Into the War Read online

  ITALO CALVINO

  Into the War

  Translated by Martin McLaughlin

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Translator’s Introduction

  An Unpublished Note by Calvino on Into the War

  A Note on the Text

  INTO THE WAR

  1 Into the War

  2 The Avanguardisti in Menton

  3 UNPA Nights

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  Into the War

  Italo Calvino, one of Italy’s foremost writers, was born 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 1972. 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.

  Martin McLaughlin is Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian at Oxford. He is the author of a monograph on Italo Calvino (1998) and the translator of the following Calvino works: Why Read the Classics? (1999), which won the John Florio Prize for translation, Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings (2003), and The Complete Cosmicomics (2009). He has also translated Umberto Eco’s On Literature (2005).

  Translator’s Introduction

  Italo Calvino (1923–85) spent the first twenty-three years of his life in San Remo, a provincial town in Liguria, near the French border. His date of birth (15 October 1923) meant he was just sixteen when Italy declared war, in June 1940, so his entry into adulthood also corresponded with Italy’s entry into war (though he would only actually see combat when he joined the partisans in 1944).

  As well as his date of birth, the place where he grew up also conditioned his life and outlook: he shared with his fellow-Ligurians a tendency to divulge little about himself; and he publicly claimed to be very wary of autobiographical writings, which he regarded as self-indulgent. Nevertheless, many elements in his fiction had a basis in the events of his life, and Calvino also wrote short autobiographical pieces at curiously regular nine-year intervals: this autobiographical trilogy, Into the War (in Italian, L’entrata in guerra, written 1952–53), was followed by two shorter pieces, The Road to San Giovanni (1962) and From the Opaque (1971).1 The most substantial of these personal works was Into the War, a trilogy of short stories mixing memory and fiction, which first came out in book form in Italian in 1954. The present edition marks the first time that the trilogy has been published in English in book form. It is a brief classic on adolescence, on that liminal age before adulthood, which so fascinated Calvino because of its metamorphic potential and the different adult outcomes that could emerge from it.

  In the author’s own case (as in the case of all those of his generation in Europe), adolescence was perhaps a more crucial time than in other eras, as it was bound up with the major upheavals of world history, and, for Calvino, would eventually involve a perilous choice a few years later: the choice between joining up as a conscript in Mussolini’s Fascist Republic or taking to the hills as a partisan. The reader here, in Into the War, encounters a different Calvino; one that is not the writer of the fantasy trilogy Our Ancestors (1960) nor the postmodern, self-reflexive author of Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979). This is Calvino the sharp-eyed realist writer, evoking his own landscape and his own past, never in an idyllic manner, but with a mixture of seriousness, comedy and, at times, poetry.

  Although, in public, Calvino dismissed autobiographical fiction, or what he called ‘the literature of memory’, as rather decadent, the motivation behind these three stories is closely bound up with both the writer himself and his parents. The first story to be written, ‘The Avanguardisti in Menton’, was composed between 25 December 1952 and 18 January 1953, while the other two were written in the summer of 1953. Calvino’s father had died on 25 October 1951, so what ultimately became an autobiographical trilogy about a young man’s entry into war and into life actually began as an homage to his recently dead father, exactly two months after the first anniversary of his death. In the end, the author’s father only appears fleetingly in all three stories, and yet the whole trilogy finishes with an affectionate portrait of him, rising early in the morning and going up the country track with the dog to his farm at San Giovanni. It can also be argued that the last page of Into the War leads directly into Calvino’s next autobiographical venture, The Road to San Giovanni, which was begun around the tenth anniversary of Mario Calvino’s death, and which expands that final page into a more detailed description of that walk into the countryside above San Remo.

  Throughout his life, Calvino had always felt distant from his father, who seemed to him out of touch with the times, like someone who belonged more to the nineteenth century, and so the figure portrayed in Into the War is clearly a realistic version of what later became Cosimo’s exaggeratedly eccentric father in The Baron in the Trees (1957). In the title story, the father figure is seen as remote from what is happening in Europe, and, in the second tale, we see him and the author’s mother obsessively trying to save rare species of plants while thousands of human beings are being slaughtered – ‘mown down like hay’, as Calvino’s appropriately agricultural simile puts it. Yet, despite this distance, the final page of the last story adumbrates a rapprochement between father and son, a moment of closure that stresses the opposite notion to distance, the idea of the son’s closeness to his unaware father: indeed the last word in the Italian original is ‘vicino’ (‘close’). Although this trilogy is very much about a crucial stage in the young protagonist’s life, there is also a strong thematic emphasis in the stories on the relationships between the different generations caught up in the war, including the protagonist’s rapport with his parents, who appear at key moments in all three tales (i.e. near the beginning or end of each story).

  However, partly because of its slightly emotional finale, Calvino felt dissatisfied with the trilogy Into the War. Immediately after completing it he wrote to his literary mentor, Elio Vittorini, telling him he had no desire to write other such tales; just after the book was published he told one reviewer that it was ‘a dignified little book but not really essential’; and to another he said he was satisfied but also bewildered at its positive reception, since such works, he felt, prompt the crucial question: ‘Once you start on the road to autobiography, where do you stop?’ He regarded these three stories as a ‘concession to autobiography’, and his uneasiness about it culminated in 1968 when, in a letter to Guido Fink, he explained that he had turned to the memorialistic mode of Into the War under the influence of Giorgio Bassani, author of The Garden of the Finzi-Contini, but that he considers this turn an involution, and so is genuinely disappointed that Fink both remembers these stories so well and that he has actually quoted them twice. Therefore, given the author’s lack of enthusiasm for the book, it
is unsurprising that the trilogy was only reprinted once in his lifetime, in 1974.

  Even though Calvino may not have started out with the idea of an autobiographical trilogy, these three tales have a striking unity in terms of themes, time and place. To reiterate, for Calvino, the entry into adulthood was contemporaneous with Italy’s and his own entry into war. However, given the narrator’s pre-military age, the war plays an important but largely background role in these stories. Mussolini, soldiers, sailors and air raids make only fleeting appearances, almost as ‘walk-on parts’, most notably at the end of the first story, when the narrator barely catches a glimpse of il Duce as he whizzes by in a car towards the front line. More emphasis is given instead to two elements of the narrator’s increasing maturity: his growing awareness of social class and his developing ethical sense (it must be noted that, in 1953, Calvino was still a full member of the Italian Communist Party, whose ranks he had joined as a partisan).

  The first of these elements, his sensitivity to the deprived and underpaid, surfaces in all three tales. In the first, ‘Into the War’, there is an initial contrast between the aristocratic Ostero and the protagonist, but, after this, the rural poor of what Calvino calls elsewhere ‘the hidden face of Italy’ dominate the story, which is set entirely in the school where they are temporarily housed. Similarly, the protagonist’s tour of Menton in the second story, ‘The Avanguardisti in Menton’, begins in the rich villas overlooking the sea, but the real sense of the pity of war only emerges in the narrator’s visit to the artisan’s ruined shed in the older area of the town, while his rejection of the Fascist Captain Bizantini’s attack on the proletarian sailors stems from the ethic inculcated in him by his parents, namely to oppose those who despise the poor and working people. Then, in the last piece, ‘UNPA Nights’, when the narrator and Biancone arrive in the old town, they at first consort with prostitutes and pimps, but their pranks and joking are silenced by their feelings of sympathy for the honest working-class people, who lie asleep and vulnerable in their run-down houses; and the penultimate scene at the harbour contrasts the fishermen setting out before dawn with the soldiers in the armoured column, who have halted momentarily to stretch their legs in the town.

  In addition to awareness of social class, the protagonist’s growing consciousness of morality and ethics is present in all three of the tales too. Early in ‘Into the War’ we hear about the influence of his parents’ moral code on the protagonist, but the narrator takes care not to present too facile a story of ethical growth, so he says he is torn between morality and its opposite attitude, cynicism, and so ends up ‘yielding’ to a morality that is not without ‘a veneer of cynicism’. In ‘The Avanguardisti in Menton’, his critical attitude towards the young Fascist commander in his fancy uniform is compared to the moralism that regular troops feel towards shirkers and bullies. In ‘UNPA Nights’, the narrator implicitly condemns the black-shirts, saying that their vulgar chorus betrays their true nature as ‘soldiers of fortune, enemies of everyone and totally above the law’. Part of this ethical stance is dictated by the narrator’s love for all things English (Calvino himself was a great Anglophile): in the first tale he alludes to the famous quote from Hamlet, as he realizes, when helping the sick, ‘how many more things there are on earth, Ostero, than were dreamt of in our calm Anglophilia’. Similarly, in the second story, much of the action in Menton takes place in the town’s former English club; and the last tale begins with the narrator arriving at the school with his magazine, showing pictures of English cities being bombed (this story is set in September 1940), but not really understanding the images – this last story ends with the protagonist going back to the magazine just after the enemy plane has flown over, now realizing the reality of air raids. The centrality of the author’s concern with ethics here is also confirmed by what he says in an unpublished note on the trilogy, which follows at the end of this introduction. There Calvino states, in relation to this tripartite work, how he was primarily interested in portraying ‘the work of the conscience, its hard-fought moral advances in adolescence’.

  One of the most interesting aspects of this theme of ethical maturation is the way it relates to the different generations, especially in the first story. There we find not only the adolescent narrator, but also the child, who is the first victim of the war, scalded by boiling water in the power-cut; the old man, with whom the narrator establishes a bond; and the retired Fascist major. But, at the end, the real child turns out to be Mussolini, for whom war seems to be a kind of game, while the Italian people indulge him, like parents who are too kind to spoil his party. There is also a strong emphasis throughout the trilogy on the morality of the protagonist’s parents. In the first two stories we are told at an early stage how outraged they were at the destruction wrought by the war, at the treatment of the poor Ligurian farmers, and at the behaviour of Italian troops in their houses. Unusually, there is no mention of the parents early in the final tale, but instead we find, in the last two paragraphs of the story, the aforementioned portrait of the protagonist’s father getting up before dawn to go into the countryside to work, and implicit in this portrait is the father’s work ethic and devotion to the land. This emphasis on morality and the older generations confirms once more the key role played by Mario Calvino’s death in the genesis of Into the War.

  Nevertheless, despite this mature-minded concern with class, morality, and opposition to Fascism, the adolescent narrator does not grow into a full adult in the course of the trilogy. Rather, a sense of failed initiation hangs over everything, a sense of thresholds not crossed, of doors not opened (literally so, in the second story, when the protagonist steals the keys and explicitly wonders about their symbolic meaning): it is certainly not a triumphant narrative of maturity. Sex appears in all three tales, but it is the protagonist’s older friends who have sexual experiences, not the narrator himself, and, even in the last story, he lets Biancone go first with the prostitute and then loses interest. In each tale the narrator is morally rather ambiguous and aboulic, caught between an ethical stance and youthful cynicism, at times almost admiring the Fascists’ exploits.

  In fact, the dominant tone throughout, right from the start, is one of anticlimax. The English reader might compare this with the similarly ironic, downbeat tone in Evelyn Waugh’s war trilogy, The Sword of Honour, begun around the same time, in 1952. For the protagonist of the first tale, ‘Into the War’, his front-line experience is deeply anticlimactic, since, in reality, it consists in merely helping the aged and infirm to eat and go to the toilet, and then, even at the end, the appearance of Mussolini in the car is largely missed by everyone: the tale had begun with il Duce declaring war and yet ends with him speeding by almost unnoticed. This sense of let-down continues in the other two stories: the long-awaited Spanish Falangists finally arrive, but barely notice the Italian Avanguardisti at the far end of the piazza; and, in the last tale, the protagonist and his friend spend a night not guarding the school, in case of air raids, and then the one plane that does fly overhead, at dawn, does no harm at all.

  And yet, this final story, ‘UNPA Nights’, does more than just develop the feeling of anticlimax. It is perhaps the most complex of the three tales, in its mixture of narrative styles: a light-hearted portrayal of youth is combined with almost poetic descriptions of night-time in a blacked-out town. The comic tone is more prevalent than the poetic at first: Biancone, that characteristic figure, the more grown-up of the two schoolfriends, plays tricks on everyone – first on the narrator himself, then on the school caretaker, on the schoolteacher, on passers-by. There are wonderful moments of adolescent slapstick here, such as when the two boys perform a gas-masked version of La Lupescu’s love affair with King Carol of Romania. The comedy is enhanced also by Calvino’s deployment of another narrative code, that of the fairy tale: the elderly caretaker is portrayed as a witch, as she moves slowly along with her torch, while bats and moths fly round her and toads scamper
from beneath her feet, so, when they arrive at the city boundary, the narrator fears she will mount on a broomstick and fly over the town.

  The poetic tone emerges later, in some of the nocturnal descriptions. Night is a strong theme in all three tales, but the last story, set entirely in the hours of darkness, is almost a hymn to night, in which the narrator wants to wrap himself. It is also a nocturnal tour of San Remo: from the countryside, where the caretaker lives, to the old town, with its piazzas and brothels, right down to the harbour and the seawall, just before dawn. There is an increasingly poetic tenor to the descriptions of night here, particularly in the epiphanic scene at the end, where the narrator first watches the column of armoured cars halt, with their headlights blazing, then sits on the harbour wall near the prison, contemplating the town and watching the fishermen set out on their pre-dawn fishing expedition. This nocturnal emphasis is partly due to the fact that the terror of living in a city during a war is at its most acute at night-time, particularly during blackouts, which are mentioned on several occasions. But there is also, perhaps, an autobiographical motive behind these nocturnal evocations, particularly the scene at the harbour: Calvino, after all, had been imprisoned in the old harbour gaol in San Remo, and was lucky to make a narrow escape when the Germans were taking its prisoners off to Genoa.

  This final story is also effective in bringing the trilogy full circle: the primary school was the scene of the serious help given by the protagonist to the aged and infirm in the first story, but here it is the scene of a final and largely comic tale. Similarly, an air raid which had indirectly caused a child’s death is mentioned at the start of the first story, and another (in the end harmless) air alarm occurs at the end of the final piece, yet here the false alarm is contrasted with the photographs of the real bombing of English cities in 1940. Lastly, the role played by the protagonist’s parents in the stories is rounded off by the paternal portrait on the last page: if the previous two stories had ended with the anti-climactic appearance of first Mussolini and then the Falangists, this tale, and the whole trilogy of war, ends with an almost pastoral portrait of the narrator’s father arriving in the countryside in the early morning, just as the colours of the vines and olive trees start to emerge from the dark and the first birds begin to sing. From Homeric times the country landscape has been used as a counterpoint to scenes of battle, and here the emergence of colour and birdsong at the close of this war-time trilogy suggests a glimmer of optimism, perhaps the optimism that helped young anti-Fascists, like Calvino, who, thanks to his parents’ moral code, made what he later considered to be the correct ethical choices in the dark days and nights of the Second World War.