This week on Page-Turner, we?ll have a series of excerpts from ?Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985? translated by Martin McLaughlin. What follows is an introduction by Michael Wood, and the first installment of letters from Calvino to his friend Eugenio Scalfari, written when Calvino was a young man at university and in the Army. Scalfari was his closest friend at school; he went on to edit the weekly magazine L?Espresso and found the daily newspaper La Repubblica.
Italo Calvino was discreet about his life and the lives of others, and skeptical about the uses of biography. He understood that much of the world we inhabit is made up of signs, and that signs may speak more eloquently than facts. Was he born in San Remo, in Liguria? No, he was born in Santiago de las Vegas, in Cuba, but since ?an exotic birth-place on its own is not informative of anything,? he allowed the phrase ?born in San Remo? to appear repeatedly in biographical notes about him. Unlike the truth, he suggested, this falsehood said something about who he was as a writer, about his ?creative world? (letter of November 21, 1967), ?the landscape and environment that? shaped his life? (April 5, 1967).
This is to say that the best biography may be a considered fiction, and Calvino was also inclined to think that a writer?s work is all the biography anyone really requires. In his letters he returns again and again to the need for attention to the actual literary object rather than the imagined author.
But then what are we to make of the letters of such a writer, and what are we doing reading them? In part we are, I?m afraid, ignoring his warnings and careful distinctions; peeping into his privacy. These letters were not written for us or to us. We see ?that young man,? as Calvino later calls his earlier self (May 26, 1977), in all his unruly literary excitement, his half-hearted agricultural studies, his worries about conscription, followed by his departure to join the partisans. He returns from the war a declared Communist but still a diverse and witty stylist. The letters reflect his encounters with the writers Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese, both of whom meant a great deal to him, and record many of his exchanges of thoughts with friends and critics. He travels to Russia and America, reporting in detail on his impressions; resigns from the Communist Party; continues to work at the Turin publishing house Einaudi. He marries the Argentinian Esther Singer and they have a daughter, Giovanna, who appears in the letters as happy, alert, and admirably resistant to education (?she speaks three languages? and has no wish to learn to read or write? [March 1, 1972]). Calvino moves to Paris; then Rome, a place ?that young man? once swore he would never set foot in. There are kindly letters to scholars and schoolchildren, quarrelsome exchanges with figures like Pier Paolo Pasolini and Claudio Magris. Calvino ?discovers? the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, makes clear his admiration for Carlo Emilio Gadda, thinks about film with Michelangelo Antonioni, and collaborates on opera with Berio.
There are dramatic moments, albeit quietly evoked. He dates a letter to his friend Eugenio Scalfari ?the first night of the curfew imposed by the Germans? (September 12-13, 1943); sends a message on a notepad to his parents from a partisan hiding place; in another letter mentions his parents? being taken hostage and then released (?my father was on the point of being shot before my mother?s eyes?) (July 6, 1945). Calvino is constantly exercised by Italian politics. We have his letter of resignation from the Italian Communist Party (August 1, 1957). He witnesses the events of May 1968 in Paris. He thinks about Brazilian prisons, Palestinian poets, the war in Vietnam. In Cuba he meets Che Guevara.
And again and again, we encounter Calvino the voracious reader: as a young man catching up with Ibsen and Rilke and what seems to be the whole of western literature, paying attention to contemporary Italian writers of all stripes; as a prolific reviewer ?reading books to review immediately,? as he says (January 16, 1950); as a man who spent most of his adult life working as an editor in a publishing house. A collection of his letters in Italian is called I libri degli altri (Other People?s Books), a phrase itself taken from a casual, generous remark of Calvino?s: ?I have spent more time with other people?s books than with my own.? He added, ?I do not regret it.? Perhaps not coincidentally, this avid reader sometimes halts as a writer, wonders whether he is finished, whether his present pause will become permanent. All the late work, beautifully written as it is, shows a greater and greater attention to what cannot be said.
The creative writer doesn?t dominate this correspondence as we might expect. There are interesting exceptions, but on the whole the letters are not being used as practice for fiction or essays. And finally, since he is not thinking of us, Calvino does not have any sort of eye on posterity, as Andr? Gide and so many other modern letter writers do. He is living in the present, not constructing a future monument.
These aspects of the letters may therefore offer something of a surprise to the reader who comes to them from the fiction and who may at first miss the expected intricacy and play. It?s not that there is no fun in the letters (there are plenty of humorous and ironic moments) or that Calvino is ever solemn or pompous; nor am I suggesting that the letters are serious while the fiction is not. But the sense of direct communication, of a man being as clear as he can about a host of matters, complex and simple, is quite different from that created by the artistic density of Calvino?s prose fiction and indeed of many of his essays. In his art, the wit and the irony are ways of reflecting the difficulties of the world while hanging on to his sanity?instruments of reason in a world of madness. ?I am in favor,? Calvino says in one letter, ?of a clown-like mimesis of contemporary reality? (January 18, 1957). Clowns are often sad and all too sane; but their relation to reality is oblique. Calvino?s writing is part of a great literary project of hinting and suggesting, making memorable shapes and images, rather than giving information or offering explanations. In his letters, Calvino tells rather than shows his correspondents what he means?with great and often moving success.
?Michael Wood
To Eugenio Scalfari?Rome
[Turin, 10-11 May 1942]
REPLY TO THE LETTER, TO THE POEM
THAT ACCOMPANIES THE LETTER,
TO THE POSTCARD THAT FOLLOWED THE
LETTER AND THE POEM
Friend,
Here we are counting the days that separate us from our return home. Damn these professors who won?t sign you off until the final days, these labs that go on through the month of May, this militia thing. Your exams start on the 15th? Ours probably much earlier, but they?ll go on until the end of June. I start to salivate when I think about the juicy conversations we?ll have when we?re back together again.
[?] I?ve read your poem. I too, if you remember, wrote a Hermetic poem in my early youth. I know that gives enormous satisfaction to the person who writes it. But whether the person who reads it shares this enthusiasm is another matter. It?s too subjective, Hermeticism, do you see? And I see art as communication. The poet turns in on himself, tries to pin down what he has seen and felt, then pulls it out so that others can understand it. But I can?t understand these things: these discourses about the ego and the non-ego I leave to you. Yes, I understand, there?s the struggle to express the inexpressible, typical of modern art, and these are all fine things, but I?
Going back to your poem, there are a lot of good things in it, let?s be clear about that, it could even be a masterpiece of its kind, I?m not an expert. The willing reader?s effort in reading your verses and trying to reconstruct the state of mind that inspired them is rewarded by a number of clear, luminous sensations, and some images that work well. In addition the idea is fine and lofty compared to so much empty Ungarettian, Montalian, and Quasimodan absurdity. Well, I realize that I?m paying you tons of compliments whereas I had started off writing to you to tell you you?d written a lot of drivel.
Do you know what I think? That when in the school toilets we said ?I see Saturday as red, Tuesday green, and Thursday how do you see it?? we were unwittingly laying down the foundations of modern art. What is modern art but the attempt to pinpoint vague, incorporeal, inexpressible sensations? What is modern art, I would add, but the most solemn pile of nonsense that ever appeared on earth?
I?m a regular guy, I like well-defined outlines, I?m old-fashioned, bourgeois. My stories are full of facts, they have a beginning and an end. For that reason they will never be able to find success with the critics, nor occupy a place in contemporary literature. I write poetry when I have a thought that I absolutely have to bring out, I write to give vent to my feelings and I write using rhyme because I like it, tum-tetum tum-tetum tum te-tum, because I?ve got no ear, and poetry without rhyme or meter seems like soup without salt, and I write (mock me, you crowds! Make me a figure of public scorn!) I write? sonnets? and writing sonnets is boring, you have to find rhymes, you have to write hendecasyllables so after a while I get bored and my drawer is overflowing with unfinished short poems. I?ll send you one, a finished one. You judge.
Byee
To Eugenio Scalfari?Rome
Florence, 7-3-43
Comrade,
With a February exam out of the way, I am living through days that are not very enjoyable and rather lonely, but they are intense and profitable. The free time I am left with after what is taken up by the hateful duo of ?schola atque militia? I spend in large part visiting Florence like a good tourist, with the Touring Club guide in my hand. The rest of my time I divide between reading, exhibitions, lectures. Yesterday your friend Jacobbi was speaking about the necessity of tragedy, but because of Militia duties I couldn?t go and hear him and I was sorry about that as I would have liked to speak to him. The point is that here the National Theatre has sent out to the experimental theaters only the title of my play, plus my name and address. So if I don?t sort out something myself, I?ll have a long time waiting for them to get round to asking me for the script. Consequently?leaving aside the fact that I don?t want to have anything more to do with The People?s Comedy?I have to bear in mind that supposing that this year?for one reason or another?I don?t manage to write anything decent, the small ray of light cast on my name would be cancelled out by time and I?d have to start again from scratch. So if you who have a copy of my script and have the chance to talk to those people can ask them to take a look at it, you?d be doing me a favor. If it?s a chore (I realize that if it?s a chore for me to do this for myself, doing it for someone else must be even worse), let me know and I?ll send it directly to Vasile myself (let me have the address to send it to). The proposal you made about N. O. is flattering, but given the financial nature of this flattery, I think I?ll resist their advances: I?m still too ignorant to write articles and as for my output of short stories, a famous summer of overproduction has been followed by years of crisis.
I?ve started work on a new play: Filippo and the Universe. But I doubt if I?ll complete it.
All the ideas currently in my head are subject to a strange phenomenon: while I work on them and perfect them continuously from the philosophical point of view, they stay rudimentary and barely sketched on the dramatic and artistic side. In my creativity thought has the upper hand over imagination.
Another thing: quit saying in that contemptuous tone that economic articles don?t interest me. I study and am interested in those things as well. If you want to keep your articles to yourself, hold onto them (I imagine that?given the increase in your output?you?d spend a fortune between making copies and postage costs), but if when you come to San Remo you bring your Opera Omnia with you (I suppose you have a bulging album full of cuttings or other such things) I might perhaps deign to cast an eye over them. Meanwhile thanks for the Neo-Occidental offer if you send it to me. (Send it to San Remo.)
[?] RUMOURS DOING THE ROUNDS: that the class of ?24 is being called up in April, including students. Bye. For myself outlook very bleak: I?ll surely be failed at the exam to become a sergeant, since I?ll be coming from the Militia training course therefore as such highly underprepared. I?ll stay a corporal all my life, which perhaps will be very short, depending on whether they fling me to the front immediately or not. With that kind of future in front of me my view of the overall situation can?t ever be very objective and you can imagine where my aspirations are tending.
[?] I?ve read The Sea Plays and The Emperor Jones by O?Neill (it?s a rather rare edition, by Frassinelli in Turin). I?ve finally managed to ?penetrate? the nucleus of O?Neill?s theater, to discover the mechanism that determines all his plays that are in appearance so disparate and empirical: it?s the contrast between self-control and instinct, between Emerson and Freud, Puritanism and life-forces, all this with a world-view that is so tragic and pessimistic that it rescues it from any accusations of Romanticism that such a position might incur. Now I feel at ease with him and can place him alongside Ibsen and Pirandello amongst the great dialectical dramatists. (Just think, I even manage to appreciate Mourning Becomes Electra.) [?]
Italo
To Eugenio Scalfari?Rome
San Remo. 19 March 1943
Now don?t you start getting me angry as well: I ask you, the one time the Easter holidays are from 20 April to 10 May, why do you need to come to San Remo at the beginning of April? I?m still in Florence for a month, 20 March till 20 April. Then permanently in San Remo until the exams. It seems to me that if you have no engagements you can choose for your San Remo stay a period which coincides at least for a few days with my time there. Still, who gives a damn? You?re not so handsome that I?m desperate to see you! Before I forget: Addressus Florentinus:- c/o De Ponti, II Via de? Cerchi?and stop writing ?I?ll send you this, I?ll send you that as well? and then you send me nothing.
I, on the other hand, am sending you a sample of my new experiments in fiction. (It?s not stuff for N. O. but maybe for R. F. and the like.) It?s a vision of humanity sunk to the lowest level of its downward curve, humanity as an ant-hill, for whom only a latent and confused memory remains of its ancient individuality. It?s also rubbish. If you don?t like it or don?t want to do anything with it, send it back to me.
[?] Pasquale: yesterday finally found out from Gianni, his special envoy in Turin, that his leave application form from the Polytechnic has not been lost, he?ll apply soon to enroll in the first year of agriculture; at present he?s doing nothing but silently loving Maria Camilla. Gianni: makes little trips to Turin without ever running into an alarm. Giovanni: a bersagliere in Gradisca, they?re giving him a helluva you know what. Milio: he?s at Acqui for a bit, San Remo for a bit, liked Labbra serrate (Sealed Lips). Silvio: organizing the Littoriali del lavoro. Dentone: second-lieutenant in Salerno. Me: fine thanks, and you?
Then there?s Chekhov. You say he?s not relevant and I get mad. Because Chekhov?s theater is the theater of modernist positivism, the tragic conception of a pointless universe, people whose desperate ?Why??s are left without an answer, who try to disguise the pointlessness of existence in fictitious ideals. This is my (and your) theater. And the style of his work, this style that makes it almost unperformable and soporific, that too is part of this modernism that is taken to its ultimate consequences and which leads precisely to a squalid realism in its extreme objectivity: impressionism. Beyond this limit it is impossible to go: there will be reactions, forms of idealism in philosophy, of expressionism in art, but they?ll all be palliatives, things built in the void; the torment of Chekhov?s characters is immanent in our thought because it has never been solved.
[?] Since your trip to Florence is probably off, I?ll wait for you. If I have some money left on my return I?d come down to Rome: it would be handy also from the point of view of the trains, but in any case I?m sure I?ll have none left, and if I do, I?d better buy some books.
Italo
To Eugenio Scalfari, Rome
SAN REMO 5-6-43
Explain please,
What is all this nonsense you?re giving me about pure and impure art? As though we didn?t know each other well enough and had never discussed the subject. As though you didn?t know who Italo-calvino is, what he wants, what he has to say. Forget any remorse: my art has been and always will be social while trying to remain art as far as possible, just as in Ungaretti?s poetry there is always an immanent ethic even when at his most lyrical: ?tonda quel tanto che mi d? tormento? (just round enough to torment me). The funny thing is that just about a year ago you were writing me passionate letters on the necessity of a social nature in art and I was replying with even more heated letters on God knows what. We really have to burn this correspondence.
In any case, I?m fed up writing stories. I?m beginning to develop a style, which is maybe a good sign: after having imitated others so much, I can now afford to imitate myself a bit. At any rate these that I am enclosing are the last ones. (One of them I haven?t time to type and maybe it?s not worth it anyway.) Do what you want with them, maybe even rip them up. Be careful with the one about the game of tip-cat. I?ve sent it to you anyway but I didn?t think it could be published. Watch out because only Garroni could find it in conformity with the legally constituted authorities. If it turns out not to be publishable, don?t give the other one either to N. O., it?s not worth it just for one story, maybe give it to Gigliozzi, never mind about payment. And what do you mean that its form is slack? Do you know how much I polished it, word by word, to get that unsophisticated, rough and ready style?
[?] Here days that are perfect for bathing alternate with cloudy days. We?re all shit-scared of the exams. Pasquale has gone to the country and won?t be back till July. A new gang is forming whose leaders are Verdun and Lanero. I think they want to collaborate with us. But it won?t work. Marisa is solidly chained to her books. Rosetta goes out on her own or with a man. My grandmother is like all old women.
Get in touch soon.
If not, see you in August.
WRITE.
the maestro
To Eugenio Scalfari?Rome
San Remo 6-7-45
Dear Eugenio,
I was beginning to think you were dead since I had not received any reply to the various missives I sent you, from the Liberation onward, then the other day I finally got your postcard. We?re all alive; you ?down there? will never be able to understand what this period has been like for us, and how lucky we must consider anyone who has come through it. I have a right to say this more than anyone else, for my life in this last year has been a whirlwind of adventures: I?ve been a partisan all this time, I?ve been through an unspeakable series of dangers and discomforts; I?ve experienced prison and escape, been several times on the point of dying. But I?m happy with everything I?ve done, with the wealth of experiences that I have amassed, in fact I?d have liked to have done more. In a previous letter I explained my adventures in detail; I?m sorry that that one went missing. Now I?m involved in journalism and politics. I?m a Communist, fully convinced and dedicated to my cause. Tomorrow I?m going to Turin to finalize my collaboration with a weekly up there. But I?m coming back soon and I?ll be happy to see you. I imagined you?d be a big shot in the Partito d?Azione or something similar, but I learn with horror that you?ve spent this whole period in pastoral idylls. All our old friends are still alive. None of them covered themselves in glory, apart from Gianni who has to his credit a year spent in the mountains where he was commissar of a Garibaldini detachment. Now he?s extremely busy criticizing everything and everyone: previously he had just one party to speak ill of, now he?s got five or six to badmouth! Silvio was stuck for the whole period in a hospital, Pasquale?who?s just come back?in his castle. Milio was organizing Badogliani troops last summer. The ?gang? is just a memory from bygone days.
San Remo is in a real mess from the constant naval and aerial bombardments. Yesterday and today I went to your house, but nobody?s answering. On the door is written ?Minaglia.? From the outside it looks badly damaged but not destroyed.
Say hello to your parents: mine send their best to you. They too have been through quite a lot: each of them was arrested for a month and held as hostage; my father was on the point of being shot before my mother?s eyes.
See you soon and write to me.
Italo
Michael Wood?s introduction and the letters of Italo Calvino are excerpted from ?Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985,? translated by Martin McLaughlin, which will be published by Princeton University Press on May 20th. ? 2013 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.
Photograph by Mondadori Portfolip/Getty.
Source: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/05/the-letters-of-italo-calvino.html
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