Fiction and sad records of the past

Laurence Mizzi: Ħsad fil-Ħarifa, Klabb Kotba Maltin; Mill-Arkivju ta’ Ħajti, Horizon. 2012.

Laurence Mizzi is a much-respected author and broadcaster, best known perhaps for his book on Maltese individuals’ experiences of World War II and for his books about Carmelo Borg Pisani, hanged for treason during the war for entering Malta on a spying mission. Mizzi was also well known for many years as a member and later chairman of the Broadcasting Authority.

The many readers who have enjoyed Mizzi’s books on the war and on Borg Pisani will be interested in the many letters he received about them, some from distinguished personalities

Ħsad fil-Ħarifa is an engaging collection of short stories mostly written in the 1960s and 1970s, together with a few essays and a handful of poems dating back to the same period. Many of the tales were written, as he himself admits, under the influence of Temi Zammit and Ġorġ Zammit. They are amusing and mildly satirical stories mostly about small town people with pretensions, and they are set at a time when had not gone through the changes that have transformed it during the past five decades.

The plots are never elaborate and there is rarely any attempt to delve deep into the characters’ psychology, and yet some of the characters are very vivid indeed, often rousing the reader both to smile, and to sympathise with them.

Two stories from the 1960s about the misfortune that hits the well-to-do Sur Tonin are typical. Persuaded in one case to stand for election to what must have been at the time the Legislative Assembly and cunningly persuaded to throw plenty of his money around, the poor man comes a cropper, getting a humiliatingly small number of votes, while in another story he is again persuaded, this time rather reluctantly, to chair a committee to organise the village band club’s silver jubilee.

This time things go well, except that the artist who is commissioned to paint Toninu’s wife’s portrait maliciously not only depicts her warts and all but even uglifies her sole claim to beauty. Mizzi’s semi-colloquial style comes close to that of a good oral story-teller and the stories have an attractive simplicity.

Doża Żgħira ta’ Mħabba (A tiny dose of love) was written in the 1970s. Like one of the Toninu stories it is connected to a parliamentary election, but now the tone is very different. The main characters are a married couple, Ġanni and Mena, who, like other couples, disagreed about party politics. When Ġanni, a staunch Nationalist and canvasser for one of the candidates, falls seriously ill, he is determined to go and vote despite the danger to his health.

Mena, a Labour voter, sets his mind at rest after a while by showing him she has not voted and does not intend to do so. Mizzi is a great believer in marriage, and this story brings this out well.

He is fond of portraying characters who come back after a very long period, seeking to recapture the past. In Marija, for instance, an Englishman who served during the War and had an affair with a Gudja girl, comes back 36 years later, now a widower, seeking the girl he had loved. When he finds her, still a good-looker, she tells him angrily that she had borne him a son after he had left.

We learn that Marija still occupies an important place in his heart, but are left wondering why he had never tried to write to her even once. The ending is a happy one.

In Il-Qanpiena tal-Erwieħ (The All Souls bell) Mizzi reminds us amusingly of bygone folk customs with a religious connection. A boy is aged three but, though not deaf, still has never said a word. His mother is advised to go to have her son blessed by the Papas at the Greek Catholic church and queues up after many other mothers to do so, but the son remains mute.

The second attempt is to get hold of a hand-bell formerly at the Church of All Souls in Valletta and have the child drink out of it. The result is that the boy gets a bad throat infection, but, glory be, when he recovers his tongue is unloosed and, like some parrots, he embarrassingly repeats all he has heard his parents say about their relatives.

This story again is in a long tradition of Maltese folk stories, as is Skandlu fis-Sema (A scandalous incident in heaven) about a quarrel caused by a current drought in Malta, followed by a lawsuit (!) between the Apostle and St Bartholomew in the courts of heaven .

His interest in Malta’s Italophiles before and during the War is illustrated by Ħodon Ward għas-Sur Gismond (A bouquet of roses for Sur Gismond) in which the Gismond of the title’s great love for Italy is ended when he falls victim to the first air-raid on Malta by Italian bombers.

Three of the essays share the same topic: the way in which noise, rowdiness and unseemly behaviour by those around makes it impossible for him to fulfil his dream of a peaceful summer at a seaside resort. I only hope he subsequently came to realise that Buġibba in the summer is far from the best holiday resort for middle-aged and elderly persons…

Lill-Għasfur fil-Gaġġa (To a caged bird) uses the quandary of a caged bird to describe his unhappy situation and that of others in the 1970s when Mintoff embarked on his policy of making sure that civil servants and people in broadcasting always toed his line. For an excellent account of how he was treated, read his book Minn Wara l-Mikrofonu (1994).

Verse is not the medium in which Mizzi expresses himself best, but his elegy on his father who died after suffering from a cruel disease, Kalvarju MS1, portrays the poet’s sorrow but also his deeply Christian attitude towards suffering and death.

Mill-Arkivju ta’ Ħajti is a selection of letters sent to Mizzi and a smaller number sent by him between 1950 and 2008. Those in the first section, Xandir (Broadcasting) are a grim reminder of the sorry state to which Mintoff’s government in the 1970s reduced trade unionism and freedom of speech.

In 1977 Mizzi was suspended for three months after having acted in accordance with a legitimate directive by his trade union, and in 1982, after obeying the Nationalist Party’s directive of civil disobedience (the Mnarja directive) he was transferred from his job as officer in charge of school broadcasting and sent back to his old job in a classroom.

In the last year of Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici’s administration he was made member of the Broadcasting Authority (a body reconstituted after two years in limbo) and ended up as chairman of the Authority under the new Nationalist administration, but, as a letter by the intellectual Oliver Friggieri shows, there were Nationalists who were still dissatisfied with the state of broadcasting in 1991.

The many readers who have enjoyed Mizzi’s books on the war and on Borg Pisani will be interested in the many letters he received about them, some from distinguished personalities, and all those interested in the Maltese literature of the last decades will want to read the letters written to Mizzi by Francis Ebejer, Karmenu Vassallo, Gużè Chetcuti, Herbert Ganado and Albert Cassola.