Monthly Archives: June 2025

Giorgio Bassani, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles

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Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000), The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles. Pt 2 of The Novel of Ferrara, translated from the Italian by Jamie McKendrick (W.W. Norton, 2016). First published 1958

Giorgio Bassani revised a sequence of novels and short stories into a single entity as The Novel of Ferrara in 1974 and 1980. In my previous post I discussed the first part of this compilation: a collection of five short stories, Within the Walls. Its title reflects the action of each story, which takes place within the massive city walls that encircle the centre of the city of Bassani’s youth, Ferrara, in Emilia-Romagna, near Bologna and Venice.

The anonymous narrator of most of these works is evidently a character very similar to Bassani himself: a middle-aged Jewish man who is usually looking back to his youth and childhood in Ferrara, witnessing the rise of the fascist party from the 1920s, the increasingly extreme antisemitism and intolerance towards groups perceived by the party to be sub-human – in particular the previously well-integrated Jewish community, and in the case of The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, homosexuals.

It’s a novel that has a strong Death in Venice element. The wearer of the titular glasses is Dr Athos Fadigati, an ENT specialist who comes to Ferrara in 1919 and rapidly establishes himself as an eminent medical specialist. He runs his own ‘magnificent private clinic’, and becomes director of the ENT department of ‘the big, new Sant’Anna Hospital. He’d made it, as they say.’

By the time the story proper gets under way, he’s well established, much appreciated for his ‘courteous, discreet manners…disinterestedness and the fair-minded spirit of charity toward his poorer patients.’ His clinic, with its efficient, modern ways, becomes popular, even fashionable.

It is pretty obvious that this mild, refined, rather timid and liberal man is gay. Around 1930, when Fadigati was about 40, the townsfolk figure out the truth. They choose to be indulgent; his discreet ‘style’ suits them, and they can pretend not to know about his ‘sexual abnormalities’ – just as they turn a blind eye to the increasingly violent and repressive behaviour of the fascist thugs who rule their society.

An arrogant, selfish young man, Deliliers, commutes with a group of fellow students, including the narrator, on the train to Bologna, where they attend the university (as Bassani did). The doctor, another occasional commuter, gradually insinuates himself into their group. He’s evidently attracted to this boisterous group of young people, being a lonely but sociable man. Deliliers singles him out for exploitation.

The plot culminates in scenes on the beach near Rimini. The narrator and his family are on holiday there, and the adults who know Fadigati from their home city are scandalised when they see him appear daily at his beach hut, waiting forlornly for Deliliers: they are openly sharing a room, and are seen to be flaunting their affair.

It comes as no surprise that Deliliers treats the kindly doctor very badly. The theme of betrayal and bigotry (Deliliers is clearly homophobic, and just uses the doctor as a sugar daddy, with a view to punishing and humiliating him while fleecing him) parallels that of the intolerant attitudes towards and treatment of the Jewish citizens of Ferrara by the fascists and the complacently complicit Ferrarese citizens who support and endorse them.

Bassani doesn’t labour this connection, and it’s in the beach scenes that his narrative skill is best seen. Many of these feature discussions of politics and morality between the narrator, his father, and a family of fellow Ferrara citizens who often sit near them on the sands of the Adriatic beach:

Romantic, patriotic, politically naïve and inexperienced like so many Jews of his generation, my father, returning from the Front in 1919, had also enrolled in the Fascist Party. He had thus been a Fascist from the “very beginning” and at heart remained one despite his gentleness and his honesty. But since Mussolini, after the early scuffles, had begun to reach an agreement with Hitler, my father had started to feel uneasy. He never stopped thinking about the possibility of an outbreak of anti-Semitism in Italy as well, and suffering from it, he would allow the odd bitter word against the Regime to escape him.

The matriarch of the other family is viciously homophobic towards Fadigati, who had taken to joining the narrator’s family group, which had welcomed him into their company as a cultured and decent man. She also enthusiastically praises Il Duce – ‘so very human’, ‘a good husband’ with a ‘great heart’. Her husband agrees with this gushing, blinkered view: ‘”let’s not forget it,”’ he says, Mussolini ‘”has given us the Empire.”’ The narrator’s father registers wide-eyed astonishment as the couple continue to eulogise Mussolini’s ‘generous Romagnolo blood’.

On another occasion she claims ‘objectivity’ in arguing that one had to ‘accept and recognize’ the ‘undeniable greatness’ of Hitler’s Germany. When the narrator sneeringly points out that Hitler himself ‘disposed of’ the Chancellor of Austria, Dollfuss (murdered by a group of Austrian Nazis in 1934), she simply snorts, ‘”That’s of no importance!”’ She goes on that ‘in certain circumstances’ a head of state must be ‘“capable of moving beyond the delicate feelings of the common people, of the small people like ourselves.”’

This kind of bigotry, with its dismissal of more rational moral and political objections is only too often being seen in today’s discourse. In the USA, Europe (including now the UK, with its extreme right wing Reform party increasingly dominating the polls and media) and elsewhere this kind of enthusiasm for populism and nationalism is a cause of growing concern among those of us who value a liberal, humanitarian, egalitarian way of living.

When the Racial Laws are introduced by Mussolini the year of these beach scenes, 1938, a ‘crude campaign of vilification’ against the Jews in the press is met with incredulity by the narrator’s father. The narrator can’t bear to go to the beach where the fascist sympathising woman enthusiastically justifies these draconian measures. He’s increasingly frustrated with his father’s indignant, mystified protestations that the Jews had always displayed ‘patriotic merits’ and been ‘most distinguished Fascists’. He sees his father as having been naïve to have ever believed that the Jews had truly been accepted and assimilated into Italian society.

The narrator resigns himself to a life of marginalisation, exclusion and ‘internal exile’, of the kind we see in almost every story in this sequence of works. The elegiac tone of the narrative, as these events are recalled by the narrator a couple of decades after they took place, reinforces the poignant force of the novel.

Giorgio Bassani, Within the Walls

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Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000), Within the Walls (Pt 1 of The Novel of Ferrara, W.W. Norton, 2016). First published as Cinque storie ferraresi (1956), rev. as Dentro le mura in 1974 and 1980. Translated from the Italian by Jamie McKendrick

These five stories are linked by their setting in the north-eastern Italian city of Ferrara in Emilia-Romagna, famous for its grand renaissance palaces and ancient grass-topped city walls, within which the stories are set. It was a great cultural centre in the 15th and 16th centuries, then fell into decline. Its Jewish community, one of the oldest in Italy, became a ghetto in 1627 after the city came under papal control. It remained so until unification in the mid-19thcentury.

Giorgio Bassani was born in Bologna to a prosperous Ferrarese Jewish family, and spent much of his youth in Ferrara. This troubled history of tension between the Jewish population, which had dwindled to about 700, and the largely Catholic Ferraresi became more heated with the rise of fascism after WWI. In the 1930s, during which period most of the stories in The Novel of Ferrara are set, the city had been a stronghold of fascist fervour and excess.

A central feature of the stories in Within the Walls is the poignant, repeated revelation that many of the Jewish people in the city embraced fascism enthusiastically – as indeed Bassani’s own father did. This attempt to show patriotism and allegiance to Italy ended with the introduction of Mussolini’s notorious Racial Laws of 1938, which excluded Jews from public life and civic/social integration. As a result the Jewish community became isolated and vilified – ‘strangers in their own home’ (a phrase disappointingly echoed recently by the British prime minister). The consequent sense of internal exile, marginalization and estrangement is a strong theme in all of these stories, and the spectre of the death camps in Germany becomes an increasingly sinister presence.

In ‘Lida Mantovani’ a young working-class girl is made pregnant and then abandoned by her well-to-do Jewish lover. She returns with her baby to her mother’s home, and they behave as if nothing untoward had happened.

Lida’s longing for love and completeness is thwarted, and she lives the rest of her life with a much older husband whose devotion she cannot reciprocate. She has to settle for stoic, passionless tranquillity, and opts out of life.

‘A Stroll Before Dinner’ features a contrasting situation. This time the middle-class Jewish lover, Dr Corso, does the decent thing and marries Gemma, the working-class Catholic lover who falls pregnant by him – a marriage that horrifies his family. They and his community feel he’s compromised a promising future as a physician.

Unlike Lida and her dull husband, this couple seem to lead a happy life for several decades. Corso rises to become head of his hospital. Then, as so often happens in this collection, he simply disappears – deported with his young son to Germany ‘in the autumn of 1943’, a phrase chillingly inserted in a parenthesis as Gemma’s sister reflects on her marginal, loveless existence as Corso’s housekeeper after Gemma’s death:

Love was something different [the sister] reflected – no one knew that better than her. / It was something cruel, atrocious, to be spied on from a distance, or to be dreamed of beneath lowered eyelids.

The other three stories focus on the atrocities committed by the fascists and their consequences. The people of the city are aghast when, in ‘A Memorial Tablet in Via Mazzini’, the sole survivor of the mass deportation of 183 of Ferrara’s Jewish community returns to the city and persists in telling everyone what he witnessed and about the fate of his family and friends. The townsfolk fear ‘they might unexpectedly be called to account’. Their acts of complicity and subsequent denial are compromised by him; ‘Surely he should behave himself, and stop going around annoying people?’ they fume. These are the same people who colluded with and supported the fascists, and helped seize the Jewish people’s possessions and auctioned them off in their own synagogues, or presided in the courts that ordered firing squads.

Their collective shame and guilt are painfully exposed by this sad, broken man’s return. They find his request to live among them again ‘personally threatening’, and when he slaps the face of a former high-up fascist functionary who’d provoked him with his hypocritical words of sympathy, his angry gesture is to them ‘inexplicable and provocative’. They did what they dId because ‘They needed to survive. At any cost.’ His behaviour is to them ‘eccentric and offensive’. He’s gradually ostracised and excluded, and they convince themselves that his stories of the camps are ‘forced and exaggerated, in short…false.’

‘The Final Years of Clelia Trotti’ recounts the grim fate of a prominent anti-fascist woman at the hands of the fascist regime. She’s imprisoned, and after the introduction of the Racial Laws placed under house arrest and hostile surveillance – it’s another example of ‘internal exile’.

The other major outrage of the period was the massacre in 1943 of eleven anti-fascists. ‘A Night in 1943’ has another of Bassani’s trademark characters – the eyewitness who turns a blind eye to the scene he watched, a detached observer who salves his conscience by refusing to acknowledge what he saw: the machine-gunning of these unarmed prisoners, kidnapped from their jail by a blackshirt death squad, against the city walls.

Even decades later the citizens shun that area of the walls, preferring to forget. The plasterer who later cements over the bullet-holes symbolises the attempts of these compromised people to cover up their shameful history, to erase it. After the massacre they’re horrified but treat the killers ‘respectfully’, and make a ‘public show of supporting and submitting to their violence’.

These are powerful, well-crafted stories. The complex syntax accentuates the way these citizens of Ferrara go through all kinds of moral and emotional contortions to try to eradicate their memories of that terrible time and their complicity in what took place. It must have been a nightmare to translate; Jamie McKendrick does pretty well rendering the Italian into fairly natural English.

A soldier’s life: Alexander Baron, From the City, From the Plough

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Alexander Baron (1917-1999), From the City, From the Plough, Imperial War Museum Classics, 2019; first published 1948 (library copy)

The soldier lives in a drama: he never has the time to perceive it. His life, even in battle, is a succession of chores.

 The title From the City, From the Plough refers to the soldiers recruited to the newly-replenished (fictional) Fifth Battalion Wessex Infantry during WWII: it’s made up mostly of cockney wide-boys and rural south-western ‘bumpkins’ – farmboys bemused by the military life, and longing for the familiar routines of land work.

The novel follows the progress of the unit from tedious, repetitive training in the south of England through the D-Day landings and subsequent campaign fighting the German forces across France. It’s a sort of collage narrative structure, an impressionistic sequence of scenes in which soldiers grumble and hustle through manoeuvres, pointless route marches and frequent unexplained changes of location.

There are many memorable incidents or vignettes. A tough, swaggering and battle-hardened Irishman challenges his sergeant’s authority and gets humiliated. A young lad has his first sexual encounter and is whisked away by the army as he’s on the point of marrying his sweetheart. The CO grieves for his missing-in-action son, and this clouds his judgement and influences his behaviour towards his men.

The last third of the novel reminded me of Saving Private Ryan; it depicts the noise, dirt, confusion, exhaustion and numbing terror of battle as the unit storms the Normandy beaches and advances through northern France with painful slowness.

They suffer fearful losses trying to take a well-fortified hilltop ridge. Many of the colourful characters we’d met earlier in the narrative are killed in action. Those who survive can’t grieve – they couldn’t go on if they felt too much. Nevertheless there’s a heart-breaking moment when a young recruit, blinded during the beach landings and sent back to England for medical treatment, sends his comrades a gift of cigarettes; the fact that he was feeling sorry for them touches them deeply.

It’s a powerful, fierce account. The blurb praises it highly, likening it to WWI classics like All Quiet on the Western Front. It probably justifies that comparison, though it clearly reflects a more modern sensibility in the style and approach to a war novel. The cynical, weary response of the unit’s second in command when told by his brigadier that his exhausted, decimated battalion had to go back into action against the strategically advantaged ridge-top German troops – purely as a diversionary tactic – sums up the unromantic, emotionally numbed heroism mixed with stoicism of these ordinary men sacrificed to the relentless military machine. The stark realism of the novel doubtless stems from Baron’s own experience as a soldier who served in the Sicilian, Italian and Normandy campaigns during the war.

The Ambassadors, part 3

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In my previous post on Henry James’s late novel The Ambassadors, I highlighted the inadequacy of Strether for the sensitive mission to Paris via London. There are a few plot spoilers in what follows.

I’d like to explore a few more passages to try to show James’s skilful, witty handling of characters interacting in ways that produce drama and comedy.

In Book 2 ch.1 Strether has another conversation with his shrewd, perceptive and generally more worldly confidante Maria Gostrey. She puts it to him that Chad Newsome is a young man he’s been sent out to ‘rescue’, his mission is to separate him from ‘the wicked woman’ he’s assumed to be involved with in Paris.

This blunt assertion has the effect on Strether of ‘pulling him up’ – an idiom that’s used several times about him in such exchanges. She makes it clear he hasn’t any grasp of the ‘facts’ of the matter, and his assumptions once again reveal the narrow-minded prudishness of Woollett people back home in New England.

A little later in this chapter Miss Gostrey asks him what he does in Woollett. He tells her that the town has a ‘Review’, financed by his fiancée Mrs Newsome (Chad’s mother), which he ‘not at all magnificently, edit[s]’. She asks what kind of review it is:

His serenity was now completely restored. “Well, it’s green.”

Mrs Newsome must be quite a ‘swell’, Miss Gostrey teases, and so must he; no, he insists, “that’s not the way it works”. She sees through his show of modesty: “you efface yourself”. He protests; his name is on the cover – this is what he’s ‘reduced to doing’ for himself:

“It seems to rescue a little, you see, from the wreck of hopes and ambitions, the refuse-heap of disappointments and failures, my one presentable little scrap of an identity.”

As we saw last time, when she got him to confess he can’t enjoy life as he should, she serves to expose his rather endearing lack of self-confidence; that wasn’t false modesty – he genuinely thinks he’s a “failure”. This scene, with its witty dialogue and comic tone, shows up the novel’s central theme: that Strether is a sad, Prufrock-like character who senses his inadequacy, which is worse than not knowing it.

This characterisation is reinforced a few sentences later. The Review, he tells Miss Gostrey, goes in for unpopular opinions – ‘”that is so far as we dare.” She presses him again:

”And how far do you dare?”

“Well, she very far. I much less. I don’t begin to have her faith.”

Like Prufrock, Strether longs to feel strong emotion, but doesn’t ‘dare’ disturb the universe. Leavis’s objection, that I wrote about in the first of these posts on The Ambassadors, was that what Paris represented – for Strether and for people in general – wasn’t fully ‘realized’. I disagree. Passages like this reveal, even before he gets to Paris, that his experience of Europe, where Miss Gostrey acts as not just a confidante but also as a catalyst, brings about an epiphany. He comes to see clearly the shortcomings and petty joyless puritanism and vulgarity of Woollett.  He’s forced to confront his timid passivity and submissiveness in his relations with the formidable Mrs Newsome and her set.

This theme is reinforced through the rest of the novel. In Book 4 ch. 1, Strether tells Chad in Paris quite openly about the purpose of his visit: “to make you break with everything”. Chad’s calm and dignified response is ‘disconcerting’ to him (this is another term often used of Strether). He perceives in Chad’s expression a kindness, because Chad can see Strether’s ‘disordered state’ – is even sorry for him. Once again Strether confronts the ludicrousness of his position. When Chad presses him to admit that his people assume he’s being detained in Paris by ‘some woman’: ‘“Is that…what they think at Woollett?”’, Strether ‘changed colour’, feeling he’s stated his case ‘stupidly’. He’s shown blushing on several occasions like this in the novel; his embarrassment is salutary. Chad concludes with a final, fateful thrust: ‘”I must say then you show a low mind!”’

Chad has completely turned the tables on Strether; once again he has been ‘pulled up’ by the young man’s superior worldliness; he’s exposed the ‘smugness’, ‘vulgarity’ and ‘pride’ that inspired Strether’s mission. The comic reversal has a serious side. Chad is later to be seen to be not entirely truthful in his representation of his relationship with Mme de Vionnet, the ‘wicked woman’. But Strether’s bumbling, unquestioning acceptance of Woollett values is being seriously undermined – to the extent that he starts to take Chad’s side. He’s repeatedly forced to acknowledge his own limitations, with reminders of ‘what he didn’t know’ – what was good or bad. He’s lost his way, and this mission is yet another of the many ‘mistakes’ he admits to on several occasions.

These are brought out most clearly in the famous scene in Book 5 ch.2, when Strether urges Chad’s young friend Little Bilham:

“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.”

Bilham mustn’t leave it until too late, he insists, as he has.

“I see it now. I haven’t done so enough before – and now I’m too old; too old at any rate for what I see. Oh I do see, at least…It’s too late. And as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my having the gumption to know it was there…Still, one has the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t be, like me, without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it; I don’t know quite which…at present I’m a case of reaction against the mistake…don’t make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!”

He might ostensibly fail in his mission to bring Chad back into line with Woollett’s values (and paradoxically Chad reveals himself to be not so far removed from them after all), but in ‘failing better’ he finally starts to ‘see’, to ‘know’ more about himself. Leavis accused James of failing to show clearly what Strether learns – but that’s the whole point: he has to recognise he’s made mistakes, missed the train of life, as he put it, before he can start to be capable of living a fuller, more rewarding life.

His epiphany is brilliantly evoked in the final pages of the novel (Book 12 ch. 5). Having a farewell meal with Miss Gostrey, they discuss Chad’s decision to return willingly to Woollett  – a choice that now Strether perceives as the young man’s fickleness and heartless abandonment of Mme de Vionnet. Once again he’d misread the situation; Chad’s veneer of charm was not, as he’d come to believe, the nobility of a true ‘gentleman’.

Miss Godfrey asks if Strether might now be able to patch things up with his fiancée Mrs Newsome, given that he could make a case for not having failed in his mission to send the son home. No, he insists, all is over between them. She presses him: is he sure?

“Oh yes – sure now. Too much has happened. I’m different for her.”

…”I see. So that as she’s different for you-“

“Ah but,” he interrupted, “she’s not. And as Miss Gostrey wondered again: “She’s the same. She’s more than ever the same. But do what I didn’t before – I see her.”

The brilliance of the novel, to sum up, then, is that James presents in what’s outwardly a comedy of manners a sad, moving story of a disappointed man being changed utterly by his contact with European culture. He may not be truly enlightened as a consequence, but he is at least rendered capable of perceiving his shortcomings. In a novel in which ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’ are constantly referenced, Strether is shown, with the subtlety and poise of a master of the genre, to learn something crucial about the change he’s undergone; to paraphrase Dylan in ‘Love Minus Zero’, he learns some truths about failure and success.