Hermit in paris: autobiographical writings by Italo Calvino & Martin McLaughlin

Author:Italo Calvino & Martin McLaughlin [Calvino, Italo & McLaughlin, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographie
ISBN: 9780375714269
Published: 2004-08-10T17:41:50+00:00

Political Autobiography of a Young Man

I. A Childhood under Fascism

1) I was sixteen in 1939, so in replying to the question about the ideas I grew up with before the war, I have to beware of generic approximations, I have to try to reconstruct a network of images and emotions rather than ideas.

The danger for those writing autobiographical memoirs in a political key is that excessive weight is given to politics compared to the weight it really has in childhood and adolescence. I could begin by saying that the first memory of my life is that of a socialist being beaten up by Fascist lynch-squads, something which I think few among those born in 1923 can manage to remember; and indeed it is a memory which must probably refer to the last time Fascist squads used coshes, in 1926, after an attempt on Mussolini. The person attacked was Professor Gaspare Amoretti, an old Latin teacher (father of a Communist from the Ordine Nuovo group who later fell in Japan on a mission for the Third International), who at that time was living in the annexe of our villa at San Remo. I remember clearly that we were at dinner when the old professor came in with his face beaten up and bleeding, his bowtie all torn, asking for help.

But to make everything that you will see and hear in your life stem from your first childhood memory is a literary temptation. One’s perspectives in childhood and adolescence are different; disparate impressions and judgments are placed alongside each other without any logic; even for those who grow up in an environment which is open to opinion and information a line of judgment is formed only with the passage of time.

As a child listening to the adults’ discussions in our house, I always felt that it was taken for granted that in Italy everything was going wrong. And during adolescence I and my companions at school were almost all hostile to Fascism. But it is not at all inevitable that just because of this my road towards anti-Fascism was already marked out. At that time I was very far from seeing the situation in political terms, as a struggle of one ideology against another, and from working out perspectives towards a solution for the future. Seeing that politics is an object of contempt and obloquy in the eyes of the best people, the most spontaneous attitude for a young person is to think that it is an area that is irredeemably corrupt, and that one has to look for other values in life. The distance between judging Fascism negatively and having a political commitment to anti-Fascism was so great it could not be conceived of today.

However, now I have to beware of another error or habit typical of those who write autobiographical memoirs: that of tending to configure your own experience as the ‘typical’ experience of a particular generation and ambience, emphasizing the more common aspects and ignoring the more particular and personal ones.

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