Woman of Rome_A Life of Elsa Morante Read online

  five

  HOUSE OF LIARS

  The war over, Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia returned to Rome. They settled back into their small apartment on via Sgambati with the beautiful view of the Borghese Gardens and Elsa resumed work on her novel. She—unlike Moravia who was very disciplined in his work habits and wrote every morning for a prescribed number of hours—was the sort of writer who could go days, months even, without writing a single word but once she began, she wrote day and night, hardly stopping. “At a time like this,” she said in a magazine interview, “to have a little bit of peace and a little table all of my own is a great privilege.” She was particularly grateful, she also said, that she was allowed to finish a book that she had been yearning to write ever since she was a child, the novel House of Liars (a more literal translation of the Italian title Menzogna e sortilegio is A Lie and a Spell), and she thanked the year 1946 for having forgotten about her and for having left her in peace so that she was able to spend an entire year of real time.1

  Morante had first conceived and developed the idea for House of Liars in an unpublished novella called Vita di mia nonna (My Grandmother’s Life), which she began before World War II. The novella was a tale with two narrative threads: the first, about the narrator’s grandmother, introduces the theme of the malevolent old crone; the second, about a young man befriending another in his search for his real father, introduces the theme of the double father. After the war, when Morante was able to return to writing, she incorporated those two threads and reused some of the material from Vita di mia nonna in a much larger structure that became House of Liars. Before settling on the title, she had toyed with several others, filling page after page with all sorts of possible choices: Diamante e rubino (Diamond and Ruby), Il cugino (The Cousin), La fenice (The Phoenix), Il corvo (The Raven), Ricordi immaginari (Imaginary Memories) and La morte del padre (The Death of the Father)—this last was accompanied with the dedication “To the memory of F.L.,” who clearly must have been Francesco Lo Monaco, Elsa Morante’s biological father.2

  House of Liars was inspired by a story Elsa Morante had heard about an old blind woman whose son was killed in the war in Ethiopia. Her relatives did not want to tell her he was dead and they read her made-up letters from him. The models for the novel, she claimed, were Don Quixote and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Morante also claimed, in an interview in 1968 with the French literary critic Michel David, that with House of Liars, she had wanted to write the last possible novel on earth. She wanted to “kill” the novel genre, she told him, as well as put in it everything that had ever occurred in her life, everything that had ever tormented her. And although still young then, she said, she had had a very dramatic, full life, and she wanted to include in the novel everything that was in the nineteenth-century novel: parents who are rich, parents who are poor, orphans, good-hearted prostitutes, etc.3

  Elsa Morante always denied that the novel was autobiographical. (However, it is difficult to ignore the similarities between the names of the novel’s protagonist, Elisa, and the author’s own as well as that of the protagonist’s father, Francesco Monaco, and the author’s own father.) She said that she was incapable of reporting on “real” events, she could only write about them symbolically. Reality, she went on to tell Michel David in the same interview, was much closer or “truer” in childhood. Adults distanced themselves from reality: they were interested in careers, in money, in absolutely absurd things. The only way to try to look at reality was through the eyes of children. In fact, all her real friends—Pier Paolo Pasolini, the poet Sandro Penna, even Moravia—had remained children or were childlike. Her goal was to try to understand the truth and to express it.4

  On the subject of reality, however, Moravia tended to disagree. He claimed that he was the one who loved reality with all its warts and problems, but that he invented the characters in his novels based on his experience and observations, while in Morante’s case, it was just the opposite. She disliked reality—she regarded reality, he said, with as much fondness as her many cats regarded water—but in her novels, one could find Elsa herself and the people in her life without their having undergone much transformation.5

  Many of the characters in House of Liars bear out Moravia’s claim and have recognizable and familiar traits: one character is blond and robust and has a beautiful singing voice; another, like Elsa’s own maternal grandmother, is prone to fits: “Her crises had become more violent. She was seized with a furious hatred for her own person and abused herself, beating her head and fists against the wall.”6 Still another is a hunchback of whom the family is deeply ashamed.

  House of Liars is a sprawling and confusing novel of over eight hundred pages. Any attempt to summarize the plot is likely to lead to more confusion. Suffice it to say that it is the story of three generations of women in an eccentric Sicilian family—Cesira, the grandmother; Anna, the mother; and the granddaughter Elisa. At the outset, Elisa, who narrates the novel, claims that she is merely obeying “the insistent whispers of many voices” in an attempt to write and come to terms with her childhood and her legacy, a “poison of lying and deception [that] creeps through the branches of my family.”7 A family she describes thus: “My mother was a saint, my father a grand duke in disguise my cousin Edoardo was a desert sheik, my Aunt Concetta a prophetess and queen.”8 She too admits to having fallen victim to their make-believe: “To make oneself a worshiper, a disciple of illusion! Deliberately to make falsehood the substance of one’s thought and one’s wisdom—to reject all experience…. And while you must expect to meet in the course of my story more than one person contaminated by our family disease of illusion, you must realize that you have already met the sickest of all. And that is of course the person who writes this book: I, Elisa.”9 Thus, immediately, the narrator establishes—or, to put it more accurately, stresses—the fact that she is unreliable.

  A Gothic tale peopled with narcissistic and deceitful characters, House of Liars begins by describing how Cesira, a dreadfully deluded and angry woman, marries an impoverished and weak aristocrat, Teodoro. Their beautiful daughter, Anna, also deluded and angry, falls in love with her cousin Edoardo; when he rejects her, she marries Francesco Monaco, whom she grows to despise and whom she tries to humiliate. Victims of their romanticism and imaginations, both Cesira and Anna are incapable of living in the real world or accepting it. Most of their illusions are the result of their misguided and inappropriate idea of love—mother love in particular, which is either improperly sexual and incestuous or withholding. Here is a scene between the imperious young aristocrat, Edoardo, and his mother, Concetta: “While he laughed at his mother, he held her tight in his arms and covered her faded face with kisses and then playfully he began to remove the hairpins one by one. This childish game had once made her angry but as her beautiful gray hair fell about her shoulders now, she sighed with pleasure.”10 There is a similar scene between Francesco Monaco and his mother, Alessandra: “in the morning when his mother dipped her comb in the basin and combed her long, shining black hair, he watched her with wide eyes. What particularly attracted him to his mother was her beauty.”11 In the case of the narrator, Elisa’s love for Anna is more of an affliction: “My mother was the first and the most serious of my unhappy loves. Thanks to her, I knew from early childhood the bitterest agonies of the unaccepted lover.”12

  Most of the novel’s characters are either from the working classes or from the aristocracy—at the end of the nineteenth century in Sicily, there was no substantial middle class and society was arbitrarily divided between the elegant lords and ladies and the vulgar poor people. Also, many of Morante’s characters tend to suffer from some disease or are sick—the men are deformed, blind or ugly (Francesco Monaco, for instance, is pockmarked) and the poor women tend to be prostitutes. As in the novels of Émile Zola—a writer Elsa Morante greatly admired—there is a connection between the characters’ psychology and their social status. She represented this dichotomy stylistically: on the one han
d, there is the picturesque and the squalid (the poor, struggling, starving peasants) and on the other, the realistic and fantastic (the aristocrats and their dazzling palaces and clothes). The fact that the language in the novel is baroque and full of archaisms, mannered phrases and words that evoke romantic stereotypes is, by her own admission, done consciously in order to hide what is going on beneath the surface. It is also an attempt at literary parody, a tactic that Elsa Morante would use again and again and that would evolve into what she called an “alibi.”

  Despite these subterfuges, Elsa Morante was a close observer of human nature. Describing Francesco’s disfigurement, she wrote: “And in spite of his deep need for sympathy, Francesco fled from companionship for two motives which, although they are opposed in nature are often joined in ferocious league: pride and shyness.”13 Or recounting Concetta’s excessively righteous anger: “We may observe at this point how women passionate in virtue feel one of two conflicting emotions toward women passionate in sin: either a great love which makes them long to convert their erring sisters, or hatred, the blind and uncontrollable hatred of a rival.”14 Some of Elsa Morante’s images are no less haunting: “All my thoughts, like flags beating against the wind, turned back to the burning season behind me which had cut short my childhood and transformed my destiny. Even today, in a sense, I live in that childhood summer around which my spirit wheels and beats ceaselessly, like an insect around a dazzling lamp.”15

  The book’s central and most significant episode, however, does not occur until nearly the end and it returns the reader to the original inspiration for the novel: the letters. Anna, the narrator’s mother, writes herself letters from the now dead Edoardo (the lover she had as an adolescent and with whom she has been all along obsessed). Not only does she read these letters out loud to Donna Concetta, Edoardo’s mother, who is equally obsessed with her son, but writing them becomes the principal cause of Anna’s joy and her sexual pleasure: “Her eyes shone with an extraordinary splendor, her lips parted softly and flushed a fresh pink, and an ardent color lighted her face and even spread over her bared shoulders,”16 or again, “When finally she came to bed, she did not stretch out but slipping the letter she had just written under her pillow, she lay half uncovered, her head resting against the head of the bed. She would lie like that for several minutes with her eyes closed; she was not asleep, I could tell, because her face was not in repose but was filled with a bright ecstasy.”17 Edoardo is a phantom, a ghost, a product of Anna’s overwrought imagination and yet the effect he has on Anna is that of a flesh-and-blood lover: “Anna’s imaginary adultery had brought about a great change in her body and face, no less than a real transgression would have done…. [S] he had the ambiguous air of involuntary suggestiveness and remembered pleasures that loose women have after a rendezvous. Her face was soft and relaxed, her full, half-parted lips preserved the traces of imagined kisses, and her elusive, languid, glowing glance seemed dazzled by recent visions of love.”18

  These made-up letters are the crux of the novel and are largely responsible for its ambiguity and complexity. They address the theme of powerlessness or impotence, which manifests itself through silence, omission and lies. Not revealing the content of these letters, which presumably is erotic (another form of self-censorship), was the way that Elsa Morante chose to express the difficulty of writing about the female experience, both sexual and psychological. The self-censorship too can be said to echo the use of asterisks in the 1938 diary where, again, erotic content is implicit, not explicit.

  In the end, notwithstanding the admiration one might feel for the ambitious enterprise, House of Liars remains a strangely anachronistic and lugubrious novel. The reader is not drawn to any of the characters, nor does he or she care much what happens to any of them. No matter that it was willed, the writing is irritatingly precious, the plot is too convoluted and contrived to be credible. The result is a kind of artificial airlessness. Michel David, the critic who interviewed Morante, made the same sort of observation about House of Liars, saying that fresh air seemed to be lacking in this Sicilian hothouse, although he was ready to bite into lemons and discover that they taste of oranges.19

  Curiously and inexplicably, House of Liars ends with an ode to a cat. The cat’s name is Alvaro and Elisa claims that, although she has concealed him until the end, he is “one of the most endearing and important of characters.”20 The last stanza goes:

  The simple joy of having you as a friend

  Fills my heart to the brim; my agonies and fancies

  Die in your kisses and your sweet laments,

  So deeply you console me,

  O cat of mine! 21

  At the time of the publication of House of Liars, the Hungarian critic Georg Lukács said that it was the greatest modern Italian novel and he praised the writer for both her style and her ability to move huge blocks of narrative with ease. Most contemporary critics, however, greeted the novel with incomprehension: they accused it of being retrograde and romantic, a nineteenth-century novel written in the twentieth century and severely out of step with the realism or neorealism of the day. Others interpreted House of Liars in popularized and imprecise Freudian terms, or simply as a popular romance. Critics often asked what sort of relationship the writer had to the women in the novel—where they are depicted as either crazy or evil and where love for them is a via dolorosa and suffering is joy. All love, the novel seems to say, is a game of force and violence; the female dream of love is masochistic (an embrace of suffering, delusion and eventual death) and the male one is sadistic (men prefer the pain of others)—which would lead one to believe that the answer might be that Morante did not like women. Instead, I would argue that Morante disliked a certain type of woman: a petty, deceitful, manipulative, falsely powerful woman who gave women in general a bad name. Ultimately, too, Elsa Morante understood that it was a man’s world and to be a woman was more difficult.22

  There has, however, always been a very strong tradition of women writers in Italy, and Elsa Morante must have been well aware of it. If one looks only at the literary scene dating from the unification of Italy (after 1861), there is no lack of female writers (not to mention poets). Enrichetta Caracciolo, a nun, wrote a widely read and translated memoir called Misteri del chiostro napoletano (Mysteries of the Neapolitan Convents); Neera, a pseudonym for Anna Radius Zuccari, wrote twenty-two novels; La Marchesa Colombi (her real name was Maria Antonietta Torriani) wrote a little jewel called Un matrimonio in provincia (A Small-Town Marriage), which is said to have influenced Natalia Ginzburg and whose style is both ironic and quite modern (this novel ends with the surprising line “The fact is I am gaining weight” to summarize a life filled with disappointment). Other writers include Contessa Lara, Bruno Sperani (a pseudonym for Beatrice Speraz), Maria Messina, Matilde Serao and Grazia Deledda, the latter nearly forgotten now even though in 1926 she won the Nobel Prize for literature. These women writers wrote what today would probably be considered popular literature and at the time they were widely read.

  In the twentieth century, the writer Sibilla Aleramo particularly stands out for her autobiographical novel Una donna (A Woman), which tells the story of a young woman who, after being raped, is forced into a loveless marriage in order to hush up her disgrace. She manages to escape to Rome, leaving her husband and young son, and goes on to lead a scandalous life and to have many heterosexual and homosexual affairs. Una donna can be considered the first truly Italian feminist novel because it introduces a protagonist who is self-aware of her plight and her lack of freedom. (Interestingly, when male scholars speak of this work, they mostly stress Aleramo’s erotic and scandalous life.) More contemporary writers are Rosa Benedetta, Fausta Cialente, Paola Masino, Gianna Manzini, Anna Banti (who was married to the well-known art critic Roberto Longhi) and Anna Maria Ortese.

  What most of these women writers have in common is their social class; they were all well connected and well educated. Unlike Elsa Morante, they did not have to earn a living.
Also, in their novels, they showed a tendency to move away from the popular verismo (realism) of the day and write more surreal and mythical stories. No doubt Elsa Morante had read many of these women writers and no doubt, too, she was influenced by their presence. Whether she was influenced by their work is less certain.

  Fifty years after the novel’s original publication and on the occasion of a new edition, when writing about House of Liars—a sort of retrospective summation—Cesare Garboli, Elsa Morante’s great friend and one of the executors of her estate, who wrote extensively about her and her oeuvre, compared Morante’s work to Natalia Ginzburg’s. Both writers, he said, expressed the provocative force of sex and wrote about the fragility and vulnerability of the female experience. Garboli claimed that Natalia Ginzburg was a more forgiving and wiser writer—she often rendered the female experience as a sort of flat dialogue—and looked at the nature of women with compassion, while Elsa Morante’s relationship to sex was terrible and savage; she wrote about the nature of women with such mocking animosity that Garboli had to wonder whether House of Liars was in fact a misogynist novel.23

  As it turned out, however, Elsa Morante was the writer of her generation whom Natalia Ginzburg admired most.24 Natalia Ginzburg was also Elsa Morante’s first editor and, years later, she recalled the experience of receiving the novel and working with Elsa:

  In ’48, I think it was in winter, a letter came to me from Elsa Morante. In it, she told me that she had just finished a novel and she wanted to know if she could send it to me. I lived in Turin and I was working at the publishing house Einaudi. I had met Elsa Morante in Rome, I don’t remember anymore where we met; we did not exchange very many words. It seems to me that I told her how much I loved one of her short stories, which had come out in a magazine several years before, during the war. In any case, our meetings, according to what I remember, were few and brief. But I was the person she knew best in that publishing house. That’s how I got the manuscript of House of Liars: I received it in the mail. There were corrections on it in red ink. I remember with what surprise I read the chapter titles, because it seemed like a novel from another time, and I was intrigued when glancing through the pages I found here and there words capitalized: the Pockmarked, the Cousin…. I read House of Liars straight through and I liked it immensely: although I can’t say that then I clearly understood its importance and greatness. I knew only that I loved it and it had been a long time since I had read anything that gave me such life and joy. It was an extraordinary adventure for me to discover, among the chapter titles I perceived still like those of the nineteenth century, the time and cities that were our own, and that had the painful and shattered intensity of our daily life; for me, it was a great emotion to discover the possibility even in our time, when books were miserly and tangled, of giving our fellow human beings a work of art so luminous and generous. Perhaps, in a way, I understood the greatness. I had not worked very long at this publishing house and I did not have the authority to decide alone to publish a book; I sought the advice of Pavese; I don’t think that he read it then in manuscript but he thought it was a good idea to publish it.