Rachel Cusk on Natalia Ginzberg:
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 realize 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 bourgeois 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 recognized 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 realization 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.
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