SOURCE: Boyers, Peggy. “An Introduction: Natalia Ginzburg in Her Essays.” Salmagundi, no. 96 (fall 1992): 54-84.

[In the following essay, Boyers surveys the diverse subject matter of Ginzburg's essays and praises her nonfiction work as concise, perceptive, and lucid.]

In an autobiographical essay on “Childhood” Natalia Ginzburg wrote of her family the following: “We were ‘nothing’, my brothers had told me; we were ‘mixed’, that is, half Jewish and half Catholic, but in fact neither one thing nor the other: nothing. This being ‘nothing’ in religion seemed to me to pervade our whole way of life: we were neither really rich, nor really poor: excluded from both these worlds, relegated to some neutral, amorphous, indefinable, nameless area.” In her childhood Ginzburg experienced “this being ‘nothing’” as a source of anguish, but in her adult years she valued it more than anything else. The inability to classify herself, her family, or her experience early prepared her for the unfettered, ideologically free approach that was to become her critical trademark.

When Ginzburg looks back on her education she finds most important “the inattention, the incoherence, the absurdity and the absolute absence of any definite or precise ideology.” It is as the product of this haphazard and chaotic education that she flung herself into the task of clarifying for herself and for her readers every issue that came her way: from abortion to old age, from the bringing up of children to the way we mourn our dead. With almost child-like clarity Natalia Ginzburg often appears to be considering her subjects for the first time. Frequently opening with a short declarative observation like, “With women the first thing to grow old is the neck,” she bluntly sets out on a direct course to the heart of the matter—in this case, the plight of Italian women of a certain generation who are losing their looks and who are having to redefine their identities in a world for which they have not been prepared. The issue itself may seem slight or unpromising, but the freshness and candor of Ginzburg's insistent questioning invariably invite our interest.

Ginzburg attributed her concision and clarity of expression to having been the last of five children and having had to make her needs understood quickly before losing the attention of her elders. But there were other reasons. The atmosphere of her childhood home was one of stark, impatient rationality. From what she tells us about her family life, it seems that there was little tolerance for murky thinking or unclear expression of any kind. Her formal education may have been chaotic, but clarity, reason and order presided imperiously over daily life.

In another age her parents would have been known as “free thinkers.” Although her father was Jewish and her mother Catholic by birth, neither obeyed the conventions and practices of their respective religions. All members of the family were aware of a muscular, robustly secular morality that took the place of religion and was every bit as imposing. Natalia's authoritarian father, a scientist of some repute, dictated every aspect of family life out of a set of very definite convictions about what was right or wrong, sensible or stupid. Though his judgments were not made according to any ideological or religious program, they carried the force of enormous conviction and moral fervor. The young Natalia grew up in an atmosphere of stubborn, almost puritanical, nonconformity where much to which she was attracted—pretty dresses, dainty shoes and Christmas trees—was forbidden and ridiculed. She would have liked to attend school like a ‘normal’ child, but even this was denied her. Acutely aware of the danger of contagious diseases, in an era before the development of polio, mumps, diphtheria and rubella vaccines, her father insisted that she receive her elementary education at home. Cold showers, strenuous mountain vacations in unheated cottages and plain, hearty food were part of the regimen her father imposed in severe contradistinction to what most ‘normal’ Italians typically enjoyed. He was staunchly antifascist as well and fearless about openly declaring his views. This refusal to do the expected, to take the comfortable route was early instilled in the young Natalia during her “absurd, incoherent” education. While she remained fuzzy on such things as the “lowest common denominator” and “the highest common multiple” she did come away from childhood with the well-established habit of non-conformity. If the Levi family had no particular religion to define them, their identity was clearly delineated by what they were not and did not do. They were not like anyone else they knew. Nothing soft or frivolous—be it an attitude or an item of clothing—was allowed. No current fashions, rich foods or alcohol entered the house. Stupidity was associated with lack of discipline and unseriousness. Fops and poseurs were not tolerated. While the family never wanted for any of the essentials, there never seems to have been an excess of money around either, and this, too, set Ginzburg's family apart from the privileged class to which they belonged.

The word “nothing,” then, for Natalia Ginzburg has a special meaning and a special function. It both establishes her as a somewhat reluctant outsider and confers on her the authority that position affords. While taking advantage of this outsider position she nonetheless never loses sight of her original reluctance to not be “like everyone else.” The desire to “belong” is never more than a memory in her work, and yet the memory is so alive for her that Ginzburg still feels its power.

Throughout her writings are guilty confessions of childhood longings to be like regular folk. In one essay in which she berates herself for having no ability to understand politics, she harks back to her happy childhood fantasies about the king whom she secretly loved. (How much more pleasant to be a cheery monarchist than a disgruntled Republican like her father!) In another essay she remembers the double shame she felt being the only girl in her class not to wear the obligatory gym shirt with the fascist insignia. These memories are called up not in the tormented, self-hating spirit of St. Augustine, but in the vulnerable voice of someone still working things out. Memories of childhood cast their shadow over the clear light of reason and insinuate themselves in such a way as to obscure, undermine—and enrich—the confident, even didactic tone that frequently characterizes Natalia Ginzburg's essays. The essay, “On Invisible Government,” in which she declares, “There are those who don't understand anything about politics. I am among them,” is nevertheless full of withering observations about the lies routinely found in various Italian single-party newspapers, both during and after election campaigns. She mocks the journalistic practice of disguising defeat with headlines of triumph and declares that were she head of a party newspaper whose party had lost miserably in an election she would announce the loss in bold type. “I think the truth is salutary and helpful in politics as elsewhere,” she adds, almost as an aside. In this case “knowing nothing” allows her to play the ingenue and to speak plainly about dishonest practices which have become politically acceptable.

For someone who knew “nothing of politics” Natalia Ginzburg spent a good part of her career involved in political issues. An elected member of the Camera dei Deputati, the Italian House of Representatives, and a frequent contributor to newspapers, she was hardly politically inactive. But with it all she continued to maintain that of politics she knew “nulla.” Again the word “nothing” is loaded with significance. Although she was persuaded to run for the party of the Independent Left in 1983, she did so on the condition she not be expected to know anything. Nor could she be expected to vote with her comrades on any particular issue. Having come of age in the fascist era, she possessed a political orientation which was inevitably straightforward: one was a socialist and an anti-fascist, one was for individual freedom and against tyranny. Although she realized that the world had become infinitely more complicated in the post-war era, she refused to be very subtle about her position. Subtle she could surely be in exposing the not always obvious tyrannies of ordinary life, but her stance seemed to her obvious. She was made to be a person who bore witness to injustice and dishonesties, large and small.

In the final years of her life much of Ginzburg's attention was focused on Italian adoption laws and their merciless enforcement by legalistic judges. Her involvement with the adoption issue reached fever pitch with the case of Serena Cruz, a Filipino girl whose adoption by a working-class family was suspected to have been illegal and who therefore was taken from her Italian family and reassigned to another. The court case mounted against the original family lacked solid evidence, included flagrant abuses of legal procedures, and violated the human rights of the adoptive parents from start to finish. Moved by the helplessness of the ignorant and ill-counselled victims, Ginzburg set to work. She began her campaign in the newspapers, brought the matter to the Camera and when all else failed wrote a short book documenting the case “because we all have a short memory.” She failed in her efforts to reverse the action of the courts, but she did succeed in mobilizing public sentiment. The Italian adoption laws are now being reexamined, and there is some hope that change will occur. But besides providing a history of the case, a record which Serena Cruz herself may someday consult, Ginzburg's book is an impassioned examination and discussion of the way abstract, legalistic, so-called ‘progressive’ thinking (in this instance the case was initiated, ironically, by a public agency for the protection of minors) can lose sight of important human particulars and lead to cruelty and injustice. When asked why she took to heart the destiny of this girl when there were so many like her who were taken from their parents by institutions, Ginzburg responded that this is not a good way to think about such matters. To do so is “to turn your eyes from reality, to place the particular facts of this case within an anonymous and immense series of analogous facts that fill up the world and in so doing to see absolutely nothing. The power and immensity of the numbers crush and overpower the particulars of one single, solitary misfortune … when a person or a group of persons has suffered a misfortune or an offense before our eyes it is necessary that we become indignant on their behalf, that we preserve and keep alive in our memory that indignation along with the particulars of that misfortune, or of that offense, as though it were indestructible and unique.”

Looking at everything one often sees nothing. So Ginzburg declares. In this sense, her politics may be described as the politics of the particular. When she says she knows nothing of politics she insists, in effect, that she will have nothing of generalities. One case at a time, she finds her way and refuses to be diverted by principles, enlightened or otherwise.

Ginzburg's natural sympathy for the poor and her desire to help the underprivileged once led her to join the Communist Party. A friend she esteemed and trusted persuaded her that she belonged there. But it was not surprising that she quickly let her membership expire. Her approach to problems was necessarily too idiosyncratic to satisfy party expectations. Nevertheless, the party always held some mysterious allure for her, an allure she recognized as an irrational throw-back to a cluster of associations that had nothing to do with her thoughts on any party platform. In an amusing essay called “Two Communists” Ginzburg reflects on the pleasure she derived from having been described once as a Communist by the Communist party newspaper L'Unitá. Her ties to the Communist Party, she admits, are “obscure, subterranean, visceral … Having no basis in reason, they rise from the depths, like affections.” As someone who was frequently criticized by the left for her outspoken non-partisan views on issues like abortion and the women's movement, she no doubt found it comforting to be recognized as a person of ideals. At its most primitive and dreamy the imaginary Communist utopia was not so far from the fairy-tale “Invisible Government” of Ginzburg's childhood. Having written eloquently on the subject of the equality of men and women, she enjoys for a moment identification with the impossible dream of a truly egalitarian society.

One has only to read her essay on abortion to understand how any political party would have had difficulty claiming Ginzburg as a spokesperson. She provides no politically useful slogans on the subject, only dark, not altogether progressive, reflections. While she unequivocally supports what in the U.S. is called “pro-choice,” she arrives at that position by a painful, morally complicated route. According to Ginzburg one cannot escape the fact that abortion involves killing and that this therefore makes it the most terrifying decision a woman can encounter. It is her conviction, however, that in aborting the fetus one is not killing a developed being, but rather “the remote and pale blue-print of a person”; in doing so a woman chooses “to separate herself for good from a single, precise and real possibility of life.” Refusing even to list the familiar enlightened arguments for abortion, Natalia Ginzburg feels that a problem this grave, this private, is really outside the realm of the practical. “Logical reasonings, the light of usual moral considerations, don't apply and are of no help because there are no logical reasons or clarifications where everything is immersed in darkness. It is a choice in which the individual and her destiny face each other in the dark.” Meditation on the subject of abortion inevitably leads the author to basic questions about the meaning of life and death: “It is true that each destiny can be a destiny of pain and if we start to think about this and that and to ask what our destiny will be, we ask ourselves if perhaps it would be right and sensible to never give life and to always choose nullity.” These are somber words which are not designed to help a woman in crisis to make an easy, expedient decision. Confronted, in the early 1970's, with what she felt was a frivolous political campaign to legalize abortion, she seeks to restore moral weight to the problem. When she witnesses a festive group of pro-choice demonstrators displaying macabre placards with such messages as “My belly is my own and I'll do with it what I please,” she confesses to finding the whole scene repulsive. “The truth is,” she reflects, “that life itself is also our own and not a single one of us manages to do whatever she pleases.”

There is a kind of disturbing fatalism in that sentence, a stubborn refusal to allow for a moment's delusion. Yes, abortion should be legal, she believes, “because it is the most private, the most anarchic and the most solitary of all human choices,” but the campaign should be waged as an austere legal matter in the courts. She wants the choice to be the individual's, not the state's. But the individual should not delude herself about the moral clarity of the issue or lean on a support group to help erase ambivalence.

Perhaps what disturbed Ginzburg most about the pro-choice position on abortion is that it offered to many a comfortable, consequence-free solution to carelessness. And special circumstances were no less likely to raise disturbing questions. In fact, for Ginzburg, even in cases of rape or abnormal pregnancy the decision to abort must be troubling, if only because the motives or advantages seem irresistibly compelling. Ginzburg hates comfortable solutions of all sorts and in this essay tries everything in her power to restore discomfort even to the idea of legal, safe abortion. Yes, a woman should be allowed to make the decision for herself, but she should not forget “that in her choice she is choosing for two, even if the other implicated in the choice is mute. It involves lacerating the self, killing a part of the self, tearing from one's own being forever a definite but unknown living possibility; it is a mute dark choice, as mute as the understanding that binds the mother to that hidden form; and the relationship between the mother and that living, unknown, and hidden form is in reality the most clouded, enmeshed, the blackest relationship that can exist in the world; it is the least free of all relationships and it concerns no one else.” When arguing on behalf of Serena Cruz, Ginzburg urges us to consider first the needs and responsibilities of particular individuals. With abortion we are urged again to consider primarily the individual mother—neither the law nor the shrieking sisters of the movement may be permitted to distract us from that focus.

One suspects that Ginzburg's contribution to the discussion moved some thoughtful readers but that in general it was useless to political activists of both camps. Ginzburg ends up opposed both to abortion and to those who would forbid it. As each view cancels out the other politically, she finds herself once again on the side of “nothing.”

One may recognize in Ginzburg's impassioned argument for legal abortion sentiments that come paradoxically closer to those held by defenders of the “Right to Life” movement in our country than to those used by the “Pro-Choicers.” Though she would no doubt prefer a world in which women resisted the option to abort, her commitment to individual choice forces her to write on behalf of legalization. But she insists that women should and must consider their choices on their own without recourse to politically authorized guidelines. Ginzburg's radical individualism requires that women grasp their situation with all its metaphysical and physical implications and choose for themselves. To rely on political answers to private problems is to betray one's responsibility to the self. Since for Ginzburg the self is the only vehicle of truth there is, to betray the self is to betray the truth. If “To thine own self be true” can be said to be the only fundamental advice she offers then it must be understood in this special sense: to be true to the self is to rely on “nothing” to justify one's course, that is, to grasp the essentially opaque nature of the moral realm and to struggle in the dark until a course of action presents itself. This is what Natalia Ginzburg means when she says that the realm wherein the decision to abort or not takes place is a place “where everything is immersed in darkness” and in which “the individual and her destiny face each other in the dark.” For Ginzburg any course which avoids this apprehension of the dark is false. Paradoxically in this case, nothing is not what issues from nothing. On the contrary, it is in the commitment to “nothing,” in this special sense, that Ginzburg finds meaning.

Similarly, when discussing the related subject of “The Feminine Condition” Ginzburg eschews political formulae which tend to generalize situations and render them meaningless. Conceding the obvious right away—“I share all the practical goals of the feminist movement”—she goes on to confess that she “does not love feminism.” What she does not love, she explains, is the “spiritual attitude” which she sees as characterizing the movement. Once again she sweeps past the political into the spiritual realm where what is important is to determine what is true and to reject what is not.

In the first place, Ginzburg detects in the feminists' “spiritual attitude” an element of bad faith in the borrowing of socialist slogans to conduct their campaign as if it were a class struggle. The words “Women of the World Unite” she finds false and misleading because they group women into a single class which, she contends, they are not. “There isn't the faintest resemblance,” she writes, “between the lives of women who are in a state of servitude and women who are members of privileged society.” She regards the use of the adapted socialist slogan by the privileged women of the bourgeoisie as dishonest and counter-productive. “Proletarians of the World Unite,” on the other hand, is a slogan which to Ginzburg makes sense, however misguided some of the hopes associated with it. The words “women of the world unite” seem false and harmful to her because they deflect attention from specific, possibly addressable problems suffered by women in an actual state of servitude. She disapproves of the slogan not only because it is practically unhelpful to women with potentially remediable problems, but because it serves the desires of middle-class and professional women to create an aura of legitimate anger for transparently political purposes. A movement led by members of privileged society which derives its political force from the appropriation of injustice suffered by the disadvantaged is regarded by Ginzburg as having a shabby “spiritual attitude.”

The treatment of women as a social class with uniform complaints engenders other problems with which Ginzburg has difficulty. If women from disparate economic and social groups are asked to unite, that on behalf of which they unite becomes necessarily the one condition they do share, namely that of being women. Thus the state of servitude from which all women must liberate themselves ends up being the condition of womanhood itself. In this way, according to Ginzburg, the feminist movement is based on the false premise that to be a woman is to have been born into a state of humiliation. “The feminine condition, like that of maternity,” writes Ginzburg, “is not in itself a reason for humiliation or for pride because the feminine condition is not in itself anything. It is only essential to recognize and to love it, to recognize and to love both the happiness and the pain, since both happiness and pain are inseparable in the emotions.” By insisting that the feminine condition is “not anything,” Ginzburg continues to resist the categories so seductive to most of her contemporaries.

Ginzburg does not dispute the fact that women have been abused or dominated by men. What she does criticize is the view that this fact defines the relations between the sexes. Just as the feminine condition is not anything, neither are the relations between men and women anything. The conditions of both sexes are riddled with pain and happiness, and to lose sight of this complicated situation is to settle for an unnecessarily “impoverished, lame and reductive view of the world.” Ginzburg finds unlovable, then, a “spiritual attitude” which is, in addition to being false and resentful, sadly narrow. While it may be important to bear in mind that Ginzburg's complaints about feminism were originally directed to a movement still in its early stages of militancy, it is also important to note that they are not altogether irrelevant today, when some in the movement would like us to believe it has outgrown its more infantile delusions.

The themes of falsehood and truth recur in Natalia Ginzburg's work not only in regard to issues of a political or ideological nature where moral questions are typically invoked, but in her responses to literature. When reviewing a book of poems by her friend, Giorgio Bassani, the novelist best known in the U.S. as the author of The Garden of the Finzi Continis, she declares the poems deficient because they exude “satisfaction” and because this comfortable posture seems to her in Bassani's case willed, rather than genuine. She recalls with admiration and nostalgia one of Bassani's earlier books, a novel called L'Airone, and wonders at his decline into a consistently even-tempered and tepid poeticism.

“It is striking to note the distance between L'Airone and the current poems entitled Epitaffio,” Ginzburg writes. “It is striking not so much because L'Airone is beautiful and the poems are not, but because in these poems Bassani has become a different person whose whole temperament has changed, his background and his foundation.” Her objection to the new work is two-fold, both moral and aesthetic. The moral objection has to do with the false voice Bassani has assumed in the new work, with his desire to ingratiate himself with a new sort of public by offering an easy optimism. Even death in these poems is “stripped of its severity and mystery,” mundanely associated instead with a prospect of satisfaction. “In the world of satisfaction,” she continues, “everything is possible, even the taming of death and the rendering tolerable of its company. It is as if [Bassani] had wanted to exile himself from the land of his ancient, serious, Hebraic and tragic idea of death.” Ginzburg's moral objection to what she sees as a false or shallowly optimistic posture informs her rejection of the poems as literature. Bassani's complacency produces tedious and predictable work, Ginzburg argues, because “satisfaction is opaque; it only contents the person who is experiencing it and extends nothing to anyone else, neither shadow nor light.”

If we wonder why Ginzburg should make these points by reviewing a modest book by her old friend with such vehemence and disdain, Ginzburg explains that it is precisely because “I like Giorgio Bassani very much” and claim him as “my friend for many years.” She is “sorry” to be so hard on his poems, but she does so “just the same because it seems to me that in this Italian life of ours we all pass the time smiling at each other, and standing on ceremony and congratulating one another without ever expressing our genuine thoughts.” No guild solidarity for Ginzburg, thank you, and no pretending that friends are those to whom, by definition, criticism does not apply.

Reviewing the work of another friend, she opens with similar bluntness—“I do not like Moravia's latest book”—, and she goes on to write an essay which is both an appreciation of Alberto Moravia and a harsh reprimand for the falseness and bad faith of his late work. Uncomfortable in the role of Grand Inquisitor, however, especially when confronting her friend and mentor, Ginzburg carefully establishes for herself the persona of intimidated acolyte and unworthy friend of the great author. She confides that she has just spent an evening with Moravia during which she tormented herself about whether or not to tell him how little she liked his new work. In the end she is “a villain”: she tells him nothing. “Moravia,” she confesses, “intimidates me.” He intimidates her, we learn, mainly because of his importance to her as a model. As a young girl she secretly read and re-read Gli Indifferenti in the deliberate spirit of an apprentice setting out to absorb the lessons of the master. During the fascist years in Italy the world about her seemed “dead and embalmed … reality appeared veiled, remote and ineffable—like a specter—and to seek it out and touch it seemed a desperate enterprise.” She studied Gli Indifferenti in order “to learn to move in a world that had turned to stone.”

But it is not only as a model that Moravia intimidates the reviewer, but as a person. His “brusque, impatient manner” reduces her to a stammer. She can't help feeling in his presence that he cares little about her opinions, but she realizes, as she writes, that in fact the opposite is true: Moravia cares too much about what others think. But even if his impatient manner is “merely a physical manifestation of his inner nervousness,” Moravia so frightens her that she has never managed to tell him how passionate she is about many of his books or why they have been so important to her. She has not even told him that the reason he intimidates her is that it was from him that she learned to write. In writing her review, it seems she is making up for more than an evening of villainous silence. But lest we think her too courageous, she mentions in passing that she believes Moravia is abroad with a friend. She will break her silence, yes, but only in a whisper while the master is out of ear-shot. But of course she is not whispering her opinions, she is committing them to print in a large circulation newspaper, La Stampa, which everyone knows Moravia will read upon his return. The villainous silence of the recent evening will have been broken and discussion will take place. Meanwhile, while his back is turned, she has work to do. Holding onto the persona of ‘coward’ she proceeds to share with us her “genuine thoughts” about the novel Io e Lui.

Once again her judgement pivots on the moral axis of truth and falsehood. The review is an occasion to examine the way in which Moravia's weakest work is a reflection of the way he has allowed his public persona—a larger than life oracular figure which Natalia Ginzburg finds repugnant and false—to dominate his creative life. His recent book is as contrived and mechanical as the self from which it issues. It comes from the same place as the canned views he regularly spouts in T.V. and magazine interviews. She compares the new book and other similarly contrived works to children's wind-up toys in which the sound of the key turning drowns out any possibility of genuine expression. She hates the recent book and others like it quite as much as she loves the early work, which she passionately defends as the genuine product of an original and fearless imagination. The essay, moving in its struggle to separate the valuable from the dispensable, the authentic voice from the false image, also inevitably calls to mind the adage, “with friends like this who needs enemies.” This adage, of course, would not have pleased Ginzburg, since for her the enemy was the one who would not struggle to express a genuine thought, who would rather silently “smile and smile and be a villain,” than disapprove and risk giving offence.

Another (dubious) beneficiary of Natalia Ginzburg's ardent struggle against duplicity among friends was Giulio Einaudi, founder in the 1930's of the famous Italian publishing house with Cesare Pavese and Natalia Ginzburg's first husband, Leone Ginzburg. When Natalia Ginzburg was widowed during the Nazi Occupation of Italy it was Einaudi who invited her to Torino to work as an editor for the firm. Not only did she work at Einaudi most of her adult life, but most of her books were originally published there. Nevertheless, despite her personal and professional ties to Einaudi, in an essay entitled “Without Fairies or Witches,” she attacks him for publishing an unworthy series of children's books, four introductory volumes of which she has just received and read. The publisher of “the most beautiful book written for children in our time,” Italo Calvino's Italian Fables, should know better. And what is so terrible about the new books? Upon first reading she finds they are more or less acceptable, although she is aware of a growing uneasiness as she completes the last of them. She can't quite place the source of her discomfort until she reads the jacket copy announcing that these books are “stories for children which are simple, without fairies or witches, luminous castles, beautiful princes or mysterious magicians.” Even worse, these books are said to be “for a new generation of individuals without inhibitions or repressions, who are free and conscious of their power.” She objects to the ideologically dogmatic purpose of the series and admits that her original irritation at the stories has now become full-blown detestation. First of all, she finds utterly false the explicit claim to be offering children books which are “illusion-free.” The meliorist imagination which creates stories about wolves who turn out to be friendly if only one feeds them teaches children a lesson which is false both on a practical and on a moral level. “Whoever wrote this,” she asserts, “has thought it best to demystify the idea of the wolf in the eyes of children. But wolves exist. One can feed them as much as one likes, but they still remain wolves and they habitually eat people. But besides actual wolves, there are people who resemble wolves and of these the world is full.”

What upsets Ginzburg is not only that the books offer children bad advice on the handling of wolves, but that this advice is based on the premise that children should be protected from the apprehension of danger in the world, and from the possibility of experiencing fear. “It is a mistake,” she writes, to say “that fear is bad. It is necessary to suffer fear and thus to learn how to bear it.” In an almost zen-like view of life, reminiscent of her advice to women “to love both the happiness and the pain” of being women, she resists the rhetoric of simple optimism. As in her discussion of Bassani's and Moravia's weakness, she finds that inevitably what issues from a false moral base (with Bassani and Moravia the imposition of a contrived self, with Einaudi, the contrivance of a didactic grid) is bad art. Everything in the new children's books is “predictable and predetermined,” whereas a series of books for children should be “adventurous and free as a forest.” Instead, this series is likened to “a wooden scaffold.” The publication of one such book, she imagines, might pass as acceptable, but the prospect of others like it is “asphyxiating.” The series, then, is not only doomed because of its pedagogical goals but because it promises to perpetuate boring books.

But lest she end the review on a purely aesthetic consideration, Natalia Ginzburg returns to the matter of the jacket copy and reflects on the idea that these books are designed for a new generation that is “free and without inhibitions.” She hopes that future generations will indeed be free, but with regard to the rest: “We don't know at all if it is a good thing to grow without inhibitions. Perhaps before long it will be discovered that the inhibitions, which people of today glorify in shedding, the very inhibitions which individuals have struggled to dominate and endure, will turn out to have been the bread and the salt of the spirit.”

A person who spent a great deal of time overcoming her own inhibitions with regard to the honest appraisal of her friends' work was understandably haunted by the idea that perhaps inhibitions are something to be respected after all. With regard to the ethic promoted in the series of children's books, an ethic of indiscriminate, ‘liberated’, self-expression, I believe she felt at least a temperamental aversion. But insofar as “the inhibitions” include a reluctance to tell the awful truth when it is uncomfortable, or cruel, Ginzburg was clearly capable of entertaining more than one idea. As she closes her review of the Einaudi books, she considers that perhaps her policy of public candor will turn out to have been wrong-headed after all and that the immense effort she will have expended toward this end will have been a needless self-indulgence. She refuses, and will refuse, to spare her friends, in spite of her doubts, but she will continue to be troubled by those doubts. Honor bound to respond to Einaudi because “he is an old friend and therefore incapable of doing anything to which I can feel indifferent,” she need not hold accountable the (perhaps more fortunate) editor of the series: As she “does not know him,” he has not earned her response. If this seems to make of criticism a strictly family matter, it is no less the case that the editor of the Einaudi series is implicated in Ginzburg's attack. So too are others who feel themselves and their own customary practices interrogated in Ginzburg's piece. And it may even be that, in her criticism, Ginzburg makes worthy strangers into friends by offering them a blunt and serious response, while others offer only condolence, encouragement or platitude.

Occasionally in her essays Ginzburg writes tellingly about her own experience as the recipient of criticism. In the essay “People To Talk To,” she recounts a typical critical encounter with her eldest son.

I show him what I have written and at once he showers me with insults. The odd thing is that his rude remarks in no way hurt me; in fact, they make me laugh. He laughs as well, but this does not stop his bullying me with savage amusement. His coal-black eyes, his bristly wild black head, glitter with gaiety. I think insulting me is one of the pleasures of his life. Listening to his insults is certainly one of mine.

Though Ginzburg finds it “hard to say what benefit I get from these insults,” she is “revived and restored” by these “savage” encounters, deriving energy from the generous dose of harsh but affectionate honesty. If she loses anything by submitting to these rude upbraidings, anything in the way of self-esteem or conviction, she seems unaware of the loss, and is ever ready to give and to absorb further rebuke.

In the preface to her last collection of plays, Teatro, Ginzburg lovingly remembers the scathing dismissals of her plays which the novelist Elsa Morante could always be counted upon to deliver. Ginzburg recounts how, after reading Ginzburg's first play, Morante invited her out to dinner with the actress Adriana Asti (for whom the play had been written) to let them know “how little she liked the play.” Morante, announcing her intention to “tell you the truth,” found the play “fatuous, silly, sugary, affected and false.” “I heard that sentence, ‘I'll tell you the truth’ many more times during the course of that dinner,” Ginzburg recalls, “pronounced in that shrill Argentine voice at that table, in that restaurant, outside under the arbor in the cool humid late September air.” The occasion of Morante's merciless demolition of that first play remains in Ginzburg's memory as a precious moment of intimacy between friends. Perhaps her friend's recent death accounts for Ginzburg's nostalgic, even romantic evocation of “that table, that restaurant, outside under the arbor in the cool humid late September air”, which renders the whole scene idyllic, despite the context of furious disapproval. But there is more than the elegiac note in Ginzburg's remembrance, and more than nostalgia. “I loved Elsa and everything that came from her seemed good even when it hurt me,” explains Ginzburg. “I always felt there was something in her furies which imparted health and strength … I emerged stunned but neither wounded nor humiliated.” Elsa Morante's rages, Ginzburg asserts, were like those of her own sister: “violent, impetuous and generous. They did not wound, leave sores or draw blood.”

Criticism, then, is a form of generosity and, like generosity's cousin, charity, begins at home. For Ginzburg the atmosphere of intimate abandon necessary for honest exchange seems to exist paradigmatically in the family. One's best friends, those who will “tell you the truth,” are as close as siblings, as one's children, or even one's father.

In an essay on “Criticism” Ginzburg calls for a criticism that is “clear, steady, inexorable and pure” and likens the role of the ideal critic to that of the father, acknowledging that both roles have largely “become extinct.” The critic/father for whom she longs is the familiar patriarch in the Freudian mode, an intransigent and distant authority figure. Ginzburg “thirsts,” in fact, for “an intelligence that is inexorable, clear and haughty, that examines us remotely, from a distance, that watches us from a window above, that doesn't come to mingle with us in the dust of our courtyards.” Not at all concerned that her projection will seem excessively severe, or that the patriarchal language will itself seem a mark of her own submissive fears, Ginzburg flies directly in the face of cautions to which her contemporaries are routinely sensitive. Drawing freely on images and archetypes that powerfully summon a bracing intransigence, Ginzburg creates a framework in which generosity seems rather a more difficult goal than it appears in other writers.

In “What Is Literature,” for example, Sartre describes an “attitude of generosity” which similarly presides over the act of reading, and characterizes reading itself as “a pact of generosity between author and reader.” Ginzburg, by contrast, offers a more extreme view of the reader as critic and the author as gratefully submissive flagellant, while also insisting that an “attitude of generosity” govern the relationship. But for Ginzburg there can be no generosity without a criticism that is harsh, disinterested and uncompromising—without, that is, the kind of resistance and blunt exchange of views that can make for real intimacy and mutual respect. So intense is the ideal exchange between reader and writer that Ginzburg needs the family model to make her point. Readers of the essay on “Criticism” may smile at its use of such an archaic model to embody the idea of a critical process that can be at once harsh and caring, disinterested and somehow personal. And yet it is precisely the archaic intransigence of the model that is the point. Ginzburg misses the simple authoritative structures of family and society despite their obvious shortcomings.

An old-fashioned Freudian father had many faults—as Ginzburg's portrait of her own father in Family Sayings amply demonstrates—but with such a father one at least knew where one stood. If one received a tongue lashing one knew that one had erred, but that one was not despised. And one was free to reject the opinion of the authority figure, as young Natalia Ginzburg frequently did in her private moments. So honest criticism, however devastating its initial impact, needn't have a debilitating effect on an author. If Elsa Morante's harsh dismissal of Ginzburg's first play caused her immediately to question every word she had written, Morante did not persuade her to make substantive changes in the work. Ginzburg read and re-read what she had written and emerged confirmed in her conviction that the play was what she had intended. The idea that criticism must refuse its prerogatives for fear of discouraging imagination is given the lie again and again in Ginzburg's writing, and even where she finds herself chastened by a particularly astute response to her work she is no less grateful for the experience of encounter.

Of course routine criticism sometimes seems not much more than a series of practical, more or less useful, observations. But the real function of criticism—so Ginzburg suggests—is to put one in touch with one's self, with one's true purpose. The ideal father/critic in his consummate disinterestedness is the personification of “an intelligence … that is clear in its knowledge of us and in the way it can reveal what we are to ourselves …” One is provoked by criticism—whether sympathetic or antagonistic—into discovering something true about oneself, about one's work. Similarly, when one is engaged in the act of criticizing the work of another, one discovers the limits of one's tolerance, the curve and tensile strength of one's own sensibility. To be a friend is to subject the other to the full weight and intensity of one's very being, while yielding as well to the answering recalcitrance of a different order of intensity.

“One needs friends mainly in order to become impudent,” says Elias Canetti, and except for the word “mainly” the aphorism speaks for Ginzburg as well. For her the statement neatly describes the dynamic that exists between friends, a dynamic that can be mutually confirming, however critical. Impudence, insofar as it describes a certain willingness to utter an unpleasant observation, unequivocally and without embarrassment, may be said to be Ginzburg's dominant critical mode. Normally a pejorative term, impudence is in Ginzburg a positive quality, and may even be her greatest strength. If it sometimes seems obnoxious—especially to the object of censure—in Ginzburg's hands it is likely at least not to seem an expression of the critic's competitive self-regard. Impudence is shameless truth-telling, and Ginzburg is as likely to tell the blunt truth at her own expense as to engage in a quarrel with a friend. She enjoys shocking us with confessions of her own limitations and often depicts herself in various decidedly unheroic postures. In the memoiristic essay on her psychoanalysis she appears as the dizzy patient who has a hard time distinguishing between Freudian and Jungian psychology and whose mind wanders uncontrollably as her doctor endeavors patiently to instruct her. In a piece on Edvard Munch she confesses she knows little about painting and “rarely looks at pictures or reproductions.” Elsewhere she laments that really she's no good at writing criticism, that she is “only a little” better at this than she is at studying languages or speaking in public (her most detested activities). Perhaps the most appalling confession appears in the double portrait of herself and her second husband, “He and I”, in which she plays the dreamy, disorganized, somewhat lazy cultural primitive, in every way the foil to the energetic, fastidious, scholarly, cultural omnivore. “I don't understand painting or any of the figurative arts and don't care,” she says, openly admitting an inadequacy most self-respecting intellectuals would certainly hide if they felt it.

One may well ask whether in the face of such confessions Ginzburg's determination to have her say on such subjects as art and psychoanalysis seems a function of impudence or of innocence. Were it not for Ginzburg's surprising capacity to illuminate everything she examines—including topics she ostensibly knows little about—her confessions of inadequacy would accomplish very little.

In fact the sometimes brazen philistinism of her remarks is tempered by her interest in the subject of personality, fate and will. Ginzburg confesses inadequacy not to make herself seem small but to get at the way we know ourselves and learn to apportion blame and praise. True, she has no use for music—or so she claims; but, she goes on, “I suffer not loving music.” What starts out sounding like a philistine assertion ends up a wistful reflection on her painful limitations. It seems to Ginzburg that music is a realm of pleasure and stimulation from which she is excluded. And while she is sorry about this, she is nevertheless resigned to the unmusical condition as an aspect of her fate. In the title essay of her collection, Never Must You Ask Me, she muses that perhaps at one time she might have developed the capacity to love music, but “through some tragic mistake,” it escaped her. “Perhaps it was once quite close to me,” she speculates, “just a step away. Perhaps it did not wish to cross that short space which separated us and, without my realizing, escaped.” A curious mixture of defiance and fatalism underlies these confessions. Revealing her weaknesses is for Natalia Ginzburg a sort of stoical exercise in simultaneously confronting and acknowledging her fate. Refusing to accept her fate silently, she exposes it mercilessly to ridicule, while yet resisting the temptation to rob it entirely of its mystery and dignity. Acknowledging the composite self she was fated to be, exposing her irremediable weaknesses, she reflects on limitation generally and on the delusions to which her more sanguine contemporaries are susceptible.

The fundamental fatalism may in part explain Ginzburg's mistrust of politics, her suspicion that political programs designed to ameliorate long-standing social problems are often a salve to conscience rather than an effectual or serious response. Not that Ginzburg demanded of herself an immediately practical or effectual program every time she took on a problem. She often wrote with no hope of rapidly turning things around, and she was quite willing to admire and to learn from others who wrote with no greater prospect of effecting basic changes. Ginzburg's fatalism was part of an attitude to life, an element in her resistance to undue optimism and pretence. It marked her, investing even her more amiable excursions with a degree of sternness and disinfatuation that some of her readers will find hard to take. In this—if in no other way—she reminds us a little of Sigmund Freud, who was similarly impatient with optimistic pieties. Surely she was at one with Freud in believing that analysis of others' work can lead to self-knowledge, and that the writing cure, like the talking cure, can best serve those who resist easy consolation.

Author of over two hundred essays, ten novels, one autobiographical work, one biography, two collections of plays and a half dozen short stories, Ginzburg dealt with her shortcomings rather well. Very early she discovered she was destined to be a writer, and she continued writing to the end. In “My Vocation” she speaks of her calling as a severe task master whom she must serve or be damned. The vocation to write is a difficult one, she admits; nevertheless it is “the most beautiful of all [vocations] because all of life nourishes it … The days and houses of our lives and of the lives of those we help, everything we read and see, think and discuss sate its appetite … It is a vocation which feeds on horrible things as well: it eats the best and the worst of life. Both our bad sentiments and our good ones flow in its blood …”

In “Portrait of a Writer”—a thinly disguised self-portrait written in the form of a parable—Ginzburg is painfully harsh about her own development. It is one of the very few places in which she writes in the third person, and the writer she portrays is a man. Nevertheless, it is perhaps the single most self-revealing thing she ever wrote. The essay follows the progress of a young man guiltily indulging his habit—writing—instead of doing what he was ‘supposed’ to be doing: becoming educated and cultivated. The writer goes through stages of denying his gift and then of discovering what a modest gift it is after all. And indeed, Ginzburg speaks elsewhere of her disappointment in her own novelistic limitations, for example her inability to produce large, densely textured, architecturally vast, complicated works along the lines of the nineteenth century Russian novels she so much admired. Her fiction, by contrast, is terse, starkly understated and, with the exception of All Our Yesterdays, short. In her essay she associates the incapacity for the larger forms with stinginess and dishonesty. The writer in her essay has an imagination which was “neither adventurous nor generous. It was dry, meagre and thin. He thought of it as a slender, delicate, precious gift, and felt that he was coaxing a few sad, languid flowers from a dry soil. Whereas he would have liked an enormous landscape of fields and words. This way he felt poor. He felt he had to use what he had parsimoniously … His meanness was not merely parsimony, it was real avarice. He thought of a few things and put them down swiftly and dryly. As he wanted to love what he wrote he called his avarice sobriety.”

In a less self-lacerating mood Ginzburg names Chekhov as a model for great writing on a less than grand scale. But in Ginzburg's parable the writer of “dry, meagre thin work” alternates between feeling he has nothing left to offer and suspecting that all along he “was not really made to invent but to record the things that happened to others or to himself, things that had really taken place.” The writer is ambivalent about his future and his past: He does not know “whether to weep for his imagination or [assuming there had ever been something vital to lose] to celebrate the loss as a liberation.”

Written in 1970 when Ginzburg was fifty-four, seven years after the triumphant publication of Family Sayings, her best selling novelistic memoir of her childhood and early adulthood, the grim literary parable is somewhat surprising. In Family Sayings, Ginzburg had broken out of her tight impersonal mode, the spare style she by turns despised in herself and admired in others like Ivy Compton Burnett and Emily Dickinson. Where early she thought to disguise her ‘banal’ Torinese origins and experiences, in 1963 she used Piedmontese dialect, the Torinese community of local characters and families and her memories of oft-repeated family tales to create what she calls a “Family Lexicon,” a book that really defies generic classification, but is probably best described as an autobiographical collage. But the critical and popular success of Family Sayings did not stimulate Ginzburg to take on other comparably ambitious projects. Like the writer in her parable, she knew not how best to make use of her powers, and for a while clearly doubted her capacity to invent. In the years following publication of Family Sayings, Ginzburg's writing slowed down considerably. Her fiction came to a stand-still and she even wrote fewer essays. In 1964—the year her father died—her only publication was the introduction to a new edition of her first stories. In 1965 she did write her first play and in 1968 came out with two others. But she worried over what she regarded as a decline both in scope and intensity. When her second husband, Gabriele Baldini, died suddenly in 1969, she seems to have decided to deal with her grief by turning outward, and wrote for the newspaper La Stampa thirty-three essays in two years. Among these are sombre meditations on death and on the frightful state of the world. The essays also include amusing anecdotal material and a straightforward, plain-spoken cultural criticism. None of this activity, apparently, was sufficient to dispel the sense of loss and diminishment under which Ginzburg labored.

Inevitably the writer in her “Portrait” begins to doubt the point of writing at all. He fears he is the only one who cares about his work, and “at times he is overwhelmed by the thought that he may be writing merely to decipher himself.” What had earlier seemed a promising relationship between self-discovery and a knowledge of others in the world no longer seemed likely. Faced with what looked more and more like the drying up of creative energies, Ginzburg was forced to consider what she might make of a diminished capacity. By 1970 she was trying out the idea that henceforward the kind of writing she would be doing would be journalistic and autobiographical. If she could not invent she could at least try to think through the implications of the work she had come to.

The final paragraphs of Ginzburg's “Portrait” re-examine the difference between “invention” and “truth-telling” and also attempt to trace the source of the predicament in which she then found herself. Truth-telling, the writer in the parable concludes, is not without its disadvantages: the memories called up by his exertions cause suffering both in himself and in others whom he loves. “Compared to truth-telling,” Ginzburg writes, “invention seems to him like playing with a basket of kittens, whereas truth-telling is like being involved with tigers.” Sometimes he tells himself that whatever a writer does in the service of his writing is legitimate. He may even “free the tigers and take them for a stroll”—that is, court danger even at the risk of others—if he is so inclined. But on further reflection the writer decides that in fact writers do not have any special rights, and he is thereby faced with a dilemma: He wants on the one hand to write the truth and on the other hand to avoid giving pain to himself or to others. The writer in the parable would rather not be “a shepherd of tigers” but sees no way out of his dilemma.

This sort of double-bind thinking is intolerable to Ginzburg. She hates it in herself and in her “writer.” Specifically she deplores the writer's persistent efforts to legitimize an activity which needs no legitimation, which will inevitably proceed from various motives and produce unforeseeable consequences. The stark dichotomy to which the writer is drawn—between truth-telling and invention—is itself misleading and dangerous, suggesting as it does that writing is either intentional or free, that the writer of essays does something utterly distinct from what is done by the inventor. By the end of her “Portrait,” Ginzburg's writer wishes truth might give him what he never received from his own meagre invention, namely, abundance and clarity, but realizes that this is impossible: “As soon as he tries to tell the truth he loses himself in gazing at its violence and immensity.” Moved increasingly to note the unreliability of the opposed categories, Ginzburg's writer concludes—with Ginzburg's obvious approval—that

he has done nothing but pile error upon error. How stupid he has been. He also asked himself a great number of stupid questions. He wondered whether writing was a duty or a pleasure to him. Stupid. It was neither. In the best moments for him it was, and is, like living on this earth.

That final note belongs unmistakably to Ginzburg, for whom, as she says, writing is neither duty nor pleasure, but like life itself: nothing. Impatient with insistent attempts to resolve the unresolvable, Ginzburg regards questions about the relation, say, between duty and pleasure as unproductive and exasperating because they cannot be settled or usefully addressed. Finally the questions themselves seem “stupid.” Determined to put a stop to her own compulsive self-examination and to control her anxiety over being unable to write fiction, Ginzburg drives herself toward an acceptance of her fate. She is—she must be—the person she knows herself to be, alternately resolute and ambivalent, committed at once to truth-telling and to the palpable reality of her own errors and misdirections. And yet, whatever the decisiveness of her resolve to live with herself and to banish “stupid questions,” Ginzburg cannot be at peace with her resolve. The “nothing” to which Ginzburg had so often turned for definition and identity did not invariably satisfy her unquiet intelligence. Having mocked her ‘writer’ into oblivion for wanting reasons for this and that, she is left in the rather unhappy position of asserting once again that nothing is all.

The formulation of a philosophy of negativity without nihilism was the great challenge of Ginzburg's career. She made no attempt to come to a systematic formulation as such, but throughout her writing there is a consistent attempt to face nothingness and to wrest from it some sort of meaning. Negativity, nay-saying, the stark refusal of optimism, however earnestly exercised, are nevertheless relentlessly in the service of working out the implications of a moral vision based on something: an intuition of the good. And behind that shadowy intuition is an even more shadowy and tenuous belief in God and in divine providence. But so strong is the abhorrence of ideology and of all static systems of belief that Ginzburg's overriding concern is to resist the comfortable appropriation of a ready-made ethics and to insist that the moral life is a difficult, improvisatory, highly individualized matter. As a way of explaining, or at least acknowledging this difficult idea, “Nothing” seemed to Ginzburg anything but an empty or contentious concept. In fact, it was unthinkable without some rather precise relation to ideas of Fate and God. Ginzburg knew very well that such ideas have typically led others toward a more positive view of the world than the view rendered in her writings, and she did not need to be told that her vision of contemporary society in essay after essay and throughout her plays and novels was unrelentingly grim. And yet the project of her life seemed to her—as it seems to us—to have been to assert moral values that might actually redeem humanity through inquiry, honest criticism and encounter. To understand that project was her goal as surely as it must seem the goal of those who are attracted to Ginzburg without always quite knowing why.

Ginzburg's ideas about Fate, God and nothingness are suggestively anticipated in an epigraph by Simone Weil appended to Ginzburg's essay “On Believing and Not Believing in God.” Weil writes: The God which we must love is absent. Though we cannot know exactly what Simone Weil had in mind when she wrote those words, it seems safe to say at least that they are grounded in an Eastern idea of divine nullity. Weil's was a confident though complex faith which could accommodate idiosyncratic expression and ambiguity. Since she firmly and publicly considered herself a Christian, she could allow herself to dwell in paradox and still emerge with her faith unscathed. For Weil the fact that God is absent is one of the ways in which he afflicts us and a means by which he further binds us to him in dutiful worship. To love an absent God for Weil is the most perfect love there is, perfect because it is pure—that is, without motive or self-interest. Ginzburg, on the other hand, comes to Weil's words as a person whose faith in God is insecure, only a step away from atheism, and who is in addition impatient with all thought of perfection. God, for Ginzburg as for Weil, is absent, yet in Ginzburg we acknowledge him only as an intuition of transcendent good, as the force which makes possible the sentiment of value or ‘love’ in our lives, and which is responsible for our destinies.

For one so committed to resisting easy explanations for significance and causation Ginzburg was nevertheless tremendously drawn to the idea of God, to the possibility of a guarantor of ultimate meaning, even to the promise of an afterlife. A 1991 account of the significant facts of her life which Ginzburg wrote in the third person for a biographical encyclopedia includes the following lines, scrawled in pen at the bottom of the final page:

She lives alone with her daughter, Suzanna, who has been seriously ill since her first months of life. Her daughter's illness prevents her from thinking calmly about death. She still has faith in providence and in the affections of her other children, and in guardian angels. She believes in God, albeit in a chaotic, tormented and discontinuous manner.

These lines, added on, it seems, at the last minute, sharpen the brief account of her life and make it clearly personal, despite its third person presentation. Written during her last year of life, the last two sentences present an extremely concise distillation of her religious views. Her final written statement on the subject of God is more certain than anything written earlier, but still lacks the comfortable security of a genuine faith.

Although most of Ginzburg's work—both the essays and the fiction—is written in the first person, it is usually in the third person, with the mask of invented personae, that Ginzburg is paradoxically most personal and direct about her convictions and beliefs. The essay “On Believing and Not Believing in God”—which struggles to define a position by describing the views of two invented characters, the Believer and the Non-Believer—reveals much about her own doubts and beliefs.

Like all bi-polar paradigms which attempt to explain human behavior, the two opposing types of Believer and Non-Believer do not, unfortunately, encompass the possibilities for explaining, or even identifying, the many religious or spiritual affiliations to which human beings have sworn allegiance. Nevertheless, Ginzburg's paradigm undermines its own initial intention of dividing the world into simple polarities and offers an inveterately non-conformist view of faith. Not surprisingly, Ginzburg's ostensible opposing types end up very much resembling each other.

Many of us who regard most things otherworldly with a happy indifference will expect to recognize ourselves in Ginzburg's description of the rational non-believer. We may even admit to sharing the assumption that “non-belief means courage, manliness and strength.” But when Ginzburg adds that the Non-Believer regards belief as “stupid, ridiculous, cowardly and the sign of a state of inferiority” we may begin to feel uncomfortable placing ourselves among the enlightened. We may wish, rather, to be included among the Believers, whose belief is anyway so embattled and uncomfortable it hardly counts at all.

That we should be drawn to identify with both groups is possible because belief in God is only one factor among many which make up the attitude, the stance toward life, which according to Ginzburg distinguishes the Believer from the Non-Believer. The Non-Believer differs from the Believer not only in his lack of faith but in his intolerance toward Believers and his feeling of confident superiority. Ginzburg's Believer's faith is “so doubting, so wavering, so ready to be snuffed out altogether that it is not in the least consoling and does very little to throw light on things.” Ginzburg's Believer is not only insecure in his belief but committed to his insecurity as an important condition of belief. Not for him the comfort and triumphant satisfaction derived from “marching together like an army in a particular direction drawing pride and strength from the fact of being united and numerous.” In fact, Ginzburg adds rather playfully, this sort of confident and victorious religion is not the sort of thing likely to appeal to God, who can't possibly “want to be loved in the way an army loves victory.” Her extreme stoicism allows her neither the luxury of a comfortable faith nor a community of Believers from which to derive strength. If one must believe in God because “the world without God would seem terrible” one is at the same time not entitled to any real assurance that one's belief is well-founded. “The Believer's belief is so incredulous,” she writes, “that it is very much like not believing.”

If there is hardly a difference between believing and not believing, can it be very important whether one believes or not? Ginzburg anticipates our challenge with a typically slippery response. Although the differences are slight, she insists they are “essential,” and in this she sees another “proof” of how “essential is everything to do with God.” The logic of this formulation, while appearing circular and tautological to those of us accustomed to operating in the happy daylight of Enlightened Reason, is revealing of Ginzburg's dark vision. That the difference between believing and not believing is essential seems to her too obvious to bother examining. The difference accounts for two totally divergent ways of being-in-the-world, the one straightforwardly empirical and devoid of any idea of the sacred or of mystery, the other shrouded in uncertainty and doubt, but rich in spiritual depth. That this difference should exist even when faith is weak and vulnerable seems in itself wondrous to her and “proof” that God exists.

God, for Ginzburg, is also associated with that which is marvelous in the world, most of all the experience of wondrous moments of consciousness, what T. S. Eliot called “epiphanies.” When Ginzburg's Believer attempts to define God, the closest he can come is to describe certain epiphanic moments which for him confirm the existence of the spiritual, if not the absolute existence of God. The Believer is “sad, incredulous and lonely,” and even “lacks words with which to speak to God.” The words which are commonly used “sound false to him,” as do “abstract concepts and generic ideas” like the idea of God as a father, a friend or a brother. As always, Ginzburg is most comfortable in the realm of the particular, and so when her Believer thinks concretely about real people—his brothers, sisters, children—either alive or dead, and of his love for them, remembering particular times and places shared with them, he experiences a sensation akin to a religious experience. These memories fill him with “burning tears and … a strange happiness, then for a moment he feels, trembling and fluttering, something that vanishes at once which, perhaps, was God.” At one point she speculates that this happiness that we feel when remembering those who have passed away is a sign that “we shall have that happiness again in another place; that if our life is now dust and ashes it doesn't matter,” because there is perhaps a place “where all that has been taken from us will be ours again.”

Ginzburg is alert to the possibility that her occasional fantasies and optimistic conjectures may seem quaint or amusing, and she is frequently ill at ease with the high tone of sustained philosophical enquiry. Often she is apt to undercut her own earnest metaphysical speculations, to retreat to rather more mundane concerns: what to do in Paradise to escape boredom; how to retain a lively interest in the things of this world while dwelling on ultimate matters; how to avoid boring oneself to death while reaching for the consolations of wisdom. Ginzburg was ever willing to give herself to such thoughts in the hope that they would occasionally yield fresh insight. She saw what might have seemed trivial or silly in her preoccupations, but she was confident that in the end the impulse to speak truthfully would bring her face to face with what was essential in her experience. If most people did not expend themselves on the vicissitudes of belief or on fantasies of the afterlife, that did not mean that her reflections on such matters would not help them to think more honestly about their own quandaries.

Ginzburg's fear of boredom is one of those apparently silly preoccupations not often engaged by sensible essayists, however much the subject may once have seemed irresistible to poets like Baudelaire and John Berryman, or to Chekhov. But Ginzburg makes of the spectre a thoroughly haunting and painfully proximate theme. In fact, throughout Ginzburg's work acquiescence in the boring is viewed as a failure tantamount to moral weakness, and she probed the corners of her subject with a relentlessness that could seem strange and oppressive. In a review of the movie Dillinger is Dead she declares angrily, “After ten minutes I realized that I was bored to death … The film is and seeks to be nothing more than this: a day in the life of a man who kills his wife out of boredom.” What Ginzburg misses in the film is the effort to make the audience feel anything toward the characters, either sympathy or disapproval. “The dreariness of living,” she continues, “cannot be expressed unless life is loved and regarded with passion and surprise. Whereas boredom in life gives birth to further boredom, and its motionless, glassy fruit is like neither life nor death.” In art, that which is boring, which does not reveal anything about human experience, is an affront to interest and to hope; in life, the ever-present sensation of boredom is an intimation of death.

If boredom is death's harbinger, its antidote, engaged activity—in Ginzburg's case, writing—is what gives life meaning. Talk, writing, the constant negation of silence and boredom—this was her project. And yet, however much of a virulent boredom-hater she was, one has the sense that Ginzburg herself gave into boredom rather more than less in her life, and that she was not happy about this inclination. The chattering persona of her plays, the almost compulsive expression of her “genuine thoughts” in essay after essay, all may be said to have been driven from a desperate desire to combat her own inclination to be bored. In a 1970 essay on “The Collective Life” she confesses: “To tell the truth, the time in which we live inspires me with nothing but hatred and boredom.” Trying to put her finger on the origin of this feeling, to locate when and how it came to be that she was no longer amused or intrigued by the very things which used to amuse and intrigue her, she offers the following explanation:

If I had to translate what happened to me into an image I'd say that I now have the sensation that suddenly the world became covered with mushrooms and that these mushrooms are not at all interesting to me.

At some point Ginzburg seems to have experienced a kind of Fall. Obviously, the war and the unimaginable suffering caused by it were traumatic for her as for everyone who lived through those years. But whatever the war meant to her, it certainly was not boring. Neither was its aftermath. With all the work to be done both in the resistance during the war and in the period of recovery afterwards there was no time for boredom. But once the at least superficial recovery had been made and Italy was back on its feet Ginzburg seems to have experienced severe disenchantment with practically everything around her. Her novels and plays describe the dissolution of family life, the erosion of relationships among friends, husbands, wives, children and parents. Her essays pick up where the fiction leaves off, discussing the literature of her peers, the attitudes and mores of her contemporaries and of generations younger than her own. And through it all the concern with boredom is ever-present, not always obvious, but irresistible.

Now boredom, along with negativity and nothingness, are hardly unfamiliar concerns for intellectuals and artists of Natalia Ginzburg's generation. But these ideas have an entirely different meaning for her than they do for writers like Thomas Bernhard or Sartre. While their boredom stems from disgust and hatred directed at an unworthy world, Ginzburg's is only the disappointed aftermath of a species of unrequited love. It's as if she loved too much a world unable to respond in kind. Even in childhood nothing could measure up to the richness of Ginzburg's fantasies and passions. But instead of blaming the world for its drabness and insufficiency she typically takes the blame herself. It is not surprising to us that, in an essay on a visit to Amherst, Massachusetts, she is moved by Emily Dickinson's unanswered “Letter to the World,” although Ginzburg herself is surprised. After visiting Amherst and being rather unimpressed by its sleepy beauty, she allows herself to feel impatient and even a trifle angry at the poet who acquiesced in such pinched circumstances. The sight of Dickinson's stiff white dress in the museum cupboard inspires her with mild revulsion. The sprawling manicured lawns and the prim white churches repel her. Even Amherst's mosquitoes seem of a distinctly loathesome, silent variety, stinging one without warning. The whole place is aggressively boring. But when she reads the poetry upon her return to Italy Ginzburg is overcome with sympathy for the American poet. Dickinson's “Letter to the World” speaks to her in an unexpected way. While Ginzburg cannot be said to have experienced anything like the kind of solitude and loneliness of an Emily Dickinson, she did feel isolated much of the time in her views, and Dickinson's poignant acceptance of her situation suddenly seems not far from the stoical acceptance Ginzburg espouses in essay after essay. Dickinson was a kind of heroine in the face of what to others would have been an unspeakable sameness and boredom, always looking, thinking, recording, making a hard, durable art out of thin, unpromising materials. Ginzburg's essay on Dickinson is not, alas, the complete reflection one would want from one artist on the work of another, but it vividly and concisely reveals much about both writers.

Ginzburg is moved by Dickinson because her career was testimony to a triumph—in small, steady increments—of art over life, of creativity over boredom. That the sensibility of the work itself was akin to her own also contributed to the final positive valuation of the poems. Boredom, the symptom of capitulation to nothingness, is the constant threat, ever to be combatted with words: with analysis, argument, discrimination, and the tireless assignment of meaning to one's own activity and the activity of others. It is as if Ginzburg early intuited the possibility of Nothingness as a permanent aspect of the human condition, understood as well its corrosive effect on the self, and made a decision to keep it under control. Her insistence on a positive valuation of the word “nothing” throughout her work is perhaps the strongest weapon she used to resist its insidious power, refusing to allow it its familiar nihilistic subversions. Niente, which derives from the participial form of the Latin “nasci,” meaning “to be born”, has at its root not death but birth. The essential irony of this derivation, which makes of the word a pregnant sign of a fateful but nonetheless promising condition, was not lost on Ginzburg; indeed, it was her constant awareness of this irony which was the basis and stimulus of her always troubled but purposeful vocation.