Papa the Investor
How Hemingway became a major shareholder in a venerable Italian publishing house.
Ernest Hemingway had a rough time with his Italian publisher, Einaudi, the venerable Turin-based house that still prints a good portion of his titles today. The issue, as is so often the case, was money: Einaudi, Hemingway complained, were communists looking for any excuse to withhold his overdue royalties. After 1947, he’d grown so exasperated that he refused to publish another book with them. So it’s all the more startling to discover that in the spring of 1955, he quietly agreed to convert a large part of his growing credit with the house into company stock, becoming a major shareholder overnight. Hemingway was usually very prudent with his money—and the chronically mismanaged Einaudi was hardly a safe investment. But having a stake in the publication of his own books, he hoped, would make it easier to get his hands on his growing pile of Italian cash.Bunga-Bunga
As an author, Hemingway had gotten a late start in Italy. During the twenties and thirties, when the Anglophone world consecrated him as one of its brightest talents, he was persona non grata in the country. His blacklisting started as early as 1923, when Hemingway, still a young reporter for the Toronto Star, described Mussolini as “the biggest bluff in Europe.” In 1927, he wrote a few sardonic sketches on Fascist Italy for the New Republic. But it was the 1929 publication of A Farewell to Arms, with its antimilitarism and its powerful description of the rout of the Italian Army after Caporetto, that made him an enemy in the eyes of the Mussolini regime—a reputation further sealed by his support for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
Thus Hemingway’s books were banned in Fascist Italy even as the works of other American writers, such as Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and John Dos Passos, were brought into translation with success and acclaim. But as soon as Mussolini fell, in 1943, publishers scrambled to buy up the translation rights to his novels. The first Italian edition of The Sun Also Rises was published by a little-known company, Jandi Sapi, in the early summer of 1944, only weeks after General Mark Clark’s troops liberated Rome. A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and To Have and Have Not came out in quick succession with different houses the following year, immediately after the liberation of Northern Italy. The translations were hurried and the first editions sloppy; it was unclear which house owned which rights, if it owned any at all.
To sort things out, Hemingway gave his agents the go-ahead to sign several deals with Einaudi, a young, left-leaning literary house with a strong list of American authors. By early 1947, they’d secured the rights to The Sun Also Rises, The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories, Green Hills of Africa, Death in the Afternoon, and To Have and Have Not, thus emerging triumphant in the postwar battle for Hemingway. But his two biggest titles, A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, still eluded them.
Arnoldo Mondadori, who’d built his eponymous publishing house during Mussolini’s years, claimed those two books based on contracts signed in Switzerland during the war. In the spring of 1945, he wrote an unctuous letter to Hemingway, begging him in rudimentary English for the privilege of becoming his “sole publisher” in Italy. “I intended to diffuse your name, almost unknown to the Italian public, as largely as possible, because I know the moral and cultural advantage our readers would have had by coming in touch with your poetic world,” he wrote. He would’ve written sooner, he added, but he was prevented by “draconian fascist prohibitions.” Mondadori had been a card-carrying member of the Fascist Party.
Understandably, Hemingway didn’t want his work disseminated by a former Fascist—at least not in the spring of 1945, when most of Italy was still in ruins. He left Mondadori’s letter unanswered. Even so, a series of court rulings awarded Mondadori the rights for Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls. The line was now drawn: Einaudi and Mondadori were rivals as the world plunged into the Cold War.
*Three years later, in September 1948, Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, sailed to Europe. They’d planned to land at Cannes and cruise Provence, but a series of mechanical mishaps forced the ship to dock in Genoa. Hemingway hadn’t set foot in Italy in more than twenty years, and memories of his time as a volunteer at the front in 1918 came crowding back. He drove Mary to Stresa, on Lake Maggiore, where he’d spent time recuperating from his war wounds....MORE, including Silvio Berlusconi.
HT: Arts & Letters Daily
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