Von Rezzori Again

Only one more post--for now--on Gregor von Rezzori, and those distinctive, affecting memoirs*(one a novel, but that's a detail) of his life in the heart of Europe through the tumultuous middle of the 20th Century. He remarks somewhere--I let the page ref slip away from me--on a happy time in his later life, and adds, parenthetically, that he didn't have very many of them. And you recognize with a start that he is right: indeed, has written one (or two) of the rarest of all books--books about an unhappy life that are not themelves unhappy. For consider: he was born in Bukovina, the child of two parents utterly self-absorbed and each isolated in his (her) narcissism--born, I say, just in time to be uprooted by World War I. At the end of the war his "native country" was reorganized out from under him. He knocked around as a desultory student in the turbulent years between the wars and found himself in Vienna just in time for the Anschluss in 1938. And then...

Of "then" he doesn't write much in these books. He evidently lived out World War II in Germany, but, being then a "Romanian," he was not drafted into World War II. He makes glancing reference to some hard times in the chaos that followed the war. Wiki says he was at one time a stateless person, though he ended his life a citizen of Austria.

Things seem to have gone better after the war. He became a writer and broadcaster, and found his way into the movie business, both as a writer and an actor. By his old age, he evidently evolved into something of a personage, a living monument amid the wreckage of his time. At some point he made it back to his ancestral Italy, where he married a woman who bears formidable handle of "Baronessa Beatrice Monti della Corte von Rezzori"— New York magazine calls her "impatient, charismatic, preternaturally controlling." Together they created a Tuscan retreat for writers, which survived him (and over which she presides).

Of all this he writes with an unobtrusive grace, just safely downwindf rom suavity. One other thing you notice (and if you don't he'll call your attention to it)--an almost paralyizing detachment, one could say chilliness, as if he early learned that the appropriate facade for gazing into the abyss was a mask of civility. He's tried so many other crafts with success, it's a wonder he didn't wind up a diplomat. Or maybe that's just it: he was a diplomat, devoting his whole career to the raison d'État of a sovereignty of one.
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*Memoirs of an Anti-Semite; The Snows of Yesteryear.