Backlisted - The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino

Episode Date: June 24, 2019

Italo Calvino's third novel The Baron in the Trees (Il barone rampante) is the subject of this episode. Joining John and Andy to discuss the book is writer and fabulist Caspar Henderson. Elsewhere, John discusses Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me by Kate Clanchy and Andy talks about and reads from W.H. Auden's late collection of poetry About the House.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)7'08 - Some Kids I taught and What the Taught me by Kate Clanchy14'26 - Listen Poetry recommendations, 23'56 - The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. I bumped into Jason Donovan on a bike the other day. Did you? Yeah. He just literally started talking to me and I looked up and I was like,

fellow cyclist talking to me. Oh, it's Jason Donovan. Wow. Did you manage not to go, you're Jason Donovan? Well, funnily enough, I had worked with him previously. I said, I worked with you previously, mentioned what I'd worked on. And I said, what are you up to now? And he said, he's back in Joseph, but as the pharaoh.

They say you appear in Joseph twice, once on the way up. I bumped into a celebrity from the 1980s at a thing last night as well. That's the Nobel Prize winning novelist, Kazuo Ishiguro, who I think I've met before, but anyway, I had a very interesting chat with him. And he confirmed for me a rumour, which I live in a seaside town in Kent, and he confirmed for me the rumour that has swept that town for several years, that he, when he was a student at the University of Kent, he lived in the same seaside town as I do.

And not only that, he lived three houses away from our house. Amazing. And so him, you, Peter Cushing. And Hugh Hopper from the Soft Machine also lives in the same road. Or he did. Ishiguro also said that he used to play in the folk night at the Duke of Cumberland pub at the top of Harbour Street. It's in Whitstable we're talking

about uh he was something you do regularly yeah i'm continuing his great work by he was really funny he was going i had really long hair and a beard and i think you can find photographs of me online playing a set at the duke of cumberland and you know i had he said and i said oh you probably can't he went no no have a look, Google Images. So I did have a look earlier. And there are some shots of Ishiguro with very long hair and a beard and an acoustic guitar. He told me once many years ago and not long after he'd won the Booker that he had massive problem writing again after the Booker.

There's that thing of, you know, you write a novel and you don't really think about the audience and then you win a massive literary prize. And suddenly you feel like in the next book, you feel like you're sort of, it's like the Thomas Hardy sketch from Monty Python, you know, in the middle of Wembley Stadium with everybody. As he does at the beginning of The Return of the Native.

It's like Tessa the d'Urberville's all over again. He's crossed it out. But he obviously got over it. What do you think of The Buried Giant? I'm curious. I haven't read it yet. I talked about it on Backlisted quite a long time ago. You did, yes, gosh.

You did. He's incapable of writing the same book twice. It's the closest he gets, weirdly, I think, to Calvino. I don't think it altogether worked. Have you read it? Yes, I have, yeah Calvino. I don't think it altogether worked. Have you read it? Yes, I have, yeah. But I'm slightly kind of haunted by it. And it's something I absolutely feel I would go back and reread.

Did you like it? I think I did. I found it strange. I couldn't quite work out why. But then I liked it more and more as I read it. And there is the fabular aspect, yeah. I think it's one of those books that you would definitely get a lot more out of. He is extraordinary in that regard, that you'd never let me go.

Which is, I think, an incredible book. Yes, an incredible book. It's hard to imagine anybody who writes more differently. Shall we start? Shall we start? Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us somewhere in northern Italy in the late 18th century. We're sitting in the branches of a spreading Ilex tree,

kitted out in suits of animal fur, reclining in a bar of sun-dappled leaves, looking out across the dense and tangled woodland towards the sea. These really are getting very Rococo now. As you'll discover, it's the book rather brings it out in you. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. Joining us today is Casper Henderson. Hi. Casper is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, New Scientist and the New York Review of Books.

From 2002 to 2005, he was a senior editor at Open Democracy. His work has received the Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors in 2009 and the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award in 2010. Yeah. Okay. His first book, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, a bestiary for the 21st century, was shortlisted for the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books

and earned him the epithet, the zoological Borges. I didn't know that. Well, there we go. And his second, The New Map of Wonders, also published by Granter, in 2017 to rave reviews, moving one critic to write that it created, quote, a new vision of science illuminated by a rich range of literature, philosophy, art and music. And you've got there, you've brought in to show us today, like show and tell.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I brought my, very proud of this because I can't say I actually had much to do with it. But the Italian edition of the book of barely imagined beings and it's just beautiful they made a wonderful the design is breathtaking in the production this book has actually been translated into a number of languages and was redesigned in germany and in j Japan and elsewhere but this is by far the most beautiful it is one of my favorite slightly uh embarrassing uh Caspar now but it is one of my absolute if you're interested in animals at all you're interested in the possibilities the

myriad protean possibilities of of nature he gathers um collection of animals. It's like a novel. It's like a Calvino novel, actually. It's kind of all the possible ways that life can be. Well, if they're not our ancestors, they're definitely our cousins. Your work has been compared to Italo Calvino just a moment ago. Just a moment ago. There we go. That'll be the first and only time. Because the book, of course, that Caspar has chosen to talk to us about today

is The Baron and the Trees by the Italian novelist Italo Calvino, first published as Il Barone Rampante by Arnaudi in 1957. Most English readers will have discovered it as the middle part of a trilogy of tales called Our Ancestors, along with The Cloven Viscount and the Non-Existent Knight. But before we haul ourselves into the canopy, I realise I've woken up to find myself in the middle of a podcast, a podcast in which I, Andy Miller, am talking to a person I seem to know called John Mitchinson,

and I'm asking him what he's been reading this week. Thank you. Thank you, Andy. You've got to be a telecomton to make that work. But anyway. I'm here all week. I am talking about a book which has, I have to say, moved and enraged me more than any I've read in a very long time. I think it's probably the most intense reading experience I've had all year.

It's by Kate Clanchy and it's called Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. You know, there is a wonderfully Ron Seal aspect to that title, which is it is about her experience. She is a teacher and has been a teacher for many years in the state school system. And the book is basically framed as a selection of stories that she's gathered together from her interactions with students over the years. But I'll read a bit from the book that puts it in better context than that. It is enraging because the fiddling around with educational policy and the changes that politicians make, the bit I read will give you some background to that.

It's made me cry just because I realised that school is still, you know, for some people, at least a wound that never heals. I hated school, found it very, very difficult, was bullied a lot. But I also had teachers that have moulded me possibly more than anybody else I've ever met in my life. And some of the criticism of the book that I've read is, well, it's all right for her. She's obviously a very good teacher. What if your kids don't have very good teachers? But the way she structures the book through the getting the students to tell their own stories, everyone, I think Philip Pullman has said it's the best book on teachers and teaching that he'd ever read. No one has said better so much of what

Badley needs saying. When people are talking, you know, in that lordly way about educational standards having dipped you want to give them this book a lot of the star turns in this book are from our young children from immigrant families writing given being given the chance and the space and the support to write about their own experiences for the first time and the results she's already published in a book called england of poems that she'd collected from her the poetry classes that she's already published in a book called England, a lot of poems that she'd collected from the poetry classes that she's done. You realise that there's such a richness of culture that is out there that the middle-class bubble that too many of us live in isn't being touched by, and to our great loss.

I can only read it in small bits. I find the story so affecting I have to stop, cry a bit, and then go back to it. And I don't know whether that's just because it does um to use that horrible modern word trigger so much of those memories of school and the cruelty of children i was saying to you earlier wasn't my son finished taking his gcses this morning the gcses which have been reshaped according to the will and whim of Michael Gove when he was Education Secretary. And, you know, he'll never hear this. So the talk we were given by the teachers when they were, you know,

implementing these changes did not fill one with confidence that anyone other than Michael Gove thought it was the right thing to do. I'm going to read a bit. Well, my final thing is please read this book. Please read it and share it. For teachers have a lower social standing than other professionals. This isn't just because we are paid less, as I found out when I entered the even less well remunerated, but far more prestigious profession of writing. And it isn't just because of the messy, practical nature of teachers' work either. Laymen do not tell a vet how to go about birthing calves or a gynaecologist where to poke.

It may be because so many teachers are women or perhaps because we work with poor children and it is certainly because so few of us are posh ourselves. Teaching has always been the profession of first resort from graduates from working class backgrounds. It's because of gender and class prejudice, because in short most teachers are Miss, as working class pupils call their female teachers in England. Miss. I've heard so many professional people express distaste for that term, but never a working teacher. Usually the grounds are sexism, but real children in real schools don't use Miss with any less or more respect than Sir. Miss grates only on the ears of those who've never heard it used well, as it grated on me as a middle-class Scot 30 years ago. No longer. Miss is the name I put on like a coat when I go into a school.

Miss is the shoes I stand in when I call out the kids in the corridor for running or shouting. Miss is my cloak of protection when I ask a weeping child what is wrong. Miss is the name I give another teacher in my classroom in the way co-parents refer to each other as mum or dad. Miss seems to me a beautiful name because it has been offered to me so often with love. I would like more people to understand what Miss means and to listen to teachers. Parts of this book therefore are a sort of telling back long-stued accounts of how teachers actually do tackle the apostrophe, of how we exclude and include, of the place of religion in schools, of how the many political changes of the last decades have played out in the classroom, of what a demanding intellectual highly skilled profession teaching can be. These confident answers though are short and few because mostly what I found in school is not

certainty but more questions, complex questions very often about identity, nationality, art and money, but offered very personally questions embodied in children. These questions and the piercing moments when they were presented to me make up the bulk of this book. It is structured around them, first around the child and the dilemma she brings, then in a wider grouping of related topics, and finally loosely around the course of my 30 years in schools, because it is me, not the children, learning the lessons here. I am in each story, clearly delineated, so that you will know what sort of person is doing the listening and filtering, and I hope be able to put my views aside and see the kids more clearly. I want to show you us, children and teachers, kids and miss, both in groups, as if in a long school corridor, and then close in so you can see the stuff we've brought with

us from home, so you can hear some of the things we say. Cool, brilliant, sounds amazing. I don't think I've read anything that has made me simultaneously think and be moved since maybe Stuart A Life Lived Backwards. There's a kind of moral centre to it, which is stronger than in almost anything I've read in a long, long time. Now, Andy, what have you been reading? John, I, like you, hated school and was bullied a lot while I was there, and I've been reading poetry. I wonder if they are related in any way a pair of fathering gentleness

I asked some people on Twitter to recommend me some single volumes of poetry and I got an amazing response to that and I thought over the next few episodes I will mention some of the volumes of poetry that people recommended to me partly because we're having to do so much um significant uh reading for the next few episodes coming up in quite an intense and so I'm I'm taking breaks from some of the books that we've got coming up on the podcast and just dipping into some of these volumes of poetry. And the first one I thought I'd talk about is by W.H. Auden and was first published in 1966, and it's called About the House. It's long out of print. It hasn't been in print as a single volume for decades,

although all the poems are in the collected W.H. Auden. And it was recommended to me, along with a shelf full of other fascinating things, by the poet Ira Lightman. So thank you very much, Ira. And he said to me, how's your Auden? And I said, well, you know, it's pretty good. And my Auden is pretty good,

but he said you should have a look at About the House. Auden has moved to America. He's not doing much apart from having dinner with people and having a house built in New Mexico and out of that he writes a collection of poetry some of which is glib some of which is funny some of which is very moving some of which is intellectually challenging some of which is rather facetious but taken as a portrait of the poet Auden in his 56th, 57th year, in his mid-50s. It's a terrific collection of the type I think you, Andy,

will find fascinating. It works as a book, not as a set of poems drawn from different places, but as a read-through experience. And he was absolutely right. It's terrific. So it's called About the House. And it has a poem in it called On the Circuit, which I'm not going to read from, which is a fantastically grumpy poem about how awful it is being on tour in America when you're a very successful poet.

That's very funny. It's got a wonderful poem called Iceland Revisited, which longtime listeners will recall that when I went to Iceland about three years ago, I read the book Letters from Iceland, which he co-authored with Louis McNeice. So there's a poem about revisiting Iceland several decades later without McNeice and thinking about McNeice. And then there's a poem called The Cave of Making, which is in memoriam Louis McNeice. And when we recorded our episode last year about Autumn Journal,

I wanted to include an extract of this particular poem, The Cave of Making, and there is a recording on YouTube of Auden reading the poem in the episode, but we had to cut it, didn't we, Nick, for just timing reasons rather than anything else. But I'd like to read a little bit from it here because it captures all the different facets of orden's voice at this period it's sort of amusing but heartfelt but intellectual but very touching so i'm going to give it a go if i I don't get it first time, you listeners won't know because we'll record it again until I do get it. If that takes all night, well, that's fine.

So this is towards the end of the poem. Who would, for preference, be a bard in an oral culture? Obliged at drunken feasts to improvise a eulogy of some beefy illiterate burner, giver of rings, or depend for bread on the moods of a Baroque prince, expected, like his dwarf, to amuse. After all, it's rather a privilege amid the affluent traffic to serve this unpopular art, which cannot be turned into background noise for study or hung as a status trophy by rising executives, cannot be done like Venice or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon being read or ignored. Our handful of clients at least can ruin.

It's heartless to forget about the underdeveloped countries, but a starving ear is as deaf as a suburban optimist's. To stomachs only the Hindu integers truthfully speak. Our forerunners might envy us our remnants still able to listen. As Nietzsche said they would, the plebs have got steadily denser, the optimates quicker still on the uptake. Today, even Talleyrand might seem a naive. He had so little to cope with. I should like to become, if possible, a minor Atlantic Goethe, with his passion for weather and stones, but without his silliness re the cross, at times a bore, but while knowing speech can at best, a shadow echoing the silent light, bear witness to the truth, it is not, he wished it were, as the Francophile gaggle of pure songsters are too vain to we are not musicians to stink of poetry is unbecoming and never to be dull shows a lack of taste even a limerick ought to be something a man of honor awaiting death from cancer or a firing squad could read without contempt.

At that frontier I wouldn't dare speak to anyone in either a prophet's bellow or a diplomat's whisper. Seeing you know our mystery from the inside and therefore how much in our lonely dens we need the companionship of our good dead to give us comfort on dourly days when the self is a non-entity dumped on a mound of nothing, to break the spell of our self-enchantment when lip-smacking imps of Mork and Hooey write with us what they will, you won't think me imposing if I ask you to stay at my elbow until cocktail time Dear Shade For your elegy

I should have been able to manage something more like you Than this egocentric monologue But accept it For friendship's sake. Wonderful. All that I want to say about it is the shift there from almost light verse into something totally heartfelt and profound in terms of Auden's own creative need,

need, need to express himself in these different registers. It's beautiful and it's such a beautiful collection. And when it came out, it got terrible reviews. Did it? Yeah. Because Auden by 1966 is old news. It's 30 years gone. It's so interesting.

And then what happens, as Welbeck says, it takes a generation for all those critics to die and a different generation of critics to take their place. So it's not in print. You can buy it secondhand. You can get all those poems in the collected order. We'll put an Abe book link up on the website. I haven't read this collection,

but I recently came across his poem on the moon landing. It's a 1969, obviously this by Jordan, which is really quite a good poem. I've got it here. I've got it here. Oh, have you? I happen to. Oh, great. Here's one I prepared earlier. I've never read it. Come on. Live a little. It's a two hour episode. Let's go.

Moon landing. It's natural the boys should whoop it up for so huge a phallic triumph. An adventure it would not have occurred to women to think worthwhile, made possible only because we like huddling in gangs and knowing the exact time.

Yes, our sex may in fairness hurrah the deed, although the motives that primed it were somewhat less than menschlich. A grand gesture, but what is it period? What is it os? We were always adroiter with objects than lives, and more facile at courage than kindness. From the moment the first flint was flaked, this landing was merely a matter of time. But ourselves, like Adams, don't fit us exactly, modern only in this, our lack of decorum. Homer's heroes were certainly no braver than our trio, but more fortunate. Hector was excused

the insult of having his valour covered by television. Worth going to see? I can well believe it. Worth seeing? Nah. I once rode through a desert and was not charmed. Give me a watered, lively garden, remote from the blatherers about the new, the von Brauns and their ilk, where on August mornings I can count the morning glories, where to die has a meaning and no engine can shift my perspective. Unsmudged, thank God, my moon still queens the heavens. She ebbs and falls, a presence to glop at. Her old man, made of grit, not protein, still visits my Austrian several with his old detachment and the old warnings still have power to scare me. Hybris comes to an ugly finish. Irreverence is a greater oath than superstition.

Our apparatrix will continue making the usual squalid mess called history. All we can pray for is that artists, chefs and saints may still appear blithe to it. That was terrific. We should do an episode on Auden in the 60s. That would be great. Let's pick this up again shortly. Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees is what we're here to talk about.

The first question we always ask is, where were you? Do you remember, Caspar, where you were when you first became aware of this book or Calvino in general? I don't remember specifically. It was in the 80s. I was in my 20s. And I'm looking at the books I have, and I see that I gave them to my mother and then nicked them from her. So I don't remember specifically.

I think he was a thing in the 80s when I was a student. He was perhaps more red than he is now. I think that's true, although there is a sense, I got a sense that people have started coming back to Calvino, but it's really true that I think he was much red in the late 70s and early 80s, and the generation of writers of who we would consider Angela Carter to be part, and Salman Rushdie, really rated Calvino.

There are more obvious Calvino books that you could have chosen. So you could have chosen If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, which we will talk about a bit more. Invisible Cities. Invisible Cities. They're not so much read now, I think, which i've not read i love it yeah i bet you do great i bet you do because it's just that's the sort of it's a very sciencey one isn't it it's sciencey but it's so funny and it's so brilliantly light and deep at the same time

but tell us why then you so Barren in the Trees. Well, it's one of my favourite books. I've had it for 30 years and I go back to it. It makes me laugh and feel better every time. This might seem, this is stretching a comparison a bit far, but I realised it makes me think of the first movement of the Eroica Symphony by Beethoven, which takes two simple musical ideas and builds this incredible structure

and it's allegro con brio, it's incredible vigour and it's a young man's work. And, you know, I don't think Baron in the Trees is as great a work as the Eroica Symphony. Perhaps it's stupid to try and even compare them, but it has something of that energy and inventiveness and delight and beauty. I mean, it's just an extraordinary work,

and it has very many pitches and tones. I think it's fabulism, you know, fable at its best in some way. Maybe that's what I think. You read blurbs from the 80s. That's one of the ways that Calvino's described a fabulist. I read a lot of Calvino over the last few weeks, and I think I agree with you. I think it has for such an intellectual writer that The Baron in the Trees has a soulfulness which you

don't find in his other work. You know it's proceeding from a sort of playful intellectual position, but whether it's because it channels elements of his own childhood, his parents, his upbringing, it seems like he becomes captivated by his own story in a way that Kalvinov is often distant from the storytelling. And indeed, that's part of the storytelling, is at one remove telling you what he's doing. I don't find that so much in Baron in the Trees. What he says, which is interesting, is that he was trying to write sort of,

and I think he did write some slightly picaresque adventures, he said, in the Italy of wartime. So there was a sort of slight neo-realismo, which was very much in vogue then. So he was trying to write the realistic novel reflecting, this is all in Calvino hyphens the realistic novel reflecting the problems of Italian society and he hadn't managed to do so. He was at that stage he says in inverted commas a politically committed writer and then in 1951 he says when I was 28 and not at all sure I was going to carry on writing I began doing what came most naturally to me, that is, following the memory of the things I had loved best since boyhood. Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I

myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer from another age and another country discovered in an attic. And that is kind of what this is, isn't it? I think it is. I mean, you've touched on a lot of things here, and there are others too. I mean, Andy, you mentioned the autobiographical element. His father was an agronomist and his mother was a botanist, and he grew up in this area, Liguria, like northwest Italy.

And the book is set around the time of the Napoleonic Wars, but it's also, I think there's something autobiographical, both his parents, the place he grew up, but also he wrote it just after he was, I think he was expelled from the Communist Party. He had been a partisan in World War II and his parents had been held hostage by the SS. His father had endured a mock execution at least once. And that's present, I think, in the SS. His father had endured a mock execution at least once. And that's present, I think, in the book. Also, he had just been expelled from the Communist Party. He'd been a member of the Communist Party, but this was around the time of the Hungarian uprising, and he fell out with the Italian Communist Party and was expelled. He wrote this book in three months over the summer there, so I think it's a kind of book of rebellion and escape. But it also draws on these deeper horrors and autobiographical roots.

May I read the blurb from your copy? Sure. Because I want to… Is that a Picador? No, this is an American copy. So I just want to fix this for listeners who may not have read it. This is probably the 70s, isn't it? And it's published Harcourt Brace.

That's what this looks like to me, yeah. Yeah, late 70s or so. Long considered in Europe to be Calvino's finest work, The Baron in the Trees is yet another example of this brilliant Italian writer's gift for fantasy. Set in the 18th century, it tells the story of Cosimo, a young Italian nobleman who rebels against parental authority by climbing into the trees

and remaining there for the rest of his life. He adapts efficiently to an arboreal existence, hunts, sows crops, plays games with earthbound friends, fights forest fires, solves engineering problems, and even manages to have love affairs. This is a very good book. It's a brilliant book. Isn't it? It's really good. He also has time to read and think. His proposal for an ideal state in the trees is acknowledged by Diderot and Napoleon pays him homage.

From his perch in the trees, Cosimo sees the age of Voltaire pass by and a new century dawn. His ending is as graceful and unusual as his life has been. I think that's terrific. Now let's counterpoint that with the blurb on the Picador edition. I'm just going to read the last paragraph,

which for long-time listeners will, I think, sound a note of recognition. Elegant, witty and provocative, these novels gracefully acknowledge debts to a multiplicity of sources, from the Troubadours to Voltaire, from the Sicilian puppet theatre to the stories of R.L. Stevenson. But their common factor and their most obvious delight is quite simply in the display of the exuberant talent of a master storyteller. talent of a master storyteller.

A master! So he's a master storyteller. But what's so weird? Yes, okay, so what's weird about this? I thought about this. The use of the phrase master storyteller to apply to Italo Calvino only makes sense, like so many Calvino things, in inverted commas. Yeah. So the phrase master storyteller, which we take the mickey out

of on bat listed quite a lot is habitually applied to the jeffrey arches of this world right you know in a sense calvino in that regard is not a master storyteller if you pick up say invisible cities or if on a winter's night a traveler they toy with the idea of what storytelling is, but do they grab you as narratives? They do not. That's almost the point. It's playing with your expectation of narrative. Funnily enough, The Baron in the Trees probably is the most straightforward piece of storytelling in the oeuvre, right?

It is, but I think it's picaresque. So in addition to some of the sources mentioned there i think you know you can go back to well even before quixote with there's a spanish uh novel called lazario de turmes it's a very well known in spain not well known here and uh you know there's tristan machandy there's obviously um voltaire and condi but there's also i you know there's russo there's the goodi, but there's also, you know, there's Rousseau, there's the good soldier Schweik, I think is kind of in there. There's so much that it's alluding to, at least indirectly. But yes, it's a good story. It's a story of a life.

It's actually quite touching, and I think very touching. I'm prepared to agree. You know, it's actually very touching. It's beautiful. It's sexy, it's really funny. The two central love affairs are kind of beautifully done, I think. And I had not read this trilogy before, which is odd, because I think I discovered Calvino. I know exactly the moment I discovered Calvino,

and you'll pick up on this, Andy. I was a precocious, probably 19-year-old 19 year old reading the observer and i read a review of if on a winter's night a traveler by salman rushti and okay and it was quite a full-on review you know if there's any i think i have it here yeah it's about sitting down when the end of the world that this is a book to read and and there was enough of the the review of someone's book bookshelves i went and bought that picador edition did you and i've still got i'll show those bullies oh i'll i'll read a proper and actually i i loved it at the time and then you go on to you know you go on to the hard stuff invisible cities you know it's like uh if in a winter night um but i sort of wish it's

it's funny i don't know what i would have thought because I was trying to, you know, I was interested in fiction that broke the rules, which If On A Winter's Night obviously does. I wonder what I would have thought. I might have thought that The Baron and the Trees was too straightforward. You know, Rushdie says, I have that. He wrote this in 1981 as part of a long essay. Just at the very very very beginning he says um one of the difficulties with writing about Italo Calvino is that he has

already said about himself just about everything there is to be said yeah if on a winter's night a traveler distills into a single volume what is perhaps the dominant characteristic of Calvino's entire output his protean metamorphic genius for never doing the same thing twice. And actually, that's been my experience reading these different books in the last few weeks, that you would almost say they were by different authors. He has an, and it is an, let's call it what it is, there is an intellectual rigour to the conceptualizing of each piece which

means that it almost takes on different prose characteristics so the prose and we're reading them in translation but the prose of if on a winter's night a traveler is significantly different from the prose of invisible cities but the rigor of carrying through the idea is steel, I think. And I think that's true of the three stories in Our Ancestors as well. But Caspar, it has a wildly different effect on each of the three stories in that trilogy. Yeah, I mean, I agree. There's no doubting his intellect. And you can see that also

in other books, we might have time to talk about Six Memos for the next millennium, for example. Before I answer your question, I don't get on with If Honor Winters Night a Traveller. I don't really enjoy it. I don't like it. Comes to mind the being John Malkovich film and the scene where John Malkovich goes down his own brain and everybody is Malkovich. I just don't, you know, I get bored by that. I mean, it's funny the first time. I read it on a winter's night of travel like 25 years ago, and then I read it again this week.

And I really, when I read it 25 years ago, I really loved it. And I wonder if there is something of a young man's book about it, that the smart assery of it seems tremendously appealing. it that the smart assery of it seems tremendously appealing coming back to it now i found it challenging infuriating yeah utterly brilliant yeah i frequently felt like doing the thing i hate doing which calvino talks about about throwing the book not merely across the room but across the cosmos. At points it's so annoying. But at the same time it made me – and Rushdew says this about Calvino, you know what, he always makes you laugh.

And funnily enough you love Invisible Cities, Casper, don't you? I don't know if I love it. I go back to it. I can see why people don't like it. I do find it intriguing. I struggle with it. I really struggle with it. It's got this, you know, twilight mood and this sort of elegiac keeping the drowsy emperor awake.

Yeah. I feel badly that I didn't have time to reread it because I loved it. That was the next book I read. And then that was sort of for me peak Calvino. I've always thought Calvino was as interesting as Borges. And if, you know, if you don't like Borges, then you don't like Borges. It's fine. You're allowed not to like Borges.

But, I mean, if you're interested, I mean, what he says, Calvino, at a certain point in, you're talking about the six memos, which is a, I mean, it's like kind of antimatter, this book. So let's just tell people what the book is. It's called Six Memos for the Next Millennium, and it was the last thing he wrote. It was the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, I think, given in.

He, in fact, did not finish the lectures, did he? No, he died of a brain haemorrhage. Heart, brain? I'm not sure. He was only mid-60s. 1985. I remember it really clearly because it was exactly, it's that thing, the excitement of reading what you think is a great living master of the form,

and then suddenly he died. And I wonder if that, to be honest, Andy, I wonder if that didn't kind of give him a bit of extra, you know, the fact that he died and he was, as it were, at the top of his game. Well, it's true. What's interesting is he had been published for decades in Italy, and then there's an intense period of publication for him from the 70s into the 80s. He is discovered by people like Angela Carter, we mentioned,

but also Gore Vidal in the States. He becomes fashionable. There's an intensity to the rate at which his books are published in Europe and America, which is not reflected in his Italian publication. And I'm sure you're right John I'm I'm sort of in terms of career moves his death in the mid-80s could not have been better timed for his European and American publishers certainly I think we should come back to this John yeah because I think we need to hear something from the baron in the trees uh Casper, would you be kind enough to select something to give us a flavour of the...

I'd be delighted. So here he is in his early days in the trees. Got the right page here. Cosimo would spend happy hours too amid the undulating leaves of the Ilex, or Holm oak, and he loved its peeling bark, from which, when preoccupied, he would pick off a piece with his fingers, not from any desire to do harm, but to help the tree in its long travail of birth. Or he would peel away the white bark of a plane tree, uncovering layers of old yellow mildew. He also loved the knobby trunks, like the elm, with the tender shoots and clusters of little jagged leaves and twigs growing out of the walls. But it wasn't an easy

tree to move about on, as the branches grew upwards, slender and thickly covered, leaving little foothold. In the woods he preferred beeches and oaks. The pines had very close-knit branches, brittle and thick with cones, leaving him no space or support. And the chestnut, with its prickly leaves, husks and bark, and its high branches, seemed a good tree to avoid. These sympathies and antipathies Cosimo came to recognise in time, or to recognise consciously, but already in those first days they had begun to be an instinctive part of him. recognised consciously, but already in those first days they had begun to be an instinctive part of him. Now it was a whole different world, made up of narrow curved bridges in the emptiness, or knots or peel or scores roughening the trunks, of lights varying their green according to the

veils of thicker or scarcer leaves, trembling at the first quiver of the air on the chutes, or moving like sails with the bend of the tree in the wind. While down below our world lay flattened, and our bodies looked quite disproportionate, and we certainly understood nothing of what he knew up there, he who spent his nights listening to the sap running through its cells, the circles marking the years inside the trunks, the patches of mould growing ever larger helped by the north wind, the birds sleeping and quivering in their nests, then resettling their heads in the softest down of their wings, and the caterpillar waking, and the chrysalis opening.

There is the moment when the silence of the countryside gathers in the ear and breaks into a myriad of sounds, a croaking and squeaking, a swift rustle in the grass, a plop in the water, a pattering on earth and pebbles, and high above all, the call of the cicada. The sounds follow one another and the ear eventually discerns more of them, just as fingers, unwinding a ball of wool, feel each fibre interwoven with progressively thinner and less palpable threads. The frogs continue croaking in the background without changing the flow of sounds,

just as the light does not vary from the continuous winking of the stars. But at every rise or fall of the wind, every sound changes and is renewed. All that remains in the inner recesses of the ear is a vague murmur, the sea. That is a fabulous passage. Tone, isn't it? Tone. This whole novel could fall badly from its

branch down to the forest floor if it weren't so well judged in terms of the balance between lightness and profundity right yeah constantly leaping from branch to branch as you said you you you pointed us towards that quote about calvino being like a squirrel that pervasively compared him to a squirrel leaping from... Quite some time before he wrote this book.

The kind of brilliance of Calvino for me is that he's telling on one level, it's a fable, it's a simple story, right? But he's also, the idea, this image, as he says, stories start in an image, and the image is of a boy who goes up into the trees and decides not to come down. And then after that, there's a whole logical entailment that has to happen absolutely how does he wash how does it yeah by the end of the book it's the whole history of civilization in through this through this one character because right you know he goes through this period where he's a hunter-gatherer and he's kind of almost shamanistically becoming the animals you know

becoming the trees becoming the and then he gets books and then he goes, and then he educates himself. And then he starts to become, you know, he becomes a lawgiver and he starts to, and then he becomes briefly a freemason. And then he writes this great sort of liberating tract. So it's that thing that it's at one level, So it's that thing that at one level it's massively ambitious. He's doing it through almost the fairy tale kind of structure, which the more I thought about it, the more I admired it. The tract is called The Constitutional Project for a Republican City with a declaration of the rights of men, women, children, domestic and wild animals, including birds, fishes and insects, and all vegetation,

whether trees, vegetable or grass. And then his brother, who's the narrator, says, it was a very fine work, which could have been a useful guide to any government, but no one took any notice of it and it remained a dead letter. But that's the brilliant Calvino humour. So we have a clip now of Calvino being interviewed on TV about The Baron in the Trees in 1960.

And you'll be pleased to hear that he's not speaking in Italian. Italo Calvino, can you give us the reasons for such a behaviour, such a behaviour? I imagined a story, tel comportement d'une telle conduite je suis imaginé une histoire seulement parce que l'image d'une homme qui vit sur les arbres et ne descend pas à terre c'était c'est une image qui m'a obsédé pour beaucoup de temps. Mais je crois qu'il y a aussi une signification. Une signification... Symbolique?

Bien, symbolique. Je laisse ouverte les plus différentes interprétations. ouvertes les plus différentes interprétations. Je crois que ce n'est pas un livre, que ce n'est pas une image d'évasion complètement. C'est une image de solitude, c'est une image de volonté, c'est une image d'obstination. D'accord. Mais est-ce que vivre dans les arbres, est-ce the woods the same thing, for example, as moving to a tour d'Ivoire?

No, no. I protest against this interpretation. Not on every show. I protest against this interpretation. Yes, what he's saying there, I'm praising wildly, is this isn't a book about escape. It is a book about living in the way you want to live, or it's a book about engaging with the world on your own terms. And also you get to hear Calvino, the Italian Italo Calvino, speaking in French on French TV.

That's about half an hour long. You can see the whole thing on YouTube if you want to. Also, I'd like to say about The Barren and the Trees, because this is Italo Calvino, it's also a book about books. Yes. All Italo Calvino's books are about books, right? I mean, so obviously If On A Winter's Night A Traveller is about reading and writing and the relationship between those.

But Invisible Cities is also based on Marco Polo. So I've got a little bit from The Baron and the Trees here, which I just wanted to read, which seemed appropriate, about books, about his love of reading, Cosimo's love of reading. Cosimo had acquired a passion for reading and study, which remained with him for the rest of his life. The attitude in which we now usually found him

was astride a comfortable branch with a book open in his hand, or his back against a fork as if on a school bench with a sheet of paper on a plank and an ink stand in a hole of the tree writing with a long quill pen. Cosimo who was devouring books of every kind and spending half his time in reading and half in hunting to pay the booksellers bills always had some new story to tell, of Rousseau botanising on his walks through the forests of Switzerland, or Benjamin Franklin trying to capture lightning with an eagle, of the Baron de la Hontan living happily among the Indians of America.

To keep his books, Cosimo constructed a kind of hanging bookcase, sheltered as best he could from rain and nibbling mouths. But he would continuously change them around, according to his studies and tastes of the moment. For he considered books as rather like birds, which it saddened him to see caged or motionless. Now that seems to me, that seems quintessential Calvino to me. The idea of the book as the living object, the thing that exists in the reader's apprehension, but also has a life

outside of the reader's apprehension. I mean, that's the theme that runs through so much of Calvino's work. Two things on that. Quite soon after the passage you've read, I think there's a, I think, really hilarious story. He befriends a desperate brigand called Jan de Brugge, who's this horrible version of Robin Hood, terrorising the entire neighborhood, who borrows a book from Cosimo and becomes a bibliomaniac. He can't stop reading and he completely loses interest

in being a brigand. And he's desperate to read Clarissa by Richard Sandberg. And these young brigands come to him and say, look, you've got to do a robbery for us. It's like, you know, the excise man is going to be at such and such a place and you've got to do it. And he refuses. And they take away his book and they tear out the ending until the brigand will go and perform the robbery. And then just later in the book, there's a passage about printing his own books. And Cosimo also began to write certain things himself, such as the Song of the Black

Bird, the Knocker, the Woodpecker, the Dialogue of the Owls, and to distribute them publicly. In fact, it was at this period of dementia that he learned the art of printing and began to print some pamphlets or gazettes, among them the Magpies Gazette, later all collected under the title the Bipeds Monitor. He also brought into a nut tree a typographer's table and chaise, a press, a case of type and a crock of ink and he spent his days composing his pages, pulling his copies. Some spiders and butterflies would get caught between type and paper and their marks would be printed on the page. Sometimes the lizard would jump on the sheet while the ink was fresh

and smear everything with its tail. Sometimes the squirrels would take a letter of the alphabet and carry it off to their lair thinking it was something to eat, as happened with the letter Q. But I love that, the madness of the... There's a brilliant scene, going back to the reading, where he finally... Janda Brighi is literally about to be executed.

He's standing on the scaffold and he's... It says, The prosecution took a long time preparing its case. The brigand resisted the rack. It took days to make him confess each of his innumerable crimes. So before and after the interrogations every day, he would listen to Cosimo reading. When Clarissa finished, Cosimo saw he was rather sad

and it struck him that Richardson might be a little depressing to want to shut up like that. So he decided to start a novel by fielding, whose plot and movement might give him back a sense of his lost liberty. That was during the trial, and Gian De Brugge could think of nothing but the adventures of Jonathan Wilde. The day of execution came before the novel was finished. Gian de Brugge made his last journey in the land of the living on a cart with a friar. Hangings at Ambroso were from a high oak in the middle of the square. The whole population was standing around in a circle. When his head went

in the noose, Gian de Brugge heard a whistle between the branches. He raised his face. There was Cosimo with a shut book. Tell me how it ends, said the condemned man. I'm sorry to tell you, Jan, answered Cosimo, that Jonathan ends hanged by the neck. Thank you, like me. Goodbye. And he himself kicked away the ladder and was so strangled. When the body ceased to twitch, the crowd went away. Cosimo remained until nightfall, astride the branch from which the hanged man was dangling. Every time a crow came near to peck at the corpse's eyes or nose,

Cosimo chased it away with a wave of his cap. Which is kind of a bit grotesque. It's grotesque, but it's actually very touching. Very touching. I've got a question. Right. So when i started reading this uh the baron in the trees alarm bells ring because i thought uh-oh this this is going to be

magical realism and i am allergic to magical realism i was thinking this is going to be gabrielle garcia bloody marquez all over again i'm going to be stuffed with this book for hundreds of pages and yet i had none of the'm going to be stuffed with this book for hundreds of pages. And yet I had none of the usual problems that I have with that particular genre. But I couldn't put my finger on what it was that wasn't driving me nuts, which is what normally happens. And I think perhaps it is the lightness of it. You know, the bit that you just read, John, there,

manages to be preposterous yeah completely realistic funny funny but also really moving yeah that's what i mean about that squirrel like jumping from branch to branch from tone to tone that seems to me to be the thing that makes it play i i know exactly what you're saying andy and i think um i don't know if this is putting one's finger on the right answer, but it actually, John, you mentioned the six memos for the next millennium. And there he talks about fables. And one of the things he'd done, I think in the 60s or possibly earlier, he'd edited a collection of Italian fables.

And in the memos, he talks about the simplicity. So you take a preposterous idea that the servant for the king has to get feather from an ogre. And the story goes from there. And it's preposterous. But the simplicity of the story and the drive of the narrative holds it together. It doesn't. It's just so well realized. It doesn't demand that somehow there's a virtuosic ability to make that work for you.

demand that you somehow there's a virtuosic ability to make that work for you it's without being true also with the other two stories in our ancestors the first one of which is called the cloven viscount and that is a fable about a viscount who is split in two split in two right and the two halves then have different... Which I thought was terrific. It was very funny. It's a tour de force. And then the third part is the non-existent knight about a knight who doesn't exist. I found that insufferable.

I really struggled with that. So it goes to show you... I mean, I'm not saying my reading is correct, but they each take on a very particular character and they aren't really like one another, the three volumes, are they? I mean, they're written in close proximity. There's about three or four years. All written in the 50s.

They're published separately before they're gathered together. I don't think either of the other two stories is nearly as good. I agree the Clove and Viscount admits it takes this ludicrous, totally preposterous idea and somehow makes it work, and it's funny. Yeah, at the risk of boringly agreeing, I just don't enjoy the non-existent night nearly as much. It just doesn't work. Whereas I think The Baron and the Trees just shines out.

He says something really interesting in the essay on exactitude about how he works. He says, the fact is my writing has always found itself facing two divergent paths that correspond to two different types of knowledge. One path goes into the mental space of bodiless rationality, where one may trace lines that converge, projections, abstract forms, vectors of force. converge, projections, abstract forms, vectors of force. The other path goes through a space crammed with objects and attempts to create a verbal equivalent of that space by filling the page with words, involving a most careful painstaking effort to adapt what is written to what is not written, to the sum of what is sayable and not sayable. These are two different drives toward exactitude that will never attain complete

fulfillment. One because natural languages always say something more than formalized languages can. Natural languages always involve a certain amount of noise that impinges upon the essentiality of information. And the other because in representing the density and continuity of the world around us, language is revealed as defective and fragmentary, always saying something less with respect to the sum of what can be experienced. I think that feeling that he's kind of the abstract, experimental, geometric writer,

and the writer who's writing in that first passage you read beautifully, who observes the natural world and who who's who captures the details you sort of feel that there's a battle going on in every calvino story i mean i prefer him when he's doing his you know natural language um you know full of the plenitude of stuff. And maybe less now than I perhaps would have admired when I was younger. He also, I think there's obviously an effect on his writing. He's invited to join Ulipo by Raymond Queneau in the 1960s, so Queneau, Perec, where you take a formally rigorous idea and stick to it.

Invisible Cities is written along those lines, definitely. If On A Winter's Night A Travisible Cities is written along those lines, definitely. If on a winter's night a traveller is written along those lines, definitely. I'm simultaneously repelled and attracted by it. I love the flagrant intellectualism of it and the insolent cleverness of it is wonderful. Right. But at the same time, as I say, it sort of makes me want to bang the book on the table

and shout at it and throw it across the room, even though I never throw books. But that seems to be built into the project. That's the idea. You know, the idea is, come on, reader. This is where we're going. It's up to you to keep up. Come on.

Chop, chop. Maybe that's why to you to keep up. Come on. Chop, chop. Maybe that's why I find his collection of Italian folk tales. I just think I go back to that. Oh, it's tremendous. That's the one I go back to time and time again, just because I think it is like kind of crack. You know, it's like, you know, the stories are so strong and so memorable and there's less of him making shit up.

I think the Ulipoo this is a matter of taste maybe but i think there's a straight jacket there and you know in my case maybe i like invisible cities a bit more and if on a winter's night a bit less and we're in sort of but like we can probably see each other's position but i like it when again i think he he put himself in a straight jacket there and he when he escapes it it's, he's just at his best. So there's a very late book, Mr. Palomar, which it's hard to describe, but it's something like Monsieur Hulot meets Montaigne with really good science writing. You have my attention.

I have never read Mr. Palomar. Well, it's a collection of observations. And it's clearly about him, and it's very much an old man's book. of observations these short and it's clearly about him and it's very much an old man's book there's you know superb observation of how waves on the sea form and fold over each other followed by a passage a short section about an old man walking down a beach and seeing a young woman naked with naked breasts and thinking about how he can either look or not look at her and and uh you know it's ridiculous and very funny. It's well worth attention.

And it feels completely free. There's no demand to have a structure. Yeah. Well, before we bring the proceedings to a close, I want to talk a little bit about Calvino's essay, Why Read the Classics? Because I think any listener to Batlisted would expect and appreciate and love this essay.

England expects. I mean, I'm just going to read a few. It's as the selection that John read out on our episode about how to talk about books you haven't read. It has that brilliant humour, intellectual game playing. But at the same time, it's very heartfelt. It's brain and heart together. And so it's a list of reasons to read the classics. And I won't read all of them. I'll just read a few. But then he ends it in a way which totally dovetails with the section that John was

reading earlier from The Baron in the Trees, trees you know about reading a great novel just before you are hanged so why read the classics and it begins let us begin by putting forward some definitions one the classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying i'm rereading never never, I'm reading. Two, the classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them, but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them. Three, the classics are books which exercise a particular influence both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable and when they hide in the layers of memory

disguised as the individuals or the collective unconscious i mean that's really good amazing and and he continues like that you know why the classics? He might as well be saying, why pay attention to the classics even if you don't read them? Because they are there to be read whether you choose to or not. You've already partaken of them even if you've never actively read them. And it ends like this. It has the most wonderful ending. Ends like this, it has the most wonderful ending.

If anyone objects that the classics are not worth all that effort, I will cite Cioran, not a classic, at least not yet, but a contemporary thinker who is only now being translated into Italian. While the hemlock was being prepared, Socrates was learning a melody on the flute what use will that be to you he was asked he replied at least i will learn this melody before i die and that's sort of of a piece isn't it it, with the William Maxwell thing. We've talked about it on here several times. You know, the idea of, you know, I know I'm dying, but when I go, I'm going to miss reading novels. And that seems like a good moment.

It's normally John who says this, but dammit, I'm going to say it. Unfortunately, there can be no ludic ending within an ending to this podcast. It has to end it can't end and then not end uh we'd like to offer our not even slightly post-modern thanks to casper for reminding us of the intricate loveliness of calvino's universe to our producer nicky birch for providing a solid basis on which we can weave castles in the air and to unbound for underwriting all our weird meanderings you can download all 94 of our shows plus follow links clips suggestions for further reading by visiting our website backlisted.fm and you can contact us on Twitter, Facebook and Boundless. Before you do that, why not leave us a review on iTunes

and file it under podcasts I need to tell my friends to listen to, even if they have previously claimed they don't usually listen to podcasts about books. Thank you for listening. This is Andy Miller saying you are listening to a podcast about a book by Italo Calvino. And good night. Good night. Yay! Good night.

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