Hermit in Paris (5 page)

I ASK EVERYONE ABOUT SALINGER AND EVERYONE TELLS ME ABOUT THIS SAD CASE: THE MOST IMPORTANT WRITER OF THE GENERATION BETWEEN US, WHO NO LONGER WRITES, HAS BEEN TAKEN TO A PSYCHIATRIC INSTITUTION, AND THE LATEST THINGS HE HAS WRITTEN ARE STORIES FOR THE
NEW YORKER
. IT IS RATHER LIKE WHAT HAPPENED TO FITZGERALD IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE CENTURY. I THINK WE SHOULD DO THE OTHER BOOK BY SALINGER AS WELL, AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, NAMELY
NINE STORIES
(LITTLE BROWN, AND REPRINTED BY THE MODERN LIBRARY). SALINGER IS BY NOW A KIND OF CLASSIC IN AMERICA.

All writers here have the chance to say that they have to write a book and have to stay at home for a year and can obtain a grant for it.

Grants

For professors grants are easy because they usually don’t teach for more than two years in succession before finding a way of securing a grant for a year or two, without having to be accountable to anyone. However if they then want another grant, they have to somehow write a book, so there is this inflation of academic books which are maybe pointless but at least they are books, whereas in Italy publications for university posts are maybe pointless but they are not even books, and you certainly cannot live off them.

Sweezy

Dear Raniero,
³⁵
I wrote to Sweezy
³⁶
in order to see him, but he had Leo Hubermann telephone me to say that he is now at Cornell University for a few days, then he is going to his house in the country (here everyone disappears at Christmas), and that I should write to him. But since we have to contact him, it is of course better if you do so: you can explain your plan in detail. If then he wants to reply through me, I am at his disposal. But bear in mind that I will be staying in New York only until early January then I shall be leaving for California and will not be back in NY until mid-March.

Styron

I have the proofs of Styron’s new novel;
³⁷
from the early pages I have read it seems good. Will I ever find the time to read? I don’t know (that is, I always think I have something better to do than read) and if I see that I can’t manage to read on I’ll send the proofs to you.

The Lecture

I gave my lecture at the Casa Italiana of Columbia University, and there was quite a big audience despite it being Christmas, and so I have begun to carry out my role as ambassador for Italian opposition culture, which when one arrives here one feels one has to do, even though it is a bore to stand there and explain Italian Resistance literature and post-war culture down to the present day and to launch into a discourse which will include all the forbidden names; however, the fact is that here nobody has said these things, and I believe that I have accomplished at least one initial achievement regarding Italian cultural policy in America, just by saying all the things that Prezzolini does not want said and showing Donini (who runs the Embassy’s Italian Cultural Institute: he is Ambrogio’s brother, almost as much a conformist as his brother but on the opposite side; he is not stupid, and what’s more has a complex about having a brother who is a Communist) how to do his job. They were all there and they took it on the chin, Prezzolini did not object: on the contrary, he said he agreed with me in many respects and they all congratulated me ‘on that part of the lecture in which [I] spoke about Ludovico Ariosto’ (namely, the final part where I was only speaking about my own position in order to cheer the audience up and where I ended with a profession of loyalty to Ariosto) but not on the rest. And the few clear-thinking Italians in that ambience felt slightly cheered. I do not know what impression it made on the Americans, as American Italophiles are never very bright. And the truth is that Italian culture has little to say, these days even less than ever, even in a world as refractory to ideas as this one.

Christmas

I will spare you the description of the phantasmagoria that is Christmas in this city, because you have read about it a hundred thousand times and all I could add is my guarantee that it is even more excessive than you can imagine, and nowhere could you see a festival permeate the life of a city more: it’s not a city any more, it’s Christmas. Christmas in this consumerist civilization has become the ultimate celebration of consumerism; the ubiquitous Santa Claus (Father Christmas) you see in human form at the door of every shop holding his little bell, and depicted on every poster, in every shop-window, while at every shop-door the unremitting God of consumption imposes on everyone happiness and well-being, cost what it may.

Prospects for the Election

The cult of Stevenson
³⁸
among the majority of intellectuals, as though he were some sort of saint, is not likely to have any effect this time either, on the decision of the mass of voters. Stevenson probably will not even be his own party’s candidate after being ousted last time, and there is a great danger that the Democratic candidate will be the Catholic Kennedy, and in all the papers there is great talk of the possibility of a Catholic President. But in reality it is almost certain that the election will be won by the Republicans and so the crucial choice will be the Republican Party’s decision regarding Nixon and Rockefeller. As for Rockefeller, I hear him spoken about either very negatively or in extremely positive terms. For instance, Max Ascoli,
³⁹
always a supporter of the most realistic policies, seems to me to have made up his mind to support Rockefeller, whereas he has no time for Nixon whom he regards as an opportunist ready to support the most contradictory policies depending on which way the wind blows. Others speak to me about Rockefeller as a man lusting for power and devoid of scruples. The reality is that America has nothing new to say in terms of political alignments.

The Latest American Joke

Do you know the difference between the optimist and the pessimist?

The optimist is learning Russian; the pessimist is learning Chinese.

New York, 2 January 1960

Happy New Year to all my friends in Turin!

For the last twenty days I have been without any reply to my letters, indeed I would say without any signs of life except for the minutes of a meeting dated 21 December. I regret this lack of dialogue (basically there was only ever a dialogue with my very early letters) which comes at a time when the hardest work of the winter season ought now to have tailed off. Einaudi Publishing has never succeeded in distance-working, and if you had all sent me criticisms, advice, encouragement, it would have helped me not to feel cut off in the isolation of the individual traveller who is not involved in the production process of a developing company. I have felt this even more in these weeks when the city’s Christmas madness has halted my systematic visits to publishers (though I have by now very few left to deal with) and now I am about to leave, around the 12
^th
: Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago then San Francisco, Los Angeles and the South, and for a couple of months my letters will just be reportages of my travels plus, I hope, accounts of books I have read, because I am going to take books with me in the hope of reading them.

On Horseback through the Streets of New York

For the first time in my life I get on a horse. Sunday morning in Central Park. But the stable is rather far towards the west from Central Park and as soon as I am in the saddle I have to go along a lengthy stretch of 89
^th
Street and cross over a couple of Avenues. I ride along high above the roofs of the cars, which are forced to slow down behind the horse’s pace. In Central Park the going is good though a bit muddy. I try out a trot and also a bit of a gallop, which is easier. All around, in the marvellously clear air of New York (no city in the world has such clear air and such a beautiful sky), are skyscrapers. Along the lawns in the Park run the inevitable squirrels. My companion, sitting lightly on her horse, shouts technical instructions to me which I don’t understand. I have this sensation of dominating New York in a way I have never done before, and I am going to recommend to all visitors to New York that the first thing they should do is a tour on horseback. I met this woman, a writer’s wife, at a party yesterday where I was guest of honour (Erich Maria Remarque was also there with his wife, Paulette Goddard, who has aged considerably from the time of
Tempi moderni
but has great eyes and is full of verve, in short she’s very nice, whereas with her husband there was an instant feeling of mutual antipathy), anyway this woman, who was young and Jewish but with a real feeling for nature, says a propos of
The Baron in the Trees
that she loves ‘to ride’, but never ‘rides’ because her husband never takes her, but that I must certainly know how to ‘ride’ well. I tell her that I have never been on a horse in my life, so we fix up to meet again the next day and they also lent me a pair of little Mexican riding boots. It is clear that this is ‘the right way of approach to America’,
⁴⁰
because one has to go through all the means of communication in historical sequence and eventually I will arrive at the Cadillac.

The Actors’ Studio

Often on a Tuesday or Friday morning I go to the Actors’ Studio which is a kind of hovel in the port area, and there are always many actors, even some famous ones, and directors who sit around, with Lee Strasberg there in the middle, and each time a group of actors put on a short play or just a scene, in order to study some problems, then they explain to their colleagues the problems they encountered in acting it, and the others discuss and criticize and Strasberg gives his opinion and often delivers an actual lecture. All this is free, of course: it is a club for actors to experiment and discuss. Or there are exercises invented by Strasberg called ‘A Private Moment’: here an actor without a script portrays a personal problem, for instance you see someone in bed who gets up slowly, then is seized by despair, he swears, tries to get back to sleep, gets up, goes to the window, puts on a record, then feels less desperate, etc. After this they discuss, etc. It is all rather funny: this Strasberg (who was one of that group of playwrights from the ’30s when there was also Clifford Odets and company) is obsessed with the idea of internal sincerity, which the actor has to ‘feel’ (which seems a load of rubbish to me), and the standard question when they perform a scene from a play is: ‘but in that moment were you working on your own problem or on a stage problem?’ because to make your own psychological problem identify with the problem portrayed in the play is regarded as the
ne plus ultra
. In short, it is the umpteenth proof of the weakness of American thought; however, it is a place where one can breathe a genuine atmosphere, full of passion for improvement, and it is also the place which symbolizes better than any other the elements that make up the American spirit in New York: the Russian component (in this case Stanislavsky), brought here by the Jews, mixed with the Freudian notion of internal sincerity, which is rooted in the old Protestant component of public confession, and all this held together by the fundamental Anglo-Saxon pedagogical idea that holds that everything can be taught. At the Actors’ Studio two American actors, husband and wife, who saw my little play at Spoleto, the only one I have ever written in my life, asked me to put it on there, so we translated it together and they will perform it in a few weeks, but I will by then be in California. There is also a section of the Actors’ Studio for playwrights, but I have never been. There are no books about the Actors’ Studio.

Electronic Brains

I have contacted the head office of the biggest producer of calculating machines, IBM. Their public relations are very classy, they received me as though I were the Italian President and put the entire firm at my disposal. When they learned that I was going to Washington, they set up a visit for me to the Space Computing Center, in other words the tracking station which receives all the data and does all the calculations for the Vanguard and various other rockets. I was all pleased with myself, thinking I was going to see things that were almost top secret, whereas this Space Computing Center sits in a shop-window in a street in central Washington and is for show more than anything else; however, it is a functioning centre, though the danger that all the astronauts’ data would be lost if a lorry smashed the window in a crash is nullified by the fact that there is another identical centre at Cape Canaveral. However, it was really fascinating: I saw models of rockets and satellites, which in theory should even take off if you turn on certain lights, but the models are always broken. Young mathematicians type on space computer keyboards with hesitant and absent-minded gestures. On the 23
^rd
IBM in New York put at my disposal a Cadillac with a chauffeur and a technical expert from Turin to be my guide at Poughkeepsie, up in Westchester where IBM’s huge factory is. This is a factory with 10, 000 employees, like a medieval city, and in front of it is a huge carpark for 4, 000 cars (these immense carparks full of grey and blue cars, that you see as soon as you leave New York, are one of the things that give you the most authentic feeling of America). I am received by a group of managers who explain to me first the way the whole organization is structured, and one of the first things they tell me is that there is no trade union. Naturally I ask why; ‘They don’t need them’ is their answer. In fact they are all paid better here than elsewhere, the paternalism is quite open, and the colour portrait of Mr Watson
⁴¹
hangs everywhere; I will later learn that on Mr Watson’s birthday the employees were invited to the party with a cyclostyled letter explaining that if they did not have a car to go to the party with their wives, a car supplied by the management would come to fetch them at such and such a time; if the wife did not have an evening-dress the management would provide her with one, and a baby-sitter service was also assured for that evening, and at table number such and such places numbered such and such were booked for them, and when Mr Watson came in they all had to stand and sing the following song to the famous tune, etc., and there on the letter were the words of a song in honour of Mr Watson. However, all this is beside the point. I visited the factory, they explained everything about the cores which make up the machines’ memory and I also learnt how just through the positive and negative charges in the cores you can represent any number or letter, and all the processes they use to produce those tiny transistors, and then I saw the Ramac, which is the part that carries out the operations even on data input at random, not in any established order. Very beautiful machines with these cascades of threads in beautiful, different colours, producing an effect like a wonderful abstract painting. I had lunch with some managers and researchers, but no alcohol since Mr Watson forbids alcohol in the factory. I visited the labs, wonderful architecture, better than Olivetti, all with moveable walls so they can have rooms of any size they want, and the organization of research is excellent, totally separate from production; all in all, the organization of the firm is extremely efficient, although when they do a drawing on the blackboard for you to give an outline of the company’s structure, they draw lines that continue above Mr Watson and they say: God. Even though I was falling asleep, they explained all this problem about the insulators, you know. I also saw the school they have: wonderful. The staff: two categories, the managerial type who really are quite intimidating, and what we would call the Olivetti type; but of course I was not able to understand the relationship or the dialectic between the two types. It was an amazing sight, all those mathematicians and physicists in their little cells with their green blackboards. The workers were certainly highly qualified, and there was a very smooth rhythm of work; many women, all of them fat and ugly (beautiful women here, too, as in Italian cities, are now only to be found in certain social strata). Many boxes of sweets on every worktop: it’s Christmas. Among all these computers were Christmas decorations and banners; many departments organize Christmas parties; loudspeakers broadcast for the workforce of the most advanced technology in the world Christmas carols, a gift from the management of IBM.