Hermit in Paris (11 page)
Those who are not used to these things are the whites, because the blacks had never dared do such things, and of course they don’t know what to say except that there has been infiltration by Communists. The first battle was the one about buses, last year. The boycotting of the buses following an incident (the arrest of a black girl who had wanted to sit on a seat reserved for whites) was the first mass protest by the blacks and it was successful. Then they tried to mount a legal action to have the whites’ park open to blacks, but the town council ordered all parks to be closed, and so the city was for the whole summer, and still is today, without a public park, a swimming-pool, etc. These protests were organized by this young black political activist, Luther King (who like all the others is officially a Baptist Church minister), who has no particular social or political programme except equal rights for blacks. Actually there is no doubt that once they gain equality the blacks will be even more conservative than the rest, as has happened with other minorities once they emerge from poverty, the Irish and the Italians; but for the meantime, this spirit of struggle is something unique in America today and it is important that there is also a mobilization of black students, who usually think that they have made it and try only not to cause trouble. With this courtroom coffee-shop row, last week the whole city went into a state of tension like in a civil war, the KKK put bombs in several houses (I visited some of the people who had been bombed) and a few days ago they clubbed a black woman over the head with a baseball bat and the judge did not find the KKK person accused guilty despite witnesses, photographs, etc. The thing that is difficult for a European to understand is how these things can happen in a nation which is 75 percent non-segregationist, and how they can take place without the involvement of the rest of the country. But the autonomy of the individual States is such that here they are even more outside Washington’s jurisdiction or New York public opinion, than if they were, say, in the Middle East. And there is no possibility (or perhaps they lack the ability?) for the black movement here to find allies, neither for King nor for the more left-wing activists, who maintain (correctly) that the crucial point is that of being allowed to vote. King now has allies in the colonial peoples’ movement, but they can only provide moral support; he was recently in Ghana, Egypt, and India; he was also invited to Russia, but refused because otherwise, etc. So the minute I arrived in Montgomery, into the hottest part of this situation, I learnt that King was in town and I got them to take me to him. He is a very stout and capable person, physically resembling Bourghiba a bit, with a little moustache: the fact that he is a pastor has nothing to do with his physical appearance (his second-in-command and successor, Abernathy, a young rather fat man who also has a small moustache, looks like a jazz-player), these are politicians whose only weapon is the pulpit and even their non-violence does not really have a mystical aura about it: it is the only form of struggle possible and they use it with the controlled political skill which the extreme harshness of their conditions has taught them. These black leaders – I’ve approached several of them in the last few days, of different tendencies – are lucid, decisive people, totally devoid of black self-pity, not terribly kind (though of course I was an unknown foreigner who had turned up to nose around in days which were very eventful for them). The race question is a damnable thing: for a century a huge country like the South has not spoken or thought about anything else, just this problem, whether they are progressives or reactionaries. So I arrive escorted by blacks in the sacristy of Abernathy’s church and King is there along with another black minister who is also a leader, and I am present at a council-of-war meeting where they decide on this Sunday’s course of action which I have just described to you; then we go to another church where the students have gathered, in order to give them this instruction, and then I stay for this dramatic, moving meeting, I the sole white among three thousand black students, perhaps the first white to do so in the whole history of the South. Naturally I have come here also with introductions to extremely racist, ultra-reactionary high-society ladies, and I have to divide my days with acrobatic skill so that they do not suspect what a deadly enemy they are harbouring in their midst (above all whites are forbidden by law from entering blacks’ houses or getting into a car with them). From the Baptist church I move on to the city’s theatre where respectable people have gathered for the gala première of the Chicago Ballet, to which I have been invited by the local paper’s gossip columnist, a good friend of the Dominican dictator, Trujillo. Today, however, after the Capitol, I have ten minutes of peace to calm down after all the emotion, then a high-society lady comes to collect me and shows me, as we drive along, their factory of gherkins in vinegar, and hints vaguely at the day’s ‘troubles’ caused by that agitator Luther King. This famous Southern aristocracy gives me the impression of being uniquely stupid in its continual harking back to the glories of the Confederacy; this Confederate patriotism which survives intact after a century, as though they were talking of things from their youth, in the tone of someone who is confident you share their emotions, is something which is more unbearable than ridiculous.
8.3.60
Meanwhile, Monday 7 March I crossed Alabama and Georgia by bus, through the poverty-stricken countryside, the blacks’ wooden shacks, the squalid little towns. The sad conclusion is that the American economy has not got the slightest capacity to solve the problems of the underdeveloped areas; everything that was done was carried out at the time of the New Deal; after that, absolutely nothing, and the economic collapse of the South hits you in the eyes, and I am not surprised that they still talk about the Civil War as though it were yesterday; nothing has been done in a hundred years to repair the ruin of the South caused by the War of Secession.
Consequently, my impressions of the South would be very dark if I had not discovered
Savannah
I stopped at Savannah, Georgia, to sleep and have a look at it, attracted only by its beautiful name and by some historical, literary or musical memory, but no one said I should go there, no one in any State of the United States. AND IT IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CITY IN THE UNITED STATES. Absolutely, there is nothing to compare with it. I don’t know yet what Charleston, South Carolina, is like, where I will be going tomorrow and which is more famous. This is a town where nobody ever comes (despite having a top-class tourist infrastructure and knowing how to present its attractions – relating to both history and town planning – with a sophistication unknown elsewhere; but this is perhaps the secret of its charm, that internal American tourism, which is always so phoney, has not touched it). It is a town which has remained practically unchanged, just as it was in the prosperous days of the South at the start of the nineteenth century, in the heyday of cotton; and it is one of the only American cities to have been built with unique urban planning, of extreme rational regularity and variety and harmony: at every second intersection there is a small tree-lined square, all identical, but always different, because of the pleasantness of the buildings which range from the colonial period to that of the Civil War. I stayed there spending the whole day going round from street to street, enjoying the forgotten pleasure of feeling a city, a city which is the expression of a civilization, and it is only in this way by seeing Savannah that you can understand what type of civilization the South was. Of course it is a city of the utmost and lethal ennui, but ennui with a style, full of rationality, Protestantism, England. A boring, fussy city with detailed instructions in hotel bedrooms on the route to follow in case of an air-raid alarm; the most famous personality born here is the founder of the Girl Scouts; in a house where I went (because I was naturally curious to get to know the inhabitants) they served me tea, I mean tea, no whiskey, nothing alcoholic, just tea, the first time this has happened to me in this country. Here too, as elsewhere in the South, old ladies do nothing but talk of their ancestors, though here you understand what being a Southern gentleman or gentlewoman is really about, whereas in Montgomery they are frighteningly uncouth despite being rich – relatively rich for the South – while here everything exudes an air of genteel poverty (the city lives really off its port, which is the first harbour that I’ve seen which has a flavour of old America) and the attitude towards the blacks is one of sentimental paternalism. But tomorrow I will tell you all about
9.3.60
Charleston
Full of wonderful so-called
ante bellum
houses (pre- the War of Secession) and some even date from the eighteenth century, but filthy and falling apart. And as a city nothing to compare with Savannah.
And now?
I could go to North Carolina where I have been
invited to the University at Chapel Hill.
Or turn back towards the west, to
Colorado, where I have several invites.
And from there fly to Wyoming, where I have been
invited to a ranch.
And from there fly to the far north-west, to Seattle
in Washington State. Having omitted the
north-west is a mistake I cannot forgive myself.
And come back, stopping in Chicago, where I
stayed only a few days and the city certainly
has much more to be discovered.
But I would certainly also like to go back
to the two big cities in California.
I would like to continue to go zigzagging
round the whole continent, as I have been doing
now for the last two months.
Instead,
I am going back to New York to spend the two months that
still separate me from my return to Europe, because New York,
rootless city, is the only one where I could think I have put
down some roots, and in the end two months of travel are not
enough, and New York is the only place I could pretend to reside.
Two months which in the event will be
shortened by a series of invitations,
each one of three or four days and for
which I have already made precise note of the commitments and dates:
in a college of millionaire girls
in Bennington, Vermont
at Yale University
again at Harvard University
once more in Washington.
So now I am tortured by the thought that my
days in New York will fly away in a twinkling,
and the only thing I regret is
not being able to stay long enough in this city
about which for two months I have heard nothing but criticism
and I share all the criticisms that people make about it however
[Unpublished. Calvino tells the story of his journey to the United States in letters sent to the Einaudi publishing house.]
The Cloven Communist
I meet Italo Calvino in San Remo. This is a kind of very brief summer
ritual: it never lasts more than ten minutes and those minutes correspond
exactly to the sum of our silences. But this time the rule, which has been
in force now for many years, is no longer valid: there are too many reasons
for making an exception. First of all the publication of a large volume by
Einaudi,
Our Ancestors
, which contains not in any strict order
The Cloven Viscount
,
The Baron in the Trees
and
The Non-Existent Knight
; also the author’s journey to America. I do not know where to
begin, but I am quite clear in my own mind about my intention to get
Calvino to talk for our readers, and I suddenly find that, making a rapid
mental sketch of this Ligurian writer, I come up against the image of Cesare
Pavese. This is in a certain sense an obligatory point of reference, a way of
anchoring Calvino to his roots or rather of bringing together his natural
development (everything that relates to the Liguria in which he grew up)
and his intellectual formation, and perhaps something else as well. On this
occasion there is an important date, one that offers the pretext for reflecting
on quite a long period in our history. This is the tenth anniversary of the
death of Pavese and it takes place exactly on the 27
th
of this month. I go
back to the pain and surprise of those days, make a quick calculation of
everything that has happened since, of what we have become both individually and as a family and it is in this very context that I find the first
question to put to Calvino. The rest will come later: his work, his trip to
America, his political ideas. For the time being, starting from the memory
of Pavese means genuinely anchoring ourselves to our own history.
Ten years on from his death, what is your opinion of Pavese’s works?
What has time brought out and what has it, on the other hand, left
aside? Finally, if you feel you are in his debt, in what sense do you
think we should speak of such a debt?
A few weeks ago some friends from Rome came to Turin to make a documentary about Pavese’s city. I took them around, showing them the places where we went together: the River Po, the bars, the hills. Certainly in these ten years many things have changed, more than I expected. Already there is a ‘Pavese era’, with its own very distinct face – that twenty-year period 1930–50 which only now appears to us with a single physiognomy, spanning the war, unified in the look of the streets, in the design of objects, in the way women looked, in the way people behaved, and also in the psychological climate and the world of ideas. This is already enough to relegate Pavese to the past, but also to reaffirm his worth in a dimension that we previously did not pay enough attention to: he was the author of a fresco of his time which is without equal and which was articulated throughout his nine brief novels, as though it were a tightly packed and complete
comédie humaine
. How many things are there that, precisely because they are distant and almost incomprehensible today, turn out to be charged with fascinating poetic force! Where on earth can you find these days young people faced with long days and endless nights, who don’t know what to do or where to go, bored because of their own virginity and the void around them, not because they are sated and have a void inside them as they do today? And yet how authentic and credible it is, how we suffer this torment when we read Pavese! And this problem of solitude, what was it? Yet everything is so clear, painful and distant, just as Leopardi is clear, painful and distant.
Pavese’s nine novels have a stylistic and thematic unity which is extremely compact, yet each of them is so different from the next. I used to think
La casa in collina [The House on the Hill]
and
Tra donne sole [Amongst Women Only]
the best of them, each in its different way, but I reread recently
Il diavolo sulle colline [The
Devil in the Hills]
which, I remember, was the novel of his that I understood least, when Pavese gave me the manuscript to read. Now I see that it is a story that has many layers it can be read on, perhaps the richest of his novels, containing a highly complex and lively philosophical debate (though with maybe a bit too much discussion) and containing as if in concentrated form all the essence of Pavese the thinker (the Pavese of the diary and the essays), all fused into a narrative which is exciting, first-class, brim-full of things.
Of course no one in Italian literature followed the Pavese route. Neither in terms of language, nor in that way he had of extracting a poetic tension from a realistic, objective story, and not even in his despair, which initially seemed the element that was most likely to catch on. (Even internal suffering is something seasonal; who today wants to suffer?) Pavese has gone back to being ‘the most isolated voice in Italian poetry’, as the blurb read on an old edition of his
Lavorare stanca [Hard Labour]
, a blurb dictated, I think, by himself.
Even I myself, who am meant to be his disciple, in what sense do I deserve that label? What links me to Pavese is our common taste for a style that is both poetic and moral, a kind of toughness, and a love of many of the same authors: all things that I inherited from him, from the five years of almost daily contact I had with him; and that is no small amount. But in my own work, in the last ten years, I have moved away from the climate that prevailed when Pavese was the first reader and arbiter of everything I wrote. And who knows what he would say now! Some critics get it completely wrong, saying that my fantasy tales derive from Pavese’s ideas on ‘myth’. What has that got to do with them? Actually in his final essays Pavese maintained that one cannot endow with a poetic (‘mythic’, he would have said) force images from other epochs than our own, in other words he condemned a type of literature which coincidentally I was to undertake less than a year after he died. The truth is that our ways of working were always different; I do not start from considerations of poetic method: I career down dangerous roads, hoping always to survive through ‘natural’ strength. Pavese did not; as far as he was concerned, there was no such thing as a poet’s ‘nature’; everything was rigorous self-construction based on will power, he never took a step unless he was certain of what he was doing, in literature; if only he had been the same in his life!
Seeing that you have touched on the subject, can you tell us why for
some time you have preferred in your writing to work on the reflected
images of reality, on the ideas that sustain it, and have moved away from
the direct and immediate music of things.
I tried to answer this question in the preface to the volume
Our
Ancestors
which gathers together my three lyric-epic-comic novels,
The Cloven Viscount
,
The Baron in the Trees
,
The Non-Existent Knight
. Now that cycle is complete, finished, it’s there for whoever wants to study it or enjoy it; it’s not up to me any more. For me the only thing that counts is what I am going to do next, and for the moment I do not know what that will be. But as I told you earlier, I never start out from an idea of poetic method, I never say: ‘I will now do a realistic-objective story, or a psychological or fantasy one.’ 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 of both love for all that exists and of desire for its transformation. Then you put the point of the pen on the white page, work out a certain angle so that it produces the black signs which make sense, and wait to see what comes out of all this. (It is also true that you often end by tearing everything up.)
I have heard that you are preparing a book about your impressions of
your journey through the United States. Do you think that travelling
helps a writer these days? In your case, what positive and negative experiences did you draw from your trip to America?
When I set out for the United Sates, and also throughout my travels there, I swore that I would never write a book on America (there are already so many!). Now, however, I have changed my mind. Travel books are a useful, modest and yet self-contained way of writing literature. These are books that have a practical use, even though, or precisely because, countries change from year to year and in fixing them as you have seen them you record their changing essence; and in such books you can express something that goes beyond the description of places one has seen, a relationship between yourself and reality, a process of knowledge.
These are things I have come to believe only recently; up until yesterday I believed that travelling could only have an indirect influence on the substance of what I write. Here what was relevant was that I had had Pavese as my mentor, the great enemy of travelling. He used to say more or less that poetry comes from a germ that you carry in you for years, perhaps for ever; what influence can having spent a day or week here or there have on this incredibly slow maturation process? Certainly, travelling is a life experience, which can mature or change something in us like any other experience, this was what I thought, and a journey can help us write better because it has helped us understand something more of life; someone visits India, for instance, and on returning home will write better, say, his memories of his first day at school. In any case, I have always enjoyed travelling, leaving aside its effect on literature. And it was also in this spirit that I made my recent American trip: because I was interested in the United States, in what it is really like, not to undertake, I don’t know, some ‘literary pilgrimage’ or because I wanted ‘to be inspired by it’.
However, in the United States, I was seized, as never before, by a desire to know and possess fully a polymorphous and complex reality, something Other. What happened was something like falling in love. Lovers, as everyone knows, spend a lot of time arguing; and even now that I have returned, every so often I find myself arguing inside myself with America; but in any case I continue to live inside that experience, I fling myself avidly and jealously on everything I hear or read about that country which I claim to be the only one to understand. Seeing that in this case I was seized by ‘the music of things’, as you said earlier, Carlo, I really ought to hurry and try to put it down on paper.
Negative aspects of travel? Everyone will say that it distracts you from that horizon of set objects that constitute your own poetic world, it disperses that absorbed concentration which is a condition (one of the conditions) conducive to literary creation. But in the end, even if it is a dispersal, what does it matter? In human terms, it is better to travel than to stay at home. First of all live, and then philosophize and write. Writers above all should live with an attitude towards the world which effects a greater acquisition of truth. That small something which will reflect this on the page, anything, will be the literature of our time, nothing else.
What then does the return home represent, what value do your memories have as someone from Liguria?
Ligurians divide into two categories: those attached to their own place like limpets stuck to a rock, whom you could never move; and those who regard the world as their home and wherever they are they find themselves at home. But even the latter category, and I belong to them, as perhaps you do, too, come back home regularly, and stay attached to their land as much as the former. My own area, the Western Riviera, has become unrecognizable in the last fifteen years, but perhaps precisely because of that fact rediscovering behind all this cement the traces of a Liguria of my memory is an operation of patriotic
pietas
that betrays even more my love and trepidation for the place. It is just like scraping away today’s dominant commercialized mentality to find the old ethical substratum our families used to have, and that in your case, Carlo, must be one of a Catholicism with Jansenist overtones, whereas for me it is a secular tradition, deriving from Mazzinian and free-thinking Masonic roots, all geared towards an ethics of ‘achievement’. What binds me to my home area, above all to the land we had above San Remo, is the memory of my father, which seems to grow deeper and deeper, one of the strangest personalities and existences, yet also one of the most characteristic of the generation that grew up after the Risorgimento, and the last Ligurian to be typical of a Liguria that no longer exists (typical even in the fact of his having spent a third of his life on the other side of the Atlantic).
However, I realize that these are sentimental factors whereas rationally I have always sought to look at things from the point of view of the most advanced standpoint of the world of productivity, the sectors of society which are most decisive for the history of humanity, whether these be in industrial Europe, America or in Russia. When I was younger this contradiction preoccupied me considerably: if I knew that the world that counted was the one that I have just described, why in creative terms did I have to remain bound to the Riviera which survives on a subsistence economy, caught between the false prosperity of tourism and an agriculture which is largely that of a depressed area? And yet, when I wrote stories set in the Riviera, the images came to me very clearly, precisely, whereas when I wrote about the industrial world everything turned out less focused, greyish. The fact is that we write well about what we have left behind, since it represents something finished (though later you discover it is not over at all).
You always have to start out from what you are. Sociological criticism could perform this concrete service instead of moving around in generic terms as it does: define the true essence of every writer from his own point of view, uncover his real social background which perhaps is in total contrast with appearances. In my case they could perhaps discover that deep down they will find the rural smallholder, an individualist, a hard worker, mean, hostile to the State and to the taxman, who, reacting against an agricultural economy which brings no returns, and to the remorse he feels for having left the country in the hands of tenants, proposes universal solutions to his crisis: Communism or the industrial world or the rootless life of globe-trotting intellectuals, or maybe just rediscovering on the page the harmony with nature that has been lost in the real world.