Families and Friends: A Conversation in Rome with Natalia Ginzburg

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This interview with Natalia Ginzburg was originally published in the August / September 1985 issue of The London Magazine.

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Natalia Ginzburg’s principal concern as a writer is the disintegration of the family in contemporary society and, relatedly, broken marriages, solitude, the loss of innocence and the futility of human aspirations. A feline sense of irony, at times reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s, at others of Ivy Compton-Burnett, a writer for whom the Italian has an enormous admiration (‘la grande signorina’), pervades her work.

I found Signoria Ginzburg in her office at the Rome branch of the Einaudi publishing house, where she is a director. The room overlooked the pensione where Keats died, at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Piazza di Spagna.

The conversation, said Ginzburg, lighting a cigarette, would have to be conducted in Italian. English, she called, ‘il più difficile lingua del mondo’. Then she began to speak in strange oracular tones, about her major theme: the death of the family.

‘I have never written about the family as though it were an entirely contented unit. Far from it. Often it turns out to be a nest of contagious germs, full of harmful and malicious forces. Nevertheless I believe the family is absolutely irreplaceable. Its ties form a kind of fertile soil from which we draw sustenance, to which we turn in times of need. The sundering of its binding-links in the twentieth century is nothing short of tragedy.’

I asked Ginzburg if such an opinion could be construed as reactionary. Alberto Moravia, Leonard Sciascia and other Italian writers of the ideological Left having cursed the family as the bane of their society.

‘Perhaps I am something of a reactionary,’ replied Ginzburg. ‘A reactionary in certain of my nostalgic affections for institutions and ways of the past, though certainly not in my political beliefs.’

In Tutti i nostri ieri (1952), (All our yesterdays), Natalia Ginzburg’s long account of a Piedmontese family and its struggle to survive under Mussolini’s regime, there is a reason for this disintegration of the family: the devastating effect of Italian fascism. Exactly the same could be said for the now-classic Lessico famigliare (1963), (Family Sayings, 1967), an autobiographical account of the ‘diaspora’ of Ginz-burg’s own family before and after the last war.

In a more recent novel such as Caro Michele (1973), or her last, La città e la casa (1984), no such reasons for this disintegration are given. What has happened to the family since Tutti i nostri ieri?

‘The answer,’ said Ginzburg, ‘is simple. Family ties have today been irreparably damaged, and often for no reason, and not only in Italy. In Caro Michele and La città e la casa I tried to show how fathers lose trace of their sons, how children are born outside of marriage, how relatives are divided geographically, if not mentally. Marriages no longer last. Half of the characters in La città e la casa have anyway no desire to marry. And who can blame them? Better to live a life apart than one in eternal conflict. I don’t know if there is any hope for the family in the future, but today it seems as though we’ve come to the end of the line and the family will quite possibly be made redundant. Once that happens, of course, the fabric of society as we know it will be destroyed.’

Catastrophic marriages appear frequently in Ginzburg’s tales of broken families. ‘Il matrimonio’ wails a character in the play Ti ho sposato per allegria (1965), (I married you for fun) ‘è un’ istituzione infernale… è un’ istituzione diabolica‘. In È stato cosi (1947), (It was like this), perhaps Ginzburg’s most uncompromisingly depressing book, the heroine murders her husband in payment for his infidelity. ‘Gli ho sparato negli occhi,’ ‘I shot him in the eyes’ runs a refrain throughout the novel.

‘Tell me,’ said Signora Ginzburg, taking another cigarette from a silver case, ‘is your family still in one piece?’ Yes, I replied, it is. ‘And your parents, have they divorced?’ No, I said. ‘You are very fortunate.’ She gave a diffident smile, baring a gold tooth.

Natalia Ginzburg spoke entirely without gestures throughout our conversation. Her only movements were those required to light a cigarette. Not a very Italian characteristic, speaking without one’s hands. She didn’t look very Latin either: short grey hair, fair skinned, of an austere kind of elegance though without any concessions to sartorial finery.

All I ever try to do when I write is to show things as they are, as I see them, as honestly as I can.

If the family is invariably on the brink of collapse in Ginzburg’s books it is often due to her pusillanimous husbands, many of whom are portrayed, often quite pitilessly, as spineless weaklings.

The one exception is the bellicose, though entirely amiable figure of Natalia Ginzburg’s own father in the autobiographical Lessico familiare, the blustery rages of whom never fail to keep his unruly offspring under control.

It was not only a father’s outbursts of bad temper which prevented the Ginzburg family from disintegrating in this novel. Above all it was the ‘family sayings’ (a private lexicon made up of neologisms and esoteric jokes) invented by Ginzburg’s parents which held her family together, no matter how disunited it became. Ginzburg’s entire life is throughout Lessico familiare indissolubly linked to this paternal language. Whenever a brother or sister mentions a ‘family saying’ her past comes involuntarily flooding back to her, much as it did to Proust when he smelt the aroma of the madeleine.

In the absence, however, of a dominant father figure or a paternal language it is the mothers who preside over the family in Ginzburg’s books. ‘Come’ é strano,’ marvels a character in Ti ho sposato per allegria, ‘queste madri che se ne stanno acquattate in fondo alla nostra vita, nel buio, così importanti, cosi determinanti per noi.’ ‘How strange, these mothers who lie hidden in the depths of one’s life, in its very roots, in the dark, so important and decisive for us all.’

‘During my childhood,’ Natalia Ginzburg went on, ‘men seemed to be in possession of a kind of solidity or vigour which they now lack. Today men are more fragile, are often unable to confront things as they are, weighed down by forces beyond their control. In my early books it was the women who suffered, who were the victims of solitude. From La Famiglia (1977) on, it became the men. The altered rôle which women play in my books reflects, of course, the altered rôle they play in Italian society at large. Today, it goes without saying, women have more autonomy, are much stronger. Although in certain parts of Italy, such as Sicily, women are still unfortunately in a state of absolute subordination.’

Natalia Ginzburg is not, however, a feminist. ‘It is the weakening position of parents which I worry about more than anything. The loss of father-figures like my own is something I feel very keenly. The key to all our problems, I often think, would be to replace our fathers of yesterday, to give back to the world its long lost… virilitá. Otherwise we are all of us orphans, to the very end.’

‘I suppose,’ said Ginzburg with another of her rare smiles, ‘you might think I’m being reactionary again.’

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For someone of seventy, Ginzburg has a surprisingly acute awareness of the young. In Caro Michele and La città e la casa the various aberrant life-styles of the young characters (sex, drugs and the Red Brigade) are described in convincing detail. I asked her how she seemed to know so much.

‘I really don’t know,’ she replied. ‘All I ever try to do when I write is to show things as they are, as I see them, as honestly as I can. I have no ideological beliefs or concepts, no philosophical or sociological systems. I believe in the imagination.’

A number of Italian critics and writers, not surprisingly, have used words like ‘lamentoso’ or ‘depresivo’ when describing Natalia Ginzburg’s books. In fact, Cesare Pavese, with affectionate irony, gave them the name ‘la lagna’, literally ‘groan’ or ‘complaint’. I asked her what she thought of Pavese’s verdict:

‘I agree with it,’ Ginzburg said, ‘although in recent years I would like to think that the tone of my books has become more dry, less emotional, that I’ve managed to keep Pavese’s lagna at bay. But yes, I suppose my books will always be a little gloomy, a little “lamentoso”. Besides I’ve no desire to prove a very great writer wrong. We were the greatest of friends, Pavese and I. His verse, especially those poems collected in Lavorare stanca had an enormous effect on me. In particular I admired the way his poetry celebrated the melancholy of Turin, a city in which I lived for many vears. I wrote a kind of homage to Pavese once. It’s called Ritato d’un amico (1957).’ Portrait of a friend like Pavese’s novels themselves, is resolutely devoid of sentiment.

‘He died in the summer. In summer our city is deserted and seems very large, clear and echoing, like an empty city square: the sky has a milky pallor, limpid but not luminous: the river flows as level as a street and gives off neither humidity nor freshness … He had imagined his death in a poem written many, many years before:

It will not be necessary to get up from the bed.
Only the morning will enter the empty room.
The window will be sufficient to clothe everything
With a quiet clarity, like a light.
It will cast a thin shadow on his face where it lies.
What will be remembered are clots of shadow
Flattened like old ashes
In the fireplace. Memory will be the flame
That yesterday flared in his dead eyes.’

‘However the writer who influenced me the most,’ Signora Ginzburg continued, ‘was not Pavese but Chekhov, whose plays I discovered in my early twenties.’

She describes this discovery in her preface to Cinque romanzi brevi (1964):

‘At that time my literary heroes were for the most part foreign. Being ignorant of any language other than Italian, I had to read Chekhov in translation. Since I was little concerned about his actual style this didn’t seem to bother me much. No, what really interested me was his technique of articulating a story, of handling and illuminating reality. And since my literary idols were mostly foreign, I was pained at having to live in Turin, at being Italian: what I would have liked to describe was the Nevskij whereas I had to content myself with describing the Lungo Po.’

Chekhov’s ‘…modo di maneggiare e iluminare la realtà’ is well exemplified in Ginzburg’s first novel, La strada che va in città (1944), The road to the city. Here the story of a young girl’s initiation into the cruel world of the adult is gradually built up by blending seeming trifles and pieces of inconsequential detail (snatches of gossip, the lyrics of popular song) against a background of a reactionary and philistine Italy. These details gradually deepen to expose the tedium, futility and ultimate banality of everydav existence. The city of the title (presumably Turin) functions in a remarkably similar way to Chekhov’s Moscow: a dreamed of paradise which nobody ever manages to visit, suffering as they are from a desperate, divan-bound inertia.

‘Shortly after Chekhov,’ said Ginzburg, ‘I discovered Proust, again one of the great literary finds of my life. Proust’s world has always haunted me and some time ago I translated Du Côté de chez Swann for Einaudi.’

I find it extremely difficult to use the third person because we are all, deep down, incurable individualists.

As with Proust, Ginzburg’s recovery of the past is only ever partially accomplished and always has about it an air of melancholy. In Ritratto d’un amico the ghost of Pavese is very much alive in the city of Turin and yet the act of resurrecting his presence is in itself cause for depression:

‘And the sadness with which the city fills us every time we return lies in this feeling that we are at home and, at the same time, that we have no reason to stay here: because here, in our city, the city in which we spent our youth, so few things remain alive for us and we are oppressed by a throng of memories and shadows.’

Sometimes the brevity of Natalia Ginzburg’s sentences has been attributed to the influence of Hemingway, at others to Gertrude Stein. Certainly it could not be further removed from the sinuous sentences and endless subordinate clauses of Proust. ‘Today writers have an extreme need of short sentences, otherwise people can’t be bothered to read what they’ve written.’

Stylistically, Ginzburg seems closer to Ivy Compton-Burnett. ‘I lived around the corner from Ivy Compton-Burnett when I was in London thirty years ago. Unfortunately I never met her, although I got to know her through her books. I couldn’t speak English but I was determined to read them.’

Ginzburg was also evidently attracted to the character of Ivy Compton-Burnett. In a collection of essays entitled Mai devi doman-darmi (1970), (You never have to ask me) she imagines her among ‘cups of tea, embroidered tablecloths, the morning’s mail under the door,the weekly visit to the laundrette: a conservative kind of solitude; an educated, disciplined and impoverished way of life.’

Italian critics have frequently attributed the bitter-sweet (crudeltà e dolcezza) tone of Ginzburg’s books to the influence of Ivy Compton-Burnett.

‘Perhaps,’ Natalia Ginzburg agreed, ‘they are right. But you know there was never anything remotely sweet about Compton-Burnett’s novels. Ferocious yes, but never sweet. I would prefer to think of my books as a mixture of “dolcezza” and “malinconia”, and never without a certain… tenderness. There are, however, certain stylistic similarities between my writing and Compton-Burnett’s. What I admire tremendously is the way she conjures up a whole world through dialogue, without ever going to the lengths of describing it.’

Le voci della sera (1961), (Voices in the dark, 1963), in which Ginzburg projects an ironic picture of a bourgeois Piedmontese family during the last war was written, as she admitted, ‘very much under the influence of Compton-Burnett.’

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Le voci della sera, as with all Ginzburg’s major novels, is narrated in the first person by a young girl looking back on her past.

‘I have always written in the first person. The one exception is Tutti i nostri ieri. I find it extremely difficult to use the third person because we are all, deep down, incurable individualists. I need to dominate the plot of a story, I can’t have others take over and do it for me.’

Caro Michele and La città e la casa are both epistolary novels, a literary genre which no other Italian writer is currently interested in. (‘The telephone has taken over,’ she said ruefully.) These novels are not made up of the letters of one but of fifteen characters. What person, I wondered, does this mean they are written in?

‘They are still in the first. I used the form of the “romanzo epistolare” because it gave me the license to speak in the first person whilst at the same time splitting that person up. Those characters who say “I” are all at the same time part of a larger “I” which is myself. My whole literary career has been a search for ways of adopting the first person. For this reason I see my plays in exactly the same light as my epistolary novels: a splintering of a large “I” into several smaller ones, each with its individual point of view.’

Stylistic characteristics, I believe, are always of an autobiographical origin.

Italo Calvino, a writer whom Natalia Ginzburg helped during his formative years, once wrote that the various first-person narrators in early books like Le voci della sera either find themselves up against an adult world far too mysterious for their comprehension, or at loggerheads with characters whom they consider superior to themselves. ‘And the linguistic or conceptual means with which they struggle to make sense of the world always fall just that little bit short of what is expected of them: that is, satisfactorily to explain the mysterious ways of the world. The secret of Natalia’s simple style and its poetic tension are born out of this essential disproportion.’

Calvino concludes by comparing the effect of this ‘disproportion’ to the futile attempt of one who would: ‘…far passare il mare in un imbuto’, or ‘strain the sea in a sieve’.

I wondered what Ginzburg thought about Calvino’s insight.

‘Certainly it is true that the narrators of many of my novels are confused children in an adult’s world. But I am inclined to believe that there is perhaps an autobiographical reason for the simplicity or … poetry about which Calvino speaks. I am the youngest of five brothers and sisters and always had, as a child, the distinct feeling of inferiority. The grown-ups knew everything and I knew nothing. Evidently this sensation never left me and affected the way my narrators look at the world. Stylistic characteristics, I believe, are always of an autobiographical origin.’

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Most of the facts of Ginzburg’s life are to be found in Lessico familiare. Born in Palermo in 1916, she spent most of her childhood in Turin, where her father, Giuseppe Levi, was professor of Anatomy at the university. In Turin she came to know a distinguished circle of intellectuals militant in the Resistance: Carlo Levi, Cesare Pavese, Giulio Einaudi among them.

In 1938 she married Leone Ginzburg, professor of Russian literature at Turin. In 1944 he was executed in Rome by the Nazis, ostensibly for editing an anti-fascist newspaper. Two years previously Natalia Ginzburg had published her first novel under the pseudonym of Alessandra Tornimparte. It sold well, and she determined to embark upon a career as a writer.

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In her introduction to Lessico familiare, Natalia Ginzburg wrote that although nothing had been invented in the portrayal of her family, one ought to read it as though it were a novel: ‘that is without demanding of it more nor less than what a novel can give’. She applies the same criterion to La Famiglia Manzoni (1983), a historical novel which charts the ancestry of Alessandro Manzoni, based almost exclusively on original letters and documents.

What then is the difference between a novel, La città e la casa and history La famiglia Manzoni, or between a novel and autobiography, Lessico Famigliare?

‘There isn’t any. Or at least there isn’t one for me. No matter what I write I have the same feelings, am always in the same state of mind. Having said that, I find purely imaginative writing a bit of a trial. La città e la casa is a work of pure invention and it was extremely difficult to write.’

Ginzburg has elsewhere described invention in terms of a kind of anathema: ‘Whenever, travelling along the well-worn footpath of the novelist I have paused to invent something, I have always afterwards felt the urgent need to destroy it.’

Fortunately, Natalia Ginzburg has written very little which is not, one way or another, rooted in so-called reality. Invention, in the sense of fantasy cut off from the everyday, has never been of much interest to her. Her endeavour has always been the poetic transfiguration of the prosaic. And rarely without a sense of humour:

‘La vita…’ sighs a character in one of Ginzburg’s marital farces, Fragola e panna (1966), (Stramberries and cream) ‘è molto avara di tragedie, e ci regala invece una fiorita di barzellette.’ ‘Life is really very ungenerous with its tragedies, and presents us with a bouquet of jokes instead.’

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Natalia Ginzburg was an Italian author whose books won her both the Strega Prize and the Bagutta Prize.

Ian Thomson was born in London in 1961, and went to Pembroke College, Cambridge. He is an award-winning biographer, reporter, translator and literary critic.

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