by Lily Tuck
These wizened, old crones will reappear time and time again in Morante’s fiction, in short stories (such as “Il ladro dei lumi,” “Via dell’Angelo” and “La nonna”—where the grandmother actually murders her grandchildren) and most notably in her novel House of Liars, where again the grandmother, instead of being a life-affirming force, is a mad, destructive one.
But Morante also has dreams—dreams that are equally disturbing—about provocative, preadolescent young girls. These girls, some of them prostitutes, who are usually glimpsed from afar, are sexually uninhibited and seem to suggest a repressed eroticism. In one dream, Morante sees a girl from a speeding train:
The protagonist of the film is a young energetic, strong girl who is head of a band of girls whose silhouettes remain in the shadow. Her silhouette, however, is very clear, she is beautiful, her face is luminous and fine, her two dark braids are tied around her temples…she stays seated in mid air, keeping her balance with her feet. Tidily, she pulls her dress over her knees (in such a way that the public cannot see on the screen what she in her modesty hides) but I, by lowering my eyes, can see in between her thighs, her uncovered sex…which looks to me like a little gray field, shriveled a little, with, around it, a little yellow halo. The train continues its course, the scene disappears…. [January 22]
In another dream, Morante watches as several young girls dance on a balcony:
They strike shameless poses which are often obscene, they laugh and do their exercises in a disorganized manner, lifting their legs. [March 7]
It has been suggested that these two contradictory figures—the old crone and the sexy preadolescent girl—form an archetypal image of both sterility and fecundity, which might explain Morante’s state of mind during this period: her ambivalence, her unreconciled sexuality, her maternal longings. It also addresses some of the difficulties inherent in her search for a feminine identity. Years later, Pier Paolo Pasolini was to find the apt phrase to describe Elsa: “nonna bambina” (a grandmother child).
The writing or the recording of the dreams progresses by association and in ways that are not always clear. Most of the events that occur seem to be taken from daily life. There are definite feelings of life’s precariousness and a fear of death; her death and the death of others are constant themes in Elsa Morante’s dreams. In a long, involved dream on February 25, Kafka is dying, unnoticed, inside a child’s crib in Elsa’s studio. He is wearing a flowered cretonne dress that resembles one of Morante’s dresses and tied around his eyes is her black hair band. When she awakes, not surprisingly, she wonders if, in the dream, it was not she who was dying? Or was it Alberto Moravia?
The two dreams in which a baby appears are very troubling indeed, particularly as it is not clear whether they refer to a miscarriage or an abortion (the reason, it has been suggested, that Elsa could not have children). In either case, however, they appear to refer to an actual event in Elsa Morante’s life.
In the first dream Morante is attending a baby’s funeral; she describes the baby, whose body is not yet decomposed but gives off a bad odor.
I do my best to think but I cannot remember if this child is mine. Could it be that it was mine, the son of WILLY COPPENS? [March 16]
Who was Willy Coppens? Was he the father of her child? The reader cannot help but ask. Unfortunately, there is no answer.
In the second dream, Morante claims to be only half asleep. She is holding a baby in her arms. Feeling both anxious and happy, she squeezes him tightly so he cannot escape. The child is large, plump and blond and she thinks, Lord, now, I will no longer be alone, you are here, my love. Then, she asks God to forgive her: “How could I possibly keep him?” One had to, she goes on, it was fate, it was the will of God…but she has sinned.
An inspiration, I think. This child, big already, who existed and did not exist, it was him. In fact, Coppens was blond. I am afraid. But of whom? afraid of you? he is an angel, and perhaps he has forgiven me and he prays for me.
(“Here is the little fetus,” they said.) [April 27]
On a more positive note, she writes:
Dreams, what miracles!…One word, one look suffices to propel a dream toward nameless paths, adventurous voyages. It is like a thread which turns itself into fabulous lace.
Could that be the secret of art? To remember how one saw the work in a dream state, to try to say again how one saw it, to try above all to remember. For to invent, no doubt, is to remember. [February 23]
Here her dreams are viewed as a source of inspiration:
Where do the characters in a dream come from? By that I mean not the ones who more or less represent those in our daily lives but the other unknown ones…. They are the veritable artistic creations. [February 25]
The last dream entry, on July 30, is very short:
Last night I dreamt about pink flowers.
Like an earlier dream on January 21 about pink flowers, which reminds her of spring and gives her a childish and sensual joy, this dream presents a hopeful image, a dream of love perhaps (it may even refer to marriage). In any case, the flowers bode well, signifying as they do the hope for salvation and lightness as opposed to Elsa Morante’s dreaded state of old age and pesanteur or heaviness.
four
THE WAR YEARS
Elsa Morante met Alberto Moravia in 1937, the same year—Moravia was the one to point this out—that Hitler met Mussolini.1 In fact, not too long afterward, one day in June 1938, Elsa Morante remembered how Mussolini and Hitler had paraded together in a convertible limousine underneath her apartment window and that she caught a glimpse of “the two awful heads, both shining in the sun, one round, white and greasy like a cheese, the other not so blond as I expected, glittering with brilliantine.” She had prepared a pot of boiling oil on her stove and she was ready to pour it over the two heads, but at the last moment Moravia dissuaded her and convinced her of “the utter foolishness of it all.”2 At the time of her meeting Moravia, Elsa was living on via del Corso with an older man; she also had several other lovers. In fact, she invented a cockamamie story to tell Moravia, no doubt to intrigue him and which he believed, about how she had been in love with a young English lord who was a homosexual and who was murdered in front of her eyes by his lover.3
In his autobiography, Moravia repeatedly mentioned how poor Elsa was at the time of their first meeting. So poor that he gave her one of his old suits, “a tan chalk-stripe,”4 which Elsa refashioned into a tailleur for herself. (It is difficult to imagine—no matter how good a seamstress she might have been—making his suit fit her, as Moravia was nearly a foot taller; in addition, it is a bit disturbing to think of Elsa wearing Moravia’s cast-off clothes.) But, almost in the same breath, Moravia also remembered Elsa as looking elegant in a close-fitting black dress with a beautiful blue fox fur. These disparate descriptions of her clothes, however, serve to reaffirm the sort of hand-to-mouth existence that Elsa Morante must have led during those years.
Soon they became a recognized couple, Morante-Moravia, and they had dinner every evening at one of several local, inexpensive trattorias with their friends—the artists Giuseppe Capogrossi, Toti Scialoja, Renato Guttuso, and the writers Mario Pannunzio, Vitaliano Brancati, Sandro De Feo. All ardent anti-Fascists, they spent most of their meals vociferously denouncing the regime and the anti-Semitic racial laws that Italy adopted in 1938. These, the most striking step in the Fascist radicalization, affected a lot of intellectuals—one out of twelve university professors had to abandon their chairs.5 But as if paralyzed, these anti-Fascists did nothing. Moravia recalled how he and his friends waited for something awful to happen, none of them capable of foreseeing the specific horrors to come in the German occupation of Europe. However, by 1939, Moravia believed that everyone must have known about the camps and the extermination of the Jews as he claimed to: “I knew also about the Russian concentration camps,” he said. “I went often to Paris and received all possible information: I bought books, I met Russian and German exiles. I remember that
in 1940 Alberto Mondadori, returning from Poland, told me, ‘horrible things are happening.’ ‘What?’ (I asked.) The Germans had invited him to witness a massacre of Jews, like a performance. He didn’t accept, naturally, but he went around Milan telling about it.”6
At the time, too, Moravia—despite the success of his first novel, The Time of Indifference—had very little money. He was living at home with his parents, which actually was not an unusual situation for a thirty-year-old bachelor in Italy. However, it was also the incidental and not particularly flattering reason that Moravia gave for marrying Elsa, since Rome, he said, was unusually cold the winter of 1940–41 and he could hardly bear walking home every night from her place. Years later, in a series of conversations with Alain Elkann that formed the basis of his autobiography, Alberto Moravia also claimed never to have been in love with Elsa Morante. Instead, he said, “I loved her, yes, but I never managed to lose my head: I never fell, in other words. She always knew this, and it was perhaps also the chief reason for the difficulties of our life together. I wasn’t in love, but I was fascinated by an extreme, heart-rending, passionate quality in her character. It was as if every day of her life were the last, just before her death. So in an atmosphere of impassioned aggressiveness on her part and defensive affection on mine, we lived together for twenty-five years.” Nor did he ever feel a violent physical desire for Morante.7
On Easter Monday, April 14, 1941, a day known in Italy as the Monday of the Angel, Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia were married in Chiesa del Gesù, the Jesuit church whose gorgeously lavish baroque interior houses the remains of St. Ignatius Loyola. Father Tacchi-Venturi, a Jesuit priest who was also Mussolini’s confessor, married them. Elsa Morante had insisted on being married in church for, although not a practicing Catholic, she was a devout one. Too poor to buy her a ring, Alberto Moravia brought her a bouquet of lilies of the valley. Moravia’s family did not attend the wedding, but, afterward, they invited the newlyweds to dinner. At this dinner, Moravia’s mother tried to give Elsa some domestic advice and Elsa responded rudely to her. According to Moravia, Elsa believed that there were two sorts of people—those who had a soul and those who didn’t. His mother, she said, did not have a soul. The two women never saw each other again.8
The same year Elsa Morante translated Katherine Mansfield’s posthumous short story collection Scrapbook into Italian. No doubt the work was motivated by both financial necessity and a shared aesthetic sensibility. Morante and Mansfield each believed in the importance of mood and atmosphere, rather than plot or action, as the driving force in the short story, which ideally would culminate in “one blazing moment” (Mansfield’s words)9 or in an epiphany. Also, both writers were admirers of and influenced by Chekhov. And, at a time when experimental writing was in vogue, and even though they experimented with narrative techniques, neither writer trespassed far beyond the barriers of the classical prose style. More specifically, it is interesting to take a look at the similarities, which also includes a similarity in the choice of story titles: Katherine Mansfield’s “The Man without a Temperament,” written in 1920, and Morante’s “Un uomo senza carattere” (“A Man without Character”), written in 1941, the same year of her translation. In both stories, the self-sacrificing, overly sensitive male protagonists are intent on trying to support and help a woman who in one case is a pathetic invalid and in the other a ludicrous and self-deluded fool. Robert Salesby, in the Mansfield story, gives up his life in London in order to look after his sick wife while, in Morante’s story, the artless and naïve hero, Poeta—in what turns out to be a misguided attempt to be chivalrous and honest—tells silly, stupid Candida that the men in the village are making fun of her, a bit of truth that causes her to become mortally sick. And although Poeta fantasizes that he might marry her (the ultimate self-sacrifice to save Candida’s dignity), Candida dies, thus perhaps illustrating Elsa Morante’s own feelings of unworthiness. The outcome, in both stories, subverts the males’ traditional roles as well as exposes the females’ feelings of dependence and unworthiness. In the case of Katherine Mansfield, the autobiographical elements in the story are obvious, since like her female character she was ill with tuberculosis and hospitalized, and she had written the story in part to show that she understood the difficulties her illness was causing her marriage. In Elsa Morante’s case, it has been pointed out that the year she wrote the story coincided with the year of her marriage to Alberto Moravia, to whom she always felt inferior and whose social and intellectual stature intimidated her.10
The next year, 1942, Elsa Morante’s book of children’s stories The Marvelous Adventures of Cathy with the Long Tresses and Other Stories (Le bellissime avventure di Caterì dalla trecciolina e altre storie) was published exactly as she had written and illustrated it years earlier in school. A letter from publisher Giulio Einaudi offering his most cordial salutations and the copy of a check stub confirm that the balance of 2000 lire was paid to Elsa Morante for the rights to this book. The money must have been most welcome.
In Rome, Alberto and Elsa lived in a two-room attic apartment on via Sgambati; the apartment had a marvelous view of the Borghese Gardens but was too small to allow them to work separately. As a result, they spent quite a lot of time on Capri during the early years of their marriage. Capri was cheap and the beauty of both the island and the sea around it provided them, especially in wartime, with a consolation of sorts. The many months the two spent there in the village of Anacapri, in large rented rooms in a villa owned by the former mayor, remained one of the most beautiful memories of Moravia’s life:
Anacapri was a genuine village, very likable, with hospitable, simple people…. They never locked the doors of their houses because nobody would think of stealing. We ate sandwiches on the beach, or we ate in a trattoria, Maria’s, at the Piccola Marina, four tables under an arbor. We ate eggplant, octopus, things like that. Then around four we would go back up to Anacapri where we would have tea. I’d buy the newspapers in town, writing paper, cigarettes…. At five we would take a walk in the interior of the island. The war was on, and in Anacapri there were only some Swedish families…. We went to see the cannons that were supposed to defend the Bay of Naples…. They never fired a shot. Elsa walked around with a Siamese cat on a leash and I had an owl on my shoulder.11
Because they had so little money, they went everywhere on foot—climbing up the steep, winding road from the village of Capri to Anacapri—often quarreling the whole time. Moravia was working on his coming-of-age novella, Agostino, and Elsa Morante had begun writing her eight-hundred-page first novel, House of Liars (Menzogna e sortilegio).
Alberto Moravia’s 1952 story, “Bitter Honeymoon” (in Italian, “Luna di miele, sole di fiele,” which translated literally means Moon of Honey, Sun of Bile) is set in Capri. The story contains so many recognizable biographical details that the reader cannot help but try to draw certain parallels between the relationship of Moravia and Morante and that of the protagonists. The story begins with a description of Anacapri, to which the newly married Giacomo has just returned, bringing his wife, Simona, for their honeymoon:
But this time, immediately upon their arrival, everything seemed very different. The sultry dog-days of mid-August were upon them and steaming humidity overclouded the sky. Even on the heights of Anacapri, there was no trace of the crisp air, of flowers or the violet sea whose praises Giacomo had sung. The paths winding through the fields were covered with a layer of yellow dust…. Long before autumn was due, the leaves had begun to turn red and brown, and occasional trees had withered away from lack of water. Dust particles filled the motionless air…and the odours of meadows and sea had given way to those of scorched stones and dried dung.12
Even Simona’s looks have lost their romantic appeal, although the description of her—except for the color of her hair—certainly brings to mind Elsa Morante:
Although Simona was not tall, she had childishly long legs with slender thighs, rising to an indentation, almost a cleft at eit
her side, visible under her shorts, where they were joined to the body. The whiteness of her legs was chaste, shiny and cold, she had a narrow waist and hips, and her only womanly feature, revealed when she turned around to speak to him, was the fullness of her low-swung breasts, which seemed like extraneous and burdensome weights, unsuited to her delicate frame. Similarly her thick, blonde hair, although it was cut short, hung heavily over her neck.13
Clearly, Moravia’s descriptions are designed to show Giacomo’s disillusionment and fear that his marriage is a failure—Simona had refused to make love the night before, on their wedding night. Giacomo’s unease is further enhanced by his own feeling of impotence and frigidity:
It was really hot—there was no doubt about that—and in the heavy air all round there seemed to Giacomo to reside the same obstacle, the same impossibility that bogged down his relationship with his wife: the impossibility of a rainfall that would clear the air, the impossibility of love. He had a sensation of something like panic, when looking at her again he felt that his will to love was purely intellectual and did not involve his senses.14
Toward the end of the story, when again Simona refuses to sleep with him, Giacomo cuts his finger to pretend there is blood on the sheets and finally—after he does consummate his marriage (during a fierce thunderstorm)—he reflects: “Nothing was settled.”15 Like many of Moravia’s male protagonists, Giacomo is both filled with sexual desire and frightened by the object of his desire. This ambiguity is often dramatized by an act of violence.
This violence is not just imagined violence but based on Moravia’s own actions or reactions. The events in another story, “The Unfortunate Lover” (“L’amante infelice”), he admitted, were “ready made” for him. Not only did he transcribe them exactly how they had occurred, he claimed that although he had lost his head over the woman, he was not in love with her: “We spent a magnificent day. We went out in a boat to swim at the Grotta Verde. Then we ate at the Piccola Marina: a perfect day. We took a carriage and went up to my room. She fell asleep. But I tried to make love…. She rejected me crossly and—as if seized by a temporary homicidal insanity—I grabbed her by the neck and tried to strangle her.”16