Hermit in Paris Read Free Page B

of
Aretusa
came out very late, the following year. Meanwhile Vittorini had read another story of mine and had published it in the weekly
Il Politecnico,
in December 1945.
    By then I had enrolled in the Literature Faculty of Turin University, going straight into the third year, as a result of the exemptions given to war returnees. During 1946 I took all the examinations that the four-year course required, and I even obtained some good marks. In ’47 I graduated with a thesis on the Opera Omnia of Joseph Conrad. I went through university too quickly, and I regret it; but then my mind was on other things: on politics, in which I got involved passionately; on journalism, because I was writing pieces on a wide range of topics for
l’Unità
; on creative literature because in those years I wrote very many short stories and one novel (in twenty days in December ’46), entitled
The Path to the Spiders’ Nests
: that was how that world of poetics evolved from which, like it or not, I have never substantially departed. From 1945, and especially from when Pavese returned to Turin in ’46, I had started to gravitate around the Einaudi publishing house, for whom I began working by going round selling books on hire purchase: I became an editor there in 1947, and am still working for them. But I also felt the lure and influence of Milan and Vittorini, right from the time of
Il Politecnico
. As for Rome, I have a relationship of both polemical rejection and attraction to the city, attracted by the presence of Carlo Levi and other critics such as Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg.
    I have travelled through Europe, both on this side and on the other side of the Iron Curtain; but travels are not events of much importance.
    As for work involving a considerable amount of scholarship and bibliographical research, I produced the edition of
Italian
Folktales
(1956); it took two years of total commitment and I enjoyed it; but afterwards I abandoned the career of the scholar; I am more interested in being a writer, and that already causes me enough sweat.
    [E. F. Accrocca,
Ritratti su misura (Personal Portraits)
(Venice: Sodalizio del Libro, 1960).]

American Diary 1959–1960
    On board ship, 3 Nov. ’59
    Dear Daniele 9 and friends,
    For me boredom has now taken on the image of this transatlantic liner. Why did I ever decide not to take the plane? I would have arrived in America buzzing with the rhythm of the world of big business and high politics, instead I will arrive weighed down by an already heavy dose of American boredom, American old age, American lack of vital resources. Thankfully I only have one more evening to spend on the steamer, after four evenings of desperate tedium. The ‘
belle époque
’ flavour of liners no longer manages to conjure up a single image. That hint of a memory of past times that you can get from Monte Carlo or the spa at San Pellegrino Terme does not happen here, because a liner is modern: it may be something ‘old-world’ in concept but they are built pretentiously now, and populated by people that are antiquated, old and ugly. The only thing that you can glean from it is a definition of boredom as being somehow out of phase with history, a feeling of being cut off but with the consciousness that everything else is still going on: the boredom of Leopardi’s Recanati, just like that of
The Three Sisters
, is no different from the boredom of a journey in a transatlantic liner.
    Long live Socialism.
    Long live Aviation.
    My Travelling Companions (Young Creative Writers)
    There are only three of them because the German Günther [
sic
] Grass failed the medical examination and, thanks to the barbaric law that you have to have sound lungs to enter America, he has had to give up the scholarship. 10
    There is a fourth writer who is going tourist (third) class because he is bringing with him, at his own expense, his wife and young son, so we have only seen him once. He is Alfred Tomlinson, an English