Odd Jobs (128 page)

Fancy Goods
contains three stories—“Clarissa,” “Delphine,” and “Aurora”—and
Open All Night
six—“Catalan Night,” “Turkish Night,” “The Roman Night,” “The Six-Day Night,” “Hungarian Night,” and “Borealis.” Each story has a woman at its center and indeed seems designed to display her, by means of a glittering succession of scenes and anecdotes that yet leave ambiguous, often, her relationship with the narrator. He, though unnamed and passive, is a continuous presence, and by virtue of his ardent voice an emphatic one. In
Fancy Goods
, whose episodes take place primarily in London, during World War I, the narrator is younger than in the stories of
Open All Night
, where he has become a man-about-Europe, if not a roué. The women flit through his life like large, gorgeous, inscrutable butterflies. Some achieve unhappy ends: Remedios, a Spanish revolutionary, sets off an explosion and is arrested; Isabel, a French coquette in Rome, is found strangled; Anna, a Russian aristocrat reduced to being a waitress in Constantinople, announces her intention of spending two weeks in Paris and then committing suicide;
and Zaël, a Jewish dancer in Vienna, demands to be taken back to Hungary and is kidnapped and presumably murdered there. Others simply vanish from view, like Aurora in London: “She makes a sign. Number 19 bus comes docilely to curb at her feet. She ascends the stair like a frieze unrolling itself.”

The writing is the thing. Whether the prose’s confident oddity derives from Morand’s original or from Pound’s translation scarcely matters; the effect is luxurious, sharp, compressed, startling:

Such richness of imagery, so quickly folded and superimposed, feels cubist. The issues are circled rather than faced. Not so much the people as the spaces between them are exactly drawn. The spurts of dialogue, where they occur, are elliptical and Firbankish. A certain deliberate Gallic wit presides; the humorous rhetorical device of syllepsis occurs perhaps
too often: “freshly caulked keels flaming with red lead and the sunset,” “a small woman, excessively preserved by milk of cucumbers and egoism,” “I … arose with satisfaction and with bleeding hands.” The Zeitgeist is diagnosed in a kindred cadence: “It’s the sacrificed generation, ma’am. The men have gone off to be soldiers, and the women have all gone crazy.” The shattered, frenetic postwar Europe is described in language both jazzy and coldly detached; the scenes seem illumined by sliced moonlight:

Mr. Mitchell’s introduction compares a few passages of Morand’s French with Pound’s and other translations in case we needed to be convinced that as a translator Pound was incomparably bold and energetic. Though linguistic scholars have always been pained by some of Pound’s liberties and etymological leaps, it was he above all others in the twentieth century who lifted translation to the status of an art. His translations are not transparent; they can be eccentric and flamboyant and more active than the original. “
Dans une atmosphère de tabac
” becomes “in this air freighted with tobacco,” “
Atroce matin d’exécution
” becomes “A good day for a hanging” (as opposed to another translator’s flat-footed “Atrocious morning for an excursion”), and “
Voilà une curieuse rencontre
” becomes, simply, “Mm.” Modernist translation came to the fore, a proclaimed artistic medium, like thick paint. Even if a dozen cavalier extensions of the literal French exist on every page, Morand was well served by Pound, and perhaps his English reputation would be less negligible if this translation had been published when delivered.

Proust’s preface to
Fancy Goods
aimed to serve in a different way: by blessing Morand in full view of French readers, much as Anatole France had, a generation before, provided a preface for the young Proust’s
Pleasures and Days
. In 1921, Proust, like his hero Baldassare Silvande in that youthful collection, knew he was dying; his preface, in Pound’s translation—the least worked-over, we are told, of Pound’s manuscript—is a remarkable late efflorescence, an epic example of a gratuitous genre. Proust begins by telling the reader that “I should like to have undertaken the useless labor of doing a real preface for these charming brief romances”; but “a stranger has taken her abode in my
mind.” He gives the stranger’s name: Death. “I was surprised at her lack of beauty. I had always thought Death beautiful. How otherwise should she get the better of us?” Then the invalid takes up the notion, once raised by his old patron Anatole France, that “singularity of style should be rejected,” and in a grandly irrelevant delirium of quotation from memory discusses the past styles of Baudelaire and Taine, Sainte-Beuve and Stendhal (“a great writer without knowing it”), Madame de Sévigné and Racine (“doubtless in Racine an hysteric of genius was struggling in the control of a superior intelligence”). It all suggests a prima donna’s fluttering farewells, though what Pound liked about the preface was how it “shoveled what one hopes is a final funeral clod upon the corpse of Sainte-Beuve.” Of young Morand there is scarcely a word, though Proust does drop a valuable warning: “This new writer is usually fatiguing to read and difficult to understand because he joins things by new relationships. One follows the first half of the phrase very well, and then one falls. One feels it is only because the new writer is more agile than we are.”

Since the death of Vladimir Nabokov, no writer has been more agile than Italo Calvino—and there was something gruff and abrasive about Nabokov, something modern as it were, which the Italian postmodernist has smoothly shucked. Calvino’s prose, though ingenious, is never difficult; though colorful, never opaque. The reader is charmed, not challenged. True,
Marcovaldo
is a minor work, untranslated into English for twenty years. The author’s note tells us that the first of these twenty stories “were written in the early 1950s and thus are set in a very poor Italy, the Italy of neo-realistic movies. The last stories date from the mid-60s, when the illusions of an economic boom flourished.” The sardonic Marxist tone of this note reminds us that Calvino was for twelve years—up to the Russian suppression of the Hungarian revolt in 1956—a Communist. Marcovaldo is a member of the working class in an unnamed industrial city; he lives with his wife and six children in a half-basement, and later in an attic apartment. While in a park, he longs to sleep “in the midst of this cool green shade and not in my cramped, hot room; here amid the silence, not amid the snoring and sleep-talking of my whole family and the racing of trams down below in the street.” In another story, a snowfall mercifully masks the realities of his workday until a sneeze disperses the flakes; then “to his gaze there appeared the familiar courtyard, the gray walls, the boxes from the warehouse, the things of every day, sharp and hostile.” His family chops up roadside
billboards for warmth, and wants to cook a pet rabbit he has brought home to them. But such grim proletarian realities are established primarily as the ground for merriment, for the repeated demonstration of Marcovaldo’s hopeful, generous, and dauntless spirit. He nurses a sallow potted plant into a flourishing tree; he develops a thriving clinic based upon the healing properties of wasp stings; he dresses up as Santa Claus and motorbikes about the city delivering presents. The stories, as they play across potentially sombre ground, reminded me of nothing so much as Giovanni Guareschi’s
Little World of Don Camillo
(1950) and its successor volumes of comic vignettes about the jockeying between the priest and the Communist mayor of a small Italian village—best-selling Cold War whimsy.

Yet
Marcovaldo
shows not only Calvino’s fine fanciful hand and habit of mathematical rigor (the twenty stories make a fivefold cycle of the four seasons) but the concerns of his major fiction—Man in the universe, men in cities.

Natural reality, for which natural man naturally hungers, emerges even in the cityscape, once men are eliminated. During the August holidays, when the streets are deserted,

The little book carries a surprising message: Destroy. In the last story, a wealthy child smashes all his presents and burns down his house; the joy
of the Destructive Gift dawns upon the spirit of Christmas Consumption, and the city in Marcovaldo’s vision is replaced by a wilderness, “an expanse of snow … white as this page.”

But there is a qualitative difference between such envisioned simplification—the reduction of experience to the page, the word, the book—and the actual shattered aftermath sketched by Morand, the Europe of crazy women and of men who ask, “Who [will] console me for the anonymous farce of creation?” Calvino is as much a postwar writer as Morand; indeed, he fought, in the Italian resistance, whereas Morand merely witnessed World War I from within the diplomatic service. Yet Calvino’s work gives a consoling impression, of delectable self-entertainment in a world of deferred disaster. Whereas Morand’s prose texture prickles with a thousand little tenacious claws of extra precision, of “reaching,” Calvino’s (as rendered in William Weaver’s transparent translation) is smooth, even where its message is anarchic and subversive. One feels that personal outrage and bewilderment have been sublimated, that an insulating interface with the world has been developed. Calvino’s experiments, though copious and tireless, lack the sense of emergency that Morand’s nervous glimpses of café life convey. They are not, to use a term that has cropped up several times already, hysterical.

A certain light on the modernist-postmodernist problem was slantingly cast by the recent small squabble over the new frames in the renovated Museum of Modern Art’s rehanging of its collection. The early “modern” paintings, from Cézanne to the Fauves, were shifted from their traditional bulky and ornate sculptured frames to thin flat gilded frames marked to ape bamboo. The Museum, according to
The New York Times
, says the new framing saves space and reduces visual clutter. Mark Davis, a professional framer, observed of the new framing, “I think it’s silly, antiseptic, and somewhat hysterical.… The reductive idea is a tenet of hard-core Modernism, and we’re not so concerned with orthodox Modernism today. Now that we’ve arrived at post-Modernism, things are much looser, more eclectic. Tastes have broadened, a lot more is acceptable.” There are a number of adjectives that invite comment here, but “hysterical” is the striking one. Was modernism hysterical? In the dictionary sense of “emotional excitability” I suppose it was; and if you had inherited a century’s worth of Victorian furniture, of overstuffed thrones and rococo priedieux, of peacock feathers and elephant’s-foot umbrella stands, of ornate plaster picture frames and leatherbound uniform
sets, of busts of Napoleon and Victor Hugo and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, of morals and rhymes and armor-plated pieties, you might be hysterical, too. The clutter of that compulsively accumulating nineteenth century goaded the modernists to great efforts of rejection and made them see reality, however bleak, as an invitingly open attic window. Webster’s dictionary, helpful as always, defines “modernism” as “the philosophy and practices of modern art;
esp.:
a self-conscious break with the past and a search for new forms of expression.” A requisite of modernism was disenchantment with past masters—Proust wrote “
contre
Sainte-Beuve,” Pound trashed the Edwardians, etc. The good postmodernist, on the other hand, enjoys a respectful educated acquaintanceship with the moderns; indeed, he often makes his living by teaching them to students. As John Barth puts it, “He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back.” The moderns digested, the postmodernist looks relatively plump. He can go nimbly through motions that cost the moderns some agony. Instead of cleaning out an attic, he lives in one, among the smiling busts of Proust and Joyce, Kafka and Rilke and Pound. The window, for the time being, is closed.

M
R
. P
ALOMAR
, by Italo Calvino, translated from the Italian by William Weaver. 130 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.