by Lily Tuck
The only female presence in the boy’s life, Immacolatella will die giving birth to her pups.
Arturo’s father, Wilhelm, a bastard by birth and half German, is an outcast on the island, yet Arturo worships him. “The main reason for his supremacy was his difference from everyone else; this was the most wonderful, the most mysterious thing about him. He was different from all the men on Procida, which was like saying from everyone I knew in the world, and even—which made it so galling—from me.” Not only is the father different, he is handsome. “In summer his body seemed to drink in the sun like oil, and glowed, darkly, caressingly; in winter it grew as pale as a pearl again…. His soft straight hair was blond—of a dense fairness that gleamed and glowed in particular lights; and at the nape of his neck where it was shorter, almost shaven, it was actually golden. And his eyes were a violet blue like the sea at moments, darkened by clouds” while, Arturo, his son, “is dark in every season.”16 And, more difficult still, no matter what Arturo does, Wilhelm remains coldly indifferent and emotionally unavailable to his son:
In the meantime, when we were together, I took every opportunity to show him my courage and fearlessness. Barefoot, almost flying from point to point, I’d cross the burning rocks and dive into the sea from the highest of them. In the water I did the most astounding acrobatics and showed I was expert at every sort of swimming…. He’d sit on the shore without taking the smallest notice of me; and as soon as I ran up and flung myself on the sand beside him…he’d get up, with a kind of capricious indolence, looking absent, frowning, as if listening to some mysterious invitation murmured in his ear. He’d raise his lazy arms and float away on his side, and slowly, slowly swim away, in the arms of his bride, the sea.17
A moody, unpredictable yet romantic loner, Wilhelm’s comings and goings remain a mystery to his son: “He always got ready to leave at the last minute” and “He might come back in two or three days, or he might stay away for months, until the winter or longer.” Each time, “[t]he very minute he left Procida, my father would turn into a legend again.”18
Women are scorned and ignored by the Geraces. Their house has been nicknamed the House of the Guaglioni (in Neopolitan dialect guaglione means “boy” or “young man”), and, under the auspices of the previous owner, the house had been the site of wild parties exclusively for men. Rumor had it that the house was fatal to the women who lived there—Arturo’s eighteen-year-old mother died in the house giving birth to him. As a result, Arturo is disdainfully ignorant: “Although I knew nothing about real women, the glimpses I got of them were quite enough to make me conclude that they had absolutely nothing in common with the women in books. Real women, I thought, weren’t splendid or magnificent. They were little creatures who could never grow as big as men, and they spent their whole life shut up indoors; that’s why they were so pale. All bundled up in the aprons, skirts, and petticoats that had to hide those mysterious bodies of theirs, they seemed to me misshapen, almost deformed.” And again: “Sometimes, though not very often, some foreign woman would come to the island and go down to the beach and get undressed to bathe, without the slightest modesty, just like a man…. My father seemed to consider them ridiculous and hateful…. And as for the women, no one even looked at them. As far as Procidans were concerned, as far as I was concerned, they weren’t women at all, but crazy beasts come down from the moon. It never entered my head that their shameless bodies might be beautiful.”19
On a winter afternoon when “a cold squall of rain was clouding Procida,” this near idyllic isolation changes with the arrival of Wilhelm’s young bride, Nunziatella, an uneducated, simple girl not much older than Arturo himself. Not surprisingly, Arturo does not know what to make of Nunziatella; he is both attracted to and repulsed by her, and his sexual feelings for her are confused: “I saw her rise bewilderedly from the blankets, showing her small bare shoulders and the shape of her bosom; and I hated her more furiously than ever. I suddenly wished that she was really a boy like me, that I could punch her until my anger was satiated.” Arturo is also jealous of her as she has drastically altered the relationship between him and his father, which leads him to complain, “I was enduring the trials more bitter than Othello’s. In his tragedy the unhappy Moor at least knew what he was up against, and why he was fighting: the woman he loved on one side, the enemy on the other. While Arturo Gerace’s battlefield was one great confused dilemma, without the relief of hope or of revenge.” He avoids Wilhelm and Nunziatella and spends the days by himself; at night, in bed, rather than listen to their lovemaking, Arturo covers his ears with his hands “for fear of hearing that shriek again from their room…. I’d sooner have seen a wild beast rise up before me than have heard it again.”20
Arturo’s feelings are further complicated by the fact that Wilhelm Gerace does not love his wife; instead he takes pleasure in humiliating and abusing her. “[W]omen,” he tells her, “are like leprosy—when they get hold of you they want to eat you up completely, bit by bit, and isolate you from the rest of the world. Women’s love brings bad luck; they don’t know how to love.” Arturo, who is listening, shares his father’s ill will toward Nunziatella: “I was glad he was ill-treating her, and, what’s more, hoped he’d vent his rage on her physically, fling her on the floor, even, stamp on her. I almost felt I’d find peace in an outrage like that.” Once Wilhelm leaves the island, Arturo takes his own revenge by being cruel and insulting to Nunziatella while she is naïvely and sweetly oblivious and continues to try to please him and to act like his mother—which only succeeds in further infuriating and confusing Arturo. “My rage, with nothing to vent itself on, became such a torment that I began to moan furiously, as if I’d been wounded…[P]erhaps I was unconsciously suffering for my heart’s impossible longings and for the interwoven, contradictory jealousies and complex passions that were to be mine.”21
After Nunziatella gives birth to Arturo’s half brother, Carmine, the tone of the novel changes, as do Arturo’s feelings for Nunziatella. Although still jealous, the object of his jealousy has shifted and his thoughts are tinged with melancholy and longing. Here Arturo is watching Nunziatella kiss her little son: “I didn’t know there were so many kisses in the world, and just to think that I had never had any or ever given any! I watched those two kissing each other as, from a solitary ship out at sea, I might watch an unapproachable, mysterious, enchanted country, full of flowers and foliage.” He becomes obsessed with her and with kisses: “it would seem to me that everything in all the world was kissing. The boats tied together along the beach were kissing each other; the movement of the sea was a kiss as it ran in to the island; the sheep as they cropped the grass were kissing the ground; the wind in the leaves and the grass was all a lament of kisses…. There was no one about in the street who didn’t know the taste of kisses: the women, the fishermen, the beggars, the boys—I was the only one who didn’t. And I had such a longing to know them that I thought of scarcely anything else night and day.”22
Arturo gets to satisfy his longing; he kisses his stepmother and the novel heads toward its inevitable conclusion. Along with his loss of innocence, Arturo’s life on the island starts to unravel: he is introduced to sex (but not love) by a young widow who is a cripple and he finally understands that his love for Nunziatella—although reciprocated—can never be consummated. But far more traumatic for Arturo is his discovery that his father, whom he has idolized, is perversely infatuated with a common criminal incarcerated in Procida’s prison. He witnesses the mortification and self-abasement his father endures when the convict rejects him with the rude epithet “Vattene, parodia!” (the phrase is translated as “Beat it, you grotesque,” but a more accurate meaning is “Go away, you pervert!”).23 The novel ends with Arturo leaving the island of Procida, leaving behind his childhood, his dreams and the tales of heroism that, in the past, sustained him. Ahead, in Arturo’s future, looms the tragic specter of World War II. He had dreamt about sailing away and now the reader knows that he is probably going
to war. He has lost the paradise of his childhood. Happiness was that moment, that place, that point in space and time.24 The opening lines of the poem that serves as an epigraph for the novel predict the end: “That which you thought was a small point of earth / was everything,” as does the last line: “there is no paradise except in limbo.” The island was limbo and that limbo was the only true paradise.
When Arturo’s Island was first published it was compared to Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, but it turned out that Elsa Morante had never heard of either the book or the author. Both House of Liars and Arturo’s Island, as the critic Cesare Garboli pointed out, were written in a sort of intellectual vacuum. For ten years, Elsa Morante wrote nearly in secret with, for company, only her pen, paper, ink and a bunch of cats. She escaped all models and influences or what Harold Bloom, many years later, was to call “the anxiety of influence.”25 (Except for Mozart. Mozart, Elsa Morante always claimed, was her greatest influence and the greatest master in her life. While she was writing Arturo’s Island, she listened obsessively to The Magic Flute.) But “anxiety of influence” or not, the inspiration for Arturo’s Island must certainly have been Luchino Visconti. Readers have gone so far as to say that the novel was written “under the sign of Visconti” and the relationship between Arturo and his father, Wilhelm, certainly appears to bear this out by mirroring and translating fictionally Elsa’s own story with Visconti. It would seem as if, consciously and deliberately, she chose an alter ego in the character of Arturo to tell her own story and to describe her infatuation with Visconti and her eventual deception (like Wilhelm, he was homosexual). A bit childishly, Elsa tended to idolize the men she loved and Visconti always represented someone mythical to her, perhaps precisely because of his very otherness, his unavailability—like a distant star.
For me, Arturo’s Island will always be Elsa Morante’s most lyrical and luminous work. Despite its persistent themes of loss, rejection, adult betrayal and even sadism, the novel manages to celebrate childhood, the power of magic and myth, and the redemptive goodness of nature and animals. It is clear that Elsa Morante loved children and that she believed that the only way to look at reality was through their eyes. Children are the wise custodians of fables and the innocents with paradisal fantasies—both qualities lost to adults. Children always play a central role in Morante’s work and, to depict them, she depended on her own personal biography and memories, often intruding or inserting herself in the narrative. As a result, her characters have often been accused of being narcissistic. In Arturo’s Island, Arturo himself admits, “Maybe while I thought I was in love with this or that person, or with two or three people at the same time, I really didn’t love anyone. The fact was that, on the whole, I was too much in love with love; this has always been my real passion.” Love, in Elsa Morante’s work, always consumes and usually turns into hate; it is rarely joyful or peaceful. Yet, even while Arturo, at the end of the novel, wonders whether he in fact ever really loved his father, he allows a ray of light to fall on this dark tale and a promise of some happiness (however narcissistic) as he pictures Carmine, his half brother. “She [Nunziatella] preferred calling him by his second name, Arturo. And I like to think that there is another Arturo Gerace on the island, a fair boy who now, perhaps, races along the beaches happy and free….”26 Not so surprising then that the other epigraph for the novel, a line from Umberto Saba, reads, “If I see myself in him, I am content….”
Arturo’s Island won the prestigious Strega Prize in 1957. That same year Blanche Knopf acquired the American rights to it for $1500 and triumphantly wrote a colleague that “I have just bought the one great book in Italy that by all accounts is worth having.”27 Soon after, Blanche Knopf received a lovely letter in French from Elsa Morante expressing her pleasure at being published by the prestigious house founded by Blanche’s husband, Alfred A. Knopf as well as her personal happiness at having recently met Blanche in Rome. She wrote that she was convinced that “books, like people, flourished most in sympathetic circumstances and such circumstances brought good luck.” In addition, she told Blanche Knopf that she hoped to visit the United States the following year and was looking forward to seeing her.28 Over the next year and a half, their correspondence grew more affectionate, Blanche Knopf writing that she had begun taking Italian lessons and addressing Elsa Morante in her letters as “dearest Elsa,” while Elsa reciprocated with “dear Madame Blanche.” A large part of their correspondence concerned translation issues. Knopf had decided to share the translator, Isabel Quigly, with the British publisher, William Collins Sons. Although an adequate enough translator, Quigly fell ill and fell far behind schedule; worse, her translation turned out to be too anglicized and Herbert Weinstock, another Knopf editor, had to do a lot of editing. Judith B. Jones, Blanche Knopf’s assistant, also mailed several memos querying errors in the translation, specifically about the word “parody,” arguing that “grotesque” was not a good substitute and suggesting instead the words “poseur,” “buffoon” and “imposter”—even “charlatan,” for, at the risk of sounding “fussy” (her word), Jones understood that “parody” was a key word in the novel.29 Unfortunately, her advice was not taken.
Inexplicably, both Collins and Knopf wanted to change the title. “The House of Dreams,” “A King and a Star,” “The Golden Island” “The Golden Spider” were proposed and fortunately discarded.30 Two American writers, both of whom had spent a great deal of time in Italy and were well acquainted with Elsa Morante, contributed blurbs for the novel’s jacket. Robert Penn Warren wrote, “To miss the fiction of Elsa Morante is to miss one of the beautiful and important things the literature of our time has to offer,” and Francis Steegmuller added his praise, “The most beautiful novel I’ve read in years.” Published in England in May, Arturo’s Island was a great success and jumped up to the best-seller list. Meantime, Erich Linder, Elsa’s agent and friend, sold foreign rights to the novel in Germany, Sweden, France, Norway and Finland.
In the United States, Arturo’s Island finally came out on August 17, 1959, which nearly coincided with the date of Elsa Morante’s birthday—this, as Elsa wrote to Blanche Knopf, “was the best possible omen for the occasion.”31 This turned out to be true as Arturo’s Island received two rave reviews in The New York Times. A day after publication, Gilbert Millstein began his review by saying: “From time to time there appear works for which the only possible description is sublime.” Afraid that his praise might appear excessive, he went on to write, “I also want the book to be as widely read as is possible for a fine contemporary novel…. Whatever uplift is to be found in the book derives from watching the growth of a fourteen-year-old boy into a sixteen-year-old man on an exotic island in the Bay of Naples two years before the opening of the World War II. Whatever its sonorities, they are the cadenced, functional ones of excellent prose.”32 Frederic Morton also glowingly reviewed the novel in the Sunday Times Book Review, comparing the language of the novel to the “melody of legend.” He continued, “Miss Morante possesses the Italian gift of distilling universality out of the primitive. But, she also has a fine feminine instinct for the singing detail. The combination enables her to create a poetic, princely savage of a hero, half freebooter, half Huckleberry Finn. She catches the echo and iridescence of a tragedy from which lucky old Huck was spared: growing up.”33
In September, Elsa Morante was finally able to fulfill her wish and come to New York for a month. During her stay she was invited to Sunday lunch in Purchase, New York, by Blanche’s husband, Alfred—the Knopfs famously did not get along and Blanche was away in Europe at the time. As Elsa later wrote in a thank-you letter, she enjoyed her day in the country very much.34 Also, during her visit to America, Frederic Morton interviewed her over lunch for the Times. He described her as looking like “a small, delicately molded dark blonde, with the cheeks and eyes of a melancholy cherub…and with a tiny gap between front teeth that would do the prettiest gamine honor.” He also said that she looked younger than someone
in her early forties and that she was shy. The shyness, he soon came to realize, was not due to Elsa Morante’s lack of self-confidence but due to insecurity about speaking English (as they talked she often switched to French). In the interview, Elsa Morante again said how she believed that there were three kinds of heroes: Achilles who accepts reality, Hamlet who refuses it and Don Quixote who invents his own, and that her characters were like Don Quixote. Arturo was like that too. She then told Morton: “I’ve always wanted to be a boy, a boy like Arturo, who can hunt and fish and climb big rocks, and go about dressed badly, and have the dreams and illusions of a boy. And I’ve always wanted to swim, but…I never learn [sic]. Maybe that is why Arturo is so much in the ocean. So you see, through writing I am like Don Quixote.” Morton concluded the interview by asking Elsa Morante whether she and Moravia influenced each other’s writing—as he put it in “an attempt to foist some American togetherness on a superbly Continental couple,” and a question that Italian interviewers no doubt knew better than to ask. Putting her coffee cup down firmly, Elsa replied, “No. He has an identity. I have an identity. Basta.”35
eight
WITHOUT THE COMFORT OF RELIGION
In 1959, on her first visit to New York City, Elsa Morante fell in love with Bill Morrow, a twenty-three-year-old painter from Madisonville, Kentucky. Bill Morrow was tall, blond and very handsome. Bill was introduced to Elsa by a mutual friend. As it turned out—a strange coincidence—the friend was Sergio, the same young Chilean I knew in Rome, who took me to Fregene to have lunch with Moravia. (Later I learned that Sergio had committed suicide. His death, I imagine, must have been due in part to the times. Times that were spent recklessly—drinking, doing drugs, sleeping around—and that became known as la dolce vita.)