Transiting From Tradition

 What I get from The Times Literary Supplement's review The scars of love: Elsa Morante’s urgent, exhilarating novel of falsehood and secrecy by Tim Parks is another example of how art can deal with a changing society.

Menzogna e sortilegio, the book is called in Italian – literally, “falsehood and sorcery”. And at once its sheer length warns you that of such things there is no end. Such is its intensity and exhausting extension, such the urgency of its extraordinary plot, that there may come moments when, despite one’s admiration, one is tempted to skip. Yet with each new chapter of the work once described by the great Hungarian critic György Lukács as “the finest Italian novel of modern times”, Morante shifts her ground and winds up her narrative to new levels of folly and delirium. You must resign yourself to reading every compelling word.

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If readers fear my review has given away too much, they need only turn to the novel itself to find I have barely scratched the surface. This is a work of wild abundance and inexhaustible psychological depth. But enough has, I hope, been said to address the objection levelled at Lies and Sorcery by some of Morante’s contemporaries: that history, as Calvino was concerned, “was banned from its pages”, that the book was not of its time. Where were the enormities of fascism, the horrors of war, the challenges of postwar reconstruction? Eleven years after publication, Morante, who gave few interviews, would defend herself by explaining that it was precisely during the war, when she and Moravia had gone into hiding in the hills south of Rome, that she had passed “precociously and with ruinous violence” from youth to maturity, fantasy to consciousness, and that “all this I put in my novel … even though the war is never mentioned”.

As soon as the point is made, it seems obvious. What had Italian fascism been, after all, if not a vast exercise in collective denial, in falsehood and sorcery? Hadn’t Mussolini himself declared that illusion “is perhaps the only reality in life”? Isn’t it impossible, reading the speeches and propaganda of those times, to understand, as with Anna’s fake letters from Edoardo, how people could have once delighted over them? And if we listen today to recordings of Mussolini’s ravings, are we not struck by an impression of “profound mockery”?

Morante’s book evokes the passage from a traditional society steeped in the values of collectiveness and belonging to one obsessed with power, with the idea that an individual need only impose their will to have what they want. (“The winner of the war will be whoever wants to win it”, Mussolini proclaimed.) The rhetoric of war is everywhere in this novel. Edoardo’s mother seems “at war with all living things”. In particular she “declare[s] a pitiless war” on any girl her son finds attractive. Troubled by the “bitter wars of my capricious parents,” Elisa fantasizes “a mother and daughter who, facing great adversity, wars and dangers of all sorts, in the end always found themselves to be supremely victorious”. Anna’s fake letters, Elisa tells us, imagine Edoardo meeting emperors, sultans, kings and queens, and rejoicing in their cruelty, in the thought that “a sovereign’s honor [is] measured by the number of his victims”. “Our totalitarian will”, Mussolini announced in 1925, “shall be declared with still greater ferocity.” Unsettled by his wife’s fierce competitiveness, Moravia remarked that Elsa was “a bit totalitarian, with me or against me”. In her diary Morante complained of her “humiliations”, the fact that people always paid more attention to her husband than to her. Nevertheless, she wished “to satisfy his snobbism … by being famous”. Writing the fake letters, Anna imagines Edoardo ordering her to punish herself for her supposed shortcomings: obeying, she cuts off her beautiful hair and sleeps on iron bedsprings. “How can one avoid becoming a master in a country of slaves?” asked Mussolini. At the beginning of Lies Elisa explains that she has become a recluse precisely for fear of conceding power over herself to some new lover. And in the absence, it seems, of any human acquaintance she concludes her long narrative with a cheerful little ode to her cat. In Woman of Rome (2008), Morante’s American biographer, Lily Tuck, finds this ending inexplicable, trivial. But what relationship could be safer? And hadn’t Elisa earlier described herself as the devoted cat of her beloved mother? Morante was the proud owner of many cats – regal Siameses – and she imposed them on her lovers, many of whom were openly homosexual men. She wanted to be “the only woman around”, suggests her French biographer, René Ceccatty (see Elsa Morante: Une vie pour la littérature, 2018).

It seems to me change should be our theme.

Also, another reminder of how little we get of the world's literature and how much that can teach.us.

sch 10/23