California Italian Studies

When Calvino died, he was at work on the Harvard lectures, which remained incomplete. This incompleteness leads one to realize that  Lezioni americane is in fact a work in Italian that Calvino never really imagined, nor actually wrote. An apocryphal book of sorts, of which only an original nucleus is left that tells us about his idea of literature as reflected in his library of similarly apocryphal books; hidden books that preside over and inspire the process of writing. What remains of the planned lectures are various layers of sunken work, an underground archive of notebooks, handwritten notes, typescripts sent out to be translated only to be written over and reworked. There are also traces of previous stages of Calvino’s study of the books he utilized, annotated and commented, and reused to write the lectures.

This is, however, the first time that Calvino takes the measure of his entire mental library in order to recount his idea of literature and offer mirror images of himself as writer and reader through the paths of his memory and poetic imaginary. For the first time, Calvino looks for himself systematically among the books of his library, both mental and real, and searches for his place in the frame that holds together six ideal shelves. These ideal shelves are reflections of images of himself and of an idea of literature whereby all forms of knowledge arise from anomalies hidden in the great library of the world. Through new insights based on research conducted in Calvino’s personal archives and his library (preserved in the writer’s house in Rome’s Campo Marzio until the death of Esther Calvino), this article presents a reading of Calvino’s Norton Lectures as a tale about the idea of an apocryphal library, or, in other words, a hidden library, which may be the originary secret of his work.