by Gore Vidal
I do remember in 1948 coming across a book by Italo Calvino. An Italian Calvin, I said to myself, fixing permanently his name in my memory. Idly, I wondered what a man called Italo Calvino would write about. I glanced at his first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947). Something about partisans in Liguria. A fellow war novelist. No, I thought; and put it down. I did note that he was two years older than I, worked for the publisher Einaudi, lived in Turin.
During the last year, I have read Calvino straight through, starting with the book I only glanced at in 1948, now translated as The Path to the Nest of Spiders.
Calvino’s first novel is a plainly told, exuberant sort of book. Although the writing is conventional, there is an odd intensity in the way Calvino sees things, a closeness of scrutiny much like that of William Golding. Like Golding he knows how and when to occupy entirely, with all senses functioning, landscape, state of mind, act. In The Spire Golding makes the flawed church so real that one smells the mortar, sees the motes of dust, fears for the ill-placed stones. Calvino does the same in the story of Pin, a boy living on the Ligurian coast of Italy, near San Remo (although Calvino was brought up in San Remo, he was actually born in Cuba, a detail given by none of his American publishers; no doubt in deference to our recent attempted conquest of that unfortunate island).
Pin lives with his sister, a prostitute. He spends his days at a low-life bar where he amuses with songs and taunts the grown-ups, a race of monsters as far as he is concerned, but he has no other companions, for “Pin is a boy who does not know how to play games, and cannot take part in the games either of children or grown-ups.” Pin dreams, however, of “a friend, a real friend who understands him and whom he can understand, and then to him, and only to him, will he show the place where the spiders have their lairs.”
It’s on a stony little path which winds down to the torrent between earthy grassy slopes. There, in the grass, the spiders make their nests, in tunnels lined with dry grass. But the wonderful thing is that the nests have tiny doors, also made of dried grass, tiny round doors which can open and shut.
This sort of precise, quasi-scientific observation keeps Calvino from the sort of sentimentality that was prevalent in the Forties, when wise children learned compassion from a black mammy as she deep-fried chitlins and Jesus in equal parts south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Pin joins the partisans in the hills above the Ligurian coast. I have a suspicion that Calvino is dreaming all this, for he writes like a bookish, near-sighted man who has mislaid his glasses: objects held close-to are vividly described but the middle and far distances of landscape and war tend to blur. It makes no difference, however, for the dreams of a near-sighted young man at the beginning of a literary career can be more real to the reader than the busy reportage of those journalist-novelists who were so entirely there and, seeing it all, saw nothing.
Although Calvino manages to inhabit the skin of the outraged and outrageous child, his men and women are almost always shadowy. Later in his career, Calvino will eliminate men and women altogether as he re-creates the cosmos. Meanwhile, as a beginning, he is a vivid, if occasionally clumsy, writer. Two thirds of the way through the narrative he shifts the point of view from Pin to a pair of commissars who would have been more effective had he observed them from outside. Then, confusingly, he shifts again, briefly, into the mind of a traitor who is about to be shot. Finally, he returns to Pin just as the boy finds the longed-for friend, a young partisan called Cousin who takes him in hand not only literally but, presumably, for the rest of the time Pin will need to grow up. Calvino’s last paragraphs are almost always jubilant—the sort of cheerful codas that only a deep pessimist about human matters could write. But then Calvino, like one of Pin’s friends, Red Wolf, “belongs to the generation brought up on strip cartoons; he has taken them all seriously and life has not disproved them so far.”
In 1952 Calvino published The Cloven Viscount, one of the three short novels he has since collected under the title Our Ancestors. They are engaging works, written in a style somewhat like that of T. H. White’s Arthurian novels. The narrator of The Cloven Viscount is, again, an orphan boy. During a war between Austria and Turkey (1716) the boy’s uncle Viscount Medardo was cloven from pate to crotch by a cannonball. Saved by doctors on the battlefield, the half Viscount was sent home with one leg, one arm, one eye, half a nose, mouth, etc. En route, Calvino pays homage (ironic?) to Malaparte (“The patch of plain they were crossing was covered with horses’ carcasses, some supine with hooves to the sky, others prone with muzzles dug into the earth”—a nice reprise of those dead horses in The Skin).
The story is cheerfully, briskly told. The half Viscount is a perfect bastard and takes pleasure in murder, fire, torture. He burns down part of his own castle, hoping to incinerate his old nurse Sebastiana; finally, he packs her off to a leper colony. He tries to poison his nephew. He never stops slashing living creatures in half. He has a thing about halfness.
“If only I could have every thing like this,” said my uncle, lying face down on the rocks, stroking the convulsive half of an octopus, “so that everyone could escape from his obtuse and ignorant wholeness. I was whole and all things were natural and confused to me, stupid as the air; I thought I was seeing all and it was only the outside rind. If you ever become a half of yourself, and I hope you do for your own sake, my boy, you’ll understand things beyond the common intelligence of brains that are whole. You’ll have lost half of yourself and of the world, but the remaining half will be a thousand times deeper and more precious.”
I note that the publisher’s blurb would have us believe that this is “an allegory of modern man—alienated and mutilated—this novel has profound overtones. As a parody of the Christian parables of good and evil, it is both witty and refreshing.” Well, at least the book is witty and refreshing. Actually the story is less Christian than a send-up of Plato and his ideas of the whole.
In due course the other half of the Viscount hits town; this half is unbearably good and deeply boring. He, too, is given to celebrating halfness because “One understands the sorrow of every person and thing in the world at its own incompleteness. I was whole and did not understand….” A charming young girl named Pamela (homage to Richardson) is beloved by both halves of the Viscount; but she has serious reservations about each. “Doing good together is the only way to love,” intones the good half. To which the irritable girl responds, “A pity. I thought there were other ways.” When the two halves are finally united, the resulting whole Viscount is the usual not very interesting human mixture. In a happy ending, he marries Pamela. But the boy-narrator is not content. “Amid all this fervor of wholeness, [I] felt myself growing sadder and more lacking. Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.”
The Cloven Viscount is filled with many closely observed natural images like “The subsoil was so full of ants that a hand put down anywhere came up all black and swarming with them.” I don’t know which was written first, The Cloven Viscount (1952) or “The Argentine Ant,” published in Botteghe Oscure (1952), but Calvino’s nightmare of an ant-infested world touched on in the novel becomes the subject of “The Argentine Ant” and I fear that I must now trot out that so often misused word “masterpiece.” Or, put another way, if “The Argentine Ant” is not a masterpiece of twentieth-century prose writing, I cannot think of anything better. Certainly it is as minatory and strange as anything by Kafka. It is also hideously funny. In some forty pages Calvino gives us “the human condition,” as the blurb writers would say, in spades. That is, the human condition today. Or the dilemma of modern man. Or the disrupted environment. Or nature’s revenge. Or an allegory of grace. Whatever…But a story is, finally, what it tells and no more.
Calvino’s first sentence is rather better than God’s “in the beginning was the word.” God (as told to Saint John) has always had a penchant for cloudy abstractions of the sort favored by American novelists, heavyweight division—unlike Calvino, who simply tells us w
hat’s what: “When we came to settle here we did not know about the ants.” No nonsense about “here” or “we.” Here is a place infested with ants and we are the nuclear family: father, mother, child. No names.
“We” have rented a house in a town “where our Uncle Augusto used to hang out. Uncle Augusto rather liked the place, though he did say, ‘You should see the ants over there…they’re not like the ones here, those ants….’ But we paid no attention at the time.” As the local landlady Signora Mauro shows the young couple about the house they have just rented from her, she distracts their attention from the walls with a long dissertation on the gas meter. When she has gone, the baby is put to bed and the young couple take a stroll outside. Their next-door neighbor is spraying the plants in his garden with a bellows. The ants, he explains, “as if not wanting to make it sound important.”
The young couple return to their house and find it infested with ants. The Argentine ants. The husband-narrator suddenly recalls that this country is known for them. “It comes from South America,” he adds, helpfully, to his distraught wife. Finally, they go to bed without “the feeling we were starting a new life, only a sense of dragging on into a future full of new troubles.”
The rest of the story deals with the way that the others in the valley cope with the ants. Some go in for poisons; others make fantastic contraptions to confuse or kill the insects while for twenty years the Argentine Ant Control Corporation’s representative has been putting out molasses ostensibly to control (kill) the ants but many believe that this is done to feed the ants. The frantic young couple pay a call on Signora Mauro in her dim palatial drawing room. She is firm; ants do not exist in well-tended houses, but from the way she squirms in her chair it is plain that the ants are crawling about under her clothes.
Methodically, Calvino describes the various human responses to The Condition. There is the Christian Scientist ignoring of all evidence; the Manichaean acceptance of evil; the relentless Darwinian faith that genetic superiority will prevail. But the ants prove indestructible and the story ends with the family going down to the seaside where there are no ants; where
The water was calm, with just a slight continual change of color, blue and black, darker farthest away. I thought of the expanses of water like this, of the infinite grains of soft sand down there at the bottom of the sea where the currents leave white shells washed clean by the waves.
I don’t know what this coda means. I also see no reason for it to mean. A contrast has been made between the ant-infested valley and the cool serenity of mineral and of shell beneath the sea, that other air we can no longer breathe since our ancestors chose to live upon the land.
In 1956 Calvino edited a volume of Italian fables, and the local critics decided that he was true heir to Grimm. Certainly the bright, deadly fairy tale attracts him and he returned to it with The Baron in the Trees (1957). Like the other two tales in the trilogy, the story is related in the first person: this time by the eponymous baron’s brother. The year is 1767. The place Liguria. The Baron is Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, who after an argument at dinner on June 15 decides to live in the trees. The response of family and friends to this decision is varied. But Cosimo is content. Later he goes in for politics; deals with Napoleon himself; becomes legend.
Calvino has now developed two ways of writing. One is literally fabulous. The other makes use of a dry, rather didactic style in which the detail is as precisely observed as if the author were writing a manual for the construction of a solar heating unit. Yet the premises of the “dry” stories are often quite as fantastic as those of the fairy tales.*1
“Smog” was published in 1958, a long time before the current preoccupation with man’s systematic destruction of the environment. The narrator comes to a large city to take over a small magazine called Purification. The owner of the magazine, Commendatore Cordà, is an important manufacturer who produces the sort of air pollution that his magazine would like to eliminate. Cordà has it both ways and his new editor settles in nicely. The prevailing image of the story is smog: gray dust covers everything; nothing is ever clean. The city is very like the valley of the Argentine ants but on a larger scale, for now a vast population is slowly strangling in the fumes of its industry, of the combustion engine.
Calvino is finely comic as he shows us the publisher instructing his editor in how to strike the right tone. “We are not utopians, mind you, we are practical men.” Or, “It’s a battle for an ideal.” Or, “There will not be (nor has there ever been) any contradiction between an economy in free, natural expansion and the hygiene necessary to the human organism…between the smoke of our productive factories and the green of our incomparable natural beauty….” Finally, the editorial policy is set. “We are one of the cities where the problem of air pollution is most serious, but at the same time we are the city where most is being done to counteract the situation. At the same time, you understand!” By some fifteen years, Calvino anticipated Exxon’s double-talk ads on American television.
This is the first of Calvino’s stories where a realistic affair takes place between a man and a woman—well, fairly realistic. We never know how the elegant and wealthy Claudia came to meet the narrator or what she sees in him; yet, periodically, she descends upon him, confuses him (“to embrace her, I had removed my glasses”). One day they drive out of the city. The narrator comments on the ugliness of the city and the ubiquitous smog. Claudia says that “people have lost the sense of beauty.” He answers, “Beauty has to be constantly invented.” They argue; he finds everything cruel. Later, he meets a proletarian who is in arms against Cordà. The narrator admires the worker Omar, admires “the stubborn ones, the tough ones.” But Calvino does not really engage, in Sartre’s sense. He suspects that the trap we are in is too great for mere politics to spring.
The narrator begins to write about atomic radiation in the atmosphere; about the way the weather is changing in the world. Is there a connection? Even Cordà is momentarily alarmed. But then life goes on, for is not Cordà himself “the smog’s master? It was he who blew it out constantly over the city,” and his magazine was “born of the need to give those working to produce the smog some hope of a life that was not all smog, and yet, at the same time, to celebrate its power.”
The story’s coda resembles that of “The Argentine Ant.” The narrator goes to the outskirts of the city where the women are doing laundry. The sight is cheering. “It wasn’t much, but for me, seeking only images to retain in my eyes, perhaps it was enough.”
The next year Calvino switched to his other manner. The Nonexistent Knight is the last of the Our Ancestors trilogy though it comes first chronologically, in the age of Charlemagne. Again a war is going on. We are not introduced to the narrator until page 34—Sister Theodora is a nun in a convent who has been assigned to tell this story “for the health of the soul.” Unfortunately, the plot is giving her a good deal of trouble because “we nuns have few occasions to speak with soldiers…. Apart from religious ceremonies, triduums, novenas, gardening, harvesting, vintaging, whippings, slavery, incest, fires, hangings, invasions, sacking, rape and pestilence, we have had no experience.”
Sister Theodora does her best with the tale of Agiluf, a knight who does not exist. What does exist is a suit of white armor from which comes the voice of Agiluf. He is a devoted knight in the service of Charlemagne who thinks him a bit much but graciously concedes, “for someone who doesn’t exist, you seem in fine form.” Since Agiluf has no appetites or weaknesses, he is the perfect soldier and so disliked by all. As for Agiluf, “people’s bodies gave him a disagreeable feeling resembling envy, but also a stab of pride of contemptuous superiority.” A young man (an older version of Pin, of the cloven Viscount’s nephew) named Raimbaut joins the army to avenge his father’s death. Agiluf gives him dull advice. There are battles. General observations. “What is war, after all, but this passing of more and more dented objects from hand to hand?” Then a meeting with a man who confuses himself with things
outside himself. When he drinks soup, he becomes soup; thinks he is soup to be drunk in turn: “the world being nothing but a vast shapeless mass of soup in which all things dissolved.”
Calvino now strikes a theme which will be developed in later works. The confusion between “I”/“it” “I”/“you” the arbitrariness of naming things, of categorizing, and of setting apart, particularly when “World conditions were still confused in the era when this book took place. It was not rare then to find names and thoughts and forms and institutions that corresponded to nothing in existence. But at the same time the world was polluted with objects and capacities and persons who lacked any name or distinguishing mark.”
A triangle occurs. Raimbaut falls in love with a knight who proves to be a young woman, Bradamante. Unfortunately, she falls in love with Agiluf, the nonexistent knight. At this point there is rather too much plot for Sister Theodora, who strikes the professional writer’s saddest note. “One starts off writing with a certain zest, but a time comes when the pen merely grates in dusty ink, and not a drop of life flows, and life is all outside, outside the window, outside oneself, and it seems that never more can one escape into a page one is writing, open out another world, leap the gap.”
But the teller finally gets a grip on the tale; closes the gap. Knightly quests are conducted, concluded. Agiluf surrenders his armor and ceases to be; Raimbaut is allowed to inhabit the armor. Bradamante has vanished, but with a fine coup de théâtre Sister Theodora reveals to us that she is Bradamante, who is now rushing the narrative to its end so that she can take the beloved white armor in her arms: aware that it now contains the young and passionate Raimbaut, her true love. “That is why my pen at a certain point began running on so. I rush to meet him…. A page is good only when we turn it and find life urging along….”
