Calvino - Why read the classics?

Italo Calvinos works include Numbers in the Dark, The Road to San Giovanni, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, The Baron in the Trees, If on a Winters Night a Traveler, Invisible Cities, Marcovaldo, and Mr. Palomar. Calvino died in 1985.

Also by ITALO CALVINO

The Baron in the Trees
The Castle of Crossed Destinies
Cosmicomics
Difficult Loves
Fantastic Tales
If on a Winters Night a Traveler
Invisible Cities
Italian Folktales
Marcovaldo
Mr. Palomar
The Nonexistent Knight and the Cloven Viscount
Numbers in the Dark
The Road to San Giovanni
Six Memos for the Next Millennium
t zero
Under the Jaguar Sun
The Uses of Literature
The Watcher and Other Stories

Eleven of the thirty-six essays in this book have appeared in English before. 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 Calvinos classics, selected in consultation with the authors widow, and based on material that the author had set aside for some such future publication. Calvinos 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 Calvinos 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 Calvinos 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 centurys 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 writers 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 exactly contemporary with his longest, and most Robinsonian novel, The Baron in the Trees (1957), and many of the episodes highlighted in Calvinos 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. Gaddas 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 Ovids Metamorphoses, discussed at length in the essay in this volume. Similarly the central definition of Pliny in the 1982 essay (the measured movement of [Plinys] 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. Calvinos appetite for French literature also embraces contemporary writers such as Ponge and Queneau, the essay on the latter reflecting the Italian authors 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 Ponges defamiliarisation of quotidian objects echoes Mr Palomars 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.