Cutting people down to size
Francis King
INNOCENCE by Penelope Fitzgerald Collins, f9.95 Acar journey of only a few minutes takes one from Vicenza to the Villa Val- marana, famous both for its Tiepolo fres- coes and for the statues of dwarfs (I Nani) ranged around its walls. Clearly it must have been a visit to the Villa Valmarana that inspired Penelope Fitzgerald to create her La Ricordanza, a similar villa outside Florence, in which a noble family, the Ridolfi, have lived, in increasing obscurity, for many generations.
Back in the 16th century a Ridofli, him- self a midget, marries a midget and has a midget daughter by her. As a companion for this daughter, from whom he wishes to conceal the truth of the family abnormal- ity, he brings into the villa, sealed off from the outer world, another midget girl. But unaccountably, soon after her arrival, this newcomer begins to grow with remarkable celerity. The Ridolfi girl, devoted to her new companion and wishing to spare her the ignominy (as she sees it) of realisation of her monstrous size, then out of compas- sion decides that it would be better for her if she were to be blinded and have her legs amputed at the knees. This grim fairy-tale announces the theme on which the rest of the novel is a series of often brilliant and always fascinating variations. When love impels us to attempt changes in others, what all too often results is grotesque mutilation and therefore unhappiness for all.
Anyone who lived in Florence (as I did) in the Fifties will marvel at the authenticity with which Mrs Fitzgerald brings that period of tentatively burgeoning hope and confidence to life. This is particularly remarkable since so few of her characters — a visiting art historian, a couple settled in Tuscany, a convent-educated Amazon — are English. Mrs Fitzgerald is particular- ly successful with her Ridolfi, their Italian blood thinned by the passing of centuries as much as it has been diluted by foreign marriages. Impractical, impoverished and for the most part idle — the exceptions are one member of the family who is a Monsig- fore and another who runs the estate they are sadly ill-equipped to survive in the post-war world. Curiously, Mrs Fitzgerald's one failure of characterisation is her heroine, Chiara, the daughter of the family. When she writes of her, it is as though a sculptor were kneading a piece of clay with increasing frenzy and frustration, never quite suc- ceeding in breathing life into it. In con- trast, the penniless neurologist from the Mezzogiorno, Salvatore, with whom Chiara makes what appears to be a certain misalliance, is a wholly credible, if also almost wholly unlikeable, creation.
What has made him unlikeable — it is here that we have an example of love resulting in mutilation — is, on the one hand, the devotion of a mother who insisted on naming him after the Saviour, and, on the other, the influence of a father constantly dreaming of an Italy, such as the left-wing martyr Antonio Gramsci envis- aged, of Liberazione and Umanita. In first migrating to the prosperous north, then opting for a life of science, and finally marrying into the minor aristocracy, Salva- tore has constantly attempted to repudiate his peasant inheritance. He is the kind of man who, having coolly discarded a mis- tress, can tell her 'You can cry if you like', and who believes that 'to be boring is the unforgiveable sin'.
A scarcely less interesting character is Chiara's cousin Cesare, one of those peo- ple who opt for celibacy and withdrawal from the world, without embracing a reli- gious vocation, for which they lack the requisite belief. When Chiara's friend, the English Amazon, declares her love for Cesare, and when Salvatore appropriates one of his guns in order to kill himself in a moment of despair about his marriage, he behaves with equal detachment. One senses that it is with him, rather than with Chiara and Salvatore, that Mrs Fitzgerald's sympathies chiefly lie. Those who interfere least in the lives of others are, she seems to be telling us, in general those who do the least harm.
The book contains some splendid set- pieces. The most vivid of these is when the ten-year-old Salvatore is taken by his father to the Clinica Quisisana in Rome, to visit Antonio Gramsci, who has been transferred there from prison when known to be terminally ill from spinal tuberculo- sis. Mrs Fitzgerald is unsparing here 'Salvatore had seen deformed animals, and dead bodies of both people and animals, but never anything as ugly as comrade Gramsci. Ugliness is a hard thing to forgive at the age of ten.' She is also extremely moving.
There are times in this book when she seems to be searching for a path from which she has inadvertently wandered, and other times when her pace grows a little weary. But, all in all, this is, in equal measure, a work of moral, intellectual and emotional richness.
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