A few years later, in 1976, I was able to re-extend my come-visit invitation, this time from Johns Hopkins, whereto I had moved and wherefrom we contrived to extract some special funding for distinguished visitors in connection with the university’s centennial festivities. And this time, to our interdepartmental delight, Calvino accepted. Indeed, he accepted in English, declaring that he now felt confident enough in our language to give the thing a brief try. And at the close of his letter of acceptance I was charmed by. . Friendly yours.
In the event, he was with us in Baltimore for about two weeks in March of that year: a dapper, courteous, reserved but entirely cordial fellow whose alert, rather intense mien reminded me of a sharp-eyed bird’s. To my apprentice fiction-writers he read his essay on fiction as an ars combinatoria within a closed field. To the university’s Italian community he lectured in Italian on Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi (but he politely declined an invitation from the Italian consulate in Baltimore to attend a reception there in his honor, on the grounds that he was visiting as a writer, not as a paisano). To the university community at large he gave a public reading from Cosmicomics, T-Zero, and Invisible Cities, which my wife and I remember with particular warmth despite the strain of his fallible and often hesitant English. I had let Calvino know, earlier, that his fiction had been among my courtship materials in the wooing of my bride — especially the lovely closing story from Cosmicomics, called “The Spiral”—and in acknowledgment of his unwitting role as our Galeoto, he included that story in his program, dedicating it to us. Finally, to our literature students and faculty he gave a delightful talk in English on his adventures with the Tarot cards, illustrating his remarks with the deck itself. A student of mine from those days remembers his accidentally dropping the whole pack in mid-demonstration; I myself cannot imagine Italo Calvino ever dropping a card or missing a trick — and sure enough, when I recently reviewed the videotapes of that occasion, I was gratified to see vindicated both my memory and Calvino’s manual dexterity.
Of that too-brief Baltimore sojourn I recall little else. We pointed out to Calvino our city’s funky Bromo-Seltzer Building, which Baltimoreans declare to resemble a Sienese tower. Calvino politely opined that it did not look remarkably Sienese to him, even without the giant blue trademark bottle that used to crown its clock (with the letters B-R-O-M-O-S-E-L-T-Z-E-R instead of numerals). We showed him a particularly bleak nighttime stretch of featureless East Baltimore rowhouses, their cornices lined with hundreds of chattering starlings; to me the scene looked very like de Chirico, but Calvino, delighted with it, said, “It’s all Edward Hopper!” Both impressions, I think, are defensible. Off he presently went to join his wife up in New York City, which he loved, then down with her to Mexico City, which he didn’t love (although he much admired the smaller towns and the Mexican countryside, and was an avid collector of pre-Columbian artifacts), and then back to his home turf, the Paris/Torino axis along which he regularly commuted in those days. We continued to exchange books and occasional letters (such a lover of “lightness” and “quickness” cannot have admired my enormous novel called LETTERS, which I sent him in 1979, although I’m confident he would have approved its formal design). My wife and I looked forward to a reunion with him and Mrs. Calvino during his Norton lectureship at Harvard in 1985/86: a reunion and a lectureship that, alas, never came to pass.
Two final reminiscences, and then on with the story. Just a week or so after the news reached us of Italo’s death on September 19, 1985, Umberto Eco happened to be our guest at Johns Hopkins, and of course we spoke of our mutual lost friend (a much closer friend of Eco’s, to be sure; Calvino had been Eco’s “chaperon,” as Eco himself put it, for the Strega Prize). He had it on good authority, Eco told me, that despite the damage of the massive stroke that had felled Calvino a fortnight earlier, the man managed to utter, as perhaps his final words, “I paralleli! I paralleli!” (“The parallels! The parallels!”). Kindly perpend that wonderful exit-line, to which I shall shortly return.
A year or so later, Esther (“Chichita”) Calvino telephoned to ask whom I might recommend to write a foreword to the Harvard University Press’s forthcoming publication of her husband’s never-delivered Norton lectures, Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Promptly and warmly I recommended myself for that melancholy last rite, but she explained that the Press was insisting on the introducer’s being someone from the Harvard community. On that I drew a blank, and in the event she wrote the touching and altogether admirable foreword herself — the first of several that she has since written for posthumous editions of her husband’s work.
In those five lovely Memo lectures—“Lightness,” “Quickness,” “Exactitude,” “Visibility,” and “Multiplicity”3—Calvino voices several times his admiration for Jorge Luis Borges, an admiration that he and I had shared in our Baltimore conversations. The story-series Lost in the Funhouse, I had told Calvino, was my attempt to assimilate my encounter with Borges’s narrative imagination; the T-Zero collection, Calvino had replied, was his endeavor to do likewise. If parallel lines can be bent non-Euclideanly back upon themselves, I shall circle now back to this lecture’s starting-place and draw a few paralleli—also some anti-paralleli—between the fiction of those two superb writers, who were born a quarter-century apart (both, as it happens, in Latin America) but who died, alas for literature, within nine months of each other (both as it happens, in Europe).
FIRST, SOME NOT particularly literary paralleli. The two gentlemen shared that dignified, polite, even somewhat courtly but altogether approachable and good-humored sociability that I mentioned earlier; nothing in the least rowdy, “bohemian,” or as some might say, re-demptively vulgar about either of them, at least in my limited experience of their company. Compared for example to Vladimir Nabokov, Gore Vidal, or John Gardner (to name three very dissimilar antitypes), both Borges and Calvino were nonbelligerent with respect to their fellow writers. I note with some envy that Calvino’s fiction in particular — rather like García Márquez’s, but perhaps a touch less than Borges’s — is mutually admired by writers who might agree on very little else. Vidal, Gardner, Mary McCarthy, John Updike (whom I have the honor of having introduced to Calvino’s fiction) — all are or were warm Calvinistas along with us alleged Postmodernists, even though Mr. Vidal, in my opinion, gets things wrong even when singing the writer’s praises, which characteristically he cannot do without disparaging other of his contemporaries. Borges and Calvino shared moreover not only their Latin American nativity — Calvino was born in Cuba, where his father was doing agronomical work in 1923—but also a specifically Argentine connection: Borges was born in Buenos Aires and lived most of his life in that city; Esther Judith Singer Calvino was likewise born in Buenos Aires, but spent most of her adult life in Europe — an Italian citizen living and working in Paris as a translator until the Calvinos resettled in Rome. Borges, it occurs to me to mention, declared himself pleased to have a Jewish component in his ancestry (not a very direct one, it turns out, though a consequentiaclass="underline" One of his English grandmother’s sisters married an Italian-Jewish engineer who immigrated to Argentina with his bride and with Borges’s grandmother-to-be), and he said that only once did he break his own rule against political writing: He wrote two pro-Israel poems at the time of the Six-Day War. A fair number of his stories deal with explicitly Jewish themes and characters—“The Aleph,” “Deutsches Requiem,” “Emma Zunz,” and “The Secret Miracle,” among others — and in conversation he once gently corrected my mispronunciation of the word Kabbalah. To the best of my recollection, Calvino’s Jewish connection nowhere surfaces in his fiction; perhaps his wife wasn’t particularly interested in that aspect of her ethnicity, or perhaps Italo wasn’t. His double Latino connection, on the other hand, notably does surface from time to time — for example in the wonderful story “The Jaguar Sun”—but its contexts are typically more Central American than Argentinean, distinctly removed from Borges’s pampas and milongas and Buenos Airean suburbs. In Calvino’s early story specifically entitled “The Argentine Ant,” the setting and the characters are thoroughly Italian; only the eponymous ants are said to “come from South America.”