The twentieth century with open eyes One hundred years by Gina Lagorio- Corriere.it

What a year, 1922. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Beppe Fenoglio, Luigi Meneghello, Giorgio Manganelli, Luciano Bianciardi, Raffaele La Capria. Not only that: Luciano Erba was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, actually almost forgotten by the celebrations. And Gina Lagorio, one of the great women of literature,complex and multiple figure: writer of novels and theater, author for children and for school, scholar (of the same age Fenoglio, Sbarbaro, Barile and Ligurian poetry), literary critic (also for the “Corriere”), publisher in alongside Livio Garzanti, her second husband, Member of Parliament for the independent Left group from 1987 to 1992.

In the same firm and unmistakable personality, generous and severe, Gina Lagorio contained a plurality of ways.To say a writer, in her case, is not to say a single thing, because there is the “pure” novelist of The beach of the wolf (1977) or by Tosca of cats (1983), there is the historical narrator (Between the starry walls of 1991), but there is also the memorialist of Approximate down (1971), which in a fictional key leads back to the illness and death of her first husband, Emilio Lagorio, protagonist of the Savona resistance as told in a thin and admirable chronicle, Let’s tell ourselves how it went. To this vein, let’s say autobiographical, are linked other books (almost all of them, if we mean autobiography in a broad sense), but especially the poignant memoir Càpitaa sometimes angry diary of her illness, published in the year of her death, 2005. Always with her eyes and heart turned on one side to her Piedmont (she was born in Bra, Cuneo) and on the other to her Liguria (sentimental land of adoption not only literary).

Therefore, after reading his books, to better understand the complexity and multiplicity of which it was said, a look at the remarkable correspondence that in its various guises, literary editorial civil,Gina has been entertaining for decades. Her letters can be found, along with all her other handwritten materials, at the Centro Apice in Milan, which has just celebrated its twentieth anniversary. To get an idea of ​​her relationship capacity, it is enough to say that there are 1,200 Italian correspondents and 250 foreigners. She starts from 1955 and in the fifty years that pass, various nuclei and different strands can be identified that reveal a personality-crossroads, versatile and curious. Because if there are writers for whom literary activity is a good reason to close the windows to the world, Gina Lagorio cultivates an interest (certainly primary) in literature that is spontaneously open to the life of others, and her interlocutors know this.

It is therefore no wonder that in writing them, tones of confidence are often allowed.In an elzeviro published in the «Corriere» on June 20, 1997, about Giorgio Caproni, Gina Lagorio recalled that one day she received a postcard from Ravegno, a small Ligurian town on the Trebbia, with a glimpse of wood and water dominated by wheels of an old mill. In his irregular and minute handwriting Caproni wrote: «A greeting from this mill which by now only grinds water. (An emblem of mine?) ». Now the archive tells us that that postcard was sent on August 16, 1986. The year before, Caproni always turned to his friend, but this time to the publisher’s mediator friend, to ask her (“I don’t dare to Livio”) to read the poems of Ugo Reale: «It seems to me that – under the apparently modest and almost mortified tone – a heart very worthy of listening beats alive. I appeal to your sensitivity as a writer, so loved by me ». Caproni added that he highly esteem Reale, whose only wrong was “always having lived too much (due to excess of discretion) on the sidelines”. And the delicacy with which the old poet dares to put forward his proposal is striking: «Do not want me for this intrusion of mine! You know I’m not used to annoy people. ‘

So, the confidante and the publisher. A pity not to always be able to read the answers of “dear Gina”, but sometimes it happens. In the case of a novel by the banker-writer Rodolfo Doni (A flight of birds) promoted by Geno Pampaloni, highly authoritative critic, we have a minute with the non-conciliatory judgment of Lagorio: “The novel holds up only at times, in my opinion, it has wedges, and delays that I don’t know how much they can be endured within a story with such a particular cut ». Pass it to Garzanti no: “If I know him a little, he would liquidate him in the name of his, dearest, prejudices of him.” It is obvious that Pampaloni remains an admirer of him, a faithful and intelligent reader. And here begins the third rich line of the correspondence: that relating to the opinions expressed on the books of Gina Lagorio.Needless to say, they mostly come from primary names: in addition to Pampaloni, there are Maria Corti, Cesare Segre, Giuseppe Pontiggia, Cesare Garboli, Luigi Baldacci… And they are almost never opinions of circumstance. Baldacci in October 1983 sent her a real review in epistolary form. La Tosca dei Cats, he writes, touches on a subject “systematically ignored by the two triumphant cultures: the Christian and the Marxist”: it is the relationship between man and animal. It will be a letter full of enthusiasm, in which the critic observes among other things: “You have the ability to make an autobiography by working on characters diametrically opposed to you”.

The reflection that arises from leafing through the papers of Gina Lagorio is this: how many things would one learn confidentially (therefore more willingly) if only one could read (that is, publish) certain letters, where culture, taste, criticism, the sense of history pass through unofficial roads,they appear not in an academic double-breasted suit but in a dressing gown if not in pajamas. Here, for example, we find another golden vein, which could (should?) Be the first: the political-civil one. The corpus of letters of the great classical philologist and essayist Sebastiano Timpanaro and that of the Italian master Carlo Dionisotti are very rich. We would need to read them, then study them. But first thank Gina.