Translated and with an afterword by Jamie McKendrick
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE GOLD-RIMMED SPECTACLES
Afterword
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Giorgio Bassani was born in 1916. From 1938 onwards he became involved in various anti-fascist activities for which he was imprisoned in 1943. His works include The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, The Heron, Behind the Door and Five Stories of Ferrara, which won the Strega Prize. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis was awarded the Viareggio Prize in 1962 and was made into a feature film.
Jamie McKendrick is an award-winning poet and translator. His translation of Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is already available, and he is currently translating the rest of the Ferrara Cycle anew for Penguin Modern Classics.
Giorgio Bassani’s fiction has a tenacious adherence to the facts of his own life, time and place. ‘I believe,’ he commented in one interview, ‘that I’m one of the few, the very few, contemporary writers who places dates in the context of what he writes.’ Although he confesses to having invented some streets and squares, he wants the Ferrara of his stories to be ‘una città vera’ – and credible in its detail, an ‘image as real and concrete as possible’. The narrator of The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, he goes on to say, is not the author himself as he was when a student, but is a ‘part’ of himself: ‘At that time I was almost like that, but not exactly that.’ Representation of time, place and self is not something given, however: it must be constructed.
Because Bassani’s arrival at the threshold of adulthood also coincided with a critical moment for the Jewish community he was part of, it results in a double awakening of a consciousness of self and of the world. It is no coincidence that nearly all of his novels and short stories, though they found their first completion some twenty years later, hark back to this period of formation. They are works of history, civic and personal. His fiction, it could be said, is fact by other means.
But those other means are crucial: they allow the time to be told not as an objective narrative but through various lenses, gold-rimmed or unadorned. The term ‘faction’ has emerged in the last few years to delineate a kind of crossover of factual and fictive writing, a blurred borderline where actual characters may be seen within a fictional setting, essentially historical fictions. To some extent this story, and much of Bassani’s other fiction, could be seen as precursors for this genre. And yet, however attentive and convincing his backdrop and accurate his portrayal of the times, Bassani does not sacrifice any of the imaginative autonomy of his fiction. Its verisimilitude is a triumph of art as well as of memory.
Published in 1958, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles is set during the unnamed narrator’s first year at Bologna University. It follows the school incidents of the novel Bassani would write in 1964 – Dietro la porta (Behind the Door) – and the period it describes overlaps with the latter part of his next novel, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962), which narrates episodes from childhood, school and university. The first and shortest of all Bassani’s novels, formally it occupies the borderland between short novel and novella. Although, as the title suggests, its focus is on the wearer of those occhiali d’oro, the older Dr Athos Fadigati, its narration has a golden aura of early adulthood, of the daily train journeys from Ferrara to Bologna, and its denouement occurs in the Adriatic seaside town of Riccione, a traditional summer resort for the Ferraresi. As with The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, any youthful idyll is disrupted by the events of the time. The period of youth the story describes is not anyway one of innocence, or at least quite soon the experiences of adulthood break in upon it – the narrator for instance, towards the end of the story, is seen exiting a brothel, his friend Nino Bottecchiari is deliberating whether to throw over his incipient Socialist principles to take a job with the Fascist Party as a Cultural Attaché and, least innocent of all, Eraldo Deliliers, their idolized sporting companion, instead of pursuing his promising career as a boxer, has embarked on a career as ruthless parasite.
The book studies the predicament of the outsider in diptych form – the intertwined fates of the homosexual doctor and the young Jewish narrator at the point, in 1937–8, that Italian Fascism begins to follow the precepts of Nazi racism. Dr Fadigati is not rejected by Ferrarese society because he is a homosexual, so long as his affairs are kept discreet, although he is the target of jokes and innuendoes, and treated with growing contempt by the young university students he befriends on the daily train journeys to and from Bologna. He becomes a social outcast only when his homosexuality breaks out of the shadows, and ironically this occurs not by his own choice but because Deliliers wishes to boastfully display his conquest. Although it is also conceivable that Fadigati’s isolation is not so much precipitated by his own actions as by the increasing prejudice and intolerance of the times. Running parallel with Fadigati’s ‘fall’ is the vicious government-run propaganda campaign in the press against the Jewish community which prepares the way for the passing of the Racial Laws in 1938. Fadigati’s odd, almost masochistic acceptance of his public humiliation is in contrast to the narrator’s rage at his own exclusion, his determination to ‘respond’ to hatred ‘with hatred’, and yet their position relative to the society of Ferrara is subtly parallel. One of the triumphs of this short novel is the way in which these connections emerge not explicitly but psychologically, not as political discourse but as narrative, although all the more forcefully for that.
One small but significant example of the fusion of the historical and the fictive occurs when Signora Lavezzoli, defender of Mussolini and Hitler and virulent castigator of Dr Fadigati’s homosexuality, in a conversation with the narrator’s family makes a telling reference to an article by Padre Gemelli ‘in the last issue of the Civiltà Cattolica’, a Jesuit magazine founded in the 1850s and still current:
The theme of the article was the ‘ancient and vexed question juive’. According to Padre Gemelli – the signora continued – the recurrent persecutions to which the ‘Israelites’ had been subjected everywhere in the world for almost two thousand years could not be explained other than as a sign of celestial ire. And the article concluded with the following question: is it permitted for a Christian, even if his heart recoils, as one can understand, from every idea of violence, to venture a judgement on historic events through which the will of God is so clearly manifest?
Padre Gemelli is not an invented representative of the Church but a real figure: a Franciscan priest, Rector of the Catholic University of Milan and President of the Pontificio Accademia delle Scienze. He was also a keen vivisectionist whose scientific researches involved trepanning the skulls and cutting the vocal chords of ownerless cats, without, as one commentator notes, the kindness to animals we would associate with the founder of his Order. However, Bassani’s account neatly sums up his traditional, anti-Judaic position, which extended in some of his remarks to include the biological, anti-Semitic concept of ‘blood’; indeed he was a signatory of the 1938 Manifesto of Racist Scientists. During this period, he also reported two students from the university, who were gaoled for five years, for anti-Fascist activities. Though he briefly lost his job as rector, as a result of an investigation into his collusions with the Regime after the war, he was soon reinstated, on what seems to have been the fabricated evidence of his assistance in the escape of a large number of Jews and political prisoners – an escape bravely effected by the work of another priest, Carlo Varischi. Gemelli was to hold his position as rector until his death, and various schools and an important hospital in Rome are still named after him.
Gemelli’s first recorded racist outburst occurs in 1924: the suicide of the professor and writer Felice Momigliano allows him to cherish the hope that along with ‘Positivism, Socialism, Free Thought and with Momigliano’, ‘all those Jews who continue the work of the Jews who crucified Our Lord’ would die, and preferably ‘before dying, repentant, they should ask to be baptized’.
In a more unctuous style, very much along the lines of this reference in the novel, is a speech he gave in January 1939 at Bologna University:
Without doubt tragic and painful is the situation of those who cannot be a part, both because of their blood and their religion, of this magnificent fatherland; a tragic situation in which we see once again, as in many other centuries, the manifestation of that terrible sentence which the deicidal people have brought upon themselves and because of which they wander solitary in the world, incapable of finding the peace of a homeland, while the consequences of their horrible crime follows them everywhere and in every age.
Although Signora Lavezzoli is mistaken, and Gemelli did not publish this in Civiltà Cattolica, her account is a perfectly accurate representation of his views. Moreover, although in 1938 the magazine distanced itself from racist ideology in a circumspect article by its editor Enrico Rosa SJ, the argument still concluded with the recommendation of forms of segregation for the Jewish community, and the magazine’s history furnishes many examples of anti-Semitism. One of its contributors, M. Barberi SJ, the year before, considering ‘The Jewish Question in Hungary’, laments what he sees as the corrosive presence of Jews in that country: ‘all, or nearly all the Jews of the intellectual or ruling class are not only unbelievers, but freethinkers, or revolutionaries, or Masonic organizers … in a word, their law in life (and thus their practical moral law) is worldly success by whatever means’. The article is strongly reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s infamous words four years earlier in After Strange Gods: ‘reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable’. Both writers belong to that wing of clerical anti-Judaism that made common cause with racist ideology, even while denying that this was the case.
This kind of pervasive discourse, which has taken me more than a page to trace, Bassani has managed to convey with astonishing economy and accuracy within a few lines, while at the same time furthering our understanding of Signora Lavezzoli and of the narrator’s bleak and growing unease. It is a chilling moment. The narrator gets up ‘without too many courtesies’, leaving the signora’s and the padre’s menacing phrase, ‘la volontà di Dio’, to resound on the terrace of the Grand Hôtel and in the reader’s ear.
This incident is followed soon after, back in Ferrara, by the narrator’s conversation with his friend Nino Bottecchiari. Nino’s well-meaning sympathy for the Jewish community fails to prevent him from displaying a singular insensitivity, which the narrator reluctantly defines as ‘goyische’. The experience is almost more galling for him than the sanctimonious prejudices of Signora Lavezzoli. It is only with Dr Fadigati, whom some time later he meets in the city at night, that a frank exchange on this issue is possible. Fadigati actually understands what ostracism and exclusion feel like, because he is experiencing them himself, despite his own responses being far more meek and self-accusing. The scene allows all the implicit connections between the two to emerge. And its setting outside a brothel, the banal conversation overheard from within, the menacing group of youths, one of them urinating on a wall, the beseeching mongrel who has attached herself to Fadigati, the frozen fogbound streets all compose a masterly study of the city continuing its normal everyday life, but with a subtle tinge of the squalid, the nightmarish, the infernal.
Into this grim scene, however, the mongrel’s presence brings the light and warmth of a creaturely affection. Fadigati arrives scolding the dog that has been following him and spends a disturbed night attending to her. The dog makes him reflect morosely on the instinctual life denied him but, with great pathos, shows both his isolation and his compassion. The city itself has become hostile and vicious, a different kind of creature, as we see in the youths who seem to consider both the narrator and the doctor as homosexuals, and therefore prey. In this context there is nothing sentimental about the narrator’s relations with Fadigati, or about Fadigati’s with the dog – it concerns the survival of something without which life has no value. It’s an inspired episode in a story that pays such attention to history, for the dog’s needs are immediate and unhistorical, and are a poignant reminder of how fragile all existence is.
A similar recognition occurs when the narrator vents his frustration at the dire political climate on his little sister, Fanny, and then suddenly relents, seeing her abject and in tears: ‘The suntan from the seaside had already vanished; the skin of her face had returned to its pallid, almost diaphanous state, so much so that the blue veins in her temples showed.’ The image makes us startlingly aware of just how vulnerable and unprotected she is.
In a novel that charts the momentous exclusion of the Jewish community, the decision to put another victim of ‘excommunication’ centre-stage is a significant act of imaginative sympathy. Before this novel, as far as I’m aware, there are no examples in Italian fiction of a homosexual figure as protagonist. Dr Fadigati is not portrayed, any more than the narrator himself is, as a saintly victim. He is a dreamy bourgeois with a taste for working-class life. He stares longingly from the train at the workers in the small stations, stands in the dark of the stalls at the cinema, to the chagrin of the well-off who are seated in the circle, and frequents the proletarian zones of the city in the evenings. His speech is a stilted mix of medical truisms and slightly old-world courtesies. His taste in art is that of an informed and mild aesthete – he has a passion for opera, especially Wagner, and is both a collector and connoisseur of recent Italian art – signs of a slightly too effusive, even bohemian, character to his fellow middle-class observers, but which are considered, until his life is put under scrutiny, as harmless at worst and at best charming foibles. His literary taste is conventional – he shares with the narrator’s father a devotion to the lyric poetry of Carducci. He quotes the Iliad in Greek, Catullus in Latin. Another, more revealing, literary reference comes to light during one of those train journeys in which he fondly reminisces about his own student days in Padua, the garden of his lodgings, and makes reference to a nineteenth-century American short story. Though this is unnamed, he clearly has in mind Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Rappuccini’s Daughter’, set in Padua. It’s a curious choice, and somewhat recherché for an Italian professional in the 1930s. The story has indeed certain oblique parallels with Fadigati’s own fate – as the protagonist falls in love with a young woman who, due to the evil experiments of her botanist father, bears in her person the fatal poison of the plants in the garden she attends. It’s a moment of unguarded expansiveness on Fadigati’s part, one for which he pays dearly: Deliliers cuts off Fadigati’s reminiscences with spectacular brutality and subsequently this beautiful youth will poison the doctor’s life. Another strange parallel occurs in the introduction to the tale in which the author speaks of the invented teller, a certain De l’Aubépine (French for ‘hawthorn’) and characterizes his narrative style:
His writings, to do them justice, are not altogether destitute of fancy and originality; they might have won him greater reputation but for an inveterate love of allegory, which is apt to invest his plots and characters with the aspect of scenery and people in the clouds, and to steal away the human warmth out of his conceptions. His fictions are sometimes historical, sometimes of the present day, and sometimes, so far as can be discovered, have little or no reference either to time or space.
This otherworldly and allegorical narrative manner is, one might think, exactly the opposite of Bassani’s own chosen mode which, by his own account, keeps so close to the actualities of time and place. With this reference, though, it is as if Bassani were also laying claim to a kind of allegorical truth for his tale, and one which his readers would not want to deny him.
Not too much to ask, is it? It was in 1935 when Allen Lane, Managing Director of Bodley Head Publishers, stood on a platform at Exeter railway station looking for something good to read on his journey back to London. His choice was limited to popular magazines and poor-quality paperbacks – the same choice faced every day by the vast majority of readers, few of whom could afford hardbacks. Lanes disappointment and subsequent anger at the range of books generally available led him to found a company – and change the world.
We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it
Sir Allen Lane, 1902–1970, founder of Penguin Books
The quality paperback had arrived – and not just in bookshops. Lane was adamant that his Penguins should appear in chain stores and tobacconists, and should cost no more than a packet of cigarettes.
Reading habits (and cigarette prices) have changed since 1935, but Penguin still believes in publishing the best books for everybody to enjoy. We still believe that good design costs no more than bad design, and we still believe that quality books published passionately and responsibly make the world a better place.
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Time has begun to thin them out, and yet it would be wrong to claim that only a few people in Ferrara still remember Dr Fadigati. Oh yes, Athos Fadigati – they would recall – the ENT specialist who had a clinic and his own house in Via Gorgadello, a short walk from the Piazza delle Erbe, and who ended up so badly, poor man, so tragically. It was he who, when he left his native Venice as a young man, and came to settle in our city, had seemed destined to follow the most regular, the most uneventful, and for that reason, the most enviable of careers …
It was in 1919, just after the other war. Because of my age, I who write this can only offer a rather vague and confused picture of that period. The town-centre caffèAPERITIF LENIN