Hermit in Paris
Table of Contents
Questionnaire, 1956 - Italo Calvino’s Replies to a Survey by Il Café
My Travelling Companions (Young Creative Writers)
Political Autobiography of a Young Man
I should like to thank Luca Baranelli for his incalculable support in this and in other matters, and for his equally precious friendship.
E. C.
Translator’s Note
I should like to acknowledge the valuable help given by the following: Luca Baranelli; Christopher Brooke; Giovanni Capoccia; Alan Divack and the reference librarian of the Ford Foundation; Cathy McLaughlin; Francesca Miotto; Oliver Ready; Neelam Srivastava; Emmanuela Tandello; Diego Zancani.
Preface
The bulk of this volume consists of twelve items published by Italo Calvino in different books, one unpublished piece ‘American Diary’ and one work that was never published in Italy but was printed in Lugano in a limited edition,
Hermit in Paris.
In August 1985, a month before he was due to leave for Harvard University, Calvino was tired and worried. He would have liked to have finished the six lectures that he was preparing before arriving in the USA, but he could not do so. He would make corrections, change the order, fiddle about, and then would leave everything as before, or almost. He was making no progress.
I thought that a possible solution was to persuade him to move on to something else, to concentrate on another of the many projects he had in mind. To my question: ‘Why don’t you leave the lectures and finish
The Road to San Giovanni
?’ he replied, ‘Because that’s my biography, and my biography is not yet . . .’ He did not finish the sentence. Was he about to say ‘is not yet finished’? Or maybe he was thinking, ‘That book is not
all
of my autobiography’?
Years later I came across a folder entitled
Autobiographical Pieces
containing a series of texts with notes already written by him about their first publication. There was, then, another autobiographical project, quite different from the one hinted at in
The
Road to San Giovanni.
It is difficult, not to say impossible, to understand how Calvino would have presented these works, which he left in chronological order. There is no doubt that they refer to the most important aspects of his life, with the explicit intention of explaining precisely his political, literary and existential choices, of informing us about how, why and when they happened. The
when
was very important: in the note accompanying ‘Political Autobiography of a Young Man’, Calvino writes: ‘As for the convictions expressed . . . they – like every other work in this collection – are only the testimony of what I believed at that particular time and not necessarily afterwards.’
The material prepared by Calvino for this book goes up to December 1980. It is by the express will of the author that three of these fourteen pieces appear in two successive versions. I added the last five texts because they are strictly autobiographical and because they seem to me to complete the others.
Looking at this collection of texts it appeared to me that some of them lacked that sense of immediacy that one expects from an autobiography. It is not just for this reason that I thought of including ‘American Diary 1959–1960’. Calvino talked and wrote on several occasions of the importance that journey had in his life. And yet he decided, when it was already at the stage of second proofs, not to publish
An Optimist in America,
the book inspired by that trip. The explanation for this brusque change of mind is to be found in a letter to Luca Baranelli of 24 January 1985: ‘I decided not to publish the book because rereading it at proof stage I felt it was too slight as a work of literature and not original enough to be a work of journalistic reportage. Was I right? Who knows? If it had been published then, the book would at least have been a document of its time, and of one stage in my journey . . .’
‘American Diary’, however, is nothing but a series of letters sent regularly to his friend Daniele Ponchiroli at Einaudi, but meant also for all his colleagues at the Turin publishing house and even, as Calvino says, for anyone who wants to know about his impressions and experiences in America.
As an autobiographical document – and not as a piece of literature – it seems to me to be absolutely essential; as a self-portrait, it is the most spontaneous and direct one we have.
The sense of this collection, then, could be: to effect a closer relationship between the author and his readers, and to deepen it by means of these writings. Calvino believed that ‘what counts is what we are, and the way we deepen our relationship with the world and with others, a relationship that can be one both of love for all that exists and of desire for its transformation.’
Esther Calvino
Stranger in Turin
I do not think that those of us who – in the field of literature – are Turinese by adoption are very numerous. I know plenty who are Milanese by adoption – no wonder: almost all the writers in Milan are not native; the number of adopted Roman authors continues to grow; Florentines by adoption there still are, though less than before; but as for Turin, one feels that one has to be born there, or to have come down there from the valleys of Piedmont following the natural movement of the rivers that flow into the Po. In my case, however, Turin was actually the result of a deliberate choice. I come from a region, Liguria, which has only fragments or hints of a literary tradition, so that everyone can – luckily! – discover or invent his own tradition. Liguria is a region which has no clearly defined cultural capital, so the Ligurian writer – a rare bird, to tell the truth – is also a migrating bird.
Turin possessed certain qualities that attracted me that were not unlike those of my own region, and were ones I preferred: absence of romantic froth, reliance above all on one’s own work, an innate diffidence and reserve; and in addition the sure sense that one was part of the big world of action, not the closed provincial world, a pleasure in living that was tempered with irony, and a rational, clarifying intelligence. So it was Turin’s moral, civic image, not its literary dimension, that attracted me. It was the lure of the Turin of thirty years earlier, which had been perceived and evoked by another adoptive Turinese, the Sardinian Antonio Gramsci, and which had been defined in certain passages that are still so stimulating today, written by a Turin intellectual – this time of genuine extraction – Piero Gobetti.
1
This was the Turin of the revolutionary workers who in the aftermath of the First World War had organized themselves into the city’s ruling class, the Turin of the anti-Fascist intellectuals who had refused to compromise. Is this Turin still alive today? Does it make its presence felt in today’s Italy? I believe that it possesses the virtue of retaining its strength like a fire beneath the ashes, and that it continues to survive even when it least seems so. The Turin that was for me a world of literature was identified with one single person, to whom I had been lucky enough to be close for a number of years but whom all too soon I lost: a man about whom much is written these days, and often in a way that makes it difficult to recognize him. The fact is that his own writings are not capable of giving us a full picture of him: for it was his example of productivity that was fundamental, witnessing how the culture of the man of letters and the sensitivity of the poet were transformed into productive work, into values that were put at the service of his neighbours, into the organization and commerce of ideas, into practice and into a school of all the techniques of which a modern cultural civilization consists.
I am talking of Cesare Pavese. And I can add that for me, as for others who knew and saw him regularly, what Turin taught us amounted to what Pavese taught us. My life in Turin is deeply marked by his example; he was the first to read every page I wrote; if I have a profession it is because he was the one who taught me it, introducing me to that world of publishing for which Turin is today still a cultural centre of more than just national importance; lastly, it was he who taught me to see his city, to appreciate its subtle beauty walking along its streets and in its hills.
Here I really ought to change topic and say how a stranger like myself manages to fit in with this landscape, how I have settled in, I who am more a rockfish or woodland bird who has been transplanted here among these colonnades, to sniff the mists and the sub-Alpine chills. But that would be a long story. I would need to attempt a definition of the secret interplay of motifs which links the spare geometry of these grid-plan streets with the spare geometry of the dry-stone walls of my own countryside. And explain too the particular relationship between civilization and the world of nature in Turin: which is such that all it takes is the re-emergence of green leaves along the boulevards, the glimmer of the river Po, the warm proximity of the hills, and suddenly one’s heart is open again to landscapes that had never really been forgotten, and you rethink your position within the vast world of nature, in short you taste the flavour of being alive.
[‘L’Approdo’, Rivista trimestrale di lettere ed arti, II.1 (January– March, 1953).]
The Writer and the City
If one admits that a writer’s work can be influenced by the environment in which it is produced, by the elements of the surrounding scenery, then one has to admit that Turin is the ideal city in which to be a writer. I do not understand how one could manage to write in one of those cities where images of the present are so overwhelming and powerful that they leave the writer no margin of space or silence. Here in Turin you can write because past and future have greater prominence than the present, the force of past history and the anticipation of the future give a concreteness and sense to the discrete, ordered images of today. Turin is a city which entices the writer towards vigour, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way towards madness.
[Unpublished note on Turin from 1960.]
Questionnaire, 1956
Italo Calvino’s Replies to a Survey by
Il Café
Bio-bibliographical details
I was born on 15 October 1923 in Santiago de Las Vegas, a village near Havana, where my agronomist father, a Ligurian from San Remo, was the director of an experimental agriculture institute, and my mother, who was Sardinian and a botanist, was his assistant. Unfortunately, I cannot remember anything about Cuba, because by 1925 I was already in Italy, in San Remo, where my father had returned with my mother to take charge of an experimental floriculture institute. My birth overseas now boils down to an unusual detail on official forms, a bundle of family memories, and a first name which was inspired by the
pietas
of émigrés towards their own household gods, but which back in their homeland sounded brazen and pompously patriotic like Carducci’s poetry. I lived with my parents in San Remo until I was twenty, in a garden full of rare and exotic plants, and in the woods of the hinterland behind San Remo with my father, an old and indefatigable hunter. When I was old enough to go to university, I enrolled in the Agriculture Faculty because of this family tradition and with no real vocation, but my head was already full of literature. In the meantime the German occupation took place and, fulfilling political ideals I had held for some time, I fought with the Garibaldini partisans in the same woods that my father had taught me to know as a boy. After the Liberation I enrolled in the Arts Faculty, in Turin, and I graduated, far too quickly, in 1947, with a thesis on Joseph Conrad. My initiation into the world of literature came about towards the end of 1945, in the ambience of Vittorini
2
and his journal Il Politecnico, which published one of my first short stories. But by then my very first short story had been read by Pavese who recommended it to Muscetta’s
Aretusa
which published it. My development as a writer was primarily due to Pavese’s teaching: I worked closely with him on a daily basis in the last years of his life. I have been living in Turin since 1945, always in the ambit of the Einaudi publishing house, for which I started to work by selling books on hire purchase, and it is in their editorial offices that I still work today. In the past ten years I have written only a fraction of the things I would have liked to write, and I have published only a small proportion of what I have written, in the four books that have been printed so far.
Which critic has been most supportive of you? And which most hostile?
They have all been far too generous about my books, right from the outset, from the most authoritative names to the young critics of my own generation: among the former I am delighted to mention here De Robertis, who has followed my work closely from my first book onwards, and Cecchi
3
for what he wrote about
The Cloven Viscount
, not to mention Bo, Bocelli, Pampaloni, Falqui and also poor old Cajumi who was my first ever reviewer. The few critics who have been unfavourable are those who intrigue me most, the ones from whom I expect more: however, I have not been lucky enough to have received a negative critique which is both serious and in-depth, one which teaches me useful things. I did receive an article by Enzo Giachino, when
The Path
to the Spiders’ Nests
came out, a total, absolute dismissal of the book, a real hatchet-job, but also extremely witty, which is perhaps one of the best articles written about my books, one of the few which every so often I like to reread, but not even that taught me anything really: it attacked only external aspects of the novel, which I could have improved by myself.
Could you tell us briefly something about the aesthetic canon that you
subscribe to?
I expounded some general ideas of mine on literature in a lecture last February, entitled ‘
Il midollo del leone
’ [‘The Lion’s Marrow’] and recently published in a journal. At present I would not want to add anything to that. But bear in mind that I am far from claiming that I succeed in putting into practice what I go around preaching. I write as well as I can on each occasion.
From what background, and from what characters and situations, do you
like to derive the themes of your books?
I still don’t really know, and this is perhaps why I change tack so frequently. In nearly all my most successful works there is the backdrop of the Riviera, and they are therefore often connected to the world of my childhood and adolescence. From the point of view of fidelity to one’s own themes, my moving away from the town of my childhood and my ancestors deprived me of a certain source of inspiration, but on the other hand one cannot write about something one is still inside. For a long time now I have been trying to write something about Turin, which is for many profound reasons my adopted city, but it never works out properly. Perhaps I need to leave Turin to manage it. As for social classes, I cannot say that I write about one rather than another. As long as I was writing about partisans I was certain that it worked well: I had understood lots of things about the partisans, and through them I had become familiar with several social strata, including those on the very fringes of society. I am very interested in working-class people, but I still cannot write about them convincingly: it is one thing to be interested in something, it is quite another knowing how to represent it successfully. I am not really discouraged by this: I will learn to do it, sooner or later. I do not have very strong roots in my class, the bourgeoisie, since I was born into a nonconformist family, which was very far from traditional ways of thinking and behaving; and I should say that the middle class do not interest me very much, not even for polemical purposes. I am going into all this detail because I set out to reply to the question, not because these are problems that disrupt my sleep. The stories that I am interested in narrating are always stories about a search for human completeness, integration, to be achieved through trials that are both practical and moral at the same time, and that constitute something above and beyond all the alienation and division that is imposed on contemporary man. This is where any poetic and moral unity in my work should be sought.
Who is your favourite contemporary Italian novelist? And which of the
younger writers interests you most?
I think that Pavese remains the most important, most complex and the densest Italian writer of our time. Whatever problem you set yourself, you cannot but refer back to him, both as a literary expert and as a writer. Vittorini, too, with the literary discourse he initiated, influenced my development strongly. I say ‘initiated’, because today we have the impression that it was a discourse left half-finished, which we are waiting to take up again. Later on, once we had got beyond the phase of a predominant interest in new experiments with language, I moved closer to Moravia, who is the only writer in Italy who is an author in a way that I would call ‘institutional’: that is, he produces at regular intervals works which each time chart the moral definitions of our times, definitions which deal with the way we behave, the way society is developing, and general trends in the way we think. My penchant for Stendhal makes me feel I have much in common with Tobino,
4
though I cannot forgive him his affected glorying in being provincial and, what’s more, Tuscan. I have a particular predilection for and indeed friendship with Carlo Levi,
5
first and foremost because of his anti-romantic polemics, and secondly because his non-fiction narratives represent the most serious way forward for a literature that deals with society in a problematic manner; however, I do not go along with his claim that today this kind of narrative must replace the novel, which, as far as I am concerned, serves other purposes.
Turning to younger writers, in the small group of authors born around 1915, Cassola
6
and Bassani
7
;
have set about studying certain fractures in the Italian middle-class conscience, and theirs are the most interesting stories that one can read nowadays; but in Cassola I would criticize a certain superficiality of reactions in the way his works deal with human relationships, and in Bassani the hint of preciosity that makes you think of the Crepuscular poets in Italy. Among those of us who are even younger and who began by working with story-formats that were tough, set among workers, full of action, the one who has gone furthest down that road is Rea.
8
Now there is Pasolini, one of the foremost exponents of his generation both as poet and as a literary expert: he has written a novel about which I feel many reservations as regards its ‘poetics’, but the more one thinks about it, the more you feel it is something which is well-finished and which will last.
Which is your favourite contemporary foreign novelist?
I wrote an article about a year ago on what Hemingway meant for me when I started out as a writer. Once I realized that Hemingway was not enough for me, I cannot say that his place has been taken by any other contemporary author. For the last five or six years, like everyone else, I have been making inroads into Thomas Mann, and I am more and more impressed by the richness of his subject matter. However, I continue to believe that nowadays we have to write in a different way. I am freer in my relationships with writers of the past and I indulge in limitless enthusiasms; in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries I have a whole host of models and writers I regard as friends whom I never tire of going back to.
How have your books been received outside Italy?
It is too soon to say.
The Cloven Viscount
is just coming out in France, and will come out shortly in Germany.
The Path to the
Spiders’ Nests
will be published in Britain in the spring, to be followed six months later by
Adam, One Afternoon
.
What are you working on now?
I never count my chickens until they’re hatched.
Do you think writers should be involved in politics? And how should
they do so? To what political tendency do you belong?
I believe that all men should be involved in politics. And writers too, inasmuch as they are men. I believe that our civic and moral conscience should influence the man first and then the writer. It is a long road, but there is no other. And I believe that the writer must keep open a discourse which in its implications cannot but be political as well. I have remained faithful to these principles, and in the nearly twelve years of my membership of the Communist Party, my conscience as a Communist and my conscience as a writer have not entered into those agonizing conflicts which have tormented many of my friends, making them believe that it was necessary to opt for either one conscience or the other. Everything that forces us to give up a part of ourselves is negative. I participate in politics and literature in different ways, according to my abilities, but both things interest me as forming one and the same discourse about humanity.
[
Il Café
, IV.1 (January 1956) introduced Italo Calvino under the rubric ‘
La nuova letteratura
’ (
New Writing
) with a short story (‘
Un
viaggio con le mucche
’ (‘A Journey with the Cows’), later included in
Marcovaldo
) preceded by his replies to a questionnaire set by G. B. Vicari. The same text, with a few variants, is found in Elio Filippo Accrocca,
Ritratti su misura (Personal Portraits)
(Venice: Sodalizio del Libro, 1960) and appears below.]
Personal Portrait
I am the son of scientists: my father was an agronomist, my mother a botanist; both were university professors. Among my family and relations only scientific subjects were held in any honour; one maternal uncle was a university professor of chemistry married to another chemist (in fact I had two uncles who were chemists married to two women chemists); my brother is a university lecturer in geology. I am the black sheep of the family, the only one to have studied literature. My father was Ligurian, from an old San Remo family; my mother is Sardinian. My father lived for about twenty years in Mexico, in charge of various institutes of experimental agronomy, then Cuba; he took my mother to Cuba: they had got to know each other through exchanging scientific papers, and they were married during a whirlwind visit to Italy; I was born in a village near Havana, Santiago de Las Vegas, on 15 October 1923. Unfortunately I do not remember anything about Cuba, because before I was even two I was already in Italy, in San Remo, to which my father had returned, along with my mother, to be director of the experimental floriculture institute. All I retain of my birth overseas is a complicated detail on my birth certificate (which in brief biographical notes I replace with the more
accurate
one: born in San Remo), a certain amount of family memories, and my first name, which my mother, thinking that I was going to grow up in a foreign land, decided to give me so that I would not forget my ancestors’ homeland, but which in Italy sounds belligerently nationalist. I lived with my parents in San Remo until I was twenty, in a garden full of rare and exotic plants, and in the woods of the Ligurian pre-Alps, along with my father who was a tireless old hunter. After secondary school I made some attempts to follow the family’s scientific tradition, but my head was already full of literature and I gave up. In the meantime the German occupation had taken place and, following political feelings I had held since adolescence, I fought with the partisans, in the Garibaldi Brigades. The partisan war took place in the same woods which my father had taught me to know since childhood; I deepened my identification with that landscape, and in it I made my first discovery of the pain of the human world.
It was that experience which, some months later, in the autumn of 1945, gave birth to my first short stories. The first one was sent to a friend, who was in Rome at the time; Pavese thought it was good and passed it on to Muscetta, editor of the journal
Aretusa
. That issue of
Aretusa
came out very late, the following year. Meanwhile Vittorini had read another story of mine and had published it in the weekly
Il Politecnico,
in December 1945.
By then I had enrolled in the Literature Faculty of Turin University, going straight into the third year, as a result of the exemptions given to war returnees. During 1946 I took all the examinations that the four-year course required, and I even obtained some good marks. In ’47 I graduated with a thesis on the Opera Omnia of Joseph Conrad. I went through university too quickly, and I regret it; but then my mind was on other things: on politics, in which I got involved passionately; on journalism, because I was writing pieces on a wide range of topics for
l’Unità
; on creative literature because in those years I wrote very many short stories and one novel (in twenty days in December ’46), entitled
The Path to the Spiders’ Nests
: that was how that world of poetics evolved from which, like it or not, I have never substantially departed. From 1945, and especially from when Pavese returned to Turin in ’46, I had started to gravitate around the Einaudi publishing house, for whom I began working by going round selling books on hire purchase: I became an editor there in 1947, and am still working for them. But I also felt the lure and influence of Milan and Vittorini, right from the time of
Il Politecnico
. As for Rome, I have a relationship of both polemical rejection and attraction to the city, attracted by the presence of Carlo Levi and other critics such as Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg.
I have travelled through Europe, both on this side and on the other side of the Iron Curtain; but travels are not events of much importance.
As for work involving a considerable amount of scholarship and bibliographical research, I produced the edition of
Italian
Folktales
(1956); it took two years of total commitment and I enjoyed it; but afterwards I abandoned the career of the scholar; I am more interested in being a writer, and that already causes me enough sweat.
[E. F. Accrocca,
Ritratti su misura (Personal Portraits)
(Venice: Sodalizio del Libro, 1960).]
