Praz—that melancholy flâneur of the past, half encyclopedist, half medium in an impeccable tuxedo—has the decency to turn the essay into a form of autobiography with just the right disguise. His discretion becomes a superior form of eloquence; it reveals the essential without the stridency of those who have little to say. He glosses the foreign as if he were encrypting his own intricate portrait. Like a spectral figure—and how he is one, a collector of exquisitely forgotten obsessions—he wanders the corridors of European culture with the ease of someone who has always belonged there.
If you’re looking for a catalog of academic truths here, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. This is something else: an archaeology of taste, if you prefer the label. As in the nooks of those old mansions cluttered with memories—his, of course, that unforgettable House of Life—fragments emerge with the aura of the ancient, revealing connections that only a gaze educated in the dimness of private libraries and museums closed on Mondays could detect. There are “scraps of outdated garments” and an almost subversive insistence on style as refuge, compass, as well as a sharp personal defense against the persistent tide of the pedestrian. I urge you to listen to this passage, to see if you understand:
Perhaps it’s above all a matter of light. The romantics of the mid-nineteenth century were not cheerful people, and probably for that reason they created that second rococo that pretends to give itself carefree and coquettish airs with the mischievous curves of its furniture, with its striking fake lacquers, with the hundred dimples of its upholstery, as if sofas, armchairs, and poufs were about to burst into an immense smile, and with its flowers scattered everywhere, in upholstery, porcelain, walls, book bindings, in cross-stitch, in bouquets, in cornucopias, or in large baskets where the flowers were made of shells colored with aniline, supported by a filling of green paper and old newspapers, and protected by a glass dome on a glossy black painted base. But, despite all that, the romantics of the bourgeois and industrialized nineteenth century were not cheerful people. It would seem that the dense smoke of the first locomotives and numerous factories had spread a perpetual veil before their eyes, a bit like the one, not metaphorically, that Hawthorne makes his priest wear.
And among so many other presences, the most cultured inflections of Vernon Lee are heard in these pages, the somewhat excessive but so distinctive orchestra of D’Annunzio, the eternal chiaroscuro of the vanitas… All of it orchestrated by a mind that had the rare virtue of turning collecting into a form of prolonged introspection, and criticism into a major art.
The first Italian edition, Voce dietro la scena: Un’antologia personale, was published by Adelphi in Milan, back in 1980, at the request of Roberto Calasso. With this, my hypocrite lecteur, you should have more than enough to try to think for yourself, if you still have the courage to do so.
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This morning, while delivering a copy of Bartleby to Mrs. Clotilde Bernal, who insists on reading only authors who end in suicide or disappearance, a smoke-colored cat climbed onto my bag and refused to get off for four blocks. It didn’t meow, just stared at me with that expression one finds in Nietzsche’s portraits. I read that passage from Praz aloud to it, and, satisfied, it silently got off at the corner of Ursulines and Chartres.
