Elsa Morante: a long-winded introduction
PLUS: Let's begin reading Arturo's Island!
You guys, we’re finally ~almost here! This week I’m quietly introducing you to one of my all-time favorite authors, and by quietly I mean I’m coming in with a steel chair to fight all of Ms. Morante’s haters and MAKE you love her like a do.
…do you ever wonder if a past author would approve of your interpretation of their work? Sometimes I think she would, other times I feel like Elsa’s ghost is about to appear over my desk and punch me in the face. She was wild like that, and who can blame her? Elsa, Elsa, forgive me. I love you, Elsa.
Life and works
Elsa Morante was born in Rome on August 18th, 1912. Her mother, Irma, was a Montessori educator who had successfully escaped a Jewish ghetto. Her father, Augusto, managed a youth correction facility; possibly homosexual, he wasn’t Elsa’s biological father, a truth that she would learn only as a teenager.
The eldest child in the family, Morante learned to read and write long before going to school, and interacted with people of all sorts in her working-class neighborhood and through her parents’ respective workplaces. Starting from 1933 she consistently wrote children’s fairy tales, nursery rhymes, poetry and short stories for local magazines.
In 1941 she published her first book, a collection of her short stories, followed in 1942 by a children’s book she illustrated herself. Meanwhile she had met and fallen in tumultuous love with fellow writer Alberto Moravia, also half-Jewish. The couple married in a pointedly catholic ceremony that wasn’t enough to evade racial discrimination. In 1943 they escaped Nazi-occupied Rome and hid in a farmer village, a bucolic setting that inspired Moravia’s Two Women (later adapted in an Oscar-winning movie starring Sophia Loren.) In the countryside, Morante began writing her first adult novel, Menzogna e Sortilegio, published in 1948 and translated in English with the title House of Liars. Her second novel, Arturo’s Island, came out in 1957 and won the Strega Prize, the most prestigious Italian literary award. Morante was the first woman to win the prize.
Exceptionally multi-talented, in those years Morante was also writing movie scripts, composing musical scores, hosting a radio program and even trying her hand at directing, all efforts that went mostly ignored or uncredited. (For instance, not many know that she collaborated with Franco Zeffirelli on the songs for Romeo and Juliet.) She published a second collection of short stories in 1963, followed by an essay on the atomic bomb in 1965 and a book of poetry, The World Saved by Children, in 1968.
Separated from her husband (although they never divorced), always pining and heartbroken over troubled men, Morante grew depressed and disillusioned and progressively abandoned the spotlight. In 1974 she published her most famous and controversial novel, La Storia (History), but refused to leave any interviews about it. Her last (and significantly darker) novel, Aracoeli, came out in 1982. Soon after Morante was diagnosed with hydrocephalus and attempted suicide. She was saved by her housekeeper, but never fully recovered. She died of a heart attack in 1985, at age 73.
Elsa, the men, and the women
Morante famously refused to be called a scrittrice, a “female writer”. To her it was as absurd as “discriminating between blonde and dark-haired, fat and thin authors.” In the same 1960s interview she stated that “[...] a woman, in order to establish herself via her talents, has to overcome hardships at least ten times greater than what a man would encounter, and still she will never be able to achieve the same position in society of a man equally or less talented than her.”1
Despite her vitriolic words, Morante would positively recoil at being called a feminist. Throughout her career she fought to be seen as “one of the boys”, to be accepted into the prestigious and entirely male circle of post-war writers, despite being (in my opinion!) the most talented of the lot. She was friends with all the famous authors, Saba, Penna, Gadda, Bassani, Moravia whom she married, and a victim of the group’s inevitable mockery. “Did little Elsa scream an awful lot yesterday?” Gadda would ask.2
During my research I was struck by the casual misogyny that pervaded the discourse around Morante in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Even her most faithful admirers weren’t immune to it: literary critic and good friend Cesare Garboli lamented that she was “born female” and that her prose “merely pretends to be shy, while she adorns it in jewels with typical coquetry.”3 Garboli also wondered how someone as talented as Morante could “come out of nowhere,” while authors like Woolf or de Beauvoir were taught by their clever fathers. It took modern women biographers to point out that Morante’s mother, Irma Poggibonsi, was one of the most accomplished educators of her time.4
The author’s ongoing struggle with gender roles can be plainly see in her female characters: illiterate, animalesque, defined by motherhood and their submission to men, they couldn’t be more different from childless, brilliant, loud and opinionated Elsa Morante, raised during the reactionary Fascist regime, a hag, an unrepentant cat lady, “working disheveled and wild like a witch.”5 She tortured and dissected, worshiped and humiliated her women, and rolled her eyes at whoever tried to engage her in feminist discourse when all she wanted was talk about Homer, Plato, Spinoza, Giordano Bruno: her heroes were all men. (She was also enamored with Simone Weil’s work, but you didn’t hear that from me.)
Elsa’s critics
Despite her urge to fit in, Morante’s passionate and independent nature compelled her to dance to her own beat. She was always furiously working, always in love with this or that broody (often younger, often queer) intellectual and spiraling into despair and depression whenever a man inevitably left her—Bill Morrow, a young painter from NYC who jumped off a skyscraper. Pier Paolo Pasolini, the famed director, who broke off their long friendship and collaboration when Morante’s WW2 novel, History, didn’t measure up to his literary standards: it was too long, too sentimental, it wasted time on minor characters, on the women, children and pets dead under the bombings.
Pasolini’s scorching review was only one of many published in 1974. Thanks to Morante’s marketing genius (one of her many, many talents) History was printed directly on paperback and sold at such a low price it tempted virtually everyone to buy a copy—that summer Italian beaches offered the unusual sight of thousands and thousands of readers engaging with a 600 pages novel. Typically, the general public adored the book and soon promoted it to a cult classic, while literary critics overwhelmingly despised it.
One of the few positive voices, author Natalia Ginzburg, wrote in her review: “I wondered how long had it been since I had cried so much over a book, and I remembered crying in the distant days of my adolescence as I read Dostoevsky.”6 But it was no longer 1880, dry Monty Pythonesque sarcasm was all the rage and earnest sentimentality was in bad taste. Elsa Morante kept stubbornly doing her own thing, writing “fairy tales” in the years of gritty neorealism (and we will see together just how “real” Arturo’s Island is), sticking to the feuilleton format of 19th century serial fiction, ignoring all fads and using past literature as the solid foundation to experiment in her own totally unique way.
There’s much more to say on what makes Morante’s works timeless classics, much to discuss about the themes of folklore, poetry, nature, magic, philosophy, psychology, childhood, parenting, happiness, religion, anarchy. As always I’m getting ahead of myself, I simply cannot wait to dive in! And as a treat to myself, I will now post my analysis of the first two parts from Arturo’s Island. If you already have the book, go ahead and read the first five pages. If you’re not sure where to get a copy, here’s a few hints.
The fantastic adventures of Star Boy on Prison Island
In the woods outside my mother’s village there’s an abandoned little church. If you look through the dusty window you can faintly make out the life-sized figure of a wax madonna wearing a wig of real hair, a sight that gave me nightmares throughout my childhood.
The wax lady saints in their glass cages are one of the many chilling details Morante peppers throughout her description of Procida island. A strong beginning is the telltale of a skilled storyteller, so what do you think of these first few pages? I like to imagine a movie camera approaching, capturing the impossible natural beauty of the island, endless meadows of volcanic flowers, orchards hidden away “like imperial gardens”, beaches “gentle and cool” under towering cliffs. As we move closer to the inhabitants, we encounter “sunless alleys”, “deep and dark” shops. Unfriendly, isolated, suspicious people, a solitary port that seems miles and miles away from the gaiety of Naples, of nearby Ischia and Capri. Women hidden in their black clothes and veils, living “cloistered like nuns.”
They never go to the beach; for women it’s a sin to swim in the sea, and a sin even to watch others swimming.
As we travel from the port up to the hills we encounter many cages: a captured turtledove, an owl raised in chains with a bleeding wing, the saints, the women, up, up to the citadel and the prison complex sitting on top of what looks like a mountain (but, the author reminds us, is merely a hill.)
To passing ships, especially at night, all that appears of Procida is this dark mass, which makes our island seem like a fortress in the middle of the sea.
To Arturo, safe in his house, the prison looks like a fantastic abandoned castle. He is a fairy tale boy, named after a star, after king Arthur, or so he says. (Who do you think he is?) We don’t get to know the actual thought process behind Arturo’s name, his mother died of childbirth at not even eighteen and all the boy has of her is a photo he worships like the picture of a saint.
What do you think of our setting and protagonist? Is the time period clear or nebulous? What is the message the author is conveying? What do you expect Arturo’s narration to be like? Will the author be able to embody a teenage boy?
Next week we’re going to read half through chapter one, up until page 37. Here you can find the complete reading schedule, please let me know if something isn’t clear.
See you all very soon!
From “Opere”, by E. Morante, an anthology curated by C. Cecchi and C. Garboli, 1989, translation mine.
Gadda’s words are reported by Rossana Dedola in her biography Elsa Morante, l’Incantatrice (“Elsa Morante, the Enchantress”), Lindau editions 2022, translation mine.
From Garboli’s introduction to Arturo’s Island, 1968, translation mine.
Specifically this was stated by Rossana Dedola in her biography. I cannot stress how much her work has helped my research.
Another emblematic description by Garboli, translation mine. From Il Gioco Segreto, Nove Immagini di Elsa Morante (“The Secret Game, Nine Images of Elsa Morante”) Adelphi editions 1995.
Ginzburg’s review appeared on Corriere della Sera on June 30th 1974.