Tag Archives: Ferrara

Giorgio Bassani, Behind the Door

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Giorgio Bassani, Behind the Door (first published 1964).  The Novel of Ferrara, part 4. Translated from the Italian by Jamie McKendrick (Norton, 2018)

As in the previous sections of Bassani’s collection of stories and novels set in and around the northern Italian walled city of Ferrara, the narrator is clearly a character very like Bassani himself, and features centrally in this novel. As usual he narrates from the viewpoint of an adult looking back several decades, in this case to his childhood.

He informs us early on that he had been unhappy many times in his life, often touching ‘the depths of despair’. Few of these periods, however were ‘blacker’ for him than the first months October 1929 to June 1930. This kind of reflection is also found in the previous works in this sequence, featuring episodes later in his early adult life, when the fascist regime was becoming more violently anti-Semitic.

The years since those secondary school days he describes as not of ‘any use’, and his suffering was ‘a hidden wound, secretly bleeding’. He had just moved up from what we in the UK call primary school to the secondary (or senior high) school – aged about 14. He knows hardly any of the other youngsters in the class, some of whom are older than him (some would be resitting a year), he dislikes his new teachers, and he feels ‘out of place and deeply uneasy’ – another aspect of his experience that is familiar from the previous works in The Novel of Ferrara sequence.

A line from Dante’s ‘Canzoni’, expounded during an Italian lesson, resonates with him as he recalls this dark time: ‘The exile imposed on me I hold as an honor’ (this being an American edition, the spelling is American). As a member of Ferrara’s Jewish community, the narrator/Bassani returns to the central theme of state-authorised persecution that was exacerbated terribly with the introduction of Mussolini’s so-called Racial Laws of 1938. When he reflects on what became of Carlo, one of his cleverest classmates, with whom he lost contact when he left school, he adds:

‘Our generation has been buffeted about like few others. The war and all the rest of it obliterated a multitude of our intentions and vocations…’

That seemingly casual ‘all the rest of it’ encompasses the initial ostracization and internal exile imposed on the Jewish population, culminating in the extermination camps in Germany to which so many were transported in the early 1940s. This no doubt accounts for the sombre tone and dark mood that pervades this whole sequence of semi-autobiographical works.

He longs to be accepted and befriended by the cooler, less angsty kids, but harbours a deep resentment towards them as well, including Carlo: ‘I loathed him, I admired and envied him at the same time.’ Talk about mixed up.

Then Luciano, a new boy, joins the class, and shares a desk with him. He’s skinny, awkward and submissively ingratiating. The narrator immediate dislikes him, too, but finds himself, against his better judgement, taking him home to do homework together. An odd couple friendship slowly forms.

When the narrator learns an unpleasant aspect of Luciano’s character, he is unable to confront him. An ‘encounter with the truth’ is beyond him; he feels ‘nailed by birth to a destiny of exclusion and resentment’, and ‘it was useless to think I’d ever be able to throw open the door behind which I was yet again hiding. I just couldn’t do it – there was no remedy. Not now. Not ever.’

This probably all sounds very depressing, and this novel is initially less engaging than the first three sections of this sequence. The narrator resembles Joyce’s anguished character Stephen Dedalus, without the self-belief in his own literary merit and promise. But on looking back on it I can see that Behind the Doorprovides a fascinating insight into Bassani’s own experience of those dreadful years of oppression – a fascist initiative that was enthusiastically embraced by his non-Jewish fellow citizens.

It’s no wonder that he felt excluded and emotionally conflicted by his schooldays when he looked back on them from the perspective of a man who lived through the holocaust, in which most of his family and friends were murdered, while his fellow citizens – some of whom would have been his classmates – were complicit in the persecution and genocide. That door he hides behind protects him from truths that are too awful to contemplate.

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.