by
Stuart Hall
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‘How can you be interested in Henry James?’ Edward Thompson – the historian E. P. Thompson – once admonished me, with exasperation. ‘Ah!’ I thought to myself. But what about his sensitivity to the little deceptions and evasions of the English which one finds in his works, and the complex dialectic he weaves between innocence and experience, for which America and Europe came to be rich and interchangeable signifers? In The Portrait of a Lady he was alive to the tragic depths which accompany such things. He was brilliantly perceptive about how the fine sentiment and the exquisite good taste of his characters mask a crude, vulgar and venal self-interest. He intuitively grasped the moral vacuum at the centre of worldly wealth and aesthetic sophistication, the corruption secreted at the heart of a refined class self-confident in its own ethical superiority. He had an instinct for the fact that individual moral choice is always also cultural and social, and vice versa. He brought to bear on his unpromising material profound insights into the finely tuned distinctions between American and European versions of civilization.
Film was already one of my abiding passions. It seemed to me the most innovative of the modern arts. I had always had a passionate addiction to the movies, and as a youth in Kingston I saw on Saturday afternoon matinees at the Carib Theatre everything from Hollywood that found its way to Jamaica: westerns, melodramas, thrillers, musicals and film noir; Bogart and Bacall, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, John Garfield, the lot. This passion continued in Oxford. We went to the cinema two or three times a week. My first experiences of Continental cinema included Eisenstein and Pudovkin, Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave. They were a revelation. I realize now that this combination of arguing about literary criticism, reading modern literature, especially with the Americans, following the Caribbean novel and poetry, going to the movies, listening to and playing jazz meant that I began to construct a sort of intellectual counter-life to Oxford, more appropriate to my growing sense of being a radical outsider, a feeling which deepened as I came to the end of my time as an undergraduate.
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From 1956 until I made the move to Birmingham in 1964, ‘normal’ life was suspended by my political activity: by my editing ULR and, from 1960, New Left Review (NLR); by the larger attempts to build around these publications social movements, eventually organized by the creation of the New Left Clubs; by the long and arduous struggle to get the ideas we were generating mobilized, and by our attempt to activate them inside the Labour Party. At the same time, as we experienced what felt to us as a thaw in the Cold War, we invested great energies in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which represented a strategic social movement in its own right. Suez and Hungary had fractured the old politics, and the carapace of the Cold War had been – temporarily, as it turned out – shattered. Out of this emerged our ‘between/against both camps’ position and the hope for the creation of an independent, popular Left politics.
I am in the middle of my discussion about politics and I’m having to explain my shifting relations to the concept of culture. I make no apology for this. This journey took me to an understanding of culture as the signifying dimension of human practice. In Althusser’s terms, culture exists as one of the founding instances of every social formation, without which societies cannot exist as such.
From the vantage of today, for a different generation, our investments in ULR and then the founding of the NLR might seem parochial. But it didn’t feel like that at the time. We laboured long and hard to seize the moment, as it were, and to recast the Left so that we weren’t left behind by history. We endeavoured to keep our eyes on the prize.
By then I knew the traditions of socialist politics in England. But I hadn’t been formed in them, like Raymond Williams or Edward Thompson. I was a neophyte among them. Can anyone imagine what it must have been like being alongside these luminaries? Editorial boards were a nightmare for me. I’d indicate the possible contents of the next issue and then hold up my hands before the storm broke and the fathers spoke!
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On one side there was Gino and Rasetti, the mountains, the “black schists,” the crystals, the insects; on the other was Mario, my sister Paola, and the Ternis who detested the mountains and loved stuffy rooms with the windows closed, dimmed lights, and cafés. This latter group loved the paintings of Casorati, the theater of Pirandello, the poetry of Verlaine, Gallimard editions, Proust. They were two incommunicable worlds.
I didn’t know yet which side I would choose. They both attracted me. I hadn’t yet decided if, in my life, I wanted to study beetles, chemistry, or botany, or if, instead, I would paint pictures or write novels. In Rasetti’s and Gino’s world everything was clear, everything would unfold beneath the light of the sun, everything was plausible and without mysteries or secrets. The discussions, on the other hand, that Terni, Paola, and Mario had while sitting on the couch in the living room were tinged with mystery and obscurity, arousing in me a combination of fear and fascination.
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“I’m bored!” my mother said. “I have nothing to do anymore, there’s nothing more for me to do in this place. Everyone has left. I’m bored!”
“You’re bored,” my father responded, “because you have no inner life.”
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“He is someone,” my mother said, “who is very sophisticated, intelligent, translates from Russian, and does beautiful translations.”
“But,” my father said, “he is very ugly. Jews are notoriously ugly.”
“And you?” said my mother. “You’re not Jewish?”
“I am, in fact, ugly too,” my father said.
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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.