Why Read the Classics?

by Italo Calvino

  It is this jagged cultural panorama that is Hemingway’s context, and here we might bring in for comparison another writer who is often named in this context, Stendhal. This is not an arbitrary choice, but is suggested by Hemingway’s admission of admiration for him, and justified by a certain analogy in their chosen sobriety of style—even though this is much more skilful, Flaubertian, in the more modern writer—and by certain parallels in key events and places in their lives (that ‘Milanese’ Italy they both loved). Stendhal’s heroes are on the border between eighteenth-century rationalist lucidity and Romantic Sturm und Drang, between an Enlightenment education of the sentiments and the Romantic exaltation of amoral individualism. Hemingway’s heroes find themselves at the same crossroads a hundred years later, when bourgeois thought has been impoverished, past its best—which instead has been inherited by the new working class—and yet is still developing as best it can, between blind alleys and partial and contradictory solutions: from the old Enlightenment trunk American technicist philosophies branch off, while the Romantic trunk brings forth its final fruits in existential nihilism. Stendhal’s hero, though a product of the Revolution, still accepted the world of the Holy Alliance and submitted to the rules of his own hypocritical game, in order to fight his own individual battle. Hemingway’s hero, who has also seen open up the great alternative of the October Revolution, accepts the world of imperialism and moves amongst imperialism’s massacres, also fighting a battle with lucidity and detachment, but one which he knows is lost from the outset because he is on his own.

  Hemingway’s fundamental intuition was to have realised that war was the most accurate image, the everyday reality of the bourgeois world in the imperialist age. At the age of eighteen, even before America joined the war, he managed to reach the Italian front, just to see what war was like, first as an ambulance driver, then in charge of a canteen shuttling on bike between the trenches on the river Piave (as we learn from a recent book by Charles A. Fenton, The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway (Farrar and Strauss, 1954)). (A long essay could be written on how much he understood about Italy, and how already in 1917 he was able to recognise the country’s ‘fascist’ face and on the opposite side the people’s face, as he portrayed them in his best novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929); and also on how much he still understood of 1949 Italy and portrayed in his less successful, but still in many respects interesting, novel, Across the River and Into the Trees; but also on how much he never understood, never managing to escape from his tourist shell.) His first book (published in 1924 then expanded in 1925), whose tone was set by his memories of the Great War and those of the massacres in Greece which he witnessed as a journalist, is entitled In Our Time, a title which by itself does not tell us much, but which takes on a cutting ironic tone if it is true that he wanted to echo a line from The Book of Common Prayer: ‘Give us peace in our time, O Lord.’ The flavour of war conveyed in the brief chapters of In Our Time was decisive for Hemingway’s development, just as the impressions described in the Tales of Sebastopol were crucial for Tolstoy. And I don’t know whether it was Hemingway’s admiration for Tolstoy that led him to seek out the experience of war, or vice versa. Of course, the manner of being at war described by Hemingway is not the same as in Tolstoy, nor as in another admired author, who wrote a minor classic, the American Stephen Crane. This is war in distant lands, viewed with the detachment of a foreigner: Hemingway thus prefigures the spirit of the American soldier in Europe.

  If the poet who celebrated British imperialism, Kipling, still had a precise link with his adopted country, so that his India also became a fatherland for him, in Hemingway (who unlike Kipling did not want to ‘celebrate’ anything but only to report facts and things) we find the spirit of America roaming the world without any clear motive, following the lead of its expanding economy.

  But Hemingway interests us more not for his testimony of the reality of war or for his condemnation of massacres. Just as no poet identifies totally with the ideas which he represents, so Hemingway is not to be identified solely with the cultural crisis which is his context. Leaving aside the limits of behaviourism, that identification of man with his actions, his being able to cope or not with the duties that have been imposed on him, is still a valid and correct way of conceiving of existence, a way which can be adopted by a more industrious humanity than Hemingway’s heroes, whose actions are almost never a job—except in ‘exceptional’ jobs, such as shark-fishing, or having a precise duty in a struggle. We do not really know what to do with his bullfights, for all the technique they require; but the clear, precise seriousness with which his characters know how to light a fire in the outdoors, cast a rod, position a machine gun, that is of interest and use to us. We can do without all of the more flashy and famous sides of Hemingway, in return for those moments of perfect integration of man with the world in the things he does, for those moments when man finds himself at peace with nature though still struggling with it, in harmony with humankind even in the fire of battle. If someone one day manages to write poetically about the relationship of the worker with his machinery, with the precise operations of his labour, he will have to go back to these moments in Hemingway, attaching them from their context of touristic futility, brutality or boredom, and restoring them to the organic context of the modern productive world from which Hemingway has taken and isolated them. Hemingway has understood how to live in the world with open, dry eyes, without illusions or mysticism, how to be alone without anguish and how it is better to be in company than to be alone: and, in particular, he has developed a style which expresses fully his conception of life, and which though sometimes betraying its limitations and defects, in its more successful moments (as in the Nick Adams stories) it can be considered the driest and most immediate language, the least redundant and pompous style, the most limpid and realistic prose in modern literature. (A Soviet critic, J. Kashkin, in a fine article which came out in a 1935 issue of International Literature, and which was quoted in the proceedings of the symposium edited by John K. M. McCaffery, Ernest Hemingway: the Man and his Work (The World Publishing Company, 1950) compares the style of those tales to that of Pushkin the novelist.)

  In fact there is nothing more remote from Hemingway than the hazy symbolism, and religious-based exoticism with which he is associated by Carlos Baker in his Hemingway, the Writer as Artist (Princeton University Press, 1952, recently translated into Italian by G. Ambrosoli for Guanda). This volume contains extremely precious information and quotations from unpublished letters by Hemingway to Baker himself, to Fitzgerald and others, and it also has an excellent bibliography (missing from the Italian translation), as well as useful individual analyses, for instance of Hemingway’s polemical relationship with — not his adherence to — the ‘lost generation’ in Fiesta; but the book is based on flimsy critical formulas, like the opposition between ‘Home’ and ‘Not-home’, between ‘Mountain’ and ‘Plain’, and it talks of ‘Christian symbolism’ in The Old Man and the Sea.

  Less ambitious and less philologically interesting is another American book: Philip Young’s brief Ernest Hemingway (Rinehart, 1952). Young too, poor soul, has to go to considerable lengths to prove that Hemingway was never a Communist, that he is not ‘un-American’, that one can be crude and pessimistic without being ‘un-American’. But the general outlines of his critical approach show us the Hemingway we know, attributing a fundamental value to the Nick Adams stories, and placing them in the tradition inaugurated by that wonderful book—wonderful for its language, the richness of life and adventure it contains, its sense of nature, its involvement with the social problems of its time and place—which is Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

  [1954]

  Francis Ponge

  ‘Kings do not touch doors. They do not know that pleasure of pushing open in front of you, slowly or brusquely, one of those big familiar rectangular panels, and turning back to close it in its place again—holding a door in your arms.’

  ‘…the pleasure of
grabbing, at the belly of one of those tall obstacles to a room, its porcelain knob; the rapid duel in which you hold back your step for the instant it takes for the eye to open and the whole body to adapt to its new surroundings.’

  ‘With a friendly hand you hold onto it still, before decisively pushing it back and closing yourself in another room—a feeling of enclosure which is reenforced by the click of the handle’s powerful, but well-oiled spring.’

  This brief text is entitled The Pleasures of the Door and is a good example of Francis Ponge’s poetry: taking the most humble object, the most everyday action, and trying to consider it afresh, abandoning every habit of perception, and describing it without any verbal mechanism that has been worn by use. And all this, not for some reason extraneous to the fact in itself (for, say, symbolism, ideology or aesthetics), but solely in order to reestablish a relationship with things as things, with the difference between one thing and another, and with the difference of everything from us. Suddenly we discover that existing could be a much more intense, interesting and genuine experience than that absent-minded routine to which our senses have become hardened. This makes Francis Ponge, I believe, one of the great sages of our times, one of the few fundamental authors to whom we should turn so as not to continue going round in circles.

  How? By allowing our attention to rest, for instance, on one of those wooden trays used by fruitsellers. ‘At every street corner leading to the major markets it shines still with the unpresumptuous brightness of plain wood. Still brand new, and slightly surprised at finding itself in an ungainly position, thrown out with the rubbish never to return, this object is in reality one of the most charming objects around—on whose fate, however, one should not dwell too long.’ That final qualification is a typical Ponge move: it would be hopeless if, once our sympathy had been aroused for this lowest and lightest of objects, we should insist too much on sympathising; that would ruin everything, that little grain of truth that we had just garnered would be instantly lost.

  He does the same with a candle, a cigarette, an orange, an oyster, a piece of boiled meat, and bread: this inventory of ‘objects’ extending to the vegetable, animal and mineral worlds is contained in the slim volume which first made Francis Ponge famous in France (Le Parti pris des choses (The Voices of Things), 1942) and which Einaudi has now published (Il partito preso delle cose) with a useful, accurate introduction by Jacqueline Risset and a facing Italian translation of the French original. (A translation of a poet’s work with the original on the opposite page can have no better function than to stimulate readers into attempting their own versions.) A tiny book ideally suited to being slipped into your pocket or put by your bedside table next to the clock (since the book is by Ponge, the very physicality of the book as object cries out for the same treatment). This ought also to be the opportunity for this discreet, retiring poet to find new acolytes in Italy. Instructions for use are: a few pages every evening will provide a reading which is at one with Ponge’s method of sending out words like tentacles over the porous and variegated substance of the world.

  I used the word acolytes to denote the unconditional and rather jealous devotion which has hitherto characterised his following both in France (where over the years it has included very different if not opposite characters from himself, from Sartre to the young members of the Tel Quel group) and in Italy (where his translators have included Ungaretti and Piero Bigongiari: the latter has been for years his most competent and enthusiastic exponent, having edited back in 1971 a wide selection of his works in Mondadori’s Specchio series, entitled Vita del testo).

  Despite all this, Ponge’s moment (he has just turned eighty, having been born, in Montpellier, on 27 March 1899) has still to come, I am convinced, both in France and in Italy. And since this appeal of mine is addressed to Ponge’s many potential readers who as yet know nothing of him, I should immediately say something that should have been stated at the outset: that this poet writes entirely in prose. Short texts, ranging from half a page to six or seven, in his early period; though lately his texts have expanded to reflect that process of constantly moving closer to the truth, which is what writing means for him: his description of a piece of soap, for example, or a dried fig, have expanded into books in their own right, and his description of a meadow has become La Fabrique du pré (Making A Meadow).

  Jacqueline Risset rightly contrasts Ponge ‘s work with two other basic trends in contemporary French literature which describes ‘things’: Sartre (in a couple of passages in La Nausée) looking at a root, or at a face in the mirror, as though they were totally divorced from any reference to or meaning for humanity, and summoning up a disturbing and distraught vision; and Robbe-Grillet who established a kind of ‘non-anthropomorphic’ writing, describing the world in absolutely neutral, cold, objective terms.

  Ponge (who chronologically precedes both of them) is ‘anthropomorphic’ in the sense that he wants to identify with things, as if man came out of himself to experience what it is like to be a thing. This involves a struggle with language, constantly pulling it and folding it back like a sheet which is in some places too short, in others too long, since language always tends to say too little or too much. It recalls Leonardo da Vinci’s writing: he too tried to describe in brief texts which he laboriously wrote and rewrote, the flaring up of fire and the scraping of a file.

  Ponge’s sense of proportion and discretion—which is at the same time the sign of his practicality — is reflected in the fact that in order to talk about the sea he has to take as his theme the shores, beaches and coasts. The infinite never enters his pages, or rather it enters them when it encounters its own borders and only at that point does it really start to exist (Sea Shores): ‘Profiting from the reciprocal distance which prevents coasts from linking up with each other except via the sea or by tortuous twists and turns, the sea allows every shore to believe that it is heading towards it in particular. In reality, the sea is courteous with all of them, actually more than courteous: it can show maximum enthusiasm and successive passions for each shore, keeping in its basin an infinite store of currents. It only ever marginally exceeds its own limits, it imposes its own restraint on its waves, and like the jelly-fish which it leaves for fishermen as a miniature image or sample of itself, it does nothing but ecstatically prostrate itself before all its shores.’

  His secret is with every object or element to fix on its decisive aspect, which is nearly always the one we usually consider least, and to construct his discourse around that. To define water, for instance, Ponge homes in on its irresistible ‘vice’, which is gravity, its tendency to descend. But doesn’t every object, for example a wardrobe, obey the force of gravity? This is where Ponge by distinguishing the very different way a wardrobe adheres to the ground, manages to see—almost from the inside—what it is to be liquid, the rejection of any and every shape in order simply to obey the obsessive idea of its own gravity …

  A cataloguer of the diversity of things (De Varietate Rerum is how the work of this new, understated Lucretius has been defined), Ponge also has a couple of themes to which, in this first collection, he constantly returns, hammering away at the same cluster of images and ideas. One is the world of vegetation, paying particular attention to the shape of trees; the other is that of molluscs, particularly seashells, snails, and shells in general.

  With trees, it is their comparison with man that constantly emerges in Ponge’s discourse. They have no gestures: they simply multiply their arms, hands, fingers—like a Buddha. And in this way, doing nothing, they get to the bottom of their thoughts. They hide nothing from themselves, they cannot harbour a secret idea, they open out entirely, honestly and without restrictions. Doing nothing else, they spend all their time complicating their own shape, perfecting their own bodies towards greater complexity for analysis … Animate beings express themselves orally, or with mimetic gestures which however instantly disappear. But the vegetable world expresses itself in a written form that is indelible. It has no
way of going back, it is impossible to have a change of mind: in order to correct something, the only thing it can do is to add. Like taking a text that has already been written and published and correcting it through a series of appendices, and so on. But one also has to say that plants do not ramify ad infinitum. Each one of them has a limit.’

  Must we conclude that things in Ponge always refer back to a spoken or written discourse, to words? Finding a metaphor of writing in every written text has become too obvious a critical exercise for it to yield any further benefit here. We can say that in Ponge language, that indispensable medium linking subject and object, is constantly compared with what objects express outside language, and that in this comparison it is reassessed and redefined—and often revalued. If leaves are the trees’ words, they only know how to repeat the same word. ‘When in spring … they think they can sing a different song, to come out of themselves, to extend to the whole of nature and to embrace it, they still transmit, in thousands of copies, the same note, the same word, the same leaf. One cannot escape from the tree by solely arboreal means’

  (If there is a negative value, or something damned, in Ponge’s universe, where it seems as if everything is saved, it is repetition: the sea’s waves breaking on the shore all decline the same noun, ‘a thousand important lords and ladies all with the same name are thus admitted on the same day to be presented by the prolix and prolific sea.’ But multiplicity is also the principle of individualisation, of diversity: a pebble is ‘a stone at the stage when for it the age of the person, the individual begins, that is to say the age of the word.’)