Italo Calvino: Year of Living Keenly

As a former student of Italian, I am ashamed to confess that I have only ever read Italo Calvino in translation. I console myself with Calvino’s own preface to his first novel in which the author recalls the profound effect of Italian translations of Russian works on his literary development. In any case, Archibald Colquhoun’s rendering of Calvino’s first novel, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests (1947), is so natural that I would hope this is sufficient for at least some appreciation of the original writer’s merits.

The Path to the Spiders’ Nests is engrossing in its gritty detail, and has been linked to the Neo-realist cinema movement emerging contemporaneously. It tells a warts-and-all story of World-War-Two Resistance at a time when Resistance narratives were about to become controlled by the Italian State, played down and effectively buried by the Christian Democrats to the frustration of the Italian Communist Party of which Calvino was then a member. The story centres around a fearless young boy, Pin, who tries his best to become part of the “adult” games of civil war. He has a savage sense of humour that wins him fans among the anti-Fascist partisans with whom he congregates, but this is not quite enough for him to be taken completely seriously. 

Pin’s principle act of rebellion is purloining a pistol from a German soldier who is seeing his sister, known crudely as the “mattress” of the Ligurian town where the novel takes place. Pin was originally instructed to perform this act by partisans, but he decides to hide the weapon in the banks of the river near the spiders’ nests, a place Pin believes only he is aware of. The concealed gun is part of Pin’s fantasy of becoming his own rebel, not tied to a partisan GAP (Patriotic Action Group) run by adults that do not value him highly enough. Pin’s inclination towards anger and violence throughout the book is seemingly not tied to any ideology, though: at one point he wonders whether, “in his heart of hearts”, he would not rather join the Fascist Black Brigades rather than the partisans. He is seemingly a product of the Fascist period’s fetishisation of violence, dating back to the Fascist squadristi of the early 1920s to the Futurist thought of Marinetti which gave aesthetic justifications for violence.

The Neo-realist squalor of The Path to the Spiders’ Nests makes it a thoroughly engaging, if disturbing read. We feel able almost to smell and taste the partisan life, while the consistent present tense hurries the narrative to an uneasy rhythm expected of their precarious existence. The narrating voice frequently takes on a childlike simplicity, too: “Now it is day, and the big man is pissing on the embers of the fire”. Calvino’s realism - physicalism, even – describes a time when people lived keenly, constantly on alert, and the immediacy of the novel reflects this.

This is perhaps down to the precise historical moment during which the story was written. We read in the preface that, at the end of the war, “[t]he rebirth of freedom of speech manifested itself first and foremost in a craving to tell stories”. Everyone had a story to tell about the war, and Calvino believed this common ground blurred the distinction between reader and writer, such that Neo-realism is not, strictly speaking, an artistic movement at all but, rather, “a many-sided revelation of the different Italys that existed”. Academic Ann Hallamore Caesar goes further than this, tracing the origins of immediate post-War realism to the short story tradition of Boccaccio’s Decameron, in the sense that both seek “to combine the durability of written communication with the immediacy of the spoken”.

The commitment to “telling a tale” behind The Path to the Spiders’ Nests is a common theme in war literature, fiction and non-fiction alike. It is as if the violent, hard-hitting exceptionalism of war time makes writers want to strip back traditional literary artifice to let the story speak for itself. Calvino’s work brings to mind George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, in which we are told of the mud, cigarettes and “that bright red sausage which tastes of soap and gives you diarrhoea”. As the Italian partisans devour chestnuts from mess tins, Orwell’s Republican militia contend with “the tinny taste of bean-stews wolfed hurriedly out of unclean pannikins”. In both cases one of the main struggles of civil war is to remember amid the chaos of daily life that it is supposed to serve a greater struggle in the first place. For Orwell the internal rivalries within Republican forces lead to his eventual disillusionment with the conflict, whereas Pin is too young to realise the ideologies behind the violence in northern Italy. In a way, child though he is, Pin possesses a mature cynicism, a Hobbesian view of man fighting man which removes The Path to the Spiders’ Nests from the forced dichotomies of civil war.

This is what makes Calvino’s preface to his work so striking. Here was a writer with close ties to the Italian Communist Party, like many of his contemporaries, who uses his later preface to show the “anti-political” nature of a key piece of Resistance literature. This may reflect Calvino’s own departure from realism, but it is also bound up with a certain exhaustion implicit in writing up such formative experiences. The preface concludes with the assessment of realist writing as a double-edged sword: by writing up experiences about which there are “so many things to say”, there arises “a barrier between you and that experience”. In other words, experience is the “basic nutrition” for literature, but “the minute it gives shape to a work of literature it withers and dies”. The Resistance novel is a zero-sum game, then, in which the reader is exhilarated and fully invested in the story, while the author is drained by having committed it to writing. 

Reading these wartime accounts during a time of limited travel and social contact, it is only natural that they seem to be written in some sort of mythological “year of living keenly”. Even by the time of Calvino’s 1964 preface, the world had change beyond recognition – Italy’s economic miracle of the 1960s would have been unimaginable to Pin and his comrades. Calvino manages to evoke this intensely lived historical moment through crude physical reality and a quickened narrative pace. Thankfully, all of this comes through in Colquhoun’s translation, and so I do not feel too guilty in choosing English over Italian.