Woman of Rome

by Lily Tuck

  Although she rarely inhaled, Elsa Morante was a heavy smoker. She smoked North Pole menthol cigarettes, and she used a long cigarette holder—always the same one. She insisted on lighting her own cigarettes because, as she liked to say, “the pleasure of smoking lies in lighting up the cigarette. I hate those people, who out of kindness, rob you of that pleasure.” Occasionally, she tried drugs. Allen Midgette remembers her telling him over the phone that she had taken some LSD. Elsa said the only effect she felt was a headache, but, worried, Allen went over to her apartment anyway—Elsa was then still living on via del Babuino. When he got there Elsa asked him whether he would mind if she lay down on the floor for a while, which was not like her at all—although not prudish, Elsa was proper in her way and she was not a flirt. Lying on the floor, she began to talk about the apartment as if it were not hers: how it was ugly and looked like a doctor’s office. She discussed the paintings on the walls with him. One painting was a portrait of Elsa by her friend Leonor Fini, and it was beautiful but Elsa did not like it; the other was a Braque, a small landscape of a beach by the sea, very simple and also very beautiful and that painting Elsa said she did like. She then said that she wanted to go out and see the architecture of Rome. Allen and Elsa walked to Piazza del Popolo and when she saw the cars (cars were then permitted on the piazza), she said how she had never realized before how dirty cars were. When she saw the obelisk in the middle of the piazza, she said, “It’s all made of dust.” Afterward Allen walked her home and Elsa said, “Good night, Allen, you are an angel.”15

  Elsa’s truth-telling proved helpful to him, Daniele said, when he went to see his aunt soon after he was divorced. Instead of trying to console him, Elsa told Daniele that his wife had done the right thing to leave him and for him not to come back and see her until he had put his own life in order. Elsa’s outspokenness proved less useful a few years later, when Daniele took his second wife to meet her. Elsa noticed that Daniele’s wife did not shave her armpits. As a result, Elsa imagined that she was an angry feminist, a kind of militant, which she was not at all. Elsa made a huge scene, telling Daniele’s wife never to come again with that hair hanging from under her arm. The wife, who was very sensitive and proper, never went to see Elsa again.16

  Ginevra Bompiani, the owner of the beautiful necklace Elsa coveted when they used to play Murder in the Dark, recalled how she and her friends, who were young and impressionable at the time, learned a great deal from Elsa. They learned not to use euphemisms and to say things the way they were—in other words, they learned not to lie. Conversations with Elsa, Ginevra recalled, were never trivial; they never talked about worldly things, which was also a useful lesson.17 Patrizia Cavalli remembered how Elsa was almost superstitious about telling the truth and how she would make pronouncements and judge things in absolute terms: “Questo e molto bello” (“This is very good”) or “Questo e bruto” (“This is bad”). In this sense, she was reassuring because Patrizia felt that if Elsa agreed or if she said something was good or beautiful, it was, and she should believe it. As a result too, her friends developed a kind of sostanza etica (“ethical essence”) or a way of behaving.18 Ginevra also remembered what a wonderful storyteller Elsa was. She would tell all sorts of stories about herself and her life and she never told the same one twice. Ginevra described what a beautiful way Elsa had of making contact with people, simple people, and how, for instance, in the summer, when Ginevra, Giorgio Agamben and Elsa went to the island of Ponza together, Elsa would talk to the old women on the island. She would talk to them for hours and make them talk to her as well. She had a real sense of people and could tap into their “fairy tale” side. It was really beautiful to see, and the word Ginevra used was fabuloso.19

  The next time Carlo Cecchi met Elsa was in 1966 at a screening of an experimental film called The Blind Fly (A mosca cieca), based loosely on Camus’s The Stranger, in which he played the protagonist. Elsa was very much moved by the film, telling Carlo Cecchi, “You know, you’ve made my day!” From then on, they saw each other quite often, usually with Peter Hartman, Bernardo Bertolucci and others connected to or interested in the Living Theater.

  One day Carlo mentioned that he was going to Venice to see the Berliner Ensemble, the theater company founded by Bertolt Brecht. Elsa said that she wanted to go as well but that it was always difficult to find a place to stay in Venice. Cecchi drove to Venice with friends, and since he had no money he stayed at a youth hostel, but once there, he managed to get two tickets for all the performances as well as find a room for Elsa in a pensione. He then telephoned Elsa and told her, “Come.” It was his telling her to come and that he would pick her up at the airport that convinced her. On the appointed day, Cecchi went to the airport. He was early and because it was a beautiful sunny day, he lay down on the runway in the sun to wait for Elsa’s plane. (During our interview, we both laughed at the image of Carlo sunbathing on the runway and at how impossible that would be to do today.) When Elsa arrived they took the bus into Venice. On the bus, Elsa opened her purse and handed her money to Cecchi, saying: “Look at all the money I brought. Take it—senza complimenti.” (“With no strings attached” is the English expression that comes closest to match this Italian idiom).

  But what truly changed him, Carlo Cecchi said, was what Elsa told him one day during that trip. They were in a gondola on the Grand Canal and she began talking about the nonexistence of time as the fourth dimension of space. As an example, she told him a parable—a favorite and one that Bertolucci used in his 1964 film Before the Revolution. Two men are walking together in the desert. When they stop to rest, the older man tells the younger man to fetch him some water. The young man sets off to the nearest village; at the fountain there he sees a beautiful young woman. He falls in love with her, kisses her and marries her. They have several children. One day, a terrible plague afflicts the village and the man’s wife dies. His children die. Distraught, he leaves the village and wanders, for days, in the desert. All of a sudden he comes across the old man, who is sitting in the same spot where he left him when he went to fetch the water. The old man asks, “Where is the water? I’ve been waiting for you all morning.”

  Elsa talked to Cecchi about the Upanishads and how their philosophy related to contemporary physics, and it was the first time he had been introduced to these ideas. Elsa, he said, opened up his framework of cultural references—references that hitherto had been tied to a humanism based on the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce’s idealism, and to storicismo, a belief in history as an instrument of knowledge. Elsa, Cecchi also said, had unconsciously chosen Venice as the living proof, where one could literally touch the reality of years, to introduce him to these new concepts. It was a very important time for them both—and not just because it deepened and solidified their friendship.20

  Elsa Morante wrote most of The World Saved by Children and Other Poems (Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini e altri poemi) in 1966. She finished the book the next summer and it was published in 1968. That was the year Italian students revolted, marking the beginning of a large protest movement in Italy (never as intense as the May student uprising in France, but more profound and long-lasting).21 By the late 1960s, the total number of students entering university in Italy had grown tenfold since the 1920s, but the system itself had not undergone any corresponding expansion. There were shortages of classrooms, textbooks, teachers, etc. To make matters worse, the new open access to education also meant that there was a great disparity within the student body itself, between the rich and poor. The working-class students, too busy trying to make ends meet so they could afford their education, often could not pass the exams, get a degree or, later, find jobs. In 1967, eight students under the direction of Don Lorenzo Milani* wrote Lettera a una professoressa (Letter to a Professor), an extraordinary document, in which they blamed the triumph of individualism and consumerism, said to be modeled on the American ideal of free enterprise. They wrote, “You care nothing for society or its needs…. The lift is a machin
e for avoiding your neighbors, the car for ignoring people who go by tram, the telephone for not talking face to face.”22 A powerful indictment of the injustices of the school system as well, Lettera a una professoressa became a best seller in several languages and the cult text for the protesting students. In addition, by 1968, an entire generation of Italians, disgusted and disillusioned by the Vietnam War, had jettisoned their admiration of the United States to embrace the counterculture, the black-power movement and the legacy of Che Guevara.23

  The student revolutionaries came mostly from the wealthier upper and middle classes (the working-class students did not have the luxury or leisure to protest), yet the fact that they were anti-capitalists as well as anti-Communists created a certain amount of political confusion. This confusion manifested itself primarily through violence—rioting in the streets and confrontations with the police. One of the people to object to this contradiction was Pier Paolo Pasolini, his objections fueled no doubt by his espousing the cause of the proletariat and by his contempt for the student bourgeoisie. On June 16, 1968, he published a poem mocking the students in the newspaper L’Espresso. It read in part:

  Now the journalists of all the world (including those of the television)

  are licking your arses (as one still says in student slang).

  Not me, my dears.

  You have the faces of spoilt rich brats….

  You are cowardly, uncertain and desperate….

  When, the other day, at Villa Giulia you fought the police

  I can tell you I was on their side.

  Because police are the sons of the poor.

  They come from subtopias, in the cities and countryside…24

  The trade unionist Vittorio Foa took particular exception to Pasolini’s poem, accusing him of missing the point. “In my opinion,” Foa wrote, speaking on behalf of both the students and the workers, “everything is being done to isolate the youth movement…. In all this concerted action only the voice of the poet was missing.”25

  Although The World Saved by Children was not intended as a political statement, it took a strong moral stance. In the preface to an early edition, Elsa Morante stated that she believed that no conscious person was allowed not to know. Modern technology enabled even the most average man to be conscious of the immense misery and destruction that is present everywhere in the world. Three years earlier, in 1965—first in Turin at the Teatro Carignano, then in Rome at the Teatro Eliseo—under the auspices of the Italian Cultural Association, Elsa Morante had given a lecture called “For or against the Atomic Bomb.”* It was a kind of J’accuse aimed at the Italian middle class and at their consumer-driven society over which the atomic bomb had cast a large shadow. The atomic bomb, Morante claimed, was the “flower” or the natural expression for contemporary society (as were the Platonic dialogues for the Greeks, Raphael’s Madonnas for the Italian humanists, and so forth) and the sign of approaching disintegration. Art, however, she also maintained, was the opposite of disintegration, because its function was precisely to prevent it and to restore the integrity of reality. The duty of poets was to open their own consciousness and the consciousness of others to reality and the reason for the presence of poets in the world was to find an answer for themselves and for others.26

  Described by the publisher as a “novel,” a “memorial,” a “manifesto,” a “ballet,” both a “comedy” and a “tragedy,” a “dialogue,” an “autobiography,” a “cartoon” and, finally, a “magic key,”27 The World Saved by Children is unquestionably Morante’s most unusual work. An odd and difficult (and nearly untranslatable) collection of songs, poems, and a play, it is hard to classify. In a review that appeared in the journal Paragone, Pasolini came the closest. Writing in free verse, the same form used by Morante, he said the book was certainly a political manifesto but written like a fable, with humor and joy. He coined the phrase nonna bambina (“grandmother child”) to describe the author and praised her ability to scandalize not only bourgeois society but all social classes and her refusal to follow literary trends. He admired her willed childishness as well as her love for children and the adults who remain like them.28 Bernardo Bertolucci hailed the book as well, saying that the poems were written in a state of great freedom.29

  The World Saved by Children begins with a long poem, “Addio” (“Good-bye”), which was written as a sad farewell to Bill Morrow. One can hear the influence of the beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, as well as the autobiographical self-scrutiny and anarchistic spirit of Walt Whitman:

  and when, competing with the blackbird

  you threw yourself off the roof

  to try to fly….

  ......................

  “Who is there? Samarkand? London? Persepolis?

  Is it you!? It’s me, from New York City!! Can you hear my voice?

  How are you? Here one is bored to death! There, too? When are you coming back?

  Hey! I’ve got the cat here sitting on my belly

  Who greets you! Can you hear her, her voice? 30

  The Evening at Colonus (La serata a colono), a one-act play, is a parody of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. Here, Oedipus is not the king of Thebes but a small blind Italian landowner accompanied by Antigone, who speaks to him in dialect (the same dialect, Carlo Cecchi said, spoken by Lucia, Elsa’s maid). Meanwhile, the chorus speaks in satiric tones making allusions to a number of disparate sources: documents transcribed from Nazi concentration camps, ancient Aztec songs, the Vedas, Hölderlin, the Dead Sea Scrolls, blues sung by slaves, and so on. (Carlo Cecchi also said how he hoped, one day, to produce this play.)

  The style of the last section, “Canzoni popolari” (“Popular Songs”), most resembles twentieth-century experimental writing. A lot of the text is printed crosswise on the page. Handwritten “words” such as “BUMM,” “THUMPA” and “KRASH” fill other pages, musical scores and the words “pandemonio generale” (“general pandemonium”) surrounded by exclamation and question marks fill another. The section ends with the disclaimer (in large letters) that, anyway, it is all a “GAME.”

  The title The World Saved by Children was not chosen lightly. In the poem titled “La canzone degli F [elici]. P [oci]. e degli I [nfelici]. M [olti].” (“The Song of the Happy Few and the Unhappy Many”), perhaps the most important and revelatory section of the book, Elsa Morante divides the world into two groups: the Happy Few and the Unhappy Many (or Multitude). The Happy Few, the group to which children belong, are the salt of the earth, the breath of fire, the true revolutionaries. They are said to have a great sense of reality, which must not be confused with practicality, usefulness or convenience. In addition to the children, the Happy Few who inhabit Morante’s pantheon are Spinoza, Antonio Gramsci, Arthur Rimbaud, Giordano Bruno, Joan of Arc, Simone Weil, Mozart, Giovanni Bellini, Plato and Rembrandt. Their names are placed in boxes that include the date and cause of death (Rimbaud, for example, died of gangrene, both Giordano Bruno and Joan of Arc were burned alive and Bellini died of old age) that fill a page and that Morante arranged in the form of a cross. At the other end of the spectrum are the Unhappy Many, who are the rest of us. According to Morante, we or them, as the case may be, live abandoned by the spirit and practice the degrading vice of power, which makes us blind to reality.

  On a hot summer night not long after The World Saved by Children was published, Elsa Morante and Cesare Garboli had dinner together. Garboli recalled,

  Rome was deserted. Like two loyal dogs, we met in an old trattoria on via della Vite. We got into an argument. I have to confess that in that ovenlike temperature, I felt depressed, bitter and unhappy. I can’t remember what we ordered. I do remember that at one point I began to predict that the destiny of the world would be both sinister and optimistic. I told Elsa that all our complaints about our present civilization were the result of our shortsightedness…. History is only a parenthesis. Life is quantifiable…. Once nature will be defeated, we will lean over our own hearts (which we will no long
er have) just in time to say, along with the poet, “you have beaten enough.”* And perhaps the earth will explode then. Yet the button for the catastrophe will not be pushed by us but by beings who are equal to death, by beings for whom life or death will no longer present a fundamental alternative.

  I remember now that Elsa was eating buffalo mozzarella. She told me that she was surprised that I could talk such nonsense. Death, she objected, does not exist, it is a physical appearance. What truly is, she said, never began and will never end. We see only an insignificant aspect of reality. I, in turn, accused her of spiritualism. I told her that she was a mystic, and that all the oriental philosophies seemed to me to be therapies to treat incurable diseases. I insisted on telling her that the revolt against technology, welfare, consumerism, the establishment arose from the same set of neurosis that produced this civilization: the symptoms vary but the disease is the same. And it is the consciousness of death. The moment man differentiated himself from animal confusion by becoming cognizant of death, man began to both build civilization and rebel against it…. The disease of man, I told Elsa, sounding in spite of myself like a Nietzschean, is not his inability to escape from a diminished reality but his inability to escape religion. It is time to do it. But the price for escaping religion is to embrace death. Your Happy Few, I concluded, are not happy at all.