Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

“You ask me how Commerce began… One day, all of a sudden, Valéry said: ‘Why couldn’t we continue our meetings by publishing our discussions in a review? As a title I suggest  Commerce, the commerce of ideas.’ That idea delighted all of us there. The editors (Larbaud, Valéry, and Fargue) were appointed immediately. Adrienne Monnier and I took respon-sibility for putting everything in motion and we started straight away.” These are the words of Marguerite Caetani, describing events in 1924. She was born Marguerite Gilbert Chapin, an American who had arrived in Europe in 1902 and married Roffredo Caetani, Prince of Bassiano. In Paris they called her “the Princess,” though she signed herself Marguerite Caetani.  Of the three editors, Paul Valéry was the authority, Léon-Paul Fargue a writer admired above all by other writers, and Valery Larbaud a great literary go-between, a mercurial ferryman whenever one spoke in a certain way about literature (as Italo Svevo and James Joyce could testify). Neither Marguerite Caetani, who financed Commerce, nor the three editors had anything to proclaim. There was never any question of drawing up a program for the review, nor was it ever raised in conversation with friends, however distant or occasional. Before the first issue had appeared, Valéry wrote to Larbaud:  I’m in receipt in Rome of your esteemed letter of the  12th which takes me back somewhat to the atmosphere of our lunches, infrequent though friendly. The fruit of this union is Commerce … The tedious thing is writing. … I would have been very pleased if we had founded a review where there was no need to write. You realize what advantage! Reader, author, everyone happy.   “Without pressing so far into the perfection of the genre, it would have been possible to fulfill what I had thought up when I was 23 and had a phobia about the penholder. I wanted to do a review of 2 to 4 pages.  Title: The Essential.  And nothing more than ideas, in 2 or 3 lines. None other than the lean…  It could be signed with initials, for economy Marguerite Caetani’s name never appeared in the twenty-eight issues of Commerce. The review’s symbol was a pair of old Roman scales, an image of which appeared opposite the frontispiece of the first issue, beneath the indication of the print run (1,600 copies). Recognizing the proper weight: this was the essential premise of the review. Everything not in this balanced spirit was rejected. It has to be remembered that reviews were those that had spines (not the same, therefore, as general periodicals such as The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, or the Times Literary Supplement). They are now largely a matter of the past, since literary reviews are among the considerable number of cultural forms that have gradually disappeared over the last fifty years. Their golden age, it is now clear, was between the two world wars, with notable early examples in the years straddling 1900 (La Revue Blanche, The Yellow Book, Die Insel). Marguerite Caetani was too elegant not to shun like the plague any semblance of a literary hostess. She was a Guermantes, not a Verdurin. This is also why she has generally escaped the attention of many rough and rapacious academics who continue to fill their mouths with “modernism” and “avant-garde.” Marguerite Caetani has not been detected by their narrow radar. Perhaps this is why little of importance has been written about her. All the more conspicuous, therefore, is  the magnificent portrait of Marguerite (or Margherita, as she calls her) that Elena Croce left us in her memoir Due città, or Two Cities.  It is a portrait of Marguerite Caetani’s years in Italy, when she ran the journal Botteghe Oscure between 1948 and 1960 in Rome, a journal much vaunted by Anglo-American expatriates of the time, an excellent review, but which gives the sense of a disaster that has already struck — and can only be read as a colonial version of Commerce. To see this, it is enough to put a copy of Commerce next to one of Botteghe Oscure. The comparison is entirely unfavorable to the latter: poor paper quality, less appealing format and page