by Sarah Vowell
11 February 1936
Making a little joke out of it, just barely hinting, the political adviser mentions mentoring. Incentivization. If a phalanx fulfills more of the Plan, the platoon commander gets paid more. I’m not swallowing that bait. How could I be a Stakhanovite when I have no wish to work at BAM for more than a year? If you stand out then you will never get away. In any well-ordered project you find some disorder, but we have more disorder than order. They put pressure on the guards and hint at incentivization, but make no attempt to address the real problem. There are all these miscellaneous “educators” in the Education and Culture Unit slobbing about, getting drunk and generally behaving scandalously, and the guards are expected to cover for the job they are not doing.
The phalanx leaders have it in for the guards. Our superiors are supposedly rehabilitating zeks and we’re supposed to just put up with it. Why doesn’t someone put those people in their place and stop them undermining our authority! If you dismissed me now without a month’s notice I’d agree to it in a flash. In fact, I’d agree to donate a month’s pay on top. What sort of work can you do in that kind of mood? All the same, I wonder what they do with educated people who would be capable of managing a phalanx, teaching them and so on.
12 February 1936
Today is a holiday in Moscow. I would be riding the tram home, planning my evening.
13 February 1936
The hills, the taiga, my thoughts, all exist in a kind of vacuum. Not only that, but a vacuum with constraints. There is another world abroad. I know it exists, but I can’t get there.
23 February 1936
Red Army Day. I hand over 5 Platoon and prepare 4 for handover. Something is in the air. I’ll be somewhere, somehow. I don’t like moving, carting my belongings around, settling in. I’ll even miss 4 Platoon a bit. They weren’t such a bad lot.
25–26 February 1936
In Zavitaya. Spent a sleepless night in a truck. I feel doped all day. The boss calls me in and appoints me commander of a division. I’ve drawn the short straw, I’ll have to serve in this army for decades now, like a serf. I sit with Savchuk and listen to the gramophone. It’s emotionally unsettling.
I receive my letter of appointment. I have to start forming a divisional HQ. I have a meeting with the men from Moscow. Someone has a keen ear and long tongue. The company commander alludes to my demob yearnings. It feels strange, after the taiga, to be in an actual town. I’ll have to get used to it. I’m not feeling quite right in the head. Must be the sleepless nights.
Also the jubilation, the wild, throbbing jubilation, has thrown me off balance. I receive a greetings telegram to mark Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army Day. I’ll enter . . . [sentence left incomplete]. The violin reduces me to a quivering wreck. There’s nobody to exchange so much as a word with. There’s no one to answer my questions.
I can’t do this. I can’t.
My pen is blunt.
Just breaking off in mid-sentence.
SHEILA HETI
■
A Correspondence with Elena Ferrante
FROM Brick
I interviewed Elena Ferrante by email over the summer of 2016. She read my questions (which were written in English) and wrote her responses in Italian. Her replies were translated by Ann Goldstein, the English translator of Ferrante’s many books. I had been hesitant about conducting this interview when I was offered the opportunity, for I admire Ferrante’s reticence. Yet, debating it over with myself, it seemed it would be a mistake not to ask this great writer questions, if I had the chance.
For those who are unaware, Ferrante is one of the most celebrated contemporary writers in the world, and rightly so. In 2011, she released the first of a series of four books (each around 350 pages in length) called The Neapolitan Quartet, which follow two female friends from the time of their childhood in Naples in the 1950s to the present day. The books thrillingly unmask the consciousness and social situation of these women, tracing the complex bonds and political struggles of several generations of families in twentieth-century Naples. Reading these books, I felt a keen loss over the many great books that had not been written by women down through time; Ferrante made me long for even more first-rate writers to map (and to have mapped) the many underwritten aspects of the female experience. To me, the books have a distinctly female point of view: the point of view not of the natural victor but of one who has to fight for the right to observe.
Her three earlier and shorter novels (Troubling Love, The Days of Abandonment, and The Lost Daughter, published in Italian between 1992 and 2006) are like tinctures of the quartet: exquisitely precise and intensely felt, they magnify moments in a life and are written in a style and language that calls to mind few others—perhaps Clarice Lispector, for being just as brutal, penetrating, and heartbreaking. Ferrante’s books are profoundly contemporary while giving the same satisfaction as many nineteenth-century novels, as if Ferrante were not living in a landscape of busily competing media, but rather writing in a world where the quiet of readers can be taken for granted. She is formally risk-taking yet is a masterful storyteller. Her books rush you along in a swell of complicity, curiosity, feeling, and suspense. I cannot think of a single person I know who has not read Ferrante only to fall helplessly into her world. She has collapsed the gap between the sort of books that writers feel awe for and that the reading public can’t get enough of—the rarest thing.
Speaking personally, as a writer who has engaged in the various publicity and marketing strategies that many of us allow, I was interested to talk to Ferrante about how she knew from the beginning that she wanted to avoid the performance of self; I wanted to ask about the relationship between her own “disappearance” and the many disappearances she writes about. To me, there is something special about Ferrante’s disappearance as a body: unlike with, say, Salinger or Pynchon, disappearance is Ferrante’s main literary theme, and so her choice seems artistically meaningful, not just personal. I wanted to ask about how she—as a great illustrator of the human condition—has navigated such experiences as motherhood, discipleship, and rebellion. Naturally, I was curious to know how she wrote her books, but I didn’t ask too many craft questions because I know that for any writer, composition is ultimately a mystery.
Ferrante has managed, for decades, that difficult and enviable thing: the maintenance of total privacy as a human being, along with total openness as a creator through her art. I, and many of her devoted readers, hope there is even more of that art still to come. We are so grateful she took the time to do this interview, although as you will see, she doesn’t consider this an interview at all.
—Sheila Heti
HETI: You’ve remarked that you forget the books you read. Do you think there’s some connection between being a reader who forgets (I am too) and being able to create and write? Maybe forgetting is a subconscious kind of remembering that allows writers to recombine what they’ve taken from literature in ways that are particular to them.
FERRANTE: Yes, that’s probably the case. I do forget, I forget especially the books I’ve loved very much. I have an impression of them, I have a feeling for them, but to discuss them I would have to reread them. If I had a clear memory that allowed me to cite passages, point out crucial moments, any attempt at writing of my own would seem to me lost at the start. Imagination is said to be a function of memory. I prefer to think that it’s a function of nostalgia. We compose stories knowing very well that we are the last to arrive. And yet every time it seems to us that we are returning to the moment when the first human being, with nothing but the truth of his experience and the urge to reinvent it at every step, began to tell a story.
HETI: Do you have any interest in writing short stories?
FERRANTE: I’ve written very few short stories. The form that suits me is the long story, not the novel: I surprised myself by the dimensions of The Neapolitan Quartet. The thickness of the volumes on the shelf makes me anxious, I have the feeling that I overdid it.
FERRANTE: I’ve never worshipped books. I’ve always had a sense of the provisional nature of forms—the world changes continuously and what seemed to us inconceivable soon becomes a habit. I admit, however, that I do worship writing. Everything will change, but I can’t imagine the end of the possibility of writing, with whatever tool, on whatever surface.
HETI: Your three novels before The Neapolitan Quartet—were they written in fragments, which you later pieced into a narrative, or were they written from beginning to end? Some writers plan what’s going to happen chapters before they get there; others can see only a few sentences ahead. What is the process like for you?
FERRANTE: I’ve always worked a lot on fragments. Sometimes there was almost no connection between them: they were good as selfsufficient pages, but there was no way to put them together. More often, though, a single fragment expanded and became a long story. The result almost always seemed to me artificial in tone because of an excess of invention, a maniacal attention to the sentence. I liked to tell stories—yes, I’ve always liked that—but I couldn’t stick to what it seemed to me I had in mind in a satisfying way. Here I must explain myself: I always know what I want to tell but in a very confused way, so confused that I wouldn’t be able to say it even to myself. In the past, to get out of that confusion, in the urgency to express myself and understand what was going through my own head, I would talk to a friend. But I soon discovered that the spoken story took away the desire to write, and so I learned to be silent. If I want the story to move from confusion to order, I have to write: for me, there is no other way. Naturally, once the story is under way, as it moves on from the beginning and seeks a conclusion, I may discover possible links to material already written, and I use it or rewrite it. But essentially, when I write, I myself am amazed at what emerges from the fog and becomes clear, establishes connections, finds junctions. Yet I should clarify here that not even this simple movement from confusion to story has ever seemed to me sufficient. The problem for me is naturalness of tone and preserving the truth. If, in telling a story, the writing loses truth, I throw it away.
HETI: You once said, “I tend to edit and then inevitably revert to the original draft, when I see what I’ve lost by editing.” I agree: there is always some power in the way a person first catches the words on the page. Can you talk about balancing your instinct to keep the rawness with your instinct to clean up? If you often prefer the first draft to the edited draft, what does your editing process consist of?
FERRANTE: I detest vapid, sugary, sentimental tones and I try to get rid of them. I detest refinement when it cancels out naturalness, and so I look for precision without going too far. I could continue like that, with a fine list of intentions, but it’s just talk. In fact, I move by instinct, a spontaneous movement that, if I put it in order, becomes merely a banal guidebook. So let’s say that, pulled this way and that by countless readings, by varied layers of taste, by inclinations and idiosyncrasies, I generally aim at what seems to me perfection. Then, however, perfection suddenly seems an insane excess of refinement and I return to versions that seem effective precisely because they are imperfect.
HETI: Picasso said the new work of art always looks ugly at first, especially to its creator. Did you find your books ugly in the way Picasso meant?
FERRANTE: Yes, certainly yes, but not because I feel the book as new; rather because I feel it as mine, tarnished by contact with my experience.
HETI: Your books resist the pressure to be “correct” in a feminist sense. For me, I have noticed that often women will react negatively to portrayals of women that are “un-feminist.” Why do you think such readers have a hard time with portrayals of women that conflict with their ideals? Do they feel the female author is somehow betraying them?
FERRANTE: “Correctness” has never been a concern of mine when I write. Nor have I ever felt, in telling a story, that I had to adapt the story or the character to the demands of a cultural alignment, to the urgent needs of political battles, even if I share them a hundred percent. Literature is not the sounding board of ideologies. I write always and only about what it seems to me I know thoroughly, and I would not bend the truth of a story to any higher necessity, not even to some ethical imperative or some prudent consistency with myself.
HETI: Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Elsa Morante, Clarice Lispector, Alice Munro. What are these writers, whom you cite among your favorite writers, able to do?
FERRANTE: Pride and Prejudice is perfect, but I find Sense and Sensibility and Emma more appealing. I like texts that are generous and thus imperfect. Elsa Morante’s House of Liars and Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H. also belong to this category, for different reasons.
HETI : Could you speak a bit about Madame Bovary? This book always upsets me. I can’t take how unsympathetic Flaubert is to Bovary, how trite he feels her entrapment is, how foolish and narcissistic her fantasies. What do you think of the character of Bovary, and of Flaubert’s relationship to his character?
FERRANTE: I think of Emma Bovary as the extraordinary incarnation, today more alive than ever, of how women can become the victims of debased liberating ideologies. Madame Bovary reads, and reads about what the full life of a romantic woman should be; that is to say, not a stupid, pious, provincial woman but a free woman worthy of a Byron. Flaubert shows in fact how his heroine’s romanticizing is modeled more on male needs than on hers. Even structurally, the book shows the vise in which Emma is gripped. Not only does the author make her a victim of superficial lovers—although he concedes her the title, he denies her both the opening (devoted to Charles Bovary) and the end (devoted to the pharmacist Homais). Good books are not those that tell how things ought to go but those that tell how things do go.
HETI: Do you keep copies of the books you have written and published in the room where you write?
FERRANTE: No.
HETI: So much contemporary female writing is accused of narcissism. Have you escaped the charge of narcissism, or have you received it? I’d like to bind this question to your comments about women who “practice a conscious surveillance on themselves,” who before were “watched over by parents, by brothers, by husbands, by the community.” You have written that women who practice surveillance on themselves are the “heroines of our time,” but it’s precisely these women—real and fictional—who are accused of the sin of narcissism, as if a woman looking at herself (rather than being looked at by a man) was insulting to everyone. How do you understand this charge?
FERRANTE: I’ve never felt narcissism to be a sin. It seems, rather, a cognitive tool that, like all cognitive tools, can be used in a distorted way. No, I think it’s necessary to be absolutely in love with ourselves. It’s only by reflecting on myself with attention and care that I can reflect on the world. It’s only by turning my gaze on myself that I can understand others, feel them as my kin. On the other hand, it’s only by assiduously watching myself that I can take control and train myself to give the best of myself. The woman who practices surveillance on herself without letting herself be the object of surveillance is the great innovation of our times.
HETI: You’ve said, “Even if we’re constantly tempted to lower our guard—out of love, or weariness, or sympathy, or kindness—we women shouldn’t do it. We can lose from one moment to the next everything that we have achieved.” This is very striking to me. What does it mean to you to lower your guard? Women are taught to give ourselves fully, with great trust, in love . . . but you think we shouldn’t?
FERRANTE: It seems to me risky to forget that no one gave us the freedoms we have today—we took them. For that very reason they can at any moment be taken away again. So just that, we mustn’t ever lower our guard. It’s wonderful to give oneself fully to anothe
r, we women know how to do it. And we should continue. It’s a serious mistake to retreat, giving up the marvelous feelings we’re capable of. Yet it’s indispensable to keep alive the sense of self. In Naples, certain girls who showed the marks of beatings would say, even with pleased half-smiles, He hits me because he loves me. No one can dare to hurt us because he loves us, not a lover, not a friend, not even children.
HETI: You’ve said, “I feel such a sense of unease and distrust these days that I can no longer write even half a word without fearing that, once published, it might be distorted or purposely taken out of context and used in a malicious way.” I think this is something many writers feel. Have you found a solution for it?
FERRANTE: Yes. Be silent, recover my strength, start again.
HETI: Do you ever have the desire to publish under a new pseudonym—to leave Ferrante behind and release a book into the world around which there are no assumptions? Or do you like building the oeuvre? Do you have a connection to the name?
FERRANTE: No, I don’t enjoy playing with pseudonyms. That bit of “I” that I manage to put together as an author corresponds to the name of Elena Ferrante.
HETI: I think many male artists are flattered by the idea of having artistic disciples, and many young men I know (writers, artists) enjoy being disciples of the older male artists they respect. This seems less the case among women who admire other women; women seem not to want imitators and seem not to want to imitate even the women they love. If this is true, how does a female literary tradition come into being? Or how do women become part of a non-gendered tradition, if tradition has anything to do with strong links between writers?