Hermit in Paris Read Free Page A

should be involved in politics. And writers too, inasmuch as they are men. I believe that our civic and moral conscience should influence the man first and then the writer. It is a long road, but there is no other. And I believe that the writer must keep open a discourse which in its implications cannot but be political as well. I have remained faithful to these principles, and in the nearly twelve years of my membership of the Communist Party, my conscience as a Communist and my conscience as a writer have not entered into those agonizing conflicts which have tormented many of my friends, making them believe that it was necessary to opt for either one conscience or the other. Everything that forces us to give up a part of ourselves is negative. I participate in politics and literature in different ways, according to my abilities, but both things interest me as forming one and the same discourse about humanity.
    [
Il Café
, IV.1 (January 1956) introduced Italo Calvino under the rubric ‘
La nuova letteratura
’ (
New Writing
) with a short story (‘
Un
viaggio con le mucche
’ (‘A Journey with the Cows’), later included in
Marcovaldo
) preceded by his replies to a questionnaire set by G. B. Vicari. The same text, with a few variants, is found in Elio Filippo Accrocca,
Ritratti su misura (Personal Portraits)
(Venice: Sodalizio del Libro, 1960) and appears below.]
    Personal Portrait
    I am the son of scientists: my father was an agronomist, my mother a botanist; both were university professors. Among my family and relations only scientific subjects were held in any honour; one maternal uncle was a university professor of chemistry married to another chemist (in fact I had two uncles who were chemists married to two women chemists); my brother is a university lecturer in geology. I am the black sheep of the family, the only one to have studied literature. My father was Ligurian, from an old San Remo family; my mother is Sardinian. My father lived for about twenty years in Mexico, in charge of various institutes of experimental agronomy, then Cuba; he took my mother to Cuba: they had got to know each other through exchanging scientific papers, and they were married during a whirlwind visit to Italy; I was born in a village near Havana, Santiago de Las Vegas, on 15 October 1923. Unfortunately I do not remember anything about Cuba, because before I was even two I was already in Italy, in San Remo, to which my father had returned, along with my mother, to be director of the experimental floriculture institute. All I retain of my birth overseas is a complicated detail on my birth certificate (which in brief biographical notes I replace with the more
accurate
one: born in San Remo), a certain amount of family memories, and my first name, which my mother, thinking that I was going to grow up in a foreign land, decided to give me so that I would not forget my ancestors’ homeland, but which in Italy sounds belligerently nationalist. I lived with my parents in San Remo until I was twenty, in a garden full of rare and exotic plants, and in the woods of the Ligurian pre-Alps, along with my father who was a tireless old hunter. After secondary school I made some attempts to follow the family’s scientific tradition, but my head was already full of literature and I gave up. In the meantime the German occupation had taken place and, following political feelings I had held since adolescence, I fought with the partisans, in the Garibaldi Brigades. The partisan war took place in the same woods which my father had taught me to know since childhood; I deepened my identification with that landscape, and in it I made my first discovery of the pain of the human world.
    It was that experience which, some months later, in the autumn of 1945, gave birth to my first short stories. The first one was sent to a friend, who was in Rome at the time; Pavese thought it was good and passed it on to Muscetta, editor of the journal
Aretusa
. That issue