Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings

by Italo Calvino

  Before the war, I can speak not so much of a set of ideas as a conditioning – by my family, geography, the society we moved in and also my own psychology – which led me spontaneously to share anti-Fascist, anti-Nazi, anti-Franco, anti-war and antiracist opinions. This conditioning and these opinions would not have been enough on their own to make me commit myself to the political struggle. Between a negative judgment of Fascism and active anti-Fascist commitment there was a distance then which perhaps today we are unable to appreciate. When you see that politics is an object of obloquy and ridicule in the eyes of the best people around you, the most spontaneous attitude for a young person is to conclude that it is a field that is irredeemably corrupt, something you must avoid, and that you must look for other values in life.

  It was then that another form of conditioning entered into play: historical conditioning. The war quickly became the daily backdrop to our lives, the only object of our thoughts. We found ourselves immersed in politics, or rather in history, even without any choice of will. What did the outcome of that all-out conflict that bathed Europe in blood mean for the future of the world and for the future of each one of us? And how ought each one of us to behave in those events that were so far beyond the scale of our will power? What is the role of the individual in history? And does history have any sense? And does the concept of ‘progress’ still have any meaning?

  These were the questions that we could not but ask ourselves: and that was how I developed the attitude I have never lost, of casting every problem as an historical problem, or at least to winkle out of each problem the historical kernel. If the term ‘generation’ has a meaning, ours could be characterized by this special sensitivity to history as a personal experience; and this applies particularly to Italy, and also more or less to all the countries where there was a rupture caused by the war and the Resistance.

  Our experience of history was different from that of preceding generations, and it was in implicit or explicit polemic with them; and reasons for polemics were not hard to find: if there was ever a young generation able to put their parents in the dock, that was us, and this is always a fortunate position. However, it was not a total rupture: we had to find among our parents’ ideas those that we could hold on to in order to begin again from scratch, those which they had not been able to or were not in time to turn into action. Consequently ours was not a nihilistic or iconoclastic generation or a generation of ‘angry young men’: on the contrary, we were precociously endowed with that sense of historical continuity which turns the real revolutionary into the only kind of ‘conservative’ possible, namely he who, in the general catastrophe of human affairs when they are left to biological impulses, knows how to choose what needs to be saved and defended and developed and made to bear fruit.

  Alongside the problem of our participation in historical events, I would like to mention another one that was fundamental in our experience: the problem of the means which history – and therefore we ourselves – must use.

  For many of us, right from boyhood, rejecting the Fascist mentality meant above all repudiating weapons and violence; so the involvement in the armed partisan struggle meant above all overcoming powerful psychological blocks within us. I had grown up with a mentality which could more easily have led me to become a conscientious objector than a partisan; and yet all of a sudden I found myself in the middle of the most bloody fighting. However – as was said by the man who first defined this position of commitment for us, and who was first to pay for it with his life – ‘this most recent generation has no time to develop inner dramas: it has found a perfectly constructed external drama’. The tragedy of our country and the ferocity of our enemies increased as the settling of scores approached; the logic of the Resistance was the very logic of our urge towards life.

  One could have fallen, as a reaction, into extremism, because it seemed to us that there could never be satisfactory revenge for so many outrages; or, in order to discipline this emotional impulse, fall into a cold politicized legalism.

  But from all these components fused together into one single burning vitality, what emerged was the partisan spirit, that is to say that ability to overcome dangers and difficulties on impulse, a mixture of warlike pride and self-irony as regards that very warlike pride, a sense of being the real incarnation of legal authority and self-irony regarding the situation in which we found ourselves incarnating it, a manner that was sometimes boastful and truculent but always animated by generosity, an anxiety to make every noble cause our own. At a distance of so many years, I have to say that this spirit, which allowed the partisans to perform the marvellous deeds they did, remains even today a human attitude that is without peer, for moving in the hostile reality of the world.

  3) At the Liberation I naturally found myself channelled into active politics, following on from the excitement of the Resistance. Having ‘been a partisan’ seemed to me as it did to many other young people an irrevocable event in our lives, not a temporary condition like ‘military service’. From that point on we saw our civilian life as a continuation of the partisan struggle by other means; the military defeat of Fascism was only the premise; the Italy for which we had fought still existed only in theory; we had to turn it into a reality on so many levels. Whatever activity we wanted to undertake in social and economic life, it seemed natural to us that it should be integrated with participation in political life, that it should derive its meaning from that.

  After the Liberation I confirmed my membership of the Communist party, which I had joined during the Resistance primarily to participate in the fight against the Germans and Fascists in the most active and organized units, and the ones that had the most convincing political line.

  Communism represented what were (and basically will remain) the two poles of political attraction between which I have oscillated. On one side our rejection of the society which had produced Fascism had led us to dream of a revolution which would start with a clean slate, and build on its own the basic instruments of government, and, triumphing over the inevitable trail of mistakes and excesses that accompanies every revolution, would manage to form a society which was the antithesis of bourgeois society (it was the image of the October Revolution that we had in our heads, that is to say much more a starting point than an end point). On the other hand, we aspired to a civilization that was the most modern and progressive and complex from a political, social, economic, cultural point of view, with a ruling class that was highly qualified, in other words with culture inserted at every level of leadership in politics and productivity. (But maybe we formed this image later than 1945 and now I am backdating it arbitrarily? No, it was already alive then, and was inspired not only by a certain Western progressive climate – Roosevelt’s New Deal, the British Fabian Society – but also by aspects of the Soviet world.)

  But for those of us who were members then, Communism was not only a cluster of political aspirations: it was also the fusion of these with our cultural and literary aspirations. I remember when, in my provincial city, the first copies of l’Unità arrived after the Liberation. I opened the Milan edition: its deputy editor was Elio Vittorini. I opened the Turin edition: Cesare Pavese was writing on the cultural page. As luck would have it, these were my two favourite Italian writers, about whom I knew nothing up until then except two of their books and some of their translations. And now I discovered that they were in the field that I too had chosen: I thought this was how it had to be. And similarly the discovery that the painter Guttuso was a Communist! And Picasso too! That ideal of a culture that was integral to political struggle appeared to us in those days as part of natural reality. (But in fact it was not like that: we were to bang our head against the brick wall of the relationship between politics and culture for fifteen years, and the problem is still not solved.)

  I settled in Turin, which represented for me – and indeed it really was at that time – the city where the workers’ movement and the movement of ideas helped form a climate which seemed to
combine the best of a tradition and a prospect for the future. Turin meant both the old workers’ high command of Ordine Nuovo and the anti-Fascist intellectuals who had kept alive a moral and civic line in Italian culture: around both groupings were the young people who had emerged from the Resistance, full of interests and energy. My development followed both paths simultaneously: on the one side I became linked to the Einaudi publishing house, around which there gravitated people of widely differing ideological tendencies and temperaments but always committed to an interest in historical problems, and where there was much debate and everyone kept their eyes open on everything that was being thought about and written about in the world; at the same time I participated in party activity – also collaborating on, and for a certain period editing, l’Unità – thus getting the chance to know the majority of the ‘old gang’, those who had been close to Gramsci. (I will always remember the serene clarity, rigour and gentleness of Camilla Ravera, who was for us the model of an intellectual with a humane form of political culture which we would have liked to revive and re-establish in the midst of our reality which was full of contradictions and harshness; and particularly the figures of workers’ leaders, like Battista Santhià, whose rebellious temperament had accepted discipline and patience.)

  But I would not like to give a sugary picture of the early years of my political formation, as though the discovery of the tragic aspects of Stalinism only happened later for us. I became a Communist just when the arguments were raging about the Stalin–Trotsky split, the elimination of internal opposition by Stalin, the mystery of the famous ‘confessions’ at the Moscow trials, and the Soviet–German pact. These were all events that preceded my involvement in political life, but still burning questions and the subject of constant polemics between ourselves and our friends/enemies in the non-Communist left. I accepted these facts, in part convincing myself that ‘they were necessary’, in part putting them aside while I waited to be able to explain them better to myself, and in part I was confident that they were temporary aspects of Communism, not justifiable ideologically and consequently destined to be re-debated in the more or less near future (a perspective which turned out to be – at least vaguely – accurate).

  So it was not that I was ill-informed on the facts, but I did not really have very clear ideas on what these many facts meant. My ‘class’ of 1945–46 young lefties was inspired above all by a desire for action; the one after us – say about five or ten years after us – is driven above all by a desire for knowledge: they know everything about the sacred texts and collections of old newspapers but they do not love active political life as we loved it.

  At that time we were not terrified by contradictions, on the contrary: every different aspect and form of language of that highly complex organism that was the Italian Communist party was a different pole of attraction working also on each one of us; where the call of the ‘new party’, of the ‘working-class government’ ended, one continued to hear the extremist voice of the Italian people’s old love of faction, and the cold watchwords of international strategy smothered the capacity for compromise of ad hoc tactics. In that period we had not yet distinguished a clear dialectic of different currents; not that our militancy in the party was ever docile or conformist: we always had particular questions we wanted to see debated, and these were always full of general implications as well, but we were capable of finding ourselves one minute in favour of the workers and ideological rigour, the next minute being more tactical and courting liberalism, depending on the circumstances.

  That was how it came about that I found myself admiring alternately one or other of the two major Communist leader-figures in Turin: Mario Montagnana and Celeste Negarville. Both of working-class origin, with a very difficult but glorious past in each case during the twenty years of clandestine operation, prisons and exile, Montagnana and Negarville were so different in psychology and mentality as to incarnate two conflicting souls within Communism. My more strictly party education took place under the shadow at times of one, at times of the other, and I was fond of both men, though in different ways, and I also felt myself in sharp conflict now with one, now with the other. I feel I have stayed close to the memory of both men, and it is for that reason that I want to remember them both together.

  Mario Montagnana was the incarnation of the revolutionary rigour typical of the old working-class area of Borgo San Paolo, and had stayed faithful – often in open polemic with the official party line – to a workers’ intransigence which was entirely underpinned by a morality of almost puritanical inflexibility. He was my editor when I worked on the Turin edition of l’Unità. He had gone into journalism from the factory floor, as a young man, when Gramsci was editor; and he always had in mind the paper made by workers for workers, with news about the shop-floor and the different departments, news that reflected workers’ opinion on every event. He admitted through clenched teeth that many things had changed in the factory world and the life of the people from the time of his early militancy, and he always tried to place every situation and problem against the ideal image of that proletarian culture of those times, making no concessions to the class enemy, a fierce fighter in the sacrifices and the struggles whether minimal or serious, rigid about party discipline, an ascetic more from a sense of dignity and pride than from necessity.

  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 c
lean 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 20th 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.