At Home

by Gore Vidal

  Palomar is drawn to the evil-smelling reptile house. “Beyond the glass of every cage, there is the world as it was before man, or after, to show that the world of man is not eternal and is not unique.” The crocodiles, in their stillness, horrify him. “What are they waiting for, or what have they given up waiting for? In what time are they immersed?…The thought of a time outside our existence is intolerable.” Palomar flees to the albino gorilla, “sole exemplar in the world of a form not chosen, not loved.” The gorilla, in his boredom, plays with a rubber tire; he presses it to his bosom by the hour. The image haunts Palomar. “ ‘Just as the gorilla has his tire, which serves as tangible support for a raving, wordless speech,’ he thinks, ‘so I have this image of a great white ape. We all turn in our hands an old, empty tire through which we would like to reach the final meaning, at which words do not arrive.’ ” This is the ultimate of writers’ images; that indescribable state where words are absent not because they are stopped by the iron bars of a cage at the zoo but by the limitations of that bone-covered binary electrical system which, in Calvino’s case, broke down on September 19, 1985.

  * * *

  Suddenly, up ahead, on a hill overlooking the sea, is Castiglion della Pescaia. To my left is the beach where Palomar saw but sees no longer the sword of light. The sea has turned an odd disagreeable purple color, more suitable to the Caribbean of Calvino’s birth than the Mediterranean. The sky is overcast. The air is hot, humid, windless (the headline of today’s newspaper, which has devoted six pages to Calvino’s life and work: CATACLISMA IN MESSICO). I am forty minutes early.

  The cemetery is on a hill back of the town which is on a lower hill. We park next to a piece of medieval wall and a broken tower. I walk up to the cemetery which is surrounded by a high cement wall. I am reminded of Calvino’s deep dislike of cement. In one of his early books, La Speculazione Edilizia, he described how the building trade had managed, in the 1950s, to bury the Italian Riviera, his native Liguria, under a sea of “horrible reinforced cement”; “il boom,” it was called. To the right of the cemetery entrance a large section of wall has been papered over with the same small funeral notice, repeated several hundred times. The name “Italo Calvino,” the name of Castiglion della Pescáia, “the town of Palomar,” the sign says proudly; then the homage of mayor and city council and populace.

  Inside the cemetery there are several walled-off areas. The first is a sort of atrium, whose walls are filled with drawers containing the dead, stacked one above the other, each with a photograph of the occupant, taken rather too late in life to arouse much pity as opposed to awe. There are plastic flowers everywhere and a few real flowers. There are occasional small chapels, the final repository of wealthy or noble families. I have a sense of panic: They aren’t going to put Italo in a drawer, are they? But then to the right, at the end of the atrium, in the open air, against a low wall, I see a row of vast floral wreaths, suitable for an American or Neapolitan gangster, and not a drawer but a new grave, the size of a bathtub in a moderately luxurious hotel. On one of the wreaths, I can make out the words Senato and Communist…, the homage of the Communist delegation in the Italian Senate. Parenthetically, since Italy is a country of many political parties and few ideologies, the level of the ordinary parliamentarian is apt to be higher than his American or English counterpart. Moravia sits in the European Parliament. Sciascia was in the chamber of deputies. Every party tries to put on its electoral list a number of celebrated intellectual names. The current mayor of Florence was, until recently, the head of the Paris Opéra: According to popular wisdom, anyone who could handle that can of worms can probably deal with Florence.

  * * *

  Over the wall, the purple sea and red-tiled whitewashed houses are visible. As I gaze, moderately melancholy, at Palomar country, I am recognized by a journalist from Naples. I am a neighbor, after all; I live at nearby Ravello. Among the tombs, I am interviewed. How had I met Calvino? A few drops of warm rain fall. A cameraman appears from behind a family chapel and takes my picture. The state television crew is arriving. Eleven years ago, I say, I wrote a piece about his work. Had you met him before that? Logrolling is even more noticeable in a small country like Italy than it is in our own dear New York Times. No, I had not met him when I wrote the piece. I had just read him, admired him; described (the critic’s only task) his work for those who were able to read me (the critic’s single aim). Did you meet him later? Yes, he wrote me a letter about the piece. In Italian or English? Italian, I say. What did he say? What do you think he said? I am getting irritable. He said he liked what I’d written.

  Actually, Calvino’s letter had been, characteristically, interesting and tangential. I had ended my description with “Reading Calvino, I had the unnerving sense that I was also writing what he had written; thus does his art prove his case as writer and reader become one, or One.” This caught his attention. Politely, he began by saying that he had always been attracted by my “mordant irony,” and so forth, but he particularly liked what I had written about him for two reasons. The first, “One feels that you have written this essay for the pleasure of writing it, alternating warm praise and criticism and reserve with an absolute sincerity, with freedom, and continuous humor, and this sensation of pleasure is irresistibly communicated to the reader. Second, I have always thought it would be difficult to extract a unifying theme from my books, each so different from the other. Now you—exploring my works as it should be done, that is, by going at it in an unsystematic way, stopping here and there; sometimes aimed directly without straying aside; other times, wandering like a vagabond—have succeeded in giving a general sense to all I have written, almost a philosophy—‘the whole and the many,’ etc.—and it makes me very happy when someone is able to find a philosophy from the productions of my mind which has little philosophy.” Then Calvino comes to the point. “The ending of your essay contains an affirmation of what seems to me important in an absolute sense. I don’t know if it really refers to me, but it is true of an ideal literature for each one of us: the end being that every one of us must be, that the writer and reader become one, or One. And to close all of my discourse and yours in a perfect circle, let us say that this One is All.” In a sense, the later Palomar was the gathering together of the strands of a philosophy or philosophies; hence, the inscription “my last meditations on Nature.”

  I let slip not a word of this to the young journalist. But I do tell him that soon after the letter I had met Calvino and his wife, Chichita, at the house of an American publisher, and though assured that there would be no writers there but us, I found a room ablaze with American literary genius. Fearful of becoming prematurely One with them, I split into the night.

  Two years ago, when I was made an honorary citizen of Ravello, Calvino accepted the town’s invitation to participate in the ceremony, where he delivered a splendid discourse on my work in general and on Duluth in particular. Also, since Calvino’s Roman flat was on the same street as mine (we were separated by—oh, the beauty of the random symbol!—the Pantheon), we saw each other occasionally.

  * * *

  For the last year, Calvino had been looking forward to his fall and winter at Harvard. He even began to bone up on “literary theory.” He knew perfectly well what a mephitic kindergarten our English departments have become, and I cannot wait to see what he has to say in the five lectures that he did write. I had planned to arm him with a wonderfully silly bit of lowbrow criticism (from Partisan Review) on why people just don’t like to read much anymore. John Gardner is quoted with admiration: “ ‘In nearly all good fiction, the basic—all but inescapable—plot form is this: a central character wants something, goes after it despite opposition (perhaps including his own doubts), and so arrives at a win, lose or draw.’ ” For those still curious about high-, middle-, and lowbrow, this last is the Excelsior of lowbrow commercialites, written in letters of gold in the halls of the Thalberg Building at MGM but never to be f
ound in, say, the original Partisan Review of Rahv and Dupee, Trilling and Chase. The PR “critic” then quotes “a reviewer” in The New York Times who is trying to figure out why Calvino is popular. “If love fails, they begin again; their lives are a series of new beginnings, where complications have not yet begun to show themselves. Unlike the great Russian and French novelists [this is pure middlebrow: Which novelists, dummy? Name names, make your case, describe], who follow their characters through the long and winding caverns [!] of their lives, Calvino just turns off the set after the easy beginning and switches to another channel.” This sort of writing has given American bookchat (a word I coined, you will be eager to know) a permanently bad name. But our PR critic, a woman, this year’s favored minority (sic), states, sternly, that all this “indeterminacy” is not the kind of stuff real folks want to read. “And Calvino is popular, if at all, among theorists, consumers of ‘texts’ rather than of novels and stories.” I shall now never have the chance to laugh with Calvino over this latest report from the land to which Bouvard and Pécuchet emigrated.

  At the foot of cemetery hill, a van filled with police arrives. Crowds are anticipated. The day before, the president of the republic had come to the Siena hospital to say farewell. One can imagine a similar scene in the United States. High atop the Tulsa Tower Hospital, the Reverend Oral Roberts enters the hushed room. “Mr. President, it’s all over. He has crossed the shining river.” A tear gleams in the Acting President’s eye. “The last roundup,” he murmurs. The tiny figure at his side, huge lidless eyes aswim with tears, whispers, “Does this mean, no more Harlequin novels?” The Acting President holds her close. “There will always be Harlequins, Mommie,” he says. ‘But they won’t be the same. Not without Louis L’Amour.”

  * * *

  Now several hundred friends of Calvino, writers, editors, publishers, press, local dignitaries fill up the cemetery. I hold Chichita’s hand a long moment; she has had, someone said, two weeks of coming to terms not so much with death as with the nightmare of dying.

  The last chapter of Palomar begins, “Mr. Palomar decides that from now on he will act as if he were dead, to see how the world gets along without him.” So far, not too good, I thought. Mexico City has fallen down and his daughter is late to the burial. On the plus side, there is no priest, no service, no words. Suddenly, as a dozen television cameras switch on, the dark shiny wooden box, containing Calvino, appears in the atrium. How small the box is, I think. Was he smaller than I remember? Or has he shrunk? Of course, he is dead but, as he wrote, “First of all, you must not confuse being dead with not being, a condition that occupies the vast expanse of time before birth, apparently symmetrical with the other, equally vast expanse that follows death. In fact, before birth we are part of the infinite possibilities that may or may not be fulfilled; whereas, once dead, we cannot fulfill ourselves either in the past (to which we now belong entirely but on which we can no longer have any influence) or in the future (which, even if influenced by us, remains forbidden to us).”

  With a crash, the pallbearers drop the box into the shallow bathtub. Palomar’s nose is now about four inches beneath the earth he used to examine so minutely. Then tiles are casually arranged over the coffin; and the box is seen no more. As we wait for the daughter to arrive, the heat is disagreeable. We look at one another as though we are at a party that has refused to take off. I recognize Natalia Ginzburg. I see someone who looks as if he ought to be Umberto Eco, and is. “A person’s life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole…” I notice, in the crowd, several dozen young schoolchildren. They are fans of Calvino’s fairy tales; plainly, precocious consumers of “texts” and proto-theorists. Then daughter and buckets of cement arrive simultaneously. One of the masons pours cement over the tiles; expertly, he smooths the viscous surface with a trowel. Horrible cement. “Therefore Palomar prepares to become a grouchy dead man, reluctant to submit to the sentence to remain exactly as he is; but he is unwilling to give up anything of himself, even if it is a burden.” Finally, the cement is flush with the ground; and that’s that.

  I am standing behind Chichita, who is very still. Finally, I look up from the gray oblong of fresh cement and there, staring straight at me, is Calvino. He looks anguished, odd, not quite right. But it is unmistakably Mr. Palomar, witnessing his own funeral. For one brief mad moment we stare at each other; then he looks down at the coffin that contains not himself but Italo. The man I thought was Italo is his younger brother, Floriano.

  I move away, before the others. On the drive back to Rome, the sun is bright and hot; yet rain starts to fall. Devil is beating his wife, as they say in the South. Then a rainbow covers the entire eastern sky. For the Romans and the Etruscans, earlier inhabitants of the countryside through which we are driving, the rainbow was an ominous herald of coming change in human affairs, death of kings, cities, world. I make a gesture to ward off the evil eye. Time can now end. But “ ‘If time has to end, it can be described, instant by instant,’ Palomar thinks, ‘and each instant, when described, expands so that its end can no longer be seen.’ He decides that he will set himself to describing every instant of his life, and until he has described them all he will no longer think of being dead. At that moment he dies.”*2 So end “my last meditations on Nature,” and Calvino and Nature are now one, or One.

  THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  November 21, 1985

  *1 Although the three estates, high-, middle-, and lowbrow, are as dead as Dwight Macdonald, their most vigorous deployer, something about today’s literary scene, combined with Calvino’s death, impels me to resurrect the terms. Presently, I shall demonstrate.

  *2 Now that Calvino’s work is done, one must praise the faithful William Weaver for his elegant translations over many years.

  CHAPTER 22

  WHY I AM EIGHT YEARS YOUNGER THAN ANTHONY BURGESS

  I saw them coming, an army of two with banners. He was tall, pale, eyes narrowed from cigarette smoke of his own making (an eighty-a-day man for years); she was small, round faced, somewhat bloated. In the gracious plywood-paneled room, the hard stuff was flowing, and the flower of British bookchat and publishing was on hand to drink it all up in honor, not quite the noun, of my return, after a decade’s absence, to Literature, with a long reflection on the origins of Christianity, novelly disguised as a novel. The year, 1964.

  She said in a loud clear voice, “You,” and then I ceased to understand her, “chung cheers boog sightee Joyce yearsen roscoe conkling.” I am certain that I heard the name of the nineteenth-century New York senator, and I turned to the man—the senator’s biographer?—and saw, like infected buttonholes, eyes I dare not meet in dreams. “Tchess.” He took up the refrain. “Boog Joyce venially blind, too, bolder.” I had been drinking, but not that much, while the tall man appeared sober. Obviously, I was having my chronic problem with English voices: the low rapid mumble, the urgent wheeze, the imploding diphthong, vowels wrongly stressed, and consonants long since gone west with the thirteen colonies.

  We were separated. I was told that I had been talking to Anthony Burgess and his wife, Lynne. Burgess had written some comic novels about life east of Maugham—or Suez; now there was a new book called A Clockwork Orange. I knew nothing of him except for one splendid anecdote. Under another name, he had reviewed one of his own books in a British paper. The Brits were horrified. I was delighted: Whitman had done the same. Besides, I was stern, shouldn’t there be at least one review in all of England written by someone who had actually read the book?

  * * *

  Again the army approached, banners raised high. We worked out a common language. Lynne was pissed off that my novel Julian was a Book Society choice. She was even more annoyed when I wanted to know what the Book Society was. I had a vision of aged flappers reciting Dorothy Richardson over sugary tea. The society was like an American book club, she growled. I apologized. Th
is was not enough. Truth crackled in the air. A novel by Burgess had finally been chosen, in 1961; yet he was eight years my senior. I was too young to be so honored. I mounted my high horse, tethered conveniently near. “I have written more books than Mr. Burgess,” I said, settling myself into the saddle. “And over a greater length of time.” Swift, suspicious adding and subtracting was done as we ate small but heavy sausages, diapered in a fried bread and speared with lethal plastic toothpicks. True, eighteen years had passed since my first book was published (at twenty) and a mere seven years since his first (at thirty-seven) but he was certain that he was well ahead in units of production. I was not. But before I could begin the long count, he said, “Anyway, I’m actually a composer.” This was superb, and I ceded the high ground to him. Lynne did not. She rounded on him: You are not a composer. Pussy-whipped, he winced and muttered, “roscoe g. conkling.” As I rode off into the night, no boyish treble sounded, “Shane!”

  Four years later Lynne was dead of the drink (cirrhosis of the liver). In due course, Burgess married an Italian, lived in Rome, and from time to time our paths crossed, cross. Now, twenty-three years after our first meeting, he is suddenly, astonishingly, seventy years old (I remain, throughout eternity, eight years his junior), and the author of twenty-eight novels and dozens of odd volumes on this and that as well as a part-time laborer in television and films and the theater, where he recently distinguished himself with an adaptation of Cyrano that changed everyone’s view of that familiar but not-so-high war horse.