by Tim Parks
The psychology Bassani uncovers here is immediately relevant for anyone trying to get a grip on today’s multi-ethnic society: ‘It was futile’, the novel’s narrator tells us, ‘to attempt to instruct the others [the Gentiles that is], any of them … even those playmates infinitely more loved (at least in my case) than Jewish acquaintances, in a matter so private. Poor souls! In this regard you couldn’t think of them as anything better than simple plebs, forever condemned to irreparable abysses of ignorance, or rather – as even my father used to say, grinning benignly – “goy niggers”.’1 In this sense it is the Jewish community that excludes the others and not vice versa. Many of the Jewish characters in the novel nourish a superiority complex with regard to goys, a complex actually strengthened when (in 1938) serious persecution begins, if only because that persecution is so evidently brutal and stupid.
The young hero and heroine of The Garden of the Finzi-Contini, however, are not only both Jewish but both attend the same synagogue. They are not divided by any sectarian schism. There is no obvious barrier to their relationship. All the same, the positions their families occupy within the Jewish community and with regard to wider Italian society suggest profoundly different attitudes to life, attitudes that will be recognisable in any era or social context.
The narrator of the novel and its main character is never named, but so closely does his biography and family resemble Bassani’s that critics have got into the habit of referring to him as B. B’s father, an optimist, an erstwhile doctor turned administrator of old family property, has always been eager to become part of modern Italy and wishes the same level of assimilation for his family and for the Jewish community as a whole. He thinks of himself simultaneously as a Jew and an Italian and trusts that he will not be obliged to choose between the two. This outlook seems admirable. B’s father is a man who gladly accepts social responsibility. He is president of the committee that maintains the local Jewish cemetery. Yet to participate fully in Italian public life in the 1930s means to become a member of the Fascist Party. In 1933, B’s father is delighted that ninety per cent of Ferrara’s Jews are card-carrying Fascists. And he is furious that Micòl’s father, Ermanno Finzi-Contini, refuses to join the party. When, to spare the rich reclusive man any possible bureaucratic tedium, a membership card is made up for him and taken to his house, the professor – for Ermanno Finzi-Contini is a cultured person, although he holds no university position – tears it up.
The reader will be tempted to side with this refusal to compromise, especially because, on every other occasion, Ermanno is such a gentle, mild-mannered person. Yet his gesture is not the result of a committed anti-Fascist, but part, rather, of a general instinct to isolate himself and his family, not only from wider Italian society, but from the Jewish community as well. So determinedly does he do this, that B’s father will paradoxically accuse the Finzi-Contini of anti-Semitism, this despite the fact that when the two families sit one behind the other at the synagogue it is evident that Ermanno Finzi-Contini speaks Hebrew and can repeat all the prayers of the liturgy, while the narrator’s more Italianised father can barely mutter a word.
The description of the Finzi-Contini family, at once entirely convincing and magnificently enigmatic, is one of the triumphs of Bassani’s literary career. On putting this novel down you feel you could reflect endlessly on the relationship of each family member to the others, on their many contradictions, and above all on what they might or might not represent. To be sure, you will reach no firm conclusions, but all the same the conviction grows that, with the Finzi-Contini, Bassani was seeking to get to grips with a very special product of the modern world, a phenomenon of far wider significance than the structure of society in Ferrara, or even the question of Jewish persecution.
Nevertheless, these people do have to be seen in context. On the annexation of the Papal States into a unified Italy in 1861, the obligation of Ferrara’s Jews to live segregated in the town’s ghetto was ended. To celebrate his newly won rights, Ermanno’s grandfather, Moise Finzi-Contini, a hugely rich man, bought out the property of an impoverished nobleman. The property was large: ten hectares on the edge of town protected by a high wall including a stately home in an advanced state of disrepair. Moise’s son Menotti, Ermanno’s father, rebuilt and extended the house and took his sophisticated wife to live there. Rather than moving out of the ghetto in order to get into Italian society, the Finzi-Contini have moved out of society altogether and begun to cultivate what B’s father sees as absurd pretensions to nobility. (The name Finzi-Contini in Italian might actually suggest ‘fake little counts’, though it should be said that Finzi is the name of a well known Jewish family.)
The Finzi-Contini vocation for isolation is consolidated in the next generation when Ermanno and his wife, Olga, lose their firstborn son, Guido, at six years old, to meningitis. (The doctor who diagnoses the incurable disease is none other than Dr Corcos of ‘A Stroll Before Dinner’, the man who married down into the most humble strata of Italian society.) Convinced that the death was brought about through contact with others, father and mother decide to have the two children born after Guido, Alberto and Micòl, educated at home and almost entirely segregated from the world. As a result, B will only ever see Micòl when she and her brother come, as private students, to take their annual state exams at school, or, more regularly, at the synagogue.
Bassani is a master of the dramatic set piece that carries, without ever seeming contrived, a profound significance. Week by week, in the synagogue, the young narrator is fascinated by the Finzi-Contini family sitting on the bench behind him. To control his son, B’s father waits for the rabbi to deliver the closing blessing, when each Jewish father drapes his prayer shawl over the heads of his whole family. He then forces his son under the shawl to stop his constant gazing at the family behind. But the shawl is so threadbare that the boy is able to peep through the holes. Charmed by the sound of Ermanno Finzi-Contini chanting the prayers in Hebrew, but with an upper-class Tuscan accent, B exchanges exciting glances with the Finzi-Contini children who seem to be inviting him to come in under their shawl.
So: the father who advocates mixing and assimilation tries in vain to stop his son from mixing with the family who have chosen isolation. Meantime, although the narrator’s family is clearly divided within itself, the son rebelling against the father, the Finzi-Contini, on the other hand and for all their social isolation, seem united in casting a spell over the young man, an aesthetic spell, made up of class and caste, beautiful language, beautiful gestures and a beautiful girl. It is a curious and disturbing characteristic of the Finzi-Contini that they never seem to disagree with each other and, with the exception of their attendance at the synagogue, are never to be seen outside the walls of their huge garden. Friends can be invited into that garden, but, for reasons we never quite understand, they can’t invite a Finzi-Contini to come out.
B’s first invitation into the garden comes on a hot summer day in his early teens. He has just heard that he has failed an exam and is cycling miserably and aimlessly about the town. Astride a high wall, the young Micòl calls to him, suggests he climb over into the garden via a series of footholds. She has placed a ladder on the inside. What do we know about Micòl? That she is blonde and bright-eyed, slim and tall, that her manner is always one of affectionate mockery and that she speaks in a peculiar sing-song, a private language almost, Finzi-Continesque, that she shares with her brother. She is playful, attractive. B is seduced, but scared. Of what? Of the high wall, he says. He would prefer to go into the garden through the main gate. But then the others would know, Micòl objects. At once the boy’s fear shifts to the girl’s sexuality. Segregated from the world, at one with her close-knit but exclusive family, any openness to others on Micòl’s part must be clandestine. What does she want from him? Is it that each member of the family needs occasional victims from outside to make their collective separateness possible? Nervous, the boy fusses over the problem of hiding his bicycle and the moment
passes. Inside the garden, Perotti, the gatekeeper, the chauffeur, the butler almost, has spotted the girl on the wall. She must come down.
A word needs to be said here on the wonderfully comic and always sinister figure of Perotti. Employed, together with his wife and children, in the role of family retainer, this ageing factotum of peasant stock has invested even more in the Finzi-Continis’ supposed nobility than they have themselves. Officially a servant, he thus begins to function as a prison warder. Manically assiduous, he polishes the family’s ancient horse carriage, their old American car, their old American lift. If ever a Finzi-Contini shows any signs of slipping from the role of perfect aristocrat, Perotti will be there to prevent him or her from going too far. A strange hint of the gothic pervades the garden of the Finzi-Contini. It is all the more sinister for being a parodied gothic, a modern gothic, where the cloud hanging over the noble house has a terrible historical reality.
But what is there inside this huge, walled garden and why did Bassani make it the title and focus of his book? Having missed his chance, or escaped the trap perhaps, in his teens, B doesn’t get to see beyond the wall until he is in his early twenties. It is the autumn of 1938. The new Race Laws have led to the expulsion of all members of the Jewish community from Ferrara’s tennis club. Suddenly, both Alberto and Micòl Finzi-Contini are phoning the narrator to suggest that he could come to play tennis on the court in their garden. Arriving at the great gate to the property, B finds he is not alone. The family have invited half a dozen others. The story proper can begin.
But why this sudden generosity from the Finzi-Contini, demands B’s father? He senses danger for his son in this liaison. Why this unexpected openness? Various family members offer inadequate explanations: because we have a tennis court and you have nowhere to play; because the Race Laws have now placed all Jews in the same boat; there can no longer be any distinction between us. But there is distinction. It is always the narrator who visits the Finzi-Contini house, never vice versa. The attentive reader smells a rat. What is the reason, then, for this change of attitude?
Bassani’s genius is never to be explicit. We cannot separate one strand of life from another. Did the Finzi-Contini really segregate their children because their first son died of meningitis, or was that just a convenient alibi? In 1938 both Alberto and Micòl, now in their early twenties, are at a critical moment in life. Both are officially studying at universities in other towns, while in fact living at home. Like the narrator, both are taking far longer than seems necessary to complete their undergraduate theses and hence their degrees. It is a situation all Italian readers will immediately recognise. The undergraduate thesis, something not required in British or American universities, is a moment of initiation in Italy, a passport to the adult world. All three are shivering on the brink. They are hanging back. What is the point of graduating if society then excludes Jews from the workplace? Your degree is worth nothing.
But there is more to it than that. As with all gothic scenarios, the air is dense with repressed or hidden sexuality. The two young Finzi-Contini, Alberto and Micòl, seem blocked, stalled, marooned, and not only in their studies. Perhaps the political situation is covering some deeper difficulty with facing the world and mixing with life outside their protected garden. By allowing others into their world to play tennis they have found a way to alleviate a tension that would otherwise force them out into adulthood. Sport, after all, offers a pleasant surrogate for life’s crueller battles.
In an Indian summer that shines on far into November, the fiercely fought tennis games become a daily ritual. Taking turns to play and rest, B finds himself being shown around the vast grounds by Micòl. He is now hopelessly in love and she has singled him out for friendship. Yet the reader’s attention is insistently diverted towards the garden. Immediately we are struck by this reflection: if the Finzi-Contini have refused to mix with the outside world, they nevertheless, in the protected space they live in, have mixed together, generously and heterogeneously, everything that the world has to offer. This is their modernity. Desiring separateness, they seek to possess exoticism, in the security of their own home. Their garden is full of trees from other climes. Micòl can name scores of species. Some have to be protected against the harsh, Po Valley winters by stacking straw against the trunks. The house itself is a bizarre mixture of architectural styles. The food they serve is extravagant in its variety and quantity. It includes kosher food and pork. There is a remarkable library that precludes any need to consult the library in Ferrara. Books on literature and science, Italian history and ancient Judaism, are mixed promiscuously together. The latest American hi-fi equipment abounds. Alberto has personalised his gramophone by separating treble and bass on four different speakers carefully distributed around the antique panelling of his room. Micòl has personalised a recipe she brought back from Austria for something called Skiwasser, a hot drink for winter weather. She has added grapes and consumes the concoction ice-cold. She keeps a flask of Skiwasser beside her bed, along with a collection of tiny glass ornaments from Venice.
Acquired, segregated and manipulated in this way, the world’s abundance is tamed and aestheticised. But that, after all, is what gardens do to nature. The garden is a hybrid space, at once real and unreal, as sport is at once a real engagement, but nothing like the battle to be joined outside the garden only a year hence. In so many ways, the Finzi-Contini foreshadow the modern consumer’s obsession with control and security, with possessing the whole world in the safe domestic space, shutting out reality, living in a state of denial. The Race Laws give the family a further excuse for establishing a separate existence. After all, they have the money that makes this possible. Again and again the narrator is surprised to see how the Finzi-Contini, all of them, seem pleased rather than scandalised by the increasingly harsh treatment of the Jews. Isolated together, each has – something unheard of at the time in Italy – a telephone extension in his or her bedroom. ‘To protect your freedom,’ Micòl tells the narrator, ‘there’s nothing better than having a good telephone extension.’2 The subject of the thesis she is taking so long to finish is that most hermetic of poets, Emily Dickinson.
Through the autumn of 1938, the late adolescence of these three Italian Jews is wonderfully and frustratingly protracted in game after game of tennis, walk after walk around the vast grounds. To make matters more complicated and infinitely more ambiguous, a fourth character and tennis player becomes important. Giampiero Malnate already has his degree. He is a few years older than the others. He is a Gentile not a Jew. He comes from the big city of Milan not the provincial backwater of Ferrara. He does not hide a frank and experienced sexuality. He has a job as a chemist with a government project to develop synthetic rubber, this in the hope of making Fascist Italy independent of the wider world. And, ironically, he is a communist. He is optimistic. He believes the world can be improved. He deplores the capitalist basis of the Finzi-Contini wealth. In short, Malnate is everything the other three are not. He has a start in life. He is initiated.
What is this man doing then in the dreamy garden of the Finzi-Contini, a place of eternal suspension, of life delayed? Malnate was originally invited by Alberto, with whom he studied at university. Is it possible that Alberto is homosexual? He shows no interest in women. Bassani will give us no more than the vaguest hints. Or is Giampiero there for Micòl? Are both brother and sister jealous of Giampiero’s relationship with the other? At one point Micòl tells the narrator that she would no more have sex with him than with her brother. But perhaps there is a sexual attraction between her and her brother. In love with Micòl, the narrator’s frustration mounts. So much of what is going on makes no sense. He has fierce political arguments with Giampiero that turn out not to be about politics at all but, obscurely, about the roles the two men have come to occupy within the Finzi-Contini household. While they battle it out, Alberto obsessively adjusts the treble and bass on his hi-fi system, Perotti and his family serve lavish teas. Soon enough the tension rea
ches the point where some clarifying drama must be at hand. One way or another, these youngsters must become adult.
Three of the finest Italian novels that, in one way or another, deal with the Second War seem obsessed by the choice between action and inaction, which in turn becomes a question of how far and in what way one should or should not become involved in society, since action inevitably means involvement. Despite this similarity of theme, all three are marvellously different. In Dino Buzzati’s surreal work The Tartar Steppe a young army officer is called to serve in a remote fort at the furthest extreme of his country’s borders. High in the mountains, the fort overlooks a vast desert whence the Tartars are expected to attack. Immediately on his arrival, the officer senses that his posting there is a disaster. He has been utterly removed from all social life. He is desperate to leave. But very soon he finds himself strangely enchanted by the fort’s military rituals, by a life rendered dramatic by the alpine scenery, and above all by the promise of an eventual Tartar attack. In the end, he rejects an offer to return to his distant hometown, his pretty girlfriend. His whole life passes by. The Tartars fail to show. Military conflict becomes a dream that would give meaning to all he has renounced. He yearns for it but is doomed to frustration. Old and sick, he is leaving the fort for the last time when the Tartar army finally appears en masse. As if conjured up by the officer’s disappointment, the catastrophe has finally come. Delivered to the publishers in 1939, The Tartar Steppe (or The Fort as Buzzati had wanted it to be titled) is an astonishingly timely warning of the dangers of substituting ordinary social involvement with the allure of heroic action and military glory.