The Letters of Italo Calvino, Day V : The New Yorker

This week on Page-Turner, we've been running a series of excerpts from ?Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985,? translated by Martin McLaughlin, which will be published on May 20th (read our first three installments here, here, here, and here.). In this final installment of the letters, from when the writer was in his fifties, Calvino spars with, compliments, and, in one case, attacks three of his eminent literary contemporaries: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gore Vidal, and Claudio Magris. Pasolini had reviewed Calvino?s ?Invisible Cities,? and Calvino argues with him about weighing in on ?current affairs.? He praises a review Vidal published of his work in The New York Review of Books. In his highly critical letter to Magris, he strongly opposes an anti-abortion piece that Magris wrote, and declares a pause in their friendship (they later became friendly again).

To Pier Paolo Pasolini?Rome

Paris, 7.2.73

Dear Pier Paolo,

Only yesterday did I read your wonderful article and I am happy that writing books can still hold surprises for me, the surprise of a dialog like this, a discourse like yours which is full of a direct approach to the text and lively intelligence, far removed from any of the predictable mechanisms of critical discourse. And happy that my book has provided the occasion for new, ingenious, and focused reflections like the ones you put forward: in all of them I recognize my book from new angles which are already encouraging me to find new developments and links to your discussion. Above all this looms the extraordinary image of the universal future, stretching out in its entirety, where sense is lost, so that knowledge too becomes memory. And look, this is already a Platonic motif and is linked to the Platonism you mention shortly afterwards. You are the first critic to point out this Platonic component in my work, which seems to me to be central. And you rightly move on to explain, in a move that resonates with those in the book, how the subject matter of dreams is real.

A brief word on our having ?stopped being close to one another? in the last ten years or so. What you mean is that it is you who have gone very far away: not just with the cinema, which is the thing that is furthest from the mental rhythms of a bookworm, which is what I have become in the meantime, but because also your use of words has shifted to communicating a presence traumatically as though projecting it onto big screens: a mode of rapid intervention on the present that I ruled out from the start. All this on the one hand, whereas the kind of discourse into which you put the best of yourself is made up of extremely minute judgments that are precisely argued, based on a meticulous micro-analysis of words and people (talents you have not lost, as these well-honed critical interventions of yours testify), and this is the type of discourse that can only have indirect influences, after doing the rounds, at a distance of years and years, just like poetic discourse.

By contrast, being present in order to have your say on ?current affairs? according to the newspapers, using the newspapers? measure of what is topical, engaging directly with public opinion, certainly gives one a great sensation of being alive, but this is life in the world of effects, not in the world of slow reasoning and reflection. It is thus your ?way of having chosen topicality? which has divided us, not mine, which doesn?t exist. I quickly realized that I had no place in actuality and I stayed on the sidelines, maybe champing at the bit, but still remaining silent, as you say yourself moreover; in any case, even if I had spoken out, there would not have been anyone prepared to listen and reply to me. Where did you ever see in my behavior any ?a priori commitment to the student cause?? As for an ?openness toward the Neo-avant-garde,? I?ll let that go: I would always welcome a change in the mental climate of Italian literature, if ever there were any hint of it, and even though this or that set of poetics does not persuade me, I am always interested in what can come out of the interaction with other poetics. But my reservations and allergies toward the new politics are stronger than the urge to oppose the old politics, and so I no longer had a position to uphold since I had ruled them out one by one, and this also took away my curiosity to know people, follow developments, distinguish positions. And not possessing any competence or qualifications to express my judgments, it is natural that I stayed silent, both publicly and in private, reinforced in this attitude of mine by the lack of success that yours and others? interventions encountered, interventions which in any case I did not feel I could associate myself with at all.

What you say about my image starting to turn yellow and fade matches precisely my intentions. Since the dead are no longer in a place where too many things no longer belong to them, they must feel a mixture of spite and relief, no different from my state of mind. It is no accident that I?ve gone to live in a big city where I know nobody and no one knows I exist. In this way I have been able to realize a kind of existence which was at least one of the many existences I had always dreamt of: I spend twelve hours a day reading, on most days of the year.

[?] Thank you once more and accept my best wishes as an old friend.

Your,

Italo Calvino

* * *

To Gore Vidal?Rome

San Remo, 20 June 1974

Dear Gore Vidal,

I have started this letter many times and interrupted it many times. I was looking for excuses: like I had to find your address, like I did not know whether you were in Rome or New York. I tried to write to you in English, but the things I thought out in Italian did not sound right when translated into English, and the things I thought in English did not sound good when I recast them in Italian. The problem is that you have written a critical essay on me that is as spontaneous and friendly as a letter, and now I would like to write you a letter that is as carefully thought out and analytical as a critical essay in order to convey to you how happy I was at reading it.

Happy not just at being read with such enthusiasm and intelligence and affinity, and not just because it was written by you, in other words by a writer whose biting irony, capacity to transform reality, and precise adherence to our own times had always attracted me, but also for the way in which your review was written, which seems admirable to me for two reasons.

First: one feels that you wrote this article for the pleasure of writing it, alternating warm praise with criticisms and reservations in a totally sincere tone, and with constant freedom and humor, and this feeling of pleasure is communicated irresistibly to the reader.

Second: I have always thought that it is difficult to extract from my books, each of which is so different from the others, a unitary discourse, an overall definition, maybe even just the outline of an author that is not also split up. Now you?despite exploring my ?uvre in the way it demands to be explored, namely in a non-systematic way, moving like someone out for a walk who stops here, but moves on there without looking around, over there wanders about in an occasional diversion?you manage to establish a general sense in everything I have written, almost a philosophy??the whole and the many? etc.? and I am very happy when someone manages to find a philosophy in the products of my so unphilosophical mind.

?The conclusion of your review contains a statement that seems to me to be important in an absolute way. I don?t dare to wonder whether it is true if applied to myself, but it is true as a literary ideal for each of us: the aim that each one of us has to reach has to be that ?writer and reader become one, or One.? And to encompass both your discourse and mine in a perfect circle, we will say that this One is the Whole.

I was keen to convey to you these general considerations that your essay inspired in me. On another occasion perhaps I will reply to you more analytically, point by point. For the moment I just wanted to say this: you note that already in 1958 I was worried about the destruction of the environment, and this recognition makes me happy because it comes from you who have always been in the front line in the defense of ecology. Also on this topic is A Plunge into Real Estate which I will send you in Italian. There is a translation of it (by D. S. Carne-Ross) in a paperback anthology: Six Modern Italian Novellas, edited by W. Arrowsmith, New York, Permabook, 1964.

I am writing to you from San Remo, from the house where the events in that novella took place?twenty years ago?and since then things have only changed in terms of quantity, in other words, our house is more and more surrounded by a horrible forest of reinforced concrete, and our family is always having to deal with some entrepreneur: this time to sell it for good.

But I am here only passing through, in this Riviera which now only represents the past for me, and which I now no longer recognize. Now I spend the summers with my wife and daughter in a pine-forest in the Tuscan Maremma, two hours from Rome. I have a small house in an estate (alas!) but greenness is respected there more than elsewhere. My address is: Pineta di Roccamare, Castiglione della Pescaia (Grosseto). If you come and see us, I hope to be able to express my thanks personally to you better than by letter.

Italo Calvino

* * *

To Claudio Magris?Trieste

[Paris, 3-8 February 1975]

Dear Prof. Magris,

I was very disappointed to read your article ?Gli sbagliati? [The Deluded]. It pained me a lot not only that you had written it but above all because you think in this way.

Bringing a child into the world makes sense only if this child is wanted consciously and freely by its two parents. If it is not, then it is simply animal and criminal behavior. A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people. If this is not the case, then humanity becomes?as it is already to a large extent?no more than a rabbit-warren. But this is no longer a ?free-range? warren but a ?battery? one, in the conditions of artificiality in which it lives, with artificial light and chemical feed.

Only those people?a man and a woman?who are a hundred percent convinced that they possess the moral and physical possibility not only of rearing a child but of welcoming it as a welcome and beloved presence, have the right to procreate. If this is not the case, they must first of all do everything not to conceive, and if they do conceive (given that the margin for unpredictability continues to be high) abortion is not only a sad necessity, but a highly moral decision to be taken with full freedom of conscience. I do not understand how you can associate abortion with an idea of hedonism or the good life. Abortion is [a] terrifying thing [? ].

In abortion the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman. Also for any man with a conscience every abortion is a moral ordeal that leaves a mark, but certainly here the fate of the woman is in such a disproportionate condition of unfairness compared with the man?s, that every male should bite his tongue three times before speaking about such things. Just at the moment when we are trying to make less barbarous a situation which for the woman is truly terrifying, an intellectual [uses] his authority so that women have to stay in this hell. Let me tell you, you are really irresponsible, to say the least. I would not mock the ?hygienic-prophylactic measures? so much; certainly you will never have to undergo a scraping of your womb. But I?d like to see your face if they forced you to have an operation in the filth and without any recourse to hospitals under pain of imprisonment. Your ?integrity of life? vitalism is to say the least fatuous. For Pasolini to say these things does not surprise me. But I thought that you knew what it costs and what the responsibilities are if you bring other lives into this world.

I am sorry that such a radical divergence of opinion on these basic ethical questions has interrupted our friendship.

Photograph by Isolde Ohlbaum/laif/Redux.

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/05/the-letters-of-italo-calvino-day-v.html

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