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Elsa Morante (1918-1985)

 

Italian novelist, short-story writer and poet, whose most famous work, La storia (1974), was called at the time of its publication the novel of the century. The penetrating study of the impact of WW II on European culture was immediately translated into several languages. Elsa Morante first achieved fame with Menzogna e sortilegio (1948, House of Liars), which received the Viareggio Prize. Her final novel, Aracoeli (1982), earned her the Prix Medicis Etranger. Morante was married to novelist Alberto Moravia; they later separated, but for a time hey were the most successful literary couple in Italy.

The wedding was held in church, out of the usual respect for public opinion and also for the groom, who, personally indifferent to religions, was never to know, not even he, the secret of Nora Almagia. Because of their common poverty, the bride, insted of a white dress, wore a dark blue woolen suit, with the skirt tucked at the waist, and a fitted jacket. But she had dainty white leather shoes, a white blouse with embroidered lapels under her jacket, and, on her head, a little tarlatan veil with an orange blossom crown. Her purse, a present from Nora (who every month, no matter what, always laid aside a few lire against such exceptional events) was of silver mesh. In all her life, before and afterwards, Iduzza was never so elegant and brand new as on that day; and she felt an enormous responsibility, taking care in church, and also during the subsequent train journey, not to stain her shoes or wrinkle her slip. (History: A Novel by Elsa Morante, translated from the Italian by William Weaver, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977, p. 30; original title: La storia, 1974)

Elsa Morante was born in Rome, the daughter of Francesco Lo Monaco, a Sicilian, and Irma Poggubonzi, of Jewish descent of her mother's side. Elsa was the oldest of four surviving children, who all got a Catholic education. She grew up believing that her mother's second husband, Augusto Morante, was her father. However, due to his impotence which Irma discovered on her wedding night, she made him sleep alone. The family secret was unveiled when she was in her late teens. While keeping her private life to herself, Morante also fabulated many details of her life.

Both Irma, a friend of Maria Montessori, and Augusto were teachers. The family moved to Monte Verde Nuovo in 1922, where Morante began to write stories and poems. After completing her secondary school education, she left home. To support herself, she gave Latin and Italian lesson, and resorted to prostitution. For a short period, she studied literature  at the University of Rome.  Her early stories were published in such magazines as Il Corriere dei Piccoli, I diritti della scuola, and Oggi. Some of them were written under the pseudonym Antonio Carrera.

Morante's marriage with the writer Alberto Moravia, an opponent of Mussolini's fascist government, brought her into contact with the leading Italian writers and intellectuals of the day. They had met in 1937, when she was living with an older man; she took then a younger lover and became acquainted with Moravia. "We had supper together with some friends, and as I was saying good night to her, she slipped the keys of her house into my hand. . . .  I remember how that year and the following years I suffered with spasmophilia, which is a form of nervous colitis."  (Life of Moravia by Alberto Moravia and Alain Elkann, translated by William Weaver, South Royalton, Vermont: Steerforth Italia, 2000, p. 130) Moravia was attracted to her by her personality and he also realized that she was a born writer. Recalling their time together, Moravia said in Vida di Moravia (1990, Life of Moravia), that he never fell in love with Elsa. He loved her, but he did not manage to lose totally his mind. She was aware of it. (Ibid., p. 135)

Il gioco segreto (1941), Morante's first book, consisted of short pieces, several of which had been published in periodicals. It was followed by Le bellissime avventure di Caterì dalla trecciolina (1942), a children's book, which was later expanded as Le straordinarie avventure di Caterina  (1959).

During the last years of World War II, Morante lived the life of a refugee in the countryside near Cassino, hiding from the fascist authorities. Later the rural world of the south played an important part in her fiction. In the late 1940s, the American translator William Weaver arrived in Rome and became friends with a number of writers, among them Moravia and Morante, and made their work known in the United States.

Morante's Menzogna e sortilegio was written in poetic language and showed the influence of Katherine Mansfield, whose works Morante had translated. The novel achieved a critical success and was translated in an awkwardly cut version into English and published in the United States under the title House of Liars (1951).

Menzogna e sortilegio, set in a Sicily both modern and legendary, presented themes that were central in Morante's works: memories, dreams and obsessions spanning over generations, a young, sensitive person in rebellion against bourgeois traditions, a private world threatened by external reality. The Hungarian philosopher and literature theoretician György Lukács placed Morante at the same level as Thomas Mann. In Italy Morante's unconventional narrative did not fit the way national identity was reconstructed by the intellectual elite:

Morante was not a prolific writer. Her next novel, L'isola di Arturo (Arturo's Island), which combined fantasy with Freudian themes, came outnearly ten years later. During this period silence she destroyed much of her texts, but wrote a novella, 'The Andalusian Shawl' for the anthology Modern Italian Stories (1955), and a long poem, 'The Adventure,' published in the American review Wake. It has been said, that Arturo's Island was written "under the sign of Visconti;" Morante also listened obsessively to The Magic Flute.

The adolescent narrator, Arturo, looks back at his life on the island of Procida in the Bay of Naples. He becomes aware of his passionate love for his Neapolitan stepmother. Arturo's father, whom Arturo first worships, is cold to his son and his wife, and he turns out to be a victim of his own passion: homosexual affairs, visits to his lover in the island's prison. To face the bitter reality, Arturo leaves his Procida with his friend to enlist. Damiano Damiani's film adaptation of the novel from 1962 did not quite capture Morante's vision.

Morante and Moravia lived together for twenty-five years. Morante had an affair with the film director Luchino Visconti; they fell in love in 1955 when Moravia was visiting America. However, both the director Bernardo Bertolucci and the acresss Adriana Asti, who knew Visconti very well, have claimed that they did not have a "real" affair. Most likely, the poem Alibi (1958) was inspired by Visconti. A practicing Catholic, she refused to divorce  Moravia, who had his own affairs too.

From the late 1960s, Morante became increasingly reclusive. In her last years Morante was confined to a wheelchair, after an accident in which she broke her hip. In April 1983, she attempted suicide by swallowing three different kinds of sleeping pills and turning on the gas. She lived for another two and a half years, reading and rereading at the hospital Dante's Inferno. Morante died of cardiac arrest in Rome on November 25, 1985. All the leading newspapers in Italy wrote long obituaries devoted to her and her work. 

The plot is not the central element in Morante's fiction, nor neorealistic preoccupation with leftist politics. Often her subjects are taken from persecutions and injustices, without direct connections to the mainstream historical and social conditions. A great exception is Morante's major work, La storia (History), set in Rome during and after WW II.

At the start Morante summarizes the main historical events, and their impact on the everyday life of her characters, distantly or indirectly. The story focuses on the lives of Iduzza, Ida Ramundo Mancusco, a half-Jewish schoolteacher, her child Useppe, who dies of an epileptic attack, and Nino, her elder son, a fascist who becomes a partisan. Iduzza's husband has died. She experiences all the horrors of war, she is raped by a German soldier on his way to North Africa, and fights for survival with her two sons. Each of the novel's eight sections begins and ends with a brief history of the ongoing war, narrated by the omniscient "I": "1906-1913 Nothing very new, in the great world. Like all centuries and  the millennia that have  proceded it on earth, the new century also observes the well-known, immobile principle of historical dynamics, power to some, servitude to the others." (Ibid., p. 3)

La storia, as with Morante's other works, reflects a deep understanding of the human psyche and the historical processes experienced by ordinary people, who are trapped by forces beyond their control. Pier Paolo Pasolini reviewed favorably L'isola di Arturo, but criticized La storia in Tempo for "mannerism" and made fun of Morante's celebration of vitality and joie de vivre. He also suspected that one of the characters, Davide Segre, was in part his fictional caricature.

Morante also published essays and short stories. Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini, a collection of poems in various styles, popular songs, and a one-act play, came out in 1968. Upon the completion of L'isola di Arturo, she began writing Senza i conforti della religione (Without the Comfort of Religion), which examined the relationship between cinema and poetry. She never finished this work, but it provided material for her other fiction and essays

Throughout her career as a writer, Morante was criticized by feminist authors for her portraying mythologized female characters, insted of taking up issues with which Women's Liberation was concerned. Anna Nozzoli even accused Morante of being hostile to her own sex in Tabù e coscienza (1978, Taboo and Conscience). And in addition, Morante did not refer to herself as "scrittare" (woman writer), but "scrittore" (man writer). Her final novel, Aracoeli  (1982), was a mixture of private dreams, fantasies, imaginary encounters, and flashbacks, narrated by the guilt-ridden neurotic Emanuele. Aracoeli is his mother, who suddenly undergoes a terrible change - she becomes a nymphomaniac, and dies of a malignant brain tumor, the cause of her wild behavior. The book received mixed reviews. Raymond Rosenthal wrote: "it would seem that Elsa Morante has turned against her innermost creative self and vision, her carefully nurtured private mythology, her special cult of the young and the innocent. This book reads as if she has surrendered to a blunt cynicism that doesn't work for her." (The New York Times, January 13, 1985)

For further reading: Against Redemption: Democracy, Memory, and Literature in Post-fascist Italy by Franco Baldasso (2022); Il pensiero monologico: personaggio e vita psichica in Volponi, Morante e Pasolini by Gloria Scarfone (2022); Queer(ing) Gender in Italian Women's Writing: Maraini, Sapienza, Morante by Maria Morelli (2021); MoranteMoravia: storia di un amore by Anna Folli (2018); Elsa Morante: une vie pour la littérature by René de Ceccatty (2018) Elsa Morante's Politics of Writing: Rethinking Subjectivity, History, and the Power of Art, edited by Stefania Lucamante (2014); Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante by Lily Tuck (2009); Death or Deception: Sense of Place in Buzzati And Morante by Felix Siddell (2006); Under Arturo'S Star: The Cultural Legacies Of Elsa Morante by Sharon Wood and Stefania Lucamante (2005); The Theme of Childhood in Elsa Morante by Grace Z. Kalay (1996); 'History: A Novel' by S. Spender, in New York Review of Books (28 April 1977: 31-34); Italian Women Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Rinaldina Russell (1994); Struttura e stile nella narrativa di Elsa Morante by Angelo Raffaele Pupino (1968)

Selected works:

  • Il gioco segreto, 1941
  • Le bellissime avventure di Caterì dalla Trecciolina e altre storie, 1941
  • Il libro degli appunti /  Katherine Mansfield, 1945 (translator)
  • Menzogna e sortilegio, 1948 (Viareggio Prize)
    - House of Liars (translated by Adrienne Foulke and Andrew Chiappe, 1951;  see also: Open City: Seven Writers in Postwar Rome: Ignazio Silone, Giorgio Bassani, Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, Carlo Levi, Carlo Emili, edited by William Weaver and Kristina Olson, 1999) / Lies and Sorcery (translated by Jenny McPhee, 2022) 
  • Il meglio di Katherine Mansfield, 1957 (translator, with Marcella Hannau)
  • L'isola di Arturo, 1957 (Strega Prize)
    - Arturo's Island (tr.  Isabel Quigley, 1959; Amm Goldstein, 2018)
    - Arturon saari (suom. Alli Holma, 1958)
    - film 1962, prod. by Compagnia Cinematografica Champion, dir.  Damiano Damiani, starring Vanni De Maigret, Kay Meersman, Reginald Kernan, Luigi Giuliani, Gabriella Giorgelli
  • Alibi, 1958 (first published in Tempo presente in 1957) 
  • Le straordinarie avventure di Caterina, 1959
  • Lo scialle andaluso, 1963
  • Il Mondo Salvato dai Ragazzini, 1968
  • La storia, 1974
    - History (translated by William Weaver, 1977)
    - La Storia: romaani (suom. Ulla-Kaarina Jokinen, Elina Suomela, 1976)
    - TV film 1986, prod. Films A2, dir.  Luigi Comencini, screenplay by Suso Cecchi d'Amico, Cristina Comencini, featuring Claudia Cardinale, Francisco Rabal, Andrea Spada, Antonio Degli Schiavi
  • Aracoeli, 1982 (Prix Medicis Etranger)
    - Aracoeli: A Novel (tr.  William Weaver, 1984)
    - Aracoeli (suom. Aira Buffa, 1987)
  • Pro e contro la bomba atomica, 1987 (foreword by Cesare Garboli)
  • "Piccolo manifesto" e altri scritti, 1988
  • Diario 1938, 1989 (ed. Alba Andreini)
  • Opere, 1988-90 (2 vols., ed Carlo Cecchi and Cesare Garboli)
  • 'Beato Angelico', 2000 (in Scritti d'arte: dieci maestri della pittura raccontati da dieci grandi della letteratura)
  • Racconti dimenticati, 2002 (ed. Irene Babboni and Carlo Cecchi)
  • The World Saved by Kids and Other Epics, 2016 (translated by Cristina Viti)
  • La vita nel suo movimento: recensioni cinematografiche, 1950-1951, 2017 (a cura di Goffredo Fofi)
  • Lies and Sorcery, 2022 (Menzogna e sortilegio, translated by Jenny McPhee)


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