Required Reading for Italian-Americans...

Sicilian Culture: News & Views

Inventing Calvino: Hermit in Paris
By Michael Mewshaw, LA Times

In 1983, the town of Ravello bestowed honorary citizenship on Gore Vidal. To mark the occasion, Italy's most celebrated writer, Italo Calvino, offered his friend an encomium that quickly became a conundrum. The author of fantasies and folk tales, metafictions and hypernovels, Calvino mused:

"I must ask myself if we are indeed in Ravello, or in a Ravello reconstructed in a Hollywood studio, with an actor playing Gore Vidal, or if we are in the TV documentary on Vidal in Ravello.... Or, since there is a spaceship in Duluth manned by centipedes who can take on any appearance, even becoming dead ringers for U.S. political figures, perhaps we could be aboard that spaceship, which left Duluth for Ravello, and the E.T.s aboard could have taken on the appearance of the American writer we are here to celebrate."

This produced considerable head-scratching in the crowd of celebrants. But after Vidal's official investiture, we took it on faith that we were in Ravello and we were, in fact, invited back to his villa for drinks. During the walk there, I fell in beside Calvino and, although at a loss over what to say about his speech, I told him how much I admired "Invisible Cities." Its evocation of place was impeccable, I said.

With a sidelong glance of withering appraisal, he asked, "Do you read Calvino in Italian or in translation?"

"Translation," I admitted. It was the first time I had ever heard a writer refer to himself in the third person.

"Then you have never read Calvino." He accelerated along the colonnade of cypress trees, leaving me to watch his disappearing back.

Lost then and now for a witty reply, I confess slight uneasiness at reviewing "Hermit in Paris." After all, if reading Calvino's fiction in English is not really reading Calvino, then who is one reading in these posthumously published autobiographical writings? Is the centipede at the controls of this particular spaceship the same shape-changing creature who produced the autobiographical pieces collected in "The Road to San Giovanni," published less than a decade after Calvino's death in 1985? Moreover, since Calvino chose not to publish "American Diary 1959-1960" -- he withdrew it when the manuscript was in proofs -- does its inclusion here constitute a double violation of an identity that Calvino suggested existed only in Italian? And what is that identity?

Committing myself to a definition of Calvino the way a mountaineer commits with sweaty palms to assaulting Mt. Everest, I was both puzzled and pleased by the ease of the climb in "Hermit in Paris." Whatever its other virtues, its miscellaneous sections provide helpful pitons for readers who have been stymied by the icy polish, slick salients and thin air of Calvino's fictional summits. In earnest answers to questionnaires, un-ironic essays for newspapers and personal letters, he takes pains to explain himself, his political evolution and aesthetics, something he never deigned to do in "The Castle of Crossed Destinies," "Mr. Palomar" or other narratives in which artifice and paradox conjure a text of geometrical perfection and crystalline complexity.

Though Calvino's fiction depends on selectivity and a "combinatory calculus of structures," these pieces are repetitive, sometimes relaxed to the point of garrulousness and endearingly ditzy... But more often he hits the mark with his observations about the States, and there's something irresistibly zany about the idea of Calvino larking around on a grant from the Ford Foundation, going into Bourbon Street bars and "trying to start discussions with the girl dancers about unionization."

Again and again, he describes growing up in San Remo, on the Italian Riviera, son of an agronomist and a botanist, raised in a secular, scientific atmosphere. When the Fascists came to power, he joined the partisans and fought in the woods that his "father had taught me to know as a boy." After the war, he became a Communist, breaking with the party in 1957 after the Russian invasion of Hungary, and he charts his journey to political withdrawal with painful candor in the essay, "Was I a Stalinist Too?" In the end, he makes an admission that seems to sum up his character and contradict his image as an artistic dandy. "I don't believe in anything that is easy, quick, spontaneous, improvised, rough and ready. I believe in the strength of what is now, 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." Small wonder Vidal joked that his friend's name meant Italian Calvinist.

Yet, tempting as it is to accept Calvino's self-evaluation, he was a man frequently as divided as the protagonist of "The Cloven Viscount," who was shot in half by a cannon. Pulled between subject and object, reason and fantasy, his parents' scientific method and his own fecund imagination, he tells an interviewer in "The Situation in 1978" about his challenge with each project: "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.... "

Then, elaborating on a concept that he set forth in the story "The Common Dustbin" -- that we are what we don't throw away -- Calvino adds in the same interview, "In my euphoric moments I think that that void which I do not occupy can be filled by another me, doing things that I ought to have done but was not able to do. Another me that could emerge only from that void."

When I read these passages, my mind reeled back to that evening in Ravello when I felt put down by Calvino for not reading him in the original. Maybe I got it all wrong and he meant there was no "original," only a series of relative and contingent Calvinos that the reader participates in creating. Maybe, instead of dismissing me, he was challenging me to get on with the job of inventing him in English. This is perhaps the central accomplishment of "Hermit in Paris" -- the eagerness it roused in me, and will no doubt in others, to return to Il Maestro's earlier books and to read them in a different, deeper context.

Michael Mewshaw is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, "Shelter From the Storm: A Novel" and "Do I Owe You Something?: A Memoir of the Literary Life."

Los Angeles Times: Inventing Calvino
www.calendarlive.com/books/bookreview/cl-bk-mewshaw20apr20,0,6473295.story?coll=cl%2Dbookreview

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