28/09/13 16:54Italo Calvino on Writing: Insights from 40+ Years of His Newly Released Letters | Brain Pickings

Página 1 de 14http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/10/italo-calvino-on-writing/

Search

aboutsupportcontactbookshelfnewsletterliterary jukeboxsoundsart

newsletter

Brain Pickings has a freeweekly interestingness digest.It comes out on Sundays andoffers the week's bestarticles. Here's an example.Like? Sign up.

Name

Email

subscribe

donating = loving

Brain Pickings remains ad-free and takes hundreds ofhours a month to researchand write, and thousands ofdollars to sustain. If you findany joy and value in it, pleaseconsider becoming a Memberand supporting with arecurring monthly donationof your choosing, between acup of tea and a good dinner:

♥ $7 / month

You can also become a one-time patron with a singledonation in any amount:

Italo Calvino on Writing: Insightsfrom 40+ Years of His NewlyReleased Lettersby Maria Popova

“One writes most of all in order to take part in a collectiveenterprise.”

Culled from the 600+ pages of Italo Calvino:Letters, 1941-1985 (public library) — the same

fantastic recently released tome that gave us

Calvino’s prescient meditation on abortion and

the meaning of life — are the beloved author’s

collected insights on writing spanning more

than four decades of his career, a fine addition

to this master list of famous writers’ wisdom on

the craft.

On March 7, 1942, writing from university to

his best friend and literary-minded comrade-in-

arms, Eugenio Scalfari, in the typical tone of

irreverent facetiousness the two shared, 18-

year-old Calvino extols the joy and art of writing letters::

A fine thing it is to have a distant friend who writes long lettersfull of drivel and to be able to reply to him with equally lengthyletters full of drivel; fine not because I like to plunge intocaptious polemics nor because I enjoy getting certain ideasinto the head of some idiot from the Urbe, but because writinglong letters to friends means having a moral excuse for notstudying.

In the same letter, Calvino admonishes Eugenio about the mixed motives of the

publishing world — at least as an 18-year-old aspiring writer saw it:

Don’t trust the big names that support youth movements: it’sfashionable to show you’re favoring youth.

Several weeks later, Calvino — who had gone to university to study agriculture

but found himself increasingly drawn to literature as he immersed himself in the

dullness of his major — shares with Eugenio an intense expression of the inner

contradiction that defines being human, the increasing inner tug-of-war

28/09/13 16:54Italo Calvino on Writing: Insights from 40+ Years of His Newly Released Letters | Brain Pickings

Página 2 de 14http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/10/italo-calvino-on-writing/

labors of love between the disinterested agronomist and self-conscious poet:

It will perhaps please you to know that, as regards the famousitalcalvinian dualism, the agronomist is about to lose out, andthe poet will emerge as the clear winner. My revision for theexams is still today in a deplorable state and offers no hope ofrecovery. The Easter holidays, which were filled with thepleasures of cheerful cycling trips along the Via Aurelia anddaring but unsuccessful pursuits of Riviera Amazons, havelong disappeared. The poet, on the other hand, has been moreproductive: he has finished the famous Brezza di terra (LandBreeze) and would now do well to go off and hide. The work issolemn rubbish and I don’t think I’ll have the courage topresent it, not even in Florence. Rhetoric, artifice, and tritePirandellian ideas grafted onto pompous D’Annunzianlanguage. But also daring, warmth, enthusiasm and, whatcounts above all, real poetry.

In early May of 1942, after Eugenio sends Italo one of his poems, Calvino echoes

Wordsworth as he articulates his budding philosophy on poetry, then trails off

in a meta-affirmation:

I’ve read your poem. I too, if you remember, wrote a Hermeticpoem in my early youth. I know that gives enormoussatisfaction to the person who writes it. But whether theperson who reads it shares this enthusiasm is another matter.It’s too subjective, Hermeticism, do you see? And I see art ascommunication. The poet turns in on himself, tries to pindown what he has seen and felt, then pulls it out so thatothers can understand it. But I can’t understand these things:these discourses about the ego and the non-ego I leave to you.Yes, I understand, there’s the struggle to express theinexpressible, typical of modern art, and these are all finethings, but I …

28/09/13 16:54Italo Calvino on Writing: Insights from 40+ Years of His Newly Released Letters | Brain Pickings

Página 3 de 14http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/10/italo-calvino-on-writing/

must-reads

Later in the same lengthy letter, Calvino, sharing in Bukowski’s assertion that

writing should come “unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth

and your gut” and dissenting from Coleridge’s view that “the mere addition of

meter does not in itself entitle a work to the name of poem,” engages in his

usual self-derisive conviction:

I’m a regular guy, I like well-defined outlines, I’m old-fashioned,bourgeois. My stories are full of facts, they have a beginningand an end. For that reason they will never be able to findsuccess with the critics, nor occupy a place in contemporaryliterature. I write poetry when I have a thought that Iabsolutely have to bring out, I write to give vent to my feelingsand I write using rhyme because I like it, tum-tetum tumtetumtum te-tum, because I’ve got no ear, and poetry withoutrhyme or meter seems like soup without salt, and I write(mock me, you crowds! Make me a figure of public scorn!) Iwrite … sonnets … and writing sonnets is boring, you haveto find rhymes, you have to write hendecasyllables so after awhile I get bored and my drawer is overflowing with unfinishedshort poems.

In July of the following year, still in school and approaching his 20th birthday,

Italo grumbles to Eugenio in frustration over his creative process, which seems

to disobey the general principles of intuitive incubation and unconscious

processing:

I’m still too ignorant to write articles and as for my output ofshort stories, a famous summer of overproduction has beenfollowed by years of crisis. … All the ideas currently in myhead are subject to a strange phenomenon: while I work onthem and perfect them continuously from the philosophicalpoint of view, they stay rudimentary and barely sketched on

28/09/13 16:54Italo Calvino on Writing: Insights from 40+ Years of His Newly Released Letters | Brain Pickings

Página 4 de 14http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/10/italo-calvino-on-writing/

HOW TO FIND YOUR PURPOSE AND DO

WHAT YOU LOVE

FAIL SAFE: COURAGE AND THE CREATIVE

LIFE

FAMOUS WRITERS ON WRITING

HOW TO STAY SANE

CULTURAL ICONS ON THE MEANING OF LIFE

the dramatic and artistic side. In my creativity thought has theupper hand over imagination.

Having long left school and working on his second novel, Calvino found himself

no less full of inner contradiction and resistance to the calling of the writing life

and its grueling routines. In a November 1948 to his friend Silvio Micheli, he

voices, as if in a desperate effort to reconcile, his conflicted desires :

When you’re working you get buried, drowned under things.You’ve no more friends nor art. Only when you’ve an eveningor afternoon free can you roam the streets or court a girl.That’s all. In short, working is pointless. I mean, from the pointof view of education. But it’s essential. I cannot — and I don’twant to — live the writer’s life, that is to say write for a living.The novel I was writing, which for months and months hadsucked all my blood (because, stubborn as I am, I wasdetermined to finish it even though I no longer felt it was goinganywhere), is dead, awful, full of wonderful clever things butdesperately bad, forced, it’ll never work and I must not finishit. And I must not write for some time now otherwise I’d makemore mistakes. I hope that Einaudi will publish my shortstories eventually, they’re the only thing I believe in and whichI believe are useful.

A few weeks prior, Calvino had written to another friend:

For seven or eight months now I’ve been mucking about witha novel that I began in a moment of weakness and it’s turningout to be very bad, causing me to waste lots of my time. Butat least it’ll get rid of my desire to write novels for four or fiveyears, which is what I dream of doing, and will allow me tostudy kind of seriously and learn to write decently.

28/09/13 16:54Italo Calvino on Writing: Insights from 40+ Years of His Newly Released Letters | Brain Pickings

Página 5 de 14http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/10/italo-calvino-on-writing/

ALBERT EINSTEIN ON THE SECRET TOLEARNING ANYTHING

THE BEST BOOKS OF 2012

THE DAILY ROUTINES OF FAMOUS

WRITERS

5 ESSENTIAL BOOKS ON FEAR AND THE

CREATIVE PROCESS

10 TIPS ON WRITING FROM DAVID OGILVY

On July 27, 1949, Calvino writes to Cesare Pavese:

To write well about the elegant world you have to know it andexperience it to the depths of your being just as Proust,Radiguet and Fitzgerald did: what matters is not whether youlove it or hate it, but only to be quite clear about your positionregarding it.

In early December of the same year, Calvino writes to literary critic Geno

Pampaloni, who had just reviewed the author’s second major published work,

the short-story collection The Crow, expressing once again his inner turmoil:

My problem today is how to escape from the limits of thesebooks, from this definition of me as a writer of adventures,fairy-tales, and fun, in which I can’t express myself or realizemyself to the full.

In a lengthy letter to literary critic Mario Motta dated January 16, 1950, Calvino

addresses the alleged death of the novel, a death toll still nervously resounding

today:

There have been so many debates on the novel in the lastthirty years, both by those who claimed it was dead and bythose who wanted it to be alive in a certain way, that if oneconducts the debate without serious preliminary work toestablish the terms of the question as it has to be set up andas it has never been set up before, we’ll end up saying andmaking others say a lot of commonplaces.

Calvino echoes Herbert Spencer’s admonition that “to have a specific style is to be

poor in speech” in a March 1950 letter to Elsa Morante, one of the most

influential postwar novelists, whom he had befriended:

The fact is that I already feel I am a prisoner of a kind of styleand it is essential that I escape from it at all costs: I’m nowtrying to write a totally different book, but it’s damned difficult;I’m trying to break up the rhythms, the echoes which I feel thesentences I write eventually slide into, as into pre-existingmolds, I try to see facts and things and people in the roundinstead of being drawn in colors that have no shading. Forthat reason the book I’m going to write interests me infinitelymore than the other one.

As dangerous as the blind adhesion to a style, Calvino writes in a May 1959

letter, is the blind reliance on tools, the cult of medium over message — but

harnessing the power of tools is one of the craft’s greatest arts:

One should never have taboos about the tools we use, that aslong as the thought or images or style one wants to putforward do not become deformed by the medium, one must

28/09/13 16:54Italo Calvino on Writing: Insights from 40+ Years of His Newly Released Letters | Brain Pickings

Página 6 de 14http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/10/italo-calvino-on-writing/

9 BOOKS TO HELP YOU READ MORE AND

WRITE BETTER

JOHN CLEESE ON THE 5 FACTORS TOMAKE YOUR LIFE MORE CREATIVE

JOAN DIDION ON KEEPING A NOTEBOOK

100 IDEAS THAT CHANGED GRAPHIC

DESIGN

7 MUST-READ BOOKS ON THE ART &SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS

on the contrary try to make use of the most powerful andmost efficient of those tools.

The creative process, however, is an entirely different matter for Calvino, one

where efficiency and merit aren’t necessarily correlated. In August of the same

year, he complains to his friend Luigi Santucci about his creative block and

sluggish daily routine — and yet he accepts that state, resigns to it as a given of

the writing life. Above all, he adds to other famous meditations on why writers

write — including ones from George Orwell, David Foster Wallace, Joan Didion,

Mary Karr, Isabel Allende, Susan Orlean, Joy Williams, and Charles Bukowski —

and speaks to the difference between a career and a calling, that profound and

unshakable sense of purpose that is the mark of good art:

You can imagine how slowly my fictional output has beengoing this summer, you who know how much labor,dissatisfaction, irritability, uncertainty this work costs …However — and this is the point — it is worth it. Or rather:one does not ask if it’s worth it. We are people, there is nodoubt, who exist solely insofar as we write, otherwise we don’texist at all. Even if we did not have a single reader any more,we would have to write; and this not because ours can be asolitary job, on the contrary it is a dialog we take part in whenwe write, a common discourse, but this dialog can still alwaysbe supposed to be taking place with authors of the past, withauthors we love and whose discourse we are forcing ourselvesto develop, or else with those still to come, those we wantthrough our writing to configure in one particular way ratherthan another. I am exaggerating: heaven help those who writewithout being read; for that reason there are too many peoplewriting today and one cannot ask for indulgence for someonewho has little to say, and one cannot allow trade-union orcorporate sympathies.

28/09/13 16:54Italo Calvino on Writing: Insights from 40+ Years of His Newly Released Letters | Brain Pickings

Página 7 de 14http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/10/italo-calvino-on-writing/

RICHARD DAWKINS ON EVIDENCE INSCIENCE, LIFE AND LOVE: A LETTER TOHIS 10-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER

CREATIVE CARTOGRAPHY: 7 MUST-READ

BOOKS ON MAPS

CARL SAGAN ON SCIENCE AND

SPIRITUALITY

JOHN STEINBECK ON FALLING IN LOVE: A1958 LETTER

7 OBSCURE CHILDREN’S BOOKS BY

FAMOUS AUTHORS OF ADULT LITERATURE

In the same letter, he returns to the question of the novel and his relationship

with fiction:

Even more annoying are those who theorize that the novel hasto be like this or like that, that one must write the novel, etc.Let them go to hell! How much energy is wasted in Italy intrying to write the novel that obeys all the rules. The energymight have been useful to provide us with more modest, moregenuine things, that had less pretensions: short stories,memoirs, notes, testimonials, or at any rate books that areopen, without a preconceived plan.

Personally, I believe in fiction because the stories I like arethose with a beginning and an end. I try to write them as theybest come to me, depending on what I have to say. We are in

28/09/13 16:54Italo Calvino on Writing: Insights from 40+ Years of His Newly Released Letters | Brain Pickings

Página 8 de 14http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/10/italo-calvino-on-writing/

WHY WE LOVE: 5 BOOKS ON THE

PSYCHOLOGY OF LOVE

7 MUST-READ BOOKS ON MUSIC,EMOTION & THE BRAIN

BERTRAND RUSSELL'S 10COMMANDMENTS OF TEACHING

5! TIMELESS COMMENCEMENT SPEECHES

TO TEACH YOU TO DEFINE YOUR OWN

SUCCESS

explore

activism advertising

animation artbooks children'sbooks collaboration

creativity

a period when in literature and especially in fiction one can doanything, absolutely anything, and all styles and methodscoexist. What the public (and also the critics) require arebooks (“open” novels) that are rich in substance, density,tension.

Three years later, in April of 1962, Calvino returns to his conception of fiction,

this time with more dimension and more sensitivity to the inherent

contradictions of literature:

One cannot construct in fiction a harmonious language toexpress something that is not yet harmonious. We live in acultural ambience where many different languages and levelsof knowledge intersect and contradict each other.

In October of the following year, feeling yet constrained by that “cultural

ambience,” Calvino fantasizes about freely and wholeheartedly immersing

himself in modernism:

Secretly I dream that soon, once the kingdom of literature hasbeen divided between the two opposing factions oftraditionalists and innovators, who are united by a commonand equal insensitivity to words, I will be able finally to writeworks that are clandestine, pursuing an ideal of modern proseto hand down to the generations which eventually, God knowswhen, will understand …

But he is far from conceiving of the writer as a solitary creature working in

isolation, in service of some egoic genius. In a December 1967 letter, he

parenthetically acknowledges the labyrinth of literature:

One writes most of all in order to take part in a collectiveenterprise.

Similarly, in a letter penned a few months later, he recognizes the writer’s mind

— like that of any great thinker — needs to be a cross-disciplinary one:

Every field of writing cannot be indifferent to other fields.

Much like H.P. Lovecraft argued against the distinction between “amateur” and

“professional” journalists and Greil Marcus negated the divide between “high”

and “low” culture, Calvino admonishes against the toxic dichotomy between

“major” and “minor” writers and echoes Anaïs Nin’s defense of the fluid self”:

As a young man my aspiration was to become a “minorwriter.” (Because it was always those that are called “minor”that I liked most and to whom I felt closest.) But this was

28/09/13 16:54Italo Calvino on Writing: Insights from 40+ Years of His Newly Released Letters | Brain Pickings

Página 9 de 14http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/10/italo-calvino-on-writing/

culture data

visualization designdiaries documentaryeducation film food

happiness historyillustrationinnovation interviewknowledge letters

literature love musicneuroscience omnibusphilosophyphotography poetry

politicspsychology remix

science social web

SoundCloud sustainabilitytechnology TEDvideo vintage vintage

children's books worldwriting

already a flawed criterion because it presupposes that “major”writers exist. Basically, I am convinced that not only are thereno “major” or “minor” writers, but writers themselves do notexist — or at least they do not count for much. As far as I amconcerned, you still try too hard to explain Calvino withCalvino, to chart a history, a continuity in Calvino, and maybethis Calvino does not have any continuity, he dies and isreborn every second. What counts is whether in the workthat he is doing at a certain point there is something that canrelate to the present or future work done by others, as canhappen to anyone who works, just because of the fact thatthey are creating such possibilities.

Calvino, in fact, is largely uncomfortable with the conventions of literary fame.

In September of 1968, in a warm letter to John Woodhouse, who had just

written the first book on Calvino, he reflects on the perils of prestige:

The public figure of the writer, the writer-character, the“personality-cult” of the author, are all becoming for me moreand more intolerable in others, and consequently in myself. Inshort, if a critic writes about a problem and makes referenceto one (or more) of my works in relation to that problem, thisgives me the sense that my work is not pointless. Whereas theprospect of my bust crowned with laurel appearing along withthe other busts in the hall of famous writers gives me no joy atall.

28/09/13 16:54Italo Calvino on Writing: Insights from 40+ Years of His Newly Released Letters | Brain Pickings

Página 10 de 14http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/10/italo-calvino-on-writing/

In an August 1970 letter, Calvino adds to history’s noteworthy meditations on

criticism:

The only kind of literature that is possible today: a literaturethat is both critical and creative.

In the summer of 1973, he returns to the idea that all literature is

interconnected or, as Virginia Woolf memorably put it, “words belong to each

other,” and laments the literary landscape of the time:

I am very discouraged by this general dearth of books comingout, a desert that also affects me, removes my desire to write,because books cannot grow if they don’t find around them thecompany of other books their same age and that are congenialto them.

28/09/13 16:54Italo Calvino on Writing: Insights from 40+ Years of His Newly Released Letters | Brain Pickings

Página 11 de 14http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/10/italo-calvino-on-writing/

One of his most prescient and timely meditations comes from a November 1975

letter and, once again, dissents against the artificial and detrimental hierarchies

of the literary world:

The distinction between journalists and writers put in thoseterms does not distinguish anything at all: one cannot say apriori that a writer just because he is a writer is more capableof handling ideas and of seeing what is essential than ajournalist when we are dealing with a good journalist.

In late 1979, having just turned fifty-six, Calvino reflects on his nature as a

writer, reflecting also on the era’s evolution and presaging our present culture

of compressed timelines:

The fact is that I have always been more a writer of shortstories than a novelist, and it is second nature to me to close— both in formal and conceptual terms — even a story thatremains open; to condense into a short narrative space all theelements that give a sense of completion to the story.However, I do not mean by this that I am in favor only ofshort time-spans — or rather, there is no doubt that we areliving in a period in which time has been shattered, there is noroom to breathe, no possibility of foreseeing and planningahead, and that this rhythm is imposed on what I write — butideally I believe more and more that the only thing that countsis what moves in long, very long time-spans, both in geologicaleras and in the history of society. Trying to work out thedirections in which these things are moving is very difficult; forthat reason I feel more and more incapable of understandingwhat really is happening in a world which does nothing butprove each model wrong.

28/09/13 16:54Italo Calvino on Writing: Insights from 40+ Years of His Newly Released Letters | Brain Pickings

Página 12 de 14http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/10/italo-calvino-on-writing/

In the summer of 1980, he returns to the tension between career and calling

and, echoing Tchaikovsky’s letter on commissioned work vs. creative purpose,

confesses that freelance writing for literary journals leaves him vacant:

This jack-of-all-trades kind of writing does not give me anysatisfaction at all, even though, yes, it is also a vocation ofmine, but it is certainly the most time-consuming and leastuseful activity I could be doing, and what’s more in recenttimes what I manage to come up with are only boring thingsand my conscience is only at peace if I manage to entertainpeople.

And still, for all his tremendous insight and wisdom, Calvino is also a relentless

devil’s advocate against himself, brimming with mischievous self-consciousness

and self-derision that bespeaks one of the grand truths of creative life: No great

artist can afford to take himself too seriously. Even in his formative years,

Calvino intuited this: 19-year-old Italo tells Eugenio after writing his friend a

lengthy letter full of youth’s typical early grapples with philosophy:

I found this letter that I had started to write yesterday eveningand I reread it with interest. Dammit, what a lot of drivel Imanaged to write! In the end it’s impossible to understandanything in it. But better that way: the less one understandsthe more posterity will appreciate my profundity of thought. Infact, let me say:

POSTERITY IS STUPID

Think how annoyed they’ll be when they read that!

And yet we’re far more amused than annoyed, and infinitely delighted, for ItaloCalvino: Letters, 1941-1985 is an absolute treasure trove in its entirety — the

most profound intersection of writing, philosophy, and literary voyeurism since

Susan Sontag’s journals and the diary of Anaïs Nin.

Donating = Loving

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If

you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting

Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of

tea and a good dinner:

♥ $7 / month

28/09/13 16:54Italo Calvino on Writing: Insights from 40+ Years of His Newly Released Letters | Brain Pickings

Página 13 de 14http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/10/italo-calvino-on-writing/

Brain Pickings participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earncommissions by linking to Amazon. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link on here, I get a smallpercentage of its price. That helps support Brain Pickings by offsetting a fraction of what it takes to maintain the site, and is very much appreciated.

Brain Pickings Subscribe

RSSemail

Design by:Josh Boston

24919

You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out onSundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what toexpect. Like? Sign up.

Me gusta 894

275

TAGS: BOOKS ITALO CALVINO LETTERS WRITING

Famous Writers onNew York: TimelessPrivate Reflectionsfrom Diaries, Letters &Personal Essays

Italo Calvino onAmerica

Jorge Luis Borges onWriting: Wisdom fromHis Most CandidInterviews

Italo Calvino's PoeticCV

You might also enjoy:

28/09/13 16:54Italo Calvino on Writing: Insights from 40+ Years of His Newly Released Letters | Brain Pickings

Página 14 de 14http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/10/italo-calvino-on-writing/