Larkin is reluctantly respected despite the barren seaminess of his life and views

Larkin is reluctantly respected, despite the barren seaminess of his life and views. After dishing the dirt, Hamilton includes a brief selection of his subjects’ best verse as a corrective.Far from Heaven, by David Underdown, Pimlico, £12.50, 308ppIn 1605, the entry of John White into Dorchester must have been something like the arrival of Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter. White was an ardent puritan determined to clean up a town so mired in depravity that the Lord destroyed much of it in a devastating fire. Though its scholarship has been acclaimed, Far from Heaven is the most readable sort of history. David Underdown entertainingly describes the everyday veniality – mostly drunkenness, but quite a bit of sex as well – that ensured Dorchester was only temporarily the Geneva of Dorset.. Resident in Turin in 1953, Italo Calvino writes in praise of those qualities the Piedmontese share with the people of his own Liguria: “absence of romantic froth, reliance, above all, on one’s own work, an innate diffidence and reserve”.

Surprising words from this genial fantasist, best remembered in Britain for the jocular postmodernism of his fiction. But most of the fragments, essays and interviews collected here evince a concern with literary and political moralities, presenting Calvino’s lively, generous mind in dialogue with the dilemmas of his time.Calvino’s voice, in a series of early self-portraits, is unexpectedly unassuming and practical. He rehearses an undramatic myth of origins: his birth in Cuba to scientific parents, his early return to San Remo, his youthful encounter with fascism, his stumble into a writing career via a meeting with the genius of Italian letters, Cesare Pavese.
Calvino pauses often to analyse his debt to his mentor then, on a point of difference in attitude to myth, discards the Pavese influence to pursue his own route with the three novels collected in Our Ancestors. In late interviews Calvino, discussing influences in a tone that echoes the theory-inflected literary rhetoric of the Eighties, mentions affinities with US experimentalists, but ironically neglects Pavese. Perhaps he was laying an Oedipal ghost to rest.Calvino’s predilections distanced him, in style and theme, from his older contemporaries. Moravia, Morante, Ginzburg and Bassani are mentioned here, the first with respect, the last begrudgingly.

His voice came to resemble those of Borges, Kafka et al, adding a distinctive Italian flavour to the canon of magic realism His older contemporaries may well be the greater voices. This shouldn’t obscure Calvino’s bright genius: displaced and quirky, it made him, like the errant knights of his fables, a player on another ground.These writings display a growing internationalism. A whimsical journal of a US voyage is peppered with what appear to be name-dropping references to Ferlinghetti, Purdy et al, until you realise that he has only the dimmest idea of who they are. Then Calvino, turning his back on lies and fictions, leaps into a black protest march in the South.