Woman of Rome_A Life of Elsa Morante Read online

  “To a Fable” (“Alla favola”), written in 1947 and dedicated to Anna in House of Liars, despite its difficulties, is regarded by most critics and readers of her work as Morante’s most successful poem.

  Di te, Finzione, mi cingo,

  fatua veste.

  Ti lavoro con l’auree piume

  che vestí prima d’esser fuoco

  la mia grande stagione defunta

  per mutarmi in fenice lucente!

  L’ago è rovente, la tela è fumo.

  Consunta fra i suoi cerchi d’oro

  giace la vanesia mano

  pur se al gioco di m’ama non m’ama

  la risposta celeste

  mi fingo.

  O Fiction, I draw about me

  your concealing garment

  and adorn it with golden plumage

  that was mine in the great lost season

  before I grew all fire

  and rose a radiant phoenix!

  But the needle is flame, the cloth is smoke,

  and the vain hand lies withered away

  under the golden rings—

  even if in the game of “loves me, loves me not”

  I invent a consoling reply:

  an illusory voice from heaven.13

  Again, the poem posits that fiction is not just an external quality added to reality but a quality of reality, and that there is no real conflict or dialectic between what is real and what is imaginary. It also implies that the duty of the artist or writer is to penetrate more deeply into this reality.

  The language of Elsa Morante’s poetry is often artificial, theatrical and difficult to respond to. She makes a point of using outmoded words and the poems appear self-conscious. Often, she seems to be writing with magic formulas. There is a strong sense of destiny in the poems and many references to Greek mythological figures, but fortunately this high-mindedness is undercut by Morante’s never taking herself too seriously. She is aware that there are bigger tragedies in the world than her unhappy loves, and there is always a strong sense of irony in the poems. She deliberately sets out to act the part of the pazzeriella or fool (in the Shakespearean sense). “Oh, crazy one” (“Ah, pazza”) is how she addresses herself in “Avventura,” which is a way of establishing empathy with the reader and of keeping the poem from becoming too heavy-handed. And, of the sixteen poems in Alibi, three of them are addressed to Elsa Morante’s beloved cats.

  Alberto Moravia’s friendship with Pasolini was based more on their mutual interest in political and cultural matters, although they did not always agree on them. In addition, they traveled a great deal together, to Africa and to India. Both men wrote books about the 1961 trip to India that Elsa also went on. It is indicative of the difference in their personalities that Pasolini’s is called The Scent of India while Moravia’s book is called An Idea of India. In his account Pasolini often mentions that he and Moravia took long, contemplative evening walks through the streets of Calcutta, Delhi, Agra and Benares, but he does not always make it clear whether Elsa Morante was with them or not. She does not appear until he describes a visit to Sister (not yet Mother) Teresa, who was administering a leper colony. According to Pasolini there were sixty thousand lepers in Calcutta. Clearly he was very impressed with Sister Teresa and used his poetic and cinematographer’s sensibility to describe her: “Sister Teresa is an old woman, brown of skin, because she is Albanian, tall, dry, with two almost masculine cheek-bones, and a gentle eye which ‘sees’ wherever it looks. In an impressive way she resembles a famous Saint Anna of Michelangelo: and on her features is impressed true goodness, of the type described by Proust in his old maid Françoise: goodness without sentimental additions, without expectations, both tranquil and tranquillising, powerful and practical.”14

  The second time Elsa is acknowledged concerned a young beggar named Revi, whom Pasolini befriended. With the hope of bettering the boy’s prospects, Pasolini took him to the home of a Dutch priest where, with very mixed feelings, he left him. “That evening at supper in the hotel I tormented Moravia and Elsa with my scruples: we were getting towards the end of our voyage in India, and were practically drained by the pressure of its suffering and by pity. Every time one leaves someone in India one has the impression that one is leaving a dying person who is about to drown in the midst of the flotsam of a shipwreck.”15 (It has been pointed out that the two times Pasolini mentioned Morante on that trip to India, the circumstances had to do with acts of charity.16) Later, Elsa was to describe to a friend a more lighthearted moment in India with Pasolini: “There was this little waiter serving us, and after a few words in broken English, off goes the boy and off goes the poet after him. Six minutes later the poet comes back and says: ‘I made love to him.’ ‘Love?!’ said I, ‘what love? Six minutes’ love!? Call it a little spasm of evacuation, that’s all.’”17

  It was Pasolini who was finally able to rescue Elsa Morante from her solitary grieving over Bill Morrow’s untimely death. He asked her to choose the music for the sound track of his new film, The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Elsa selected Bach, Mozart and the recently released Congolese Mass Missa Luba; although not credited, she also assisted him directing. The cast included Elsa’s brother Marcello Morante as Saint Joseph, her nephew Giacomo Morante as one of the apostles, Pasolini’s good friends Enzo Siciliano and Giorgio Agamben as two other apostles, Natalia Ginzburg as Mary of Bethany and her second husband, Gabriele Baldini, as Mary’s husband. (Pasolini’s first feature, Accatone, caused an uproar at the 1961 Venice Film Festival for its sympathetic portrayal of amoral characters, pimps and prostitutes. In it, Elsa Morante appears briefly as a prisoner sitting on the floor of her cell, looking dejected.) The work seemed to revive Elsa. She moved back to the apartment on via dell’Oca from the one she had rented for herself and Bill Morrow on via del Babuino, and she busied herself redecorating it. She bought new wallpaper and new furniture—rattan sofas and chairs covered in pale, linen fabrics—and she hung Morrow’s colorful painting on the walls.

  For the Christmas holidays in 1965, Elsa went to visit her brother Aldo, then the director of the Banca Commerciale in Mexico City. She spent several months in Mexico and traveled to the Yucatán. She fell in love with the country and would return to visit several times. On one of her trips Elsa claimed to have tried psychedelic mushrooms and she even, she said, managed to smuggle a peyote button back to Italy, which she kept on her desk. Later, Elsa was to say that these trips to Mexico were some of the happiest times in her life.

  On the same day that Patrizia Cavalli showed me Elsa’s clothes, she let me listen to a recording of Elsa’s voice. The tape was old and scratchy but one could hear Elsa clearly reciting her poems in a deep, sonorous voice. Patrizia started to laugh: Elsa, she said, was speaking in an unnatural, self-conscious way, as if speaking by rote. Also, she had put on a pretentious Roman accent and she did not talk at all like that in real life. On the tape, Elsa was saying: “Solo chi ama conosce. Povero chi non ama!” (“Only the one who loves knows. Unfortunate the one who does not love!”) and I closed my eyes and listened as carefully as I could. No matter what Patrizia said, I thought it was amazing to hear Elsa Morante’s voice.

  ten

  THE WORLD SAVED BY CHILDREN

  The Living Theater opened at the Teatro Eliseo in Rome in 1965 with Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, which was both an instant success and an enormous shock. The Italian audiences were unaccustomed to this American avant-garde troupe’s revolutionary stance, which broke down the barriers between art and politics, challenged sexual assumptions and confronted the audience, often forcing it to participate. Elsa Morante first saw a performance with a young American friend who was living in Rome. Peter Hartman was a musician as well as a poet and an actor who had once worked with the Living Theater back in New York. Not surprisingly, since she was so attracted to the American counterculture of the time, Elsa loved the Living Theater and, right away, she befriended Julian Beck and his wife, Judith Malina, its founders. To this day,
Judith Malina, who had just turned eighty when I interviewed her, has happy memories of how Morante and Moravia welcomed them with open arms. In particular, she remembered the day Elsa took them on their first tour of Rome. As they were about to round the corner and enter Piazza Navona, Elsa told them, “Now, you are going to see the most beautiful piazza in the world.”1 Elsa was deeply connected to the city, Malina said; she had a wonderful relationship with every stone, every street, and an uncanny ability to find beauty and splendor everywhere. Elsa introduced Judith and Julian to her friends and, for once, Judith Malina said, they felt appreciated.2 Certainly, all the Italians (most Europeans, as a matter of fact) Malina and Beck met, although still conservative, were very impressed by the avant-garde company, with its lack of inhibitions regarding nudity, sex and the use of drugs. Elsa must have supported and agreed with the Living Theater’s anarchist imperatives, which stated that the plays should be performed in the street, outside of institutionalized theaters, and for the benefit of the proletariat—the poorest of the poor. Probably too, according to her coexecutor Carlo Cecchi, Elsa Morante must have made an unconscious connection between Bill Morrow and the Living Theater.3

  I first met Carlo Cecchi, an actor and the director of a theater company, in Iesi, a city near the Adriatic coast, where he was both directing and acting in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author; when we met again the following year, I took a bus to the hill town of Urbino, where he was rehearsing a production of Molière’s Tartuffe—as a result, I got to see some beautiful Italian countryside, especially the region known as Marche, thanks to Cecchi’s willingness to share his memories of Elsa. Carlo Cecchi met Elsa, in 1965, when he was twenty-three—almost a boy, he said—and he, too, had been deeply affected by the Living Theater. He had studied at the Accademia in Rome and was acting; with friends, he had already put together a small underground theater called A la Lettera near Piazza di Spagna, where he had produced Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy. The play had been banned and the newspapers in Rome had been full of the controversy. Next, while he was rehearsing Woyzeck by Georg Büchner, the telephone rang one day and he heard Elsa Morante’s voice for the first time. A “singing” voice was how he described it—not very crystalline but filled with resonance. The Living Theater was having problems with the police—someone had gone onstage naked—and since she knew he had had a similar sort of problem, she had telephoned to ask for his advice. She also knew he was a friend of Peter Hartman. When she learned that he was directing Woyzeck, Elsa became very enthusiastic and animated. She had seen the play several times and felt it was a masterpiece. In general, she spoke with great passion about the theater. The way she spoke to him, too, Carlo Cecchi could not help but remark, was curious, as if they had known each other for a long time. Finally Elsa said, “Come, it is better that we meet and talk about all these things.”

  Carlo Cecchi went to see Elsa Morante in her apartment on via dell’Oca on an autumn morning. The apartment consisted of two floors and she had asked him to come directly to the apartment’s studio on the top floor, which had its own entrance. Her studio, he remembered, was quite dark and furnished simply; there was an enormous desk, her record player and record collection and some photos on the walls. Outside was the bright terrace and it was like going from night to day, with the explosion of light on the terrace, which was full of plants—sunflowers, bougainvillea and lemon trees—and the view below of Piazza del Popolo, with the Egyptian obelisk and the domes of three churches: Santa Maria del Popolo, Santa Maria di Montesanto and Santa Maria dei Miracoli.

  Carlo Cecchi found Elsa Morante very beautiful. He had no idea how old she was—he thought she was forty, no more than forty—and he described her hair as “not too long, red brown, more brown than red.” She was slim and wore slacks and a beautiful sweater. Elsa asked Carlo if he wanted something to eat—he was then poor and thin. “No, just coffee,” he answered. They sat out on the terrace and spoke about the Living Theater and many other things as well. When it was time for him to leave, Elsa told him that she was going to New York and Mexico soon. After this, his first encounter with her, Carlo did not see Elsa again for another year.4

  Elsa Morante made a point of avoiding the literary set, the more social and political crowd Moravia belonged to. She did not see Moravia often—he and Dacia Maraini lived across the river in an apartment on Lungo Tevere delle Vittoria—but when she did, their relationship was always quite cordial. She defended him and spoke of him with tenderness, although sometimes she made fun of him a little—of his stinginess, for example. By then, too, in Rome, Elsa had created her own circle of friends, who were for the most part younger and with whom she felt an affinity: Paolo and Stella Graziosi, Angelica Ippolito, Dario Bellezza, Patrizia Cavalli, Carlo Cecchi, Peter Hartman, Allen Midgette, Fleur Jaeggy, Piergiorgio Bellocchio, Ginevra Bompiani, Giorgio Agamben, Grazia Cherchi, Linuccia Saba and Paolo Volponi. Later her friends included Goffredo Fofi, Tonino Ricchezza and Alfonso Berardinelli. Her presence, according to the critic Alfonso Berardinelli, was charismatic and she had the effect of being like a guru to her friends.5 Apparently, she was very astute at figuring out people’s weaknesses and their hidden sides. She was also fiercely loyal and very generous. Adriana Asti remembers how Elsa always gave her presents: jewelry, scarves, once a bit of opium inside a carved wooden box!6 Another friend, Charis Vivante, remembered how Elsa brought her back a beautiful silk kimono from Japan.7 She also had an uncanny ability to know when to help. Allen Midgette recalls how sometimes he was so poor he would go three or four days without food and just as he thought he was going to starve to death, Elsa would appear and take him out to lunch. Another time, Allen found a broken piggy bank lying on the floor of his tiny apartment in Trastevere with a 20,000 lire note next to it. Elsa, he guessed, had thrown the piggy bank through his window.

  Another young man Elsa befriended was William Edwards, a handsome Englishman who was wandering around the world aimlessly and who now would probably be diagnosed as bipolar, as he alternated between states of being docile and violently aggressive. Clearly Elsa was very fond of Edwards. She wrote a poem about him with the line “Happiness does not exist without a boy / Without a boy, it is pointless to drag through life.”8

  When Edwards was arrested for deliberately breaking things in an antique store and was taken by the police to a mental hospital, Elsa enlisted Allen Midgette’s help to get him out. It was a very rainy day and Elsa and Allen could not find a taxi so when a horse and carriage came clip-clopping by, out of desperation, they hired it and got in. Allen Midgette remembers how on the way to the hospital they both began to laugh hysterically at the surreal picture they must have made: arriving at the loony bin in the pouring rain in a horse and carriage to try to get someone in there out.

  Elsa Morante was always very attracted to handsome, young, homosexual (or perhaps bisexual) men. The most obvious reason for this attraction, of course, is that women—particularly women of a certain age—feel safe with homosexual men because there is no possibility of sex between them. Also, it is certainly not unusual for artistic women to be attracted to homosexuals and feel a kinship to them, the result of similar sensibilities and interests. In Morante’s case, however, I would venture that her attraction to young gay men had more to do with her maternal instincts and her desire to have a son. The young men Elsa was drawn to were for the most part slightly childlike in the sense that they had a certain innocence or purity about them (as Allen Midgette still does), a kind of naïveté that translates itself into a sweetness and a trust in life and in other people to help them and an optimism that somehow everything will turn out all right. Elsa’s love for these young men can be compared to the love that she might have felt for a child of her own. However, her love for, say, Bill Morrow, Allen Midgette or William Edwards—unlike the many archetypal and mythological figures of mothers who fall in love with their sons—could manifest itself without the specter of incest.

  Nor was Elsa a demonstratively phys
ical person. She never kissed anyone and if someone tried to kiss her she drew back. As she grew older, she said that kissing her was like “kissing a rotten apple.” She always gave Patrizia Cavalli her hand, which was odd since they were close friends. One Christmas day—and this impressed Patrizia enormously—when Patrizia was all alone, she had had a misunderstanding with her family, and, during lunch, she asked Elsa whether they were going to also have dinner together that evening. Elsa, who must have sensed how upset Patrizia was, did something she had never done before. She took Patrizia’s chin in her hand and said, “Ma certo tesore” (“But of course, darling”).9 Patrizia was very moved by this little gesture of tenderness and affection.

  The only member of her family whom Elsa liked and included in her group of friends was Daniele Morante, the oldest of Marcello’s ten children. (Interestingly, she always introduced him as a friend and never as her nephew.) Of the other nine, she had formed a negative impression that did not make much sense. (For instance, Elsa once heard Daniele’s sister Laura, who was fourteen at the time, humming a popular song that she could not stand and based on that little incident decided that she did not want anything more to do with Laura.) For the most part, she and Daniele maintained a warm relationship. In 1966, when Daniele was newly married and studying in Rome, Elsa Morante lent him and his wife her studio apartment on via Archimede. In the end, however, because Elsa’s maid Lucia went there from time to time to tidy up and must have reported back to Elsa what a terrible mess the apartment was in, Elsa asked them both to leave. Having to do this upset her so much that she began to cry and, as compensation, she gave Daniele and his wife some money.10