Woman of Rome_A Life of Elsa Morante Read online

  Apparently Bill Morrow was the sort of person everyone—men, women, children—fell in love with (in retrospect, this may have been part of his problem). Not only was he very, very handsome—he had once been a model and his looks were a cross between James Dean’s and Alain Delon’s—but too many people loved him. The actor Allen Midgette, a friend of Bill and later a friend of Elsa Morante as well, remembers how a package once arrived in New York for Bill. The package was from Elsa in Italy and it contained a mirror with a note that said, “Dear Bill, This is for you to look at your beautiful face.” Allen also recalls how surprised he was that anyone could speak so frankly and right away he thought Elsa must be an interesting woman. According still to Allen, Bill Morrow was incredibly alive and colorful and completely without prejudice or guile—in a word, “dynamite.” He also inspired truth in people, which is probably why Elsa was so attracted to him.

  Bernardo Bertolucci, too, was curious about Bill. One day, he asked Allen (who had gone to Rome to pursue his acting career), “Can you tell me about this Bill Morrow because all these people speak about him as if he were Jesus Christ?” Allen, who must have been a bit in love with Bill himself, replied that Bill was a holy man but not in the way Bertolucci might think. Later, in Bertolucci’s film Before the Revolution, Allen Midgette played the part of a disaffected young Calabrian man who kills himself. Just before he does so, there is a poignant scene in which Midgette acrobatically rides his bicycle—sometimes standing on the seat—in a sort of dance where he repeatedly crashes and gets up again, seemingly unfazed, as if to prove his infallibility. Allen told me that, during that scene, he was thinking of Bill. Later, Pasolini made a film called Teorema (Theorem) in which Terence Stamp plays a stranger who is either Christ, God, the devil or simply a hustler and who manages to have sex with everyone in a family—husband, wife, son, daughter—as well as their maid, forever changing each of them. However, except for the maid, all the family members live the experience but do not understand it because, according to Pasolini’s theory, the bourgeoisie has lost the sense of the sacred. Only the servant, who is a peasant, has not. It has been suggested that the character played by Terence Stamp was based on Bill Morrow. Alberto Moravia, of all people, once said that he never understood how a man could love another man until he met Bill Morrow. The poet Sandro Penna, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Natalia Ginzburg, all loved Bill Morrow. They thought he was the reincarnation of Rimbaud.1

  According to everyone who saw them together, Elsa and Bill had a very intense, dramatic love affair. Elsa was almost fifty and Bill was less than half her age, although it was he who had sought her out. Elsa rented an apartment for them both on via del Babuino, but Bill spent most of his days painting in Elsa’s via Archimede studio, with his cat, Kumquat, that he had brought with him from New York, and listening to his favorite music, Buddy Holly, Bessie Smith, John Coltrane. Apparently, he never learned much Italian—he and Elsa spoke English together, Bill talking in his Kentucky accent. All the while, however, Elsa worried a great deal about Bill. She understood his problems and wanted to both protect him and make him strong. She often acted more like a mother to him than a lover. An epileptic, Bill was prone to seizures; also, he drank too much and was addicted to Seconal. He had already been hospitalized in New York after a suicide attempt. Allen Midgette remembers another incident when both young men were out on the terrace at via Archimede. “I could feel he was up to something,” Allen told me, “and I sat down next to his legs as he was standing there looking over and I knew I had to grab them and sure enough, it happened, and I grabbed his legs and would not let go and he just laughed and said, that, anyway, he would have fallen on the terrace below, which was just a couple of floors down. Bill was not the kind of person you talked with about things like that, you couldn’t say: ‘Hey, what was that about?’ because he would tell you not to come around anymore.”2

  Together Elsa and Bill went to Ischia, Switzerland and Venice; Elsa also went to New York several times with Bill. At the time, she was very attracted to the burgeoning American counterculture and to the beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso and the novelist Jack Kerouac. She also loved New York City, as a letter she wrote to Pasolini in 1960 illustrates: “This is not a city, but the city, it is the universe, the firmament, the viscera of the earth. You would love it! Millions of Anglo-Saxons, Italians, Spaniards, Chinese, Negroes, Puerto Ricans, running around on the streets. Everyone returns your greeting, as if they knew you. They ask your [first] name and right away start calling you by it. And all around, buildings like immense rocks, and cars like shooting stars.”3

  Elsa Morante traveled a great deal during the late fifties and early sixties. She went to the Soviet Union with Giacomo Debenedetti; to China as part of a cultural delegation; to Brazil on a PEN conference with Moravia; and, finally, in 1961, to India with Pasolini and Moravia. Happy at the time and in love and, as a result, perhaps more forthcoming, she gave an interview to Francine Virduzzo, a reporter for the magazine Afrique-Action. The piece begins by describing Elsa: “Elsa Morante is a strange woman who has a catlike face and, who, like a cat, has that deceptive lethargy, that ‘farniente’ aspect which allows her to relentlessly observe quotidian reality. Like a cat, Elsa Morante gives herself over to the pitiless dissection of life so as to be able to act slowly and seldom, but with absolute certainty.”

  The interview’s most interesting section covered contemporary literature and other writers:

  Francine Virduzzo: Do you think one can speak of an influence of the French nouveau roman on modern Italian literature?

  Elsa Morante: No, thank goodness. The French phenomenon of the nouveau roman is not a cultural one. It has to do with eccentricities, which are not susceptible to any developments….

  F.V.: Who then, according to you, are the principal young Italian writers?

  E.M.: Pasolini, naturally, and then [Carlo] Cassola, [Italo] Calvino, and also Natalia Ginzburg, who is an extremely interesting writer.

  F.V.: What book are you actually working on now?

  E.M.: I have already written about half of it. Its title? Without the Comfort of Religion. It is the story of a young man after the war who dies of a terrible disease.

  F.V.: And now the classic question: who has influenced you the most?

  E.M.: I can’t really say that I have been influenced by any writer—by a musician, yes: Mozart is my master. He is the only artist whom I can recognize as a master. From him, I learned a lot of things that I was never able to understand. No, no single writer has really influenced me, but I can tell you who my favorite authors are: Saba. I very much like Saba and Penna. They are two very important poets and I always quote them. As for novelists? Verga, and then, if we are speaking of foreign literature…Cervantes, Stendhal, Tchekhov [sic], Melville.4

  A few years earlier, in the spring of 1959, Morante participated in a survey, consisting of nine questions, conducted by Nuovi Argomenti, the magazine cofounded by Moravia. The first question in the survey asked whether there was a crisis in the novel as a literary genre. Morante did not think so: wonderful novels, she said, had been written and she named their authors: Proust, James, Svevo and Saba (she dismissed Joyce but admitted that she might be mistaken). She maintained that, every day, the word was constantly being renewed with life, like a fresh rose. Another question asked whether the novel had turned its back on psychology (Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute were the examples given), Morante answered in the negative: every novel, she claimed, is a psychological drama because it represents the relation of man to reality and each writer, she continued, has a predominant sentiment that stimulates or colors his or her discovery of the world. The penultimate question was about the difficulties of writing a historical novel and it seemed to already address those that would later be raised by her novel History, which she would not begin writing for at least another decade. She answered with examples of historical works that have captured certain truths: “In a most psychologically intim
ate poem, Petrarch describes his secret love for a married woman and yet the Sonnets give one of the perfect images of fourteenth-century Italy; Manzoni’s The Betrothed tells the story at the time of the Lansquenets* yet it presents a perfect picture of nineteenth-century Italy; Kafka writes surreal fables yet no photographic or documentary work expresses certain atrocious verities of this present century as do those surreal fables.” To the last question, “Who are your favorite novelists and why?” Morante’s answer was consistent with the one she gave Francine Virduzzo: Homer, Cervantes, Stendhal, Melville, Chekhov, and Verga; the reason she chose these writers, she said, is that they elicited from her “an extraordinary surge of vitality.” 5

  The novel Elsa Morante was working on, Senza i comforti della religione (Without the Comfort of Religion), was going to be totally autobiographical—not in the sense of reality (the characters were invented), but in the sense that the main character, Giuseppe, would represent a part of her soul and be the opposite of Arturo in Arturo’s Island. It is the story of two brothers—one a bastard, the other legitimate; one dark, the other light; one a poet, the other a filmmaker; one shy and sensitive, the other brash and ambitious; etc.—that, in Morante’s hands, would have turned into a tragedy, the tale of a fallen idol. Morante had not yet decided whether to write the novel in the first or third person but, according to her notes, the problem that interested her was one not of style but of religion. A Catholic, Elsa Morante was religious, although not in a conventional or orthodox sense. She had studied a lot of Indian philosophy—Hinduism, Buddhism and Sufism—and she did not believe in a divinity who was a single entity and was outside the universe. Instead, she believed in an incarnate god who manifested himself in the forces of nature. Her religiosity was more mystical and a bit idolatrous—for instance, she thought of Christ as a sort of rebellious youth, an idea that also greatly influenced Pasolini. Basically, she embraced all religions.

  Later, Elsa was very influenced by Simone Weil. One could not, she felt, live without religion—the kind of religion that was altruistic and a help to others. Art, too, that was born from this desire to be useful was a form of religion. In Without the Comfort of Religion, her work in progress, she planned for the main character to solve the religion problem by becoming a poet. Italy, she also added in her notes for the novel, was the country that was the least religious in the world; the Italians could be a great people in moments of misery, but when they became fortunate they lost their direction.6

  At the opening of an exhibition of Bill Morrow’s paintings at the Nuova Pesta gallery in Rome, in March 1962, Enzo Siciliano, the critic and writer, saw Bill for the first time and described him as “thin, graceful and looking like certain well-bred Anglo-Saxons; wrapped in a single-breasted, beige raincoat, the color of which seemed to match his body…. His smooth, blond hair fell on his forehead, his features were sharp and animated, his eyes were the color of water.” Siciliano also wrote that rumor had it that Morrow’s sexual orientation was ambiguous and that he had a taste for “the honey-sweet perfume of hashish.” He compared the bright, pure colors of Morrow’s paintings to the collages of Matisse, then, taking into account his nationality, compared them to the paintings of Stuart Davis, “a Stuart Davis who had gone back to the roots of figurative art.”7 The year before, at the Galerie Lambert in Paris, Alberto Moravia wrote a brief introduction to another of Bill Morrow’s exhibits. He repeatedly mentioned the violence inherent in the paintings at the same time that they evoked “the silence, the suspension, the fluctuation, the depth, the light and its reflection that are inherent in the states of mind arrived at by contemplation.”8

  Now, Carlo Cecchi, Elsa Morante’s executor,* owns all of Bill Morrow’s paintings. (Anna Magnani owned one once, a painting of a horse, but after Bill Morrow died, Elsa Morante bought it back from Magnani.) On a cold winter morning I drove thirty or forty kilometers north of Rome to Carlo Cecchi’s eighteenth-century house, built on the side of a cliff, to see them. Cecchi had taken a lot of trouble—his house was being renovated—and he had spread the unframed paintings on the floor against the walls of his living room for me to see. I am afraid he was disappointed by my reaction. For the most part, while they are quite vibrant and colorful, the paintings seem fairly naïve and a little childish. A lot of them are of animals: horses, pigeons, cats—the reason Elsa may have liked them.

  In April 1962, while Bill Morrow was in New York for a brief visit—he was planning to return to Italy and live there permanently with Elsa—he was killed. It was presumed (although never confirmed) that, hallucinating on LSD, he had thought he could fly and he jumped off a Manhattan skyscraper. It has also been said that that day was particularly windy. When Elsa Morante heard the news of Bill’s death, she was devastated. She locked herself up in her bedroom and, for two months, never left it. Prescient perhaps, Moravia had ended his introduction to Bill Morrow’s show at the Galerie Lambert in Paris with the words “And although these paintings appear so immediate, so pure, so calm and limpid, they are born of the rage of a youth spent in the anguish and strangeness of a world profoundly alienated which is that of the United States. Thus, once again, art will have been paid for by life.”9

  That year and those that immediately followed must, most certainly, have been among the unhappiest in Elsa Morante’s life. She turned fifty and, added to the remorse and sorrow she felt for the tragic and premature death of Bill Morrow, there might have been another even deeper and crueler reason for her unhappiness. Her marriage to Alberto Moravia, always difficult under the best of circumstances, had come to an end. Moravia left Elsa to live with Dacia Maraini, a younger woman who was a poet, playwright, novelist and journalist. His feelings on leaving Elsa—he and Dacia were on their way to Africa together—Moravia described thus: “During the night, as we were flying out, I was awake and was trying to look down at the shadows of the Sahara. And then all of a sudden I felt a sense of absolute physical liberation. As if I had rid myself of something heavy, like a plaster cast.” Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia never divorced or got a legal separation. Moravia simply moved out and went to live with Dacia. They remained on cordial terms, seeing each other from time to time, for as Moravia also said, “the separation was never entirely complete.”10 To support Elsa, he opened a bank account in her name—one she could draw on whenever she needed money. Elsa’s needs were modest and she did not often make use of this account; also her books, especially History, brought her income.

  After Bill Morrow’s death, Elsa Morante no longer had the desire to write. She abandoned Without the Comfort of Religion, the novel she had been working on. If someone asked what she was doing, she answered that she was “writing very little.” Consumed by grief, idle and restless, Elsa appeared to be living one day at a time. On the spur of the moment, she traveled to Spain, to Greece, to islands in the Mediterranean, sometimes alone or sometimes with a friend or someone she had met by chance. One day, for instance, she called Allen Midgette at his hotel and asked him to go to Spain with her for a few weeks, which he did. In a diary entry written in September 1963, she described her peripatetic way of life: “I travel at random, from island to island, without a specific plan. I stop where I like and for however long I like. I travel alone and go from one island to the other on old steam liners and on fishing boats.”

  Six months later, she wrote:

  Two years since April 30 [the date of Bill Morrow’s death]. And I continue to live as if I were still alive. At certain moments, I forget the horror. Some bit of consolation arrives, as if I had found you in something else. But then the pain returns unexpectedly. Also, now the other dead are death itself. Before you, it was not like this.

  How many more years must I still linger: twenty, thirty? The only humanly possible way to reach the end is not to be myself, but to be all the others, all those who remain. Not to be separate. To be all who are past, present and future, all who are alive and are dead. That way I can also be you….

  The only possible happin
ess: not to be one but to be everyone.…

  A sort of parody of the gestures I made when I lived. Putting notebooks in order, moving around, putting on records in between the times that I was writing novels.

  This terrible feeling—like a siren—Sleep sleep sleep—Fall fly–

  To keep a diary?!?! He used to say: yes, to put in all the shit [sic; in English]—rubbish, the dregs—11

  Meanwhile, Blanche Knopf wrote to Elsa, “It is so long since I have heard from you that what I really expect is a new novel on my desk tomorrow morning. What has happened and where have you been and have you been writing?”12 Several months later, Blanche sent another letter complaining that Elsa had not answered her and that too much time had elapsed since she had heard from Elsa and since Elsa had written a novel.13 In a third letter, she was persistent but optimistic: “I hear, and am very interested in the news, that you are finishing a novel. It is high time…. Tell me how it is coming along and when I will be likely to see [sic]. It has been too long since I have heard anything from you so I long to have an answer to this. I hope you are well and having a lovely time and getting on fast with this new book.”14 Blanche Knopf also wrote to Elsa’s agent and to her Italian publisher in the hope of having more definite news. Both men put her off politely. Erich Linder wrote: “I am also sorry to disappoint you over the Morante novel: I have heard absolutely nothing about it, and as far as I know there is no sign of it…[w]hich may not mean much, as she may produce it any day all the same.”15