Hermit in Paris Page 2

  Turning to younger writers, in the small group of authors born around 1915, Cassola6 and Bassani7; have set about studying certain fractures in the Italian middle-class conscience, and theirs are the most interesting stories that one can read nowadays; but in Cassola I would criticize a certain superficiality of reactions in the way his works deal with human relationships, and in Bassani the hint of preciosity that makes you think of the Crepuscular poets in Italy. Among those of us who are even younger and who began by working with story-formats that were tough, set among workers, full of action, the one who has gone furthest down that road is Rea.8 Now there is Pasolini, one of the foremost exponents of his generation both as poet and as a literary expert: he has written a novel about which I feel many reservations as regards its ‘poetics’, but the more one thinks about it, the more you feel it is something which is well-finished and which will last.

  Which is your favourite contemporary foreign novelist?

  I wrote an article about a year ago on what Hemingway meant for me when I started out as a writer. Once I realized that Hemingway was not enough for me, I cannot say that his place has been taken by any other contemporary author. For the last five or six years, like everyone else, I have been making inroads into Thomas Mann, and I am more and more impressed by the richness of his subject matter. However, I continue to believe that nowadays we have to write in a different way. I am freer in my relationships with writers of the past and I indulge in limitless enthusiasms; in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries I have a whole host of models and writers I regard as friends whom I never tire of going back to.

  How have your books been received outside Italy?

  It is too soon to say. The Cloven Viscount is just coming out in France, and will come out shortly in Germany. The Path to the Spiders’ Nests will be published in Britain in the spring, to be followed six months later by Adam, One Afternoon.

  What are you working on now?

  I never count my chickens until they’re hatched.

  Do you think writers should be involved in politics? And how should they do so? To what political tendency do you belong?

  I believe that all men should be involved in politics. And writers too, inasmuch as they are men. I believe that our civic and moral conscience should influence the man first and then the writer. It is a long road, but there is no other. And I believe that the writer must keep open a discourse which in its implications cannot but be political as well. I have remained faithful to these principles, and in the nearly twelve years of my membership of the Communist Party, my conscience as a Communist and my conscience as a writer have not entered into those agonizing conflicts which have tormented many of my friends, making them believe that it was necessary to opt for either one conscience or the other. Everything that forces us to give up a part of ourselves is negative. I participate in politics and literature in different ways, according to my abilities, but both things interest me as forming one and the same discourse about humanity.

  [Il Café, IV.1 (January 1956) introduced Italo Calvino under the rubric ‘La nuova letteratura’ (New Writing) with a short story (‘Un viaggio con le mucche’ (‘A Journey with the Cows’), later included in Marcovaldo) preceded by his replies to a questionnaire set by G. B. Vicari. The same text, with a few variants, is found in Elio Filippo Accrocca, Ritratti su misura (Personal Portraits) (Venice: Sodalizio del Libro, 1960) and appears below.]

  Personal Portrait

  I am the son of scientists: my father was an agronomist, my mother a botanist; both were university professors. Among my family and relations only scientific subjects were held in any honour; one maternal uncle was a university professor of chemistry married to another chemist (in fact I had two uncles who were chemists married to two women chemists); my brother is a university lecturer in geology. I am the black sheep of the family, the only one to have studied literature. My father was Ligurian, from an old San Remo family; my mother is Sardinian. My father lived for about twenty years in Mexico, in charge of various institutes of experimental agronomy, then Cuba; he took my mother to Cuba: they had got to know each other through exchanging scientific papers, and they were married during a whirlwind visit to Italy; I was born in a village near Havana, Santiago de Las Vegas, on 15 October 1923. Unfortunately I do not remember anything about Cuba, because before I was even two I was already in Italy, in San Remo, to which my father had returned, along with my mother, to be director of the experimental floriculture institute. All I retain of my birth overseas is a complicated detail on my birth certificate (which in brief biographical notes I replace with the more accurate one: born in San Remo), a certain amount of family memories, and my first name, which my mother, thinking that I was going to grow up in a foreign land, decided to give me so that I would not forget my ancestors’ homeland, but which in Italy sounds belligerently nationalist. I lived with my parents in San Remo until I was twenty, in a garden full of rare and exotic plants, and in the woods of the Ligurian pre-Alps, along with my father who was a tireless old hunter. After secondary school I made some attempts to follow the family’s scientific tradition, but my head was already full of literature and I gave up. In the meantime the German occupation had taken place and, following political feelings I had held since adolescence, I fought with the partisans, in the Garibaldi Brigades. The partisan war took place in the same woods which my father had taught me to know since childhood; I deepened my identification with that landscape, and in it I made my first discovery of the pain of the human world.

  It was that experience which, some months later, in the autumn of 1945, gave birth to my first short stories. The first one was sent to a friend, who was in Rome at the time; Pavese thought it was good and passed it on to Muscetta, editor of the journal Aretusa. That issue of Aretusa came out very late, the following year. Meanwhile Vittorini had read another story of mine and had published it in the weekly Il Politecnico, in December 1945.

  By then I had enrolled in the Literature Faculty of Turin University, going straight into the third year, as a result of the exemptions given to war returnees. During 1946 I took all the examinations that the four-year course required, and I even obtained some good marks. In ’47 I graduated with a thesis on the Opera Omnia of Joseph Conrad. I went through university too quickly, and I regret it; but then my mind was on other things: on politics, in which I got involved passionately; on journalism, because I was writing pieces on a wide range of topics for l’Unità; on creative literature because in those years I wrote very many short stories and one novel (in twenty days in December ’46), entitled The Path to the Spiders’ Nests: that was how that world of poetics evolved from which, like it or not, I have never substantially departed. From 1945, and especially from when Pavese returned to Turin in ’46, I had started to gravitate around the Einaudi publishing house, for whom I began working by going round selling books on hire purchase: I became an editor there in 1947, and am still working for them. But I also felt the lure and influence of Milan and Vittorini, right from the time of Il Politecnico. As for Rome, I have a relationship of both polemical rejection and attraction to the city, attracted by the presence of Carlo Levi and other critics such as Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg.

  I have travelled through Europe, both on this side and on the other side of the Iron Curtain; but travels are not events of much importance.

  As for work involving a considerable amount of scholarship and bibliographical research, I produced the edition of Italian Folktales (1956); it took two years of total commitment and I enjoyed it; but afterwards I abandoned the career of the scholar; I am more interested in being a writer, and that already causes me enough sweat.

  [E. F. Accrocca, Ritratti su misura (Personal Portraits) (Venice: Sodalizio del Libro, 1960).]

  American Diary 1959–1960

  On board ship, 3 Nov. ’59

  Dear Daniele9 and friends,

  For me boredom has now taken on the image of this transatlantic liner. Why did I ever decide not t
o take the plane? I would have arrived in America buzzing with the rhythm of the world of big business and high politics, instead I will arrive weighed down by an already heavy dose of American boredom, American old age, American lack of vital resources. Thankfully I only have one more evening to spend on the steamer, after four evenings of desperate tedium. The ‘belle époque’ flavour of liners no longer manages to conjure up a single image. That hint of a memory of past times that you can get from Monte Carlo or the spa at San Pellegrino Terme does not happen here, because a liner is modern: it may be something ‘old-world’ in concept but they are built pretentiously now, and populated by people that are antiquated, old and ugly. The only thing that you can glean from it is a definition of boredom as being somehow out of phase with history, a feeling of being cut off but with the consciousness that everything else is still going on: the boredom of Leopardi’s Recanati, just like that of The Three Sisters, is no different from the boredom of a journey in a transatlantic liner.

  Long live Socialism.

  Long live Aviation.

  My Travelling Companions (Young Creative Writers)

  There are only three of them because the German Günther [sic] Grass failed the medical examination and, thanks to the barbaric law that you have to have sound lungs to enter America, he has had to give up the scholarship.10

  There is a fourth writer who is going tourist (third) class because he is bringing with him, at his own expense, his wife and young son, so we have only seen him once. He is Alfred Tomlinson, an English poet, a typical example of a British university type.11 He is thirty-two but could be fifty-two.

  The other three are:

  Claude Ollier, French, thirty-seven years old, a Nouveau Roman writer: to date he has only written one book.12 He wanted to take advantage of the voyage finally to read Proust but the ship’s travelling library only extends as far as Cronin.

  Fernando Arrabal, Spanish, twenty-seven years old, small, baby-faced with a beard under his chin and a little fringe.13; He has lived in Paris for years. He has written works for the theatre which no one has ever wanted to put on and also a novel published by Julliard. He is desperately poor. He does not know any Spanish writers, and he hates them all because they call him a traitor and would like him to do Socialist Realism and write against Franco and he refuses to write against Franco, he doesn’t even know who Franco is, but in Spain you cannot publish anything or win literary prizes unless you are against Franco because the person who runs everything is [Juan] Goytisolo who forces everyone to do Socialist Realism, i.e. Hemingway-Dos Passos, but he hasn’t read Hemingway-Dos Passos, and hasn’t even read Goytisolo because he cannot stand reading Socialist Realism, and apart from Ionesco and Ezra Pound he does not like very much else. He is extremely aggressive, and jokes in an obsessive and lugubrious way, constantly bombarding me with questions about how on earth I can be interested in politics, and also about what exactly one does with women. There are two targets for his attacks: politics and sex. He and the French Teddy Boys, for whom he acts as interpreter, cannot even conceive of people who find politics or sex interesting. He is only interested in cinema (especially Cinemascope, Technicolor and gangsters), and pinball. Since leaving the seminary (he studied to be a Jesuit, in Spain) he has not had any sexual relations, apparently not even with his wife (they have been married three years), and has never had any desire to have any, and the same goes for politics. He says that the French Teddy Boys who are coming on to the scene now are even more remote than he is from politics and sex. He does not speak a word of English, and writes in French.

  Hugo Claus, a Flemish Belgian, thirty-two years old, he began publishing at nineteen and since then he has written an enormous quantity of things, and for the new generation he is the most famous writer, playwright and poet of the Flemish-Dutch-speaking area.14 Much of this stuff he himself says is worthless, including the novel which has been translated and published in France and America, but he is anything but stupid and unpleasant: he is a big, fair-haired guy with a stunning wife who is an actress (whom I got to know as she was saying goodbye to him at the quay), and he is the only one of these three who has read a lot and whose judgments are reliable. Four hours after the launch of the first sputnik he had already written a poem about it, which was published instantly on the front page of a Belgian daily paper.

  My new and, I think, definitive address for all the time I will be in New York, i.e. up to around 5 January, is:

  Grosvenor Hotel

  35 Fifth Avenue

  New York

  From the Diary of the Early Days in New York

  9 November 1959

  Arrival

  The boredom of the voyage is handsomely compensated for by the emotions stirred up on arrival at New York, the most spectacular sight that anyone can see on this earth. The skyscrapers appear grey in the sky which has just cleared and they seem like the ruins of some monstrous New York abandoned three thousand years in the future. Then gradually you make out the colours which are different from any idea you had of them, and a complicated pattern of shapes. Everything is silent and deserted, then the car traffic starts to flow. The massive, grey, fin-de-siècle look of the buildings gives New York, as Ollier immediately pointed out, the appearance of a German city.

  Lettunich

  Mateo Lettunich, Head of the Arts Division of the Institute of International Education (IIE) (his family were originally from Dubrovnik), who has an obsession with saving money, did not want me to get a porter for my stuff. The Van Rensselaer hotel where he has arranged for us to have rooms is filthy, down-at-heel, stinking, a dump. If we ask him about a restaurant, he always recommends the worst one in the area. He has the worried, frightened look of those Soviet interpreters who accompany delegations, though he has none of the phlegmatic savoir-faire with which Victor V., the functionary who was the son of aristocrats, accompanied our delegation of young city and country workers. Those of us who have been spoiled by the hospitality of socialist countries are made to feel ill at ease by the awkward tentativeness with which the land of capitalism manages the millions of the Ford Foundation. But the fact is that here you do not travel as a delegation, and once you have cleared a few formalities, everyone goes off on his own and does what he wants and I won’t see Mateo again. He is a writer of avant-garde plays which have never been performed.

  Hotels

  The next day I go around Greenwich Village looking for a hotel and they are all the same: old, filthy, smelly, with threadbare carpets, even though none of them has the suicidal view of my room at the Van R. with its filthy, rusty, iron fire-escape stairs in front of the window and its view over a blind courtyard on which the sun never shines. But I make for the Grosvenor which is the Village’s elegant hotel, old but clean; I have a beautiful room in quintessentially Henry James style (it is just a short walk away from Washington Square, which has stayed mostly as it was in his time), and I pay seven dollars a day as long as I guarantee to stay two months and pay a month in advance.

  New York Is Not Exactly America

  This phrase, which I had read in all the books on New York, is repeated to us ten times a day, and it’s true, but what does it matter? It’s New York, a place which is neither exactly America nor exactly Europe, which gives you a burst of extraordinary energy, which you immediately feel you know like the back of your hand, as though you had always lived here, and at certain times, especially uptown where you can feel the busy life of the big offices and factories of ready-made clothes, it lands on top of you as though to crush you. Naturally, the minute you land here, you think of anything except turning back.

  The Village

  Maybe I’m wrong to stay in the Village. It is so unlike the rest of New York, even though it’s in the centre of the city. It is so like Paris, but deep down you realize that this is an unwitting similarity which does everything to make you believe it’s deliberate. There are three different social strata in the Village: the respectable middle-class residents, particularly in the new
apartment blocks which are rising up even here; the native Italians who try to resist the influx of artists (which began in the 1910s because it cost less here) and who often fight with them (the riots and mass arrests of last spring has meant fewer Sunday tourists, who are mostly New Yorkers from other districts), but at the same time it is thanks to the bohemians and the bohemian atmosphere that the Italians survive and their shops make money; and the bohemians themselves who are all now known popularly as ‘beatniks’ and who are more dirty and unpleasant than any of their Parisian confrères. Meanwhile, the way the area looks is threatened by property speculation which plants skyscrapers even here. I signed a petition to save the Village, for a young female activist collecting signatures on the corner of Sixth Avenue. We Village people are very attached to our own area. We also have two newspapers just for ourselves: the Villager and the Village Voice.

  A Small World

  I am right opposite Orion Press, Mischa15 lives a block away, Grove Press is just round the corner, and from my window I can see Macmillan’s huge building.

  The Cars

  The most amusing thing when you arrive is seeing that in America all the cars are enormous. It is not that there are small ones and big ones, they are all huge, sometimes almost laughably so: the cars we consider only for major tourist trips are normal for them, and even the taxis have really long tailfins. Among my friends, the only New Yorker with a small car is Barney Rosset, ever the nonconformist: he has one of those tiny little cars, a red Isetta.