Italo Calvino - Numbers in the Dark: And Other Stories

Italo Calvino began writing in his teens: short stories, fables, poetry and plays. The theatre was his first vocation and perhaps the one that he spent most time on. There are many surviving works from this period which have never been published. Calvino's extraordinary capacity for self-criticism and self-referential analysis soon led him to give up the theatre. In a letter to his friend Eugenio Scalfari written in 1945 he announces laconically, Tve switched to stories. Written in capitals and covering a whole page the news must have been important indeed.

From then on there was never a period when Calvino was not writing. He wrote every day, wherever he was and in whatever circumstances, at a table or on his knee, in planes or hotel rooms. It is not surprising therefore that he should have left such a huge amount of work, including innumerable stories and fables. In addition to those he brought together in various collections, there are many which only appeared in newspapers and magazines, while others remained unpublished.

The texts collected in this volume unpublished and otherwise - are just some of those written between 1943 - when the author was still in his teens - and 1984.

Some pieces were initially planned as novels but later became stories, a process that was not unusual with Calvino, who reworked a number of sections from an unpublished novel, The White Schooner, for his Collected Stories of 1958.

Other pieces in this present volume came in response to specific requests: Glaciation, for example might never have been written if a Japanese distillery producing, amongst other things, a whisky which is extremely successful in the Far East, had not decided to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary by commissioning stories from some well-known European writers. There was only one condition: that an alcoholic drink of some kind should be mentioned in the text. Glaciation first appeared in Japanese before being published in Italian. Another story with a curious history is The Burning of the Abominable House. There had been a somewhat vague request from IBM: how far was it possible to write a story using the computer? This was in 1973 in Paris when it wasn't easy to gain access to data processing equipment. Undaunted, Calvino gave the project a great deal of his time, carrying out all the operations the computer was supposed to do himself. The story was finally published in the Italian edition of Playboy, Calvino didn't really feel this was a problem, though he had originally planned for it to be published in Oulipo as an example of ars combinatona and a challenge to his own mathematical abilities.

As far as the stories that open this collection are concerned, almost all previously unpublished and very short - Calvino referred to them as raccontini, little stories - it may be useful to know that in a note found amongst his juvenilia and dated 1943, he wrote: One writes fables in periods of oppression. When a man cannot give clear form to his thinking, he expresses it in fables. These little stories correspond to a young man's political and social experiences during the death throes of Fascism. When the times were right, he added with the end of the war and Fascism, that is the fable would no longer be necessary and the writer would be able to move on to other things. But the tides and dates of many of the pieces in this collection and of other works not included here suggest that despite these youthful reflections, Calvino did in fact continue to write fables for many years thereafter.

Also included in this volume are one or two pieces, such as The Call of the Water, which, while neither stories nor fables in the strict sense of those words, are now very difficult to find elsewhere and definitely worth the reader's attention.

In other cases, texts that may seem unconnected to the main body of his work are part of projects that Calvino had clearly developed in his mind but did not have time to finish.

Esther Calvino

Fables and Stones
1943-1958

I stepped off the pavement, walked backwards a few paces looking up, and, from the middle of the street, brought my hands to my mouth to make a megaphone and shouted towards the top stories of the block: Teresa!