Photographie dédicacée à Guy Tosi
“à Mon très cher Guy Tosi, avec ma fidèle reconnaissance, bien affectueusement, Curzio Malaparte, Paris, mars 1948.”
A fine dedicated portrait, testifying to Malaparte’s profound gratitude toward the man who had done so much to establish his reputation in France.
An Italianist and specialist of Gabriele d’Annunzio, to whom he devoted his doctoral thesis, Guy Tosi joined Éditions Denoël in 1943 as a reader. After Robert Denoël’s death, he became the house’s literary director and played a decisive role in renewing its catalogue, notably overseeing the works of Blaise Cendrars, Henry Miller, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Curzio Malaparte.
It was Tosi who took the decisive initiative of bringing the French translation of Kaputt to Denoël. Published in September 1946, this hallucinatory account of a Europe at war had an immediate and considerable impact, and durably established Malaparte’s reputation in France. In Tosi, Malaparte found not only a publisher but an attentive interlocutor, able to defend his books, negotiate their translations and guide their reception. Blaise Cendrars, who also grew close to Tosi, immediately recognized the power of the book: after reading Kaputt, he congratulated the publisher for issuing this “great book, rather disgusting, just as I like them,” which seemed to him to fully reflect the violence of the age. This admiration led Cendrars to place the “Naples” section of Bourlinguer under the sign of Malaparte, honoring both the author of Kaputt and the young volunteer of the Great War exiled to the Lipari Islands. The two writers had not yet met, however, and it was Guy Tosi who first brought them together on 4 June 1948 in Paris, at the reception organized by Denoël for the publication of Bourlinguer.
Dated March 1948, this photograph precedes that meeting by a few months. It also belongs to a crucial period in the relationship between Malaparte and his publisher: Tosi was then working on the French preparation of La Peau, whose translation and publication choices generated an abundant correspondence. The phrase “ma fidèle reconnaissance” takes on its full meaning here: it thanks a proven editorial loyalty, one destined to continue around the Italian writer’s second masterpiece.