What would you do if your city was occupied by a foreign army? Your country’s institutions in the grip of an illiberal ideology? Your workplace taken over by violent thugs? This is one of the major topics of European fiction—was probably THE topic for much of the twentieth century—but it’s almost nonexistent in the fiction of the angloworld. Canadians, Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, eccentrically, have no historical memory of events of this kind to mull over in fiction—and the British are culturally joining them there as well as the two World Wars recede from the horizon.
I am not denying there have been illiberal crazes in the English speaking countries, and some have made it into fiction (The Crucible; the flurry of fictionalizing Alan Turing’s life a few years ago). There is a corner of American fiction tackling American military engagements abroad, but it’s not a densely populated corner (there’s Greg Baxter’s The Apartment, about a PTSD’d US soldier back from Iraq trying to rent an apartment in a quiet Central European town, but I can’t think of very many others that were discussed in major book reviewing publications). There’s also a mini subset of counterfactual fiction that tries to imagine what would America have been like if the Nazis had won. None of that comes anywhere near the looming, menacing shadow that the historical experience of foreign occupation and totalitarianism casts over generations of European fiction—and fiction of many other parts of the world.
Before you write to me to say all that is true about the fiction of the New World except if you’re black or indigenous, I’ll say that military occupation, systemic genocide, fascism and Stalinism are 1) very different phenomena from the trans-Atlantic slavery and colonization and settlement of North America 2) much more recent to European writers (some European countries were under a military dictatorship until well into the 1970s. Polish rulers imposed the pro-Soviet martial law on the country in the early 1980s).
As a reader, I’ve been obsessed with the “what do you do if the elephant of history plants itself in your room” fiction, and given the region of the world I come from, it’s unsurprising. The not so brilliant fact of the matter was, Yugoslav liberal democrats for the most part did not rush to take up arms to free the country from German and Italian occupation; the communists did. The Communist Party which was banned in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia built and organized the armed resistance while the liberals like me, I am guessing, tried to cling to some semblance of normal life and waited for the Allies or the Red Army to liberate the country. This is what the vast majority of European countries (and bourgeoisies) did. While I don’t subscribe to the the Marxist thesis that bourgeois liberalism and fascism are distant cousins (with the following shared values: sanctity of private property; laws legitimizing the winners’ spoils; the only formally equal playing field—etc.), I do think that us liberals are often confounded by violence. We don’t have a good response to it. We just need to pour more education and more economic security wherever that’s coming from, is our response to bullying. And we like our property too much. (I sometimes walk through Rosedale and find myself thinking, you wouldn’t do anything if tomorrow we are occupied by the Nazis, would you? You’d just want this beautiful house to continue existing. I get it.) And our jobs. And comfort for our families. Are we cowards? The jury of history is out.
We don’t even know how to handle untrue beliefs passionately held. We abscond away from conflict, thinking it will take care of itself and mere months later, our institutions are led by people who insist that men are women if they feel like it and Canada is committing genocide as we speak, and that everyone who disagrees will be unemployable. But I digress.
Imagine finally getting a job you wanted your entire life—dunno, the weekend culture supplement editor, as in Antonio Tabucchi’s novel Sostiene Pereira—and your country exactly at that time becomes a military dictatorship. Tabucchi sets the novel in Lisbon in the early days of Salazarist takeover, 1932. I’ve read the novel as a student in the 1990s and although I was not unfamiliar with the general political themes I missed the nuances of the many personal compromises one needs to negotiate as a writer in an unfree society and an unfree medium. Pereira is a middle-aged culture editor in a proper (if not widely read) Catholic daily when he hires a young man to write obituaries of famous authors. The man and his girlfriend keep getting in trouble, and submitting “unpublishable” celebratory obits of people like Lorca, and damning obits of people like d’Annunzio. But Pereira is non-political, he is no one’s comrade, he won’t succumb to madness from either side, the civil war is happening in Spain not in Portugal, and he will absolutely go to the seaside resort for the mud treatment that his heart doctor recommended. It’s a comedy in every one of its sentences, Pereira Claims (translated by Patrick Creagh here as Pereira Maintains). The phrase is often repeated in the book, because Pereira is constantly justifying his position to the reader and to himself. Since it’s a comedy, Pereira will give us a happy ending of sorts: when violence literally enters his apartment, there isn’t much else Pereira can do but take sides. And he does it with flare.
There is an Italian film by the same name starring Marcello Mastroianni, with music by Ennio Morricone:
I’ve actually reread Pereira as an antidote to Cesare Pavese’s intensely bleak (and probably more truthful) 1948 novel The House on the Hill, which answers the same existential question in a very different way.
The narrator of The House is a teacher who while still teaching in Turin lives on one of the peaceful hills surrounding the northern Italian city. Some of his male peers (and some of the female ones too) are either in the Mussolini’s army, doing their patriotic duty, or part of the armed partisan resistance. Others still work their day jobs, like him. His time off is spent walking the dog, eating meals with his two elderly landladies, and hanging out with some newly acquired friends—and a long-lost ex and her son—down at the tavern. They seem to be anti-fascist: this is never openly discussed, the book’s tone is almost oneiric, until someone tattles and they are all picked up by the police and disappear from the story.
It’s 1943, and Italy is about to switch to the side of the Allies, which will promptly be followed by the German invasion. The war at its most brutal is only just beginning.
To paraphrase the translator Tim Parks who also wrote the book’s foreword, the year 1943 was the year of as much moral clarity as there was going to be in the Italian war theatre. It’s when even the former Italian army recruits joined the partisans to fight the German invasion of the country. The 1943 was a great test before Italian men. Pavese himself joined a convent, and at one point in the novel the narrator too works among the monks in order to escape police attention. The House is understood to be fairly autobiographical: Pavese wrestling with his own demons. He was against the war tout court, Parks suggest; a pacifist. While knowing full well about the fate of the active anti-fascists like his friend Leone Ginzburg, who was arrested in the clandestine printshop of the paper L’Italia libera, tortured by the Germans and died in prison at the age of 34.
Natalia Ginzburg writes about some of that obliquely in her essays collected in The Little Virtues.
Also, credit where due: there were a lot of liberals in that group of anti-fascists around and with Leone Ginzburg: Norberto Bobbio, the “liberal revolutionary” Piero Bobetti. All were admirers of Benedetto Croce. Ginzburg would not have called himself a communist.
The House is a disconcerting read, told by an unmoored self maintaining a competent facade of reasonableness.
When a colleague at the school talks to him about his misgivings about continuing to teach:
The whole thing was getting more and more absurd. I explained that no one would ever dream of reproaching us for having served this government. ‘In that case, everyone would have to stop,’ I said. ‘The tram drivers, the judges, the postmen. Life would stop.’
Calm and stubborn, he told me that was exactly what was needed.
With the anti-fascist friends at the tavern:
‘Doing or not doing stuff,’ I said forcefully, ‘is a matter of chance. No one plans to get involved. The patriots and partisans are all deserters, draft-dodgers, people long compromised. People who’ve already fallen in the water. So they might as well go for it’.
‘Lots of them are not compromised,’ Cate said. ‘Every day someone dives in who could happily have stayed home. Take Tono…’
‘Oh, but this is where your grandmother is right,’ I cried. ‘It’s class destiny. The life you lead takes you there. Not for nothing the future is in the factories. That’s why I like you all…’
But near the end of the novel the rationalizations have dried up.
The war burns down our houses, scatters bodies full of bullets in our streets and squares, hunts us down like hares from one den to the next. In the end it will force us to fight like the others, it will demand our active engagement. The day will come when no one can stay out of the war - not the cowards, not the sad, nor the loners. Since I’ve been back with my family, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Everyone will have agreed to fight.
Not the narrator of The House on the Hill. The novel ends while the war is still ongoing and our Hamlet still can’t act.
Surviving the war means surviving the war, and also surviving what you did or not do during the war. (Pavese only survived former; he took his own life in the liberated Italy, in 1950.) Now that I’m re-reading Natalia Ginzburg’s essays (tr. Dick Davis), surviving the war is also a knowledge. The kind that the anglophone fiction does not have (any longer).
A house is not particularly solid. It can collapse from one moment to the next. Behind the peaceful little vases of flowers, behind the teapots and carpets and waxed floors there is the other true face of the house—the hideous face of a house that has been reduced to rubble.
[…] This is how it was for many of us in Italy, and elsewhere, and we believed that one day we would be able to walk without anxiety down the streets of our own cities, but now that we can perhaps walk there without anxiety we realize that we shall never be cured of this sickness. And so we are constantly forced to seek out a new strength, a new toughness with which to face whatever reality may confront us. We have been driven to look for an inward peace which is not the product of carpets and little vases of flowers.
"Are we cowards? The jury of history is out". Do you reallystill have still doubts about it?