An excerpt from an article by Vivian Gornick.
Natalia Ginzburg came from a dysfunctional family and very young she learned that self-protection required the cultivation of an inner distance from others. Eventually it took a heavy toll. In adolescence, she developed a “stony-faced” (her word) hauteur that made her feel unreal to herself, and soon enough it made everyone around here seem unreal as well. In time she became sealed into an emotional anomie that hardened with the years.
In 1938, at the age of 21, Natalia married Leone Ginzburg, an anti-fascist, and, in 1941, when he was declared persona non grata by the government, accompanied him into what was then called “internal exile” – removal to some rural area from from the urban centers. In 1943, after the fall of Mussolini, the family (by then they had three children) decided it was safe to move back to Rome – a miscalculation for which they would pay dearly. Leone went first, and five months later Natalia and the children followed. Within 20 days of the family’s arrival in the city, Leone was arrested by German police and taken off to prison, where he was tortured and killed.
Ginzburg’s armor – her haughty anomie – had been in place all this time. But now, with war on the ground – the loss of her young husband, death raining from the sky, countless children abandoned in the rubble – life shocked her into an experience she could never have imagined. Suddenly, she felt stifled inside the separateness from others she had valued all these years. No longer a protection, this deep withdrawal of hers now seemed dangerous: a threat to her own survival. Somehow, she realized, she must begin to feel connected, or at least to act as though she felt connected. She must teach herself – now! – to mimic the look and feel of unthinking, everyday, comradeship.
Ah, she has it: “We learn,” she writes with something like wonder in her voice, “to ask for help from the first passer-by.” And then, “we learn to give help to the first passer-by.” And then, at last, she finds herself – and that’s exactly it: finds herself – feeling not only saved but curiously alive through the simple act of taking part in the fellowship of suffering.
The experience led Ginzburg to the insight that dominated her work for the rest of her life. In “that brief moment when one day it fell to our lot to live when we had looked at the things of the world for the last time,” she had “found a point of equilibrium for our wavering life.” From then on, she writes, “we could look at our neighbor with a gaze that would always be just and free, not the timid or contemptuous gaze of someone who whenever he is with his neighbor always asks himself if he is his master or his servant.”
I don’t for a minute believe that this seemingly epiphanic moment brought about a permanent change in Ginzburg’s behavior. But when the war was over and the fellowship of suffering had loosened its hold on her, she remained grateful to both, not because they had destroyed her original sense of aloofness but because they had taught her that it had been in place for so much of her life. She now understood that all these years she had been a stranger to herself.