La frantumaglia Read online

  “Ferrante’s writing seems to say something that hasn’t been said before—it isn’t easy to specify what this is—in a way so compelling its readers forget where they are, abandon friends and disdain sleep.”

  —Joanna Biggs, The London Review of Books

  “Ferrante has written about female identity with a heft and sharpness unmatched by anyone since Doris Lessing.”

  —Elizabeth Lowry, The Wall Street Journal

  “Ferrante, in her unflinching willingness to lead us toward ‘the mutable fury of things,’ places the readers inside intimate relations between women and men with an irresistible and urgent immediacy.”

  —Roger Cohen, The New York Review of Books

  “Elena Ferrante’s decision to remain biographically unavailable is her greatest gift to readers, and maybe her boldest creative gesture.”

  —David Kurnick, Public Books

  “Reading Ferrante is an extraordinary experience. There’s a powerful and unsettling candor in her writing.”

  —Nick Romeo, The Boston Globe

  “To the uninitiated, the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante is best described as Balzac meets The Sopranos and rewrites feminist theory.”

  —The Times of London

  “Ferrante writes with the kind of power saved for weather systems with female names.”

  —The Los Angeles Times

  ALSO BY

  ELENA FERRANTE

  The Days of Abandonment

  Troubling Love

  The Lost Daughter

  The Beach at Night

  MY BRILLIANT FRIEND

  (The Neapolitan Quartet)

  My Brilliant Friend

  The Story of a New Name

  Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

  The Story of the Lost Child

  Europa Editions

  214 West 29th St., Suite 1003

  New York NY 10001

  [email protected]

  www.europaeditions.com

  Copyright © 2016 by Edizioni E/O

  First publication 2016 by Europa Editions

  All translations by Ann Goldstein unless otherwise noted.

  Original Title: La frantumaglia

  Translation copyright © 2016 by Europa Editions

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  Cover photo: Francesca Woodman, House #3, Providence, Rhode Island

  Copyright © George and Betty Woodman

  ISBN 9781609453046

  Elena Ferrante

  FRANTUMAGLIA

  I

  PAPERS: 1991-2003

  II

  TESSERAE: 2003-2007

  III

  LETTERS: 2011-2016

  CONTENTS

  I

  PAPERS: 1991-2003

  II

  TESSERAE: 2003-2007

  III

  LETTERS: 2011-2016

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  I

  PAPERS: 1991-2003

  THESE LETTERS

  These letters are intended for those who have read, loved, and talked about Troubling Love and The Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante’s first two novels. Over the years, the first became a cult book, and in 1995 Mario Martone made a film based on it; meanwhile, questions about the author’s public reticence multiplied. The second novel further broadened her audience; she gained passionate readers, both male and female; and questions about the person of Elena Ferrante became pressing.

  To satisfy the curiosity of this exacting yet generous audience, we decided to collect here some letters from the author to Edizioni E/O; the few interviews she has given; and her correspondence with particular readers. Among other things, these writings should clarify, we hope conclusively, the writer’s motives for remaining outside, the media circus and its demands, as she has for ten years.

  Sandra Ozzola and Sandro Ferri,

  publishers of Edizioni E/O

  and Europa Editions.

  NOTE

  This introduction was included in an earlier edition of La Frantumaglia, released in Italy in September, 2003.

  All the notes that follow have been added by the editors of this unabridged and updated edition of Frantumaglia.

  1.

  THE GIFT OF THE BEFANA

  Dear Sandra,

  During the meeting I had recently with you and your husband, which was very enjoyable, you asked me what I intend to do for the promotion of Troubling Love (it’s good that you’re getting me used to calling the book by its final title). You asked the question ironically, with one of your bemused expressions. There and then, I didn’t have the courage to answer you: I thought I had already been clear with Sandro; he had said that he absolutely agreed with my decision, and I hoped that he wouldn’t return to the subject, even jokingly. Now I’m answering in writing, which eliminates awkward pauses, hesitations, any possibility of compliance.

  I do not intend to do anything for Troubling Love, anything that might involve the public engagement of me personally. I’ve already done enough for this long story: I wrote it. If the book is worth anything, that should be sufficient. I won’t participate in discussions and conferences, if I’m invited. I won’t go and accept prizes, if any are awarded to me. I will never promote the book, especially on television, not in Italy or, as the case may be, abroad. I will be interviewed only in writing, but I would prefer to limit even that to the indispensable minimum. I am absolutely committed in this sense to myself and my family. I hope not to be forced to change my mind. I understand that this may cause some difficulties at the publishing house. I have great respect for your work, I liked you both immediately, and I don’t want to cause trouble. If you no longer mean to support me, tell me right away, I’ll understand. It’s not at all necessary for me to publish this book. To explain all the reasons for my decision, is, as you know, hard for me. I will only tell you that it’s a small wager with myself, with my convictions. I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t. There are plenty of examples. I very much love those mysterious volumes, both ancient and modern, that have no definite author but have had and continue to have an intense life of their own. They seem to me a sort of nighttime miracle, like the gifts of the Befana, which I waited for as a child. I went to bed in great excitement and in the morning I woke up and the gifts were there, but no one had seen the Befana. True miracles are the ones whose makers will never be known; they are the very small miracles of the secret spirits of the home or the great miracles that leave us truly astonished. I still have this childish wish for marvels, large or small, I still believe in them.

  Therefore, dear Sandra, I will say to you clearly: if Troubling Love does not have, in itself, thread enough to weave, well, it means that you and I were mistaken; if, on the other hand, it does, the thread will be woven where it can be, and we will have only to thank the readers for their patience in taking it by the end and pulling.

  Besides, isn’t it true that promotion is expensive? I will be the publishing house’s least expensive author. I’ll spare you even my presence.

  Warmly,

  Elena

  NOTE

  Letter dated September 21, 1991

  The Befana is an ugly old woman who brings gifts to good children—somewhat in the manner of Santa Claus—on the eve of Epiphany, January 6.

  2.

  MOTHERS’ DRESSMAKERS

  Dear Sandra,

  This business of the prize
is very upsetting to me. I must say that what has most perturbed me isn’t that my book is being given a prize but that the prize has the name of Elsa Morante. In order to write a few lines of thanks that would be essentially an homage to a writer I love, I began to look through her books for suitable passages. I discovered that anxiety plays dirty tricks. I leafed through book after book, and I couldn’t track down even a word that would do for my situation, when in fact I clearly remembered many. How and when words escape from books and the books end up seeming like empty graves is something to think about.

  What veiled my mind in these circumstances? I was searching for an unequivocally female passage on the mother figure, but the male narrative voices invented by Morante clouded my view. I knew that maternal passages existed, yet to find them I would have to regain the impression of my first reading, when I had been able to hear the male voices as disguised versions of female voices and feelings. But to achieve something like that the worst thing you can do is read with the urgent need to find a passage to quote. Books are complex organisms, and the lines that affected us deeply are the most intense moments of an earthquake that the text provokes in us as readers from the first pages: either one tracks down the fault, and becomes the fault, or the words that seemed written just for us can’t be found, and, if they are, they seem banal, even a cliché.

  In the end I resorted to the quotation you know; I wanted to use it as an epigraph for Troubling Love, but it’s hard to use because when I read it today it seems obvious, merely a humorous passage on how the southern male dematerializes the body of the mother. Therefore, in case you consider it necessary to quote that passage to make the reading of my thank-you text more comprehensible, I transcribe here the entire page. Morante summarizes freely what her character, Giuditta, will say to her son, commenting on the Sicilian attitude the boy has adopted to mark the end of his mother’s theater career, after she has been humiliated, and her return to a less disturbing figure.

  Giuditta seized his hand and covered it with kisses. At that moment (she said to him later), he had assumed the expression of a Sicilian: of those severe Sicilians, men of honor, always watchful of their sisters, making sure they didn’t go out alone at night, didn’t attract suitors, didn’t wear lipstick! And for whom “mother” means two things: old and holy. The proper color for a mother’s clothes is black, or, at most, gray or brown. The clothes are shapeless, since no one, starting with the mother’s dressmaker, must think that a mother has a woman’s body. Her age is a mystery with no importance, because her only age is old age. That shapeless old age has holy eyes that weep not for herself but for her children; it has holy lips, that recite prayers not for herself but for her children. And woe to those who utter in vain, in front of those children, the holy name of their mother! Woe! It’s a mortal offense!

  This passage, I would insist, should be read without emphasis, in a normal voice, with no attempt at the declamatory tones of a bad actor. Whoever reads should emphasize only, and slightly, shapeless, mothers’ dressmakers, woman’s body, mystery with no importance.

  And here at last is my letter for the prize jury. I hope it’s clear that Morante’s words are not at all a cliché.

  I apologize again for the trouble I cause you.

  Dear President, Dear Jurors,

  I deeply love the works of Elsa Morante, and I have many of her words in my mind. Before writing to you, I tried to find some to hold on to and extract their meaning. I found almost none where I remembered them. Many were concealed. Others I recognized as I paged through the books, even though I wasn’t looking for them, and they fascinated me more than the ones I was looking for. Words make unpredictable journeys in the reader’s mind. Among other things, I was looking for words about the mother figure, which is central in Morante’s work, and I searched in House of Liars, in Arturo’s Island, in History, in Aracoeli. I finally found some in The Andalusian Shawl, the ones that after all, perhaps, I was seeking.

  You certainly know them better than I do and it’s pointless for me to repeat them here. They describe the way sons imagine their mothers: in a state of perennial old age, with holy eyes, with holy lips, dressed in black or gray or at most brown. At first the author speaks of particular sons: “those severe Sicilians, honorable, always watchful of their sisters.” But, within a few sentences, she has set aside Sicily and moves instead—it seems to me—to a less local maternal image. This happens with the appearance of the adjective “shapeless.” The mother’s clothes are shapeless and her only age, old age, is also “shapeless,” “since,” Elsa Morante writes, “no one, starting with the mother’s dressmaker, must think that a mother has a woman’s body.”

  That “no one must think” seems very significant. It means that shapelessness is so powerful, in conditioning the word “mother,” that sons and daughters, when they think of the body to which the word should refer, cannot give it its proper shapes without revulsion. Not even the mother’s dressmaker, who is also a woman, daughter, mother, can do so. She, in fact, out of habit, heedlessly, cuts out clothes for the mother that eliminate the woman, as if the latter were a leprosy of the former. They do this, and so the mother’s age becomes a mystery with no importance, and old age becomes her only age.

  I thought of these “mothers’ dressmakers” in a conscious way only now, as I write. But they have a great attraction for me, in particular if I associate them with an expression that has intrigued me since I was a child. The expression is: “cut out the clothes on”—that is, “cut down,” or “gossip.” I imagined that it hid a spiteful meaning: a malicious aggression, a violence that ruins the clothes and indecently exposes the wearer; or, even worse, a magic art capable of molding a body to the point of obscenity. Today the expression seems to me neither spiteful nor indecent. Rather, the connection between cut, clothe, speak excites me. And it seems to me fascinating that that connection gave rise to a metaphor of gossip. If the mother’s dressmaker learned to cut out her clothes and expose her, or if she cut the clothes in such a way as to recover the woman’s body that the mother has, that she had, in clothing her the dressmaker would undress her, and her body, her age, would no longer be a mystery with no importance.

  Perhaps when Elsa Morante spoke of mothers and their dressmakers she was also speaking about the need to find the mother’s true clothes and tear up the habits that weigh on the word “mother.” Or maybe not. In any case I remember other images (the reference to a “maternal shroud,” for example, described as the “weave of fresh love on the leper’s body”) within which it would be nice to lose oneself in order to rise again as a new dressmaker ready to fight the error of the Shapeless.

  NOTE

  Troubling Love was awarded a prize for a first novel by the 1992 Procida Prize, Arturo’s Island—Elsa Morante. The author did not attend the ceremony but instead sent the publishers this letter to the jurors, which was read during the ceremony. The text was published in Cahiers Elsa Morante, edited by Jeal-Noël Schifano and Tjuna Notarbartolo, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane 1993, and it is reprinted here with slight modifications. The passage cited is from the story collection Lo Scialle Andaluso (The Andalusian Shawl).

  3.

  WRITING ON COMMAND

  Dear Sandra,

  What a terrible thing you’ve done: when I happily agreed to write something for the anniversary of your publishing venture, I discovered that the slope of writing to order is a slippery one, and that the descent is in fact pleasurable. What is next?

  Now that you’ve made me pull out the plug, will all the water flow out through the drain? At this moment I feel ready to write about anything.

  Will you ask me to celebrate the new car you’ve just bought? I’ll fish out from somewhere a memory of my first ride in a car and, line by line, end up congratulating you on yours. Will you ask me to compliment your cat on the kittens she’s given birth to? I will resurrect the cat that my father first gave me and then, exasperated by its
meowing, took away, abandoning her on the road to Secondigliano. You’ll ask me to contribute an essay to a book you’re doing on the Naples of today? I’ll start from a time when I was afraid to go out for fear of meeting a busybody neighbor whom my mother had thrown out of the house, and, word by word, bring out the fear of violence that reaches us on the rebound today, while the old politics touches up its makeup and we don’t know where to find the new that we ought to support. Should I make an offering to the feminine need to learn to love one’s mother? I will recount how my mother held my hand on the street when I was little: I’ll start from there—actually, thinking about it, I’d really like to do this. I preserve a distant sensation of skin against skin, as she held tight to my hand, out of anxiety that I would slip away and run along the uneven, dangerous street: I felt her fear and was afraid. And then I’ll find a way to develop my theme to the point where I can cite Luce Irigaray1 and Luisa Muraro.2 Words draw out words: one can always write a banal, elegant, heartfelt, amusing coherent page on any subject, low or high, simple or complex, frivolous or fundamental.

  What to do, then, say no to people whom we love and trust? It’s not my way. So I’ve written some commemorative lines, trying to communicate a true feeling of admiration for the noble battle that you’ve been fighting all these years, and that today, I think, is even more difficult to win.

  Here, then, is my message: good wishes. For the time being, I’ll settle for beginning with a caper bush. Beyond that, I don’t know. I could inundate you with recollections, thoughts, universalizing sketches. What does it take? I feel capable of writing to order on the youth of today, the abominations of TV, Di Giacomo,3 Francesco Iovine,4 the art of the yawn, an ashtray. Chekhov, the great Chekhov, talking to a journalist who wanted to know how his stories originated, picked up the first object he happened on—an ashtray, in fact—and said to him: You see this? Come by tomorrow and I’ll give you a story entitled “The Ashtray.” A wonderful anecdote.