Hermit in Paris (14 page)
Our relations were strained as though between a father and son, perhaps precisely because, as between father and son, there was an affection and respect which he had in me and I held for him, and this turned into an antagonism: in him because he saw I was different from what he had hoped, and in me for always disappointing him. He was an old-fashioned man; but in educating us in a revolutionary discipline that he had maintained despite everything, he injected a moral warmth, a genuine passion for human worth, which rescued his obsession with rigour from any calculated coldness.
Celeste Negarville was about ten years his junior (he was forty at the Liberation) but already represented a different epoch. The revolutionary proletariat had made him enjoy the pleasure of the larger political game, and he used this experience with all the composure of the most expert and skilled member of the ruling classes. It was said that in Rome at the Liberation this ex-worker, a hero of conspiracies and prison terms now turned government minister, had impressed everyone with his unsuspected personality, that of a real gentleman, with his intelligence, elegance and love of life, and at the same time his bond with the masses which was what gave him his strength. When I began to follow his career, which was on his return to Turin, the exciting time was over, and there was now no hope of being able to develop Italian democracy on the basis of the unity of the anti-Fascist forces. In the harsh, noisy world of a big working-class city as the Cold War intensified, this Machiavellian prince, open-minded and a bit of a fixer, clever and even contemptuous in the way he used people, never touched by egalitarian or populist worries, was often criticized by the younger members: we found him cynical, exploitative, with no interest in specific problems, and distant from the passion for truth and justice of the rank and file. Gradually we realized that his political vision was larger, more intelligent and modern, and we understood him better in human terms: his refinement shone out through the layer of bitterness and scepticism that settled over him as time passed, through the inertia of his return to an easy-going plebeian obtuseness, through the dissatisfaction of a man who refuses to accept that he is growing old. Not yet aware of the struggle between the various tendencies within the party, we based all our judgments on individuals on moralistic and psychological criteria, as the rank and file usually does: of course we did not understand very much about what was going on, but we were inclined to try to understand the reality of men and the world they lived in by going outside fixed ideas, and this effort in our attentions and judgments was not without fruit.
With Stalin’s death, Negarville rediscovered his verve, revealing a passion for sincerity which must have always lurked within him; a conscience which had always remained clean and critical in the face of all the involutions of international Communism. In the debates of those years, he was among the most ready to carry forward the process of renewal which had been started by the 20
th
Congress; and we now saw to what extent what we had complained of as his cynicism had in reality been the defence of a moral sensitivity and of an objectivity in personal judgment that he had always keenly felt, though without ever disobeying the rules of the game in internal Communist policy, which is one of staying silent and waiting when the power relations are not favourable to your own line.
Montagnana, on the other hand, in the years when we felt a process of renewal developing in the party, was always one of the fiercest opponents of new ideas, whether in the political or trade-union arena. I never had the chance to see him now except at meetings or official events, and he seemed to me a man going against the movement of the times and people’s consciences. In the debates of 1956 he defended the methods and the men of Stalinism with a ruthlessness that bordered on the cynical, but I recognized deep down his extreme moralism which led him to identify with all the harshness, even the tragic and painful harshness which his generation of Communist militants had accepted and made their own, paying for them in person, with their own skin or with their consciences.
And I found that the old ‘cynicism’ of Negarville had been more alive – both in its moral conscience and its awareness of history – than Montagnana’s almost ‘religious’ attitude: Montagnana too had certainly suffered for everything that he could not accept or justify, but he had sacrificed all his reservations for a fanatical support of theory that had become a prop for the inhumanity of political systems.
Today the figures of these two Communists, now dead, come together in my memory and my judgment with all their good and bad points: at a time when every truth had to be paid for with many lies, both had tried to keep alive their own truth which was as contradictory and abused as the history of those years was.
I realize that having set out to tell the story of those who were young at the Liberation, I have ended up talking about the old. But the process of defining our generation – and perhaps this is true not just for our generation – also meant attempting to understand fully the experience of those who preceded us.
4) For some years now I have stopped being a member of the Communist party, and I have not joined any other party. I see politics along more general lines, and I feel less involved and responsible for it. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I now understand so many questions I did not understand previously, by looking at them from a less immediate perspective; but on the other hand I know that we can only understand fully what we do in practice by assiduous, daily application. The Soviet Union and the United States are as much at the centre of my interests and worries as before, because the images I have for our future come from these two sides. I get less worked up about the things that are wrong in the USSR, not least because there are fewer of them; I get more worked up when America does something wrong, not least because it continues to do so on all sides. From Europe I continue to expect not political solutions but ideological developments, and these continue not to materialize. All in all, many things have changed in the general political situation, but the basic ‘scale of values’ I believe in has not changed very much.
I would like to point out here at least two things which I have believed in throughout my career and continue to believe in. One is the passion for a global culture, and the rejection of the lack of contact caused through excessive specialization: I want to keep alive an image of culture as a unified whole, which is composed of every aspect of what we know and do, and in which the various discourses of every area of research and production become part of that general discourse which is the history of humanity, which we must manage to seize and develop ultimately in a human direction. (And literature should of course be in the middle of these different languages and keep alive the communication between them.)
My other passion is for a political struggle and a culture (and literature) which will be the education of a new ruling class (or new class
tout court
, if class means only that which has class-consciousness, as in Marx). I have always worked and continue to work with this in mind: seeing the new ruling class taking shape, and contributing to give it a shape and profile.
[The first part of this essay appeared in the journal
Il Paradosso
, 5:23–24 (September-December, 1960). The second part was published in the collective volume
La generazione degli anni difficili
[
The Generation that Lived through Difficult Times
] (Bari: Laterza, 1962).
In 1960
Il Paradosso
, a Milan journal dealing with youth culture, conducted a survey involving people from politics and literature who had grown up under Fascism to give younger people an account of the experience of those who had gone before them. The enquiry, entitled ‘
La generazione degli anni difficili
’ was divided into four themes which correspond to the four sections of the text:
The ideas you grew up with until the advent of war.
What effects did the war have on your development? Did it represent a collapse, or modification, or confirmation of your ideas?
When, or why did you decide to commit yourself to political activity, and what contingent considerations affected your choice?
If possible, state the scale of values in which you believed then, and the history of that scale of values down to the present.
The answers were later collected in the volume with the same title, published by Laterza in 1962 and edited by the enquiry’s promoters (Ettore Albertoni, Ezio Antonini and Renato Palmieri). For that publication in book form I preferred to recast totally my response, or rather to begin my autobiographical account from the point where I had interrupted it in the journal article. I publish here the two texts in succession. As for the convictions expressed in the second piece, they – like every other work in this collection – are only the testimony of what I believed at that particular time and not necessarily afterwards. (Author’s note.)
The general title (‘Political Autobiography of a Young Man’) and the title of the first piece (‘A Childhood under Fascism’) are Calvino’s.]
A Letter in Two Versions
1
Dear Mr Ricci,
Here is my CV. I was born in 1923 under a sky in which the radiant Sun and melancholy Saturn were housed in the harmonious Libra. I spent the first twenty-five years of my life in what was in those days a still-verdant San Remo, which contained cosmopolitan eccentrics amid the surly isolation of its rural, practical folk; I was marked for life by both these aspects of the place. Then I moved to industrious and rational Turin, where the risk of going mad is no less than elsewhere (as Nietzsche found out). I arrived at a time when the streets opened out deserted and endless, so few were the cars; to shorten my journeys on foot I would cross the rectilinear streets on long obliques from one angle to the other – a procedure that today is not just impossible but unthinkable – and in this way I would advance marking out invisible hypotenuses between grey right-angled sides. I got to know only barely other famous metropolises, on the Atlantic and Pacific, falling in love with all of them at first sight: I deluded myself into believing that I had understood and possessed some of them, while others remained for ever ungraspable and foreign to me. For many years I suffered from a geographical neurosis: I was unable to stay three consecutive days in one city or place. In the end I chose definitive wife and dwelling in Paris, a city which is surrounded by forests and horn-beams and birches, where I walk with my daughter Abigail, and which in turn surrounds the Bibliothèque Nationale, where I go to consult rare books, using my Reader’s Ticket no. 2516. In this way, prepared for the Worst, and becoming more and more dissatisfied as regards the Best, I am already anticipating the incomparable joys of growing old. That’s all.
Yours sincerely,
Calvino
[From the book
Tarocchi (Tarot Cards)
(Parma: F. M. Ricci, 1969). At the end of this volume in the ‘
I segni dell’uomo
’ series there is a biographical note by the author of the text, in the form of a facsimile of an autograph letter to the publisher, Ricci.]
2
Dear Mr Ricci,
Here is my CV. I was born in 1923 under a sky in which the radiant Sun and melancholy Saturn were housed in the harmonious Libra. I spent the first twenty-five years of my life in what was in those days a still-verdant San Remo, where two worlds clashed, one cosmopolitan and eccentric, the other rural and enclosed; I was marked for life by both these aspects of the place. Then I moved to industrious and rational Turin, where the risk of going mad is no less than elsewhere. I arrived at a time when the streets opened out deserted and endless to the pedestrian that I was; to shorten my journeys which consisted of a series of right angles, I would mark out invisible hypotenuses while crossing the grey streets; a way of proceeding that today is not just impossible but unthinkable. Chance led me to cross other famous cities, on the sea and on rivers, on ocean and channel, on lake and on fjord, falling in love with all of them at first sight: some I believed I had understood and possessed, while others remained for ever ungraspable and foreign to me. For many years I suffered from a geographical neurosis: I was unable to stay three consecutive days in one city. Having said that, I could not but marry a foreigner; a foreigner everywhere, who had naturally ended up in the only city which was never foreign to anyone. That is why, dear FMR, we often meet at Orly airport.
As for my books, I regret not having published each one under a different
nom de plume
: that way I would feel freer to start again from scratch each time, just as I always try to do anyway.
Yours,
Calvino
[From the book
Tarots
(Parma: F. M. Ricci, 1974). Written in French, unpublished in Italian. When Franco Maria Ricci asked me for an autograph copy in French of my earlier biographical letter, I decided to rewrite the text completely. (Author’s note.)]
Objective Biographical Notice
Italo Calvino’s father was an agronomist from San Remo who had lived for many years in Mexico and in other tropical countries; he had married a junior lecturer in botany from Pavia University, who was from a Sardinian family and who had followed him on his travels: their first-born son was born on 15 October 1923 in a suburb of Havana, just before the parents’ definitive return to Italy.
Italo Calvino spent the first twenty-five years of his life almost without a break in San Remo, at Villa Meridiana, which at that time was the headquarters of the Experimental Floriculture Centre, and in the family’s ancestral land at San Giovanni Battista, where his father cultivated grapefruit and avocados. His parents, who were freethinkers, did not give their son any religious education. Italo Calvino attended regular schooling in San Remo: his nursery school was the St George School, his primary school the Waldensian School, and secondary schooling was at the G. D. Cassini Royal High School. After obtaining his school-leaving certificate, he enrolled in the Agriculture Faculty of Turin University (where his father was the professor in charge of tropical agriculture) but he never got beyond his first exams.
During the twenty months of German occupation, Italo Calvino went through experiences common to the young people of his age who had avoided the call-up to the Fascist Social Republic of Italy: he undertook conspiratorial and partisan activity, fought for several months in the ‘Garibaldi’ Brigades in the violent war-theatre of the Maritime Alps, along with his sixteen-year-old brother. His father and mother were taken hostage by the Germans and held for several months.
In the period immediately after the Liberation, Calvino was politically active on behalf of the Communist party (of which he had been a member in the Resistance) in the Imperia area and among the students in Turin. In this same period he began to write short stories inspired by the life of guerrilla warfare he had led, and he made his first cultural contacts with Milan (Elio Vittorini’s
Il Politecnico
) and Turin (the Einaudi publishing house).
The first short story he wrote was read by Cesare Pavese who passed it on to the journal that Carlo Muscetta ran in Rome (
Aretusa
, December 1945). In the meantime Vittorini had published another of his stories in
Il Politecnico
(on which Calvino also collaborated with articles on social problems in Liguria). Giansiro Ferrata invited him to send other stories to the Milan edition of
l’Unità
. In those days daily papers consisted of a single sheet, but a couple of times a week they began to come out with four pages instead of two: Calvino also worked on the third page, the cultural page, of the Genoa edition of
l’Unità
(winning a short-story prize jointly with Marcello Venturi) and of the Turin edition (where for some time Alfonso Gatto was one of the editors).
In the meantime the student changed faculty, transferring to the Arts Faculty, at the University of Turin, and enrolling directly in the third year of the literature course, with the special permission granted to war returnees. He lived in an unheated attic: he wrote stories and as soon as he finished one he would take it to be read by Natalia Ginzburg and Cesare Pavese who were getting the Einaudi publishing offices back on their feet. In order not to have him always hanging around, Pavese encouraged him to write a novel; he received the same advice from Giansiro Ferrata in Milan who was on the jury of a competition for an unpublished novel launched by the publisher Mondadori to provide the first sample of new post-war writers. The novel that Calvino finished just in time for the deadline of 31 December 1946 (
The Path to
the Spiders’ Nests
) would not impress Ferrata or Vittorini nor would it make it into the final shortlist (which consisted of Milena Milani, Oreste del Buono, Luigi Santucci). Calvino let Pavese read it, who recommended it, though with some reservations, to Giulio Einaudi. Einaudi was enthusiastic about it and launched its publication, even going so far as putting up posters. It sold 6, 000 copies: quite a success for those days.
In the same month that his first novel was published, November 1947, Calvino scraped a degree in Arts with a thesis on English literature (Joseph Conrad). But it could be said that his development took place entirely outside university lecture theatres, in those years between the Liberation and 1950, debating, discovering new friends and mentors, accepting unsteady and occasional jobs, in that climate of poverty and feverish undertakings that was typical of the time. He had begun working at Einaudi in the publicity and press office, a job he would continue to hold as his permanent employment in years to come.
The atmosphere at the Turin publishing house, with its preponderance of historians and philosophers over critics and writers, and its constant debates between the supporters of different political and ideological tendencies, was fundamental in the intellectual formation of the young Calvino: gradually he found himself assimilating the experience of a generation slightly older than himself, of men who had already been moving in the world of literature and political debate for ten or fifteen years now, who had been militants in the anti-Fascist movement in the Action Party or the Christian Left movement or the Communist party. A major influence (not least because of his opposition to Calvino’s non-religious outlook) was the friendship, moral influence and vital volubility of the Catholic philosopher Felice Balbo, who at that time was a full member of the Communist party.
After almost a year as editor of the cultural page of the Turin edition of
l’Unità
(from 1948 to 1949) Calvino realized that he did not have what it takes to become a good journalist or a professional politician. He continued working with
l’Unità
off and on for several years, with literary pieces and above all with trade-union surveys, articles on industrial and agrarian strikes and factory occupations. This link with the practical side of political and union organization (which also involved close friendships with comrades of his own generation) occupied him more than the ideological or cultural debates, and helped him overcome the crisis caused by the condemnation and expulsion from the party of friends and intellectual groupings to whom he had been close (Vittorini and
Il Politecnico
in 1947; Felice Balbo and
Cultura e
realtà
in 1950).
What he was still not sure about was his literary vocation: after the publication of his first novel, Italo Calvino tried for years to write others in the same vein of picaresque social realism, but they were all mercilessly torn to pieces and rejected by his mentors and advisers. Fed up with those laborious failures, he abandoned himself to what came more spontaneously to him: he was basically a teller of stories, and he wrote
The Cloven Viscount
in a spurt of creativity. He thought he should publish it in a journal and not as a book so as not to give too much importance to what was simply a bagatelle, but Vittorini insisted on turning it into a short book for his ‘
Gettoni
’ series. It received an unexpected unanimity of approval from the critics; it even inspired a fine article by Emilio Cecchi, which in those days meant the consecrating (or co-opting) of the writer into ‘official’ Italian literature. In Communist circles it stirred up a small polemic over the question of ‘realism’ but, balancing that, it also received authoritative approval.
From that success Calvino’s ‘fantasy’ output took off (though this was a term already current among critics right from the time of his first novel) and at the same time a number of works portraying contemporary experiences in an ironic Stendhalian key. To define these alternating works Vittorini coined the formula ‘realism with a fantasy thrust’ and ‘fantasy with a realistic thrust’, a formula that became fashionable. Calvino tried also in theoretical terms to articulate the different elements of his thought and poetics: he gave the most structured outline of his programme in a lecture he delivered in Florence in 1955 (‘
Il midollo del leone
’ (‘The Lion’s Marrow’),
Paragone
, 6:66).
In this way Italo Calvino carved out his place in 1950s Italian literature, in an atmosphere that was now very different from that at the end of the 1940s, the period to which he continued to feel tied in terms of ideas. The literary capital of Italy in the 1950s was Rome, and Calvino, though remaining explicitly ‘Turinese’, now spent much of his time in Rome, enjoying that fun-loving city and a great many friends and associates, among whom the serene figure of Carlo Levi dominated.
It was in those years that Giulio Einaudi commissioned from his ‘fabulous’ author the volume of
Italian Folktales
, which Calvino selected and translated from the dialects of the nineteenth-century collections made by folklorists, both published and unpublished. This also had an academic component (in terms of the research, the introduction and the notes) which briefly aroused in Calvino a dormant vocation to be an academic.
Meantime the period of the great political debates approached which would shake the apparently monolithic world of Communism. In 1954–5, in a climate of truce amid the struggles between the various groupings of Italian Communist intellectuals, Calvino collaborated regularly on the Roman weekly journal Il Contemporaneo, run by Salinari
53
and Trombadori.
54
At the same time his discussions with the Milanese Hegelian Marxists were very important for him: discussions with Cesare Cases and especially with Renato Solmi, and behind them Franco Fortini, who had been and would continue to be an implacable opposing voice for Calvino. Having got involved in the battles inside the Communist party in 1956, Calvino (who was also collaborating on the Roman journal
Città Aperta
) resigned from the party in 1957. For some time (1958–59) he took part in the debates about forming a new socialist left and worked on Antonio Giolitti’s
55
journal
Passato e Presente
and the weekly
Italia Domani
.
In 1959 Vittorini began the publication of a series of journal issues containing literary texts and critical pieces (
Il Menabò
) that reacted against the prevailing literary climate, and insisted that Calvino’s name appear alongside his own as co-editor. Calvino published in
Il Menabò
a number of essays in which he sought to sum up the international literary situation: ‘
Il mare dell’oggettività
’ (‘The Sea of Objects’) (
Il Menabò
, 2 (1959)), ‘
La sfida al
labirinto
’ (‘The Challenge to the Labyrinth’) (
Il Menabò,
5 (1962)), and also an attempt at outlining a general ideological map entitled ‘L’antitesi operaia’ (‘The Working Class as Dialectical Antithesis’) (
Il Menabò
, 7 (1964)). The criticisms his friends made on this last text persuaded him to abandon definitively the field of theoretical speculation.
In 1959–60 Calvino spent six months in the United States of America. In the ten years that followed, his journeys outside Italy became more frequent. In 1964 he married: his wife is Argentinian, of Russian origin, a translator from English who lives in Paris. In 1965 his daughter was born.
In recent times documents to establish Calvino’s biography have become increasingly rare: his public appearances have grown fewer, his presence is less felt, he no longer works on newspapers, he no longer gets on young people’s nerves by siding with them or against them.Very little is known about his travels since he is one of the few Italian writers who does not write travel books or reportages. His detachment from the official world of literature was sealed in 1968 when he refused a substantial literary prize.
The author of
The Baron in the Trees
seems more determined than ever to keep his distance from the world. Has he reached a condition of indifferent detachment? If you know him, you would think that it is more the heightened awareness of how complicated the world is that forces him to stifle within himself outbreaks of hope as much as those of anguish.
[Written in 1970 for a volume in the Einaudi series ‘
Gli Struzzi
’,
Gli amori difficili (Difficult Loves)
, following the series’ requirements for biographical notes. (Author’s note.)]