The Path to the Spiders' Nests Read online

  Italo Calvino

  THE PATH TO THE SPIDERS’ NESTS

  Translated from the Italian by Archibald Colquhoun

  Revised by Martin McLaughlin

  Contents

  Note to the 1998 Translation

  Preface to The Path to the Spiders’ Nests

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  The Path to the Spiders’ Nests

  Italu Calvino, one of Italy’s foremost writers, Was burn in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in San Remo, Italy. when the Germans occupied northern Italy during the Second world War, he joined the partisans. The novel that resulted from this experience, published in English under the title The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, won wide acclaim. Best known for his experimental masterpieces Invisible Cities and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Calvino was also a brilliant exponent of allegorical fantasy in such works as The Castle of Crossed Destinies, The Complete Cosmicomics, and the trilogy, Our Ancestors, comprising The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees and The Non Existent Knight. An essayist, journalist and the author of many stories, Calvino won the prestigious Italian literary award, the Premio Feltrinelli, in 1973. Eighteen of his books have been published in English.

  The New Statesman said, ‘Calvino cannot be defined within our existing terms … his is a voice which cries out the need to rehabilitate ourselves to our books, our lives, our world’ and Time called him ‘Quite possibly the best Italian novelist alive, one of those storytellers who hold a mirror up to nature and then write about the mirror.’

  Italo Calvino died in September 1985, aged sixty-two.

  Note to the 1998 Translation

  Italo Calvino (1923–85) wrote his first novel at the age of twenty-three, in a few weeks in December 1946. Published in October 1947, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests won the Premio Riccione that year, and sold 6,000 copies, an unusually high level of sales for the time. But the author soon turned his back on his first book, as he modified his early neo-realist poetics, and refused to authorize a re-edition until 1954. Only a decade later, in 1964, as he prepared to abandon realism altogether and embark on the fictions that were to make him internationally famous, did Calvino go back to his first book and authorize a third, definitive edition; and this time, to accompany the novel, he composed a preface which remains his most substantial and revealing self-commentary, as well as an indispensable, objective analysis of Italian neo-realism.

  Despite its length, however, the preface makes no explicit mention of the substantial changes that Calvino made in the text of both the 1954 and 1964 editions. In both cases he excised or toned down certain passages depicting Cousin’s and Pin’s anti-feminism, Mancino’s political extremism, as well as some violent details. However, reading between the lines, we can see that sections two and three of the preface do at least hint at the changes, when he criticizes the youthful extremism of the novel in its exaggerated emphasis on sex, violence, political ideology, and expressionist characters, and then adds: ‘The unease which this book caused me for so long has to a certain extent subsided, but to a certain extent still remains.’ Only late in life and nearly twenty years after writing the preface did Calvino explicitly acknowledge the changes and their motivation. In an interview with students in 1983 he admitted:

  I had written things that seemed to me too brutal or exaggerated [in The Path to the Spiders’ Nests]. So I tried to attenuate some of those overstated and certainly brutal passages, even although they were attributed to the thoughts of other characters, not to me. Perhaps it was also to do with the fact that, when I wrote the book, I imagined that it would be read by just a few hundred people, as happened at that time for works of Italian literature. Instead when I realized that its readership was so much more numerous, the novel’s status changed in my own eyes. I reread it and thought ‘How on earth could I have written such things?’ So I made some corrections. Of course there are still exaggerated elements in the novel: these are due to the almost adolescent phase I was still undergoing when I wrote the book, a phase which young people go through. It is the book of a very young man.

  The implications of this publishing background for the book’s English translation are important. Since the first English version has a copyright of 1956, it is likely that the translator, Archibald Colquhoun, used the 1954 edition, but comparison of the passages omitted and added by the author at various stages suggests either that the 1954 copy used by the translator had somehow retained one or two passages from the first edition (such as the very different opening paragraphs), or that Colquhoun was given the 1947 text with cancellations and additions marked by the author. It is worth adding that Colquhoun himself or his publisher also censored certain passages deemed unsuitable for the sexual and political climate of the 1950s (such as the description of Mancino’s obscene tattoos or the mention of the serenity of the Soviet Union).

  The task of issuing an English version of The Path to the Spiders’ Nests suitable for the 1990s meant that Colquhoun’s translation had to be updated in at least three ways: first by cutting out passages which Calvino himself omitted for the definitive edition, especially as the preface alludes, however implicitly, to these excisions; secondly by inserting the sections that Calvino had added to produce the 1964 edition as well as those that had been silently censored in the English version; and thirdly to eliminate a number of errors that had crept into Colquhoun’s otherwise fine translation. It was also necessary to update numerous words and turns of phrase which are now misleading or meaningless. These are the four main areas in which I have revised the 1956 translation. I have also altered Colquhoun’s translation of the title from The Path to the Nest of Spiders to The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, partly to be more faithful to the plural nidi in Italian, partly to avoid the inadvertent echo of ‘a nest of vipers’ in Colquhoun’s title (which produces quite the wrong associations in English), but particularly because we know that Calvino was delighted that the novel’s title in English could both be more concise and could avoid the awkward double genitive in Italian (‘Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno’). Similarly, the important preface which had been translated in 1976 by William Weaver in a slightly abridged form now appears in English in full for the first time, though in this case rather than simply revising Weaver’s translation I have translated it from scratch.

  Readers often find prefaces off-putting, and either postpone reading them until after finishing the novel, or simply choose not to read them. However, the inclusion of Calvino’s preface in this volume not only respects the definitive will of the author, it also provides the reader with a typical sample of Calvino’s elegant essay-writing as well as a good novel. In fact, even allowing for the difference of genre between a literary preface and a novel, these two pieces of prose allow us a glimpse of how Calvino had matured as a writer in the two decades between the 1940s and the 1960s. The preface displays some typically Calvinian symmetries and dialectics. For a start, it has, in all, twelve sections like the twelve chapters of the novel. The first section deals with external elements of the context in which the book emerged (the anonymous oral tradition of narrative in post-war Italy as people were allowed to speak freely again and recount their adventures); the second with the book’s Italian literary ancestry (Verga, Vittorini, Pavese). This dialectic between external and literary elements informs the whole preface: the next three se
ctions return to non-literary factors (the question of commitment), while the two central ones establish international literary influences (Hemingway, Russian writers, Stevenson). Finally Calvino returns to other external factors (the discussions with ‘Kim’, his own meditations on violence, his identification with Pin), before concluding with further literary discussion (of Fenoglio and of the cost of writing one’s first novel).

  Salman Rushdie pointed out that The Path to the Spiders’ Nests had one of the best titles in post-war literature, but felt that the ending had ‘dipped its feet in slush’. But if the close of the novel is rather anodyne, the more mature preface ends with one of those elegant Calvinian paradoxes that are typical of the writer at the peak of his powers: ‘A completed book will never compensate me for what I destroyed in writing it: namely that experience which if preserved throughout the years of my life might have helped to compose my last book, and which in fact was sufficient only to write the first.’ Reviewing Calvino’s last work, Mr Palomar, the poet Seamus Heaney talked of the author’s fondness for ‘binary blarney’ and noted that ‘symmetries and arithmetic have always tempted Italo Calvino’s imagination to grow flirtatious and to begin its fantastic display’. The reader can enjoy something of that love of binary systems and symmetries here, and can appreciate that even in this early novel and its 1964 preface Calvino is, in Heaney’s words, ‘on the high wire, on lines of thought strung out above the big international circus’.

  Martin McLaughlin

  Christ Church, Oxford

  Preface to The Path to the Spiders’ Nests

  This is the first novel I wrote. I could almost say it was my very first piece of writing apart from a few short stories. How does it strike me when I look at it again today? Well, I read it now not so much as one of my own works but rather as a book which arose anonymously out of the general climate of the time, from a moral tension that was in the air, and a literary tendency which epitomized our generation immediately after the Second World War.

  The literary explosion of those years in Italy was not so much an artistic phenomenon, more a physical, existential, collective need. We had come through the war, and those of us of the younger generation – who had just been old enough to be partisans – did not feel crushed or defeated or damaged by the experience; rather we were the victors, carried onward by the forward thrust of the battle which we had just won, the exclusive guardians of its legacy. This was not facile optimism, however, or gratuitous euphoria; quite the opposite: what we felt ourselves to be the heirs of, was a sense of life being something which could begin again from scratch, a feeling of public outrage against injustice, even a kind of flair for surviving danger and slaughter. But the accent that we put on all this was one of almost provocative cheerfulness. Many things grew out of that climate including the tone of my earliest short stories and of my first novel.

  This is what strikes me most today: the anonymous voice of that age, which comes across more strongly than my own individual inflections which were still rather uncertain. The fact of having emerged from an experience – a war, a civil war – which had spared no one, established an immediacy of communication between the writer and his public: we were face to face, on equal terms, bursting with stories to tell; everyone had experienced their own drama, had lived a chaotic, exciting, adventurous existence; we took the words from each other’s mouths. The rebirth of freedom of speech manifested itself first and foremost in a craving to tell stories: in the trains that were starting to run again, crammed with people and bags of flour and drums of oil, every passenger would recount to complete strangers the adventures which had befallen him, as did everyone eating at the tables of the temporary soup-kitchens, every woman in the queues at the shops. The greyness of everyday life seemed something that belonged to another epoch; we existed in a multi-coloured world of stories.

  The result was that those who began writing in that period found themselves dealing with the same subject matter as these anonymous storytellers: not only did we have the adventures that each one of us had endured personally or witnessed, but there were also tales which came to us already formed as narratives, with a voice, a cadence, a facial gesture to accompany them. During the partisan war the adventures which we had only just lived through were transformed and reshaped into stories told around the fire at night; they had already assumed a style, a language, a tone of bravado, which relished harrowing detail or horrific effects. The subject matter and language of some of my short stories, as well as some parts of this novel stem from this newly born oral tradition.

  And yet, and yet … the secret heart of the way we wrote then lay not merely in this basic universality of content – that was not what really spurred us to write (perhaps the fact of having opened this preface with a re-evocation of a collective state of mind, makes me forget that I am talking about a book, written matter, lines of words on a blank page); on the contrary, it was as clear as day to us that the stories that were told were simply raw material: the explosive charge of freedom which inspired young writers in those days resided not so much in their urge to provide documentary information, as in the urge to express. Express what? Ourselves, life’s rough taste which we had just experienced, the many things we thought we knew or were, and perhaps really did know and really were at that time. Characters, landscapes, shoot-outs, political messages, dialect words, swear-words, lyric passages, violence and sexual encounters, all these were but colours on our palette, notes on our scale: we knew only too well that what counted was the music not the libretto. We were all content-driven, yet there were never such obsessive formalists as ourselves; we claimed to be a school of objective writers, but there were never such effusive lyricists as us.

  That was what ‘Neo-realism’ was for those of us who began writing in that context; and this book represents a typical sample of ‘Neo-realism’’s virtues and defects, arising as it did out of that naive desire to create literature characteristic of a ‘school’. For the fact is that those who now think of ‘Neo-realism’ primarily as a contamination or coercion of literature by non-literary forces, are really shifting the terms of the question: in reality the non-literary elements were simply there, so solid and indisputable that they seemed to us to be completely natural; for us the problem appeared to be entirely one of poetics, of how to transform that world which for us was the world into a work of literature.

  ‘Neo-realism’ was not a school. (Let me try to be precise about these matters.) It was many voices combined, mostly voices from the provinces, a many-sided revelation of the different Italys that existed, a revelation also – and in particular – of the Italys that had been least explored by literature. Without this variety of different Italys, each of them unknown to the other, or which we believed were unknown to each other, and without this range of dialects and local forms of Italian which were to be leavened and moulded by the literary language, ‘Neo-realism’ would never have existed. But it was not simply an updated version of nineteenth-century regional ‘verismo’. The local settings were intended to give a flavour of authenticity to a fictional representation with which everyone the world over would be able to identify – like the American provinces in the works of those 1930s writers whose direct or indirect heirs so many critics accused us of being. That is why the language, style and rhythm of what we wrote had so much importance for us – for this realism we strove for, which was at the same time intended to be as far removed as possible from nineteenth-century naturalism. We thought of ourselves as descending from a line, or rather a triangle, of literary models – Giovanni Verga’s I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree), Elio Vittorini’s Conversazione in Sicilia (Conversation in Sicily), and Cesare Pavese’s Paesi tuoi (The Harvesters) – which was to be the starting point for all of us, working with our own local lexis and landscape. (I am still talking in the plural as though I were referring to an organized, self-conscious movement, even now when I am trying to explain that it was just the opposite of that. How easy it is, once one s
tarts talking about literature, and even in the middle of the most serious, factual discussion, to slip unwittingly into telling stories … That is why literary analysis, whether my own or anyone else’s, annoys me more and more.)

  My landscape was something which I jealously guarded as my own (this is where I could really begin this preface: by reducing to a minimum the above section on ‘The autobiography of a literary generation’, and plunging straight in to a discussion of what concerns me most directly, perhaps I can avoid generalizations and vagueness …), a landscape which nobody had ever really written about. (Except the poet Eugenio Montale, and he was in any case from the other side of the Ligurian Riviera. I felt that I could almost always read Montale from this perspective of local memory, identifying both with his imagery and with his language.) I was from the Western Ligurian Riviera. In polemical spirit I obliterated the whole tourist coastline from the landscape of my home town, San Remo: the palm-fringed promenade, the Casino, the hotels and villas. It was almost as though I was ashamed of it. I began with the alleyways of the Old Town, went up along the hillside streams, avoiding the geometric fields of carnations: I preferred the terraced strips planted with vines and olives surrounded by crumbling, dry-stone walls. I advanced along the mule-tracks rising above the fallow fields up to where the pinewoods began, then the chestnut trees: that was how I moved from the sea – always seen from above, like a thin strip between two green curtains – up to the winding valleys of the Ligurian Pre-Alps.

  I had my own landscape. But in order to represent it I had to make it take second place to something else, to people, to stories. The Resistance solved this problem of the fusion of landscape and characters. The novel which I would never have been able to write without that fusion is here. The everyday landscape of my whole existence up until that time had now become totally extraordinary and full of exciting incident. One single story unwound from the gloomy alleyways bridged by arches between the houses in the Old Town all the way up to the woods, and it was the story of armed men chasing and hiding from each other. I was able to portray even the villas now that I had seen them requisitioned and metamorphosed into guardhouses and prisons, and the carnation fields too, once they had become dangerous open terrain, perilous to cross, evoking only the rattle of gun-fire in the air. It was from this new possibility of situating human stories in landscapes that ‘Neo-realism’…