We don’t choose our relatives but we do choose our friends and traveling companions. I was bound to Italo Calvino by a subtle yet deep tie. We were almost the same age, and, having both emerged from the defining experience of the Resistance, were first recognized as writers at the same time, in the same (for us memorable) review by Arrigo Cajumi, in these columns, which paired his Path to the Spiders’ Nest with my If This Is a Man. We were both naturally shy, and never spoke at length: it wasn’t necessary. A hint, a brief reference to our respective “works in progress,” and the understanding was immediate.
Not just understanding: I owe a lot to Italo. When he was an editor at the Einaudi offices in Turin, it was natural for me to turn to him. To me he was like a brother, more than that, like an older brother, although he was four years younger. In contrast to me, he was an expert at his job: he had it in his blood. A spiritual son of Pavese, he had inherited his editorial expertise, his rigor, and his quick and vigorous judgment. Italo’s tips and his advice were never vague or superfluous.
We had other ties as well. With two scientists for parents, Italo, alone in the Italian environment, had an appetite for science. He cultivated it; he fed on it as a learned and inquisitive amateur, and relied on it for his later books. Nature and science were for him one and the same thing: science as a lens by means of which to see nature more clearly, as a key to get to its heart, as a code to decipher it. Nothing in his character is lyrical or idyllic, and yet he was a great poet of nature, sometimes in the negative, as when he described its absence from cities. Only half ironic, he would say that he envied my decades of experience as a chemist, in laboratories and factories. We discussed and shared vague and ambitious projects for a mediating and revealing literature, straddling the “two cultures,” sharing in both. He came closer than I did to this goal, endowed as he was with a wide and varied culture and an acquaintance with many of the greatest intellectuals of our time. An admirer and student, in Paris, of Raymond Queneau, he recently invited me to review with him some difficult passages of the Italian translation of Petite cosmogonie portative.1 For me, that turned out to be a spiritual feast: I was fascinated by his acumen as a philologist, to which my modest technical experience could add very little.
His premature death leaves a painful void. He was at the height of his powers, and had too many things to say, things that were his and his alone, and which nobody else will ever be able to express in that way of his, so difficult to imitate: both nimble and sharp, never predictable, never gratuitous; sometimes playful, never easy, never content with the surface of things.
La Stampa, September 20, 1985
1. Published in English, in part, as A Pocket Cosmogony.