SOURCE: Ward, David. “Natalia Ginzburg's Early Writings in L'Italia libera.” In Natalia Ginzburg: A Voice of the Twentieth Century, edited by Angela M. Jeannet and Giuliana Sanguinetti Katz, pp. 46-62. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

[In the following essay, Ward notes the optimism and the militant tone of Ginzburg's writing around the end of World War II.]

Rome's Traforo, the tunnel which connects via del Tritone and via Nazionale, is not usually considered one of the consecrated sites of Italian political life. Yet, for Natalia Ginzburg and her close friend Carlo Levi, it has a significant if highly personal history. For both, the Traforo has intimate connections with their years of militancy in the Partito d'azione (Action Party), the short-lived Liberal-Socialist Party co-founded by Leone Ginzburg, Natalia's first husband. As did many other young Italians, both Levi and Natalia Ginzburg equate the brief life of the party with the equally brief period of optimism about Italy's future that pervaded the whole country following the fall of fascism and the end of World War II. After more than twenty years of a Fascist regime and a traumatic, divisive war which had not only pitted Italian against Italian, but had also seen Italy invaded twice and reduced to a battleground in someone else's war, many Italians were convinced that out of the ruins of history a unique opportunity had been offered them to refound their country along dramatically new lines. The vast dislocation that all aspects of Italian life and culture had suffered during the war and under occupation had the paradoxically beneficial effect of clearing the ground on which a new culture and society could be built. As Italo Calvino put it, writing of the atmosphere of those years in the Preface to the 1964 edition of his Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Nest of Spiders), this was indeed a time when anything seemed possible, when one could ‘ricominciare da zero’ (start again from zero).¹

For Carlo Levi, who became the first post-Liberation editor of the Action Party newspaper L'Italia libera (Free Italy), before resigning in January 1946 after the fall of the provisional government headed by the party's leader Ferruccio Parri, the Traforo is the setting for one of the most important dialogues in L'orologio (The Watch), his fictionalized account of the days in and around November 1945 when the Parri government was brought down to make way for the first of many Christian Democrat administrations.² In the tunnel, presented as a Plato-like cavern of echoes and shadows, three of the novel's protagonists discuss how in the wake of Parri's demise it had been possible for the old regime to reassert itself. Distinguishing between luigini (the ruling class) and contadini (the peasants), Levi analyses why the post-war hopes and aspirations for radical change in a post-Fascist Italy that the Action Party militants had lodged in the Parri government were thwarted. By luigini Levi means the proponents of a deeply rooted Gattopardesque political culture, known as trasformismo, which prizes continuity with the past over the instances of rupture that the contadini, the militants of the Action Party, proposed. Aiming to bring the ideals and values of the Resistance experience to bear on the construction of a new post-Fascist Italy, the contadini, or, as Levi also calls them, the poeti (poets), were the new protagonists on the political scene whose ambitious, sometimes ingenuous projects were gradually stifled by the tenacity of the stubborn, conservative political culture of the luigini.³

For a time at least, Natalia Ginzburg recognized herself in Levi's definition of contadini and shared the aspirations toward rupture with the history, habits, and culture of Italy's past that the Action Party embraced. Indeed, in the writings she published in the final years of the war and in the years immediately following it we find an optimism that readers only familiar with her later work might find surprising. Ginzburg returns to these important years in her short 1971 newspaper article entitled ‘Il traforo,’ now available in the collection Vita immaginaria (Imaginary Life).⁴ Whether or not she had the passage from Levi's novel in mind, the Traforo itself, more than twenty years after that experience, still reminds Ginzburg of her militancy in the Action Party. Whenever she walks through the tunnel, she writes, ‘incontro e saluto la sua memoria’ (‘I meet and greet its memory’) (140). Her period of militancy in the Action Party is no matter of simple nostalgia, however. For Ginzburg, the Action Party stands in her memory as a monument to a tangled web of emotions whose effects were still felt by an entire generation even twenty years after the event. Writing of the pervasive optimism of the period, she says: at that time ‘il mondo appariva chiaro, lineare, semplice’ (the world seemed to be a clear, straightforward, simple place), (140), in which she had ‘la certezza assoluta di poter scrivere e parlare di qualunque cosa’ (‘the absolute certainty to be able to write and speak about anything’), (141), and her future seemed to be laid out irresistibly in front of her.

As the essay continues, however, her harsh words immediately alert us to the damning critique she reserved in later years for what she came to see as the disastrous effects the unfounded optimism of those years had had on an entire generation. In no uncertain terms she writes of the repulsion she and others of her generation feel when they look back on the ‘rovine e le ceneri’ (‘ruins and ashes’) of a world in which they had invested their ‘orgoglio, vanità e amore’ (‘pride, vanity and love’) (141). Not only was the optimism that underpinned the plans for large-scale national renewal of those years unfounded, but the failure to implement their plans also greatly conditioned that generation's future choices. Having seen their original ambitious plans come to nothing, this generation is now wary about making any plans at all. From the one extreme in which limits seemed to exist only to be swept away, the negative experience of the postwar years had pushed an entire generation to the other extreme, where limits take on the reassuring and familiar contours of a safe haven: ‘Avendo noi sbagliato tanto in giovinezza ci sembra di salvarci dagli sbagli muovendoci ora pochissimo e pronunciando un numero assai esiguo e cauto di parole’ (‘As we have made so many mistakes in our youth, it seems to us that we can save ourselves from mistakes by doing as little as possible and expressing a very limited number of cautious words’) (142).

Yet, at the same time, this generation is also haunted by the idealism of those years now long gone. The dilemma and tragedy of this generation lie not only in the retrenchment their early negative experiences have provoked, but also in the fond memory they still have for the postwar world they imagined. The memory of that imagined world stays with those who imagined it, rendering them always nostalgic for a world that in any case would never have been feasible, but which still exists as a mirage in their consciousness. Feeling repulsion for ‘quel volto, quel passo imprudente, quelle parole incaute e quei pensieri incauti e quelle illusioni’ (‘that face, that imprudent step, those reckless words and those reckless thoughts and those illusions’) (143), Ginzburg looks back on a youthful image she holds dear and on indestructible memories that still today move her. Even though they turned out to be bogus, the sense of clarity and unity of purpose that characterized the postwar years are still desired as an antidote to today's incomprehensible world. But attractive as that image of their former selves might be, it is also the source of the bitter and confused relationship with the past with which that generation has been unable to come to terms. Overcome by self-doubt and self-imposed silence, Natalia's generation is haunted by a continuing desire for that long gone sense of freedom and plenitude that they know, but refuse to admit, is also the cause of their present crisis.

The same article supplies an example of the confusion inherent in today's world. Aiming to go to a left-wing demonstration, Ginzburg achieves the opposite: she unwittingly and distractedly enters a nearby movie theatre where a neofascist group is holding a meeting on the ‘Role of Women in Contemporary Society’ (146). Disturbed by the idea of such ideologically opposed groups holding meetings in the same street at the same time, and by the fact that the neofascists are discussing a topic dear to the left, Natalia seems to hark back to those former times when such confusion, she thinks, would not have been possible.

The left-wing political meeting she eventually went to also supplies another tangible sign of her generation's crisis. This time it takes the form of the failure to express outrage in the face of intolerable events, exemplified here by the case of Pietro Valpreda, the anarchist wrongly accused of and jailed for planting the bomb in Milan's Piazza Fontana, which marked the beginning of that murky period in recent Italian history known as the strategia della tensione (strategy of tension). Despite her attendance at the meeting, she realizes that her commitment is half-hearted. Although she knows it is intolerable to entertain the idea that an innocent person should go to jail, nonetheless, she writes, ‘io la tolleravo e avrei continuato a tollerarla’ (‘I tolerated it and I would continue to tolerate it’) (144). Later that afternoon, she tells us, she would continue to lead her life of Sunday phone calls and cigarettes.

The tone of ‘Il traforo’ recalls the equally damning analysis of the same period that Natalia had written eight years earlier in Lessico famigliare (Family Sayings). Here one of the mistakes of which she writes in ‘Il traforo’ is exemplified: namely, that of being ingenuous enough to believe that political change could be brought about by cultural activity; in other words, that the confines which separate poetry from politics had been collapsed. This, she writes, was the common error, ‘credere che tutto si potesse trasformare in poesia e parole’ (‘to believe that everything could be turned into poetry and words’). And when the ingenuousness of believing the world to be a simple place was unmasked by the realization that reality was ‘complessa, segreta, indecifrabile e oscura’ (‘complex, secret, indecipherable and dark’), a nauseous and long-lasting hangover took the place of the light-headedness that had gripped an entire generation (166). And her other novel which deals head-on with the Resistance experience, Tutti i nostri ieri (All Our Yesterdays), published in 1952, concludes with this sentence, which deflates any lingering last hopes the reader may have had about the possibility of postwar renewal: ‘E risero un poco ed erano molto amici loro tre insieme Anna, Emanuele e Giustino, ed erano contenti d'essere loro tre insieme a pensare a tutti quelli che erano morti, e alla lunga guerra e al dolore e al clamore e alla lunga vita difficile che si trovavano adesso davanti e che era piena di tutte le cose che non sapevano fare’ (‘And the three of them together, Anna, Emanuele, and Giustino laughed a bit and were very friendly and happy to be together and to think about all the others who were dead, and the long war and the pain and the chaos and the long difficult life that they had in front of them which was full of things they had no idea how to do’) (321).

The harshness of this retrospective glance twenty years later should not induce us into forgetting that these words are also addressed to Ginzburg herself. Part of the clear, linear, and simple world she had imagined in the years in and around the end of World War II was Ginzburg's conviction that she herself would write political articles in newspapers (‘Il traforo,’ 140) and thereby contribute, perhaps, to the new Italy the Action Party project foresaw. And for a while she did. Indeed, reading the articles she wrote in the mid-1940s, one is surprised to find exactly the same idealistic proposals and ideas that she was to attack so sharply a few years later. The articles in question are ‘I nostri figli’ (‘Our Children’), ‘Chiarezza’ (‘Clarity’), and ‘Cronaca di un paese’ (‘Chronicle of a Village’), all published in L'Italia libera on, respectively, 22 November 1944, 31 December 1944, and 9 January 1945. To the best of my knowledge none of these writings has been republished elsewhere, and certainly not in any of the major collections of Ginzburg's writings. Echoes of some of the themes contained in the articles, however, recur in Ginzburg's other published works. A few lines from ‘Chiarezza’ can be found in Tutti i nostri ieri, and, as we shall see, ‘I nostri figli’ has, thematically at least, a great deal in common with the article ‘Il figlio dell'uomo’ (‘The Son of Man’), written about a year later. ‘Cronaca di un paese’ recounts the same experience Ginzburg had described in ‘Inverno in Abruzzo’ (‘Winter in the Abruzzo’), written in the autumn of 1944, originally published in Aretusa, and now the opening essay in Le piccole virtù (The Small Virtues).⁵ Both texts share a similar structure based on micro-narrative accounts of the events and inhabitants of the village where Leone, Natalia, and their children were exiled. Their experience in Abruzzo, in fact, was very similar to Carlo Levi's earlier one in Lucania. Indeed, both the micro-narrative format of ‘Cronaca di un paese’ and the themes it brings up bear a striking resemblance to Levi's Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli), which he wrote between December 1943 and July 1944 in hiding in Florence.⁶ Both texts tell of a village divided between the signori, the degraded and corrupt local bourgeoisie and the peasants; of the ineptitude of local doctors; and of the villagers' widespread habit of writing anonymous letters to denounce their fellow villagers.

Although both texts were presumably written at about the same time, ‘Cronaca di un paese’ is far less confessional in tone than ‘Inverno in Abruzzo.’ The latter, in fact, acts as a reminder that the seeds of the later critical stance Ginzburg was to take on the events and atmosphere of those years were present even as they were taking place. Already, in fact, in the autumn of 1944, under the shadow of Leone's death in prison, Ginzburg reflected on the damage that broken dreams inflict on the self. Dreams never come true and ‘appena li vediamo spezzati, comprendiamo a un tratto che le gioie maggiori della nostra vita sono fuori della realtà (‘as soon as we see them broken, we understand immediately that the greatest joys in our life are outside reality’) (18). Yet the nostalgia for a time when those dreams ‘fervevano in noi’ (‘welled up in us’) (18) continues. The time of dreams that had not yet come untrue, she writes, taking up a theme she was to broach in later texts, was the time when ‘avevo fede in un avvenire facile e lieto, ricco di desideri appagati, di esperienze e di communi imprese’ (‘I had faith in an easy and happy future, full of satisfied desires, experiences and common aims’). This was ‘il tempo migliore della mia vita e solo adesso che m'è sfuggito per sempre, solo adesso lo so’ (‘the best time of my life, and only now it has escaped me for ever, only now do I know that’) (18-19).

Yet, written at approximately the same time, a few months after Leone's death, which left Ginzburg a young widow with three small children to raise, her other articles for L'Italia libera reflect the unbounded optimism of the period. ‘I nostri figli,’ like many of her later works, takes the form of a reflection on the institution of the family and on parenthood. As even the most cursory of readings reveals, Ginzburg's fiction flows over with characters, usually women, for whom contact with these institutions, along with marriage, has led to disastrous personal consequences. Either through the weakness of individuals, the pull of the institution itself, the incompetency of parents or parent figures, or a combination of all three, Ginzburg's often helpless young women fall into a world of life-denying conventions for which their adolescence and family upbringing has done nothing to prepare them in advance.

Delia in La strada che va in città (The Road to the City), the never-named protagonist of E stato così (That's the Way It Was), and Elsa in Le voci della sera (Voices in the Evening) all fall into loveless marriages, and retreat from what could be professional careers and some degree of personal gratification into drudgery, boredom, and full-time child-rearing. Pressure to conform to institutional conventions also overcomes ideological barricades: Raffaella, who had fought in the anti-fascist Resistance movement, ends up by marrying an unreconstructed fascist, as does Concettina, who was brought up in an anti-fascist family in Tutti i nostri ieri. Again, parents or parent figures like Maria in Tutti i nostri ieri or Matilde in Le voci della sera, whether well-meaning but misguided, or completely unsuited to bringing up children, remain blind to the needs and aspirations of their daughters. One of the constant themes to which Ginzburg returns is the unbridgeable gap which separates the hopes, needs, and aspirations of a prewar generation from those of a postwar generation. Spurred on by the dislocation and turmoil experienced in all sectors of civil life during World War II, the rate at which the postwar generation had developed needs different from those of the prewar generation had accelerated enormously. That swift rate of change, however, had neither been understood by parents nor matched by developments in the institutions and conventions which govern daily life. The younger generations grow up in and into institutions like family and marriage made for previous generations whose needs are no longer shared by their children. Although aware of their new needs, the postwar generation had failed to either rid itself of the old institutions which were central to their parents' lives or to elaborate new ones.

Offering new parents advice on how to bring up their children, the article ‘I nostri figli’ strikes a far more optimistic tone insofar as it indicates the path to be followed if the institutions of marriage and family are to be reformed from within. At her most utilitarian, Ginzburg sketches the guidelines for parents to bring up their children in such a way that, as she writes in the article's concluding words, the ‘speranze di un tempo più saggio e felice’ (‘hopes for a wiser and happier time’), which had been raised by the heady experience of the Resistance, are not extinguished.⁷

The essay itself focuses on the passage in adult life from the relative freedom and ease of a pre-parenthood stage to the difficulties encountered in the post-parenthood stage. If, in the former stage, courage, sacrifice, enthusiasm, universal love, energy, and so on, are all qualities it is relatively simple to find in oneself, in the latter we are faced with new complications which change us radically, throw us violently into the adult world, and bring us closer to the ‘espressioni ed atteggiamenti’ (‘expressions and attitudes’) we associate with our parents. In the place of a universal concern, we take on a necessarily narrower viewpoint, which can lead to what Ginzburg calls an ‘egoismo famigliare’ (‘family egoism’). In such a state, our thoughts no longer go out to the world as a whole, but are concentrated on the daily problems connected with our children: ‘Che cosa mangerà il nostro bambino? Con che cosa si baloccherà? Come vestirlo? Come fare perché sia sempre sano, forte, felice?’ (‘What will our child eat? What will he play with? How to dress him? What to do to make sure he's always healthy, strong, happy?’)

For Ginzburg, this passage is a crucial stage in adult life and signals, in the worst of cases, a watershed between the previously held hopes for a wiser, happier world and the dashing of those hopes. It is for this reason that parents must negotiate this passage with the utmost care. At issue, however, is not only the question of bringing up one's children so that they don't become spoiled little brats; going further, Ginzburg pushes the question into the realm of the political. The danger she sees is that spoiled little brats may become little fascist brats. In an early indication that the personal is always political, she locates in ‘egoismo famigliare’ a fertile terrain in which a fascist culture can find cannon fodder and sink its roots: ‘Se gettiamo uno sguardo sul passato, possiamo facilmente constatare come l'egoismo famigliare … sia stato la caratteristica principale, forse anche la prima sorgente di quegli anni oscuri, privi di ogni interesse politico e d'ogni carità umana, che si chiamarono l'era fascista’ (‘If we glance back at the past we can easily see how the family egoism I am speaking about has been the main characteristic, perhaps even the primary source of those dark years, devoid of any political interest and human charity, that were called the fascist era’).

Fascism, then, far from being a phenomenon external to Italian institutional life, or a parenthesis in the course of history, or the invasion of a barbarian tribe, or a virus which has infected an otherwise healthy body, as Benedetto Croce and many other anti-Fascists from a variety of ideological standpoints had argued, is for Ginzburg located at a local level within the family. As such, Ginzburg's analysis of Fascism and its origins is very much in line with that of the Action Party. For the likes of Carlo Rosselli and Piero Gobetti, the intellectual mentors of the party, as well as Leone Ginzburg and Carlo Levi, Fascism was an entirely Italian phenomenon which sprang from the limits of pre-Fascist liberal society. Fascism, then, was not an aberration from the norm; rather it was a consequence of a set of flawed premises. Or, as Piero Gobetti put it, Fascism was Italy's autobiography.⁸

But if Fascism is located at a local level in the family, it is also at the same level that an effective anti-Fascist culture can, and indeed must, be put into practice. Herein lies the crucial role of parents. The thrust of ‘I nostri figli’ is to indicate what changes in family costume anti-Fascist parents need to make to ensure that their children do not grow up into little fascists. In order to do this, writes Ginzburg, parents must, first, stop being conventional parents, and continue to be the young, enthusiastic, and lively companions they were previously; second, learn how to deprive their children of a thing or two so that they do not grow up spoilt; and third, remind them that there are also other, less fortunate children with similar and more pressing needs in the world.

The burden of Ginzburg's article is to place responsibility for the construction of a robust anti-Fascist culture at the micro-level of radical change in the way parents relate to and bring up their children. Not only can we read ‘I nostri figli’ as a thinly veiled criticism of her own family headed by an anti-Fascist yet determinedly patriarchal and intolerant father, but also as an alternative to the ineffective anti-Fascism practised by the characters in Tutti i nostri ieri: the father, for example, whose anti-Fascism consists of a memoir which is never finished, let alone sees the light of day; and the children, whose daydreamings of heroic anti-Fascist actions are completely severed from the everyday reality of the struggle.

The text which ‘I nostri figli’ most closely resembles for both tone and content is ‘Il figlio dell'uomo,’ first published in the Italian Communist Party newspaper L'unità (Unity) in 1946, and republished in Le piccole virtù.⁹ As we shall see, this text acts as a bridge between ‘I nostri figli’ and the second of her L'Italia libera articles, ‘Chiarezza.’ In ‘Il figlio dell'uomo,’ the accent once again falls on the gap which separates the present generation of parents from past generations. The experience of Fascism and the war has produced a new generation of young people, now become parents, whose hopes, aspirations, and fears have little in common with those of their parents. No longer able to follow the time-honoured directives on how to bring up children, they refuse to tell their children the lies their parents had told them. There is, writes Ginzburg, ‘un abisso incolmabile fra noi e le generazioni di prima’ (‘an unbridgeable gap between us and earlier generations’) (72).

Her generation, she goes on, is both unlucky and privileged: unlucky because, having experienced the fear of arrest, exile, deportation to the death camps, persecution, and having stared reality square ‘nel suo volto più tetro’ (‘in its darkest face’) (70), they know they will never forget or recover from that trauma: ‘Non guariremo più di questa guerra … non saremo mai più gente tranquilla’ (We will never get over this war … we will never again be tranquil folk’) (70). But at the same time, this generation is also privileged. The same experiences which have brought them face to face with the bare essence of things in all their brutality—‘vicini alle cose nella loro sostanza’ (‘close to things in their essence’) (70)—have complicated their lives, but also brought them a degree of unprecedented existential wealth. As Ginzburg writes in the essay's concluding sentence, the ‘anxiety’ felt by the members of this generation, which cuts to the very heart of their being, is the source of their happiness: ‘noi siamo legati a questa nostra angoscia e in fondo lieti del nostro destino di uomini’ (‘we are tied to our anxiety and we are ultimately happy about our human destiny’) (72).

This happiness derives from the clarity of vision that the war generation's specific experiences have made possible. Their privilege, in fact, is to have been exposed directly to reality without the customary mediations. Having shared the horror of war with their children, and having seen beyond the ‘veli e le menzogne’ (‘veils and lies’) with which their parents had hidden from them ‘la realtà nella sua vera sostanza’ (‘reality in its true essence’) (72), the present generation can no longer tell their own children the same mystifying stories of storks, cabbage patches, little trees and rabbits which had constructed their own worlds. The present generation's clarity of vision, as well as contrasting with the previous generation's, also contrasts strongly with the false clarity and over-simplification characteristic of the Fascist era, which is the subject of ‘Chiarezza,’ the second of the articles she wrote for L'Italia libera. The Fascist era, she writes, is guilty of not having had the intellectual or moral courage to admit that the world was a complicated place of contradiction and doubt. There were, for example, no suicides reported under Fascism, only accidental shootings; no poor people, only those who received the providential benefit of Fascist charity. In this climate of ‘perenne ottimismo’ (‘permanent optimism’), there was no place for the ‘malcontenti,’ ‘dubbiosi’ or ‘tormentati’ (‘the unhappy, the doubters, the tormented’). Indeed, it was the false optimism of the Fascist era, she continues, which created in many the need to rediscover a dimension to life which was more complicated, ‘intima e tormentata’ (‘intimate and tormented’). But that refuge into the self also had negative consequences which led literature to decouple itself from a direct engagement with reality: ‘fu appunto quella semplificazione a renderci tutti più complessi e difficili, più involuti in ogni nostra espressione ed azione, a negarci ogni possibilità di una vera chiarezza’ (‘it was that simplification that made us more complex and difficult, more introspective in our every expression and act, and denied us the possibility of true clarity’).¹⁰

But if now in the post-Fascist era the time has come for ‘un ritorno alla chiarezza’ (‘a return to clarity’), the question still remains of how to shake off the bad habits of the recent past. Given that for an entire generation ‘il fascismo … è penetrato nella nostra anima e l'ha avvelenata’ (‘Fascism … penetrated our soul and poisoned it’), the foremost task of the new era is to go back once again to the ‘forme più elementari e spontanee nella parola, nei rapporti umani, nei pensieri e nei sentimenti’ (‘most elementary and spontaneous forms in words, in human relationships, in thought and in feelings’).

The article ends with the suggestion that clarity, far from being a crystal-clear vision of self-evident, free-standing facts, is itself contingent on an act of self-examination: ‘credo che il primo atto da compiere sia questo, ritrovare se stessi’ (‘I believe that the first thing to do is this, find ourselves again’). But the major error of the postwar generation, as Ginzburg reminds us in ‘Il traforo,’ was to have bought into exactly the same kind of over-simplified false clarity of vision that had characterized Fascism. Clearly, for Ginzburg, clarity is not a crystal-clear given.

Indeed, clarity is one of the more elusive and misunderstood concepts in Ginzburg's entire body of work. For one thing, clarity and simplicity are not overlapping categories: what is seemingly clear is not necessarily simple. Although Ginzburg is renowned for a pared-down, economic style, her writing itself is far from simple. ‘Lui e io’ (‘He and I’) may be a clearly expressed exposition of her relationship with her second husband Gabriele Baldini, but it is far from being a simple relationship;¹¹ and ‘Il traforo,’ her look back on her militancy in the Action Party, though similarly expressed in her habitual limpid prose style, reveals a knot of still unresolved tensions.

Clarity is not so much a question of seeing the sharp contours of reality pared down to its bare essence, as being ready to admit that even at its clearest the essence of reality is a tangled web of conflicting and changing emotions, a microcosm of which is her own experience then and now with the Action Party. In an interview given to Delia Lennie in 1971, Ginzburg ties the question of clarity to an ‘awareness of one's own limitations.’¹² And a year later in another interview, she speaks of the choice of language a writer makes as more a question of moral than of aesthetic choice.¹³ More than an index of perfect vision, clarity is an ethical index of an individual's willingness to recognize the finitude of the human self as well as the limitations this places on our standing in and relationship with the world. Our relationship to reality is less one in which we dig deep to discover its immutable truths, than one in which we consider reality as an unresolved, evolving project which will stretch beyond the span of any single individual's lifetime. Devoid of the intellectual and moral courage necessary to acknowledge these limitations, Fascism, for example, contented itself with offering the kind of superficial clarity that the Ginzburg of her postwar phase decidedly rejects.

We may also consider Ginzburg's experiments in impersonal narration, which characterize a good many of her works, in this light. If the individual does not hold the keys with which to unlock the eternal secrets of reality, then, any pretence to do so is an act of moral dishonesty. Many of Ginzburg's texts can be seen as attempts to reconcile two almost contradictory demands: first, to stare reality in the face and tell its story in narrative form; and second, to maintain an attitude of humility before that reality. We can follow the tension between these two demands in Ginzburg's experiments in narrative voice. In fact, many of her works can be seen as mini-laboratories in which she attempts to develop a narrative voice which, on the one hand, satisfies the first ethical demand by telling the story of the world while, on the other, it satisfies the second by avoiding the imposing, organizing, and ultimately authoritarian voice of the omniscient narrator. Although Lessico famigliare, for example, is purportedly a semi-autobiographical account of the Levi family, Ginzburg, eclipsing herself almost entirely, never becomes the overt organizing presence around which more conventional historical or autobiographical texts revolve. Reducing to a minimum references even to the most joyous and tragic events of her life—marriage and widowhood with Leone Ginzburg, who died of a heart attack following torture in Rome's Regina Coeli prison in 1944—Ginzburg, in Lessico famigliare, employs the kind of nonassertive narrative voice she later attempted to develop in her epistolary novels Caro Michele (Dear Michael), La città e la casa (The City and the House), and the historical reconstruction based on letters, La famiglia Manzoni (The Manzoni Family).

Yet, at the same time, there is space within the body of Ginzburg's writings for a forceful, indeed dogmatic, voice which seems to brook little argument. Both in ‘I nostri figli’ and in ‘Il figlio dell'uomo,’ she writes with great strength and conviction of an experience that is hers, but is also that of an entire generation. The confidently expressed ‘we’ of these pages is in no doubt at all about who she and her group are, where they have been together, what they have shared together, and what those experiences have done to them. If Ginzburg harbours doubts about the extent to which we can know or understand in any unequivocal way the knot of contradictory emotions that make up reality, she also believes that there are certain experiences that impress themselves so strongly on the human self that they can be narrated with conviction. The kind of narrative voice toward which Ginzburg is working is one which can express both the uncertainty she feels about the world as a whole, but also the certainty about the truth of those events which she has experienced, as it were, in the flesh. In her interview with Toscani, Ginzburg likens her position as narrator to that of ‘a man contemplating the universe from a very small outcrop of rock, and all he can write about is what he can hold in his hands and see beneath his feet. He can have no certainty about anything else.’¹⁴ Certainty, then, is circumscribed to what the writer experiences from his or her particular position. This, to be sure, gives certainty only a modest purview, but it is, despite its modesty, a certainty on which we can rely and which authorizes us to state that certainty in no uncertain terms.

The experiences about which we can be certain are not, then, to be found in the longue durée of history, but in the specificity and unicity of a particular event. To recover the particularity and certainty of that event it is necessary to sever it from its contiguity with the numerous other events which surround it and create its context. Ginzburg's fear is that, seen in the general context, the strong and unique contours of an event may be honed down and the event's particularity lost. To focus on that particularity we need to force ourselves perhaps to forget the historical context which surrounds the event. A positive mental effort, then, needs to be made if we are not to allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by a bigger picture of history which may offer alibis to individual outrages and temper our reactions by treating such outrages as, say, the spirit of the age, or justifying them as the consequence of contingent circumstances.

If we look all the time at the big picture of history, Ginzburg tells us in an interview apropos of Serena Cruz, an adopted child on whose behalf she organized a vast and vociferous campaign in the late 1980s, we risk seeing nothing, only perhaps a large confusing backdrop against which we are no longer able to distinguish the immensity of the small truth in all its particularity. What we must not do is ‘to place the particular facts of this case within an anonymous and immense series of analogous facts that fill up the world and in so doing see absolutely nothing. The power and immensity of numbers crush and overpower the particulars of one single, solitary misfortune … it is necessary … that we preserve and keep alive in our memory that indignation … or that offense, as though it were indestructible and unique.’¹⁵

But if this is a coping mechanism that allows Ginzburg to avoid a full-time engagement with the master discourse of history, while at the same time allowing her to, as it were, dip into it when her limits of tolerance have been reached, as in the case of Serena Cruz, it is still far from being a satisfactory answer. For one thing, it makes full-time militancy in a political party and adherence to a manifesto almost impossible. Despite her term of office in the Italian Parliament as a member of the Sinistra Indipendente (Independent Left) group, Ginzburg was always reticent to commit herself fully to an endorsement of any political party's program. This reluctance certainly derives from her negative experiences in the mid-1940s with the Action Party and the disappointment she and many of her generation felt as it became evident that the shape postwar, post-Fascist Italy was taking was very different from what they had hoped or imagined. For this generation, whose aspirations outstretched their abilities and which saw itself increasingly as the victim of history, an appropriate motto might be ‘Once bitten, twice shy.’

The body of Ginzburg's writings are haunted by the presence of the person who came to exemplify most tragically the mistakes of that generation: her friend and fellow writer, Cesare Pavese, to whom she dedicates some of her most moving pages in both ‘Ritratto di un amico’ (‘Portrait of a Friend’), originally written in 1957 and now in Le piccole virtù, and in Lessico famigliare.¹⁶ In many ways, Pavese is constructed as the negative example against which Ginzburg defines and elaborates her own survival tactics. As Ginzburg describes it, Pavese's great mistake was to believe that the world was made to his measure and would unfold in the same logical, reasoned way he had imagined. If the errors of Ginzburg and her like were generated by ‘impulso, imprudenza, stupidità e candore’ (‘impulse, recklessness, stupidity and candour’), Pavese's came ‘dalla prudenza, dall'astuzia, dal calcolo, e dall'intelligenza’ (‘from prudence, cunning, calculation and intelligence’) (Lessico, 198). And, adds Ginzburg, ‘Nulla è pericoloso come questa sorta di errori’ (‘Nothing is more dangerous than this kind of mistake’) (198). When he discovered that the world had gone in a direction different from the one he had calculated, the shock was so great that it pushed him to his suicide in 1950. Differently from Ginzburg and others like her, Pavese was unable to ascribe his errors to stupidity or inability or ingenuousness. Whereas others were able to use their own human frailty to account for the failure of their projects, Pavese was unable to do so. Pavese remained, then, a prisoner of what Ginzburg calls ‘la voce amara della ragione’ (‘the bitter voice of reason’) (199), whose roots stretched down so deeply into his consciousness as to deny him the life-saving freedom that Ginzburg's fragility and awareness of her own limits granted her. In Ginzburg's terms, Pavese saw things too clearly for his own good, and was unable to come to terms with an unclear, confused world which did not obey the logic by which he had imagined it to be governed. This is the danger Ginzburg sees in investing too much of ourselves in a commitment to a world that is believed to be a clear, linear, and simple place, as she thought it was in the mid-1940s. To learn and accept that we are not the measure of reality, that we do not hold its reins in our hands, is both to acknowledge our own limits—painful as that may be, especially if we compare ourselves to an earlier more idealistic phase—and to save our lives from the disappointment and tragedy which has haunted and continues to haunt Italy's postwar generation of which Ginzburg was a part.

Notes

1. Italo Calvino, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (Turin: Einaudi, 1964), 7. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Italian are my own.

2. Carlo Levi, L'orologio (Turin: Einaudi, 1950).

3. For a longer account of the Action Party's defeat, see Vittorio Foa, Il cavallo e la torre: Riflessioni su una vita (Turin: Einaudi, 1991).

4. Natalia Ginzburg, ‘Il traforo,’ Vita immaginaria (Milan: Mondadori, 1974), 140-6. Further references will appear parenthetically within the text.

5. Ginzburg, ‘Inverno in Abruzzo,’ Le piccole virtù (Turin: Einaudi, 1962), 13-19. Further references will appear parenthetically in the text.

6. Carlo Levi, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Turin: Einaudi, 1945).

7. For the text and translation of ‘I nostri figli’ see pages 226-9 of this book.

8. Piero Gobetti, La rivoluzione liberale: Saggio sulla lotta politica in Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), 165.

9. Ginzburg, ‘Il figlio dell'uomo,’ Le piccole virtù, 69-72. Further references will appear parenthetically in the text.

10. For the text and translation of ‘Chiarezza’ see pages 230-3 of this book.

11. Ginzburg, ‘Lui e io,’ Le piccole virtù, 53-65.

12. Delia Lennie, ‘Una scrittrice: Natalia Ginzburg,’ in Posso presentarle (London: Longman, 1971), p. 70. Cited in Alan Bullock, Natalia Ginzburg (New York/Oxford: Berg, 1991), 27.

13. C. Toscani, ‘Incontro con Natalia Ginzburg,’ Il ragguaglio librario, 39, no. 6 (1972): 210. Cited in Bullock, Natalia Ginzburg, 27.

14. Toscani, ‘Interview with Natalia Ginzburg,’ 211. Quoted in Bullock, Natalia Ginzburg, 42.

15. Ginzburg, quoted in Peggy Boyers, ‘On Natalia Ginzburg,’ Salmagundi 96 (Fall 1992): 58.

16. Ginzburg, ‘Ritratto d'un amico,’ Le piccole virtù, 25-34.

Works Cited

Boyers, Peggy. ‘On Natalia Ginzburg,’ Salmagundi 96 (Fall 1992).

Calvino, Italo. Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno. Turin: Einaudi, 1964.

Foa, Vittorio. Il cavallo e la torre: Riflessioni su una vita. Turin: Einaudi, 1991.

Ginzburg, Natalia. ‘I nostri figli.’ L'Italia libera 2, no. 165 (11 December 1944).

———. ‘Chiarezza.’ L'Italia libera, 2, no. 198 (31 December 1944).

———. ‘Cronaca di un paese.’ L'Italia libera 3, no. 7 (9 January 1945).

———. Tutti i nostri ieri. Turin: Einaudi, 1952.

———. ‘Inverno in Abruzzo.’ Le piccole virtù, 13-19. Turin: Einaudi, 1962.

———. ‘Ritratto d'un amico.’ Le piccole virtù, 25-34. Turin: Einaudi, 1962.

———. ‘Lui e io.’ Le piccole virtù, 53-65. Turin: Einaudi, 1962.

———. ‘Il figlio dell'uomo.’ Le piccole virtù, 69-72. Turin: Einaudi, 1962.

———. Lessico famigliare. Turin: Einaudi, 1963.

———. ‘Il traforo.’ Vita immaginaria, 140-6. Milan: Mondadori, 1974.

Gobetti, Piero. La rivoluzione liberale: Saggio sulla lotta politica in Italia. Turin: Einaudi, 1983.

Lennie, Delia. ‘Una scrittrice: Natalia Ginzburg.’ In Posso presentarle. London: Longman, 1971. Cited in Bullock, Alan, Natalia Ginzburg (New York/Oxford: Berg, 1991.

Levi, Carlo. Cristo si è fermato a Eboli. Turin: Einaudi, 1945.

———. L'orologio. Turin: Einaudi, 1950.

Toscani, C. ‘Incontro con Natalia Ginzburg.’ Il ragguaglio librario 39, no. 6 (1972): 210. Cited in Bullock, Natalia Ginzburg (New York/Oxford: Berg, 1991).