8.3.60
Meanwhile, Monday 7 March I crossed Alabama and Georgia by bus, through the poverty-stricken countryside, the blacks’ wooden shacks, the squalid little towns. The sad conclusion is that the American economy has not got the slightest capacity to solve the problems of the underdeveloped areas; everything that was done was carried out at the time of the New Deal; after that, absolutely nothing, and the economic collapse of the South hits you in the eyes, and I am not surprised that they still talk about the Civil War as though it were yesterday; nothing has been done in a hundred years to repair the ruin of the South caused by the War of Secession.
Consequently, my impressions of the South would be very dark if I had not discovered
Savannah
I stopped at Savannah, Georgia, to sleep and have a look at it, attracted only by its beautiful name and by some historical, literary or musical memory, but no one said I should go there, no one in any State of the United States. AND IT IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CITY IN THE UNITED STATES. Absolutely, there is nothing to compare with it. I don’t know yet what Charleston, South Carolina, is like, where I will be going tomorrow and which is more famous. This is a town where nobody ever comes (despite having a top-class tourist infrastructure and knowing how to present its attractions – relating to both history and town planning – with a sophistication unknown elsewhere; but this is perhaps the secret of its charm, that internal American tourism, which is always so phoney, has not touched it). It is a town which has remained practically unchanged, just as it was in the prosperous days of the South at the start of the nineteenth century, in the heyday of cotton; and it is one of the only American cities to have been built with unique urban planning, of extreme rational regularity and variety and harmony: at every second intersection there is a small tree-lined square, all identical, but always different, because of the pleasantness of the buildings which range from the colonial period to that of the Civil War. I stayed there spending the whole day going round from street to street, enjoying the forgotten pleasure of feeling a city, a city which is the expression of a civilization, and it is only in this way by seeing Savannah that you can understand what type of civilization the South was. Of course it is a city of the utmost and lethal ennui, but ennui with a style, full of rationality, Protestantism, England. A boring, fussy city with detailed instructions in hotel bedrooms on the route to follow in case of an air-raid alarm; the most famous personality born here is the founder of the Girl Scouts; in a house where I went (because I was naturally curious to get to know the inhabitants) they served me tea, I mean tea, no whiskey, nothing alcoholic, just tea, the first time this has happened to me in this country. Here too, as elsewhere in the South, old ladies do nothing but talk of their ancestors, though here you understand what being a Southern gentleman or gentlewoman is really about, whereas in Montgomery they are frighteningly uncouth despite being rich – relatively rich for the South – while here everything exudes an air of genteel poverty (the city lives really off its port, which is the first harbour that I’ve seen which has a flavour of old America) and the attitude towards the blacks is one of sentimental paternalism. But tomorrow I will tell you all about
9.3.60
Charleston
Full of wonderful so-called ante bellum houses (pre- the War of Secession) and some even date from the eighteenth century, but filthy and falling apart. And as a city nothing to compare with Savannah.
And now?
I could go to North Carolina where I have been
invited to the University at Chapel Hill.
Or turn back towards the west, to
Colorado, where I have several invites.
And from there fly to Wyoming, where I have been
invited to a ranch.
And from there fly to the far north-west, to Seattle
in Washington State. Having omitted the
north-west is a mistake I cannot forgive myself.
And come back, stopping in Chicago, where I
stayed only a few days and the city certainly
has much more to be discovered.
But I would certainly also like to go back
to the two big cities in California.
I would like to continue to go zigzagging
round the whole continent, as I have been doing
now for the last two months.
Instead,
I am going back to New York to spend the two months that
still separate me from my return to Europe, because New York,
rootless city, is the only one where I could think I have put
down some roots, and in the end two months of travel are not
enough, and New York is the only place I could pretend to reside.
Two months which in the event will be
shortened by a series of invitations,
each one of three or four days and for
which I have already made precise note of the commitments and dates:
in a college of millionaire girls
in Bennington, Vermont
at Yale University
again at Harvard University
once more in Washington.
So now I am tortured by the thought that my
days in New York will fly away in a twinkling,
and the only thing I regret is
not being able to stay long enough in this city
about which for two months I have heard nothing but criticism
and I share all the criticisms that people make about it however
[Unpublished. Calvino tells the story of his journey to the United States in letters sent to the Einaudi publishing house.]
The Cloven Communist
I meet Italo Calvino in San Remo. This is a kind of very brief summer ritual: it never lasts more than ten minutes and those minutes correspond exactly to the sum of our silences. But this time the rule, which has been in force now for many years, is no longer valid: there are too many reasons for making an exception. First of all the publication of a large volume by Einaudi, Our Ancestors, which contains not in any strict order The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees and The Non-Existent Knight; also the author’s journey to America. I do not know where to begin, but I am quite clear in my own mind about my intention to get Calvino to talk for our readers, and I suddenly find that, making a rapid mental sketch of this Ligurian writer, I come up against the image of Cesare Pavese. This is in a certain sense an obligatory point of reference, a way of anchoring Calvino to his roots or rather of bringing together his natural development (everything that relates to the Liguria in which he grew up) and his intellectual formation, and perhaps something else as well. On this occasion there is an important date, one that offers the pretext for reflecting on quite a long period in our history. This is the tenth anniversary of the death of Pavese and it takes place exactly on the 27th of this month. I go back to the pain and surprise of those days, make a quick calculation of everything that has happened since, of what we have become both individually and as a family and it is in this very context that I find the first question to put to Calvino. The rest will come later: his work, his trip to America, his political ideas. For the time being, starting from the memory of Pavese means genuinely anchoring ourselves to our own history. Ten years on from his death, what is your opinion of Pavese’s works? What has time brought out and what has it, on the other hand, left aside? Finally, if you feel you are in his debt, in what sense do you think we should speak of such a debt?
A few weeks ago some friends from Rome came to Turin to make a documentary about Pavese’s city. I took them around, showing them the places where we went together: the River Po, the bars, the hills. Certainly in these ten years many things have changed, more than I expected. Already there is a ‘Pavese era’, with its own very distinct face – that twenty-year period 1930–50 which only now appears to us with a single physiognomy, spanning the war, unified in the look of the streets, in the design of objects, in the way women looked, in the way
people behaved, and also in the psychological climate and the world of ideas. This is already enough to relegate Pavese to the past, but also to reaffirm his worth in a dimension that we previously did not pay enough attention to: he was the author of a fresco of his time which is without equal and which was articulated throughout his nine brief novels, as though it were a tightly packed and complete comédie humaine. How many things are there that, precisely because they are distant and almost incomprehensible today, turn out to be charged with fascinating poetic force! Where on earth can you find these days young people faced with long days and endless nights, who don’t know what to do or where to go, bored because of their own virginity and the void around them, not because they are sated and have a void inside them as they do today? And yet how authentic and credible it is, how we suffer this torment when we read Pavese! And this problem of solitude, what was it? Yet everything is so clear, painful and distant, just as Leopardi is clear, painful and distant.
Pavese’s nine novels have a stylistic and thematic unity which is extremely compact, yet each of them is so different from the next. I used to think La casa in collina [The House on the Hill] and Tra donne sole [Amongst Women Only] the best of them, each in its different way, but I reread recently Il diavolo sulle colline [The Devil in the Hills] which, I remember, was the novel of his that I understood least, when Pavese gave me the manuscript to read. Now I see that it is a story that has many layers it can be read on, perhaps the richest of his novels, containing a highly complex and lively philosophical debate (though with maybe a bit too much discussion) and containing as if in concentrated form all the essence of Pavese the thinker (the Pavese of the diary and the essays), all fused into a narrative which is exciting, first-class, brim-full of things.
Of course no one in Italian literature followed the Pavese route. Neither in terms of language, nor in that way he had of extracting a poetic tension from a realistic, objective story, and not even in his despair, which initially seemed the element that was most likely to catch on. (Even internal suffering is something seasonal; who today wants to suffer?) Pavese has gone back to being ‘the most isolated voice in Italian poetry’, as the blurb read on an old edition of his Lavorare stanca [Hard Labour], a blurb dictated, I think, by himself.
Even I myself, who am meant to be his disciple, in what sense do I deserve that label? What links me to Pavese is our common taste for a style that is both poetic and moral, a kind of toughness, and a love of many of the same authors: all things that I inherited from him, from the five years of almost daily contact I had with him; and that is no small amount. But in my own work, in the last ten years, I have moved away from the climate that prevailed when Pavese was the first reader and arbiter of everything I wrote. And who knows what he would say now! Some critics get it completely wrong, saying that my fantasy tales derive from Pavese’s ideas on ‘myth’. What has that got to do with them? Actually in his final essays Pavese maintained that one cannot endow with a poetic (‘mythic’, he would have said) force images from other epochs than our own, in other words he condemned a type of literature which coincidentally I was to undertake less than a year after he died. The truth is that our ways of working were always different; I do not start from considerations of poetic method: I career down dangerous roads, hoping always to survive through ‘natural’ strength. Pavese did not; as far as he was concerned, there was no such thing as a poet’s ‘nature’; everything was rigorous self-construction based on will power, he never took a step unless he was certain of what he was doing, in literature; if only he had been the same in his life!
Seeing that you have touched on the subject, can you tell us why for some time you have preferred in your writing to work on the reflected images of reality, on the ideas that sustain it, and have moved away from the direct and immediate music of things.
I tried to answer this question in the preface to the volume Our Ancestors which gathers together my three lyric-epic-comic novels, The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees, The Non-Existent Knight. Now that cycle is complete, finished, it’s there for whoever wants to study it or enjoy it; it’s not up to me any more. For me the only thing that counts is what I am going to do next, and for the moment I do not know what that will be. But as I told you earlier, I never start out from an idea of poetic method, I never say: ‘I will now do a realistic-objective story, or a psychological or fantasy one.’ What counts is what we are, and the way we deepen our relationship with the world and with others, a relationship that can be one of both love for all that exists and of desire for its transformation. Then you put the point of the pen on the white page, work out a certain angle so that it produces the black signs which make sense, and wait to see what comes out of all this. (It is also true that you often end by tearing everything up.)
I have heard that you are preparing a book about your impressions of your journey through the United States. Do you think that travelling helps a writer these days? In your case, what positive and negative experiences did you draw from your trip to America?
When I set out for the United Sates, and also throughout my travels there, I swore that I would never write a book on America (there are already so many!). Now, however, I have changed my mind. Travel books are a useful, modest and yet self-contained way of writing literature. These are books that have a practical use, even though, or precisely because, countries change from year to year and in fixing them as you have seen them you record their changing essence; and in such books you can express something that goes beyond the description of places one has seen, a relationship between yourself and reality, a process of knowledge.