Two Serious Ladies

Jane Bowles, photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1951

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.   

  - W. H. Auden, September 1, 1939

Though I’ve read Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies several times, it remains to me the strangest of novels. I can never fully recall what happens within its entwined and peripatetic plots, and with each reading the book seems nearly as surprising and odd as the first time. Certain words and phrases culled from the text could describe the work itself: “gloriously unpredictable,” for example, or “a train ride into the blue.” The narrative’s almost child-like quality contrasts with its close, even dreadful atmosphere, a style suggestive of the running narrative a couple of precocious and not-so-innocent children might concoct while playing with dolls.

This disconnect appears on the first page, where a blithe description of the privileged childhood of one of Bowles’ “serious ladies,” Christina Goering, swerves dangerously in a single sentence: “Even then she wore the look of certain fanatics who think of themselves as leaders without once having gained the respect of a single human being.” At this discordant note, the reader may give a second thought to the character’s charged family name, and the uneasy distance only increases when, just afterwards, the child Goering orders her sister Sophie’s friend into muddy water in order to try to wash away the girl’s sins.

Describing the action of Two Serious Ladies poses a challenge to the reviewer. Awash in alcohol, the narrative also includes dreams, and the novel as a whole possesses a woozy, dream-like ambiance, or as Miss Goering says of one of her own perceptions, something “like a dream that is remembered long after it has been dreamed.” Indeed, many of the novel’s sparsely placed but arresting images arise as though having welled up from subconscious sources to stand like the puzzling objects in a Giorgio de Chirico painting: a fire engine glowing red in the night; a blue peacock mosaic on the floor of a depressing apartment building; a garden enclosed by barbed wire, beneath which a dog is trying to crawl; a woman with no arms or legs.

Divided into three parts, the narrative follows the adult Miss Goering as she invites to live with her a Miss Gamelon, the exotically-named cousin of Miss Goering’s childhood governess. At a party Miss Goering briefly encounters an old friend – Bowles’ other “serious” lady, Mrs. Copperfield, who admits her dread of an upcoming trip to Panama – then goes home with another party guest, Arnold, and meets Arnold’s indignant mother and spry, lively father. At home later, Miss Goering announces that she intends to leave her fancy house for “some more tawdry place” on a nearby island. Abandoning this story, the novel’s second part follows Mrs. Copperfield to Panama, where, as her husband goes off to explore the jungle, Mrs. Copperfield returns to the run-down hotel/brothel where she’s befriended a teenage prostitute, Pacifica, and the hotel’s proprietor, Mrs. Quill. The narrative returns in the third part to Miss Goering, Miss Gamelon, Arnold and Arnold’s father, now sharing Miss Goering’s “tawdry” new home, and introduces other characters Miss Goering encounters during nighttime excursions into the town across from the island. The novel culminates in a bar in which Miss Goering and Miss Copperfield meet again as though for the purpose of comparing their respective (mis)adventures.

Despite the novel’s lugubrious atmosphere – Truman Capote described Bowles’ settings as “every room an atrocity, every urban landscape a neon-dourness” - Two Serious Ladies repeatedly surprises the reader with flashes of sharp wit, humorous situational irony, evanescent moments of happiness or tranquility, and above all a deep quirkiness in its characters that is both memorable and anchored by a sense of moral force. Conventional, Bowles’ two serious ladies are not, and indeed they make a point of embracing non-conformity, as Miss Goering, who has been a typist for famous authors, asserts:

I think, though, that you can make friends more quickly with queer people. Or else you don’t make friends with them at all – one way or the other. Many of my authors were very queer. In that way I’ve had an advantage of association that most people don’t have. I know something about what I call real honest-to-God maniacs.

The novel is full of oddballs, most perched unsteadily on the dulled edge of some psychological longing or frustration. Paranoia, detachment, alienation, misunderstanding – these qualities of relation rub up against the instant and even fond attachments that coalesce and dissolve throughout the story. The men in Two Serious Ladies appear largely self-absorbed, ineffectual, even brutish, their characters and motivations revealed in withering clarity. Arnold is a milquetoast; Mr. Copperfield seeks out authentic travel “experiences” while dismissing his wife’s attachments to the local prostitutes. Toby, a client at the Hotel de Las Palmas who latches onto Mrs. Quill, proves an unscrupulous profiteer. One of Pacifica’s clients splits her lip – one of several episodes of violence in Two Serious Ladies. Andy, a man whom Christina Goering meets in a bar then moves in with briefly, is presumptuous and washed up. His successor in Miss Goering’s adventures, Ben, a gangster, makes no bones about seeing women as existing only to satisfy his every whim. Even the most appealing male character, Arnold’s father, admits to a tyrannical relationship with a wife he resents and even “knock[s]…around all day long.” But a few of these men display occasional moments of remorse or thoughtfulness, as when Arnold’s father pens a beseeching letter to his wife, or when Andy, when pressed for why he didn’t reveal a morbid sexual obsession to the girl he once intended to marry, replies that he “wanted the buildings to stay in place for her and…the stars to be over her head and not cockeyed.” 

Against most of Bowles’ characters, her two “serious ladies” stand out through a drive that impels them to confront their fears and an awareness of themselves as beings capable of choice and self-determination. “The idea,’ said Miss Goering, ‘is to change first of our own volition and according to our own inner promptings before they impose completely arbitrary changes on us.’” The women’s motivations too are presented starkly, albeit with qualifiers. Mrs. Copperfield’s “sole object in life,” the narrator tells us, “was to be happy, although people who had observed her behavior over a period of years would have been surprised to discover that this was all.” Miss Goering, intent on working out her “own little idea of salvation,” repeatedly responds to questions about her behavior by noting that it’s not for fun that she does what she does, but because “it is necessary.” Attainment of the ideals of both women is a near constant struggle involving dynamic tensions between autonomy and dependence, attraction and repulsion, domesticity and travel, safety and daring, insularity and expansiveness, peace and violence, tyranny and timidity. Dualities and binaries recur throughout Two Serious Ladies (including, obviously, in the title), as though Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield form a single dialectical unit representing characteristics and choices both opposed and complementary.

In their rejection of convention and embrace of asserting their own volition, and even as they sink to the lower depths, Bowles’ serious ladies display a questing, even moral quality. They are not eccentric simply to be eccentric. Christina in particular is determined to conquer her fears; her sojourns out of the house seem equal parts Homeric odyssey and Dantesque descent, as she sails, or rather, takes the ferry, across water - a thematic motif running throughout Two Serious Ladies. Repeatedly, Miss Goering plunges into the water, coercing others to join her or leaving them behind on an island, including Miss Gamelon, who admits to an insurmountable inability to cross a big body of water, a fear that has prevented her from fulfilling her dreams and which, one can surmise, excludes her from being “serious.” Mrs. Copperfield resists water and is terrified when her Pacifica offers to teach her how to swim, but submits nonetheless, her vulnerability poignantly revealed as she hangs on “hard to Pacifica’s thigh with the strength of years of sorrow and frustration in her hand.” 

But the moral dimension of these women seems unmoored from any conventional morality. Despite frequent allusions to religion, such as Mrs. Goering’s quest for sainthood and a reference to Mrs. Copperfield’s being of l’age du Christ, Bowles’ serious ladies follow a vague internal compass. “It is against my entire code,” proclaims Miss Goering in response to Arnold’s invitation to spend the night, “but then, I have never even begun to use my code, although I judge everything by it.” And when Miss Goering accuses Mrs. Copperfield of having gone to pieces, Mrs. Copperfield retorts, “I have gone to pieces, which is a thing I’ve wanted to do for years.” Whither that compass may lead them and whether it’s in the right direction or not seems nearly beside the point when a life choice is always of interest, but perhaps not of importance, as Miss Goering opines, simultaneously wondering if, though she feels nearer to sainthood, something inside “hidden from my sight is piling sin upon sin as fast as Mrs. Copperfield.”

Claire Messud’s introduction to a new edition of Two Serious Ladies, while focusing on the unconventionality of the novel and the characters, barely skirts the important context in which Bowles’ novel was born. Bowles composed Two Serious Ladies in the early 1940’s as fascism marched across Europe. Although aside from the resonant name “Goering” there is nothing manifest in Two Serious Ladies regarding the dire events unfolding in the world, anxiety about the war seems as subsumed into the narrative as the sea seems contained in an oyster. Messud also omits mention of the “February House” in Brooklyn Heights, the creative furnace in which Bowles lived with her husband Paul, Carson McCullers, W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, the burlesque and Broadway performer Gypsy Rose Lee, and the house’s founder, the charismatic editor George Davis, with an almost infinite parade of the most notable artists and writers of the time passing through, including many, like Klaus and Erika Mann and Salvador and Gala Dalí, fleeing the horrors of the Europe. W. H. Auden was particularly involved in inspiring and influencing Bowles’ work on Two Serious Ladies; the novel’s questions of choice and morality in a world in which humanity seems abandoned to its own devices and sinking into a terrible conformity echo those found in much of Auden’s most searching work of the time. Sherrell Tippins, in February House, a study of the community, notes both authors’ fascination with Franz Kafka, especially Kafka’s implicit questioning of original sin in a world in which God is non-existent - or arbitrary, indifferent, asleep.

Two Serious Ladies grapples with difficult questions and eschews easy answers. Its style is breathtakingly original. Its peculiar realism, which starkly presents life as a panoply of choices, a grasping in a world of violence and alienation but also of intrepidness and small kindnesses, is infused with a strangeness that pushes it towards a haunting surrealism. But above all, its mesmerizing, complex binary characters are what truly stand out in the novel. In one of the few instances in Two Serious Ladies in which Bowles actually employs the word “serious” (aside from in the title), Arnold complains of his “more and more…insupportable” life, wishing to switch to something “in the book line, or in the painting line,” noting that his family “doesn’t believe that such an occupation is serious.”  Arnold’s father instead dismisses his son as lacking the capacity to be an artist, which requires “a certain amount of brawn and pluck and character.” One can see in Bowles’ two serious ladies - eccentric, courageous, awful, frail, determined, perhaps even damned - no small amount of brawn and pluck and character, an unfiltered embrace of curiosity regarding the world around them, a struggle to create themselves anew, horrid warts and all, to wrest a bit of self-determination and a lot of originality from a darkening world. In delivering us her only novel, as singular and daring and discomfiting a work as one can find in any literature, Jane Bowles has displayed the same.

 Many thanks to the Dolce Bellezza blog for organizing this group read of Two Serious Ladies!

Wrapping Up 2015

Unopened bottle of Mumm champagne, 

found and displayed by artist Jenny Odell

 at the Recology Artist-in-Residence program

 of the San Francisco City garbage dump. 

Seraillon’s fifth year of existence, 2015, has been something like a Christmas panettone: delicious Italian (mostly Neapolitan) ingredients, but with a few domestic and exotic fruits and a very, very few rancid walnuts thrown into the mix. For another year, I’ve been awestruck by the works I’ve read; each succeeding year-end wrap-up serves to underscore how the universe of literary marvels is ever-expanding, and how my sense of getting a grip on it all seems ever-receding.

Here are a few notes from this year of reading:

Best Work Consisting of 2,279 Sonnets

The year began with the joyful discovery of the Roman sonnets of Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, who used dialect to create, in sonnet form, a raw, ribald and not infrequently moving portrait of the Eternal City. The enthusiasm and different approaches taken by Belli’s several translators - perhaps most notably Anthony Burgess in his literary novella ABBA ABBA - helped to ramp up my own enthusiasm. Belli is a poet to read and re-read.

Best Work in which All The Characters End Up Enclosed in a Pumpkin

Going back a bit further in time, Teofilo Folengo’s Baldo may well rank as my favorite book of the year, a hugely entertaining, bawdy and inventive tale that served as a chief inspiration for Rabelais but which offers up a free-wheeling innocence unmatched by its offspring.

Five Exceptional 20^th Century Italian Novels (and a Note About Four 21^st Century Italian Novels)

Raffaele La Capria’s The Mortal Wound, which inspired Paolo Sorrentino’s film La Grande Bellezza, beautifully captures the paralysis of an entire generation of Neapolitans.

Guido Morselli’s “alternate history” novel Divertimento 1889 I found charming, funny, and subtly disturbing.

J. Rudolfo Wilcock’s catalogue of mostly fictional artists and dreamers in The Temple of Iconoclasts stood out by virtue of its incredibly wry humor.

Ennio Flaiano’s riveting The Short Cut, exploring an episode during Fascist Italy’s misadventure in East Africa, ranked up there with the best of Graham Greene.

Finally, a late contender, Daniele del Giudice’s surprising Lines of Light counts among the most inventive contemporary novels I’ve read in a long time, an almost plotless story concerning two men, a novel writer and a particle physicist, briefly intersecting and diverging amid love’s lines, angles and rhymes in their approaches to the exploration of knowledge.

Before leaving off the Italians, I feel obliged here to say something about Elena Ferrante’s “Neapolitan Quartet,” which I chomped down in a gulp. I intend to write about these books in early 2016, after having written around them in 2015 by noting some of Ferrante’s obvious influences.

Best Travelogue/Anti-Clerical Parody for Showing Up Gustave Flaubert

José Maria Eça de Queiroz’s The Relic proved an unexpected and utterly charming, funny and irreverent novel, one so different from his The Maias that I have trouble deciding which, between these two, is my favorite among the several of Eça’s works that I’ve now read. But I can easily say that The Relic is among my favorite works read in 2015, a novel I’m already pushing on other readers unfamiliar with this terrific writer.

Best Modern Poetry Discovery

A terrific discovery in poetry this year, thanks to a kind friend who sent along a recently translated selection – The Perfect Hour - is Portuguese poet Sophia Mello de Breyner Andresen. Here’s a book I’ve kept on the night table for frequent reading of delicate poems which prove that sometimes a limited palette is all that’s needed to create marvelous poetry. It’s a short book one can read in an hour – a perfect hour.

Probably the Best Novel Ever Set Anywhere Near Bakersfield, California

I owe thanks to Jacqui of Jacquiwine’s Journal for turning me on to Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at The Wedding, a comic psychological novel of two sisters whose complex relationship is tested by the impending marriage of one. Why this isn’t a better-known American classic I do not know. 

Best Second Visit with a Writer I’ve Wanted to Read Again

Thanks to another suggestion from Jacqui, I returned for a second time to Elizabeth Taylor, this time her novel Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont – delicate, funny, moving, among the most affecting works about aging that I can recall having read.

Best Discovery of a Writer I’d Resisted Reading Before

Arnold Bennett. I loved his Anna of the Five Towns, and quickly followed it with his delightful The Card.

Best Fulfillment of a Decades-Long Reading Project

Finally this year I succeeded in finishing a goal I started at age 17: reading all of Virginia Woolf’s novels. The Voyage Out, her first novel, was the only one remaining, and what surprises it provided! Perhaps reading everything else before reading this one was a good thing, for in The Voyage Out one sees the germs of almost everything else Woolf wrote, including the introduction of Clarissa Dalloway. The Voyage Out also possesses a liveliness and humor that seems somewhat diminished in Woolf’s later writing, and contains one of my favorite scenes from all of my reading this year, in which two of the characters, braving a storm at sea, sequester themselves in a cabin on the boat and drink champagne from a glass that's still holding a toothbrush.

Most Moving Short Novel about Approaching the End of Life

Little Songs in the Shade of Tamaara, by Egyptian writer Mohammed Afifi. A simple idea: a man catalogues everything in his garden. But through attentiveness and reminiscence he manages to recall and evaluate an entire life of tragedy and triumph as he approaches the end of it. This small, beautifully structured book resonated profoundly; would that any of us could express the feelings of facing life’s end with such courage, grace and beauty.

A Great Novel About the Sahara

New Waw is the second novel I’ve read by Taureg writer Ibrahim Al-Koni, who creates poetic gems through merging ethnography and a profound appreciation of the desert in exploring the lives of Taureg nomads.

A Bad But Entertaining Novel About The Sahara

Pierre Benoit’s L’Atlantide was a colossal success in France when it appeared in 1919. I read it in an English translation under the kitsch title Queen of Atlantis, one I found entirely appropriate to the B-film quality of this story of French explorers discovering a lost civilization in the furthest reaches of the desert (it’s Atlantis – surprise!). A hoot from start to finish.

Best Historical Fiction

This award must go to Jean-Noel Schifano’s Chroniques Napolitaines – beautifully written, filled with love affairs and violence stemming from the same addiction to passion that characterized baroque Naples.  

Best Short Story Collection That Involves the Paint on the Mona Lisa’s Canvas Suddenly Deciding to Fly Off and Explore the World

To be fair, I only read a handful of short story collections this year, but César Aira’s The Musical Brain, a long-anticipated translation of the Argentine novelist’s shorter works, ranked for me among the best of the books I’ve read by Aira, with one deliriously inventive story succeeding another. The New Directions hardcover edition also gets kudos for its terrific cover.

Two Novels I Intend to Re-Read Before Writing About Them

Long on my list of novels to be read, and now read at last for the first, but surely not the last time, is Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. I flagged so many lines on so many pages that in the end I decided I’d just have to read it again.

Effi Briest, by Theodor Fontane. I am still haunted by the Chinese figure in Fontane’s novel, as well as by the quick eclipse of youth that occurs in its opening pages. Though I read Effi Briest early this year, it has rested in my head as perhaps the novel I am most eager to re-visit. 

Best Work I’m Still Reading, and Other Projects for 2016

I am thrilled to be halfway through a re-read of Don Quixote. This coming year I’ll likely still keep exploring Italian literature, but look forward to pursuing many other writers I’ve yet to discover as well as re-reading authors I want to revisit (perhaps especially Arnold Bennett and his The Old Wives’ Tale). One of the writers I intend to revisit, for the umpteenth time, is Jane Bowles and her novel Two Serious Ladies. Please see this announcement of a proposed group read with the Dolce Bellezza blog.

Finally, a huge thanks to all of you who have visited Seraillon this year and to all of you who have pointed the way to so many wonderful paths to explore in literature. I wish you a joyful and peaceful 2016 - wherever you might get your champagne. 

"The Great Lost Moment" - Raffaele La Capria's The Mortal Wound

“In the sunlit lands of the far South there is a kind of secret ministry for the defence of Nature against Reason, a sort of all-powerful genius loci, which watches over the unbroken sleep of the inhabitants.”  - Anna Maria Ortese, “Strange Apparition”

Among my favorite discoveries in Italian literature this year has been Raffaele La Capria’s 1961 novel The Mortal Wound (Ferito a Morte, English translation 1964 by Marguerite Waldman). La Capria is one of the Neapolitan writers whom Anna Maria Ortese, in The Sea Doesn’t Bathe Naples, criticizes for exercising “an art apparently rooted in arid desperation.” In The Mortal Wound La Capria returns the favor: one of his characters explicitly references Ortese’s title, rejecting a point of view that dwells on “the two Naples, one a rigged-up affair, the other the real life. The Naples bathed by the sea and the Naples of the back alleys, Vesuvius and counter-Vesuvius. And so forth and so on.“ Though the two authors diverge in their approaches to literature, they share a bred-in-the-bone affection for their city fused with a scathing condemnation of its failings. In The Mortal Wound, La Capria levels his entire generation; the book, a portrait of dissolution and paralysis, emerged as among the most important novels of postwar Naples.[i]

La Capria’s title, The Mortal Wound, refers to Naples itself, both setting and subject of this fascinating and moving work, which in addition boasts of two noteworthy characteristics that have placed it on the literary map. First, it contains the first reference to pasta puttanesca, in a brief but entertaining passage that does little to shed light on the notoriously-named dish other than to suggest a Syracusan origin. Second, The Mortal Wound served as a key inspiration for director Paolo Sorrentino’s Academy Award-winning 2013 film The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza). One can recognize discrete elements of the novel in the film, but readers expecting a faithful correspondence may be disappointed: the similarities are almost entirely thematic and in the works’ overarching tone of nostalgic regret.

Lyrical and atmospheric, The Mortal Wound uses a polyphonic set of narrators and a mixture of dialogue, interior monologue, and free indirect discourse, peppered by frequent flashbacks, to capture the generation of Neapolitans from World War II into the years preceding Italy’s “Boom,” and covering the period of mayor Achille Lauro’s transformation of the city that saw incomes rise in tandem with organized crime and corruption; civic improvements as well as rampant real estate speculation; and a pursuit of profit that saw cherished aspects of old Naples quickly razed in a rush to riches.

La Capria filters this portrait largely through Massimo DeLuca, eldest son of a once well-off family now reduced nearly to ruin but still clinging to the manners and habits of its former prosperity. Sifting through the complexity of the novel’s narrative style - translator Waldman’s choice to place portions of the text into italics, ostensibly to facilitate distinction between the novel’s shifting narrators, is of marginal help - one pieces together Massimo’s life.

The young Massimo spends much of his time hanging around clubs, cafés and casinos, engaging in repetitive discourse about Neapolitan torpor and entrapment, of the “southern labyrinth” where the exertion of reason is useless, of those who leave and those who stay, of fortunes made in the Americas, of the differences between Pommery and Veuve Cliquot. Massimo’s coterie of ruined Neapolitans of all ages, “a community of idlenesses,” find little to do with themselves other than gamble for days on end and chase sensuality (L’Oro di Napoli, the 1957 film by La Capria’s close friend Vittorio di Sica, features an amusing portrait of a gambler La Capria might have used as a model). The best minds of Massimo’s generation - not starving, hysterical, or naked, but passive and pliant - watch their lives pour through their fingers. Even the recent war evokes a bitter nostalgia: “If nothing ever happens in Naples, you say, when war breaks out, for better or worse something’s got to happen even here. Because look, Massimo said, ‘a war seems better than the way I spend my days, without knowing where to go or what to do.’” Arguments fizz out with a whimper; when one character challenges another to a duel, he’s ridiculed for both the anachronism and the economics of the idea: “…so much for the doctor, so much for the taxi, so much for the reconciliation supper.”

Acutely afflicted by the city’s intractable hold, Massimo nonetheless remains distinct and aloof from the others, and feels most at home while diving for fish in the Bay of Naples with his younger brother, Nini. “Under water,” as Massimo’s journalist friend Gaetano asks him, “you forget even that you were born, don’t you?” La Capria repeatedly plays with the contrast between this silent undersea beauty and the grinding city above, his submarine passages turning into flights of lyrical prose, an escape into a magical world:

The breathing of the sea covered and uncovered the rock extended below the water like the wreck of a ship. Round it pressed the dense blue, probed in vain by conical sun-shafts, by luminous barbs. Tiny green wrasse and rainbow wrasse, butterfly-blennies, blue damsel-fish and saddled bream, drawn forward and pushed back by that breathing, for an instant hovering black in that deep blue light, then immediately hurled back again invisible against the carpet of brown seaweed.

If parts of Naples have not been bathed by the sea, the same cannot be said of what the sea receives from Naples. An environmental consciousness pervades The Mortal Wound, as the enchanting world in which Massimo seeks refuge is imperiled by garbage, industrial waste and sewage, as well as by the collateral damage from German, British and American attacks on the city during the war, such as the devastating and lingering effects of phosphorus bombs.

Despite these assaults, Nature remains the triumphant enemy. The city is “The Virgin Forest,” a once glorious European capital fallen into a pitiable, inert modern state now bypassed by the currents of History, the “blue line running through countries and cities: New York, London, Paris, Zurich, Rome, even Rome! But there the line suddenly veers, indeed recoils in horror and runs off…to the north.” The DeLuca family’s parallel decline is atmospherically woven into their living quarters, the Palazzo Medina (identifiable as the real-life Palazzo Donn’Anna), a crumbling 300-year-old edifice not so much bathed by the bay as being swallowed by it:

The façade, more exposed to the sea, is a trifle out of true; has it given way at the base or is that only an impression? as though the ebb and flow of waves had rotted the foundation? Wind and salt water eating away the blocks of tufa, now concave and gritty, only their edges jut out with the lime and bricks; a constant imperceptible crumbling; if you pass your finger over it you can feel the yellow dust coming away. For the past three hundred years the palace has withstood the moods of the sea, the blows of waves and bombs, but the centuries will conquer it with patience, millimetre by millimetre, until the quiet Neapolitan waters will claim their victory on a beautiful day like this, as they are already doing over the three or four surviving buttresses of Pollione’s villa under Cape Posilippo, and fishes will swim in the rooms rendered unrecognizable by marine incrustations, the erosions of waved and corroding mollusks. Only a matter of time.

This same abandonment to Nature is reflected in daily lives of Massimo and those around him, a fatal Neapolitan passivity that impedes forward motion and keeps its inhabitants rooted in place. Even Capri, glittering on the horizon, exists only as a far-away dream neither of the young brothers has ever visited. Gaetano jokingly suggests that Neapolitans should install “a lovely neon sign, very large, at the top of Vesuvius, for everyone to read: WHOEVER STAYS WILL BE DEFEATED.”

And yet Massimo stays. Ruminating on a letter from Gaetano, who has left Naples and written to ask, “Why are you still there?” Massimo ruminates, “And how could I tell him the absurd thing, how am I to tell him: to find again a single one of those days intact as it used to be, to find it by chance, one morning, going out with the fishing boat and the gun?” The intact moment Massimo seeks most is a certain night with Carla Boursier – she herself passes through the novel like an elusive ghost - the “great lost moment” of Massimo’s life (recognizable in Jep Gambardella’s retreat into similar memories in La Grande Belezza), a past, fleeting fantasy of love and promise that haunts Massimo and holds him like an anchor.

This is one sad book. Regarding those who do manage to get away, La Capria omits details of their sojourns in Rome and elsewhere, as though Neapolitanism is so entrenched as to blot out anything unrelated to it. But the almost unrelenting paralysis is partially set off by the southern Italian wit and creativity of those of Massimo’s coterie who somehow manage to make it into middle age without having succumbed to the “dream of the new car, the sports model, money…narrow lives, in a circle of scruffy friends.” Dissolute playboys and bon vivants, they trade goods on the black market, flit among and live off the rich foreigners who visit Capri and Ischia, survive by solely through their wits and not inconsiderable wit. A dark but sharp humor is woven into La Capria’s novel. For instance, one of Massimo’s friends is named Rossomalpelo, a literary joke referencing Verga’s grim short story featuring one of the most unfortunate characters in any literature. Here, he’s among those who leave, and when Massimo runs into him again in Naples after many years, he’s a successful architect, “well-informed and capable of indignation,” helping to pile Lauro’s shoddy modern edifices onto the historic old buildings of the city. If Massimo’s generation has wallowed in indifference and idleness, they partially compensate by a vivid humor and capriciousness. The final chapters, for all the spiritual emptiness they display, are injected with gags and scams that would be laugh out loud funny (particularly a stunt that Nini pulls in Capri’s famous Blue Grotto) were not they emblematic of something stunted and immature in men who have allowed their time to pass them by.

There’s a certain heroism in this dissolution, as conveyed in one character’s disparaging remark offering up Romans as a contrast, referring to their “…dreams of modest happiness, the acme of prudence at the age of twenty, they never once compromise themselves with a daring remark: tactical and practical.” “The mortal wound” of Naples, however, presents one a limited set of choices: to leave for a more mundane world, to abandon the struggle and succumb entirely, or to reinvent oneself, however meanly and hopelessly. As Sasà, disgraced in middle age but once the paragon of youth among Massimo’s friends, asserts: “You see, in a city where seventy per cent have no regular employment you’ve simply got to invent something, don’t you? They force us to.”

Displaying almost none of the determined activism of Anna Maria Ortese’s work, The Mortal Wound nonetheless conveys its “arid desperation” with sensitivity, lyricism and humor, and above all with a fierce and fatal appreciation of Naples itself. La Capria movingly depicts a generation that, in failing to escape or to act, in a simultaneous submission to and rejection of Naples’ “absurd scale of values,” has little to honor in life other than those maddeningly ambiguous, Neapolitan gifts of resistance, reinvention, and a terminal, blind refusal to capitulate despite certain defeat.   

 Image: Paul Klee, "Fish Magic," 1925, Philadelphia Museum of Art; this same image was used for the cover of the original 1961 Bompiani edition of Ferito a Morte. 

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[i] Though the novel is second in a trilogy, “Tre Romanzi del una Giornata” (Three Novels of a Day), the books, published approximately ten years apart, can be read as stand-alone works (the first, A Day of Impatience [1952], is also available in an English translation by William Weaver).

An Early Ortese: The Sea Doesn't Bathe Naples

Giovana Bianco and Pino Valente, site specific installation, 

 Museo Madre contemporary art museum, Naples, 2015

For a Neapolitan work to begin with the words “It’s sunny! Oh, it’s sunny!” is pretty much a guarantee that a leveling blow waits just around the corner. Anna Maria Ortese’s powerful 1953 book, Il mare non bagna Napoli - The Sea Doesn’t Bathe Naples, or as translated in substantially modified form in a hard-to-find 1955 English edition by Frances Frenaye, The Bay is Not Naples - delivers numerous knock-out punches, revealing a different side of the author than that displayed in The Iguana. Ill-equipped for the Italian original, I made do with Frenaye’s edition, which contains eight pieces, three added by the translator, who also subtracts a sizable chunk of the longest of Ortese’s themes. As the book is so difficult to obtain in English, I’ll be less restrained than usual in providing details.

Il mare non bagna Napoli – which saw the light of day thanks to the enthusiastic efforts of Elio Vittorini and Italo Calvino - offers devastating critiques of the city. In a style that marks much post-war Neapolitan writing (and echoes the blend of fact and fancy of Curzio Malaparte’s portrait of 1944 Naples in The Skin), Ortese combines journalism with fiction to get at Naples’ inexorable social problems. Along the way, she takes to task her fellow Neapolitan writers for having rejected the “blue sky” writing of an earlier generation only to “replace it with an art apparently rooted in arid desperation.” This last phrase, articulated in the “The Silence of Reason,” the excerpt from the long piece truncated by Frenaye, both characterizes the prevailing Neapolitan style and points up Ortese’s rejection of its lack of determination to fight back. In the book’s pointed views of both Naples and those who wrote about it, Il mare non bagna Napoli struck the city’s readers - and especially its writers - like a tsunami.

Moving progressively from a neorealist literary style to a more journalistic one, Frenaye’s translation of Ortese’s book begins with four pieces focused on daily life in Naples’ poorest quarters, where Ortese had spent a good portion of her youth. The first piece, “A Pair of Glasses,” an increasingly gritty story with a Katherine Mansfield-style attention to the lives of children, concerns Eugenia, a young girl in a grim apartment building whose family splurges to buy her a first pair of eyeglasses that reveal to her both the gloriousness of the world and the undeniable misery of her immediate surroundings. “The Sea and Naples” continues Ortese’s depiction of this squalid neighborhood, reaching a tragic nadir with the death of a baby by “an accidental fall” from a window after her father “by sheer chance struck the baby” while beating the child’s mother (the lancing italics are Ortese’s). A portrait of domestic life in the mold of Matilde Serao follows: “Family Scene” delivers just what its title promises while plunging the hallowed Italian notion of “family” into the same chilled cauldron of dry-ice dry irony to which “sunny” has been consigned. Concluding this section of the book is a snapshot of Neapolitan street life, “The Gold of Forcella,” depicting the rough neighborhood named in the title and the quiet desperation with which its residents wait in a pawn shop in the hope of redeeming some prized object for a few thousand lira.

In “A City in Spite of Itself,” Ortese takes a turn that might seem abrupt were her goal simply to produce a series of short stories. Instead, this piece is riveting journalism as filtered through a fiction-writer’s eye, an exploration of the vast Granili III-IV apartment block, a converted military building on Naples’ outskirts that, at the time of Ortese’s visit, housed some 3,000 people packed 20-25 to a room. Ortese here digs deeply into the wretchedness of life among Naples’ poor after the war, many living in conditions as bad or worse than they suffered during the occupation and bombing. Simultaenously, the story presents an unforgettable portrait of the determined “matriarch” of the building, Signora Antonia Lo Savio. Ortese’s account of her initial meeting of Lo Savio demonstrates the author’s remarkable hybrid style, in which it’s easy to see how a surrealistic element might emerge in later works:

A woman swollen up like a dying bird, with black hair hanging over the hump on her back and a lemon-yellow face dominated by a big pointed nose, which came down all the way to a harelip, stood brandishing a comb in front of a jagged mirror, while she held a bunch of hairpins in her mouth. ‘Just a minute,’ she said when she saw me, and she even smiled…She must have been the offspring of hideously diseased parents, and yet there was something regal in the way she walked and talked. And there was something more, a bright light in her mouse-like eyes, which revealed not only her consciousness of evil in all its ramifactions [sic], but also a very human zest in combatting it.

That someone makes an effort to provide essential services in this inhuman inferno only marginally eases the grimness of Ortese’s essay, as evident in her account of the youngest denizens of the apartment block:

There was nothing childlike about these children except their age. They were little men and women, already acquainted with everything, with the beginning of life and its end, already eroded by poverty, idleness and vice, burdened with sickly bodies and twisted minds, wearing imbecile or corrupt smiles on their faces, artful and at the same time acting with a desolate indifference. Ninety percent of them, Antonia told me, are tubercular or susceptible to tuberculosis, that is when they are not rachitic or tainted with syphilis from their fathers and mothers. They are accustomed to witnessing their parents’ intercourse and the imitation of it is their favourite game, indeed almost the only one they have except for throwing stones.

These are the children “lucky” enough to survive. In a scene scoured of all sentimentality, Ortese describes rushing out with Lo Savio to where a young boy has fallen dead while at play with his friends. Neighbors gather: “Now they were taking him to the Morgue for examination, and parents and friends had turned the occasion into a sort of funeral, the simplest funeral I had ever seen. The dead boy wasn’t in a coffin but in the arms of his mother, a yellowish woman who looked half like a fox and half like a dustbin.”

Ortese’s lengthy interrogation of her fellow writers in “The Silence of Reason” provides an invaluable glimpse into the Neapolitan literati of her time – though not a particularly flattering one. It’s a shame that this piece has been cut, as one seldom encounters a writer so sober and burningly direct in criticizing her own circle of writers from within. Organized around a peripatetic series of home visits with Luigi Compagnone, Domenico Rea, Raffaele La Capria and, presumably, others mentioned at the essay’s beginning (Frenaye omits more than half of the piece), “The Silence of Reason” accelerates the decline in the sunny optimism about the city that began with Eugenia’s anticipation of new glasses as well as in whatever self-restraint Ortese has had up to this point. Her comments on Naples turn acidic, describing its writers as no more than anyone around them representative of:

the true Naples, all bright colours and heedlessness, and of the tradition of her ancient past – they were all a part of the current of troubled youth that ran beneath the great pile of antiquity…The city around them was what we all know: a larva stream of dollars and pus. Americans had stepped into the shoes of the Bourbons, and the syllables ‘O.K.’ were enough to cause every heart between Vicaria and Posilippo to tremble…

But Ortese’s most vitriolic condemnation appears in the final two pieces. The first of these recounts the pain of her return to Naples after a long absence to encounter only the ravages of age, dementia, and the daily wear and tear of the city on old friends. Still, Ortese manages to cull some slight romantic affection for Naples out of the blue sea and warm air, enough to push her into the book’s final piece, “A Strange Apparition.” Here she challenges the virus with which even she is infected, the sentimentality that can see “a truly exceptional city…a marvelous confusion,” only later awakening one to “the real horror, stemming from the destruction of thought itself.” As though echoing Jean-Noël Schifano’s characterization of Naples as a city run by passion, Ortese goes Schifano one further by limning “this extraordinary being, Passion,”

…as widespread as poverty, as agreeable as indolence, as dangerous as rhetoric or vice, and yet able at times to provide some consolation, and almost as lightfooted and superficial as the moon. It was to this fatuous and pernicious creature, perpetually appearing and disappearing, present everywhere and nowhere, whose name was never pronounced simply because its power was written on every side, that the City, amputated of its last vestige of thoughtfulness and indeed any semblance of mental systemization, owed its morbid and hallucinating beauty…All around lay the mad City, with children and dogs poking about in the garbage that littered its streets, with broken-down houses on either side, shattered lamp-posts, abandoned vehicles without wheels, fragments of champagne bottles, and everywhere masses of dead men’s skulls and bones. And the truly grotesque thing was this: that when the terrible First Citizen of the City passed by, these skeletons, which should normally have been weary unto death, came to life and danced in the streets; ancient jawbones shook with laughter and tears gushed out of cavernous sockets…So it was that the place knew no peace.

It seems unjust that Ortese’s book has yet to be translated in full and that the one existing translation is nearly impossible to obtain. The book clearly still serves as an important reference for contemporary writers and artists from Italy’s south. Sicilian writer Roberto Alajmo, in his amusing 2005 “anti-travelogue,” Palermo, even borrows Ortese’s title for that of a chapter in his own book (substituting Palermo for Naples), and if not already apparent to readers familiar with Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, Ortese’s book is an undeniably significant influence. Given the fever currently attaching to Ferrante’s volumes, a reissue of Ortese’s book should be a priority. Besides provoking a sobering realization that little seems to have changed in the lives of Naples’ poor over the past 60 years, Il mare non bagna Napoli gives an essential glimpse into the origins of Ferrante’s work. The first two stories of Il mare non bagna Naples are so close in atmosphere and subject to Ferrante’s books that they might even be mistaken for discarded drafts. The characters inhabit a similar courtyard apartment building, endure the same entrenched atmosphere of violence and neglect, bear Neapolitan names identical to some in Ferrante (including “Lina” and “Nunziata”), and even include, in a central, galvanizing scene, a mother devastated by the loss of her child, her “reddened fingers stuck into her hair as if to claw the brain below.” Ferrante’s work pays homage to Ortese’s overarching tone of indignation, particularly when directed at the suffering in what Ortese in one scene refers to as “the eternal story of the mothers, wives and daughters of the human race.” However similar their aims, though, these writers differ significantly: in thematic and temporal scope, certainly, and not least in Ortese’s splendid, strange language compared to Ferrante’s galloping, workhorse sentences. Nonetheless, readers of the latter writer should find Ortese’s book a mesmerizing companion to Ferrante’s Neapolitan project, as well as a daring work of both social criticism and narrative inventiveness that stands, toweringly, on its own.   

For much of the background on Il mare non bagna Napoli, I am indebted to Professor Lucia Re's long and fascinating article on the book's history, themes and reception.