Highbrow Refuge

BOTTEGHE OSCURE, Vol. XII (533 pp.] -Farrar, Sfraus ($2.50).

For highbrow writers, a handsome, American-born Italian princess nearing 72 is the closest thing to a patron saint in the world today. When they visit Rome (and that is the thing for them to do these days), they vie for invitations to her home, a gloomy Renaissance palazzo with an irresistibly highbrow address: 32 Via delle Botteghe Oscure (Street of the Dark Shops). There they get fruit juice and cakes, plenty of rarefied talk about writers and writing, and lots of sympathy. The Princess Marguerite Caetani's interest in their work is as genuine as her 800-year-old title, and what is more, she backs it with money.

Princess Caetani (nee Marguerite Chapin of New London, Conn.) gets 500 or so manuscripts a year, and scrupulously goes through them all. Those writers lucky enough to please her fancy will see their stuff in Botteghe Oscure, a fat, cream-colored semiannual collection of writing that prints contributions in French, Italian and English. A writer who is known to be well-to-do may get very little for a fine long story. A poor poet may be paid beyond his wildest hopes for a brief poem.

Those who judge Botteghe by its contributions in English will find a mixed bag. Poet-Novelist Robert Graves (I, Claudius, Sergeant Lamb's America) leads off with The Devil Is a Protestant, a mildly humorous essay contrasting the austerities of Protestant worship and Roman Catholicism's stress on rich symbolisms. Any Graves fan can see that a talented righthander has been giving his left hand a workout. But there are well-written, offbeat stories by such U.S. writers as Alfred Chester and Elizabeth Hardwick that few magazines would try out on their readers. The princess thought they were worth Drinting, and she was right. Poetry is another of the princess' passions, and Botteghe has it in abundance. It ranges from the pretentious, comma-plagued lines of Philippines-born Jose Garcia Villa:

As, I, am, long, and, beautiful, (Like, a, fish; like, a, rose)

to the rollicking and rare gaiety of James Broughton:

Come dally me, darling, dally me with kisses, loiter me with lingers while the Romes all burn.

So far, the world has paid scant attention to the princess and her highbrow Botteghe. U.S. circulation is under 2,000, much less in other countries, and even the rich princess has had to sell some of her paintings to keep it going. But Marguerite Caetani is an old hand at backing forlorn literary causes. For ten years she ran France's distinguished quarterly Commerce, and her home in Paris, like the palace in Rome, was a gathering place for writers. Her distant cousin, T. S. Eliot, warned her not to start Botteghe, told her it was tough enough to back a high brow magazine in one language, let alone three.

But Princess Caetani refuses to talk about quitting, hopes that a sudden spurt in circulation will save the magazine and let her keep her paintings. Certainly, the more creative U.S. highbrows would regard the death of Botteghe as a calamity. In the U.S., the literary quarterlies have become forums for academicians whose most congenial task is to criticize each other's criticism. Young writers and un conventional writers have never had too many places where they could turn, have fewer than ever today.

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