Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

TWO NOVELLAS and a novel “DEAD YESTERDAYS” (aka “ALL OUR YESTERDAYS”) by Natalia Ginzburg (Published in Italian between 1942 and 1952; English language translations first made between 1949 and 1956)

            Despite having visited Italy four times in my life; and despite having an Italian daughter-in-law, in the twelve years so far that this blog has existed, I have covered only four Italian novels, to wit, Alessandro Manzoni’s 19^th century classic I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed) ; Alberto Moravia’s cynical 1920s first novel Gli Indifferenti (The Time of Indifference) ; Ignazio Silone’s 1930s anti-Fascist novel Fontamara ; and Elsa Morante’s 1970s blockbuster chronicling the war years LaStoria (History: A Novel). Following my penchant for reading books that have sat unread on my shelves to years, I turn now to the first important works of one of Italy’s most influential authors of the mid-20^th century, Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991). As a teenager, she wrote stories for magazines. But her first important literary works were two novellas, The Road to the City and The Dry Heart, both written when she was in her twenties and both later published together, in English translation, as one volume. 

The Road to the City (La Strada che va in citta) was first published in Italy in 1942 under the pseudonym “Alessandra Tornimparte”. This was because Natalia Ginzburg, born Natalia Levi, had a Jewish name and also adopted the surname of her first husband Leone Ginzburg. The Fascist government had, since 1938, adopted anti-Jewish laws. Jewish writers were not allowed to publish. This novella (60 pages long) was published in English in 1949, translated by Frances Frenaye. It is a harsh little story, told in the first person by Delia, aged 17. She lives in a crowded slum of a house some way outside an unnamed city. The city, which she occasionally visits, is a sort of icon for her – somewhere this almost-peasant girl wishes to escape to. There is casual brutality in her home. The children, including teenager Delia,  are regularly shouted at, thrashed or beaten for complaining or being lazy. Papa is a bully, determined to preserve the family’s “respectability”, such as it is. Mama is very strict and very proper about who her children should socialise with.  Delia often weeps, often shouts, is often extremely emotive. Delia is naïve about sex. At least two young men, at different times, take her to the woods and seduce her. Bearing in mind that Delia herself is the narrator, we can only read her as somebody victimised by her naïvete . But with great skill Natalia Ginzburg subtly changes the tone, even as it is still Delia’s voice speaking. Once Delia falls pregnant, it is her parents who collaborate with her to ensure she marries the seducer, Guido, who comes from a middle-class family (he is the son of a doctor) and who has prospects of the career in the city. Delia goes through more harsh times, having to hide her pregnancy for some months by living in an even dirtier and slummier house in another village, and having to wait for her parents to ensure that Guido will really marry her. But in the end, the child is born, the marriage takes place and Guido and Delia get to live in a very plush apartment, paid for by Guido’s parents, in the much-desired city. Delia has, in effect, navigated “the road to the city” of the title, by guile and cunning as much as by misfortune. She is not exactly an “unreliable narrator”, but she comes close. Given her social class, status and lack of opportunity, she is in many ways still a victim of circumstance. But she is not helpless. She has knowingly formed much of her own destiny and this, I think was Natalia Ginzburg’s main point. Do not assume that the deprived classes are without all resources.

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The Dry Heart (E stato cosi) was first published in Italy after the war, in 1947, Ginzburg’s first substantial publication to appear under her own name. It too was first published in English in 1949, translated by Frances Frenaye. It is a little longer than the earlier novella – 80 pages. Could it be that, now the Fascist regime had fallen, Natalia Ginzburg felt free to write critically about the middle-classes? At any rate, The Dry Heart is set among what is clearly the bourgeoisie – people who visit Rome regularly and sometimes take holidays in San Remo. Once again, the story is told in a confessional first-person style by a woman, but the woman is never given a name. It begins in an alarming way. The narrator has just shot her husband Alberto dead. Returning every so often to the present moment, the narrative is in effect a series of flashbacks leading to why this came to pass. The narrator, daughter of a doctor, was a teacher at a girls’ school, apparently teaching Classics. At the age of 26 she met Alberto who was in his forties, short (shorter than she), fat and not particularly handsome, but a sort of intellectual who dabbled in writing history. They became friends. They walked and talked together. Did he love her? He never said so. Did she love him? She wasn’t sure – but, in this state of ambiguity, she suggested they get married. They did. But he still didn’t show her much affection and she wasn’t so sure about him. He kept disappearing on trips to see his friend Augusto. Then she discovered that he had a long-term mistress Giovanna. The narrator’s cousin and friend Francesca tells the narrator that you can’t trust men and besides she thinks it’s better to take a series of lovers than to get married. The narrator insists her husband give her a baby. That should cement their marriage. But with baby crying through the night, baby always needing to be fed and cleaned, baby taking up all her time and wearing her out, the narrator finds her husband gives her no assistance whatsoever. Then Alberto leaves her. At the age of three, baby dies. For a while, Alberto comes back to her and offers sympathy. He still has his mistress Giovanna. The narrator asks Giovanna to visit her. Wife and mistress converse politely. The narrator is neither repulsed nor impressed by the woman. Nothing changes. Then Alberto says he will now definitively leave her. So she shoots him. Now what is going on here? In the near-peasant-class characters of The Road to the City, we had people who screamed, quarrelled, shouted and cried a lot, letting their emotions out. In The Dry Heart we have polite people who stifle what they really mean, are impassive to the point of emotional deadness, never shout, bottle it all up and as a result cause a final explosion. The problem is not only the misalliance of the narrator and Alberto, but the manners and mores of the class they were born into. Don’t shout, don’t make a fuss, don’t say what you really think. What will the neighbours think? “The dry heart” belongs to all characters in this novella – wife, husband, mistress, cousin. The narrator is as much victim and perpetrator as Delia in The Road to the City.

            I’m sure that in both of these novellas, part of Natalia Ginzburg’s purpose was to comment on the status of women in Italy in the 1940s – their lack of power; the family codes that constrained them; the need to marry; and the taboos around sexual behaviour. Even so, these two stories are not feminist tracts and Ginzburg is not presenting her two first-person narrators as either paragons or helpless victims. Both women and men calculate and scheme.

            You will note that neither of these novellas addresses directly politics or big public issues. They are tightly-focused personal stories; yet the milieu presented tells us much about society. Reading these novellas, you will also notice the unemotional style is which Natalia Ginzburg writes. Her characters might have moments of passion and outrage, but Ginzburg reports them and moves on. What characters do is enough to convey emotion to us. When things are bad, the simple fact of reporting events tells us so. This does not mean that Ginzburg herself is indifferent or detached from her characters. It means that by accumulating events and physical facts, we absorb enough to be engaged. The total effect is very charged.

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            All this applies to Natalia Ginzburg’s first full-length novel, Dead Yesterdays, published in Italy in 1952 and presented in English translation by Angus Davidson in 1956. The original  Italian title is Tutti i nostri ieri, which literally means All Our Yesterdays. Frankly, Dead Yesterdays is a deadening title for this novel, and in later English editions Angus Davidson’s same translation was repackaged correctly as All Our Yesterdays. (And confusingly it was sometimes renamed Light for Fools. I understand that this title derives from Macbeth's anguished statement "All our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death", but it still seems an unecessarily literary title to me.)

            This novel initially presents the reader with a number of problems. We are, in the first 50 or so pages, introduced to so many characters so quickly that confusion reigns and it takes some time for the reader to adjust to who is whom. Out of this mass of characters, a particular protagonist emerges only slowly. Further, Ginzburg has the habit of presenting conversations as reported speech rather than direct speech – part of her technique of reporting and focusing on facts. Yet, by cumulative detail, the greatness of this novel slowly presents itself.

The first half of the novel is situated in an unnamed town in the north of Italy. Turin appears to be the largest city in the same region. The cast of characters are comfortably middle class. The novel begins in the late 1930s.

On one side of the street lives the family of a disgruntled old man, a widower, who hates Mussolini’s government and is disgusted that so many of his old friends have opportunistically deserted the Socialism of their youth and switched to Fascism. The old man dies within the first 15 pages of the novel, leaving in charge of his brood his late wife’s lady’s companion Signora Maria, who is old, crotchety and demanding, but who is also a fund of practical common sense. The family she bosses ranges from siblings in their twenties to young adolescents. The dreamy idealistic university student Ippolito is officially head of the house and has unwillingly inherited responsibility for his father’s soap factory. His sister Concettina is always on the lookout for a fiancé but has so far found nobody eligible. Giustino, unlike his elder brother, is an eager young man of action. And then there is the schoolgirl Anna, a young teenager when the novel begins.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the street, lives another middle-class family headed by the widow known as “Mammina”, including mature would-be intellectual Emanuele,  red-haired man-hungry Amelia and the slightly thuggish little boy Gauma who mistreats little Anna from across the road.

Other important characters are part of the cast. A boy called Danilo has repeatedly tried without success to woo Concettina. A German boy called Franz could possibly be a confirmed Nazi, and members of the two families are wary of him (he turns out to be a German-Jew on the run from Hitler’s regime).

Now you see what I mean by a confusing plethora of characters, presented to us with no dominant character emerging. What binds them together, however, is the beat of history, For the whole of the first half of the novel takes place against the background of the approach of war, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the invasion of Poland, the “phony war” in the West and then the Nazi invasion of France. The younger people discuss these things, and share rumours, in fear of how far the war will spread and whether Italy will be involved. There are many conflicting loyalties. For a while Danilo, Emanuele and Ippolito form a secret, anti-Fascist group, idealistically hoping that a revolution might overthrow Fascism. Danilo is jailed for a while and the group breaks up. Then there is an ebullient man in his forties called Cenzo Rena, who comes from further south in Italy and who mocks Ippolito and Emanuele as “provincial intellectuals” who know nothing of the way the world works. Meanwhile Concettina does find a man to marry – a none-too-bright young Fascist. And Amelia marries the Jewish boy Franz.

There is a feverish mood by mid-1940 as characters discuss whether or not Italy will join in the war. Finally, in June 1940, Mussolini declares war on France (which has already been invaded by Germany). Characters react in different ways. One leading character commits suicide in despair, others are drafted into the army, and yet others seek places to hide and sit out the war.

Surprisingly, the dominant protagonist to emerge is the young schoolgirl Anna. Her story has run alongside the politicised story of her older siblings and friends. Aged 16, she is seduced by, and made pregnant by, the thuggish young Gauma, whose response is to give her money and tell her to find a “midwife” to get rid of the baby. Anna at first accepts this solution, but before she goes through with it, she meets Cenzo Rena, who says he will marry her and take her to live down south, where nobody will know her and there will be no scandal. She accepts. So the 48-year-old Cenzo Rena marries the 16-year-old Anna and they set off for the village San Costanzo further south.

And here, exactly half-way through Dead Yesterdays, the whole tone of the novel changes, for Part Two introduces us to a different world, far from the middle-class niceties of northern Italy. San Costanzo is the home of impoverished peasants trying to work arid land and with a social hierarchy bordering on the feudal. There is still a querulous Marchesa, a minor aristocrat, who wants to be regarded as the lady of the manor. There is a corrupt Fascist police-sergeant who never looks after the peasants’ interests and never takes their complaints or petitions seriously. Bribes are the order of the day and so is poverty. Young Anna is at first snobbish enough to resent the fact that Cenzo Rena invites contadini (peasant farmers) into his home. Cenza Reno is in some ways a bit of a rogue; but he firmly and truthfully explains to Anna that he is the only champion of the contadini and their only advocate who can stand up to the police-sergeant and get their grievances dealt with.

Suffice it to say that Part Two runs through the whole of the war,  as seen from this southern village, including the collapse of the Fascist regime, brutal occupation as the Germans invade and then are pushed back by Allied forces (interestingly Natalia Ginzburg has only the English as liberators and doesn’t mention the Americans) and reprisals. News comes from the north of some members of Anna’s circle who became partisans fighting against Fascism in what amounted to a North Italian civil war. One childhood friend was drafted to fight in Russia. The Fascist regime did not set out, like the Nazis, to exterminate Jews; but in their antisemitic phase, their technique was to banish Italian Jews to remote peasant villages in order to “isolate” them. In this novel, impoverished Jews are assigned to San Costanzo by such “internal exile”, but they are treated as well as they can be by the peasants of the village, who quickly understand that these Jews are just poor people like themselves.

Much happens in this second half of the novel – much reported violence; many deaths – but when the war is over, when the Germans are gone and when the Fascist regime is over, there is no sense of triumph, only exhaustion, pain and sorrow. And realistically we are shown that those who have survived fall back into the same gossip, the same pointless quarrels, the same attitudes that they had before the war. Triumphs are brief and life goes on.

You may now see why Natalia Ginzburg called the novel All Our Yesterdays. The whole of Italy, north and south, is depicted, middle-class youngsters and dirt-poor peasants given equal time. Some of the motifs of her two novellas are carried over into this novel, such as the fate of the unmarried pregnant young woman and the “scandal” surrounding her; the unease of a mis-matched marriage; and the contrast of peasant (in The Road to the City) and the bourgeoisie (in The Dry Heart).

A few closing words about Natalia Ginzburg, revealing among other things her authority to write such a novel as this one. Her father was Jewish and her mother Gentile. They were secular and raised their children as atheists. In the 1930s, Natalia attended university in Turin and was for some years a member of the underground Communist Party, propagandising against the Fascist regime. She married the Communist activist Leone Ginzburg and had three children by him; but as a Communist, Leone was condemned to “internal exile” in the central Abruzzi region. Rather than be separated from him, Natalia decided to take her children and join him. Her account of impoverished peasant village life in Dead Yesterdays / All Our Yesterdays is drawn from what she witnessed there, as is her account of middle-class life in northern Italy, although specific characters are fiction. When Natalia Ginzburg writes about rumours that were circulated, the social structure of the peasants’ life, and the generosity of peasants towards exiled Jewish refugees, she is recording fact.

 Later, Leone, Natalia and their children moved to Rome, where Leone edited an underground newspaper. In 1944 he was caught by Fascists and handed over to occupying German forces who tortured him to death. Eight years later, in 1952 long after the war was over, Natalia Ginzburg married again, to a literary critic called Gabriele Baldini. She had two children by him, but both children died young of congenital diseases. In her work, the status of women, motherhood and marriage are as central as her social perspective, meaning she was essentially a feminist writer. Like many others, she withdrew from the Communist Party in the 1950s and she surprised many of her former comrades by siding with the Catholic Church over the issue of removing crucifixes from state-school classrooms. Indeed some reports said that she had fully embraced Catholicism, but this is disputed. Other reports say she re-joined the Communist Party, but again this is disputed. At any rate, late in life she was elected to the national assembly (parliament) as an Independent candidate, not allied to any party. (BTW, it was not uncommon in Italy for Catholics to also be Communists – on a visit to Italy my parents were amused to see a poster advertising a Communist youth rally which included times that young comrades could go to Mass.)

It is interesting that in the mid 20^th century, many of Italy’s best-known novelists and non-fiction writers were either Jewish or at least had some Jewish ancestry. This includes Natalia Ginzburg, Carlo Levi, Primo Levi, Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante.