When I began to write I was a young man who had read very little; so trying to reconstruct an ‘influential’ library means going immediately back to the books of my childhood: every such list, I believe, must begin with Pinocchio which I have always considered a model of narration, where every motif is presented and returns with an exemplary rhythm and clarity, every episode has a function and a necessity in the overall design of the plot, every character has a clarity of visual outline and an unmistakable way of speaking. If a continuity can be discerned in my earliest development – let’s say from the age of six to twenty-three – it is one that goes from Pinocchio to Kafka’s Amerika, another decisive book in my life, and one which I have always considered ‘The Novel’ par excellence in world literature in the twentieth century and perhaps not only in that century. The unifying element could be defined thus: the adventure and solitude of an individual lost in the vastness of the world, as he moves towards an internal initiation into the world and a construction of the self.
But the elements that go into the construction of a poetic world are many; for each one of them precise sources can be found in some of the things one reads when young. Recently, when rereading the hunting scene in The Legend of St Julian the Hospitaller, I relived with precise certainty the point when that taste for the Gothic and animalistic first took hold of me, the taste that emerges in a story like ‘The Crow Comes Last’ and in others of that period and afterwards.
In your creative career, as suggested by your works, one never finds repetition, which is an extremely positive thing. In this context do you prefer to pick out, in the history of your narrative works, a process of consistent development, of going forward in stages, or would you stress changes of route which were due to the fact that you had reached in each phase of your work the essential goal you had set yourself? Or, a third hypothesis, are you one of those writers who think they have continued to write only one book throughout their life?
I would opt for the second hypothesis: a change of direction in order to say something that I would not have been able to say with the previous approach. This does not mean that I regard the preceding line of research as coming to an end: it can happen that I continue for years to plan other texts to add to those I have already written, even though now I am busy with something completely different; in fact I do not consider any operation complete until I have given it a sense and a structure I can consider definitive.
Almost everything I write can be ideally fitted into ‘macrotexts’, a procedure that you, Maria Corti, studied with regard to the Marcovaldo stories. Even the Marcovaldo suite, which I consider closed, I could have continued further, applying that narrative mechanism to the technological and social changes in the city in subsequent years; but after a while, the spontaneity of a certain type of writing, as you noted in your analysis, runs out. Consequently there have been many series which I began but which I then abandoned without bringing them to a conclusion.
‘A Plunge into Real Estate’, ‘The Watcher’ and a third story of which I only wrote a few pages, ‘Che spavento l’estate’ (‘What a Fright that Summer’), were all conceived together around 1955 as a triptych with the overall title Chronicle of the Fifties, centring on the reaction of the intellectual to the negative reality around him. But by the time I managed to complete ‘The Watcher’ too much time had elapsed, we were already in the 1960s, I felt the need to search for new forms, and so that series remained unfinished.
In the meantime I had also written ‘Smog’, a story that at that time I considered very different because I had written it using a different method of transforming experience, whereas it could easily have become the third story in the planned triptych. Instead, it found its place as an accompaniment to ‘The Argentine Ant’, written ten years previously, in a diptych justified by structural and conceptual affinities.
The language of an artist, as Montale said, is ‘a language that is historicized, that has a relationship. It is valid in as much as it opposes, or differs from, other languages.’ How would you describe the identity of your language from this perspective?
This question ought to be turned back to you critics. I can only say that I try to counteract the mental laziness that is in evidence in the works of so many of my fellow-novelists in their use of a language that is as predictable and insipid as can be. I believe that prose requires an investment of all one’s verbal resources, just as poetry does: a spark and precision in the choice of words, economy and significance and inventiveness in their distribution and strategy, élan and mobility and tension in the sentence, and agility and ductility in shifting from one register to another, from one rhythm to another. For instance, writers who use too obvious or redundant adjectives or ones that are only there for an effect which they would be unable to achieve otherwise, can be considered in some cases as naïve, and in others as dishonest: in either case they are never people you can trust.
Having said that, I will add that I do not agree either that one should load the phrase with too many intentions, winks and grimaces to the reader, colouring, layers, blends, pirouettes. Yes of course, one must aim to obtain the maximum effect, but one must also take care that this result is achieved, if not with minimal means, then at least with means that are not disproportionate to the end one seeks to attain.
In the period when I began to ask myself the question of how to write, namely in the early 40s, there was an idea of a morality which had to give shape to the style, and this is perhaps the thing that has remained most with me from that climate in Italian literature, throughout all the distance that separates us from then. If I have to define with an example my ideal kind of writing, here is a book that I have to hand because it has just been published (1984) but it contains pages written in the 1940s: Giorgio Caproni’s Il labirinto (The Labyrinth).68 I would choose this paragraph from p.17:
On the bare slope of Grammondo we went out into the open air. And although the sky had turned filthy, and from the West there blew an impetuous, rain-laden wind that was anything but gentle, the pleasure of giving our feet some air, feet still tender and burnt by that first forced march, prevented me from satisfying my overpowering desire to pitch camp and fling myself immediately under the covers. And yet there was still the odd rash person who, despite his tiredness, had the strength to try to be pointlessly clever, putting himself well on show on the crest of the mountain, right opposite the French, instead of staying with the rest of us a few metres below, under cover. Not courage at all: irresponsibility. And when an officer roared at him the rebuke he deserved, pointing out the danger he was exposing us to, I realized, or rather I felt, I was genuinely in line, and that the battle would be a question of hours, maybe minutes.
I will put two similar questions into one. Does the creative process behind your texts involve many phases of rewriting? It could be said that you attach great importance to the ‘possible worlds’ an author can invent, and therefore to the relationship between what you choose to actualize in the text, and what you are forced to exclude but continue to keep in mind. Would you like to say something about this?
Usually I carry an idea in my head for years before making up my mind to give it shape on the page, and on many occasions while waiting for this to happen I just let it die. The idea dies in any case, even when I decide to start writing: from that point there will exist only attempts to realize the idea, approximations, the struggle with my means of expression. Every time I start writing something, it requires an effort of will, because I know that what awaits me is the labour and dissatisfaction of trying and trying again, correcting, rewriting.
Spontaneity also has its moments: sometimes at the beginning – and in that case it does not usually last long – sometimes as a thrust you develop as you go along, sometimes as a final flourish. But is spontaneity something we should value? It certainly is for the writer, since it allows you to write with less effort, without going into crisis every minute; but it is not certain that the work always benefits from it
. The important thing is spontaneity as an impression which the work conveys, but that does not mean that you can achieve this result by using spontaneity as a means: in many cases it is only patient elaboration that allows you to arrive at the most satisfying and apparently ‘spontaneous’ solution.
Every text has its own history, its own method. There are books which come to fruition by a process of exclusion: first you accumulate a mass of material, I mean written pages; then you make a selection, gradually realizing what it is that fits into that design, that programme, and what on the other hand remains extraneous. The book Mr Palomar is the result of many phases of this type of work, in which ‘removing’ played a much greater role than ‘inserting’.
Have the natural and cultural environments in which you have lived – Turin, Rome, Paris – been congenial and stimulating for you, or did you preserve your solitude more strongly in some than in others?
The city which I have felt was my own city more than any other is New York. I once even wrote, imitating Stendhal, that I wanted ‘New Yorker’ to be engraved on my tombstone. That was in 1960. I have not changed my mind, even though I have lived most of the time since then in Paris, a city which I never leave except for brief periods and where perhaps, if I could choose, I will die. But every time I go to New York I find it more beautiful and closer to the shape of an ideal city. It may also be the fact that it is a geometric, crystalline city, without a past, without depth, apparently without secrets; therefore it is the city which intimidates me least, the city which I can have the illusion of possessing in my mind, of being able to think about in its entirety all in the same instant.
Despite all that, how much do you see New York in the stories I have written? Very little. Perhaps just a couple of stories from Time and the Hunter or similar works, and the odd page here and there. (Look, I’ve just checked The Castle of Crossed Destinies: page 80.) And Paris? I certainly could not find many more examples. The fact is that many of my stories are not situated in any recognizable place. Perhaps that is why replying to this question is costing me so much effort: for me, the processes of the imagination follow paths that do not always coincide with the paths we follow in life.
As for a natural environment, the one you cannot reject or hide is the landscape of your birth, where you grew up; San Remo continues to pop up in my books, in the most varied panoramas and perspectives, especially seen from above, and it is particularly present in Invisible Cities. Naturally I am talking of San Remo as it was up until thirty or thirty-five years ago, and particularly as it was fifty or sixty years ago, when I was a child. Every investigation of this kind has to begin with that nucleus from which one’s imagination, psychology and language develop; this attachment to San Remo is as strong in me now as the urge to stay close to my roots was in my youth, an urge which soon turned out to be pointless, since the places quickly ceased to exist.
After the war I could not wait to set against the fixity of that ancestral backdrop, from which I had never moved, the panorama of the big city; after some wavering between Milan and Turin, I ended up finding a job in Turin and also a certain number of reasons (that now it would take a real effort to dig up again) to justify my eventual place of residence as a cultural choice. Was I at that time trying to position myself in response to the Milan/Turin opposition? Probably I was, although I did have a strong tendency to try to link the two opposing terms. In fact for all the years I lived more or less definitively in Turin (and that was quite a few, fifteen or so years), I tried as far as possible to live in the two cities as though it were just one city, divided not so much by the 127 kilometres of motorway, as by the incompatibility between the grid pattern of one and the circular plan of the other, something which caused psycho-topographical difficulties for the person trying to live in both of them at the same time.
At the start of the post-war period, the general fervour of cultural productivity which took on different shapes in euphoric and extrovert Milan, as opposed to methodical and cautious Turin, shifted the magnetic pole of Italian literature to the North, which was a novelty by comparison with the geography of Italian literature between the wars, which had had Florence as its undisputed capital. However, even then defining a ‘Northern’ approach as opposed to a previous ‘Florentine’ approach would have been to force the terms, for the simple fact that the exponents of both traditions had been (at different times but without interruption) the same people.
Just as in later years it would have been difficult, when Rome became the residential centre of a large number of people who wrote, people from all over and from every literary tendency, to find a common denominator to define a ‘Roman line’ as opposed to any other line. In short, it seems to me that a map of Italian literature today is totally independent of the geographical map, and I leave the question open as to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.
As for me, I am fine only when I do not have to ask myself ‘Why am I here?’, a question which you can forget about usually in cities which have such a rich and complex cultural texture, a bibliography so vast as to discourage anyone who was thinking of writing from adding anything else to it. For example, for the last two centuries writers from all over the world have lived in Rome, who have got no particular reason to be in Rome more than anywhere else, some of them curious explorers who found the city’s spirit congenial to them (Gogol, more than anyone else), others profiting from the advantage of feeling like a foreigner.
Unlike other writers, in your case creative activity has never prevented you from producing parallel theoretical reflections, both metafictional and metapoetic. Just look, if we needed an example, at a very recent text, ‘How I wrote one of my books’, which came out in ‘Actes sémiotiques. Documents’, 6:51 (1984) (‘Groupe de Recherches sémiolinguistiques’ from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales). And confirmation would come from the powerful suggestions that semiologists and literary theorists have always derived from your oeuvre, even though you do not appear to be writing a programmatic work. How do you explain this sort of brilliant symbiosis?
It is quite natural for ideas in general circulation to have influenced me, sometimes immediately, at other times with delayed action. The important thing would be to have thought in advance of something that was subsequently useful to others. The fact that I had dealt with popular folktales at a time when no one bothered about their mysterious mechanisms, made me particularly receptive to structuralist problems, as soon as they came to general attention about a decade later. However, I do not think I have a real theoretical vocation. One’s pleasure in experimenting with a method of thought as though it were a gadget imposing demanding and complicated rules can coexist with a basic agnosticism and empiricism; the way poets and artists think, I believe, is like this. It is quite different from investing all your expectations of reaching a truth in a theory or a methodology (as one would in a philosophy or ideology). I have always greatly admired and loved the rigour of philosophy and science; but always from a bit of a distance.
How do you feel being part of Italian literature today? Can you glimpse anything in more recent times that goes beyond pure decorum? Moreover, does the question about the ‘sense of literature’, which has been asked by more than one journal, seem to you to have any sense?
To give an overview of Italian literature today – and to reconfigure in this light the literary history of the century – one must take account of various factors which were true forty years ago, at the time of my literary apprenticeship, and which have become clear again now, so they have always been true: a) the privileged position of poetry in verse, containing as it does values that prosewriters and storytellers also pursue, though by different means but with the same ends; b) in fiction the prevalence of the short story and other forms of creative writing, more than the novel, whose successes are rare and exceptional; c) the fact that unconventional, eccentric and atypical writers end up being the most representative figures of their time.
Bearing all t
his in mind, and going back over the totality of what I have done and said and thought, wrongly or rightly, I have to conclude that I feel perfectly at ease in Italian literature and that I could not imagine myself anywhere but in that context.
[First published in Autografo, 2:6 (October, 1985).]
1 Piero Gobetti (1901–26), influential Turinese intellectual, founder of the anti-Fascist journal La rivoluzione liberale, which was forced to cease publication in 1925. Gobetti died in exile in Paris from the after-effects of Fascist beatings.
2 Elio Vittorini (1908–66), novelist, journalist, translator (particularly of American literature in the 1930s and 40s) and leading cultural figure in post-war Italy. Initially a Fascist, he switched to anti-Fascism after the Spanish Civil War and in the Second World War fought with the partisans in Milan. His most famous novel was Conversazione in Sicilia (Conversation in Sicily) (1938–39), defined by Calvino as ‘a one-off Guernica of a novel’.
3 Emilio Cecchi (1884–1966), influential critic, expert on English and American literature, and author of two major travelogues, Mexico (1932) and L’America amara (Bitter America) (1940).
4 Mario Tobino (1910–91), prolific Tuscan novelist and also psychiatrist, whose early works, Il figlio del farmacista (The Chemist’s Son) (1942) and Il deserto della Libia (The Libyan Desert) (1950), were largely autobiographical.
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