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Today it was her very soul that was escaping, intangible. Ah, that gnawing irritation he had just recognized, how often had he felt it through all the little inexpressible contusions by which a loving heart is continually bruised.
He recalled all the painful impressions of this petty jealousy falling upon him by little blows day by day. Each time she had noticed, admired, liked, desired something, he had been jealous of it; jealous of everything in an imperceptible and continuous fashion, of everything that absorbed the time, Annette’s glances, attention, gaiety, astonishment, affection—anything that took a little of her from him. He had been jealous of all she did without him, of all he did not know, of her outings, her readings, of all that seemed to afford her pleasure, jealous of an heroic officer wounded in Africa and who was the talk of Paris for about a week, jealous of the author of a highly praised novel, of a young poet she hadn’t seen but whose verses Musadieu recited; and finally jealous of all men praised before her, even in an indifferent sort of way, for when one loves a woman one cannot tolerate without anguish that she should even think of anyone else with an appearance of interest. One feels at heart the imperious need of being the only one in the world in her eyes. One wants her to see, to know, to appreciate no one else. As soon as she manifests a desire to turn around to look at or recognize anybody, one throws himself before her vision, and if unsuccessful in turning it aside or entirely absorbing it, one suffers to the bottom of one’s soul.
Like all older painters, Bertin was vexed by these newcomers, irritated by their ostracizing, and perplexed by their doctrines. He began reading the article with the rising anger that readily excites a nervous heart, then glancing farther along, perceived his own name, and those few words at the end of a sentence struck him like a blow of the fist full to the breast: “Olivier Bertin’s old-fashioned art. . . .”
He had always been sensitive to both criticism and praise, but far down in his consciousness, notwithstanding his legitimate vanity, his pain under criticism was greater than his pleasure under praise, a consequence of the uneasiness concerning himself which his hesitations had always fed. Formerly, however, in the days of his triumphs, the waving of incense was so frequent that it made him forget the pinpricks. Today, with the ceaseless appearance of new artists and new admirers, congratulations were rarer and disparagement emphatic. He felt he was enrolled in the battalions of old painters of talent whom the younger do not treat as masters; and since he was as intelligent as he was perspicacious, he now suffered as much from the slightest insinuations as from direct attacks.
Never had a wound to his artistic pride proved so painful. He remained gasping, and read the article over in order to understand its slightest shades. A few colleagues and himself were swept aside with outrageous unconcern; and he got up murmuring those words that remained on his lips: “Olivier Bertin’s old-fashioned art. . . .”
He tried to speak and could not, for now sobs were choking him. She listened to the stifling in his breast as he leaned against her. Then, seized again by the selfish anguish of love that had been gnawing at her so long, she said in the heartrending tone in which one realizes a horrible misfortune, “My God, how you love her!”
Once more he confessed. “Ah! Yes, I love her!”
She thought a few moments, and resumed, “You never loved me so?”
He did not deny it, for it was one of those hours where one speaks the whole truth, and murmured, “No, I was too young then!”
She was surprised. “Too young? Why?”
“Because life was too sweet. It is only at our age that one loves desperately.”
She asked, “Does what you feel when near her resemble what you used to feel when near me?”
“Yes and no—and yet it’s almost the same thing. I’ve loved you as much as anyone may love a woman. I love her like yourself, since she is yourself, but that love has become something irresistible, destructive, stronger than death. I belong to it as a burning building belongs to the flames.”
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.
love this
“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.”
lmao
“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.
lmao
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.
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.
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.
According to the ABC theory of Rational-Emotive Therapy (RET) that I (AE) originated in 1955, and according to the other cognitive-behavioral therapies that followed RET, this is what usually occurs when you make yourself neurotic. That is, when you make yourself anxious, depressed, enraged, self-hating, phobic, or addicted. You take your preferences and desires for healthy Goals (such as success, approval, comfort, and pleasure) and you turn them into strong, rigid shoulds, oughts, musts, and commands. Like the rest of us, you are fallible and imperfect. Because others and world conditions often thwart your grandiose musts, you make yourself needlessly miserable when you devoutly believe a must. In RET we coined the term musturbation to highlight humorously this un-humorous process by which you make yourself miserable. An old saying in RET is “Musturbation leads to self-abuse.”
cheesy but not unhelpful