View all notes
Here is my CV. I was born in 1923 under a sky in which the radiant Sun and melancholy Saturn were housed in the harmonious Libra. I spent the first twenty-five years of my life in what was in those days a still-verdant San Remo, which contained cosmopolitan eccentrics amid the surly isolation of its rural, practical folk; I was marked for life by both these aspects of the place. Then I moved to industrious and rational Turin, where the risk of going mad is no less than elsewhere (as Nietzsche found out). I arrived at a time when the streets opened out deserted and endless, so few were the cars; to shorten my journeys on foot I would cross the rectilinear streets on long obliques from one angle to the other – a procedure that today is not just impossible but unthinkable – and in this way I would advance marking out invisible hypotenuses between grey right-angled sides. I got to know only barely other famous metropolises, on the Atlantic and Pacific, falling in love with all of them at first sight: I deluded myself into believing that I had understood and possessed some of them, while others remained for ever ungraspable and foreign to me. For many years I suffered from a geographical neurosis: I was unable to stay three consecutive days in one city or place. In the end I chose definitive wife and dwelling in Paris, a city which is surrounded by forests and horn-beams and birches, where I walk with my daughter Abigail, and which in turn surrounds the Bibliothèque Nationale, where I go to consult rare books, using my Reader’s Ticket no. 2516. In this way, prepared for the Worst, and becoming more and more dissatisfied as regards the Best, I am already anticipating the incomparable joys of growing old. That’s all.
YES
In the same month that his first novel was published, November 1947, Calvino scraped a degree in Arts with a thesis on English literature (Joseph Conrad). But it could be said that his development took place entirely outside university lecture theatres, in those years between the Liberation and 1950, debating, discovering new friends and mentors, accepting unsteady and occasional jobs, in that climate of poverty and feverish undertakings that was typical of the time. He had begun working at Einaudi in the publicity and press office, a job he would continue to hold as his permanent employment in years to come.
The atmosphere at the Turin publishing house, with its preponderance of historians and philosophers over critics and writers, and its constant debates between the supporters of different political and ideological tendencies, was fundamental in the intellectual formation of the young Calvino: gradually he found himself assimilating the experience of a generation slightly older than himself, of men who had already been moving in the world of literature and political debate for ten or fifteen years now, who had been militants in the anti-Fascist movement in the Action Party or the Christian Left movement or the Communist party. A major influence (not least because of his opposition to Calvino’s non-religious outlook) was the friendship, moral influence and vital volubility of the Catholic philosopher Felice Balbo, who at that time was a full member of the Communist party.
love this
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.
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…
<3
Perhaps politics remains tied in my experience to that extreme situation: a sense of inflexible necessity and a search for the different and the multiple in a rigid world. So I will conclude by saying: if I have been (though very much in my own way) a Stalinist, this was not by chance. There are elements that characterize that epoch, which are part of me: I don’t believe in anything that is easy, quick, spontaneous, improvised, rough and ready. I believe in the strength of what is slow, calm, obstinate, devoid of fanaticisms and enthusiasms. I do not believe in any liberation either individual or collective that can be obtained without the cost of self-discipline, of self-construction, of effort. If this way of thinking seems to some people Stalinist, well all right, I will have no difficulty in admitting that in this sense I am a bit Stalinist still.
[...] But at that time, twenty-four years ago, our perspective on things was more or less that. We Italian Communists were schizophrenic. Yes, I really think that that is the correct term. One side of our minds was and wanted to be a witness to the truth, avenging the wrongs suffered by the weak and oppressed, and defending justice against every abuse. The other side justified those wrongs, the abuses, the tyrannies of the party, Stalin, all in the name of the Cause. Schizophrenic. Split. I recall very clearly that whenever I happened to travel to some Socialist country, I felt profoundly uncomfortable, foreign, hostile. But when the train brought me back to Italy, whenever I crossed back over the border, I would ask myself: but here, in Italy, in this Italy, what else could I be but a Communist? That is why the thaw, the end of Stalinism, took a terrible weight from our chest: because our moral standing, our split personality, could finally be put together again, revolution and truth finally went back to being the same thing. This was, in those days, the dream and hope of many of us.
Instead I deepened what had always been my conviction: that what counts is the complexity of a culture in developing its various concrete aspects, in the things produced by labour, in its technical methods for doing things, in experience and knowledge and morality, in the values which become defined through practical work. In short, my idea had always been to join in building a cultural context capable of meeting the needs of a modern Italy and in which literature constituted an innovative force and the repository of the deepest convictions. On this basis, I renewed and strengthened my friendship with Elio Vittorini and together we published Il Menabò, a journal which came out a couple of times a year, between 1959 and 1966, and which followed or predicted the changes taking place in Italian literature, in ideas and in practice.
But now, once again, I have found a formula for putting something else before writing, namely my need for what I do to make sense as an innovative operation in the present cultural context, to be in some sense something that has never been attempted before, and which represents a further development of the possibilities of literary expression. I would very much like to be one of those writers who have something really clear in their head to say and throughout their life they promote this idea in their works. I would like to be like that, but I am not; my relationship with ideas is more complex and problematical; I always think of the pros and cons in everything and each time I have to construct a very complex picture. This is the reason why I can even go many years without publishing anything, working on projects which constantly end up in crisis.
Now that I am sixty, I have at last realized that the duty of the writer is simply to do what he knows how to do: storytellers have to tell stories, to portray, to invent. For many years I have given up laying down precepts about how one should write: what is the point of preaching one kind of literature or another, if then the things that you end up writing are maybe totally different? It took me a long time to realize that what counts is not your intention but what you actually achieve. So my literary work has become also a search for myself, an attempt to understand what I am.
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.