Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“HISTORY: A Novel” by Elsa Morante (“LA
STORIA” first published in Italian 1974; English translation by William Weaver
first published 1977)
Sometimes
a novel can stay in your head for years, even if you were never fully satisfied
with it in the first place. This has been my experience with Elsa Morante’s History. (The original Italian title La Storia means both “story” and “history”,
just like l’histoire in French.)
When it was
first published in Italy in 1974, it was a huge bestseller, although the
critical reaction to it was mixed. It was translated into most European
languages, made it into English in 1977 and earned high praise from at least
some highbrow reviewers. It has been placed on a few of those tedious “100 Best
Novels of the 20th Century” lists, although it was never in any
other country the bestseller that it was in Italy. History is a blockbuster, being the best part of 800 pages long in
the hardback version I read nearly thirty years ago. Looking at it again years
later in the Penguin Modern Classics edition (the same translation by William
Weaver), I find some of the judgments I made on it then still seem valid, while
others I would modify.
Despite its
length, its central storyline can be synopsised briefly. Spanning the years
from 1941 to 1947, it deals with a poor woman’s dogged attempts to survive and
to protect her two children in Italy during the Second World War and its
immediate sombre aftermath.
Ida Mancuso
(sometimes known as Ramundo) is a partly-Jewish working-class schoolteacher in
the San Lorenzo quarter of Rome. She is widowed and has an unruly pubescent son
Antonio (usually known as Nino and sometimes as Ninnuzzu). Ida is raped by the
German soldier Gunther, who proceeds to be killed in the war. Ida gives birth
to the rapist’s son Giuseppe (usually known as Useppe). From this point on, the
focus of her life is protecting Useppe.
The war years
are bleak. Ida is bombed out of her home and evacuated to a crowded room, which
she has to share with a large and rowdy Neapolitan mob nicknamed ironically
“the Thousand”. In a spirit of pure devilry and adventurousness, the thuggish teenager
Nino, who was once an ardently Fascist youth, now joins the partisans. Ida has
to worry about whether he will be killed in action, just as she fears that a
pogrom will be unleashed against people of her ancestry. Her fears are shared
by Davide Segre, an Italian Jew who has escaped from a round-up in the north
and who travels under the alias “Carlo Vivaldi”. Davide, who is something of an
intellectual, becomes as important as Ida in the latter part of the novel. Davide
joins the loutish Nino in the partisans toward the end of the war (they are
hailed as heroes by the Communist tavern-keeper Remo, but the novel takes a
more ironical view of their exploits).
The war ends.
Nino’s visits to his mother become rarer. Ida is frequently sick as is the
little boy Useppe. There are suggestions that wartime malnutrition has weakened
them. On top of this, Useppe shows signs of being an epileptic. Nino (who is
hero-worshipped by his little brother) becomes a black marketeer. He dies in a
road crash. Davide the intellectual, having no cause to serve, sinks into lethargic
despair. He moves in with the ugly old whore Santina to have a place to sleep,
but she is murdered by her pimp. Submitting to complete despair, Davide commits
suicide by overdosing on painkillers. Useppe, now aged six, is subject to
nightmares and convulsions. He dies in a fit.
After all her
deprivations, Ida’s mind cracks. She goes raving mad and, we are told, spends
the last nine years of her life in a madhouse.
Over 800 pages,
the brute forces of history have destroyed the Wretched of the Earth - Davide
the hunted intellectual; Ida and the two sons she tried to protect; not to
mention the hordes of bombed-out and displaced refugees who figure greatly in
supporting roles. I said the novel was long but, as you can see, the concept is
essentially a simple one. Apparently Elsa Morante’s first inspiration for the
novel was a newspaper story, just after the war, about a bereaved working-class
woman found raving mad over the corpse of her child in a bombed-out Roman
apartment.
According to my
reading diaries, when I first read this novel I called it “long-winded” and “overlong”
and I resented some of the author’s stylistic mannerisms. There are some direct
addresses to the reader in the otherwise third-person narrative, as if the
narrator is an historian conveying historical records to us. (“As far as I have been able to discover, Ida
was at this time….” etc. etc.). These come across as very arch.
Given that most
of her main characters are not very conscious of the forces that create their historical
circumstances, and are not following in detail the huge world war of which
their Italian experience is just a small part, Morante precedes each of the
novel’s seven parts with a summary of historical events, newspaper style. Some
critics have compared this technique with the newspaper cut-up style of John
Dos Passos in his USA trilogy. While
it is not the author’s intention, this does make the experience of her main
characters look a small thing in comparison with the death camps, the bombing
of Coventry, the Battle of Stalingrad and so forth.
More than
anything, though, I found the novel too loaded with physical descriptions of
places and circumstances, often leaving the characters as small and redundant
figures on a large and over-elaborated stage. The urge to document and record
takes precedence over characterization. Ida herself is, after all, not a very
complex character. The author herself says early on that Ida has a childish and
immature mind – and she sinks into the background once Davide comes to dominate
the pages. In the latter half of the novel, little Useppe also becomes a centre
of attention, with his poetic mind and his attraction to animals (the dogs
Blitz and Bella, and the cat who lives in the crowded cellar with “the
Thousand”). The author is in effect attempting to make the child a
representative of all the privations that war wreaks on the helpless –
spiritual privations as well as physical ones.
The trouble
here, though, is that nobody in the novel, apart from the omniscient narrator,
appears to have a thinking adult mind. Even Davide, the novel’s representative
of intellectuals, produces no more than thirty pages of semi-coherent drunken
ravings shortly before his death. Things happen
to characters. In an odd way, amid all their experiences, they are
passive creatures. Puppets.
The author’s
position is summed up in a sentence before the death of Useppe: “All History and all the nations of the earth
had agreed on this end: the slaughter of the child Useppe Ramundo”. History
is a blind force in which power squashes weakness and poor people are passive
and helpless victims. Useppe’s whole young existence has been the progressive
stripping from him of everything that could give his life colour and meaning –
the dog Blitz, his brother Nino whom he idolises, Davide, the kid Pietro Scimo
(who is hauled off to reform school and away from Useppe once the war is over).
This passivity –
and essential brainlessness – of the main characters, places us and the
author-narrator in an odd position. We are in effect forced to look down on the characters rather than to
see them as our fellow human beings. In this respect, much of History has the same effect as the worst
tendencies of Emile Zola. Here is
the author ostensibly asking us the see the realities of deprived lives and to
sympathise with them; but in effect making us see them as a species quite
different from us literary and reading people. On first reading this book, I
found myself using the word “patronising”.
And yet, coming
back to History for a second time, I
do find that it has a major strength, too. It is that very documentary tendency
which has such a negative effect on characterization. It is the asides of the
novel – the vignettes of things that are not essential to the arc of the main
narrative – that are most memorable. These I held in my mind longest between my
two readings of the novel. I would include such scenes as Ida chancing on a
rail-truck crammed with Jews in wartime Rome and obviously bound for a death
camp; or the horrible and minute description of Nazis murdering the family of
one of Nino’s girlfriends, deemed to be partisans; or the account, quite
unconnected with the rest of the novel, of an Italian soldier dying on the
Eastern Front. I do not think History
works as a novel, but as documentary it has some very arresting moments.
To round things
off, a few words about the author.
Elsa Morante
(1912-84) was for twenty years married to AlbertoMoravia, Italy’s best-known novelist of the mid-20th century;
but obviously she, as a writer, resented being known to the general public
mainly as another novelist’s wife. Feminist critics have adopted her own view
of herself and “talked her up”. Her marriage was very stormy (both spouses had
multiple affairs and arguments) and ended in divorce. Morante and Moravia had
something in common, however, which was important to the genesis of History. They both had some Jewish
forebears and for some of the Second World War, they chose to hide out among
south Italian peasants for fear of a round-up. Clearly some of the things
Morante records in History came from
her observations in those years.
History took Morante many
years to write, and she regarded it as her magnum opus. But, despite its being
a huge bestseller in Italy, she was wounded by the critical response. The Left
were irked that she tended to see history as a blind, irrational force, even if
early passages denounced capitalists and big business for promoting war. This
led to negative reviews from Morante’s left-wing friends, who ridiculed Morante
for ignoring ideology and seeing working-class people as so helpless and
passive. The Marxist film director Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote a particularly
stinging review, which led Morante to break off her long friendship with him.
From just a little
searching around the ‘net, I am interested to find that scholarly articles are still
written about History in
publish-or-perish academic journals. But, amidst the praise, there is often an
undertone suggesting that the novel has not survived all that well as a
literary work and is not held in the same esteem as it was originally. It is
mainly analysed as an historical document.
Redundant
cinematic footnote: I have not seen the 1986
Italian film La Storia based on the
novel and starring Claudia Cardinale in the leading role. Apparently filmed as
a TV series, it was cut down to make a feature film, but was not successful
internationally.
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