Classe di Scienze Sociali
Settore di Scienze Politiche
Anno accademico 2018-19
Tesi di Licenza Magistrale
The Cultural Cold War: Italo Calvino’s Travel in the United States
(1959-60)
Candidato: Michele Pajero Relatrice: Dott.ssa Emanuela Minuto
Tutor: Prof.ssa Barbara Henry
Contents
0. Abstract (p.3)
1. The Cultural Cold War (p.5)
2. The Ford Foundation’s activities in Italy (p.11)
3. The Cultural Policy of the Italian Communist Party (p.14)
4. The Communism of Italo Calvino (p.16)
5. The Expanding World of International Exchange (p.20)
6. The Young Artists Program (p.28)
7. Calvino in the United States (p.33)
8. Conclusion (p.42)
Archival Sources and Bibliography (p.46)
0. Abstract
Thanks to a Ford Foundation grant, the well-known Italian novelist Italo Calvino visited the United States for six months when he was 36 years old, from November 1959 to April 1960, invited by the well-established Institute of International Education based in New York, which was responsible for the Young Artists Program. The Program was aimed at promoting the professional career and the understanding of the United States of young and promising foreign artists. The political meaning of the Young Artists Program and the reasons behind the invitation of Calvino have been so far overlooked. Through the activity of individuals like Shepard Stone, Director of the International Affairs Division of the Ford Foundation, and Mateo Lettunich of the Arts Program of the International Institute of Education, non-state American actors worked side by side with government officials and the political, artistic and business élite, to shape the American cultural diplomacy toward Italy and Western Europe during the Cold War. In 1959 Calvino was one of the most known Italian writers in the United States and – at the same time - one of the most prominent Communist intellectuals in Italy. After the XX Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the crisis in Poland and Hungary in 1956, he decided to leave the Party in 1957, although he did not repudiate its ideology in full. Therefore, he constituted the ideal profile of fellow-traveller to approach and influence in the eyes of the American officials. The Ford Foundation and the International Institute of Education worked toward that goal and achieved impressive results, since his American experience permeated several of his fiction and non-fiction works thereafter, although his love for the United States – and for New York in particular – was mixed with criticism. In order to shed light upon this important episode of the cultural Cold War, I will use both published and unpublished sources, namely Calvino’s own writings and
correspondence, and the archival records of the Ford Foundation and the Institute of International Education.
1. The Cultural Cold War
Many books have been written on the history of the Cold War and the foreign policy of the United States. Recently there have been many attempts to reframe it under a global perspective, giving more space to the Third World and studying the Cold War international relations as a multiplayer game, shedding light upon the agency of non-American actors.1 A
branch of study in particular has explored the field of cultural relations and propaganda of the United States toward the Eastern Bloc, the allies and the rest of the world.2 The Cold War was also a competition to win the hearts and minds of the élites, and Western Europe constituted one of the main battlefields. After the Second World War, especially until the crisis in Poland and Hungary in the 1956, the socialist experiment in the Soviet Union was a positive model and a source of inspiration for many Europeans. The communist parties in countries like Italy had a hold on society, and were very active in the realm of propaganda - in collaboration with the Soviet Union - to exalt communism and discredit the United States, capitalism and cultural imperialism. The United States had boots on the ground in this propaganda battle over Europe, and deployed several weapons to contrast the communist influence, through both overt and covert operations, financing and supporting a wide range of propaganda projects aimed at influencing the political, economic and intellectual foreign élites.3
1 For example Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (New York: Basic Books, 2017).
2 For example Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe. Shepard Stone
between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Greg
Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
3 Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 2006).
The United States propaganda machinery used to support the American grand design of the new world order was already born in World War One, when the Wilson Administration established the Committee on Public Information (CPI) to promote the American war goals, both at home and abroad. The criticism surrounding the deceitful use of propaganda and the consequences of the isolationist instances of the Congress, however, led to the weakening and then the disappearance of propaganda agencies; at least, until the late 1930s. In fact, the influence of the Axis powers in Southern America became a matter of deep concern within the F. D. Roosevelt Administration, who therefore created an Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA) headed by Nelson Rockefeller, to strike back and promote inter-American cultural exchange. After the entrance into the war, in 1942 an Office of War Information (OWI) started dealing with the information and propaganda activities abroad, shoulder to shoulder with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of the CIA, which was involved in military operations of psychological warfare. Psychological warfare acquired more and more importance as the ideological conflict grew in intensity, and after the war it became a key Cold War tool redeployed against communism. The wartime agencies merged in the Department of State and in 1947 the NSC-4 (National Security Council memorandum) pushed the information services toward the adoption of forms of political warfare to contrast the Soviet threat; this document also established the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In January 1948 the Smith-Mundt Act provided financial cover for exchange and information programs, preceded in 1946 by the Fulbright Act. While the European Recovery Plan (also known as the Marshall Plan) strengthened the ties between the United States and the so-called “free world”, media like Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty and initiatives like the Eisenhower’s Crusade for Freedom built a solid fortress of propaganda abroad. The continued rising of the budgets of the State Department and other external agencies supported a global propaganda effort without geographical borders, and virtually without any
political and moral limits, justified by the urgent need to confront the imminent communist global threat. The Eisenhower Administration was particularly in favor of psychological warfare and deployed it in several countries and for multiple reasons, increasing in intensity in response to events like the Korean War and the death of Stalin, which seemed to encourage a more proactive stance in the United States. In 1953 the United States Information Agency (USIA) was established, to coordinate precisely the propaganda activities abroad and gather information. United States authorities were given the power to manipulate public opinion even in the so-called “free world” for the benefit of the United States national interests and the Atlantic Community strategy.
Western Europe was a particularly challenging scenario, due to the strength of national communist parties, its strategic value and the lack of conformity among the public opinion and the élites in front of the red menace. In the 1950s American officials had grave reservations about the strength of Europe’s commitment to the worldwide anticommunist crusade: anti-Americanism was particularly widespread among the élites. Soft power, although it was not labeled as such at that time, was considered a key component of American-European relations.4 Anti-Americanism was indeed a source of constant concern for the American authorities. In a speech delivered at a symposium on the arts in 1955, George Kennan frankly addressed the problem: ‘Many of the feelings about us which other people would think are political have their origins in the impression that we are a nation of vulgar, materialistic nouveaux riches, lacking in manners and in sensitivity, interested only in making money, contemptuous of every refinement of aesthetic feeling … in Western Europe … we have become identified in the minds of people with
things and impulses of the modern age which they hate in themselves – such things as modern technology, standardization, and mass culture, which they themselves are rapidly acquiring.’5
Anti-Americanism, however, had ancient roots: the European intellectual élites already experienced a deep ideological and existential crisis between the two world wars. Many of them turned to the communist experiment in the Soviet Union to find new original values to lead European societies out of the mud of the 1920s-30s, while others embraced the Nazi and Fascist ideologies.6 As the power and influence of the United States in Europe grew after
World War Two, anti-Americanism spread especially where the national communist parties were stronger, like in Italy.7 The Congress of the United States acknowledged the seriousness
of the problem when some of its representatives toured the “Free World” in 1947; as a consequence, they voted for an increase of the funds and political commitment in the field of international propaganda and psychological warfare. Anti-Americanism had to be fought back through a patient and continued effort to persuade the élites to agree on the United States’ vision of the world order, through the celebration of its achievements in the fields of modern art, dance and literature, and of its social and technological modernity. Most of all, they had to seem more attractive than the Soviet counterpart. That is why the USIA, CIA and Department of State intervened heavily in the political and cultural life of the Western European countries. But these governmental actors were not alone: non-state players like the big foundations, corporations and wealthy individuals worked shoulder to shoulder with state agencies
5 George Kennan, “International Exchange in the Arts,” in Perspectives USA 16 (1956): 9.
6 Benjamin Martin, A New Order for European Culture: the German-Italian Axis and the Reordering of
International Cultural Exchange, 1936-1943 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).
7 Piero Craveri and Gaetano Quagliarello (eds.), L’Antiamericanismo in Italia e in Europa nel Secondo
toward the same goal. Their collaboration was neither horizontal nor vertical; there was rather an osmotic relationship between diplomacy, administration, business and philanthropy, by virtue of the particular individualistic and capitalistic social structure and mindset of the American world. Big families like the Rockefeller and the Ford, and individuals like George Kennan and other CIA and State Department veterans, slid smoothly between the interconnected spheres of politics, culture and business. A tight network formed by top-level élites participated in conceiving and implementing the diplomatic and cultural relations of the United States with the rest of the world. That is the case, for example, of the funding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), established in 1950 in an anti-Communist perspective.8 It was a network of intellectuals from all around Western Europe, heavily funded by both the CIA and the Ford Foundation, committed to defend European culture and promote the principles of liberal democracy against every kind of totalitarianism. It included prominent intellectuals like Karl Jaspers, Ignazio Silone, Arthur Schlesinger, Bertrand Russell, Raymond Aron, Benedetto Croce and Arthur Koestler. In 1966-7 the secret sources of their funding were brought to light causing a significant backstop of its activities, but in the meantime it had promoted conferences and seminars, published journals and books, working as the beachhead of the United States Government in the Old World. This intellectual network and other numerous initiatives in the realm of high culture could not have been possible without the fundamental cooperation of the American big foundations, including the Ford. As pointed out by Frances S. Saunders, ‘the use of philanthropic foundations was the most convenient way to pass large sums of money to Agency projects without alerting the recipients to their source’.9 The Ford Foundation in particular was the wealthiest foundation in the world in the 1950s, 8 Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe,108-42. 9 Frances S. Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: the CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000), 134.
with assets worth billions dollars.10 The officials of this Foundation – whose establishment
dated back to 1934, but became fully operative only after the Second World War - were State Department veterans or even former CIA agents. Its board funded tens of programs at home and all around the world, notably in the arts, education - creating entire University departments from scratch -, training and international exchange, granting some hundreds million dollars for development and cultural projects that fit very well in the United States foreign policy agenda. In 1959 - when Calvino was invited in the United States thanks to a Ford Foundation grant, as we will see - the chairman was John J. McCloy. He had already been Assistant Secretary of War, President of the World Bank, High Commissioner of Germany, and from 1953 Chairman of both the Rockefellers’ Chase Manhattan Bank and the Council on Foreign Relations.11 He already worked shoulder to shoulder with the CIA in Germany, but
during his presidency he even established some sub-committees to collaborate directly with the Agency.12 Another individual, Shepard Stone, the head of the International Affairs division
of the Foundation, played a pivotal role for the expansion of the Foundation programs abroad.13 He already worked with McCloy in Germany, and while working for the Foundation
he was responsible for the grants accorded to the CCF.14 More generally, he was one of the
most important points of reference for the anti-communist intellectuals in Western Europe and one key-actor of the American cultural diplomacy in the Old World. 10 Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe, 143-77. 11 Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, 141. 12 Ibidem. 13 Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe. 14 Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, 144.
2. The Ford Foundation’s activities in Italy
Through the International Affairs division headed by Shepard Stone, the Ford Foundation run several programs in Western Europe, funding also international exchange initiatives through the Travel and Study grants. While at the beginning of the 1950s the grantees were mainly from Europe – in particular from West Germany and the UK -, toward the end of the decade the Foundation focused on non-European developing countries, responding to the decisive global shifts caused by the revolutionary changes in the so-called “Third World” and the achievement of political independence by more and more former European colonies in Asia.
In 1959, when Calvino left for the United States, the Foundation was already very interested in the Italian peninsula, as well as the American Government officials, who followed closely and carefully its political and economic evolution. When the revelations that followed the XX Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and the Polish and Hungarian uprisings put in crisis the Italian Communist Party (PCI, Partito Comunista Italiano), the Foundation had already financed several development programs in Southern Italy in the field of education and training. The Foundation showed a particular interest in the value of the RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana) as a modern tool to fight illiteracy and educate the masses. As well as in other world scenarios, the Ford Foundation believed that an effective and genuine effort to improve education and training, and to defeat poverty and overpopulation, could erode the sources of popular discontent that fuelled the favor for the radical and communist parties. It was a belief shared with the Italian liberal democratic parties which were concerned about the questione meridionale, as in the case of Ugo La Malfa, while radings like Cristo si è Fermato a Eboli were well known on the other shore of the ocean.
The Foundation had valuable contacts with top-level cadres in the political and cultural Italian community. In 1958, while the Ford Foundation was conceiving the Young Artists Program, a Foundation’s official, William McNeil Lowry, conducted a thorough inquiry in Italy and in other European countries over the support of the arts.15 Although the results of that
inquiry were to be used to set a domestic agenda, nonetheless it is impressive that Lowry had such an easy access to the heads of the Italian Government.16 However, the Italian
Government’s power to influence the cultural production was welcomed with criticism, especially regarding the proactive attitude of the Catholics in the Government and the Vatican to contrast and even censor the film industry when it did not comply with the religious and political standards.17 After all, the United States had nothing similar to the Italian Ministry of
Culture at home: individualism and meritocracy in the New World welcomed the heavy intervention of private and semi-private organizations such as the Ford Foundation, but categorically refused the heavy-handed presence of the Federal Government – at least in theory. Apart from the political sphere, the Foundation had key contacts among intellectuals too, from the writer Ignazio Silone to the publisher of the Intercultural Publications Elizabeth Borgese.18 Ignazio Silone was the Italian intellectual that was closest to the Ford Foundation 15 Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC): Ford Foundation (FF) records, Office of Humanities and the Arts, Office of the Vice President, Office Files of Wilson McNeil Lowry - Series IV: Programs – FA582 – Box 6, Folder 25 – HA, Inquiry into the Support of the Arts in France, UK, Denmark and Italy.
16 He met the following officials: Pasquale Lopez, Theater Section of the Italian Presidency of the Council of Ministers (PCM); Giuseppe Padellaro, Chief of the Ufficio della Proprietà Letteraria, Artistica
e scientifica, PCM; Pittoli, Head of the Theatre and Opera Section, PCM; Guglielmo Triches, Assistant to
the Director General, Fine Arts Department, Ministry of Education. 17 Ibid.
and to the American Government, besides being widely known for his fiction works abroad.19
As we know, Silone worked shoulder to shoulder with the OSS during the Second World War and continued to cooperate with the American authorities due to his valuable commitment to the anti-communist crusade.20 The literary journal Tempo Presente, which he directed with
Nicola Chiaromonte, was funded by the Ford Foundation itself, together with the CIA, through to the connection with the CCF, where both Silone and Chiaromonte played a major role.21 The Ford Foundation funded also the Intercultural Publications Program, that was used to print the works of important anti-communist like George Orwell and to launch editorial initiatives like Perspectives, a quite unsuccessful cultural journal that was used to spread anti-communist and pro-American feelings in the Old World.22 The Italian Government, on his side, was well aware of the funding of Silone’s magazine by the CCF; moreover, the Government itself funded the same journal.23 During his travel in Italy, Lowry paid a visit also to Naomi Huber, the
Cultural Affairs officer of the American Embassy to Italy, and Gertrude S. Hooker, Cultural Affairs officer of the USIA, demonstrating the strength of the Foundation’s connections with the American propaganda machinery abroad.24
3. The Cultural Policy of the Italian Communist Party
19 Elizabeth Leake, The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). 20 Emanuele Saccarelli, “The Intellectual as Agent: Politics and Independence in the Other ‘Caso Silone’,” in History of European Ideas 40 (2014): 381-405.21 Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe, 140. 22 Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, 140.
23 RAC: FF records, Grant and Project Proposals – Series: 1957 - FA734 - Reel L57-100 - Mission to
Europe (Waldemar Nielsen).
The Italian political life was a subject of great interest for the American authorities, due to the strength of the PCI. The Salerno Turn of Palmiro Togliatti in 1944 marked a turning point for the future of the Party and its relationship with the Soviet Union. Apparently accepting to compete with the other political parties on a democratic basis, the PCI decided to focus on the patient and wise achievement of the cultural hegemony envisaged by Antonio Gramsci during his captivity under the Fascist Regime.25 The embracement of the Gramscian
thesis was both a propaganda tool useful to qualify themselves as a genuinely democratic and national party, and a strategic choice to target and recruit the intellectuals for the victory of communism in the peninsula. Therefore, through the establishment of journals (La Rinascita), newspapers (L’Unità), magazines (Vie Nuove) and the collaboration with publishing houses (Einaudi), the Communist Party invested on the intellectuals. It achieved impressive results, at least among the cultural élites that had led the opposition to the Fascist regime and fought in the Resistenza after 1943. After the exclusion from the Government in 1947 and the growth of anti-Communist propaganda, led by the Demochristian Party (DC, Democrazia Cristiana) and the other liberal-democratic political organizations - supported by the United States -, the PCI stressed more and more the imperative of party discipline and the duty to conform to the Zhdanovian aesthetic principles and Neorealism in the arts. That caused some serious frictions between the intellectuals and the Party; the clash in 1947 between Elio Vittorini on one side, director of the leftist journal Il Politecnico, and Togliatti on the other, was the most evident example.26 In 1948 a Cultural Commission was established within the Party,
25 For the cultural policy of the PCI throughout the 1950s, see Stephen Gundle, Between Hollywood and
Moscow: the Italian Communists and the Challenge of Mass Culture (Durham: Duke University Press,
2000), 11-105; Nello Ajello, Intellettuali e PCI 1944-1958 (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1979). 26 Nello Ajello, Intellettuali e PCI, 113-38.
responsible for the cultural policy and used as a transmission belt to dialogue with the intellectuals. While the end of the war and the Resistance experience brought to an ideological crisis for many intellectuals like Cesare Pavese, who killed himself in 1950, many others enthusiastically engaged in the Party’s activities, looking for a new role to play as both artists and points of reference for the public opinion. The Einaudi publishing house played a major role in that regard: between 1947 and 1951 it published the writings by Antonio Gramsci, in accordance to Togliatti’s will, and many other books and engagé journals like Vittorini’s Il
Politecnico.27 Through figures like Carlo Muscetta and Antonio Giolitti, the PCI was constantly
in touch with the publishing house, and Giulio Einaudi himself and his entourage had to acquiesce several times to the Party’s requests. However, while the Party was closing its political and cultural ranks due to the increasing exasperation of the ideological struggle, the Italian society experienced an unprecedented modernization characterized by the growth of factories, the spread of technological innovations, changings in the world of media and the growth of popular culture under the American influence. Some communist intellectuals such as Italo Calvino began to think that a new modern cultural strategy was needed. Moreover, the lack of intellectual independence and the political-artistic debate within the Einaudi publishing house stranded the ties with the PCI already before the major crisis in 1956, when the international events in the Eastern Bloc caused a major crisis of consent both among the intellectuals and the general population.28 The report by Krushchev on the crimes of Stalinism
and the uprising in Poland and Hungary in 1956 caused a major crisis of the post-war principles of collaboration and hierarchy existing between the intellectuals and the PCI. When Togliatti and the Communist cadres entrenched in an orthodox and defensive position and
27 Luisa Mangoni, Pensare i libri. La Casa Editrice Einaudi dagli Anni Trenta agli Anni Sessanta (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999).
failed to meet the intellectuals’ request to elaborate a new strategic and cultural policy, many saw no other option but to leave the PCI. Like in Calvino’s case, many left the official militancy ranks, but remained faithful to the ideology, while others joined other political parties, like in Antonio Giolitti’s case, and a part of them even enrolled in the anti-communist crusade. The intellectual entourage of the Einaudi publishing house – including Italo Calvino - remembered those years as a time of deep ideological and existential crisis.
4. The Communism of Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino was a leading intellectual for the Italian and European political and cultural life. Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 but moved to San Remo shortly after.29 His
parents were both scientists and his family’s interests contributed to the development of his long-lasting curiosity for technology and modernity in all its forms. In 1944 he joined the communist partisan bands that fought Nazism in Northern Italy. That experience was fundamental for the young Calvino and for many other intellectuals emerging from the Fascist
Ventennio. Together with many other young minds of his generation, he supported the PCI
after the Resistenza, embracing a political project that proposed a convincing political solution to the progressive instances developed during the war. As Calvino himself explained in an interview dated 1962:
29 For a short biography of Italo Calvino, see Domenico Scarpa, Italo Calvino (Milano: Mondadori,
2005), 1-52. For an account of his life and his literary work in relation with the American literature and myth, see Paola Castellucci, Un Modo di Stare al Mondo. Italo Calvino e l’America (Bari: Adriatica Editrice, 1999).
‘Il comunismo rappresentava quelli che erano (e In fondo resteranno) i due poli d’attrazione politica tra i quali ho sempre oscillato. Da una parte il rifiuto della società che aveva prodotto il fascismo ci aveva portato a sognare una rivoluzione che partisse da una tabula rasa … e … arrivasse a formare una società che fosse l’antitesi di quella borghese … Dall’altra parte aspiravamo a una civiltà la più moderna e progredita e complessa dal punto di vista politico, sociale, economico, culturale, con una classe dirigente altamente qualificata, cioè con l’inserimento della cultura a tutti i livelli della direzione politica e produttiva … arrivarono le prime copie dell’Unità, dopo il 25 aprile. Apro l’Unità di Milano: vice-direttore era Elio Vittorini. Apro l’Unità di Torino: in terza pagina scriveva Cesare Pavese. Manco a farlo apposta erano i due scrittori italiani miei preferiti … E ora scoprivo che erano nel campo che anch’io avevo scelto: pensavo che non poteva essere altrimenti … Quell’ideale d’una cultura che fosse tutt’uno con la lotta politica ci si delineava in quei giorni come una realtà naturale (Invece non era affatto così: coi rapporti tra politica e cultura dovevamo romperci la testa per quindici anni…).’30 The Resistenza was also the subject of his first novel, Il Sentiero dei Nidi di Ragno – published by the Einaudi publishing house in 1947 -, as well as the main theme of various other books written by some of his closest friends, like Cesare Pavese.31 After the war, Calvino moved to Torino and collaborated with the leftist Il Politecnico directed by Elio Vittorini, and worked for
L’Unità, the official newspaper of the PCI. From 1949, he began to work for the Einaudi
publishing house. The editorial work of Calvino and his colleagues deeply influenced the Italian cultural life after World War Two; the Einaudi significantly included in its ranks prominent communist intellectuals like Cesare Pavese and Elio Vittorini. He was a militant of the PCI and participated to several propagandistic initiatives sponsored by the Soviets, like
30 Italo Calvino, Eremita a Parigi. Pagine Autobiografiche (Milano: Mondadori, 1994), 171-2.
31 Calvino, Il Sentiero dei Nidi di Ragno (Torino: Einaudi, 1947); Cesare Pavese, La Luna e i Falò (Torino: Einaudi, 1950).
the World Festival of Youth and Students in 1947 and 1949. His militancy consisted also in the writing of reportages and articles in communist and leftist journals and magazines on topics like the work in the factories and in the countryside; in the meantime, he wrote non-fiction works as well. In 1951 he was invited in the Soviet Union for two months and published a
reportage of that experience on the pages of L’Unità.32 He drew a quite positive picture of the
USSR, but in 1979 in an article published on La Repubblica reconsidered his original views:
‘Nel Diario di un viaggio in Urss … annotavo quasi esclusivamente osservazioni minime di vita quotidiana, aspetti rasserenanti, tranquillizzanti, atemporali, apolitici … la mia vera colpa di stalinismo è stata proprio questa: per difendermi da una realtà che non conoscevo, ma in qualche modo presentivo e a cui non volevo dare un nome, collaboravo col mio linguaggio non ufficiale che all’ipocrisia ufficiale presentava come sereno e sorridente ciò che era dramma e tensione e strazio … I rombi di tuono del ’56 dissolsero tutte le maschere e gli schermi.’33
In 1952 he published another important novel, Il Visconte Dimezzato.34 In 1953 he even wrote
in Società a harsh article against the American decision to execute the Rosenberg.35 However,
his love for non-realistic fiction works clashed with the Zhdanovian aesthetic principles adopted by the PCI and did not fit well in the frame of Neorealism. He felt an incredible admiration for the American literature, shared with other fellow writers at the Einaudi publisher house, from Fernanda Pivano to Cesare Pavese and Elio Vittorini. The curiosity for the American world was shared by many intellectuals of his generation, who were attracted
32 Calvino, “Taccuino di Viaggio nell’Unione Sovietica (1952),” in Saggi 1945-85 (Milano: Mondadori, 1995), 2407-96.
33 Calvino, Eremita a Parigi, 224-5.
34 Calvino, Il Visconte Dimezzato (Torino: Einaudi, 1952).
by cultural expressions that were radically different from the Fascist aesthetic and ideological forms. However, after the war Calvino’s admiration for writers like Ernst Hemingway was challenged by the Communist cadres, who worked to keep the ranks closed against capitalistic and bourgeoise literature. All these bones of contention surfaced in the chaotic months of 1957, which marked a major crisis of Calvino’s own political and professional life. He felt really distant from the political position of orthodox communists like Giorgio Amendola. He showed a clear dissent from the Party’s cultural and political policy, and desperately pushed for a radical revision of the Stalinist years.36 In the end, he decided to announce his
resignation from the Party through a letter, published in L’Unità.37 He thought that the
intellectuals had to express their commitment to the communist cause as true leaders in the Italian society, therefore they needed more autonomy. After he left the Party, however, he did not repudiate its ideology, but preferred to play a critical and independent intellectual role outside the Party. As he argued in 1962, reflecting on his own decision: ‘[ho creduto lungo il mio cammino e continuo a credere] per una lotta politica e una cultura (e letteratura) come formazione di una nuova classe dirigente … Ho sempre lavorato e lavoro con questo in mente: vedere prender forma la classe dirigente nuova, e contribuire a dare ad essa un segno, un’impronta.’38 Thereafter, he continued working for the Einaudi and wrote articles for several journals of the communist diaspora, while in 1959 he founded Il Menabò with Elio Vittorini, published by Einaudi as well. 1957 was a pivotal year for Calvino also from a literary point of view: in that
36 Mangoni, Pensare i Libri, 857-8.
37 “Le dimissioni di Calvino dal PCI condannate dal C.D. di Torino”, in L’Unità, 8-7-1957. 38 Calvino, Eremita a Parigi, 179.
year he published Il Barone Rampante, one of his most famous fiction works, and La
Speculazione Edilizia, a short novel representing the ideological crisis of his generation.39 La Speculazione Edilizia was first published in Botteghe Oscure, the journal of the Princess
Marguerite Caetani. At the turn of the decade, Calvino could finally define himself as a writer, having reached the necessary economic success and public recognition – also abroad -, but at the same time he did not renounce to define himself as a socially and politically engaged intellectual. In 1959-60, when he was invited to the United States by the Ford Foundation, he had already published Il Cavaliere Inesistente, while Il Barone Rampante and Il Sentiero dei
Nidi di Ragno had been translated in English; he was also working to have the collection Fiabe Italiane, Il Cavaliere Inesistente and Il Visconte Dimezzato published in the United States.40
5. The Expanding World of International Exchange
The main goal of the Young Artists Program was to bring young rising foreign cultural leaders to the United States to achieve a better understanding of the American nation:‘Through active and carefully planned participation … foreign cultural leaders could achieve a better understanding of America and its people, culture, and way of life in a most organic and
39 Calvino, Il Barone Rampante (Torino: Einaudi, 1957); Italo Calvino, “La Speculazione Edilizia,” in
Botteghe Oscure 10 (1957): 438-517.
40 Calvino, Il Cavaliere Inesistente (Torino: Einaudi, 1959); The Path to the Nest of Spiders (Boston: Beacon, 1957); The Baron in the Trees (New York: Random House, 1959); Italian Fables (New York: Collier Books, 1961); The Nonexistent King and The Cloven Viscount (New York: Random House, 1962).
meaningful way. These leaders, as writers and cultural spokesmen of their respective nations in Europe, carry great weight in their own countries and in the European community’.41 The project was conceived by Mateo Lettunich, head of the Arts Program of the Institute of International Education (IIE) based in New York, and the International Affairs division of the Ford Foundation, which promised a 7 years grant. Mateo Lettunich was a Department of State veteran who already worked as a cultural affairs advisor in Berlin from 1948, while in the late 1950s joined the IIE and collaborated with the Ford Foundation.42 At the same time, a similar
grant was given by the Ford Foundation to the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in Washington D.C. to run a parallel program to bring more established foreign cultural leaders in the United States. The ICA had already been involved in such activities: intellectuals like Henri Cartier Bressons, Arnold Toynbee and Salvatore Quasimodo visited the United States thanks to ICA programs, meeting fellow artists like Marta Graham and Igor Stravinsky.43 The Young Artists Program had the full support of the Under Secretary of State Christian Herter and the USIA, also because it was useful to lean on a solid network of contacts and thus reduce the overhead costs.44 The IIE was founded after the Great War in 1919 ‘to prepare Americans for their new leadership role’ in the world, thanks to individuals like Stephen Pierce Duggan and the Nobel Laureates Nicholas Murray Butler, President of the Columbia University and of the Carnegie 41 RAC: FF records – Series: Grants H to K - FA732D - Reel 3006 – Institute of International Education, Inc. –Executive Committee Docket Items 11-13-1958. 42 Obituary in The Monterey Herald, 4-7-2013. 43 RAC: FF records – Series: Grants H to K - FA732D - Reel 3006 – Institute of International Education, Inc. –Executive Committee Docket Items 4-25-1962. 44 RAC: FF records - Grants H to K - FA732D - Reel 3006 – Institute of International Education, Inc. – Executive Committee Docket Items 11-13-1958.
Endowment for International Peace, and Elihu Root, former Secretary of State.45 Duggan
directed the IIE until 1946 and the Council on Foreign Relations until 1950. He worked in the United States cultural cooperation with Southern America to contrast the Axis propaganda initiatives and was also involved in the UNESCO. His son, Laurence Duggan, Chief of the Latin American Division of the State Department, followed as president of the IIE after his father, but died in 1948. Kenneth Holland, another State Department veteran, followed as head of the IIE from 1950 to 1973. During his mandate, the IIE budget grew from 1,2 million to 20 million dollars. During the Cold War, several Foundations - including the Ford -, corporations, universities and the Government turned to the IIE to run several programs of international exchange in the field of education, training and the arts. The IIE was notably responsible for the Fulbright program, established with a Congress law in 1948, and for all the Ford Foundation grants involving international education. In 1959, when Italo Calvino was given a grant by the Ford Foundation through the IIE, the latter had 564,600 dollars contributions from foundations and 794,353 dollars from the Government.46 The board of Trustees included
the most prominent individuals in New York and the USA, like Edward Barrett, Dean of the Columbia University, Eugene Black, the President of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and diplomats like James Zellerbach, ambassador to Italy from 1957 to 1960.47
45 RAC: Institute of International Education (IIE) records – Publications, Paper records – Series 1 - FA1291 – Box 10 – The First 75 Years of the Institute of International Education.
46 RAC: Institute of International Education (IIE) records – Publications, Paper records – Series 1 - FA1291 – Box 9 – IIE Annual Report 1960.
International exchange acquired a decisive importance in the Cold War years, and the IIE was the non-governmental leader in the field. The number of international exchange programs and their importance increased substantially toward the end of the 1950s.
In October 1956 the IIE launched a conference on the arts and the exchange of persons that gathered several key actors in the field.48 On that occasion, the President of the IIE
Holland reminded the political meaning of the subject being debated: ‘Much has recently been said about the need to counteract the cultural propaganda offensive of the Soviet Union which stresses their cultural achievements and disparages of the United States … In most parts of the world, cultural and spiritual life hold a predominant place in the life of the people. Their impressions of us are formed by what they believe to be our way of life and our cultural patterns. We have been pictured as a materialistic society, interested only in money and gadgets, and lacking in sensitivity. It is important that the rest of the world know and understand the cultural and spiritual life in the United States, and since the arts transcend language barriers, national barriers and political barriers, they are in a strategic position to convey to other peoples the real values of American life’.49
In Western Europe, in particular, anti-Americanism and the peace movements supported by the Soviet Union were popular among the intellectuals, and leftist individuals – like Italo Calvino - were invited in USSR to see the tremendous achievements of socialism with their own eyes. The American nation had to demonstrate the superiority of its society and convince the world to support its peace and development goals. The same concerns about anti-
48 RAC: Institute of International Education (IIE) records – Publications, Paper records – Series 1 - FA1291 – Box 10 – The Arts and Exchange of Persons. Report of a conference on The Arts and Exchange
of Persons held October 4 and 5, 1956 at the Institute of International Education.
Americanism were revealed by other speeches during the conference, like in Francis Henry Taylor’s case, director of the Worcester Art Museum:
‘there is virtually no American history taught in Europe … the elites are fairly conversant with the American novel, they know a little bit about American poetry and they are quite familiar with our gadgets, our ice boxes, our electric stoves and automobiles. But they have no knowledge whatever of the things that make up our American atavism and our American historical climate … We have pauperized them in virtually every other way. They find consolation in parading a certain inherited sophistication, if you want to call it that, or belief in their superior ability to understand the life of the mind. Of course, that is just nonsense … I think it is just as important for us to bring over alert, keen young minds from Europe who are going to take America as they see it and not as it has been handed to them by the propagandists in their own countries.'50
James Laughlin, who led the literature panel of the conference, made some other recommendations that were substantially adopted by the IIE when it launched the Young Artists Program:
‘from the standpoint of national interest – sending writers abroad helps to reduce such misconceptions as the stereotype of the United States as an exclusively materialistic culture. And from the same point of view, it may be even more effective to bring foreign writers to the United States, particularly since so many of the exchangees now arriving here are technicians … in terms of age, young writers should be considered more in need of aid than writers of established reputation … the most desirable method of selection would be to use a committee of qualified writers, editors and critics serving on voluntary and rotating basis, thus assuring catholicity … similar committees might be set up abroad to choose the foreign exchangees … a new and
permanent, though flexible, programming service be set up to handle exchanges in the arts for the sponsoring agencies.’51
It is no coincidence Laughlin was the director of the Intercultural Publications program of the Ford Foundation: he ‘launched the magazine Perspectives, which was targeted at the Non-Communist Left in France, England, Italy and Germany’.52 The nature of the IIE conference in 1956 demonstrates that the IIE was aware of the importance of soft power in the Cold War and of conscious of the serious challenge posed by anti-Americanism. That is also the subject of a welcoming book distributed to the incoming exchangees – thus also to the Young Artists Program grantees – which devoted some pages to that issue:
‘These three methods of influence – social, economic and technological – are inextricably blended both in their manifestations and their impact. What has happened in the last quarter century is something comparable to the expansion of England through the eighteenth and nineteenth century industrial revolutions: the spread of an American culture that is not primarily intellectual or artistic but predominantly social and technological. This is what European critics have in mind when they complain of the “Americanization” of Europe or warn against the “American Challenge” … “blame” expressed the attitude of the intellectuals and the elite, not that of the masses of the populations. European intellectuals had long despised “Americanization” because they considered it a calculated rejection of the past, tradition, beauty, and culture, and a surrender to crass materialism’.53
51 Ibidem.
52 Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, 141.
53 RAC: Institute of International Education (IIE) records – Publications, Paper records – Series 1 - FA1291 – Box 10 – The Arts and Exchange of Persons. Report of a conference on The Arts and Exchange
We have to keep in mind these premises to understand the cultural and political roots of the Young Artists Program.
A review of the Travel and Study Awards program supported by the International Affairs Division of the Ford Foundation showed another aspect of the rationale behind the Young Artists Program, shared by all the actors involved in international exchange, including the Department of State. The main point was that programs that were not openly sponsored by the Government had a clear advantage:
‘In many cases … the program which has no official or semi-official overtones can permit a broader selection enabling useful trips to be made by individuals who might hesitate to come to the U.S. under governmental auspices and who would find no difficulties in a trip financed by a private foundation’.54
This is a key factor at the basis of the activities of the big Foundations and programs such as the Young Artists. An apparently neutral sponsorship helped to maintain a low political profile and in many cases it even provided coverage for CIA activities. It was necessary to defend the American cultural diplomacy from allegations of political and cultural imperialism. The same rationale is revealed also in the nature of the collaboration existing between the Ford Foundation, the American Government and another well-known Italian writer: Ignazio Silone. In 1955 the America-Italy Society, with a Ford Foundation grant and in collaboration with the Department of State, invited the Italian novelist to the United States for the first time, although in the end he had to decline due to health reasons. The reasons of such
54 RAC: FF records, International Affairs records – Series III: Grants – FA748 – Box 5, Folder 1965,
a collaboration were obvious and demonstrated the advantages of an effective private-public relationship in the realm of cultural diplomacy and propaganda: ‘The Department of State is in favor of such a visit by Sig. Silone and has communicated with the Foundation regarding the possibility of Foundation assistance. The American Embassy at Rome has for some time urged the visit on the grounds that it would further U.S. policy objectives in Italy. From the beginning of the development of Foundation program plans for Europe, Sig. Silone’s name has always been included as one of the best examples of the type of influential intellectual leaders that should be brought to this country because of their influence among intellectual and other groups inclined to be hostile toward the U.S. … For obvious reasons Silone … would be in a stronger strategic position to continue his anti-Communist influence upon returning from a visit to the U.S. if the visit were not sponsored by the U.S. government.’55
In these frantic years that witnessed the inaugurations of dozens of exchange programs and the growth of an intense debate on the future of cultural diplomacy, in January 1959 the IIE sponsored the Third National Conference on Exchange of Persons.56 It was a sort of States-General in the world of international exchange and it paved the way for programs like the Young Artists. It was attended by the Government, public servants, big Foundations, intellectuals, businessmen and artists. In his address to the conference, President Eisenhower stressed the importance of his idea of “people-to-people diplomacy” and significantly noticed that the Secretary of State had recently appointed a specialist to coordinate the efforts in that field. During the conference, the participants argued that the United States had to avoid any 55 RAC: FF records – Series: Grants A to B – FA732A – Reel 0496 – Folder: America-Italy Society, Inc. – Memorandum from Shepard Stone to Don K. Price 2-11-1955. 56 RAC: FF records – Series: 1959 General Correspondence – FA735 - Reel C-1330 – Folder: Institute of International Education.
accusation of cultural imperialism, but still needed to confront the great investments made by USSR in cultural diplomacy. Activities in that field had to be seen as ‘a pathway to basic improvement of understanding rather than a propaganda shortcut’, while ‘national interest itself is no longer an adequate scale by which to measure success or failure … the national interest as expressed in this program has now become the international interest’.57 This
demonstrates the belief shared by the conference participants – representatives of the American cultural diplomacy galaxy - on the importance of considering the American foreign policy goals as universal and neutral principles. This debate, alongside the ones examined above, constituted the incubator of the Young Artists Program in which Italo Calvino was involved.
6. The Young Artists Program
The Young Artists Program gave young foreign creative artists the opportunity to visit the United States; they were selected for their professional potential and their probable adaptability to the American scene. Each year, a series of foreign artists were chosen from different countries and various fields of work. In 1959-60, the first year of the program, it was the turn of 7 writers, while in 1960-1 it was the turn of composers, for example. The initial focus of the program was on Western Europe, but in the following years other countries were involved, from Latin America to the nations of the Eastern Bloc. The political value of this geographic rationale was underlined in a memorandum sent by the IIE to the Ford
57 RAC: FF records – Series: 1959: General Correspondence – FA735 - Reel C-1330 – Folder: Institute of International Education –World Progress through Educational Exchange. The Story of a Conference.
Foundation in May 1966, the last year of the program.58 Discussing the need to select more
grantees from non-Western areas of the world, the IIE officials stated:
‘Although not satisfied that enough artists from non-Western areas have been selected for these grants … this process must not result in our neglecting the European artists. As our relations with France both politically and culturally descend into a tar pit of deprecations and accusations we should do everything possible to avoid slighting her budding artists and intellectuals … across the Rhine an ominous chrysalis called “militant nationalism” appears to be gestating among the Germans again obliging us to remember the importance of preserving the close ties with the community of German artists and the larger community of German cosmopolitans generally … As Spain girds for the future without Franco, stronger ties between American and Spanish artists may help to make that future somewhat less chaotic, somewhat more in line with present political and social developments on the continent as a whole’.59
The Program was intended to avoid the natural suspicion of the intellectuals toward forms of government sponsorship. A follow-up program was put in place to obtain information about the artists involved once they returned back home ‘for the edification of interested agencies in the U.S.’ and to assess the significance and the impact of their foreign
58 RAC: FF records – Series: Grants A to B – FA732A – Reel 0496 – Folder: America-Italy Society, Inc. –
Concerning the extension of the International Cultural Exchange Program, Memorandum dated
5-26-1966. 59 Ibidem.
experience.60 The program was conceived for the same anti-Soviet and anti-anti-Americanism
reasons underlying the general contemporary debate on international exchange.
The 1959-60 selection committee of the Program was significantly chaired by James Laughlin of the Intercultural Publications. With the help of national committees set in foreign countries, 7 grantees were chosen out of more than 60 applicants from Western Europe and Israel: Fernando Arrabal, a Spanish playwriter residing in France; Italo Calvino; Hugo Claus, a Belgian novelist, poet and playwriter; Günter Grass, from Western Germany; Claude Ollier, a French novelist; Alfred Tomlinson, from UK; and Matitayahu Meged, from Israel. Unfortunately, Günter Grass was denied the visa by the American Consulate due to health reasons, and was replaced by Robert Pinget, a Swiss writer. Some of the candidates originally rejected received an invitation from the Department of States under the umbrella of the Leaders and Specialists Program, indicating again a close collaboration between the IIE and the Government. All the writers were welcomed in New York by the IIE and arranged a travel schedule for the months to come in collaboration with the American Institution. They had a great freedom to choose who, what, where and when they liked to see and to do. The IIE tried to accommodate all their requests and organized meetings with publishers, American artists and prominent individuals in New York City and in the other States through its regional offices, besides of course conferences and seminars.
But how the writers were selected in the first place? The national selection committees were formed by high-profile individuals, For example, Roland Barthes, Samuel Beckett and Emil M. Cioran were part of the French committee. In the Italian case, Princess Marguerite Caetani was one of the main components, while Alberto Moravia and Nicola Chiaromonte had
60 RAC: FF records - Grants H to K - FA732D - Reel 3006 – Institute of International Education, Inc. –A
Proposal for an International Program in the Creative Arts by the Institute of International Education, August 1958.
been contacted as well, but did not join the committee in the end. Nonetheless, the rationale of the choice of those particular individuals is indicative of the political meaning of the operation. Nicola Chiaromonte, as we know, was among the founders of the CCF and directed with Ignazio Silone the journal Tempo Presente, while Moravia was known as an anti-Stalinist intellectual. More importantly, Princess Marguerite Caetani was an American-Italian noblewoman who founded and edited the literary journal Botteghe Oscure from 1948 to 1960. The journal published works by Italian and international writers and was well known by the IIE officials. Although Botteghe Oscure formally had an apolitical nature, Princess Caetani, in collaboration with Giorgio Bassani, selected and published only the writings of non-communist intellectuals, including former communists and anti-communists.61 For example,
the writings of intellectuals engagés like Pavese, Sartre and Vittorini were rejected, while former Communists such as Paolo Volponi, Pasolini, Paolo Roversi and Fortini were published.62 What is even more striking, is that Italo Calvino himself published in Botteghe Oscure his first work after his resignation from the PCI: La Speculazione Edilizia, which is a
short novel that describes the ideological crisis of his generation. Even the choice of the title of the journal, Botteghe Oscure, signified an evident symbolic opposition to the PCI, since everybody knew that the Party had its headquarters in the same street of the noblewoman’s palace.63 It is no coincidence Princess Caetani decided to publish Calvino’s novel on her
61 Massimiliano Tortora, “Botteghe Oscure e la ‘repubblica delle lettere’,” in Italian Studies 73 (2018): 179.
62 Ibidem. 63 Ivi: 170-1.
journal; and it is no coincidence she strongly recommended him to the Young Artists Program’s selection committee, and her opinion was held in high regard.64 In the files of the IIE and the Ford Foundation there is no reference at all to Calvino’s political militancy in the PCI. In the short bio of the Italian writer, there is only a reference to his enrolment in the partisan bands in World War Two, but his communist political affiliation is somehow left out of the picture.65 But it is highly unlikely, almost impossible, that neither
the IIE nor the Ford Foundation had a political reason to prefer Calvino to the other candidates. Of course, Calvino was chosen for his artistic potential, and probably because his novels were already known in the United States in 1959. And the heads of the Program were not mistaken in that regard, since Calvino’s fame substantially increased in the following years – although the travel in the United States in turn probably played a role. But he was chosen also because of his past militancy in the Party and outside the Party; because he worked for the leftist Einaudi publishing house and could influence his colleagues; and because of his general potential as an intellectual leader. He was a former communist, a fellow-traveller, an intellectual whose ideology began to fall apart in the previous few years. Due to all those reasons, he constituted the ideal candidate for the program, and the decision to fund his travel was a very wise one.
64 ‘Calvino was highly recommended by the Princess Caetani, who knows him and his work in her capacity as editor of the “Botteghe Oscure”, one of Europe’s outstanding literary journals. She considers him one of the very best of the young generation of Italian writers, and thinks that his visit to America can be a most valuable experience for him’. RAC: FF records - Grants H to K - FA732D - Reel 3006 – Institute of International Education, Inc. – Young Artists Project 1959-60, Selection Committee
Meeting, 8-4-1959.
Moreover, there is another point in support of this thesis: Shepard Stone was fully aware that the political activities of a foreign individual had to come under the scrutiny of the State Department, before it could be admitted to the United States. When he organized Silone’s American journey 1955, for instance, he knew that ‘Because of Sig. Silone’s prior Party associations, it was necessary for the State Department to request the Attorney General to authorize his admittance under the special authority contained in Section 212 (d) (3) of the Immigration and Nationality Act concerning non-immigrants’.66 Therefore, the total lack of
references to Italo Calvino’s prior political life is paradoxically a clear sign of the political rationale behind it. The problem is that the Cold War imperatives had to remain between the lines: an explicit reference to them could harm the reputation of neutrality of the whole artistic project.
7. Calvino in the United States
Italo Calvino arrived in New York at the invitation of the Ford Foundation and with the support of the IIE in November 1959. He wrote an accurate account of his travel in the United States through the letters he addressed to Daniele Ponchiroli and his colleagues of the Einaudi publishing house.67 He also published his travel memoir in several journals when he cameback home: in 1960 in ABC; in L’Europa Letteraria, L’Illustrazione Letteraria, and Tempo
Presente in 1961; in 1961-2 in Nuovi Argomenti.68 He also wrote a book on the same subject - 66 RAC: FF records – Series: Grants A to B – FA732A – Reel 0496 – Folder: America-Italy Society, Inc. – Memorandum from Shepard Stone to Don K. Price 2-11-1955. 67 Calvino, Lettere 1940-85 (Milano: Mondadori, 2000), 613-52; also published in Italo Calvino, Eremita a Parigi, 26-138. 68 Published in Italo Calvino, Saggi, 2497-2679.
Un Ottimista in America - but decided to destroy it before publication; it was published
posthumously in 2014.69
The visit to the United States gave him the opportunity to see the country with his own eyes, travelling from the East to the West coast. He met some editors, both as an Einaudi editor and as a writer, to make sure that his own works were properly distributed and to create a professional network that crossed the Atlantic. He also met writers like James Purdy, union leaders in San Francisco, civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King in Montgomery, and visited several cities for tourism. He toured various universities in the country, including the Columbia University, gave speeches on the Italian literature and dialogued with Italian and American faculty members. He had a strong interest in exploring the country and meeting “true” Americans, but he had mixed feelings toward the American nation. On one hand, he contemned the materialism, babbittry and consumerism of the American culture, as a European and as a communist. On the other hand, he was attracted by the United States as the land of modernity: the technological advancements of the New World and the power of its economy amazed him. The space calculators and the frantic activity of Wall Street were all expressions of an advanced society that constituted both the model and the inevitable final stage for all the Western societies, despite his skepticism and suspicion toward the disruptive power of that scientific knowledge.
Reflecting about his travel in 1962, he declared that ‘Unione Sovietica e Stati Uniti sono come prima al centro del mio interesse e delle mie preoccupazioni, perché dall’una e dall’altra parte vengono le immagini che mi faccio del nostro futuro’.70 Before coming to the United
States, Calvino already felt existentially affected by the Cold War in first person: ‘Eravamo nel cuore della guerra fredda, nell’aria era una tensione, un dilaniamento sordo, che non si
69 Calvino, Un Ottimista in America (Milano: Mondadori, 2019). 70 Calvino, Eremita a Parigi, 178-9.
manifestavano in immagini visibili ma dominavano i nostri animi’.71 The United States were
the model of the individualistic and high-tech way of life, while the Soviet Union was the land that pursued an equalitarian and communitarian utopia. But both of the models had to be explored: ‘l’amore per la Russia qui mi pare naturalissimo, un necessario complemento dell’amore per l’America’.72 There were some differences, of course. When he visited the
Soviet Union in 1951 he could travel only in a group, following a strict schedule, while in the United States he could freely explore all the country by himself. America had always been a constant point of reference for Calvino from a political point of view, as he stated in 1976, in a more toughtful and less ideological way: ‘Non c’è più un’Europa che può guardare l’America dall’alto del suo passato, del suo sapere e della sua sensibilità: l’Europa porta in sé ormai tanto d’America – non meno di quanto l’America porta in sé d’Europa, - che l’interesse a guardarsi - non meno forte e mai deluso – somiglia sempre più a quello che si prova di fronte a uno specchio: uno specchio dotato del potere di rivelarci qualcosa del passato o del futuro’.73
During his travel, Calvino focused very much on the differences between the Old and the New World, and dwelled on the American traits that were more familiar to him and fit more into his American myth: ‘l’America … è per un quarto un paese drammatico, teso, violento, esplosivo di contraddizioni, carico d’una vitalità brutale, fisiologica, ed è questa l’America che ho amato e amo; e per buona metà è un paese di noia, di vuoto, di monotonia, di acefala produzione e acefalo consumo e questo è l’inferno americano’.74 The Italian writer was fully
conscious of the issue of anti-Americanism, and tried to avoid it through the pursuit of a personal and total immersion in the American society. Meeting people in the flesh and
71 Castellucci, Un Modo di Stare al Mondo, 52. 72 Italo Calvino, Saggi, 2528.
73 Italo Calvino, “Collezione di Sabbia,” in Saggi, 425. 74 Italo Calvino, Lettere, 641.
observing carefully the United States from within, was his antidote to the risk of banalization. But, at the same time, it seemed that all the stereotypes he knew about the Americans were bound to turn out to be true: ‘Sono venuto qui stabilendomi come prima regola di non pormi mai dal punto di vista dell’antiamericanismo tradizionale, della polemica con la cultura industriale di massa ecc. ma certo finisco per riscoprire nella pratica quotidiana, nelle case editrici, nel modo di considerare la letteratura, quella mancanza di personalità, di genialità, tante volte sentita lamentare in teoria … qui le case editrici non hanno un’anima … sono puri organismi commerciali’.75 As he wrote in a letter to the communist leader Paolo Spriano, ‘è
che qui è un paese dove non capiscono niente di noi dell’Europa, - e la Russia qui la senti parte dell’Europa, senza gran differenza dal resto – perché mancano completamente del senso della storia’.76 And, on the same point: ‘L’America cerca sempre di pensare per entità assolute,
siano pur esse il denaro o il successo; benché la sua realtà sia il movimento, non ha il senso dell’antitesi se non come contrapposizione tra Dio e Satana’.77 But he also realized that the
most execrated American sins like materialism had their roots, after all, in a sincere communitarian idealism: ‘Capisco anche che su questioni così angosciosamente pratiche, la vera immoralità è il ragionare in termini di ideali teorici e di moralità astratta. Capisco che nella praticità tutte cifre e tutta risultati della mentalità americana c’è pure una forza morale che a noi troppe volte sfugge; anche il «materialismo Americano», come tutti i materialismi, è sostenuto nel suo fondo da una forte carica ideale’.78 75 Calvino, Lettere, 615-6. 76 Calvino, Lettere, 629. 77 Calvino, Saggi, 2546. 78 Calvino, Saggi, 2566-7.
