Places and interiors Edited 07/ 04/ 2024
“There’s a mystery that can surround or locate itself at the center of a house’s life. It was there in my grandmother’s house, and I recognize it when I think of Father D. [priest] and his brother. The house’s very structure, the number or arrangement of its rooms, has a powerful effect upon the decisions people make by which they live and know themselves….” From Seeing through Places by Mary Gordon
“Every day silence harvests its victims. Silence is a mortal illness.” Natalia Ginzburg
Today’s post, more or less, centers on two women writers, their books and the places that shaped them.
Mary Gordon
“Memory is the tether that connects us to our past, it is what keeps us anchored and alive,” Mary Gordon
Mary Gordon’s book of essays, Seeing through Places: Reflections of Geography and Identity, first published in 2001, explores the role that places and interiors play in the formation of our identity. She weaves the connections between how we experience places, houses, objects and people and how we become ourselves. As we move with her– from her parents’ flat to her grandmother’s house, to a beloved rented house she inhabited in Cape Cod for eight years, about which she writes: “of the “washashores,” the non–Cape natives, she inhabited a marginal, almost but not quite secure place”, to Rome, to her houses in Barnard first as a young student and later as a mature writer, wife and mother– we follow the different threads of personal narrative, social commentary and ideas on religion and other matters. Gordon reveals the relationships between the emotional, intellectual and physical architectures of our lives. She demonstrates how places become the building blocks of our psyche, as they inform and shape our lives and who we become.
She begins her book with her grandmother’s house on Long Island because in many ways it became the centre of her childhood and adolescence, and seemingly this was the house that left a more lasting imprint on her. Her grandmother’s house she says had nothing to do with postwar life in America, it expressed a historical era that the twenty-one grandchildren vaguely understood: “Each object in her house belonged to the Old World. Nothing was easy; everything required maintenance of a complicated and specialized sort. Nothing was disposable, replaceable…… My grandmother’s house had no connection to prosperity; it had righteousness instead…… Her house was her body, and like her body, was honorable, daunting, reassuring, defended, castigating, harsh, embellished, dark. I can’t imagine how she lived, that is to say how she didn’t die of the endless labor her life entailed. Nine children. It’s easy either to romanticize her or utterly to push her aside.”
Gordon grew up as the child of an Irish-Italian Catholic mother and a Jewish father, who had converted to Catholicism. Religion permeated her upbringing. She writes: “We didn’t have a television. To watch television, we went either to my grandmother’s or to my glamorous aunt’s. ……. On Tuesdays, we went to her house to watch Bishop Sheen. Those nights after the moon vanished and the screen filled in its image, what you saw first was an empty chair. His. The bishop’s. And then himself….. We watched as the bishop sat in silence, a few seconds before he spoke. His eyes seemed transparent. They knew everything. They looked into your sinful soul. There was a blackboard on which he drew diagrams and wrote key words……”
When she was seven her father died and she and her mother had to move in with her grandmother and aunt. She describes how words had failed her in expressing her grief over her father’s passing and how as a means of consolation or distraction she was allowed to choose the paint colour of the room she and her mother were going to occupy in the house. This, Gordon says, allowed her to enter into a world without words, which had failed to explain the enormity of her loss and to console her. She writes: “Color did what words could not. I surrounded myself in questions of pure color……. First I had to decide what basic color I would choose. Colors, to me, were always people. My favorite color was blue (I was named for the Virgin, and it was her color) but I knew that blue was the favorite color of many people, and so I said my favorite color was orange, which I knew no one liked best. But this sacrifice made me hate orange, and from that day on I’ve never bought anything orange, except the fruit. I didn’t want blue for my bedroom, it was too much like the color of my inner world. I didn’t want green; green was efficient and official, committed to getting on with things. Red was dangerous, purple was too old, yellow was a blond. I wanted something entirely unlike my life, but representing what I wanted my life to be. I chose pink. But I felt, deeply, that some pinks were hateful….”
Through her descriptions of the various houses and places we learn about change and loss and about her childhood world and that of others. In one essay about another family and another house, that of her baby sitter’s, we catch glimpses of the role of religion in her upbringing, the dynamics of her parents’ relationship, and that of the baby sitter’s larger household and its influences on her. After her grandmother’s death she writes of her house, which now was her mother’s: “it was not a loving house; it was a house that required service from a devoted lover, and perhaps, the limits of devotedness having been tested and reached, it would return regard. But we failed the house and it punished us and we, like whipped creatures, huddled against it, trying simply to survive. We needed a protector, and it had to be a mother or a man.”
Gordon explores the role of reading and play in her early life. One chapter begins: “AS A CHILD, I was not good at playing, which means I was a failure at the duties of my state in life..The phrase “Go and play” had for me the ring of a sentence handed down by a mercilessly careless magistrate.” She explains that running tired her, climbing frightened her and she couldn’t catch a ball because she feared being hit by it. Even her reading choices didn’t involve adventure stories, but consisted mostly of fairly tales and saints’ lives. Thankfully, she adds her parents never suggested alternatives to reading..“When I read,” she writes, “ it didn’t matter that I was only masquerading as a child. There was no falseness in my position as a reader. If I lost myself in the fates of virgin martyrs or fairy princesses……… there was nothing shameful in the shiftiness of my identity. It was expected that ordinary human beings lost themselves in that way, it was only the proof of a serious or ardent nature, not the evidence of a crook’s sleight of hand.”
However, in her chapter, Places to Play, Gordon writes about the playing activities that she did engage in with an amazing awareness of her young inner world. Her child self was entranced by her Sally doll and her paper dolls, that were called cutouts, rosebuds and crinolines, bonnets, pansies, frills and bits of silks, rejected from the linings of the coats that her grandmother made, which she transformed into veils and gowns. She writes: “A china tea set, miniature, white with pale forget-me-nots. I became not a figure or a character, but a color and a texture, soft, edgeless, inviting. I became an atmosphere. I lost my history, my face.”
In describing her favourite play place in her father’s small study, we learn both about her relation to her father and her playing preferences. She writes that while her father was at his desk trying to write books that brought in no money, in a corner of his study was a space she loved to play: “On the floor of the closet, alongside my father’s shoes, was my toy box: a tin rectangle, two feet by four, painted in a circus design in circus colors. That I was given only this inadequate space for play explains, perhaps, or at least provides a lively metaphor for, why I didn’t have more appetite for play, why I didn’t think it was important. It was because my parents didn’t think it was important.”
She would spread out pictures and objects to create a world where all was lightness and prettiness, ”a world impossible to my family’s imagination: a world without martyrdom. A world without heroics. A world where nothing was at stake.” She returns to the theme of being afraid of being martyred. She writes that many of the Roman martyrs whose names they said each day at Mass, whom she imagined stood in rooms devoid of furniture, except for a chair, were women who met horrific deaths like being devoured by lions or being pierced at their breast by a sword.
Italy is a significant geography in Gordon’s psyche. We witness the Rome and the Vatican of her childhood imagination integrated with her adult visits. The first time she went to Rome by herself was to interview Natalia Ginzburg, an Italian writer whom she much admired anδ believed was underappreciated by American audiences. I also read Natalia Ginzburg and other Italian writers in my late teens and twenties. I found some of these books on my bookshelves, 1970s and 1980s editions. I re-read Caro Michele and The Dry Heart in one sitting. Memories came up, and the language and the ambience of her stories became known to me again.
Natalia Ginzburg
From The Little Virtues by
In her book of essays, The Little Virtues, that I’m currently reading, novelist Rachel Cusk has written that her voice “comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language. Writings from more than half a century ago read as if they have just been—in some mysterious sense—composed…. This voice emerges from her preoccupations and themes, whose specificity and universality she considers with a gravitas and authority that seem both familiar and entirely original. It is an authority grounded in living and being rather than in thinking or even in language, an authority perhaps better compared to that of the visual artist, who is obliged to negotiate first with the seen, tangible world.” And in her book, The Dry Heart, Hilma Wolitzer writes: “The raw beauty of Ginzburg’s prose compels our gaze. First we look inward, with the shock of recognition inspired by all great writing, and then, inevitably, out at the shared world she evokes with such uncompromising clarity.”
Although the essays in her book, The Little Virtues, were written separately and in distinct circumstances between 1944 and 1960, they read as a memoir of sorts. In many of these essays Ginzburg writes about places and interiors and through these accounts her circumstances and the historical background become visible to us.
In her first essay Winter in the Abruzzi, written in 1944, Ginzburg writes: “We were in exile: our city was a long way off, and so were books, friends, the various desultory events of a real existence. We lit our green stove with its long chimney that went through the ceiling: we gathered together in the room with the stove – there we cooked and ate, my husband wrote at the big oval table, the children covered the floor with toys. There was an eagle painted on the ceiling of the room, and I used to look at the eagle and think that was exile. Exile was the eagle, the murmur of the green stove, the vast, silent countryside and the motionless snow.”
In her essay, Worn-out shoes, written in 1945 in Rome, where she temporarily lived with a friend, after her husband’s tortuous murder, two unembellished sentences reveal her circumstances and the times she lived in: “We have a mattress and a bed, and every evening we toss up for which of the two of us shall sleep in the bed. When we get up in the morning our worn-out shoes are waiting for us on the rug.”
In Portrait of a Friend, written in 1957, Ginzburg describes the shifts that have taken place in her sense of a place, which we see can be both home and not simultaneously: “Now, we live elsewhere in a completely different, much bigger city, and if we meet and talk about our own city we do so with no sense of regret that we have left it, and say that we could not live there any longer. But when we go back, simply passing through the station and walking in the misty avenues is enough to make us feel we have come home; and the sadness with which the city fills us every time we return lies in this feeling that we are at home and, at the same time, that we have no reason to stay here; because here, in our own home, our own city, the city in which we spent our youth, so few things remain alive for us and we are oppressed by a throng of memories and shadows.”
“Writing is an act of courage – it is a way to dive into the depths of oneself……. Writing is a way to make sense of the world, to find meaning in the chaos.” Mary Gordon
In the last chapters Gordon ponders on the distance she has travelled and asks: “How has it happened that I have become someone who, as a child, I would never even have thought of? Someone I would not have seen on holy cards or in movies. Someone I might not even have read about.”
First she imagines what could have been her destiny. Then she explains how she got to this very different and desired place. She contributes, who she has been able to become and the place she inhabits and feels she belongs, to many things, including “a great good luck that has allowed [her] to be back where [she] belongs” and her love for great public buildings. She goes back in time and describes how her love for these was born: “It was on these trips, especially the ones with my father that I learned to love great public buildings. They came into my life naturally in that we didn’t visit them especially, we were on our way to someplace else, to see someone else and the buildings just happened to be there.”
She is where she wants to be and for that she feels gratitude. She writes: “I am where I want to be, where I have always wanted to be. I might have longed for temporary sojourns in one or another of the great capitals of the world, but this is the place I’ve always wanted to call home.” And elsewhere she says: “I am where I am because of the benevolence of an institution. The same one that admitted me as a student and opened the world to me hired me later to teach young women like my former self, and provided me with a dwelling so that I could afford to live in this place.”