La frantumaglia

by Elena Ferrante

  It distressed me to make this decision. The desire to be knocked over by your film (of whose success I’ve had no doubts from the moment I read the screenplay) is at least as strong as that of seeking a sturdy shelter. Naturally I will not resist for long and in the end I will not find any adequate protection. But I’m sure that until then you will understand not so much my reserve (I’m hardly reserved) but my fears.

  With great affection,

  Elena Ferrante

  NOTE

  The Martone-Ferrante correspondence on Troubling Love was published in the magazine Linea d’ombra, double issue 106, July/August 1995.

  6.

  MEDIA HIERARCHIES

  Dear Erbani,

  Your letter impressed me with its terse frankness, a quality that only the writing of clear-minded people has. If I were sure of being able to respond with equal transparency to the questions you intend to ask, I would say all right, let’s do the interview. But I look for ideas by running after words, and it takes me many sentences—real, confusing, jumbled speeches—to arrive at an answer. This doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t like to chat with you. Your letter, thanks precisely to the clean exposition that distinguishes it, provoked in me the wish to ask you a question in turn. The question is the following: Why, although you read my book a year ago, although you admire it as you say, did you get the idea of communicating with me only now, after learning that a film is being made from Troubling Love?

  If we were to have, let’s say, not an interview but a friendly conversation, I would discuss with you in particular the reasons for this long delay, starting, for example, from an observation of yours. You write, but less brutally than in my summary: your book says something to me, but your name says nothing. Question: if my book had said nothing to you and my name had said something, would it have taken you less time to ask for an interview?

  Don’t take it as a bitter remark, it isn’t; I’m just exploiting the fact that you’ve written plainly to bring up plainly a problem that is important to me. I want to ask you this: Is a book, from the media point of view, above all the name of the person who writes it? Is the fame of the author or, rather, the author personality who takes the stage thanks to the media, a crucial support for the book? Isn’t it newsworthy, for the cultural pages, that a good book has been published? Is it newsworthy, instead, that a name able to say something to editorial offices is on the cover of some book or other?

  I think the good news is always: a book worth reading has come out. I also think that, for real readers, who wrote it isn’t important. I think that readers of a good book hope at most that the author of a good book will continue to work conscientiously and make other good books. I think, finally, that even the authors of the classics are only a pile of dead letters alongside the life that flares up in their pages as soon as one begins to read them. That’s all. To put it another way: even Tolstoy is an insignificant shadow if he takes a stroll with Anna Karenina.

  You will say: What do you want from me, it’s the unwritten law of journalism that imposes such procedures; if one is no one I can’t give him space; if not even in Naples is there a dog who’s ever heard of the author of Troubling Love, why in the world should it be necessary to talk about her book, interview her in the pages of a big newspaper? Merely because she has written a decent book?

  You’re right, you have acted in the only way that is journalistically possible today. You have waited for an event that could justify an article, a headline, on a book that you didn’t dislike. A year later, the event arrived: a film is being made from that book, the director has a not unimportant name, it’s now possible to ask for an interview with this woman, who doesn’t have even a tiny local reputation. Finally, you explained to me clearly, politely, perhaps sadly, that it is the film-event that makes my book a worthy interview subject.

  Well, I won’t complain. I’m pleased that a film is being made from Troubling Love, I hope that this brings the book more readers. But must I also be happy to observe that a book becomes important for the cultural pages only because a film is being made from it? Must I also be happy to be promoted to an interviewed author only thanks to the good name of another author, Martone, who works in theater and cinema, fields more loudly acclaimed by the media? Must I also be happy that it is the film of Troubling Love that indicates the existence of the book Troubling Love? Don’t you think that accepting hierarchies of this type, taking them as natural, encourages the idea that literature, in the lists of cultural products, occupies the lowest position? Don’t you think that it would be nice to provide a journalistic initiative that risked everything by saying to the public: read books, see movies, go to the theater, hear music, and construct your own preferences based on the works and not on the editorial pecking order displayed by the dailies, by the Sunday supplements, by TV?

  I will stop here and thank you for your kind request.

  NOTE

  The letter is undated but is probably from 1995. It wasn’t sent. It originated as a response to the following letter from Francesco Erbani:

  Dear Signora Ferrante,

  A year ago your novel fell into my hands. I opened it with curiosity, I read the beginning and found it breathtaking. I was born in Naples in the late fifties and I have a certain familiarity with Neapolitan writers, those of the generation that came right after the war, those active in the sixties, the youngest. But your name said nothing to me. And then that scorching beginning. I read Troubling Love in a couple of days, at times eagerly, seduced by the colors that the city seemed to me to emanate. Then I left it there, to float in memory. Some time ago I discovered that a film would be made from your book and I developed the idea of getting in touch with you.

  I am a journalist, I work for the cultural pages of the Repubblica, and I would be very pleased if I could interview you. I’ve been told of your reserve, and I’m afraid you’ll refuse, but at the same time I nourish a hope that a conversation with you published in a newspaper would be only a small break in a rule that I admire.

  If you agree, I could come and see you, but if you prefer I could let you have the questions in writing.

  I await your response confidently.

  Cordially,

  Francesco Erbani

  After reading the letter in the first edition of La Frantumaglia, Erbani wrote to the author:

  . . . The arguments that you raise are real . . . : I, too . . . suffer greatly from certain requirements imposed by show business and from the reduction of literary work to goods. And you are right when you maintain that often in the newspapers books are not discussed for their value and that authors are neglected because “they are no one.” But the point is another: I didn’t write to you when I had read the book, I believe in the summer of 1993, and did not ask you for an interview, for the very simple reason that at the time I worked not at la Repubblica but in a press agency, where I was employed in the foreign news department. I spoke of it two years later, as soon as I could, taking Martone’s film as the occasion.

  7.

  YES, NO, I DON’T KNOW

  Hypothetical laconic interview

  Dear Sandra,

  I’m sorry to say that I can’t answer the questions from Annamaria Guadagni. It’s a limitation not of the questions, which in fact are good and profound, but of mine. Let’s resign ourselves and from now on avoid promising interviews that I won’t give. Maybe in time I’ll learn, but I take it for granted that in time no one will have the desire to interview me, and so the problem will be resolved at its root.

  The fact remains that every question makes me want to gather ideas, rummage in favorite books, use old notes, annotate, digress, relate, confess, argue. All things that I like doing and that in fact I do: they are the best part of my days. But in the end I realize that I put together material not for an interview, not for an article (as Guadagni also, politely, proposes) but for a story-essay, and naturally I lose heart. W
hat does a newspaper do with at least ten dense pages for every question of the interview?

  So, since I’m stubborn, I put everything aside and try to find a few brilliant sentences that clearly express the meaning of the pages I’ve accumulated in the meantime. Soon, however, the sentences seem to me not at all brilliant but at times fatuous, at times pretentious, for the most part stupid. As I result I let it go, very depressed.

  Maybe interviews should be of this type:

  Q. Is it wrong to think that the mother in Troubling Love is one with Naples?

  A. I don’t think so.

  Q. Did you flee Naples?

  A. Yes.

  Q. For you is the imperfect the true dimension of writing?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Does confusing oneself with one’s mother in fact mean losing one’s identity as a woman, losing oneself?

  A. No.

  Q. Is Troubling Love the need to possess the mother?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Is it your distorted gaze that gives us the impression of traveling in a hallucination, amid unreal bodies?

  A. I don’t know.

  Q. Doesn’t it seem to you that your book, once on the screen, might generate something between a mystery film and a horror film?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Did you help Martone with the screenplay of his film?

  A. No.

  Q. Will you go to see it?

  A. Yes.

  But what would Annamaria Guadagni make of an interview of this type? And then it is enough for me to reread the yeses, the nos, the I don’t knows to start again from the beginning. For example the I don’t knows, if you dug deep enough, might reveal that I know a lot or even too much. And some yeses, by force of argument, might become I don’t knows. In other words, dear Sandra, let’s drop it, and in such a way that Guadagni will forgive me and I apologize, to you and Sandro, for the way I complicate your editorial life.

  Until next time,

  Elena

  NOTE

  Letter of March, 1995. Below are the questions from Annamaria Guadagni.

  Dear Elena,

  I’m very pleased that you’ve agreed to answer my questions. But, given that we will speak only in writing, we could also work in another way: for example, you could write an article that follows the course of my questions. See what you think, I leave the choice up to you. I would ask you also to let me have some information on your life and current profession. Naturally, what you consider suitable: all that is known of you is that you live in Greece. In fact, maybe I would start there, at a distance, to ask my questions.

  1. In my imagination the mother who kills herself in Troubling Love is confused with the city. A livid, vulgar, and vital Naples, hated and loved. Is it a mistaken impression? And did you escape from Naples?

  2. Childhood is a tissue of lies that endure in the imperfect. The imperfect is the tense of stories and fables. How long does it last? Forever? Is it the dimension where one can be Amalia but also her husband, Caserta but also his son Antonio? In short, for you is it the dimension of writing?

  3. Femininity is defined around the mother-daughter relationship. But the battle of identity is to find oneself, detaching oneself from the other, the mother. One of the most disturbing aspects of your book is that it seems to achieve this journey backward: in the beginning there are two women and in the course of the novel they become confused with one another. I think that the daughter therefore loses herself, but do you agree? Is she lost or found?

  4. At the end of the novel there is a sort of revelation: the jealousy of Amalia’s husband is the jealousy of Delia, who furthermore discovers or recalls that she set it off with a childish act of informing. A confusion in which fantasies about the mother’s lover are confused with those of a seduction of the child Delia by Antonio’s grandfather. But what is the troubling love, the engine of everything? The need to possess the mother?

  5. The bodies in your novel seem unreal. Is it that somewhat distorted gaze that gives us so to speak the sensation of traveling in a hallucination?

  6. Imagining this story on the movie screen evokes famous changes of identity. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho or Roman Polanski’s The Tenant. Something between a mystery and horror. What do you think?

  7. Did you help Martone with the screenplay of the film? Will you see it?

  I would ask you to send a text that is not longer than four pages as soon as possible. It will appear in l’Unità very likely with an interview with Martone on the film. I would like to meet you.

  Meanwhile thank you for everything, fondly,

  Annamaria Guadagni

  8.

  CLOTHES, BODIES

  Troubling Love on the screen

  Dear Mario,

  I’ve seen the film again and again, and it’s really beautiful—it seemed to me a very important work. More than that I can’t tell you, because my situation as a not disinterested viewer won’t let me. So I will try to write to you not about the artistic results that you achieved but about the feelings that your work aroused in me. I doubt, however, that I will be able to finish this letter; my ideas are very confused, and I’m afraid I won’t find a thread that satisfies me.

  The film, I’ll tell you immediately, caused a violent uneasiness in me. You, rightly, in order to realize your work, gave the book a sharp tug that deprived it of its literary clothing. The places, the people, and the acts are shown in their very concrete definition and, to my eyes, in their naked recognizability. Right away, the disquiet that Naples, with its sounds, its words, has always provoked in me reached me directly from the screen. Almost all the characters in my story again became living persons, bodies moving in well-known settings, individuals often miraculously resembling the inhabitants of my memory. I saw clearly for the first time what a disturbing story I had told. I was very upset, I struggled not to withdraw. In the moment I couldn’t understand what had really happened to my book, how it could be that I who had written the story could see it only now, exposed in all its extreme consequences. Evidently, although I often said it to myself, I hadn’t taken into account that if the director is very good, as you are, everything that on the page is disguised or invented to make the story function becomes, on the screen, emotionally irrelevant, one barely sees it, while the living nucleus that animates everything is revealed with an intolerable disruptiveness.

  Don’t misunderstand me, I haven’t changed my mind, I’m pleased with your work and that of your colleagues, pleased and moved. But I’m also upset by it. Deep down I hoped that, of my book, one would see on the screen the way in which an adult woman, Delia, was capable of telling herself how she had used her childhood hostility toward her mother in a murky male game aimed at the use, the control, the violent protection of a woman’s body that was too seductive. I counted on the fact that the rest would remain in the background and surface only here and there, outside the actions of the plot, like a luminous signal. I was in other words more or less prepared to see Delia, determined as a detective in a thriller, traveling through a male city ungovernable in both its public and its private behavior. But she didn’t do that, or rather she didn’t do only that. You skillfully directed the woman’s investigation of men whose movements can’t be ordered, who are guided by the worst aspects of the Neapolitan past—those which are unredeemable. You showed the bodies of Caserta, of the uncle, of Antonio, of the father, and also, I would say, of the candidate, caught in a tangled mass of hatreds and complicity and weaknesses, a network of misery and power and hierarchically institutionalized subjection. And you put in Delia’s eyes a mocking, aggressive, sexually disgusted or distracted, at times compassionate gaze. But you didn’t stop here. Rather, you almost immediately obscured the mechanics of the plot and distinguished with an astuteness of vision, from the first scenes, the junctions of the mother-daughter relationship. That is what upset me. I don’t know how to tel
l you what a violent emotional shock Delia’s gaze upon the nursing mother and the movement of Amalia among children-work-husband gave me: Licia Maglietta is a perfect young mother, with a piercing truthfulness. During the entire arc of the film there is not a single moment in which the image of the mother’s body—which Delia loves and rejects with an insistent childish passion that is still urgent in the half-sleep of the adult—isn’t true, almost unbearably so.

  I felt a painful unease as I watched Delia wake up, when the old mother—what a disturbing appearance Angela Luce’s is—brings her coffee and talks to her in that affectionately annoying voice and touches her and sits beside her and Delia barely moves, her voice reaches us languidly from sleep, from affection and hostility. But the most effective and most disturbing moments came as I watched the hallucinatory movement of the elevator: the contact between bodies, the attraction-repulsion, the mother with the swollen belly, the whole with those tonalities which seem to capture psychic rather than physical reality. What in the film is for me true and thus difficult to see is there, in that obsession of the daughter with her mother. The strongest moments for me are those in which you find great visual solutions for showing Delia’s emotions on the screen. I’m referring to what you’ve done with the scene on the bus, how you transfer it to the hallucination of the tram, to the use you make of that extraordinary actor who plays the uncle. I’m referring to the concreteness of the half-naked women in the Vossi store, the embarrassment-ostentatiousness with which Delia changes her clothes. I’m referring to Bonaiuto in the rain in an anguished Naples, to how her body slides into the cavelike environment of the sauna, up to the scene, beautiful both for its visual qualities and for its symbolic ones, of masturbating in the water (a scene much more dazzling than in my book: the change of place for the sexual encounter between Delia and Antonio is effective, and then also there the image of the actor on the screen is astonishing, it sweeps away invention and sinks into the reality I know).