Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings

by Italo Calvino

  Instead I deepened what had always been my conviction: that what counts is the complexity of a culture in developing its various concrete aspects, in the things produced by labour, in its technical methods for doing things, in experience and knowledge and morality, in the values which become defined through practical work. In short, my idea had always been to join in building a cultural context capable of meeting the needs of a modern Italy and in which literature constituted an innovative force and the repository of the deepest convictions. On this basis, I renewed and strengthened my friendship with Elio Vittorini and together we published Il Menabò, a journal which came out a couple of times a year, between 1959 and 1966, and which followed or predicted the changes taking place in Italian literature, in ideas and in practice.

  Vittorini was a man who had always subordinated his own work to a broader battle to establish what the foundations of Italian culture and literature should be in the context of the whole cultural picture; so much so that he sacrificed for this battle his own creative activity, the books he could have written. He was a man of great decisiveness in the different ideas he championed and was very combative; these were all qualities I did not possess and when Elio died in 1966 that was the end of that kind of activity for me. But the moral imperative of this writer who was so different from any other marked me deeply, in the sense that I always need to justify the fact of writing a book with the meaning that this book might take on as a new cultural operation in a wider context.

  But now, once again, I have found a formula for putting something else before writing, namely my need for what I do to make sense as an innovative operation in the present cultural context, to be in some sense something that has never been attempted before, and which represents a further development of the possibilities of literary expression. I would very much like to be one of those writers who have something really clear in their head to say and throughout their life they promote this idea in their works. I would like to be like that, but I am not; my relationship with ideas is more complex and problematical; I always think of the pros and cons in everything and each time I have to construct a very complex picture. This is the reason why I can even go many years without publishing anything, working on projects which constantly end up in crisis.

  So you see that coming to interview me on the subject of success is really barking up the wrong tree, because the successful writer is the one who believes strongly in himself, in his discourse, in the idea he has in his head, and he goes along his road certain that the world will follow after him. I, on the other hand, always feel the need to justify the fact that I write, that I impose on other people something that has come out of my head and which I am always unsure of and dissatisfied with. Now I am not making a moral distinction: even the writer who is sure of his own truth can be morally admirable and even heroic; the only thing that is not admirable is to exploit success by continuing to meet the public’s expectations in the most obvious way. I have never done this, even though I knew that my innovations might cause consternation among my readership and I could lose part of it along the way.

  Now that I am sixty, I have at last realized that the duty of the writer is simply to do what he knows how to do: storytellers have to tell stories, to portray, to invent. For many years I have given up laying down precepts about how one should write: what is the point of preaching one kind of literature or another, if then the things that you end up writing are maybe totally different? It took me a long time to realize that what counts is not your intention but what you actually achieve. So my literary work has become also a search for myself, an attempt to understand what I am.

  I notice that up to now I have talked little about the pleasure you can enjoy when writing: if you don’t experience at least a little bit of fun, you will never write anything good. For me doing things that give me pleasure means doing new things. Writing as such is a boring and solitary occupation; if you repeat yourself, an infinite sadness seizes hold of you. Certainly, it has to be said that even the page that I think I’ve written most spontaneously costs an awful lot of effort; a sense of relief, of satisfaction, only sets in afterwards, once the book is finished. But what is important is that my readers enjoy themselves, not me.

  I think I can say that I have managed to keep on board at least a part of my readership, even when writing new things; I have accustomed my readers always to expect something new from me: they know that tried-and-tested recipes don’t satisfy me and that I don’t get any fun out of repeating myself.

  My books do not belong to the category of best-sellers, books that sell tens of thousands of copies the minute they are published and then are already forgotten the following year. My greatest satisfaction is seeing my books being reprinted every year, some with print-runs of ten or fifteen thousand copies every time.

  Up to now I have only been speaking about Italy, but under the subject of this interview it is also relevant to speak of how an Italian writer can also become known outside Italy. Of course, an author’s image changes because in Italy he is seen for the ensemble of his activities, in the context of a culture consisting of many components, of many reference points, whereas abroad it is only the translations of your books that arrive, like meteorites, from which critics and readers have to develop an idea of the planet that they have come from. I began to be translated in major countries towards the end of the 1950s; it was a period when works were translated everywhere more perhaps than they are now; perhaps because there was a greater expectation for what might emerge. But being translated does not yet mean being read properly. It is a kind of routine: even abroad a novel in translation is published in a few thousand copies, polite reviews appear in the papers, the book stays in the bookshops a couple of weeks, then it disappears, only to reappear remaindered at half price, then it is pulped. International fame means mostly this; in my case too it was like this for a long time. The fact of ‘existing’ as an author abroad is something that I’ve only been aware of for the last ten years or so, and it relates particularly to two countries: France and the United States.

  In France I began to ‘exist’ really when I was published in the Livres de poche, and subsequently in other paperback series by other publishers. Suddenly I began to meet French people who had read my books, something which had never happened before, even though many people had heard of me. Nowadays all my books are reprinted frequently and several are available in paperback: so I would say that in France my success is due more to anonymous readers than to critics.

  In the United States you could say that what happened was the opposite: my name became established first thanks to some important ‘opinion-maker’ (such as Gore Vidal: you could say that it was he who really launched me) and the book of mine that became a hit was the one that you would have said was the furthest from American reading habits: Invisible Cities. Even today in the United States I am still considered above all as the author of Invisible Cities, a book that is apparently loved by poets, architects and in general by young students. All my books are reprinted in ‘trade paperbacks’ which is the mid-market category of quality paperbacks, which reaches out also to the vast student reading public. But when the Italian Folktales were translated unabridged (twenty-five years after the original Italian edition) the surprise success was considered almost a ‘mass’ phenomenon.

  At this point I could start to create new problems for myself, in other words to think how to place myself in terms of world literature. But to tell you the truth, I have always considered literature in a context broader than the purely national one, so this could never be a problem for me. Just as the fact of being an Italian writer who has never indulged in any of the commonplaces that foreigners expect from Italians has never made me feel the need to explain how and why I could not be anything but an Italian writer. In short, perhaps the time has come for me to accept myself as I am, and to write just as it comes, for the remainder of life that is left to me, or even to give up there and then if I saw that I had nothing more to say
.

  [Interview with Felice Froio, published in his Dietro il successo. Ricordi e testimonianze di alcuni protagonisti del nostro tempo: quale segreto dietro il loro successo? (Behind the Success. Memories and Declarations from Some of the Most Important People of Our Time: What is the Secret behind their Success?) (Milan: Sugarco, 1984).]

  I Would Like to be Mercutio …

  I would like to be Mercutio. Among his virtues, I admire above all his lightness, in a world full of brutality, his dreaming imagination – as the poet of Queen Mab – and at the same time his wisdom, as the voice of reason amid the fanatical hatreds of Capulets and Montagues. He sticks to the old code of chivalry at the price of his life perhaps just for the sake of style and yet he is a modern man, sceptical and ironic: a Don Quixote who knows very well what dreams are and what reality is, and he lives both with open eyes.

  [The New York Times Book Review, 89:49 (2 December 1984) asked a certain number of celebrities what character from a novel or from a work of non-fiction they would like to be. This was Calvino’s reply (in English).]

  My City Is New York

  In what way did your first contacts with American culture develop, and in particular your contacts with its literature, from Hemingway’s novels to Faulkner’s?

  In terms of my own development, which took place in the 1940s, it was initially as a simple reader that I first discovered American fiction, which at that time represented a huge opening on the Italian horizon. For that reason, when I was young, American literature was very important and of course I read all the novels that reached Italy in those days. To begin with, however, I was a provincial: I lived in San Remo and had no literary background since I was a student in the Agriculture Faculty. Later I became a friend of Pavese and Vittorini; I never knew Pintòr67 as he died during the war. I was a homo novus: I started to get around only after the war.

  It is true that Hemingway was one of my models, perhaps because in terms of stylistic models he was easier than Faulkner, who is so much more complex. And also as far as my first writings are concerned, I was definitely influenced by Hemingway; in fact I even went to see him in a hotel in Stresa, in 1948, I think, and we went out fishing on a boat in the lake.

  Faced with a literary output as vast and heterogeneous as yours, it is not always easy to trace and focus on possible links and genuine influences which tie it to one writer or another; as far as American literature is concerned, which classic works do you appreciate and like the most?

  I am a writer of short stories first and foremost more than a novelist, so one area of reading which has certainly influenced me, right from childhood, if you like, and not just in an American context but in absolute terms, I would say is Edgar Allan Poe, since he is a writer who knows how to do everything, in terms of the short story. Within its confines he is an author of limitless possibilities; and also because he seems to me to be a mythical figure, a hero of literature, a cultural hero, founder of all the narrative genres that would be developed after him.

  For this reason one can trace lines which link Poe with, for instance, Borges or Kafka: you could trace extraordinary links like this that never end. Even a writer as unusual as Giorgio Manganelli – certainly one of the most notable Italian writers of recent years – he too, despite being so different from Poe, discovered him when he translated him, and he too has established a genuine rapport with Poe. For this reason also I think that Poe’s presence is very much a contemporary one. Still on the subject of links with classic American writers, I could cite the names of Hawthorne or Mark Twain: the latter is a writer I certainly feel close to, particularly in what we could call his more ungainly and ‘unsophisticated’ aspects.

  Let us continue following the evolution of this relationship of yours with a society and a literature which in turn was changing as new avenues, new experiences opened up, compared with those that had inspired the generation of the 1930s and 1940s.

  Naturally American literature became different, around 1950, after Pavese’s death; but already towards the end of the 1940s this change was in the air. I remember when Pavese began to read the new books that arrived here in the post-war period – there was Saul Bellow with his first novel, Dangling Man – and I remember Vittorini too, who said: ‘This lot are like European writers, they’re more intellectual, we are not so interested in them.’

  It was a completely different turn that American literature had taken, and when in 1959 I went to the United States for the first time as an adult, that mythical picture of the writers of the early post-war years, which was still that of the so-called Lost Generation, no longer held sway. This was the time when a figure like Henry Miller was much more important than Hemingway, whom nobody bothered about any more. Things, then, have changed radically: nowadays you would need to see what relations there have been between the writers of my generation, both in Italy and in America; you could make some comparisons. Who is the equivalent of Norman Mailer, for instance? For certain provocative aspects, Pasolini could be, even though Mailer is a character who still is much more like Hemingway, who was linked to that kind of writer.

  We have come to the present situation, to the time when it is no longer possible to look at America in terms of the barbaric, nor at the American writer as the crude, violent, often unreflecting interpreter of that reality.

  This is something that needs to be thought out fully: this image of an America that is barbaric and full of vital energy certainly no longer exists. The American writer, unlike what happens, or happened, in Italy – since even here we are moving in that direction – is someone who works in a university, who writes novels about campus life, about the gossip surrounding the adulterous affairs between lecturers, which is not the big wide world, not something genuinely exciting, but that is the way things are: life in American society is like that.

  What aspects of the American literary world of today seem to you to be most significant, and who are the most important personages?

  Nowadays, in American literature, sometimes I look with envy at those writers who know how to instantly catch something of contemporary life in their novels, who have a chatty and ironic style, like Saul Bellow; I am certainly not good enough to do that kind of thing. American fiction has novelists capable of writing a novel a year and of giving the flavour of a period; I envy them enormously.

  Among writers who are my contemporaries I would say that I lived through the discovery of a writer who had a genuinely beautiful style – I’m talking about John Updike – and that when he began writing he seemed a really important author. Later he also wrote a bit too much: he still remains an intelligent, brilliant person, but at times one notes a certain facileness in American writers of today. If I had to say who is the living author I like best, and who has also influenced me in some way, I would say it is Vladimir Nabokov: a great Russian writer and a great writer in English; he has invented an English which is of extraordinary richness. He truly is a great genius, one of the greatest writers of the century and one of the people with whom I identify most. Of course he is also someone of extraordinary cynicism, of formidable cruelty, but he is genuinely one of the great authors.

  From the way your most recent fiction has developed – If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller and even more so Mr. Palomar – one might think there was some link between you and the so-called initiators of the post-modern.

  Of course I also have links with what could be defined as the new American avant-garde: I am someone who goes to the United States every so often to do these creative writing courses, and I am a friend of John Barth, a writer who began with a very fine novel, The End of the Road. After this first book, which we could define as existentialist, Barth became more and more complicated, with works of more sophisticated structure; it is he who, despite not reading works in any other language than English, is to an extent the American ambassador to the new European literatures. Apart from Barth, Donald Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon, there are other writers whose works I follow and with whom I am als
o friends.

  In conclusion, I would like to ask you what your encounter with America as a physical entity has meant for you in terms of personal sensations: city America, as it is portrayed in so many films as well as novels, and the real city, which is the symbol of today’s America.

  In terms of literature I am a bit of an autodidact, I was a late starter and naturally for many years I went to the cinema, when you could see two films a day, and these were American films. I had an intense rapport as a spectator with American cinema, so much so that for me cinema remains essentially American cinema.

  My physical encounter with America was a truly marvellous experience: New York is one of my cities, and in fact, still in the 1960s, in Cosmicomics, and also in Time and the Hunter, there are stories that are set in New York. On the other side of the Atlantic I feel part of that majority of Italians who go to America with great ease – by now there are millions and millions of them – and not of that minority who stay in Italy; perhaps because the first time I went to America, with my parents, I was just one year old. When I went back for the first time as an adult to the USA, I had a grant from the Ford Foundation which entitled me to go round all the States, with no obligation: naturally I did this trip, travelling in the South, and also in California, but I felt I was a New Yorker: my city is New York.

  [Interview by Ugo Rubeo, recorded in Palermo in September 1984; later published in Mal d’America – da mito a realtà (The American Malaise – from Myth to Reality) (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1987). The title is not by Calvino.]

  Interview with Maria Corti

  Which authors had the greatest influence on your development as a writer? And is there a common element, something which unifies those that were your most genuine preferences in reading?

  You would like me to mention some book I read as an adolescent and which subsequently made its influence felt in things I later wrote. I will say at once: Ippolito Nievo’s Le confessioni di un ottuagenario (Confessions of an Octogenarian), the only Italian nineteenth-century novel which had a novelistic charm that was comparable to that found so abundantly in foreign literatures. An episode in my first novel, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, was inspired by the meeting of Carlino and Spaccafumo. An atmosphere vaguely reminiscent of the Castello di Fratta is evoked in The Cloven Viscount. And The Baron in the Trees reworks Nievo’s novel around the protagonist’s entire life, and it covers the same historical period, straddling the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the same social environments; moreover, the female character in my novel is modelled on Nievo’s La Pisana.