The Complete Short Stories of Natalia Ginzburg Page 3
If elements of self-indulgence in È stato così are understandable given the author’s gloomy state of mind during the immediate postwar period, the novel was nonetheless important in helping Ginzburg to realize the degree to which a writer’s personal acquaintance with the facts of life and the range of human experience should influence the process of creative composition. Her naive faith in the stability of social structures and her instinctive assumption that happiness, or at least satisfaction, is a recognizable norm in human existence had been swept away by the war and replaced by an intense awareness of the potential for unhappiness that exists in the human make-up. This awareness, harking back to the intuitive feeling that enabled her to focus on distress in her earliest characters, now allowed her to distinguish consciously and creatively between feelings of victimization which may dominate an individual in a specific context and an intellectual realization that suffering is a fundamental part of the human condition. This valuable lesson proved, at least in the long term, another important step in Ginzburg’s development as an author. In the two years that elapsed between the completion of È stato così and the composition of her essay Il mio mestiere she slowly began to adapt to a new life in which some degree of emotional and spiritual stability could be achieved alongside a gradual improvement in her material circumstances.42
It is clear that her next literary creation, La madre (‘The Mother’),43 evinces a new perception and a new mastery in the author’s work. Composed in 1948 (though not published until 1957), La madre is the description of a family in crisis seen through the eyes of two children, still young enough to share their mother’s bed at night and thus too naive to understand her emotional problems; though they are sufficiently perceptive to notice everything that happens around them, they inevitably lack the ability to distinguish between trivial details and events whose importance the reader can recognize as deeply disturbing, thus ensuring the presence in this story of two distinct levels of reality. Like the mother in I bambini, this similarly unnamed woman also neglects her children, but in a very different context, apparently more comforting and supporting but in reality even colder and more isolated. A very young widow, little more than a child herself, she inhabits a spiritual void in which the impossibility of establishing fruitful communications with her children is paralleled by the equally rigid limitations of her aged parents, who refuse to accept that she still has emotional and sexual needs that cannot be satisfied in the essentially passive role which society has automatically assigned her on the death of her husband; as a result she exists in a kind of limbo in which her increasingly desperate attempts to find some sort of equilibrium emphasize more and more the difference between her disorganized existence and the solid conventions which regulate the daily life of her family.44
Dimly aware that all is not well with their mother, the children marvel at her curious behaviour. Quite clearly, ‘their mother was not an important person.’ When one day the children see her sitting in a café with a strange man, looking ‘relaxed and happy, as she never [looked] when she was at home,’ this merely confirms what the reader has known for some time: she has a lover but is prevented by the rigid conventions which govern her position from acknowledging him openly. A trip to Milan by the grandparents to visit some relatives, which coincides with the maid’s day off, gives her a chance to invite him home and make friends with the children, who find him charming and are reluctant to go out and play after lunch; when their mother puts them to bed at the end of the day they see nothing strange in her suggestion to avoid mentioning him to their grandparents, who ‘did not like receiving guests.’ Inevitably this guilty relationship based on subterfuge is doomed to failure, and when she is abandoned by her lover and once more feels alone in the world, she can no longer bear the strain and kills herself, a gesture which elicits no sympathy from the community but merely sanctions the general view that she is a heartless deviant who has abandoned her two children. Shocked by what has happened, the boys try to understand what lies behind their mother’s actions, but they are soon distracted, first by the thrilling new life they lead in the country at Aunt Clementina’s and, subsequently, on their return home, by the well-regulated routine of life with their grandparents; this sense of security, together with the excitement of growing up, soon leads them to forget their mother and her problems, so that they eventually even forget what she looked like.45
La madre represents something of a high point in Ginzburg’s literary repertoire – undoubtedly one of her finest works. While the plight of the young female protagonist and the story’s conclusion are no less tragic than those evidenced in her earlier works, the narrative technique is far more controlled and perfectly balanced between objective description and personal involvement, well in keeping with the author’s definition of successful writing as an amalgam of ‘ruthlessness, pride, irony, physical tenderness … imagination and memory … clarity and obscurity.’46 We may see this improvement as indicative of a new lease of life, made manifest two years later by her marriage to Gabriele Baldini, later appointed to the Chair of English in Rome, where Ginzburg subsequently took up residence. A succession of successful novels shows that Ginzburg’s creative energies prospered over the next decade: Valentino (‘Valentino’) in 1951 was followed by Tutti i nostri ieri (‘All Our Yesterdays’) the year after and Sagittario (‘Sagittarius’) in 1957. In 1959, her life took a radically different direction when she moved from Rome to London following her husband’s appointment there as the Director of the Italian Institute. This new environment proved productive in literary terms as her nostalgia for her past life burst forth in one of her best-known works: Le voci della sera (‘Voices in the Evening’) released in 1961, and the semi-autobiographic novel, Lessico famigliare (‘Family Sayings’) which followed in 1965.47
The same year also marked the release of Ginzburg’s last published short story, Il maresciallo (‘The Marshal’),48 which features a group of children playing in a cellar who are repeatedly visited by a marshal who tells them adventure stories about his life and becomes the focal point of their existence. When they tell an adult about him he no longer comes to see them, and a fight develops when one of their number voices what they all know but dare not mention: he does not exist. Adults break up the fight and close the cellar, thus putting an end to the children’s meetings. Il maresciallo points to a simple truth: that children need affection and communication. If they don’t receive it from adults they create their own surrogate world in which it has a central role, but this cannot last longer than a limited period. As greater maturity develops, this surrogate world is destroyed, causing suffering among the less mature. The story also recalls familiar themes in Ginzburg’s earlier short stories – particularly I bambini and La madre – focusing on the sense of alienation, insecurity, disorientation, and insensitivity which can exist between parents and children. Indeed, while children may make demands on their parents which are sometimes unrealistic, parents must realize this and act as ‘fixed points’ for their children. If I bambini highlights that other areas of an adult’s life can make playing this role difficult, or as in La madre, impossible, Il maresciallo emphasizes the risk of adults who are just too self-absorbed to devote time and attention to their children. Children need a clear framework in which to live their lives; parents and adults generally should be seen as being in charge and thus able to protect and educate their children, as Ginzburg reflected in her essay Le piccole virtú (‘The Little Virtues’): ‘bringing up children essentially means creating a special relationship with them.’49
The short stories contained in this volume are the most recent contributions to a growing body of translations which have gradually introduced Ginzburg’s fiction to English-speaking audiences. A series of translations published by Carcanet Press (during the 1980s and 1990s) comprises a range of the author’s novellas and novels, which include the following publications: ‘Lessico famigliare’ – Family Sayings (1984); ‘Tutti i nostri ieri’ – All Our Yesterdays (1
986); ‘La città e la casa’ – The City and the House (1986); ‘La famiglia Manzoni’ – The Manzoni Family (1987); ‘Valentino’ – Valentino (1987); ‘Sagittario’ – Sagittarius (1987); ‘La strada che va in città’ – The Road to the City (1989); ‘È stato così’ – The Dry Heart (1989); ‘Famiglia’ – Family (1992); ‘Borghesia’ – Borghesia (1992). The same publisher has released two further works: The Things We Used to Say (1997) (a new translation of Lessico famigliare) and Voices in the Evening (2003) (‘Le voci della sera’). In addition to these publications an interesting miscellany of the author’s essays has also appeared: A Place to Live and Other Selected Essays of Natalia Ginzburg (Seven Stories Press, 2002). The most recent addition to this body of translated work is an impressive and much-needed complete collection of Ginzburg’s plays, which were composed principally between 1965 and 1971. This has appeared under the title The Wrong Door: The Complete Plays of Natalia Ginzburg (University of Toronto Press, 2008).
Paul Owen James Lewis, with extensive contributions from Alan Bullock
Notes
1 Natalia Ginzburg, Il mio mestiere (‘My Vocation’), which appears in her collection of essays entitled Le piccole virtù (‘The Little Virtues’), reproduced in Natalia Ginzburg: Opere raccolte e ordinate dall’Autore, ed. Cesare Garboli (Mondadori, 1986), 1: 840. Henceforth, NG: Opere.
2 Alan Bullock, Natalia Ginzburg: Human Relationships in a Changing World (Oxford: Berg, 1991), 64.
3 Ibid. 175.
4 Natalia Ginzburg, I rapporti umani (‘Human Relationships’), which appears in her collection of essays entitled Le piccole virtù (‘The Little Virtues’), reproduced in NG, Opere, 1: 871.
5 Bullock 65.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 NG Opere: Il mio mestiere, 1: 843.
9 Ibid. 844.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Paragraph derived from Bullock 11–12. See also generally NG Opere: Il mio mestiere, 1: 843–5.
13 Natalia Ginzburg, Un’assenza (‘An Absence’) (1933) appears in NG Opere, 1: 171–7.
14 Plot summary derived from Bullock 176.
15 Natalia Ginzburg, Giulietta (1934) appears in Solaria, nos. 5–6 (1934): 66–72. Published under her maiden name Natalia Levi.
16 Plot summary derived from Bullock 176–7.
17 Natalia Ginzburg, I bambini (‘The Children’) (1934) appears in Solaria, anno IX, no. 1 (1934): 66–72. Published under her maiden name, Natalia Levi.
18 Paragraph derived from Bullock, 1991, 68; on NG’s father, Giuseppe Levi, see generally Bullock, 1991, 210–11. Giuseppe Levi appears as a character in Ginzburg’s semi-autographical novel entitled Lessico famigliare (‘Family Sayings’) reproduced in NG Opere, 1: 897–1115.
19 Plot summary derived from Bullock 68–9.
20 Plot summary derived from Bullock 69.
21 Natalia Ginzburg, Casa al mare (‘The House by the Sea’) (1937) appears in NG Opere, 1: 178–86.
22 Plot summary derived from Bullock 177–8.
23 Preface to Cinque romanzi brevi (Turin: Einaudi, 1964), 6; passage and translation derived from Bullock 14–15.
24 NG: Opere, Il mio mestiere, 1: 846; translation derived from Bullock 15.
25 Ibid., 848; translation derived from Bullock 15.
26 Paragraph derived from Bullock 14–15.
27 Paragraph derived from ibid. 16.
28 Paragraph derived from ibid., 16–17. See generally NG Opere: Il mio mestiere, 1: 848–50.
29 Natalia Ginzburg, Mio marito (‘My Husband’) (1941) appears in NG Opere, 1: 187–202.
30 Plot summary derived from Bullock 178–9.
31 This biblical quotation appears in Latin in NG’s original: ‘Uxori vir debitum reddat: Similiter autem et uxor viro.’ A more orthodox English translation would be: ‘Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence and likewise also the wife unto the husband.’
32 Interpretation and passage derived from Bullock 19.
33 Preface to Cinque romanzi brevi, 10; passage cited in Bullock 17.
34 Interpretation and text derived from Bullock 17.
35 Paragraph derived from Bullock 17–19.
36 Paragraph derived from Bullock 20–1.
37 Natalia Ginzburg, Passaggio di tedeschi a Erra (‘German Soldiers Pass through Erra’) (1945) appears in Mercurio, anno 2, no. 9 (1945): 35–41.
38 Paragraph derived from Bullock 181.
39 Preface to Cinque romanzi brevi, 14; translation derived from Bullock 21.
40 NG: Il mio mestiere, 851–2; text and translation derived from Bullock 21–2.
41 Ibid.
42 Paragraph derived from Bullock 22.
43 Natalia Ginzburg, La madre (‘The Mother’) (1948), appears in NG Opere, 1: 203–15.
44 Plot summary derived from Bullock 70.
45 Plot summary derived from Bullock 70–1.
46 NG: Il mio mestiere, 1: 852, cited in Bullock 22.
47 Paragraph derived from Bullock 22–3.
48 Natalia Ginzburg, Il maresciallo (‘The Sergeant’) appears in Racconti italiani 1965 (Milano: Selezione dal Reader’s Digest 1964), 25–32.
49 Natalia Ginzburg, Le piccole virtù reproduced in NG Opere, 1: 884.
An Absence
BACK HOME FROM THE STATION he felt lonely in his house; it felt too big for him. Now as never before the long dark curtains, the dusty shelves, and the servant with white cotton gloves who waited on the table seemed meaningless to him. Without Anna, it all took on the appearance of a farce. In the evening the double bed, with its sky-blue satin quilt, made him laugh at first, but then left him feeling miserable. Anna loved things which were lavish, majestic, and old-fashioned. If she had known how to, she would have made herself a dress with drapes and layers, and a wide feather hat as was the fashion once upon a time.
That first evening alone Maurizio went to bed early and slept deeply. In the morning he was woken up by the screams of his child who did not want to have a wash. His eyes began to search for Anna’s white bathrobe hanging next to the bed. He could not see it, and then he remembered … ‘Anna is in San Remo.’ He thought that he ought to go and scold the child and give him a good talking-to as Anna would have done, tell him, for example, that all good boys wash, and that he would end up like that Pierino Porcospino,1 and then threaten to take away his new ball. But he realized that he had no desire to do this, so he stayed where he was. After a while the screams stopped and he heard the heavy steps of the nursemaid and her loud voice whispering, “Come along now, go and say good morning to papa.” Then the child appeared in front of him at the door with his ruffled blond hair and little red face. “Dear Villi, come here.” He helped him climb up onto the bed, stroking his cold little hands with his own, which were covered in sweat. “Who was being naughty a moment ago? You know I don’t like naughty children.” They played with a ball in their pyjamas for a while and had a great deal of fun. The morning was clear, sunny, and calm. “Now go and get dressed, dear Villi.” He spent an hour in the bathtub scrubbing himself all over with the sponge. Then he had a cup of cocoa brought to him. Anna always drank tea, and also had tea brought for him, because, she said, one ought not to give the servants too much to do. ‘This isn’t a hotel,’ she used to say.
He got dressed, went into the study, and stretched out on the settee without taking his shoes off, apologizing in his heart to Anna. ‘What on earth shall I do? I don’t feel like going out.’ He reached out towards the shelf and picked up a volume of modern French poems which Anna liked. He read one and got bored. He preferred poems with rhymes and rhythm; one day he had said so to Anna, but she had pulled a face.
He tried to imagine Anna in San Remo, and pictured her walking along an avenue in her loose-fitting white coat. He also imagined her, in the evening, wearing her black dress which was cut very low on the back. Anna only dressed in black and white; always black and white, just like the keys on a piano. ‘Like this, one is refined,’ she use
d to say. She hated things which were not refined. Sometimes she would describe some of her husband’s friends as ‘good folk.’ But you could tell by the way she said ‘good folk’ that really she looked down on them.
Sometimes he was not absolutely sure that Anna did not look down on him, and sometimes the thought of having married her filled him with wonder. Before becoming engaged to him she had been courted by a Jewish student for a month; he was a man with a short red beard who spluttered when he spoke. He also knew eleven languages and had many good qualities. Anna had not married him only because she would never deign to marry someone who was ugly and poor. When Anna’s parents and Maurizio’s father had arranged the marriage, Anna had not refused, and Maurizio had asked himself many times why on earth not. The morning when he first woke up in the large double bed with the sky-blue satin quilt, and Anna next to him, he asked himself if it was really true, and how it could be so. He knew he was very rich, but Anna too was very well off. Anna was not in love with him, and neither was he with Anna. Both of them knew these things, and yet they were not unhappy, even if at the beginning there had been some mild disagreements, because Anna wanted antique furniture while Maurizio liked the twentieth-century style, or because of the tea and the cocoa, and things of that sort.