Go for the great virtues, not the little ones

One of my social media acquaintances noted recently that he was rereading Natalia Ginzburg's slim essay collection The Little Virtues. He reads it once a year, and has done so for twenty years. Wow. I almost never reread something. With an endorsement like that, I thought I ought to look into it.

I've known the Italian author "Natalia Ginzburg" for years, but The Little Virtues is her first work I've read. Her work explored family relationships, politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. She wrote novels, short stories and essays, for which she received the Strega Prize and Bagutta Prize. An activist, for a time in the 1930s she belonged to the Italian Communist Party. In 1983 she was elected to Parliament from Rome as an Independent. Born in Palermo, Sicily in 1916, Ginzburg spent most of her youth in Turin with her family, as her father in 1919 took a position with the University of Turin. Her father, Giuseppe Levi, a renowned Italian histologist, was born into a Jewish Italian family, and her mother, Lidia Tanzi, was Catholic. Her parents were secular and raised Natalia, her sister Paola (who would marry Adriano Olivetti) and her three brothers as atheists. Their home was a center of cultural life, as her parents invited intellectuals, activists and industrialists. At age 17 in 1933, Ginzburg published her first story, "I bambini," in the magazine Solaria.

In 1938, she married Leone Ginzburg, and they had three children together, Carlo, Andrea, and Alessandra. Their son Carlo Ginzburg became a historian. Although Natalia Ginzburg was able to live relatively free of harassment during World War II, her husband Leone was sent into internal exile because of his anti-Fascist activities, assigned from 1941–1943 to a village in Abruzzo. She and their children lived most of the time with him. Opponents of the Fascist regime, she and her husband secretly went to Rome and edited an anti-Fascist newspaper, until Leone Ginzburg was arrested. He died in 1944 after suffering severe torture, including crucifixion, in jail. In 1950, Ginzburg married again, to Gabriele Baldini, a scholar of English literature. They lived in Rome. He died in 1969; she died in 1991. (Thank you, Wikipedia.)

The Little Virtues was published in 1985 and the eleven essays, fluently translated by Dick Davis, were published in newspapers and magazines between 1944 and 1962. They range from a memoir of the time in Abruzzo to comparing and contrasting herself with her husband ("He always feels hot. I always feel cold . . . He speaks several languages well. I do not speak any well . . . ") to a critique of England and English life ("English shop assistants are the stupidest shop assistants in the world . . . The restaurants are either too crowded or too empty. And they are either stiff and priggish or squalid . . . ") She wrote that last in 1960; England's restaurants have changed.

What makes The Little Virtues worth reading once a year are Ginzburg's essays on her vocation, on human relationships, and on the little virtues. Her vocation, of course, is to write. "When I sit down to write I feel extraordinarily at ease, and I move in an element which, it seems to me,  I know extraordinarily well; I use tools that are familiar to me and they fit snugly in my hands." That, it seems to me, is a good way to tell if what you do is your vocation (I call it my calling) or just a job. It works whether you are a carpenter, plumber, welder, baker, programmer, or poet.

And while it is tempting to quote much more, I will quote only the first paragraph of her title essay:

"As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one's neighbor and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know."

I wish I'd read this when my children were young.