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PARTISAN REVIEW
years later she is still there among the squalid ruins. The Italian Army had
first taken over and worked over the hotel, and it was followed by the
Germans and certain French.Jack did not reappear till the war ended but his
mother stayed on to welcome the non-paying guests. Netta wrote Jack,
"When the Italians were here your mother was their mother, but I was not
their Moslem wife." History has not, after all, been altogether off-stage.
"The Four Seasons" is about Mussolini and the English, although it is
also about a young Italian servant girl who spends a year working for the
Unwins on the Ligurian coast. Her employers are upper-class but penuri–
ous; they share a thin cutlet or the vegetable remains of a stew as a family
meal and their two children are so weak wi th rickets that Carmela devel–
ops a bend in her spine from carrying them about. To the Unwins and their
friends the serving-girl remains an invisibility though she catches the kind–
ly attention of the new clergyman who wants to fix the church clock and
is advised "none of us has ever missed a train," and she is glanced at sym–
pathetically by Dr. Chaffee who gives her anemia pills she treasures as
keepsakes. But she never understands the Signora's neurotic phobias and
mix of suspicion and an insincere benevolence which does not prevent her
from neglecting to pay Carmela's wages. Although a picture of Mussolini
had hung in her village classroom Carmela does not take notice, as we do,
that the Unwins are admirers of the new Fascist state. When her little
brother shows up one day at the kitchen door Mr. Unwin says, "Why do
you beg? No one needs to beg in modern Italy." Carmela's last glimpse of
Dr. Chaffee is on a line ofJewish deportees. He gives her a vague wave of
farewell-or benediction.
In each of Gallant's successive decade-groupings stories that seem to be
simply episodes of mundane life are lit from beneath by history. One of the
most elaborate stories of the fifties is "The Remission" which relates how
Alec Webb came down to the Riviera to die and died too slowly, so that
his family changed while he did so. As Alec faded, his wife took on more
brilliant color, and, finally, a lover, and his children, growing imperceptibly
older, accommodated to their mother's defection. Only Alec's friends, the
resident eccentrics and snobs of the English colony, seemed stuck change–
lessly in time. Alec's replacement by Barbara's lover, a movie bit player, is
historical. "If he sounded like a man in a British joke, it was probably
because he had said so many British-sounding lines in films set on the
Riviera. Eric Wilkinson was the chap with the strong blue eyes and ginger
mustache, never younger than thirty-four, who flashed on for a second,just
long enough to show there was an Englishman in the room." Dying at last,
this type of the English gentleman has become a movie formula.
As for many, the sixties were a watershed for Gallant. In Paris during
the tumultuous days of
soixante-huit
she kept a remarkable notebook
