Italo Calvino - Why Read the Classics?

Italo Calvino

Why Read the

CLASSICS?

Translated from the Italian by

MARTIN MCLAUGHLIN

Translation copyright 1999 by Jonathan Cape

ISBN 0-679-41524-6

Contents

Translator's Introduction vii Preface 1

Why Read the Classics? 3

The Odysseys Within The Odyssey 11

Xenophon's Anabasis 19

Ovid and Universal Contiguity 25

The Sky, Man, the Elephant 37

Nezami's Seven Princesses 47

Tirant lo Blanc 53

The Structure of the Orlando Furioso 59

Brief Anthology of Octaves from Ariosto 69

Gerolamo Cardano 77

The Book of Nature in Galileo 83

Cyrano on the Moon 91

Robinson Crusoe, Journal of Mercantile Virtues 97

Candide, or Concerning Narrative Rapidity 103

Denis Diderot, Jacques le Fataliste 107

Giammaria Ortes 113

Knowledge as Dust-cloud in Stendhal 119

Guide for New Readers of Stendhal's Charterhouse 131

The City as Novel in Balzac 139

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend 145

Gustave Flaubert, Trois Contes 151

Leo Tolstoy, Two Hussars 155

Mark Twain, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg 159

Henry James, Daisy Miller 165

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Pavilion on the Links 169

Conrad's Captains 173

Pasternak and the Revolution 179

The World is an Artichoke 197

Carlo Emilio Gadda, the Pasticciaccio 201

Eugenio Montale, 'Forse un mattino andando' 209

Montale's Cliff 219

Hemingway and Ourselves 223

Francis Ponge 231

Jorge Luis Borges 237

The Philosophy of Raymond Queneau 245

Pavese and Human Sacrifice 261

Publisher's Note 265

Translator's Introduction

Eleven of the thirty-six essays in this book have appeared in English before.1 The justification for retranslating those eleven pieces stems from the desire to provide an integral English version that corresponds exactly to the important posthumous anthology Perch leggere i classici (Milan: Mondadori, 1991). That volume represents a personal collection of essays on Calvino 's classics, selected in consultation with the author's widow, and based on material that the author had set aside for some such future publication. Calvino's English readers now not only have access to a substantial and coherent sample of his literary criticism but can also gain an insight into what amounts to his personal canon of great classics. Some of the essays appearing here for the first time in English translation will be of particular interest to Calvino's readers in the Anglo-American world: no fewer than seven of them deal with major authors of texts in English (Defoe, Dickens, Conrad, Stevenson, Twain, James, Hemingway), while others contain substantial references to writers such as Sterne (Diderot), Shakespeare (Ortes), Dickens (Balzac) and Kipling (Hemingway).

One of several other insights that this collection offers is the omnivorous nature of Calvino's tastes in reading. Apart from the seven essays on texts in English, Italian literature naturally enjoys pride of place with ten essays, but there are no fewer than nine devoted to French works, four to classical authors from the ancient world, and two each to Russian and Hispanic writers.

The volume also provides an idea of how one of the twentieth century's greatest fiction writers developed as a literary critic, starting with early essays from his militant Communist period in the 1950s (on Conrad,

Hemingway, Defoe, Pasternak), covering his prolific and varied literary interests in the 1970s (English, Russian, French and Greco-Roman writers), right down to some of his final and finest essays written in the 1980s. The essays chart the development of an increasingly sophisticated literary critic, who was anything but provincial in his literary tastes: on the evidence of these essays, even if he had not become an internationally renowned fiction writer, Calvino would have been one of the most interesting essayists and critics of the twentieth century.

Why Read the Classics? also mirrors the fiction writer's own creative evolution, from neorealist to postmodernist, from Conrad and Hemingway to Queneau and Borges. Right from the outset he was particularly interested in literature in English: Stevenson and Kipling had been favourite authors in his childhood, and his university thesis on Conrad (completed while he was writing his first novel, in 1946-47) was a precocious study of the ideas, characters and style of the author of Lord Jim. As a writer of neorealist fiction, he was naturally deeply indebted to Hemingway, so it is no surprise to find that these two authors are the subjects of the earliest essays in this collection. During the 1950s, as his own fiction shifts from neorealism towards fantasy, Calvino moves away from twentieth-century authors: the essay on Robinson Crusoe is almost exacdy contemporary with his longest, and most 'Robinsonian' novel, The Baron in the Trees (1957), and many of the episodes highlighted in Calvino's essay on Defoe resurface intertextually in his novel.

The 1963 essay on Gadda was written just at the time when a new literary avant-garde emerged in Italy which also had a profound effect on Calvino. Gadda's sense of the complexity of the world suited perfectly the mood of the author, who at that stage was turning his back on traditional realist fiction and embarking on the cosmicomical tales that were to confirm his international reputation as a major fantasist. These cosmic interests are reflected in the essays on Cyrano and Galileo: the latter, Calvino claimed in a famous polemic in the 1960s, was one of the most important Italian prosewriters ever.

Many of the 1970s essays in this collection are introductions to novellas or long short stories by authors such as James, Twain, Tolstoy, Stevenson and Balzac. This was part of an attractive initiative undertaken by Calvino in those years, the series he launched with Einaudi entitled 'Centopagine'. He always held a high aesthetic regard for brief texts (of no more than one hundred pages) which avoided the complexity and length of the novel. His

often declared admiration for eighteenth-century Enlightenment values is reflected in the essays on Diderot, Voltaire and Ortes, while his enthusiasm for classic nineteenth-century fiction is evident in the substantial contributions on Stendhal and Flaubert, and in the detailed analysis of Our Mutual Friend, which displays particular sensitivity to Dickens' style and to the comparative efficacy of rival Italian translations of the novel.

One final trend also evident here is worth noting: in the 1970s and 1980s not only does Calvino turn back to Italian classics such as Ariosto, but he also rereads a number of ancient texts, such as Homer, Xenophon, Ovid and Pliny. His creative writing in this period is also informed by this new aspiration towards classical qualities: in the central section of Invisible Cities, for instance, the city of Baucis explicitly recalls the myth in the central book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, discussed at length in the essay in this volume. Similarly the central definition of Pliny in the 1982 essay ('the measured movement of [Pliny's] prose ... is enlivened by his admiration for everything that exists and his respect for the infinite diversity of all phenomena') throws interesting light on the creative work Calvino was composing at this same time: in one sense Mr Palomar (1983) is a modern, or post-modern, Pliny, its smooth prose encompassing his interest in all flora and fauna. Calvino's appetite for French literature also embraces contemporary writers such as Ponge and Queneau, the essay on the latter reflecting the Italian author's interest in that innovative blend of literature and mathematics that was characteristic of the French author and his friends in the OULIPO (Ouvroir de Littrature Potentielle); while Ponge's defamiliarisation of quotidian objects echoes Mr Palomar's attempt to see the universe with fresh eyes, whether it be waves on a beach, the sky at night, or the blades of grass in a lawn. The collection as a whole thus offers a kind of rear view into the everyday workshop of a great creative writer: what Calvino read was often metamorphosed creatively, intertextually, into what Calvino wrote.