by Lily Tuck
Into the homeless dormitory comes the disruptive voice of Davide Segre,* initially known as Vivaldi Carlo. He has escaped from a German prison camp, where he was tortured. A poet, but a poet of anguish, he is the Jew, the intellectual, the anarchist (also, the victim of drug abuse). He is the prophetic voice of suffering, and of the apocalypse: “History, of course, is all an obscenity from the beginning; however, years as obscene as these have never existed before,” Davide Segre shouts out in one of his many tirades. Later—never mind that by then the war is over and no one in the crowded tavern listens to him—he continues his harangue:*
[A]ll History is a history of fascisms, more or less disguised…in the Greece of Pericles…and in the Rome of the Caesars and the Popes…and in the steppes of the Huns…and in the Aztec Empire…and in the America of the pioneers…and in the Italy of the Risorgimento…always and everywhere…free men and slaves…rich and poor…. And so, here we are…this poor matter, material for work and labor, become fodder for extermination and destruction…. Extermination camps.20
By the spring of 1947, Ida has resumed teaching; her hair is white and she has turned into an old woman. Useppe’s epileptic seizures are more frequent and severe; Davide Segre has died and Nino too has been killed, in an accident. Bella, Nino’s dog, reappears to look after Useppe. The boy and the dog take walks and during one of them they discover a place along the banks of the Tiber River, a place where grass grows green and birds sing (the birds sing: “It’s a joke / a joke / all a joke”)—an elysian field where time ceases to exist—and here, the novel takes a strange turn. For more than six hundred pages, Morante’s narrative has portrayed a poor people’s struggle for everyday existence and now, all of a sudden, it depicts a kind of eden. Only this eden cannot last. Despite the protection of his magical and marvelous dog, despite having found a paradise, Useppe is beset by a band of pirates—or so he believes (the pirates turn out to be boys like himself ). In the battle that ensues he has an epileptic fit, which presages his death the following day. But, first, Bella—who, while battling with the pirates, has transformed herself from a gentle shepherdess into “a terrifying monster,” “her jaws wide and her fierce teeth bare, her big eyes resembling two pieces of volcanic glass,”—delivers a triumphant report not unlike one of Mussolini’s war bulletins on the events of the day: “THE DEFEATED WOLVES HAVE RETREATED IN FLIGHT, ABANDONING THE SIEGE OF THE HUT AND THE ENGAGEMENT ENDED WITH THE SENSATIONAL VICTORY OF USEPPE AND BELLA.”21 The two, Useppe and Bella, are no different from the others. They self-destruct. According to Morante, nothing can survive in this corrupt and violent world—not reality, not fantasy and certainly not poetry.
With the death of Useppe, Ida goes mad. When finally the authorities break down the door of her apartment, they will find her physically frozen, a state of paralysis that, according to the narrator, will last for another nine years and until her death. Thus, Ida plays out the same tragic drama originally reported in the newspaper article that was Morante’s inspiration for the story.
In the final section of the novel, the events of the years 1948 through 1967 are summarized; beginning with the crimes committed by southern landowners against the Italian peasants and workers and ending with “Three thousand six hundred and twenty-one aerial bombardments in Vietnam in a six month period, the United States declares.—In Greece, army officers seize power and suspend the constitution. Mass deportations and arrests.” The novel ends with the words “…and History continues…”22
Elsa Morante was meticulous in her research. She knew Rome intimately and was obsessed with accuracy. She spent hours, for instance, in a garage learning about motorcycles and how they function since Nino owns a Triumph. She was also a perfectionist. When she was going through the final galleys of History, she asked Patrizia Cavalli to read them out loud to her. She instructed her to read mechanically, without inflection or without giving a sense to the words. It took Patrizia several days and when the novel was published she could not, she said, read it again.23
Rereading History now, admittedly, would be a very different experience from reading the novel when it first came out in 1974. That year, the atmosphere on the Italian political scene was highly charged. The early seventies had seen the election of Enrico Berlinguer as national secretary of the Communist Party, and it appeared to those on the left—including many academics, writers and artists—that new solutions to Italy’s social and economic problems might be in sight. Berlinguer launched the concept of the “historic compromise” between the three major political parties—the Communists, the right-wing Christian Democrats and the Socialists—as well as a convergence of Catholic and Communist morality in the name of a greater political good (for Berlinguer himself, the latter was the most important goal). He hoped that the Communists and Catholics could find, in historian Paul Ginsborg’s words, “a shared moral and ethical code on which to base the political and social salvation of Italy. The Catholic emphasis on solidarity would combine with the Communist practice of collective action to produce a new political order.”24
Although Berlinguer’s project ultimately failed for a number of reasons—the main one being that it was too vague—the Italian left in the early 1970s was riding along on a wave of great optimism and it viewed Elsa Morante’s novel as far too pessimistic a vision of the world and out of sync with the dominant Marxist ideology of the period. As a result, the novel polarized the Italian intellectual community. The debate was carried on in literary journals: La Fiera Letteraria devoted two issues to trying to decide whether History was or was not a masterpiece. The Communist newspaper Il Manifesto published an “invective-letter” composed in concert by four writers. The book, in fact, was as divisive for Italian intellectuals as Lampedusa’s Il gattopardo was when it was published in 1958. And in 1976, History was banned in Franco’s Spain.25 The resistance and hostility from some Italian critics and a part of the Italian public to the novel was due, on the one hand, to their failure to understand the author’s ideology and, on the other, to Morante’s own refusal to align herself with any one political party. Nonetheless, the novel’s huge sales record was testimony to the fact that controversy may not always be such a bad thing.
One writer who greeted History enthusiastically was Natalia Ginzburg. In a review in Corriere della Sera, she said that she was happy to live in a world where there was also Elsa Morante. Nonetheless, Elsa harbored suspicions about the review; she thought Natalia Ginzburg’s enthusiasm was excessive. She complained that it was a hidden way of being aggressive. Although, the psychology is a bit simplistic, it has also been suggested that Natalia envied Elsa’s literary genius while Elsa envied Natalia’s maternity. Natalia had children.26
Inexplicably, Pier Paolo Pasolini did not follow suit. He wrote a most damning and cruel review of History. The review appeared in two separate installments in Tempo Illustrato, a newspaper where he had begun writing a weekly book review and where he had already reviewed such writers as Marianne Moore, John Ashbery, “the best of the New York school,”27 Céline, Gabriel García Márquez, E. M. Forster and Italo Calvino, to whom he gave a rave for Invisible Cities. The review began with admiration for the novel’s huge scale and subject: “And it is difficult to imagine a subject more ambitious than this.” However, Pasolini felt Morante should probably have spent another year or two working on it. Then, dividing Morante’s novel into three books, he wrote that the first book was “extraordinarily beautiful…I read it while I was in the middle of rereading The Brothers Karamazov and it stood up to the comparison marvelously well.” Yet the criticism that followed was not so laudatory. The second book “misses the point completely; it is nothing more than a mass of haphazard thrown together information; the third book is beautiful although discontinuous and with many of the same confusions as those of the middle book.”
Pasolini became harsher still when he commented on Morante’s use of dialects:
The Roman language spoken by Nino and his friends Morante will forgive me but
I must be blunt) resembles that used by the scribblers of Il Messagero; whereas Davide speaks in an unrecognizable way: the boy presents himself as from Bologna, while in fact he is from Mantua, but talks as if he were from Venice. There is not a single place in the whole of Alta Italia where “cadere” [to fall] is said “cader.” There, in northern Italy, it is “cascare” that has won out over other current forms or variations. That Davide says “cader” is offensive to the reader: but, above all, it is offensive to him. Where is Morante’s great love for him if she is too lazy to make the slightest effort to listen to the way he talks?
Pasolini aggressively pressed on with his attack: all but Ida were false characters, constructed arbitrarily and founded on abstractions. Nothing they said or did seemed plausible. What, for instance, was Morante’s logic in having an important character like Nino disappear from the story while, instead, she supplied a lot of irrelevant and useless information about minor characters the reader did not care about? Pasolini attacked the “mannerism” of her writing and mocked how she portrayed Useppe and how she described animals. In addition, he objected to the way the events that are summarized at the beginning of each section reappeared as part of the narrative and thus, he claimed, lost their vitality and reality. Finally, Pasolini went after Morante’s ideology, maintaining that it was not possible to separate the History of the victims of Power from the History of Power. Morante’s philosophical-political framework was merely a construct, a pastiche. He ended his review, “When such an ideology is transformed into the ‘theme’ of a popular novel—voluminous by definition, full of facts and information, predictable, coming full circle to closure—it loses all credibility: it becomes a feeble pretext that ends by undermining the disproportionate narrative structure which it intended to put in motion.”28
It is not difficult to imagine how devastated Elsa Morante must have been by Pasolini’s review. And how angry. Although, over the last few years, their relationship had become more distant and difficult—they had very different views on politics and Pasolini’s life was very public while hers was very private and perhaps, too, Elsa disapproved of his obsessive and dangerous sexual encounters—Elsa prided herself on her loyalty to her friends. If anyone ever spoke against Pasolini, she always defended him. Thus she could not understand or reconcile herself to the animosity in the article and the violence of his attack. Their friendship came to an abrupt end. Elsa Morante and Pier Paolo Pasolini never spoke to each other again.
A year later, in 1975, Pasolini was found brutally murdered on a deserted beach in Ostia. Photographs show him lying on his back, one arm bloody and twisted, his hair matted, his jaw fractured, his nose flattened, his ear cut in half; worse still, and not apparent in the photos, Pasolini’s testicles were badly bruised, his sternum and ten ribs were broken, his liver was lacerated and his heart had burst. Giuseppe (Pino) Pelosi, a seventeen-year-old boy whom Pasolini had picked up that night, was accused and eventually convicted of his death, the result of beatings with a plank studded with nails and running Pasolini over, perhaps even twice, with his own car, an Alfa.
The investigation of the murder, however, was seriously mishandled: the police waited too long, the site was not secured and soon after heavy rains obliterated tire tracks, footprints and other evidence; and much of the testimony at the trial was based on conjecture and contradictory confessions. The newspapers were full of articles: some made Pasolini out to be a hero and a martyr, others a whipping boy.
The day of Pasolini’s funeral, ten thousand people lined the streets around the Campo dei Fiori in Rome to bid Pier Paolo farewell. The coffin was brought on foot from the Communist Party’s Casa di Cultura near Piazza Venezia, where the body had lain in state, and his friends, including Bernardo Bertolucci, carried it. Another friend, Sergio Citti, had tied Pasolini’s red soccer jersey around it—number eleven. At the sight of the coffin, the crowds applauded, fists rose in the traditional revolutionary salute, people threw flowers. One journalist wrote, “On such a Roman November afternoon, the day begins to end and the birds rise toward a sun justly called blood-red.”29 At the funeral, Alberto Moravia spoke movingly about Pasolini, saying that he was the most important Italian poet of the second half of the century and that he should not be marginalized by his sexuality. He finished with the words “Few poets are born…only two or three in a century.” Grief-stricken and devastated, Elsa, who attended the funeral, was said to have howled like an animal.30
While he was translating La storia into English, William Weaver complained that Elsa Morante would call every morning at ten thirty—the time he had once mentioned to her that he took a break for coffee. She asked questions or else she would say things like “Now on page 379, when I use the word so-and-so, how will you translate that?” And Weaver would answer: “Elsa, I’m on page 123. I’ve got no idea!” But that never stopped her and she called almost daily, ruining his mornings. Finally, Weaver could stand it no longer. He sat down and wrote her a letter: “Dear Elsa, I’m giving up the job. I think you better find somebody else, I don’t think that this is working.” He made a copy for the publisher and another for his agent and sealed the envelopes to mail the next morning. Just at that moment, Elsa called him once more: “I’m calling to say that this is the last time I’m going to call you because I realize that this is not helping you.” Elsa, Weaver said, had read his mind. He tore up the letters and finished the translation. Even so, she was the hardest person he had ever worked with.31
When History was published in the United States in 1977 by Knopf, the reviews were mixed. In The New York Times, Robert Alter, a professor of comparative literature at Berkeley, compared the novel’s setting, “a vast war-scarred landscape of rubble” to that of grainy black-and-white neorealist films and described the plot as a “progress of disasters.” He wrote, “It is of course pernicious nonsense to reduce all history to such a grossly leveling common denominator. All that remains of historical experience is the pangs of victimhood; and those, after abundant repetition and heavy insistence, are likely to leave readers numbed—and with a sense that the sharpness of authorial indictment has finally been eroded by sentimentality.” The novel, he felt, fails as a whole despite some “arresting moments” when Morante “manages to carry out wonderful forays into the uncanny, moving from bleak earthbound things to metaphysical vistas.”32
Stephen Spender, in his review in The New York Review of Books, was more positive, although his praise seemed a bit fainthearted. He did praise Morante’s style and compared her treatment of Ida to that of Flaubert’s Félicité in A Simple Heart. Although the novel is full of doomed characters, Spender noted, “it is also full of enchanting surprises, showing the immense vitality of the poor and oppressed.” He ended his review by calling William Weaver’s translation “a fine achievement.”33
Notwithstanding the faint praise, a passage from Morante’s novel describing the last days of the German occupation of Rome was excerpted in The New York Times. Twice the novel appeared on The Times’ noteworthy lists: first on May 8 as an “Editors’ Choice” and on June 5 in “Fiction” (presumably, the recommended summer reading for that year). Along with History, some of the other novels on the latter list were: Amateurs by Donald Barthelme, An American Romance by John Casey, A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion, The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino (also translated by William Weaver), Falconer by John Cheever, Fools Say by Nathalie Sarraute, Henry and Cato by Iris Murdoch, In the Miro District and Other Stories by Peter Taylor, Junky by William S. Burroughs, Lancelot by Walker Percy, October Light by John Gardner, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz and a new translation of The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu—an impressive array of books.
As a result, no doubt, of the mixed reviews, Morante’s novel did not do particularly well in the United States nor, in the words of Erich Linder, did it fulfill Knopf’s expectations. However, in France, it was a huge success and, in spite of a “doubtful” translation, Gallimard, the publisher, repr
inted History three times and sales approached fifty thousand copies.34
Large, sprawling, messy, ambitious, strange, History is difficult to judge. Although it appears realistic, the novel breaks with conventional storytelling tradition. There is very little plot, most of the action appears random and disconnected and, instead of heroes, there are only poor human beings motivated by hunger and the search for shelter. There is no narrative center, only a web of stories, each leading away from the others. Morante’s discourse is self-conscious, her tone aggrieved and often cynical. The novel is a sustained dolorous cry against injustice at the same time that it is deeply pessimistic about art. Like the serpent that devours its own tail, History tells the story of its own demise. Cesare Garboli was quite right when he wrote that History is based on antiphrasis and expresses itself through antithesis and negation. Contrary to what the reader expects, the end of the war does not bring euphoria or happiness but, instead, transforms the novel into one about the impossibility of sustaining any kind of creativity.35
The tragedy of war is the actual protagonist of Elsa Morante’s novel; it is the grand mal from which Useppe suffers and which affects us all. Conceived both as a literary work and a political action, the novel also makes quite clear the impossibility and futility of fictionalizing an event of such historical magnitude as World War II (in Italian, the war’s non-romanzabilità). Writers such as Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel have written actual testimonies, but not fictional accounts. This, more than anything else, is Elsa Morante’s difficult legacy. At once self-reflective and political (a combination quite new in Italian postwar fiction), her novel, by putting into question the future of the human race by depicting the recent terrible past, places the onus of responsibility for “change” on the reader.36 In Morante’s own words, History is both a “work of poetry” and “an act of accusation against all the fascism of the world.”37