In Natalia Ginzburg’s essay collection The Little Virtues (translated by Dick Davis, originally published in 1962) I found the kind of essayistic voice I love most: confident, assured, and wise, but somehow also humble and self-deprecating, willing to explore her failings as openly as her successes. This may be a strange connection, but she reminded me of Mary McCarthy and her essay, “My Confession,” where, with utter assurance, she tells an embarrassing story about accidentally becoming a Trotskyite. I love it when essayists, particularly women, write in the easy, informal style that Ginzburg and McCarthy have (Sallie Tisdale does this too) and manage to be entertaining, crystal clear, personal, intellectual, and brilliant all at once. Nice trick if you can pull it off! And congratulations to Dick Davis, who translates Ginzburg beautifully.
I’d read one essay from this collection previously, “He and I,” which is in Phillip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay. This essay alone, which I read in a college class, made me fall in love with her and know that I would read more of her one day. That college class was two and a half decades ago, and I can’t say why it took me this long, except that sometimes it just does. Rereading “He and I,” I fell in love with the essay again, although this time with a little cringing along the way: the essay is about her relationship with her husband, charting all the differences between them, and her husband can be mean! I’m not sure I paid attention to that last time around. He tells her she has no curiosity, that she wastes time, that without him she is good for nothing. He won’t turn off the music when she wants quiet to work. She lists all the things he can do that she can’t: dance, type, drive, sing. But she points out how she can be difficult and annoying too, and, in the end, the subtext of the whole essay is that she can do what matters most to her — write — the result of which is that, as the brilliant essayist she is, she has tremendous power over him. She may be full of failures and weaknesses, lacking his wide-ranging knowledge and energy, but we remember him only because of her.
Some of the essays I don’t want to tell you about because you should discover them on your own. “Winter in Abruzzi” is one of those, and all I’ll say about that is that Ginzburg knows how to end an essay. She has this way of using the last few paragraphs to broaden her scope, put everything in a larger context, and make you rethink everything you just read.
She can also find meaning in anything — delightfully, brilliantly, making it seem easy (I am sure it is not). “Worn-out Shoes” is one of those essays. In five pages she begins with living in Rome with a friend, both of them wearing worn-out shoes, and moves into philosophies of life, gracefully and wittily evoked — she is never ponderous — while also describing war-time survival and her philosophy of childrearing. She asks:
So, my children live with my mother and so far they do not have worn-out shoes. But what kind of men will they be? I mean, what kind of shoes will they have when they are men? What road will they choose to walk down? Will they decide to give up everything that is pleasant but not necessary, or will they affirm that everything is necessary and that men have the right to wear sound, solid shoes on their feet?
She doesn’t judge either possibility, but she does say that having dry, warm feet when we are children can help us learn to wear worn-out shoes as an adult. And that’s where it ends, not with an argument about how we should live, but about what might make life more bearable. The essays have a lightness of tone that makes the struggles of Ginzburg’s life that lie behind her writing all the more moving.
She has this way of being persuasive even when what she’s arguing is probably wrong. I felt this way about her essays on England. She writes that “England is the most melancholy country in the world” and goes on to make a string of generalizations about the country — it’s welcoming to foreigners, it knows how to govern itself well, English people have no imagination whatsoever. These are ridiculous things to say! And yet somehow the essay is still meaningful and enjoyable — I say this as someone who is not English, obviously — perhaps because her voice is authoritative but also very much a personal one, so even as she makes pronouncements, it feels as though she is giving her own perspective, and not necessarily as truth, but as possibility, or exploration. Her essay “Human Relationships” describes a lifetime, from childhood through middle age, that is presumably her own, but uses “we” throughout, as though what happened to her has happened to everyone. But it’s a generous “we,” a pronoun that invites us into her life to see the world through her eyes, so we can understand her point better. She’s inviting us to think through her experience to see our own more clearly. I think her “I,” the one that generalizes and pronounces, operates in the same way: as an invitation to try on her ideas for awhile, leaving us with the freedom to keep, reject, or modify them as we see fit.
Lastly, I’ll say that the title essay, which closes the volume, is full of wisdom about raising children that I was inspired to follow immediately. I love what she has to say about children and money:
The true defence against wealth is not a fear of wealth — of its fragility and of the vicious consequences that it can bring — the true defence against wealth is an indifference to money. There is no better way to teach a child this indifference than to give him money to spend when there is money — because then he will learn to part with it without worrying about it or regretting it. But, it will be said, then the child will be used to having money and will not be able to do without it; if tomorrow he is not rich, what is he to do? But it is easier not to have money once we have learnt to spend it, once we have learnt how quickly it runs through our hands; and it is easier to learn to do without money when we are thoroughly familiar with it than when we have paid it the homage of our reverence and fear throughout our childhood, than when we have sensed its presence all around us and not been allowed to raise our eyes and look it in the face.
She also has wise things to say about education and schooling and giving children space and privacy. I was saying recently (okay, I was tweeting recently) that my favorite thing in writing is exploring ideas with a very present narrator/voice, which is why I love essays and essayistic fiction. Ginzburg is exactly what I was talking about here: this is a book about ideas, but even more so, it’s a book about ideas as processed through the mind of an extremely interesting person I would want to be friends with if I could.
Publishing This Week
New books out this week that I haven’t yet read and am adding to my TBR (quotations from the publisher):
Nancy by Bruno Lloret, translated by Ellen Jones (Two Lines Press): set in Chile, a novel telling the story of a woman, Nancy, who looks back on her life from the perspective of her deathbed.
Trafik by Rikki Ducornet (Coffee House Press): a mix of experimental fiction and science fiction, about “passion, loss, and identity” in a “post-Earth universe.”
Aquarium by Yaara Shehori, translated by Todd Hasak-Lowy (FSG): a novel about two sisters who are deaf and were raised in seclusion by deaf parents and what happens when they emerge from their isolation.
Arriving in a Thick Fog by Jung Young Moon, translated by Mah Eunji and Jeffrey Karvonen (Deep Vellum Press): four linked novellas that blend “real life, fiction, and ideas.”
New on the TBR
New books acquired:
The Gentle Barbarian by Bohumil Hrabal, translated by Paul Wilson (New Directions, 2021): the latest installment of my New Directions subscription.
My Morningless Mornings by Stefany Anne Golberg (Unnamed Press, 2020): a memoir, of sorts, about insomnia, and a book about art and philosophy.
Added to my wishlist (books that have caught my eye but I don’t yet own):
Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: Bookmarked by Justin St. Germain (Ig Publishing, 2021): I haven’t read In Cold Blood, but this book still intrigues me. It’s about the author’s obsession with Capote and how it affected the writing of his own book, Son of a Gun.
Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation by Eli Clare (Duke University Press, 2015, originally published in 1999): I read about this book on Laura Sackton’s newsletter, Books and Bakes. Essays on queerness and disability that weave together memoir, history, and political thinking.
Currently Reading
Negative Space by Lilly Dancyger (Sante Fe Writers Project, publishing May 1st): a memoir about growing up with troubled parents who struggled with addiction. Her artist father died when she was 12, and this book is a love letter to him and a reckoning with his life and legacy.
Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima, translated by Geraldine Harcourt (Picador, originally published in 1979): a novel about a single mother in Tokyo. MANY bookish people I know love this novel.
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky (Graywolf Press, 2019): poetry.
The Cormac Report
When we heard the news of Beverly Cleary’s death, we were all sad, Cormac included. He knew about her very advanced age (she died at 104) and would occasionally talk about how great it was that she had lived so long. Rick and I read all the Ramona books to him and many of the Henry Huggins and Ribsy books as well. In fact, Rick had copies of many of these books from when he was a kid. We listened to many of the books on audio as well.
Reading the Henry Huggins books to Cormac got awkward at times, as Henry is very dismissive of girls as a category in a way that may be age-appropriate and still common today, I’m not sure, but it’s not an attitude I want Cormac picking up on. Fortunately, Cormac responded well when I criticized Henry’s blanket dismissal of girls, and he seemed to get that we could enjoy the books while at the same time thinking Henry can sometimes be unfair.
But with the Ramona books I didn’t have that particular worry. I grew up reading them and love them best of everything Cleary wrote, and now that I think about it, she may have had an influence on my reading tastes, as I still love reading books about regular people experiencing everyday things. I absolutely love how Cleary makes day-to-day life so dramatic and exciting. She can write lengthy chapters that feel fraught with meaning — that ARE fraught with meaning — but then I step back and realize that very little has happened plot-wise. Ramona has had to play with an annoying little kid or she struggles with spelling or her parents are fighting. Cleary takes her time with these stories, really diving into what Ramona is feeling, and the effect is that she makes the thoughts and experiences of a child utterly absorbing.
Cormac’s current reading tastes usually run more toward fantasy or Dog Man-like graphic novels, but he can appreciate what Cleary accomplished, and for that I’m grateful.
Have a good week everyone!