This week on Page-Turner, we’ll have a series of excerpts from “Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985” translated by Martin McLaughlin. What follows is an introduction by Michael Wood, and the first installment of letters from Calvino to his friend Eugenio Scalfari, written when Calvino was a young man at university and in the Army. Scalfari was his closest friend at school; he went on to edit the weekly magazine L’Espresso and found the daily newspaper La Repubblica.

Italo Calvino was discreet about his life and the lives of others, and skeptical about the uses of biography. He understood that much of the world we inhabit is made up of signs, and that signs may speak more eloquently than facts. Was he born in San Remo, in Liguria? No, he was born in Santiago de las Vegas, in Cuba, but since “an exotic birth-place on its own is not informative of anything,” he allowed the phrase “born in San Remo” to appear repeatedly in biographical notes about him. Unlike the truth, he suggested, this falsehood said something about who he was as a writer, about his “creative world” (letter of November 21, 1967), “the landscape and environment that… shaped his life” (April 5, 1967).

This is to say that the best biography may be a considered fiction, and Calvino was also inclined to think that a writer’s work is all the biography anyone really requires. In his letters he returns again and again to the need for attention to the actual literary object rather than the imagined author.

But then what are we to make of the letters of such a writer, and what are we doing reading them? In part we are, I’m afraid, ignoring his warnings and careful distinctions; peeping into his privacy. These letters were not written for us or to us. We see “that young man,” as Calvino later calls his earlier self (May 26, 1977), in all his unruly literary excitement, his half-hearted agricultural studies, his worries about conscription, followed by his departure to join the partisans. He returns from the war a declared Communist but still a diverse and witty stylist. The letters reflect his encounters with the writers Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese, both of whom meant a great deal to him, and record many of his exchanges of thoughts with friends and critics. He travels to Russia and America, reporting in detail on his impressions; resigns from the Communist Party; continues to work at the Turin publishing house Einaudi. He marries the Argentinian Esther Singer and they have a daughter, Giovanna, who appears in the letters as happy, alert, and admirably resistant to education (“she speaks three languages… and has no wish to learn to read or write” [March 1, 1972]). Calvino moves to Paris; then Rome, a place “that young man” once swore he would never set foot in. There are kindly letters to scholars and schoolchildren, quarrelsome exchanges with figures like Pier Paolo Pasolini and Claudio Magris. Calvino “discovers” the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, makes clear his admiration for Carlo Emilio Gadda, thinks about film with Michelangelo Antonioni, and collaborates on opera with Berio.

There are dramatic moments, albeit quietly evoked. He dates a letter to his friend Eugenio Scalfari “the first night of the curfew imposed by the Germans” (September 12-13, 1943); sends a message on a notepad to his parents from a partisan hiding place; in another letter mentions his parents’ being taken hostage and then released (“my father was on the point of being shot before my mother’s eyes”) (July 6, 1945). Calvino is constantly exercised by Italian politics. We have his letter of resignation from the Italian Communist Party (August 1, 1957). He witnesses the events of May 1968 in Paris. He thinks about Brazilian prisons, Palestinian poets, the war in Vietnam. In Cuba he meets Che Guevara.

And again and again, we encounter Calvino the voracious reader: as a young man catching up with Ibsen and Rilke and what seems to be the whole of western literature, paying attention to contemporary Italian writers of all stripes; as a prolific reviewer “reading books to review immediately,” as he says (January 16, 1950); as a man who spent most of his adult life working as an editor in a publishing house. A collection of his letters in Italian is called I libri degli altri (Other People’s Books), a phrase itself taken from a casual, generous remark of Calvino’s: “I have spent more time with other people’s books than with my own.” He added, “I do not regret it.” Perhaps not coincidentally, this avid reader sometimes halts as a writer, wonders whether he is finished, whether his present pause will become permanent. All the late work, beautifully written as it is, shows a greater and greater attention to what cannot be said.

The creative writer doesn’t dominate this correspondence as we might expect. There are interesting exceptions, but on the whole the letters are not being used as practice for fiction or essays. And finally, since he is not thinking of us, Calvino does not have any sort of eye on posterity, as André Gide and so many other modern letter writers do. He is living in the present, not constructing a future monument.

These aspects of the letters may therefore offer something of a surprise to the reader who comes to them from the fiction and who may at first miss the expected intricacy and play. It’s not that there is no fun in the letters (there are plenty of humorous and ironic moments) or that Calvino is ever solemn or pompous; nor am I suggesting that the letters are serious while the fiction is not. But the sense of direct communication, of a man being as clear as he can about a host of matters, complex and simple, is quite different from that created by the artistic density of Calvino’s prose fiction and indeed of many of his essays. In his art, the wit and the irony are ways of reflecting the difficulties of the world while hanging on to his sanity—instruments of reason in a world of madness. “I am in favor,” Calvino says in one letter, “of a clown-like mimesis of contemporary reality” (January 18, 1957). Clowns are often sad and all too sane; but their relation to reality is oblique. Calvino’s writing is part of a great literary project of hinting and suggesting, making memorable shapes and images, rather than giving information or offering explanations. In his letters, Calvino tells rather than shows his correspondents what he means—with great and often moving success.

—Michael Wood

* * *

To Eugenio Scalfari—Rome

[Turin, 10-11 May 1942]

REPLY TO THE LETTER, TO THE POEM

THAT ACCOMPANIES THE LETTER,

TO THE POSTCARD THAT FOLLOWED THE

LETTER AND THE POEM

Friend,

Here we are counting the days that separate us from our return home. Damn these professors who won’t sign you off until the final days, these labs that go on through the month of May, this militia thing. Your exams start on the 15th? Ours probably much earlier, but they’ll go on until the end of June. I start to salivate when I think about the juicy conversations we’ll have when we’re back together again.