Wanting to Belong

Henry James in a flak jacket watches Maisie slip on her khaki bloomers and petticoats. How a child makes sense of war. It is one way of reading this novel. Another was once a topical theme, before certificates replaced ideas as the educated’s raison d'être. It is the fate of the middle class intellectual, adrift in a world for which his ideas have not prepared him. Italo Calvino, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests. When innocence takes a tumble.

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What is it with these Italians! Their writers, all they do is write about growing up. Life, it seems, never to free itself of adolescence; and it doesn’t matter where you are; the battlefield, its immediate aftermath, or in the long years of middle age, when one reflects on these moments of survival and trial. And the sauce on this familial pasta? A sweet melancholy. There it is in Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi Continis; there again with Cesare Pavese, his The Moon and the Bonfire; and now Italo Calvino throws his schoolboy cap into the publisher’s office. Kids in unfamiliar worlds. That explosion of wonder! And never to assimilate that first excitement, as we experience the sudden strangeness of existence. We open the door to an odd house and step into the mysterious. What are we seeing? What did we witness? Stuff that’s peculiar, unsettling, at times miraculous but ultimately inexplicable, unknowable. To remain always outside our grasp.

War a perfect symbol for these feelings of strangeness and alienation (often conflated). War a world to which Pin desperately wants to belong. Alas, his age excludes him; for not only do the men stop him from fighting, but his own immaturity rises up an immense barrier, over which his intelligence cannot climb: there is much he does not understand, even though, an acute observer, he clearly, and thus cruelly, describes what he sees….

‘Don’t you know they’re going to make a special detachment for each, though?’ says Pin. ‘They’ll make all of us commanders. Long Zena they’ll make a commander of the arm-chair-borne partisans. Sure, a detachment of partisans who go into action sitting down. There are soldiers mounted on horse, aren’t there? Now they’ll  have partisans mounted on rocking-chairs!’ 

The humour highlights Pin’s cleverness, but camouflages his childish ignorance. This boy can grasp the externals of what he sees, thus his parody of a couple fucking - he turns the cook Mancino into a gigantic cuckold, whose horns get stuck amongst the trees - but he has no feel, no real understanding, for what they are doing. Humans little more than automatons. Hopelessly at a loss with the why question, Pin - do I have to say? - is forever asking why why why…as if feeling can be reduced to sentences and paragraphs. There can be no proper answer for this young mind. We think of paper blown about in the wind, flying beyond his floundering fingers. Feelings are growth, they require the soil of experience. You can’t grow a tree out of concrete…. He has to wait. One reason why it is sensible to shield children from many facts of life, to wait until they are mature enough for them. In a time of war this is not possible. Pin confronted by situations his feelings are not wise enough to comprehend. It's not just confusion. Such teenage innocence makes him an alien in what should be home territory. The men turn away from this odd child, and his lack of sympathetic understanding (to see a thing but not feel its emotional core is uncanny). Poor Pin. He is outside the spirit of these people. He is lonely. His precocity isolating him even further; for though he makes all the men and women laugh he also frightens them; for who next will be the victim of his cruel tongue? He is not liked. Some even hate him. Sad Pin! He so wants to belong. His sister shows some tenderness; but her outrageous reputation - she is a prostitute - and slovenly ways disgust him. And anyway it is the wrong kind of belonging. Although he wants to be loved his instinct is to reject such tenderness: it causes too much pain. A problem of the clever child; whose detachment is its own obstacle to sympathy, a simple communion. Kindness hurts because it cracks the thick ice of that clever consciousness; thus better not let it thaw, the feelings flow. For the clever mind - all points covered in its bunker - any approach of the emotions is an enemy attack. And when they cannot be repulsed - or the ice melts - the emotions will be intellectualised; ideas the mind’s sterilisation plant. We could say love has become an idea for which Pin’s mind craves but against which his whole persona defends itself; a double-bind that isolates him further. The result is inevitable: he feels like a bad person; the usual lot of the loner, who exiled from the group is outcast from its morality. Such alienation makes a child hard; he is likely to resist the easy conventions of the group, the instinctive sympathies of daily living. Yet softness remains; Pin both recognises and feels the goodness of a peasant family who gives him a meal.

Pin is not evil, though he can be nasty; for there are no emotional bonds to dampen down his tongue, restrain his comedian’s intellect. He is lonely. And the war, by disturbing the settled society of the town, has increased that loneliness, for now he must exist physically as well as mentally by himself; gone the scaffolding of the commonplace, with its rituals of contact and banter, that supports the character. In war Pin’s yearning to be liked and loved intensifies, any comrade will do: Fascists, Germans, even the partisans. This yearning greater so are the means to satisfy that yearning; war a chance to create close knit groups - more sect than community - that rarely exist in peacetime. For a while the partisans promise a refuge to Pin; but disappointment is certain, his battalion a ragbag of misfits whose leader - Dritto - prefers shagging to killing. The ideal anorexic, the camaraderie is thin, this band of warriors held together not by companionship or shared ideas but through fear and bloodlust. Thus some men wander off, while others join the other side; not for belief, but for food and - in Pelle’s case: wanting weapons for himself - because the Fascists have better arms.

It is the upper bourgeoise student who is the enthusiast. Another adolescent! Who believes he is on the right side of history.

Kim is logical when he is analysing the situation with the detachment commissars, but when he is walking along alone and reasoning with himself things become mysterious and magical again, and life seems full of miracles. Our heads are still full of magic and miracles, thinks Kim. Sometimes he feels he is walking amid a world of symbols, like his namesake, little Kim in the middle of India, in that book of Kipling’s which he had so often reread as a boy.

‘Kim…Kim… Who is Kim…?’

Why is he walking over the mountains that night, getting ready for a battle, with power over life and death, after that gloomy childhood of his as a rich man’s son, and his shy adolescence? At times he feels at the mercy of crazy swings of mood, as if he’s acting hysterically, but no, his thoughts are logical, he can analyse everything with perfect clarity. And yet, he’s not serene. His parents were serene, those parents from the great middle class which created their own riches. The proletariat is serene for it knows what it wants, so are the peasants who are now doing sentry duty over their own villages. The Soviets are serene, they have made their minds up about everything and are now fighting with both passion and method, not because war is a fine thing but because it is necessary. The Bolsheviks! The Soviet Union is perhaps already a serene country, perhaps there is no more poverty there. Will Kim ever be serene? One day perhaps we will all achieve serenity and will not understand so much because we will have understood everything.

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Kim thinks of the column of Germans and Fascists who are perhaps at that moment advancing up the valley, towards the dawn which will bring death pouring down on their heads from the crests of the mountains. It is the column of lost gestures. One of the soldiers, waking up at a jolt of the truck is now thinking ‘I love you, Kate.’ In six or seven hours he’ll be dead, we’ll have killed him; even if he hadn’t thought ‘I love you, Kate,’ it would have been the same; everything that he does or thinks is lost, cancelled from history.

I, on the other hand, am walking through a larch wood and every step I take is history. I think ‘I love you, Adriana’ and that is history, will have great consequences. I’ll behave tomorrow in battle like a man who has thought tonight ‘I love you, Adriana.’ Perhaps I may not accomplish great deeds but history is made up of little anonymous gestures; I may die tomorrow even before that German, but everything I do before dying and my death too will be little parts of history, and all the thoughts I’m having now will influence my history tomorrow, tomorrow’s history of the human race.

Serene. A strange word in such a context. But it is the right word, so precise, so telling of an intellectual’s predicament. Intellectuals an unusual social type, mostly alienated from their class, yet whose key attributes - its education and social concern - are carried over into their ideas and radical dissent. Ideas. Life. More than in any other social group these are in conflict; and as we know, nothing is more troublesome, painful, so desirous of remedy, than a mind filled with doubt and mental strife. We want our minds to be a quiet reading room, not an agora of angry and competing voices. Most of us let the mob pass us by, their noise gradually fading away, until the square returns to its usual stillness. To let that horrible hullabaloo sink down into the stuff of daily living. An intellectual cannot do this. It is their tragedy. Somehow, through some miracle, they must make life fit that idea. Only when this happens, when they have completed that particular jigsaw puzzle, can they be at peace, find serenity.

Intellectuals. How they need their miracles!

Conjuring up his fantasies of the future, Kim compliments himself on his analytic qualities; so cold, such a realist, his hero that exemplary commissar. A typical teenager! With his overactive imagination and too active critical faculty. Neither one thing nor t’other; thus this constant misunderstanding of himself. And oh so fluid…his life pebbles rolling out to sea. One’s identity changing; the needs of the senses clashing with a strident intellect; and at the same time faced with a world independent of the self, our first reaction to remake it in our own image; thus the love affair with big ideas and a movement that embodies them - Bolshevism here. Our bodies their own battlefield. Peace, that serenity, requires we merge ourselves with an abstraction, fuse ourselves to a cult. Like all religions, Communism has all the attributes to keep the fairy tale of childhood alive; and with its promise of realism and truth, together with its analytic tools, it appeals specifically to the adolescent mind. It doesn’t help that Kim is rich. For his education has extended his adolescence, and encouraged the belief that these fantasies can come true. This bourgeois not to command factories and government departments but rule the People’s minds.

Too young. This young adult is not mature enough to separate the idea from the emotions, and so grasp just how much of the idea is driven by his own desires and disappointments. At this age ideas are not a stethoscope listening in to Nature’s heartbeat but a telescope scanning its distant surfaces.

Calvino appears to have made a curious error in this book. Surely Pin is Kipling’s Kim, not this fictional surrogate for the author himself?1 It suggests a sentimental weakness; Calvino’s deepest wish to identify with Pin, a character foreign to his whole being. Thus a strange cocktail of aesthetic truth and lies is served up in this novelist’s bar. At some level Calvino knows he is nothing like Pin (or Kipling’s Kim) but he cannot accept this truth; the author still too close to his own adolescence when he wrote this novel….

We stumble along a path, trip, and fall over.

Kim, though years older than Pin, is mentally much younger: he is naive. It is why, recognising the true character of many of these partisans, Kim avoids the obvious conclusion - greed not idealism is what drives them. Instead, he skates across the thick ice of his romantic ideas to pirouette around his fantasies, of a socialist heaven, a communal paradise. Individuals exist only as material for signs and symbols. People as persons are quickly forgotten, water droplets frozen into the compacted mass, when an idealist is skating over the lake. 

Pin, younger, poorer and closer to the rubbish strewn earth, sees the realities hidden by such illusions; though his child’s mind, with its weak judgement and lack of intellectual penetration, prevents him from grasping their true nature, their depth, their import. These partisans a bunch of individuals held together by weak bonds. No ideology, no love of humanity, here. They disillusion Pin, while their desires - for women, for drink, for the enemy’s death - he cannot apprehend. He returns home, but finds it changed. Most of the men are either dead, taken prisoner or have turned traitor - all that talk about creating resistance cells has destroyed his little world. The things that remain depress him: his sister even more slatternly than before. War offers only the illusory hope of camaraderie; while the heroic exploits of a character like Red Wolf, though straight out of an adventure story, do not represent the realities of the partisan cause. But even Red Wolf must let Pin down. Red Wolf not the sort of person to meet the emotional needs of a lonely boy. Even tough nuts like Pin need affection. War is not the place for him. He doesn't fit in; while he lacks the physical strength, the technical skill or the ideological foolishness to prosper in such circumstances. War is not a place for children. Leave it to the comic books.

The ending is sentimental. The one man Pin looks up to - Cousin, a true lone wolf - rejects his sister, and takes the boy back to the war-zone. Pin has at last found someone he can worship, has found a surrogate father (rather than a charismatic friend, the usual escape route from adolescent difficulties).2 It is not a fantasy. We must not forget, as I forgot at the beginning of this piece, that Pin is a child. He needs love, not new ideas, a new identity. Adolescence a long way off; the reason this novel can end happily. Only a child to believe they can return to the Garden of Eden.

Review: The Path to the Spiders’ Nests

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1.  How much of this has to do with the class origins of the writer? To a middle class intellectual the proletariat is a foreign nation; especially in an Italy where the cultural differences between the urban, literate elite and the peasantry (many of whom migrated to the city to work in the factories) could be vast. Perhaps the attraction of Communism was its promise of an initiation and then immersion into this alien world. The ironies that came out of this illusion are in retrospect extremely painful. Perhaps the best account of this illusion and its shattering is Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest tetralogy.

2.  The Bonfire and the Moon and The Garden of the Finzi Continis.