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"I shall take my children in hand and overcome the temptation to let my life go to pieces. I shall become serious and motherly, as always happens when I am with them."
(from Worn-out shoes)

In the wake of two books of Natalia Ginzburg I have been reading some time ago (a brief biography on Chekhov, Tsjechov. Een schrijversleven and her novel All Our Yesterdays, a family novel on growing up during the Second World War), I came across these lines. Her perceptive and in my opinion wise insight on the need for resilience as a mother hit home. Because Ginzburg’s sober, luminous and no-nonsense style and particularly her peculiar, somewhat prickly humour had resonated with me previously, I was quite excited to find a copy of this collection on the shelves of the (digital) library.

These eleven essayistic pieces, written at different times and places (between 1944 and 1960, in Turin, Rome and London) mark episodes in Ginzburg’s life, ranging in tone from elegiac to sharp and bitter, to meditative and mildly nostalgic. She thematises friendship, poverty, compassion, war experiences, happiness, morality, the vocation of writing, parenthood, intimate and family relationships often by relating these grand themes dexterously and with a light, almost sleight of hand touch, to her own life, without rendering her discourse so overwhelmingly personal it might turn mawkish or for the reader uninterestingly egotistical.

The fragment on motherly duties echoed the thoughts of the (insupportable) Momina in Cesare Pavese’s novel Tra donne sole (Among Women Only), where Momina puts sharply that the decision of having children is ineludibly a committal one and so she will not: When you have children, you accept life. So don’t have children, if you cannot accept living yourself. Regardless of what fate has in store for you, remember that having children implies you cannot decide to give up anymore and so you will lose your ultimate freedom of self-determination (One year after that penultimate novel, Pavese ended his own life, like one of the characters in his novel, in a Turin hotel room by a barbiturate overdose, following his own bitter logic to the very end. Pavese was a friend of Leone and Natalia Ginzburg; he is the nameless friend she commemorates tenderly and poetically in Portrait of a Friend, without mentioning his name once).



"There is a kind of uniform monotony in the fate of man. Our lives unfold according to ancient, unchangeable laws, according to an invariable and ancient rhythm. Our dreams are never realised and as soon as we see them betrayed we realise that the intensest joys of our life have nothing to do with reality. No sooner do we see them betrayed than we are consumed with regret for the time when they glowed within us. And in this succession of hopes and regrets our life slips by."

There is a fresh feel to these essays, the tone at once radiant and detached (for instance when matter-of-factly mentioning the brutal death in prison of her spouse Leone, murdered and tortured by the fascist police), often having a bittersweet aftertaste. I wasn’t so gripped by England: Eulogy and Lament which is pervaded with a bitter homesickness, which seemed to make Ginzburg unforgiving in her observations with regard to what she perceives as typical English in both the landscape and the people, to what she perceives as the English way of living which looks very pale and depressing in comparison to the Italian one.

"Human relationships have to be rediscovered and reinvented every day. We have to remember constantly that every kind of meeting with our neighbour is a human action and so it is always evil or good, true or deceitful, a kindness or a sin."



My favourite pieces were Winter in the Abruzzi (1944), Worn-out shoes (1945) and particularly the titular essay The Little Virtues (1960), which, as an anti-bourgeois valediction to the petty values that sometimes tend to encumber the upbringing of a child into responsible adulthood, I would recommend to every parent.

"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; not 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."

"In general I think we should be very cautious about promising and providing rewards and punishments. Because life rarely has its rewards and punishments; usually sacrifices have no reward, and often evil deeds go unpunished, at time they are even richly rewarded with success and money. Therefore it is best that our children should know from infancy that good is not rewarded and that evil goes unpunished; yet they must love good and hate evil, and it is not possible to give any logical explanation for this."

For me this is Ginzburg at her best: it are such insights, almost casually phrased moral observations, which make this collection feel relevant and powerful.

Nevertheless, something held me back from embracing these pieces fully, a similar sense of slight disappointment that grated me when I was reading Rachel Cusk’s Coventry: Essays (Cusk wrote an introduction to The Little Virtues which also features in that Coventry collection). I am aware however this feeling that something is missing is not at all connected to the essays as they are; it reflects my own indisposition to accept them for what they are �� another illustration how my own expectations on what an essay ‘should�� essentially be keeping me from fully grasping and enjoying what I was reading. I like to read essays which are lucid, to the point, erudite and thought-provoking and which inspire me to look at things in a different way, or which bring forth the excitement of being struck by a turn of phrase capturing some nebulous thought or feeling of mine enticing a big yes, yes, brilliant! as if I were one of the prisoners let out of the cave enabled to see things in the light of truth for a moment. Some of the essays offered such flashes of gemlike observations, others more came across as vignettes about Ginzburg’s life �� not as essays.

Familiar only with the scent but not (yet?) with the taste of the beverage, Natalia Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues is how I imagine a fine, smooth cognac: earthly-coloured, rich in flavour and best to savour by small sips.

(***1/2)
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