Objective Biographical Notice
Italo Calvino’s father was an agronomist from San Remo who had lived for many years in Mexico and in other tropical countries; he had married a junior lecturer in botany from Pavia University, who was from a Sardinian family and who had followed him on his travels: their first-born son was born on 15 October 1923 in a suburb of Havana, just before the parents’ definitive return to Italy.
Italo Calvino spent the first twenty-five years of his life almost without a break in San Remo, at Villa Meridiana, which at that time was the headquarters of the Experimental Floriculture Centre, and in the family’s ancestral land at San Giovanni Battista, where his father cultivated grapefruit and avocados. His parents, who were freethinkers, did not give their son any religious education. Italo Calvino attended regular schooling in San Remo: his nursery school was the St George School, his primary school the Waldensian School, and secondary schooling was at the G. D. Cassini Royal High School. After obtaining his school-leaving certificate, he enrolled in the Agriculture Faculty of Turin University (where his father was the professor in charge of tropical agriculture) but he never got beyond his first exams.
During the twenty months of German occupation, Italo Calvino went through experiences common to the young people of his age who had avoided the call-up to the Fascist Social Republic of Italy: he undertook conspiratorial and partisan activity, fought for several months in the ‘Garibaldi’ Brigades in the violent war-theatre of the Maritime Alps, along with his sixteen-year-old brother. His father and mother were taken hostage by the Germans and held for several months.
In the period immediately after the Liberation, Calvino was politically active on behalf of the Communist party (of which he had been a member in the Resistance) in the Imperia area and among the students in Turin. In this same period he began to write short stories inspired by the life of guerrilla warfare he had led, and he made his first cultural contacts with Milan (Elio Vittorini’s Il Politecnico) and Turin (the Einaudi publishing house).
The first short story he wrote was read by Cesare Pavese who passed it on to the journal that Carlo Muscetta ran in Rome (Aretusa, December 1945). In the meantime Vittorini had published another of his stories in Il Politecnico (on which Calvino also collaborated with articles on social problems in Liguria). Giansiro Ferrata invited him to send other stories to the Milan edition of l’Unità. In those days daily papers consisted of a single sheet, but a couple of times a week they began to come out with four pages instead of two: Calvino also worked on the third page, the cultural page, of the Genoa edition of l’Unità (winning a short-story prize jointly with Marcello Venturi) and of the Turin edition (where for some time Alfonso Gatto was one of the editors).
In the meantime the student changed faculty, transferring to the Arts Faculty, at the University of Turin, and enrolling directly in the third year of the literature course, with the special permission granted to war returnees. He lived in an unheated attic: he wrote stories and as soon as he finished one he would take it to be read by Natalia Ginzburg and Cesare Pavese who were getting the Einaudi publishing offices back on their feet. In order not to have him always hanging around, Pavese encouraged him to write a novel; he received the same advice from Giansiro Ferrata in Milan who was on the jury of a competition for an unpublished novel launched by the publisher Mondadori to provide the first sample of new post-war writers. The novel that Calvino finished just in time for the deadline of 31 December 1946 (The Path to the Spiders’ Nests) would not impress Ferrata or Vittorini nor would it make it into the final shortlist (which consisted of Milena Milani, Oreste del Buono, Luigi Santucci). Calvino let Pavese read it, who recommended it, though with some reservations, to Giulio Einaudi. Einaudi was enthusiastic about it and launched its publication, even going so far as putting up posters. It sold 6, 000 copies: quite a success for those days.
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.
After almost a year as editor of the cultural page of the Turin edition of l’Unità (from 1948 to 1949) Calvino realized that he did not have what it takes to become a good journalist or a professional politician. He continued working with l’Unità off and on for several years, with literary pieces and above all with trade-union surveys, articles on industrial and agrarian strikes and factory occupations. This link with the practical side of political and union organization (which also involved close friendships with comrades of his own generation) occupied him more than the ideological or cultural debates, and helped him overcome the crisis caused by the condemnation and expulsion from the party of friends and intellectual groupings to whom he had been close (Vittorini and Il Politecnico in 1947; Felice Balbo and Cultura e realtà in 1950).
What he was still not sure about was his literary vocation: after the publication of his first novel, Italo Calvino tried for years to write others in the same vein of picaresque social realism, but they were all mercilessly torn to pieces and rejected by his mentors and advisers. Fed up with those laborious failures, he abandoned himself to what came more spontaneously to him: he was basically a teller of stories, and he wrote The Cloven Viscount in a spurt of creativity. He thought he should publish it in a journal and not as a book so as not to give too much importance to what was simply a bagatelle, but Vittorini insisted on turning it into a short book for his ‘Gettoni’ series. It received an unexpected unanimity of approval from the critics; it even inspired a fine article by Emilio Cecchi, which in those days meant the consecrating (or co-opting) of the writer into ‘official’ Italian literature. In Communist circles it stirred up a small polemic over the question of ‘realism’ but, balancing that, it also received authoritative approval.
From that success Calvino’s ‘fantasy’ output took off (though this was a term already current among critics right from the time of his first novel) and at the same time a number of works portraying contemporary experiences in an ironic Stendhalian key. To define these alternating works Vittorini coined the formula ‘realism with a fantasy thrust’ and ‘fantasy with a realistic thrust’, a formula that became fashionable. Calvino tried also in theoretical terms to articulate the different elements of his thought and poetics: he gave the most structured outline of his programme in a lecture he delivered in Florence in 1955 (‘Il midollo del leone’ (‘The Lion’s Marrow’), Paragone, 6:66).
In this way Italo Calvino carved out his place in 1950s Italian literature, in an atmosphere that was now very different from that at the end of the 1940s, the period to which he continued to feel tied in terms of ideas. The literary capital of Italy in the 1950s was Rome, and Calvino, though remaining explicitly ‘Turinese’, now spent much of his time in Rome, enjoying that fun-loving city and a great many friends and associates, among whom the serene figure of Carlo Levi dominated.
It was in those years that Giulio Einaudi commissioned from his ‘fabulous’ author the volume of Italian Folktales, which Calvino selected and translated from the dialects of the nineteenth-century collections made by folklorists, both published and unpublished. This also had an academic component (in terms of the research, the introduction and the notes) which briefly aroused in Calvino a dormant vocation to be an academic.
Meantime the period of the great political debates approached which would shake the apparently monolithic world of Communism. In 1954–5, in a climate of truce amid the struggles between the various groupings of Italian Communist intellectuals, Calvino collaborated regularly on the Roman weekly journal Il Contemporaneo, run by Salinari53 and Trombadori.54 At the same time his discussions with the Milanese Hegelian Marxists were very important for him: discussions with Cesare Cases and especially with Renato Solmi, and behind them Franco Fortini, who had been and would continue to be an implacable opposing voice for Calvino. Having got involved in the battles inside the Communist party in 1956, Calvino (who was also collaborating on the Roman journal Città Aperta) resigned from the party in 1957. For some time (1958–59) he took part in the debates about forming a new socialist left and worked on Antonio Giolitti’s55 journal Passato e Presente and the weekly Italia Domani.
In 1959 Vittorini began the publication of a series of journal issues containing literary texts and critical pieces (Il Menabò ) that reacted against the prevailing literary climate, and insisted that Calvino’s name appear alongside his own as co-editor. Calvino published in Il Menabò a number of essays in which he sought to sum up the international literary situation: ‘Il mare dell’oggettività ’ (‘The Sea of Objects’) (Il Menabò, 2 (1959)), ‘La sfida al labirinto’ (‘The Challenge to the Labyrinth’) (Il Menabò, 5 (1962)), and also an attempt at outlining a general ideological map entitled ‘L’antitesi operaia’ (‘The Working Class as Dialectical Antithesis’) (Il Menabò, 7 (1964)). The criticisms his friends made on this last text persuaded him to abandon definitively the field of theoretical speculation.
In 1959–60 Calvino spent six months in the United States of America. In the ten years that followed, his journeys outside Italy became more frequent. In 1964 he married: his wife is Argentinian, of Russian origin, a translator from English who lives in Paris. In 1965 his daughter was born.
In recent times documents to establish Calvino’s biography have become increasingly rare: his public appearances have grown fewer, his presence is less felt, he no longer works on newspapers, he no longer gets on young people’s nerves by siding with them or against them.Very little is known about his travels since he is one of the few Italian writers who does not write travel books or reportages. His detachment from the official world of literature was sealed in 1968 when he refused a substantial literary prize.
The author of The Baron in the Trees seems more determined than ever to keep his distance from the world. Has he reached a condition of indifferent detachment? If you know him, you would think that it is more the heightened awareness of how complicated the world is that forces him to stifle within himself outbreaks of hope as much as those of anguish.
[Written in 1970 for a volume in the Einaudi series ‘Gli Struzzi’, Gli amori difficili (Difficult Loves), following the series’ requirements for biographical notes. (Author’s note.)]