James Baldwin was as eloquent and persuasive a speaker as he was a writer. Below, several film clips of Baldwin in interviews and, finally, at a roundtable following the 1963 March on Washington.

A biographical overview of James Baldwin

James Baldwin and Embracing the “Other”

James  Baldwin asks, “Who is the nigger?”

“Why are you afraid of him?”

The Washington March of 1963: roundtable discussion with James Baldwin, Marlon Brando, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Charlton Heston, and Joseph Mankiewicz.

Wait a minute. The moon, at the dawn of time when it was closest to the earth, was still at least 12,000 miles away. Too long for any ladder. Clearly, Italo Calvino (1923-1985,) one of the greatest European writers of the last century, took a mountain of artistic license when he published his science-based fantasies, Cosmicomics, in 1965. But for the generations of readers swept away with the wit and magic of these loosely linked stories, that’s part of the fun.

Cosmicomics will be discussed at the popular “Another Look” book club, at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 27, at Levinthal Hall, Stanford Humanities Center. Acclaimed author Robert Pogue Harrison, the Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian Literature, will moderate the panel, with award-winning novelist Tobias Wolff, the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor, and literary journalist and visiting scholar Cynthia Haven, who blogs at The Book Haven.

Harrison hosts the radio talk show “Entitled Opinions” and contributes regularly to the New York Review of Books. The event launches the third year of “Another Look,” founded by the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English.  The event is free and open to the public.

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Robert Pogue Harrison will moderate the October 27 “Another Look” discussion on Cosmicomics, a collection of science-inspired fantasies by one of the greatest European writers of the last century, Italo Calvino. Harrison is the author of several acclaimed books – the newest, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age will be published later this year. Stanford’s Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature also hosts the popular and cerebral radio talk show, Entitled Opinions, available on iTunes. He contributes regularly to the New York Review of Books. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was recently named chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, one of the highest cultural honors France offers.

“Another Look”’s Cynthia Haven spoke with him in preparation for the upcoming event.

Haven: Calvino once wrote, “I like telling things in cartoon form,” and even suggested that readers try to visualize his Cosmicomic stories as comic strips. Is this a hint about why he is calling this first 1965 collection of the tales Cosmicomics?

Harrison: Well, there’s a connection with the comic strips, as you mentioned. But I think it’s important to keep in mind that the Italian literary tradition is so rich in comic genres, broadly understood. Just think of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which he called the Commedia. It’s a cosmic comedy that takes Dante through the other world – hell, purgatory, and finally the heavens.

One aspect of Calvino’s title has to do with this literary predecessor, Dante. Another has to do with the role that comedy has played in so much of the history of “serious” Italian literature – Dante, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Goldoni, Pirandello, and many others.

Haven: So why are you drawn to these stories, and why did you pick them for “Another Look”?

Harrison: I like them because of their imaginative vitality and flair. I thought it would be a book of the sort that hardly anyone in the group would have read. Frankly, I find that Anglo-American fiction, which is a great tradition, is far too dominated by the genres of realism, with its lifelike characters, plots, setting, and so forth. From that point of view, Cosmicomics completely scrambles the readers’ expectations.

In addition, Calvino’s book deals directly with the whole phenomenon of evolution, which is the huge scientific obsession of our own time. I’m not referring to the debates about evolution versus creation. It’s more that in so many different areas of the sciences, the forces of evolution are more and more being brought in as an explanatory mechanism for understanding anything that is under investigation. The force of evolution, the anthropomorphic imagination that you have in these stories, along with the sheer charm of the book – that’s why I chose it.

Haven: Let’s see. Calvino was born in Santiago de Las Vegas, a suburb outside Havana in 1923, to Italian parents who were both botanists. That’s why Calvino’s friend Gore Vidal wrote that “he instinctively looks to the natural world for illumination of his own interior” – rather as you do in your own book Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. But science, as well as nature, was clearly a powerful legacy from his parents.

Harrison: That’s right. Calvino makes it clear in several of his interviews that he’s been interested in science all along. For him, science and fantasy are not two separate things. There’s nothing more fantastical, in essence, than science. So he’s taking these scientific theses, which he prints at the beginning of each story, and then gives them each a story.

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I first met ltalo Calvino in Rome, sometime in the early 1960s. Our meeting was unplanned; but, appropriately, it took place in a bookshop, the high-ceilinged yet somehow intimate Libreria Einaudi (now gone), which then stood at the curve in the Via Veneto where the cafes of Dolce Vita memory give way to more sober government buildings and undistinguished middle-range hotels. I was browsing happily when my friend Gian Carlo Roscioni, then an editor for Einaudi, the publishing house, came over to me and said: “Calvino is here and would like to meet you.”

I recognized the tall, enviably thin and handsome Calvino from his photographs. Actually, I think I had even seen him once or maybe twice, at some large Roman literary bashes, which he attended infrequently, partly because he was never a bash sort of person and, more to the point, because he had never been a Rome resident for any length of time.

But now he was living in the capital, associated in some way with the Rome office of Einaudi, who had just recently brought out his latest book Le cosmicomiche. A few minutes after our introduction, Calvino asked me if I would be willing to translate this new book; and—though I hadn’t read it (a fact about which I remained cautiously silent)—I immediately said yes.

This was the simple beginning of a complex relationship and of my long journey through the world of Calvino, which was to last until his death. Only this beginning was simple; after that, things quickly became complicated. The American publisher who had accepted the book and then commissioned the translation committed suicide; his successor rejected the book; and Cosmicomics, as it was now called, was sent to an embarrassingly large number of New York houses before Helen Wolff, at Harcourt Brace, read it and enthusiastically offered to bring it out. Another beginning, another long and exciting association.

After Cosmicomics Calvino produced a kind of sequel in the same vein: Ti con zero, which I also translated. As I worked on these books, I met Calvino now and then, to discuss this or that little problem of translation. Though we were almost exactly coeval (both born in 1923, that year that also produced Maria Callas), we were in many respects quite different. The son of scientists, Calvino had a scientific and technical vocabulary that I lacked almost completely; in my family, of writers and lawyers, the emphasis was solely humanistic: even the task of replacing a blown fuse would require the assistance of an outside technician (fortunately both of my older sisters married engineers).

But Calvino and I shared a consuming passion for words and for using them, deploying them, stretching and tightening them. And our conversations were always a pleasure for me, though Calvino was anything but a conversationalist. In literary circles, hostesses exchanged horrified stories of his agonizing silences, which could freeze an entire dinner table. Calvino—it seemed to me—did not enjoy talking with me about his writing except at the basic, dictionary level of our working encounters. During one of these, a meeting at his house in Square du Chatillon in Paris, I unwittingly overstepped the bounds; I casually asked him if he was working on something new. Calvino froze, cleared his throat nervously, hemmed, hawed, then finally muttered, almost growling: “I’m thinking about some cities.” I quickly redirected the talk to the problems at hand.

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To writer Gian Carlo Ferretti in Milan from I.C. in Turin, Feb. 15, 1966. (Ferretti had written to Calvino, conveying his impressions of Cosmicomics, on December 29, 1965.)

Dear Ferretti,

I have been meaning for some time now to reply to your letter. It gave me enormous pleasure for the very intelligent things you say about my book and it also requires a certain commitment from me in replying because of the questions you ask. Yes, in the kind of stories one finds in Cosmicomics, I would like to succeed in distilling the results of my ideal form of research, and of my comments on reality; but I would like to do so not solely using symbolic or rather allegorical words with a range of meanings. I would like to be able to express everything by thinking in images, or in word-images, but word-images which have the rigor almost of abstraction which in the Cosmicomic stories happens only in “A Sign in Space” and “The Spiral” (and perhaps also in “The Light Years”), and from there to succeed in articulating a discourse that is my discourse, without it having other layers of meanings. For the time being, at the point where I at just now, I manage to let the stories organize themselves, on the basis of their own material, to let them think themselves, become a discourse of which I take note. However, this business of the objectivity of the story which takes shape by itself is for me only a partial, provisional hypothesis. I am well aware that even this question of proposing signs and following them through their potential organization is a way of thinking, and so the point of arrival must be the abolition of this opposition between the organization of signs and the organizations of meanings.

Naturally the emphasis on the abstract component in Cosmicomics must be accompanied by the constant presence of representation, through linguistic and figurative materials which provide the texture of real life. That is what defines the Cosmicomics for me.

As you can see, I am still too much taken up with characterizing this work, the Cosmicomics, from its inside to try to define it in the context of the rest of my work. The things you say on this topic, looking to parallels with The Watcher, are highly suggestive (and I hope you have the chance to develop this argument) and it seems to me that Ferrata [who had written a review for Rinascita the month before] too has gone down the same road, also with a certain finesse. But for each book I would like to create first of all a void around it, see it how it is on its own, and then put it in context.

I am very grateful for your reading of the book and for the stimulus for discussion and clarification that you have given me.

Best wishes.

Yours,

Italo Calvino