Woman of Rome_A Life of Elsa Morante

by Lily Tuck

  Lucia dressed Elsa Morante in a long white cotton Mexican dress decorated with bright colored embroidered flowers. Carlo Cecchi replaced the dreary red roses provided by the funeral home with wild flowers, daisies and miniature tangerine plants, the sort of flowers that Elsa loved and that grew on her terrace.11 Marcello Morante, Elsa’s brother, came to the funeral parlor and sat alone with her for a long time. In his memoir he described how she looked: “She was very beautiful, she looked like a child again. It seemed as if her face had freed itself from the mask that had covered it throughout her final years of physical pain and suffering. The mask had reproduced the face of her mother with a striking, uncanny similarity, and, now, in death, this mask had disappeared.”12 Alberto Moravia, who had been away in Germany when Elsa died, came back in time to view her body lying in the coffin. Like Marcello Morante, he, too, said how Elsa’s face had been transformed by old age and suffering but “[w]ith death, it had regained an almost childish aspect, serene, perhaps smiling.”13

  Elsa Morante’s death could be seen as a release from great suffering and as a blessing. Moravia wrote, “Her death made me think about the big question of euthanasia…. [F]or two years and eight months, Elsa lived a long agony. In my opinion the doctor knew very well that she would not recover from the surgery that followed her first attempt at suicide; the surgery could have been 70 percent successful so I gave permission for it because I was her husband. The operation was not successful and from that moment the doctor knew she would never recover. So they kept her alive without curing her. It would have been better not to let a person condemned to die survive.”14

  The day after her death, November 26, all the leading newspapers in Italy wrote long obituaries devoted to Elsa Morante and her oeuvre (in La Repubblica’s case, there were three full pages). Their headlines read, FROM A LIE IS BORN THE TIME OF DREAMS, GOOD-BYE ELSA OF A THOUSAND SPELLS and ELSA MORANTE, ROMANTICIST OF OUR TIME.15 Photographs showed her both young and old, with her cats, with Moravia, with Pasolini and Berardinelli. Her work was excerpted; a letter to Giacomo Debenedetti in which she wrote how she always wanted to be a boy was reprinted; drawings she did as a child were reproduced; her opinions on love, women, fame and writers were quoted, as well as one on life and literature:

  I am a little old lady who wants to be left alone. I have put on weight, I have white hair, I am sick. What could anyone say about me? The private life of a writer is gossip and gossip no matter about whom offends me. Novels are more autobiographical than anything else one could say about oneself. My life is in House of Liars and Arturo’s Island…not in the facts of my life. But it does not matter. It does not matter how the facts occur in life, it matters how they are told. In books, the facts always have a disguise, conscious or unconscious, but that disguise is their truth. It occurs in novels the way it occurs in dreams: a magical transposition of our life that is perhaps even more significant than life itself because it is enriched by the strength of the imagination. As far as I am concerned, I don’t want to be considered a living person.16

  The funeral took place at 11:00 A.M. on November 27, at the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo. Located on Piazza del Popolo, a stone’s throw away from her apartment on via dell’Oca, the beautiful old church must have been very familiar to Elsa Morante. According to legend, Santa Maria del Popolo was built on the Emperor Nero’s ancient grave site after he was disinterred and his remains were thrown into the Tiber. It is one of Rome’s first Renaissance churches and both Bernini and Raphael had a hand in its design. Two of Caravaggio’s paintings, The Conversion of St. Paul and The Crucifixion of St. Peter, hang in one of the chapels. Elsa Morante, who claimed that she no longer loved God—despite the general rule that as one gets older one becomes more religious, the reverse, she said, was true for her17—loved Jesus Christ and she must have looked at those Caravaggio paintings that depict religious experience with such vigorous realism a thousand times. During the service, the church of Santa Maria del Popolo was packed with mourners while outside a large crowd waited patiently in the cold and damp to watch Morante’s simple wooden coffin covered with wreaths of flowers drive away.

  The day after the funeral service Elsa was cremated. Cremation is not an accepted Catholic practice, yet it is tolerated now for practical reasons: the growing lack of cemetery space. The Rome crematorium then must have been brand-new and it was, as Alberto Moravia justly noted, “a strange building, very modern and very hermetic, not suggesting any idea of death.” During the cremation Moravia sat outside in the sun waiting for everything to be over. He could see a farm with cows grazing, a peaceful scene, so that his last impression was “that Elsa had faded into the air, on a sunny day. An impression, all things considered, in harmony with Elsa’s special spirituality.”18 Her remains were buried in the Prima Porta Cemetery, located a few kilometers north of central Rome, on the via Flaminia.

  Elsa Morante’s story does not quite end there, however. One night six months later, an unidentified small group, led by a loyal and intrepid friend, managed to break into the cemetery, whose high walls are strewed with broken glass and whose iron gates are locked, to dig up Elsa Morante’s remains (a highly illegal act—if caught, the leader of the group might well have had to serve a prison sentence of up to seven years). The rest can easily be imagined. With the box containing her ashes set carefully in the trunk of the borrowed car, and while none of them dared hardly breathe or speak, they drove at breakneck speed to Naples. There, again under cover of darkness, a local fisherman, his cap half hiding his rugged face, waited for them. A full moon lit their way across the Bay of Naples, prescribing a shiny, phosphorescent path for the boat as it made its determined way across the water toward the little island of Procida, to keep a promise and a last wish. When they reached the island, the wind had picked up quite a bit, tossing the small boat back and forth in the choppy waves, but that was a good thing—an excellent thing, really—for it meant that Elsa Morante’s ashes would spread farther, scatter farther out into the world.

  EPILOGUE

  There does not exist in all of Italian literature a writer who is more loved and hated, more read and more ignored, than Morante,” wrote her friend Cesare Garboli.1 Certainly, as a writer, she was, for a long time, ignored. She refused to write within a specific ideology, which made it difficult to categorize her or include her in the literary canon. She was isolated as a writer and her work was deemed both exceptional and extraneous. Her themes, which focused on homosexuality, incest and narcissism, were ahead of her time and her style was an unclassifiable mix of the postmodern disjunctive and the traditional. Her stance as a writer—that she had to be a witness as well as be the intellectual conscience of the world—was often didactic and may have alienated her readers. Her refusal to ally herself with any one political group or define herself within the feminist movement created resentment among her female peers. And, finally, an innately private person, she rarely made appearances or granted interviews, which made her less visible to the public.

  As time went by, however, Morante’s reputation grew (inversely to Moravia’s, which has declined). This growing interest was based primarily on a reevaluation of her work, which until then, with the exception of History and Arturo’s Island (the latter was always considered a cult book), had not been widely read. By the early 1990s, a number of critical and scholarly monographs on Morante began to appear in Italy. In particular, her cause was taken up by Italy’s foremost critics (also, Morante’s friends): Giacomo Debenedetti, Cesare Garboli and Alfonso Berardinelli. Elsa Morante’s oeuvre was collected in two handsome volumes, published by Meridiani Mondadori, in 1988 and 1990 respectively. They contained all but the very early stories and essays and featured a very detailed chronology.

  To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Elsa Morante’s death, a number of tributes to her were organized in 2005 by the Commune of Rome libraries. The opening conference took place at the Campidoglio on March 15; the participating speakers were Enzo Siciliano, Alfonso
Berardinelli, Patrizia Cavalli and Carlo Cecchi. A roving exhibit showed photographs by Federico Garolla of Elsa Morante taken between the years 1956 and 1961. (Unfortunately, in most of the photographs, Elsa is not seen to her best advantage, since she wears a scarf around her head; nor are the stunningly beautiful photos of her as a young woman included). Over the next eight months, a number of conferences and lectures were held at various schools, libraries and other public venues throughout Rome. The subjects ranged from the transition from novel to movie (Arturo’s Island), to her stormy relations with Pier Paolo Pasolini, and to the influence of Judaism on her work. To accompany these conferences, A Woman after My Own Taste: Elsa Morante and Others (Una signora di mio gusto: Elsa Morante e le altre), a group of short essays comparing and contrasting her work with that of other twentieth-century women writers such as Simone Weil, Maria Zambrano, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Yourcenar and Anna Maria Ortese, was published in book form. During the entire month of April, the RAI broadcasted a daily reading by Maria Paiato of History (one can still listen to these radio shows online).

  More recently, in 2006, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma mounted a comprehensive exhibit of Elsa Morante’s work, which included a large display of photos, letters, newspaper articles and manuscript pages. The accompanying illustrated catalogue, entitled Elsa’s Room (La stanze di Elsa), contains essays on both her life and work and two bibliographies. That same year, a collection of critical scholarly essays called Under Arturo’s Star: The Cultural Legacies of Elsa Morante was published in English by Purdue University Press; its editors, Stefania Lucamante and Sharon Wood, are both professors who have written extensively on Italian literature and women writers.

  During the past two years and some that I have spent writing and thinking about Elsa Morante, I have, not surprisingly, often wondered what my impressions of her would have been had I known her. My guess is that I would have—certainly at first—been intimidated by her, but I would also like to think that my admiration and respect for her would have overcome my reticence. Elsa Morante’s life was never easy. She was a serious artist who wanted, through her work, to change the world, even as she knew quite well that it was impossible. She was a passionate, deeply spiritual person who despised authority under any form. She was immensely well read, she had great intellectual curiosity, she appreciated the finer things in life—good food, pretty clothes, art, theater—she had a great sense of fun, she adored animals and children, Mozart, Rimbaud, Stendhal.

  According to people who knew her, Elsa Morante never stopped loving Alberto Moravia. A love that was often expressed in an ambivalent, disingenuous and belligerent fashion, no doubt because Elsa Morante felt that she had to both protect and defend herself from Moravia’s indifference. And Alberto Moravia must have loved her in his fashion, too. A few years later, after Elsa had died and he was married to Carmen Llera, Moravia was vacationing in Capri with his friend and biographer, Alain Elkann. Elkann asked Moravia to show him the very simple house Moravia often talked about where he and Elsa had lived during the war. A bit reluctant at first, Moravia finally agreed and the two men took a taxi up to Anacapri. But instead of a simple house, Alain Elkann said, there stood a big Napoleonic villa with a beautiful view of the Bay of Naples. Moravia became very abrupt, the way he did when he was embarrassed or did not know what to do, before he admitted that this was in fact the house where they had lived and that Elsa had had a huge room with a terrace. Then, all of a sudden, turning to Elkann, Moravia said in a gloomy voice, “You know they spread Elsa’s ashes in the sea between Capri and Procida.” By then, too, Moravia was visibly upset, he was red in the face and perspiring. “There she is again,” he said to Elkann. “Ashes, you know, move, move in the air and I thought I was liberated from Elsa and here we are.”2

  NOTES

  For full citations of books by Elsa Morante (EM), see the listing. If an English-language version is listed, that was consulted; otherwise, the original Italian edition is the source.

  1. TWO UNCLES

  1 EM, Opere, 1:xx (chronology).

  2 EM, “Avventura,” Alibi, p. 67. Unless otherwise noted, the translations from the Italian are by Giulia Ruggiero.

  3 EM, Opere, 1:xix.

  4 Ibid., 1:xx.

  5 Interview with Paolo Morante, Princeton, N.J., May 2005.

  6 Marcello Morante, Maledetta benedetta (Milan: Garzanti, 1986), p. 18.

  7 Ibid., p. 12.

  8 Ibid., pp. 42–43.

  9 Ibid., p. 39.

  10 Ibid., p. 46.

  11 Ibid., pp. 62–63.

  12 Ibid., p. 33.

  13 Ibid., p. 37.

  14 Interview with Maria Morante, Rome, January 2006.

  15 Ibid.

  16 Interview with Daniele Morante, Rome, April 2005.

  17 Interview with Patrizia Cavalli, Rome, January 2007.

  18 EM, Aracoeli, pp. 124–25.

  19 Marcello Morante, Maledetta benedetta, p. 28.

  20 Paolo Morante interview.

  2. SECRET GAMES

  1 EM, Opere, 1:xxi. Thanks to Carlo Cecchi for showing me Elsa’s school notebook.

  2 EM, “Prima della classe,” in Cahiers Elsa Morante, ed. Jean-Noël Schifano and Tjuna Notarbartolo (Naples: Edizioni Schientifiche Italiane, 1993), p. 67.

  3 EM, Opere, 1:xxii.

  4 The letter, dated February 8, 1957, was published as “una lettera inedita del Febbraio 1957 a Giacomo Debenedetti,” in Corriere della Sera, November 26, 1985, p. 3.

  5 Opere, 1:xxvi–xxvii.

  6 Marcello Morante, Maledette benedetta (Milan, Garzanti, 1986), p. 35.

  7 Ibid., p. 79.

  8 Carlo Levi’s characterization, which originally appeared in a magazine article in May 1960, is reprinted in EM, Opere, 1:xxix.

  9 Alberto Moravia and Alain Elkann, Life of Moravia, trans. William Weaver (Hanover, N.H.: Steerforth Italia, 2000), p. 134.

  10 Rocco Capozzi, Contemporary Women Writers in Italy, ed. Santo L. Aricò (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), p. 16.

  11 EM, “Domestiche,” Oggi, November 11, 1939.

  12 The essay was published posthumously in 1987, in a collection called Pro o contro la bomba atomica (For or Against the Atomic Bomb). For an interesting critique of it, see Marco Bardini, “Poetry and Reality in ‘The Aesthetics of Our Time,’” in Under Arturo’s Star: The Cultural Legacies of Elsa Morante, ed. Stefania Lucamante and Sharon Wood (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2006), pp. 67–71. “Mille città in una” was originally published in Prospettive, nos. 4–5 (1938).

  13 Cesare Garboli, preface to EM, Racconti dimenticati, p. ix.

  3. DIARY 1938

  1 Dante, Purgatory, Canto XV, 1. 31–33; translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

  2 Alba Andreaini, preface to Diario 1938, by EM, p. viii.

  3 Elisa Gambaro, “Strategies and Affabulation in Elsa Morante’s ‘Diario 1938,’” in Under Arturo’s Star: The Cultural Legacies of Elsa Morante, ed. Stefania Lucamante and Sharon Wood (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2006), p. 24.

  4 Interview with Ginevra Bompiani, Rome, April 2005.

  5 Alberto Moravia, Conjugal Love, trans. Marina Harss (New York: Other Press, 2007), p. 11.

  6 Alberto Moravia and Alain Elkann, Life of Moravia, trans. William Weaver (Hanover, N.H.: Steerforth Italia, 2000), p. 86.

  4. THE WAR YEARS

  1 Alberto Moravia and Alain Elkann, Life of Moravia, trans. William Weaver (Hanover, N.H.: Steerforth Italia, 2000), p. 138.

  2 Luca Fontana, “Elsa Morante: A Personal Remembrance,” Poetry Nation Review 14, no. 6, p. 20.

  3 EM, Opere, 1:xxviii.

  4 Moravia and Elkann, Life of Moravia, p. 137.

  5 Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p. 166.

  6 Moravia and Elkann, Life of Moravia, p. 143.

  7 Ibid., pp. 135–37.

  8 Ibid., pp. 137–38.

  9 John Middleton Murry, ed., Nov
els and Novelists (London: Constable, 1930), p. 32.

  10 Nicoletta Di Ciolla McGowan, “Elsa Morante: Translator of Katherine Mansfield,” in Under Arturo’s Star: The Cultural Legacies of Elsa Morante, ed. Stefania Lucamante and Sharon Wood (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2006), p. 62.

  11 Moravia and Elkann, Life of Moravia, p. 160.

  12 Alberto Moravia, Bitter Honeymoon and Other Stories, trans. Frances Frenaye (New York: Signet/New American Library, 1958), p. 154.

  13 Ibid., p. 155.

  14 Ibid., p. 158.

  15 Ibid., p. 175.

  16 Moravia and Elkann, Life of Moravia, p. 103.

  17 Ibid., p. 215.

  18 Ibid., pp. 166–67.

  19 Ibid., pp. 168–70.

  20 Ibid., p. 171.

  21 Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli, trans. Frances Frenaye (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1963), p. 4.

  22 Ibid., p. 22.

  23 Ibid., pp. 76–78.

  24 Moravia and Elkann, Life of Moravia, pp. 172–76.

  25 Davide Marrocco, “Un ricordo indelebile,” Latina Oggi, May 21, 1989, p. 12.

  26 Tonino Tornitore, afterword to Two Women, by Alberto Moravia, trans. Angus Davidson and Ann McCarrell (Hanover, N.H.: Steerforth Italia, 2001), p. 348 (quoting AM’s letter of December 24, 1956).

  27 Moravia and Elkann, Life of Moravia, p. 189.

  28 Ann McCarrell, afterword to Moravia, Two Women, p. 335.

  29 Moravia, Two Women, p. 39.

  30 EM, Lo scialle andaluso, p. 138.

  31 Robert Katz, The Battle for Rome (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), p. 6.

  32 EM, History, pp. 362–64.

  33 Alfred de Grazia, “Memoir of a Strange Battle Encounter,” in The Taste of War (Princeton, N.J.: Quiddity Press, 1992), unpaginated. The author is a political theorist and historian. Although his book is out of print, it is available at www.grazian-archive.com.