Calvino - Six Memos for the Next Millenium Review by NYTimes

THE PROMISED LAND OF LITERATURE

It's an old truth that writers, theorizing on the state of their form, tend to talk mainly about or to themselves. Walled in by their own despotic metaphors and scruffy unwashed visions, barely able to glimpse beyond them the light of day (is it day?), what else after all can they do? Which may, indeed, account for the general irrelevance of most literary critics; the body of work to which their judgments and speculations must in reality apply is missing.

Certainly no one has written so well about that gifted and nimble Italian genius of the short prose narrative Italo Calvino as has the master himself in these five highly personal meditations on the art of writing, originally intended for the 1985-86 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard before death intervened early that same fall with a swift startling stroke. The very titles here - ''Lightness,'' ''Quickness,''

''Exactitude,'' ''Visibility,'' ''Multiplicity'' - amount to a recital of Calvino's most admired characteristics, qualities echoed here in Patrick Creagh's sensitive translation. A sixth - Calvino's provocative open-endedness - is ironically provided by the absence of the unwritten final lecture, which was to have been titled ''Consistency.'' As though, in effect, he were being . . .

While each of these literary values is distinct, each seems at the same time to embrace the others, ''visibility'' emerging from ''lightness,'' ''exactitude'' making ''quickness'' possible, all the qualities caught up in ''multiplicity's'' net or in ''visibility's'' inner eye - it's a kind of magic act resembling the threading of the cosmos on an endless loop through the eye of a needle - in such a way that summary images of the art of writing, at least that practiced by Calvino himself, are to be found on almost every page.

Early in the first ''memo,'' for example, Calvino recalls the story from Boccaccio's ''Decameron'' about the poet Guido Cavalcanti, who, while meditating among the tombs, is surprised and surrounded by a frivolous posse of mounted partygoers intent on harassing him: ''Guido, you refuse to be of our company; but look, when you have proved that there is no God, what will you have accomplished?'' Whereupon Cavalcanti lightly ''rises above'' them in three different ways: first, by the quickness and seeming airiness of his reply (''Gentlemen, you may say anything you wish to me in your own home'' - meaning the tombs, of course); second, by the implicit and subtle reference to his own philosophy, which is itself a ''rising above'' (an overcoming of individual bodily death by conjoining the individual soul, through contemplation, with the universal intellect; this is not his home); and, third, by ''resting his hand on one of the great tombs and being very nimble,'' literally leaping over the tomb and out of their midst.

''Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium,'' Calvino goes on to say, ''I would choose that one: the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times . . . belongs to the realm of death.''

And if I were to choose a quintessential image for the author of such crystalline models of ''weightless gravity'' as ''The Nonexistent Knight,'' ''Cosmicomics,'' ''Invisible Cities'' and ''If on a Winter's Night a Traveler'' - classics of this millennium that the next will surely cherish - out of the many here, I would perhaps choose this one, the leaping poet. It seems to me a whole esthetic is hidden away in it, and a biography as well, like the universe hiding in Mr. Palomar's lawn.

At the very least, it answers to Calvino's insistence on the priority of the visual image. His own ''fantastic iconologies,'' he confesses, had their roots in his preliterate ''obsessive porings over pages and pages of cartoons''; and in one of the Qwfwg stories in the ''T Zero'' collection (''The Origin of the Birds''), he invites us to imagine the story he's telling us as a series of frames in a comic strip. If I were to extend this invitation to include ''Six Memos for the Next Millennium,'' the first frame would be dominated by the lightly leaping poet-philosopher. This figure would probably be meant to look like Calvino himself, but it might be anybody (cartooning is a rough art), and his costume would be theatrically old-fashioned, like that of the author's ''Baron in the Trees,'' say, or the bounding Mercutio of Shakespeare, whose ''dancing gait'' Calvino would also like ''to come along with us across the threshold of the new millennium.'' Near the top of the frame would be the moon, or part of it, rather nearby, toward which the central figure might or might not be soaring.

The poet, like Cavalcanti, would be vaulting out of piled-up tombstones, but the tombs would also resemble the real world in a state of petrified agitation, as though the entire earth were frantically turning to stone. The bottom of the frame would be bowed by the terrible weight of these turbulent stones, all carefully drawn in various shades of gray (even the Communist banner would be gray, not red, its frozen furl a kind of mirror image of that of the American flag planted like an ice-cream decoration on the moon) to suggest the postwar school of neorealism with which Calvino, a veteran of partisan battles against the Fascists and an active Communist (he left the party in 1957), early identified. Indeed, until a few years ago, his fellow Italians thought of him mainly as a neorealist who, in his apostasy, sometimes indulged himself with idle flights of fancy; so the smile on the leaping poet's face would be tinged with affectionate irony and melancholy.

In the second frame, ''Quickness,'' the stones would still be there, more violently distressed than ever, as though frozen at a moment of breakneck speed, but now there would be two leaping poets with a flash of lightning between them, and the moon, though still in the same place, would have little velocity lines at one side with puffs of smoke or steam, suggesting that it is ripping through the sky at a fantastic rate. ''My work as a writer has from the beginning aimed at tracing the lightning flashes of the mental circuits that capture and link points distant from each other in space and time,'' Calvino explains. Perhaps this message is cleverly inscribed on the face of the moon, using its ridges and craters as a kind of lettering for a moon balloon, more or less aimed at one or another of the leaping poets.

But why two of these leaping poets? This might suggest two separate moments felt as one and thus might be interpreted, in the master's words, ''as an allegory of narrative time and the way in which it cannot be measured against real time.'' Or it might represent the speed of thought, a moment so quick the new perception is achieved without leaving the old one behind. On the other hand, we see now that the feet of one of the figures are winged, while in the face of the other there is an expression of melancholic longing, as though, only momentarily escaping from the disciplined solitude of his Vulcanic smithy, this poet (the real one) could dream of being the lighthearted and gregarious Mercury, ever afloat, at the other end of the lightning bolt.

This pairing might also allude to Calvino's love of paradox and polarities: a multilayered folkloric doubling from this famous folk tale collector. The two figures might represent, for example, two sides of the poet's nature, such as melancholy and humor (''As melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness,'' reads the authorial legend on the moon, ''so humor is comedy that has lost its bodily weight''). Or perhaps there are two leaping poets here. Perhaps the lonely leaper has found companionship at last. Yes, the melancholy one is nearly blind, we see, with drooping eyes and lips, yet like a brother to the more humorous one, who is thinking (the cloud behind him is not a cloud after all but a soft balloon of thought): ''If I had to say which fiction writer has perfectly achieved [this] aesthetic ideal of exactitude in imagination and in language, creating works that match the rigorous geometry of the crystal and the abstraction of deductive reasoning, I would without hesitation say Jorge Luis Borges. . . . I love his work because every one of his pieces contains a model of the universe or of an attribute of the universe.''

These thoughts seem to lead us directly into the third frame, ''Exactitude,'' where the moon is now infinitely precise in all its crystalline detail, as though each of its molecules were as distinct as the letters on this page, and, around it, the entire vast universe has opened up in an almost magical display of those geometric forms, symmetries, numerical series and cosmological models known to fascinate the leaping poet-philosopher (he is alone once more, his sad-eyed double has leaped, or fallen, out of sight). The flag planted on the moon is no longer a leaden pattern of gray and white stripes and stars, but now bears a colorful legend reading: ''The Promised Land of Literature in Which Language Becomes What It Really Ought to Be.'' This banner seems to cast a glow on the lunar surface, not a shadow, and in that glow, bent over a chessboard on which the flags seen in the previous frames are now carried in parodic miniature by the split halves of wooden knights, sits the aged Kublai Khan, conversing with Marco Polo, both (such is the rude simplicity of this art form) appearing to be more or less indistinguishable manifestations of the poet leaping nearby.

At the bottom of the frame, the tombstone city is there as always, now somewhat smashed up and turned to rubble, as if all the stones had tried to speak at once and the little balloons containing their words had also turned to stone and had come crashing down on them. A kind of rain is falling as well, the raindrops shaped like little television screens, each one violently different in its distorted imagery, yet each somehow numbingly the same, the drops shattering and splintering on the stones like some terrible pestilence (represented by a freckling of asterisks and such words as ''splat!,'' ''tinkle!'' and ''ka-pop!''), a raucous contrast to the solemn harmonious brilliance of the skies above.

This comic strip, admittedly, is beginning to look like a snip from an animated cartoon: after three frames, the poet is still leaping as at the beginning, the moon is still hovering in the near distance like an impossible desire, and the petrified city of the dying millennium continues to fall heavily through the bottom of the frame, even though there's more of it piled up on top than ever. It is not even certain that our poet-philosopher is really leaping. For all his seeming grace, he may be hopelessly suspended between earth and sky, attached to the tombstones below perhaps like a kite on an invisible string, or dangling from the moon like a paper puppet, or strung out between both at once, a victim of the opposing gravitational forces of the cosmos and the quotidian, infinity and the clock, intellect and body, contemplation and engagement, or, as he says, ''the tension between geometric rationality and the entanglements of human lives.''

But perhaps that is our story. Not all comics are action strips after all. Nor does our textual source even pretend to tell a tale. Adventure is not a topic in ''Six Memos for the Next Millennium,'' romance is not. True, given our author's affection for the invention and commingling of forms, one might have anticipated essays that were more like poems, meditations disguised as narratives, lectures informed by Mr. Palomar's ''art of keeping silent.'' But, no, these are indeed lectures, the sort that the people at Harvard would have understood as such, a reasoned and often eloquent defense of a set of literary principles, placed in their historical context, fleshed out with examples both private and erudite, and supported by authority.

If there is a story hidden away here, it is that of this poet-philosopher, committed to his art but unsure of all else, one who aspires to the abstract beauty of geometry and music, but who remains enmeshed in the world's disorder and clangor and ''ruthless energy,'' one who wishes with all his heart to be freed from a self that will not let go, to escape from anthropomorphism even while knowing that ''our imagination cannot be anything but anthropomorphic.'' In his growing skepticism about any truths not born in simple, scrupulous observation and the free play of imagination, Calvino passed from social realism into revelatory fantasy, then into self-reflective fictions (his so-called ''hypernovels'') and finally into quiet reflections upon minutiae that lead one to a contemplation of death, or at least of ''being dead.'' Yet he never stopped trying to the very end to bridge ''the unbridgeable gulf'' (and so, a romance after all, an intimate adventure) between language and experience.

This is the subject of the fourth frame, ''Visibility.'' In it, the poet seems to have placed an immense distance between himself and the heap of stones and rubble below. And yet the hand that helps him launch his leap is resting still on the heavy tomb - an optical illusion, of course, the point being not the illusion but that it is optical. Like the universe itself, which seems at one moment like a remote and insoluble geometric puzzle fading into infinity, and at the next like a theater marquee on this side of the moon, with the legend: ''My procedure aims at uniting the spontaneous generation of images and the intentionality of discursive thought.''

This frame, vivid in all its particulars, is riven by illusion and paradox. In an illustration meant as a tribute to the visual image, for example, the poet's eyes are closed. Hovering behind him, in a softly sculpted cloudlike balloon representing his thoughts, are nested all the other frames of our comic strip like a diminishing sequence of television screens - and, oddly, the universe depicted in each of these frames within each cloud opens up in all its vastness to embrace the cloud that contains it and the meditating poet as well, so that each of the frames somehow contains all the others.

It is in short a celebration of the imagination, which has the power, as our author translates Dante as saying, of ''stealing us away from the outer world and carrying us off into an inner one.'' It is an exploration of those images that ''rain down into the high fantasy,'' with the intention of seeking out ''a means to attain a knowledge that is outside the individual, outside the subjective.'' Direct observation of the real world is only part of it, barely mentioned here. Where we might see a battle between partisans and Fascists in the Ligurian hills, say, or even a panorama of Roman rooftops as viewed from Calvino's windows, we find instead a small square cartoon of Felix the Cat, metamorphosing paintings of Carpaccio, an abyss spanned by a bridge composed entirely of words and a ''repertory of what is potential, what is hypothetical, of what does not exist and has never existed, and perhaps will never exist but might have existed.''

In the fifth frame, almost inevitably, everything explodes. There is suddenly a vast profusion of worlds and moons and poets and much else besides, as though to say: ''Every life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every conceivable fashion.'' This is the ''Multiplicity'' frame, or it would be were not the frame too exploding, unable to contain the sudden proliferation of images and the infinitely complex web of interrelationships among them. And yet, perhaps this exploding frame is the frame for this picture, an image of literature's irrepressible ambition, its dream of a ''novel about the universe'' (Goethe), the ''ultimate book'' (Novalis), the ''Absolutely if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement.''

Suddenly, in the sixth frame, though the frame itself is back, the leaping poet-philosopher is gone. There is nothing above the tombstone city but a blank sky. We hold the cartoon up to the light: a smudge perhaps? the shadow of an erasure? a watermark? No, he is completely gone. Only the heaped-up stones remain. But look: they are starting to float.

The following remarks by Primo Levi about Italo Calvino were made during a seminar at the Milan headquarters of the Montedison chemical company in January 1986. The company's cultural division, Progetto Cultura, had published, in a special edition, a portion of ''Portable Little Cosmogony'' by the French writer Raymond Queneau; Levi and Calvino collaborated on the translation many years ago. As it turned out, the seminar occurred shortly after the death of Calvino. Levi committed suicide last April.

The way I remember Italo Calvino is somehow incompatible with his disappearance. You could say we happened to be baptized together as writers in a 1947 La Stampa article. Arrigo Caiumi reviewed both Calvino's first book, ''The Path to the Nest of Spiders,'' and my first, ''If This Be a Man.'' He saw us as the two beginners, the two young ones of the moment, and he wished us a long journey.

To be sure, there have been gaps in my enduring brotherhood with Calvino, since I lived for the most part in Turin, while he traveled extensively. But its happiest hour came in our work on Raymond Queneau's ''Portable Little Cosmogony.'' Very unhappy with the existing translation, Calvino had first revised it. He then became dissatisfied with his own revision, for this fantastic poem by Queneau, beginning with the creation of the universe and ending with computers, contains an entire canticle on chemistry that (not unlike the rest of the book) is replete with riddles. There is hardly a line in it that doesn't conceal a trap of one kind or another. Queneau was an extraordinary master at manipulating speech, at wringing out of it the last drop not just of meaning but of sound; he was a juggler, and in that respect Calvino was a passionate disciple.

Despite all the combing this Italian translation had gone through, a number of knots remained, some of which Queneau himself was no longer able to untie. Asked for help some 10 years after he had written the book, he told us: ''Bear with me; I can't remember what I wanted to say.'' It was with real happiness and delight that the two of us worked together; in fact, I would say the three of us, for there was also a cat, a small kitten perched on the table, on top of the manuscript, helping us as he could, trying now and then to turn the page with his paw. And so it turned into a game, but a great and beautiful one, and precisely the kind of game Calvino was such a master at - to squeeze out of speech everything it has to give, to make it into an instrument of penetration.

In Calvino, this love for speech was combined, as you know, with an equally deep love for nature, but a love free of all sentimentality or romanticism. His was the naturalist's passion. He had inherited it from his parents. He cultivated it to the end. And for anyone who reads him attentively it already shines through his first book and its very title - it is the path to where the spiders made their nest; it is the discovery by Calvino of the only place in the world where spiders, instead of weaving a web, build a nest.

I would say that this meticulous touch, worthy of a scientist, is present in the literary fabric of all Calvino's books. Although he didn't have a degree in science, he was in fact a scientist. A reader of ''Cosmicomics'' senses that it is no mere amusement, but an extremely profound book, one to be meditated on page by page. And this ability to make one laugh and meditate at the same time is the distinctive mark of Calvino, at least of the earlier Calvino.

In ''Cosmicomics,'' in ''T Zero,'' to a lesser extent in the famous trilogy [''The Cloven Viscount,'' ''The Baron in the Trees'' and ''The Nonexistent Knight''], and then more fully in ''Mr. Palomar,'' again and again one finds this layman's amazement before the order of creation, before this clock of which we are not too sure who the watchmaker is, before time's passage (the theme of time too is almost an obsession for Calvino, as it is for anyone who has even the vaguest idea of what today's cosmogony is about).

Trying to assess Calvino's writing, I -a hybrid of chemist and writer - would say it is perhaps most concisely defined as a rejection of any given plan or pattern. This rejection happened to coincide in him with a wondrous ability to create new patterns. This is why I truly believe that, if there is one Italian writer or indeed one modern writer in this world who will never be imitated (or, at least never imitated well), it is Calvino, for he is inimitable.

by Robert Coover

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