In fact that’s what happens. Alessandra doesn’t understand, I did. The need to offer her beauty to the loved man seemed to me not liberating but sinister. Eleonora says, showing off her half-naked body to her daughter and the neighbor: “Every time I arrive and he looks at me, I have a desire to be as beautiful as a woman in a painting.” The passage continues like that, in the voice of Alessandra: “She got up, she rushed to embrace Lydia and then Fulvia, and then me, she flew to the mirror and stopped there, observing herself. ‘Make me beautiful,’ she said, clasping her hands to her heart. ‘Make me beautiful.’ ”
Make me beautiful. How I wept at those words. The phrase remained in my memory not as a cry for life but as something deathly. A lot of time has passed and many things have changed, but the need that de Céspedes’s Eleonora expresses still seems desperate, and therefore meaningful. Let’s return to those passages as I felt them at my first, long-ago reading, and still feel them now. Eleonora, impelled by love, decides to take off the clothes of punishment, of suffering. But the only alternative she comes up with is the costume inherited from her mother, the dress worn by the female body exploited and put on display. Fulvia, the dressmaker, sews the dress, and Eleonora adorns herself as an offering to a distracted him: a Juliet dress, an Ophelia dress, a dress that is no less humiliating than the neutral dresses, the self-annihilating dresses of the roles of wife and mother. This I knew, this it seemed to me I had known forever. I knew that not only the demure clothes of Eleonora’s domestic closet but also those meant for display are clothes that hang in the closet like dead women. It would take Alessandra the whole book to understand this. Too late: like her grandmother, like her mother, she, too, emerges into death. I had perceived it, I don’t know how, in my mother’s clothes, in her passion to make herself beautiful, and that perception tormented me. I didn’t want to be like that.
But how did I want to be? When I thought of her, once I was an adult, once I was far away, I sought a means of understanding what type of woman I could become. I wanted to be beautiful, but how? Was it possible that you necessarily had to choose between dullness and ostentation? Don’t both paths lead back to the same subservient dress, Harey’s terrible dress, the one that is on you forever, anyway, and there’s no way to get it off? I was anxiously searching for my path of rebellion, of freedom. Was the way, as Alba de Céspedes has Alessandra say, using a metaphor perhaps of religious origin, to learn to wear not clothes—those will come later, as a consequence—but the body? And how does one arrive at the body beyond the clothes, the makeup, the customs imposed by the everyday job of making oneself beautiful?
I’ve never found a definite answer. But today I know that my mother, both in the dullness of domestic tasks and in the exhibition of her beauty, expressed an unbearable anguish. There was only one moment when she seemed to me a woman in tranquil expansion. It was when, sitting bent in her old chair, her legs drawn up and joined, her feet on the foot rest, around her the discarded scraps of material, she dreamed of salvific clothes, and drawing needle and thread straight she sewed together again and again the pieces of her fabrics. That was the time of her true beauty.
NOTE
The letter to Sandra Ozzola is from June, 2003. The letter from April 11, 2003, with the questions from Giuliana Olivero and Camilla Valletti that inspired Ferrante’s text, follows.
Dear Elena Ferrante,
It would give us great pleasure to have an interview with you in the pages of Indice7 (under the rubric devoted to contemporary fiction and provocatively titled “Unsuccessful Writing”). Our journal has closely followed your literary output, with reviews and comments. In particular, we have read your novels passionately, and we think your writing interprets the universe and the feelings of women by making them the center of a poetics, beyond and above literary conventions.
We would therefore be truly grateful if you would answer the questions that follow, sending us your answers by e-mail through Sandra Ozzola.
With affection,
Giuliana Olivero and Camilla Valletti
Questions
1. In very different ways, the protagonists of your novels come from archaic female models, myths of the Mediterranean matrix, from which they free themselves only in part. Is suffering the result of this intermittent relationship with one’s own origins, of this difficult and unresolved detachment from traditional roles?
2. Guilt and innocence. None of your characters can call themselves innocent but neither are they entirely guilty. How does one analyze guilt for a female? For a male?
3. How is the original betrayal of the father/mother tied to the chain of successive betrayals? What importance does reading the relationships in your novels in an anthropological-psychoanalytic key have?
4. Naples and Turin: why do you attribute to places, to cities, an almost physical, almost repellent density, as if they had a body that breathes, that sickens along with your women?
5. What relationship do your protagonists have with the rituals of clothes and makeup?
17.
AN AFTERWORD
July 3, 2003
Dearest Elena,
Yesterday, here at the beach, I got your e-mail with the long answer to the questions from the editors of Indice attached. I found it extraordinarily interesting, and it gave me an idea: couldn’t we make a book out of it? Not a ponderous essay, but reflections on subjects we’ve often discussed over the years, and certainly of interest not only to you and me but also to many other people (not just women) who are fans of your books and would like to follow you a bit more closely in your journey.
Your wish not to appear, which is absolutely legitimate, perhaps deserves a more general response, beyond the newspaper interviews, not only to placate those who get lost in the most far-fetched hypotheses on your real identity but also out of a healthy desire on the part of your readers (and I assure you that they are very many by now) to know you better.
We could publish a volume that contained, besides this most recent text, other materials that we have in our files. I don’t know—I’m thinking of, for example, the correspondence with Martone when he was working on the film made from Troubling Love, or the answers to that interview with Fofi that never reached their addressee (I think he had pulled one of his usual stunts). Or the short piece on the story of a caper plant that you wrote on the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the publishing house: there was an interesting letter along with it, like most of the letters you’ve sent us. The piece about the caper tree was really sweet. Would publishing it seem too self-laudatory? What do you think?
In other words, think about it with your usual tranquility, but I think it could be a good idea to bring out for Christmas a “book of reflections” by Elena Ferrante or something like that. If it helps, don’t think of a real book, think of a kind of cahier or of something like Linea d’ombra’s publication of the correspondence between you and Martone. Nothing, in other words, that would be especially burdensome.
Let me know what you think as soon as you can, possibly before your departure. If you agree, we would have to start getting ready.
Fondly,
Sandra
Dear Sandra,
I’ve thought a lot about your proposal, it shows a lot of confidence in the good will of readers. I’ve taken it seriously, I’ve looked at all the old papers you’ve sent, and it’s true, there is enough material to make a book. But what sort of book would it be? A collection of letters? And why should we publish my letters? And why only the letters I’ve sent you for editorial or other reasons and not those to friends and relatives or love letters or letters expressing political or cultural indignation, so as to truly touch the depths of fatuousness? Why, above all, add so much of my chatter to the two novels?
On the other hand I have to admit that I’m quite tired of always saying no to you—you’ve really been very patient over these twelve years. Especially since m
any of my nos, I know very well, were yeses, an inclination transformed into a rejection only out of timidity, out of anxiety. In this case, too, I think, it would be so.
In other words, I’m uncertain. I think a book like that might perhaps possess a cohesiveness but not autonomy. I think, that is, that by its nature it can’t be a book in itself. You’re very right to call it a book for readers of Troubling Love and The Days of Abandonment. With all consequences, however. Which is to say that, if you decide to publish it, you have to do so feeling that it is editorially, as an appendix to those two books, a sort of slightly dense afterword, as you used to do once at the end of your elegant volumes, an afterword that because of its excessive mass became a volume on its own. That’s how I see it. Only then would I feel at ease, as much as I can feel at ease.
You will note that I moved from “I” to “you”: you the publishing house, I mean. It’s not a ruse, it’s the result of reasoning. If this book that you have in mind isn’t my third book, or, to put it clearly, isn’t my new book, but an appendix to the first two, I can say to myself, to appease myself, that the decision to publish it belongs to you, you already have the material, I have only to be your ally in helping to clarify confusing formulations, eliminating an adjective or a line that is too much, giving a progressive order to material originating by chance.
Let me know,
Elena
II
TESSERAE: 2003-2007
1.
AFTER LA FRANTUMAGLIA
Dear Elena,
Here are two new items that we’d like your opinion on.
The first: Silvia Querini, the Spanish publisher, wants to publish all three of your books together, calling them trilogía del desamor, “the trilogy of unlove”: what do you think?
The second: we’d like to put La Frantumaglia into our pocket editions, but with an appendix that updates the book through The Lost Daughter: do you agree? I looked in the files: there’s the interview with the Repubblica for the publication of the Frantumaglia, something on Roberto Faenza’s film, the questions from readers at Fahrenheit, and, finally, the in-depth conversation with Luisa Muraro and Marina Terragni. I also found a couple of pieces of yours that aren’t precisely apposite. One is the piece on Patrice Chéreau’s film Gabrielle, which I kept you from sending to the Repubblica because it was too “hard” for a daily paper. The other is the piece on Madame Bovary, which I think did come out in that paper, or am I wrong?
That’s all for now. I’ll send you the material, let me know quickly.
Fondly,
Sandra
Dear Sandra,
I looked at the texts, and they’re all right, but you have to take care of the titles and the notes, I don’t have time right now. I’d like it to be very obvious that this is an appendix. Over time I’ve become very attached to La Frantumaglia; today I feel it as a complete book, with a coherence that wasn’t clear to me when you put it together.
As for the Spanish proposal, the books would come out in a single volume, if I understand correctly, and that would please me. I’m more hesitant about “desamor,” I have to think about it. How does the word sound in Spanish? My characters are not at all without love, not in the sense that we give the word. The love that Delia, Olga, Leda have experienced in different forms has, in their confrontation with life, certainly been disfigured, as after a disaster, but it preserves a powerful energy, it’s love put to the test, eviscerated, and yet alive. Or at least so it seems to me. Yes, give me some time to think about it. Meanwhile, work well, and thank you for your attention, care, everything.
Elena
2.
LIFE ON THE PAGE
Answers to questions from Francesco Erbani
Erbani: Did you study literature? And, if not literature, what?
Ferrante: I have a degree in classical literature. But degrees say little or nothing about what we’ve truly learned—out of necessity, out of passion. So it is that what has really formed us cannot, paradoxically, be catalogued.
Erbani: Do you have a job, besides writing? And what is it?
Ferrante: I study, I translate, I teach. But—like writing—studying, translating, and teaching don’t seem like jobs to me. They are, rather, ways of being active.
Erbani: Who close to you knows about Elena Ferrante?
Ferrante: When one writes truthfully, the ties most at risk are precisely the close ones, of blood, of love, of friendship. The people who stay near us in writing, to the point of accepting even the most cruel and devastating effects, can be counted on the tips of one’s fingers.
Erbani: Why did you leave Naples? Did you flee the city?
Ferrante: I needed a job and I found one outside Naples. It was a good opportunity to leave; my native city seemed to me without any possibility of redemption. Over time, this idea was reinforced. But one does not free oneself of Naples so easily. It remains in my gestures, my words, my voice, even when I put an ocean between us.
Erbani: It is said that you lived in Greece, and that now you are in Italy again. Is there any truth to this?
Ferrante: Yes, but Greece for me is also a condensed way of saying that over the years I’ve moved often, in general unwillingly, out of necessity. Now, however, I intend to become sedentary. Recently, there have been a lot of changes in my life: I’m no longer dependent on the movements of others, only on my own.
Erbani: Do you adopt any particular measures for keeping your activity as a writer hidden?
Ferrante: It’s not I who keep my activity hidden, it’s my activity that hides me. I read, reflect, take notes, ponder the writing of others, produce my own, and all this for a period that’s always longer than my day. Reading and writing are closed-room activities, which literally take you away from the gaze of others. The greater risk is that they also remove others from your gaze.
Erbani: Does writing in secret condition your work? Does it influence aspects of the writing?
Ferrante: As long as one writes only for oneself, writing is a free act by means of which, to use an oxymoron, one secretly opens oneself. The problems begin when this secret act, this revealing oneself furtively to oneself, like an adolescent writing her diary, feels the need to become a public action. The question then is: what of what I write for myself can be offered to the gaze of another? Starting at that point, it’s not the secrecy that conditions or influences the writing but the possibility of its being public.
Erbani: You say that you would not welcome “the idea of life where the success of oneself is measured by the success of the written page.” But how is it possible to make a clear separation between life and the written page?
Ferrante: In fact, it’s impossible, especially since, by vocation, I tend to throw into words—for the most part vainly—my entire body. With the sentence you quoted I meant something different. I meant that, ever since a bad period when I was very young, and consumed by a frenzy of writing, I’ve tried to consider writing not as the only way of acting in the world but as one of the three or four actions that give weight to my life.
Erbani: Why do you maintain that nothing in an author’s personal history is useful in reading him better?
Ferrante: I’m not a supporter of the idea that the author is inessential. I would like only to decide myself what part of me should be made public and what instead should remain private. I think that, in art, the life that counts is the life that remains miraculously alive in the works. So I am very much in agreement with Proust’s stand against positivist biography and against anecdotalism in the style of Sainte-Beuve. Neither the color of Leopardi’s socks nor even his conflict with the father figure helps us understand the power of his poems.
The biographical path does not lead to the genius of a work; it’s only a micro-story on the side. Or, as Northrup Frye would put it, the disruptive imaginative energy of King Lear is not in the least affected by the fact that what remains of
Shakespeare is only a couple of signatures, a will, a baptismal certificate, and the portrait of a fellow who looks like an imbecile. The living body of Shakespeare (imagination, creativity, drives, anxieties, but I would also say sounds of speech, moods, nervous responses) will act forever from within King Lear. The rest is curiosity, academic publications, wars and skirmishes for visibility in the marketplace of culture.
Erbani: You wanted to avoid the publishing circuit, not take part in its mechanisms. But it is also said that among the reasons for your reserve are coincidences between certain passages in Troubling Love and your personal experience. Which of the two reasons is truer?
Ferrante: Both are valid. They aren’t the only ones, however; I’ve tried to list other, more complex ones. But even if you add up all the reasons, my books—I hope that you would agree—are not better or worse. Like all books, good or bad, great or mediocre, they remain what they are.
Erbani: Are you not afraid, in particular, that the secrecy of your life might distort the perception of your novels? Might it, for example, induce in those who read them an abnormal curiosity, pushing them to search artificially, even obsessively, in the novel, in the narrated material, for the reasons for your absence?
Ferrante: It’s possible. When I published my first book, I hadn’t thought of the effect that the physical absence of the author would have, if cast into the middle of the widespread war to gain a recognizable physical image, a following. On the other hand, I believe that the true reader shouldn’t be confused with the fan. The true reader, I think, searches not for the brittle face of the author in flesh and blood, who makes herself beautiful for the occasion, but for the naked physiognomy that remains in every effective word.
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