Hermit in Paris

by Italo Calvino

  The front nearest us – on the French border – showed no sign of moving: for eight months, namely from the moment of France’s liberation, we had heard the rumble of cannons on the Western front; for eight months freedom was just a few kilometres away, but meanwhile the life of the partisans in the Maritime Alps had become harder and harder because, as a back route to the front line, our area was of crucial importance for the Germans who had to keep the roads clear at all costs; that was why they never gave us any peace, nor we them; and that was why our area was one of the zones that suffered the highest percentage of casualties.

  Even in those weeks when spring was in the air (it was, though, a very cold April) and we felt that victory was imminent, that feeling of uncertainty that had shaped our lives for so many months still persisted. Even in the final days of the war the Germans had reappeared by surprise and we had suffered mortalities. Just a few days prior to this, while on patrol, I had nearly fallen into their hands.

  The last camp our group made was, if I remember correctly, between Montalto and Badalucco: the fact that we had already descended into the area of olive groves was in itself a sign that this was a new season, after the winter up in the chestnut-tree zone which meant constant hunger. By this stage we were not able to reason in any other way except in terms of whether something was good or bad for our survival as partisans, as though this existence was still to last who knows how long. The valleys were once again covered in leaves and bushes, meaning a better chance of staying under cover during enemy fire, like that clump of hazel trees which had saved our lives, mine and my brother’s, twenty days earlier, after action on the Ceriana road. As long as our lives hung by a thread, it was pointless conjuring up even the notion that a new life was about to dawn, one without machine-gun fire, reprisal raids, the fear of being caught and tortured. And even afterwards, when peace had come, rediscovering the habit of functioning in a different way would take time.

  It seems to me that that night we slept for only a couple of hours, lying on the ground for the last time. I thought that the next day there would be a battle for possession of the Via Aurelia, my thoughts were those you have the night before a battle, rather than about the imminent Liberation. It was only the next day, seeing that our descent continued without any interruption, that we realized that the coast was already liberated and that we were marching directly on San Remo (in fact after some rearguard clashes with the town’s partisan groups, the Germans and Fascists had retreated towards Genoa).

  However, even that morning, the Allies’ ships had appeared off the San Remo coast and started the daily naval bombardment of the town. The town’s National Liberation Committee had assumed power under the bombardment and as its first act of government had ordered that ‘Liberated Zone’ be painted in huge white letters on the walls of Corso Imperatrice so that the warships could see it. When we got near Poggio, we began to encounter the people of the town standing on the sides of the road: they had come out to see and cheer the partisans marching along. I remember that the first people I saw were two elderly men with their hats on, coming along and chatting about their own business as though it were any old holiday; but there was one detail about them that would have been inconceivable up to the day before: they had red carnations in their lapels. In the following days I was to see thousands of people with red carnations in their lapels, but they were the first.

  I can certainly say that for me that was the first image of freedom in civilian life, of freedom without any risk to life any more, which appeared to us just like that, nonchalantly, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

  As we gradually got closer to the town, the crowds of people grew, as did the rosettes, the flowers, the girls, but coming nearer to my home brought back the thought of my parents who had been held hostage by the SS, and I did not know whether they were alive or dead, just as they did not know if their sons were alive or dead.

  I see that these memories of Liberation Day are more concerned with ‘before’ than ‘after’. But that is the way they have remained in my memory, because we were all caught up in what we had lived through, while the future as yet did not have a face, and we would never have imagined a future which would make these memories gradually fade as has happened in these thirty years.

  [Domenica del Corriere, April 1975. Supplement issued to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the Liberation, containing twenty-eight pieces on ‘That day, 25 April 1945 …’ (Author’s note.)]

  Dialect

  1) 2) and 3) Dialect culture retains its full force as long as it is defined as a municipal culture, something strictly local, guaranteeing the identity of a town, a country area, a valley, and differentiating these with respect to other neighbouring towns, country areas, valleys. When a dialect starts to become regional, in other words a kind of inter-dialect, it has already entered the purely defensive phase, in other words its decadence. Regional dialects like ‘Piedmontese’, ‘Lombard’, and ‘Veneto’ are relatively recent and bastardized creations, and today they need to be seen in the context of the major mass emigrations, seen as related to the dramatic situation which both for the immigrants and for the indigenous peoples is represented by this enforced clash of cultures, which are no longer the previous local cultures nor are they yet a new culture which transcends them.

  The situation of dialects was different in the Italy which lasted up until a quarter of a century ago, where municipal identity had very strong characteristics and was self-sufficient. In the days when I was a student, in other words already in a society which spoke the standard language fluently, dialect was still what marked us out, what distinguished those of us from San Remo from our contemporaries from Ventimiglia or Porto Maurizio, and gave rise to frequent jibes among us; not to mention the even stronger contrast between the dialects of mountain villages, like Baiardo and Triora, which reflected a completely different sociological situation, and so these dialects lent themselves easily to being caricatured by those of us living in the coastal towns. In this world (which to tell the truth was very narrow) dialect was a way of defining ourselves as speaking subjects, of giving a shape to the genius loci, in short of existing. It is not at all my intention to mythicize nostalgically that very narrow cultural horizon, merely to state that in those days there existed an expressive vitality, in other words the sense of particularity and precision, which disappears when dialect becomes generic and lazy, as it does in the ‘Pasolinian’ age of dialect: Pasolini sees dialect solely as a residue of popular vitality.

  Lexical richness (as well as richness in expressiveness) is (or rather, was) one of the great strengths of dialects. Dialects have the edge on the standard language when they contain words for which the standard language has no equivalent. But this lasts only as long as certain (agricultural, artisan, culinary, domestic) techniques last – techniques whose terminology was created or deposited in the dialect rather than in the standard language. Nowadays, in lexical terms, dialects are like tributary states towards the standard language: all they do is give dialectal endings to words that start off in technical language. And even outside the terminology of trades, the rarer words become obsolete and are lost.

  I remember that the old folk of San Remo knew dialects that represented a lexical wealth that was irreplaceable. For instance: chintagna, which means both the empty space that remains behind a house that has been built (as always in Liguria) up against terraced land, and also the empty space between the bed and the wall. I do not think an equivalent word exists in Italian; but nowadays the word does not exist even in dialect; who has heard of it or uses it now? Lexical impoverishment or homogenization is the first sign of a language’s death.

  4) My dialect is that of San Remo (now called sanremese but formerly known as sanremasco) which is one of the many Ligurian dialects of the Western Riviera, in other words of an area very distinct, in terms of cadence and phonetics, from the Genoa area (which stretches up to and including Savona). I lived the first twenty-five yea
rs of my life there almost without interruption, in times when the indigenous population were still in the majority. I lived in an agricultural environment where it was mostly dialect that was used, and my father (about half a century older than me, having been born in 1875 into an old San Remo family) spoke a dialect that was much richer and more precise and expressive than that spoken by my contemporaries. Consequently I grew up steeped in dialect but without ever having learnt it, because the strongest influence on my upbringing was my mother, who was an enemy of dialect and a rigid upholder of the purity of the Italian language. (I have to say that I have never learnt to speak fluently in any language, not least because I have always been a man of few words: and quickly my expressive and communicative needs became focused on the written language.)

  When I began to write seriously, I was obsessed with the idea that my Italian should be calqued on dialect, because as I sensed the fake quality of the language used by the majority of writers, the only guarantee of authenticity which I thought I could achieve was this closeness to the spoken usage of the people. This approach can be detected in my earliest books, whereas it becomes rare subsequently. A sensitive reader from San Remo and old connoisseur of its dialect (a lawyer whom Soldati turned into a character in one of his books) recognized and appreciated dialectal uses in my books even later on: now he is dead and I do not believe there is anyone any more who is capable of doing this.

  The impact of dialect soon becomes adulterated in whoever moves away from the place and daily conversation there. After the war I moved to Turin, where at that time dialect was still very strong at all levels of society, and although I tried to resist changing my natural Ligurian dialect, the different linguistic atmosphere could not but rub off on the way I spoke, given these dialects’ common Gallo–Italic roots.

  Nowadays my wife speaks to me in the Spanish of the River Plate, and my daughter in the French used by the school-kids of Paris: the language in which I write no longer has anything to do with any language spoken around me, except through my memory.

  [Reply to a survey by Walter della Monica. Some of the points were published in La Fiera Letteraria, 9 May 1976. The questions were: 1) What weight can the knowledge and use of dialects have in contemporary culture? Could a renewal of interest in dialects typify a new culture? 2) Do dialects still have something to contribute to the Italian language? 3) Do you know a dialect? Has it impinged on the linguistic quality of your work? (Author’s note.)]

  The Situation in 1978

  ‘The big secret is to hide, escape, cover your tracks.’ Something you said to Arbasino,56 at the start of the ‘belle époque’, as you called the 1960s. You’ve managed to do so. So much so that nowadays we wonder: is Calvino, like Astolfo, in the moon?

  The moon would be a good vantage point from which to observe the earth from a certain distance. Finding the right distance to be present and at the same time detached: that was the problem of The Baron in the Trees . But twenty years have gone by, it is becoming more and more difficult for me to situate myself on the map that charts today’s dominant mental attitudes. And every elsewhere is unsatisfying, you cannot find one. Nevertheless I still reject the role of the person chasing events. I prefer that of the person who continues his discourse, waiting for it to become topical again, like all things that have a sound basis.

  ‘Discourse’: you said it. Now you have to explain.

  Perhaps it was only a certain number of Yeses and Noes and a huge number of Buts. Sure, I belong to the last generation to believe in a model of literature that could be part of a model of society. And both models have gone up in the air. My whole life has been a process of recognizing the validity of things I said No to. But attributions of fundamental value remain, the more so the more you hear them being denied.

  That model of society, your generation’s Communist model, has burnt out. New ones have appeared, from the same source. Do you feel at home with any of them?

  The workers’ movement meant for me an ethic of work and productivity, which has faded in the last ten years. Today it is existential motivations that are in the foreground: everyone has the right to enjoy life just because they are in the world. This is a ‘creaturalism’ I do not share: I do not love people just because they are in the world. One has to earn the right to exist, and justify it with what you give to others. That is why the common ground which today unites Christian Democrat welfarism and the youth protest movement is foreign to me.

  Every elsewhere, you said, is unsatisfying. Where would there be an elsewhere that would suit you?

  For many writers, their own subjectivity is self-sufficient. That is where what counts happens. It is not even an elsewhere, basically what you live through is the totality of the world. Think of Henry Miller. Since I hate waste, I envy the writers for whom nothing is wasted, who use everything. Saul Bellow, Max Frisch: daily life as the constant nourishment for writing. I, on the other hand, feel that what happens to me cannot interest others. What I write I have to justify, even to myself, with something that is not just individual – perhaps because I come from a secular and intransigently scientific family, whose image of civilization was a human–vegetable symbiosis. Removing myself from that morality, from the duties of the agricultural smallholder, made me feel guilty. The world of my imagination did not seem important enough to be justifiable on its own. A general context was essential. It is no accident that I spent many years of my life banging my head against a brick wall, trying to square the circle that was involved in living the life of literature and Communism at the same time. A false problem. But still better than no problem at all, because writing only makes sense if you are faced with a problem to solve.

  Would you like something which allowed you once more to say Yeses and Noes? To go back to the beginning? Would you like to have the ‘plan’?

  Every time I try to write a book I have to justify it with a plan or programme, whose limits I quickly realize. So then I put it alongside another project, many other projects, and this ends up in writer’s block. Every time I have to invent, alongside the book I have to write, the author who has to write it, a kind of writer that is different from me, and from all other writers, whose limitations I see only too clearly…

  And what if among the victims of this epoch was the very concept of ‘plan’? What if this was not a transition from a ‘used’ plan to a new one, but rather the death of the whole notion of ‘plan’?

  Your hypothesis is plausible, it could be that it is our need to work things out in advance that is disappearing, and that we are entering into the way of life of other civilizations, which do not have time to plan. But the good thing in writing is the happiness in doing something, the satisfaction of something that has been completed. If this happiness replaced the will power involved in plans, then, my goodness, I would sign up immediately.

  In one of your early narratives there is a cannon shot which divides The Cloven Viscount in two. For you then [1951] there were many possible divisions: subject/object, reason/fantasy, ‘the outside road’, as Vittorini called politics, and the inner road; Calvino the journalist on the Turin l’Unità and the writer who was already seeking images from the Middle Ages. For you, harmony was lost from the beginning. Have you ever found it again?

  That’s true, there is laceration in The Cloven Viscount and perhaps in everything I wrote. And the awareness of laceration carries with it the desire for harmony. But every illusion of harmony in contingent things is mystification, so you have to look for it on other levels. That’s how I arrived at the cosmos. But the cosmos does not exist, not even for science, it is only the horizon of a consciousness that goes beyond the individual, where all chauvinistic and particularistic ideas of humanity are overcome, and one can perhaps attain a non-anthropomorphic perspective. I have never indulged in cosmic euphoria or contemplation in this ‘ascent’. More a sense of responsibility towards the universe. We are part of a chain that starts at sub-atomic or pre-galactic level: giving our actions and thoughts
the continuity with what came before us and what will come after is something I believe in. And I would want this to be something that could be gleaned from that collection of fragments that is my oeuvre.

  In your search for harmony, you have focused on higher rationality. This is the mathematics of geometrical metaphors (in the Our Ancestors trilogy), the combinatory calculus of structures (in The Castle of Crossed Destinies and Invisible Cities). Becoming more and more refined and perfect, forever upwards. At the top of this, will there not be just silence?

  Yes, and this is the anguish I have been living with for years, and I do not know if I will find a way out of it. Even calculus and geometry represent the need for something beyond the individual. I have already said that the fact of existing, my biography, what goes through my head, does not authorize my writing. However, for me the fantastic is the opposite of the arbitrary: it is a way of going back to the universals of mythical representation. I have to construct things that exist for themselves, things like crystals, which answer to an impersonal rationality. And in order for the result to be ‘natural’ I have to turn to extreme artifice. With the inevitable failure this involves, since in the finished work there is always something arbitrary and imprecise which leaves me dissatisfied.

  Of your life in the 1950s, the militant years, you said: ‘permanent professional (political) duty’. Of the 60s: ‘belle époque’. What name do you have in your calendar for the third decade that is now drawing to a close?

  I would say: non-identification. There have been many things in the air, I have experienced them while remaining open to how they might develop, but always with reservations. In the final chapter of The Castle of Crossed Destinies I compare the figure of the hermit with that of the knight who kills dragons. Well, in the 1970s I have been, above all, the hermit. At a distance, yet not very far away. In the paintings of Saint Jerome or Saint Anthony the city is in the background. An image with which I identified. But in that same chapter of The Castle of Crossed Destinies there is a sudden switch, a revolt: I move towards the juggler, the Bateleur in the Tarot cards. And I offer this as the final resolution. This conjurer and charlatan, presenting himself openly as someone who does conjuring tricks, is deep down the one who is least mystificatory.