Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings

by Italo Calvino

  The Bateleur, the Juggler: is that the only card the intellectual can play today?

  You know that my method never leads me to put everything on one single card. That is why I am remote from the hero-figures of culture in this century. The final three cards in The Castle of Crossed Destinies are three possible alternatives, united in their combination. But if the Bateleur wins, I then feel within me the need to undo all his tricks.

  Paris, ‘the metropolis that my long flight took me to’. What were you fleeing, Calvino? And is Paris adequate for this flight?

  The hermit has the city in the background, for me that city remains Italy. Paris is more a symbol of somewhere else rather than an actual elsewhere. And in any case is it true that I live in Paris? I have never managed to put together a discourse on my life in Paris, I’ve always said that instead of having a house in the country, I had a house in a foreign city, where I could have no function or role.

  To stay in one place you stay away from it. In Paris, watching Italy. What sort of a trick is this?

  Among the Invisible Cities there is one on stilts, and its inhabitants watch their own absence from on high. Maybe to understand who I am I have to observe a point where I could be but am not. Like an early photographer who poses in front of the camera and then runs to press the switch, photographing the spot where he could have been but isn’t. Perhaps that is the way the dead observe the living, a mixture of interest and incomprehension. But I only think this when I am depressed. In my euphoric moments I think that that void which I do not occupy can be filled by another me, doing the things that I ought to have done but was not able to do. Another me that could emerge only from that void.

  Great absence or great presence, a public personage plays on one or the other. For instance, Tommaso Landolfi won by playing the mystery card. Did you win by absence?

  I certainly cannot compete with Landolfi’s consistency. If in recent years I have even written lead articles for the Corriere della sera, that means that a part of me, which is the heir of a serious sounding voice and defined by Fortini as ‘the noble father’, is always on the public stage. It is not that I am very happy about this. I would rather pension off this noble father and use other images of myself. Perhaps that of the ‘cynical child’, to use another Fortini definition, from one of his epigrams.

  Between laceration and harmony it is precisely the cynical child who is there, namely irony. What role does irony have for you: defence, attack, making the impossible possible?

  Irony warns that what I write must be read with a distracted air, a mood of considerable lightness. And since I sometimes use other tones of voice, the things that count are particularly those I say with irony.

  That is an irony for external use. What about inside?

  With regard to laceration, irony is the announcement of a possible harmony; and with regard to harmony, it is the consciousness of the real laceration. Irony always warns of the other side of the coin.

  We are what we do not throw away. Is that also what you wanted to say in your last story, ‘La poubelle agr ée’ (‘The Common Dustbin’)? What elements in your intellectual journey have and have not ended up in the ‘bin’?

  Sometimes it seems to me that I have not thrown anything away, at others that I have not done anything but throw things out. In every experience what has to be looked for is the substance, which is then what remains. Here is a ‘value’: throwing much out in order to conserve what is essential.

  With the passing of time the hand sti fens or becomes lighter. How do you come to write now compared with fifteen years ago?

  I have learnt to discover the joys of writing to order, when I’m asked to do something for a definite destination, however humble. At least I know for certain that there is somebody for whom my writing serves a purpose. I feel freer, there is not that feeling of imposing on others a subjectivity that even I am not sure about. I believe in the absolute and necessary individualism of writing, but in order for it to work it has to be taken as contraband into something which denies it, or at least impedes it.

  Calvino, I will not ask you what you are writing. I’ll ask you what you will not write any more.

  If you mean will I never write again what I have already written, there is nothing that I reject in any of my writing. Of course, some roads do close. What I keep open is fiction, a storytelling that is lively and inventive, as well as the more reflective kind of writing in which narrative and essay become one.

  [Paese sera, 7 January 1978. From an interview with Daniele Del Giudice. (Author’s note.) On the original is a note by Calvino: ‘Needs editing.’]

  Was I a Stalinist Too?

  I was one of those who left the Communist party in 1956–57 because it did not de-Stalinize fast enough. But what did I say when Stalin was alive and Stalinism was accepted without question inside Communist parties? Was I or was I not a Stalinist too? I would like to be able to say: ‘I was not’; or: ‘I was, but I did not know what it meant’; or: ‘I thought I was but in reality I wasn’t.’ I do not feel that any of these answers corresponds entirely to the truth, however much partial truth there may be in all of them. If I want to succeed in understanding and making others understand what I thought then (something that is not easy because we change over the years and we end up changing even our memories, our memories of how we were), I had better start by saying: ‘Yes, I was a Stalinist’, and then try to see more clearly what that might have meant.

  I will not situate the problem in either its subjective context (how in the general upheaval of the war a young Italian, without any political experience or instruction, found that he was all of a sudden a Communist), or its objective context (Stalin meant then Stalingrad, Russia stopping Hitler’s triumphant march and descending like an avalanche of fire and sword on Berlin), not because these are unimportant, but because we can take them as read. And let’s come to the crucial point: who was Stalin for us, for me? (I had better speak in the singular, and then see whether this exploration of my individual memory yields any general consideration.) Who was Stalin between 1945 and 1953, here in this Western world which had taken its shape from the Allied victory and the Cold War? What image of him could be reconstructed from the official portraits which were all alike and from the almost total invisibility of his presence, from the written pages that descended every so often on to the world like oracles and from the tremendous silence that was his response to the endless choruses of praise?

  The images of Stalin that one could generate from this distance of his (a fortunate distance, though not everyone realized it) were several: for many rank-and-file Communists waiting for the zero hour of the revolution, Stalin was the living guarantee that this revolution would happen. (And actually the opposite was true, since Stalin tended to rule out any revolution that could happen outside the Soviet Union’s sphere of direct influence.) Then there was the Stalin who said that the proletariat had to pick up the flag of democratic liberties that had been dropped by the bourgeoisie, and this was the Stalin whose strategy offered support for Togliatti’s party line, and seemed to suggest a perspective of historical continuity between the bourgeois revolution and that of the proletariat, a continuity which the alliance between the Three (or Five?) Great Powers against the Axis had sealed … Was that what Stalin was for me? But how could this image be preserved given all the aspects which blatantly contradicted it? Let us try out a first formulation: although Stalinism was very compact, it contained for Western Communists a range, however limited, of possibilities in politics, culture and behaviour which all differed to a certain extent. There were different ways of being a Stalinist, but the rules of the game were that whoever upheld one line was obliged not to present it as an alternative to the others.

  As far as I am concerned, Stalin had become a figure in my life only at the moment when he had had himself photographed with Roosevelt and Churchill in the wicker armchairs at Yalta. What had happened previously, the struggle against Trotsky, the great purges, were ju
st that, things that had happened ‘previously’, when I did not feel directly involved. Of course, the mystery surrounding the incredible self-accusations in the Moscow trials continued to cast an icy shadow (all the more so when the same scene repeated itself in the trials of Budapest and Prague), but the huge pyres of the war seemed to have diminished all other pyres and to have absorbed them into one furnace, in the climate of imminent tragedy. Even the enormous trauma of those who had entered the political struggle before us – the German–Soviet pact of 1939 – was counterbalanced by the history of the subsequent years (as long as you did not look too closely into the details, which in any case were not very well known in Italy). What I wanted to identify with was the history that began with the rescue from Nazism and Fascism which then ruled Europe, and with everything else that had anticipated it in the past. Stalin seemed to represent the moment when Communism had become a huge river, now distant from the headlong and uneven course it began with, a river into which the currents of history flowed. I could, then, formulate my own position thus: my Stalinism as much as my anti-Stalinism stemmed from the same nucleus of values. For this reason, for me and for many others, the development of an anti-Stalinist conscience was not felt as a change, but as a fulfilment of one’s own convictions.

  Not that I did not believe there was another version of history, incompatible with that image. I would prefer to be taken for a supporter of the most cynical Machiavellian approach than for one of those who say: ‘Stalin’s atrocities? Who knew anything about them? I had no idea.’ Of course no one suspected the extent of the massacres (and even now every new estimate of the number of millions of victims shows up the preceding estimate as too optimistic), nor did anyone know what the mechanism was that produced the grotesque confessions in the show trials (people sought sophisticated explanations in terms of revolutionary psychology, by which the disgraced leaders, now with no hope, calumnied themselves solely to collaborate in the development of socialism, even Koestler, who had written the most horrific book on the subject, was guilty of optimism), but the elements to make some sense of it all – or at least to understand that there were many grey areas – were in plentiful supply. You could take them into consideration or not: which was something different from believing in them or not. For instance, I was a friend of Franco Venturi,57 who knew a lot of the things that had happened out there, and told me about them with all the sarcasm of the Enlightenment man he was. Did I not believe him? Of course I believed him. It was just that I thought that I, being a Communist, had to see those facts from a different perspective from his, weighing them in different scales of positive and negative. And moreover, to draw the logical conclusions would have meant detaching myself from the movement, the organization, the masses, etc., missing the chance to participate in something that at that time counted more for me … This incapacity to transmit experience, or let’s say the lack of efficacy in communicating one’s experience, continues to be one of the most depressing facts in the way history and society work: there is no way of preventing a generation from closing its ears, history continues to be propelled by urges that are not completely under control, by partial and unclear convictions, by choices that are not choices and by necessities that are not necessities.

  At this point I can attempt to clarify my definition: Stalinism relied on necessity, things could not happen any other way from the way they happened, even though the face of that history had nothing pleasant about it. Only when I managed to understand that even inside the most iron necessity there is a point where choices are possible, and Stalin’s choices had been largely disastrous, did any justification of Stalinism become unthinkable.

  Naturally there was an area where I could not hide from myself the negativity of Stalinism in any way, and this was in my very own field of work. Soviet art and literature – once the revolutionary period had burnt out – were grim and wretched, and official aesthetics consisted in crude, high-handed directives. Not having clear ideas on how the Soviet system of directives worked, I was not inclined to hold Stalin directly responsible (in his ‘signed’ interventions he seemed to be more open than his followers). This was how I explained the system to myself: in the years when in the USSR the Communist leadership had imposed itself on the various sectors of cultural and social life, some areas had been able to profit from the leadership of people who were creative in a genuinely Communist sense, whereas other fields – like literature and art, after the various deaths and notorious suicides – had fallen into the hands of crooks and opportunists. In short, I had understood something, but not the most important thing: that it was the Stalinist system of culture that of necessity imposed this predominance of crooks, and that this system was an absolute monarchy and not a collegiate leadership.

  In order to bar the dishonest from the route to cultural power I thought it was necessary to undertake in one’s own field practical and theoretical work that was unimpeachable from the political point of view and that would act as a model of values for the new society. For this reason one had to exclude many things from one’s horizon; Communism was a narrow funnel one had to pass through in order to discover an unlimited universe on the other side. I can then add this corollary to the ‘formulation’ regarding the necessity of Stalinism I enounced previously: Stalinism possessed the power and the limitations of all great simplifications. The vision of the world that it took into consideration was very compressed and schematic, but inside it there were choices and one could struggle to make one’s choices prevail, choices which allowed back into play many values which one thought excluded.

  Behind this I could still see operating as a model that extraordinary combination of, on the one hand, intellectuals fired by a practical and inventive spirit and, on the other, the proletariat with its need for renewal, the combination that had been the miracle of revolutionary Russia. It was only later that I realized that this combination (perhaps a natural consequence of the Russian Socialist revolutionary tradition rather than the result of conscious intention by Lenin and the Bolsheviks) had lasted just a few years and had been dispersed by Stalin, depriving the workers of any power to claim rights and decimating the intellectuals in a reign of terror. So now I am able to introduce a formulation of wider import: Stalinism presented itself as the conclusion of the Enlightenment project of placing the whole mechanism of society in the domain of the intellect. It was instead the most comprehensive (and perhaps inevitable) defeat of this project.

  To this picture I have to add a more personal detail: my utopian desire to attain a non-ideological conception of the world. The intellectual atmosphere of those years was certainly less ideological than it is now, but the world in which I moved was saturated with ideology. And I had convinced myself that every time Stalin spoke, the ideologues choked on their food. And this caused me great satisfaction. It seemed to me that Stalin was always on the side of common sense over ideology. My friends criticized me heavily for this attitude both then and later, but it met the need I felt to find my own position vis-à-vis the people I regularly debated with who were very much ideologists. I was wrong, at least as regards Stalin: because Stalin was not at all the end of ideology; because my superficiality led me to identify with the worst kind of ideologizing; and because when examples of openness of thought come from a single ruler, they count for nothing, except to show that he alone can afford to be like that because he is king. So I can add this to my series of conclusions: Stalinism appeared to establish the primacy of practice over ideological principles, but in fact it twisted ideology in order to ideologize something that functioned only through force.

  I am only now beginning to understand how things stood. I mean things like me and Stalin, and me and Communism. The suffering of the Revolution, Red October, Lenin, were always distant ghosts for me, events that happened once upon a time, irrevocable events which would never happen again. I had become involved with the problematics of Communism during Stalin’s time but for reasons that were to do with Italian history, and
I had to make a constant effort to bring the Soviet Union into my frame of reference. As far as the popular democracies of Eastern Europe were concerned, I had pretty quickly come to the conclusion that this was simply a highly artificial and compulsory manoeuvre, imposed on them from outside and from on high. I thought things were different for the USSR, that Communism, after the years of the harshest struggles, had become a kind of natural state there, it had reached a spontaneity, a serenity, a mature wisdom. I projected on to reality the rudimentary simplification of my political ideas, whose ultimate aim was to rediscover, after all the distortions and injustices and massacres, a natural equilibrium beyond all history, beyond class struggle, beyond ideology, beyond Socialism and Communism.

  This was why in my ‘Diary of a Journey to the USSR’, which I published in l’Unità in 1952, what I noted down was almost exclusively minimal observations of daily life, its heartening, reassuring, timeless and non-political aspects. This non-monumental way of presenting the USSR seemed to me the least conformist approach. But in fact the real Stalinist sin I was guilty of was precisely this: in order to defend myself from a reality which I did not know, but which in some way I sensed but did not want to articulate, I collaborated with this unofficial language of mine; it presented to official hypocrisy as a picture of serenity and smiles something that was trauma and tension and torture. Stalinism was also the smooth-speaking and cheerful mask which concealed the historical tragedy taking place.