Calvino and Moravia: What Cause?

155 REVIEWS his time as a United States citizen by birth and a free person by reason of species. Much more needs to be written ofhim. Wright is our companion today. Lee Baxandall CALVINO AND MORAVIA: WHATCAUSE? Italo Calvino, Una pietra sopra. Turin: Einaudi, 1980. Alberto Moravia, Intervista sullo scrittore scomodo, ed. Nello Ajello. Bari: Laterza, 1978. As the questionnaire entitled "Les écrivains face a l'engagement" in the May 1981 issue of LeNouvel Observateur demonstrates, the rise of a new political culture (as in the France of Mitterand) peremptorily involves a new cultural politics, at the heart of which throbs the question that new political orders must face and, by facing, are immediately judged: what should the artist's role in the new society be or should he by definition be its active advocate? Historically, there have been a number of disastrous responses—from the socialist realism of Stalin to the repressive politics of contemporary East European countries— but, in most cases, the solutions have not been those of the artists themselves, unless they had become politicians. That such precedents have not diminished the need to continually ask the question, however, is evident in the recent volumes of Italy's two major writers, Italo Calvino's Une pietra sopra (discorsi di letteratura e società) and Alberto Moravia's Intervista sullo scrittore scomodo. Indeed, in these two volumes one finds a more nuanced and capable treatment of the question of engagement than in the more celebrated discussion carried out in Les Temps Modernes during the fifties between Sartre and Camus. The reason for this is simple. Italy is more self-consciously crushed between two monolithic and politically contrasting blocks (Russia and the United States), and its two major political forces, the Communist and the Christian-Democratic parties, have equally divergent cultural traditions. The former tradition also has as its touchstone the writings of Antonio Gramsci, who stood on the shoulders of both Marx and Croce in his call for a "national-popular" culture and a "going to the people" (cf. Gramsci's Quaderni delcarcere). Furthermore, Italy's own recent history has known both the Fascist and the Republican models of society. All this has created a peculiar, even privileged, intellectual humus in Italy and it helps to explain the horizons within which both Calvino and Moravia discuss the question of artistic commitment, which is a major thread that runs through these two books and offers a basis for comparing them. Calvino's collection of essays is his first, while Moravia's volume, a book-length interview with him by Nello Ajello, distills the essence of his earlier essay collections and gives them an autobiographical frame. Moravia is much more a maître à penser than Calvino, although both are intellectuals of major stature. Both were, in the early postwar years, editors of reviews (Moravia of Nuovi argomenti, Calvino a coeditor with Vittorini ofMenabò and even earlier a contributor to Vittorini's famous IIPolitecnico) and were actively involved, as most Italian writers' were, in the Popular Front. Until 1956 Calvino was a member of the Italian Communist Party (ICP), while Moravia was, and remains, strongly sympathetic to it. His Nuovi argomenti, in fact, mediated between the ICP and the West— "Not too far from the intentions of J. P. Sartre when he created Les TempsModernes," Moravia explains. Of course, the reigning aesthetic of those years was neorealism and both writers were interested in starting from the "people" in their early works, though this did not imply for them a programmatic national content or style. As Calvino notes, "Our generation. . .is the one which takes its identity from the analysis and program of Giaime Pintor: our effort cannot be a thirst for transcendence,- an internal drama, in the face of such an imposing external one." For Moravia, however, who thinks writers should steer clear of political parties and who likes to define himself as a decadent bourgeois, impegno in literature is a false problem, since all literature seeks to tell the truth. While Moravia is espousing a 156 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW simplistic and abstract ethical approach here, both he and Calvino consider the Marxist analysis of society as essentially correct, so that Marxism...