[In the following essay, Woolf elucidates the role of silence and omission in Family Sayings.]

I have written only what I remember, so if this book is read as a chronicle it could be objected that it is full of gaps. Even though I am dealing with real life, I think it ought to be read as a novel; in other words, without asking either more or less of it than a novel can give.¹

Natalia Ginzburg belonged to that remarkable generation of women writers whose talents were shaped by a late nineteenth or early twentieth-century childhood. That shaping often involved strains and repressions such as Virginia Woolf portrays in To the Lighthouse, and for Ginzburg, growing up in Mussolini's Italy, it also involved an exposure to violently conflicting political ideologies. Reaching maturity at that point in the history of female emancipation when the feeling of constriction and stifled potential was at its most painful precisely because escape was in sight for a few, these writers were often intensely preoccupied with the family and the past. Aware of the need to invent a new and female language for fiction and poetry, they economically pieced it together from fragments of that past. Few did so with the self-effacing detachment of Natalia Ginzburg, Italy's greatest post-war woman writer, in whose astringently perceptive fiction neo-realism gradually developed into a spare and poetic style which reached its culmination in her most intriguing and idiosyncratic book, Lessico famigliare (Family Sayings).

Luisa Passerini, in her study, Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class, alerts the reader to the symbolic structuring frequently given to recollected events in the oral testimonies which form a major part of her evidence and comments that:

The order in which memories are recalled undermines the notion that the chronological order is inherently ‘natural’ and automatic. It underlines the fact that all stories are based on conventions. In written autobiography, in fact, reflection, a form of active engagement with one's own past, predominates.²

Natalia Ginzburg's preface to Family Sayings, her account of her family's experiences during the Fascist period and its aftermath, makes it plain that this engagement with the past may be expressed not only through what is related but also, and just as significantly, through what is left unsaid. Ginzburg's book radically questions the conventions of ‘written autobiography’ and with them the underlying assumption that every life has, or indeed even is, a story. Instead of attempting to guarantee the truth or reality of the narrative by asserting, whether explicitly or implicitly, that what we are being told is the story of her life, Ginzburg prefaces her book, in which she is both character and narrator, with the disclaimer: ‘This is not in fact my story but rather, in spite of gaps and omissions, the story of my family’. While she claims to have invented nothing, she warns us that ‘the memory is unreliable’ and that in any case, ‘There are … many things which I remember but have omitted to write about, including many which concern me directly.’³ Far from writing the self, Ginzburg almost appears to be trying to write herself out of the record. A text so full of voluntary and involuntary omissions, she suggests, can only be read as a work of fiction.

In this essay I want to look at the importance of silence and omission in Ginzburg's Family Sayings and to consider some of the questions that this raises for our reading of autobiography, especially female autobiography. In the course of the argument I shall be calling as witnesses the historians Luisa Passerini and Susan Zuccotti, the scientist and autobiographer Rita Levi-Montalcini, and also the novelist Virginia Woolf, who grew up subject to pressures that in many ways resembled those in Ginzburg's own family but who found a very different solution to the problem of transforming the raw stuff of memory into fiction. All these kinds of narrative, as Passerini reminds us, are forms of active engagement with the past in which storytelling conventions are used, consciously or unconsciously, to impose a symbolic pattern on events. This is just as true of the seemingly factual genres of history and autobiography as it is of fiction or oral reminiscence.

Like Passerini's informants, Ginzburg begins her book not with her birth or her earliest memory but with an apparently insignificant little scene which encapsulates what are for her the dominant features of family life. This scene, imprinted through countless repetitions, in which her father angrily scolds his children for their clumsiness at table, establishes not only the father's intolerant and dominating character and the highly ritualised nature of family interaction, but also the voice and the viewpoint through which Ginzburg will control her text, a child's remembered viewpoint, powerless and partly incomprehending but sharply and coldly observant, communicated by a detached adult voice. Unlike Woolf's To the Lighthouse, which is concerned to explore the inner life of the characters, what is thought and felt but left unsaid, Ginzburg's book gives us an alarmingly clear vision of what lies on the surface, implicitly claiming that it is only by studying the surface, the irrational but stylised ticks and quirks of speech and behaviour, that we can understand how the family really functions.

The book's title, Lessico famigliare, literally means family lexicon, and Ginzburg uses this lexicon, a shared private language which codifies a comic private mythology, to set up the protective and threatening figures of her father and mother, who tower over the world of her childhood like Easter Island statues, grotesque and larger than life. These parental figures derive much of their confidence and power from interpreting their own lives in terms of a collection of stories and sayings which changes only by accretion and from which nothing is ever lost. The Easter Islanders ceased to make statues when the trees ran out; having deforested their island, they could no longer transport their vast totems from the quarries where they were carved. In her 1951 essay, ‘Silence’ Ginzburg suggests that for her own generation the words have run out:

Those ponderous words that served our parents are a currency that has been withdrawn and which no one accepts. And we realize that the new words have no value, that we can buy nothing with them … They are no use for writing books, for linking us with someone we love, for saving a friend.⁴

Those ‘meagre, barren words’ are the vocabulary of the neo-realist novel, in which young Italian writers, among them Ginzburg herself, expressed their disillusionment with all rhetoric, the tyrannical bombast of the Fascist regime under which they had grown up, the utopian propaganda of the divided left for whose resistance movement many of them had fought, and the obsolete personal language of drama and emotion, the ‘words from old opera libretti’, which seemed to have no place in the grey post-war world. The friend that this new impoverished language failed to save was her fellow writer Cesare Pavese, whose greatest novels express a vision of life at once lyrical and almost totally bleak and whose suicide in 1950 is described in Family Sayings. Ginzburg was to retain from the doctrinaire austerity of neo-realism both a prose style of stripped-down simplicity and a lifelong preoccupation with the subject of non-communication between wives and husbands, parents and children, would-be lovers who find that their love is too anaemic to survive. In Family Sayings, though, she returns to the rich and comic private language of her childhood, ironically adopting a version of her mother's story-telling role as transmitter of the family lexicon.

The task of the autobiographer is often to make public a version of what has hitherto been private, known only to an intimate circle. Ginzburg, on the contrary, gives us a private and deheroised version of events that have become part of twentieth-century European history. Ginzburg's family sheltered the socialist leader Filippo Turati during his escape from Italy. Her brother Mario was involved in what has become known as the Ponte Tresa affair; caught with his friend Sion Segre attempting to smuggle anti-fascist literature over the Swiss border, he escaped by throwing himself fully clothed into an icy river and swimming back across the border to safety and exile. The mass arrests and anti-semitic newspaper articles that followed were the first indication that Mussolini's shift towards a closer alliance with Hitler would lead a few years later to the Racial Laws which stripped Italian Jews of their civil rights. Ginzburg's husband Leone, a leader of the armed resistance, was tortured to death in Regina Coeli prison in Rome during the German occupation. If we turn to the index of Susan Zuccotti's The Italians and the Holocaust, these names are all there: Turati, Filippo: Segre Amar, Sion: Ginzburg, Leone; and with them, in what amounts to a roll call of the opponents of Fascism, disproportionately many of them Jewish or half-Jewish, are Ginzburg's father Giuseppe Levi, her brothers Alberto, Gino and Mario, her sister Paola with her husband Adriano Olivetti, and Natalia Ginzburg herself.

It is illuminating to compare Zuccotti's version of the rescue of Turati with Ginzburg's account in Family Sayings. For Zuccotti, this is a stirring tale of courage and daring, and she sets the scene accordingly.

Late in 1926, young Carlo Rosselli was involved in an adventure worthy of a Hollywood film. Filippo Turati, former member of Parliament and highly esteemed elder statesman in the moderate wing of the Socialist Party, was clearly in danger. When his lifelong companion Anna Kuliscioff died the previous year, Fascist thugs threatened violence at her funeral. Since then, they had continued to harass Turati. The old man was too weak and ill to survive a beating. Because he was unable to obtain a passport, his friends persuaded him to emigrate secretly.⁵

The name Carlo Rosselli is one which still has a powerful resonance for Italian readers. The founder of the anti-fascist organisation Justice and Liberty, he became not only a hero of the resistance movement but also one of its chief martyrs when, in 1937, he was assassinated in France, along with his younger brother Nello, by French fascist killers hired by the Mussolini regime.

As news of their murders flashed around the world, more than 200,000 people accompanied their hearse to Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.⁶

Zuccotti draws with straightforwardly unquestioning admiration on the legend of the Rosselli brothers, all the more so because a book about the Holocaust, even one concerned with Italy where more than eighty-five per cent of the small Jewish population survived, needs all the heroes it can find. This is an important factor in her account of the rescue of Turati. After describing how the fugitive was hidden in a number of safe houses, including the home of Ginzburg's family in Turin, Zuccotti gives the story the appropriate dramatic ending for ‘an adventure worthy of a Hollywood film’:

One icy night in December 1926, Adriano Olivetti … met Turati in Turin and drove him down twisting mountain roads, avoiding a number of road blocks, to Savona on the Ligurian coast. There he waited five days for a motor launch, in the company of Carlo Rosselli, Ferruccio Parri (first prime minister of Italy after the war), and Sandro Pertini … Finally, in a winter storm, with waves breaking over the boat, no stars in the sky, and a faulty compass, they struggled toward freedom. After twelve harrowing hours, they found themselves in Corsica.⁷

By contrast, Ginzburg adheres strictly to her promise to write ‘only what I remember’, giving us a private and comic view of events through the eyes of a ten-year-old child, frustrated in her longing to give away the exciting secret that the guest she has been told to call Paolo Ferrari is really Filippo Turati.

Lucio said to me, without much interest, ‘There's a man with a beard in your house who slips away from the living-room as soon as I get here.’

‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘Paolo Ferrari!’

I was longing for him to ask me some more questions, but Lucio didn't ask anything else. He was banging on the wall with a hammer to hang up a picture he had done and brought me as a present. It was a picture of a train …

I told him, ‘Don't bang the hammer like that! He's old, he's not well, he's in hiding!’

‘Who?’

‘Paolo Ferrari!’

‘Look at the tender,’ said Lucio. ‘Look, do you see, I've even painted the tender.’⁸

Her family, far from being presented as selfless and intrepid, are shown as absurdly inefficient conspirators, blithely unconscious of the scale of the risks they are running. Indeed, Ginzburg's mother rapidly comes to remember Turati's stay simply as an agreeable social event.

Paolo Ferrari was safe in Paris; but by now everyone in our house had got bored with calling him Ferrari so they called him by his real name. My mother used to say, ‘He was such a nice man! I really enjoyed having him here.’⁹

Ginzburg excises from the story everything that she was unaware of at the time, including something she discovered shortly afterwards, that one of the ‘two or three men in raincoats’ who arrived with Adriano Olivetti to drive Turati to the coast was Carlo Rosselli himself. His named presence would have brought an incongruous note of heroism into the story. If we cut from Family Sayings to Rosselli's defence of his actions at his subsequent trial, we can see just how careful Ginzburg is not to sound this heroic note.

A Rosselli secretly hosted at Pisa the dying Mazzini, an exile in his own land. It was logical that another Rosselli, later, would make an effort to save from the Fascist fury one of the most noble and unselfish spirits of his country.¹⁰

This is rhetoric of the most impressive kind, an attempt to testify to a truth that is being warped beyond recognition by the distorting glass of Fascist ideology, but it is rhetoric none the less, a political speech in the context of a political trial. Ginzburg, by contrast, tells us a quite different truth: that historic events are not necessarily experienced as historic by those who live through them. As we have seen from Zuccotti's account, this is a kind of truth that historians, by the very nature of their trade, are seldom able to show us, and it justifies Ginzburg's scrupulousness in recording ‘only what I remember’. To the eyes of the watching child, her parents show no signs that they are rising to the challenge of what Zuccotti describes as a Hollywood drama; even the confusingly transparent lies they tell her about Turati's identity correspond to earlier parental lies. It is only when Adriano Olivetti arrives with the ‘men in raincoats’ that for a moment she sees the commonplace transformed.

Adriano was starting to lose his hair and now had a square, almost bald head ringed with frizzy blond curls. That evening, his face and his thinning hair seemed to be swept by a gust of wind. His eyes were frightened, resolute and happy. I was to see those eyes two or three times in my life. They were the eyes he had when he was helping someone to escape, when there was danger and someone to be taken to safety.¹¹

This worldless glimpse, all the more vivid because it also contains the child's ordinary perception of Adriano, will later prove to be a key moment in the structure of the book.

In Ginzburg's account of the Ponte Tresa affair and its aftermath, there is an even more striking omission. Again, we are shown a view of events from inside the family group. Having already set up her brother Mario as a far from heroic figure, violently and irrationally quarrelsome and with a tendency to sulk, Ginzburg now demonstrates the protective power of the family lexicon by foregrounding her mother's idiosyncratic reactions to his famous exploit and its consequences. With one son in exile and her husband and another son in jail as suspected conspirators, Lidia Levi shields herself from the potentially intolerable pressure of threatening circumstances by making a comforting catchphrase out of some comic and peripheral aspect of them. Thinking of Mario's dangerous swim across the turbulent River Tresa, in which he was nearly shot by an Italian border guard and barely escaped drowning:

My mother, sounding happy, astonished and scared, kept clasping her hands and saying,

‘Right into the water with his coat on!’¹²

While it is important to remember that Ginzburg is here giving us a deliberately stylised version of the memories of a daughter still in her teens, there is evidence that she was not the only one to be struck by her mother's capacity for self-protective humour at this time. Anna Foa, whose own father and brothers were among those imprisoned during the Ponte Tresa affair (her brother Vittorio, who was not released until the fall of Mussolini in 1943, was later to marry Ginzburg's friend Lisetta Giua), remembers Lidia Levi joking in the police station waiting-room about what they could expect from the Fascist authorities.

She complained that one day the government would open all the safe-deposit boxes belonging to the Jews. “Do you know what I am going to do?” she said. “I'll put a chamber pot in my safe-deposit box.”¹³

In the course of this episode there is a scene in which Ginzburg describes her mother inviting the novelist Pitigrilli, who had himself been in jail, to visit the house and advise her about arrangements for supplying the prisoners with food parcels and clean clothing. The young Natalia already knows of this notorious writer, whose books are considered by her father to be highly unsuitable for a schoolgirl like herself. What the adult Ginzburg has long known by the time she comes to write Family Sayings, but neglects to tell the reader, is that this visit was heavy with dramatic irony. Pitigrilli was in fact an agent of OVRA, the Fascist secret police, and many of those arrested during the Ponte Tresa affair were rounded up on account of his spying.

Alexander Stille tells the story in Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism. Pitigrilli, whose real name was Dino Segre, was an illegitimate cousin of Sion Segre Amar, Mario Levi's friend and fellow-conspirator.

His father was from a well-to-do Jewish family, while his mother was a poor Catholic girl. As the bastard child of an undistinguished mixed match, young Dino's arrival was a Segre family scandal. His parents did not marry until he was eight. His descriptions of childhood are universally bitter, reflecting the ostracism he suffered.¹⁴

He was later to take his revenge by becoming an Edmund to his cousin's Edgar. ‘What in the world could be more beautiful than to be a bastard,’ he once wrote, ‘so that one can despise everything, without making an exception for one's own father and mother?!’¹⁵ He infiltrated the Turin circle of Justice and Liberty, of which his cousin was a member, and informed on them with such success that eventually the whole group was behind bars or in internal exile and Pitigrilli's lucrative secret profession was gone. He was unmasked at the end of the war, when his copious reports to his spy-masters were discovered and made public, among them his own account of the visit to the Levi household that Ginzburg describes. We can see from his claims to have the key to far more information than he actually conveys that spy reports too are ‘stories based on conventions’.

Before [his arrest] Giuseppe Levi … was able to warn his family. They burned many letters in a fireplace. Since not all were burned entirely an attentive examination would probably reveal some letters from [Carlo] Rosselli …

Mario Levi, who managed to escape to Switzerland … is now probably in Paris and with the Rossellis. With the excuse of going to take him clothing and money from his family, I think I can learn much from him. Now that he is free he should talk very openly.¹⁶

By confining the narrative to what she was aware of at the time, Ginzburg puts this sinister and dramatic material beyond the boundaries of her book. In doing so, she is not necessarily concealing it. When Family Sayings was published in 1963, most of her Italian readers would have been likely to have heard of Pitigrilli's role as an OVRA agent and to know about the rescue of Turati and the significance of the Ponte Tresa affair. The book operates, to some extent, by exploiting the ironic distance between events as an historian might relate them, with hindsight and from the outside, and the private, inner narrative of memory, which foregrounds the apparently comic and trivial in order to tell its own symbolic and personal story. For the informed reader, the omissions are part of the text, a code through which these distinctions can be made and understood. However there are also more complex ironies at work. While Ginzburg's book is far from being an artless collection of reminiscences, it is crucially concerned with oral story-telling, which she presents as enabling a family embattled within and beleaguered without to form a mutually protective bond, controlling the present through a shared and stylised version of the past. This story-telling is necessarily subject to, indeed dependent on, omission. Luisa Passerini found that the recollections of her oral sources also contained omissions when they were asked about their experiences during the Fascist era (omissions which imply a reading of the past that has already become problematic for the Italy of Forza Italia and its neo-Fascist allies).

The identification of Fascism with evil and a source of national shame, and the consequent desire to keep quiet about it, even among those not actually responsible … signifies that power makes those who are subjected to it complicit in its exercise. This involvement explains the frequent recurrence in the memoirs … of a sense of shame, guilt, silence and injury …

Oral recollection, oscillating as it does between silence and censorship on the one hand, and the recall of the minutest, almost ‘insignificant’ episodes on the other hand, brings us back to these issues.¹⁷

Silence can simply be omission, but it can also be a powerful unspoken presence in the text. Superficially, by writing the book Ginzburg is simply transmitting and adding to the family lexicon, but if we look more closely it becomes apparent that her story-telling is radically different from her mother's. This will become clear if we compare the mother's silence about the death of her brother Silvio with Ginzburg's silence about the death of her husband Leone.

Silvio was that brother of my mother's who had killed himself. In our house his death was always swathed in mystery; and though I know now that he killed himself, I don't really know why. I think it was mainly my father who was responsible for spreading that air of mystery round the figure of Silvio, because he didn't want us to know there had been a suicide in the family, and perhaps for other reasons to which I don't know about. As for my mother, she always used to talk about Silvio very cheerfully, having such a sunny nature that it embraced and coloured everything, making her recall only the bright side of people and events and draw a veil over grief and misfortune, to which at most she would sometimes spare the passing tribute of a sigh.¹⁸

The mother's references to Silvio recur throughout the book, memories so happy and unshadowed that they make his death seem ‘unintelligible’. While Silvio's suicide is a minor mystery, Leone Ginzburg's death is central not only to the book but to its author's life, and Ginzburg's silence about the brutal circumstances of that death and her own overwhelming grief becomes a narrative black hole which draws the entire text towards it.

They arrested him … and I never saw him again.

I found myself back with my mother in Florence. Misfortune always made her feel the cold, and she would muffle herself up in a shawl. We didn't talk to each other much about Leone's death. She had been very fond of him, but she didn't like to talk about the dead and besides she was far too busy washing and combing the children and making sure they were warmly dressed.¹⁹

The distance between the silence that Ginzburg describes here, her mother's silence as she busily recreates her past maternal role by caring for her daughter's children, and the silence that Ginzburg herself enacts by shifting the focus of the narrative away from her own bereavement to her mother's sudden ageing, her mother's pallor, her mother's need to wrap herself in ‘a purple angora shawl’, is one that can be measured by turning to an essay that Ginzburg wrote in 1946, ‘The Son of Man’.

Once the experience of evil has been endured it is never forgotten. Someone who has seen a house collapse knows only too clearly what frail things little vases of flowers and pictures and white walls are … A house is not particularly solid. It can collapse from one moment to the next. Behind the peaceful vases of flowers, behind the teapots and carpets and waxed floors there is the other true face of a house—the hideous face of a house that has been reduced to rubble.²⁰

Because of this terrible and ineradicable knowledge, ‘there is an unbridgeable abyss between us and the previous generation’. Ginzburg's mother, though profoundly shaken by ‘terrors and misfortunes’, still has a house to put in order.

The broken windows were patched up with plywood, and my father had stoves put in the rooms because the central heating didn't work. My mother immediately sent for Tersilla, and when she had Tersilla in the ironing room in front of the sewing machine, she gave a sigh of relief and felt that life might return to its old rhythm. She got floral fabrics to cover the armchairs, which had been in the cellar and were stained here and there with mould.²¹

Silence, in narratives by women, is too often seen as disempowerment, evidence of a legacy of oppression and suppression. It is important to stress that Ginzburg has not been silenced, nor is she merely reticent or stoical; rather by her silence she places Leone's death at the centre of the text, creating a space from which the reader is forced to retreat with narrative greed unsatisfied. The closing paragraph of ‘Winter in the Abruzzi’, an essay written in 1944 describing the period that she spent in internal exile with her husband and children, helps to explain why, for Ginzburg, Leone's death lies beyond narrative.

My husband died in Rome, in the prison of Regina Coeli, a few months after we left the Abruzzi. Faced with the horror of his solitary death, and faced with the anguish which preceded his death, I ask myself if this happened to us—to us, who bought oranges at Giro's and went for walks in the snow.²²

The key word here is not ‘horror’ but ‘solitary’. The fact and the circumstances of Leone's death can be recorded, but any attempt imaginatively to recreate the experience of his dying can only be a fiction. All stories, even the most terrible, console us by creating the illusion that words can shape and control the past. In Family Sayings, that work of fiction in which nothing has been invented, Ginzburg attests to the unassimilable reality of her husband's death by refusing to fictionalise it in this way. The horror and the solitude are conveyed by silence.

For an historian such as Zuccotti, the death of Leone Ginzburg, like the rescue of Turati, is one of many significant details that can be selected and pieced together to form a coherent public narrative. For the child Natalia, the rescue of Turati was experienced as part of the continuity of daily life, while for the adult Natalia her violent bereavement was a trauma which severed her connection both with the past and with her own past self. In the 1949 essay, ‘My Vocation’, she describes it as

a real, irremediable and incurable grief that shattered my life, and when I tried to put it together again I realized that I and my life had become something irreconcilable with what had gone before.²³

In Family Sayings, both of these episodes show us the impact of history in Zuccotti's sense (a large-scale pattern of events, meaningful not only to those who witness or suffer them) on an individual life and they are linked, too, by the figure of Adriano Olivetti. It is he who comes to tell Ginzburg that her husband has been arrested and to take her and her children into hiding. The omission here is one that no attentive reader could fail to register. Ginzburg does not need to put into words the danger that Adriano helps to save them from, the danger that also menaces Adriano himself and every other Italian Jew. Instead, and very movingly, she describes how that time of nightmare severance from the certainties of a known world is made endurable by his presence.

I shall always remember, as long as I live, the great comfort it was to me that morning to see his familiar figure which I had known since my childhood, after so many hours of solitude and fear … and I shall always remember his bent back as he stooped to collect our scattered clothing and pick up the children's shoes in a humble, kindly attitude of patient compassion. And when we escaped from that house, he had the same face as when he came to us to fetch Turati, the breathless, frightened, happy face he wore when he was taking someone to safety.²⁴

In her childhood, that look on Adriano's face had for a moment transformed everyday life into history. Now it is history at its most terrible which is transformed for a moment by the healing ordinariness of a human gesture. This is why, in a book which so consistently deheroises its characters, Ginzburg makes an exception for Adriano Olivetti.

I met him in the street one day in Rome, during the German occupation. He was on foot, walking by himself with his wandering gait, his eyes lost in the perpetual dreams which veiled them in a blue haze. He was dressed no differently from anyone else, yet he looked like a beggar in that crowded street and at the same time he looked like a king. Like a king in exile.²⁵

Where her parents' stories are protective and consoling precisely because they are continually retold yet always remain the same, Ginzburg uses the recurring motifs of her mother's dislike of talking about death and Adriano's ‘breathless, frightened, happy face … when he was taking someone to safety’ in order to emphasise the shift from comedy to tragedy, which is also a shift from childish ignorance to adult knowledge for the narrator/persona. The final section of the book returns us to the family lexicon, still unchanged for Ginzburg's now elderly parents but completely redefined for the reader, and here too omission has a significant part to play in the shaping of the text. Family Sayings begins and ends with the voice of Ginzburg's father, an irascible tyrant whose alarming but ultimately unsuccessful attempts at total domestic control paradoxically serve to inoculate his family against the fear of the more sinister tyranny that threatens them from without. When police agents arrive at six in the morning to search the house and arrest her son Alberto, Lidia Levi smuggles the envelope containing her bills into her daughter's schoolbag

because she was afraid that my father might catch sight of them during the search and scold her for spending too much.²⁶

His peremptory and eccentric personality dominates not only Family Sayings but also the autobiography of his most distinguished student, the Nobel prize winning scientist Rita Levi-Montalcini.

Born in 1909, seven years earlier than Ginzburg, Levi-Montalcini grew up in Turin in a free-thinking, middle-class Jewish family similar in many ways to Ginzburg's own, especially in the autocratic control that the father exerted over his children's lives and the daughter's consequent sense of distance and constraint. Unlike Family Sayings, Levi-Montalcini's In Praise of Imperfection adheres closely to the conventions of classic autobiography, conventions which enable its author to resolve her feelings of guilt and regret, inside the narrative at least, with an anguished but formal deathbed scene in which she loses her father but at last begins to love him. However, while implicitly claiming that she is simply relating the story of her life, Levi-Montalcini too makes use of recurring elements to structure her text, in this case ‘a Master-disciple relationship’²⁷ with her old professor which over the years becomes a quasi-filial one and culminates in a second, very different deathbed scene.

A significant figure in both books is Giuseppe Levi's friend and fellow scientist Tullio Terni, a passionate lover of the arts who infects first Mario and Paola, united in their affected cultivation of melancholy, and then Ginzburg's mother, that inveterate recaller of past time, with his enthusiasm for Proust.

‘La petite phrase!’ my mother used to say. ‘It's so lovely when he talks about la petite phrase! Silvio would have liked it so much!’²⁸

In spite of having built him up into a major comic character, Ginzburg records his death only in passing; a paragraph listing the friends of her parents who have failed to survive into the post-war era ends with the information that ‘Terni had died too, in Florence’.²⁹ It is Levi-Montalcini who tells us the story that this phrase conceals. After the war, the National Academy of the Lincei, a learned body which had been suppressed by Mussolini, reconstituted itself and expelled forty of its members for their involvement with Fascism. Though Terni had been no more than a passive sympathiser with the regime, Giuseppe Levi, as acting secretary for the commission conducting the purge, felt morally obliged not to make an exception for his old friend. Terni, already suffering from depression, committed suicide.

He used a vial of cyanide … like the ones he had given to his family at the time of the Nazi invasion, in the reasoned belief that if they were ever captured by the SS it would be the wisest and quickest solution.³⁰

The tragic irony here is that though Italian Jews were among the most determined opponents of Fascism, there were also many who, proud of their new assimilated status in a united Italy, became ardent early supporters of a regime which eventually deprived them of their civil rights and, after the German invasion and reinstatement of Mussolini as nominal head of the puppet Republic of Salò, collaborated in sending them to their deaths.

We need to look at Ginzburg's silence about Terni's suicide in the light of the much more significant omissions that she makes in choosing to end her narrative with her mother and father, elderly now but essentially unchanged despite all they have endured, still telling each other with undiminished zest the old stories that each has heard so many times before. Giuseppe Levi was to die, aged ninety-two, of cancer of the stomach two years after Ginzburg published Family Sayings. Levi-Montalcini's moving account of her final meeting with the old man unaffectedly elevates him from a comic character to an heroic one, ‘consumed neither by old age, nor suffering, nor by the knowledge he had of his approaching end’ which he accepts ‘with a stoic serenity’.³¹ This capacity for obstinate and rational courage had been thoroughly tested in the final years of his life. The death of his wife—Levi-Montalcini calls her ‘his adored life-companion Lidia’³²—eight years previously had been followed a year later by the amputation of his left leg above the knee, an impairment he had accepted with a proud and testy refusal of pity or assistance.

In ending her narrative where she does, before her mother's death, Ginzburg has made a novelist's decision. Unlike the parents of Alberto's wife Miranda, transported by the Germans to an ‘unknown destination’ because they believed that ‘no one is going to harm peaceful people like us’,³³ the end of the book presents Ginzburg's parents, both of them socialists and Giuseppe Levi a Jew, not merely as foolhardy but fortunate survivors but as almost mythological figures. Passerini tells us that ‘“fixed identity” … can be considered a specific feature of self-representation in oral narration’ whereas ‘it is, on the contrary, typical (historically) of written autobiography as a genre that it is “the history of the development of the personality”’.³⁴ Ginzburg's refusal to present herself as the central character of her own written narrative enables her to return us at the end of the book to the fixed identities which her mother and father have created for themselves by the incessant process of oral story-telling, identities as powerful and unchanging as those of parents seen through the eyes of a child. To have come through so much and still to preserve those identities intact seems, in its absurd way, a triumph of the human spirit, and yet their affirmation of the past is, in a very real sense, also a denial. It is in order to achieve this celebratory yet ambiguous ending that Ginzburg chooses not to leave us with the image of the maimed but indomitable old widower that Levi-Montalcini describes. It is for this reason too that she suppresses the story of Terni's suicide. Those fixed and fictive selves enable the parents to weather death and loss while remaining fundamentally untouched in their own comic and private narrative universe. Only the silence at the heart of the book, surrounding the death by torture of Leone Ginzburg, reminds us that this is a fiction. Ginzburg's parents are invulnerable, in other words, only because they are comic characters in a narrative controlled by their novelist daughter who has learnt, as they have not, how fragile and delusive is the protection afforded by irrational optimism.

If Family Sayings is thus doubly fictive, in what sense can we claim that Ginzburg, or indeed any autobiographer, is telling us the ‘truth’? A comparison with Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse may help to clarify this. Woolf's novel makes no public parade of being anything but a work of fiction, yet in her diary she describes the experience of writing it as a kind of self-psychoanalysis or exorcism, freeing her at last from the haunting presences of her mother and father, and refers to a letter in which her sister Vanessa claims that on reading it she ‘found the rising of the dead almost painful’.³⁵ That Woolf's novel too contains significant omissions is not in itself surprising; we would expect a novelist using autobiographical material to adapt or disguise it to some extent, both for literary and for personal reasons. However in To The Lighthouse the changes are often very transparent. Though nominally set on the Isle of Skye, the place descriptions unmistakably point to St. Ives, where the Stephen family had a holiday house, while the three deaths which punctuate the central section of the novel are those of Woolf's mother, half-sister and brother. Indeed, the very material that Ginzburg omits from the end of Family Sayings forms the pivot of To the Lighthouse, the terrible moment of loss on which the poetic action of the novel is poised.

(Mr. Ramsay stumbling along a passage stretched his arms out one dark morning, but, Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, he stretched his arms out. They remained empty.)³⁶

It is all the more interesting to look at what is omitted from a text in which such painful material is included.

Woolf grew up in a family that was dysfunctional in more than just that shattering series of bereavements. ‘That house of all the deaths’, as Henry James called it, was one in which the names of the dead, though endlessly brooded on, were never mentioned. In her autobiographical fragment ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Woolf describes finally breaking this taboo when she was in her mid-twenties.

I remember when Thoby died, that Adrian and I agreed to talk about him. ‘There are so many people that are dead now,’ we said.³⁷

While Woolf's mother was alive, the tensions in a disparate family group to which both parents had brought offspring from previous marriages remained decently concealed, only to show up shockingly after her death, (helping to confirm for Woolf the myth of a lost golden age). Of those four step-siblings, Laura, Leslie Stephen's eldest daughter, was mentally handicapped, while Julia Duckworth's children by her first husband, the pampered George and Gerald and the put-upon Stella, were all to be sources of division and pain. Stella's courtship and marriage, Stella's illness and death each in turn became the pretext for hysterical displays of family emotion, while Woolf famously accused both Gerald and George of sexually molesting her.

It is difficult to know quite how to judge these accusations (a difficulty compounded by the over-literal and sensationalist readings of certain recent critics).³⁸ Woolf's description³⁹ of Gerald's gropings sounds like a reliable childhood recollection of a form of interference that one imagines a good many middle-class small girls must have suffered at a period when their adolescent brothers had few other sources of information about female anatomy, but what are we to make of her dreamlike ‘memory’ of ‘a long thick fish wriggling on a hook in the larder, and Gerald beating it to death with a broom handle’?⁴⁰ In the case of George, the main evidence is ‘22 Hyde Park Gate’,⁴¹ a piece written to be read aloud to Bloomsbury's Memoir Club. This describes an evening so baroque in its accumulation of bizarre social embarrassments that long before we reach the bedroom scene it is clear that Woolf is speaking as raconteur rather than witness. Any description of sexual abuse presented to an audience as an entertaining tale is likely to be unreliable, and there is no way of judging whether Woolf is exaggerating this part of her story too or, on the contrary, concealing the extent either of George's assault or of her own complicity in it. It is even possible that sexual abuse is being used, wholly or in part, as a metaphor for other kinds of violation. In a memoir written at the end of her life, Woolf describes, with still lively anger, coming down to dinner in a new green dress and George (a quite different George—only her hatred for him is the same) telling her to ‘Go and tear it up’.⁴² It was George too who acted as master of ceremonies at her mother's deathbed, officiously wrapping his half-siblings in towels and giving them hot milk and brandy before leading them in to kiss the corpse.⁴³

All this dark and tangled stuff, which Woolf herself seems to have been unable to get into focus, vanishes behind the water-colour shimmer of To the Lighthouse. There is no literary reason why the Ramsays should have eight children, but the logic of wish-fulfilment demands that they should be there round the dinner table, all of them full brothers and sisters, not one of them ‘an idiot’. Of the girls, Woolf herself is Cam, while Prue is plainly Stella, no longer a jealously exploited step-daughter but Mr. Ramsay's true child. Laura is eliminated by allowing Vanessa to double as the artistic Rose and the harassed Nancy, housekeeper to her widowed father. The hated George is replaced by Woolf's favourite brother Thoby who becomes not only Andrew, the eldest son, but also James, the youngest, who steers the boat on the trip to the lighthouse as Thoby used to do at St. Ives.⁴⁴ In this novel written to celebrate the memory and to lay the ghost of the mother that she remembers as never having individual time for her, Woolf has also blotted out her younger brother Adrian, the child her mother ‘cherished separately’ calling him ‘My Joy’.⁴⁵ Roger and Jasper are simply ciphers, added to make up the numbers. It is in the context of this dream family that Woolf sets out to resolve her feelings about her parents, resurrecting her mother in Lily Briscoe's painting, which is also the novel, and freezing her father into the permanence of art as Lily draws that final stroke on her canvas which is both the lighthouse itself and Mr. Ramsay, liberated for ever from egotism and self-pity, leaping ‘lightly like a young man, holding his parcel, on to the rock.’⁴⁶

If we compare Woolf's novel with Family Sayings, the similarity in structure is evident. In each book, a family ruled by idiosyncratic but strongly traditional parental figures, having survived a devastating period of destruction and loss, both literally and symbolically rebuilds a house in which a former pattern of life can be re-established. This similarity is all the stronger because of the ways in which Woolf has reshaped family history into fiction. By bringing forward the date of the narrative by a decade or so, the private agony of Thoby's death is subsumed into the public cataclysm of the First World War, while as we have seen the final restoration of a lost order owes more to wish than to memory. The crucial difference between the two texts is that for Woolf bereavement and trauma are located at the heart of the family experience while for Ginzburg they are sharply separated from it. Turning back to Ginzburg's book from the impressionistic constructs of To the Lighthouse, its focused and unsparing clarity of vision makes it appear to be mapped precisely on reality and yet, as Woolf reminds us, the felt experience of living does not have this coherent and unitary quality. Through the clarity of the telling, Ginzburg is deliberately mythologizing the past, showing us not how events were experienced but how they are recalled. Memory, her source material, is also her real subject matter.

Woolf, by contrast, can be seen as writing not to recollect but to undo the past. Indeed, it is possible to read the closing sequence of the novel in terms of a symbolic pattern in which James represents justice and Cam forgiveness, while Lily Briscoe stands for art. Refracted through the prism of art, justice and mercy converge and become one and Woolf is at last able to look with detachment and acceptance at the father whose excessive demands and devouring self-pity had poisoned her youth. The year after the publication of To the Lighthouse, she notes her father's birthday in her diary and calculates that had he lived he would have been ninety-six

& could have been 96, like other people one has known; but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books—inconceivable. I used to think of him & mother daily; but writing The Lighthouse, laid them in my mind.⁴⁷

Woolf's ability to feel and record this sober and objective gratitude for her father's death shows that To the Lighthouse is not merely an exercise in aesthetic wish-fulfilment but a means of resolving long-standing feelings of anger and guilt. Where Levi-Montalcini reconciles her conflicting feelings about her relationship with her father by means of a formal deathbed scene, accepting, through the use of this nineteenth-century narrative device, the finality of loss and the inevitability of regret, it is perhaps only by writing the end of To the Lighthouse, in which as Cam she forgives her father and as Lily she abstracts and crystallises the moment of forgiveness into art, that Woolf can dissociate her rational relief at her father's death from the irrational guilt of having wished and thus symbolically caused that death.

Ginzburg too, at the end of Family Sayings, leaves her parents suspended in an unchanging present moment, but it is the collective present moment of memory. Recollections of countless similar episodes have been collated into one reflexive scene in which her parents' repetition of the stories in the family lexicon has itself become part of the lexicon. Ginzburg's essays make it plain that during her formative years she feared and disliked her father and often resented her mother, but Family Sayings neither foregrounds nor attempts to resolve these emotions, and neither does it concern itself with love, that unmentionable subject between parents and children. Lidia Levi may indeed have been her husband's ‘adored life-companion’, but the only proof their daughter offers us either of shared parental affection or of her own adult feelings for those twin pillars of her childhood world is this archetypal final scene, from which Ginzburg herself is absent or present only as a silent witness.

Notes

1. Ginzburg, Natalia, Lessico famigliare (Einaudi 1963) p. 5. All quotations from Natalia Ginzburg's Lessico famigliare (Family Sayings) are in my own translation and page references are given for the Italian text. Family Sayings has been translated by D. M. Low (Hogarth Press 1967, revised and reprinted Carcanet 1984); I am currently completing a new translation for Carcanet Press. A version of this article is included in Women's Lives, Women's Times, ed. Linda Anderson and Treva Broughton (SUNY Press, 1996).

2. Passerini, Luisa, Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class, trans. Lumley, Robert and Bloomfield, Jude (Cambridge 1987) p. 27.

3. Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare pp. 5-6.

4. Ginzburg, Natalia, The Little Virtues, trans. Davis, Dick (Carcanet 1985) p. 70.

5. Zuccotti, Susan, The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue and Survival (Peter Halban 1987) p. 243.

6. Zuccotti, p. 254.

7. Zuccotti, pp. 243-4.

8. Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare p. 83.

9. Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare p. 85.

10. Zuccotti, p. 244.

11. Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare p. 84.

12. Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare p. 102.

13. Stille, Alexander, Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families under Fascism (Jonathan Cape 1992) p. 119.

14. Stille, pp. 106-7.

15. Stille, p. 109.

16. Stille, pp. 110-1.

17. Passerini, p. 67.

18. Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare pp. 44-5.

19. Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare pp. 167-8.

20. Ginzburg, The Little Virtues pp. 49-50.

21. Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare pp. 168-9.

22. Ginzburg, The Little Virtues p. 8.

23. Ginzburg, The Little Virtues p. 67.

24. Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare p. 174.

25. Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare p. 174.

26. Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare p. 110.

27. Levi-Montalcini, Rita, In Praise of Imperfection, trans. Luigi Attardi (New York, 1988), p. 59.

28. Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare p. 66.

29. Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare p. 178.

30. Levi-Montalcini, pp. 56-7.

31. Levi-Montalcini, p. 205.

32. Levi-Montalcini, p. 203.

33. Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare p. 183.

34. Passerini, p. 61.

35. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. III, ed. Bell, Anne Olivier (Hogarth Press 1980) p. 135. Vanessa Bell's letter is quoted in Bell, Quentin, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, vol. II (Hogarth Press 1972) p. 128.

36. Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse, 3rd ed. (Hogarth Press 1977) pp. 199-200.

37. Woolf, Virginia, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Schulkind, Jeanne (Chatto and Windus 1976) p. 107.

38. See particularly DeSalvo, Louise, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (Women's Press 1989).

39. Woolf, Moments of Being p. 69.

40. Woolf, Moments of Being p. 114.

41. Woolf, Moments of Being pp. 142-55.

42. Woolf, Moments of Being p. 130.

43. Woolf, Moments of Being p. 91.

44. Woolf, Moments of Being p. 115.

45. Woolf, Moments of Being p. 83.

46. Woolf, To the Lighthouse p. 318.

47. Woolf, Diary p. 208.