Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings

by Italo Calvino

  Of course the Social Republic had its new official portraits of the Duce, in his new uniform and with his thin face; but I cannot get them to emerge from my memory of that epoch which was so full of emotions and fears. It has to be said that at a certain point my life in our town came to a stop and I found myself cut off from the circulation of those images. Only by hearsay did I find out about a cinema newsreel made by Luce in which Mussolini made once more an unexpected ‘crowd immersion’ a few months before the end, with his speech at the Teatro Lirico in Milan, the city where his fame as a crowd-puller had been born.

  At the beginning of April in a leaflet dropped from an Allied plane to the partisans (rare gifts rained down on us from the sky) there was a caricature of Mussolini (I think it was the first I had seen in my life) by the most famous English cartoonist of the time. (I am sorry that I cannot recall his name; I could go and look it up, because recently the papers mentioned him on the occasion of his death; but up until now I have respected my commitment to rely only on my memory, and I do not want to break this rule right at the end.) In the cartoon Benito and Adolf were trying on women’s dresses preparing to escape to Argentina.

  It didn’t happen. Having been the origin of so many massacres that had no image to recall them, Mussolini’s last images were those of his own massacre. Not nice to see or recall. However, I would want all dictators or would-be dictators presently in power, whether they are ‘progressive’ or reactionary, to keep them framed on their bedside table and to take a look at them every night.

  [La Repubblica, 10–11 July 1983, originally entitled ‘ Cominciò con un cilindro’ (‘It All Began with a Top Hat’).]

  Behind the Success

  I began to write as a child, though I was very far from the world of literature: in San Remo my father and mother dealt with the acclimatization of exotic plants, with the cultivation of flowers and fruit, and with genetics. Those who frequented our house belonged primarily to the scientific and technical world, the world of agriculture and agricultural experimentation. Both my parents possessed a very strong personality, my father in his vigorous practicality, my mother in her rigour as a scholar, and both had great knowledge in their field, which always intimidated me and gave me a kind of psychological block which meant that I was never able to learn anything from them, something I bitterly regret. The result was I turned more to comics, radio plays and cinema: in short, I developed an imaginative sensibility, which might have been fulfilled by a literary vocation if my surroundings had offered any stimulus in that direction, or if I had been more ready to seize that stimulus. Perhaps I could have realized this earlier, that my vocation was literature, and oriented my relationship with the world better, but I was a bit slow, especially in getting to know myself.

  San Remo between the wars was an unusual city, compared to the average in Italian society: at that time there were still plenty of foreigners, which gave a certain cosmopolitan air which I breathed in right from my childhood; but on the other hand it was very provincial, remote from what was happening in Italian culture at that time (which was in any case a rather enclosed period, even in the livelier centres). To be blunt, I had my first contact with literature when I went to school.

  I went to high school without achieving particularly brilliant marks, except in Italian, a subject in which I succeeded easily, and these marks made me study it very seriously. Of course, I could also have learnt much more from school, if I had understood myself more and what my life would be like, but that is something that I suppose everyone can say. I could not admit at that time that literature was the thing that interested me most. That would have meant enrolling for a literature degree at university, but the only thing I knew about the Literature Faculty was that it was chosen by those who wanted to become secondary-school teachers, a career which held no fascination for me. I was very attracted by what I called in a rather vague way ‘journalism’, but at that time the world of newspapers was connected with Fascism (or so it appeared to me, even more so than was the case in reality, since I was not aware of everything that was brewing): by temperament and upbringing I was not a Fascist, which does not rule out that I might have become one out of opportunism, but even in that case I would have had to struggle to go against my nature: in short, I did not have a clue what I wanted to do in life.

  I dwell on this moment of uncertainty because I believe that this insecurity, this perplexity about my vocation, also caused after-effects later in life, in the sense that I never decided to ‘be a writer’. If I was at that stage already determined to write, to express myself in literature, I still felt that I should back this dicey activity with something else, with a profession which appeared, I’m not sure whether to my own or to others’ eyes, as something useful, practical, secure.

  So much so that after getting my school-leaving certificate I made a choice which might have seemed, and perhaps was, determined by my family background, and enrolled in the Agriculture Faculty of Turin University where my father had taught up until a few years previously (he had retired by now) courses on ‘Tropical cultivation’ and ‘Tree-growing’. What I had in mind was that for me writing could be a side-line to a ‘serious’ profession: the latter would keep me in touch with reality and let me travel the world, like my father who had spent nearly twenty years of his life in Central America, and had lived through the Mexican Revolution.

  This attempt at realigning myself with a family tradition did not work, but the basic idea was not a bad one: if I had been able to remain faithful to my plan of pursuing a profession with writing as an activity that was on the margins of this life-experience, sooner or later I would have become a writer anyway, but with something extra.

  The new climate after the Liberation allowed me to frequent journalist and literary circles. That was when I abandoned Agriculture and enrolled in the Arts Faculty, but to tell you the truth I did not go much to the new Faculty because I was too impatient to join political and cultural life. That was in fact the period when a new element became decisive in my choices: politics. Politics was to have a major influence on my life for ten years or so. The situation, in short, had changed considerably on the outside, but inside myself it was still obeying the same mechanism: I was still unsure of my vocation and my chances of becoming a writer, and I tried to put this vocation below a broader and more imperative duty: joining in the renewal of Italy from the ruins of war and dictatorship.

  During the Resistance I had found myself with the Communists, as a simple partisan, and at the Liberation the PCI seemed to me the most realistic and efficient party for the immediate tasks we faced. I had no background in theory. Under Fascism the only clear idea I had was an aversion to totalitarianism and its propaganda; I had read Croce and De Ruggiero and for a while I had called myself a liberal. On the other hand, my family’s traditions were a humanitarian Socialism, and before that Mazzinianism. The tragedies of the war, the need to think about world problems in relation to mass society, the role of the PCI in the struggle against Fascism were all elements that led me to become a member of the Communist party. The practical tasks of constructing basic democratic structures after the Liberation, and immediately afterwards the campaign for the Constituent Assembly absorbed me totally, and at that time the idea of deepening my ideological knowledge or reading classics of Marxist thought would have seemed to me a waste of time.

  Alongside this life as a rank-and-file militant (which was based largely in my own town and the surrounding area), I began to work for the party press: I did surveys, reviews, short stories, initially for the Genoa edition of l’Unità, then the Turin one (at that time there were four editions of l’Unità, each of them quite autonomous). It was with the Turin edition that, once I had settled in that city, I had the closest links, working also for some time (between 1948 and ’49) as editor of the cultural page. But later, too, in the very bitter years around 1950, l’Unità would send me every now and again to do articles on the factories during strikes, occupations, moments o
f crisis. It was in this capacity that I followed the occupation of the Fiat factory in July 1948, the suppression of the trade unions, the rice-workers’ strikes in the Vercelli region.

  My encounter with journalism, then, happened in a very different way from how I had imagined it as a boy. It also involved things which from a journalistic point of view constituted a terrible apprenticeship, for instance having to provide local colour when there was a conference or exhibition; this was a practice of newspapers at the time and which still continues to a certain extent today, but it is now done more broad-mindedly, whereas in those days it was a form of second-rate literature. I remember that initially the job of writing features for l’Unità fell to the poet Alfonso Gatto, then my dearest friend and mentor, but he knew how to enjoy himself doing it, for instance covering the Giro d’Italia.

  But this political journalist phase was only a secondary element in those years of apprenticeship. In 1945 I had started to gravitate towards the Einaudi publishing house; while I was still living in San Remo, I would often go to Milan to see Elio Vittorini and the editors of Il Politecnico, and to Turin where the gruff Pavese welcomed me with a friendship which became more and more precious to me, in what were to be the last years of his life. My friendship with Giulio Einaudi, which has lasted almost forty years now, was to prove decisive for me, because I met him in Milan towards the end of 1945 and he immediately suggested some things I should do. At that stage Giulio was convinced that I also had practical, organizational and economic skills, in other words that I was one of the new type of intellectuals that he was trying to foster; at any rate Giulio always had the gift of managing to get people to do things they did not know how to do.

  In that post-Liberation period, which for me was like coming back to life again, I began to carry out some small jobs for Einaudi, particularly publicity notices, articles to send to local newspapers promoting new books, brief accounts of foreign books and Italian manuscripts that had arrived. It was then that I realized that my working environment could not be anywhere but in publishing, in an avant-garde publishers, amid people of widely differing political opinions who engaged in heated debates, but who were all very friendly with each other. I would say to myself: whether or not I become a writer, I will have a job I am passionate about, and I will be working with interesting people. The balance I had sought up until then between a practical profession and literature I found in an area quite close to literature but which was not quite identical with it: Einaudi admittedly published literature, but above all they published history, politics, economics and science and this gave me the impression of being at the centre of so many things.

  After a period of uncertainty as to whether to settle in Milan or Turin, I opted for Turin, becoming a friend and collaborator of Giulio Einaudi and the other people who worked with him and were older than me: Cesare Pavese, Felice Balbo, Natalia Ginzburg, Massimo Mila, Franco Venturi, Paolo Serini and all the others who throughout the rest of Italy worked directly or indirectly with Einaudi, and naturally I also became friendly with those of the new generation who like myself were just beginning to start working in publishing.

  So for fifteen years my life was that of an editor in publishing, and in all that time I devoted much more work to other people’s books than to my own. In short, I had succeeded only in erecting a barrier between myself and my vocation to be a writer, even though it might have appeared that I was in the most favourable environment.

  My first book, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, came out in 1947, a novel based on my experience of the partisan war. For a first novel by an unknown writer, it enjoyed what could then have been considered success: it quickly sold more than 3, 000 copies and there was an immediate reprint of another 2, 000 copies. At that time nobody read Italian fiction, but Einaudi believed in my novel and launched it. He even distributed round the bookshops a poster with a photograph in which I am walking with my hands in my pockets: at that time these were things that had never been done before. In short, I was immediately ‘successful’, but I did not realize it, because we did not talk in those terms, that kind of terminology did not exist. In any case by nature I have never been someone who lets success go to his head: I had managed to write that book and get people to read it but who knew whether I could do the same with a second novel? I continued to believe that real writers were other people; as for me, God only knew.

  In fact I tried for years to write a second novel without success; the friends I showed my efforts to were not impressed. In 1949 I published a book of short stories, which, as happens with books of short stories, had a limited run of 1, 500 copies: just enough to ensure that it reached the critics and the small group of readers who looked out for new Italian fiction at that time.

  I obtained a critical consensus (including some authoritative critics) right from those very first books. I can say that everything was quite easy for me from the start; except that I had to work all day in an office, even though I did not have to clock in, and in order to write I had to take days off, which was never denied me and that was already a stroke of luck.

  The book that marked my presence in a more identifiable way was The Cloven Viscount, a story of about a hundred pages which Vittorini published in his experimental series, ‘I Gettoni’, in 1951; this edition was practically only for the specialist, but it enjoyed a good critical success, being mentioned by Emilio Cecchi, at that time the arbiter of taste in Italian literature. From that point on, a particular direction was signposted for my literary work, namely what we could define as fantasy fiction, which I would continue to alternate with stories written in other, more realistic, keys.

  In 1957 I published The Baron in the Trees, and just afterwards (or just before, I cannot remember) the Italian Folktales appeared, a huge work which I had carried out after being commissioned to do so by my publisher. In 1958 I published my collected Racconti (Short Stories), a volume which contained all the shorter fiction I had written up until then; in short, by now I was able to afford to publish stories that were just called Short Stories.

  Was that the point at which I could consider calling myself a ‘professional’ writer? Ten years had elapsed since my first book and I would say that ten years is the time it takes for someone who continues to publish with some regularity to know whether he is going to make it as a writer. By then I no longer asked myself the question ‘Will I become a writer or not?’ since it was other people who considered that I was. Even royalties, though by no means enough to live on, were beginning to become a significant item in my meagre income. So much so that, roughly just as I turned forty, I left full-time employment at Einaudi, but I stayed on as a consultant.

  The screens I had erected around me to prevent me from considering writing as my main job were collapsing. I mentioned that my editorial work continued to interest me, but I was much more independent; the same could be said of politics: not that I was less interested in it, but I had gradually reached the point (better late than never) of wanting to state my own autonomous position against the all-powerful force of the ideological and party line. And in 1957 I declared my resignation from the Communist party with an open letter, after the debates and disagreements that had taken place in 1956.

  From the beginning of my militancy it had been the political struggles in Italy that had kept me loyal to the party; but I had always had reservations about the ‘Soviet model’ and about the ways that had been imposed on the ‘popular democracies’, all of which were topics that a Communist could not discuss ‘in case you played the enemy’s game’. When finally there was open debate in Moscow, and Warsaw and Budapest rebelled, I was one of those who believed that the hour of truth had come. I tried to participate, with many friends also from Einaudi, in the debate that was engulfing the left in the West. And I did not feel I could go back to accepting the new clampdown.

  This was a painless break in that it took place amid a general reshuffling of the Italian left, in which everyone felt the need to check their convict
ions and adopt a more precise political identity. At that point I was not yet able to say where I stood in this picture. Perhaps it was only then that we began to realize what Communism, Socialism, Marxism meant; previously, when I had joined the party, I had been more inclined to view problems on a day-by-day basis and leave general questions to one side. It was then that I saw taking shape the positions which, in their critique of official Communism, would be defined as ‘reformist’, and those which came from ‘the left’ and predicted an intensification of social conflict in Italy and the world. For a while I did not identify with one side or the other: reformism seemed to me to lead one to deal with the humdrum practicality of participating in political and administrative current affairs, which may be essential but which did not interest me at all (so that, after supporting Antonio Giolitti at the time of his removal from the PCI and in his first cultural initiatives after that, I did not follow him into the Socialist party); and as for the intransigent or revolutionary tendencies (whether they supported the workers, the Chinese model or called themselves ‘third-worlders’), despite recognizing their idealizing thrust, my objections in principle against their doctrinaire approach, abstractions, blind faith, apocalypticism, their ‘the worse it gets, the better’ mentality, were such as to make me establish a very clear distance between myself and even friends whom I valued intellectually.

  So within that world of the Italian left which was my natural habitat I found myself in a position of isolation, of politically ‘not belonging’, which would only become more pronounced with the passing of time and which would encourage my natural tendency to stay silent the more I heard the inflation of words and discourses around me.