Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings

  In 1959–60 Calvino spent six months in the United States of America. In the ten years that followed, his journeys outside Italy became more frequent. In 1964 he married: his wife is Argentinian, of Russian origin, a translator from English who lives in Paris. In 1965 his daughter was born.

  In recent times documents to establish Calvino’s biography have become increasingly rare: his public appearances have grown fewer, his presence is less felt, he no longer works on newspapers, he no longer gets on young people’s nerves by siding with them or against them.Very little is known about his travels since he is one of the few Italian writers who does not write travel books or reportages. His detachment from the official world of literature was sealed in 1968 when he refused a substantial literary prize.

  The author of The Baron in the Trees seems more determined than ever to keep his distance from the world. Has he reached a condition of indifferent detachment? If you know him, you would think that it is more the heightened awareness of how complicated the world is that forces him to stifle within himself outbreaks of hope as much as those of anguish.

  [Written in 1970 for a volume in the Einaudi series ‘Gli Struzzi’, Gli amori difficili (Difficult Loves), following the series’ requirements for biographical notes. (Author’s note.)]

  Hermit in Paris

  For some years now I have had a house in Paris, where I spend part of the year, but hitherto this city has never appeared in the things I write. Maybe to write about Paris I ought to leave, to distance myself from it, if it is true that all writing starts out from a lack or an absence. Or else be more inside it, but for that I would need to have lived there from when I was young, if it is true that it is the first years of our existence, not the places of our maturity, that shape the world of our imagination. Or rather: a place has to become an inner landscape for the imagination to start to inhabit that place, to turn it into its theatre. Now Paris has already been the inner landscape of such a huge part of world literature, of so many books that we have all read, and that have counted in our lives. Before being a city of the real world, Paris for me, as for millions of other people in every country, has been a city that I have imagined through books, a city that you appropriate when you read. You start in childhood, with The Three Musketeers, then Les Misérables; at the same time, or immediately afterwards, Paris becomes the city of History, of the French Revolution; later, as your youthful reading progresses, it becomes the city of Baudelaire, of that wonderful poetry of over a hundred years ago now, the city of painting, of the great novel cycles, Balzac, Zola, Proust …

  When I used to go to Paris as a tourist, it was still that Paris that I visited, it was an already known image that I recognized, an image to which I could add nothing. Now the accidents of life have taken me to Paris with a house and family there; if you like, I am still a tourist, because my activity, my work interests are still in Italy, but of course my way of existing in the city is different, made up of the hundreds of small practical problems of family life. Perhaps, if it identified with my personal vicissitudes, my own daily existence, and lost that aura which is the cultural and literary reflection of its image, Paris could become again an inner city, and I could write about it. It would no longer be the city about which everything has already been said, but just the city in which I happen to live, a city without a name.

  Occasionally I decide spontaneously to set totally imaginary stories in New York, a city in which I have lived for only a few months in my life: who knows why, perhaps because New York is the simplest city, at least for me, the epitome of a city, a kind of prototype of a city, as far as its topography, its visual appearance, its society is concerned. Whereas Paris has huge depth, so much behind it, so many meanings. Perhaps it intimidates a little: I mean the image of Paris, not the city itself; on the contrary, it is the city where as soon as you set foot in it you immediately find it familiar.

  When I think about it, I have never happened to set any of my narratives in Rome, and yet I have lived more in Rome than in New York, perhaps even more than in Paris. Rome is another city which I cannot speak about, another city about which too much has been written. However, nothing of what has been written about Rome can be compared with what has been written about Paris: the only thing they have in common is this: both Rome and Paris are cities about which it is difficult to say anything that has not already been said; and even their new aspects, every change they undergo, immediately finds a chorus of commentators ready to note it.

  But perhaps I do not have the talent to establish personal relations with places, I always stay half in the clouds, with just one foot in the city. My desk is a bit like an island: it could just as well be in some other country as here. And besides, cities are turning into one single city, a single endless city where the differences which once characterized each of them are disappearing. This idea, which runs through my book Invisible Cities, came to me from the way that many of us now live: we continually move from one airport to another, to enjoy a life that is almost identical no matter what city you find yourself in. I often say, and I have said it so often that I have now become a bit bored with it, that in Paris I have my country home, in the sense that as a writer I can conduct part of my activity in solitude, it does not matter where, in a house isolated in the midst of the countryside, or on an island, and this country house of mine is right in the middle of Paris. In this way, while the part of my life that is connected with my work takes place entirely in Italy, I come here when I can or have to be on my own, something that is easier for me to do in Paris.

  Italy, or at least Turin and Milan, is an hour from here; I live in an area from where it is easy to get to the motorway and then to Orly airport. You could say that at the rush hour when the city streets are blocked by traffic, I can get to Italy more quickly than, say, to the Champs Elysées. I could almost commute; we are now close to a time when it will be possible to live in Europe as though it were one single city.

  At the same time, we are close to the time when no city will be able to be used as a city: you waste more time on short trips than on long journeys. When I am in Paris, you could say that I never leave this study; from long-standing habit, every morning I go as far as St Germain-des-Prés to buy the Italian papers, using the Métro. So I am not really much of a flâneur, the man who strolls through the Paris streets, that traditional figure immortalized by Baudelaire. That’s it: international journeys as much as short journeys in the city are no longer an exploration of a series of different places: they are simply movements from one point to another between which there is an empty interval, a discontinuity, a parenthesis above the clouds if it is an air trip, and a parenthesis beneath the earth if it is a city journey.

  I have always been at ease using the Métro, from the time I first arrived in Paris as a young man and discovered that this means of transport, so simple to use, put the whole city at my disposal. And perhaps there is something of my fascination with the underground world in this relationship of mine with the Métro: the novels of Jules Verne I like most are The Black Indies and Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Or it is the anonymity that attracts me: these crowds in which I can observe everyone one by one and at the same time disappear totally myself.

  Yesterday on the Métro there was a man with bare feet: not a gipsy or a hippie, a man with glasses like me and so many others, reading the paper, looking a bit like an academic, the usual absent-minded professor type who had forgotten to put on his socks and shoes. And it was a rainy day, and he was walking about bare-foot, and nobody was looking at him, no one seemed interested. The dream of being invisible … When I find myself in an environment where I can enjoy the illusion of being invisible, I am really happy.

  The exact opposite of how I feel when I have to talk on the television, and I feel the camera pointing at me, nailing me to my visibility, to my face. I believe that writers lose a lot when they are seen in the flesh. In the old days the really popular writers were totally anonymous, just a name on the book cover, a
nd this gave them an extraordinary mystique. Gaston Leroux, Maurice Leblanc (just to mention a couple who have spread the myth of Paris among thousands of people) were very popular writers about whom no one knew anything; there have been even more popular authors whose first name was not even known, just an initial. I believe that this is the ideal condition for a writer, close to anonymity: that is when his maximum authority develops, when the writer does not have a face, a presence, but the world he portrays takes up the whole picture. Like Shakespeare, of whom no portrait remains that can help us understand what he was like, nor any information to explain anything genuinely about him. Today, by contrast, the more the author’s figure invades the field, the more the world he portrays empties; then the author himself fades, and one is left with a void on all sides.

  There is an invisible, anonymous point which is the one from which the author writes, and that is why it is difficult for me to define the relationship between the place where I write and the city surrounding that space. I can write really well in hotel rooms, in that kind of abstract, anonymous space which hotel rooms are, where I find myself facing the blank page, with no alternative, no escape. Or perhaps this is an idealized condition which worked most of all when I was younger, and the world was there just outside the door, packed with signs, accompanying me everywhere: it was so physical that all I had to do was detach myself from it just a short step to write about it. Now something must have changed, I write well only in a space which is mine, with books to hand, as though I always needed to consult something or other. Maybe it is not so much for the books themselves, but for a kind of interior space they form, as though I identified myself with my ideal library.

  And yet, I never manage to keep a library of mine together: I always have some books here, others there: when I need to consult a book in Paris, it is always a book I have in Italy, and when I have to consult a book in Italy it is always a book in my Paris house. This need to consult books when writing is a habit I have developed over the last ten years or so; previously it was not like that: everything I wrote had to come from memory, and formed part of lived experience. Even all my cultural references had to be something I carried within me, was part of me, otherwise it did not conform to the rules, it was not something I could put on to the page. But now it is exactly the opposite: even the world has become something I consult every so often, in fact the leap from this bookshelf to the world outside is not as great as it seems.

  I could say then that Paris … well, here’s what Paris is: it is a giant reference work, a city which you can consult like an encyclopaedia: whatever page you open gives you a complete list of information that is richer than that offered by any other city. Take the shops, which is the most open, communicative discourse a city uses to express itself: we all read a city, a street, a stretch of pavement, by following the row of shops. There are shops which are chapters of a treatise, shops which are entries in an encyclopaedia, shops which are pages of a newspaper. In Paris there are cheese shops where hundreds of cheeses, all of them different, are displayed, each labelled with its own name, cheeses covered in ash, cheeses covered in walnuts: a kind of museum or Louvre of cheese. They are aspects of a civilization which has allowed the survival of differentiated forms on a scale big enough to make their production economically profitable, while still maintaining their raison d’être in presupposing a choice, a system to which they belong, a language of cheeses. But above all this is a triumph of the spirit of classification and nomenclature. So if tomorrow I start writing about cheeses, I can go out and consult Paris like an enormous cheese encyclopaedia. Or consult certain grocers where you recognize still what nineteenth-century exoticism was, a mercantile exoticism that was part of early colonialism, the spirit that inspired the Universal Exposition.

  Paris has the kind of shops where one feels that this is the city which gave shape to that particular way of regarding culture which is the museum, and the museum in turn has given its form to the most varied activities in daily life, so that the galleries in the Louvre and the shop-windows form a continuum. Let’s say that everything in the street is ready to go into the museum, or that the museum is ready to absorb the street. It is no accident that my favourite museum is the one dedicated to the life and history of Paris, the Musée Carnavalet.

  This idea of the city as encyclopaedic discourse, as the collective memory, is part of a whole tradition: think of the Gothic cathedrals in which every architectural and ornamental detail, every space and element, referred to notions that were part of a global wisdom, was a sign that found echoes in other contexts. In the same way we can ‘read’ the city like a reference work, just as we read Notre-Dame (even though we read it through Viollet-Le-Duc’s restorations), capital by capital, pluvial after pluvial. And at the same time we can read the city as the collective unconscious: the collective unconscious is a huge catalogue, an enormous bestiary; we can interpret Paris as a book of dreams, an album of our unconscious, a catalogue of horrors. So on my walks as a father, accompanying my little girl, Paris opens up to my consultations with the bestiaries of the Jardin des Plantes, the serpent and reptile sections where iguanas and chameleons stay happily together: they are fauna of prehistoric epochs, and at the same time they are the dragons’ cave which our civilization drags along behind it.

  The monsters and ghosts of the unconscious which are visible outside us are an old speciality of this city which not by chance was the capital of surrealism. Because Paris, even before Breton, contained everything that then became the raw materials of the surrealist vision; and surrealism later left its mark, its traces, recognizable throughout the city, if nothing else in a particular way of appreciating the power of images, as in the surrealist bookshops, or certain small cinemas, like Le Styx, for instance, which specializes in horror films.

  The cinema too, in Paris, is a museum, or encyclopaedia to consult, not just for the quantity of films in the Cinémathèque, but for the whole network of cinemas in the Latin Quarter: those tiny, foul-smelling cinema halls, where you can see the latest film by a new Brazilian or Polish director, or old movies from the silent age or the Second World War. With a bit of careful study and a bit of luck every spectator can reconstruct the history of cinema piece by piece: I, for instance, have a weakness for 1930s films, because they were the years when cinema was for me the whole world, and in this area I can find some real treats, let’s say, in the sense of a search for lost time, seeing films from my childhood, or catching films I had missed when I was young, which I thought I had missed for ever, whereas in Paris you can always hope to find what you had thought lost, your own past or someone else’s. So yet another way to see this city: like a huge lost-property office, a little bit like the moon in Orlando Furioso which gathers up everything that has been lost in the world.

  So now we are entering into the limitless Paris adored by collectors, this city which invites you to make collections of everything, because it accumulates and classifies and redistributes, where you can search as in an archaeological excavation. The collector’s experience can still be an existential adventure, a search for the self through objects, an exploration of the world which is at the same time a realization of the self. But I cannot claim to have the collector’s instinct, or rather that instinct reawakens only with impalpable things like the images of old films, a collection of memories, of black-and-white shadows.

  I have to draw the conclusion that Paris for me is the city of my maturity: in the sense that I no longer see it in the spirit of a discovery of the world, which is the adventure that belongs to youth. In my relations with the world I have moved from exploration to consultation, that is to say that the world is a collection of data which is there, independent of me, data which I can compare, combine, transmit, maybe even occasionally enjoy, but always slightly from the outside. Beneath my house there is an old suburban railway line, the Paris-Ceinture, almost unused now, but twice a day a little train still goes by and then I remember Laforgue’s lines, which say


  Je n’aurai jamais d’aventures;

  Qu’il est petit, dans la Nature,

  Le chemin d’fer Paris-Ceinture!

  (I shall never have any adventures;

  How small in the middle of Nature

  Is the Paris-Ceinture suburban line!)

  [This text was derived from an interview with Valerio Riva for Swiss Italian TV in 1974. It was published in the same year in a limited edition, in Lugano by Edizioni Pantarei with four drawings by Giuseppe Ajmone. (Author’s note.)]

  Where I Was on 25th April 1945

  There had been a fire in a wood: I remember the long line of partisans coming down between burnt pine-trees, the hot ash under the soles of our feet, the trunks still white-hot in the night.

  It was a march that was different from the others in our life of constant movement in those woods. We had finally received the order to come down from the hills to attack our own town, San Remo; we knew the Germans were retreating from the Riviera; but we did not know which strongholds they still held. These were days when everything was shifting and our leaders were certainly kept informed on an hourly basis; but here I am trying to stick just to my memories as an ordinary partisan in the Garibaldi Brigades following my detachment and limping because of an abscess on my foot (from the moment the frost had hardened and crumpled the leather of my boots, my feet had constantly been plagued by sores). It seemed certain that this time Germany was done for, but we had had too many illusions in those years and too often we had been disappointed: so we preferred not to make any forecasts.