Family Lexicon

by Natalia Ginzburg

  And yet, one of the wonders of Ginzburg’s book is the fact—it is a fact—that the portrait of such a father can seem to us somehow affectionate. To be sure, the man was, in the ways of his time and place, something of a racist, and there is no slightest suggestion in Ginzburg’s book that this seemed to her, because commonplace, at all acceptable, or that the best thing to do when confronted by expressions of intolerance or abuse is to forgive or forget. If she never indicts Beppino directly for his use of negrigure, her decision to expose his use of this particular favorite vulgarism to correct the “mistakes” of his children is pointed.

  By the time she was writing Family Lexicon, Ginzburg was already known to be—in her fiction and her journalism—a severe and unrelenting critic of hypocrisy and whatever else she deemed less than exemplary. Her frequent contributions to the Italian newspapers L’Unita and La Stampa had earned her a reputation as a gadfly and truth teller. Even in Family Lexicon, Ginzburg’s gift for comedy in no way obstructs her cleansing, urgent will to chastise and correct. Though Beppino’s virulence can make him seem grotesque and fearsome, his refusal to let stupidity pass or to keep his mouth shut about the criminally culpable and therefore stupid Mussolini is bracing and, for Ginzburg herself, clearly challenging. Can we find it in ourselves as readers to adore a man who tells his children to stop behaving like negroes? No doubt Ginzburg knew she was making it hard for herself in placing before us a man who would seem, much of the time, incorrigible and unbearable. But she knew, too, that her man was a Jew in fascist Italy and the head of a family of resistance fighters. Ginzburg concedes nothing in her portrait of Giuseppe Levi, exposing his worst features while allowing him to seem somewhat generous in the extravagance of his passion and in his refusal to be genteel or moderate. Ginzburg often found ways to praise and admire people who knew how to live within their limitations, but she had no patience for people who were timid when circumstances demanded something more. Her own father always reminded her that mildness, like correctness, was not—certainly not always—a virtue. Whatever our misgivings or reluctance, by the time we reach the end of Family Lexicon we readily acknowledge that Giuseppe Levi is the hero—lowercase hero—of the book. It is not easy to embrace such a man, but we come to love him as a great character without whom a great book would lack the essential drive and buoyancy that color its every page.

  Odd, perhaps, to speak of buoyancy in a book that is also marked by the menace and presence of violence and oppression. But then Family Lexicon is an eccentric family chronicle, not a historical document. Mussolini’s war and the fears and dangers it imposes are often referred to, but only insofar as they occasion another stretch of family narrative or enrich an existing one. There are references to political parties and figures by now grown obscure, but the character of the book derives more from the atmosphere of the Levi household, and the peculiar intensities that animate its family members, than from its historical context. Ginzburg knows how to make us hear and see her family. We experience the tumult and pathos of their strivings and rages and sudden accessions of tenderness. Politics is never primary in Ginzburg’s world, not even when it threatens to overwhelm private life. The very enterprise of Family Lexicon—the insistent, loving, faithful construction of a family chronicle—may itself be said to be an act of fidelity and resistance.

  After the initial portrait of the father and the variety of Teutonic hardships that he routinely imposes on his household, Ginzburg portrays the other family members, each with a pat phrase or other characteristic marker not unlike the attributes of saints in medieval and Renaissance paintings. Recalling her decidedly unsaintly family members in this ritualized way helps to make memory a devotional exercise, now a matter of consolation, now of praise. As Saint Catherine has her wheel and Saint Peter his keys, the paternal grandmother is emphatically associated with her chastising of the irreverent Levi family for making “a bordello out of everything.” A psychiatrist uncle is regularly cited as “the Lunatic” only by association with his patients, not because of any lunacy of his own. The notoriously coarse Uncle Barbison is so coarse that his nickname becomes an adjective with wide-ranging pejorative connotations. And his unfortunate, very red nose comes to stand, among the Levis, for all red noses. That nose there, says Lidia, is a Barbison. Uncle Barbison is also the author of the memorable formulation “Sulfuric acid smells of fart.”

  Lidia, the mother, is more of a mystery than Beppino. She has her sayings, some dating from before her marriage, but we know rather little about her past. We do learn that Lidia Tanzi knew a number of anarchists in Milan, that she isn’t Jewish, that her mother is still alive and living comfortably in a lavishly furnished though increasingly shabby palazzo in Florence, where the family will temporarily take refuge after the war, but such information is never really developed. What matters is the way that Lidia accommodates herself to the Levi family tradition and finds her way to enrich the family lexicon and thereby to nurture the instincts for survival and resilience instilled by Giuseppe. At the same time, however, we gather that what is left out in the telling of Lidia’s story is important and perhaps too painful to dwell on in this work.

  Ginzburg is not an ostentatious writer. Her prose is famously terse and forceful, an instrument in which the smallest things are made to seem fresh and telling. In Family Lexicon she doesn’t disclose much about her own thoughts or feelings growing up in the Levi home, but when we learn about everyone else in the family circle, in such extraordinary detail and gesture, we readily feel what it was like to be among them. Vulnerabilities and incoherencies are captured more or less as a matter of course, with only occasional commentary. The child, Natalia, as drawn by her adult self, is remarkably nonjudgmental; even when she reports her mother’s preference for the company of her more gregarious sister, she does so without disdain or envy, perhaps taking consolation in obvious signs of her own difference, a difference that would eventually become distinction. In effect, Ginzburg conveys not only impressions but a fully intelligible way of thinking about them without underlining her views or striking edifying postures. For all the humor in Family Lexicon there is also an unmistakable gravity that is not to be confused with explicitly formulated ideas or convictions.

  The voice of the narrator of Family Lexicon, marked by the self-deprecation that is prominently on display in Ginzburg’s personal essays, is a voice with which Ginzburg fans will have long been familiar. She offers, for example, as sly proof of her early literary talent, a wholly unremarkable two-line poem written when she was very young to amuse her mother, who often complained of missing their sunny former home in Palermo:

  Palermino Palermino,

  You’re more beautiful than Torino.

  The Italian readers of Family Lexicon knew well that little Natalia would become one of Italy’s leading women of letters, but the child growing up and coming of age in the Levi household, on an undistinguished street in Turin during the time of fascism, has no such sense of her future self. She tells her story through the innocent eyes of an ordinary child and resists any forecasting of things to come. When we arrive at the end of the book and Natalia speaks in her adult voice, revealing details about her life and her family in the aftermath of the war, the effect is therefore all the more powerful.

  Although the book was written in middle-age, with the advantages of worldly experience and historical hindsight, Ginzburg chooses as her narrator a child for whom the prewar and war years pass mainly in the confines of the home. The Natalia whose voice is the main voice of the novel has very limited access to the outside world because to avoid contagion in a pre-vaccine era her parents keep her from school. She dislikes studying what her tutors provide, but she is a good listener and in this house of talkers whose conversations she overhears, she takes in a great deal of extracurricular information about the world. She learns about friends and relatives who die from natural causes and about others who disappear for other reasons. Eventually her parents’ best friends are no longer fixtures in t
he house; people move because of the race laws or because of opportunities elsewhere. But even as war disrupts familiar routines, the sense conveyed is that life goes on more or less normally in ways that defy persistent expectations of besetting disruption and grief. Children are born, grandchildren are celebrated, friends appear, disappear, reappear. New stories are added to the standard repertoire while older ones are reiterated well into Natalia’s adulthood. Where chaos threatens, Ginzburg’s patient idiom clarifies, insisting that no virtue or incident is too small or too trivial to recount, no saying unworthy of repetition. Childhood unfolds slowly and lightly; the pliable net of language woven to contain it all is vulnerable but equal to the task. The effect is cumulative: the sum of absurdity plus absurdity is life.

  •

  In several respects Family Lexicon provides a kind of counterexample to the families Ginzburg chose to write about in her fiction, where the focus is almost invariably on the disintegration of conventional marriage and home life and the erecting, in its stead, of a new order in which the idea of family as she knew it was becoming a thing of the past, beyond retrieval. In books like Valentino, The City and the House, Sagittarius, and Voices in the Evening, Ginzburg describes one dysfunctional couple after another carelessly poisoning their marriages, misreading each other, and mistreating their children with more or less catastrophic results. These tales of dysfunction are told with a deadpan, often comic touch. The couples are unfaithful to each other in an almost exuberant way, reporting their infidelities with brutal candor. Everything is out in the open. Characters talk incessantly and well. They even joke—about each other, about each other’s lovers, about their unfortunate children. Later they wonder how they managed to ruin things: L’abbiamo sciupato tutto. And throughout these tales we hear the familiar chiming of tags and attributes, each tale with its mini-lexicon of references, the lexicon contributing a layer of comedy without utterly neutralizing the inherent darkness of the vision.

  Although Ginzburg’s fiction is never programmatic, never reducible to social commentary or gloomy cultural prognostication, a central feature of her novels is the absence of strong parental figures who might be equipped to save the family and ensure its stability. Only All Our Yesterdays escapes this pattern, even though its central figure, Cenzo Rena (a vital and committed authority figure clearly modeled on Ginzburg’s own father), in the end leaves the family to its own devices. He does so heroically, martyring himself to save a soldier he is hiding—and therefore to save the family who is hiding the soldier. He does not, however, manage to stay with the family to protect them for as long as they will need his protection, the way Giuseppe Levi did manage miraculously to do, against all odds. When compared with the weak, morally compromised, self- indulgent mother and father figures who populate the novels, Ginzburg’s father might well seem to readers of Family Lexicon a paragon of strength and, in an old-fashioned sense of the word, character.

  About halfway into Family Lexicon, very much in passing, Ginzburg allows herself occasional references to Leone Ginzburg, the man who becomes her first husband, but only as the friend and fellow resistance fighter of Natalia’s brother, Mario. There is no reference to the wedding of Natalia and Leone, and we learn of children only indirectly, by way of Lidia having to take care of them, as if the fact of their having been born to Ginzburg during a time when she thought incessantly about the prospect of losing her husband was of little interest or importance.

  Ginzburg had forewarned us of her intentions in the prefatory Avvertenza (Warning) she wrote for the original Italian edition of the book, where she indicated that she was not much interested in writing about herself. She follows through on her original intention with disciplined consistency, resisting—for the most part—intimate details about her own sentiments. If she denies her readers a full portrait of Leone and her marriage to him, she does devote considerable attention to the writer Cesare Pavese—using the one story, perhaps, as a stand-in for the other.

  Pavese is first introduced as an energetic and opinionated co-editor at Einaudi, then as the intimate friend who commits suicide in 1950. Like the family members we come to know in Family Lexicon, Pavese, too, has his talismanic tags: his love of the first cherries in May, his stingy handshake, his abrupt, intolerant ways. In telling us of his death Ginzburg not only mourns the man but laments the impeccable logic with which he carried out the act of suicide, describing it all with a passionate regret she rarely permits herself:

  Pavese’s mistakes were worse than ours. Our mistakes were born of impulsiveness, imprudence, stupidity, and naiveté. Instead, Pavese’s mistakes were the result of prudence, guile, calculation, and intelligence. Nothing is more dangerous than this sort of mistake, which can be, as it was for him, fatal. It’s difficult to recover from a mistake made through guile. Mistakes made through guile tie us up in tight knots. Guile puts down roots in us that are stronger than those put down by recklessness or imprudence. How does one get rid of those tenacious, firm, profound roots? Prudence, calculation, guile have the face of reason, the bitter face and voice of reason, presenting infallible arguments to which there is no response, nothing to do but submit.

  Pavese killed himself one summer in Turin when none of us was there. He had contrived and calculated the circumstances regarding his death in the way he planned a walk or an evening out. On his walks or evenings out, he didn’t like to encounter anything unforeseen or surprising. Whenever the Balbos, the publisher, Pavese, and I went for a walk in the hills, he became very irritated if we strayed from the designated path or if someone arrived late to our meeting point. . . . The unforeseen made him anxious. He didn’t like to be taken by surprise.

  She returns to the loss of Pavese several times in this book, each time finding a new lens through which to see him and his act. She manages to mourn him and to chastise him at the same time, in classic Ginzburg style, loving him while exposing his faulty thinking in the same breath:

  Pavese’s relationship with his friends always included an ironic banter that he called upon whenever he was talking with us. . . . This irony of his was perhaps one of his most wonderful qualities, but he never knew how to bring his sense of irony to bear upon those things most important to him; he didn’t bring it to his relationships with the women he fell in love with, nor did he bring it to his writing. He was able to bring it to his friendships because friendship came to him naturally and he was in some ways careless about his friendships in the sense that they were something he didn’t give excessive importance to. In love, and in his writing, he threw himself into such a state of feverish calculation that he no longer knew how to laugh or to ever be entirely himself. And sometimes when I think about him now, his sense of irony is the thing I remember best about him and I cry because it no longer exists. There’s no trace of it in his books and it’s nowhere else to be found except in that flash of his wicked smile.

  That “wicked smile” is the Pavese attribute that surfaces with each iteration of his story, even as the picture is complicated by the alternating currents of love, admiration, frustration, and genuine grief that figure in Ginzburg’s narrative. Pavese had been the dearest friend of her husband, Leone, and in losing Pavese, Natalia loses not only her own good friend but another part of Leone’s world. Perhaps this is why Ginzburg allows herself a certain register of powerful emotion at the loss of Pavese, which she suppresses when referring to Leone’s death. It’s as if the loss of Leone is too great to express and so must be subsumed into the tale of Pavese; his grief at Leone’s death is huge, as is Natalia’s grief at Pavese’s. But neither loss, we must imagine, can begin to match in depth or intensity what Ginzburg must have felt when Leone was tortured and killed by the occupying Nazis in Rome, very near the end of the war.

  The news of Leone’s death is recounted with contrasting, shocking economy, buried within a description of the Einaudi offices:

  On the wall in his office the publisher had hung a portrait of Leone: his hat slightly at an angle, his eyeglas
ses 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.

  Of course Family Lexicon cannot possibly recover from this blunt, devastatingly terse report. Not even the Levi family can summon the voluble bluster and blab to lift their lives back onto the plateau of anxious comedy where they had once resided. Postwar Italy is in ruins. Everyone is older. There is not much to laugh about, and yet the book ends on something of a comic, but hardly resolved, note. The war has been survived, for the most part, but survival is a work in progress. Si tira avanti. The family moves forward, inching its way toward recovery. The losses have been enormous, but their instincts are to retrieve what they can, and as always recovery will be bound up with the recovery of laughter, or at least with recovering the reliable triggers for laughter: the sayings, spells, and familiar locutions forged by a shared experience which, though now marked by deep sadness, are the true mark of their identity and their common will to live.

  As the book closes, Ginzburg returns to the domain of the parents. Beppino and Lidia are still, despite the ravages of war, refreshingly—doggedly, insistently—themselves. “Tragedy,” Natalia writes of her mother, “had beaten her down and made her despondent . . . carved two deep hollows into her cheeks.” Yet once the family apartment in Turin is repaired and they can move back in, Lidia takes her place at the table and begins her daily recitation of old saws and family tag lines: “An apple for the little ones and a devil to peel them for the big ones.” And her husband’s rejoinder—as always a complaint, “These apples have no taste!”—is answered with the same riposte Lidia has used for thirty years: “But Beppino, they are carpandues!”