My City Is New York
In what way did your first contacts with American culture develop, and in particular your contacts with its literature, from Hemingway’s novels to Faulkner’s?
In terms of my own development, which took place in the 1940s, it was initially as a simple reader that I first discovered American fiction, which at that time represented a huge opening on the Italian horizon. For that reason, when I was young, American literature was very important and of course I read all the novels that reached Italy in those days. To begin with, however, I was a provincial: I lived in San Remo and had no literary background since I was a student in the Agriculture Faculty. Later I became a friend of Pavese and Vittorini; I never knew Pintòr67 as he died during the war. I was a homo novus: I started to get around only after the war.
It is true that Hemingway was one of my models, perhaps because in terms of stylistic models he was easier than Faulkner, who is so much more complex. And also as far as my first writings are concerned, I was definitely influenced by Hemingway; in fact I even went to see him in a hotel in Stresa, in 1948, I think, and we went out fishing on a boat in the lake.
Faced with a literary output as vast and heterogeneous as yours, it is not always easy to trace and focus on possible links and genuine influences which tie it to one writer or another; as far as American literature is concerned, which classic works do you appreciate and like the most?
I am a writer of short stories first and foremost more than a novelist, so one area of reading which has certainly influenced me, right from childhood, if you like, and not just in an American context but in absolute terms, I would say is Edgar Allan Poe, since he is a writer who knows how to do everything, in terms of the short story. Within its confines he is an author of limitless possibilities; and also because he seems to me to be a mythical figure, a hero of literature, a cultural hero, founder of all the narrative genres that would be developed after him.
For this reason one can trace lines which link Poe with, for instance, Borges or Kafka: you could trace extraordinary links like this that never end. Even a writer as unusual as Giorgio Manganelli – certainly one of the most notable Italian writers of recent years – he too, despite being so different from Poe, discovered him when he translated him, and he too has established a genuine rapport with Poe. For this reason also I think that Poe’s presence is very much a contemporary one. Still on the subject of links with classic American writers, I could cite the names of Hawthorne or Mark Twain: the latter is a writer I certainly feel close to, particularly in what we could call his more ungainly and ‘unsophisticated’ aspects.
Let us continue following the evolution of this relationship of yours with a society and a literature which in turn was changing as new avenues, new experiences opened up, compared with those that had inspired the generation of the 1930s and 1940s.
Naturally American literature became different, around 1950, after Pavese’s death; but already towards the end of the 1940s this change was in the air. I remember when Pavese began to read the new books that arrived here in the post-war period – there was Saul Bellow with his first novel, Dangling Man – and I remember Vittorini too, who said: ‘This lot are like European writers, they’re more intellectual, we are not so interested in them.’
It was a completely different turn that American literature had taken, and when in 1959 I went to the United States for the first time as an adult, that mythical picture of the writers of the early post-war years, which was still that of the so-called Lost Generation, no longer held sway. This was the time when a figure like Henry Miller was much more important than Hemingway, whom nobody bothered about any more. Things, then, have changed radically: nowadays you would need to see what relations there have been between the writers of my generation, both in Italy and in America; you could make some comparisons. Who is the equivalent of Norman Mailer, for instance? For certain provocative aspects, Pasolini could be, even though Mailer is a character who still is much more like Hemingway, who was linked to that kind of writer.
We have come to the present situation, to the time when it is no longer possible to look at America in terms of the barbaric, nor at the American writer as the crude, violent, often unreflecting interpreter of that reality.
This is something that needs to be thought out fully: this image of an America that is barbaric and full of vital energy certainly no longer exists. The American writer, unlike what happens, or happened, in Italy – since even here we are moving in that direction – is someone who works in a university, who writes novels about campus life, about the gossip surrounding the adulterous affairs between lecturers, which is not the big wide world, not something genuinely exciting, but that is the way things are: life in American society is like that.
What aspects of the American literary world of today seem to you to be most significant, and who are the most important personages?
Nowadays, in American literature, sometimes I look with envy at those writers who know how to instantly catch something of contemporary life in their novels, who have a chatty and ironic style, like Saul Bellow; I am certainly not good enough to do that kind of thing. American fiction has novelists capable of writing a novel a year and of giving the flavour of a period; I envy them enormously.
Among writers who are my contemporaries I would say that I lived through the discovery of a writer who had a genuinely beautiful style – I’m talking about John Updike – and that when he began writing he seemed a really important author. Later he also wrote a bit too much: he still remains an intelligent, brilliant person, but at times one notes a certain facileness in American writers of today. If I had to say who is the living author I like best, and who has also influenced me in some way, I would say it is Vladimir Nabokov: a great Russian writer and a great writer in English; he has invented an English which is of extraordinary richness. He truly is a great genius, one of the greatest writers of the century and one of the people with whom I identify most. Of course he is also someone of extraordinary cynicism, of formidable cruelty, but he is genuinely one of the great authors.
From the way your most recent fiction has developed – If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller and even more so Mr. Palomar – one might think there was some link between you and the so-called initiators of the post-modern.
Of course I also have links with what could be defined as the new American avant-garde: I am someone who goes to the United States every so often to do these creative writing courses, and I am a friend of John Barth, a writer who began with a very fine novel, The End of the Road. After this first book, which we could define as existentialist, Barth became more and more complicated, with works of more sophisticated structure; it is he who, despite not reading works in any other language than English, is to an extent the American ambassador to the new European literatures. Apart from Barth, Donald Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon, there are other writers whose works I follow and with whom I am also friends.
In conclusion, I would like to ask you what your encounter with America as a physical entity has meant for you in terms of personal sensations: city America, as it is portrayed in so many films as well as novels, and the real city, which is the symbol of today’s America.
In terms of literature I am a bit of an autodidact, I was a late starter and naturally for many years I went to the cinema, when you could see two films a day, and these were American films. I had an intense rapport as a spectator with American cinema, so much so that for me cinema remains essentially American cinema.
My physical encounter with America was a truly marvellous experience: New York is one of my cities, and in fact, still in the 1960s, in Cosmicomics, and also in Time and the Hunter, there are stories that are set in New York. On the other side of the Atlantic I feel part of that majority of Italians who go to America with great ease – by now there are millions and millions of them – and not of that minority who stay in Italy; perhaps because the first time I went to America, with my parents, I was just one year old. When I went back for the first time as an adult to the USA, I had a grant from the Ford Foundation which entitled me to go round all the States, with no obligation: naturally I did this trip, travelling in the South, and also in California, but I felt I was a New Yorker: my city is New York.
[Interview by Ugo Rubeo, recorded in Palermo in September 1984; later published in Mal d’America – da mito a realtà (The American Malaise – from Myth to Reality) (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1987). The title is not by Calvino.]