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rejected his manuscripts. He left a letter to a lady who had been in
his confidence for many years that simply said, "It makes no sense
to go on living." On his desk lay a folder containing all the rejection
letters. On the cover of this folder Morselli had drawn a flask-un
fiasco,
symbol of failure.
The Italian publishers, always eager to discover new home–
grown or foreign talents, had turned down all of Morselli's novels.
Some well-known "scouts" are now embarrassed, lest their motiva–
tions for the rejection become known.
Il Communista
had actually
been accepted by a major publisher in Milan and set in type. Then
the literary director was replaced and the new man-probably eager
not to offend the powerful Communist Party-rejected the book.
Morselli could have gone to court and might have imposed publica–
tion. But he was a proud and shy person who wouldn't have dreamt
of doing such a thing. One friend recalls that once Morselli went to
see an employee in a publisher's office and then left hurriedly when
he saw the publisher himself approaching. They had been to school
together and Morselli feared that he might be suspected of using this
connection to his advantage.
Guido Morselli, who had been in Sicily as an officer during
World War II, lived a life close to nature, in loneliness and silence.
Most pictures show him on horseback. Rousseau was his favorite
author. He was attractive to women and went through several
stormy but not unhappy affairs.
The nondiscovery of a writer whose topics were obviously inter–
esting, whose prose easy to read, remains a mystery. One is
reminded of the long obscurity of Italo Svevo. Had Svevo died at
sixty-one he would never have learned that he was an important
writer or, as Roberto Bazlen wrote to young Eugenio Montale in
1926, "the only modern novelist Italy has produced." As a compari–
son, however, the name of Robert Musil comes more easily to mind,
because of Morselli's hypothetical way of narrating. For him reality
was only one possibility among many, and not necessarily the most
relevant one. By naming Svevo and Musil, I do not intend to claim
for Guido Morselli a comparable importance . Long obscurity and
suicide are, as we know, powerful stimulants for posthumous over–
rating; the skeptical, self-doubting Morselli would have been the
first to mock such a turn offate. In fact , Morselli is perfectly attuned
to present-day Italy. In
Il Communista,
Ferrannini ponders that his
party "is polemicizing with the Christian Democrats and the
