Natalia Ginzburg & Beryl Bainbridge, Lynne Tillman

Two of the early essays in Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg are about London in the early 1960s, the melancholy, desolation, lack of imagination, and the depressing food. She admires the get-up of old ladies in evening wear, and otherwise can find nothing to like. 

Beryl Bainbridge in The Bottle Factory Outing speaks for this England. Employees at an Italian bottle factory in London go on an outing: big blonde Freda, mousier Brenda, fumbling Rossi, aloof Vittorio, Patrick who'd fix a leaking toilet. Seediness turns nasty. 

I keep putting the book down. Natalia and Beryl. Even their names fight each other. I read Little Virtues twice on our ten day trip to Portugal, struggled to finish The Bottle Factory Outing. Promise of worse in a seedy world is not the best for spring travel.

The last three essays in  Little Virtues are wonderful. I read them in a strange agony of appreciation, so easily can recognition turn to pain. The best was reading on the beach at Cacela Velha, the second or third time. P was practicing tightrope walking on the sand without a rope but with a balancing pole. The empty beach with very fine sand and a calligraphy of grasses crisscrossed by black beetles making long work of our lunch crumbs, draws in every empty beach I've known, Natalia Ginzburg draws in my thoughts about human relationships and silence. And the sun shines. I've chosen the house over the water where I would stay or live, the oldest of them, nearly buried in pines.

Valentino, 62 pages by Natalia Ginzburg

Up at the pond I read the whole of Valentino, by Natalia Ginzburg, 62 pages of bare story on the edge of an Italian city in the middle of the twentieth century. The story feels bare, in the sense of relentless yet gentle. People are evenly presented, in a narrative without judgement but not without feeling. At the end you feel as much for all of them, even the feckless eponymous Valentino, who was meant, his parents thought, to become a man of consequence, a doctor who would discover things and be remembered. As it was, after a flurry of schoolgirls, he marries a rich unattractive woman and has three children with her. 

His sister Caterina, our narrator, goes to live in this ménage. Her room has a pale blue carpet. She is even-handed, a schoolteacher, modest, going along with love and death enacted by others, liking the idea of sharing in the lives of others, patient as regards her own, accepting of what happens. She might marry her sister-in-law's cousin, they have an agreeable day out in the country, he drove, he wore Valentino's gloves, a woman threw a shoe at them, they ate tiny pears. A few weeks later he says he can't marry her after all, and within the year he has killed himself. His room is filled with pictures of Valentino.

Like the films of same era, it only takes a pair of gloves and a few small pears. Drawers full of letters. Walls full of pictures.      

Natalia Ginzburg, All Our Yesterdays

 I finished Natalia Ginzburg, All Our Yesterdays, on the last day of our holiday in Portugal, and was left wondering how she gave us a sense of intimacy with these people, and the war, and the land, without ever seeming to dwell long enough for us to know them, the people, the war, and the land. Yet there is an insistence, as people appear and disappear, marry unsuitably or oddly or not at all, grow old or die or think about how dying would be all right if it happened. We don't need to be told what people's feelings are because the onwardness of events takes the place of individuals and the feelings they might have. Or feelings are not the point. Onwardness, history, the interleaving of people, not even families particularly, any mesh of friends, neighbours, acquaintances. There's a coolness, distance, a looking outward at the broad flow of events, marriage, a baby here or there. Writing is a way of keeping going, not involving, urged by detail, little teeth like a wolf, a mother who works in a cake shop, or arrives from foreign parts with chocolates, goes away to school.

The quietly main character, Anna, becomes pregnant at 16, and marries an older man, a friend of her father's, who tells her a number of times, as most descriptive things like the little teeth of a wolf or a crooked smile or hair like chicken feathers, are said a number of times, that she is an insect and he just a big leaf on which she rests. He hoped she would become a strong woman but she was still an insect who didn't know how to do anything except perch on a big leaf. He is killed at the end of the book, at the end of the war, by the Germans. So, her big leaf gone, with one of her brothers and one of the family from across the road, she considers the long war and the sorrow and noise and confusion, and the long difficult life which they saw in front of them now, full of all the things they did not know how to do.

The chapter when Anna is dealing with, or ignoring, the fact that she is pregnant, about halfway through the book, is one of the few internal moments.

She thought how she had neither father nor mother, and how she had found her brother dead on a seat and how she had a baby inside her. But she had not the courage to tell anybody about the baby, nor had she the courage to go and look for a midwife in the town. It seemed to her that she would have courage only for starting a revolution.

The internal shifts quickly to the external. From the baby inside her to the revolution she might start. This is how we determine what is important. Abruptly. At times you'd least expect.

Our holiday went into a third week because we missed the plane home. There was a strike at the airport. The next day I started reading Natalia Ginzburg again, at first just sentences or paragraphs here and there, then outright I was reading the whole of the second half again, unwilling to leave these people behind, finding the emphases with pleasure, the insect face, the crooked smile and the little wolf teeth, threading the book like pearls.

READING AS WAITING

Two books, by Natalia Ginzburg and Brian Dillon, sit untouched on the windowsill downstairs. I bought them for our trip to Portugal and have kept them unopened. Meanwhile, a Raymond Chandler story, Goldfish, a few (unsatisfying) stories by Graham Swift. Most compelling might be the Rough Guide to Portugal, well out of date by now, but full of the charms of the partially unknown: town squares we'll sit in and vistas we'll absorb from hilltops and balconies. 

Graham Swift's Learning to Swim & Other Stories must have been the follow-up to Waterland, which I liked back then for its wet fenland intrigue. These days, his language seems flat and over-expansive. The undertow is on view. There's a completion I don't want and often don't wait for.

'Goldfish' I read by the stove upstairs, published for the 60th anniversary of Penguin, 60p for 60 pages, written by Chandler whose work is so filmed that his words leap off the page and into the stance of Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum, words for actions, and then the laconic pause that marks the end of one story and the start of another.

Natalia Ginzburg, whom I have been reading on and off for the last number of years, has no completion. You get in, stay a while and get off at what might be the stop at which you began your trip, yet you have travelled a long way to get here.

Brian Dillon's new book Affinities I imagine reading in the Hotel de Moura, a blue and white convent at the foot of the Great Lake; then later in front of the Forte de Sao Joao da Barra in southeastern Portugal, lying on a sandbank, facing south.

WOMEN IN 1944

In 1944 Natalia Ginzburg published an essay about women in the short-lived Italian journal Mercurio. This was recently republished by The New York Review of Books together with a letter from the journal's editor, Alba de Céspedes. These are women of my mother's generation, or a little older, and, while I can more easily read Natalia Ginzburg's novels as independent of era, an essay plants itself in its time, speaks clearly from my mother's generation despite the fact I never heard my mother talk of the position of women, except insofar as she provided a foil, a milder cushion for the views of her friend Gertie, who never married or had children and was vehement on the subject of men.  

The image that dominates Natalia Ginzburg's essay and her friend's response is the well of melancholy into which women fall, which accounts both for their pain and for their complicity.

The truth is two women will understand each other thoroughly when they start to talk about the dark well they fall into, and they can exchange many impressions about wells and the absolute impossibility of communicating with others, of accomplishing something worthwhile, no matter how hard they try, and about the floundering to get back to the surface.

Her friend Alba responds warmly to the essay, but adds a note of disagreement.

But—unlike you—I think these wells are our strength. Because every time we fall into the well we descend to the deepest roots of our being human, and in returning to the surface we carry inside us the kinds of experiences that allow us to understand everything that men—who never fall into the well—will never understand.

The gender porosity of our era may dull the force of their debate. The well is open to all these days. Which is probably a good thing, even if an unwieldy means to achieve the privilege of melancholy.

I would like to speak to you at length about the suffering (women) experience in the well, because all suffering is in a woman's life; but then, to be perfectly honest, I should also talk about the joy they find there. 

But I can't talk to you about that today because I find myself—as is so often the case— in the well.

Barbara Pym and Natalia Ginzburg in a railway compartment.

Barbara Pym was a girl from Oswestry, Shropshire, of careful decent people, but she roamed Europe in her day, and laid the plans for future novels, before settling in England. Natalia Ginzburg was a girl from Turin, of art/political/activist antecedents; she had several brothers who, she said, didn't leave much room for her to talk, so she learned to be brief. 

I can see them opposite each other in a railway compartment circa 1960.

Barbara would look at Natalia Ginzburg and situate her in the rich tapestry of human life. Maybe too european for one of her characters, sitting by the window looking out, frowning a little, too harsh, or dry, riven by continental truths. Might not see Barbara Pym at all, a cosy Englishwoman abroad. A bullet between the eyes, is Natalia's style. And then hang out the washing. 

Barbara Pym's Quartet in Autumn, Norman and Edwin, Letty and Marcia work in the same office, have lunch in different places, live alone, tend toward mania and avoidance, dye their hair, or not, exhaust their own attention to where they are now, in the autumn of their lives, in the zone of social workers and luncheon vouchers. They end as they began, separately, quietly. 

The Sweet Dove Died is quiet too, elegant, sad, nonchalant, and onward. There's a belief in this english continuum. Cloying and attractive, by turns. The elegant older woman, Leonora, the antique dealer Humphrey and his sweet nephew, James, whom Leonora wishes to trap with silken threads, James's love life, the gentle pursuit of antiques, objects that contain so much more than themselves.

A Few Green Leaves is a portrait of a village in the second half of the twentieth century, the balance tender and amused. Playing a village like an instrument, out of curiosity and kindness. Always a vicar, and several unmarried Misses, an academic couple, a DMV (deserted mediaeval village), jumble sales and flower festivals. 

Barbara Pym is comfortable in her settings, with no difficult questions; this world should continue, there is good will, eventually, through every turn, forgiveness and resignation in equal parts. Natalia Ginzburg is terse, passionate, direct; not inviting any future nor invoking any past. 

I read Barbara Pym on the rocks down at Howe's Strand on a sunny Monday. Last time we went to Howe's Strand I was reading Virginia Woolf, and a group of girls on the little beach in front of us talked loudly and ate Pringles sandwiches, saying they'd go vegan, if anything. This time there was no one, except two plump brothers who came through silently, turned around and went back.

Natalia Ginzburg

I've been reading Natalia Ginzburg. The Dry Heart and The Road to the City. Short novels of northern Italy in the nineteen fifties, young women on a cusp, thinking to be loved and maybe to love, to have a house in the city, a man, a baby, some furnishings, gadgets, an embroidery basket. Natalia Ginzburg is dry and quick. I like her sentences. They anchor you drily in a blustery week.

My father has been a country doctor at Maona for over twenty years. He is a tall, stout, slightly lame old man who uses a cherry-wood cane for walking. In summer he wears a straw hat with black ribbon around it and in winter a beaver cap and overcoat with a beaver collar. My mother is a tiny woman with a thick mass of white hair.  

I like her seventeen year-old girl walking the road to the city, coming to terms with how it is, how all along you have loved Nini your half-cousin who will die, and there you'll be, suddenly, in this unexpected life, with or without a husband or a child, none of your expectations come to fruition, just this onwardness and silence. Vous êtes sur terre, c'est sans remède.

For a girl at seventeen in the nineteen-fifties there was no interlude in which you might study, or travel, there was only life ahead, a version of the lives around, and the question of love, whether you would or anyone would love you, this bare, unattractive you who is suddenly, every day, unleashed on the world. 

On page one of The Dry Heart, a teacher/mother/wife shoots her husband between the eyes; she narrates it as if about to hang out the washing. When her baby dies of meningitis, she throws out all the baby's things. 

We're stupid and don't know what we really want when we're young. Life runs away with us before we know what it's all about.

When I was 17 or 23 life was not running away with me. Au contraire. Life hadn't arrived at all. I was still reading the label on the honey jar as I ate my toast in the morning. I was not thinking of a husband, a house or children. I was thinking of the obverse of all that, whatever it turned out to be. I had no expectations. No image. There's a freedom in hardly seeing past the end of your nose, in either direction. 

Natalia Ginsburg

By the time you're on the third successive book by Natalia Ginzburg you're prepared for any kind of ellipsis or uncertainty. You know the context and here is a new set of voices, habits and disputes. Voices in the Evening is more fragmented than the two other books of hers I've read. Among the generations and couples and their houses, she chooses slighter and slighter evidence: names of streets the reader won't know, skeletal evidence of couples breaking up. Enough for her, enough for me.

Having just read Happiness, as such and Family Lexicon, I know where I am with this writing, the scraps and instalments of lives that come our way among people we know in places we're familiar with. Stories rise from the darkness or the miasma, and then sink back. In a novel as in life, death is hardly different from no longer being talked about.

I read this book twice, starting again as soon as I reached the end, happy to spend more time in this version of human life, in which thoughts feelings and actions make temporary appearances. I do not know any more about these people at the end of the second reading than I did at the end of the first. I do not necessarily want to know more. I like to exist among fragments, to break off with a banal musing, like Elsa's mother in the last sentence of the book, considering a move from one village to another: 'I wonder if they keep the stuff that I take for my blood pressure at the chemist's in Cignano.'

If there is any guarantee that life continues, it lies in the banality of our daily questions, and the possibility of voicing them to someone else.

Natalia Ginzburg and Grace Paley

Happiness as such is next in the Natalia Ginzburg season. I used to tell students that certain books were best read in one or two long goes. At first I read bits of this book at bad moments, and couldn't find my own or the story's feet. Then, for most of a wet day I read the rest of it, swerving between the letters (this is mostly an epistolary novel) as they swerve among the vicissitudes, the ordinary mess of their lives, then let you out at the end into a somewhat cleared sky.

This is how the book ends.

A number of times I have thought that maybe while he was dying he had a flash of understanding and he travelled all the paths of his memory and I am consoled by this thought because nothing brings consolation when there is nothing left, and even seeing that dusty undershirt in that kitchen, and then leaving it behind, was a strange, icy, lonely consolation.

Natalia Ginzburg and Grace Paley are kin. Tempestuous grounded motherhoods. Blunt, canny speech. Unjudging, wry, and rude around disasters, arguments and dirty socks. Varying spareness, sometimes exasperation but never venom.

His wife is having a baby next spring. Good God, why do all these babies keep coming when everyone is so fed up with them and no one wants them around. There are just too many babies.
     I'll stop here. I need to give this letter to Mathilde who's going out shopping now and I'll stay here to watch the snow and read Pascal's Pensées.

Natalia Ginzburg said she wrote in short sentences because she was the youngest and if she wasn't quick with what she wanted to say someone else would take over.

I think we will send you money periodically. Not that money will solve anything, since you're alone, broke, unsettled, and unreliable. But we're all unreliable and broken somewhere inside and sometimes it seems desperately attractive to be unrooted and breathing nothing but your own solitude. That's how people find each other, and understand.

If we read to be somewhere else, among other people, the converse is also true. We read to find each other, and understand. As one of her characters says, 'It's nice to talk to strangers when you're depressed. At least you can make things up.'

Natalia Ginzburg, Family Lexicon

I set into Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon one night and gasped, without knowing why.

I was inside a family constructed around their habits and the way they talked, the bumpy rhythms of recollection, the tedium of what you find there: you always say the same thing, it's boring, jackass. But it's consistent, it's voiced, it forms bedrock.

Having grown up in a family beset by silence more than by speech, I move into this household in Turin in the 1930s, listen to these people, move about their world, breath drawn, disbelieving—that anyone could say this much, this clearly, without emotion, without judgement.

The habits of our language are the habits of our world. Discuss.

I first read Natalia Ginzburg when I was twenty-something and found her writing dull, but, as with Schubert songs, which my mother said I might like better when I was older, now she seems lucid and brave, her rhythms her own.

No, not brave. Honest. No, not honest, free. Not free, freed. This is family plainspeak. She had to be this blunt and if you're patient you'll find out why.  Her family was italian jewish catholic anti-fascist and that's enough for anybody in this life. She doesn't judge, she releases her family life through the things they said to each other, the clothes they wore and what they had for breakfast.

Halfway through the book we read, in mid-page, in a sentence, that the narrator married Leone Ginzburg. This is not a 'reader, I married him'. Her father flew into a rage as he did when any of his children got married, and that's it, she becomes his Ginzburg daughter.

We got married, Leone and I, and we went to live in the apartment on via Pallaglio.

Twenty-five pages later, Leone is dead.

On the wall in his office the publisher had hung a portrait of Leone; his hat slightly at an angle, his eyeglasses low on his nose, his thick black hair, his deeply dimpled cheeks, his feminine hands. Leone had died in prison, in the German section of Regina Coeli prison one icy February in Rome during the German occupation.

By the time Natalia Ginzburg enters her own story, by the time she grows up, we realise we have been curious all along, waiting for her to emerge from a hundred pages of watching and listening to her family and their friends, neighbours, absorbing the talk in which she grew.

Family Lexicon won the Strega Prize For Fiction in 1963. That was a day for truth.