“One January afternoon in the year 1941, a German soldier was out walking, enjoying an afternoon’s liberty, when he found himself wandering alone, through the San Lorenzo district of Rome.” So begins Elsa Morante’s History: A Novel1 History at its ugliest looms behind the presence of a German soldier in Italy in 1941: the Rome-Berlin Axis, the Fascist alliance just then engaged in defending annexed territories in Greece and North Africa. In fact, this very soldier belongs to a unit that is headed for Africa to help the Italians against the British.
But all this is left unsaid for the moment. We learn instead that the soldier’s name is Gunther, that he is barely old enough for military service, that he is tall for his age, and that before the war he lived with his widowed mother and brothers in a little town in Bavaria. This afternoon he has some wine in a tavern where the men are unfriendly—Germans “are not popular in certain working-class areas”—and finds that he is drunk. He wanders at random into a doorway, and soon is face to face with a woman whose name is Ida Mancuso. Speaking only four words of Italian, he is at a loss. “She, however, seeing him confront her, stared at him with an absolutely inhuman gaze, as if confronted by the true and recognizable face of horror.” Here the narrative breaks off, for we need fifty pages, the story of the woman’s life until that moment, in order to comprehend the horror in her gaze.
The interruption of the story, the backpedaling to Ida’s childhood, through the furious personal momentum of her wants, dreams, and fears, until we arrive again at that silent confrontation on the brink of her rape—this shattered form of narration shows Elsa Morante’s central faith as a novelist: that behind every human encounter, every turn in our lives, there is a pressure of historical reality, intimate psychic preparations, a universe of relevant detail. This is the first novel by Miss Morante to appear in America since Arturo’s Island (1959), and it does much to account for the very high reputation of her work in Europe. She was for a while the wife of Alberto Moravia, and is associated with the Italian cultural Left. But her realistic, humane, and inexpressibly affecting novels have little in common with the sleek, despairing coolness of such artists as Moravia, the poet Eugenio Montale, or the film-maker Bernardo Bertolucci.
History: A Novel is set in Rome during the war and just after. It is the story of Ida Mancuso, her two sons, and the people near to them in poor neighborhoods, refugee shelters, and the cadre of Resistance fighters to which the elder son belongs. To foreign observers, this is the world of neo-realist Italian cinema: Rossellini’s Open City. To the Roman masses, it was the blasted, shabby, nearly hopeless actuality of long years. Though all the world, nearly, shared in the suffering of the war, it was perhaps in Italy that its chaos most abounded.
Miss Morante takes that chaos upon herself and declares that to grasp the immense public suffering one must look closely at the infinity of private circumstances in which it took place. So, to “unpack” the look on Ida’s face, we learn that Ida’s mother was a Jew from Venice; that her father, gentle and loving, was an anarchist from Calabria; and that as a child Ida suffered from mild epilepsy. We follow her to Rome with her husband, a poor, itinerant salesman who gives her a son, Nino, and then dies of cancer shortly afterward, leaving her in the near-poverty of her salary as a schoolteacher. It is the 1930’s, when Mussolini has begun to imitate the racial policies of his German comrade, and Ida, half-Jewish, fears for herself and Nino. Gradually she, who has known no Jew except her mother, begins to frequent the Roman ghetto as if out of some protective herding instinct in the blood, like that of the animals to which characters in this book are constantly compared. And there she hears rumors, more terrifying daily, of what the Fascists have in store for the Jews of Rome. As these fears gather in her, Gunther appears on her doorstep. “And on meeting, at the very door of her home, that uniform which seemed stationed there, waiting for her, she thought she had arrived at the terrible rendezvous preordained for her since the beginning of the world.”
In the scene that follows, the mutual incomprehension of Ida and Gunther throbs like an open wound. Once inside he seeks lamely, pathetically, some basis for friendship. As he inquires with shy politeness about a photograph of Nino that hangs on the wall, Ida is frozen in the expectation that he will produce a “Wanted” photo of her son. He takes her in a confusion of rage and tenderness, she has a relapse of her petit mal, leaving her in a numbness which he mistakes for willingness, and he takes her again, lovingly. When she recovers he is asleep upon her. “Even the sleep of her aggressor, stretched out there before her, seemed to rest on the leprosy of all experiences—violence, fear—like a healing.”
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If the power of such a scene—and there are dozens of others like it in this long book—comes from the human fullness of its portraits, Miss Morante is also the master of the quick sketch, of which again there are countless vivid and memorable examples. But to account fully for her success one must go behind these qualities—qualities that have to do with her indefatigable interest in who people are and how they behave—to her broader involvement with historical forces moving outside the self and acting upon it.
From its height, “history” bears down obliquely but insistently on these individual moments in obscure lives. Thus, Gunther, trying to ingratiate himself with her, shows Ida a snapshot of his family and his home: “Then, as [Ida’s] eyes wandered over that anonymous group with dark apathy, he moved his finger to point out the landscape and sky in the background, informing her: ‘Dachau.’” It happens to be his home. Again, one day when Ida visits the ghetto she finds it deserted; in her bewilderment, she tries to ask the news from a solitary Jewish woman she recognizes, who hurries on, refusing to acknowledge her. “Signora, I’m Jewish, too,” Ida whispers, at which the woman runs off altogether. Ida follows her at a distance, and is led to the rear of the train station. A strange humming sound is heard, the mingled voices of a human mass, though there is no crowd in sight:
The invisible voices were approaching and growing louder, even though they sounded somehow inaccessible, as if they came from an isolated and contaminated place. The sound suggested certain dins of kindergartens, hospitals, prisons: however, all jumbled together, like shards thrown into the same machine. At the end of the ramp, on a straight, dead track, a train was standing which, to Ida, seemed of endless length. The voices came from inside it.
There were perhaps twenty cattle-cars, some wide open and empty, others closed with long iron bars over the outside doors. Following the standard design of such rolling-stock, the cars had no windows, except a tiny grilled opening up high. At each of those grilles, two hands could be seen clinging, or a pair of staring eyes.
Something crucial about Miss Morante’s method can be observed in this passage. The reader knows this is the train to Auschwitz, but that is not the information he is given. Instead, he is forced into Ida’s uncomprehending experience of what she sees and hears, the humming sound that grows louder, the two hands on a grille, a pair of eyes. Ida’s ignorance of the future strips away the professional “history” of such events and bluntly and palpably puts their actuality before us; we burn with Ida in the cold light of dreadful fact.
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Among our many received notions about contemporary fiction is the idea that modern historical reality is too much for the old narrative forms, too destructive and overwhelming for storytelling in the traditional mode. Walter Benjamin observed that men came back from World War I as they had come back from no previous war—with no stories to tell. What they had seen could not be narrated, though perhaps it could be mimicked in the dire hallucinations of surrealism, or rendered brokenly in one of the other discontinuous modes of modernist art. But plot, sequence, the integrity of character and action, and causality itself were no longer appropriate.
It is, therefore, stubbornly old-fashioned of Elsa Morante to take on the most powerfully disorienting moment in modern times and to treat it by means of a plot-idea, and central figures, and a style out of Tolstoy, Dickens, or Flaubert. This applies not only to Ida—who does indeed recall the heroine of a 19th-century novel, the innocent, battered woman-child struggling at the base of dark, towering ruins, like Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles—but also and especially to Giuseppe, the child conceived by Gunther and Ida in the first pages of the novel, who dies in its last. A frail, visionary child who has a precocious familiarity with loss and death, an instinctual closeness to animals, and a poetic enthusiasm for life, Giuseppe profoundly resembles the children of romantic poetry, or Dickens’s Paul Dombey.
With Giuseppe’s death scene some readers will inevitably feel that the novel has caved in under a load of anachronism and sentimentality. Yet this may be, rather, a sign of how jaded we have become in our responses to serious fiction. We have forgotten how searing an experience the work of art made flesh can be, how destructive of that distance between book and reader to which we have grown accustomed. Gravity’s Rainbow is typical of what gets called a masterpiece today, because it is intellectually aggressive and demanding but emotionally blank. When a book tries to move us, and especially when it succeeds, we feel violated: Elsa Morante’s novel is affecting enough to put vulnerabilities of this kind to the test.
History: A Novel recalls the fiction of an earlier age not just in its realism or in its direct assault on the emotions but in its overarching project. Its very title, as Robert Alter observed of it in the New York Times Book Review, “is something of a provocation. It take us back to an age when the novelist could confidently assume that he had authoritatively incorporated the actual movement of history into his imaginative inventions.” Alter goes on:
It seems to me that all the great 19th-century novels of politics and history—from The Charterhouse of Parma to Middlemarch, Germinal, The Possessed, and War and Peace—were built on some reasonably complex working hypothesis about what impels man as a political animal and about historical causation. Obviously I do not mean a “correct” hypothesis, but one sufficiently probing, subtle, and flexible to help the novelist represent men and women in the flux of history with a satisfying psychological and political amplitude.
Alter judges that, compared to the works he names, History fails because its “working hypothesis” is the too-simple one that “all history is a variation of Fascism and that all evil . . . is perpetrated by monolithic Powers.” He cites the summaries of the course of world events that appear at the head of each chapter and cover the appropriate passage of time—these, he notes, “reflect a kind of simplified popular Marxism”—and also the views of a character named Davide Segre, a Jewish intellectual and anarchist who becomes a comrade of Nino’s in the Resistance, and whom he takes as a spokesman for the author.
To this view it might be replied, first, that Segre is not any more (and may well be less) Miss Morante’s spokesman than the child Giuseppe, who, in fact, in a climactic scene in a tavern, tries to lure Segre out of his ideological delirium and into the sunlight to play. Significantly, Segre does not even surface as a “thinker” until he is hooked on drugs, in flight from all real knowledge of the world. As for the brief historical summaries at the chapter headings, these surely do express Miss Morante’s own politics directly, and they are too simple; yet on the whole they also seem to me much too terse, and too inexplicit, to represent a controlling “hypothesis.”
Even in the work of the great 19th-century realists whom Alter mentions, distinguishing personal politics from the integral meaning of the novel is a difficult but necessary act. Is The Charterhouse of Parma, for instance, to be judged by the blur of nostalgias, slogans, and histrionics that erupt from its narrator again and again, or that passed for political ideation in Stendhal’s mind? In War and Peace, to take another example, not only a hypothesis but an entire theory of history is elaborated in the opening chapters of each book. But that theory could be roughly paraphrased as saying what Miss Morante’s novel is saying: that the amplitude of lived experience defeats the act of hypothesis-making.
Many of the greatest realists in fiction began by forswearing the attempt to contain their massive subject-matters. Stendhal and Tolstoy, instead of “capturing” the world and framing it in a manner suitable for hanging, deeply meditated its uncapturable essence and pursued it with vigorous, unshapely, catch-as-catch-can abandon. Miss Morante’s History: A Novel is in their direct line of descent and bears the stamp of the best art: exalting life above itself.
1 Translated by William Weaver, Knopf, 555 pp., $10.95.
