Coventry
Page 19
Among the many themes touched on by Ginzburg – war, relationships, loss, belief, domesticity, art – the matter of femininity is handled with surprising understatement and reserve. The author occupies the successive roles of daughter, wife, mother and partner without ever allowing her perspective to be subsumed into them. Yet she is perfectly honest about what the playing of these roles involves. ‘And then my children were born,’ she writes in ‘My Vocation’, ‘and when they were very little I could not understand how anyone could sit herself down to write if she had children. I did not see how I could separate myself from them in order to follow someone or other’s fortunes in a story.’ She describes the pitfalls of gender – both male and female – without ever falling into them. This unusual objectivity, achieved by a careful use of distance that is never allowed to become detachment, is one of the pleasures of reading Ginzburg; yet it perhaps bears greater examination as an example of how a woman writer might make and inhabit an authentic place for herself in the world. ‘Irony and nastiness seemed to be very important weapons in my hands,’ she writes of her early attempts to create stories; ‘I thought they would help me write like a man, because at that time I wanted terribly to write like a man and I had a horror of anyone realising from what I wrote that I was a woman.’ She goes on to describe how the acceptance of her womanhood was fundamental to her birth as an artist, but she is careful to point out that this was not conscription to a gendered view of life: rather, it was the self-acceptance crucial to enabling anyone to speak with their own voice. The basis of Ginzburg’s world view is equality, and the stories that are built on it are built from the formation and function of individual human character alone. Here, morality and the choices that are consequent on it are the engine of narrative.
‘My husband died in Rome,’ she writes at the end of ‘Winter in the Abruzzi’, ‘in the prison of Regina Coeli, a few months after we left the Abruzzi. Faced with the horror of his solitary death, and faced with the anguish which preceded his death, I ask myself if this happened to us – to us, who bought oranges at Giro’s and went for walks in the snow.’ The torture and murder of Leone Ginzburg by the fascist police, the destruction through war of the known reality, the loss of the world of childhood and the breaking of its concept of authority: these things ‘happened’ to Natalia Ginzburg and it seems they taught her much about the dangers of extremity both to human character and to art. The exceptional violence and pain of her experiences are painstakingly transmuted into a clear-eyed universality where cruelty and exaggeration, even if they have their basis in fact, are not tolerated.
‘And you have to realise that you cannot console yourself for your grief by writing … Because this vocation is never a consolation or a way of passing the time. It is not a companion. This vocation is a master who is able to beat us till the blood flows… We must swallow our saliva and tears and grit our teeth and dry the blood from our wounds and serve him. Serve him when he asks. Then he will help us up on to our feet, fix our feet firmly on the ground; he will help us overcome madness and delirium, fever and despair. But he has to be the one who gives the orders and he always refuses to pay attention to us when we need him.’
Acknowledgements
The essays in this collection have been published previously or are forthcoming:
‘Driving As Metaphor’ (New York Times Magazine), ‘Coventry’ (Granta), ‘On Rudeness’ (New York Times Magazine), ‘Making Home’ (New York Times Magazine), ‘Lions on Leashes’ (New York Times Magazine, as ‘Raising Teenagers: The Mother of All Problems’), ‘Aftermath’ (Granta), ‘Louise Bourgeois: Suites on Fabric’ (Marlborough Fine Art Exhibition Catalogue essay), ‘I am nothing, I am everything’ (The Last Supper, Faber & Faber, 2010), ‘Shakespeare’s Sisters’ (Guardian), ‘How to Get There’ (Guardian), ‘Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence’ (Introduction, The Age of Innocence, The Folio Society, 2009, and Macmillan Collector’s Library, 2019), ‘D. H. Lawrence: The Rainbow’ (Introduction, The Rainbow, Vintage Classics, 2011, republished in the Guardian), ‘On Francoise Sagan’ (Introduction, Bonjour Tristesse, Penguin Modern Classics, 2013), ‘Olivia Manning: The Balkan Trilogy’ (Introduction, Fortunes of War: The Balkan Trilogy, Olivia Manning, New York Review of Books Classics, 2010), ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ (Guardian), ‘Never Let Me Go’ (Guardian), ‘On Natalia Ginzburg’ (Times Literary Supplement and Introduction, The Little Virtues, Daunt, 2018).
About the Author
Rachel Cusk is the author of the trilogy Outline, Transit, Kudos; the memoirs A Life’s Work, The Last Supper and Aftermath; and several other novels: Saving Agnes (winner of the Whitbread Award), The Temporary, The Country Life (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), The Lucky Ones, In the Fold, Arlington Park and The Bradshaw Variations. She was chosen as one of Granta’s 2003 Best of Young British Novelists. She has been shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize three times, most recently for Kudos.
By the Same Author
fiction
Saving Agnes
The Temporary
The Country Life
The Lucky Ones
In the Fold
Arlington Park
The Bradshaw Variations
Outline
Transit
Kudos
non-fiction
A Life’s Work
The Last Supper
Aftermath
drama
Medea
Copyright
First published in the UK in 2019
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2019
All rights reserved
© Rachel Cusk, 2019
Cover design by Faber
The right of Rachel Cusk to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–35046–9