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- Herausgeber: Daunt Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
'I really love and admire The Little Virtues.' -- Zadie Smith 'Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like.' -- Rachel Cusk 'As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones.' Between 1944 and 1960, Natalia Ginzburg wrote The Little Virtues, a collection of eleven vivid portraits of life that are central to her legacy as one of the greatest Italian writers of the twentieth century. From the Italian countryside, where she and her husband lived in exile under fascist rule, to the melancholy streets of 1960s London, Ginzburg explores loneliness and belonging against the backdrop of post-war Europe. In The Little Virtues, Ginzburg takes familiar objects and experiences – worn-out shoes, money boxes, meatballs, childhood, silence – and transforms them into subjects of great significance. While haunted by the political events of the time, Ginzburg rests her gaze on the human intimacies that shape and define our lives: friendships, marriage and parenthood. She describes her longest relationship – with her writing – in a definitive piece on vocation and motherhood, while her groundbreaking essay on raising children remains as vital as the day it was written. The Little Virtues is a poignant portrait of Italy in the twentieth century and a singular work of memoir: intrepid, wise and dazzling. 'If Ferrante is a friend, Ginzburg is a mentor.' -- Lara Feigel, Guardian 'A punch-you-in-the-stomach-with-grief-and-beauty masterpiece.' -- Maggie Nelson 'A profound commentary on Italian life.' -- Tim Parks, London Review of Books 'This reissue of a twentieth century classic contains 11 essays of wisdom that'll leave you seeing the world from a new perspective.' -- Emerald Street Translated by Dick Davis
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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‘A punch-you-in-the-stomach-with-grief-and-beauty masterpiece.’ Maggie Nelson
‘The book that taught me what I want to teach my daughter.’ – Belle Boggs, The New Yorker
‘A glowing light of modern Italian literature… As direct and clean as if it were carved in stone, it yet speaks thoughts of the heart.’ New York Times
‘A profound commentary on Italian life.’ Tim Parks, London Review of Books
The Little Virtues
NATALIA GINZBURG
Translated by Dick Davis
With an introduction by Rachel Cusk
DAUNT BOOKS
Contents
Introduction
The voice of the Italian novelist and essayist Natalia Ginzburg comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language. Writings from more than half a century ago read as if they have just been – in some mysterious sense are still being – composed. No context is required to read her: in fact, to read her is to realise how burdened literature frequently is by its own social and material milieux. Yet her work is not abstract or overtly philosophical: it is deeply practical and personal. You come away from it feeling that you know the author profoundly, without having very much idea of who she is.
It isn’t quite right to call these contradictions, because they are also the marks of a great artist, but in this case perhaps it is worth treating them as such, since they enabled Ginzburg to evolve techniques with which contemporary literature is only just catching up. Chief among these is her grasp of the self and of its moral function in narrative; second – a consequence of the first – is her liberation from conventional literary form and from the structures of thought and expression that Virginia Woolf likewise conjectured would have to be swept away if an authentic female literature were to be born. Yet this liberation is entirely towards naturalness and simplicity; it is an advance made without the propulsive force of ego, and so it is easy not to recognise it as an advance at all. Finally, Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like. This voice emerges from her preoccupations and themes, whose specificity and universality she considers with a gravitas and authority that seem both familiar and entirely original. It is an authority grounded in living and being rather than in thinking or even in language, an authority perhaps better compared to that of the visual artist, who is obliged to negotiate first with the seen, tangible world.
Ginzburg was born in Palermo in 1916, the child of a Jewish father and Catholic mother. Theirs was a left-wing intellectual household and she grew up into a milieu of radical thinkers and writers who became, with the advent of war, the defenders of liberalism and free speech. She and her young husband Leone Ginzburg were part of a group of anti-fascist activists and were central figures in protecting the freedom of the press. As well as essays Ginzburg wrote several novels, the most famous of which, Family Lexicon, is a history of a family whose observational core – in the person of its narrator and daughter of the family, Natalia – remains opaque. Ginzburg’s distinctive writing technique is easier to analyse in the more spacious setting of the novel. What at first might seem to be a narrative strategy, whereby Natalia withholds her own thoughts and feelings while her observations of those around her pour forth, becomes a profound commentary on the nature of narrative itself and how it so often misrepresents the trauma and tragedy inherent in living. Ginzburg separates the concept of storytelling from the concept of the self and in doing so takes a great stride towards a more truthful representation of reality. She identifies narrative as being in some important sense a bourgeoise enterprise, a gathering of substance from the world in order to turn it to the story’s own profit, and moreover a process of ineradicable bias, whereby things only become ‘real’ once they have been recognised and given value by an individual. Put simply, Ginzburg attempts to show what happened without needing to show it happening to somebody. Her job – her art – is to represent the flawed charm, the tragedy and comedy of the human, to show the precise extent to which our characters shape our destinies and to watch as those destinies confer their blows and their rewards upon us.
The essays in The Little Virtues, written separately and in distinct circumstances between 1944 and 1960, comprise an autobiography of sorts. ‘Winter in the Abruzzi’ describes a period in which the author, then a young wife and mother, was exiled in wartime with her family to the Italian countryside. In ‘Worn-out Shoes’ she is now alone, living in post-war Rome with another solitary woman, her children being taken care of by her mother outside the city. ‘My Vocation’ describes the dawning of her realisation that creativity is a lifetime calling and is the most enduring of the relationships she will have. In ‘England: Eulogy and Lament’ she is older and exiled again, this time in a strange country whose manners and mores she records by way of making an inventory of her own homesickness and sorrow. In ‘He and I’ she is living with a man whose character she can only describe in terms of its differences from her own, in what is palpably a relationship of middle age; this time the sense of exile is emotional as well as geographical, the feeling of alienation from one’s own history that comes from living with a man who is not the father of one’s children. ‘The Little Virtues’, a work of great restraint and courage, is a look back at parenthood. Entirely without sentiment or subjectivity, it identifies the moral cowardice inherent in conventional attitudes to children and their upbringing, and the ways in which we inculcate the values of materialism and selfishness in the generations that will replace us. ‘As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; nor shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one’s neighbour and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.’ This statement of principle serves equally as a description of Ginzburg’s own life and work.
Among the many themes touched on in these essays – war, relationships, loss, belief, domesticity, art – the matter of femininity is handled with surprising understatement and reserve. The author occupies the successive roles of daughter, wife, mother and partner without ever allowing her perspective to be subsumed into them. Yet she is perfectly honest about what the playing of these roles involves. ‘And then my children were born,’ she writes in ‘My Vocation’, ‘and when they were very little I could not understand how anyone could sit herself down to write if she had children. I did not see how I could separate myself from them in order to follow someone or other’s fortunes in a story.’ She describes the pitfalls of gender – both male and female – without ever falling into them. This unusual objectivity, achieved by a careful use of distance that is never allowed to become detachment, is one of the pleasures of reading Ginzburg; yet it perhaps bears greater examination as an example of how a woman writer might make and inhabit an authentic place for herself in the world. ‘Irony and nastiness seemed to be very important weapons in my hands,’ she writes of her early attempts to create stories; ‘I thought they would help me write like a man, because at that time I wanted terribly to write like a man and I had a horror of anyone realising from what I wrote that I was a woman.’ She goes on to describe how the acceptance of her womanhood was fundamental to her birth as an artist, but she is careful to point out that this was not conscription to a gendered view of life: rather, it was the self-acceptance crucial to enabling anyone to speak with their own voice. The basis of Ginzburg’s worldview is equality, and the stories that are built on it are built from the formation and function of individual human character alone. Here, morality and the choices that are consequent on it are the engine of narrative.
‘My husband died in Rome,’ she writes at the end of ‘Winter in the Abruzzi’, ‘in the prison of Regina Coeli, a few months after we left the Abruzzi. Faced with the horror of his solitary death, and faced with the anguish which preceded his death, I ask myself if this happened to us – to us, who bought oranges at Giro’s and went for walks in the snow.’ The torture and murder of Leone Ginzburg by the fascist police, the destruction through war of the known reality, the loss of the world of childhood and the breaking of its concept of authority: these things ‘happened’ to Natalia Ginzburg and it seems they taught her much about the dangers of extremity both to human character and to art. The exceptional violence and pain of her experiences are painstakingly transmuted into a clear-eyed universality where cruelty and exaggeration, even if they have their basis in fact, are not tolerated. ‘And you have to realise that you cannot console yourself for your grief by writing… Because this vocation is never a consolation or a way of passing the time. It is not a companion. This vocation is a master who is able to beat us till the blood flows… We must swallow our saliva and tears and grit our teeth and dry the blood from our wounds and serve him. Serve him when he asks. Then he will help us up on to our feet, fix our feet firmly on the ground; he will help us overcome madness and delirium, fever and despair. But he has to be the one who gives the orders and he always refuses to pay attention to us when we need him.’
Rachel Cusk, 2018
Preface
The essays collected here appeared in various newspapers and magazines. I am grateful to these newspapers and magazines for permission to reprint them.
They were written at the following times in the following places:
‘Winter in the Abruzzi’ (Inverno in Abruzzo), written in Rome in the autumn of 1944, published in Aretusa; ‘Worn-out Shoes’ (Le scarpe rotte), written in Rome in the autumn of 1945, published in Politecnico; ‘Portrait of a Friend’ (Ritratto d’un amico), written in Rome in 1957, appeared in Radiocorriere; ‘England: Eulogy and Lament’ (Elogio e compianto dell’Inghilterra), written in London in the spring of 1961, published in Mondo; ‘La Maison Volpé’ (La Maison Volpé), written in London in the spring of 1960, published in Mondo; ‘He and I’ (Lui e io), written in Rome in the summer of 1962, and I think unpublished; ‘The Son of Man’ (Il Figlio dell’uomo), written in Turin in 1946, published in Unità; ‘My Vocation’ (Il mio mestiere), written in Turin in the autumn of 1949, published in Ponte; ‘Silence’ (Silenzio), written in Turin in 1951, published in Cultura e realtà; ‘Human Relationships’ (I rapporti umani), written in Rome in the spring of 1953, published in Terza Generazione; ‘The Little Virtues’ (Le piccole virtú), written in London in the spring of 1960, and published in Nuovi Argomenti.
The dates are significant because they account for the changes in style. I have corrected virtually none of these essays because I am only able to correct what I write at the time that I am writing it. When this time has passed I don’t know how to make corrections. And so this book perhaps does not have much uniformity of style, and I apologise for this.
I dedicate this book to a friend of mine, whose name I shall not mention. He is not present in any of these essays, nevertheless he is the person to whom most of them are secretly addressed. Many of these essays would not have been written if I had not had various conversations with him. He gave a legitimacy and freedom of expression to certain things I had been turning over in my mind.
I record my affection and great friendship for him here – a friendship which, like all real friendships, has passed through the fire of violent disagreements.
Part One
Winter in the Abruzzi
God has given us this moment of peace
There are only two seasons in the Abruzzi: summer and winter. The spring is snowy and windy like the winter, and the autumn is hot and clear like the summer. Summer starts in June and ends in November. The long days of sunshine on the low, parched hills, the yellow dust in the streets and the babies’ dysentery come to an end, and winter begins. People stop living in the streets: the barefoot children disappear from the church steps. In the region I am talking about almost all the men disappeared after the last crops were brought in: they went for work to Terni, Sulmona or Rome. Many bricklayers came from that area, and some of the houses were elegantly built; they were like small villas with terraces and little columns, and when you entered them you would be astonished to find large dark kitchens with hams hanging from the ceilings, and vast, dirty, empty rooms. In the kitchen a fire would be burning, and there were various kinds of fire: there were great fires of oak logs, fires of branches and leaves, fires of twigs picked up one by one in the street. It was easier to tell the rich from the poor by looking at the fires they burnt than by looking at the houses or at the people themselves, or at their clothes and shoes which were all more or less the same.
