A Place to Live

by Natalia Ginzburg

  Then my children were born, and at first, when they were very small, I couldn’t understand how anyone with children could manage to write. I didn’t understand how I could ever detach myself from them to pursue some character in a story. I took to scorning my craft. Now and then I felt a desperate nostalgia for it, I felt exiled, but I forced myself to scorn it and belittle it in order to concentrate solely on my children. I thought this was what I had to do. I was preoccupied with cream of wheat and cream of barley and whether to take the children for a walk: was it sunny or not sunny, windy or not windy? The children seemed too important for me to risk losing myself in stupid stories, stupid embalmed characters. And yet I had a fierce nostalgia, and sometimes at night I could have wept, remembering how precious my craft had once been. I thought I would recover it some day or other, but I didn’t know when; I thought I had to wait until my children had grown up and left home. What I felt for my children, at that point, was an emotion I hadn’t yet learned to control. But after a while I did learn, little by little. It didn’t even take all that much time. I was still making tomato sauce and cereal, but meanwhile I was thinking about what I would write. We were living in a beautiful village in the south back then. I would recall the streets and hills of my own city, and those streets and hills would merge with the streets and hills and fields of the village we were living in then, and out of their union came a fresh landscape that I could love anew. I was homesick for my city and loved it dearly in memory, loved it and understood its nature perhaps even better than when I had lived there, and I also loved the town we were living in, dusty and white under the southern sun, its broad fields of parched stubble spread out under my windows, while the memory of my city’s boulevards with their plane trees and tall buildings sent gusts through my heart; and all of this sparked a joyous flame inside me and I had a fierce longing to write. I wrote a long story, the longest I had ever written. I took up writing again like someone who had never written before: it was so long since I had written anything that the words felt rinsed and fresh; once again everything seemed untouched, rich with flavor and scent. I wrote in the afternoons while the children were out walking with a girl from the village; I wrote avidly, with joy, and it was a gorgeous autumn and I felt so happy every day. In the story, I put some made-up people along with some real people from the village; I even came up with a few words that were always used there and that I hadn’t known before, certain curses and local expressions, and those new words, like yeast, fermented and made all the old words around them rise with fresh life. The principal character was a woman, but totally different from me. I didn’t long to write like a man anymore, for I had had children and knew all sorts of things about tomato sauce, and even if I didn’t put them in the story, simply knowing them was useful to my craft; in some arcane, mysterious way, this too served my craft. I felt that women knew things about their children that a man could never know. I wrote my story in great haste, as if in fear that it might escape me. I called it a novel, but maybe it wasn’t a novel. In any case, I had always written briefly and in haste, and at some point I even thought I understood why. It was because I had much older brothers, and when I was small, if I spoke at the table they always told me to be quiet. So I got used to speaking my piece quickly, at top speed, with the fewest possible number of words, forever afraid the others would resume their own conversations and stop listening to me. This explanation may seem somewhat silly, and yet that’s exactly what must have happened.

  As I said, that period when I was writing what I called a novel was a very happy time for me. Nothing momentous had ever taken place in my life, I had no knowledge of sickness and betrayal and loneliness and death. Nothing in my life had ever been wrecked, except for trivial things; nothing dear to my heart had ever been ripped away. I had suffered only the idle melancholies of adolescence and the pain of not knowing how to write. I was happy, back then, in a full, tranquil way, without fear or anxiety, with utter faith in the solidity and reliability of happiness in this world. When we are happy, we feel colder, clearer, more aloof from reality. When we are happy, we tend to create characters very different from ourselves, to see them in the chilly light of alienness; we shift our gaze from our satisfied, happy soul to cast judgment, quite without charity, on others—a judgment that is nonchalant and pitiless, ironic and arrogant—and all the while our imagination and creative energy are working away with vigor. We can create characters with ease, lots of characters, fundamentally unlike ourselves, and we can create solidly constructed stories that seem to have been set out to dry in a clear, cold light. What is missing, though, when we are happy in this particular way—tearless, fearless, carefree—what is missing is an intimate, loving connection with our characters, with the places and events we are writing about. What is missing is charity. To all appearances we are much more generous, in the sense that we can always find the energy to be interested in others, even to lavish our concern on them: we’re not so involved with ourselves, there being no need. But that kind of interest in others, so lacking in warmth, grasps only a few very superficial aspects of their beings. We see the world in a single dimension, it holds no secrets and shadows; we do manage, thanks to the imaginative energy driving us, to intuit and create the grief we know nothing about, but we see it purely in the sterile, chilly light of things that are not truly our own, that have no roots inside us.

  Our individual happiness or unhappiness, our terrestrial condition, has great importance for what we write. I said earlier that in the act of writing one is miraculously impelled to set aside the actual circumstances of his own life. That is certainly true. Yet being happy or unhappy leads us to write in one way or another. When we are happy our imagination is stronger; when we are unhappy, memory acts with greater force. Suffering makes the imagination feeble and lazy; it stirs, but listlessly, languidly, with the frail movements of the sick, the exhaustion and cautiousness of achy, feverish limbs; we find it difficult to shift our focus from our own life, our own spirit, the cravings and restlessness that pervade us. In our writing, memories of the past continually rise to the surface; our own voice continually reverberates, and we are powerless to silence it. A special relationship, fond and maternal, springs up between us and the characters we invent—which our languishing imagination still manages to invent—a warm relationship suffused with tears, a stifling, carnal intimacy. We have deep, doleful roots in every being and every thing in the world, a world grown full of echoes and tremors and shadows, to which we are bound by a reverent, impassioned mercy. The risk, then, is of being shipwrecked in a dark lake of still, stagnant waters and dragging our imagined characters down with us, letting them perish with us in the tepid, dark abyss, among dead rats and rotted flowers. As far as our writing is concerned, there is danger in sorrow just as there is danger in happiness. For poetic beauty is a composite of ruthlessness, arrogance, irony, carnal love, imagination and memory, of light and dark, and if we cannot achieve all of these together, our result will be impoverished, precarious, and scarcely alive.

  Also bear in mind, you cannot expect your writing to console you in your sorrow. You cannot be deluded into thinking your craft will soothe or lull you. There have been interminably desolate, lonely Sundays in my life, when I longed ardently to write something to ease my loneliness and ennui, to be comforted and beguiled by words and sentences. But I couldn’t manage to write a single line. At times like that my craft always turned me away, it didn’t want anything to do with me. Because this craft is never a consolation or a diversion. It is no companion. This craft is a master, a master capable of drawing blood, a master who shouts and passes judgment. We have to swallow our spit and tears and grit our teeth and wipe the blood from our wounds and serve him. Serve him on demand. Only then will he help us get back up and plant our feet firmly on the ground, help us overcome madness and delirium, fever and despair. But he is always the one in charge; he turns a deaf ear to our neediness.

  I came to know sorrow well after my time in the so
uth, genuine sorrow, irreparable and incurable, that fractured my whole life, and when I tried to put it back together somehow, I found that I and my life had changed beyond recognition from what we were before. My craft remained unchanged—and yet it is profoundly deceptive to say it was unchanged: the tools were the same but the way I handled them was different. At first I detested it, it repelled me, but I knew very well that in the end I would go back to serving it and it would save me. And so it’s often struck me that I haven’t been quite so unfortunate in my life, and that I’m unjust to rail against destiny for showing me no benevolence, since it has given me three children and my craft. I couldn’t even begin to imagine my life without my craft. It has always been there, it has never deserted me for a moment; even when I thought it lay dormant, its vigilant, radiant eye was watching over me.

  Such is my craft. It doesn’t yield much money, as you can see, in fact to earn a living you always need other work at the same time. Still, once in a while it does yield some small sum, and earning money from it feels so sweet, like receiving money and gifts from the hands of the one you love. Such is my craft. As I said, I can’t rightly judge the merits of its results so far or to come, or rather, I can judge the relative merits of the results achieved so far, but definitely not the absolute. When I’m writing something, I usually think it is very important and that I’m a very great writer. I imagine this happens to everyone. But in the back of my mind I always know very well what I am, namely a small, small writer. I swear I know. But it doesn’t much matter. Except I’d rather not name names; I have found that if I ask myself A small writer like who? it depresses me to name other small writers. I prefer to think no one has ever been quite like me, however small, however flea-like or mosquito-like a writer I may be. What does matter is having the conviction that it truly is a craft, a profession, something to follow for the rest of one’s life. But as a craft, it is no joke. It has countless dangers beyond the ones I’ve mentioned. We are continually menaced by grave dangers in the very act of confronting the page. There is the danger of suddenly starting to tease or perform an aria. I always have a mad longing to start performing, and have to be very careful not to do so. And there is the danger of cheating with words that don’t really come from within, that we have fished up from outside at random and skillfully pieced together, for we do become somewhat cunning. There is a danger in becoming cunning, in cheating. It is a very difficult craft, as you can see, but the most wonderful in the world. The daily ups and downs of our life, the daily ups and downs we witness in others’ lives, all that we read and see and think and discuss feeds its hunger, and it grows within us. It is a craft that thrives on terrible things too; it feeds on the best and the worst in our life, our evil feelings and our good feelings course through its blood. It feeds on us, and it thrives.

  1949

  the son of man

  There was the war, with so many houses collapsing all around us, and now people no longer feel safe and secure in their own houses, as once we did. Some things are incurable, and though years go by, we never recover. Even if we have lamps on the tables again, vases of flowers and portraits of our loved ones, we have no more faith in such things, not since we had to abandon them in haste or hunt for them in vain amid the rubble.

  It is useless to think we can recover from twenty years of what we went through. Those of us who were persecuted will never again rest easy. For us the insistent blare of a doorbell in the middle of the night can mean only the one word, “police.” And there’s no use telling ourselves over and over that nowadays the word “police” may mean friendly faces we can call on for protection and help. For us this word will always trigger suspicion and fright. I can watch my sleeping children and think with relief that I won’t have to wake them in the middle of the night and run away. But it is not a deep or utter relief. I always have the feeling that someday we’ll have to jump up at night and run away again, leaving everything behind, quiet rooms and letters and clothing and mementos.

  The experience of evil, once suffered, is never forgotten. Anyone who has seen houses collapse knows all too well how fragile vases of flowers, paintings and white walls really are. He knows all too well what a house is made of. A house is made of bricks and mortar and it can crumble. A house is nothing very solid. It can crumble from one moment to the next. Behind the serene vases of flowers, behind the teapots, the rugs and the waxed floors, is the other, the true face of the house, the horrible face of the crumbled house.

  We will never be cured of this war. It is useless. We are people who will never feel at ease, never think and plan and order our lives in peace. Look what has been done to our houses. Look what has been done to us. We can never rest easy again.

  We have known reality in its most somber guise and are no longer repelled by it. Some still complain that the writers use bitter, violent language and tell of hard, sad things, that they present reality in its most desolate terms.

  We cannot lie in books and we cannot lie in anything else we do. This may be the one good that has come out of the war: not lying and not tolerating the lies of others. This is who we young people are now, this is our generation. Our elders are still under the spell of lies, of the veils and masks shrouding reality. Our language saddens and offends them. They cannot understand the way we see reality: we are right up against the essence of things. This is the one benefit the war has brought, but only to the young. To those who are older it has brought nothing but insecurity and fear. We young people are afraid too, we too feel unsafe in our houses, but we are not defenseless against our fear. We have a toughness and a strength that those who came before us have never known.

  For some the war began simply with the war, with the crumbling houses and the Germans, but for others it started earlier, in the first years of Fascism, so that their sense of insecurity and perpetual danger is all the greater. For many of us it began long years ago—the sense of danger, of needing to hide, of suddenly having to leave the warmth of bed and home. It crept into our childhood games, it followed us to our desks at school, it taught us to see enemies everywhere. It was like that for many of us in Italy and elsewhere; we trusted that one day we would be able to walk the streets of our city in peace, but now that we can, perhaps, walk in peace, we realize we haven’t gotten over the damage we suffered. And so we are constantly forced to seek new strength and new toughness to confront whatever reality might bring. We are compelled to seek an inner peace that rugs and vases of flowers cannot yield.

  There is no peace for the son of man. Foxes and wolves have their dens, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head. We are a generation of human beings, not a generation of foxes and wolves. We all long to lay our heads down somewhere, we long for a warm, dry little den. But there is no peace for the sons of men. All of us, at some point in our lives, were deluded into thinking we could lull ourselves to sleep somewhere or other, could seize upon some certainty, some faith, and finally rest our bones. But all the old certainties have been wrenched from us, and faith, in the end, has never been a place to take one’s ease.

  And we have no more tears. What moved our parents has no power to move us. Our parents and the older generations reproach us for the way we raise our children. They would like us to lie to our children the way they lied to us. They would like our children to play with plush dolls in pretty pink rooms with little trees and rabbits painted on the walls. They would like us to swaddle their childhood in veils and lies and keep reality in its true essence carefully hidden from them. But we cannot do it. We cannot do it with children we woke in the dead of night and dressed frantically in the dark, either to run or hide, or because the sirens were lacerating the skies. We cannot do it with children who have seen fear and horror on our faces. We cannot make ourselves tell these children that we found them under cabbages or that someone who has died has gone on a long trip.

  There is a bottomless abyss between us and earlier generations. Their dangers were trivial and their houses rarely collapsed. Earthq
uakes and fires were not common or frequent occurrences. The women knitted and told the cook to get dinner ready and received their friends in houses that didn’t collapse. They pondered and planned and expected to order their lives in peace. It was another era and maybe they were fortunate. But we are bound to this our anguish and glad, at heart, of our destiny as human beings.

  1946

  portrait of a friend2

  The city that was dear to our friend is the same as ever. There’s been some change, but nothing much: they’ve added trolleys, built some subways. There are no new movie houses. The old ones still remain with their long-ago names, names whose syllables, when repeated, reawaken our childhood and youth. We live elsewhere now, in a larger and altogether different city, and if we meet and talk about our city, it is with no regret at having left; we say we couldn’t possibly live there now. But when we return, no sooner do we cross the entrance hall of the railway station and stroll through the mist of the avenues, than we feel right at home. And the sadness the city inspires each time we return is precisely in this feeling at home and feeling at the same time that we no longer have any reason to be there. For here at home in our own city, the city where we spent our youth, few things are still alive for us—we’re greeted by a cluster of memories and shadows.