by John Barth
Of that too-brief Baltimore sojourn I recall little else. We pointed out to Calvino our city’s funky Bromo-Seltzer Building, which Baltimoreans declare to resemble a Sienese tower. Calvino politely opined that it did not look remarkably Sienese to him, even without the giant blue trademark bottle that used to crown its clock (with the letters B-R-O-M-O-S-E-L-T-Z-E-R instead of numerals). We showed him a particularly bleak nighttime stretch of featureless East Baltimore rowhouses, their cornices lined with hundreds of chattering starlings; to me the scene looked very like de Chirico, but Calvino, delighted with it, said, “It’s all Edward Hopper!” Both impressions, I think, are defensible. Off he presently went to join his wife up in New York City, which he loved, then down with her to Mexico City, which he didn’t love (although he much admired the smaller towns and the Mexican countryside, and was an avid collector of pre-Columbian artifacts), and then back to his home turf, the Paris/Torino axis along which he regularly commuted in those days. We continued to exchange books and occasional letters (such a lover of “lightness” and “quickness” cannot have admired my enormous novel called LETTERS, which I sent him in 1979, although I’m confident he would have approved its formal design). My wife and I looked forward to a reunion with him and Mrs. Calvino during his Norton lectureship at Harvard in 1985/86: a reunion and a lectureship that, alas, never came to pass.
Two final reminiscences, and then on with the story. Just a week or so after the news reached us of Italo’s death on September 19, 1985, Umberto Eco happened to be our guest at Johns Hopkins, and of course we spoke of our mutual lost friend (a much closer friend of Eco’s, to be sure; Calvino had been Eco’s “chaperon,” as Eco himself put it, for the Strega Prize). He had it on good authority, Eco told me, that despite the damage of the massive stroke that had felled Calvino a fortnight earlier, the man managed to utter, as perhaps his final words, “I paralleli! I paralleli!” (“The parallels! The parallels!”). Kindly perpend that wonderful exit-line, to which I shall shortly return.
A year or so later, Esther (“Chichita”) Calvino telephoned to ask whom I might recommend to write a foreword to the Harvard University Press’s forthcoming publication of her husband’s never-delivered Norton lectures, Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Promptly and warmly I recommended myself for that melancholy last rite, but she explained that the Press was insisting on the introducer’s being someone from the Harvard community. On that I drew a blank, and in the event she wrote the touching and altogether admirable foreword herself—the first of several that she has since written for posthumous editions of her husband’s work.
In those five lovely Memo lectures—“Lightness,” “Quickness,” “Exactitude,” “Visibility,” and “Multiplicity”3—Calvino voices several times his admiration for Jorge Luis Borges, an admiration that he and I had shared in our Baltimore conversations. The story-series Lost in the Funhouse, I had told Calvino, was my attempt to assimilate my encounter with Borges’s narrative imagination; the T-Zero collection, Calvino had replied, was his endeavor to do likewise. If parallel lines can be bent non-Euclideanly back upon themselves, I shall circle now back to this lecture’s starting-place and draw a few paralleli—also some anti-paralleli—between the fiction of those two superb writers, who were born a quarter-century apart (both, as it happens, in Latin America) but who died, alas for literature, within nine months of each other (both as it happens, in Europe).
FIRST, SOME NOT particularly literary paralleli. The two gentlemen shared that dignified, polite, even somewhat courtly but altogether approachable and good-humored sociability that I mentioned earlier; nothing in the least rowdy, “bohemian,” or as some might say, re-demptively vulgar about either of them, at least in my limited experience of their company. Compared for example to Vladimir Nabokov, Gore Vidal, or John Gardner (to name three very dissimilar antitypes), both Borges and Calvino were nonbelligerent with respect to their fellow writers. I note with some envy that Calvino’s fiction in particular—rather like García Márquez’s, but perhaps a touch less than Borges’s—is mutually admired by writers who might agree on very little else. Vidal, Gardner, Mary McCarthy, John Updike (whom I have the honor of having introduced to Calvino’s fiction)—all are or were warm Calvinistas along with us alleged Postmodernists, even though Mr. Vidal, in my opinion, gets things wrong even when singing the writer’s praises, which characteristically he cannot do without disparaging other of his contemporaries. Borges and Calvino shared moreover not only their Latin American nativity—Calvino was born in Cuba, where his father was doing agronomical work in 1923—but also a specifically Argentine connection: Borges was born in Buenos Aires and lived most of his life in that city; Esther Judith Singer Calvino was likewise born in Buenos Aires, but spent most of her adult life in Europe—an Italian citizen living and working in Paris as a translator until the Calvinos resettled in Rome. Borges, it occurs to me to mention, declared himself pleased to have a Jewish component in his ancestry (not a very direct one, it turns out, though a consequential: One of his English grandmother’s sisters married an Italian-Jewish engineer who immigrated to Argentina with his bride and with Borges’s grandmother-to-be), and he said that only once did he break his own rule against political writing: He wrote two pro-Israel poems at the time of the Six-Day War. A fair number of his stories deal with explicitly Jewish themes and characters—“The Aleph,” “Deutsches Requiem,” “Emma Zunz,” and “The Secret Miracle,” among others—and in conversation he once gently corrected my mispronunciation of the word Kabbalah. To the best of my recollection, Calvino’s Jewish connection nowhere surfaces in his fiction; perhaps his wife wasn’t particularly interested in that aspect of her ethnicity, or perhaps Italo wasn’t. His double Latino connection, on the other hand, notably does surface from time to time—for example in the wonderful story “The Jaguar Sun”—but its contexts are typically more Central American than Argentinean, distinctly removed from Borges’s pampas and milongas and Buenos Airean suburbs. In Calvino’s early story specifically entitled “The Argentine Ant,” the setting and the characters are thoroughly Italian; only the eponymous ants are said to “come from South America.”
It is Italy, of course, that plays the role in Calvino’s fiction that Argentina plays in Borges’s, and we note at once another parallel: While both writers draw strongly and eloquently upon their respective national cultures, the literary orientation of both is decidedly more international than regional, in their aesthetics as well as their subject matter. Borges was a lifelong Anglophile with a passion for Beowulf and a particular fondness for the England of Robert Louis Stevenson, G. K. Chesterton, and H. G. Wells, but his literary acquaintance was encyclopedic. Calvino valued highly his extended residence in Paris and his association with Raymond Queneau’s OULIPO group (L’Ouvoir de la litterature potentielle, to which I’ll circle back presently); while he wrote knowledgeably about Italian literature from various periods, his most strongly felt affinities (after the comic books and Hollywood movies of his youth) were with Italian folktales, the novellini, and such ingeniously structured tale-cycles as Boccaccio’s Decameron. Both writers, I’m happy to point out, shared my fondness for Scheherazade and company. In Calvino’s case, rather more than in Borges’s though not more than in mine, this fondness extended to tale-cycles and narrative framing devices in general; in our final literary exchange, in 1984, I sent Calvino a half-serious essay of mine on Scheherazade’s menstrual cycle as a key to The 1001 Nights,4 and he sent me his 1982 essay in La Repubblica on Nezami’s medieval Persian tale-cycle The Seven Princesses.
This “internationalism” caused Borges to be criticized at home for being not Argentinean enough in his literary preoccupations: a criticism which Borges quietly devastates in his essay “The Argentine Writer and Tradition.” I doubt that Calvino was ever criticized for being insufficiently Italian, but I recall being told by an Italian colleague that his earlier, realistic works were knocked by the local Catholic critics for being too sympathetic to the Communists,
and that his later, fabulistic fictions were knocked by the Communist critics for their abandonment of socialist realism. Although Calvino came to describe himself as a “political agnostic,” he maintained a lively interest in the Italian political scene and wrote scathingly of the assassination of Aldo Moro. Borges was by temperament apolitical, although he despised Perón and got himself into hot water with many of his Latino literary comrades by welcoming the junta that displaced Perón and by accepting a Chilean literary award from the bloody hands of General Pinochet himself. He even permitted himself on that latter occasion some unfortunate disparagements of democratic government: as embarrassing though not incomprehensible a lapse, in its way, as García Márquez’s buddyhood with Fidel Castro, which inspired the Romanian-American writer André Codrescu to remark that one can be simultaneously a great artist and a political idiot.
In sum, sort of, both Borges and Calvino were men of formidable literary sophistication who wore their learning lightly in conversation as well as in their art; unabashed “intellectuals” who were never pedantic or snobbish in their intellectuality (as their great peer Nabokov decidedly sometimes was). Before we leave these relatively personal for more strictly literary paralleli, I suppose it might be noted that both men’s youthful lives were marked by a discreet, respectful ambivalence toward their fathers. Borges writes touchingly about his (and his military forebears) in the mini-memoir “An Autobiographical Essay”; Calvino likewise in his mini-memoir “The Road to San Giovanni.” Both to some extent felt themselves to be letting the old man down in their pursuit of (in Borges’s case) purely bookish interests and values or (in Calvino’s) nonscientific ones; and both maintained a distanced fascination with what they had “rejected”: swords, knives, and military history for Borges, the physical and natural sciences (but not agronomy) for Calvino. By way of anti-paralleli, before we move on: In part but surely not entirely because of his increasing blindness, Borges remained very much his mother’s son during her long life and his long bachelorhood, which ended (the bachelorhood) only at age 68, when his then quite old mother felt unable to accompany him to Cambridge for the Norton lectureship. That late marriage lasted scarcely longer than Harvard’s academic year; when Madre Borges succumbed in her mid-90s, Jorge Luis was admirably managed by his all-purpose assistant Maria Kodama, whom he married shortly before his death in Geneva at age 86. What Calvino’s connection with his mother was, I have no idea (she scarcely figures in the “San Giovanni” memoir, although its author acknowledges that with “silent authority” she “looks out from between the lines”). On the evidence, however, he was altogether a more physically and psychologically independent fellow: a youthful veteran of the antifascist partisan resistance in World War II, a loving husband and father who wrote with amused affection of his domestic life—in the pretty essay “La Poubelle Agréé,”5 for example, as well as in his letters. Perhaps that is why, to some of us at least, Calvino’s fiction surpasses that of Borges in warmth and emotional range, if not in virtuosity and profundity.
BUT ENOUGH INDEED of this: The muses care not a whit about our personal profiles, and not much more than a whit about our politics; their sole concern is that we achieve the high country of Mounts Helicon and Parnassus, whether despite or because of where we’re coming from, and this these two elevated spirits consistently did. The paralleli of their achievement are mostly obvious, the relevant anti-paralleli no doubt likewise. To begin with, both writers, for all their great sophistication of mind, wrote in a clear, straightforward, unmannered, non-baroque, but rigorously scrupulous style. “. . . crystalline, sober, and airy . . . without the least congestion,” is how Calvino himself (in the second of his Six Memos) describes Borges’s style, and of course those adjectives describe his own as well, as do the titles of all six of his Norton lectures: “Lightness” (Leggerezza) and deftness of touch; “Quickness” (Rapidità) in the senses both of economy of means and of velocity in narrative profluence; “Exactitude” (Esatezza) both of formal design and of verbal expression; “Visibility” (Visibilità) in the senses both of striking detail and of vivid imagery, even (perhaps especially) in the mode of fantasy; “Multiplicity” (Molteplicità) in the senses both of an ars combinatoria and of addressing the infinite interconnectedness of things, whether in expansive, incompletable works such as Gadda’s Via Merulana and Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities or in vertiginous short stories like Borges’s “Garden of Forking Paths”—all cited in Calvino’s lecture on multiplicity; and “Consistency” in the sense that in their style, their formal concerns, and their other preoccupations we readily recognize the Borgesian and the Calvinoesque. So appealing a case does Calvino make for these particular half-dozen literary values, it’s important to remember that they aren’t the only ones; indeed, that their contraries have also something to be said for them. Calvino acknowledges as much in the “Quickness” lecture: “. . . each value or virtue I chose as the subject for my lectures,” he writes, “does not exclude its opposite. Implicit in my tribute to lightness was my respect for weight, and so this apology for quickness does not presume to deny the pleasures of lingering,” et cetera. We literary lingerers—some might say malingerers—breathe a protracted sigh of relief.
Reviewing these six “memos” has fetched us already beyond the realm of style to other parallels between the fictions of Borges and Calvino. Although he commenced his authorial career in the mode of the realistic novel and never abandoned the longer narrative forms, Calvino, like Borges, much preferred the laconic short take. Even his later extended works, like Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, are (to use Calvino’s own adjectives) modular and combinatory, built up from smaller, quicker units. Borges, more from aesthetic principle than from the circumstance of his later blindness, never wrote a novella, much less a novel.6 And in his later life, like the doomed but temporarily reprieved Jaromir Hladik in “The Secret Miracle,” he was obliged to compose and revise from memory. No wonder his style is so lapidary, so . . . memorable.
On with the parallels: Although one finds flavors and even some specific detail of Buenos Aires and environs in the corpus of Borges’s fiction and of Italy in that of Calvino, and although each is a major figure in his respective national literature as well as in modern lit generally, both writers were prevailingly disinclined to the social/ psychological realism that for better or worse persists as the dominant mode in North American fiction. Myth and fable and science in Calvino’s case, literary/philosophical history and “the contamination of reality by dream” in Borges’s, take the place of social/psychological analysis and historical/geographical detail. Both writers inclined toward the ironic elevation of popular narrative genres: the folktale and comic strip for Calvino, supernaturalist and detective-fiction for Borges. Calvino even defined Postmodernism, in his “Visibility” lecture, as “the tendency to make ironic use of the stock images of the mass media, or to inject the taste for the marvelous inherited from literary tradition into narrative mechanisms that accentuate their alienation”—a tendency as characteristic of Borges’s production as of his own. Neither writer, for better or worse, was a creator of memorable characters or a delineator of grand passions, although in a public conversation in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1975, in answer to the question “What do you regard as the writer’s chief responsibility?” Borges unhesitatingly responded, “The creation of character.” A poignant response from a great writer who never really created any characters; even his unforgettable Funes the Memorious, as I have remarked elsewhere, is not so much a character as a pathological characteristic. And Calvino’s charming Qwfwq and Marco Polo and Marcovaldo and Mr. Palomar are archetypal narrative functionaries, nowise to be compared with the great pungent characters of narrative/dramatic literature. A first-rate restaurant may not offer every culinary good thing; for the pleasures of acute character-drawing as of bravura passions, one simply must look elsewhere than in the masterful writings of Jorge
Luis Borges and Italo Calvino.
Attendant upon those “Postmodernist tendencies” aforecited by Calvino—the ironic recycling of stock images and traditional narrative mechanisms—is the valorization of form, even more in Calvino than in Borges. At his consummate best, Borges so artfully deploys what I’ve called the principle of metaphoric means that (excuse the self-quotation) “not just the conceit, the key images, the mise-en-scène, the narrative choreography and point of view and all that, but even the phenomenon of the text itself, the fact of the artifact, becomes a sign of its sense.” His marvelous story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is a prime example of this high-tech tale-telling, and there are others. Borges manages this gee-whizzery, moreover, with admirable understatement, wearing his formal virtuosity up his sleeve rather than on it. Calvino, on the contrary, while never a show-off, took unabashed delight in his “romantic formalism” (again, my term, with my apology): a delight not so much in his personal ingenuity as in the exhilarating possibilities of the ars combinatoria, as witness especially the structural wizardry of The Castle of Crossed Destinies and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. His extended association with Raymond Queneau’s OULIPO group was no doubt among both the causes and the effects of this formal sportiveness.