A First-Rate Tour of the Classics

“Why Read the Classics?” brings together 36 literary essays by the ever-thoughtful, ever-incisive, elegantly and quietly reflective Italo Calvino. While Calvino’s writings on literature are not unknown to his English-speaking audience--11 of these essays have been translated previously--cumulatively they once again demonstrate the importance of reading a writer of fiction on other writers of fiction. Even the shortest of these pieces are shot through with an intimacy that comes from years of practicing a craft whose practice Calvino investigates with patience, unflagging curiosity, and an estimable breadth of allusion and reference.

In his helpful introduction, Martin McLaughlin, Calvino’s translator, points out that the changing concerns of these essays, which were written between the 1950s and the 1980s, mirror the change in Calvino’s own fiction, which in this period evolved from a realistic to a more experimental approach. Thus early essays on Conrad and Hemingway give way to later ones on Borges, Raymond Queneau and Carlo Emilio Gadda, whose avant-garde take on the novel was helpful to Calvino when he was rethinking his relationship to the form. All through his life, but particularly toward the end of it, Calvino read ancient texts; his reflections on these (Homer, Ovid, Pliny in particular) are some of the most interesting in this volume.

While some of the pieces feel like the brief reviews or introductions they once were (especially to novellas or long stories, a favorite form of Calvino’s, by James, Twain and Balzac), the meatier essays show evidence of a mind engaged in a lifelong conversation with literature. This conversation addressed both the texts and the reader’s relationship to them.

In the title essay, for example, Calvino meets head-on the curious quirk by which people are always “rereading” rather than “reading” the classics. He observes that a classic is, in fact, a book that can and should be reread, since “each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.” Even when we read a classic for the first time, it “gives the sense of rereading something we have read before.”

This deep, intuitive grasp of the layered experience of reading emerges again in Calvino’s essay on Pliny, who is usually consulted to find out what the ancients knew about a topic or to “wrinkle out bizarre facts and curiosities” about their world. Calvino instead feels that he should be read for the “measured movements” of his prose and for his “respect for the infinite diversity of all phenomena”--including the most elusive phenomenon of all, human happiness. Calvino warms to Galileo’s frequent use of the metaphor of the world as a book, and he sees Hemingway with balance and clarity as a man who teaches generosity, openness, “a readiness to snatch a lesson from life,” but who also eventually descended into mannerism and succumbed to “violent tourism,” a damning but apposite phrase.

Calvino’s literary tourism is of the most unmannered, nonviolent variety. It brings to mind an anecdote he tells about Socrates, who, as the hemlock was being prepared, set about learning a new melody on the flute. Asked what use it would be to him, he replied, “At least I will learn this melody before I die.” Learning new melodies to the end, and passing on what he has learned: Both are central to the impulse behind Calvino’s lovely book.