Little Pictures

We’ve seen life from the army’s side; left the barracks for the bordello, we hitch up with a local woman, and leave her for battles and Blighty. Time we looked at occupation from the houses of the occupied; shared some space with the wives and their kids. What do they say? Peace kills. War? A car driving too fast to get out. Elsa Morante: History: A Novel. Stop. Open the car door. Step on the tarmac. Walk to an open field. Yourself alone. Too much. All that stuff inside…it wants, it needs, out. Can’t someone keep it in? No. Just you. Nobody is going to help.

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The history is crude and coarsely ideological; the kind of thing we suspect the Communists taught factory workers after the shifts ended, the factory gates closed. The thick brush lines of class-war, with those splashes of bourgeois power, bedaubing the delicate tracery of each face and every body; the portrait, smudged, erased, wholly blotched out on ‘History’s’ canvas, now all abstract landscape. ‘History’, as told in textbooks, political pamphlets, and in the media’s garish stories, rides roughshod over individual lives; we slide under the juggernaut's wheels, as it progresses alone Time’s tracks. ‘History’. A steam roller pressing turnips into the soil. Elsa Morante writes back. It is a guerrilla’s war, where individuals snipe at the ideologues, and protect themselves from those big ideas, vast apartment blocks, empty of human beings. Actual history, history with a small ‘h’, the experience of women, men and children, fights for its life in the streets of this novel. Literature battling to preserve its own insights into historical events; Germany’s occupation of Rome. 

But you said the “history is crude and coarsely….” 

Elsa throws in a bit of ‘History’ at the start of each chapter; each begins with a chronicle of events, which highlights the poverty of the textbook kind. Why do with thin porridge when we can have a continental breakfast?

Common to other novels of the period, History: A Novel shows that for the majority the greatest difficulties occur after the war - here the occupation - has ended.1 The worst excesses over, the survivors now have to cope with the cumulative decline both of themselves and the city’s resources; also the loss of a collective spirit, that buttress to the soul, for however bad things get when you’re in a group always there’s someone to help you: Eppetondo’s savings saving Ida during the months of the black market. 

You make it sound like a bad day at the office….

The war was not easy! Ida suffered terribly, not only from the bombing - her apartment was wrecked - but also because of the food shortages, the suspension of her employment, the worry, the insecurity…every day a struggle to survive. It gets worse. Ida is a Jew. Each day could have been her last. No wonder she suffered from paranoia; few were the moments when she was not afraid; the fear of being discovered, taken away, incarcerated; the fear of humiliation, torture, murder. History: A Novel one of the great accounts of fear, its pervasive, relentless, its enervating, presence. A psychopath permanently on the doorstep.

…the whole previous period, not just the frightened hour before her attack, but the entire past, in retrospect, also presented itself to her recollection as a point of arrival, still confused in an immense remoteness. She had set sail from the crowded and vociferating content of her memory, on a boat that in this interval had gone around the world, and now, returning to its port of departure, found it silent and calm again. There were no more shooting crowds, no lynching. The familiar objects, stripped of all emotion, were no longer instruments, but creatures, vegetable or aquatic, algae, coral, starfish, which breathed in the sea’s repose, belonging to no one.

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. In moving her eyes (cleared by the recent spell as if by a bath of luminous transparency), she saw on the ground, at some distance from each other, her run-down shoes, which she had lost, along with her hat, while writhing unconsciously in the German’s arms. But not bothering to pick them up, seated, inert, on her bare heels, she fixed her widened eyes again on the sleeper, with the stupid look of the maiden in fairy tales, staring at the dragon which a magic potion has made harmless.

Now that his lover had escaped him, the boy had embraced the pillow and was hugging it tight, stubborn in his possessive jealousy of a moment before. However, his face had meanwhile taken on another expression, intent and grave; and Ida, almost without realising it, immediately read there the subject and the plot of his dream, if not the details. The dream was suited to a boy of the age, roughly, of eight. There were important matters under discussion: the sale of bicycles or accessories, where he had to deal with an untrustworthy character, no doubt an eccentric sort, a Levantine smuggler perhaps, or a Chicago gangster, or a Malayan pirate….

This character was trying to cheat: and consequently the sleeper’s lips, of a parched pink, wild and a bit chapped, protruded in an ill-concealed pout. His eyelids hardened, fluttering the gilded lashes, so short they seemed dust. And his brow furrowed in concentration, below the clumps of hair, darker than his lashes, smooth, suggesting a cool, damp softness, like the coat of a little brown kitten just bathed by its mother.

It would have been easy, now, to kill him, following the example of Judith in the Bible; but Ida, by nature, couldn’t conceive such an idea, not even as a fantasy. Her mind, distracted by its reading of the dream, was darkened by the thought that perhaps the intruder would go on sleeping until late in the evening, and Nino, coming home, might surprise him, still here. Nino, however, with his political ideas, might even be proud of his visit, and would hail the German, his mother’s rapist, as a companion….

What strikes is how little effect this attack has on Ida’s psyche; after the second penetration, done calmly, slowly, gently with a lover’s caress, Ida - who had suffered a slight epileptic fit - has become sentimental; her resistance to that first brutal assault turned into softness and daydreaming: she is imagining her attacker as a child. The association feels odd unless we know something about the Italian character, that close connection between sons and mothers with its strong sexual overtones, love between mother and son not a simple innocence.2 After the rape, unexpected, violent, overpowering, Ida exists in a post-coital fantasy, an odd idyll, barely disturbed by the outside world. All suggests the complex nature of sexuality, and indicates a fundamental disagreement (later, there is a critical reference) to Freud’s belief in the centrality of sex to a person’s life. For Ida, not the act, but the mistaken belief that others think this German her lover, causes psychological strain; the perceived wisdom about the relationship, not the rape itself, crucial to Ida’s feelings, so bound up with her identity; that sense of propriety, of honour: it is respectability that gives her strength. To think that others believe you a slut…. No, this is not liveable. Not the physical act but the ideas circulating in one’s community cause the deepest, more painful wounds. Words the sharpest swords.

Later, as it happens, such ideas lose their hold, as the neighbourhood is devastated, and friends and acquaintances disperse. What can respectability mean when few know you? And when survival demands you lie flat on your back? Even the most raddled of prostitutes - Santina - now acquires some dignity.3

The problems occur later, when Ida discovers she is pregnant; though again it is not the recovered memory but the shame of illegitimacy that haunts her; the thought of a German bastard forcing her to hide the pregnancy until the last possible moment. Ida is scared to tell her son….

Nino is delighted: ‘I have a baby brother!’ his first ecstatic reaction. And never, not once, does Ida regret the birth of her child; Useppe to become the centre of her existence, her means of surviving the war: to protect and nurture this baby produces an indomitable will; she has a purpose, that battery of energy to keep her driving over this hard, dry track of life. The rape vanishes. All that’s left is a boy who is loved, together with the cares of looking after him. Sex no earthquake sending vibrations out across the landscape…. The sexual assault a physical act only, its psychological effects quickly subsumed in the exigencies of living, squeezed out by tight circumstances, the austerities of war, the brutalities of occupation. The rape, her past, rubble on the road she clears away letting her walk freely in the present. Emotions dominate. Perceptions more important than ideas, which dissolve in an excess of feeling, softening the relations between people; even a German to be forgiven, if he shows humanity.4 

Nino has grown up an enthusiastic fascist - he loves the posters, uniforms, propaganda5- but quickly turns partisan during the war; his choice seemingly dictated by the men he meets; for like most of these characters he is no ideologue, relations with people far more important than beliefs and ideas. After the war he turns to the black market and crime; the life of risk, the liberty of the bandit, are what attracts him, plus the pleasant realities of hard cash; the things it can buy, the clothes, the motorbike, the women. And the image: of the masculine hero. Not ideals but idols rule this chap’s mind. Nino, a great lover of women, but his deepest connections are with men; his strongest most lasting friendship is with the intellectual Davide, a man he can idolise.

The women consent to Nino’s flightiness. Conditioned by the war to accept such behaviour they don’t appear to mind that much. Transience now the texture of their lives. Patrizia happy to have Nino’s baby and resigned to his young death: he is killed in a car chase.

Ida, a schoolteacher, is aloof from her new acquaintances; in the large room she shares with other bombed out families she puts up a curtain to create a private space (the only one until the middle-class Davide Segre arrives). Her profession, though of a lowly grade, has risen her just above these neighbours,6 who are loud, coarse and sensual, and seem oblivious to the presence of others; they openly have sex in this public place.7 She is brought slightly closer to them by Useppe, who runs freely around this crowded room: a young child has no class awareness.

Most of the war is seen through Useppe’s eyes. Little of its hardship touches him, the difficult conditions part of his natural environment, while the worst excesses are shielded from him both by his mother and the other inhabitants in the room. Useppe’s only real worry is not seeing his big brother Nino, whom he adores. In fact, the war is a release, Useppe has far more freedom than he would in peacetime; for Ida, so busy finding food to keep them alive, doesn't have the time or the resources to control him. Rome a place of wonder and fairy tales, where Bella, the pet dog, is transformed into a wise and benevolent parent, from whom the child seeks help and protection. War a great time for this kid! Again we speculate on some polemical intent: is Elsa Morante out to show that children are far more robust and less sexually aware - Nino and Patrizia can shag with Useppe nearby - than Freud has led us to fashionably believe?

This is not to welcome war: there are so many sides to the human animal, so many ways to survive, to prosper. The severe shortage of food is a severe deprivation, and exacerbates Useppe’s epilepsy. His freedom produces a hyperactivity which prevents him settling down; so that an early precociousness quickly succumbs to a mental inertia, as the mind submits to the instincts and feelings. Unable to conform to the rules and restraints of kindergarten he is barred from its premises, slowing down even further his mental development. This boy cannot grow. And the nightmares have started…after the Germans leave Rome; and his mother’s fears recede, driftwood on the tides of war. They start when he sees photographs of the death camps, the mass hangings and Mussolini’s execution. It is the photographs that disturb him. They may be associations with his one unsettling wartime experience - at the railway station when he sensed the inhuman atmosphere of a cattle train full of people: Jews on the way to Auschwitz. Yet it is the images themselves that upset him. Not war, but what he sees of the war is what causes the greatest pain to this young child; Ida having protected him from its worst aspects. Nevertheless, the war does seep in…physically, emotionally, psychologically its effects work their destructive acid; their biggest impact when peace comes; Ida and her son to disintegrate. Useppe’s epileptic fits become acute. He is to die of them. Ida goes mad.

This a world of intense domesticity, where public events impinge only in their consequences; the hunger, the homelessness, the fear; the dangerous liberties I have described. The war is always somewhere else. Many are the rumours - that Rome will not be bombed; that the Pope will save them; that the allies are arriving soon - but of knowledge there is little; none of Ida’s acquaintances are intellectuals or scholars, they are ordinary people who, enclosed within their own families, that boundary to their world, are only interested about surviving the day. Public events are somebody else’s concern.

The few scenes of war that we do see - with Nino and his partisan band - recall the liberties of adolescence rather than the seriousness of adult combat; the one exception is a despairing scene on the Russian front; a reminder than life in a wartime army is very different to that of the civilian population, despite the bombing, invasion, violence, rationing and insecurity (also, this is Rome, it is not Hamburg, Berlin, Leningrad or Stalingrad; a novel about a particular place and a few richly drawn characters). The guerrilla life is different again. Freedom not so much the prize as the attraction of being a partisan.

There are a few ideological types. There’s Eppetondo and Remo; the first an old enthusiast - of the kind that thinks universal peace and prosperity will arrive, like a train on time, at the next revolution, always imminent -; the second an ordinary communist who believes in Stalin as once he’d have worshipped a local saint. Again, there’s little thought and knowledge here; these political beliefs less to do with ideas than with feeling.

“I must have been about ten, or eleven… My father is driving me in the car, probably to school (it’s early in the morning), when in the street he is suddenly forced to put on the brakes. Some man has stopped us not aggressively, but almost apologetically. From what I can understand, he is a worker, discharged the day before from a building job because of the direct intervention - it seems - of my father. I never learned the reason… He’s still a young man (maybe forty), but with some gray in his eyebrows; medium height, not heavy, but strong, so he seems taller… His face is broad, with solid features, though still a bit adolescent, the way men often look in our parts…He’s wearing an oilskin jacket and a beret, with some plaster spattered on it; you can see he’s a mason. At every word jets of steam come from his mouth (this must have happened in midwinter)… And he stands there, waving his arms, wanting to explain himself, trying even to smile, to win my father over. But instead, my father doesn't even let him speak, shouting at him, swollen with anger: ‘How dare you? Not another word! Step aside! Get out of the way!’ At first, I think I see a twitch in the man’s face; when already, inside, all my blood has started pounding in one desire, or rather one infinite determination: that man must react, with his fists, maybe even a knife, against my father! But instead, he steps back to the edge of the street, in fact, he even puts his hand to his beret, like a salute, while my father, furious, almost running him down, has stepped on the accelerator… ‘You should hide yourself”! Rabble! Scum!’ my father goes on shouting; and I notice that, in his anger, the skin between his chin and his collar has made some reddish, vulgar furrows…. In that other man, on the contrary, who has remained in the street, I saw no sign of vulgarity. Then I was overcome, with a disgust, at being inside the Lancia with my father, worse than if I had been driving a tumbril to the guillotine; and I realized that we, and all our fellow bourgeois, were of the world’s scum, and that man let in the street, and his fellows, were the aristocracy…”

There is one exception: Davide Segre. Upper middle-class, he is an intellectual who takes ideas very seriously indeed, they are weaved into the texture of his being. Having rebelled against his family he cannot find a new home - he tried but failed to be a proletarian: he couldn’t hack the factory life. War disgusts him; while the partisans…they lack his sensibility, the range of reading, his subtleties of taste and judgement. All these people find him strange. A rich man’s yacht adrift on a municipal pond. And he can’t go back. His family dies, exterminated in the death camps. Davide Segre is the modern intellectual par excellence. Alone. With this need to be part of something; that ardour to belong, but able to express this need only in words and ideas, which separate him from The People, that abstract noun he mistakes for human beings. Davide lives for a revolution, which exists only in phrases, hackneyed and empty. Does anyone take him seriously? Most recognise a dead concept when they hear its hollow ring…. For sure, there’s the occasional applause, some curiosity about a human oddity (has he played the hero?) and a few - a very few - disciples; one is Nino, who idealises him because he has met no-one like this odd man; though how much due to his ideas and intelligence and how much to his haute bourgeois background is not discussed. Davide Segre. Cut off. And for all time. A ship that in leaving its home port will never find a friendly harbour.

Such loneliness turns him extremest: in the middle of a war, involved in its violent chaos, Davide calls himself a pacifist. Such psychological extremism can only imbalance the mind. Thus no surprise that when confronted by a party of Germans Davide loses it, brutally kicking one man to death; the scene terrible, sickening. It adds to his shame: he never recovers from this incident, his mind losing all balance. No good can come of this. It alienates, it does not attract. Nobody else is as angry as Davide, nor so covered in sharp edges. The workers more robust, finding contentment in even the worse circumstances; for they have the ballast of domestic love: it is in the family that one finds the weight to anchor one’s drifting mind. Davide Segre may talk about public affairs, but they are but an escape from his own psyche, that deliberating loneliness. He cannot escape his upbringing. That brutal attack on the German an echo of his father’s reaction when once faced with a worker’s reasonable request: both are brutally intolerant of opposition. The parents’ influence never wholly to be removed. We go further: Davide’s rebellion, because so bitter and instinctual, actually exaggerates the generic inheritance, the different ideological content only disguising the essential similarity. The old man hated the working classes, his son loves them, but loves them with a passion lacking in his father, because a belief in concepts prolongs and intensifies his hatred of his class and their familial representatives. (Ideology turns a short affair into a life-long marriage.) And there are ironies. Wartime poverty emphasises his wealthy background. Unlike Ida and the others, who strive to overcome the wreckage of their lives, who seek to master their impoverishment, Davide surrenders to it; he needs to suffer, to crumple into degradation; the reason he chooses the ruined Santina as his mate.8

Like many intellectuals Davide Segre finds thinking difficult. It is because his thoughts are so entangled with the feelings, themselves dark, confused, unruly. So much is private pain, personal confusion. Alienation produces unhappy people, who seek solace in ideas and in groups that can offer only a temporary sanctuary; such as class, cult, a political party; some utopian concept. Meanwhile the mind whittles away at the illusion which encases this makeshift abode.9 No new permanent home. And to think? It unsettles. It leads to disillusionment. So better not to think; thus the attraction of the factory, which exhausted his mind.10 Now he is taking drugs. Anything to be unconscious of that alienated self. In a long scene Davide makes a speech to some locals in a bar, Useppe and Bella sitting at his feet. The speech is bombastic, but also maudlin; at times boring, it occasionally scintillates, especially when he reveals his personal history, the source of his class crusade. This man can live successfully only in the public realm; yet over time this will empty him out; those hackneyed phrases, those conceptual corpses…. 

It is a rich portrait of the intellectual, whose ideas, bred of a diseased feeling, tend toward the jejune and crude; indeed, they are less ideas - little thinking goes into them - as fantasies, whose generator is a turbulent emotion, turning feelings into catchphrases, slogans and undergraduate clichés. Most is nonsense. The punters are hardly listening, more interested in their card games or the radio. The intellectual is an egotist, also a fool, who in the end alienates all who love him: his brutal brush off of Useppe is unforgivable; it may have triggered the boy’s final collapse. Intellectuals. Such selfish creatures. Their ideas rocks they throw at their own image, snarling into the mirror.

Is Elsa Morante blaming the intellectuals for this war and its human mess? The criminals those who put ideas before human beings; infusing their selfishness, their egotism, their wilfulness and social blindness, into some caricature of a concept, by which they crush all who disagree with them?11 I think this may be so. 

War is a terrible thing - for the Jews of Rome it is a catastrophe - yet it can be survived if we are nice to each other. Useppe dies and Ida going insane when they live alone. It is peace that is fatal. No longer the collective unity to support the weak and hold the fragile together. The school helps - despite the decline of Ida’s authority, and her increasing frailty, the headmistress keeps her on: she feels pity for present condition and remembers her previous conduct - but it is not enough; Ida is not strong enough to cope alone; with no family, no network of acquaintances, she is too feeble to look after Useppe; his death collapsing her sanity. This is history. Its complex, ramifying effects - the slim, beautiful Patrizia grown into a mamma with a fat arse - flow through each of these individuals, who are changed in a myriad of ways; Eppetondo becomes a hero, Nino enjoys his liberty, Davide Segre belongs to a group for the first time…. There are moments when war is good. This is not to celebrate war, even if peace defeats Ida; her mind unable to handle it. But then what is war? Did Useppe ever know it was going on…. 

Review: History: A Novel

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1. The Skin, by Curzio Malaparte.

2. An Italian Education, Tim Parks.

3. Something similar is described in Alexander Baron’s There’s No Home.

4. In Naples ’44 Norman Lewis makes a similar point: wandering allied soldiers were readily given hospitality by the peasants whose kindness arose out of their feelings, which had no ideological or national bias (he believes the same treatment was given to the Germans).

5. An Italian Education explains why this is so: the image of Fascism - on for example school certificates - was brilliant and exciting. The reality, as Nino, is to discover here, far less so.

6. For an interesting discussion of this phenomenon, in relation to Italian-Americans see The Hidden Injuries of Class, by Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb.

7. An Italian Education describes similar situations.

8. Read Arrow Into The Blue for the similarities between Santina and the prostitutes Koestler describes, particularly in relation to their pimp.

9. Perhaps the best of all accounts of the ideologue is Arthur Koestler’s Arrow Into The Blue. To quote Koestler’s father: it is tremendous, extraordinary, monumental!

10. For an illuminating description of the effects of factory work on the intellectual read Simone Weil’s account (in Simone Weil: An Anthology, edited by Sian Miles); and then compare with Arthur Seaton’s in Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. The differences tell us of the vast distance between the classes; the intellectual’s sympathy, together with the ideas they engender, only increasing this distance, for the intellectual turns these factory workers into figures of fantasy.

11. Compare with my Dynamite is Divine.