Bunch’s Moderan/Ginzburg’s Dry Heart (Books acquired, 14 July 2023)

Picked up two on Friday—

I’ve been wanting to read Natalia Ginzburg for a while, and when I saw a used copy of her novella The Dry Heart (translated by Frances Frenaye), it seemed like a good entry point. It was really the description on the back that grabbed me:

The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness—proceeds, the narrator’s murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg’s writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don’t more wives kill their husbands?

I read NYRB’s collected Moderan a few years ago, but I couldn’t pass up this Avon Bard mass market paperback.

Opening track:

“THINKING BACK (OUR GOD IS A HELPING GOD!)”

by

David R. Bunch

FLESH seemed doomed that year; death’s harpies were riding down. The once-beautiful, sweet and life-sustaining air was tinged with poison now, and man drank at his peril from the streams that had once been pure. He prayed to a God that was said to be in all things good, true and beautiful, but especially was thought to be all sternness and goodness, justice and loving-care, in some milk-white place far away, “On High.” And those prayers if answered were answered very obliquely indeed. For the air got deeper in poison from the tinkering with lethal things the flesh-man indulged in when not praying, and the water got fuller with danger as each new explosion pounded the bomb-fevered air. There was talk of the End; great discussions were handled in great halls across the land. Treaties were signed among statesmen to help the air get better, to allow the streams to recover and run pure once again. But even as the flesh-hands grasped the pens to scrawl the marks of good faith in some countries, fear lashed at capitals in other countries. Arsenals were tested anew. Things done were undone. The air got sicker; the streams ran not pure but pure danger—There seemed no chance for flesh-man, and his God seemed entirely silent wherever He was, wherever His white throne was. The HOPELESS signs were out everywhere. Little children asked that they be allowed to go quickly and not grow up hurting and maimed. Adults in what should have been the full flower of brave manhood and fair womanhood quaked, looked heavenward for some hopeful sign and, finding none, fell down and cried bitterly. The aged ones, quavering and whining now, finally decided that yes, truly they were most glad that they were so very old. The flesh billions courted at the Palace of Danger so ardently had turned against them and the mass wedding of Death and Destruction seemed now all but assured.

And then—and then this chance! Offered to all. It came first as small hope, the rumor of it, a faint faint breath of a chance seeping through the flesh-fouled metropolises. And then it was confirmed as glowing fact when the tour went round that year, year of the Greatest Darkness. And yet—and yet they scoffed, scoffed by the billions at this man working his hinges and braces, would not believe his heart was an ever-last one, had no credulity for his new wonderful lungs that could breathe him a forever-life even in bomb-tainted air. When they saw that his hands were steel they yelled robot! robot! When they saw that his eyes were wide-range, mechanism-helped, and that he’d a phfluggee-phflaggee button on his talker that he pressed from time to time to aid in his speech expression they laughed and yelled . . .

Somewhere in the wide blue space heavens there are this day a billion laughs still going, a billion raw guffaws orbiting, each closely chased by a shriek, a yelled scream that never quite catches the laugh it matches. Those strange laughs and scream nose cones that circle, and must forever, make a queer motion-monument to the unbelievers who could but laugh when they had the great dream shown them plain and who screamed over a chance that was gone when the swift black wagons of death came with death’s own personal cloth-lined boxes. But some of us SAW! We BELIEVED! We came over to the New Land. We submitted our bodies for help. We were not disappointed.

Consider the dreams we have captured here in New Processes; think of the fears turned back now in New Land; stand up and bow the head for Moderan. And know it has changed our outlook from quaking oh-God-help-us fear to massive and stalwart non-fear. Now we have Time! We can hold Time in our firm sure hands and regard it as the brightest brightest candle, one that will never burn down. We have Time arrested and shackled, imprisoned in our “rep
lacements.” Though it run with the speed of light a million times over, though it run with inexpressible speed, it is as though it stayed just with us here. A million years of it can slip past our ever-last hinges and we nod, wave, ride on deep in our hip-snuggie chairs and give thanks. To our god. For YES! when we captured Time we placed it in the rib cage of each man and sealed it there in each man’s calm-beating heart. And should a heart falter in the rib cage of any man, it is not the worry of a piffle’s worth. We have but to send off to the Big Parts Warehouse where, with other spare parts, gleaming hearts rest in rows, acres and acres of beating hearts, warmed-up and idling, ready to see a man through, each man having at least ten replaceable good ones in full repair at all times. YES, we, The Believers, intend to keep what we have; we’ll never let go! We have Time, once the arch enemy of all, like a babe in a basket—calm. We have taken an old man’s scythe blade; his long, dirty beard we have shorn. He still stands gaunt with his gloomy clothes wrestled about him, sardonic and wishing for a chance at us, to do harm. But his hourglass is out at both ends now and for us, endless, the endless sands roll through.

Our god? YES! Let us speak of our god. Once, in a long-ago almost-forgotten time, there was this Truce of the Dozen Days among the Stronghold folk while all of us made the pilgrimage. By foot or tunnel car or roll-go all of us came to the great plastic plain of the Dream Realized, and in one massive movement, at a prearranged signal in Time, told by our carefully synchronized etern-tells, all of us toggled our knee switches over to the setting marked Kneel Down. And with a crash and tinkle that thundered through the red vapor shield of that happy September we were all folded down. Some thought he bestowed a blessing on all of his children that day. Some said that he waved and nodded, and still others held that he smiled. And some there were who would swear through all the rest of their lives, eternal lives, that YES! there had been this miracle, when the voiceless gave voice in thunder, when the eyeless gazed rays of lightning through the gay and thick pink air. But I heard only the silence that day across the wide shimmering acres of gleaming radiant folk all folded down, beheld only a sharp sheen as of silver when the sun slid through for a little as some small hitch came about in a place far away where many great drive wheels and drive shafts were supplying our vapor-shield power.

So we see what we need to see, hear what our needs make us hear. Something deep in the flesh-strips of some of them required a vision, a man-like thing smiling, reassuring them, and so they “saw” a smile. Some needed a nod, a fatherly wave of the hand, and some required words even from essentially a silent god. But for me it was enough to behold—silent, adamant, marvelous—the calm strength of the moveless voiceless gleam and be reassured. Yes, he was our silent great god on the wide plastic plain of the Dream Realized, a massive reminder to homage, and our guide star since a time when New Processes Land was very new.

And when you think of all we are delivered from by his wonderful workability and help, you will not smirk at that gleaming presence, that shining shimmering wonder, the very substance of Deliverance, tall and pure. For a tall god stands in our country to remind us always of the greatest deliverance from fear ever conceived in this world. See a New Processes man in all of his staunch stainlessness, deep in his hip-snuggie chair, sitting calm as a cold bowl of oil. Know his heart is set to Dormant-Cool, and know his flexi-flex New Processes lungs are breathing him just enough of the skull-and-cross-bones air to keep him calm-cool alert. Further know he is happily, languidly, working on some Universal Deep Problem for his truce-time amusement until Big Shoot starts up again and his Stronghold can shudder to action once more, happily, totally involved with total war. And furthermore be firmly reassured that New Processes man has no worries pounding his think-tapes to gray, no anxiety about Time going by, no apprehensions concerning surprises at war, no fears in the pale green “blood” of his brain pans—none at all.

And then the flesh-man—oh, consider. CONSIDER him—the sick few that are left. Please do. Then perhaps you will see why we in our new-shining glory, flesh-strips few and played-down, pay homage to a massive stick of new-metal placed as our guide star when New Processes Land, our great Moderan, was new!