A Place to Live Read online

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  preface

  I

  human relations

  winter in the abruzzi

  my craft

  the son of man

  portrait of a friend

  II

  laziness

  my psychoanalysis

  the white mustache

  the great lady

  a place to live

  clueless travelers

  the baby who saw bears

  portrait of a writer

  film

  universal compassion

  III

  such is rome

  no fairies, no wizards

  an invisible government

  summer

  misery in the beautiful, horrible city

  fantasy life

  IV

  serena cruz , or the meaning of true justice

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  Acknowledgements

  source materials

  about the author

  Copyright Page

  Also by

  NATALIA GINZBURG

  The Road to the City

  All Our Yesterdays

  The Things We Used to Say

  The Little Virtues

  Valentino and Sagittarius, two novellas

  No Way

  The Manzoni Family

  Family: Family and Borghesia, Two Novellas

  Voices in the Evening

  The City and the House

  preface

  Natalia Ginzburg’s essays require no explication. The opposite of hermetic, they are startlingly direct, forthright, and thorough. They leave readers stunned with recognition, fixed on the inexorable paths the sentences have cleared. The limpid ease of the language seems at odds with the author’s pungent accounts of the labor and struggle the writing demanded. But of course she struggled: it is no small task to write so simply yet have each page radiant with allusion, brimming with what has grown between the lines.

  The essays show a sensibility laid bare. Apart from the impeccable style, a nakedness of thought and emotion—of the contours and dynamics of thought and emotion—is their most arresting quality. Ginzburg delivers the genesis, the embryonic growth, and the full flowering of an idea or sensation as if it were a rare and gleaming mutation from the ordinary. But a reader may want a few facts as well.

  Born in 1916, Ginzburg grew up in Turin in a large and volatile family closely connected to prominent intellectuals and artists; their domestic life is unforgettably portrayed in her 1963 autobiographical novel, Family Sayings (recently reissued under the less apt title, The Things We Used to Say). The tempestuous father who appears in several of the essays was a professor of anatomy and a non-observant Jew. During the 1920’s and ’30’s, as fascism was taking hold, the family and its circle were actively anti-fascist, and the sense of alienation and combativeness Ginzburg knew in her youth pervades her essays and many novels. She began writing as a child, as she relates with her customary wry self-scrutiny in “My Craft” and “Fantasy Life,” and published her first story at seventeen.

  In 1938 she married Leone Ginzburg (their early days together are memorably sketched in “Human Relations”). During their years of political exile in the village poignantly described in “Winter in the Abruzzi,” Ginzburg wrote her first novel, The Road to the City (published in 1942 under a pseudonym because of the racial laws proscribing the rights of Jews). After their return to Rome, Leone Ginzburg was arrested and died in prison at the hands of the fascists in 1944. Left on her own with three children, Ginzburg lived first in Rome, in the state of mind evoked in “My Psychoanalysis” and “Laziness,” then returned to Turin and continued working with the group of writers who formed Einaudi, soon to become Italy’s most distinguished publishing house. In 1950 she married Gabriele Baldini, a professor of English literature, and lived with him in Rome until his death in 1969. (It was through Baldini’s work that she spent time in England and came to write “The Great Lady,” about her discovery of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels.)

  Ginzburg’s death in 1991 was the occasion for an outpouring of critical praise and affectionate personal reminiscence in the Italian press. In her native country she has long been recognized as one of its greatest twentieth-century writers, and the most eloquent, incisive, and provocative chronicler of the war years and the postwar ambience (notably in All Our Yesterdays and Voices in the Evening). Mostly what she provoked was love and allegiance, but there was occasional exasperation at the outspoken, intransigent quality of her thought and moral judgments (precisely what I find most endearing). The critic Enzo Siciliano, while expressing awe for Ginzburg’s “grasping things without any intellectual filters,” also notes that this “very peremptory and direct way of presenting her ideas” could alienate readers accustomed to a more temperate mode of argument.

  Despite the disingenuously modest stance of several of the essays (“I don’t know anything about politics,” for example, as the opening of the astute “An Invisible Government”), hers was a life spent at the center of Italian culture; she even served for one term in Parliament. She enjoyed a close circle of literary friends whose work she did not hesitate to criticize sternly when she saw fit—Alberto Moravia, for one, or Giulio Einaudi, as evidenced in “No Fairies, No Wizards.”

  Though the trauma and grief of Leone Ginzburg’s death colored her life and work forever, Ginzburg remained unremittingly dedicated to her craft and to speaking out against injustice and equivocation. Her novels and plays focus on large moral issues as played out ruefully, often with tragicomic results, in the lives of individual characters. But the essays are where she speaks in her most candid voice. It is the intimate yet elusive tone of that voice, along with the challenge of trying to hear it in English, that has long intrigued me.

  I first encountered her work back in the 1960’s, during a crash course in intermediate Italian at the Università per stranieri (University for Foreigners) in Perugia. The professor believed in instant immersion and set us to reading Ginzburg’s essays because of their extremely simple, straightforward language (although the simple passages are punctuated with sudden bursts of syntactical convolution). I was delighted, first, that I could understand them with my rudimentary Italian. I found their author magisterial and wise but accessible, full of indignation, sly wit, homely details. As I read on and learned more about her, I realized that the surface lucidity concealed a complex, passionate mind, fully invested in every sentence. Out of the banalities of daily life, she was weaving a web of moral and philosophical subtlety and paradox.

  The pleasure of her contradictions seduced me, as well as the rigor of her thinking: a stubborn, unsparing gaze informed by vast compassion; humor that flashed forth brilliantly and unexpectedly—in a writer whose favorite subjects were contemporary anomie, moral failure, and war and its grievous aftermath; above all, the elaborations that turned up like sinuous detours, after the trusting traveler has been expecting a straight, easy road. At some point on this mesmerizing journey it is apparent that we’ve been led into darker and denser territory than we bargained for. Ginzburg forces us to examine the smallest and largest aspects of our lives with a daunting yet energizing scrutiny. By the end of each essay layered with subversive thought and feeling, we have to marvel at how she has managed to bring us so far, and so fast.

  I began translating her essays those many years ago, not only as a way to learn Italian but as an inspiration for my own writing, and as a way to keep that heartbreaking, uncompromising voice close by. It happened, back then, that a friend arranged for me to meet Ginzburg in the apartment described in “A Place to
Live.” I didn’t know what I would say, but couldn’t resist the chance to be in the same room with the writer who so entranced me; even her suffering, I regret to say, gave her a kind of glamor in my eyes. The meeting was not a great success. We drank tea in a darkish living room. She sat very straight; she wore dark clothes; she was austere, unsmiling, civil but not helpful. She seemed puzzled about what I wanted of her, which was reasonable, seeing as I myself didn’t quite know. We talked for a constrained hour and I was glad when it was over. Afterwards I thought there must be a way to talk to a famous author that I had yet to learn. I did learn, that day, that the author we love on the page is not the same person we meet in a living room. Nevertheless, the austerity and unwavering sense of self were the embodiment of what I had found in her books.

  Some years later I reviewed her novel No Way (Caro Michele in the Italian edition) for The Nation. The review somehow found its way to her (not by my doing) and she wrote me a warm, appreciative letter. I was pretty sure she didn’t connect the reviewer with the young person who had sat, awkward and near-speechless, in her living room. Still, I felt happily relieved, as if I had redeemed myself in her sight.

  Now, when the work I began over thirty years ago is done, that personal encounter no longer matters to me. With literature, the past consumes the personal and circumstantial and leaves the essential, which is the work, the words. In the case of Ginzburg, their particular power is in delineating how intricate are our responses to ordinary and extraordinary events, how fraught with dread and absurdity and effort is that “long and inevitable parabola...we have to travel to feel, at last, a bit of compassion.” Every inch of that parabola is traced with rigorous, ardent clarity. Each Ginzburg sentence reminds us that everything we say and do matters too much for carelessness and evasion. This makes daily life more difficult, yes, but more charged and exhilarating too.

  If what Ginzburg offers in her essays is the examined life, then the acuity of her writing is in the process of examination. It has been a privilege to witness and partake of that process.

  I

  the little virtues, Ginzburg’s first collection of essays, was published by Einaudi in 1963. In the selections included here, Ginzburg begins her ruminations on the themes that will occupy her entire life: the spiritual and moral devastation of the war, the writer’s craft, and the vast, amorphous, and compelling subject she calls “Human Relations.”

  Typically, and deliberately, the essays tell a great deal about Ginzburg’s feelings and attitudes but give few facts. The “right person” who appears in “Human Relations” was Leone Ginzburg, the professor of Russian literature and avid anti-fascist whom the author married in 1938. As a result of his political activities the couple and their young children were exiled to the village described in “Winter in the Abruzzi,” achingly recalled as “the best time of my life.” “The Son of Man” was written in 1946, just after the war, and less than two years after Leone Ginzburg was arrested and killed by the fascists. The agonies Ginzburg lights on so briefly but wrenchingly are literal, not metaphorical; the harshness of her adherence to truth rises from the sour fruit of experience, and will flavor the rest of her life and work.

  “My Craft” is her first long brooding about the genesis and nature of her own writing, and should be read alongside later essays on the same theme: “Portrait of a Writer” and “Fantasy Life.” Taken together, the three form a kaleidoscopic image of Ginzburg’s self-examination at different stages in her writing life.

  The style matures, the emphasis changes, but the unique voice, the wit, the utter devotion and the intensity remain the same.

  (A curious footnote about this essay’s title turns up in a recent book transcribing a series of 1990 radio interviews with Ginzburg—E difficile parlare di sé [It’s Hard to Talk About Oneself, Einaudi, 1999]. She mentions that her good friend and severe critic, novelist Elsa Morante, didn’t like the essay or the title. “She said it wasn’t a craft, ‘craft’ was a word she rejected. In general she didn’t like my essays, those pieces that, I don’t know, I call essays....” The interviewer asks whether Morante found the word “craft” too prosaic. “I don’t know,” Ginzburg says. “It didn’t appeal to her, she said it wasn’t the right word. I left it anyway, it seemed to me it was…. It was the word that had first occurred to me, and I got attached to it.”)

  Like the theme of craft, the account of Ginzburg’s childhood and family in “Human Relations” is also echoed later on, in a different mood, namely in “The White Mustache” and “Summer.” For a more detailed and dazzling depiction of Ginzburg’s early years in an atypical and chaotic family, her autobiographical novel, The Things We Used to Say, is indispensable.

  human relations

  At the center of our life is the question of human relations: as soon as we become aware of it, that is, as soon as it presents itself as a distinct question rather than a baffling ache, we begin reconstructing its history and retracing its long path through our life.

  In childhood we focus primarily on the world of adults, which we find dark and mysterious. It seems absurd, because we cannot grasp what the adults are saying to each other, nor the meaning of their actions and decisions or the reasons for their changes of mood, their sudden fits of rage. We cannot grasp what the adults are saying and we’re not interested, indeed we find it infinitely tedious. What does interest us are their decisions, which can alter the course of our days, their dark moods that cast a pall over lunches and dinners, the sudden slamming of doors and outbursts of voices in the night. We have learned that a calm conversation can erupt at any moment into an unexpected storm, with the sounds of doors slamming and objects being hurled. We’re anxiously on the alert for the slightest edge of violence in their voices. We might be absorbed in some game all by ourselves, and with no warning, angry voices rip through the house; mechanically, we go on playing, sticking stones and grass into a little pile of dirt to make a hill, but the hill doesn’t really matter anymore, we can’t be happy until peace returns to the house; doors slam and we jump; furious words fly from room to room, incomprehensible words; we don’t seek to understand them or decipher what murky reasons gave rise to them; in our bewilderment we assume they must be dreadful reasons. The whole absurd mystery of adults bears down on us. Very often it complicates our relationships in the world of our peers, with children: very often a friend has come over to play, we’re making a hill together, and a slammed door signals that peace is over; burning with shame, we pretend to be totally caught up in making the hill, we struggle to distract our friend from those savage voices resounding through the house; we carefully stick little pieces of wood into the mound of dirt, our hands suddenly grown limp and flaccid. We’re quite certain there’s no fighting in our friend’s house, no voices yelling wild words; in our friend’s house everyone is calm and civilized; fighting is a disgrace peculiar to our house. Then one day to our great relief we discover that they fight in our friend’s house just the same as in ours; maybe they fight in every house on earth.

  We’ve come into adolescence when the words adults speak become intelligible—intelligible but unimportant, since we no longer care whether or not there’s peace in the house. We can follow the thread of domestic quarrels now, foresee their course and duration: they no longer frighten us. Doors slam and we don’t jump; home is not what it once was—it’s no longer our vantage point on the rest of the universe, just a place where we happen to live and eat our meals. We eat in haste, distracted, barely listening to what the adults are saying, their intelligible but pointless words. We eat and dash off to our room so as not to hear all their pointless words; we can be quite content even if the adults around us are fighting and sulking for days on end. What matters to us no longer takes place within the walls of our house but outside, on the street and at school: we can’t be happy if our classmates look down on us ever so slightly. We would do anything to save ourselves from their scorn, anything at all. We write comic verses to make our classmates laugh, and
recite them with funny grimaces we’re ashamed of later; to win their regard we collect dirty words; we hunt for dirty words all day long in books and dictionaries at home; we notice that our classmates have taken to dressing in a loud, flashy way, and so we too, against our mother’s will, take pains to insinuate some flashy and vulgar touches in our sober clothes. We have the vague sense that they must scorn us above all because of our shyness. Who knows, maybe it was that far-off moment when we were making mudpies with our friend—the doors slamming, the savage voices resounding, the shame burning our cheeks—that very moment when shyness took root in us. We think we’ll be spending our whole life freeing ourselves from shyness, learning to move under the gaze of others with the same confidence and nonchalance as when we’re alone. Our shyness seems the most serious obstacle to gaining love and universal approval, and we’re hungry and thirsty for this approval. In our solitary fantasies, we ride triumphantly through the city on horseback, surrounded by a cheering, adoring crowd.

  At home, we punish the adults, whose absurd mystery bore down on us for so many years, by our profound contempt, our silence, our impenetrable face; for years we were obsessed by their mystery, and now we avenge it with our own mystery, a mute, impenetrable face and eyes of stone. We even take revenge on the adults at home for our schoolmates’ scorn, a scorn that seems aimed not only at us personally but at our whole family, our social standing, all our furnishings and household goods, our parents’ manners and way of life. Every now and then the old familiar rage breaks out at home, sometimes even provoked by us, by our stony face. We’re assaulted by a flurry of furious words; doors slam but we don’t jump; now the doors are slamming on our account, while we sit motionless at the table with a haughty smile. Later, alone in our room, this haughty smile will instantly dissolve and we’ll burst into tears, wallowing in our isolation and at being universally misunderstood, and we’ll take a strange pleasure in shedding those scorching tears, stifling our sobs in a pillow. Soon our mother comes in, she’s moved at the sight of our tears and invites us out for ice cream or a movie; with swollen, red eyes but a face once more stony and impenetrable, we sit next to our mother at a café table eating ice cream in tiny spoonfuls. All around us is a buzzing crowd of serene, cheerful people, while we and we alone are the most bleak, ungainly, loathsome creature that ever lived.