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Italo Calvino (1923-1985) |
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Journalist, short story writer and novelist, experimental writer whose imaginative fabulations made him one of the most important Italian fiction writers of the 20th century. Italo Calvino's career as a writer spanned nearly four decades. After forty years of writing fiction, after exploring various roads and making diverse experiments, the time has come for me to look for an overall definition of my work. I would suggest this: my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language. (from Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 3) Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba. "I will
begin
by saying that I was born under the sign of Libra," he once said.
(Libra is the 7th sign of the zodiak, operative September 24-October
23; the word for book in Italian is libro.) Both of his parents, Mario
and Eva Calvino, were botanists. Calvino moved with his family to Italy
in his youth and spent his early years in San Remo, where his father
was the curator of the botanical gardens. Between 1941 and 1947 Calvino studied at the University of Turin. In 1940, he was drafted into the Young Fascists and participated in the Italian occupation of the French Riviera, but at the age of nineteen he left and sought refuge in the Alps. Calvino joined the Communist Resistance in the Ligurian mountains. From these experiences he drew inspiration for his first stories. After the war Calvino graduated from the University of Turin and worked for the communist periodical L'Unitá in 1945 as a journalist and for Einaudi publishing house from 1948 to 1984. He wrote for various periodicals throughout his life, including L'Unitá, La Nostra Lotta, Il Garibaldino, Voce della Democrazia, Il Contemporaneo, Cittá Aperta, and La Republica. Following
in the footsteps of Cesare Pavese, Calvino signed up with the
Turin-based publishers Einaudi. Shortly after writing his graduation
thesis on Joseph Conrad, Calvino published his first novel, Il sentiero
dei nidi di ragno
(1947, The Path to the Nest of Spiders), a combination of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and
Stevenson's Treasure Island.
The story about resistance
movement seen
through the eyes of a young boy was told in an unsentimental,
neorealist way, but its fablelike twists in the narrative differed from
the documentary-like aesthetics of neorealism. "The fact that books books are always
born from other books is a truth," Calvino once said, "only
apparently in contradiction with that other truth: that books are born
from practical life and from relationships with other beings." ('Stevenson, Calvino and All the Devils in Italy' by
Michaela Vanon Alliata, in European
Stevenson, edited by Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury, 2009,
p. 217) Il visconte dimezzato (1952, The Cloven Viscount) marked Calvino's break with the common mood connected with the experience of war. It told the story of a man cut in half by a cannonball during the Turkish-Christian war. Unaware of each other, the two parts of the Viscount go on living their own lives. One side is resolved to do good, and the other side doing just the opposite. The appearance of the novel provoked a debate of realism by the Italian Communist party. In the 1950s published fantastic tales, hovering between allegory and pure fantasy, brought Calvino international acclaim and established his reputation as one of the most important Italian fiction writers of the 20th century. Il visconte dimezzato was followed by Il barone rampante (1957, The Baron in the Trees), in which an 18th-century baron's son climbs a tree and ends up spending his life in various treetops. Il cavaliere inesistente (1959, The Non-Existent Knight), the last book of the trilogy Our Ancestors, which gave precedence to fantasy outside the general neorealistic vein. Behind the playful spinning of tales also can been seen Calvino's questioning about the relationship between the individual conscience and the course of history. However, in La nuvola di smog (1958, Smog) the author returned for awhile to the social-realistic mode to satirize the industrial society. Written in the first person, the unnamed narrator is involved with a newspaper which dealt with pollution and the environment. Between 1955 and 1958 Calvino had an affair with the actress Elsa de' Giorgi, who was married to Count Sandro Contini Bonacossi. Excepts from his letters were published in an article in the Milan daily Corriere della Sera in 2004. While living in France, Calvino met the Argentinian translator Esther Judith Singer (nicknamed Chichita), who worked at UNESCO headquarters. They were married in 1964 in Havanna. In the post-1956 period, marked by the events in Hungary which were to cause Calvino to leave the Italian Communist Party, Calvino devoted himself more to journalism than to fiction; he also continued to write for Il contemporaneo, a Marxist weekly. When Calvino left the Party he felt deeply distressed and said: "Having grown up in times of dictatorship, and being overtaken by total war when of military age, I still have the notion that to live in peace and freedom is a frail kind of good fortune that might be taken away from me in an instant." (The Uses of Literature: Essays by Italo Calvino, translated by Patrick Creagh, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986, p. 340) In one article Calvino asked, "Was I Stalinist Too?" Though Calvino gave numerous interviews, he rarely discussed his private life; he was a solitary person, who stuttered, spoke haltingly, and felt out of place in his times. From 1959 to 1967 Calvino edited with Elio Vittorini the
magazine Il Menabó di letteratura. In
1952 he travelled to the Soviet Union and in 1959-60 to the United
States with the benefit of a bursary from the Ford Foundation, saying in his American diary: "Very attractive women are rare.
On the whole they are petite-bourgeois." (Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings by Italo Calvino, 2004, p. 29) On travel book, Un ottimista in America,
which he finished and was due to be published, he destroyed. "I felt it
was too weak as a literary work and not original enough as a
journalistic reportage," he explained in a letter. (Translating Travel: Contemporary Italian Travel Writing in English Translation by Loredana Polezzi, 2001, pp. 167-168) In 1967 Calvino moved to
Paris, where he became acquainted with the activities of Oulipo (The Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), led by
Raymond Queneau
and François LeLionnais. He called the group "a kind of academy of
intellectualm scrorn". After returning back to Italy, Calvino settled in Rome
in
1980. Italian critics have not been very enthusiastic about his Parisian period. Calvino was a guest at the Oulipo November 1972 meeting. He presented a short story 'Le mystère de la maison abominable' (The Burning of the Abominable House), which demonstrated how a computer program tackles a murder mystery. A version of the story, entitled 'L'incendio della casa abominevole,' was published in the Italian edition of Playboy in February 1973. Calvino said in his lecture 'Cybernetics and Ghosts' (1967) that literature "is a combinatorial game that pursues the possibilities implicit in its own material, but it is a game that at a certain point is invested with an unexpected meaning, a meaning that is not patent on the linguistic plane on which we were working but has slipped in from another level, activting something that on that second level is of great concern to the author or his society." (quoted in The Oulipo and Modern Thought by Dennis Duncan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, p. 111) In Marcovalco (1963), a collection of fables, Calvino satirized the modern, destructive urban way of living. Marcovalco is a Chaplinisque character, an ordinary working man and a father, who desperately longs for beauty and sinks in his daydreams whenever he can. When everybody leaves the city in August, he enjoys the empty streets. His peace is interrupted by a television group – it wants to interview the only person who is not on holiday. Calvino visited New York first time in 1959 and came to regard it as "my city." His 'American Diary 1959-60' consisted of letters written to colleagues. Calvino was amazed of the size of the fridges and how ignorant Americans were of Italian writing. In 1964 he went to Paris to strengthen his ties with the latest innovative trends. Le cosmicomiche(1965, Cosmicomics) set the concepts of evolution against cosmic scales. Through the boasting accounts of Qfwfq, who is as old as the universe, Calvino questions all the basic concepts of scientific theories. Qfwfq changes constantly – it has been a fish, and the last dinosaur. When his dear friend says, "Boys, the tagliatelle I would make for you!" this outburst of general love initiates "at the same moment the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitation universe, making possible billions and billions of suns, and of planets, and fields of wheat, and Mrs Ph(i)Nkₒs, scattered through the continents of the planets, kneading with floury, oil-shiny, generous arms, and she lost at that very moment, and we. mourning her loss." (The Complete Cosmocomics, translated by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks and William Weaver, London: Penguin Books, 2010, p. 48) In Il Castello dei destini incrociati (1973, The Castle of Crossed Destines) Calvino found his source of inspiration in two ancient packs of tarot cards. The novel represented a type of open text that allows for a similar variety of possible readings. Le cittá invisibli
(1972, Invisible Cities) was a
surreal
fantasy in which Marco Polo invents dream-cities to amuse Kubla Khan –
a city on stilts, a city made of waterpipes, a spiderweb city, a city
that cannot be forgotten and so on. Polo's principle as a storyteller
is: "Falsehood is never in the words; it is in the things."
(Invisible Cities, translated from the Italian by William Weaver, New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972, p. 62) In Isidore, one of the
Cities of Memory, "the foreigner hesitating
between two women always encounters a third," and in Zirma one sees "a
girl walking with a puma on a leash," and one leaves "Tamara without
having discovered it." The Great Khan's labyrinthine empire becomes a
metaphor of the universe itself. Calvino won with the book the
prestigious Premio Felrinelli Award. Of Calvino's If on a Winter's
Night a Traveller (1979), Salman Rushdie declared: "He is writing down what you have always known
except that you've never thought of it before." (Modern Conspiracy: The Importance of Being Paranoid by Emma A. Jane & Chris Fleming, 2014, p. 108) The story revolves around a conversation between an imaginary Marco Polo and an imaginary Kublai Khan. Marco Polo describes a series of surreal cities in the Khan's domain. Each city is charactericized by a unique quality or concept and they are all named for women – Adelma, Aglaura, Anastasia, etc. – names were always very important to Calvino. The novel is divided into nine parts. The first and last parts contain five vignettes between the framing narratives. The old and Khan tries to find significance from Marco Polo's fragmented tales, but the true story is the ongoing debate between the visionary Marco and the skeptical Kublai – hope versus despair. In Se una notte d'inverno unviaggiatore (If on a Winter's Night a Traveller) the story alternates the opening chapters of 10 different novels, and opens with a man discovering that the copy of the novel he has recently purchased is defective, a Polish novel having been bound within its pages. When he returns to the bookshop he meets a young woman, and they find out that their texts are 10 exerpts that parody the genres of conteporary fiction. The book includes instalments of a discourse on the experience of reading. Responsible for the 10 opening chapters might be a literary translator, whose intrigues the fantastical narrative concerns. Calvino seems to consider reading over writing. Italo Calvino died of cerebral hemorrhage in Siena, on September 19,
1985. His later essays Le lezioni americane
– about five central qualities of good fiction: lightness, quickness,
exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity – were published posthumously.
Calvino worked also on stories about the
five senses. Sight and touch were never completed, but wrote about
taste (Under the Jaguar Sun'), hearing ('A King Listens') and smell
('The Name, the Nose'). The stories were collected in Sotto il sole giaguaro (1986, Under the Jaguar Sun). About sight he
once said according to Esther Calvino: "Actually, I have been writing about visibility my whole
life." ('Le Square' by Esther Calvino, in Image, Eye and Art in Calvino,
edited by Birgitte Grundtvig, Martin McLaughlin and Lene Waage
Petersen, Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge,
2007, p. 1) Calvino once noted that there should be a time "in adult life devoted to revisiting the most important books of our youth. Even if the books have remained the same (though they do change, in the light of an altered historical perspective), we have most certainly changed, and our encounter will be an entirely new thing." (The Uses of Literature: Essays, p. 127)
Selected bibliography:
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