It's a Hard Rain's Gonna Fall: Nicola Pugliese's Malacqua: Four Days of Rain in the City of Naples Waiting for the Occurrence of an Extraordinary Event

Morning Rainstorm Over Vesuvius and Pompei, Trey Ratliff 2006, Creative Commons license

If the descriptions “feverish” and “encroaching on the hallucinatory” applied by Anna Maria Ortese to her own writing in Neapolitan Chronicles can also be said to mark an aspect of Neapolitan writing more generally, one would be hard-pressed to find a greater embodiment of this style than Nicola Pugliese’s Malacqua: Four Days of Rain in the City of Naples Waiting for the Occurrence of an Extraordinary Event. This curious little work, Pugliese’s only novel, became an overnight sensation when published in 1977. Almost as quickly, it sank beneath the waters after the author forbade its republication following the sold-out first print run. Only after Pugliese’s death in 2012 did the book reappear in Italy, and now, thanks to crowd-funding publisher And Other Stories, it is available in an English translation by Shaun Whiteside.

In most respects, Malacqua and Neapolitan Chronicles would seem to have little in common. Relatively speaking, Pugliese lacks Ortese’s high-minded gravity and sense of fierce determination to right wrongs, and the sheer velocity of his writing and ability to shift on a ten-lira coin from story to story sets him light years apart from Ortese’s journalistic prose. Aside from the book’s division into four chapters, each representing one of the four days of rain referenced in the title, there is scarcely room in the torrential narrative for the reader to gasp for air: one scene gushes into the next, the cascade of pages seldom checked by so much as a paragraph break. Thematically, however, the two writers grasp a common Neapolitan subject: the seeming intractability of the Naples’ problems and its rootedness in an inertia and acquiescence regarding the state of things. Notably, both writers’ scathing critiques of this facet of Neapolitan life are matched by an underlying fascination with and fondness for the place - “a love of the city, a love of Naples, which is the truly unique characteristic of the sons of Queen Parthenope,” as Pugliese puts it - perhaps inadvertently omitting the daughters of the Queen, whom Ortese would surely have included had the line been her own.   

Pugliese delivers exactly what his lengthy title promises. Four solid days of rain flood Naples’ streets, undermine roads, cause buildings to collapse, provoke the book’s main character to exclaim, “Christ, was this city built on a void?” and mobilize the authorities to rush about in an almost comical attempt to do something. At the same time a growing anticipation of some consequent “extraordinary event” begins to take hold among the citizenry. Odd and disturbing phenomena accompany the deluge in this city where the surreal seems part of “the natural order of things.” Most significantly, amorphous voices wail and then go silent, prompting an urgent search throughout the medieval Maschio Angioino - the Castel Nuovo - from which they seem to originate. The perplexing discovery of several identical dolls at sites where people have died as a result of the downpour’s ravages offers a clue for investigators, but the absence of further such finds shuts that avenue of inquiry. Pop songs, suddenly emanating from five-lira coins and audible only to the city’s ten-year-old girls, amplify the intimation of something extraordinary to arrive.

Even with these distinctly surrealistic elements, however, Pugliese treads less in the footsteps of Anna Maria Ortese than in those of the late 19^th century Neapolitan writer Matilde Serao. Like Serao, Pugliese takes an interest both intimate and wide-ranging in Neapolitans of all stripes. The vignettes that flow one to the next in his rushing narrative accumulate, as in Serao’s more slowly-paced work, into a panoramic, polyphonic portrait of Neapolitan society: shopkeepers, police officers, young lovers, porters, office workers, worried mothers, postal employees, city councilors, baristas, emergency personnel. Pugliese catches his swiftly sketched figures in melancholy and feverish moments of waiting, of contemplation, of pondering their predicaments and the unrelenting rain.

Coming and going throughout the novel is a more or less central figure trying to make sense of it all, the newspaper reporter Carlo Andreoli. Pugliese sets Andreoli apart from his fellow citizens only in the degree to which he is able to articulate the “distorted anxiety that climbs, and pants, and groans,” his recognition of this angst as a more or less constant presence raining down upon the city. The anxiousness – and the waiting for something “extraordinary” to result from such periodic disturbances of normalcy as a heavy rainstorm – fuse into an atmosphere described variously as a “grueling, progressive disease;” “a harsh and predetermined rancour,” an “irreversible obstinacy,” “the provisionality of an inconclusive gloomy and unbreakable presentiment which still drags glowing decorations down into the mud of anxiety.” The rain becomes a symbol of the usualness of the city’s afflictions: “Upon these things and upon these thoughts and upon these people there fell a rain which was the previous day’s rain and which might also be the next day’s rain, and the rain of other days to come.” Forming an unholy trinity with the sense of constant affliction is both an atmosphere of interminable waiting “as draining as an animal’s agony, as alive and dense as an interminable outpouring of blood” and a passive anticipation that something may come of it all:

…it was if during those hours an incomplete and distorted question had arisen over the silent city, just a hypothesis, the idea of a question. A question that refused to emerge, that refused to emerge at all, which everyone sensed deep in the tissue between rib and rib. As they breathed, they became aware of its concrete presence in the diaphragm. Over the city that dark presence, and with it fear, and foreboding as well: now perhaps the perspective on life would change, oh yes, be changed and disrupted forever.

Pugliese turns these entwined thematic elements into a literary effect that drums as steadily as the rain; the reader may be forgiven for feeling so redundantly assailed as to begin to attend the same discomfiting anticipation as Pugliese’s cast of Neapolitan characters.

Neapolitan life goes on, its minor deviations from the quotidian conjuring vexation about bigger ones to come, perhaps the threat of catastrophe – a deluge, an earthquake, Camorrist violence, even the perpetual promise of nearby Vesuvius to bury the city as it did Pompei and Heculaneum: a palpable and insistent tension between the routine threatening events that fray the city’s nerves and edges and some ultimate destruction - or salvation. Not all is gloom and doom. The “sunny fatalism” described by Pugliese’s fellow Neapolitan writer (and obvious literary influence) Raffaele La Capria in A Mortal Wound seems to have infected the city. The variations in the day to day offer diversion, alarm, stimulation, a frisson of fear, but deep down the population accepts that “it would start to feel like a siege, if we didn’t all know In the end it isn’t the first time it has rained like this. No, Naples has endured other rains, rains that were still more violent, yes sir. Which lasted longer. It pays its kickback, the city does, and it survives.”

Some readers might read that as optimism.

Anna Maria Ortese: Neapolitan Chronicles

Seraillon has often featured out of print, difficult to find or untranslated works, so I was thrilled to learn of New Vessel Press’ plan to publish one of these: a new English translation of Anna Maria Ortese’s Il Mare non bagna Napoli (The Sea Doesn’t Bathe Naples), to appear as Neapolitan Chronicles. Ortese herself came up with the new title; the one under which the book originally appeared came from her publishers, Italo Calvino and Elio Vittorini.

The new edition of Neapolitan Chronicles, by Elena Ferrante’s English translator Ann Goldstein and co-translator Jenny McPhee, presents more reason for celebration than simply the re-emergence of this seminal work. For one thing, until now, Ortese’s book has never appeared in English in its entirety; Frances Frenaye’s 1955 translation lopped off part of the longest of the five pieces that make up the volume and added three not present in the original. For another thing, Goldstein and McPhee have included a preface and afterword Ortese wrote for Roberto Calasso’s 1994 Italian re-issue, and these commentaries by Ortese help to illuminate her aims in writing the book as well as her feelings about its rocky reception by Neapolitans. The translators’ own introduction provides additional context. Finally, I should add that the New Vessel edition is quite nicely designed, as you may discern from the image above.

I have written about Ortese’s book before, partly in an effort to give attention to works of Neapolitan literature that could provide some framing around Elena Ferrante’s monumental and monumentally popular Neapolitan Quartet. Ferrante’s series owes a tremendous debt to Neapolitan Chronicles, the first piece of which, “A Pair of Eyeglasses,” could well have been the crucible in which Ferrante formed her own project concerning the lives of two girls from the same impoverished Neapolitan apartment building. Ortese has also bequeathed to Ferrante a refusal to accept the state of things in this city wracked by poverty, corruption and violence. When Neapolitan Chronicles first appeared, its unsparing, unblinking treatment of Naples met with indignation from many of its citizens. The response was such that, despite the book winning a prestigious national literary prize, Ortese quit the city of her youth.

In light of my earlier post on the book, I’ll just briefly note some observations after reading the new version. I won’t speak to the quality of translation or compare it to Frenaye’s, tasks quite beyond my competence, but I will say that the prism facet of a new translation brought out many details that had previously escaped my attention. For instance, in “The Involuntary City,” a casually dispensed line cements the dark, Piranesian confinement of Naples’ Granli VIII-IV apartment block, a partly bombed-out 18^th century grain storage facility that at the time of Ortese’s writing housed some 3,000 people with up to five families sharing a single room. While touring the building, the narrator is shown a crib made of a Coca-Cola crate that contains “what seemed to be a newborn…perfectly skeletal,” and is told by her guide that during a recent trip to the doctor, the child “saw the sun, the air…she was stupefied.” It is clear that this tiny being - fully two years old - had never before seen daylight.

In the book’s long final piece, “The Silence of Reason,” I had not previously noticed the fictional construct of what Ortese presents as journalism: a quick trip to Naples as a reporter sent to check out the local literary scene by visiting a number of her literary contemporaries, including Luigi Compangone, Raffaelle La Capria and Dominico Rea. The tenor of Ortese’s abrupt and even scathing assessments of her colleagues, whom she charges with practicing “an art rooted in arid desperation” regarding their approach to Naples, offers insights into her targets as well as herself. However, the vehicle of these criticisms - visits to the writers’ homes and meetings in the street - also positions her subjects in their human dimension while at the same time revealing their gendered privilege and underscoring the particular attention Ortese pays to women. For instance, in the section on Rea, Ortese seems to divide her attention between interviewing the author and observing his young wife, who wanders in and out to serve the men while her husband verbally berates her.

Among the more rewarding features of the new edition is Ortese’s 1994 preface. She here announces her intention to write about her writing (implying that others have looked completely beyond it, largely for political reasons), and turns upon herself the same degree of criticism she had leveled at others. She describes her writing in Neapolitan Chronicles as having

…something of the exalted and the feverish; it tends towards the high-pitched, encroaches on the hallucinatory, and at almost every point on the page displays, even in its precision, something of the too much.

Ortese goes on to refer to it as symptomatic of “authentic neurosis,” of a “disorientation” that is hers personally, not that of the city, reflective more of her “own weakness” than of anything else. Ortese’s expression of regret makes sense, given some of her dramatic characterizations as in “The Gold of Forcella,” where she refers to the neighborhood’s citizens as “a race devoid of all logic and reason…weak, neurotic, resigned to fear and impudent joy.” Viewed from another angle, however, this distancing strikes me as odd in light of the similarly “feverish” and “hallucinatory” style that seems nearly a hallmark of much Neapolitan writing, including in works by Curzio Malaparte, Roberto Saviano and Nicola Pugliese (not to mention the even more surreal works Ortese would later produce). Ortese’s mea culpa also comes across as an attempt to soften the blows she inflicted while retaining another quality she has passed along to a new generation of Neapolitan writers: a courageous intolerance of the intolerable.

Sixty-five years after these pieces first appeared, Ortese’s book still seems remarkably timely. it’s easy to appreciate that such an unflinching gaze into a city so manifestly complex, contradictory and fantastical may be key not only to Naples’ efforts to emerge from its terrible burden of troubles, but also for the city to represent what another Neapolitan writer – also in a rather “feverish” mode - mused might well be “the last remaining hope for the human race.”[1] Whether such a grand promise may ever be fulfilled, Ortese has certainly paved the way for it. At the very least Neapolitan Chronicles makes for a terrific introduction to this singular and increasingly influential Italian writer.

Neapolitan Chronicles will be published on March 13, 2018. I am grateful to New Vessel Press for alerting me to the forthcoming publication, for offering me an unsolicited review copy and for including an also unsolicited but entirely welcome blurb from seraillon inside the book.

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[1] Luciano de Crescenzo, La Napoli di Bellavista (Thus Spake Bellavista), 1979

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.