[In the following essay, Wilde-Menozzi discusses the defining characteristics of Ginzburg's work.]

An actress offered me the tapes of a two-hour interview with Natalia Ginzburg made in April 1991 six months before her death at age seventy-five. The brown, magnetic scrolls unwound a much-mourned presence: Natalia Ginzburg's voice. Robust, weathered and warm, her laughter revealed wisdom. I think I could also hear (perhaps because so many people had mentioned it to me) signs of Ginzburg's mask: pain that had not been given in to.

Apparent in the crunchy bits of verisimilitude is Natalia Ginzburg's fascination: complexity, although she was characterized as simple; disarming openness, while labeled shy; “officially” lazy, although her production belies this. Both Catholic and Jew, a nonideologue who followed her instincts, an independent who was an elected communist MP, a declared nonfeminist although her subject was family, maternity, the dispossessed. A cat lover who perpetually chose practical shoes and blue suits is a quick snapshot: she had the emotional depth and strength of ego to live beyond fixed moral schemes. Tolerant but decided, she said:

Family is a necessity. It can be repressive, obsessive, but in some way it is the necessary pedestal for becoming an adult. No substitute exists for it. Nothing can take its place. You can try to make relationships better, closer, freer, but not substitute the family. No substitute exists. This isn't a political thing. …

I had my children young. Maternity is beautiful, happy, traumatizing … strange. I felt unprepared. It was beautiful, but filled me with fears. Maternity is a theme in my work. It can be out of hand, too much love, too much fear—fear of losing something—losing the child, losing self. The makeup of some young mothers is complicated; they can only get away from their maternity. …

Women writing and a sense of guilt is an old topic. You don't lose the capacity to write if you have it. The material formulates and concentrates inside. I realize I would go six or seven years without writing. It was a pattern. Then I would feel the desire—vague, confused. It seemed all bridges had been broken, and then it came back. It returned, at least when I was young. Now that I'm old I don't know if it will come back. …

I responded to a journalist who asked why I never wrote plays. I said that I detested writing dialogue. Then to verify if what I had said was true, I tried writing a comedy. It wasn't true. I Married You for Happiness was the result. The play worked out. It wasn't hard for me. Laurence Olivier performed my work in London; Natalie Baye in Paris. …

I don't write description. I don't know how. You must do what you know how to do. You must write what you know. I often use monologue. Listening to some of my characters, so out of touch, so lacking in understanding, listening to them talk, their talking attracts and repels me. I feel pity for them, at least I mean to convey that. …

I'm translating Maupassant, a novel, Une Vie, about a woman. For me his use of the third person is sublime. It's sublime the way he describes peasants and nobles and the countryside. I've never been able to use the third person. Elsa Morante was also sublime in using it. She was my friend. …

In recent years, I've seen many small, subtle voices in manuscripts. Sometimes I'm able to recommend them. They are beautiful, and you know that they are only for a few people. Many books are destined for three thousand people or fewer. You know it's not because the books are not good but because only a small number of people will understand them. Best seller. It's a horrible term. …

My father was Jewish. My husband Leone was Jewish. He was imprisoned as an antifascist and not as a Jew. He died in prison in 1943. The world changed color after the war. What was done cut the world into before and after. But what Israel is doing to the Palestinians is not right. Violence is born from violence. War from war. We must stop killing our neighbor.

When Natalia Ginzburg died in Rome on 9 October 1991, the age of ideology, so central to Italy's postwar formation, was coming to an end. In the front-page stories in La Stampa, La Repubblica, Il Corriere della Sera, Ginzburg's lasting importance in this era shone: she never forgot the importance of the individual.

Ginzburg died at home, in the night, surrounded by her children: Carlo, Andrea, and Alessandra. By early morning, friends—intellectuals and artists, many caught unaware and stricken with grief—reached her apartment. The fragile woman was laid out on her bed wearing a dress with tiny flowers. According to the Corriere, her face “had the severe, almost irate expression that it had assumed in recent years.” By midday, inside the house Giulio Einaudi, Rosetta Loy, Vittorio Foa, Antonio Giolitti, an aristocratic intelligentsia, mingled. The name of Susanna, a fourth child, appeared in print. She was born from Ginzburg's union to Gabriele Baldini, her second husband. “Crying desperately was the aging governess who for many years has lived with the writer and her severely handicapped daughter, Susanna,” the Corriere reported. Ginzburg also had an affiliation with a fifth child, a Palestinian, Rasha Taher. The house filled with people bound to the coffee-drinking writer who “wrote lazily curled on a couch”; the parliamentarian, “who seldom spoke except when her sense of justice had been offended”; the supportive editor; the inestimable friend who “loved good food and had a clear sense of money”; the twice-widowed wife and mother. She worked on Maupassant until two days before she died. She telephoned her publisher to announce the last page was finished. The people circulating in her large Roman apartment wept for a human figure we readers will never know.

Literary comments and eulogies poured out on the ninth of October and the following day. The pictures, in which she was young, rooted in a now nonexistent Italy: a barely industrialized country struggling with fascism, monarchy, then reconstruction, communism, and shaping a society whose constitution begins: “The Italian Republic is founded on work.” As a historical premise of state, hewn from the distant poles of Catholic and communist ideas, it assumed and aspired to a society far different from that which guaranteed an individual's right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Czeslaw Milosz's statement that a man's death is a nation dying flashed.

The front-page story on the tenth that she was to be buried in a Catholic cemetery following a Catholic service stimulated several features about the experience of Jews raised in mixed marriages. Natalia Ginzburg's mother was Catholic. Ginzburg converted in her second marriage. Nevertheless, she wrote: “I am a Jew. … I'm a Jew only on my father's side, but I've always thought that my Jewish half must be given more weight and remain more troubling than my other half.” Her children decided that her religiosity belonged to the Catholic half. She was buried the following day. Her books, then, became more direct paths to the person who left them behind.

When I was in Rotterdam for a poetry festival, a woman pulled a paperback from her purse and said out of the blue—“Natalia Ginzburg, I'm reading her in Hebrew.” In Turin, a taxicab driver mentioned that he often read Cesare Pavese. He pointed out the hotel where Pavese killed himself. He liked Pavese. He didn't like Ginzburg. “All she ever wrote about was the family,” he said. Her work, from the beginning, strongly polarized readers. At home, my husband waved a sports page listing the few books that existed in the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Village library. Natalia Ginzburg, “one of the most widely read women authors,” was among those chosen. A game I used to play with my mother, on long journeys to the lake, came to mind. She insisted then, once you begin looking out for something—green Packards, blue Studebakers—suddenly you see them everywhere.

A picture of Ginzburg as a young woman, perhaps even the young woman living in confinement in Abruzzo with her husband Leone and their three children, is on the front and back of the first volume of her collected works (Mondadori). Inside are seven novels, some short stories, plays, and two of her most famous books, Le piccole virtu and Lessico famigliare. The second volume—where a photograph of her as a white-haired woman is the imprimatur—contains more novels, some unpublished work, and three collections of personal essays that Cesare Garboli celebrated for their “coherence and visceral ordering, for their unconscious breaking of codes.” The dedication in the latter volume is a strong capsule by Sandro Penna. It focuses Ginzburg's stoicism above choice: the lyrical reality of change.

But you remain on the road
unknown and infinite.
Don't ask your life
to remain, by now, as it is.

As I waited in a room of the Ducal palace in Parma for the librarian to bring the books to me, I noticed Latin lexicons and texts on regional Apennine dialects predating the American Revolutionary War sat on all the shelves. Language inside those repositories brimmed with vanished culture. Especially the dialects—tribal senses when common people lived and died in their villages—carried life inheritances known only to their members. More often than not, oral language was transcribed.

Ginzburg's most famous book, Lessico famigliare (Family Sayings), was built from that idea: oral language whose use was only completely understood within a group. The tribe in point was family. The words, loaded with judgments and values, drew unsurpassable borders. Once recalled they were as powerful a trigger as Proust's madeleine. Context was connotation: her father's offensive term, a negritude, for example. Flung in choleric bouts of parental shouting, it meant “wearing town shoes in the mountains, getting into conversations with strangers, taking off one's shoes in the sitting room.” Applied to others, especially her father's friends, it grew sharper and referred to those who failed to become antifascist. Called out in the dark, the dark extending to prison camps, thinning to inevitable distances as the family grew up, separated, and became old, the words and terms survived to define an origin, signal a bond snared and articulated in unreachable space: memories unraveling in time. When Ginzburg published the book, she both broke and immortalized the secret family code.

Natalia Ginzburg's writing can be divided, in many ways, into before and after Lessico famigliare, published in 1963. Certainly the Strega Prize transformed an affectionate space that she had been assigned as Leone Ginzburg's widow into a legitimate national respect for her as a writer. Perhaps more important, it removed an enormous block in Ginzburg herself toward her own authority as a writer. In Lessico she passed over into autobiography and a voice that was far more incisive and defined. She moved further away from the neorealism of Cesare Pavese and the detached objectivity of Alberto Moravia's antiheroes. She expressed more clearly her subtlety, analytical gifts, and even her humorous connections with life. The novels that follow, Dear Michael (1973), Family (1977), The City and the House (1984), as well as her plays (1966), successfully take up characters who live in bourgeois settings, closer to her own life. The writing she began to publish in newspapers is largely personal—memoirs, ethical and political opinions that generated enormous respect. A scientist I know said to me: “I loved the dolcezza, the sweetness, of her articles.” By sweetness, he meant her honest, often sad feeling: “We observe change, with our same unchanged eyes.”

She published a brilliant piece of microhistory: The Manzoni Family in 1983. Like many of her discoveries, it originated from empathy. Her eye had been drawn to “the gaps, the absences, the obscure areas.” The book—constructed from letters among Manzoni's family members during the course of Alessandro Manzoni's life (he survived six of his children, both of his wives)—set down dynamics that rarely included fewer than eleven members. A literary figure as important as Dante to Italians, Manzoni emerged as nothing more than a human being. Many were his failures, but probably the most painful to modern eyes concerned his youngest daughter, whom he neglected to see in the last four years of her life, as she begged for a visit. The letters are arranged by bare linking, usually chronological comments, freed from judgments. This stark paring was one of Ginzburg's hallmarks. Her reticence gives a sheen of dignity and mystery to each individual. The book ruffled many Italian critics who hold vested interests in “official” intellectualized versions of lives. The book's simple realism was called pettegolezzo, gossip or small talk. Ginzburg quite often touched deep establishment nerves. In this case she exposed patriarchy and the false beauty of abstractions like genius and art. But more than rebellion, Ginzburg's iconoclasm consisted in showing that everyone in Manzoni's family had an identity and point of view. She showed sympathy for Manzoni, recognizing as she did in herself, the “devastated theatre” of people's inner lives. Her path was original and hard to categorize.

Although women writing today have far more examples to look at, the tautologies in the topic of women writing as women writers or as writers are still real. Ginzburg resisted being categorized as a woman writer, but her passion to speak and perforate inner fantasy “where there is no space for the rich luxury of fact” originated in her experience as an outsider. In her somber childhood, where as a girl and a Jew in a family in which science, political opinion, and physical danger took precedence over art and feeling, her impulse to express herself became a painful, solitary, lifetime task. Her transcriptions of self are de facto descriptions of a woman's experience, starting from her denial itself.

Ginzburg's most original transcription of women's experience in both her fiction and nonfiction lies in a voice Eugenio Montale described as “recognizable even unsigned.” In an interesting, not completely paternalistic comment, he called her language “actually below the average level of our standard of conversation. It's a knowledgeable speech that stays close to the ground, gaining in immediacy what it would lose if it were invested in material with more dimensions. …” While below is highly contestable—whatever it was—it was an articulation that startles. Whether this is because in a traditional literary world so few women have written in their own voices is hard to know. Ginzburg's language touched an inner speech that she identified as often being “parallel” to what has been or is “mute.” It was speech that listened, and listened to how far words can deviate, either reaching the true or detaching from it, leaving one alone.

The innumerable and various ways Ginzburg seized family and relationships as subject from the standpoint of equality, that is, females equal to males, is arguably female. It defies much exterior or experiential logic. Her fictional world abolished male hierarchy and reassembled on an undefinable ground where people equally coexist. Her narrations are not stream of consciousness: they are a far sharper sense of real existences in the physical, everyday world. Ginzburg wrote on unmapped female territory—outside the reach of omniscience or absolute articulation. She highlighted internal distances between the I and the other: she concentrated external proximities between any two beings, letting context fall away. Muteness was a condition, a force, a determining obsession. She knew the deep sadness in this universal state.

Ginzburg explored the family in fiction; she tossed it out and tried dialogue in plays; she reapproached it from autobiography; she looked at it in history; and in Serena Cruz (1987), she addressed a contemporary case of children's rights. She followed her own instincts. She set aside obvious psychoanalytic tools for her artistic tasks, as was true for many Italian left-wing intellectuals.

Ginzburg, if we accept her explanation in an essay on psychoanalysis, was helped by it, but couldn't quite believe in a unilateral relationship where “pity was paid for.” She stopped attending when the analyst told her that the daughter in her dream was herself. Ginzburg interpreted the dream as a sign that she wanted to return home to Turin where her parents were tending her fatherless children. The analyst pressured her to set up an independent household in Rome, free of her parents. Ginzburg could be as disarmingly transparent and full of common sense as Tillie Olsen. She knew that she needed her parents' help in order to be the mother that she wished to be. She could not escape her role. She returned to Turin. Her rejection of psychoanalysis is an example of her stoicism, as well as her subversive personal search for authenticity.

As we read more Ginzburg we realize in how many different ways she faced family's inescapable forces. This reflects, in part, her identity, and in part a cultural obsession that she explored to test its validity. In a sense she took up no less than the most powerful institution in the world and struggled with its paradoxes for herself as a woman. Its power and shapes arose from her absolute belief that it could not be replaced.

In her early novels, the world, which is often barely described outside the characters' observations of it, could be amniotic. The unknown—the missing context, society, history—is a third party dimmed by closer issues: a pregnancy, a death. In Valentino (1957), change is usually brought about by one brief, awkward, contextless line: “he died”; “she died.” Her own experience of how life is altered by death is not articulated beyond this absolute comment until years later, when her characters begin to describe more feelings. Most often an external inertia, unhappiness, or an internal one, sex, is at work. Both are close to “muteness.” Sometimes so much else outside the actions of her characters is unstated that a reader feels sealed off inside a potent egg.

Had Ginzburg chosen a normal third-person perspective, it would have established inequalities. Women, workers, peasants would have lost the contradictory but irrefutable equality that she deliberately traced. Her internal and poetic language would have been taken over by the politics and the necessary morality she felt intruded in her life. It would have disturbed the world she was trying to gestate and express. Women seen in clearly defined contexts might quickly have become victims or idealized. Ginzburg went to enormous lengths to uncover her believed-in but disputed vision. She brought it out from inside herself. Her artistic struggle was often, then, to break through egocentric speech to an inner speech she felt.

Her characters, even the omnipresent and independent maids, like Vittoria in I Married You for Happiness (1965), speak outside of their roles. A character like young impoverished Mara, who bears an illegitimate child in Dear Michael, is symmetrical to Michael. Although burdened with a son—a lovely, banal rhythm of preparing formula and baby's crying runs symbolically through the book—her life is no worse than Michael's was. She says inarticulately in a letter: “I continue to break up over Michael, who's dead, murdered on a street and I tell myself who knows maybe some night I'll end up dead who knows in which back alley, maybe far away from my little boy and I begin to think of my child whom I have left with the baker.” Ginzburg freed her characters to utter their lonely soliloquies at microlevels where human parity was unquestionable.

In her best fiction, Ginzburg established ideal space for the Lucretias and Giuseppes to explain themselves. In these spare, elegant designs oppositions, symmetries, and repetitions create inevitable but unreadable patterns. The device of letters, which she used many times, reveals modern characters capable of little more than monologue, but that little more keeps them moving and alive. The letters are lightly chiseled panels describing inner traps. Often we feel we are seeing people looking at themselves in mirrors. Sometimes the pulse is mildly incestuous and thus, inertia-ridden. Here is a letter in the City and the House, from Piero to Giuseppe, a long-time friend and a one-time lover of his wife:

Lucrezia is gone, I don't know where she's gone, she didn't tell me. I'm alone in this house that I so loved and now hate. I don't know where Lucrezia could be. …

She told me that she will take the children away. I've told her that I'll never allow it. It's not true, I know all too well that she'll do what she intended. She has a strong character. I'm the weak one. The sensation of being a weak one, I've carried inside since childhood. She'll bring the children to me one day a week and a month in the summer. …

In a few days my mother will be back. It will be she and I alone. … My mother will cry. I'll have to console her, tell her that I'm all right. Or almost all right. I'll have to tell her that these things are quite common.

In her fictional objectifications, one character “has a difficult time in bed,” one has “thin legs but thick knees,” another possesses nothing but “a black kimono with sunflowers on it, a weasel fur coat, and a child.” Her minimalism is never cluttered; it gives bodies to her characters. Her fictional men and women are pinned in suspension by a heavy existential realization: “that all of us have the subtle capacity to thrust ourselves into desperate situations that no one else can resolve and which don't allow us to go forward or turn back.”

Ginzburg's hearing eye wrote where context had no power to function. Flatness or flattening is an effect often obtained by American minimalists for quite different ends. Ginzburg never used minimalism in a single sense. Her setting each person on his or her own feet—this simultaneous point of view—was her equivalent of Akhmatova's stand, when the woman with blue lips whispers, “Can you tell this?” Equality as an unresolvable condition was her arduous, painful, mysterious ground.

Ginzburg's fairness in showing parity, obscurity, heroism can be suffocating in her fiction. Sometimes her characters' concerns or the lack of development of external consequences are such that a reader longs for order, perspective, and rationality to interrupt the pouring physical sense of her world. Nothing exists outside people's marriages, deaths, meals, sicknesses, uncertainties, going to work; nothing escapes from a rhythm that sometimes nauseates. This is especially true in the novels Ginzburg herself described as being written when she was in an unhappy, sorrowful, anxious state. In All Our Yesterdays (1952), the characters speak only in indirect speech. In Sagittarius (1957), the writing is airless and without dialogue. Listening and talking without connections was a state Ginzburg knew from all sides.

In Ginzburg's introduction to her own plays, she recalled how Elsa Morante, after reading The Interview, said during a tense dinner in Trastevere, “I'll tell you the truth.” Ginzburg tried reading the manuscript with her friend's eyes. “I found it as she had, fatuous, sugary, preachy, and possibly false. I saved some little traces of it, there where facts and people in my life inserted themselves. I thought maybe these had escaped Elsa. I didn't tear that play up. I didn't put it in a drawer.” It was produced, successfully.

In Ginzburg's life, her stubbornness seems an important feature for her survival and often necessary for her ethical courage. Sometimes it appears in her writing as a negative characteristic; a labored struggle to get to the point or to find something missing from real life. The Morante incident reveals two other things about our subject. She had the capacity to expose her hurt, only quickly to cover it with light irony. She also recognized in herself an ability to solicit sympathy from others by the way she told a story.

In Turin, I searched for the real woman, the editor who had known Calvino, Moravia, Vittorini, the person who described Turin with brief strokes: “the fog, the gray winter, the mute streets with their deserted stalls.” An editor in the elegant white library in the Einaudi offices told me that Ginzburg favored antiheroic writers: work filtering everyday life. He reminded me that Ginzburg juried a personal memoir contest. By chance, I had in my files a story about a woman who had won. Her religious attitude toward poverty had struck me as once common in Italy and now almost gone. The image of her struggle to write was indelible. The housewife from Poggio Rusco (Mantova, where Virgil was born) had written a diary on a bedsheet. She hid it from her children. She began it after her husband died. The “graffiti” written in long columns were advanced during the night when the others were asleep. About the house she said: “The floor with holes, the windows with grates like a prison, one room and that's it, a bed here and a bed there, we and the children.” Another entry: “A nest, put together with enormous sacrifices.” Ginzburg called her own homes tane—dens, inviolable close spaces marked and signed with traces of persons and lives lived.

I stopped on Pallamaglio Street to look for the apartment that Natalia hated as a child. It was an ordinary building. The yellowish church she described was still there, the courtyard grass uncut. It was satisfying to see the house and feel the shifts of what remained on the overparked street.

I met a schoolmate, in his eighties, of Leone Ginzburg. He used to have tea—Russian tea since the family was originally from Odessa—with Leone Ginzburg after school when they were boys. The word boys started a reverie on the Liceo and those vivid years.

The Italian high school follows a model similar to that used in France. The curriculum is established at a national level; students attending it cover the same materials whether they live in Milan or Palermo. It once formed the ruling classes, an elite studying all major subjects: Greek and Latin, history, literature, philosophy, science, math. Being directed by a fascist government, naturally under fascism, it became politicized. Ginzburg and Pavese, Ginzburg's classmate, were singled out by a classics teacher, who tutored them in the principles of democracy. They started a newspaper; it was confiscated. The schoolmate remembered Ginzburg's first arrest.

The orderly continuity of elite schooling with identical national references creates something that has no parallel in American culture. The intellectual feedbacks and exchange intertwine with another traditional interconnection, family. Family, as it is taught by history, composes part of any definition of culture. It can never be only a personal or even unconscious set of forces. Latins, Greeks, Jews reached Rome before the Catholic church even began. Family remains historical, philosophic, and religious fact. It is from this viewpoint that Natalia Ginzburg began her search.

Ginzburg became a member of the Communist party in 1946. A very young widow, she possessed her own ideas of service. Under the tutelage of Felice Balbo, a Catholic left-wing intellectual working at Einaudi, she aligned herself with a tradition of fighting oppression. “But I obeyed him and went to meetings which, in my innermost soul and without being able to confess the fact, I found cheerless and boring.” In her description of Pavese's suicide in Lessico, she went further in describing her party membership. “The mistakes Pavese made were more serious than ours. Ours were the products of impulse, imprudence, stupidity, and honesty. His, on the other hand, were born from caution, astuteness, calculation, and intelligence. Nothing is as dangerous as that class of mistake. They can be fatal, as indeed they were for him.” Ginzburg put her hands on truth that extended beyond politics. She sensed the dangers of political attitudes that were required in order to be “correct.” Pavese's error, in her mind, was trying to force a consistent intellectual reality on the world. Here too lies an analysis of why Ginzburg resisted feminism as she understood it.

In 1951 she gave up her party card, saying a writer must be completely free. In the party one must stand with the oppressed. As a writer one must line up with reality. Far later, in order to express in actions “an affinity for those who lose,” she ran for MP as an independent (a nonmember) in the Communist party. She was elected in 1983 and reelected in 1987. Unable to quite disavow her hopes for the poor, she worked within a party she partially disavowed.

In her autobiographical essays, Ginzburg expressed this same complex honesty. Her ethical sense oscillated between witnessing and discovery on a range of subjects from banalities to ontological questions. It often led her to a nonanswer inside of logic and a slow finding within her own experience. “The awareness of our incapacity to individuate and follow what's true, through its millions of implications, explanations, ramifications is a source of deep unhappiness to us. … Today the instrument of good and evil falls into our hands like a hoe, and we can only lament its clumsiness and its poverty.” Nevertheless, it must be used, she said, with pity and mercy. “Ours perhaps is not a moral choice, but is rather an obedience to an unstated affinity.”

She could build an essay from inside a single word. Her essay on abortion, written before the national referendum in 1975 when Italy legalized abortion, says:

Who wants something must call it by its real name. I find it hypocritical to affirm that abortion is not killing. Abortion is killing. … But it can't be compared with anything, because it doesn't resemble anything else; it doesn't betray any other right, it doesn't implicate any other type of other generic freedoms. To abort means not to suppress another person, but the remote pale design of a person.

She often wrestled with words' extreme limits. “The words one finds at hand to clarify and define God all sound false. Abstract concepts and general ideas sound false. They are unable to illuminate the inside of anything for us, and they leave us cold.” In this essay she touched the poverty words hold to illuminate faith. “The instants,” “the shadows and signs” of God are probably the same, “only interpreted differently” by the believer and the nonbeliever. This close simultaneous perception of contradiction is vintage Ginzburg. She claims having known these “instants,” and then says that she herself has often completely forgotten them. But, in certain lucid moments, when these “shadows” are remembered, “they seem to be the only good one has ever truly felt.” Catching the reader off guard, Ginzburg quiets us with her own hope and a somber perspective on her continuous sense of pain.

Her last book, a defense of a child's rights in an illegal adoption, revealed Ginzburg's characteristic resistance to the status quo, knowing full well the risks she was taking. Who was she to defend a father who had lied about the circumstances in which he had brought the little girl, Serena Cruz, out of the Philippines? Ginzburg went to the source, the family in question, only to discover that journalists, social workers, and the judges were equally guilty of lying. As was her wont, she articulated her own groping in hopes of stimulating the nation's conscience. She wrote to testify to the “solidarity of people, … who have seen as did Serena Cruz and her adoptive parents, the tranquility of family destroyed in an instant … and who have suffered bitter devastations, separations, and loss.” Loss. In Ginzburg's lexicon it is one of the few words with a single meaning. She was seventy-three when she made this important, much-criticized appeal.

In her essay on feminism written in 1973, Ginzburg ran a long line through arguments that assert a priori that no qualitative differences exist between men and women. (I quote at length, because to my knowledge, the piece has not been translated.) “The words ‘Proletarians of the world unite’ I find extremely clear. The words ‘Women of all the world unite’ ring false to me.” Ginzburg said feminists “part from the supposition that women, even if subjugated, are better than men. Women in actual fact are neither better nor worse than men. Qualitatively, they are the same.” Ginzburg commenced from the biological; however, it was not De Beauvoir's second-sex point of view:

To create a child, you need a woman and a man. This fact, known and beyond dispute, speaks to the incompleteness of the woman, and the incompleteness of the man. … Among the lives of women born in servitude, and the lives of women who are part of privileged society, there isn't the palest connection. … It's mistaken to think that the humiliations endured by women are the only essence of relationships between men and women. … At the center of a fair vision of the world, love and hate are at its center, and false and true.

She said that men's undervaluing women has little consequence in the privileged classes, whereas this practice is loaded with consequences in the lower classes “where it can double and triple women's burdens. They feel it at home and at work. Their condition, however, arises not because they are women, but because they are part of a human condition.” Certainly not addressing relationships among women themselves, nor the buried mines of sexual violence, and probably denying much obvious, everyday guilt, nonetheless the vision she anchored contains deep, exasperating truth. It is a cultural vision about unities and independences and belonged to Ginzburg the woman who lived. We must remember, too, that it arose in a country where family is defined politically by social rights as opposed to individual rights; therefore, abortion, paid maternity leave, free day-care, leave for taking care of the elderly and the dying are part of the social contract.

Several of Ginzburg's essays can be lifted out of an Italian context and used to document the reality of writing without traditions. Much contributes to a growing knowledge and wealth. By now, from Virginia Woolf to Nadine Gordimer, many women have left maps charting their voyages. Ginzburg's descriptions of her writing paths cover many relevant experiences, including her struggle to find the language she actively suppressed. “My Vocation” can be found in the brilliant book of essays called Little Virtues (1962). “Interlocutors” is part of the collection You Must Never Ask Me (1970). “Note” was published in the first collected volume:

When I write something, usually I think that it's very important and that I'm a serious writer. I think that happens to everyone. But there is a corner of my soul where I know perfectly well and at all times what I am—that is a small, small writer. I swear that I know it. But it doesn't matter much to me. Only I don't want to think about names: I've noticed if I ask myself “a little writer like whom” I grow sad thinking of other little writers. I prefer believing that no one ever has been like me, however small, however much of a flea or mosquito of a writer I may be.

This voice was the mature and ironically self-conscious writer. One hundred years hence even if flea and mosquito are too small, their capacity to bother, bite, survive will remain unchanged.

The days and events of our life, the days and events of other people whose lives we partake in, readings and images and thoughts and discussions, satiate and grow in us. Writing is a vocation that also feeds on horrible things, it eats up the best and the worst of our life, our worst feelings like our good feelings flow in our blood. All feeds and grows in us.

This certainly captured the mature voice; and here gender has no meaning.

A writer runs two risks: the danger of being too good and tolerant with herself and the danger of minimizing herself. … Therefore a person who writes feels strongly the need to have interlocutors. To have, that is, three or four persons in the world, to whom you submit your work, your thought, and who talk about it.

This essay describes her sons, who were critical but useful to directing her, and a male friend and two women. The humility, the desire for the personal participation of loved ones, the thirst for dialogue, the upset at being criticized, fits what many women describe as the process of how women writers work in families. The house supports a cottage industry.

Ginzburg wrote that the more deeply she entered adolescence, the more difficult writing became. She could not finish a story, nor get down even “the first three lines.” Chekhov was her “numen,” her “invisible interlocutor,” to whom she submitted every inner thought for fiction. She wrote a short story, “An Absence,” at age seventeen and was told that perhaps she was a “child prodigy.” Her models for learning how to “conduct and articulate a story” were all foreign. “It pained me to have been born in Italy, to live in Turin because that which I would have liked to have described in my books was Nevsky Prospect, while instead I found myself forced to describe the Po River. The name of the city Turin didn't draw any melodious echoes from my heart, but confined me instead to the anguish of my daily existence, calling up its banality and squalor.” As a way of creating distance, she wanted to make her characters live in “an indeterminate place—a geographical cloudiness where they could grow and multiply.” (Italics are mine.) She also wanted to distance herself from a bourgeois setting. Here is an embryo of her own language to be considered: What origins does the cloudiness have? Which other women writers describe that place?

The adolescent Ginzburg knew no one who was a Borghese Jewish writer living in Piemonte; only the faraway Franz Kafka was a Jew. Soon, many of Turin's nonpracticing Jews, including her father's two Nobel prize-winning students, Rita Levi Montalcini and Renato Dulbecco, as well as Primo Levi, would write about what their identity conferred, as did Ginzburg herself. Her Jewishness reinforced her feeling of separateness, as did her being a female. Here many unacknowledged shadows intermingle and are identified later as part of her childhood way of fantasizing. She called telling her fears to herself, “night speech.”

When she was young, Ginzburg had “a sacred horror of autobiography. I had a horror, and terror: because the tendency to autobiography was rather strong in me, which I knew was common to many women: and that my life and my person, exiled and detested, could burst at any time into the forbidden land of my writing.” Noting her strong tendency toward “sentimentality,” she hated it as “feminine.” “I wanted to write like a man.” The language could not be clearer.

From an older painter, in whose studio she often sat, she heard that her own work was not bad, but was “random,” true and real in appearance, but without “true weight and meaning.” This oriented her, and she accepted its truth. But she recognized, nevertheless, that “pretending to know” was part of her character. The “pretending” was probably not merely the Greek, Latin, and math that she barely completed as the established Liceo curriculum. Was it not also that her precise drive toward the true encompassed a fidelity to her inner feeling, for which few precedents existed and which she was still denying to herself?

Her earliest stories, she thought, reached the apex of detachment. “To seem like a man, I actually pretended to be one: something I have never done again and never shall. …

“I had a profound aversion to surnames. I think that I felt pushed to look for a world that wasn't situated in any special place in Italy, a world where north and south could be together. And the same was true for surnames. I needed years and years to free myself from this aversion and I don't think I'm free even now.” What was a surname if not other, the group, the part of the name that wasn't self? Wasn't it also the group that one must not betray by putting it into public words: the family and the more dangerous reality, a Jewish name?

Ginzburg discovered the first person when she lived in confinement with her husband in Abruzzo:

In some way the girl who says I is someone I met daily on those paths. The house was hers and the mother was hers. In part there was an old school friend, whom I hadn't seen for years. And in part there was also in some obscure and confused way, myself. From that point on, when I use the first person, I'm aware that I, not so named, not invited, has threaded her way into my writing.

The Street that Leads to the City, written under a pseudonym, Alessandra Tornimparte, to avoid political dangers, was published in 1942. It established in neo-realistic characters a new tangle of feelings: sister for brother, parents against son-in-law, wife against her earlier unmarried self—closely confirming in dusty shoes, short walks, the baby's cry, the kitchen, the street before and after marriage, the dark of the evening, the light of day, the dark cords inside of her characters, the light that is primarily memory. She had wanted to write something “that her mother would like” and something in which each line was “a whip or a slap.” Her mother—that phrase—must be mined in any woman's search for language.

In 1943, Leone Ginzburg died under torture in Regina Coeli prison. All accounts describe his exceptional personality as “brilliant, passionate, imaginative.” His shy twenty-seven-year-old widow, a mother of three children and a writer who had just discovered an obscure I, was alone in a still ferocious war. Giulio Einaudi, who had founded his publishing house using Ginzburg's counsel and vision, offered his promising wife a job. Natalia returned home to the apartment she had grown up in. She and her children lived with her parents. Her mother took up the rhythm of buttons, clean pants, “shoes, they must have new shoes.”

In 1961, in London, with her second husband, a professor of English literature, Ginzburg became nostalgic for Turin. She read Italian newspapers, scanning them hungrily for street names, real news. Suddenly she found herself writing the long novel, Voices at Evening (1961). The lines of action grow out of her childhood. It is a pale story, told in thin scarves of narrative. It is roughly about the Olivetti family. The love story between star-crossed Elsa and Tomassino takes up the tragic pressures of a fixed environment. It is doomed. The reality of Jewish life starts to appear in direct speech. The memories she drew on “freed themselves effortlessly from that to which they bore no resemblance. I used surnames.” Now no female residues nor horrifying needs to mask Jewish names remain in the word surnames. Surnames now signifies treasured individuals.

In 1962 Ginzburg created Lessico famigliare in less than a month. No external standard, no internal censor held her ransom. This is what she said in “Note”:

I don't know if it's the best of my books, but certainly it's the only book that I've written in a state of complete freedom. To write it was the same as talking for me. I didn't care any more about commas or no commas, a loose stitch or a tight one: nothing, nothing, I no longer had any horror or aversions of any type. And above all, I didn't ask myself, not even once, if I wrote by accident or chance. This randomness was completely beyond me.

Thus I arrived at pure memory, I arrived at the wolf's door, by taking cross streets, telling myself that memories were sources I must never drink from, the only place in the world I must refuse to go.

At midlife Natalia Ginzburg had lived beyond all traditional bourgeois family borders. Behind her swirled the death of her tortured husband, the pain of her father being stripped of his job as professor, his imprisonment for being antifascist, his exile in Belgium because he was Jewish. Two of her brothers had been jailed in the resistance; one had jumped into the river to swim to safety in Switzerland. He slipped into France and another identity, never to fully join the family again. The birthroot of her fourth child was twisted, and Ginzburg refused to institutionalize the completely handicapped little girl. Her sister's marriage to Adriano Olivetti, a visionary from one of the great industrial families of Italy, had fallen apart. His risking his life to help her to escape from the Germans within hours after her husband's death was something she never forgot. Ginzburg's first three children were growing up in a different kind of world, an industrialized, discontinuous one. Her close friend Pavese had shot himself. Vittorini was writing about the effects of fascism. Morante was a friend. The family was a part of all the change. Her mother, who had helped her raise her children; her second husband, who had taken on her first brood; her father, who lived his rational and irrational standards: each played parts to help family endure. From door slamming to mountain walks, to talks of Proust, to the visits of some of Italy's greatest minds, to the jails, the marriages that moved the siblings apart, the children who brought in new interest, the family accumulated and dispersed melancholy, joy, despotism, and support.

Society inextricably wove in and out of the family, as an immeasurable and daily wave. In the crowded Italian family, the individual was never able to speak completely alone or outside of a context that was others. Outside of it, one was never able to describe much more than fact about members in the family, since often deep, personal feelings were hidden.

Ginzburg, the child, was a listener, far younger than her three brothers and sister. Lessico famigliare is told by her, first as a child and then as a woman yoked with the responsibility of the same rhythms. As a child she observed, never completely frightened, even though her father's anger was “terrifying”; even though her brothers Mario and Alberto fought until they bled. There were the linen cupboards, the seamstress, the warnings when the arrests started. There were her brothers' jokes, her sister's jealousy, her mother's studying Russian. The book is song-like sounds above time that become deeper and more insistent. Collectively and alone, the family grew too large to be explained.

Lessico, an epic in 117 pages, showed Italians their ancient and unquestioned roots. It also pictured the changes Italy had been through from the 1920s to the 1960s and how the country had survived. Recognized as a document of an era, the fictionalized memoir was a new texture. Its poetic, affectionate flow possessed the speed and visual zooms of film. The characters were equals. Some actions and words were repetitions that became motifs and thus the lexicon. Then the book began to add the glittering threads of endings. During those few pages, decades, in many guises, flew by.

In the last few pages, Ginzburg's mother prepared Ginzburg's children to live with their mother, Natalia, and their new father, Baldini, in Rome. She was losing a second brood. But she reached for a children's book, Sans Famille, that she used to read to Natalia when she was young. It took dramatic turns but didn't end unhappily. Ginzburg's father chimed in with a remembrance about two more of their children, Paola and Mario. “Those asses.” A discussion over a suit of clothes came up, and it transported her parents back to Liege and her father's confinement. Then her father remembered research he did on whales and whale blood, and her mother remembered her boarding school as a child. In the rhythm, remembered starts to whirl.

The book stops just short of those beautiful children's tales that end by sending us back to the beginning. Perhaps only in the last sentence, when Ginzburg's father says to his wife, “I've heard that story so many times,” do we feel Ginzburg's dilemma as a writer. She admits that her parents are old. The story she told, often from the point of view of a sensitive child, cannot triumph over time. If she had stopped herself one sentence earlier: “Oh, let's not start that story of Whiskers again,” we might have believed that her parents would go on forever. She left no false notes. Ginzburg set fantasies aside and revealed herself as consciously exchanging dreams for the throbbing intensity of what had been. The woman and the writer stood together at the wolf's door.

Note

1. I would like to thank Ineke Holzhaus for giving me the two-hour tape. I would also like to thank Carlo Ginzburg, the distinguished historian now working at UCLA and the University of Bologna, for granting me an interview that came too late to include. Meeting him was a privilege. His precise knowledge of his mother's texts, the smiling photo of her on his bookshelf, and a silence that overcame him before he said, “She was great fun,” were strong signs.

   All quotes from the original Italian are my translations. Cesare Garboli, a close friend of Ginzburg's, is the critic who has written most extensively about her work. His emphasis is on “Ginzburg's men.” He discusses at great lengths the weakness and inadequacies of her male characters. The flip side of the coin, the equality of their female counterparts, is a completely submerged issue.