“WHEN I BEGAN my career, the categorical imperative of every young writer was to represent his own time. Full of good intentions, I tried to identify myself with the ruthless energies propelling the events of our century . . . Soon I became aware that between the facts of life that should have been my raw materials, and the quick light touch I wanted for my writing, there was a gulf that cost me increasing effort to cross. Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world — qualities that stick to writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.”
Italo Calvino died in 1985, on the eve of his departure for Harvard, where he was to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures. He was preoccupied with the idea of a new century, then 15 years in the future, and his lecture series was titled Six Memos for the Next Millennium. In the series, he identified the literary values he thought indispensable — Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity — the final lecture, Consistency, was never written.
The quote above is from Lightness. Calvino’s literary life was spent trying to remove weight — from people, places, cities, and above all, from language itself.
Born in Cuba in 1923, and raised in San Remo, Calvino was a passionate opponent of Fascism. He was a Resistance fighter, and for many years, an active member of the Communist Party. His first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947), is something of a political thriller, and unlike anything he wrote afterwards. His early struggle as a writer was against the kind of Social Realism demanded by the period, and the pressure of events. He wanted to write differently, and in his own way. That meant inventing a world and a language to match it.
The Baron in the Trees, and The Cloven Viscount, marked the beginning of Calvino’s true style. They were called “fantasy” at the time, (though they are light years away from the writing that claims that term now), but they were also recognised as original works of the imagination. They make no attempt to document the real world; rather, they explain it by moving sideways from it. In a parallel universe we find we are able to think more clearly about our own situation. Calvino’s “fantasy” is in fact a serious “other-world” where, just for a time, we can be freed from the problems of gravity.
The Hermit in Paris is a collection of autobiographical writings and interviews, put together by his widow, Esther Calvino, who edited Six Memos for publication. The title piece is a charming, typically Calvino, fugitive essay on the anonymous possibilities of city living. Paris is Calvino’s retreat — that is, a home away from home, where the pleasures of a settled life are not weighed down by life’s responsibilities.
As a man committed to multiple selves, different countries are as necessary as different languages, and in Paris he speaks to his wife in her native Spanish, to his daughter in argot French, and to himself in Italian. Thus, the language he uses to writes in becomes a private message. In his study he composes a secret code, to be cracked open on publication. In the meantime, he and his words are conspirators, an underground resistance, not against the Nazis this time, but against the denseness of modern life.
The longest section of this new collection is devoted to a letter-diary about another city, New York, where Calvino had a travel scholarship in 1960. He wrote regularly to his Italian publishers, Einaudi, where he also worked as an editor. The letters cover everything from homosexuals (most of Greenwich Village) to Beatniks. Calvino seemed relieved to discover that Ginsberg’s “disgusting beard” was just a pose, and that he and his lovers “live as a quiet bourgeois menage and dress up in dirty clothes only to go out”.
There is some fascinating stuff on the race riots in Alabama, which Calvino witnessed first-hand as he travelled. He was angry and moved, and wrote about one of the protests as “a day I will never forget as long as I live”. That he felt no drive to put any of this into his fiction is evidence of the sureness of his own voice, and witness to his growing certainty that his gifts were not documentary. In an essay not printed here, because it appears in his collection The Literature Machine, Calvino discusses the political uses of literature, and concludes that “What we ask of writers is that they guarantee the survival of what we call human, in a world where everything appears inhuman”.
For Calvino, compassion, tolerance, acceptance, are rooted in an imaginative connection with other people and other lives. His masterpiece, Invisible Cities (1974; two years earlier in Italian), charts the supposed journeys of Marco Polo, city by city, as related to the great Genghis Khan. As Khan hears these stories of his empire, he begins to understand that every place is imaginary, every encounter a lucid dream. He begins to tell the stories back to Polo, each out-doing the other in invention. Yet this is no idle game. When Khan asks about the inferno, Polo tells him that it is already here. Our work is to “seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space”.
Calvino’s belief in the transforming powers of literature runs in harness with his hesitations over the newly extrovert role of the writer in society. His instinct was to let the work speak for itself. There is a slight awkwardness therefore, in publishing and reading pieces which Calvino made no effort to publish himself, outside of their original moment in newspapers, or as prefaces, journalism and letters.
The cult of celebrity that surrounds writers now is rather like those sonic frequency machines that force moles above ground. In this collection, Calvino talks enthusiastically about the “dream of being invisible” and he goes as far as to say that “writers lose a lot when they are seen in the flesh”. For Calvino, to be “just a name on a book cover” seems like “the ideal condition for a writer”.
Does this book expose him, then? Perhaps a little. He was a ruthless editor of his own work, sometimes refusing to publish pieces under contract, if he found them too slight or unsatisfactory. His power and his presence are strangely absent from this volume, although it is a series of autobiographical writings. He once said that whenever he had to talk about his own life he found himself in the stare of the Medusa, gradually turning to stone.
There is nothing petrified about these writings. What happens is that every time we think we might get close to Calvino the man, we lose him, just as his baron in the trees — at the moment when everyone thinks he will finally have to come down — takes a giant leap into the air, and grabs the end of a hot air balloon, disappearing into the sky. With Calvino, what’s left is the body of work, and maybe that is everything.
- The Hermit in Paris, translated by Martin McLaughlin, will be published next month by Jonathan Cape, £18.99; offer, £15.19
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