Lily Tuck's Biography of Elsa Morante: "Woman of Rome"

I read many biographies of writers. Before reading Lily Tuck's biography of Elsa Morante (1912-1985), a sort of female Italian Dostoevsky, I cannot recall any previous instance of reading a biography of a writer none of whose works I had read. Having read Woman of Rome, I remain more interested in Tuck as a writer than in Morante (I've now read half of the first paragraph of her first novel in William Weaver's collection Open City, plus quotations from Morante's work in Tuck's biography.)

Although I can sympathize with the hard childhood Morante had and having to flee into the mountains with her husband Alberto Moravia for a year, Tuck did not convince me that Morante is a writer I need to read or would enjoy reading (as I do Moravia and Calvino). Her idols were Mozart and Rimbaud. I don't know if Mozart was as bratty as he appears in "Amadeus" (I know he was as scatological and that Rimbaud was even brattier than he appears in "Total Eclipse"), but Morante comes across as quite impossible: generous to sycophants, very sharp-tongued and verbally abusive of Moravia, who comes across as having the patience of a saint and unflagging appreciation of her work. Though her behavior was not as outrageous as that of Rimbaud (as an enfant terrible), Morante was a tempestuous diva. (The titular Arturo of Arturo's Island clearly was named after Arthur Rimbaud.)

She preferred the company of gay men to that of women or straight men. She threw herself at Luchino Visconti and a gay American painter, Bill Morrow, but as far as her biographer knows or tells, did not attempt to bed the notorious pederast Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was for some years her best friend. It seems to me that her grand passions required impossibility of attainment. Tuck suggests family history repeating itself: Morante's mother's husband was impotent and not the father of Elsa or her siblings, and treated with continuous contempt by his wife.

There is something dutiful about Tuck's biography, which is the first of Morante in any language. I don't know what the duty was, other than completing a project based on several stays in the American Academy in Rome. Morante wished she had been born a boy (Arturo is not her only male alter ego), whereas Tuck writes of women's experiences, albeit women's "fish out of water" alienation experiences in alien environments (usually geographic, but occasionally social as well). Morante wrote hot (emotional) prose, Tuck writes taut, cool prose and does not wear her heart on her sleeve. (Tuck's French poet favorite is Paul Celan.)

Morante traveled extensively in her middle years, including times in New York, and a visit of India with Moravia and Pasolini, but she was very rooted in Rome. In contrast, Tuck who was born (in Paris in 1939 of German Jewish parents) grew up in multiple locations, including Perú, Urugauay, and summering with her father (a film producer) in Rome when she was a teenager, so that she had direct familiarity with the milieu of the Roman cultural elite (and met Moravia who was active in the Roman cinema world) in the postwar renaissance in which Morante and Moravia were leading figures.

No one seems to have read the book before its publication attuned to repetitions, of which there are more than a few. I would not go quite as far as to say the book is "padded," but question the extended graphologist analysis and the list of all the notable books on a New York Times list that included William Weaver's translation of History into English.

History was a huge best-seller in Italy and France, and, despite withering attacks from the left (including the quixotic Pasolini to whom she never spoke again, though he did not love many months after publication of his review), Morante has canonical status in Italian literature. Somewhat in the manner of the also hard-to-love Frida Kahlo, Morante's status has risen as that of the more-famous husband who left her (Diego Rivera in Kahlo's case) has fallen. With reprinting in the New York Review Press series of several Moravia novels, I don't think this is (or remains?) true in America. Not a lot of Italian literature is getting translated into English these days. Looking over the list of winners of the two main Italian literature prizes, I not only have not read but had not heard of most of the writers or books from recent years, and fewer and fewer US students are studying Italian, so very little the literature in Italian since Calvino has much presence even among those dwindling ranks of Americans interested in serious literature.

IMO, Tuck writes more like Moravia than Morante) both in producing cool prose and in regular work habits); this is not especially ironic since he comes across well in her Morante biography. Though making excuses for Morante, Tuck seems to me somewhat bemused by Morante's self-defeating behavior and indiscipline.

The book includes a number of photos. Morante does not look beautiful to me in any of them (contrast the modeling shot of Mary Lee Settle in Learning to Fly). She also does not look to me to have had "skinny legs" in the photo reproduced with my review, though it bears out the description of slender hips.

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My AC reviews of earlier Lily Tuck books:
The News from Paraguay (winner of the 2004 National Book Award for fiction)
Siam
Interviewing Matisse