Chapter 107: The Journey From Despair

Believing there’s some sense to writing is not a given, not every day. When meaning fades consider the magnolia . When setbacks, senselessness, or AI conspire to throw shade on the whole endeavor, consider Bassani’s Magnolia.

It is a modest sort of evidence, but a tangible one – trunk, branches, and plump leaves – of a victory over silence. Grander examples can be listed: simplicity here is poignant. The Magnolia can be found inside number 1 Via Cisterna del Follo, in the city of Ferrara, in northern Italy. It was planted in 1939, in dark times that darkening further. 

Its story is contained in the poem The Racial Laws by Giorgio Bassani*, which begins:

The magnolia right in the middle

of our Ferrara house’s garden is the very

same that reappears in almost every

book of mine

We planted it in ’39

ceremoniously

just a few months after

the Racial Laws were brought to bear

Giorgio Bassani is 22 when the walls start closing in, not the medieval wall for which Ferrara is famed but those that suddenly mark his community, his Jewish faith, as unwelcome in the city where they thrived for centuries. On November 17, 1938, a gesticulating Mussolini announces that Jewish Italians are no longer quite Italians. Books by Jewish authors are banned; Jews can no longer hold public office. They are barred from higher education.

His future fading, his roots denied, Bassani plants a tree behind the walls of his family’s house.

When all doors slam on him, he invents his refuge: he writes.

Desperate times can bring meaningful words, and create solace on paper absent in the world. We all know tales of how a story saved us in some way, whether written or read.

There’s Mikhail Bulgakov writing, burning, and rewriting his masterpiece The Master and Margarita, knowing full well that he would never see it published under Stalinist rule. Yet he persists until death, to finish his redemption on the page.

Or Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, finding “spiritual salvation” in a Kenyan maximum-security prison through what he could create. He wrote with the pen lent by the guards to confess the sin of speaking his mind. He is denied any surface to write and so he improvises: the whole of Devil on the Cross is etched in neat diminutive letters on heaps of coarse toilet paper that piled up in his cell.

Bassani, too, writes against the odds, against what his city has become and the executions that soil its streets. He is imprisoned in 1943. His release signals his exile. He goes into hiding and then moves to Rome, not returning to Ferrara permanently until he is buried there.

Yet in the home left behind, the tree continues to grow.

Ferrara can never be the same again. The world he knew and the world he belonged to will remain riddled with the absences left by deportation to the camps, by familiar names without gravestones and graves without bodies. So he fashions his own memorial as he returns in his writing to the time before the end.

Theorist Roland Barthes describes writing as a compromise between freedom and memory. Bassani molds his memory into freedom, into life persisting in his works on the edge of history’s cruel denial. A haven made of words for all the absences.

In the span of fifteen years, Bassani publishes the great narrative arc of “Novel of Ferrara,” the sum of six books obsessively recreating the city from afar. He returns to this work all life long, tinkering, adding, and not letting go. The Ferrara he lived in until he no longer could, became thereafter a city living inside him.

The work painstakingly blends reality and fiction in an ever-expanding map that seeks to include the whole of Ferrara of the years of trauma, chiseled from memory to construct one of the lasting works of Italian literature. The definitive portrait of a city, made by its rejected son.

The result is a tale of two cities. The first you can find on the map, Ferrara with its red bricks, cobbles stones, and castle; the second is its replica made from afar, grounded in the years of trauma and persecution, spreading further than the first through worldwide readership while giving  back to Ferrara the shadows many sought to deny in the aftermath. At the heart of the difference between the two grows the magnolia.

Bassani’s masterpiece slowly becomes synonymous with the city. In time the pariah becomes the prodigal son. Time affords symbolic triumphs: the former prison that held him now regularly features expos on his work; tours visit the landmarks of the life he had to leave behind. The Oscar-winning adaptation of his most famous novel has attracted visitors for decades. Today Bassani’s magnolia rises above the walls and overlooks the troubled places of the past.

Such is the influence of certain pieces of writing that they impose themselves on the material world. Reality follows fiction: the numbering on Baker Street is altered to allow for Sherlock Holmes’ imaginary home; a fake balcony is built on a thirteenth-century house in Verona to allow Juliette to peer onto her Romeo.

Bassani’s creation has now been taken on by the city itself. The myth has slipped into fact. Consider the magnolia. If you visit Ferrara, the city’s brochures will tell you the story of a tree planted in 1939, then guide you to this proud landmark and explain from which street to see it.

It’s a testament to the lasting meaning of words, a symbol against exclusion vindicated...and also turned into a tourist trap. What you will find if you follow the city brochure is a new fiction. Bassani’s magnolia remains out of public view inside his home. Instead, a different magnolia has been chosen to take its place, through sheer necessity, due to all those who read about the man who planted it in times of despair, are touched by his writing, and seek to pay homage.

True and false, the tree still stands, as does the truth Bassani set on the page and planted in the ground, to outlast and outgrow those who would deny him meaning.

The poem ends like this:

Straight as a sword from its base to its tip

now it overtops the neighbouring roofs

beholding every bit of the city and the infinite

green space that circles it

but now somehow stumped I can guess

how it feels frail-tipped unsure

of a stretch up there in the heights a narrow space

in the sun

like someone at a loss

after a long journey

as to which road to take or

what to do

*Translation of the extract of Bassani’s poem The Racial Laws by Jamie McKendrick