 1869, Ducasse used the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont, borrowed from the hero of Eugène Sue's Latréaumont (1837), set in the days of Louis XIV. In this final version the "D..." had completely disappeared, and was replaced by different creatures from octopus to vampire bat.

From the very first lines Maldoror makes it clear that it was not written for the readers of Sue's popular novels: "May it please that the reader, emboldened, and become momentarily as fierce as what he reads, finds without loss of bearings a wild and abrupt way across the desolate swamps of these sombre, poison-filled pages." Maldoror, the title character and a alter ego of the narrator, is a Luciferian rebel, a shapeshifter, who has chosen evil over good, but who at the same time suffers from cruelty and occasionally feels pity. In canto III Maldoror rapes a young girl, sets his bulldog on her, and then cuts open her vagina with a penknife. "From this enlarged trough he removed the internal organs, one after the other: the intestines, lungs, liver, and finally the heart itself were ripped from their roots and pulled out through the frightful aperture into the light of day."

Fearing prosecution, Ducasse's Belgian publisher refused to distribute the work to booksellers. Maldoror went nearly unnoticed by the public. Ducasse himself said in a letter, that "the whole thing went down the drain." Auguste Poulet-Malassis, who had published Baudelaire'sLes Fleurs du Mal in 1857, mentioned the author in his Bulletin trimestriel des Publications défendues en France, imprimées à l'Estranger (October 1869): "The author of this book is of no less rare a breed. Like Baudelaire, like Flaubert, he believes that the aesthetic expression of evil implies the most vital appreciation of good, the highest morality." And in the Bulletin du Bibliophile et du Bibliothécairethe reviewer wrote that the book "will find a place among the bibliographical curiosities" (May 1870).

"To study evil so as to bring out the good is not to study good in itself. Given a suitable phenomenon, I shall seek its cause." (from Poésies, 1870)

In 1869 Ducasse moved to 32 Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre and next year to 15 Rue Vivienne, and then to a hotel on Faubourg-Montmartre, as if he were trying to hide from something or someone. Between April and June 1870, he published two booklets of aphoristic prose pieces, Poésies, both printed by Balitout, Questroy et Cie. With Poésis Ducasse wanted to produce a counterpoint to the provocative and romantic theme of evil in Maldoror. "To sing of boredom, suffering, miseries, melancholies, death, darkness, the somber, etc., is wanting at all costs to look only at the puerile reverse of things," Ducasse wrote in a letter. "This is why I have completely changed methods, to sing exclusively only of hope, expectation, CALM, happiness, DUTY."

Ducasse died during the siege of Paris, on November 24, 1870. His death certificate was witnessed by Jules-François Dupuis. Raoul Vaneigem published his history of surrealism, Histoire Désinvolte du Surréalisme (1977) under this name. "I will leave no memoirs," Ducasse stated in Poésies, terrified of being pinned down. His body was buried in a temporary grave in the Cemetière du Nord. In 1871 his remnants were moved to another place in the cemetery. Maldoror was republished in 1890 but it received little notice until André Bretonrescued his work from obscurity. Breton copied by hand the only remaining copy of the Poems from the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and republished it in the Dadaist review Littérature in 1919.  

Ducasse's often quoted simile, "As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!" become a slogan of Surrealist movement. Breton and Philippe Soupault collaborated on the play Vous M'Oublierez (1920), that featured Breton as an umbrella and Paul Eluard as a sewing machine; Soupault was a dressing gown. A group of surrealists caused havoc in the Bar Maldoror in Montparnasse. Breton declared, "We are the guests of Count Lautréamont!" Ducasse's work has also inspired a number of artists, including Salvador Dali's etchings from 1934 and Man Ray's 'Enigma of Isidore Ducasse'  (1920) and 'L’Image d’Isidore Ducasse' (1933). Ray was introduced to Maldoror around 1914 by his first wife, the Belgian poetess Adon Lacroix. Jeremy  Reed's fictionalized biography,Isidore (1992), was based on the author's life. The performance artist Shishaldin told in 2004 that she was attempting to marry the Comte de Lautréamont by invoking an obscure clause in French law, which allows for the marriage between a living citizen and a dead fiancée. Much to her surprise, she learned that Lautréamont was already married to a Surrealist artist following the centenary of his death in 1970.

After Maldoror was canonized as a work of genius, its shocking scenes have been regarded as the essential part of its construction and philosophy, like in the works of Marquis de Sade. Moreover, in Lautréamont Nomad (1994) Mark Polizzotti argued, "the average child, is capable of imagining worse" – which leaves open the question of whether it is an issue with regard to an average child. However, Maurice Blanchot has emphasized that Maldodor's sadism is far from Sade. "In Lautréamont, there is a natural rebellion against injustice, a natural tendency toward goodness, a powerful elation that is, from the start, characterized by neither perversion nor evil." (Lautréamont and Sade, 2004)

Ducasse mentions in a letter as his sources of inspiration the poetry of Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Byron and Baudelaire.Les Chants de Maldoror was comprised of six cantos, in which the pseudo-aristocratic voice of the narrator expresses his deadpan disdain for the the mankind. "My poetry shall consists of attacks, by all means, upon that wild beast, man, and the Creator, who should never have begotten such vermin!" Full of contradiction, Maldoror mixes moralizing with macabre humor, warns of its corruptive power on its readers, but ends in catharsis, pretends to praise death, darkness, and cultural destruction, but basically re-established what it condemns. His heart longs for God, but he do not find what he is seeking; "I lifted my eyes higner, and higher still, until I saw a throne made of human excrement and gold, on which was sitting – with idiotic pride, his body draped in a shroud of unwashed hospital linen – he who calls himself the Creator!"  Many critics have discussed the autobiographical references given in the text and its homosexual elements. In 'canto IV' Maldoror confesses, "I have always taken infamous fancy to the pale youngsters in schools and the sickly mill-children." However, the sparse self-references in Maldoror add little to what we know of the life of the author.

Scrittori dimenticati:Blaise Cendrars

Quando si ama si deve partire (Cendrars)

Quando si ama si deve partire
lascia tua moglie lascia il tuo bambino
lascia il tuo amico lascia la tua amica
lascia la tua amante lascia il tuo amante
quando si ama si deve andar via.
il mondo è pieno di negri e di negre
donne uomini uomini donne
guarda i bei negozi.
questa carrozza quest’uomo questa donna
questa carrozza
e tutte le belle merci in vetrina.
c’è l’aria c’è il vento
le montagne l’acqua il cielo e la terra
i bambini gli animali
le piante e il carbon fossile
impara a vendere a comprare a rivendere
dà prendi dà prendi
quando si ama si deve sapere
cantare correre mangiare bere
fischiare
e imparare a lavorare
quando si ama si deve partire
non sorridere fra le lacrime
non farti il nido fra due seni
respira cammina parti vattene
faccio il bagno e guardo
vedo la bocca che so io
la mano la gamba l’occhio
faccio il bagno e guardo
il mondo intero è sempre qui
la vita con le sue cose sorprendenti
esco dalla farmacia
scendo appena dalla bilancia
peso i miei soliti 80 chili
ti amo.

Scrittrici dimenticate:Francoise Sagan

Françoise Quoirez (il nome anagrafico di Françoise Sagan) nasce il 21 Giugno 1935 a Cajarc nel Sud-ovest della Francia da Pierre Quoirez, industriale parigino, e Marie Laubard. Ultima di tre figli si trasferisce da Parigi con la famiglia agli inizi della seconda guerra mondiale per ritornarvi nel 44' dopo la Liberazione.
Studia nei collegi religiosi conseguendo nel 52' il diploma di scuola media superiore, nel 53' venne bocciata all'esame di ammissione alla Sorbona.
Esordì clamorosamente nel mondo della letteratura nel 1954, non ancora ventenne, con Bonjour Tristesse, divenendo protagonista di un prodigioso caso letterario sotto lo pseudonimo di Sagan, dalla Principessa della Recherche di Proust. Il tono della narrazione e la ricerca medesima del suo primo lavoro, parvero rivelare un'affinità con Raymond Radiguet, da subito smentita dalle opere successive sempre più conformi ad uno schema narrativo convenzione pur nella straordinaria abilità.
La Françoise di quegli anni veniva descritta come una ragazzina con i capelli tagliati alla maschietta, dall'aria insignificante, la cui conversazione pareva non rivelare la lucentezza del genio. Dovevano passare ancora due, tre anni prima che Françoise Sagan cominciasse a vestirsi in modo eccentrico, a guidare macchine velocissime, al punto che nel 1957 per via di un incidente rischiò quasi la vita, a passeggiare per i boulevard accompagnata da un gigantesco cane lupo e da giovanotti stravaganti, divenendo così il personaggio noto a tutti con un seguito di amori burrascosi e persino un figlio.
Nel 1958 sposa l'editore Guy Scholler per divorziare nel 62'. Successivamente il secondo matrimonio con Bon Westholf, progettista di ceramiche.
Françoise Sagan girò presto il mondo come giornalista, si recò a Cuba dove scrisse brillanti relazioni favorevoli ai rivoluzionari; firmò il "Manifesto dei Cento ventuno" che proclamava il diritto al refus d'obéissance verso lo stato oppressore. Per merito di questi engagements la sua opera resta un efficace documento di costume per acquistare il sapore della denuncia.
In Bonjour tristesse narra la storia di una giovinetta col padre vedovo e "viveur", ciascuno con la propria libertà, in una tacita intesa e complicità per la quale la ragazza è nei migliori rapporti con l'intima amica di lui. Sopravviene un'altra donna, fine e degna, che potrebbe ricostruire la regola, l'uomo stesso ne è incantato.
La figlia, Cécile, vede il pericolo, la fine della libertà, e cerca il rimedio riconducendo il padre alla donna meno degna. L'altra offesa, sdegnata, si suicida, lasciando tutti nella costernazione.
Sagan ebbe troppa fortuna o forse troppo in fretta, non quella del successo immediato che la consacrò giovanissima, ma quella di aver trovato subito, e per sempre, un universo letterario che non ha più potuto modificare. Una fortuna forse ingombrante.
Innanzitutto uno spazio, sempre lo stesso, mondano, borghese, artificiale, l'ambiente degli appartamenti di lusso della Costa Azzurra, dei ristoranti chic, delle auto sportive, whisky, villeggiature di lusso; personaggi che ricalcano psicologicamente i modelli di Fitzgerald, come sarà lei stessa a scriverlo in Un profilo perduto nel 1974, intenti a ingannare la noia, sostanza stessa del loro essere; una vita sognata più che vissuta, eppure anche il mondo di Proust è estremamente limitato, divorato dallo snobismo.
Come se i personaggi ancor più che governare la propria vita si limitassero ad assistervi coinvolti soltanto quando l'alcol, la danza, l'amore fisico restituiscono una certa coscienza al proprio corpo. Ricchi comunque di una certezza: che la vita, qualunque vita, è un imbroglio, la ripetizione di un copione identico, a partire dall'adolescenza, periodo cruciale ancorché oscuro.
Senza dubbio capita di provare felicità, tuttavia subito ridimensionata dal nome stesso con cui viene chiamata: contentezza, piacere. Quella di cui Sagan parla è una borghesia colta, intrisa dell'aura viziata che circola nelle librerie, nei musei, o nei caffè di Saint Germain des Près.
Intellettuali che pongono la loro lucidità a servizio di se stessi allo solo scopo di guardarsi vivere.
Nel 1986 Sagan confessò di aver sostituito l'alcol con la droga giacché il suo editore la pagava in natura. Nel febbraio 2002 fu firmata una petizione da numerosi intellettuali francesi per sostenere la scrittrice economicamente. E' morta il 24 settembre 2004, nell'ospedale di Honfleur, nella Francia settentrionale stroncata da un'embolia polmonare.
Sagan ha orrore per le persone che non hanno inquietudini, ama soltanto le intelligenze tristi; essa si rifiuta di prendere sul serio le ideologie e tale scetticismo la riconduce inevitabilmente ad abbracciare "ideologie sostitutive".
Queste lunghe fughe, il whisky, la droga, non sono che mezzi che nascono dall'enigma della vita.
"….non bisogna pensare che nel 1954 (il mio momento di gloria) mi era difficile scegliere tra i due ruoli che mi offrivano: scrittrice scandalosa o ragazza borghese, perché, insomma, non ero ne l'una ne l'altra. Mi sarebbe stato più facile essere una ragazza borghese o una scrittrice scandalosa. La mia unica soluzione, e vivamente me ne rallegro, era di fare ciò che avevo voglia di fare: la festa. Fu una festa bellissima, d'altronde intersecata da romanzi vari e da commedie. E qui che termina la mia storia. Che posso farci, dopotutto? Bruciare la vita, bere stordirmi, ecco quel che mi ha sempre sedotto. E quanto mi piace, questo gioco derisorio e gratuito nella nostra epoca meschina, sordida e crudele ma che, per un caso prodigioso di cui vivamente con essa mi congratulo, mi ha dato il modo di sfuggirle. Ah! AH!",

Scrittrici dimenticate:Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916) Austria's premiere woman author was born Countess Dubsky at Zdislawitz Castle nea r Kremsier in Moravia. Much to the disapproval of her family, she began writing in her childhood. This was considered an unseemly activity for a noblewoman. When Ebner-Eschenbach was seventeen her stepmother sent her verses to the well-known Austrian writer Franz Grillparzer for an appraisal of her talent, hoping for a negative assessment. Instead, Grillparzer wrote back complimenting the girl's "power of expression" and "talent for precise judgment." Heartened by these words from a literary figure she admired and respected, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach settled on her career, no longer so hindered by family censure. The milieu of her best known works, the stories and novels, was provincial Moravia during the pre-March period and the urban life of the petit bourgeoisie and noble classes in Vienna. She carefully examined the daily routine of the "little man and woman." The plots are often based on the author's memories of her youth and provide a sharp, but humane insight into castle and village relationships in the Biedermeier period. As the descendent of Saxon and Czech ancestors, first learning the Czech and French languages, then German, she typified the multi-nationality of the Hapsburg Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. The story collection, Dorf- und Schlossgeschichten (1883), included tales of provincial Moravia. From a Czech nursemaid, she had learned the legends and folklore of the area. A story from this collection, "Jacob Szela," sympathetically described the oppressed peasantry of neighboring Galicia and the revolt of 1846. Ebner-Eschenbach had studied the background of the uprising for a year before writing the story. She concluded that her own noble class was at fault for the unspeakable poverty of the peasant farmers. Stories like reflected on the changes in the village-manor relationship after the abolition of the robot in 1848. Marie von Ebner-E schenbach seemed to doubt that wealthy farmers were more responsible in their treatment of society's down-and-outers than were the local nobles prior to 1848. She described social injustice, but she focused on the goodness that could be found in representatives of every social class. She believed that inherent human goodness would eventually overcome adversity. At the age of eighteen she had married her cousin Moritz Ebner-Eschenbach. The marriage remained childless. As a married woman, she liv ed alternately at her castle and in Vienna, except for those periods when her husband was assigned to provincial duty. Newly married in the revolutionary year of 1848, she and her seventeen-year-older husband, belonged to a group of aristocrats, who had opposed the Metternich system. They had favored reform in government administration, in the church, and in the army. Her attitude toward moderate reform can be seen in her 1860 drama about the French Revolution, whose heroine, a Girondist, went to the block for her beliefs. Because of its "too true portrayal" of revolution, the work was forbidden publication by Emperor Francis Joseph's censors. Her historical plays were less successful than her realistic novels and short stories. Her works won general acclaim only after 1874. In 1900 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Vienna, the first to be awarded a woman, and died, during World War I, a respected member of Austria's literary elite. 

Ritratti di donna:Anna Maria Enriquez Agnoletti

Aveva trascorso l'adolescenza e la giovinezza passando dalla città natale a Napoli, Sassari, Firenze, secondo gli incarichi universitari del padre. Dopo la laurea, conseguita nell'Ateneo toscano, aveva lavorato presso l'Archivio di Stato fiorentino, ma ne era stata espulsa con le leggi razziali, perché suo padre era ebreo. Battezzata nel 1938 (sua madre era cattolica), la giovane studiosa trova lavoro a Roma presso la Biblioteca Vaticana.
È a Roma che, insieme al fratello Enzo, si dà, dopo l'8 settembre 1943, alla Resistenza. Non soltanto è tra i dirigenti del Movimento cristiano sociale ma, spostatasi a Firenze, fa in modo che la sua organizzazione si federi in Toscana con il Partito d'azione. Da Firenze prende contatti con i gruppi della Resistenza operanti nel Livornese, in Lucchesia, nella Val di Chiana e in Val d'Orcia; organizza la trasmissione via radio di informazioni agli Alleati.
È tradita da un agente provocatore, accolto in casa dopo che si era presentato, spacciandosi per un ex ufficiale, a nome di "amici cristiano sociali di Roma". Con Anna Maria è arrestata, era il 12 maggio del 1944, anche la madre, che con lei viene incarcerata. Dopo qualche tempo la figlia viene condotta a Villa Triste. Qui Anna Maria viene torturata a più riprese nel corso di un interrogatorio, condotto dagli aguzzini della banda Carità, che si protrae per sette giorni e sette notti. Ma la giovane non parla. Ricondotta in carcere ne esce il 12 giugno per essere fucilata, insieme con altri patrioti, in località Cercina.

Libri dimenticati:Delitti vittoriani

Cinque romanzi della giallista Anne Perry,ambientati nel periodo vittoriano ,che hanno come protagonisti l'ispettore Thomas Pitt e la moglie Charlotte.Imperdibili!

Frase delgiorno

Dio fu un errore,ma è difficile stabilire se fu commesso troppo presto o troppo tardi (Canetti)