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- Herausgeber: Daunt Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
'If Ferrante is a friend, Ginzburg is a mentor.' -- Lara Feigel, Guardian'Ginzburg's beautiful words have such solidity and simplicity. I read her with joy and amazement.' -- Tessa Hadley'Dear Michele, she wrote, I'm writing primarily to tell you that your father is sick. Go and visit him. He says he hasn't seen you for days.'Michele is the beloved only son of a large dysfunctional family in 1970s Rome. Headstrong and independent, he has disappeared to England to escape the dangers of his radical political ties. Back in Italy, his father lies dying.Michele's departure sets forth a series of events that will bring together everyone in his life: his mother Adriana, living in the countryside with her twin daughters Bebetta and Nannetta; his long-suffering sister Angelica; his loyal and sad friend Osvaldo; and Mara, a young woman who is prone to showing up on doorsteps with a baby that may or may not be Michele's.The story of the Prodigal Son turned on its head, Happiness, as Such is an immensely wise and absurdly funny novel-in-letters about complicated families and missed connections.'Candour and lies, love and exasperation, farce and inconsolable grief are seamlessly compounded in this very funny and deeply melancholy book.' -- Deborah Eisenberg, New York Review of Books'One of the great Italian writers of the twentieth century . . . [her] books snare so much of what is odd and lovely and fleeting in the world.' -- Parul Sehgal, New York Times'Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like.' -- Rachel Cusk'Her prose style is deceptively simple and very complex. Its effect on the reader is both calming and thrilling – that's not so easy to do.' -- Deborah LevyTranslated by Minna Zallman Proctor
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‘If Ferrante is a friend, Ginzburg is a mentor.’ Lara Feigel, Guardian
‘Candour and lies, love and exasperation, farce and inconsolable grief are seamlessly compounded in this very funny and deeply melancholy book.’ Deborah Eisenberg, New York Review of Books
‘One of the great Italian writers of the twentieth century… [her] books snare so much of what is odd and lovely and fleeting in the world.’ Parul Sehgal, New York Times
‘Filled with shimmering, risky, darting observation.’ Colm Tóibín
‘Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like.’ Rachel Cusk
‘Her prose style is deceptively simple and very complex. Its effect on the reader is both calming and thrilling – that’s not so easy to do.’ Deborah Levy
Happiness, as Such
NATALIA GINZBURG
Translated by Minna Zallman Proctor
With an introduction by Claire-Louise Bennett
DAUNT BOOKS
Contents
Introduction
What immediately struck me while reading Natalia Ginzburg’s work for the first time some years ago was how alive her writing is. The words she uses are ordinary, familiar words, arranged swiftly into straightforward and concise sentences, yet somehow each word appears utterly fresh, as if she had just that very moment cut them one by one from out all the branches of a single enormous tree. One deduces right away that such vitalised writing must have come directly from the very core of a writer who remained rooted, always, to her own experiences, and to the feelings, values, insights and concerns those experiences engendered. Ginzburg’s essays and novels tell us so much about her life and times, she leaves nothing out, yet we cannot say we know her. She remains a mystery. And if I say that Ginzburg’s writing is deeply moving, I am not simply referring to an emotional affectiveness – I am also registering a tumultuous and possibly unappeasable energy that stirs far beneath the solid surface of her steady, even sentences.
Ginzburg was born Natalia Levi in Palermo in 1916. Three years later the family moved to Turin, in the north of Italy. The youngest of five children, Natalia was schooled at home until she was eleven years old. At the age of ten she knew she wanted to be a writer. Her essay ‘My Vocation’, collected in her book The Little Virtues, is an account of the customary setbacks and hard-won triumphs she encountered on her way to becoming one. Written in 1949, only a few years after the Second World War had ended and in the aftermath of fascism, it also notes the current perils that threatened a writer facing the blank page: ‘There is the danger’, she writes, ‘of cheating with words that do not really exist within us, that we have picked up by chance from outside ourselves and which we skilfully slip in because we have become a bit dishonest.’ Ginzburg, twenty-seven at the time, was now a widow with three children. Her husband had been incarcerated and tortured to death in the Regina Coeli prison for his anti-fascist activities, just a few months after they returned to Rome following a period of exile in the Abruzzi. ‘After the time when I lived in the south I got to know grief very well – a real, irremediable and incurable grief that shattered my life […] Only my vocation remained unchanged, but it is profoundly misleading to say that even that was unchanged – the tools were still the same but the way I used them had altered.’ During this period, from the mid-1940s into the 1950s, she wrote several compressed and powerful essays that speak directly of this lonely and deeply traumatic time. It is apparent, however, that she will not be vanquished by her suffering, and her means of overcoming the temptation to ‘let my life go to pieces’ becomes in turn the hallmark of her work: speaking the truth.
Childhood is typically a time of make-believe, tall stories, elisions; when ‘truth and lies’, she writes in Family Lexicon, an autobiographical novel charting her own upbringing, ‘became all mixed up for me’. Well, no more, not for the next generation. It is an affront to tell children who have glimpsed the world in its worst possible light, who ‘have seen terror and horror in our faces’, that ‘we found them under cabbages, or that when a person dies he goes on a long journey’. Children are the key to the future, and to try to shift the reality of these knee-high attesters to atrocity back into a more innocent mode would be a grotesque kind of distortion, and a disservice. The older generation, however, does not approve, ‘they would like us to lie to our children as they lied to us’, she tells us in her essay ‘The Son of Man’; ‘but we are tied to our suffering, and at heart we are glad of our destiny as men.’ It is an arresting, unexpected line. What did she mean by it? Perhaps that there was an opportunity now to repudiate those apparently innocuous falsehoods and veils and masks, which flittered like darkening clouds throughout her childhood, then thickened into a cogent, irrevocable and heinous force that would annihilate her burgeoning happiness as a young woman. ‘And perhaps this is the one good thing to come out of the war,’ she reflected: ‘not to lie, and not allow others to lie to us.’
During the fascist years, when reality was ‘something stuck behind glass – vitreous, crystalline, mute and immobile’, writers were of course working in a very restricted way, producing hermetic compositions that suggested an arid, elusive kind of world, completely divorced from lived experience, which they absolutely could not risk openly commenting upon. So naturally, directly after this suppressive and fearsome time, there was a kind of fever, an excitement, when novelists and poets felt access to the full range of their tools returning to them. ‘Now, once more, many words were in circulation and reality appeared to be at everyone’s fingertips’, wrote Ginzburg. A ubiquitous harvesting of words ensued, yet the results, she tells us, were a confusion of poetry and politics. The idea that the glass had been broken was soon revealed to be nothing more than a fleeting fantasy. Reality was still a hard, immoveable thing, mired in arcane complexities, and so, after an initially joyous period, writers became ‘dejected and disheartened’ and withdrew back into silence. ‘It was necessary for writers to go back and choose their words, scrutinise them to see if they were true or false, if they had actual origins in our experience, or if instead they only had the ephemeral origins of a shared illusion.’ This level of scrutiny was at the heart of neorealism. Film-makers such as Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica, and writers including Alberto Moravia, Vasco Pratolini and Cesare Pavese, strove to develop new artistic strategies which enabled their work to lay bare the confusion and alienation that was hampering a traumatised Italian psyche and etiolating lines of communication between people. By representing lived experience accurately, these asphyxiating difficulties were authenticated and shown to be the new shared reality, rather than a claustrophobic, recursive nightmare going on inside one’s own head.
For Ginzburg, neorealism was ‘a way of getting close to life, of getting inside life, inside reality’. But this post-war reality was a dispirited and reticent kind of place that was not so easily accessed, and its unrealised inhabitants were perhaps not as easy to portray in literature as they were in film. In ‘Silence’, an essay composed in 1951, Ginzburg writes, ‘Those of us who have tried to write novels in our time know the discomfort and unhappiness that appears as soon as we reach the point when we have to make our characters talk to one another. For page after page our characters exchange comments that are insignificant but pregnant with a desolate unhappiness.’ Words between people have become scarce, circumspect, perfunctory; ‘the signals of castaways’. This phrase, ‘the signals of castaways’, seems like an apposite way to think about the many letters exchanged in Happiness, as Such. The epistolary form suited Ginzburg well, it allowed her to slide between a variety of ‘I’s, and to get right in beneath the skin of each one. It also means the novel is free from preamble and context, so the reader has the deliciously uncomfortable sensation of becoming immediately embroiled in the spats, tensions, expectations and disappointments, which are all piquantly attested to within it.
The first letter is from Adriana to her son Michele; we are immediately introduced to a voice that pulls no punches. The relentless candour of Adriana’s words is by turns startling, comical, alarming and heartbreaking: ‘There’s nothing worse than shyness between two people who’ve hated each other,’ she writes, reflecting on her civilised but dull monthly meetings with her ex-husband. On Osvaldo, Michele’s closest friend, she writes, ‘He’s polite. It’s the kind of politeness that makes you feel full, as if you’ve eaten too much jam.’ Describing Matilde’s imminent dinner party, she writes, ‘We are having a rice timbale, vol-au-vent with chicken and béchamel sauce, and sponge cake. I pointed out to Matilde that all the food is round.’ In her last letter she draws out a valedictory admission that is searing in its acute singularity: ‘It probably seems weird, but a person does fixate on simple and weird urges when the truth is she desires nothing.’
In a particularly excavating and intensely touching missive that details the separation between herself and Michele’s father, Adriana concedes that ‘a mother probably shouldn’t tell her son such things. It’s not instructive. But the question is, how does anyone know what ‘instructive’ is, and if there’s even such a thing as an upbringing.’ Ada, Osvaldo’s wife, doesn’t seem to think there is. She perceives the world to be full of young people drifting around aimlessly, like ‘withered seedlings’. ‘They were never young’, she complains to Osvaldo, ‘never children, and so they are incapable of growing up.’ Indeed, Michele doesn’t appear to have any idea of how he would like to live, he hasn’t cultivated any professional ambitions and lacks romantic fervour. ‘I’ve given up on sculpture school’, he writes to his mother, ‘I prefer dogs and dishes.’ And the girl he is seeing is, he tells her, ‘a little boring, but not stupid.’
Michele’s letters are typically brief, evasive, desultory, and generally lacking in vim. A similarly enervated character from a previous novel, Tommasino, speaking in Voices in the Evening, is chillingly aware of the insuperable lassitude that attenuates his spirit: ‘“You see, it is not in me,” he said, “no real vitality […] It is because I have the feeling,” he said, “that they have already lived enough, those others before me; that they have consumed all the reserves, all the vitality that was there for us […] It seems to me that I am only their shadow.”’ Tommasino has pushed his thoughts underground and has adopted the Beckettian practice of babbling into a tape recorder while sat alone at his large dining room table, and is thus rendered ‘an extraneous and lamentable presence in the empty house’. Meanwhile, as Michele drifts further and further away from his family and his country, his actions become increasingly erratic and arbitrary, and it’s hard to fathom what is directing them, or, indeed, where they will lead. ‘I wish you would come here and decide,’ writes Adriana, in a letter relaying to Michele the impractical contents of his father’s will. ‘I can’t make these decisions for you. How can I decide anything if I have no idea where and how you want to live.’ Michele has wandered too far; his estranged signals have become too breviloquently outlandish to be usefully deciphered, and Ginzburg’s grim assessment in ‘Silence’ that ‘Every day silence harvests its victims’ feels increasingly prescient.
In 1970, around the same time she wrote Happiness, as Such, Ginzburg penned an essay, ‘Portrait of a Writer’, written, unusually for her, in the third person, where she reflects, ruefully, upon her lack of imagination and the will to invent. ‘She would have liked to write streams of whirling, tumultuous pages […] Instead her pages possessed a clarity that was swift, orderly, neat and miserly.’ The forensic criticism she levels at herself in this piece makes it discomforting to read; it’s not as if by staying close to what she knew Ginzburg took the easier path. ‘The truth brings home memories that make her suffer,’ she writes in the final paragraph: ‘Compared to telling the truth, inventing was like playing with a litter of kittens. Telling the truth is like moving through a pack of lions.’
It’s Hard to Talk About Yourself is the aptly epigrammatic title of a collection of transcribed interviews Ginzburg took part in for Italian radio in 1990. In its beautifully commemorative preface, Lisa Ginzburg, her granddaughter, provides a gentler depiction of the personal and creative torments that beset and animated this most searching of writers. Life around Natalia was both ‘painful and exciting’, we are told, and this was why she was drawn to Chekhov’s work; ‘because in Chekhov, in his plays and stories, she found bundled together pain and pleasure, melancholia and life, the violence of passions and the gentleness of feelings. It was this amalgamating of things, this mixing of vital and torpid elements, of tragedies and great consolations, which was an inspiration to her.’ The Russian writer’s artistic sensibility made a deep impression on Ginzburg, and her analysis of his variegated works shaped her conception of poetic beauty, which, she said, must consist of ‘a mixture of ruthlessness, pride, irony, physical tenderness, of imagination and memory, of clarity and obscurity – and if we cannot gather all these things together we are left with something meagre, unreliable and hardly alive.’ Ginzburg could gather all those things together, like no one else. She knew well that contradictions do not cancel each other out, that they are the very life force of existence, and in her vivid delineation of them Ginzburg has given us many pages that in fact transcend the dichotomy that plagued her: her words may be ordered and clear, yet they are also dynamic, tumultuous and alive. And in this way Natalia Ginzburg fulfilled her destiny, because even when her writing is conveying the hardest of truths, it is always, and intensely, life-affirming.
Claire-Louise Bennett, 2019
Happiness, as Such
1
A woman awoke in her new house. Her name was Adriana. It was snowing outside, and her birthday, she was forty-three years old. The house was in the country. The village was visible from the house, on a hilltop, two kilometres away. Fifteen kilometres to the city. Adriana had moved in ten days earlier. She pulled on a light, tobacco-brown robe. Slid her long narrow feet into a pair of slippers that were also tobacco-brown and trimmed with dirty white fur. She headed to the kitchen and made a cup of instant coffee to dunk biscuits in. There were apple peels on the table and she swept them into a newspaper to keep for the rabbits they didn’t have yet but would soon because the milkman had promised to bring them. Then she went into the living room and pulled open the shutters. She saw herself in the mirror hanging over the sofa. She was tall, she wore her wavy copper hair cropped short, she had a small head and a long strong neck, her green eyes were wide-set and sad. She sat down at the desk to write a letter to her only son.
Dear Michele, she wrote, I’m writing primarily to tell you that your father is sick. Go and visit him. He says he hasn’t seen you for days. I was there yesterday. It was the first Thursday of the month, and I was waiting for him at Café Canova’s when I got a call from his butler telling me he was ill. So I went on up. He was in bed. Seemed quite worn out. There were bags under his eyes and his skin looked awful. He has painful indigestion and isn’t eating anything. Naturally, he’s still smoking.
When you go to see him, don’t take your usual twenty-five pairs of dirty socks. The butler, I can’t remember if his name is Enrico or Federico, isn’t up to the extra burden of managing your dirty laundry right now. He’s exhausted and overwhelmed. He doesn’t sleep at night because your father keeps calling for him. And it’s the first time he’s ever been a butler. He was a mechanic before. Plus, he’s an idiot.
If you have a lot of dirty laundry, you can bring it here. I have a woman helping me, Cloti. She started five days ago. She’s not very nice. She’s always scowling and things with her are already shaky, so if you were to show up with a suitcase full of laundry to wash and iron, that would be just fine. I should remind you however that there are good launderettes near your studio and you’re old enough to take care of yourself. You’ll be twenty-two soon. Speaking of which, it’s my birthday. The twins gave me new slippers. But I’m fond of my old slippers. I also wanted to tell you that it would be a great improvement if you washed your socks and handkerchiefs at night instead of balling them up and leaving them to fester for weeks under your bed, but I’ve always told you that and the message has never got across.
I waited there for the doctor. He’s Dr Povo. Maybe Covo. I didn’t quite catch his name. He lives in the building. I was unable to understand exactly what he thinks your father has. He says there’s an ulcer, which we already know about. He says your father should go to a clinic but your father won’t hear of it. I wonder if you think I should move into your father’s house to help him. I think the same thing periodically but I won’t do it. Sick people frighten me. I’m scared of other people’s diseases, though I’m not scared of my own. But I’ve never really been seriously ill. I went to Holland when my father had diverticulitis. I knew perfectly well it wasn’t diverticulitis. It was cancer. So I wasn’t there when he died, which I regret. But after a certain point in life a person has to dunk her regrets in the morning coffee, just like biscuits.
Moreover if I were to show up there with all my bags tomorrow, I don’t know what your father would think. He’s grown shy around me in the last few years. And I’m getting shy around him. There’s nothing worse than shyness between two people who’ve hated each other. There’s nothing to say. They can be grateful that they’re not scratching and clawing at each other but that kind of gratitude hardly leads to dialogue. After we split up, your father and I started our dull but civilised routine of meeting each other for tea at Canova’s the first Thursday of every month. I never cared for it and neither did he. His cousin Lillino, the lawyer, had suggested it. He always listens to his cousin Lillino, the lawyer from Mantua. According to Lillino the two of us needed to maintain a good relationship and meet regularly to discuss common concerns. The hours spent at Canova’s have been torture for the both of us. Your father, who is methodical in his disorganisation, had determined that we should remain sitting together at that table from five to seven thirty. Every so often he’d sigh loudly and look at his watch. That was humiliating, the way he stretched back in his chair and scratched at his mop of black hair. He reminds me of a tired old panther. We talked about you children. But he didn’t care about your sisters. You are his light. From the moment you came into the world he got it stuck in his head that you are the only person in the world worthy of his kindness and praise. We talked about you, even though he’s well aware I don’t understand you at all and that he is the only one who really knows you. And so that was the end of that conversation. The two of us are so worried about disagreeing that we avoid any conceivably volatile topic. You’ve always known about our afternoon meetings, but I don’t think you knew that it was his damned cousin who advised us to have them. I realise that I’m talking about it as if we were still going to be meeting. In reality I think your father is very sick and we won’t ever meet again at Canova’s on the first Thursday of the month.
If you weren’t such a fool I’d tell you to move out of the studio and go back to Via San Sebastianello. You could be the one being kept awake all night instead of that butler. Realistically you don’t actually do anything. Viola is running her household. Angelica works and has the baby. The twins are in school and are still young. Not to mention the fact that your father can’t stand the twins. He can’t stand Viola or Angelica either. He can’t stand his own sisters either. Cecilia is old anyway and he and Matilde hate each other. Matilde is staying here now and will be here all winter. You’re the only person whom your father loves and can stand being around. But you aren’t going to change, and I understand it’s better if you stay put, in the studio. If you went to your father’s house you’d just add to the confusion and drive the butler to despair.
