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Authors: Italo Calvino
Tags: Fiction
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months my letters will just be reportages of my travels plus, I hope, accounts of books I have read, because I am going to take books with me in the hope of reading them.
On Horseback through the Streets of New York
For the first time in my life I get on a horse. Sunday morning in Central Park. But the stable is rather far towards the west from Central Park and as soon as I am in the saddle I have to go along a lengthy stretch of 89 th Street and cross over a couple of Avenues. I ride along high above the roofs of the cars, which are forced to slow down behind the horse’s pace. In Central Park the going is good though a bit muddy. I try out a trot and also a bit of a gallop, which is easier. All around, in the marvellously clear air of New York (no city in the world has such clear air and such a beautiful sky), are skyscrapers. Along the lawns in the Park run the inevitable squirrels. My companion, sitting lightly on her horse, shouts technical instructions to me which I don’t understand. I have this sensation of dominating New York in a way I have never done before, and I am going to recommend to all visitors to New York that the first thing they should do is a tour on horseback. I met this woman, a writer’s wife, at a party yesterday where I was guest of honour (Erich Maria Remarque was also there with his wife, Paulette Goddard, who has aged considerably from the time of
Tempi moderni
but has great eyes and is full of verve, in short she’s very nice, whereas with her husband there was an instant feeling of mutual antipathy), anyway this woman, who was young and Jewish but with a real feeling for nature, says a propos of
The Baron in the Trees
that she loves ‘to ride’, but never ‘rides’ because her husband never takes her, but that I must certainly know how to ‘ride’ well. I tell her that I have never been on a horse in my life, so we fix up to meet again the next day and they also lent me a pair of little Mexican riding boots. It is clear that this is ‘the right way of approach to America’, 40 because one has to go through all the means of communication in historical sequence and eventually I will arrive at the Cadillac.
The Actors’ Studio
Often on a Tuesday or Friday morning I go to the Actors’ Studio which is a kind of hovel in the port area, and there are always many actors, even some famous ones, and directors who sit around, with Lee Strasberg there in the middle, and each time a group of actors put on a short play or just a scene, in order to study some problems, then they explain to their colleagues the problems they encountered in acting it, and the others discuss and criticize and Strasberg gives his opinion and often delivers an actual lecture. All this is free, of course: it is a club for actors to experiment and discuss. Or there are exercises invented by Strasberg called ‘A Private Moment’: here an actor without a script portrays a personal problem, for instance you see someone in bed who gets up slowly, then is seized by despair, he swears, tries to get back to sleep, gets up, goes to the window, puts on a record, then feels less desperate, etc. After this they discuss, etc. It is all rather funny: this Strasberg (who was one of that group of playwrights from the ’30s when there was also Clifford Odets and company) is obsessed with the idea of internal sincerity, which the actor has to ‘feel’ (which seems a load of rubbish to me), and the standard question when they perform a scene from a play is: ‘but in that moment were you working on your own problem or on a stage problem?’ because to make your own psychological problem identify with the problem portrayed in the play is regarded as the
ne plus ultra
. In short, it is the umpteenth proof of the weakness of American thought; however, it is a place where one can breathe a genuine atmosphere, full of passion for improvement, and it is also the place which symbolizes better than any other the elements that make up
On Horseback through the Streets of New York
For the first time in my life I get on a horse. Sunday morning in Central Park. But the stable is rather far towards the west from Central Park and as soon as I am in the saddle I have to go along a lengthy stretch of 89 th Street and cross over a couple of Avenues. I ride along high above the roofs of the cars, which are forced to slow down behind the horse’s pace. In Central Park the going is good though a bit muddy. I try out a trot and also a bit of a gallop, which is easier. All around, in the marvellously clear air of New York (no city in the world has such clear air and such a beautiful sky), are skyscrapers. Along the lawns in the Park run the inevitable squirrels. My companion, sitting lightly on her horse, shouts technical instructions to me which I don’t understand. I have this sensation of dominating New York in a way I have never done before, and I am going to recommend to all visitors to New York that the first thing they should do is a tour on horseback. I met this woman, a writer’s wife, at a party yesterday where I was guest of honour (Erich Maria Remarque was also there with his wife, Paulette Goddard, who has aged considerably from the time of
Tempi moderni
but has great eyes and is full of verve, in short she’s very nice, whereas with her husband there was an instant feeling of mutual antipathy), anyway this woman, who was young and Jewish but with a real feeling for nature, says a propos of
The Baron in the Trees
that she loves ‘to ride’, but never ‘rides’ because her husband never takes her, but that I must certainly know how to ‘ride’ well. I tell her that I have never been on a horse in my life, so we fix up to meet again the next day and they also lent me a pair of little Mexican riding boots. It is clear that this is ‘the right way of approach to America’, 40 because one has to go through all the means of communication in historical sequence and eventually I will arrive at the Cadillac.
The Actors’ Studio
Often on a Tuesday or Friday morning I go to the Actors’ Studio which is a kind of hovel in the port area, and there are always many actors, even some famous ones, and directors who sit around, with Lee Strasberg there in the middle, and each time a group of actors put on a short play or just a scene, in order to study some problems, then they explain to their colleagues the problems they encountered in acting it, and the others discuss and criticize and Strasberg gives his opinion and often delivers an actual lecture. All this is free, of course: it is a club for actors to experiment and discuss. Or there are exercises invented by Strasberg called ‘A Private Moment’: here an actor without a script portrays a personal problem, for instance you see someone in bed who gets up slowly, then is seized by despair, he swears, tries to get back to sleep, gets up, goes to the window, puts on a record, then feels less desperate, etc. After this they discuss, etc. It is all rather funny: this Strasberg (who was one of that group of playwrights from the ’30s when there was also Clifford Odets and company) is obsessed with the idea of internal sincerity, which the actor has to ‘feel’ (which seems a load of rubbish to me), and the standard question when they perform a scene from a play is: ‘but in that moment were you working on your own problem or on a stage problem?’ because to make your own psychological problem identify with the problem portrayed in the play is regarded as the
ne plus ultra
. In short, it is the umpteenth proof of the weakness of American thought; however, it is a place where one can breathe a genuine atmosphere, full of passion for improvement, and it is also the place which symbolizes better than any other the elements that make up
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