Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings

by Italo Calvino

  At Prezzolini’s

  23 Nov.

  At dinner chez Prezzolini31 who had invited me when I was still in Italy to come to his little cell on the sixteenth floor, already described many times, to enjoy his famous skills as cook and host. Also present is Mrs [Sheila] Cudahy, widow of the Marquis Pellegrini, a Catholic and Vice President of Farrar Straus, and a Hungarian count, Arady, if I caught the name right, author of a biography of Pius XI. After days and days of meeting only Jews, this mixing with reactionary Catholics is a not unpleasant distraction. Naturally, alongside Prezzolini, the Hungarian count, who is a Catholic liberal, admirer of the moderate Lombard aristocracy of the nineteenth century, actually seems more like a comrade to me. Extremely interesting conversation in which the count proves the continuity of the line going from Pius XI to John XXIII, a line which however has still not managed to win because Pius XII’s party is still strong. Everyone attacks America’s Irish clergy and Cardinal Spellman, but I notice that their reasons are the opposite of the usual criticisms of the Church’s authoritarian, hierarchical spirit: here they criticize their lack of formality, their ‘democratic’ offhandedness, their ignorance of Latin. Everyone is scandalized here by the fact that they have placed a glass case in St Patrick’s cathedral with a coloured wax statue of Pius XII, of natural size, with hair and everything just like in Madame Tussaud’s; they cannot understand how the Vatican has not intervened against this act of sacrilege, which was surely engineered by Spellman in order to spite Pope John XXIII. They are full of praise for Mencken as the great destroyer of American democratic myths. And the Hungarian in turn is full of praise for Karl Kraus (now adored by Cases, 32 just as Mencken played the role of master to all of America’s left wing). The way they extol The Leopard (which they have no hesitation in putting on the same level as Manzoni), solely for reactionary reasons, confirms – as far as I’m concerned – the enormous importance of this book in the West’s current ideological involution. Many of these discussions were clearly inspired by my presence in their midst, with minimal polemical effort on my part, naturally: I am absolutely fine with those who openly declare themselves to be reactionary, I am on friendly terms with Prezzolini, while with the count and the marchioness (whom I will see later at a business lunch) we have common ground in our knowledge of Bordighera and its society.

  N. B. Opinions on [James] Purdy and particularly on Malcolm are negative even in the Farrar Straus environment. I have not found anyone who had a good word to say about Purdy (whom I shall meet soon); on the other hand, yesterday evening they were all unanimous in lauding Malamud as the great new writer; an interesting verdict coming from Catholics. Consequently, in this year’s planning, I would say to promote Malamud more than Purdy.

  How a Big Bookshop Works

  (From the conversation I had with the manageress of Brentano’s.) The American bookshop is more complicated than an Italian one for the simple fact that the number of books published is so great that nobody, on the sales side, thinks it is possible to be on top of all of it. Brentano’s is organized very well: it is a huge bookstore with separate tables for new fiction, history, poetry, and so on, and even including sections for paperbacks (which are usually handled not by a bookseller but by the local drugstore or newsagent or separate paperback shop), periodicals, and of course a Juveniles section which you find in every bookshop. They do not buy on the one-free-copy-per-dozen system; the bookseller receives a discount of 40 percent; on rare occasions the publisher provides one free copy in every ten. Orders are taken when the publisher’s agent makes his monthly call. The staff are just shop assistants as in tie-shops and would not dream of knowing anything about books. The public are not in the habit of visiting bookshops; if for example a mother reads a review of a book on child-rearing she maybe telephones or writes to the publisher asking what she has to do to buy it, but she is not in the habit of going to the bookseller. In short, it is not really interesting: it is exactly as it is in Italy. Now the bookshops are full of small reproductions of famous classical or modern statues, which must be the latest discovery by those engaged in mass reproduction of works of art, after the reproduction of paintings (in other words it is a practice as old as can be). However, it is ugly stuff.

  Tail-lights

  A study of the American psyche could be carried out by examining in particular the enormous tailfins of their cars and the great variety and elegance of the shapes of their tail-lights, which seem to embody all the myths of American society. Apart from the enormous round lights, which one often sees even in Italy and which evoke chases of cops and robbers, there are those shaped like missiles, like skyscraper pinnacles, like film-actresses’ eyes, and the full repertoire of Freudian symbols.

  New York, 7 December 1959

  This time I am not going to write much. For the last week I have been living a rather secluded life, writing up my lecture. It’s a real bore because here they know nothing at all about Italy, so you have to start from first principles and explain absolutely everything. I mean you have to construct a whole ethical-political-literary discourse, the kind of thing you would no longer dream of doing in Italy; and even so they will not understand a thing here, since the Italophiles are always the least intelligent. However, when one sees how inadequate the official organs for the spreading of Italian culture are, one feels duty bound to try to compensate as best one can; and this lecture, unless I immediately get bored with it and ditch it completely, might be one of the more important purposes of my journey, if for no other reason than the fact that someone will have travelled throughout the USA explaining who was Gramsci, Montale, Pavese, Danilo Dolci, Gadda, Leopardi. So I have not gone on with the American diary, but it also happens that I have fewer things to say, because New York is no longer a new city to me, and although initially everyone I saw in the street was the occasion for me to offer some particular observation, now the crowd is just the usual New York crowd you see every day, and the people I meet and the way I spend my day all fall under the category of the predictable. However, I have accumulated a number of observations which I will work through gradually, and I have plunged into a more active existence now that I have finished the lecture and handed it in to be translated. I should also be able to find the time to read some books, though this is still in the future and the little wall of books on my dressing-table is by now covering up the mirror without me being able to begin dismantling it.

  So, for now, just a few points about publishers.

  Fruttero:33 I’ve bought the Modern Library anthology of horror stories and I will put it in the post tomorrow (the post offices are shut on Saturday and Sunday). What size of shoes do you wear?

  James Purdy

  I’ve been to see Purdy, who lives in Brooklyn but in the more residential part. He received me in the rented room he shares with a professor. The kitchen and a double bedroom are all in the one room. Having left his job, Purdy is living for a year on a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation and this has allowed him to finish his novel, The Nephew, which he delivered to his publisher today: it is something more like his short stories than like Malcolm. Purdy is a very pathetic character, middle-aged, big and fat and gentle, fair and reddish in complexion, and clean-shaven: he dresses soberly, and is like Gadda without the hysteria, and exudes sweetness. If he is homosexual, he is so with great tact and melancholy. At the foot of his bed is weight-lifting equipment; above it, a nineteenth-century English print of a boxer. There is a reproduction of a Crucifixion by Rouault34, and scattered all around are theology books. We discuss the sad state of American literature, which is stifled by commercial demands: if you don’t write as the New Yorker demands, you don’t get published. Purdy published his first book of short stories at his own expense, then he was discovered in England by Edith Sitwell, and subsequently Farrar Straus published his work, but he does not even know Mrs Cudahy, and the critics don’t understand him, though the book is, very slowly, managing to sell. There are no magazines that publish short stories, no
groups of writers, or at least he does not belong to any group. He gives me a list of good novels, but they are nearly all unpublished works which have not been able to find a publisher. Good literature in America is clandestine, lies in unknown authors’ drawers, and only occasionally someone emerges from the gloom breaking through the leaden cloak of commercial production. I would like to talk about capitalism and socialism, but Purdy certainly would not understand me; no one here knows or even suspects that socialism exists, capitalism wraps itself round and permeates everything, and its antithesis is nothing but a meagre, childish claim to a spiritual dimension, devoid of any coherent line or prospects. Unlike Soviet society, where the totalitarian unity of society is totally based on the constant awareness of its enemies, of its antithesis, here we are in a totalitarian structure of a medieval kind, based on the fact that no alternative exists nor even any awareness of the possibility of an alternative other than that of individualist escapism.

  I ASK EVERYONE ABOUT SALINGER AND EVERYONE TELLS ME ABOUT THIS SAD CASE: THE MOST IMPORTANT WRITER OF THE GENERATION BETWEEN US, WHO NO LONGER WRITES, HAS BEEN TAKEN TO A PSYCHIATRIC INSTITUTION, AND THE LATEST THINGS HE HAS WRITTEN ARE STORIES FOR THE NEW YORKER. IT IS RATHER LIKE WHAT HAPPENED TO FITZGERALD IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE CENTURY. I THINK WE SHOULD DO THE OTHER BOOK BY SALINGER AS WELL, AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, NAMELY NINE STORIES (LITTLE BROWN, AND REPRINTED BY THE MODERN LIBRARY). SALINGER IS BY NOW A KIND OF CLASSIC IN AMERICA.

  All writers here have the chance to say that they have to write a book and have to stay at home for a year and can obtain a grant for it.

  Grants

  For professors grants are easy because they usually don’t teach for more than two years in succession before finding a way of securing a grant for a year or two, without having to be accountable to anyone. However if they then want another grant, they have to somehow write a book, so there is this inflation of academic books which are maybe pointless but at least they are books, whereas in Italy publications for university posts are maybe pointless but they are not even books, and you certainly cannot live off them.

  Sweezy

  Dear Raniero,35 I wrote to Sweezy36 in order to see him, but he had Leo Hubermann telephone me to say that he is now at Cornell University for a few days, then he is going to his house in the country (here everyone disappears at Christmas), and that I should write to him. But since we have to contact him, it is of course better if you do so: you can explain your plan in detail. If then he wants to reply through me, I am at his disposal. But bear in mind that I will be staying in New York only until early January then I shall be leaving for California and will not be back in NY until mid-March.

  Styron

  I have the proofs of Styron’s new novel;37 from the early pages I have read it seems good. Will I ever find the time to read? I don’t know (that is, I always think I have something better to do than read) and if I see that I can’t manage to read on I’ll send the proofs to you.

  The Lecture

  I gave my lecture at the Casa Italiana of Columbia University, and there was quite a big audience despite it being Christmas, and so I have begun to carry out my role as ambassador for Italian opposition culture, which when one arrives here one feels one has to do, even though it is a bore to stand there and explain Italian Resistance literature and post-war culture down to the present day and to launch into a discourse which will include all the forbidden names; however, the fact is that here nobody has said these things, and I believe that I have accomplished at least one initial achievement regarding Italian cultural policy in America, just by saying all the things that Prezzolini does not want said and showing Donini (who runs the Embassy’s Italian Cultural Institute: he is Ambrogio’s brother, almost as much a conformist as his brother but on the opposite side; he is not stupid, and what’s more has a complex about having a brother who is a Communist) how to do his job. They were all there and they took it on the chin, Prezzolini did not object: on the contrary, he said he agreed with me in many respects and they all congratulated me ‘on that part of the lecture in which [I] spoke about Ludovico Ariosto’ (namely, the final part where I was only speaking about my own position in order to cheer the audience up and where I ended with a profession of loyalty to Ariosto) but not on the rest. And the few clear-thinking Italians in that ambience felt slightly cheered. I do not know what impression it made on the Americans, as American Italophiles are never very bright. And the truth is that Italian culture has little to say, these days even less than ever, even in a world as refractory to ideas as this one.

  Christmas

  I will spare you the description of the phantasmagoria that is Christmas in this city, because you have read about it a hundred thousand times and all I could add is my guarantee that it is even more excessive than you can imagine, and nowhere could you see a festival permeate the life of a city more: it’s not a city any more, it’s Christmas. Christmas in this consumerist civilization has become the ultimate celebration of consumerism; the ubiquitous Santa Claus (Father Christmas) you see in human form at the door of every shop holding his little bell, and depicted on every poster, in every shop-window, while at every shop-door the unremitting God of consumption imposes on everyone happiness and well-being, cost what it may.

  Prospects for the Election

  The cult of Stevenson38 among the majority of intellectuals, as though he were some sort of saint, is not likely to have any effect this time either, on the decision of the mass of voters. Stevenson probably will not even be his own party’s candidate after being ousted last time, and there is a great danger that the Democratic candidate will be the Catholic Kennedy, and in all the papers there is great talk of the possibility of a Catholic President. But in reality it is almost certain that the election will be won by the Republicans and so the crucial choice will be the Republican Party’s decision regarding Nixon and Rockefeller. As for Rockefeller, I hear him spoken about either very negatively or in extremely positive terms. For instance, Max Ascoli, 39 always a supporter of the most realistic policies, seems to me to have made up his mind to support Rockefeller, whereas he has no time for Nixon whom he regards as an opportunist ready to support the most contradictory policies depending on which way the wind blows. Others speak to me about Rockefeller as a man lusting for power and devoid of scruples. The reality is that America has nothing new to say in terms of political alignments.

  The Latest American Joke

  Do you know the difference between the optimist and the pessimist?

  The optimist is learning Russian; the pessimist is learning Chinese.

  New York, 2 January 1960

  Happy New Year to all my friends in Turin!

  For the last twenty days I have been without any reply to my letters, indeed I would say without any signs of life except for the minutes of a meeting dated 21 December. I regret this lack of dialogue (basically there was only ever a dialogue with my very early letters) which comes at a time when the hardest work of the winter season ought now to have tailed off. Einaudi Publishing has never succeeded in distance-working, and if you had all sent me criticisms, advice, encouragement, it would have helped me not to feel cut off in the isolation of the individual traveller who is not involved in the production process of a developing company. I have felt this even more in these weeks when the city’s Christmas madness has halted my systematic visits to publishers (though I have by now very few left to deal with) and now I am about to leave, around the 12th: Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago then San Francisco, Los Angeles and the South, and for a couple of months my letters will just be reportages of my travels plus, I hope, accounts of books I have read, because I am going to take books with me in the hope of reading them.

  On Horseback through the Streets of New York

  For the first time in my life I get on a horse. Sunday morning in Central Park. But the stable is rather far towards the west from Central Park and as soon as I am in the saddle I have to go along a lengthy stretch of 89 th Street and cross over a
couple of Avenues. I ride along high above the roofs of the cars, which are forced to slow down behind the horse’s pace. In Central Park the going is good though a bit muddy. I try out a trot and also a bit of a gallop, which is easier. All around, in the marvellously clear air of New York (no city in the world has such clear air and such a beautiful sky), are skyscrapers. Along the lawns in the Park run the inevitable squirrels. My companion, sitting lightly on her horse, shouts technical instructions to me which I don’t understand. I have this sensation of dominating New York in a way I have never done before, and I am going to recommend to all visitors to New York that the first thing they should do is a tour on horseback. I met this woman, a writer’s wife, at a party yesterday where I was guest of honour (Erich Maria Remarque was also there with his wife, Paulette Goddard, who has aged considerably from the time of Tempi moderni but has great eyes and is full of verve, in short she’s very nice, whereas with her husband there was an instant feeling of mutual antipathy), anyway this woman, who was young and Jewish but with a real feeling for nature, says a propos of The Baron in the Trees that she loves ‘to ride’, but never ‘rides’ because her husband never takes her, but that I must certainly know how to ‘ride’ well. I tell her that I have never been on a horse in my life, so we fix up to meet again the next day and they also lent me a pair of little Mexican riding boots. It is clear that this is ‘the right way of approach to America’,40 because one has to go through all the means of communication in historical sequence and eventually I will arrive at the Cadillac.

  The Actors’ Studio