Calvino was brave because he sat down to write what interested him – not what might interest other people. He had a day job in a publishing house, and he sought neither celebrity nor wealth. He was the extreme other of the creative writing course wannabe.
He loved the short fictional form, which was a kind of mathematical equation to him, but he liked to go on playing with the same ideas… ”
–Jeanette Winterson, An exploration of seminal novelist Italo Calvino, through his writing
The wild inventions of the Italian writer are the wellspring of 21st-century fiction
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/fiction/article6243460.ece
Three things stood out when reading Jeanette’s article on Italo Calvino.
“…Calvino was a writer who liked to disappear. He did not enjoy talking about himself…”
“…after the Second World War….In the free West art was expected to be in similar relation to the emerging social and political reality. Imagination, experiment, playfulness, beauty, the personal search for meaning that every artist must follow, had a suspect and self-indulgent feel…”
“…Calvino was a passionate believer in art as a force that could unite the disparate parts of the self – and thereby work to heal society…”
I have learned through intimate discussions with my 21-year old, a History major with an emphasis on Europe, Post World War I and II, and who is graduating from college in less than 10 days, that much of what we experience in the world, the political forces that bind our governments and citizens was birthed in the outcome of World War I and II.
It’s still inescapable that more than 90,000 men alone died in The Great War, World War I. And yet how often do we as artists, writers, and authors discuss the reality in which we write, that is so heavily as Winterson, along with my 21-year old, points out?
Italo Calvino did, not so much in writing from a place of socio-political realism, but in choosing the opposite. His writing is infused with multiple realities.
I was first introduced to Italo Calvino while earning my MFA in Creative Writing. “Invisible Cities” is an excellent and enthralling work where the Mongol conqueror, Kublai Khan and the world traveler, Marco Polo, carry on a conversation about Marco’s infinite travels.
The Khan, having reached the zenith of his rule is set to expire. He will be overtaken. The conversation, while epic in scope and poetic in structure carries a posthumous tone, not so much for the leader Khan, rather, the experiences he will never undergo nor participate in, Marco Polo’s journeys wherein Polo can only share with Khan through words.
Calvino writes in “Invisible Cities“:
…In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered…a sense of emptiness … overcomes us at evening…the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin…” (p. 5)
From a structural and craft perspective Calvino offers the rudiments and power of the micro-chapter as evidenced in Invisible Cities, a form now used by many writers such as Stephanie Meyer.
Calvino as a writer who liked to disappear, I add, into his work and a passionate believer of art as a healer for the disparate pieces of one’s self and the world had much strength.
I suspect he was also a pragmatist. He held a day job, albeit in a publishing house, despite his continual attempt through writing to answer the perpetual question that millions have held, “What is reality?”
He sought neither fame nor fortune.
And thus he was free to explore, much as Marco Polo in service of Kublai Khan. Yet even Marco’s intimate discourse could not relay the actual experience of having been there to the great Khan. Khan had missed out.
He had been king, monarch, a ruler, great–ego. And yet he was sad. For in the end the cities Polo described, were but invisible distractions from a world of having great power, but nowhere in which to explore well spring of his own reality from which all energies spring.
How much are we as writers like the Kublai Khan, or are we Marco Polo, travelers seeking to escape the confines of form and fashion, money and fame and create our own reality?
How far are we willing to travel outside of conventional, post-World War I and II and now 21st century wisdom that says our writing must earn the buck if we are to be worthy of a writing life?
That we must yield our personal best as writers, strive to become the best at our craft, ever seek to improve our skills is no question. But that the almighty dollar can evidence our having done so, I must emphatically disagree.
To hold onto this as axiom deposits us in the, “… moment that follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them…” (p. 5) a time that is much like…
“…a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain, and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed and rolls up… announcing… the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and …offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell…” (p. 5) Invisible Cities
The more I ponder Winterson’s article about Calvino, and the points that stood out to me, the more I want to remain free to create, as did Calvino. I want, like him, to escape myself and discover the rock and essence of my reality. It is essentially all I have to offer readers in my writing.
To this I must remain practical at a time when all around me, including the publishing industry, is falling from defeat to defeat and taking us into a place and time we have yet to understand.
What is your reality?
Have you explored and defined it?
Are you writing from it?
And if so, how does it feel?