What If?

Italo Calvino is one of those rare writers who makes other writers better and new writers possible. The splendid, restless variety in his novels, short stories, tales and essays is a challenge to all who write, provoking in other writers an unhappy sense of their own narrowness and lack of adventurous literary spirit. His eye, his intelligence and his sense of irony demand of veteran writers, or of writers serving their apprenticeships, that they remove blinders, shuck conventions and see. Those demands are also made on readers in the most delightful way.

In such early works as the stories of Marcovaldo, an impoverished urban jack-of-all-trades, Calvino, who died at 61 in 1985, makes the visible more visible. We see the city in new ways, in its details, its visible anguish. It doesn’t matter which city he helps us see: his city, Marcovaldo’s city or our own city. Because he sees, we look.

In other works, Calvino makes the invisible visible. His wonderful “Invisible Cities” features a young Marco Polo sitting with the Tartar emperor Kublai Khan and telling of cities that exist only in imagination, cities of memory and desire, cities of the skies and cities of the dead. Under Calvino’s delighted and poetic spell, we become citizens of all those invisible cities.

He created such people and places, I suspect, primarily for himself. Why should any human being be caged in the world of the so-called real? Today, 14 years after his death, Calvino’s works continue to provoke the imaginations of new readers and other writers. In his own way, with a sense of his playful laughter always present, Calvino was accomplishing what Joseph Conrad somberly insisted was the writer’s primary task: to help us see.

In his 1985 Harvard University lecture on Visibility (collected in “Six Memos for the Next Millennium” but undelivered because of his death that September), Calvino described his process:

“The first thing that comes to my mind is an image that for some reason strikes me as charged with meaning, even if I cannot formulate this meaning in discursive or conceptual terms. As soon as the image has become sufficiently clear in my mind, I set about developing it into a story; or better yet it is the images themselves that develop their own implicit potentialities, the story they carry within them. Around each image others come into being, forming a field of analogies, symmetries, confrontations. Into the organization of this material, which is no longer purely visual but also conceptual, there now enters my deliberate intent to give order and sense to the development of the story; or rather, what I do is try to establish which meanings might be compatible with the overall design I wish to give the story and which meanings are not compatible, always leaving a certain margin of possible alternatives” (my italics).

In the actual work of writing, Calvino probably did not consciously apply this method to his work; it’s difficult to imagine such an unshackled writer lettering these steps on paper and tacking them to the wall above his writing desk. Like most writers, he arrived at his method through the doing of the work. Here he is describing a process that is common to many writers, painters and composers: a mental doodling, a vision of color or form, a humming of a vagrant melody in the mind. These “initial meaningful images” don’t yet exist in the world; how then to make them visible? How to take such images and make the hand--or hands--transform them into something that exists, something that can be seen? Calvino goes on:

“I would say that from the moment I start putting black on white, what really matters is the written word, first as an equivalent of the visual image, then as a coherent development of the initial stylistic direction. Finally, the written word little by little comes to dominate the field. From now on it will be the writing that guides the story toward the most felicitous verbal expression, and the visual imagination has no choice but to tag along.”

That moment of “putting black on white” is the crucial one. It echoes Flaubert’s advice to the apprentice Guy de Maupassant: “Put black on white.” Flaubert and Calvino mean the same thing: until words are put on paper--in no matter how imperfect and tentative a way--they cannot be subjected to craft and thus can never aspire to be art. Getting black on white is the equivalent of the sculptor chopping the marble slab out of the quarry. Carving, refining, polishing or deliberate coarsening will follow that initial action, but even that first step must follow the more crucial stage of imagining.

This process, or self-appointed task of the writer, is no longer as simple as it seems; the hammering distractions of the world, the relentless modern blitz of information, are the enemy of solitude and the imagination. Here is Calvino in his essay on Visibility:

“We are bombarded today by such a quantity of images that we can no longer distinguish direct experience from what we have seen for a few seconds on television. The memory is littered with bits and pieces of images, like a rubbish dump, and it is more and more unlikely that any one form among so many will succeed in standing out.” We all live in that rubbish dump--readers and writers alike. The bombardment of images from television doesn’t so much stimulate the visual imagination as deaden it. Calvino, at the end of his life, understood that the insistent power of commercially manufactured imagery was diminishing human experiences. His essay on Visibility, was intended to “give warning of the danger we run in losing a basic human faculty: the power of bringing visions into focus with our eyes shut. . . .”

That basic human faculty sparkles in all of Calvino’s work. He sees, then shuts his eyes and imagines. He saw comic strips as a child, and after decades of marinating, the images arrived transformed in “Cosmicomics” (1965). He saw Tarot cards and the paintings of Carpaccio and much later takes us on a mysterious imagined journey to the “Castle of Crossed Destinies.” Read his delightful “The Baron in the Trees,” and you can imagine Calvino’s baron in the same tree with the Irishman Sweeney, who joined the nightingales in an old Gaelic chronicle and was brought to new life in 1983 in a masterful poetic sequence by Seamus Heaney. Beside them could be Federico Fellini’s very sane lunatic, who retreated to a tree in the 1974 film, “Amarcord.”

Calvino tells us in his undelivered lecture on Visibility that he is drawn to the literatures of the Renaissance, the Baroque and the Romantic ages, and that enduring passion leads him to the fantastic tale, both as reader and writer. In the introduction to his anthology, “Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday,” Calvino writes:

“The fantastic tale arises between the 17th and 18th century in the same ground as philosophic speculation: its theme is the relationship between the reality of the world we live in and know through perception and the reality of the world of thought that lives within us and directs us.”

Such a relationship exists in almost all of Calvino’s fictions. In all of Calvino’s later tales, the sense of the marvelous, of astonishment, of fantasy remains vivid. In many of his stories, we feel the artist at work. We see him at his desk. We see two crucial words rising in his mind and imagination: What if? Calvino is one of the century’s great poets of “What if?”

He is also a master craftsman. In the above-mentioned introduction, Calvino lauds certain English writers: above all, Robert Louis Stevenson (a favorite, too, of Calvino’s literary cousin, Jorge Luis Borges), along with Rudyard Kipling and H.G. Wells. All made fear visible. They were able to do so through the mastery of craft, which in turn led to huge audiences. Calvino notes the emergence in England of “a kind of refined writer who likes to disguise himself as a popular writer.” And adds: “The disguise works because he doesn’t use it condescendingly but with ease and professional zeal, something possible only when we recognize that without professional technique, artistic wisdom is powerless.”

Calvino’s stories remain examples of the power of his own artistic wisdom. They have not only survived his death; they have found an even wider audience and seem destined to be included among the century’s classic works of literature. In his own brilliant, sensible essay about the classics, published in “The Uses of Literature” (1980), Calvino writes:

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”

Which for me helps define Calvino’s own books. In the same essay he inveighed against the way literature was being taught. What he had to say 19 years ago has even more relevance today, when so many English departments are dominated by theory at the expense of literature:

“Schools and universities ought to help us understand that no book that talks about a book says more than the book in question, but instead they do their level best to make us think the opposite. There is a very widespread topsy-turviness of values whereby the introduction, critical apparatus and bibliography are used as a smoke screen to hide what the text has to say and, indeed, can say only if left to speak for itself without intermediaries who claim to know more than the text does.”

That perfectly describes the experience of reading Calvino. For all of his own refined professionalism and his immense intellectual powers, Calvino remained an amateur in the original sense of that word, which derives from the Latin amator, or lover. He did his work with the excitement and zeal of a lover. He wrote journalism and essays on deadline but managed to bring to them a sense of discovery and freshness; nothing was ever taken off the rack. He absorbed most of the literary theories of his time, turned them around in his imagination, played with them, used them and then went his own way. I never get the sense while reading him that his self-appointed task was to make literary theory visible. He was more like Marco Polo: a visitor to other lands, who came home and transformed his discoveries into something personal and new. If he saw noodles in Asia, he would soon transform them into pasta.

That ability to roam in imagination through the world, seeing and absorbing its wonders--and then asking “What if?”--is the great example he offers to the young writer or to older writers who have grown too accustomed to doing what they already know how to do. He says to us, through the example of his work, that we must be permanently unsatisfied. We must shut our eyes and imagine our own images taking us down the path to the nest of spiders. Like every great writer, he has almost no imitators. These are his stories. They are not a manner, to be adapted like a suit of clothes. They are not a style. They are his work, and nobody else’s. If they inspire the young to trust their own images, their own imaginations, their own way of doing this kind of work, they will have an enduring value beyond their own existence.

“The classics,” said Calvino, “are books which, upon reading, we find even fresher, more unexpected, and more marvelous than we had thought from hearing about them.”

In that spirit, everybody who has not read Calvino should do so. Go and get the books and surrender to their wit, their style, their intelligence and their imagination. Read them precisely because they are not part of the rubbish dump. Read them in a spirit of surrender and joy. Make this a Calvino summer.