The Complete Short Stories of Natalia Ginzburg Read online

  This austere and essentially unhappy life changes suddenly and unexpectedly one evening while the children’s father is, as usual, away on business, and their mother receives a visit from her brother-in-law, Uncle Bindi. Packed off to bed earlier than usual, and unable to sleep, Giorgio and Emilia decide to amuse themselves by creeping back to the terrace to say goodnight once more to their mother, only to see her being passionately embraced by Bindi before eventually persuading him to leave. When she realizes they have seen everything, her first panic-stricken reaction is to berate them, but the build-up of conflicting emotions is too much for her and she collapses in tears, at which point the children gather round her and she embraces them fitfully, telling them it has all been a game and begging them not to mention a word to anyone. The story ends on this note of reconciliation, with the children happily fantasizing about a new loving relationship with their mother. The irony of this situation is not lost on the reader, who, unlike the children, has no difficulty in seeing the hollowness of the happy ending, which leaves open the question of the relationship between the adults while making it clear that the mother’s new affection is hardly disinterested. While the emphasis throughout this story is on the two children and their reactions to what they see around them, Ginzburg also has an implicit understanding of their mother, whose rapport with her husband is obviously unsatisfactory and whose isolation for long periods during his absence makes it easier to understand her behaviour, thus introducing alongside the more obvious theme of parental neglect that of marital incompatibility and female loneliness.20

  Written three years later in 1937, Casa al mare (‘The House by the Sea’)21 is a more complex story, employing the device of a male narrator who is also one of the protagonists. Summoned by his old friend Walter from his home in the city to a small seaside town, the writer is charged with resolving a domestic crisis involving Walter’s relationship with his wife Vilma, a neurotic woman unable to communicate with her husband and infatuated with a middle-aged musician named Vrasti. Initially anxious not to interfere in someone else’s affairs, he is nonetheless keen to help, but no counselling of any kind takes place, and instead he soon begins to experience feelings of fulfilment, which gradually acquire a specific focus as he allows himself to fall under Vilma’s spell, first unconsciously and then, on realizing what is happening, with increasing inevitability as he attempts to delude himself into thinking that all is well. When he finally decides to depart, Vilma reacts with a tearful scene that predictably degenerates into a passionate embrace, and as he leaves the next morning filled with ‘shame’ and ‘disgust’ at what has happened, he is conscious that ‘I had resolved nothing, and had indeed made things worse, possibly ruining them forever.’ If the narrator’s total lack of will power makes him the classic example of masculine indecision, his friend Walter is equally inconclusive, hiding his inability to communicate with his wife under a mask of cold indifference to all that surrounds him; even after learning of his friend’s betrayal he reacts only with ‘a gesture of helplessness.’ The third man in this tale, Vrasti, a scruffy, alcoholic piano player who babbles incoherently in his cups, is a more obvious example of the fundamental impotence affecting both the other male protagonists, which ensures that Vilma’s problems continue unchecked. In the end we learn that following the death of her child Vilma has left her husband to live with the musician, confirming the narrator’s suspicions that his incompetence has helped destroy this marriage.22

  It is clear with the benefit of hindsight that the four short stories which appeared during this early period 1933–7, while remarkable in someone not yet clear of her teenage years, were nonetheless as limited, albeit in a different and more subtle way, as Ginzburg’s childhood poetry and adventure stories, and destined to lead to a period of writer’s block, its main characteristic, as impressed upon her by a painter whose judgment she respected, being their fortuitousness, a concept Ginzburg was later able to reflect and elaborate on:

  He said my short stories were not at all badly written, but that they were fortuitous, that is to say I knew nothing about reality, and used my imagination, living in an unreal world as do all adolescents; the objects I described and the events I narrated only had the semblance of reality and truth; I had come across them fortuitously, fishing haphazardly in a void. I was struck dumb by the truth of these words. I did indeed write fortuitously, spying on other people’s lives without really understanding them and without knowing anything about them, using my imagination and pretending to understand.23

  This approach, perhaps inevitable in someone of Ginzburg’s age, was exaggerated by the author’s fierce desire to exclude from her writing anything remotely personal. The result is a series of impressive short stories in which, however, the emphasis is on ‘grey, squalid people and things … a contemptible kind of reality lacking in glory … an avid, mean desire for little things.’24 This trend reached its peak with the publication of Casa al mare, where the author’s excessive focus on the negative qualities of her protagonists results in a set of characters totally credible within their own terms of reference, but, ultimately, lacking in humanity. As Ginzburg became more adept at this kind of writing, turning out ‘dry, clear stories … that came to a convincing conclusion,’25 she became increasingly aware that her interest in doing so was declining. Nevertheless, it was ostensibly outside events that soon intervened to change the course of her literary output at this time.26

  In 1938 Ginzburg married the Jewish intellectual Leone Ginzburg, a Marxist whose Jewishness and politics made him a natural target for the attentions of the Fascist police, something that brought her face to face with a state of political conflict she had previously observed from the confines of her family but which now became – quite literally overnight – part of her daily routine. This radical change in her personal circumstances would in itself have been sufficient to turn her attention away from creative composition, and any chance of resolving these problems was further postponed by two successive pregnancies which made it impossible for her to devote any time or energy to something other than the daily care of her children. When in 1940 Italy’s declaration of war led to her husband being exiled to the village of Pizzoli in the depressed south, she lost little time in following him, together with their children, and starting a new life in a primitive environment in which the family was required to live on a shoestring with no knowledge of when their situation might improve.27

  An initial rejection of artistic commitment, total and unqualified, to the point where, as she recalls in her essay Il mio mestiere, Ginzburg felt only contempt for her work, gradually gave way to feelings of nostalgia for the joys of writing, memories which, she tells us, often brought her to the verge of tears. Ginzburg’s new environment in Pizzoli was one she both loved and hated, a beautiful village set in the countryside, which, however, she had not chosen to inhabit and which was at the same time a source of resentment, peopled by simple country folk who were kind and helpful but with whom she and her husband had nothing in common: urban intellectuals surrounded by primitive peasants. Ironically it was the absence of distractions and of direct political harassment in her lonely village which provided the stimulus for a new period of creativity, inevitably very different from what had gone before.28

  Written in the spring of 1941, Ginzburg’s next short story Mio marito (‘My Husband’)29 focuses on the powerlessness afflicting the husband of the female narrator, a woman who gradually realizes that her marriage to a doctor practising in a depressed southern village is no more than a futile attempt on his part to overcome a sexual obsession with a local peasant girl. The husband’s gradual disintegration is skilfully traced in no little detail. Away from the village he is ‘incredibly self assured’ with a ‘stern reserved and efficient manner,’ but this superficial image vanishes after his return home with his new bride, to whom he soon confesses the truth about their marriage, informing her that the mere sight of his peasant mistress ‘stirs something inside me.’ This is a momen
t of truth which, while apparently strengthening the bond between the husband and wife, in reality drives a wedge between them, causing ‘something strained’ in their dealings with each other which extends to their relationship with the two children she bears him in following years. When one day she catches sight of him on his way to meet Mariuccia in the woods, she realizes: ‘He had learned to lie to me, and it didn’t bother him any more. My presence in his house had made him worse,’ at which point he admits he feels no love for her, especially since Mariuccia is now pregnant. Conscious, however, that he has failed his wife by marrying her under false pretences, he is gradually overcome by shame and increasingly withdraws into silence and solitude, neglecting his appearance, refusing food, and spending sleepless nights alone in his study. When Mariuccia dies in childbirth he is unable to face life without her and shoots himself.30

  One striking feature of Mio marito is the author’s focus on the reciprocal nature of the responsibilities which govern relationships between the sexes. Key to understanding this work is the quotation from Saint Paul which appears at the beginning of the story: ‘Let every man give his wife what is her due; and let every woman do the same by her husband.’31 In Mio marito, it is clear that neither partner is able to fulfil their respective obligations to each other. The husband is unable to provide his wife with love, having married her for essentially wrong reasons; equally, while the narrator fulfils the traditional wifely role, she utterly fails to communicate with her husband in relation to his emotional needs. Although she is able to exhibit trust, devotion, a sense of duty, and domestic competence, none of this, like her maternity, is enough to help him solve his problem: the spell that binds him to Mariuccia. Albeit undeniably placed from the outset in an impossible situation, it is the narrator’s active acceptance of the traditional role of inferiority coupled with her inability to respond to her husband’s needs, or offer him any sort of positive emotional rapport, that ultimately contributes to his death. As the husband tells her bluntly, ‘Your presence … gives me peace and quiet, but that’s all,’ and later equally revealingly, ‘You’re nothing new for me … You’re like my mother and my mother’s mother, and all the women who have ever lived in this house.’ It is thus apparent that her ‘strength’ is really only an abundance of patience, which could also be seen as resignation and thus something negative.

  Although in some respects this story is entirely consistent with her earlier fictional creations, Mio marito is also significant because it marked something of a watershed in Ginzburg’s literary career. The doctor suffers from an emotional disorder and demonstrates behaviour which is incompatible with any conventional understanding of normality, an approach that clearly recalls the plots of her earlier tales, particularly Un’assenza and Casa al mare, which likewise focus on emotional traumas but which, however brilliantly described, do not relate to common experience.32 Nevertheless it is equally clear that Mio marito contains elements of a new style and approach, far more effective than anything that had gone before; most striking in this respect is the author’s willingness to draw on her own personal experiences as a direct inspiration in her writing. It is significant that the narrator of Mio marito is a woman who, despite being ‘as different as possible from myself and my circumstances,’33 nonetheless has much more in common with Ginzburg than any of her previous literary creations: a woman who moves from a provincial city to the country following her marriage to a rural doctor and whose life thereafter is conditioned by his responsibilities to the village community. If the plot of this tale and its tragic conclusion are indeed very different from the author’s life, the background is clearly identical – the minor characters based directly on inhabitants of the area, and, most significantly, the doctor whose destructive passion is at the centre of the story the exact physical replica of the man who treated Ginzburg’s children during the three years she spent at Pizzoli.34

  Four months after completing Mio marito and imbued with a new sense of purpose, Ginzburg began work on her first novel: La strada che va in città (‘The Road to the City’), a work whose title perfectly expresses the contrast between rural and urban environments and, as such, her state of mind, in which the beauty and attraction of her surroundings together with her love-hate relationship with the village were combined with strong feelings of homesickness for Turin. While a detailed analysis of Ginzburg’s first novel necessarily goes beyond the scope of this work, it is nevertheless important to recognize that the novel represented a crucial step forward. On one level the book is significant for her ability to fully embrace the notion, hitherto only partially realized in Mio marito, that, in order to write successfully, she needed to draw directly on people and things from her everyday life; in addition, however, it also marked the author’s realization that she could find an entirely new source of creative inspiration by drawing on memories of her friends and relatives, using them alongside her day-to-day personal experiences. The discovery of this crucial relationship between memory and imagination in her writing led Ginzburg to feel that she could now approach her subjects with a greater degree of humanity and that, as a consequence, she was no longer writing ‘fortuitously.’35

  The collapse of the Fascist regime in July 1943 once again saw outside events intervene and radically change the direction of the Ginzburgs’ life, as Italy’s surrender in September 1943 and the subsequent occupation by her former ally, Germany, created a situation in which they found themselves deeply involved. Hopes raised by the fall of Mussolini’s Fascist rule two months previously and the all-too-brief flowering of political activity in the interim were quickly dashed and replaced by the harshness of martial law and renewed anti-Semitic persecution. Her husband’s arrest in Rome, where he had moved in July and where she soon joined him, her virtual destitution following his death in prison after torture, and her need to go into hiding to escape arrest and deportation, all ensured that she had more than her fair share of fear and suffering, rapidly achieving a spirit of maturity in a short space of time. Her return to the capital after its liberation by the Allied troops in June 1944 and employment with the publishing house of Einaudi, first in Rome and later in their head office in Turin, while ultimately signalling the beginning of a return to normality, in reality proved only the beginning of a long process of readjustment among the hardships of daily life in a country torn apart by war and civil strife and in which poverty and squalor were the norm.36

  One month after the official German surrender in 1945 the cultural review Mercurio published Ginzburg’s next work entitled Passaggio di tedeschi a Erra (‘German Soldiers Pass through Erra’).37 This short story describes in chilling detail how the euphoria occasioned by the 1943 armistice in a small rural community gives way to apprehension as the countryside swarms with occupying German forces and the villagers gradually realize that for them the war is not yet over. When one of the local peasants shoots a drunken soldier, disaster is inevitable, and seven inhabitants are executed as a reprisal, including – by mistake – the only person who can speak German and who has throughout acted as interpreter, a striking example of black humour sharper than anything so far produced by the author. With the benefit of hindsight this tale can be seen as a prelude to Ginzburg’s third novel Tutti i nostri ieri (‘All Our Yesterdays’), written seven years later, but is clearly in the first instance dictated by the possibility of speaking freely after so long about the harrowing events she had lived through, and, as such, outside the more conventional range of inspirational subjects.

  Notwithstanding this, the familiar theme of male inadequacy remains central. The men in the village are conscious of their status as virile males but are unable to realize it because of the circumstances: occupation by a superior force. There is much empty gesturing: the foolish attempt to stop the trucks, which fails miserably; the lone Communist riding back and forth claiming to have won the war when the armistice is announced; Bissecolo showing off his knowledge of German. Meanwhile the ‘professional men’ – the local carabini
eri force – are revealed as being equally impotent when confronted with a superior force, and their shame is compounded by their having to remove their uniforms. The eventual slaughter of the villagers is the direct result of the most foolish of all the instances of masculine thoughtlessness: Antonio Trabanda’s long-standing desire to kill a German, something ‘he thought about… all the time with a mania which bordered on obsession,’ an action which while apparently brave and virile is in reality stupid and catastrophic in its results.38

  Ginzburg’s first attempts to write narrative fiction in peacetime – a time when she felt ‘totally defenceless and miserable’39 – resulted in her second novel entitled È stato così (‘The Dry Heart’), which appeared in 1947. The protagonist is the epitome of naive innocence brutalized by misfortune: a young woman whose inability to defend herself against the blows of life leads her first to murder and then to suicide. When seen in context it is clear that it remains a work in which the author has drawn too freely and too deeply on the anguish of past memories to create a character with whom she has a rapport. Two years after completing the work, Ginzburg was able to reflect on its shortcomings: ‘When we are happy our imagination is stronger; when we are unhappy our memory works with greater vitality. Suffering makes the imagination weak and lazy.’40 The effect of this over-reliance on memory is aptly described by Ginzburg: ‘It is difficult for us to turn our eyes away from our own life and our own state … [and] so memories of our own past constantly crop up in the things we write,’ causing a ‘sympathy which grows up between us and the characters we invent … tender and almost maternal, warm and damp with tears, intimately physical and stifling.’41