DIFFICULT LOVES is a beautifully translated collection of early stories by the highly regarded Italian writer, Italo Calvino. Mr. Calvino is perhaps best known in North America for his antinovel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, his pseudo-geography, Invisible Cities, and for Italian Folk Tales, which really are. What you think of the fictions of the mature Calvino will depend partly on whether you consider flirtation a delightful way of passing the time or a boring waste of it, and whether, after a magic show, you feel charmed or had. It’s possible to get the sense you’re being toyed with, that Mr. Calvino is fiddling with you and doesn’t much care whether Rome is burning or not; that “reality” and “truth” are, for him, categories irrelevant to the hermetic world of art. There’s something to be said for this stance: why should a rose, or Isak Dinesen for that matter, have to demonstrate social relevance? Still, if you go too far into the palace of artifice you can turn into a rococo clock, a fate Mr. Calvino has so far been adroit enough to avoid.
All the more interesting then to open Difficult Loves, expecting tricks with string, and to realize that instead you are watching a writer in the process of getting where he later got. These are very early stories indeed: the earliest were written in 1945, when Mr. Calvino was a damp-eared twenty-two, and the latest date from the 1950s, when he was in his early thirties.
Of the four sections in the book, the first, “Riviera Stories,” is the most realistic in its inclinations. The stories are hardly stories at all but studies, carefully observed and detailed sketches of people in certain landscapes, social situations, and postures. Already Mr. Calvino is displaying a sensual delight in description, a painterliness if you like, but these pieces are for the most part fragmentary, like Leonardo’s studies of hands. Among them, two — “A Goatherd at Luncheon” and “Man in the Wasteland” — are less embryonic, but it is not until the second section, “Wartime Stories,” that the fingerprints of a major talent begin to be visible. From the subject matter — peasants and partisans versus German soldiers and Italian Fascists — you might expect shrapnel and gore, death and squalor, and some is in fact provided. But the surprise is the freshness, the sweetness even, that is present despite it. “Animal Woods,” about a German soldier lost in a forest in which the peasants have hidden their animals, has the clear charm of a fairy tale, and “One of the Three Is Still Alive” manages to turn another German, a naked, harried one this time, into a sort of momentary Adam.
In the third section, “Postwar Stories,” we find ourselves in an urban landscape reminiscent of early Fellini films and populated with waifs and strays, eccentrics, fat and/or distorted prostitutes, and men given to bizarre excesses. The baroque blends with the grotesque in the sensuous gluttony of “Theft in a Pastry Shop.” And “Desire in November” is every fur fetishist’s dream come true.
Finally, in the fourth section, “Stories of Love and Loneliness,” Mr. Calvino hits what was to become increasingly his stride. Of the eight stories in this section, five explore the borderline that divides (or does it?) illusion from reality, the imagination from the outside world, art from its subject matter. The photographer who ends by being unable to photograph anything but other photographs and destroys his love affair in the process, the man who can’t enjoy a real woman because he’s too involved in reading about an imaginary one, the nearsighted man who must choose between seeing and being seen and the poet for whom woman, nature, silence, and serenity form one set, while men, civilization, words, and suffocation form another — these are early articulations of the illusionist’s dilemma, of the complex relationship of the artist to a world he can’t quite believe in as long as he views it as material for an art which is not quite believable either. It is the artist’s love for the “real” world that drives him to transform it into an artifact, and, paradoxically — according to logic — to deny it. As the photographer says, “The minute you start saying of something, ‘Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!’ you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed.”
Difficult Loves has some of the fascination of a photo album (the author at twenty-two, the author at twenty-six, the author at thirty), but it has a lot more to offer than that. The quirkiness and grace of the writing, the originality of the imagination at work, the occasional incandescence of vision, and a certain lovable nuttiness make this collection well worth reading, and for more than archaeological reasons.