SOURCE: Goldensohn, Lorrie. “Natalia Ginzburg: The Days and Houses of Her Art.” Salmagundi, no. 96 (fall 1992): 96-129.

[In the following essay, Goldensohn traces the thematic and stylistic development of Ginzburg's work.]

Natalia Ginzburg published her first novel at 26 in 1944, her last in 1985. Her books, including a memoir and collections of essays, embrace a succession of crowded decades that stretch from fascist Italy to postwar anomie. Politics and history suffuse a work that often turns its face away from overt political analysis: “My political thinking is pretty rough and tangled, elementary and confused,” she once said. At the near edges of her writing on the postwar period, glinting once or twice in a novel, a saturated political object like a flag or a black shirt or a Roman salute emerges occasionally, is impersonally inspected, and held up to the passing daylight like an object from an archaeological dig. In the world of Voices in the Evening, Aunt Ottavia says of the young protagonist's uncle:

He was just an honourable man. He did join the Fascists, yes, but as for the black shirt he never put it on. He had one, but he never put it on.

And the text closes quickly over “our poor brother,” never to be mentioned again. Similarly, a terrorist's rusted machine gun appears wrapped in cloth in the barrel of a disused stove in No Way, to unfold itself once, and then to be sunk in the Tiber in a single narrative gesture.

In her lifetime, Natalia Ginzburg held political office in postwar Italy, and as a journalist wrote pungently and frequently on socially charged topics from war memory to adoption to feminism. Two elements of her personal history enter at oblique angles: her half-Jewish parentage, and her gender. Because she underplays her Jewishness even in the autobiographical work dealing with the fascist repressions of the Second World War, something subsumed for her in the general catastrophes overtaking Italians through the reigning militarism, I've put the extremely interesting question of this reticent self-identification to the side.¹ Instead, I prefer to concentrate on the evolution of Ginzburg's understated style, in her fiction contrasting her election of traditionally female subjects, subjects domestic and personal, with her equal reluctance to mark herself as a woman writer there or elsewhere. At several revealing points in her career, in another collision of position and preference, her instinctive concern for the close-up details of private life tangled with the impersonal, large-scale, and insistent disruptions of war.

The whole array of Ginzburg's memoir, essay, and fiction writing calls us to a provocative series of tensions and contradictions. In 1973, she wrote rather intemperately:²

There being today precise, concrete and rather clear reasons for revolt against unjust society, the revolt of feminism against the virile species is a pure waste of time, a pure futility, a guilty occasion for noise, for confusion, and a pure mistake.

The assessment of feminism that loosed this barrage seems typical of many of the politically radical women of her generation. She rejects any analysis that lumps all women together without regard for economic class, and disputes a feminism that she represents as substituting for a belief in gender equality a belief in the superiority of women. Yet through her overriding interest in the family, Ginzburg's fiction and memoir writing clearly trace the ravages of patriarchal custom and rhetoric, hardly an occupation alien to feminists today.

Whether she intended a feminist critique of the family or not, her sensitive examination of the overlooked hopes and loves of sacrificed sisters, and passive and diffident daughters, reveals their frequent displacement by the overweening father, brother, or lover. Fortunately for the reader, Ginzburg does not muster the troops so that on the one hand a battalion of complaining and victimized Women face on the other a jeering and victimizing battalion of Men, all represented in emotional colors of a single hue. It seems perfectly characteristic that the father in Valentino who sacrifices the futures of both of his daughters, in order to engineer a life for his improvident and lazy son that will make him a “man of consequence,” finds himself unable to speak in his wife's or daughter's presence: “So at home he was never allowed to finish what he was saying because we were always too impatient, and he would hark back wistfully to his teaching days when he could talk as much as he wanted and nobody humiliated him.” Yet the uncontested power of the father to make divisive choices about his children's schooling and property inheritances, to favor sons over daughters, is a vibrating little figure of inequity in a series of novels and stories. In No Way, in The House And The City, and in Valentino, Ginzburg traces the heavy burden of patriarchal authority on both men and women. As Adriana explains to her son Michele about his father in No Way:

He was no help to me because he was not interested in me or even in your sisters. He cared only about you. His affection focused on a person whom he had invented and who didn't resemble you at all.

In each of these fictions, the son struggles with varying success to accommodate his ambivalent sexuality within a doubtful assumption of conventional male ambition. In each tale, Ginzburg traces these psychological patterns in the development of both male and female, with keen awareness of the family-wide and disastrous consequences of the pressures created by traditional codes of masculinity.

Men suffer in her books at the hands of women; women are never entirely powerless; both are frequently marooned in helpless indecision, or make decisions both amazing and comic in their willful folly. If fathers are seen to be blindly uncaring, in other circumstances, young mothers also drop or drag their little infant bundles with astonishing heedlessness. But nearly always the male takes up more space in the design of lives, whether because he claims it more assertively, or because women mutely or unquestioningly cede it to him. And he gains that space whether or not it is filled with his greater or lesser happiness, and quite apart from any dignity that either male or female may display in their allotted corners.

Both a feminist and a political orientation were rejected by Ginzburg as goals of her writing. But just as her choice of domestic and personal subjects begins incrementally to build a larger picture of family dynamics, making it possible for later readers to draw their own conclusions about unhappiness and instability in family relations, Ginzburg's treatment of politics and history similarly invites reflection about the intrusion of political choices in people's lives.

First, she draws our admiration because of her penetrating, non-partisan description of character. Born into a world of socialist and generally left-wing intelligentsia, raised by people heavily committed to antifascist resistance, she consistently avoids the temptation to apply heroic enamel to any of her protagonists attached to this position. Her work is always notable for its refusal to take sides and apportion interest or approval in relation to a preferred ideology. In contravention of party loyalties, an adopted fascist family member in Voices in the Evening saves his irascible, antifascist patron from prison and deportation. In All Our Yesterdays the fumbling antifascism of adolescent protagonists is stripped of romance; a fascist family evinces a sturdy decency and a perceptible tolerance when family members of different political persuasions intermarry. Her own family is not mythicised: as adolescents, her brothers brawled hotheadedly among themselves; her father mediated these disputes with his own violence.

Ginzburg trains a keen satiric intelligence on all these acts—fictional, biographical and autobiographical—and develops her own warmly curious, but coolly balanced style, an understatement subverting any machismo of rhetoric or action emanating from either the left or right. Intrigued by the convergence of politics and feminist insight in a writer who claimed to be disregarding both, I am immensely curious about any dissonance, or counterpoint, between the work in fiction and the highly opinionated self that speaks vividly in essays and memoir about both work and life.

I

Ginzburg's biography The Manzoni Family, her own family memoir, two collections of essays, six novellas, and four novels have been rendered by eight different translators in English. But in a triumph of Ginzburg's style over collective re-composition, all of the books bear their own indelible voice-print, even as choices of diction, orders of syntax, and the distillation of images no doubt endure their silent but inevitable mutations. A tough, residual boniness carried over from the original sentences gleams through even as they move in their new English sound.

In that movement, in the juxtaposition of one image or one event against another, timing appears to create message in a style that crosses language boundaries; in the gaps between acts, things, and words, Ginzburg produces her own recognizable world. In the opening of All Our Yesterdays, the grandmother has run through all of her money; her harassed dame de compagnie, Signora Maria, is hard pressed to keep her from shopping:

Latterly she had turned very nasty, so Signora Maria said, because she could not bear having no money and could not make out how in the world this had happened, and every now and then she forgot and wanted to buy herself a hat, and Signora Maria had to drag her away from the shop-window, thumping the ground with her umbrella and chewing her veil with rage. Now she lay buried at Nice, the place where she had died, the place in which she had enjoyed herself so much as a young woman, when she was fresh and pretty and had all her money.

Buried in the middle of this brilliant portrait of a selfish and cantankerous old woman are the end of one sentence and the beginning of another, in which we are jolted by the transition from a feral old lady thumping and chewing to a young woman, pretty, serene, and dead. And as far as I can make out, the English follows faithfully the imitably swift and devastating turns of the Italian.

A similar dexterity marks the passages from Borghesia, in which the birth of cats intercuts and parallels the birth of children, and both cat and human parents go their differently savage ways. It is comic timing, too, that produces the memorable opening of Voices in The Evening, in which a hypochondriacal mother and a glum daughter reveal themselves in a lopsided dialogue in the course of a walk, during which the mother asks ten questions, greets three passerby, and produces twenty observations, inane and otherwise, before goading her daughter to a single monosyllabic question in response.

Angus Davidson translates a passage between the exiled Anna and her servant, La Maschiona, which in a similar anatomy of relations between older and younger women, charts with precision the random connections of verbal exchange:

La Maschiona, by this time, was no longer at all frightened of her, she kept calling her every minute to the window to show her something, the dog which was eating the snow, or her old seducer driving past in his cart; this was a thing that had happened many, many years ago and the baby had died after only a few hours, La Maschiona thought it was on this account that she had never found a husband, for she had not been by any means ugly once upon a time. She rubbed the window-pane with her shawl so as to have a good sight of her seducer as he drove away bumping up and down in his cart, she was pleased that he should still be a handsome man with big moustaches that were still quite black, she bore no resentment towards him after all those years, he had afterwards married a woman from Masuri who owned a great deal of land, they were full of children and one of them was now fighting in Greece. La Maschiona was pleased that her baby long ago had died after only a few hours, because now he might have found himself fighting in Greece in all that snow and slush, and she might have been waiting and waiting for a letter. But as it was, she was not waiting for anything, either for good or for bad.

In comparison with the Italian text of All Our Yesterdays³, this looks like virtually literal translation—so much so that the Italian commas are hard for English to swallow. Yet if we broke the sentences at the logical points for English, the tacking and backstitching innocence of La Maschiona's voice might have dissolved, weakening the connection through which one time period is floated within close, continuing earshot of another. Similarly, a repunctuating would risk losing the comic incongruity of the artlessly complacent speech which allows both the moral menace of Seducer and handsome black moustaches in one person, as well as the collaging of many years ago within dead after a few hours. Like the protagonist, the helpless sentence is overtaken by contingency; in the muddled pathos of La Maschiona's acceptances, an infant's death weighs against his fighting in snow and slush in Greece, where, grown to be otherwise occupied, he will forget to write his mother. The collisions and crazy quilt fusions of this exposition work silently, having no need for authorial commentary.

Either way, the tumbling particulars of the abruptly closing passage remind us, there's nothing in it but absence and futility for La Maschiona: she who has gotten little expects little. Ultimately, it is through the careless sieve of La Maschiona's speech that the words drop which lead to the death of a German soldier, and from that death to that of a central character, Cenzo Rena. Having through timing, dialogue, and sparse description positioned her people with respect to their needs and goals, and having set for them as problems the starkest of life's acquisitions—getting or keeping husbands, wives, children, or houses, gaining or losing health, or jobs—the creator of these scenarios abstains from much offstage remark.

This authorial reticence becomes a choice of style with substantive consequences. In Natalia Ginzburg's novels there is no discursive musing over the moral wisdom of her characters' choices, and a pronounced distaste for a rhetoric elevating their choices, political, social or otherwise. In the novel All Our Yesterdays as well as in the memoir Family Sayings, Ginzburg's treatment of war as part of her people's experience thus accommodates itself to other stylistic features. Quite without fuss, the novelist refuses that amplification of volume by which violent event blares into heroism.

In an understated tragedy, moral choice in her citizens under siege slips into a helpless, often stalemated, decency. In another of her fairly grim refusals, stoicism cannot substitute for bombastic patriotism. For her characters, the stage built for an heroic, Promethean defiance does not exist. What is left in large crisis often diffuses into bumpy and protracted struggle; the best vantage point for truth becomes a low angle of observation, a small-scale persistence in the thick of things.

In the final, grotesque turns of class and community which Ginzburg plays for us in All Our Yesterdays, La Maschiona's unwitting disclosure leads in chain reaction to Cenzo Rena's election of martyrdom. After being surprised into shooting the German soldier who comes to look for the refugees that La Maschiona has blurted out are hidden in the cellar, Cenzo Rena's favorite contadino, Giuseppe, an Army deserter accepting his shelter, flees. Foreseeing the inevitable discovery of the soldier's body, and physically and apparently psychologically unable to make Giuseppe dispose of the corpse, or to dispose of it himself, Cenzo Rena chooses to surrender to the Germans, to prevent the killing of village hostages in reprisal. He dies by machine gun fire against a wall in the village square. Ginzburg does not permit her readers to savor the rewards of a classic, self-immolating heroism: a particularly brutal German onslaught against hostages follows directly in the wake of Cenzo Rena's sacrifice.

Gloomily, Cenzo Rena had said about his own militarism:

If he had been given a pistol or a tommygun to fire he would not have shot it straight, he would have shot all crooked into a tree, and in the meantime he would have started thinking things which it was not right to think. Giuseppe asked him what he would have started thinking. And Cenzo Rena said he would have started thinking that the Germans were all waiters, poor unfortunates with some sort of a job at the back of them, poor unfortunates whom it was not really worthwhile killing. And this was a thought that in war-time had no sense, it was an idiotic thought but he himself might happen to have an idiotic thought of that kind.

In Cenzo Rena's thinking, the span of heroic narrative, or war time, with its skin spread only over the climactic points of victory or defeat, presents a shortfall of human experience. Under the German soldier's uniform Cenzo Rena sees the coffeehouse waiter that the soldier was before the war: sterile and directionless, war neither ennobles, transforms, nor ends the world he and Natalia Ginzburg acknowledge. After his housekeeper, La Maschiona, lets the cat out of the bag, it is in Cenzo Rena's capacious house that Jewish refugee, socialist contadino hiding out from the Italian Army, and German waiter-soldier all collide fatally. While the benevolent patriarch persists as an image of strength throughout the novel, in the test of war that history imposes, his code, too, is of limited pragmatic value. Helplessly, both novel and novelist run up against the shortcomings of the pacifist long view; neither resistance to violence nor refusal to practice it offers final benefit or consolation. For Cenzo Rena and Anna, survival of the family unit occurs only through the non-heroic Anna, who daydreams fitfully and disconnectedly of revolutionary struggle.

In All Our Yesterdays, her novel with the broadest range, Ginzburg foregrounds the small accretions of daily life, and masters a reality deriving from the patient observation of two central families. Within the ebb and flow of her narrative there are glimpses of the life that survives war: like the later nonfictional Family Sayings, this novel treats the war and the fascist period without giving us a single date, and with only sparse reference to the familiar historic markers. By slipping names, dates, political alliances, and military campaigns to the side of her book, Ginzburg only magnifies the actions of her people, reserving importance, even through massive damage, for the private life. When war breaks out in the pivotal midsection of All Our Yesterdays, Ginzburg backgrounds the mobilization and foregrounds, in this order, Anna's sister Concettina's delivery, her brother Ippolito's suicide, Anna's pregnancy by Giuma and her marriage to Cenzo Rena.

In orchestrating the final scenes, Ginzburg puts in place a series of happenings that demonstrate the overall resilience of those committed to primary relations, or who view political allegiances with, at the best, enlightened skepticism. This skeptical awareness, as well as a need for courage, is something her chief protagonist, the landowner Cenzo Rena, urges on Anna, the poky but likeable female center of the book. In passionate disapproval of her brother Ippolito's suicide because Italy has joined the war and become Germany's ally, Cenzo Rena articulates an ethical code in which people were born into the world to endure their portion: “they should live the life they had to live, even if it was carpet bombings and want and hunger.” But they are also to endure without passivity, and without violence to themselves or others. In the course of the novel neither he, Ippolito, nor Anna resolves the dilemma of appropriate resistance.

Generally, there is a huge gap in the novel's design where Cause lurks, unfathomable, and recognizable only by the way in which it brings little people together to topple over against each other, the distant source of their hurt faceless or vaguely-named agents. The people that we see up close, in vivid detail, are never themselves vicious, expressing a full-scale malevolence; Ginzburg has no appetite for juicy malevolence. Like the agnostic's deity, the real, originating deviltry is always displaced, vague and elsewhere.

It is the counterpoint of Anna and Cenzo Rena that offers the clearest picture of how Ginzburg allows gender intermittently to become a focus for shoulds and oughts. In what becomes a leitmotif, Cenzo Rena scolds Anna about her life as an insect:

Cenzo Rena said that no one found himself with courage ready-made, you had to acquire courage little by little, it was a long story and it went on almost all your life. […] He told her that up till that day she had lived like an insect. An insect that knows nothing beyond the leaf upon which it hangs.

In Cenzo Rena's mouth, the critique of the insect Anna is frequently reiterated, and then associated with her having lived in a swarm of insects, not coincidentally for this reader, an all-female swarm. Cenzo Rena's counter examples of non-insectitude are all male, although he sternly denounces Anna's brother Ippolito's suicide as a useless act of negative idealism. But even if Ippolito comes to an “insect-like end,” Cenzo Rena judges him, unlike Anna, to have been a developed, or “real person,” with mistaken although genuine convictions. At this point, Cenzo Rena compares an apparently passive, non-judgmental, or female style, invidiously with the active judgmental male, and yet the value of the insect is not so readily dismissed by either Anna or Natalia Ginzburg. The most persistent—and obviously trenchant—criticism of Rena's occasional misfires comes from the irrepressible insect, Anna. Even so, the very manner in which Cenzo Rena re-enters the novel after an earlier exit only emphasizes the hopeful flamboyance of his role as surrogate father: by then both actual heads of the two clans are dead. But even Cenzo Rena succeeds only partially in offering protection to Anna and her siblings, or to the family dog, the villagers, and the contadini he also regards as under his wing. Yet he is the closest approximation of emotionally effective masculinity that Ginzburg's fiction affords, and while mournfully so, the only clearly heroic figure of either gender.

The underlying values established in this novel are traditional, and really never contradicted by any later work: one should live decently, caring for others, and for the next generation. War, largely promoted by men, although suffered by both men and women, is a directionless affair, subverting all moral ends. Women nonetheless elide war's effects by bearing children; nothing disturbs the centrality of the family as Ginzburg's point of reference. In her embrace of childbirth as women's role, and her pictures of women and non-aggressive men as equally helpless to avert war, like Anna, she struggles against a passive world-view. Still, in All Our Yesterdays, it is the understated, rather passive and politically inactive female who survives. Anna's reactive role in the novel in part echoes Natalia Ginzburg's own refusal as a writer to foreground political choice or action. Even though Ginzburg refuses to translate her implicit views into a “position” exalting female choice or female values, through their bearing and rearing of children, women, with whatever reluctance, are seen to replenish a world brought to near extinction by male violence. Yet at war's end, the concluding words of All Our Yesterdays confirm the grim allusion of its title. The remaining family members, male and female together, are left to think:

they were pleased to be together, the three of them, thinking of all those who were dead, and of the long war and the sorrow and noise and confusion, and of the long, difficult life which they saw in front of them now, full of the things they did not know how to do.

In Cenzo Rena, Natalia Ginzburg proposes the fathering that seems best to represent her vision of what people need. And in Cenzo Rena, the novelist summons a partly idealized father that the daughter of the autobiographical Family Sayings has not appeared to experience. Very little in Natalia Ginzburg's subsequent fiction dislodges this man from his post as one of her most positive and articulate images of personal and political energy. Again and again his strength is represented as detailed caring for others in his family, among his friends, and in his village. Limiting his power are the various bureaucratic stupidities visited upon his domain by a kind of human littleness that occurs under every party label, in the nonpartisan, nonsectarian view of human evil suffusing the novel. In this work, perhaps demonstrating Natalia Ginzburg's most persuasive representation of active virtue, Cenzo Rena is liberal in attitude and frequently benevolent in effect: still it is deeply interesting to find in his assumptions of authority a landholding patriarch exercising a generally traditional control. Embedded in the macro structure of this novelist's work, we find a suggestion that all of war's survivors are somehow orphaned creatures, lamenting the death of a world whose most potent symbol is still that of the absent patriarch. Yet Ginzburg's complex appraisal shows the costs of that patriarchy to be exigent. In small and large ways, she spends the rest of her career in fiction totting up the costs, and reckoning the weight of that abandonment on the dispersed and irresolute children of the surviving generation.

II

There is no resurgence of Ginzburg's vision of effective fathering after 1956. In the unadorned directness of all the narrative voices surviving in the orphaned postwar world, a refusal to put an authoritative name or system to the sources of irrational human behavior has carried from book to book. But familial relation dominates Ginzburg's ordering of perception. The Road To The City, Ginzburg's very first novel, published when she was 25 in 1942, begins with bald simplicity:

Nini was the son of one of my father's cousins and he had been with us ever since he was a little boy. After the death of his parents he went first to live with his grandfather, but the old man used to beat him with a broomstick and he was always running away to our house. Finally his grandfather died, too, and he was told he could stay with us always.

The 17-year-old narrator, carefully noting degrees of family relation and all the salient issues of benevolence and cruelty, hands these facts to us as if she were framing an introduction for a visitor to the family household, explaining Nini's presence at the breakfast table. From first to last, the point of view in a book by Natalia Ginzburg rides loosely, planted in the middle of densely communal traffic. All of her characters group intensely in families and clusters of friends, and at any moment Ginzburg moves swiftly but easily from mind to mind. The flow of her books is always domestic, conversational, casual and radically understated, even in the moments most plunged in crisis: the outbreak of war, the discovery of the suicide's body, the realization of a swindle, the death of love, and so on. There is always a low, steady humming of language and then a dreadful or wonderful fact or observation rolls or plops into the reader's lap, but we are almost too busy chasing the ongoing narrative to stop and finger it.

The look, feel, and vital statistics of a person are tossed off swiftly, as character, like exposition, develops in keeping with Ginzburg's other minimalist habits. Readers in collusion with the novelist are expected to recognize the significance of each sharp-edged scrap thrown our way. Portraiture is usually functional and portable. Objects of clothing, things to be carried in the hand from scene to scene or year to year as gestures, body language and body type, dominate. Even when we get to see the look of a major character from the beginning, the look is a sketch rather than a painting, the modifiers a few cleanly-bitten strokes, the details singular. Of a minor character in All Our Yesterdays: “The doctor came, a humbug of the most insignificant kind, hardly taller than Signora Maria, with fair hair that looked like chickens' feathers, and big baggy trousers like a Zouave and check stockings.” In a flurry of later references, most of this will be dropped, and in a shorthand typical of Ginzburg's narration, the doctor will be subsequently and permanently abbreviated to his chicken feather hair. Giuma will be known by his “white, sharp teeth like a wolf”; in each of several critical appearances that Cenzo Rena makes over long intervals, even to the very morning of his death, he will be wrapped in a long waterproof looking like a nightshirt. A sister's husband and her little baby will be similarly cropped to their black, standup hair, as if with some people the best handle to use for their exits and entrances from the text will be the thing most starkly visible or protuberant, a piece of clothing, the hair, the teeth, the general body outline. The rapid, sweeping observation of her people's exteriors signals that timing is more important, and the lush particularities of appearance less so to Natalia Ginzburg. Urgently, the novelist focuses for the reader not upon the visual authenticity of her world, but upon the precarious and fleeting nature of our vision of others. Description is by nature provisional: the chicken feather hair, the little wolf's teeth, the oversize waterproof, even the broom perpetually wagged by Natalina in Family Sayings. All of these materials briefly hostage to reality bob on the stream of remembrance; they are its vivid flotsam and jetsam.

Her description is always sharply contextual. The oldest brother, Ippolito, is a powerful presence shadowing the family history of All Our Yesterdays, but we get almost no visual description of him, beyond his face being dry, smooth, and unsweating in the heat, until Cenzo Rena takes a good look at him nearly seventy pages into the book:

Cenzo Rena told him he was very handsome, but even this was said in order to provoke him. He said, “A pity, such a handsome young man, look how handsome he is, he might make plenty of women fall in love with him and instead of that he takes no interest in women […]” Giustino and Anna looked at Ippolito, for the first time they came to know that he was handsome. He was lying back in an armchair under the pergola with his shabby fustian jacket thrown carelessly over his shoulders, his worn shooting-boots on his feet, his long, delicate hands stroking the dog's ears, his hair streaked with gold and curly at the back of his head, his mouth twisted in the bitter smile that he wore when people tormented him. It was thus that Anna and Giustino were to remember him always, as they had seen him at Le Visciole, when he had been discovered to be handsome because Cenzo Rena had said so.

A long valedictory light is suddenly thrown across Ippolito, breaking the myopia within which family members are normally enfolded. But the portrait, while unusually extended, preserves the novelist's habits; “handsome,” the tag quickly found for the whole transaction, becomes only another adjective by which Ippolito can be “tormented” for his failure to conform to adult expectations.

It's not the detail itself, the streaky gold hair or wagging broom, that bears any importance, but the solvency of all matter in time that bears representing, how things are seen by others and taken as synecdoche, as the tag-end of a graspable but always tenuous and mysteriously partial reality. Details sparely build up worlds: but objects, gestures, and phrases matter only for the curious use that people make of them, as matter, or audible, palpable reality, is something to be deeply respected but always held in subordination to the human being fingering, suffering, or uttering it. As a matter of stylistic conviction Ginzburg rejects the large-scale, bulky accretions that constitute plot and character for a nineteenth century European realistic novel, and yet material detail is an inevitable part of her field of observation. At her sharpest, Ginzburg's systematic use of repetition, of an incremental, rocking repetition of props and sayings, counters the potentially disintegrative flux of sparse detail—Giuma's teeth, Cenzo Rena's duster—through which she manages to fix her happenings in the mind.

With an odd shock of recognition, a reader of English notices that Ginzburg's development as a novelist appears to owe as much to a specifically understated English and American tradition of realism as to the expansive, prodigal style of a Balzac or a Manzoni.⁴ Her economical description and unmediated dialogue, her desire to work small, clean, and dry—seems not only her own inclination, but what Ginzburg learned from being Hemingway's Italian editor at Einaudi, or an admirer of Ivy Compton Burnett. In “La Grande Signorina,” an essay from a collection published in 1970, Ginzburg writes of Compton Burnett's technique:

Occasionally she pauses to describe her characters' features briefly. If she does not stop to describe people and places, it is not through haste or impatience but because of a contemptuous parsimony, a fastidious rejection of what is superfluous. The rhythm of her writing is neither slow nor fast; it is the unchanging, precise, implacable rhythm of one who knows where she is going. Her patience is hammering and infernal.

Eventually, these books, which Ginzburg sought through what she described as the misty screen of her “poor” English, provided a breakthrough:

I could feel this dialogue leaping from thought to thought as precisely and as dryly as a ping-pong ball. … Those dry, precise sounds suddenly and imperiously led me back on a path I had lost.

As she mulls over this influence, Ginzburg says:

Someone like me must have seemed ridiculous, superfluous and sentimental to her. Words like ‘gratitude’ or ‘love’ must have seemed superfluous to her books; she must have been totally indifferent to herself, like a tortoise or an engineer [italics mine], and in this lay her greatness.

Perhaps partly in response to this influence, to this concession to the taming power of the small, self-effacing style, an odd miniaturizing, a diminution of scale, takes place in the populous environs of Ginzburg's work. Character does not inhere in the large prominence of single persons. The one giant Self slips away, and the novelist, neither omniscient narrator nor one ruling subjectivity, works very hard to make us identify with all of her people. In her fiction, people together negotiate the small decisions of dailiness, swiftly or slowly, impulsively or deliberately. In the strange and disruptive relation of what they say to what they do, her docile women, her doleful men, exist in an interactive bridging: not in the establishment of psychic hegemonies gotten up as individual people, but in the crackling of one gesture igniting another, and passing invisible human energy from synapse to synapse.

The constellations of these actions are much more important than the colorless and vague, but nonetheless solid, interiors within which they occur. Space in Ginzburg's fictions always seems to take a backseat to temporality. Time pulses steadily forward through the conversational manners of a narrator whose voice is merely one more voice, neither more nor less authoritative, although occasionally more acerbic, among an assembly of like-minded speakers. Often her people cannot make up their minds, to marry, to dump an exploitative lover, to join the Resistance, or to sell a house. Trapped between things each of which they only half want to do, they move hopelessly to the left or right, over the course of a lifetime discovering that one inadvertent move after the other has made all the difference. It is a style never to be accused of histrionics or of sentimentality, and one that makes an aesthetic out of affirming the collective.

III

In addition to the influence of Ivy Compton Burnett, we can point out that Natalia Ginzburg's stories and novels were written after Virginia Woolf's famous declaration that “on or about December, 1910, human character changed,” thereby altering the job of the novelist. Mere description for its own sake ceased to be gratifying for either writer or reader, and “one line of insight” became preferable to wordpaintings of the inside of houses or of the general shape of streets or parks or prisons. In Woolf's myth, as if by fiat, people were cut loose from the institutions and properties that had previously defined them, and novelists were free to concentrate on sensibility as never before. Or at the least, they were freer to question why and how sensibility derived from property and institutions.

Natalia Ginzburg's treatment of sensibility, coupled with her wariness in acknowledging any specifically female resources of manner in the shaping of her narrative style, interests me particularly. As Woolf impatiently shucked an Arnold Bennett-like accretion of the descriptive goods and houses of the novel, Ginsburg never accepted confinement within gender or politics. Unlike Woolf, she kept any enthusiasm for feminism on a very tight rein. In “The Feminine Condition” she grudgingly acknowledged the political goal of equality for women, but she didn't want gender anywhere near discussion of her work as a writer. While she made her subject in the postwar era out of the traditional woman's territory of lovers, husbands and wives, children and pets, all lost or strayed within that ubiquitous entity, the family, she wanted nothing to disturb her sense of her vantage point as gender-blind: “In our best moments,” she says, “our thought is neither of woman nor of man.”

For the women of her generation, the need to be taken into male work communities brought them all to douse the signs of their femininity at one point or another; an act too ripely associated with female worlds only reminded everybody of the familiar codes that were being uncomfortably realigned or rejected by the mere presence of women in certain offices, laboratories, and schoolrooms. No doubt there was a revolutionary exhilaration for many women bursting into previously forbidden male sanctuaries—but the corollary often seems to have been a stifling of the femininity too insistently connected to former lives. A wonderful example of that occurs for a brief moment in Rita Levi-Montalcini's autobiography, showing us feelings that must apply to Natalia Ginzburg as well. A Turin contemporary of Ginzburg's, a devoted protegée of Ginzburg's father, Giuseppe Levi, and now a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, Levi-Montalcini recalls her shock in 1946 at the sight of American university students knitting in class⁵: “a custom that pleasantly underlined the informality of the American system of teaching but ran counter to my strong sense of equality between the sexes and to my innate dislike for this so typically feminine activity.” In this sentence I am arrested by what the and joins: “equality between the sexes” belongs to a radical rejection of anything “typically feminine,” leading one to the conclusion that sexual equality for many women frequently meant a paradoxical suppression of gender consciousness as the price of that “equality.”

Ginzburg's ambivalence about any style straying too narrowly and identifiably into feminine excesses of emotionality is very like Levi-Montalcini's rejection of “typically feminine activity.” It's all right for a novelist to observe women and men and in a levelling glance to transmit faithfully the effects of gender coding, but it isn't all right to call attention to yourself doing that or anything else in high female style. Here the pointilliste brilliance of an Ivy Compton Burnett provided a bracing alternative.

In any case, Natalia Ginzburg's people carry a minimum load on the page. The clipped and pungent style is perhaps a great departure from a national literature generally elitist and traditionally dominated by the higher eloquence, even through the historical moment of verismo. But the same understatement that shies from rhetorical machismo comes to resemble her suspicion of the emotionally expansive as feminine, sentimental, and untruthful: here the gender ascription that she veers away from seems a fear of possible contamination by the betraying self and its irreducible body. In his study Prisoners of Hope: The Silver Age of The Italian Jews 1924-1974, in a few tantalizingly brief quotations from an introduction to Cinque romanzi brevi existing only in Italian, H. Stuart Hughes shows Ginzburg having a “horror of autobiography” as of “feminine sentimentality.” At least in her early work like The Road to The City, Ginzburg said she wanted every sentence “like a whipping or a slap.” Whether early or late, neither a deeply feminine nor a deeply masculine self is to be trusted. The resolute cruelty of her image for the sentence is belied on every page we read, where the tone is always balanced, and the satire, while incisive, kindly. In “My Vocation,” written in 1949, she offers a characteristically unpretentious explanation for the brevity of her early style—but the description suits her later work as well:

Because I had brothers who were much older than me and when I was small if I talked at table they always told me to be quiet. And so I was used to speaking very fast, in a headlong fashion with the smallest possible number of words, and always afraid that the others would start talking among themselves again and stop listening to me. Perhaps this seems a rather stupid explanation; nevertheless that is how it was.

The story is repeated in a late interview with Mary Gordon.

Perhaps it is more wholly in character to say that her minimalist style comes from deliberately sidestepping both macho heroics and “feminine sentimentality,” a tightlipped avoidance of the grand style and of conventional gender coding that amounts to an ethics of understatement. In the concluding paragraph of “My Vocation” she offers another rationale for reticence and restraint:

We are constantly threatened with grave dangers whenever we write a page. There is the danger of suddenly starting to be flirtatious and of singing. I always have a crazy desire to sing and I have to be very careful that I don't. And there is the danger of cheating with words that do not really exist within us, that we have picked up by chance outside of ourselves and which we skillfully slip in because we have become a bit dishonest. There is the danger of cheating and being dishonest.

Ginzburg's dislike of rhetoric and fear of “singing,” or sham emotion, work as a genuine part of her swift directness. In the same spirit of proud deletion Jane Austen made us believe in the validity of work dedicated to the social and domestic: “What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of Variety and Glow?—How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour?” The modesties of this disclaimer should not be mistaken; their iron-willed smallness contains a principled refusal. Ginzburg says:

But there is one corner of my mind in which I know very well what I am, which is a small, a very small writer. I swear I know it. […] I prefer to think that no one has ever been like me, however small, however much a mosquito or a flea of a writer I may be.

It is the ecstasy of that smallness that raises eyebrows. For both of these women, plugging away indefatigably for decades at their vocation, it is hard to hear these excesses of womanly demur—two-inch book-bits and flea-sized writers—without feeling a cross-grain of fierce pride in the stubborn originality of what they do. The hell with flags and manly, spirited sketches. But it may have required a war and endurance of a totalitarian government for Natalia Ginzburg to allow us to see how “small” really means resilient, and memorable; how in Ginzburg's own figure for self-effacing craft, “greatness” could be tortoise, or taught us, within the female “tortoise” engineering of an Ivy Compton Burnett as well as under the modernist banner of a male Joyce or Proust.

In Ginzburg we see the manners of a code of survival after the banners and rhetoric of the grand style, or even the rhetoric of grand ambition, have all blown away. The largest test of her work may be the result of what happens when a civilian social satirist interested in family and neighborhood meets the blows of the twentieth century, and takes on the classic male subject, war, as she does notably in All Our Yesterdays, her memoir Family Sayings, and several essays. In “The Son of Man,” an essay written in 1946, she says:

We shall not get over this war. It is useless to try. We shall never be people who go peacefully about their business, who think and study and manage their lives quietly. Something has happened to our houses. Something has happened to us.

[…] And we are a people without tears. The things that moved our parents do not move us at all. Our parents and those older than us disapprove of the way we bring up our children. They would like us to lie to our children as they lied to us. They would like our children to play with woolly toys in pretty pink rooms with little trees and rabbits painted on the walls. They would like us to surround their infancy with veils and lies, and carefully hide the truth of things from them. But we cannot do this. We cannot do this to children whom we have woken in the middle of the night and tremblingly dressed in the darkness so that we could flee with them or hide them, or simply because the air-raid sirens were lacerating the skies. We cannot do this to children who have seen terror and horror in our faces.

Resonantly, she says: “There is an unbridgeable abyss between us and the previous generation. […] we are tied to our suffering, and at heart we are glad of our destiny as men.”

In the chronology of her work, Ginzburg performs herself in literature with enormous reticence. In essays, she avoids first person singular and gender-specific reference. Her one book-length memoir confines itself largely to other family members; the smallest of its concerns, still conforming to her early mistrust of autobiography, is the author's development as a writer. Even as her novels or short stories do not address issues of gender injustice directly, merely demonstrating them in action with deadeye accuracy, she is not interested in using herself as a writer to trace the consequences of being a female writing. She does not distinguish gender as an issue for writers. However truncated or elliptical, her fictional handling of politics and history, with its occasional swipes at an infantilized masculine bellicosity found in both leftwing and rightwing practice, anticipates later feminist thinking more openly linking sexism and military aggression. As she once sought to avoid “feminine sentimentality,” equally, she refuses the masculine inverse of that sentimentality, the inflations of the patriotic code, or the imperial seductions of la gloire.

In “The Feminine Condition,” Ginzburg props up her belief in gender equality with a puzzling kind of essentialism. For women:

no matter what we think or do, there still exists the fact of our singular physicality, and that if we're women, the feminine signs of our temperament stamp themselves on our actions and words. But our final end is to join the realm where men and women can recognize each other with indifferent regard to our personal physiognomy.

My problem with these recognitions of difference and sameness lies in identifying the gap in the line, the space at which difference blends into sameness, is spoken or erased into or out of being. At what point does gender, as the mark of difference, of “the feminine signs of our temperament,” come into play; at which point is gender gracefully and modestly supposed to take a back seat to considerations of universality?

Ginzburg's refusal to deal more openly with the impact of gender on her own shaping as a writer at times seems an obfuscation, a part of what she herself might name “cheating with words.” In the 1953 essay “Human Relationships,” Ginzburg placed herself and that disquieting female body behind the pronoun “we”; it is “we” who pass through friendships in the fickle explorative passions of youth, “we” who grow up middle-class, “we” who meet our fiancee, and “we” who undergo tragic loss—all in a thinly-veiled version of Ginzburg's own life. And there are moments when “we” who are reading this essay of “our” experience wish to rebel and say in amazement, why that isn't me at all, it's you, Natalia Ginzburg!

The thinker in Ginzburg's formative years was gendered male, starting with her brilliant, autocratic father, and the three brothers, one of whom followed directly in her father's footsteps. The family seems to have fallen into the conventional pattern, too, in which formal thought, or logic, science, and history were the province of the male, and the arts belonged to her singer mother, Lidia, and to a story-making Natalia, who had small use for an openly didactic or reflective discourse in those stories. As she spells out a clearly autobiographical, bleak and chastened view of writing in “Portrait of a Writer,” her pronoun is he. Of course Ginzburg is conforming with current usage, as everyone did then, and yet the male pronoun once again points out the suppression of femaleness as part of the Little Mermaid-like bargain which joins her to the male world of letters.

As problems of faith surface in the essay, “On Believing and Not Believing in God,” the choice of her deity as a stern patriarch indicates the degree of continuing struggle with models of inner authority that traces a figure in both her fiction and her essay work. The self that downed the master narrative in the development of her style, taking a model of too-faithful apprenticeship or daughterhood with it, now resurrects Our Lord and Father in this essay. The traits of God in this piece resemble a much sterner and infinitely more powerful, if distant, Cenzo Rena. Both non-believer and anguished believing interlocutor are pronominally male, even as the attraction of not believing is described sardonically as “created only for the bare and virile mind of men.” In “Criticism,” she writes: “We suffer from the lack of criticism in the same way that we suffer for the lack of a father in our adult life.” Ideally, this is not what “he,” the writer, needs:

Perhaps he should not think too much of the work he has already done, which is moving ahead, noisily or silently. He has had the great pleasure of writing it; and this, really, should be enough to last him forever.

But “our” desire for the father continues:

As we wait anxiously for the father who will never come and help us, simply because he doesn't exist, we think more and more wistfully and longingly of a being who might bring order to our muddled, scattered lives; we see his tall watchful figure projected on to the walls, we hear his stern voice echoing in the shadows. But we shall never have our tears dried, never take over this fatherly role ourselves; it may be a simple thing but it is impossible, inadmissible, and we continue to grope and tremble in the dark.

In “People To Talk To,” her other offbeat piece on critics, Ginzburg refers to herself as writer in a rare first person. But while she points briefly to a woman friend as a counsel for probity and accuracy, the emotional weight of the piece leans to the two sons who are really seen to father her writing. The scene in the essay becomes progressively more domestic, cosy; shirts and pajamas appear on the page as props along with the manuscripts. There is no recognizably literary rubric like “Influences on My Work”; instead, she chooses the deliberately flat “People to Talk to”: a title no-one could accuse of generating self-importance, or of thrusting her occupation as a writer forward into prominence, with an unbecoming and unfeminine immodesty. But the older son finds her “basically, a sugary, sentimental writer.” The youngest signs with a facial expression that leads her to find her writing “repulsive. It gave out a powerfully sweet smell.” And through their dismissive vision of the much-dreaded female sentimentality, Ginzburg is able “to push dead thoughts out of my way.”

Often at a chagrined or disapproving distance from her treacherously female self, the real, historical body of Natalia Ginzburg the writer vanishes into the convenient removes of the fictional, or into a persona in which her essay-writing voice usually evades a harness joining both woman and writer.

In her essay on Ivy Compton Burnett she is consoled by others for never having met Compton Burnett: “she talked only of trivial things, her conversation wasn't interesting.” Ginzburg answers:

Of course she wouldn't have wasted her breath talking to someone in a drawing-room; […] Probably she used her real voice—loud, violent and tragic—only in the darkness of her own spirit.

The writer in propria persona that Ginzburg manufactures in essays lives uneasily somewhere between the drawing-room self and the “real voice” of the non-gendered spirit.

Yet in Family Sayings a repression of female selfhood in favor of a wider lens trained on the scenes of her childhood and youth operates with distinctive success. In this memoir, habitual understatement becomes a woman's instrumental silence about her role as player, a reluctant and elusive presentation of autobiographical detail that winds up being enormously moving. It is a text through which we tread very carefully, being brought to pay as much attention to what is not said as to what is.

In the opening sections, it is a child's world that we are led to, a world dominated by the polar presences of mother and father, and in which the narrator, the youngest of five children, appears as the last and least member of a vigorous, jostling company. Although the Levi family's culturally rich circle included a collection of remarkable people notable in the Italian antifascist literary and intellectual movements of the 1930's and earlier, Ginzburg's memoir faces away from any conventional social and historical contextualizing. For the audience for whom the book was intended, perhaps those facts were dismissed in advance by an impatient “They know all that.” The premise of the book is the retrieval of a world through its tribal aphorisms, the family jokes and sayings which become “our Latin, the vocabulary of our days gone by”:

They are the evidence of a vital nucleus which has ceased to exist, but which survives in its texts salvaged from the fury of the waters and the corrosion of time. These phrases are the foundation of our family unity which will persist as long as we are in this world […].

The diction is aureate, the tone “high”; yet the sayings themselves—“We did not come to Bergamo for a picnic,” and “What does sulphuric acid pong of?”—are small, innately colorless verbal explosions, unmemorable to anyone outside the vital nucleus. As in the larger form of Ginzburg's own writings, the sum and style of what behavior points to in the aggregate is often the message, and not the incidental verbal prop or action.

Although good humor seasons everything unfolded to us, and the women of the book are presented no less vividly or actively than the men, in Family Sayings Ginzburg offers, without overt commentary, a direct picture of the damaging effects of patriarchal powers, within the smaller family unit, and abroad in the larger scene. From the first sentence the professor father bellows and admonishes the family grouped around the dinner table. Although neither mother nor daughters sound as if the paternal thumb had succeeded in grinding them down, the force and violence of the male is the backdrop surrounding their lives. The antifascist politics of the Levi family developed in these circumstances:

At home we lived always with the nightmare of our father's outbursts of fury which exploded unexpectedly and often for the pettiest reason: a pair of shoes that could not be found, a book out of its proper place, or if a lightbulb had gone, dinner was slightly late, or some dish a little overcooked. And then we also lived with the nightmare of quarrels between my brothers Alberto and Mario which broke out unexpectedly. We would suddenly hear a noise in their room of chairs being overturned and thumps against the wall followed by wild piercing yells. Alberto and Mario were big now and very strong, and when they set to with their fists they really hurt each other, and emerged with bleeding noses, swollen lips and torn clothes.

“They are murding each other,” my mother would scream, dropping the “er” in fright. “Beppino, come here, they are murding each other,” she would scream to my father.

My father's intervention was as violent as all his actions. He flung himself between the two of them locked in violent combat and whacked them all over. I was a little girl then and can recall my terror at these three men fighting savagely.

Even though all three came to share the same politics, and were united in their opposition to Mussolini, enduring jail sentences and exile as their portion, the same rooster-like fractiousness continued to characterize their exchanges of opinion.

Ginzburg shows the fascist or antifascist male uttering his decree in confidence of his right to do so, whether obeyed by the woman or not. She also sets before us phrases that silently delineate the mother's sometimes supporting and sometimes subverting male powers. Clear at least outwardly about the family ranking, at one point the mother announces, “The one thing I really care about is my sons. I only have fun with my sons.” But the daughter who may or may not have listened to this expression of preference with either voluble impatience or stoic resignation now pointedly repeats it without commentary. “Fun” for the mother is paradoxically the serious world, the world in which men's doings matter most, and in which antifascism is a kind of adventure. The father wakes in the night worrying about his arrested sons, but then: “He was, however, happy to have a son who was a conspirator.” When the father in his turn is arrested and released, he “was very pleased with himself for having been in prison.” When the youngest is released as well, the mother says: “So now it is back to the ordinary boring life.”

For her father, her mother, and for her remembering self, the least important part of the family sayings becomes the daughter's power to contain them. The book chooses instead an extremely compressed and much intermitted narrative of Natalia Ginzburg's journey from her father's house as a daughter to a wife with a husband and household of her own; in this universalizing personal narrative neither her feelings about her gender nor her Jewishness figures much. Finally, however, the elided or laconic treatment of personal subject matter begins to make formal sense, as what we are asked to fill in for ourselves begins to vibrate effectively above the nuanced words presenting behavior in laser-like outline.

Ginzburg's first marriage to the antifascist Leone Ginzburg is treated summarily. The final pages on the war are marked by huge gaps and transitions of head-jolting abruptness. Leone Ginzburg initially intrudes without explanation into the text, in brief, isolated references. The first glimpse we catch of him is through the father's eyes:

“What is Mario up to with that man Ginzburg?” he asked my mother. […] “He is a very cultivated, intelligent man, who does very fine translations from Russian.”

“But he is very ugly,” said my father. “We know Jews are all ugly …”

“And what about you?” said my mother. “Aren't you a Jew?”

“Well, yes, I am ugly, too,” said my father.

Jewishness in the memoir, or elsewhere, for this half-Jewish daughter, remains a subject addressed in fragments, and attached to queasy feelings. From a brief essay on the subject:

I maintain that there is no affinity among Jews except one that is extremely superficial, because I believe that men should transcend the confines of their origins. This is what I believe but when I meet a Jew I don't succeed in repressing a strange and dark sensation of connivance.

She describes feelings of “affinity”; even with people “hateful” to her she cannot repress “a feeling of secret complicity” in their common Jewishness. And, like her feelings about femininity, the feeling about Jewish identity uncomfortably challenges her rejection of that “affinity” for a wash of transcendent humanity, her longing for a world with no “division of blood.”⁶ Once again, as with femininity, essential features of personal identity are to be suppressed; even noticing them constitutes bad faith, more of that turning away from the universal. Nor does she permit herself to discuss other possible sources of discomfort in acknowledging Jewishness, the flickers of internalized self-loathing, or the absorption of negative feelings by the self, which are the bitter residue of our struggle to deal with negative projections of our essential group identities like femininity, or ethnicity, by others. But at least the lines of force and breakage are visible in her encounters with these feelings.

Great care is taken to dwell on Leone without the dreaded “feminine sentimentality,” as Ginzburg in her writing leaves on the page no whiff of eulogy, none of the golden embalming through which a dead hero might be seen and canonized. There is also a fierce protective privacy about their lives together, so that few signs of that young marriage are left for us to spell out.

Although the broad facts are provided of Leone Ginzburg's end, the death in this memoir is first decisively buried in domestic detail:

Leone was running a secret newspaper and was always out of the house. He was arrested twenty days after our arrival [in Rome], and I never saw him again. I rejoined my mother in Florence. Misfortune always made her feel very cold and she wrapped herself in a shawl. We did not exchange many words about Leone's death. She had been very fond of him, but she did not like talking about the dead; her constant preoccupation was bathing the children, combing their hair and keeping them warm.

It is the mother who experiences misfortune; all feeling is displaced onto her: she had been very fond; her constant preoccupation; in this substitution we are made to feel the well-nigh unbearable quality of feelings that the wife refuses even to sketch. The great void, the shattering inconclusiveness that must occur when a beloved person simply disappears is mimicked by the occlusions of the novelist herself, as loss can be performed but not described. The most complete details that we are given of his death are announced in the memoir next to the description of a portrait:

The Publisher had a portrait of Leone on the wall in his room, with his head bent a little to one side, his spectacles halfway down his nose, a thick mane of black hair, deep dimples in his cheeks, and his feminine hands. During the German occupation Leone had died in the German wing of the Regina Coeli prison in Rome, one icy February.

This image leads to a train of others in which her husband's catastrophe is patched together with all of the deadly fractures and losses of that time. Facts are told in pieces; twenty years later they are still too painful to be addressed, except in different, widely-spaced bits. In the nearest approach to a recapitulation of those events that her memoir offers, Ginzburg braids an image of Leone's last day with an image of her rescue by Adriano Olivetti:

Leone was arrested in a secret printing-works. We had a flat near Piazza Bologna, and I was there alone with the children; I waited for him. The hours passed and when there was no sign of him gradually I realized that he must have been arrested. That day passed, the night and the following morning. Adriano came and told me to leave at once since Leone had been arrested; the police might arrive at any moment. He helped me to pack and dress the children, and we hurried away to some friends who had agreed to take me in.

The period put to this story is not her grief for her husband or her own danger or her children's, but a final image of Olivetti:

I shall always remember, all my life, the great relief which I had felt that morning on seeing before me the familiar figure I had known since I was a child, […] And I shall always remember his back bending to gather up our belongings scattered about the rooms—the children's shoes for instance—and his good, humble and compassionate movements. As we left his face had […] that fearful, happy look he had when he was taking someone to safety.

In these displacements and shifts of perspective, from the detail of a friend's bending to pick up children's shoes, and then later to a long, closing shot of refugees along a dusty road, from the personal involvements of husband, friends and parent, to the more distant reflections of neighbors and hapless strangers equally caught in disaster, to the twisting up of images of the near and the far past, of wartime and immediately postwar time, Ginzburg's reticences and occlusions follow, like a tracing of light along a figure, the curvatures of memory by which trauma is reabsorbed, and the iteration of details of salvage and rescue blunt a wounding.

In these passages, she grapples with the insult to memory, imitating in the formal techniques of her presentation the fracture of thinking and the numbing of the ability to feel that war and political oppression offer. The cut edges of the text point to loss, as through the silences of the gapped page, meaning pours; and denial becomes a comprehensive enactment. She speaks of the fascist years as “dumb and petrified”; they were “in a state of crystalline, mute immobility.” After the war and the dismantling of the fascist regime, “words were in circulation, and reality appeared again to be within arm's length.” But then that closeness proved to be only another side of a distancing glass, and penetrating the glass into reality became only another “transitory illusion”:

So the post-war period was gloomy and depressed after the first lighthearted post-war years. Many isolated themselves in the world of their dreams or in any work that would provide a living; colorless after so much excitement, though everyone forgot the brief illusory moment when they shared their neighbors' lives. For many years, of course, no one practised their own professions, but all thought they could and should do a thousand things together, and it was some time before each man took up his own profession and accepted its burden and the daily fatigue and solitude, which is the sole means we have of contributing to the needs of others who are similarly lost and prisoners of solitude.

Having lived through a time which conferred both a glaze of heroic sacrifice and a clearer sense of common goals, survivors can only return to dailiness and a permanent sense of an echoing and long-settling diminishment, the diminishment hovering over human life, war or no war.

In a moment of quixotic acceptance, the terms of which bear no close examination, Adriana, the grieving mother in No Way casts back to a scrap of song sung in the past by her husband, her ex-lover, and her son, recently dead of a knife wound in a street skirmish. She writes to her ex-lover about her son:

In the car he began to sing a song his father always sang. Usually that annoyed me because it reminded me of his father, about whom I felt very bitter at that time. But I was content that day and all my bitterness grew light and sweet. The song went, “non avemo ni canones—ni tanks ni aviones—oi Carmelà.” And you knew the song and continued, “El terror de los fascistas—rumba—larumba-larumba-là.” You will think it stupid, but I have written this letter to thank you for having sung with Michael that day […] I would like to ask you as a favor to send me the words of that song by mail if you know them. You may think it strange, but one has very minimal and odd wishes when in fact one desires nothing.

Here Adriana gropes for a meaning both heroic and rational in circumstances which defy that hope.

Whatever we may think ultimately of the life not represented or questioned, there is still an admirably delicate balance in Natalia Ginzburg's work. On the one hand, she notes the courage and “excitement” of the heroic enterprise, for Adriana a need to remember the metonymic words of the songs, or to recuperate what Emmanuele in All Our Yesterdays remembers as the truth and nobility of the words torn from one in moments of “fear and danger,” in the existential baldness of the extreme politics of war. On the other, she moves to affirm the sustaining turns of “ordinary, boring life.” Throughout, there is the elastic toughness within ordinary language that families deploy in their “sayings,” as these sayings or even singings become the rope holding the bucket that Ginzburg dips far down into the well of her past.

What makes Ginzburg's understatement so penetrating is our sense of its connection to a dissident consciousness of the limits of personal and political rhetoric; this is the consciousness of someone who has survived the testing and exposure of tenets in extremities unknown to most of us who grew up in postwar American intellectual communities. Unlike the minimalist habits of contemporary American fiction writers, Ginzburg's convictions were tried in circumstances which were more than psychologically dangerous. And perhaps because of the respect that we accord to sheer brute experience, there is a particular gratitude which the postwar reader owes Ginzburg for her complex, skeptical treatment of heroic themes.

In “Silence,” a 1951 essay, Natalia Ginzburg decried silence as “a mortal illness,” something that “must be faced and judged from a moral standpoint”; nonetheless, as a novelist she silenced the authorial commentator in herself, and took the direct impress of dialogue and enactment as her primary tool in the writing that she referred to as her “vocation.” This is a word whose religious and ethical underpinnings should not be dismissed. “A vocation,” she announces elsewhere in the grand language, or “singing,” which her fiction is usually at pains to undercut, “is man's one true wealth and salvation.”

In her fiction there is a decisive underemphasis on the obvious “issues” and a bundling away of the declamations, however persuasive, that occasionally pepper the essays. War and politics are made to fit the people that wage and practice them, rather than vice versa. The full complexity of family and seignorial, fascist or communist, urban and rural codes that her narratives bear witness to emerges through the glinting or amusing or appalling acts and events she plausibly details. Although the raw data for the games of the sociologist and historian are presented with discreet force, war, politics, religion, issues of any kind are not Ginzburg's first subject: behavior is.

The general causes of that behaviour are not her subject either. Nor is the lengthy interiority of an introspective mind. In an essay about Cesare Pavese, “Portrait of A Friend,” Ginzburg offers a partial explanation of his suicide, saying:

we felt humiliated by the fact that we bored him but we were unable to tell him that we saw only too clearly where his mistake lay—in his refusal to love the daily current of existence which flows on evenly and apparently without secrets.

In the open presentation of the complex fractures and folds of that nervous surface Natalia Ginzburg displays her faith in the strength of its moral energies. By evading the seductions of interior monologue, in her most important stylistic choice, fraught with ethical consequence, she refuses the temptations of the dangerously inward individual perspective for a more collective reality. Part of Ginzburg's reticence seems a wariness about the potentially narcissistic freedoms offered in the “avowedly lyrical and autobiographical” mode that her friend Alberto Moravia saw as the breath of the twentieth century novelist in his 1941 essay, “The Man and the Character.”

In her fiction and out of it, if the true patriarch has died or disappeared, the vision of, or longing for, a matriarch has not supplanted him—and all the siblings appear to be having a damned hard time of it. It might be said that the occlusions of Family Sayings offer a rather dark and bitter range of truth. In both Natalia Ginzburg's fictional and nonfictional worlds, however, considerable ambitions are being enacted. In All Our Yesterdays, the one novel focussed on war, war and the making of war never supersede our interest in human lives. The novel begins before the war and ends after it, with political alliance, armistice, and the noting of any public events deliberately subordinated to the rhythms of individual lives.

Natalia Ginzburg's focus on the collective civilian life, her flea-size perspective, joining Austen's two-inch ivory, Ivy Compton Burnett's tortoise engineer, and Virginia Woolf's mosaic technique in The Years, properly restores the personal, domestic, and familial to the narrative center. In Family Sayings as in other texts, the reining in of principal speakers is resolute, the avoidance of the massive canvas of a Tolstoy or a Balzac bewilderingly complete. And still the role that gender plays in this sizing of ambitions is highly ambiguous; when a Henry James may be accused of the precious or restricted, it is clearly not gender alone which shrinks a canvas. Nor is Natalia Ginzburg's emphasis on the family naive endorsement, or ultimately a focus which results in the complete displacement of “broader” or “larger” ambitions. In Family Sayings it is the family which is privileged in the writer's memory. But the whole weight of the memoir and of Ginzburg's postwar fictionalizing shrewdly forbids any easy idealization of the family and its stabilizing effects on its members. Finally, it is a large, active and incrementally generous world that the smallness of Natalia Ginzburg—insect, tortoise, engineer, or ivory painter—encircles.

Notes

1. Much of what needs to be said on this topic is covered by H. Stuart Hughes in Prisoners of Hope: The Silver Age of The Italian Jews 1924-1974.

2. Natalia Ginzburg, Vita imagginaria, “La condizione femminile.” Translation by Peggy Boyers.

3. In all questions dealing with the original Italian texts, I am deeply grateful to Peggy Boyers and Kate Greenspan for help.

4. It seems perfectly characteristic that Ginzburg's one literary biography, The Manzoni Family, published in 1983 and translated to English in 1989, should have focused not on literary questions, but on the family life of Alessandro Manzoni. Among other things, this chronicle offers lengthy detail on the not always edifying spectacle of the relations between the famous novelist and his children.

5. Rita Levi-Montalcini, In Praise of Imperfection, (New York: 1988), p. 119. This fascinating autobiography discussing Giuseppe Levi's role in the biologist's life as a beloved mentor covers much of the territory of Ginzburg's Family Sayings, without once mentioning her.

6. From Vita immaginaria, “Gli ebrei.” Translation by Peggy Boyers.