Hermit in Paris

by Italo Calvino

  Electronic Brains

  I have contacted the head office of the biggest producer of calculating machines, IBM. Their public relations are very classy, they received me as though I were the Italian President and put the entire firm at my disposal. When they learned that I was going to Washington, they set up a visit for me to the Space Computing Center, in other words the tracking station which receives all the data and does all the calculations for the Vanguard and various other rockets. I was all pleased with myself, thinking I was going to see things that were almost top secret, whereas this Space Computing Center sits in a shop-window in a street in central Washington and is for show more than anything else; however, it is a functioning centre, though the danger that all the astronauts’ data would be lost if a lorry smashed the window in a crash is nullified by the fact that there is another identical centre at Cape Canaveral. However, it was really fascinating: I saw models of rockets and satellites, which in theory should even take off if you turn on certain lights, but the models are always broken. Young mathematicians type on space computer keyboards with hesitant and absent-minded gestures. On the 23rd IBM in New York put at my disposal a Cadillac with a chauffeur and a technical expert from Turin to be my guide at Poughkeepsie, up in Westchester where IBM’s huge factory is. This is a factory with 10, 000 employees, like a medieval city, and in front of it is a huge carpark for 4, 000 cars (these immense carparks full of grey and blue cars, that you see as soon as you leave New York, are one of the things that give you the most authentic feeling of America). I am received by a group of managers who explain to me first the way the whole organization is structured, and one of the first things they tell me is that there is no trade union. Naturally I ask why; ‘They don’t need them’ is their answer. In fact they are all paid better here than elsewhere, the paternalism is quite open, and the colour portrait of Mr Watson41 hangs everywhere; I will later learn that on Mr Watson’s birthday the employees were invited to the party with a cyclostyled letter explaining that if they did not have a car to go to the party with their wives, a car supplied by the management would come to fetch them at such and such a time; if the wife did not have an evening-dress the management would provide her with one, and a baby-sitter service was also assured for that evening, and at table number such and such places numbered such and such were booked for them, and when Mr Watson came in they all had to stand and sing the following song to the famous tune, etc., and there on the letter were the words of a song in honour of Mr Watson. However, all this is beside the point. I visited the factory, they explained everything about the cores which make up the machines’ memory and I also learnt how just through the positive and negative charges in the cores you can represent any number or letter, and all the processes they use to produce those tiny transistors, and then I saw the Ramac, which is the part that carries out the operations even on data input at random, not in any established order. Very beautiful machines with these cascades of threads in beautiful, different colours, producing an effect like a wonderful abstract painting. I had lunch with some managers and researchers, but no alcohol since Mr Watson forbids alcohol in the factory. I visited the labs, wonderful architecture, better than Olivetti, all with moveable walls so they can have rooms of any size they want, and the organization of research is excellent, totally separate from production; all in all, the organization of the firm is extremely efficient, although when they do a drawing on the blackboard for you to give an outline of the company’s structure, they draw lines that continue above Mr Watson and they say: God. Even though I was falling asleep, they explained all this problem about the insulators, you know. I also saw the school they have: wonderful. The staff: two categories, the managerial type who really are quite intimidating, and what we would call the Olivetti type; but of course I was not able to understand the relationship or the dialectic between the two types. It was an amazing sight, all those mathematicians and physicists in their little cells with their green blackboards. The workers were certainly highly qualified, and there was a very smooth rhythm of work; many women, all of them fat and ugly (beautiful women here, too, as in Italian cities, are now only to be found in certain social strata). Many boxes of sweets on every worktop: it’s Christmas. Among all these computers were Christmas decorations and banners; many departments organize Christmas parties; loudspeakers broadcast for the workforce of the most advanced technology in the world Christmas carols, a gift from the management of IBM.

  Homesick for New York

  I am not going to tell you about Washington because it is exactly as one has always imagined Washington from what one has read: artificial, boring, and very elegant, and basically I can even say I liked it, I would not want it to be any other way, but the fact is that I was not even three days in the place and I could not stand it any longer, so homesick was I for New York, and so I raced back here again.

  The Cinema

  Naturally I never go to the cinema because in the evening I like to see people, but what strikes me is how nobody goes to the cinema, I never find anyone who has been to the cinema or who talks about films. This is of course a feature of Manhattan, and I expect that as I go around America I will see the other side, but certainly this island is a unique case in the world of a society in our time for which cinema does not count at all, very odd for someone who comes from Italy. At most, in our circles, which in New York is not a special category but is the city (publishing, journalism, theatre, agents, writers, and all the enormous world of advertising and public relations, plus the world of education and research and the lawyers who are also always concerned with questions over authors’ rights, etc.), at most they discuss old silent movies which you can see every day at the Museum of Modern Art, or Ingmar Bergman’s films; but for example I have never found anyone who has seen On the Beach (which is the only film I went to see, because it interested me as a political symptom even though it is not very good).

  Midwest Diary

  Chicago, 21 January

  I have spent ten days between Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago and in these few days I have had more of a sense of America than in the two months I spent in New York. More sense of America in that I continually found myself saying: yes, this is the real America.

  The most typical image of an American town is that of streets flanked by places selling used cars, enormous lots full of white, sky-blue or pale-green cars lined up beneath festoons of little coloured flags, billboards showing not the price but the savings (you can easily get a car for a hundred and even for fifty dollars), and these car-dealers go on sometimes for miles, a bit like a horse-fair.

  But Where Is the City?

  The truth is that you can go around by car for hours and not find what should be the city centre; in places like Cleveland the city tends to disappear, spreading out across an area that is as large as one of our provinces. There is still a downtown, that is to say a centre, but it is only a centre with offices. The middle classes live in avenues of small two-storey houses that are all the same, even though no two are alike, with a few metres of green lawn in front and a garage for three or four cars depending on the number of adults in the family. You cannot go anywhere without a car, because there is nowhere to go. Every now and again, at a crossroads in these avenues, there is a shopping-centre for doing the shopping. The middle classes never leave this zone, the children grow up without knowing anything except this world populated by small, well-off families like their own, who all have to change their car once a year because if they have last year’s model they lose face with their neighbours. The man goes out every morning to work and returns at 5 p.m., puts on his slippers and watches TV.

  The poor areas are exactly the same, the little houses are identical, only instead of just one family two or three families live in them, and the building, usually of wood, deteriorates in the space of a few years. What four or five years ago was an elegant suburb is now in the hands of the well-off, black middle classes. The Jews have left their poor ghetto because now in Cleveland the
y are all more or less rich, and their previous houses have now all become slums for blacks. The churches remain – I mean the buildings – the synagogues in the ex-Jewish areas have now turned into Baptist churches for blacks, but they have retained the candelabra on the windows and the archivolts. The movement of races from one area to another in these big cities is constant: where the Italians once were now you find Hungarians, and so on. The Puerto Ricans have not yet reached the Midwest, they are still concentrated in New York, but here in the last few years there has been a huge amount of Mexican immigration. But the curious feature is that now on the bottom rung of the immigration ladder are the internal migrants, the poor whites from Virginia who come to work up here in the factories, and since they were the last to arrive, they find themselves below the blacks, and their racism and hatred of the anti-segregationist Yankees intensifies.

  The Gold Family

  In Cleveland I am the guest of the Golds, a typical Midwestern Jewish family. Herbert’s father came here from Russia as a boy, became a labourer and greengrocer, and only after the last war did he succeed in becoming the richest hotel owner in Cleveland, but he still lives modestly in his little house, gives a lot of money to Israel which he visits every year, is totally philistine and Americanized, but as in many Jewish families he is proud of having a famous intellectual in the family and totally tolerant of his way of life. His wife is the typical American-Jewish mother, one of this country’s great institutions, her Jewish cuisine is excellent, the whole family including the four children exude an extraordinary serenity, the satisfaction of having made it, and she is also Woman of Valour of the state of Israel. Of her children, the eldest is a lawyer and has his office in the hotel (tax consultancy, of course) and the youngest helps his father in the hotel, and besides Herbert there is another son who wants to be a writer, Sidney, who is the real character in the family: he was a manual worker until recently, and also worked at Ford’s in Detroit, but he always quits jobs, is half-Communist, wants to be a writer like his brother, and for the time being his father is keeping him (he is thirty-five) because he realizes that to have sons who are writers gives him extra prestige among his fellow citizens. But Sidney is not sharp like Herb, he is naïve and ineffectual and he is set to become the pathetic failure of the area, a poet and a radical.

  The Motels

  I have lived in several motels (one brand-new one in Cleveland, owned by Gold senior) which are now no longer like wooden cabins, but built with brick, with a huge carpark, surrounded by single-room apartments, often two-storey buildings, each room with a double bed (which by day becomes a divan), TV, radio-alarm, shower, kitchen, fridge, everything organized so that the minimum of service is needed: a paradise for salesmen and lovers, and less expensive than any decent hotel.

  The Elections

  In intellectuals’ houses all the talk is of the election, much more so than in New York. Violently frightened by the face of American Catholicism that I saw in Boston, where the Madonna continues to loom large over the old cradle of Puritanism (Boston is 75 percent Catholic and now lives under an Italo-Irish dictatorship), I peddle bitter anti-Kennedy propaganda, and generally find fertile terrain among the families of Jewish professors, though on the whole they see Nixon as the danger for them and often they are taken in by the idea that the rise of the Catholic Democrats, who represent nationalities who were poor and working-class until recently, has something democratic about it, and they do not know about the reactionary role performed by Spellman’s American-Irish church inside the Catholic world. Then there are some militant Democrats, like the wife of one congressman: he was a Humphrey supporter but was ready to go over to Kennedy if he won the convention; she actually lost her temper completely and chased us out of her house. (Among the middle classes here one meets even intelligent people who feel the need to proclaim constantly that everything is fine, that American culture is first-class – they quote university, theatre and library statistics just like the Soviets – as though they needed to convince themselves before others, yet on the other hand it is here in the provinces, among the same class of people, that you find the most lucid, serious and well-informed critics of American life and society.)

  The Prostitutes

  After two and a half months in which – incredibly for a European – I have never seen a prostitute on the streets, here in some black districts I rediscover the sight familiar to all Western European cities: prostitutes. There are some in white areas too, but they are usually in certain cafés, and in any case they are very few. The most astonishing thing about New York – which is the result of both Puritanism and freer female morals – is that despite its enormous size you never see a single prostitute. They exist only in provincial towns.

  Inter-racial Paternalism

  The Karamu is a community centre in Cleveland set up around thirty years ago to promote common cultural activities between whites and ‘colored’ peoples. Architecturally very beautiful, with theatres, exhibitions by black artists, craft-fairs, museums of African culture, everything in first-class taste, classrooms where every evening I see blacks concentrating on chemistry and biology lessons. I think I’m back in the USSR. I am invited by the theatre’s director, a white Jewish man who puts on stage works that involve whites and blacks (amateurs and professionals work for free, he is a professional who prefers to work in the provinces and is paid by this centre), to see the dress rehearsal of a play which opens tomorrow night. We watch the play, but it is a tearjerker, an edifying tale about society along moderate lines on the theme of race (by a black author), an instance of educational parish theatre, or rather exactly like a similar play I saw nine years ago in Leningrad in a similar small theatre run by the Komsomol in a similar pioneers’ house, but at least there the hypocrisy was different, not this paternalistic falseness beneath which this institution presents itself to me. I read a brochure about a series of lectures on politics: it is government propaganda. I express my opinion on the play to the director’s wife as I accompany her home (she seemed to me to be a very intelligent, liberated and happy woman) but she really believed in good faith that the play was good: she is a prisoner, like many provincial intellectuals, of a solely relative scale of values, engulfed by mediocrity.

  My thoughts naturally run to Olivetti,42 and here there is the opportunity to check the origin and function of his ideas in a country where they are not a strange growth, but experiences which have emerged empirically in certain areas of ‘enlightened capitalism’. You could say in general that Olivetti has more style than his masters, and that on the whole he can make use of the best collaborators that Italy has to offer, whereas here paternalistic cultural initiatives operate on a much more provincial level, since the centralized cultural industry absorbs the ablest into New York and corrupts them in a different way; and here these things reveal their mechanisms more. (Here often with Americans – at least with some of them – I find myself speaking well of Olivetti and presenting him in a totally favourable light; this is one of the few Italian phenomena that Americans can understand and appreciate and it can give them an idea of ‘the other Italy’ of which they are completely ignorant. I also mention Togliatti,43 of course, and speak well of him – you cannot really have a discussion with an American in which you outline first the seriousness and historical legitimacy of certain phenomena, and then their negative aspects – but they don’t understand a thing, it’s like talking to a brick wall.)

  The Museums

  In all these industrial towns of the Midwest there are wonderful museums, with Italian primitives and French impressionists, first-class collections scattered here and there, also a lot of average stuff but never poor quality and every now and again there is a really famous masterpiece (Corallo cover stuff )44 which you never expected to find here. I am sorry that I was not able to stop at Toledo, a small steelworks town which is said to have the best museum. Then there are always technical innovations in the way they are set up: in the Cleveland museum there are no custodians
in the rooms but in every room there is a camera hanging from the ceiling which swivels round photographing the visitors: by this means a single custodian in his booth can keep an eye on the whole museum. In Detroit’s museum you can hire for 25 cents a little cardboard box with a transistor to put against your ear: in each room there is a transmitter with a disc which explains about all the paintings in the room.