The scars of love

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.

The story is narrated by a young woman, Elisa – the name immediately suggests an authorial alter ego – who, at twenty-five, is dragging out a solitary, misanthropic existence in the flat left to her by her “adoptive mother” and “guardian”, a “fallen woman”. Her active life, she soon confides, was to all intents and purposes arrested fifteen years earlier with the death of her parents, whose main legacy – “transmitted to me like a disease” – was a vocation for denial, for living knowingly and contentedly in a state of complete rejection of reality. Told, Elisa claims, under dictation from her dead relatives, the novel is an attempt to understand how all this came about.

Her protagonists, she at once apologizes, are hardly “illustrious people”, rather “a wretched middle-class family,” but coloured by her omnivorous reading of “fantasy books from far flung places”: German legends, Scandinavian fables, ancient epics, oriental love stories. The setting – never actually named – would appear to be fin de siècle Palermo, but a Palermo transported from the Sicilian coast to “the middle of a parched, shrub-covered plain … distant from any industry”. In the ancient city centre “grandiose structures” look “cumbersome and forlorn”, while most of the action takes place in a northern district whose “shameless modernity made it perhaps the most squalid of all”.

Here we meet Elisa’s grandmother Cesira, an “itinerant teacher” disdainful of “the uncouth society in which she was forced to live”. Tutoring the children of a well-to-do family, Cesira is flattered by the attention of an ageing aristocratic roué, Teodoro Massia di Corullo, whom she marries under the illusion that he is wealthy. When she discovers that he long ago squandered his inheritance and is banished from his family, her resentment will know no bounds. The couple’s only child, Anna, thus grows up in a poisonous, poverty-stricken environment, preferring her father’s dotage to her mother’s rancour. A glimpse, in early childhood, of her delicately handsome and fabulously rich cousin Edoardo, her father’s nephew, stepping out of a carriage, prompts a lifelong yearning that is at one with a profound sense of injustice. Conjured up in the most lavish detail, the love affair that ensues when these two meet in late adolescence is at once poignant, comical and shocking. The ingenuous Anna places her life entirely in Edoardo’s manipulative hands. He is brilliant, jealous, spoilt beyond belief and unfailingly ambiguous. Tenderness and cruelty, narcissism and sadism, are entwined in a frenzy of never quite consummated eroticism, until, drunk on the power Anna has invested in him, but fearful of the consequences, Edoardo simply disappears from her life.

Elsa Morante was born in 1912 and wrote Lies and Sorcery between 1942 and 1948. Previously she had only written short stories, many of them for children. All around her, other Italian novelists – Carlo Cassola, Natalia Ginzburg, Beppe Fenoglio, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cesare Pavese, the young Italo Calvino – were repudiating fascist magniloquence to work in the spare, direct style of a politically engaged neorealism. Morante was aware of their achievements and aspirations; in 1941, after four years of conflicted courtship, she had married Alberto Moravia, whose own early novelThe Time of Indifference (1929) would be considered a forerunner of this new sobriety. The couple were very much part of Rome’s literary world. Yet when the manuscript of Liesand Sorcery arrived on the desk of Ginzburg at the publisher Einaudi, it provoked astonishment.

“I remember how amazed I was”, recalled Ginzburg, “seeing the chapter titles, because it looked like a novel from another age.” Calvino also had initial misgivings, worrying that the story seemed based on “a highly sophisticated and contrived play of fables”. At the same time both were full of admiration for the vitality of the characters and the prose. In fact, as the critic Cesare Garboli pointed out in his 1994 introduction to the Italian edition, the modern world is always present in Lies, and the misery of poverty and urban ugliness constantly acknowledged, but the tone of the book tends to obscure this, since, rather than denouncing squalor, Morante aligns her style energetically, even joyfully, with the spirit of denial that inspires and deludes her characters. She seems delighted, for example, to describe Anna and Cesira gloating and dreaming over their few precious jewels, even if they are obliged to pawn them for much of the time. And just as the characters think of their lovers as princes and princesses, their enemies as ogres or demons (Don Quixote was an acknowledged influence), so the prose moves in a lush, syntactically elaborate, enigmatically archaic atmosphere, in sharp contrast to the tawdry settings. At the headiest point of the cousins’ affair – in a chapter entitled “New and inconclusive conversations between the budding lovers. The subject of “Abroad” resurfaces with the participation of Manuelito the matador, the czarevich, etc. The scar.” – Edoardo torments but also enchants Anna with accounts of a year-long world tour he is about to embark on, which will inevitably mark the end of their relationship:

He pictured himself riding on the back of a dromedary, an enormous beast called Alí, who, despite Edoardo’s relatively small size, would under his command become as obedient and servile as a donkey. In recompense, he would bedeck Alí in majestic colored saddles and tack, and travel around like the magi, wearing a turban on his head, a wide gem-studded belt around his waist and velvet slippers on his feet.

This comic folly is pursued for some pages, including imagined visits to Spain, Russia and France, encouraging a young woman who has “renounced not only herself but her own reason” to marvel over how magnificent her boyfriend will be when he has left her. The “scar” of the chapter title is something she asks her lover to burn into the corner of her mouth with a curling iron as “a sign of her eternal fidelity”. So fantasy forces itself on the flesh. But Anna is not merely a victim; from the moment Edoardo declares his interest in her, she is convinced that others must recognize that they are her “inferiors and servants”, and astonishes her neighbours with her unwarranted airs. Love is always tangled with social status in Morante’s world, and falling in love is a process in which extremes of sovereignty and servility are played out. “With the first sharp prick of love”, Elisa tells us of her own experiences, “an endless landscape of love-sickness would open up before me … the power of the beloved … determined … by how thoroughly [he or she] satisfied his or her taste for domination over me”.

Denial and secrecy are close companions in this mindset; a humble background or an unworthy lover must be kept hidden, otherwise friends might point out the absurdity of one’s pretensions. But so must a diamond ring, if received from the wrong person. Being besotted with one parent means keeping secrets from the other. All biographies of Morante are quick to recount the great secret that both united and divided her family of origin: when Elsa was ten, her mother, Irma, confessed to her and her three younger siblings that their natural father was not, as they had always supposed, Augusto Morante, Irma’s husband and the man of the house, but their favourite “uncle”, Francesco Lo Monaco. Irma was Jewish, a schoolteacher from Modena; Augusto was Sicilian and worked in a corrective institute for delinquent children. The couple scraped together a living in the Testaccio district of Rome. Francesco was a postal worker based in Palermo, but regularly travelled on postal trains, thus stopping over in Rome from time to time. Apparently Augusto, whether because impotent or homosexual, had himself proposed Francesco as the partner to satisfy Irma’s desire for children. Very likely the mother had chosen to tell the children in order to explain her aversion to a husband she treated with open contempt. But the children were not to tell anyone. Nor were they to speak about their Jewishness. When Elsa was seven Irma had her baptized, convincing an acquaintance whom she met through her teaching, the aristocrat Maria Maraini Gonzaga, to assume the role of godmother; she then successfully urged the rich woman to keep Elsa in her villa during the summer months each year. Irma was ambitious for her daughter. “I learned”, Morante later remarked, “how the rich lived, something I described in Lies and Sorcery”. She also learnt to captivate her younger brothers with tales of aristocratic life. In her story “The Secret Game” (1941), three children neglected by their noble parents play out the roles of princess, lover and servant. Just as the action strays towards the dangerously erotic – a kiss turning the princess’s hair from black to blonde – their mother interrupts.

Morante’s characters oscillate between extremes of triumph and humiliation. Precocious as children, they are invariably traumatized and stymied in early adolescence. Elisa’s father, Francesco (Morante frequently uses names from her immediate family), is the only child of an elderly peasant and his young second wife. Blue-eyed and brilliant at school, he basks in the adoration of his mother, only to be devastated in early adolescence when smallpox ravages his face. Beauty and power sit close together in Morante’s world. From now on he will be nicknamed “Pockface”. As consolation, his mother tells him he is not the son of her ageing, miserly husband, of whom they are both ashamed, but of Nicola Monaco, the handsome administrator of a grand aristocratic family who occasionally visits their village. With the same attention to the waywardness of human behaviour that characterizes all her writing, Morante builds up the psychology of a young man who comes to the university in Palermo preaching Marxism and social revolution, but at the same time claiming to be of noble descent. Both attitudes come across as equally fanciful. Seeking to contact his father, Francesco meets Edoardo, who explains that Nicola Monaco was dismissed from their household for aggravated fraud and has since died in prison. Edoardo befriends Francesco, takes over his life, destroys his relationship with his fun-loving girlfriend and introduces him to the now wretched and resentful, but still beautiful, Anna, encouraging the penniless student to stand beneath her window and sing the same song Edoardo himself had written and sung for her a year before. Deeply impressed with the young woman’s hauteur, “Pockface” is soon determined to become her slave. Eventually Anna will marry Francesco out of financial necessity – and in the hope that he can keep her in touch with Edoardo.

Edoardo is everywhere in this book, the man with the charmed existence whose narcissism compels him to manipulate and destroy the lives of others. He showers affection and money on his victims, praises and ridicules, seduces and snubs, then tosses them aside. Humiliated, they remain incurably attached to him, or to the fascination of a wealth, prestige and charisma that make the fabulous possible. But even Edoardo, to his amazement, is mortal. Stricken with tuberculosis, he turns to his doting mother, Concetta, whose religious fanaticism (another form of denial) he has always mocked. Parent-child relationships are consistently described in the same terms as romantic liaisons in Morante’s work. Concetta is quite as lovesick for Edoardo as is Anna. In one episode that contrives to be both comic and grotesque, the elderly noblewoman mortifies herself, walking veiled and barefoot from church to church through old Palermo in midwinter. Feeling this has earned her the right to demand God’s grace, she at last enters the city’s cathedral with an air “of supreme triumph”, savouring “her glory after so much humiliation”. To no avail. Edoardo dies.

At last we are approaching the core of the novel. The only child of the torment that is Anna and Francesco’s marriage, Elisa becomes the repository of both parents’ secret worship of the dead Edoardo. Loathing her father (long since banished from the matrimonial bed), worshipping a mother who pays her no attention whatsoever, the little girl feels like “a provincial novice admitted to the holy mysteries of an unprecedented cult”. At a casual meeting in the street, Concetta, who has lost her mind and chooses to believe that her son is still alive, asks Anna, the poor relative she has always despised, if she has received any letters from him. Anna says she has. From this point on Anna will spend her nights writing long missives to herself as if from her one-time lover, then taking her daughter with her to the noble family’s ancient palazzo, where, between walls plastered with photos and portraits of the “divine being” (Edoardo, of course), she reads the fake letters aloud to the immense gratification of both the decrepit mother and the bewildered Elisa, who is soon as in love with Edoardo as everyone else.

What is the content of these seductive letters? Certainly, writing them has transformed Anna, who now appears with “lips parted and plump as if they preserved the imprint of recent kisses”. But Elisa refuses to transcribe them for us. Re-reading the letters fifteen years on, she tells us, they “not only lack beauty and joy … but exude martyrdom, abasement, and punishment; [and] above all … mockery, profound mockery”. How could anyone ever have delighted over them? She cannot understand.

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).

Elsa Morante’s is, undeniably, a grim vision of the world; yet to read Lies and Sorcery in this heroic new translation by Jenny McPhee, always admirably attentive to the original’s delicate balance between archaism and fluency, is exhilarating throughout. “I can’t say that I clearly understood [the novel’s] importance and greatness”, recalled Natalia Ginzburg after putting down the manuscript. “I knew only that I loved it and it had been a long time since I had read anything that gave me such life and joy.”

Tim Parks’s most recent novel, Hotel Milano, appeared earlier this year

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