Woman of Rome_A Life of Elsa Morante Read online

  Giulio Einaudi reinforced these uncertainties: “But I have the impression that the work goes on very irregularly, with long pauses, and I cannot foresee when it will be finished.”16 Clearly, Elsa was not in touch with either her publisher or her agent.

  However, earlier, in 1963, Einaudi had published Lo scialle andaluso (The Andalusian Shawl) a collection of twelve short stories. Except for the title story, which was written in 1951 and published in Botteghe Oscure, the literary review founded by the American-born Princess Marguerite Caetani (née Chapin), and two other stories, “Donna Amalia” (1950) and “Il soldato siciliano” (1945), the other nine stories were all written well before World War II. Most of them had appeared in the 1941 collection Il gioco segreto.

  The title story tells of a son’s obsessive love for his mother, an old ballerina whose lack of talent has driven her from the corps de ballet of the Opera of Rome to a provincial theater where she is booed offstage, and the mother’s love for the son. Morante deftly depicts the mother through the adolescent, jealous eyes of the son and the son through the besotted eyes of the mother and how both live in a fabulous world of make-believe. As in House of Liars, it is this world of make-believe and how they will remain trapped in their fantasies—not their obsessive, inappropriate love—that is the subject of the story. For the critic Cesare Garboli, “The Andalusian Shawl” was a little jewel, a perfect short story that also had the “contour” of a novel. He wrote that the story maintained a perfect balance between hilarity and tragedy and that the style stood halfway between what he called the “shadow” of House of Liars and the “smile” of Arturo’s Island.17

  The stories “The Thief of Light” (“Il ladro dei lumi”) and “Donna Amalia” represent two apposite aspects of Morante’s belief: in the first story, the protagonist becomes the symbol of modern man by robbing the world of light and plunging humanity into darkness; in the second, the eponymous character represents the splendor of art and of life. The story “The Sicilian Soldier” (“Il soldato siciliano”) stands in between the two and perhaps expresses Elsa Morante’s true message: the solitary wanderings of the soldier with a miner’s lamp on his head looking for death. The strongest of the other stories in the collection, “The Secret Game” (“Il gioco segreto”), which was discussed earlier and has been compared to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, is a fable of infancy and death where literature becomes the salvation for the three unhappy children who are unable to establish a healthy relationship with reality.18 Here again, the underlying pathology is not sex but an obsessive fascination with make-believe. The deliberately formal and old-fashioned style and language in these short stories was also intended to take the reader back to the past, to an older literary period. This is grammatically true as well. (Instead of using the conditional past, the accepted and mandatory tense to denote the future in Italian, Morante deliberately chose to use the conditional present, no longer a commonly used tense, to denote such a future action.)

  The novel Morante had set aside when Bill Morrow died, Without the Comfort of Religion, would never be completed. It belonged to a period when Elsa Morante was happy. It was also a time when Rome, according to Cesare Garboli, was beautiful and there was an immense hunger for life, the desire for pleasure and celebration. A time, too, when he described Elsa as being full of life. He talked about her gaiety, her puerile naïveté, her pleasure at giving joy to others, her laughter, her engaging way of talking and her moodiness, which he compared to the smallest cloud in a blue sky that could herald more clouds, a storm.19 With the death of Bill Morrow, the beautiful magic boy, the angel made of flesh and blood, all this changed for Elsa Morante. She had to face the awareness of herself as an older woman without fantasies, without a foreseeable future. This sudden and unwelcome self-knowledge may have driven her selection of stories: revisiting old stories and rewriting them may have been a way of surviving.

  nine

  POETRY AND PASOLINI

  Elsa Morante had a distinctive style of dressing that was all her own—she did not follow any fashion. She was, for instance, one of the first women in Italy to wear trousers. She also loved the color blue, electric blue, which is a difficult color to wear. Patrizia Cavalli, who became one of Elsa’s closest friends, has kept some of Morante’s clothes and one day while we were talking, she opened two large cupboards in her apartment and showed me some of them. She held up several tight-waisted taffeta evening dresses with voluminous skirts—an especially elegant one had a black velvet top and an iridescent pleated silk skirt, made by the French designer Jacques Fath—and a satin evening coat with dolman sleeves. All the clothes were very “sixties” and made up a much less austere and more youthful-looking wardrobe than I had imagined. Patrizia also showed me some bright cotton blouses that had large cuffs and high romantic collars. I particularly liked a purple one and held it up to myself for size. It was obvious, from looking at her clothes, that Elsa was quite small and slender—and she had no hips. In today’s sizes, she might have been a four or a six—except for her bust, which Patrizia, gesturing with her hands, suggested was ample.

  Lighting a cigarette, Patrizia Cavalli recounted how she first met Elsa Morante in either 1971 or 1972—the way she remembers is that Elsa gave her a cat who died when he was five years old in 1977. Patrizia Cavalli was a young student then (lazy and feckless is how she described herself ), and a new life opened up for her as a result of this meeting. She described Elsa Morante as a kind of magnet for people, people Patrizia got to meet and who, to this day, have remained her friends.

  She also described a day—a day she would never forget—when, walking back to Piazza Navona after lunch, Elsa suddenly turned to her and asked, “And you, Patrizia, what do you do?” Quickly taking stock and coming up with something, Cavalli told Morante that she wrote poems—something she had never admitted to anyone before because she was afraid of both committing herself and of risking judgment. Elsa Morante said, “Ah, why don’t you let me read your poems? I want to know how you are made.” This, naturally, posed an even greater threat for Patrizia. She kept making up excuses and putting Elsa off, hoping she would forget but of course she didn’t. At the same time, Patrizia was forced to reevaluate her poems—some of them, she realized, were awful. She began to write new poems, she developed an ear and she figured out what her relationship to language was. Finally, after six months, Patrizia Cavalli chose some older poems that she thought were not too bad and some new ones and gave them to Elsa. Most of her poems were very, very short:

  Mi darà la mano mi dirà:

  “Ciao bella ci vediamo.” 1

  You will give me your hand and you will say to me;

  “Good-bye beauty we will see one another again.”

  Afterward she went home, had lunch and worried. Half an hour later the telephone rang, and it was Elsa, who said, “Oh, Patrizia, I am happy! You are a poet.” From that moment on, Patrizia Cavalli’s life was changed forever. She felt accepted by Elsa, who had given her confidence and allowed her to become a poet. Elsa was also generous. She introduced Patrizia to her publisher and, in turn, Einaudi took the poems. But the funny thing, Patrizia Cavalli said, was that she herself was so naïve that she was not even surprised or excited by this—she thought that was how it always was. She was so indifferent, she said, because the important thing for her was that Elsa had liked her poems. Elsa Morante chose the order of the poems in the collection and even chose its title: Le mie poesie non cambieranno il mondo (My Poems Will Not Change the World). In appreciation, Patrizia Cavalli dedicated her book of poems to Elsa.2

  The poet Sandro Penna was also a great friend of Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia. Known as a protégé of Umberto Saba, Penna wrote exclusively about love—his love for young boys. Like Patrizia Cavalli’s, all his poems are very short and record an equally short and fleeting encounter, a moment of intense feeling or obsessive desire:

  Tu morirai fanciullo ed io ugualmente

  ma più belli di te ragazzi ancora
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  dormiranno nel sole in riva al mare.

  You’re going to die, kid.

  And so am I.

  But kids more beautiful

  than you already

  sleep in the sun

  at the seashore.3

  For Penna the adolescent boy, ragazzo or fanciullo, was both the inspiration and the personification of love. Not surprisingly, Sandro Penna and Pier Paolo Pasolini were good friends as well. Rumor had it that Penna and Pasolini were in competition to see who could seduce the greater number of young boys—the famous ragazzi di vita* (the literal meaning is “boys of life”)—along the banks of the Tiber or, for that matter, anywhere in Rome.

  Pier Paolo Pasolini was, for many years, Elsa Morante’s greatest friend. He was also the most talked about, the most discussed and insulted man in all of Italy and, probably, the most misunderstood. For many people of that era, Pasolini was the “emblem of scandal,” “the personification of provocative transgression” and “the prototype of indecency.”4 Anticonformist, difficult, private, extreme, he was attacked equally by right-wing conservatives, Fascists and Communists. Writers were made uncomfortable by the way he flaunted his homosexuality, filmmakers were jealous of his vast success, politicians mocked his meddling. He constantly took controversial positions—against student demonstrators and in support of the police, against divorce, against abortion—some of which, like his appeals to abolish schools and television and his obsession with preserving the Friulian dialect, seemed downright contrarian. Finally, his “cult of youth,” his boyish clothes (tight jeans and boots), his obsession with staying fit, his habit of playing pickup soccer with local boys, his fast cars, his vanity, were all derided.

  Pier Paolo was extremely affectionate. He loved Elsa and they saw each other nearly daily. If not, they corresponded to each other in verse—Pasolini once sent Elsa a poem in the shape of a rose (poesia in forma di rosa) and she wrote back a calligram in the shape of a cat (madrigale in forma di gatto). They told each other their dreams and tried to interpret them. Pasolini made his deep attachment to Elsa clear: “What a pleasure; we meet almost every day, and to meet her gives me a feeling of celebration, as though each time we were returning from long journeys. We don’t think about it, but deep down it’s always a miracle to see one another.” Describing her with his keen filmmaker’s eye, he wrote, “Elsa is sitting on the edge of the divan, upright, swathed in one of her undersea colors, with those eyes whose nearsightedness spreads a film of light haze around the pupils, the eyelids, and the stormy face.”5

  They shared their obsessive truth-telling as well as their love of games. More important, however, they were interested in Eastern religions and philosophies; they both had a similar theory of reality, which they loved to discuss. For Morante and Pasolini, the opposition between the real and the unreal was more significant than the opposition between life and death. They believed that only the authentic—the concrete, however painful or unhappy—mattered. Both ranted against the establishment, against power, illusion and the idea of possession. Morante’s concept of reality, which was influenced by her reading of Simone Weil, especially Weil’s Cahiers (a book she had read so often the pages were in tatters), was based on the imaginary—not necessarily a contradiction—and on how fables, fantasies, mystery and magic serve to illuminate the “real” world. For Morante, the “real,” which could be as ephemeral as happiness or a song, is the world transformed by the imagination and is invisible. It is the “dream of the thing,” an expression attributed to Karl Marx that Pasolini planned to use as a title for a novel and which conveyed reality to him in its entirety.6 Pasolini was also influenced (as to some extent was Morante) by the writer Carlo Levi, who believed in an art where naming things for the first time made them exist. He also believed in a reality that was easier to find among the simple, southern Italian peasantry than among the corrupted bourgeoisie.

  In 1955, Elsa Morante did Pasolini a large service. She persuaded Moravia to publish Pasolini’s great verse epic, The Ashes of Gramsci (Le ceneri di Gramsci), in Nuovi Argomenti, which, until then, did not publish poetry. The eleven poems in this work were based on the notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, the cofounder of the Italian Communist Party who, for ten years and until his death, was a political prisoner of the Fascists. The Ashes of Gramsci, which is often compared to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (while the poet himself is often compared to Che Guevara), is Pasolini’s best-known literary work. It is an angry lament for lost hopes and, in the words of a Pasolini biographer, “the betrayal of the dream for which Guido [Pasolini, Pier Paolo’s brother*] died: the failure of the left, and of all Italians, to hold together and realize the vision of a more just postwar society.”7

  tra le vecchie muraglie l’autunnale

  maggio. In esso c’è il grigiore del mondo

  la fine del decennio in cui ci appare

  tra le macerie finito il profondo

  e ingenuo sforzo di rifare la vita;

  Inside the ancient walls

  the autumnal May diffuses a deadly

  peace, disquieting like our destinies,

  and holds the whole world’s dismay

  the finish of the decade that saw

  the profound, naïve struggle to make

  life over collapse in ruins.8

  In his verses, Pasolini managed to integrate his personal anguish with Italian history in a tone that was a remarkable combination of confessional poetry and public rhetoric. When it was subsequently published in book form, The Ashes of Gramsci was an instant success and sold out. It won the Viareggio Prize for poetry in 1957.

  The next year, there was additional cause for celebration. Longanesi Editions published the collected poems of the three friends: Elsa Morante’s Alibi (Alibi), Sandro Penna’s Croce e delizia (A Cross and a Delight) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s L’usignolo della Chiesa Cattolica (The Nightingale of the Catholic Church). Of the three, Morante’s collection received the least attention from the critics and the public. She was accused of being a beginner and her poems were thought to strain too hard to be experimental and modern. Even Cesare Garboli, her ardent supporter, admitted that he preferred poems with rhymes and rhythms and liked only old-fashioned, traditional verse.9 Hard as it is to judge poetry, harder still when it is written in another language, it may nevertheless be interesting to look at how her poems illumine her prose, keeping in mind what she wrote in the preface to Alibi. Perhaps anticipating the criticism, Elsa Morante asked the reader to forgive the little worth and importance of the pages that were to follow. She wrote that she was by nature and by destiny a writer of prose stories. Her few verses were no more than an echo of her novels and no more than a pastime—a game, to which she sometimes liked to abandon herself without too much commitment for the simple pleasure of the music. And if she had decided to publish these verses (some of which dated back to her youth), she had done so only in the hope that they might offer the reader the same bit of repose and pleasure she received from composing them.10

  The main theme of the sixteen poems in Morante’s collection is love, a love that ranges from a sort of glorified love to one that is idolatrous and addictive. In the poem “Avventura” (“Adventure”), which is addressed to Luchino Visconti and begins: “Do you have a heart? Legend has it that you don’t have one,” the love described is not mutual. Instead, it becomes a mirror of the speaker’s own self and is a narcissistic and masochistic love. Every love, according to Morante, is a lost love and she, in particular, has a vocation for unhappy loves. Certainly, in Visconti’s case, it was an impossible love. “Alibi,” the title poem, has been read as a metaphor and the key to Morante’s universe and how she understands the creative process and the writing of fiction. As the meaning of the word suggests, an alibi is an absence or an excuse, and it was how Morante saw fiction or poetry as providing a way of creating an alternate reality, a reality that does not necessarily replace present reality but becomes a part of it, and changes it. Morante also claimed, “Only the
one who loves knows. Unfortunate the one who does not love!” Only through love, Morante is saying, can one break through the barrier of conventional knowledge and truly know reality (implicit, too, in the poem is the concept that one cannot know a person unless one loves him).

  The German composer Hans Werner Henze, who was living in Italy (and still is) and was a friend of Elsa, set “Alibi” to music in his Cantata della fiaba estrema. The piece was first played in Zurich on February 26, 1965, and Elsa attended the performance. According to Henze, she was not particularly pleased and felt that the music was not sufficiently impassioned while he felt that he had captured the gentle and childlike quality of the poem. Wisely, he did not try to justify his interpretation or explain his intentions to Elsa.11

  Elsa Morante’s extensive library contained a volume of Coleridge’s complete poems and, as an exercise, it is interesting to see which verses she earmarked and made notations beside, as they may shed a light on her private feelings. Among those she underlined were “Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide, wide, sea! / And never a saint took pity on / My soul in agony” from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; “I know ’tis but a dream, yet feel more anguish / Than if ’twere truth” and “Will no one hear these stifled groans and wake me?” from “The Night-mare Death in Life”; and “By woman wailing for her demon-lover!” from Kubla Khan. Morante also penciled in crosses beside: “Composed on a journey Homeward; the Author having received Intelligence of the Birth of a Son,” and “To a Friend who asked how I felt when the Nurse first presented my Infant to me.” Both sonnets have to do with the birth of a child and the writer’s rather ambivalent reaction and could very well be indications of Elsa Morante’s own feelings of loneliness and loss.12