The Cloven Communist

I meet Italo Calvino in San Remo. This is a kind of very brief summer ritual: it never lasts more than ten minutes and those minutes correspond exactly to the sum of our silences. But this time the rule, which has been in force now for many years, is no longer valid: there are too many reasons for making an exception. First of all the publication of a large volume by Einaudi, Our Ancestors, which contains not in any strict order The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees and The Non-Existent Knight; also the author’s journey to America. I do not know where to begin, but I am quite clear in my own mind about my intention to get Calvino to talk for our readers, and I suddenly find that, making a rapid mental sketch of this Ligurian writer, I come up against the image of Cesare Pavese. This is in a certain sense an obligatory point of reference, a way of anchoring Calvino to his roots or rather of bringing together his natural development (everything that relates to the Liguria in which he grew up) and his intellectual formation, and perhaps something else as well. On this occasion there is an important date, one that offers the pretext for reflecting on quite a long period in our history. This is the tenth anniversary of the death of Pavese and it takes place exactly on the 27th of this month. I go back to the pain and surprise of those days, make a quick calculation of everything that has happened since, of what we have become both individually and as a family and it is in this very context that I find the first question to put to Calvino. The rest will come later: his work, his trip to America, his political ideas. For the time being, starting from the memory of Pavese means genuinely anchoring ourselves to our own history. Ten years on from his death, what is your opinion of Pavese’s works? What has time brought out and what has it, on the other hand, left aside? Finally, if you feel you are in his debt, in what sense do you think we should speak of such a debt?

A few weeks ago some friends from Rome came to Turin to make a documentary about Pavese’s city. I took them around, showing them the places where we went together: the River Po, the bars, the hills. Certainly in these ten years many things have changed, more than I expected. Already there is a ‘Pavese era’, with its own very distinct face – that twenty-year period 1930–50 which only now appears to us with a single physiognomy, spanning the war, unified in the look of the streets, in the design of objects, in the way women looked, in the way people behaved, and also in the psychological climate and the world of ideas. This is already enough to relegate Pavese to the past, but also to reaffirm his worth in a dimension that we previously did not pay enough attention to: he was the author of a fresco of his time which is without equal and which was articulated throughout his nine brief novels, as though it were a tightly packed and complete comédie humaine. How many things are there that, precisely because they are distant and almost incomprehensible today, turn out to be charged with fascinating poetic force! Where on earth can you find these days young people faced with long days and endless nights, who don’t know what to do or where to go, bored because of their own virginity and the void around them, not because they are sated and have a void inside them as they do today? And yet how authentic and credible it is, how we suffer this torment when we read Pavese! And this problem of solitude, what was it? Yet everything is so clear, painful and distant, just as Leopardi is clear, painful and distant.

Pavese’s nine novels have a stylistic and thematic unity which is extremely compact, yet each of them is so different from the next. I used to think La casa in collina [The House on the Hill] and Tra donne sole [Amongst Women Only] the best of them, each in its different way, but I reread recently Il diavolo sulle colline [The Devil in the Hills] which, I remember, was the novel of his that I understood least, when Pavese gave me the manuscript to read. Now I see that it is a story that has many layers it can be read on, perhaps the richest of his novels, containing a highly complex and lively philosophical debate (though with maybe a bit too much discussion) and containing as if in concentrated form all the essence of Pavese the thinker (the Pavese of the diary and the essays), all fused into a narrative which is exciting, first-class, brim-full of things.

Of course no one in Italian literature followed the Pavese route. Neither in terms of language, nor in that way he had of extracting a poetic tension from a realistic, objective story, and not even in his despair, which initially seemed the element that was most likely to catch on. (Even internal suffering is something seasonal; who today wants to suffer?) Pavese has gone back to being ‘the most isolated voice in Italian poetry’, as the blurb read on an old edition of his Lavorare stanca [Hard Labour], a blurb dictated, I think, by himself.

Even I myself, who am meant to be his disciple, in what sense do I deserve that label? What links me to Pavese is our common taste for a style that is both poetic and moral, a kind of toughness, and a love of many of the same authors: all things that I inherited from him, from the five years of almost daily contact I had with him; and that is no small amount. But in my own work, in the last ten years, I have moved away from the climate that prevailed when Pavese was the first reader and arbiter of everything I wrote. And who knows what he would say now! Some critics get it completely wrong, saying that my fantasy tales derive from Pavese’s ideas on ‘myth’. What has that got to do with them? Actually in his final essays Pavese maintained that one cannot endow with a poetic (‘mythic’, he would have said) force images from other epochs than our own, in other words he condemned a type of literature which coincidentally I was to undertake less than a year after he died. The truth is that our ways of working were always different; I do not start from considerations of poetic method: I career down dangerous roads, hoping always to survive through ‘natural’ strength. Pavese did not; as far as he was concerned, there was no such thing as a poet’s ‘nature’; everything was rigorous self-construction based on will power, he never took a step unless he was certain of what he was doing, in literature; if only he had been the same in his life!

Seeing that you have touched on the subject, can you tell us why for some time you have preferred in your writing to work on the reflected images of reality, on the ideas that sustain it, and have moved away from the direct and immediate music of things.

I tried to answer this question in the preface to the volume Our Ancestors which gathers together my three lyric-epic-comic novels, The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees, The Non-Existent Knight. Now that cycle is complete, finished, it’s there for whoever wants to study it or enjoy it; it’s not up to me any more. For me the only thing that counts is what I am going to do next, and for the moment I do not know what that will be. But as I told you earlier, I never start out from an idea of poetic method, I never say: ‘I will now do a realistic-objective story, or a psychological or fantasy one.’ What counts is what we are, and the way we deepen our relationship with the world and with others, a relationship that can be one of both love for all that exists and of desire for its transformation. Then you put the point of the pen on the white page, work out a certain angle so that it produces the black signs which make sense, and wait to see what comes out of all this. (It is also true that you often end by tearing everything up.)

I have heard that you are preparing a book about your impressions of your journey through the United States. Do you think that travelling helps a writer these days? In your case, what positive and negative experiences did you draw from your trip to America?

When I set out for the United Sates, and also throughout my travels there, I swore that I would never write a book on America (there are already so many!). Now, however, I have changed my mind. Travel books are a useful, modest and yet self-contained way of writing literature. These are books that have a practical use, even though, or precisely because, countries change from year to year and in fixing them as you have seen them you record their changing essence; and in such books you can express something that goes beyond the description of places one has seen, a relationship between yourself and reality, a process of knowledge.

These are things I have come to believe only recently; up until yesterday I believed that travelling could only have an indirect influence on the substance of what I write. Here what was relevant was that I had had Pavese as my mentor, the great enemy of travelling. He used to say more or less that poetry comes from a germ that you carry in you for years, perhaps for ever; what influence can having spent a day or week here or there have on this incredibly slow maturation process? Certainly, travelling is a life experience, which can mature or change something in us like any other experience, this was what I thought, and a journey can help us write better because it has helped us understand something more of life; someone visits India, for instance, and on returning home will write better, say, his memories of his first day at school. In any case, I have always enjoyed travelling, leaving aside its effect on literature. And it was also in this spirit that I made my recent American trip: because I was interested in the United States, in what it is really like, not to undertake, I don’t know, some ‘literary pilgrimage’ or because I wanted ‘to be inspired by it’.

However, in the United States, I was seized, as never before, by a desire to know and possess fully a polymorphous and complex reality, something Other. What happened was something like falling in love. Lovers, as everyone knows, spend a lot of time arguing; and even now that I have returned, every so often I find myself arguing inside myself with America; but in any case I continue to live inside that experience, I fling myself avidly and jealously on everything I hear or read about that country which I claim to be the only one to understand. Seeing that in this case I was seized by ‘the music of things’, as you said earlier, Carlo, I really ought to hurry and try to put it down on paper.

Negative aspects of travel? Everyone will say that it distracts you from that horizon of set objects that constitute your own poetic world, it disperses that absorbed concentration which is a condition (one of the conditions) conducive to literary creation. But in the end, even if it is a dispersal, what does it matter? In human terms, it is better to travel than to stay at home. First of all live, and then philosophize and write. Writers above all should live with an attitude towards the world which effects a greater acquisition of truth. That small something which will reflect this on the page, anything, will be the literature of our time, nothing else.

What then does the return home represent, what value do your memories have as someone from Liguria?

Ligurians divide into two categories: those attached to their own place like limpets stuck to a rock, whom you could never move; and those who regard the world as their home and wherever they are they find themselves at home. But even the latter category, and I belong to them, as perhaps you do, too, come back home regularly, and stay attached to their land as much as the former. My own area, the Western Riviera, has become unrecognizable in the last fifteen years, but perhaps precisely because of that fact rediscovering behind all this cement the traces of a Liguria of my memory is an operation of patriotic pietas that betrays even more my love and trepidation for the place. It is just like scraping away today’s dominant commercialized mentality to find the old ethical substratum our families used to have, and that in your case, Carlo, must be one of a Catholicism with Jansenist overtones, whereas for me it is a secular tradition, deriving from Mazzinian and free-thinking Masonic roots, all geared towards an ethics of ‘achievement’. What binds me to my home area, above all to the land we had above San Remo, is the memory of my father, which seems to grow deeper and deeper, one of the strangest personalities and existences, yet also one of the most characteristic of the generation that grew up after the Risorgimento, and the last Ligurian to be typical of a Liguria that no longer exists (typical even in the fact of his having spent a third of his life on the other side of the Atlantic).

However, I realize that these are sentimental factors whereas rationally I have always sought to look at things from the point of view of the most advanced standpoint of the world of productivity, the sectors of society which are most decisive for the history of humanity, whether these be in industrial Europe, America or in Russia. When I was younger this contradiction preoccupied me considerably: if I knew that the world that counted was the one that I have just described, why in creative terms did I have to remain bound to the Riviera which survives on a subsistence economy, caught between the false prosperity of tourism and an agriculture which is largely that of a depressed area? And yet, when I wrote stories set in the Riviera, the images came to me very clearly, precisely, whereas when I wrote about the industrial world everything turned out less focused, greyish. The fact is that we write well about what we have left behind, since it represents something finished (though later you discover it is not over at all).

You always have to start out from what you are. Sociological criticism could perform this concrete service instead of moving around in generic terms as it does: define the true essence of every writer from his own point of view, uncover his real social background which perhaps is in total contrast with appearances. In my case they could perhaps discover that deep down they will find the rural smallholder, an individualist, a hard worker, mean, hostile to the State and to the taxman, who, reacting against an agricultural economy which brings no returns, and to the remorse he feels for having left the country in the hands of tenants, proposes universal solutions to his crisis: Communism or the industrial world or the rootless life of globe-trotting intellectuals, or maybe just rediscovering on the page the harmony with nature that has been lost in the real world.

If you had to write a brief account of your political experiences, which points would you want to emphasize? Which friendships helped you become what you are? Did ideas or real people count more?

A few months ago, I was just back from America, there was that series of lectures in Turin on Fascism and anti-Fascism: for each one the Teatro Alfieri was packed, and in the middle of that crowd I recognized the faces of that little big world which makes up anti-Fascism, the people of the Resistance, back together again no matter what road they had taken in the meantime, and in addition very many young people. Well, that was wonderful: we are still here, and we still count; in fact shortly afterwards we had some proof of that.

Men always count more than ideas. For me ideas have always had eyes, nose, mouth, arms and legs. Political history for me is above all a history of human presences. Just when you least expect, you realize that Italy is full of wonderful people.

My generation was a fine generation, even if it has not done everything it could have. Certainly, for us, politics retained for years perhaps an exaggerated importance, whereas life is made up of so many things. But this passion for civic society provided our cultural development with some sinew: if we got interested in many different things it was for that reason. Even if I look around, in Europe, in America, at our contemporaries and those who are younger than us, I have to say that we were sharper. Among the young people who have grown up in Italy after us, the best of them know more than we did, but they are all more theoretical, their ideological passion derives from books; our first passion was action; and this does not mean being more superficial: quite the reverse.

As you can see, I am trying to give an overall outline, to delineate a continuity between the time when I was part of a political organization and now when I am more a ‘free-booter’. Because what counts is whatever is continuous, the positive element that is recognizable in every reality. My political ideas now? Perhaps I don’t have much of a sense of current questions, but I regard myself as an ideal citizen of a world based on an understanding between America and Russia. Of course, that means hoping that many things will change on both sides, it means counting on the new men who are certainly emerging on both sides. And China? If America and Russia can together solve the undeveloped world’s problems, the most painful routes will be avoided. There has been so much pain already. And Italy? And Europe? I don’t know, if we can think in terms that are not parochial but on a world scale (that is the least we can ask in this interplanetary era) we can be not passive pawns of the future but its real shapers.

[Interview with IC by Carlo Bo, L’Europeo, XVI, 35, 28 August 1960.]