Woman of Rome_A Life of Elsa Morante Read online

  }In the spring, House of Liars was ready in page proofs and Elsa came to Turin to correct them. She stayed in an inn near the railroad station; an inn not far from the one where a few years later Cesare Pavese died. I had a copy of the proofs and she had another; I remember that because of the tremendous effort and the emotion and because of the fear she had of printed errors, she got a fever.* When she was cured of this fever, she used to come out in the evenings and sit in a café on the street, waiting for Pavese, myself, Felice Balbo and Italo Calvino to leave the office and come sit with her. She and Pavese discussed many things but without great anger; they did not agree on anything yet in these discussions there was never any sign of animosity.25

  In 1948, House of Liars won the Viareggio Prize, a prestigious Italian literary award. Elsa Morante shared the prize with Aldo Palazzeschi, one of the most prolific Italian writers, for his novel The Cuccoli Brothers (I fratelli Cuccoli). As a result, the fortunes of Alberto Moravia, who had just published The Woman of Rome (La romana), and Elsa Morante were very much improved. To celebrate they rented an elegant house on Capri and briefly spent money extravagantly—mainly, according to Moravia, to chase away the nightmare of the miseries they had endured. They traveled together, and Elsa went to France and England for the first time. (In London, apparently, food was still so scarce that when they went to an elegant restaurant, which Moravia described as decorated “with Doric columns, red plush, that sort of thing,” and he ordered a shrimp cocktail, he was brought a single shrimp on a dish.26) Moravia sold the small apartment on via Sgambati and purchased a larger, more elegant one at via dell’Oca 27, near the Piazza del Popolo. He also bought a small apartment on via Archimede as a studio for Elsa and he bought Elsa a beaver coat. After that, Moravia said, he was broke.27

  The American edition of House of Liars came out in 1951, three years after its original publication in Italian. The novel was much abridged—from the original 800 pages, more than 200 pages were cut. These cuts were made without consulting the author, and as a result Elsa Morante wrote a letter complaining bitterly about the abridged American version, threatening to take legal action. Natalia Ginzburg, her editor, answered with an apology, saying how she too was angry and sorry. However Sanford Greenburger, the American agent for the book, claimed that if the cuts had not been made, the book would have been too long and too costly and would not have been published in America. Elsa Morante wrote another letter in which she said that the cuts had caused her great sorrow and more suffering than she had the whole year.

  Yet more suffering must have been caused by the description on the front jacket flap of House of Liars: “This long and distinguished novel, winner of Rome’s literary prize—the Viareggio—is the first work of Elsa Morante, who in private life is Mrs. Alberto Moravia.” Elsa did not want to be known by Alberto Moravia’s name, and many stories have evolved around people committing this error. Moravia himself described how once finding the weather unexpectedly cold in Egypt, he sent a telegram to Elsa, who was to join him shortly, asking her to bring him his overcoat. He addressed it to “Elsa Moravia,” with this result: “Elsa received the telegram, took the overcoat, came to Cairo, and the moment she arrived began a scene that lasted three days, because I should have written Elsa Morante. Practically speaking, this scene, so cruel and unjust, cast a pall on our whole journey….”28 When Elsa’s favorite nephew, Daniele Morante, was nine or ten, he made the same mistake, addressing a letter to Elsa Moravia. She replied, in an affectionate but firm manner, saying that her name was Morante and would always be Morante.29 Another error—this time on the back jacket flap of the same American edition of House of Liars—was the claim that “she [was] a native of Sicily.” Elsa Morante was a native of Rome; she had spent three days in Sicily prior to writing the novel.

  In a review of House of Liars that appeared in The New Yorker, Maeve Brennan praised the fine translation and hailed Elsa Morante (mercifully, not Mrs. Alberto Moravia) as “a young Italian writer of extraordinary emotional power.” She was able to appreciate the novel despite the fact that there was “no development…, no plot, no solution,” and despite the often melodramatic exaggerated tone of the prose and the overly passionate nature of the characters—“operatic in their transports of fury and despair” was how she described them. Mostly, Brennan understood that Elsa Morante was a writer of enormous talent and that she was quite fearless. “Miss Morante, it is clear, is not afraid of romantic dénouements. Neither is she afraid of passion or of melodrama or of the extravagant, elegant phrases she handles so superbly. She seems afraid of nothing, except, possibly, the dullness and resignation of a sensible solution.”30

  Behind or along with Elsa Morante’s fierceness, willfulness and unpredictable sense of humor there was also a sweet and disingenuous side to her nature. William Weaver, the translator, recalled how as he gave Elsa Morante his copy of House of Liars to sign, afraid that she would quiz him on the book, he quickly confessed that he had not yet read it. Instead of chiding him, Elsa was full of genuine and quite childish enthusiasm: “Oh, how I envy you!” she told Weaver. “How I wish I could read my book with a fresh mind! What a wonderful experience you have in store for you! You’re really lucky!”31

  six

  ROME

  I always tell everyone, when I have the chance, that Rome is the most beautiful city in the world,” wrote Pier Paolo Pasolini, the filmmaker, writer and poet. “Of all the cities I know, it’s the one where I’d rather live; in fact, I can’t imagine living anywhere else. In my worst nightmares, I dream that I am forced to leave Rome and return to Northern Italy. Its beauty is a natural mystery. We can attribute it to the baroque, the atmosphere, the composition of the terrain, with its elevations and depressions, a landscape that continually offers new perspective, to the Tiber that runs through it, opening glorious airy spaces in its heart, and most of all the stratification of styles which at every angle offers up a new, surprising cross section. The excessive beauty produced by this superposition of styles is a veritable shock to the system. But would Rome be the most beautiful city in the world if it were not at the same time, the ugliest?”1

  William Weaver, the preeminent translator of Italian literature—he translated not only Elsa Morante and Pier Paolo Pasolini but also such writers as Giorgio Bassani, Roberto Calasso, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Primo Levi, Italo Svevo and Alberto Moravia—would have agreed with Pasolini. For Weaver, Rome represented “the fabled, the perfect, the ideal answer to every dream.” He had first come to Italy during World War II as an ambulance driver for the American Field Service, and since both the Germans and his duties kept him between Naples and Monte Cassino, Rome seemed “unattainable, [and] became legend, the stuff of my constant frustrated daydreams…. Rome—the imagined Rome of my obsession—was tidy, clean, brightly-lighted, sunny; there were bookshops with books in English, newspapers, theater, music. There were dinner-parties and smart cafés—there was the Europe I had yearned all my brief life to visit.”2 Weaver, a near penniless student at the time who was hoping to write a novel, finally realized his dream when he arrived in Rome in 1947. And despite the fact that, for an entire generation, most artistic creation had come to a halt in Italy, Weaver’s naïve enthusiasm proved prescient. It was not long before he saw what he called a “creative explosion,” with films like Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero, and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thief, and books like Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli and Alberto Moravia’s The Woman of Rome. Exhibitions, too, he noted, presented new painters and sculptors as well as the innovative industrial designers who produced the sleek and elegant Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter. All this, according to Weaver, was proof of the Italian spirit and the country’s creative vitality, which indeed had revived and was flourishing.

  Another writer, Sybille Bedford, herself recently arrived in Rome, echoed these sentiments: “Early post-war Italy was glorious. One embraced the people for whom the springs of life were flowing again; they w
ere at one with the staggering beauty of what there was to see, everywhere, dawdling in the sun, the sweet air, the new near quiet. Petrol was scarce, the Vespas and rattling trams were joyful toys, their noise another attribute to being alive.”3 Certainly, there seemed to be much to look forward to. In a 1946 referendum, the majority of Italian voters preferred a republic over a monarchy; the change represented hope for the reconstruction and modernization of a war-torn country, the possibility of a democratic debate between political parties and an opportunity for a more egalitarian and prosperous society, especially in the country’s very poor south.4

  Nonetheless, in the late forties and early fifties, despite all the new activity in business and in the arts, Rome—all of Italy, in fact—was far from being an ideal or easy place to live. The country was still in political turmoil and suffering from the aftershocks of the war, which included shortages of food, fuel, housing. Reacting to the general poverty and popular unrest as well as to the recent horrors of the Fascist regime, hundreds of political parties sprang up, taking part in what Norman Lewis, a British intelligence agent stationed in Naples, called “the wild democratic free-for-all.”5

  Most intellectuals were either Communists or Socialists but the majority party was the church-sanctioned Christian Democrats. To ensure victory, the Roman Catholic Church threatened anyone voting for the Communist Party with excommunication, local priests exhorted their parishioners to vote for the Christian Democrats, armies of nuns were sent out to preach to housewives. Posters showed Communist wolves trying to devour Italian children. When the Christian Democrats, whom Weaver called “the party of film censorship, of reaction, of former Fascists slightly whitewashed over,” won the election of April 1948, “[s]omething went out of Roman life…; a kind of dull resignation set in.”6

  Alberto Moravia was more pragmatic: “I was sure the Christian Democrats would win, because Italy is a pendulum: many Italians voted for the Communists, but they didn’t want communism to take over.”7 Moravia believed his fellow intellectuals felt the same way as their countrymen. “To understand the situation of the intellectuals, and of the Italians in general, you have to realize that they had hated Fascism because it was a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie: a contradiction, in other words. The bourgeoisie is either liberal or it’s nothing. But from that to go to communism, to Stalin, is a great step, too big for the Italians at that moment in history.”8

  The Christian Democrats, with Alcide De Gasperi at their head, managed to gather support from many different sectors of Italian society and become the leading political party in all postwar Italian governments (of which there were many). Nonetheless, the average Italian citizen never identified with the government, which he viewed with cynicism and as fundamentally oppressive and corrupt. Also, a large minority of Italians, made up primarily of the working class, embraced a counterideology and remained profoundly opposed to the government. Still more controversial were many of the government’s policies which reflected the need to maintain the support of the United States. From 1948 to 1951, the Marshall Plan poured money into Italian redevelopment and industrialization, with the implicit caveat that the Christian Democrats eradicate the Communist Party. The end result was that the governments led by the Christian Democrats were inherently unstable, founded as they were on weak leadership and a bare majority of unenthusiastic popular support. And finally, the fact that Christian Democratic rule was based on Catholicism, Americanism and anticommunism gave critics good reason to compare it to an autocratic regime, a regime that, according to many, lasted until the death of Aldo Moro in 1978.

  As it turned out, William Weaver’s pensione in Rome was located not far from via dell’Oca, and, as a result, he saw a great deal of Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia. He recalled how, for the first time in their lives, thanks to their combined royalties and the film reviews Moravia had begun writing, they were able to furnish their apartment comfortably with sofas and chairs, put up paintings on the walls and populate it with Elsa’s numerous Siamese cats. Elsa, who had grown up in semipoverty, was particularly pleased to be able to afford the luxury of a cook. For the first time in her life, she gave dinner parties. Otherwise, she, Moravia and their group of friends, which included Weaver, would gather at the last minute to dine—after a heated discussion on the merits and faults of the various restaurants—at one of the local trattorias.

  Weaver quickly learned the protocol to adopt with Elsa when inviting her and Alberto Moravia for dinner, as she was extremely sensitive to slights—no doubt that feeling was exacerbated by having always to defer in public to her more famous husband. When calling to make a date, Weaver cautioned: “You were never to say, ‘Could you and Alberto come—?’ Even the use of the plural voi was a grave infraction…. The proper course was to invite Elsa: Can you—tu—come for dinner on Thursday?…Then when all was agreed, you could venture, in as offhand a tone as possible: ‘If Alberto’s free, tell him to join us.’ ‘I’ll tell him,’ she would reply, audibly dubious.”9

  Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante were well-known (famous, in fact) for their terrible arguments. Some arguments grew so loud that they could be heard all the way from their apartment to the Bolognese, the restaurant below them on Piazza del Popolo. According to Moravia, the fights were never personal but the result of their two very different views of the world.10 Nonetheless, Elsa tended to say hurtful and outrageous things. She liked to quarrel, she liked to cast blame. In public, too—because Moravia acted so cold and indifferent—Morante tried to provoke him by insulting him, humiliating him, accusing him of sexual impotence. Often, according to the filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, a friend, Moravia had to get up from the table, leave the restaurant and walk around the block several times in order to cool off. One particularly memorable quarrel occurred in a restaurant called Romolo, and was over the habits of the Italian peasants. During it, Elsa shouted, “Don’t talk nonsense, Alberto, in the south peasant mothers masturbate their children to put them to sleep at night.” The crucial verb was uttered in such a shrill, loud cry, William Weaver reported, that it seemed to echo interminably beneath the low vaults of the restaurant ceiling. All the diners stopped talking and ate their meals in shocked silence; no one, not even the waiters, dared to speak. Only Elsa remained oblivious and unaffected.11

  But William Weaver also recalled more congenial times. One of the pleasures he described was the popular weekly Sunday ritual—not mass but a trip to the Cinema Barberini, closed to the public on that day and reserved for the Rome Cineclub. This predominantly leftist group—most were students hoping to become directors, actors or screenwriters—showed avant-garde films each week. Older film buffs like Elsa Morante and Moravia often attended, as well as professionals like Luchino Visconti, surrounded by his court of good-looking young men, and Vittorio De Sica, looking like a distinguished ambassador from a small country.12

  My father, Rodolphe Solmsen, was a regular member of the Cineclub and here I will digress from Elsa Morante’s story and perhaps also suggest a reason for my telling it. A German and a Jew—albeit an assimilated one, he was baptized a Lutheran—my father settled in Rome after the war to make movies along with William Wyler, Carlo Ponti, Dino De Laurentiis and, of course, Roberto Rossellini. Two of the films he produced were set in Rome. Le ragazze di Piazza di Spagna (Three Girls from Rome), far and away my favorite, was directed by Luciano Emmer and was shot on location. I remember how I watched mesmerized as Lucia Bosé, Cosetta Greco and Liliana Bonfatti sat together on a parapet on the Spanish Steps, their shapely legs dangling in the air while the makeup lady ran back and forth in between takes to comb their hair, apply more lipstick or rearrange the fold of their clothes. In fairly straightforward and predictable fashion, the movie followed the troubled romances of the three young women, seamstresses in a fashion house located on Piazza di Spagna. Made in 1952, the film (whose cast also included Marcello Mastroianni and Eduardo De Filippo) was basically a romantic comedy and followed the new trend in filmmaking, a more humoro
us, rose-colored look at life called neorealismo rosa. But, mostly, I think, I loved the movie because of Lucia Bosé. I was enchanted by her grace and beauty. (A few years later, Lucia Bosé was to give up her movie career to marry the Spanish bullfighter Luis-Miguel Dominguín.) Villa Borghese (in English, It Happened in the Park), the second of my father’s films set in Rome, was likewise a comedy of sorts. It was written by Sergio Amidei and co-directed by Vittorio De Sica and it had a distinguished cast that included De Sica himself, Gérard Philipe, Micheline Presle, Terence Hill (then known as Mario Girotti) and Anna-Maria Ferrero. The film consisted of a series of interconnected vignettes, a kind of la ronde that took place during a single day—beginning in the morning with a nanny and her charge and ending late at night with a prostitute—all set in historic Villa Borghese park. An earlier film produced by my father, Donne senza nome (Women without Names), which starred Simone Simon and was set in a displaced persons camp (shot at Cinecittà as well as in Alberobello, a town famous for the curiously shaped roofs of its houses), had the gritty, unflinching realism the two later films lacked. In 1950, it won the Golden Laurel Award at the Venice Film Festival, the citation reading, “A tribute to the motion picture produced in Europe by Europeans in the Italian language that has made the greatest contribution to mutual understanding and goodwill between the peoples of the free and democratic world.”