Hermit in Paris Read online

  In Short

  I expected so much from SF, I had heard so much about it, now that I have spent a fortnight here (also because I was waiting to arrange with my colleagues to leave by car with some of them), now that I am leaving, well, I cannot say deep down that I really know much more about it than I did before, that I have got to know it properly, and basically maybe I am not terribly interested. Life is monotonous here, I did not meet any exceptional people (apart from Rexroth), I had no success with women (not that the city is greedy with its treasures, it’s just the way it turned out, perhaps I am now entering a downward spiral). From the moment I left New York I have heard nothing but criticism of New York, rather in the same way as we criticize Rome (though of course it is totally different), yet this is all justified; however, New York is perhaps the only place in America where you feel at the centre and not at the margins, in the provinces, so for that reason I prefer its horror to this privileged beauty, its enslavement to the freedoms which remain local and privileged and very particularized, and which do not represent a genuine antithesis.

  California Diary

  Los Angeles, 20 February

  Memories of a Motorist

  I leave SFrancisco on 7 February with Ollier Pinget Claus and wife in a Ford that we hired and which we will leave in LA. We take turns at driving. It’s not difficult, just a bit laborious because it doesn’t hold the road perfectly. The traffic system of parallel lines instead of overtaking on the left is better and far less dangerous than in Italy. Of course where the road narrows, with just two lanes for traffic in either direction, overtaking happens practically just like in Italy. But the problem is always that of staying between the lines, and if you change lane you must be sure no one is coming up behind you. The speed limits are very strict and have to be obeyed because there are constantly police cars and motor-cycles with radar control. In built-up areas it is 25 or 35 miles an hour, while the overall limit in the State of California is 65 miles per hour. Our car is not an automatic (only the more expensive ones are), which means that out on the open road it is fine, but in LA with all the traffic that there is and the constant traffic lights you realize that not having to change gear is a tremendous relief. The problem of parking is very serious in LA as well. The minute we arrive we leave the car for just a few minutes in a no-parking area and when we come back we cannot find it: the police have already had it towed away by a little lorry with a crane and we are forced to spend half a day getting it back from a garage which is used for this purpose. All the systems to help traffic flow work with miraculous speed: one night in SFrancisco coming back with a friend from a party a little bit merry, the car ended up stranded, off the road; it was raining, we ran to a public telephone to call the emergency services, and we had not even got back to the car but the lorry was already there pulling the car out.

  It Is Not True What Everyone Always Says

  that the only way to see America is to go across it by car. Apart from the fact that it is impossible given its enormous size, it is also deadly boring. A few outings on the motorway are enough to give an idea of what small-town and even village America is like on average, with the endless suburbs along the highways, a sight of desperate squalor, with all those low buildings, petrol stations or other shops which look like them, and the colours of the writing on the shop signs, and you realize that 95 percent of America is a country of ugliness, oppressiveness and sameness, in short of relentless monotony. Then you go across even deserted areas for hours and hours, like those we crossed amid the forests and coasts of California, certainly among the most beautiful places in the world, but even there you feel a certain lack of interest, perhaps because of that absence of human dimensions. But the most boring thing about travelling by car is spending the evening in one of those tiny anonymous towns where there is absolutely nothing to do except to have it confirmed that the ennui of a small American town is exactly how it has always been described, or even worse. America keeps its promises: there is the bar with its wall adorned with hunting-trophies of deer and reindeer; in the public bar there are farmers with cowboy hats playing cards, a fat prostitute seducing a salesman, a drunk trying to start a fight. This squalor is not just to be found in the small anonymous towns but also, in a slightly more alluring form, in famous holiday centres like Monterey and Carmel; and there too in this dead season it is very difficult to find a restaurant that will serve dinner.

  In These Earthly Paradises

  where American writers live, I would not live if you paid me. There is nothing else to do but get drunk. A young lad called Dennis Murphy or something similar, who has written a best-seller, The Sergeant, which has now been translated and published in Mondadori’s Medusa series – he has just received a copy of it which he shows me, convinced that Mondadori is a small publisher – arrives in the morning with his wrists slashed. During the night he got drunk and put his fists through the windows of his villa. As for Henry Miller who lives here at Big Sur, we already know that he is not receiving any visitors because he is writing. The old writer (now over seventy) has recently remarried, and his new wife is nineteen years old, so all the rest of his energies are devoted to writing in order to finish the books that he still wants to write before he dies.

  Hotels for the Elderly

  My friends avoid motels convinced (completely wrongly) that they cost more so we end up in filthy, flea-ridden small hotels. A permanent feature of hotels are the old folk who live in them and spend their days and evenings in the lounge watching television. California is the great refuge for old people who have ended up on their own all over the United States: they come to spend their years in its mild climate living off their savings in a small hotel. But also in New York the majority of hotel guests are the elderly, particularly old women.

  The Pacific

  is a sea which is completely different, with these sheer coastlines formed not of rock but of earth, and these harbours with their high, wooden palisades. The marine vegetation is also totally different: the waves cast up on to the beach seaweed that has a wooden texture but is as pliant as a whip, three or four metres long, with a little bearded head. You can fight whipping duels with this incredibly long and robust seaweed. Just below the surface of the water and on the shore there is neither sand nor rocks, but rather a porous, breathing mass of marine organisms. The seabed is alive, made up of molluscs which are open like eyes, dilating and contracting with the beat of each wave. And even in the days of full sunlight there hovers over the ocean a shadow of mist and vapour.

  Los Angeles

  From the moment I arrived in America, everyone told me that Los Angeles was horrible, that I would really like SFrancisco but would hate LA, so I had convinced myself that I would definitely like it. And indeed I arrive and am immediately enthusiastic: yes, this is the American city, the impossible city, it’s so enormous, and since I only enjoy being in huge cities it is just right for me. It is as long as if the area between Milan and Turin were just one single city stretching north as far as Como and south as far as Vercelli. But the beauty of it is that in between, between one district and the next (they’re actually called cities and often they are nothing but endless stretches of villas, big and small), there are huge, totally deserted mountains which you have to cross to go from one part of the city to another, populated by deer and mountain lions or pumas, and on the sea there are peninsulas and beaches that are among the most beautiful in the world. Furthermore it is a really brash city, dull, with no pretence at having monuments or quaint features – not like SFrancisco which is the only American city to have a ‘personality’ in the European sense: there is no problem loving SFrancisco, everyone can do it – but LA, this really is the American landscape, and here at last the extremely high and widespread quality of life in California does not appear to be an island of privilege, but, linked as it is to a big industrial city of these dimensions, seems to be something structural. But after a few days in Los Angeles I realize that life here is impossible, more imposs
ible than in any other place in America, and for the temporary visitor (who, on the other hand, can usually enjoy a city better than its residents) it is actually a source of despair. The huge distances mean that a social life is practically impossible, except for the residents of Beverly Hills who can socialize among themselves, as can those of Santa Monica or of Pasadena and so on; in other words, one falls back into a provincial existence, even though a gilded one. Otherwise you have to face car journeys of forty minutes, an hour, an hour and a half, and I always have to rely on someone to give me a lift, or I drive my friends’ cars but I get tired and bored; and there is no public transport except the odd bus, and the taxis are very rare and very expensive. To this lack of form there corresponds a lack of soul in the city: you do not even find that vulgar soul like you get in Chicago and which I hoped to find again here; in truth it is not really a city, but an agglomeration of people who earn, who have excellent conditions for working well but no links with others. In any case Piovene48 has described Los Angeles very well, so I will not dwell on it, but refer you to his chapter on it, which is excellent.

  The Suburbs

  When you see how these professors – both the good ones and the mediocrities – live in this paradise on earth, and also see the extraordinary money the university devotes to research, you say to yourself that the price of all this must be the death of the soul, and certainly here even the most robust souls, I believe, would soon start to perish. A city made of a thousand suburbs, Los Angeles is also the suburb of the world, in everything, even in cinema: in reality it is not so much that cinema is ‘done’ here as that ‘people come to do cinema here’. I who always am obsessed with living in the centre in every city, here too I go to stay in a hotel downtown, but here downtown is only a centre full of offices, nobody lives there, and my friends from the Department of Italian at UCLA persuade me to go and stay in a motel at Westwood, where I will be nearer them. I feel so at home in motels that I could spend my whole life there; and this is a Mormon motel, opposite an absurdly enormous Mormon temple, closed to everyone except the elders of the sect, next to a neat area inhabited by Japanese (who work cutting the lawns in front of the houses in nearby neighbourhoods) and Mexicans. However, I lose contact with other parts of the city, and to a certain extent I lose the desire to look up the many people whose addresses I have been given and for whom I have been given letters of introduction (even telephoning is complicated: each district has its own phone-book, you cannot find the other phone-books here, most telephone calls are made via the operator as though they were long-distance calls), and so for the first time since I came to America, instead of doggedly trying to multiply my contacts with the locals, I allow myself to be carried along in the routine of life enjoyed by the Italian professors who live in their own little world.

  On Cinema, so I Have Nothing to Tell You

  When I left New York Arthur Miller was here, but he has now gone, his secretary’s letter informs me, so I have missed the opportunity to meet the most famous woman in America (however, I hope to find them again in New York), and from my contacts in the cinema world I extract only boring official visits to the Walt Disney and Fox studios, with the usual Western villages which have been meticulously reconstructed. These months in Hollywood (I use the word Hollywood in the European sense: as you know, Hollywood is now a district of restaurants, theatres and night-clubs, a kind of Broadway, but it has nothing more to do with cinema production; the studios are elsewhere, in the country) are a dead season since in April in California everyone makes their tax return, and the tax officials come to check the number of film-rolls that have been shot and base their taxes on that. So the film-makers try to shoot as little as possible in these months, and send the rolls they have used to Arizona. When the tax inspection is over, they have them sent back: this is a trick that everyone knows about, but as far as the law is concerned they are in the clear. So at 20th Century Fox there was only one film being shot, some science-fiction thing. The only interesting detail I noticed was this guy, among the technicians, dressed as a cowboy, with game-bags full of little stones and a sling in place of a pistol. He is the person whose duty it is to frighten the ducks (the scene was set on a tropical river) by firing stones when the director needs a flight of ducks in a certain direction.

  In short, I’m telling you all this to say that I’m sorry but I was not invited to any party full of famous divas, directors and producers. Here is not like New York, here people plan important parties two months in advance, given the general dispersal. And in any case, since the Chaplins are no longer here, life is not the same, etc.

  Tree-houses

  I’m bathing in the swimming pool in Chiquita’s house, an acrobatic dancer, in Malibu. Her husband always plays a bodyguard in films. She has had herself built a wonderful house in a tree which sways in the wind. As a theorist of this kind of existence, I visit it and have myself photographed. I later discover that it is not the acrobat’s idea: the psychoanalyst I visit the next day also has one in his villa; tree-houses are very common in California.

  I Am not Going to Mexico

  from here, as I had planned, along with the other writers on the grant. I discover that my visa is valid only ‘for one admission’, so if I leave I cannot come back in again. The others, though, all have visas ‘for unlimited admissions’ and off they go. I could only go there when I leave the United States, before coming back to Italy, if my thirst for new emotions has not been satisfied.

  The Best and Biggest Ranch in California

  I have been able to visit is the Newhall family’s ranch. Huge orange and walnut groves. Again without any human presence, as always in American agriculture, everything is done by machine, even the walnut harvest. The picking of oranges, on the other hand, is entrusted to a union of specialized Mexican labourers. I also saw cowboys: they were passing between the palisades, behind which the cows are kept, in huge spaces, bored and chewing their synthetic feed which is brought to them by conduits and appropriately graded by a nearby windmill. They will never see a prairie in their life, neither the cowboys nor the cows.

  Accidents of a Pedestrian

  ‘Here anyone going on foot will be arrested immediately’ was what we jokingly said on arrival in Los Angeles, where there are no pedestrians. In fact, one day I try to go by foot for a stretch through Culver City, and after a few blocks a policeman on a motorbike comes alongside and stops me. I had crossed a street – one that was narrow and deserted, what’s more – while the light was at red. In order to avoid the fine – ‘the ticket’ – I explain that I am a foreigner, etc., that I am an absent-minded professor, etc., but he has no sense of humour, makes a lot of fuss and asks a lot of questions because I do not have my passport with me (in America I have noticed – even before this – that documents are totally pointless); he does not give me a ticket, but he keeps me there for a quarter of an hour. A pedestrian is always a suspicious character. However, he is protected by the law: whenever one crosses the street at any point, all the cars halt, as they do in Italy but only at the zebra crossing. Since they are few in number, like the redskins, they are trying to preserve them.

  In Short,

  you do not really want me to tell you about the villas of the film stars along Sunset Boulevard, about the prints on the cement at the Chinese Theatre, about the inevitable visit to Disneyland and Marineland (which actually is something amazing: circus games not just with seals and dolphins, but with the most enormous whales!). This instalment of the diary has turned out a bit flat, since here I ended up being a bit of a tourist, partly because once I had become free of the company of my colleagues, on arriving here (I hate being in a group; only if I am alone and constantly changing company do I feel I’m travelling) I was constantly undecided whether to leave the next day or stay longer, forever allowing myself to become seduced by amorous adventures which the city doles out in generous quantities but which never succeeded in transmitting their excitement to the following days, and if I am not in
a state of continual tension I do not enjoy my travelling, and so I am also unsure about the next stages of my trip, caught between the desire to see EVERYTHING and the desire to return as soon as possible to New York where I always have ‘a good time’.

  Meantime I will now cross Nevada Arizona New Mexico, using airplanes, Greyhound buses and the train. Between the end of the month and the beginning of March I will be at:

  C/o IIE

  1300 Main Street

  Houston 2, Texas

  Otherwise I have always a reliable NY address:

  C/o F. J. Horch Ass.

  325 East 57th St

  New York 22, NY

  Diary from the South-west

  I arrive in Las Vegas by plane, late on Friday evening. In this city full of hotels and motels there is not a single vacancy to be found. This holiday weekend (Monday 22 February is Washington’s birthday) has ensured that everything was booked up more than a month in advance and not only by people from Los Angeles but all over the country, because a stay in the gambling capital is de rigueur for every American, like a trip to Mecca. You all know what Las Vegas is like, in the middle of the most squalid desert in Nevada, an old gold-diggers’ village, and even now it is not very large, consisting virtually of just two streets, the old Main Street with all the most famous gambling houses, and the new lengthy Strip, a road in the desert that is all neon signs, even more so than Broadway, with marvellous motels, casinos, and theatres which show the most famous nude women performers in the whole world, the Folies Bergère, Lido, etc., as well as the most famous Broadway singers and actors, except that on Broadway there are never more than five or six major revues on at any one time, whereas here there are around twenty theatres and you can even see three shows a night since they go on until four in the morning. As for gambling, it continues round the clock, twenty-four hours out of twenty-four, practically everywhere, because every public space is a casino and all you find here are public spaces, and where there are no roulette or baccarat tables there are rows and rows of those famous one-armed bandits from the time of the pioneers, so you see crowds of frantic people frantically playing these machines, like workers in a factory (Piovene’s image, which conveys the idea perfectly). As you know, Nevada is the only State where gambling is permitted, prostitution is legalized, divorce possible after six weeks’ residence, marriage possible at any time as long as you swear you are not already married. I arrive, climb into a taxi with a man from Washington, a navy employee and fanatic of these shows, and the taxi driver very scrupulously takes us round all the motels but everywhere there is the luminous sign saying No Vacancies, so he ends up renting us a room in his own house, a modest little house, which I share with the Washington employee, and I am happy at this rare opportunity to be able to see every now and again at close quarters the life of the average American. He is a serious well-behaved man, gambles very little and cautiously, is very careful not to go with women who in any case would cost a fortune, but his main ambition is to see as many shows as possible, he has come this far by plane for that very reason, he spends three practically sleepless nights in order to catch three shows a night, and you know how boring shows like the Folies Bergère are, and he sends the programme from every theatre (here you can send it like a postcard paid for by the theatre) to his friends and colleagues in the office to show them what fine things he has seen. The taxi man is also a good guy, with a good respectable little family, his wife is a Sunday school teacher, and in the taxi the first thing he does is to explain to us the benefits of legalized prostitution: ‘I believe in legalized prostitution.’ I have to say that Las Vegas has not been a disappointment: it is all just as you have read about so many times, with wedding chapels in the middle of the gambling-dens and the farce theatres with their advertisements for the quickest marriages (this is even more brazen than I had imagined: these little churches are really fair booths built like candy boxes with little statues of Cupid in front; they have names like The Stars’ Wedding Chapel and their billboards have Hollywood-style close-ups of happy couples kissing), but what is genuine here is a huge authentic sense of vitality, crowds of people with loads of money constantly on the move. I have to say I like Las Vegas; I seriously like the place. Not at all like the gambling cities in Europe, actually the complete opposite thanks to its plebeian, Western feel, and very different from places like Pigalle. Here you sense tremendous physical well-being, this is a productive, brash society enjoying itself as a community, between one plane and the next, and here you can genuinely sense that the pioneers, gold-diggers, etc. have shaped this absurd city-cum-gambling-den in the desert. I am aware I am saying things that are incredibly banal, but I am travelling through a banal country and I cannot find a better way to cope than living and thinking about this in a banal way. (I won’t tell you how all the local colour – Western, pioneer, gold-rush, and beyond that Indian and Mexican – is the object of tourist exploitation and rhetoric, and is chopped up into tiny souvenirs in quaint little shops, all enough to make you feel sated with it for the rest of your life.)