Drink, Thirsty One

Rebecca Schultz reviews Elsa Morante’s “Lies and Sorcery,” translated by Jenny McPhee.

By Rebecca SchultzDecember 27, 2024

• Fiction

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 1948, Lies and Sorcery, Elsa Morante’s debut novel, was made available to English readers for the first time last year, in Jenny McPhee’s translation. We got it, probably, thanks to Ferrante fever. Morante is Elena Ferrante’s Elena Ferrante: Ferrante says that Lies and Sorcery is the novel through which she “discovered that an entirely female story—entirely women’s desires and ideas and feelings—could be compelling and, at the same time, have great literary value.” I read Lies and Sorcery in the same heat with which I burned through Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels (2012–15) years ago. Then I read Morante’s other two novels that have been translated into English, History (1974) and Arturo’s Island (1957), all without the fever breaking. I felt the same way I remember feeling reading Ferrante, which is also how Ferrante felt reading Morante: literature can be this?

I did not, however, immediately understand what Ferrante meant about “a female story.” At the center of each Morante novel is not, as in Ferrante’s work, a woman’s rage and yearning, but a neglected child’s. Elisa, of Lies and Sorcery, is in love with her mother, Anna, who in turn is in love with the ghost of her sadistic cousin Edoardo. Love, a potent, nasty force in the novel, is not an especially gendered one: it is for Elisa’s father Francesco the same sick enchantment that it is for her mother Anna. Arturo of Arturo’s Island is enamored of his father and grows up in a crumbling castle famed for its boys-only house parties, and History, too, feels like an ostentatiously masculine project: a novel of World War II, but really of all of history, it has at its center a boy named Useppe, whose great love is his brother Nino.

I wondered, then, what Ferrante meant by a “female story” and whether some subtler quality of femaleness might account for the fever that the Morante novels induced in me. All three novels did feel “female” in the sense that they’re full of pleasures I’ve long ago been taught to deride as embarrassing and unliterary. Morante’s fiction is bleak, true, and deeply adult, and it suffers no illusions. But her novels aren’t slim, disaffected, careful, or realistic, qualities I’ve come to associate with high literature, perhaps especially literature by women who want to be taken seriously by men. Instead, they’re fanciful, baroque, and disarmingly ingenuous despite a glaze of ornate, winking fictionality. These are novels of vampiric lovers singing in the street and scalding each other with curling irons, family jewels, talking dogs, and orphans in castles—the kinds of things lowbrow women and children like to read about. Here, for example, is part of a conversation between a five-year-old Useppe and a Maremma Sheepdog named Bella in History (translated by William Weaver):

“Once I had some puppies…”

She had never spoken of them to him before. “I don’t know how many there were,” she went on, “because I can’t count. But when it was feeding time, all my tits were occupied, that’s sure, every one!!! So there were lots of them, and each more beautiful than the other. […] When I looked at one, he was the most beautiful; but I would look at another, and this one was the most beautiful; […] meanwhile another would stick his nose up, and he was beyond doubt the most beautiful. Their beauty was infinite, that’s the truth of it. Infinite beauties can’t be compared.”

Neither cute nor sentimental nor stylishly magical realist, Bella’s speech is evidently written by a writer who isn’t afraid to play: one who can feel her way into the monologue of a sheepdog without self-consciousness, and instead with humor, imagination, and respect for the character. The result is a scene that, like the entire Bella-Useppe friendship—which comes late in a novel that, by that point, has stunned us with the breadth, randomness, and depravity of destruction wrought by war—feels like a gift for us, a sunlit place in the novel to briefly rest. Bella’s puppies were drowned; for Morante, not afraid of seeming childish or womanish, this loss counts among the many violent ends in the book. Finally, it’s by staying close to this charmed and charming dog and toddler, and seeing what becomes of them, that readers grieve and comprehend all that has been stamped out in this long, brutal story.

No less fanciful than Bella’s speech is the following song written by Edoardo, of Lies and Sorcery, for his cousin Anna. The song, “Diamond and Ruby,” is performed by a tubercular Edoardo in the scene when, at last, he promises to marry Anna, though, alas, the promise is a product of his fever:

For the love of a ruby, he was dying of thirst
the white diamond, the white knight:
“O Ruby, O Maiden, O Pity, O Red Rose,
let me drink from your veins.”
“My veins, O beloved, shall be your fountain.
Drink, thirsty one, drink, my soul!”

Like Bella’s speech, Edoardo’s song, a flamboyant and gothic figment of a little girl’s erotic imagination, could only have been written by a writer who has given herself permission to play. This bold playfulness is responsible for Lies and Sorcery’s charms as well as its darkness and pathos. “Diamond and Ruby” and its false promises foreshadow the jewels that, later, Anna’s husband Francesco will buy her ritually each year only to need to pawn them again. Together, all this ephemeral jewelry gives the novel a frosted-over, rococo quality, like a cake or a palace, that bewitchingly covers over poverty and abjection as Anna and Edoardo, and then Anna by herself, test, erotically, the limits of her self-abnegation, finding it to be, in fact, limitless. She’ll give Edoardo the drawstring of her nightgown and walk home bare-chested; she’ll write letters to herself from his ghost while her house descends into squalor. In Lies and Sorcery, characters vacate themselves, letting their lives go to seed to nurture instead an obsession with a beloved who seems like an enchanted door to their true greatness. This is how Anna loves Edoardo and how Francesco loves Anna, and it’s also how Francesco’s mother loved him and how Anna’s father loved her. This adoration and this neglect feel like two sides of the same coin because the adored children grow up empty, hungry for imaginary lives, and soon enslave themselves, in turn, to somebody whose love promises to make the imaginary life real.

So in order to take in all of this cruelty in a long, intergenerational rope and in a global sweep, respectively, Lies and Sorcery and History are narrated omnisciently. The omniscience feels old-fashioned, giving the novels a storybook quality and also a certain bravado, since both novels have first-person narrators whose omniscience is actually impossible. Elisa, still a child, writes the story of her parents and grandparents alone in a room with a cat, as if she is playing dolls, after everyone in her family has died, a narration that nonetheless is authoritative and feels reliable. History is narrated by a friend of Useppe’s, who never appears in the book and whose relation to Useppe and the other characters is never specified, but who can report on everything from Useppe’s birth to the unwitnessed murder of Nino’s lover. Like a girl playing dolls, Morante’s narration obeys no rules and makes no apologies; it roves everywhere, gives authority to the sheepdog, makes the beautiful dark cousin seek the beautiful blond cousin in his palazzo. All told, the Morante potion makes me wonder why, in our overstimulating, overly connected yet violently dissociated world, any writer thinks that rendering realistically one paltry subjectivity is the serious project. Why don’t we all write headlong into our oldest and most lurid imaginary games?

As I continued to toy with the concept of a female story, it occurred to me that one imaginary game—a game played by boys, by men who have shaped our histories, and traditionally taken seriously in literature—is conspicuously absent from these novels. No heroes, no great men. All three novels are epics, History especially so, but unlike in the “male” epics of Homer, Virgil, Tolstoy, and even Joyce, their shape is not the long arrow of a great man reaching his destiny. The epic ambition telegraphed by the title History: A Novel (La Storia, the Italian title, means both “history” and “story”) is underlined via interludes between the novel’s sections, which narrate the history of the 20th century in a timeline. The timelines become granular when we get into the 1940s, tracking month by month the movements of peoples, of leaders, of militaries, and so on through the war, but the first interlude, which opens the novel, begins by characterizing 1906–13 this way:

Nothing very new, in the great world. Like all the centuries and the millennia that have preceded it on earth, the new century also observes the well-known, immobile principle of historical dynamics: power to some, servitude to others. And on this rule are based, in agreement, both the internal order of society (at present dominated by the “Powerful,” known as the capitalists) and the international order (known as imperialism) dominated by certain Nations also known as “Powers,” which have virtually divided the entire surface of the globe into their respective properties, or Empires.

Arch yet serious—a history to end all histories, told for an audience of aliens, as confident as Tolstoy’s digressions on the nature of history in War and Peace (1967). But the heroic death will belong finally to Bella the dog, not to a Prince Andrei. The “story” of History begins by invoking a teenage German soldier wandering Rome hungry for a woman, which, as always in Morante’s work, also means homesick for Mama. The woman he finds is Ida, a widowed schoolteacher, whom he rapes in her apartment before going off to a comically brief career, promptly dying the next day in exposition, in his first day in battle, and disappearing from the novel. We stay, meanwhile, with Ida, who has much to worry about—her Jewish blood, her childhood “fits,” and now this pregnancy; she gives birth to Useppe in secret with the help of an androgynous midwife she meets in the ghetto and names Ezekiel. This plot sounds operatic, and yet the structure of the novel resists plot and feels instead like life, aimless, without meaning, glory, or telos. As the war rages on in the zoomed-out interludes, we stay zoomed-in on Useppe, at first in his crib, where he spends the days of his infancy alone and delighted, seeing stars in a wad of spit, while Ida, desperate, afraid, and ignorant, teaches school. Useppe explores the wider world of the apartment and then, after their building is hit by an air raid, the refugee shelter where he and Ida hide with a larger cast of characters; we follow him there and, finally, to the apartment in which he dies at the age of five. His days are mostly full of hunger; of waiting, delightedly meeting any and all company; and of an accumulation of losses we might trace back to the “Powers” and the “Powerful.”

Useppe’s brother Nino, who is in a guerrilla resistance group, could be our hero if Morante had wanted him to be. She distinctly does not. Nino leaves home a Blackshirt and returns many months and 30 pages later an ardent communist; his true love encompasses “surprises and amorous fortune, risk and anarchy.” He’s a joyous creature, and we like him, but we see close-up the damage he reaps on Useppe, whereas any good he might accomplish in his exciting resistance group happens out of the reader’s view. This framing, as deliberate as the speedy exit of the Nazi, makes me feel like I’m in a negative space around an epic—a story, that is, that’s female in its shape, female like the “female” end of the extension cord, female like the thing pierced by the arrow-shaped male epic.

Another wannabe hero is Arturo of Arturo’s Island, who dreams of becoming “a magnificent lord, who threw innumerable coins to the crowd. Or a great Arab king, who crossed a burning desert on horseback, and, as he passed, the coolest springs gushed up to the sky” (in Ann Goldstein’s translation). But Arturo, like Useppe or a typical Jane Austen heroine, mostly spends his days waiting for his beloved to return his affection, and the book follows not his adventures but his empty days and heartbreak. Indeed, Morante seems to know, in all three novels, that it’s precisely in our fantasies where we’re big, powerful actors in this world that we’re at our most clownish. I think of John Berger’s formulation in Ways of Seeing (1972): men act, women appear—which Morante turns into an incisive critique of all that “acting.” These novels feel female, then, finally, because they are infused by the knowledge that in a story as big as “history” or as big as the long line of family inheritance, men, too, are women: more acted-upon than acting, moved by forces larger than them, playing pretend while they wait.

And here is where my reading of Morante makes me look with fresh eyes on Ferrante’s female stories, which start to feel a touch fantastical. Morante is perhaps a closer, more curious writer of men than Ferrante, men being, in Ferrante’s work, creatures whose violence and entitlement are like dragons the heroines must slay. As for women, Ferrante’s Lila and Lenù, albeit astonishingly lifelike, are also heroines, who in their mythic twinship rise out of their poor, violent beginnings and take on the patriarchy and the mob. I confess that Lila and Lenù, for a long period, were heroines of mine, so indulge me a moment: is it possible that they are avatars for Ferrante and Morante? In addition to naming herself after Morante, and her fictional alter ego, Elena (Lenù), after her own new name, Ferrante named Elena’s entire female line after Morante characters: her sister is Elisa and her second daughter Elsa; her mother and third daughter are both Immacolata, which is the name of Arturo’s beloved dog. Elena has an adolescent horror of her mother’s body; she shakes it off as she does poverty when she becomes the creator and creature and mythic twin of Lila. Ferrante, too, in taking a pseudonym, shook off her earthly origins; as far as we know, she has no mother but Morante, no child but Elena.

I, too, reading these novels as a young person, shook something off. I remember being moved by an early paragraph in which a teenage Elena deliberates whether to bring Lila to a party: I’d never seen the kinds of things I mostly did with my brain, my petty “desires and ideas and feelings,” rendered so frankly and with so much refreshing ugliness, and yet also elevated and important, the stuff of epic. I thought of A Room of One’s Own (1929), the women’s stories that have “never been seen since the world began,” about my own little life getting transmuted into art.

In short, I read those novels the way Elena wrote them, and the way Morante’s Elisa wrote hers, and the way a girl plays with dolls: with a fever born from a wound, a defensive grandiosity, a hunger to be reborn in them like a vampire. This is the same hunger with which, in Morante’s work, characters of both sexes love, history transpires, cities burn. Ferrante’s work feels different from Morante’s in that Ferrante feeds us, gives us brilliant and enormous dolls to project ourselves onto, whereas Morante—for all her playfulness, jewels, and lush islands—leaves us mostly as we are, hungry and small. She is, in that way, maybe the more realist, more grown-up writer. But to read them together makes a point that is perhaps Morante’s strongest: male or female, all of our stories are shaped by others.

Reality frightens us: we don’t like listening or changing; we prefer instead to stay in the thrall of someone larger, whose fantastic vision suits us. We also like to impose our vision on others, to tell other people who they are. When reality—say, the reality of a genocide, or of a climate catastrophe, or of an enraged electorate—challenges our fantasy, we plug our ears and stay the course. Morante’s work reminds us of this: of the way in which we’re all—men and women, left and right, powerful and powerless—little fascists, exactly because we’re hungry and small. So despite the talking dogs and the fairy-tale castles, Morante’s novels are relentless in telling the truth. She is ready to show us a reality we’d rather not face: that the grand vision is often false, that all our stories are shaped by others. In the fall of 2024, this feels like good medicine.