The Gold-Rimmed Eyeglasses by Giorgio Bassani

First published:Gli occhiali d’oro, 1958 (The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, 1960; revised as The Gold-Rimmed Eyeglasses, 1975)

Type of work: Tragedy

Time of work: The late 1930’s

Locale: Ferrara and Rimini, Italy

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, a male literature student, twenty years old, from a middle-class Jewish family
• Dr. Athos Fadigati, a distinguished ear, nose, and throat specialist, born in Venice but practicing in Ferrara
• Eraldo Deliliers, a fellow student of the narrator and the companion of Fadigati

The Novel

The Gold-Rimmed Eyeglasses is above all a precise reconstruction of the time and place that provide the background for all Giorgio Bassani’s major fiction: the middle class and professional world of Ferrara, as seen from the vantage point of a member of the city’s well-established Jewish community. Fascism was at its height during the last years of the 1930’s, a period marked by the cementing of the ties between Italy and Nazi Germany, and the passing of the Special Laws against the Jews. The mounting climate of intolerance takes its psychic and physical toll on the characters in the novel.

Dr. Athos Fadigati is a distinguished physician, with a flourishing practice in Ferrara, as well as being the head of the ear, nose, and throat department of the city’s main hospital. The children of most of the best families in Ferrara have been under his care, and even the narrator remembers having his tonsils removed by Fadigati. Since the early 1920’s (and coinciding with the new order imposed by the Fascist regime on Italian society), Fadigati’s life has been one of unruffled professional advancement. Nevertheless, Fadigati has a weakness that threatens his seemingly impregnable social status. He is to be found during the evening frequenting the stalls, and not the balconies, of the local cinemas, or favoring the more popular and lower-class areas of town rather than the cafes of the major boulevards; wherever, in short, groups of proletarian youths, soldiers, perhaps, or knots of soccer fans may be gathered. Imperceptibly, Bassani brings his respectable bourgeois chorus, which has hitherto been preoccupied with finding the doctor a suitable wife, to the conclusion that Fadigati prefers men to women.

In the second section of the novel, Fadigati comes to the fore, as he befriends a group of university students who take the early morning train from Ferrara to Bologna. He gradually establishes himself as an avuncular companion, a man of culture, and an occasional counselor. He manages to break down the reserve that naturally divides the generations, but on some of those train journeys, he must submit to the undisguised insults of Eraldo Deliliers, not only the most handsome member of the group but also the most arrogant and dangerous.

The summer of 1937, at Rimini, marks the decline and fall of Fadigati. On his arrival at the resort to spend his summer vacation with his family, the narrator learns that Fadigati and Deliliers are sharing a room at the Grand-Hotel, and that they have been seen at all the most fashionable resorts along the Adriatic coast, traveling in an Alfa Romeo sports car. This scandal naturally is the main topic of conversation among the respectable Ferraresi gathered on the Rimini beachfront, and Fadigati is ostracized by virtually everyone except the narrator and his family, with whom he establishes a close friendship. The relationship with Deliliers can only end in disaster. Fadigati is left more and more to his own devices, while Deliliers shamelessly exploits the older man’s good nature and imprudent generosity. Following a violent scene at the hotel, Deliliers finally leaves, taking with him the car and most of his benefactor’s money and valuables. The summer is over, the weather changes for the worse, and everyone returns to Ferrara.

In the last four chapters of the book, the destinies of Fadigati and the narrator are more closely intertwined. Fadigati loses his post at the hospital and almost all of his patients, and the narrator observes with mounting despair the government’s well-orchestrated anti-Semitic campaign (which culminated in the introduction of racial laws in 1938). He can hardly bear to have a cup of coffee in the cafes in the center of town or talk with his university companions. With Fadigati, he shares a sense of persecution: the unjust isolation of the innocent. Unlike his father, he refuses to be consoled by bland reassurances from well-placed acquaintances that no racial laws will ever come to pass in Italy. A meeting tentatively arranged between the two friends does not take place, probably as the result of a weekend of torrential rain, and on Sunday, the narrator reads that the Fadigati’s body was found in the river. He was the victim of an accident, according to the paper.

The Characters

Like other men in his situation with a professional reputation to uphold, Fadigati must live a dual life, divided between day and night: by day, the concerned throat specialist; by night, a lonely man withdrawing into the shadows of the ill-lit popular quarters of the city and the cheaper seats at the cinema. It is when Bassani draws his tragic victim out of the nocturnal shadows of Ferrara, and even out of the discreet monotones of the winter train journeys, into the blinding summer sun that bakes the bathers at Rimini that the reader knows that Fadigati’s collapse is imminent. Light is the medium of exposure, and from exposure to public disgrace is but a step. Fadigati’s decision to appear openly at Rimini with Deliliers seems such a calculated affront to public opinion, and so out of character, that the narrator rightly attributes it to Fadigati’s shameless companion. The narrator also discerns in Fadigati’s nature another quality that leads to his demise. When Fadigati shows his young friend the curt note left by his departed lover, he seems to revel in his own humiliation. The exultant tone in his voice reveals a self-destructive desire, derived perhaps from a corrosive guilt that demands some kind of expiation.

The narrator of the story is not a distant bystander but a participant drawn into the action by moral compulsion. It is not only his reputation as a dreamer (a “poet”) that sets him apart from his companions. It is also the fact that he is a Jew. He shares this isolation with Fadigati, and this melancholy similarity of experience develops into the book’s central relationship and illuminates its major theme. Apart from Deliliers, the narrator is the only member of the crowd on the train who turns up at Rimini, and it is he and his family (his father is an amiable naif) who offer the only companionship Fadigati can find in his enforced solitude. This is to be the last summer of relative tranquillity. Winter announces darkness and despair, and the narrative tone grows bleaker with the change in the weather. It is significant that the narrator and Fadigati encounter each other at night in the fog, that rain prevents their final rendezvous, and that only the narrator seems to be aware of Fadigati’s suicide.

Deliliers is not so much a character as a nemesis, a destructive force whose single function is Fadigati’s downfall. Naturally, the young man combines demoniac calculation with Apollonian beauty. A perfect physical specimen, and an amateur middle-weight boxing champion, Deliliers is an extremist in both his decadent beauty and his cynicism, inspiring in others no mere love or affection but instead blind infatuation. He will use his physical beauty as a means of blackmail and seduction, with the pathetic Fadigati perhaps only the first of a long trail of victims. Deliliers is an exact product of his time, or any time that reveres the cult of the body without any corresponding dose of moral awareness. In his cynicism and brutality, and his exalted egotism, he is a born Fascist, but without the political affiliation.

A minor character, Nino Bottecchiari, the acknowledged intellectual of the group of students on the Bologna train, is also worth noting. Bottecchiari comes from a family of established Socialists (his uncle is an ex-Socialist deputy). When the narrator runs into Bottecchiari on his return from vacation, however, Bottecchiari informs him that he has been offered a job as chief cultural officer for the district by one of the leaders of the local Fascist Party. Should he accept? The narrator bitterly tells him to do so and without a moment’s hesitation. For the narrator, it is all of a piece: the humiliation of Fadigati, the anti-Semitic campaign, the brutality of Deliliers, the cynical ambition of this former student. Bottecchiari may pretend to despise his fellow Italians and the present political leadership, but while the Fascists are in power, they command the jobs. At the start of what promises to be a successful political career, Bottecchiari is a representative figure, a man prepared to jettison moral tradition when it suits his interests.

Critical Context

Bassani’s fiction is deliberately limited to the experience of the Jewish community in Ferrara and largely to the few years that correspond to the most formative period of his own life, from the late 1930’s until the end of the war. In those years, he was graduated from the university, embarked on a literary career, witnessed the local effects of the Holocaust, and joined the Italian Resistance. Only upon entering this seemingly narrow world, and surrendering to Bassani’s language, can one appreciate the richness of a narrative experience set in a narrow compass. Bassani’s genius is to evoke, in the microcosm that he creates, the connecting links between the tragedies and struggles endured by his characters and those of coreligionists in a host of other communities beyond Ferrara, and beyond Italy itself. To have been a part of a well-established Jewish community in that time and place was not only a personal misfortune; it was also, for the writer, a kind of historical gift, for it presented him with a local and universal theme and allowed him to link the fate of his Jews with that of all victims of the Holocaust.

The fiction of Bassani is of a piece, and The Gold-Rimmed Eyeglasses should be read along with the collection of tales in which it was published, in 1956, Cinque storie ferraresi (Five Stories of Ferrara, 1971). The stories follow the experiences of the Jews during World War II. The narrator of The Gold-Rimmed Eyeglasses anticipates the Special Laws and their consequences. Ninety-year-old Doctor Elias Corcos from “La passeggiate primadi cena” (“A Walk Before Supper”) is rounded up with 182 other Jewish victims and shipped off to Germany. In “Una lapide in Via Mazzini” (“A Plaque in Via Mazzini”), Geo Josz, the single survivor of that group of victims, returns from Auschwitz. Also among that group, and mentioned in passing in The Gold-Rimmed Eyeglasses, are the Finzi-Continis, the subject of Bassani’s most famous novel, Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1962; The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, 1965). This recapitulation of themes and the reappearance of characters gives Bassani’s oeuvre the unity of the saga novel. A writer who worked miniature in a provincial corner of Italy, Bassani nevertheless belongs to the European tradition.

Bibliography

Clay, G.R. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXV (October 9, 1960), p. 54.

Grillandi, Massimo. Invito alla lettura di Giorgio Bassani, 1972.

The New Yorker. Review. XXXVI (December 24, 1960), p. 61.

Pacifici, Sergio. Review in Saturday Review. XLIII (August 20, 1960), p. 16.

Trevelyan, R., ed. Italian Writing Today, 1967.