Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings

by Italo Calvino

  A Club

  Could San Francisco’s secret be that it is a city of aristocracies? An old writer of local history books takes me to lunch at the Bohemian Club. This is the first club along English lines that I have seen in America. Everything, the wood-panelled walls, the gaming-rooms, the paintings from the beginning of the century, the portraits of famous members, the library, are exactly what they would be like in the most conservative clubs in London, which I find deeply moving – as always when I see some glimmer of Anglo-Saxon civilization in this country which is of all countries the farthest that could be imagined from England. And yet as its name suggests, this was eighty years ago the artists’ and writers’ club, full of heirlooms of Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, Frank Norris, and even Stevenson and Kipling, who both lived in SF, the former for quite some time, the latter just for a few months, and also Mark Twain who was a journalist here when he was still known as Samuel Clemens. Nowadays the members are all around sixty, and they actually have an English look to them: maybe they are some of the few Anglo-Saxon descendants in San Francisco. So is San Francisco really a conglomerate of élites? The San Francisco publishing world does mostly numbered editions, The Book Club of California publishes editions of classics like Tallone in Italy, for instance collections of letters by Californians during the Civil War with reproductions of the manuscript letter, a fascinating new way of presenting history books by including exact reproduction of the documents. SFrancisco is the city where you find the typographers used by the New York publishers. Even the Italians, compared to the other Italian communities in America, have all the characteristics of an élite, although my lunch at Il Cenacolo, the Italians’ club, did not suggest a major difference in level from similar locales in New York.

  Zellerbach

  Near my hotel is the wonderful new skyscraper housing the headquarters of Zellerbach’s paperworks. Z. is from one of the very few Jewish families who lived in SFrancisco before the Gold Rush (1849 is always used as the watershed between California’s prehistory and history), Jews who did not mix with the subsequent waves of Central and Eastern Yiddish immigrants (who in any case are few in Calif.) and they constitute an aristocracy on their own.

  Ferlinghetti

  Ferlinghetti (who, as you know, is called Ferling and who added that ending out of his admiration for Italians, blacks, and other vital and primitive peoples) is the most intelligent of the beatnik poets (the only one with a sense of humour: his poems are a little like Prévert’s) and he has not left SF for NY. However, at present he is travelling in Chile so I missed the most authoritative guide to the city’s secrets, just as in Chicago I missed out on Algren’s guidance. Ferlinghetti has a bookshop, The City Lights, which is the best bookshop among SFrancisco’s avant-garde. He sells almost entirely paperbacks, as does Discovery, the other literature bookshop in Columbus Ave. The paperback range, however, covers a very broad price band: besides genuinely popular editions (which are almost always only commercial titles) selling at 35 or 50 cents, there is a whole range (vast numbers of books, reflecting an enormous breadth of interest and intelligence in titles) of soft-cover cultural books costing a dollar and a half or 1.75 or even 2 dollars, and which thus come remarkably close to the price for hardback editions which are around 3 dollars. But the paperback public buy paperbacks even if they are dear and would never buy hardback.

  The Provinces

  Life is not different from life in NY, just as the social make-up of the city is no different. But at parties here you sense something that is the archetypal provincial atmosphere: gossip here is no longer NY gossip, it already has a provincial inflection. This is particularly true of the small world and artificial paradise of the Berkeley professors, each one of whom lives in his little luxury villa: these all form a row along lengthy streets climbing up the mountain. Actually, more than provincial the atmosphere is colonial: we are on the Pacific.

  Truth Is Stranger than Fiction

  I chose this hotel, after going round seven or eight others, as it was the most suitable in terms of price, cleanliness and location. No one had recommended it to me. Two days later I discover that Ollier, Claus and Meged, three of my fellow grant-receivers, live there, having all arrived at different times: independently of each other, all four of us chose the same hotel from a thousand small hotels of the same type in this area.

  The Monument

  I always avoid in these notes any description of the landscapes, monuments or tourist trips in the city. But I have to put this one in. Going through a park near the Golden Gate, suddenly you find yourself facing a huge neoclassical construction, all surrounded with columns, reflected in a lake, a thing of immense proportions; it is in ruins, with plants growing inside it and this huge ruin is all made of papier mâché and rounded off with great care. It produces a surreal, nightmarish effect, not even Borges could have dreamt up anything like this. It is the Palace of Fine Arts, built for the PanAmerican exhibition in 1915. Tourist brochures, oblivious to its grotesqueness, point it out as one of the finest pieces of neoclassical architecture in America and maybe this is even true. There is in it above all a dream of what culture was in the eyes of 1915 millionaire America, and the building in its present state is well-placed to illustrate someone or other’s definition of America having passed from barbarism to decadence with nothing in between. Now that the building is falling to pieces, the San Franciscans, who are really keen on it, have decided to rebuild it in stone, with all the metopes sculpted in marble. The State of California is putting in five million dollars, the municipality another five million, the Chamber of Commerce another five million and the final five million will be collected from the public.

  Sausalito

  The sea in the bay and nearby is cold even in summer, and despite its latitude and vegetation (eucalyptus and redwoods) the beautiful marine and woodland areas near SF have nothing Mediterranean about them, because the colours, given the permanently cloudy and rainy sky and the fog which comes in daily, are not even like those of the most gloomy days in Liguria’s Santa Margherita, they are more like the colours of a Scandinavian fjord. Or of a lake: Sausalito, which of the various tourist villages and yacht marinas is the one that has taken on an intellectual hue, full of boutiques, and inhabited by writers, painters and homosexuals, is just like Ascona.

  The Professor

  Like nearly every young writer, Mark Harris (we read but rejected his comic novel Wake Up, Stupid months ago) teaches creative writing in a college, the State College of SFrancisco. What he is specifically expert at is baseball: he has three novels on baseball. When he speaks about American literature, of the difficulty of writing literature in a society which is so prosperous and where the problems still have to be discovered, he says some not unintelligent things. But he is totally devoid of any information about European literatures, of any inkling of what has happened and is happening across the Atlantic. Not that he is totally without interest: he listens in astonishment to even the most obvious information you give him. He does not know that there was a civil war in Spain. (He will certainly have read Hemingway, but in the way that we read about wars between maharajahs in the South Seas.) The philosophy professor in the same college, whom I did not meet but Meged did, knows about only one philosopher: Wittgenstein. Of Hegel’s philosophy he knows only that it is metaphysical and that it is not worth his while bothering about it, while of Heidegger and Sartre he says that they are essayists not philosophers.

  Babbitt

  Mario Spagna (pronounced Spagg-na, and known as Spag), whose family originally hail from Castelfranco d’Ivrea (but he does not know any Italian, just a few words in Piedmontese dialect), and who takes me in his car to see the surrounding country, was introduced to me by his neighbour Mark Harris as your typical, average American. At the age of fifty he took early retirement from his job with Standard Oil in order to cultivate his inner spirit. He writes mainly letters to senators and congressmen. He reads the papers, cutting out the items which concern in particul
ar the local parliamentarians and giving them his advice and approval. He has also written an article which was published: ‘Facing the Mirror’, urging young people to look at themselves in the mirror not out of vanity but to examine their conscience. He has spent several years working out a project for a Temple of Peace and Beauty to be built on the slopes of Mount Timalpais and which should become the seat of World Government of the United Nations.

  Do It Yourself

  I never emphasize in my notes the fact that all of American life, and all their highly active social life, runs without any service personnel, and that American houses, almost always constructed with great efficiency and enthusiasm, have been painted (the walls, that is), and have had stairs put in, and all the various bits of carpentry, etc., carried out by the owners themselves, because of the non-existence or prohibitive cost of labour for such jobs. Tony O.’s beautiful, elegant house (he’s a professor at Berkeley) was entirely built by himself, both the masonry and the wood, from the foundations to the roof, but he is not the only one to have done so. For many of the well-off, middle-class intellectuals, making yourself a home means literally making it with your own hands.

  Europe

  The writer N. M. M.46 is the third of three famous English sisters, who were very beautiful in their day. One was Hitler’s lover, another is the wife of Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the English Fascists. This one, who is a Communist, was the wife of Neville Chamberlain’s son, who died fighting with the republicans in Spain: after that she came to America where she is very active in all the democratic, anti-racial committees.

  Public relations

  The brochure that Mr C., public relations man, has given me about his agency, I only manage to read now, on the bus taking me to his vineyard in Moon Valley (of Jack London memory) where he has invited me to spend Sunday. God, what kind of a host have I ended up with? Here he is photographed with Cardinal Spellman, ‘his good friend’, being congratulated by the cardinal for the mission carried out for the State Department to save Brazil from Communism (thanks to Mr C.’s public relations initiative ‘within a year the tide had turned against the Communists’). Elsewhere the brochure defines public relations (which C.’s staff carry out on behalf of various corporations and occasionally for the State Department): ‘One branch of public relations may deal with creating news and getting it published. Another branch does quite the opposite, to prevent or reduce the impact of unfavorable news.’ We are in the heart of Americanness here: there is a naïvety in the way it presents itself so openly which is paralleled only by certain kinds of naïve Soviet propaganda. I foresee an afternoon of uncomfortable political discussions. But no: in his private life Mr C. is a sensitive, reasonable and discreet person, both in his beautiful house built entirely by himself and full of wonderful Mexican ornaments, and in his vineyard which is maintained without a labour force (there are very few skilled vine-dressers in the area: as is well known, there are no more peasants in America, except in the South; one of his neighbours who has a considerable wine-making firm as a side-line had to get someone over from France to prune the vines), while his vines are nibbled at by deer beneath a fine rain. In one of his books, on Mexico, which he gives me to read, alongside the usual anti-Communist discourse typical of the American press, there are also critical analyses of the Mexican Church which are serious and full of common sense. And the conversation on European and American political issues stays on a level of reasonable liberalism. He too is worried by the Catholic advance (‘And your friend Cardinal Spellman?’ ‘Well, he’s a good guy, but the other priests …’). But he does not dwell on Communism (apart from the inevitable question on the situation of Italian Communism that all Americans ask): public relations also features sensitivity and tact among its characteristics. The cuisine that he and his wife (an architect) prepare directly over the fire is the best that I have tasted in my whole trip.

  A Beatnik Party

  I am invited to a beatnik party. There have been police raids lately to stamp out the marijuana traffic, and someone is always on guard at the door in case the police arrive. (There have also been beatnik rallies in the streets to protest against the ‘Fascist systems’ and to advocate the decriminalization of drugs.) Here, in the house of someone I don’t even know, the only drink is wine, poor-quality wine at that, there are no chairs, nowhere to dance, there are blacks who play the drums, but there is no room, there are several good-looking girls but the nicest ones are usually lesbians, and in any case you don’t really get to know anyone, there is no discussion, and the inevitable drug-addict, who at similar parties in New York is a decent, clean person, here is squalid and filthy and goes around offering heroin or Benzedrine. In short, the ‘bourgeois’ parties are better, at least there are better drinks (I forgot to say that among the crowd at this party there was also Graham Greene, who now lives in SFrancisco, but I did not even manage to see him).47

  Kenneth Rexroth

  is certainly the most notable person I have met in America: I do not know his poetry (he has written about twenty books of verse and several works of criticism plus many translations from Japanese classics and other poets) but as a person he made a tremendous impression on me. An old anarcho-syndicalist, he acted for many years as a trade-union organizer. He is everyone’s enemy, and every now and then bursts out into brief bouts of scornful laughter. His favourite targets are the ex-Communists and ex-Trotskyites of Partisan Review, Trilling and company. He is a handsome old man with a white moustache, he was also a boxer in his youth, and he receives me dressed in an old soldier’s jerkin and a cowboy shirt. He is optimistic about the future: even though there are no political or ideological movements here, technical progress, etc. will bring in something new. In any case even if Hitler had won, if all the anti-Fascists had been killed and all the books burnt, etc., history would have started again from scratch, but everything would have turned out the same, only a question of time. But what are the new groupings, forces, tendencies which might allow us to catch a glimpse of tomorrow’s America? This is the question I ask everyone, always without any great results, and I also ask him it. He says that in the universities where he goes to read his poetry he is encountering a new generation, still rather amorphous, but full of interest and revolutionary urges. The beatniks are a superficial phenomenon, the rent-a-mob rebels of Madison Avenue. But the real young generation is to be found in the universities. There is also the black movement in the South, and Luther King is the great black leader who is now in Ghana (there is now an interesting relationship between the black movement here and the new African states): these are more or less things which I had heard people in NY say, and I’ve not yet managed to meet this famous new university generation, at least not in any illuminating way. Rexroth also talks to me (respectfully) about the groups of Catholic anarchists, Dorothy Day’s movement which I had heard about in New York, where she is active, publishing a magazine rather like Témoignage Chrétien. Also a part of this group is our own author J. F. Powers and the poet Brother Antoninus, who seems to me to be a bit like our Father Turoldo. Rexroth is writing a lengthy autobiography, which he says can be translated in Europe because he has done all the things that Europeans expect an American to have done. Now he works as a literary critic on SFrancisco radio (SF has its own independent radio station, which is very good, autonomous and offers excellent international news coverage. It is the sole source of information here, because the SF newspapers are of very low quality and the New York Times arrives here three days late. I have lived through and am still living through these days of the French crisis cut off from any source of information except the skeletal coverage in the local papers, which are all obsessed with the Finch crime).

  The Chinese New Year

  I was looking forward to the New Year parade (last night, 5 February), thinking it would be a great people’s festival with the famous dragons, but I was disappointed. There was a military parade of marines, local politicians went by in de luxe limousines, then leaders o
f the Chinese community who had the same gangsterish, Fascist look as the heads of the Italian community, young boys all in line like the GIL in Mussolini’s Youth Movement and similar organizations, the anti-Communist committee, and a huge number of young ‘Misses’ all very Americanized. At the end there was a dragon, very long and beautiful, but there was absolutely no sense of popular spontaneity, rather an ‘imperialist’ or if you prefer ‘American-Fascist’ atmosphere which is the first time I’ve come across it on my trip. (But other sources tell me of a very different spirit in Chinatown: in the Chinese cinema, which shows only films in Chinese, produced in Formosa or Hong Kong, they apparently showed films made in Communist China for two consecutive months, before the Americans realized.)