The Letters of Italo Calvino, Day IV: The New Yorker This week on Page-Turner, we're running a series of excerpts from "Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985," translated by Martin McLaughlin, which will be published on May 20th (read our first three installments here, here, and here.). In the following letters, Calvino confronts one of his critics, and sends an excited dispatch from the student protests of "68 in Paris to an old friend and frequent correspondent, the writer Michele Rago. Your review of Time and the Hunter in Paragone gave me the rare satisfaction of finding a critic who is highly attentive and who knows how to read (and quote), someone for whom nothing is lost in the page. [...] I am happy that you find Time and the Hunter "nice"; yet the more books are "not nice" (in other words difficult to digest for our habits of thought and tastes) the more they count; the more laborious it is to absorb them, the more important they are. Now, however, I have to be more detailed. Judging this phase of my work in relation to and in opposition to avant-garde European literature does not seem relevant to me, because it is clear that I remain a writer of the artisan school, I like constructing things that close well, I have a relationship with the reader that is based on mutual satisfaction. By contrast, the avant-garde is a human attitude first and foremost not a literature, it involves a different relationship with the work and the reader (and one judges it according to the categorizing, heroic nature of this attitude); if someone, say, "is not born to it," in other words does not have this as his fundamental vocation, it would be ridiculous for him to start. But what I wanted to say was this: I make artisan products but in a period when the avant-garde does this, that and the other; and even though these different fields are not adjacent, they influence each other (just as every field of writing cannot be indifferent to other fields). For instance, now I am reading Heissenbüttel, and I discover that he also explains the things I am doing: I see with interest - and I would like to emphasize this - an analogy between my position (on the level of artisanal products) and his (on the level of the avant-garde). In short, what counts for me is my participation in a collective enterprise, not the "genuinely major results" which you complain I never reach. All that counts is one's contribution to that complex thing that is culture. What are "major" results? It is only a cultural situation that is beyond this one that can give the value of "major" to a result. And even that is only a symbol of a whole combination of results, maybe minuscule but important. I believe that this is a criterion that does not lead anywhere: let's leave it to the weeklies that deal with literary news and interview writers on the possibility of writing "masterpieces." I have to say that I have never bothered with major results. As a young man my aspiration was to become a "minor writer." Because it was always those that are called "minor" that I liked most and to whom I felt closest. But this was already a flawed criterion because it presupposes that "major" writers exist. Basically, I am convinced that not only are there no "major" or "minor" writers, but writers themselves do not exist - or at least they do not count for much. As far as I am concerned, you still try too hard to explain Calvino with Calvino, to chart a history, a continuity in Calvino, and maybe this Calvino does not have any continuity, he dies and is reborn every second. What counts is whether in the work that he is doing at a certain point there is something that can relate to the present or future work done by others, as can happen to anyone who works, just because of the fact that they are creating such possibilities. However, I have to say that your search for the real Calvino - although I do not approve of it in methodological terms - leads to the establishment of a common denominator that I like: "aggression and clear opposition." If this comes out also in stories where I intended to be as detached and impersonal as could be, then there must be some truth in it and in that case I am happy about this. For that reason your article has given me great satisfaction - as you can see from the passion for discussion it has aroused in me - and I am infinitely grateful to you. Yours, Italo Calvino To Michele Rago - Milan Cinquale, 27.7.68 Dear Michele, [...]Can you believe that it was only the day before yesterday that I got your letter of 15 May which had been sent on from Paris? Signs that the backlog of post caused by the strike is only now starting to be sorted out. Let me now give you a quick run-down of our life in the last few months. During the days of the first barricades I was on a lecture trip to Holland with Chichita. Marcelo was fighting on the barricades but was unhurt. We got back to Paris in the wonderful days of the occupations of the Sorbonne and of the first factories. Then a quick trip to Italy to pick up the baby (whom we had left with a former baby-sitter during our trip) and to vote. The transport strike meant we were stuck in Italy; worrying days of waiting in Turin. Meanwhile Marcelo was arrested and kept for twenty-four hours in Beaujon, then released, but by that stage moving around was dangerous for foreign students. In Turin I hired a car that had to go back to France and we drove back to Paris with a load of petrol cans for the trip there and back. There we lived through the extraordinary days of the car-less and metro-less city, with the queues outside the shops. Then there was De Gaulle's speech, the Gaullists" cars going round, horns blaring, trying to penetrate the Latin Quarter and getting sent back, the Sorbonne like a fortress under siege, with mercenaries from Katanga lying in wait, and the young people expecting the worst and cursing the Communists. Nights during which no one did anything but go around on foot, amidst constant alarms, in a climate of amazing excitement. In the atmosphere of debacle that soon took over, we left with my car and the cans of petrol, taking Marcelo to safety. We were constantly expecting to see the famous armored cars which were said to be surrounding Paris and which soon turned out to be the hyped-up story that all sides (the official and traditional sides of the old political game) were relying on. We followed the sad finale on the radio from Italy. From the end of June we have been here in a house we rented for the summer. We will go back to Paris in September (as long as the wave of xenophobia does not create any obstacles for our stay). It seems to me that something really is changing in Europe. We are certainly moving toward a new revolutionary force, which also includes the workers, whereas by now the road the Communist parties are on is as irreversible as the one taken by social democrats on the eve of the First World War. The question as to how far the reaction will move down the road toward fascism does not seem to worry the young revolutionaries. Who knows, maybe that is right, since we are living through a period that is so different from any in our past and things constantly turn out differently from however we imagine them. I cannot formulate any prediction: I know that all I can say either follows old schemes or is totally up in the air. This is the situation that is common to our generations: this was in evidence in France where the only ones out of tune were the writers, even with the best will in the world. Basically I find myself in the ideal position of being a spectator: things are happening that interest me profoundly, that correspond in general terms to what I wanted to see happen (even though I would have been unable to foresee them clearly) and my participation in them is not called for, in fact it is ruled out. This is something that salves my conscience and allows me to relax fully; what more could I ask for? [...] With warmest good wishes. Photograph by Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum