31 May 2013 14:33:15
For much of his life, Calvino worked for the leftist publishing house of Einaudi, based in Turin. Founded in 1933, Einaudi was the most commercially successful publisher in Italy, its white-spined paperbacks a staple of every cultivated Italian home. The director, Giulio Einaudi, had an imposingly aristocratic manner and a reputation for frivolity, but his staff were handpicked for their stringent moral seriousness.
The bulk of the correspondence in this collection concerns Calvino's tireless work on behalf of Einaudi and his struggle to succeed as a writer in post-fascist Italy. Along the way are letters sent to fellow Italian writers (Alberto Moravia, Natalia Ginzburg, Elsa Morante) in support of abortion and workers rights, as well as bulletins dispatched from 50s New York and Communist Cuba (where Calvino met Che Guevara). The correspondence is distinguished by its sly philosophic humour and mandarin diversity of interests, ranging from the chivalric romances of Charlemagne to French structuralist theory.
Above all, the letters illuminate the politics of book publishing in Italy after the overthrow of Mussolini. Calvino's first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947), was born directly out of his experience as a partisan during Italy's anti-fascist resistance. It was influenced by Ernest Hemingway and Italy's "news-reel" school of realism, which aimed for an unpolished immediacy of the street. Hemingway served as an antidote to fascist rhetoric and obfuscation. Yet Calvino's writing was already marked by a fabulous gothic undertow, with allusions to medieval artists such as Hieronymus Bosch and Albrecht Atldorfer. In his letters, he styles himself both "the fabulist Calvino" and "the realist Calvino": which was the real one?
The novelist and poet Cesare Pavese, Einaudi's managing editor, was among the first to detect the virtuoso fable-maker in Calvino. The 24-year-old was a "squirrel with a quill", Pavese said, whose fiction read like a "folk tale from the forests". On 27 August 1950 Pavese killed himself and, to judge by these letters, his death devastated Calvino and his circle; in solitude and despair, the lugubrious, pipe-smoking author had ingested 16 sachets of barbiturate powder in a Turin hotel. Italy's greatest living novelist was dead at the age of 42, "just when he was at the apex of his literary fame", Calvino writes to a friend. His death was a "tragic ordeal", not least for Einaudi's staff.
Pavese's editorial assistant, the young novelist Ginzburg, was grief-stricken. Calvino's correspondence with her, alternately teasing and affectionate, is one of the delights of this book. From a beach on the Ligurian coast in the hot summer of 1950 he wrote: "I spend the afternoons on some rocks here, belly in the sun, reading Thomas Mann, who writes very well about many things that are completely incomprehensible to me."
Ginzburg, with her trademark crooked smile, was cast as Mary Magdalene in Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1964 film The Gospel According to Matthew. Calvino's relationship with Pasolini was at first admiring: alone among Einaudi authors, Pasolini had revived the Italian tradition of nationalist "civil poetry", which spoke in personal terms of the country's blighted history and politics. His great verse epic The Ashes of Gramsci (1957) was, Calvino wrote to him, the "most important" poem to have emerged in postwar Italy. He and Pasolini shared an interest in Italian dialect and folk literature.
As the 50s gave way to the 60s, however, Calvino came to see Pasolini as a clamorous self-publicist, who had sublimated his literary gifts to film-making. There was a rapprochement in 1973 after Pasolini favourably reviewed Calvino's Marco Polo fantasia, Invisible Cities, in a national newspaper. Delighted, Calvino wrote to him: "Thank you – and accept my best wishes as an old friend." Two years later, Pasolini was found murdered on wasteland outside Rome. His death, apparently at the hands of a rent boy, was the outcome, Calvino wrote to the poet Andrea Zanzotto, of a "D'Annunzian" hankering after redemption through violence: "Pasolini was the ideologiser of eros and the eroticiser of ideology," he concluded.
Towards the end of his life, Calvino moved from Turin (via Paris) to Rome, where he lived in a flat adjacent to Ginzburg's. There he embarked on, among other things, a translation of Raymond Queneau's crackpot account of the Creation, A Small Portable Cosmogony, but found himself defeated by the alchemical-scientific allusions. The Turin writer Primo Levi, with his background in industrial chemistry, was called in to help. Calvino greatly admired Levi, whose concentration camp chronicle If This Is a Man he had reviewed in 1948 for Italy's Communist daily L'Unità. The last letter in this volume, dated 30 April 1985, was addressed to Primo Levi with "warmest good wishes". Four months later, Calvino was dead of a cerebral haemorrhage. Many Italians felt they had not only lost a literary friend, but that the nation's modern literary life had somehow ended. Letters of condolence came from the Vatican and the president. Calvino was 61.
Superbly translated by Martin McLaughlin, these letters place Calvino in the larger frame of 20th-century Italy and provide a showcase for his refined and civil voice. His widow, the Argentinian Chichita Calvino, has been careful to exclude all personal and love letters, as Calvino was jealous of his privacy. I must confess a personal interest. In 1983, as a callow 22-year-old, I wrote to Calvino requesting an interview in Rome. To my amazement, he agreed. In his flat near the Pantheon he leafed through the many pages of questions I presented. "Troppo, troppo, too many," he said. After three hours, Chichita gestured me to the French windows. "Look at our garden." There were hundreds of bougainvilleas – a wash of pink in the Roman evening. Years later, when I called on Chichita she said she remembered the evening all right. "But it would only be fair now, 10 years on, to tell you that I invited you to look at the flowers to mean that the interview was over." She added: "Not for one moment did I think you were interested in flowers." Calvino, as the son of a botanist mother and an agronomist father, was proud to know his bougainvilleas from other flora. Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985 is a charming addition to the Planet Calvino – a place cluttered with sphinxes, chimeras, knights, spaceships and viscounts both cloven and whole.
