Reading in an Age of Uncertainty

Forty years ago, the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg published a novel called “Voices in the Evening.” The book opens with two women, a mother and a daughter, walking. One narrates, the other talks. The sentences pile up, one on one, casual to the point of disconnect:

“My mother said, ‘I feel a kind of lump in my throat.’

“My mother said, ‘What a fine head of hair [the General] has, at that age!’

“She said, ‘Did you notice how ugly the dog has become?’

“‘However did [the new doctor] discover that I have high blood pressure? It has always been low with me, always.’”

These banalities continue--both in speech and in narration--widening to include many characters, many histories. The reader thinks, “Who are these people? What are they about? Their speech is tiresome, their situation dull, why should I care?” Suddenly, she realizes there is something stunned, dreamlike, permanently anesthetized in the narration: These people are actually saying and doing startling things to one another. And then she realizes that all this is taking place soon after the war. The war is the unnamed character here. The war is the drain, the gap, the terrible lassitude at the heart of a remarkable novel.

War alters the sensibility of a people who suffer it in the flesh, and their literature reflects the change in both an immediate sense and a lingering one. The immediate is the novels, the memoirs, the reporting that emerge from the war itself; the lingering an influence that reflects the change in the national consciousness. In America we have had only the immediate--the literature made by the men who have left home to go to war--but in much of the rest of the world (Europe, Israel, Asia), significant works of the other sort have been written by women as well: those who have endured the fear and slogged through the rubble at home. Three who did it brilliantly are the Italian Ginzburg, the Russian Anna Akhmatova and the Anglo Irish Elizabeth Bowen.

Bowen’s 1948 novel, “The Heat of the Day,” set in London in the fall of 1942, is probably the most intelligent noir ever written. Stella, a 40-year-old divorcee in love with Robert, a survivor of Dunkirk, is dogged by Harrison, a mysterious intelligence agent who materializes repeatedly to tell her that her lover is a traitor. As the bombs fall nightly on London, Harrison’s menacing, now-familiar presence eats into Stella’s anxieties and begins to haunt her. When he insinuates that the war is only our inner lives made manifest, she is pierced by the memory of her own past treacheries and realizes that “[S]he could no more blame the world than one can blame any fellow-sufferer: in these last twenty of its and her own years she had to watch in it what she felt in herself--a clear-sightedly helpless progress toward disaster. The fateful course of her fatalistic century seemed more and more her own: together had she and it arrived at the testing extremities of their noonday. Neither had lived before.”

The situation is surreal, the psychologizing profound, and the eerie inwardness trapped in Bowen’s distinctive prose resonates inside a peculiar silence that fills the reader’s heart with dread.

Then there is Akhmatova--born in 1889, famous by 1913, banned by 1924, living the balance of her 76 years in the midst of revolution, terror, enemy siege. Through it all she saw herself as a keeper of the culture, a thing to be kept alive through the clarity of her memories. She knew well the danger to her poetry of living relentlessly with the past, just as she knew the bitter cost of remaining responsive. “I will say,” she wrote in 1959, “that I never fled or skulked away from Poetry, although repeated and powerful blows of the oars on my numbed hands, which clung to the side of the boat, were an indication that I should let myself sink to the bottom.”

These words appear in a volume of Akhmatova’s prose writings called “My Half Century,” a compilation of journal entries, letters, public addresses and reminiscences. It is in the reminiscences that one sees etched deeply her lifelong identification with art, self and world. This is what Petersburg before the revolution signifies. This is what she takes as her higher obligation to preserve in accurate detail. Her head is filled with an encyclopedic mass of recollection: names and dates, dinners and readings, encounters on the street, who said what to whom in 1910. As I read these diary entries, I see her in my mind’s eye, year after year in room after room (Leningrad, Moscow, Tashkent), writing against an endless background of war and death and torture and imprisonment, absorbed as she bends over her thoughts, correcting, correcting, the story of a piece of life that occurred so long ago and so far away it must often seem, even to her, like something she dreamed.

Then the urgency breaks through and concentrates her anew. There is a force of motivation behind the trance-like quality of these memories that is breathtaking. The power of Akhmatova’s need to record this history accurately begins to feel emblematic. The insularity and the remoteness of what she is recalling, seen behind the large foreground of daily Soviet reality, give this act--her life itself--the feel of some great, mad, literary work.

What unites all these works is a severe absence of sentiment--and even of inner motion. A remarkable stillness suffuses the prose in each; a stillness beyond pain, fear or agitation. It is as though, in each case, the writer feels herself standing at the end of history--eyes dry, sentences cold and pure--staring hard, without longing or fantasy or regret, into the is-ness of what is. These days I find in this kind of writing solace of the deepest sort. When experience slides off the scale and civilization seems at an end, only hard truths, not romantic drama, will do.

Nearly four months ago, at 9:30 on a clear, even brilliant, morning in early autumn, I stood across the street from my apartment house in Greenwich Village, in a silent crowd, watching the tallest buildings in Manhattan burn and then fall. No one spoke, no one cried out. I think everyone in that crowd knew, then and there, that our world had changed and that New York would never be the same. In the months since that horrifying day, an atmosphere difficult to define--somewhat stunned, somewhat disoriented, strangely thoughtful--has enveloped the city and not yet abated. All remains muted--the traffic, the noise, the crowd; restaurants, theaters, museums; sometimes half-empty, sometimes even deserted. The town often feels vacant, confused, unrooted, its mood emblematic: as though it speaks for what people are enduring across the country.

And throughout it all, the weather has been unusually clear, warm, beautiful, all the while that some elusive element in our life seems to be draining steadily away. A man sits home on Saturday afternoons when every Saturday for 30 years he has gone to a jazz concert. “I don’t know,” he shrugs; “there’s no entertainment in entertainment any more.” A woman who loves New York movies turns off the television set when one comes on. “I don’t know,” she says vaguely; “they don’t seem to apply.” Another finds herself flinching at the sight of photographs with New York in the background. Everything, she says, feels like “before,” and nothing “before” gives comfort.

I know what they mean. One soft clear night a few weeks ago, I was crossing Broadway, somewhere in the Seventies, and halfway across, the light changed. I stopped on the island that divides the avenue and did what everyone does: looked down the street for a break in the traffic so that I could safely run the light. To my amazement, there was no traffic. Not a car in sight. I stood there hypnotized by the grand and vivid emptiness. I couldn’t recall the time--except for a blizzard, perhaps--when Broadway had ever, even for a moment, been free of oncoming traffic. It looked like a scene from another time. “Just like a Berenice Abb....”

I started thinking, and instantly the thought cut itself short. In fact, I wrenched myself from it. I saw that it was frightening me to even consider “a scene from another time.” As though some fatal break had occurred between me and the right to yearn over that long-ago New York, alive in a Berenice Abbott photograph out of the 1930s. The light changed, and I remained standing on the island; unable to step off the sidewalk into a thought whose origin was rooted in an equanimity that now seemed lost forever: the one I used to think was my birthright.

That night I realized what it is that’s been draining away throughout this sad, stunned, lovely season: It’s nostalgia. And then I realized that it was this that was at the heart of Ginzburg, Bowen and Akhmatova. It wasn’t sentiment that was missing from them, it was nostalgia. That cold pure silence at the heart of modern European prose is the absence of nostalgia: made available only to those who stand at the end of history staring, without longing or regret, into the is-ness of what is. The moment is so stark that for writers, comfort comes only from a stripped-down prose that honors the starkness with a fully present attention. This, it now occurred to me, is the great difference between what Americans mean by “postwar literature” and what the rest of the world has meant. A difference, it also occurred to me, that one could perhaps register only at the moment that it was about to evaporate.

*

Vivian Gornick is the author, most recently, of “The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative.”