The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal

by Gore Vidal

  With the completion of the trilogy, Calvino took to his other manner and wrote “The Watcher,” the most realistic of his stories and the most overtly political. The narrator has a name, Amerigo Ormea. He is a poll watcher in Turin for the Communist party during the national election of 1953. Amerigo’s poll is inside the vast “Cottolengo Hospital for Incurables.” Apparently the mad and the senile and even the comatose are allowed to vote (“hospitals, asylums and convents had served as great reservoirs of votes for the Christian Democrat party”). Amerigo is a serene observer of democracy’s confusions, having “learned that change, in politics, comes through long and complex processes” he also confesses that “acquiring experience had meant becoming slightly pessimistic.”

  In the course of the day, Amerigo observes with fine dispassion the priests and nuns as they herd their charges into the polling booths that have been set up inside the hospital. Despite the grotesqueries of the situation, Amerigo takes some pleasure in the matter-of-factness of the voting, for “in Italy, which had always bowed and scraped before every form of pomp, display, sumptuousness, ornament, this seemed to him finally the lesson of an honest, austere morality, and a perpetual, silent revenge on the Fascists… now they had fallen into dust with all their gold fringe and their ribbons, while democracy, with its stark ceremony of pieces of paper folded over like telegrams, of pencils given to callused or shaky hands, went ahead.”

  But for the watcher boredom eventually sets in; it is a long day. “Amerigo felt a yearning need for beauty, which became focused in the thought of his mistress Lia.” He contemplates Lia in reverie. “What is this need of ours for beauty? Amerigo asks himself.” Apparently Calvino has not advanced much beyond the last dialogue in “Smog.” He contemplates the perfection of classical Greece but recalls that the Greeks destroyed deformed children, redundant girls. Obviously placing beauty too high in the scale of values is “a step toward an inhuman civilization, which will then sentence the deformed to be thrown off a cliff.”

  When another poll watcher remarks to Amerigo that the mad all must recognize one another in Cottolengo, he slips into reverie: “They would remember that humanity could be a different thing, as in fables, a world of giants, an Olympus…. As we do: and perhaps, without realizing it, we are deformed, backward, compared to a different, forgotten form of existence….” What is human, what is real?

  Calvino’s vision is usually presented in fantastic terms but now he becomes unusually concrete. Since he has elected to illuminate an actual time and place (Italy between 1945 and the election of 1953), he is able to spell it out. “In those years the Italian Communist party, among its many other tasks, had also assumed the position of an ideal liberal party, which had never really existed. And so the bosom of each individual communist could house two personalities at once: an intransigent revolutionary and an Olympian liberal.” Amerigo’s pessimism derives from the obvious fact that the two do not go together. I am reminded of Alexander Herzen’s comment about the Latins: they do not want liberty, they want to sue for liberty.

  Amerigo goes home to lunch (he has a maid who cooks and serves! Written in 1963 about the events of 1953, this is plainly a historical novel). He looks for a book to read. “Pure literature” is out. “Personal literature now seemed to him a row of tombstones in a cemetery; the literature of the living as well as of the dead. Now he sought something else from books: the wisdom of the ages or simply something that helped to understand something.” He takes a stab at Marx’s Youthful Writings. “Man’s universality appears, practically speaking, in that same universe that makes all nature man’s inorganic body…. Nature is man’s inorganic body precisely because it is not his human body.” Thus genius turns everything into itself. As Marx invented Kapital from capitalism, so Calvino turns a passage of Marx into Calvino himself: the man who drinks soup is the soup that drinks him. Wholeness is all.

  Fortified with this reassuring text, Amerigo endures a telephone conversation with Lia. It is the usual quibbling conversation between Calvino protagonist and Calvino mistress. She tells him that she is pregnant. “Amerigo was an ardent supporter of birth control, even though his party’s attitude on the subject was either agnostic or hostile. Nothing shocked him so much as the ease with which people multiply, and the more hungry and backward, the more they keep having children….” In the land of Margaret Sanger this point of view is not exactly startling, but for an Italian Communist a dozen years ago, the sense of a world dying of too many children, of too much “smog” was a monstrous revelation. At this point, Amerigo rounds on both the Bible and Marx as demented celebrators of human fecundity.

  Amerigo returns to the hospital; observes children shaped like fish and again wonders at what point is a human being human. Finally the day ends; the voting is done. Amerigo looks out over the complex of hospital buildings and notes that the reddish sun appeared to open “perspectives of a city that had never been seen.” Thus the Calvino coda strikes its first familiar chord. Laughing women cross the courtyard with a cauldron, “perhaps the evening soup. Even the ultimate city of imperfection has its perfect hour, the watcher thought, the hour, the moment, when every city is the City.” In Italian the plural for the word “city” is also the singular.

  Most realistic and specific of Calvino’s works, “The Watcher” has proved (to date) to be the last of the “dry” narratives. In 1965 Calvino published Cosmicomics: twelve brief stories dealing in a fantastic way with the creation of the universe, man, society. Like Pin’s young friend who decided that life indeed resembles the strip cartoon, Calvino has deployed his complex prose in order to compose in words a super strip cartoon narrated by Qfwfq whose progress from life inside the first atom to mollusk on the earth’s sea floor to social-climbing amphibian to dinosaur to moon-farmer is told in a dozen episodes that are entirely unlike anything that anyone else has written since, well, let us say Lucian.

  “At Daybreak” is the story of the creation of the universe as viewed by Qfwfq and his mysterious tribe consisting of a father, mother, sister, brother, Granny, as well as acquaintances—formless sentiencies who inhabit the universal dust that is on the verge of becoming the nebula which will contain our solar system. Where and who they are is, literally, obscure, since light has not yet been invented. So “there was nothing to do but wait, keep covered as best we could, doze, speak out now and then to make sure we were all still there; and, naturally, scratch ourselves; because—they can say what they like—all those particles spinning around had only one effect, a troublesome itching.” That itch starts to change things. Condensation begins. Also, confusion: Granny loses her cushion, “a little ellipsoid of galactic matter.” Things clot; nickel is formed; members of the tribe start flying off in all directions. Suddenly the condensation is complete and light breaks. The sun is now in its place and the planets begin their orbits “and, above all, it was deathly hot.”

  As the earth starts to jell, Qfwfq’s sister takes fright and vanishes inside the planet and is not heard from again “until I met her, much later, at Canberra in 1912, married to a certain Sullivan, a retired railroad man, so changed I hardly recognized her.”

  The early Calvino was much like his peers Pavese and Vittorini—writers who tended to reflect the realistic storytelling of Hemingway and Dos Passos. Then Calvino moved to Paris, where he found his own voice or voices and became, to a degree, infected by the French. Since the writing of Our Ancestors and the three stories that make up The Watcher, Calvino has been influenced, variously, by Barthes and the semiologists, by Borges, and by the now old New Novel. In Cosmicomics these influences are generally benign, since Calvino is too formidable and original an artist to be derailed by theoreticians or undone by the example of another creator. Nevertheless the story “A Sign in Space” comes perilously close to being altogether too reverent an obeisance to semiology.

  As the sun takes two hundred million years to revolve around the galaxy, Qfwfq becomes obsessed with making a sign in space, something pecul
iarly his own to mark his passage as well as something that would impress anyone who might be watching. His ambition is the result of a desire to think because “to think something had never been possible, first because there were no things to think about, and second because signs to think of them by were lacking, but from the moment there was that sign, it was possible for someone thinking to think of a sign, and therefore that one, in the sense that the sign was the thing you could think about and also the sign of the thing thought, namely, itself.” So he makes his sign (“I felt I was going forth to conquer the only thing that mattered to me, sign and dominion and name…”).

  Unfortunately, a spiteful contemporary named Kgwgk erases Qfwfq’s sign and replaces it with his own. In a rage, Qfwfq wants “to make a new sign in space, a real sign that would make Kgwgk die of envy.” So, out of competitiveness, art is born. But the task of sign-making is becoming more difficult because the world “was beginning to produce an image of itself, and in everything a form was beginning to correspond to a function” (a theme from The Nonexistent Knight) and “in this new sign of mine you could perceive the influence of our new way of looking at things, call it style if you like….”

  Qfwfq is delighted with his new sign but as time passes he likes it less and less, thinks it is a bit pretentious, old-fashioned; decides he must erase it before his rival sees it (so writers revise old books or make new ones that obliterate earlier works—yes, call it style if you like). Finally, Qfwfq erases the inadequate sign. For a time he is pleased that there is nothing in space which might make him look idiotic to a rival—in this, he resembles so many would-be writers who contrive to vanish into universities and, each year, by not publishing that novel or poem, increase their reputations.

  But doing nothing is, finally, abhorrent to the real artist: Qfwfq starts to amuse himself by making false signs, “to annoy Kgwgk…notches in space, holes, stains, little tricks that only an incompetent creature like Kgwgk could mistake for signs.” So the artist masochistically mocks his own art, shatters form (the sign) itself, makes jokes to confuse and exploit 57th Street. But then things get out of hand. To Qfwfq’s horror, every time he passes what he thinks was one of his false signs, there are a dozen other signs, all scribbled over his.

  Finally, everything was now so obscured by a crisscross of meaningless signs that “world and space seemed the mirror of each other, both minutely adorned with hieroglyphics and ideograms” including the badly inked tail of the letter R in an evening newspaper joined to a thready imperfection in the paper, one among the eight hundred thousand flakings of a tarred wall in the Melbourne docks…. In the universe now there was no longer a container and a thing contained, but only a general thickness of signs superimposed and coagulated.”

  Qfwfq gives up. There is no longer a point of reference “because it was clear that, independent of signs, space didn’t exist and perhaps had never existed.” So the story concludes; and the rest is the solipsism of art. To the old debate about being and non-being, Calvino adds his own vision of the multiplicity of signs which obliterates all meaning. Too many names for a thing is like no name for a thing; therefore, no thing, nothing.

  “How Much Shall We Bet?” continues the theme. At the beginning Qfwfq “bet that there was going to be a universe, and I hit the nail on the head.” This was the first bet he won with Dean (k)yK. Through the ages the two continue to make bets and Qfwfq usually wins because “I bet on the possibility of a certain event’s taking place, whereas the Dean almost always bet against it.”

  Qfwfq kept on winning until he began to take wild leaps into the future. “On February 28, 1926, at Santhia, in the Province of Vercelli—got that? At number 18 in Via Garibaldi—you follow me? Signorina Giuseppina Pensotti, aged twenty-two, leaves her home at quarter to six in the afternoon; does she turn right or left?” Qfwfq starts losing. Then they begin to bet about characters in unwritten novels…will Balzac make Lucien de Rubempré kill himself at the end of Les illusions perdues? The Dean wins that one.

  The two bettors end up in charge of vast research foundations which contain innumerable reference libraries. Finally, like man’s universe itself, they begin to drown in signs and Qfwfq looks back nostalgically to the beginning, “How beautiful it was then, through that void, to draw lines and parabolas, pick out the precise point, the intersection between space and time when the event would spring forth, undeniable in the prominence of its glow; whereas now events come flowing down without interruption, like cement being poured, one column next to the other…a doughy mass of events without form or direction, which surrounds, submerges, crushes all reasoning.”

  In another story the last of the dinosaurs turns out to be Qfwfq, who meets and moves in with the next race. The New Ones don’t realize that he is one of their dread enemies from the past. They think him remarkably ugly but not unduly alien. Qfwfq’s attitude is like that of the protagonist in William Golding’s The Inheritors except that in Calvino’s version the last of the Old Ones merges with the inheritors. Amused, Qfwfq listens to the monstrous, conflicting legends about his race, tribute to the power of man’s imagination, to the words he uses, to the signs he recognizes.

  Finally, “I knew that the more the Dinosaurs disappear, the more they extend their dominion, and over forests far more vast than those that cover the continents: in the labyrinth of the survivors’ thoughts.” But Qfwfq was not at all sentimental about being the last dinosaur and at the story’s end he left the New Ones and “travelled through valleys and plains. I came to a station, caught the first train, and was lost in the crowd.”

  In “The Spiral,” the last of the Cosmicomics, Qfwfq is a mollusk on a rock in the primeval sea. The theme is again in ovo omnes. Calvino describes with minuteness the sensations of the mollusk on the rock, “damp and happy…. I was what they call a narcissist to a slight extent; I mean I stayed there observing myself all the time, I saw all my good points and all my defects, and I liked myself for the former and for the latter; I had no terms of comparison, you must remember that, too.” Such was Eden. But then the heat of the sun started altering things; there were vibrations from another sex; there were eggs to be fertilized: love.

  In response to the new things, Qfwfq expresses himself by making a shell which turns out to be a spiral that is not only very good for defense but unusually beautiful. Yet Qfwfq takes no credit for the beauty: “My shell made itself, without my taking any special pains to have it come out one way rather than another.” But then the instinctive artist in the mollusk asserts itself: “This doesn’t mean that I was absent-minded during that time; I applied myself instead, to the act of secreting….” Meanwhile, she, the beloved, is making her shell, identical with his.

  Ages pass. The shell-Qfwfq is on a railroad embankment as a train passes by. A party of Dutch girls looks out the window. Qfwfq is not startled by anything, for “I feel as if, in making the shell, I had also made the rest.” But one new element has entered the equation. “I had failed to foresee one thing: the eyes that finally opened to see us didn’t belong to us but to others.” So dies Narcissus. “They developed eyes at our expense. So sight, our sight, which we were obscurely waiting for, was the sight that the others had of us.”

  But the artist who made the spiral-shaped shell is not to be outdone by miscalculation or by fate. Proudly he concludes: “All these eyes were mine. I had made them possible; I had had the active part; I furnished them the raw material, the image.” Again the gallant coda, for fixed in the watcher’s eye is not only the fact of the beautiful shell that he made but also “the most faithful image of her” who had inspired the shell and was the shell: thus male and female are at last united in the retina of a stranger’s eye.

  In 1967, Calvino published more of Qfwfq’s adventures in Time and the Hunter. For the most part they are engaging cartoons, but one is disconcerted to encounter altogether too many bits of Sarraute, of Robbe-Grillet, of Borges (far too much of Borges) incorporated in the prose of what I have come to regard as
a true modern master. On page 6 occurs “viscous” on page 11 “acid mucus.” I started to feel queasy: these are Sarraute words. I decided that their use was simply a matter of coincidence. But when, on page 29, I saw the dread word “magma” I knew that Calvino has been too long in Paris, for only Sarrautistes use “magma,” a word the great theoretician of the old New Novel so arbitrarily and uniquely appropriated from the discipline of science. Elsewhere in the stories, Robbe-Grillet’s technique of recording the minutiae of a banal situation stops cold some of Calvino’s best effects.

  “The Chase,” in fact, could have been written by Robbe-Grillet. This is not a compliment. Take the beginning:

  That car chasing me is faster than mine; inside there is one man, alone, armed with a pistol, a good shot…. We have stopped at a traffic signal, in a long column. The signal is regulated in such a way that on our side the red light lasts a hundred and eighty seconds and the green light a hundred and twenty, no doubt based on the premise that the perpendicular traffic is heavier and slower.

  And so on for sixteen pages, like a movie in slow motion.

  The theory behind this sort of enervating prose is as follows, since to write is to describe, with words, why not then describe words themselves (with other words)? Or, glory be! words describing words describing an action of no importance (the corner of that room in Robbe-Grillet’s Jalousie). This sort of “experiment” has always seemed to me to be of more use to students of language than to readers of writing. On his own and at his best, Calvino does what very few writers can do: he describes imaginary worlds with the most extraordinary precision and beauty (a word he has single-handedly removed from that sphere of suspicion which the old New Novelists maintain surrounds all words and any narrative).