Germain des Pres. Bang in the middle of it was Gino Nibbi’s Leonardo Bookshop.
We venerated Gino. He was the boss. None of us really knew why. He had a number of engaging characteristics but charm has never been required of oracles, rather the contrary. He was prodigiously cultivated but there were several other bright boys in the neighbourhood. It certainly wasn’t an irresistible determination to dominate the scene which endowed him with his unaccountable authority. Nobody could have been less self-assertive. Still, there it was. We didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought of us but we candidly hankered after Gino’s good opinion. However much or however well you wrote or painted or sculpted or composed, unless you had Gino’s okay you didn’t qualify as any sort of artist, not even in your own eyes. Acceptance by Gino wasn’t signified by so much as a public pat on the back but somehow the news got around. From then on, you were taken seriously.
Initiates—Albert Tucker, say, or George Bell, or Adrian Lawlor—rarely let a week go by without visiting Gino at the Leonardo. They—we—went there to riffle through books in languages we couldn’t read and to look at reproductions of painters we’d never heard of. We went there to pore, goggle-eyed, over copies of transition and Minotaure and to spell our way through volumes of poems by Peret and Aragon. We went there for the delight of Gino’s urbane conversation. In fact, about the only thing we didn’t go there for was to buy books.
One or two local politicians had had the dotty idea that it would impress the electorate if they set themselves up as men of taste and they would sometimes drop in at the Leonardo. So would Melbourne’s solitary press lordling. So would a handful of well-heeled ‘professional men’. I hope they, at least, bought some things from time to time and, if they did, I hope Gino upped his prices. The rest of us were far too broke to think of buying the sumptuous goods he had to offer. We were strictly Penguin Books men. Gino never seemed to mind. I always had the impression that we were, if anything, rather more welcome than the paying customers.
Come to think of it, I did once buy a book from Gino—a lavish limited edition of a story by Richard Aldington printed at Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press. Gino hunched his shoulders miserably and groaned a bit when I asked the price, as if the mention of money occasioned him deep physical pain, which quite possibly it did. Finally, he named some absurdly low figure and then, evidently deciding that it was nonetheless too much, insisted on throwing in another Hours Press production, Samuel Beckett’s first published work, the poem Whoroscope.
Long afterwards, meeting Beckett in Paris, I mentioned that I had this booklet of his and told him where and how I’d acquired it. Beckett being Beckett, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at the effect which the innocuous little anecdote had on him. That furrowed anguished face of his grew still more furrowed, still more anguished. He evinced signs of consternation, of positive alarm. Whoroscope consisted of a single folded sheet enclosed in a flimsy cardboard cover, the sort of thing that is easily lost or casually thrown away, especially when the author, as was Beckett’s case when the thing was published, is completely unknown. A large proportion of the tiny original edition must long since have disappeared. So how, asked Beckett, in a sort of panic, could one of the few survivors ever have got to Melbourne, of all places? There was, he insisted, something downright spooky about it. He himself hadn’t seen a copy in twenty years.
For a moment, I was tempted to show myself as princely as Gino had been and to make Beckett a present of Whoroscope. Only for a moment, though, and, in due course, when my financial situation was sicklier than usual, I sold it for enough to keep me going for a couple of months. It was somehow altogether natural that Gino’s friendly paw should have been extended like this, disregarding time and space, just when I needed it. There was always a touch of the necromancer about him.
Half the literary memoirs of the Twenties and Thirties contain some dewy-eyed recollections of those bookshops which were something more than merely commercial establishments where books are sold: Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Co. in Paris, Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in London, Orioli’s Lungarno in Florence. No doubt they were everything we’ve been told. But it seems unjust that a few of the rose petals scattered over them couldn’t have been set aside for the Leonardo. If it had been located anywhere except in Melbourne it would have topped the list.
The Leonardo didn’t even look like a bookshop. It looked like a rather untidy club. There was no counter, any more than there would be in a club. In the middle of the room there was a large table which, in a proper club, would have been bestrewn with copies of Country Life and the Army List. Here, such hearty literature had been replaced by those unwholesome transitions and Minotaures which awed us so deeply. Gino sat behind a smaller table in the corner. He was somewhat below average in height and distinctly above average in bulk. Years of unrestrained gobbling of pasta and risotto had given him an impressive belly and a round jowly face. With his head bent over a book or a portfolio of prints, as it invariably was, he looked, if such a thing can be imagined, like an Italianate Buddha meditating under the Bo Tree. Strangers were received with a polite but abstracted nod. For friends and acquaintances he would heave himself out of his chair and advance to shake hands in the European manner.
He must have been in Australia for ten years or more when I first knew him but he still retained a succulent al dente Italian accent. Sometimes, too, he would bring out a word into which he had introduced a slight and pleasing variation, not exactly Italian but rather pure Ginoan. To this day, for example, I can clearly hear his engaging pronunciation of ‘sword’, with no nonsense about eliding the ‘w’. Sword, in Gino’s mouth, was always flatly ‘sward’.
In spite of these minor idiosyncrasies, his vocabulary was notable for its range and precision. If the exact word he wanted momentarily eluded him, he would interrupt himself for as long as was needed in order to recapture it. When he did recall it, it unfailingly proved well worth waiting for. In an article about him which I read not long ago, Desmond O’Grady describes one such moment and avers that it occurred during a public lecture. I could have sworn that it was in the course of a conversation with a small group of us at the Leonardo. Not that it matters. O’Grady and I both have a memory of Gino discoursing fluently on some sculpture or other. All of a sudden—silence, right in the middle of a sentence. It was as though poor Gino had had a stroke. One never quite got used to these abrupt spasms of speechlessness. Nothing was to be heard but little gasps and grunts of frustration. His hands clawed tormentedly in the air in an effort to trace the shapes he had in mind. We did our best to help him out.
‘Spiral, Gino?’
‘No, no, is not spiral.’
More cabbalistic scrabblings.
‘Coiled?’
‘No, no, no.’
One of us tried a long shot: ‘Convoluted?’
‘No, no, no’ and then, exhaling with the vast relief of a man who has at last succeeded in dislodging a fishbone in his throat, ‘Helicoidal!’ We felt like applauding.
With no swards to worry about and with plenty of time to pick his way among the convolutions and helicoidals, Gino’s written English flowed smoothly. His style, however, remained unequivocally his own, and a splendidly rococo style it was. I seem to have preserved an article he published on El Greco and it abounds in characteristic Ginoan locutions. ‘He digested the fire and projected it with the same craving incandescence in his own direction ... phosphorescence wriggling along edges of contours ... climaxes of well interwoven dramas, without the auxilium of preliminary tests ...’
Myself, though, I preferred Gino’s prose as exemplified in his private correspondence. One particular letter I had from him has never ceased to enchant me. It was written from Rome, towards the end of Holy Week. As a stout anticlerical of the old school, Gino thought it desirable to warn
