It is Italy, of course, that plays the role in Calvino’s fiction that Argentina plays in Borges’s, and we note at once another paralleclass="underline" While both writers draw strongly and eloquently upon their respective national cultures, the literary orientation of both is decidedly more international than regional, in their aesthetics as well as their subject matter. Borges was a lifelong Anglophile with a passion for Beowulf and a particular fondness for the England of Robert Louis Stevenson, G. K. Chesterton, and H. G. Wells, but his literary acquaintance was encyclopedic. Calvino valued highly his extended residence in Paris and his association with Raymond Queneau’s OULIPO group (L’Ouvoir de la litterature potentielle, to which I’ll circle back presently); while he wrote knowledgeably about Italian literature from various periods, his most strongly felt affinities (after the comic books and Hollywood movies of his youth) were with Italian folktales, the novellini, and such ingeniously structured tale-cycles as Boccaccio’s Decameron. Both writers, I’m happy to point out, shared my fondness for Scheherazade and company. In Calvino’s case, rather more than in Borges’s though not more than in mine, this fondness extended to tale-cycles and narrative framing devices in general; in our final literary exchange, in 1984, I sent Calvino a half-serious essay of mine on Scheherazade’s menstrual cycle as a key to The 1001 Nights,4 and he sent me his 1982 essay in La Repubblica on Nezami’s medieval Persian tale-cycle The Seven Princesses.
This “internationalism” caused Borges to be criticized at home for being not Argentinean enough in his literary preoccupations: a criticism which Borges quietly devastates in his essay “The Argentine Writer and Tradition.” I doubt that Calvino was ever criticized for being insufficiently Italian, but I recall being told by an Italian colleague that his earlier, realistic works were knocked by the local Catholic critics for being too sympathetic to the Communists, and that his later, fabulistic fictions were knocked by the Communist critics for their abandonment of socialist realism. Although Calvino came to describe himself as a “political agnostic,” he maintained a lively interest in the Italian political scene and wrote scathingly of the assassination of Aldo Moro. Borges was by temperament apolitical, although he despised Perón and got himself into hot water with many of his Latino literary comrades by welcoming the junta that displaced Perón and by accepting a Chilean literary award from the bloody hands of General Pinochet himself. He even permitted himself on that latter occasion some unfortunate disparagements of democratic government: as embarrassing though not incomprehensible a lapse, in its way, as García Márquez’s buddyhood with Fidel Castro, which inspired the Romanian-American writer André Codrescu to remark that one can be simultaneously a great artist and a political idiot.
In sum, sort of, both Borges and Calvino were men of formidable literary sophistication who wore their learning lightly in conversation as well as in their art; unabashed “intellectuals” who were never pedantic or snobbish in their intellectuality (as their great peer Nabokov decidedly sometimes was). Before we leave these relatively personal for more strictly literary paralleli, I suppose it might be noted that both men’s youthful lives were marked by a discreet, respectful ambivalence toward their fathers. Borges writes touchingly about his (and his military forebears) in the mini-memoir “An Autobiographical Essay”; Calvino likewise in his mini-memoir “The Road to San Giovanni.” Both to some extent felt themselves to be letting the old man down in their pursuit of (in Borges’s case) purely bookish interests and values or (in Calvino’s) nonscientific ones; and both maintained a distanced fascination with what they had “rejected”: swords, knives, and military history for Borges, the physical and natural sciences (but not agronomy) for Calvino. By way of anti-paralleli, before we move on: In part but surely not entirely because of his increasing blindness, Borges remained very much his mother’s son during her long life and his long bachelorhood, which ended (the bachelorhood) only at age 68, when his then quite old mother felt unable to accompany him to Cambridge for the Norton lectureship. That late marriage lasted scarcely longer than Harvard’s academic year; when Madre Borges succumbed in her mid-90s, Jorge Luis was admirably managed by his all-purpose assistant Maria Kodama, whom he married shortly before his death in Geneva at age 86. What Calvino’s connection with his mother was, I have no idea (she scarcely figures in the “San Giovanni” memoir, although its author acknowledges that with “silent authority” she “looks out from between the lines”). On the evidence, however, he was altogether a more physically and psychologically independent fellow: a youthful veteran of the antifascist partisan resistance in World War II, a loving husband and father who wrote with amused affection of his domestic life — in the pretty essay “La Poubelle Agréé,”5 for example, as well as in his letters. Perhaps that is why, to some of us at least, Calvino’s fiction surpasses that of Borges in warmth and emotional range, if not in virtuosity and profundity.
BUT ENOUGH INDEED of this: The muses care not a whit about our personal profiles, and not much more than a whit about our politics; their sole concern is that we achieve the high country of Mounts Helicon and Parnassus, whether despite or because of where we’re coming from, and this these two elevated spirits consistently did. The paralleli of their achievement are mostly obvious, the relevant anti-paralleli no doubt likewise. To begin with, both writers, for all their great sophistication of mind, wrote in a clear, straightforward, unmannered, non-baroque, but rigorously scrupulous style. “. . crystalline, sober, and airy. . without the least congestion,” is how Calvino himself (in the second of his Six Memos) describes Borges’s style, and of course those adjectives describe his own as well, as do the titles of all six of his Norton lectures: “Lightness” (Leggerezza) and deftness of touch; “Quickness” (Rapidità) in the senses both of economy of means and of velocity in narrative profluence; “Exactitude” (Esatezza) both of formal design and of verbal expression; “Visibility” (Visibilità) in the senses both of striking detail and of vivid imagery, even (perhaps especially) in the mode of fantasy; “Multiplicity” (Molteplicità) in the senses both of an ars combinatoria and of addressing the infinite interconnectedness of things, whether in expansive, incompletable works such as Gadda’s Via Merulana and Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities or in vertiginous short stories like Borges’s “Garden of Forking Paths”—all cited in Calvino’s lecture on multiplicity; and “Consistency” in the sense that in their style, their formal concerns, and their other preoccupations we readily recognize the Borgesian and the Calvinoesque. So appealing a case does Calvino make for these particular half-dozen literary values, it’s important to remember that they aren’t the only ones; indeed, that their contraries have also something to be said for them. Calvino acknowledges as much in the “Quickness” lecture: “. . each value or virtue I chose as the subject for my lectures,” he writes, “does not exclude its opposite. Implicit in my tribute to lightness was my respect for weight, and so this apology for quickness does not presume to deny the pleasures of lingering,” et cetera. We literary lingerers — some might say malingerers — breathe a protracted sigh of relief.