by Tim Parks
Pavese’s The House on the Hill was written soon after the Second War. Again, the title presents the novel’s themes spatially, and again, like Buzzati’s fort and Bassani’s garden, Pavese’s house on the hill is a place of suspension, of action denied. It is 1944 and night after night, a schoolteacher retreats from Turin to a house in the surrounding hills to escape the Allied bombardment. Although he spends his evenings with a group of anti-Fascist activists, admiring their idealism and attracted to their warmth and vitality, he finds himself unable to join them. In Pavese’s book, then, unlike Buzzati’s, action is abundantly available, the Tartars are everywhere, but the intellectual, pacifist narrator cannot bring himself to participate. Yet he feels guilty for not doing so. He feels unmanned and excluded from life. When his friends are rounded up and imprisoned by the Fascists, the schoolteacher flees. In one memorable scene, he witnesses a partisan ambush of a Fascist military truck. After the fighting is over, he finds it impossible to step over the corpses of the Fascist soldiers on the road. He feels sick, paralysed, and has to turn back.
That a period of social violence and political extremism, such as Italy experienced in the 1920s and 1930s, should oblige the country’s writers and artists to reflect on their obligation or otherwise to get involved would seem obvious enough. It was civil war, after all, that inspired Andrew Marvell’s great meditation on the merits of the active and contemplative lives in ‘An Horatian Ode’. But it is surprising that all three of these Italian novels, each so different in its approach, should constantly entwine the themes of public action and sexual fulfilment, as if rejection of one necessarily implied renunciation of the other. Home on leave from his remote posting, Buzzati’s officer is still in time to propose marriage to his old girlfriend and escape his arid fate in the fort. But it is so difficult to speak to her, he feels so inept. Among the community of communist activists he visits, Pavese’s schoolteacher comes across an ex-girlfriend. She has a child that may even be his. But the young mother emphatically excludes him from her life. She will not renew the relationship and will not let him assume a fatherly role with the child. In The Garden of the Finzi-Contini, communist playboy Giampiero Malnate brings both a political and sexual urgency into the otherwise decadent and languid atmosphere of the garden. Micòl, who has resolved never to marry, mocks him, saying she doesn’t give a damn about his social-democratic future. Speaking to the narrator about his unhappiness, she freely mixes the vocabulary of love and war, declaring that love is for the bloodthirsty, for people ready to struggle to get the better of each other day in day out, a cruel sport, far crueller than tennis. Fully aware that war is imminent, she concentrates her energies on getting her father to resurface their deteriorating clay court.
Thus in a highly politicised era, when every publication in Italy was scrutinised for orthodoxy or heresy on both sides of the ideological divide, all these novelists transmit the truth that individual political views are the result not of correct or false reasoning, nor the inevitable expression of a good or evil disposition, but are deeply connected with the whole personality, the mysteries of identity and fate.
But beneath every other theme and concern, and whether or not prompted by the political situation, the question all these three novels quite explicitly ask is: what does it mean to have lived? These, after all, were the years of the existentialists. Bassani, or his narrator, begins his novel with a visit by himself and some friends to an Etruscan cemetery. We don’t feel sad for the dead of antiquity, someone says, because it is as if they had never lived. A child in the company, however, reminds everybody that, of course, that is not true; however long ago, the Etruscans did live, like everybody else. The tombs bear out that simple reflection with their bas-reliefs showing all the objects they used: hoes, ropes, axes, scissors, spades, knives, bows and arrows. Such are the objects with which one engages in action, whether domestic or military. They are none of them things the Finzi-Contini ever hold in their hands.
From beginning to end, cemeteries are present through the novel, more so perhaps than in any work by Edgar Allan Poe. B’s father is responsible for the upkeep of the Jewish cemetery in Ferrara. Ermanno Finzi-Contini has published a collection of all the inscriptions in the famous Jewish cemetery of Venice, where, we discover, he also proposed to his wife. Cemeteries are places of memory and affection, uniting the living and the dead, not places to be shunned or feared. The horror, in this novel, is not death, or even dying young. No, the one truly terrifying thing is to pass from youth to cemetery without having lived, without initiation. And that is the fate one risks in the garden of the Finzi-Contini, a gothic world where death and immaturity are magically superimposed and time suspended. Ultimately this will be the fate of Alberto Finzi-Contini, who renounces every form of engagement, political, moral and sexual, and dies of cancer before he can be taken, like his sister and the rest of his family, to the terrible initiation of the Nazi death camps.
We are told nothing of the fate of Bassani’s narrator during and after the war; all we know is that he lived to tell the tale. Bassani himself, however, definitely chose the way of engagement and initiation. Having finished his thesis and, like the narrator of the novel, taken his degree in literature in 1939, he joined one of the liberal political groupings that were forming to fight Fascism. It was called Il partito d’azione. Arrested in May 1943, Bassani was released in July when Mussolini fled Rome. Days later he married. ‘Art,’ his narrator remarks in The Garden of the Finzi-Contini, ‘when it is pure, is always abnormal, antisocial, it can’t be used for anything.’3 In that sense, of course, art and writing have much in common with Micòl’s enchanted garden. But, however much the Finzi-Contini might wish to, one does not live in a work of art.
After the Struggle
* * *
[Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky]
‘YOU CANNOT TAKE a man who was all struggle’, wrote Tolstoy of Dostoevsky, after his great rival’s death, ‘and set him up on a monument for the instruction of posterity.’1
To which struggle exactly was Count Tolstoy referring? Certainly not the liberal cause that had condemned Dostoevsky to spending four years in a Siberian labour camp and six more as a soldier. In his mid-twenties Feodor Mikhailovich had fallen under the charismatic influence of the revolutionary Nikolay Speshnev and joined his secret society. At once, he was anxious: Speshnev had lent him a large sum of money. How could the young writer ever repay his ‘very own Mephistopheles’2 and escape this compromising and politically dangerous situation? Three days after being arrested and placed in solitary confinement, Dostoevsky tells us, he felt an enormous sense of relief and serenity. Later he would remark: ‘penal servitude saved me’.3
Such moments of relief, of internal conflict resolved in extreme well-being, feature prominently in Dostoevsky’s work. Usually they follow a dramatic surrender of pride by a powerful personality: a murderer confesses, or the great man kneels before the holy hermit, the innocent prostitute, though not before having passed through agonies of uncertainty and rebellion. Notes from Underground, however, is unique among Dostoevsky’s writings in that it begins with a man whose struggling is long since over and ended in failure: ‘I am a sick man … I am a wicked man’4 our anonymous narrator opens his hundred-page monologue. More than any of the writer’s other works, this will be Dostoevsky’s justification for a life that is indeed all struggle.
Notes is organised in two parts: first, a long statement of the narrator’s present situation and vision of the world; second, an account of a dramatic incident in his past. He describes himself as a minor civil servant who has retired on the back of a modest inheritance. In short, a nobody. His sickness and wickedness, we soon learn, are the result of ‘intellectual activity’, which is always and in every form ‘a disease’.5 It led him to be acutely sensitive to the good and the beautiful while invariably choosing to act in an ugly and repulsive fashion. This painful contradiction caused the narrator years of unhappy struggle as he tried to reconcile egoism
with moral sensibility. But at last he is worn out, he has ‘lost even the desire to struggle’.6 More intellectually feverish than ever, he gnashes his teeth in obscurity, consoling himself with the thought that ‘it had to be so’, that ‘this was really my normal state’.
The circumstances in which Dostoevsky wrote this disturbing incipit are worth bearing in mind.7 Discharged from the army in 1859, aged thirty-eight, he had brought his newly married wife to St Petersburg and begun publishing, together with his brother Mikhail, a political and literary magazine, Time. The magazine was successful, the writer’s career on the rise, but his marriage was unhappy. Maria Dimitrievna suffered from tuberculosis and frequently accused her husband of being ‘a rogue, a rascal and a criminal’.8 Perhaps to be worthy of her accusations, Dostoevsky began an affair with a twenty-three-year-old and took time off to travel in Europe where he discovered the joys of roulette.
In 1863 the censors closed Time, plunging the Dostoevsky brothers into dire financial trouble. But while waiting for permission to publish again, Feodor once more set out to travel in Europe, despite the fact that his wife was now seriously ill. Claiming he needed to consult Western doctors about his epilepsy, he headed for Paris where his young mistress was waiting. His beloved Apollinaria Suslova, however, now decided that there would be no more sex between them. They would travel to Italy as friends, not lovers. Holier than the average adulterer, Dostoevsky went along with this, while making frequent attempts to get the girl back between the sheets. She refused, but generously lent him money to go home when gambling bouts left him penniless.
After three months away, then, Dostoevsky returns to Russia to find his wife at death’s door and his brother desperate to gather material for a new magazine that the censors have at last given permission to publish: Feodor Mikhailovich must write something, at once. So after months of indulgence and sinful pleasure, Dostoevsky faces a period of labour and renunciation. Perhaps it is not surprising then that in Notes from Underground the polarities of good and evil are present throughout but without any possibility of either becoming dominant; instead we have a perverse, self-lacerating enjoyment of their simultaneity and incompatibility. Of his more noble thoughts the narrator tells us:
These influxes of ‘everything beautiful and lofty’ used also to come to me during my little debauches; … and yet they did not annihilate the little debauch … on the contrary, it was as if they enlivened it by contrast and came in exactly the proportion required for a good sauce. The sauce here consisted of contradiction and suffering, of tormenting inner analysis and all these torments and tormenticules lent my little debauch a certain piquancy, even meaning …9
Yet it would be a mistake to think of Notes as primarily a private document. One of the consequences of the strict censorship that made direct statements on many issues impossible was that Russian fiction in this period was always understood as a disguised form of political debate. So no sooner has Dostoevsky established the perverse psychology of his narrator than it is being used in the public arena as an attack on the recent novel What is to be Done? by the revolutionary theorist Nikolay Chernyshevsky, an attack that takes up the whole first part of the book.
A word must be said here on Dostoevsky’s idiosyncratic style when entering the political fray. Throughout the nineteenth century a fierce debate raged in Russia between westward-looking reformers and tsarist conservatives. At issue were the condition of the serfs, the authority of the tsar. In his editorial for the opening issue of Time in 1861 Dostoevsky makes the strange claim that what will distinguish his paper is that he is really convinced of what he says, even if it may sound like ‘copybook maxims’,10 while his political opponents are not. In the following editorials he goes on to attack the ideas of the westernised liberals, while sympathising with their generous spirit, and to support the conservative ideas of the tsarist camp while attacking their reactionary harshness. The terms of public debate are thus undermined. No idea can be judged without consideration of the mind and personality that anchors it in reality.
Needless to say, this peculiar approach exercised no political influence, completely confused the censors and was partly responsible for the decision to close down Time in 1863. So as Dostoevsky embarks on his first piece for the new magazine, called Epoque, he is determined that on this occasion there be no mistake: he absolutely and implacably opposes the revolutionary Nikolay Chernyshevsky.
Chernyshevsky was an optimist proposing an ethics of rational egoism. Far from struggling with irreconcilable opposites, the characters in What is to be Done? show how a person’s real self-interest, when properly understood, is always compatible with the general good. Thus the two young heroes of the novel, who are in love with the same woman, are able to sort out their problems without pain or conflict. Thus, if each person acts selfishly and in his or her own interest, properly understood, society can be reorganised to the benefit of everyone.
At first glance the target seems too easy to be interesting. ‘Oh, what a baby!’11 our underground narrator exclaims, having summarised Chernyshevsky’s position, ‘Oh, what a pure innocent child!’ And he raises the objection that if one’s best interests can be determined by reason and if one then inevitably acts in accordance with those interests, all one’s actions can be predetermined, a state of affairs man instinctively resists. He himself, the narrator claims, frequently and deliberately acts against his best interests, since the highest good is not happiness or material wealth but simply this freedom to do whatever one wishes. As a result of this argument, the first part of the book is often interpreted as a defence of free will over determinism, even if that means accepting unhappy and unattractive phenomena like our sick and spiteful narrator.
But Notes is a much more radical and disturbing document than that. For Dostoevsky had the immense good fortune that the enemy of the moment provided him with the stimulus for an exploration of the very possibility of speaking of selfhood and self-interest at all, something that must have been much on the author’s mind after his own erratic behaviour of recent months. Here the monologue form is crucial. ‘I am a wicked man’ the narrator introduces himself. But only moments later he claims: ‘as a matter of fact, I was never able to become wicked.’12 Indeed: ‘I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect.’13
One observes here, as ever, Dostoevsky’s habit of seeing only opposite and mutually exclusive alternatives, all equally impossible for our narrator, since, whichever way he leans, his brain is ‘swarming’ with ‘opposite tendencies’.14 There were thus two related struggles in his past: one between good and evil, or selfishness and renunciation, and, in response to the resulting confusion, the struggle to become someone. It is because our narrator has failed in both struggles that he must remain anonymous. Unable to be bad or good, he is nobody; irretrievably selfish, he has no self worthy of a name. ‘An intelligent man of the nineteenth century’,15 he defends himself, ‘must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being.’
Character, the narrator argues, is consolidated in action, good or bad. But the corrosive nature of intellectual thought constantly undermines the basis of action because one senses its futility. Imagining someone who is able to act, to take revenge, for example, the narrator remarks:
Well, sirs, it is just such an ingenuous man that I regard as the real, normal man … I envy such a man to the point of extreme bile. He is stupid … but perhaps a normal man ought to be stupid, how do you know? Perhaps it’s even beautiful. And I am the more convinced of this, so to speak, suspicion, seeing that if, for example, one takes the antithesis of the normal man, that is, the man of heightened conscious ness [sic], who came, of course, not from the bosom of nature but from a retort (this is almost mysticism, gentlemen, but I suspect that, too) this retort man sometimes folds before his antithesis so far that he honestly regards himself, with all his heightened consciousness as a mouse and not a man. A highly c
onscious mouse, perhaps, but a mouse all the same, whereas here we have a man, and consequently … and so on …16
Such self-deconstructing reflection not only dismisses centuries of Enlightenment optimism, but opens a wound in the reader’s relationship with the narrative voice. Who is it really who is speaking? Since the man who doesn’t act has no real relationship with anyone (he admits that the ‘gentlemen’ he addresses are mere rhetorical constructs), since he constantly contradicts himself, since he is often not sure himself whether he is lying or not, we begin to feel that he is no more than a voice stretched across time. At moments of ellipsis – and there are many – he simply ceases to exist.
The style of Notes reinforces our doubts. It is dense with references to scenes and rhetoric from well-known novels of the recent past. This passage is taken from Gogol, that image from Pushkin, or Turgenev. The narrator begins to dream, but then realises he is fantasising something he read somewhere. He frequently refers to his bookish imagination, suggesting that his mind can inhabit well-worn but contradictory positions without any investment in them. Or, worse still, without knowing whether he has any investment in them. The statement reminds us of Dostoevsky’s perception that his political opponents often put forward positions without really believing in them. At this point, as with the Hollywood habit of quoting interminably from previous films, we have the growing and very modern concern that every statement put before us comes wrapped in a sticky layer of parody. Nothing can be taken seriously except the absence of a convincing seriousness consequent on the disappearance of a reliable identity. The ‘struggle’ is towards truly holding a position, any position, even if it seems taken from ‘copybook maxims’.