The Redemption of the Siren

Paola Villani The Redemption of the Siren “Those who have no roots, and are cosmopolitan, go toward the death of passion and of the human: to avoid being provincial you must have a living village in your memory, to which the image and the heart always return, and that science and poetry have reshaped into a universal voice”.1 Doubtless, the ‘myth’ of Naples has been more successful than the real, or ‘true’ Naples. One could say that throughout the centuries the legend of urbs Neapolis has won over history, facts and men, and has been delivered as an ‘ideal’ patrimony of humanity. ‘Ideal’, because the myth has often been set aside by the Machiavellian ‘effective truth’.2 The Siren ‘Parthenope’ has entered into a legend that has not always done her justice, but that has had success in the world, with all the elements needed to go beyond the narrow limits of space and time. Therefore, the myth of Naples would confirm the original hermeneutic acceptance of the myth itself, as in the Greek mythos, in which the city is presented as a collection of deviant representations with respect to the historical truth, rationally demonstrated or directly experienced (logos). Naples is often presented to humanity not as a ‘place of memory’, but as a ‘memory of a place’, a collection of representations from the imagination, of a religious, sacred, and ritualistic or sociological and philosophical nature. It was a double myth: on the one hand, the enchanted, poetic land, the cradle of the highest humanity and wisdom; on the other, Naples as a magic but dark place, Neapolis as a true Siren, the symbol of 1 2 Ernesto De Martino, L’etnologo e il poeta, Preface to A. Pierro, Poesie (Roma: M. Dell’Arco, 1958). It would be a complex, and perhaps futile, operation to try to re-trace the long critical history of the interpretation of the myth from its birth, as a voluntary truth-reveailing operation, to a rudimental form of science, and on to its becoming a product of the religious spirit applied to themes which regarded the community. The “science of myths”, however, agrees to set the beginnings within the world of ancient Greece and, more precisely, at the distinction established by the historians of the archaic and classical age (specifically Herodotus and, to a greater extent Thucydides). 264 Paola Villani irresistible and fatal temptation, and therefore by association, a symbol of evil, for a city of immense charisma that is like no other. Legend and history have had distinct outcomes and destinies: their pathways often intersect, but they have created different faces for the same city and the same culture. In some moments throughout its history, however, due to a natural and involuntary movement one might call telluric, the two Naples’, the historical one and the mythical one, have almost completely coincided. So the myth has become, in the words of Giambattista Vico, a ‘vera narratio’. One of the moments that can certainly be put in this category is the Naples of the Second World War, and in particular the Naples of ’43, torn by the conflict and the nazi-fascist occupation. Naples had to open its doors to another foreign population: the liberators. It was after this contingency that the very Neapolitan Ermanno Rea already felt the need to highlight the two Naples’, to rediscover the city beyond the stereotypes, to find the real face of the city, the other Naples, forgotten or transfigured by travel literature and by folklore.3 So, in this historical context, the Siren city seems to liberate itself from the burden of its thousand portraits, those that have unjustly denigrated it and those that have sung of its splendors; to regain possession of itself and return to being the centre of national political life as well as culture, altogether a symbol of the universal suffering of humanity. Those wounds that had afflicted it before, impeding development, were now war wounds, the misery that was sublimated in the poverty of war. The ‘American Naples’ asked for a ransom, the ‘siren’ wanted ‘redemption’ and the high cost of the blood of many of its citizens nearly washed away the ‘marks of sin’ that they wanted to see upon it, right or wrong. Much has already been written on the American Naples4 (‘NapoliSciangai’5) in political or literary history. Now we must look at this prolific period following this interpretive key in the progressive ‘redemption’ of the 3 4 5 The essay by Rea is called “Le due Napoli” (1949) and is found in Fate bene alle anime del Purgatorio. Illuminazioni napoletane (Milano: Mondadori, 1977). Antonio Papa, “Napoli americana. Commentari”, Belfagor (31 June 1982), p. 249: “Metropolis-behind the front lines of Cassino, land of epidemics and of natural calamities, Naples was the theatre of the first impact between the economy of survival of great urban masses and the wartime consumerism of the conquerers, in a singular mix of phenomena of moderniwation and regression: according to a largely generalized model, but not without original characterizations.”. This is the title of one of the most illuminating descriptions of the city at that time: Nello Ajello, “Napoli-Sciangai”, in Nord-Sud (December 1954), p. 103. On daily life in Naples see Ferdinando Isabella, Napoli dall’8 settembre ad Achille Lauro (Napoli: Guida, 1980); Paolo De Marco, Polvere di piselli. La vita quotidiana a Napoli durante l’occupazione alleata (1943-1944) (Napoli: Liguori, 1996). The Redemption of the Siren 265 ‘body’ of Naples. In those years, the city truly was an international crossroads, crossed by many Italian or foreign travellers, literary men, allied soldiers or scholars, that immortalized the images of pain, as in the famous ‘fresco’ by Paul Ginsborg. In reality, in this ideal transfiguration of the liberation, the ‘suffering’ had already started in 1942, with the first of three tragic events of the Second World War in Naples: the bombarding of the port after the first air raid, on December 4th, 1942. It was then that the organization of the Neapolitan antifascists began. Intellectuals and politicians united forces. Adolfo Omodeo, on the 16th of July 1943, at just six days from the Allied landing in Sicily, in the name of the opposition groups, wrote a letter-manifesto published only in the foreign press that declared that the Italians were ready for an ‘active collaboration’ with the allies, who were not considered enemy invaders but comrades in the work of ‘human redemption’6. The armistice of September 8th surprised everyone. In spite of this preparatory work, the landing of the allies threw disorder onto a city that was already on its knees. One reads in the il Mattino of September 11th: “Naples is like a besieged city that has no reserves or provisions. It completely lacks all basic hygiene supplies, and totally and definitively lacks transport systems”7. The Neapolitans, however, were ready to collaborate. At the Neapolitan Committee for National Liberation, nearly 80,000 unemployed workers presented themselves, ready to work. This provoked the reaction of the German troops, and the savage murder of a sailor (who had been accused of having shot a Nazis) in front of the University on September 12th, 1943. This is one of the best remembered episodes of the period. At the end of the month, the so-called ‘Four Days’ (‘Quattro Giornate’) began, and for many they represented “one of the shining moments in the history of Naples, that once again had found the heroic impulse that it had shown many times over the centuries, in battles as in popular uprisings and riots”.8 Encroaching upon the glorious, apologetic scaffolding, which the historians have erected around the ‘Four Days’ as a “popular and creative 6 7 8 Giacomo De Antonellis, “Contributo alla Storia di Napoli negli anni 1918-1948”, in Storia di Napoli (Napoli: ESI, 1971), p. 151. il Mattino (11 September 1943). Carlo Criscio, Un cuore alla radio. Napoli 1943-1944 (Napoli: Criscio, 1954), p. 21. Similar enthusiastic tones on the ‘Four Days’ (‘Quattro giornate’) are used by Artieri: “the Resistance began here, in this city, [Naples]; it started with the beautiful epic of the ‘Four Days’, which was exemplary not only for its courage, but even more rare, for the wisdom and the moderation of the political passion shown when the last of its episodes was over and the last generous blood was spilled.” G. Artieri, “Breve storia di un’epopea”, in Le quattro giornate di Napoli, ed. by Giovanni Artieri (Napoli: Marotta, 1963), p. 15. 266 Paola Villani fight for the liberation from Nazism”,9 is the doubt, the mere hypothesis that the episode constitutes a historiographical myth. This hypothesis is inserted in a revisionist view that strips the ideological weight from the facts. At the end of the 1940’s, in this direction, with a real pioneering, demystifying spirit, we find the historian Edmondo Cione.10 Whether it is a historiographic myth or not, one incontrovertible fact which came out of those dramatic moments is the tragic character of that historical context. The first executions started in the Vomero quarter, but the entire city was involved until it became a single spectacle of devastation, described by many in sorrowful terms. It is on this occasion that the glory of the ‘scugnizzi’ arose. It was not a true ‘Resistance’,11 but it certainly was an occasion of mini ‘heroism’ that was previously unknown to the national press. Among the protagonists of this Phartenopean resistance, there was the ‘Corpo di Liberazione’ sustained by Omodeo and Croce. Little by little, the outline of the scenario of a collective tragedy emerged, remembered by many in frescoes of a rare effectiveness. The well-known account by Aldo De Jaco is eloquent, [...] a poor and desperate city, abandoned to its hunger, prisoner of an enemy that had received orders to reduce it to ‘mud and ashes’ ... ; a city that had been struck and shattered by more than a hundred bombardments, that had seen thousands of its inhabitants die and in the end had rebelled – and it was the first great city of Europe to do so – against the occupiers who were busy raking the houses to take the husbands away from their wives, parents away from their children, and send them to Germany to work and die for Hitler’s cause.12 9 10 11 12 Gguido D’Agostino, Le quattro giornate di Napoli (Milano: Newton & Compton, 1998), p. 11. Cione asserts that the ‘Four Days’ “should certainly be pruned of all of the apologetic exaggeration by some anti-fascits and cleared of every political significance.” Edmondo Cione, Napoli e Malaparte (Naples: Pellerano-Del Gaudio, no date [1950]), p. 61. So the Neapolitan population rebelled not for political reasons, but only for the “tremendous war conduct of the Germans, though objectively necessary, was always very harsh [...]” (Cione, pp. 61-62). On the meaning of the Four Days, between the two extremes of devaluation on one side and defence on the other. Biagio Passaro and Francesco Soverina, “A difficult antifascism: the South of Italy (1943-1980)”, in Il Presente e la storia, 45 (June 1994), pp. 43-84; Antonio Drago, “The interpretation of the Four Days according to two fundamental options,” in Mezzogiorno 1943. La scelta, la lotta, la speranza, ed. by Giovanni Chianese, (Napoli: ESI, 1996), p. 387 ff. G. De Antonellis, “Contributo alla Storia di Napoli negli anni 1918-1948”, in Storia di Napoli, (Napoli: ESI, 1971), p. 155: “Even though for the Campania area it is difficult to speak of resistance, in the proper sense, in that it lacks the specific characteristics of this ideological and military movement, the battles and the massacres that involve the Neapolitan area must be remembered.” A. De Jaco, Le quattro giornate di Napoli, (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1972), p. 7. The Redemption of the Siren 267 On the first of October in 1943, a Friday, among the first to enter the city was Gino De Sanctis, who remembered the experience in his Diario dimenticato (Forgotten Diary).13 “An unfinished victory”, mixed with tragedy and furor, is what overwhelmed Naples when the Allies landed. Among the observers who were most moved to pity by post-war Naples was the famous John Huston, who found himself in Naples in the first months after the allied occupation.14 In those years, then, a unique symbology of the American Naples often utilizes the image of a ‘body’ united with that of violence, of rape, to represent the suffering Parthenope. A symbology used, even before the wellknown novel La Pelle, in one of the most illuminating and still little known novel-chronicles on this theme, Il Regno del Sud, by Agostino degli Espinosa. This ‘body’ of Naples is lacerated by deep wounds. Daily life, soon after the liberation, is shown as a mixture of poverty and delinquency, hunger, unemployment, and a wave of inflation that increased the cost of living by 293 percent. Of the seven hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants registered in the city in 1945, the unemployed were more than one hundred thousand. There was no electricity, gas, water, and telephone and telegraph service was interrupted.15 The plague of prostitution spread so much that – according to Norman Lewis – it came to involve around one hundred and fifty thousand women.16 Perhaps it was a way to exorcise the war,17 but it was also a social and economic problem of vast dimensions, that brought grave consequences to 13 14 15 16 17 Gaetano De Sanctis, “Brani di un diario dimenticato”, in Le quattro giornate, ed. by G. Artieri (Naples: Marotta, 1963), p. 142. The author also refers to the Island of Capri, where Benedetto Croce had sought refuge: “Capri was liberated from the first day of the landing. For days and days the Neapolitans saw their island in the sea as a fortress of salvation, a hope. We heard that in that fortress Benedetto Croce, the Maestro who had taught ‘the religion of freedom’, had flown to the safety from his villa in Sorrento. It is a sign.” De Sanctis, p. 142. J. Huston, Cinque mogli e sessanta film (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1982), pp. 135-136. Papa, pp. 253-254; De Marco, p. 117. Norman Lewis, Napoli ’44 (Napoli: Adelphi,1998), pp. 136-137. Sergio Lambiase, Gian Battista Nazzaro, Napoli 1940-1945 (Milano: Longanesi, 1978), p. 135: “It is as if the exhausted city had awakened from a nightmare: to uninhibit desire, to concede oneself is another way to celebrate, in an orgy of ‘enraged’ offers, to exit from a long tunnel of fear. It is, in a certain sense, like wanting to dissipate the insecurity, the precariousness, the suffering endured in an excess of life without any other purpose than to live in excess”. Lewis identifies a ‘structural’ prostitution that involved around forty-two thousand women, as well as one described as ‘cyclical’ “this was the prostitution practiced within the unsuspected middle and lower-middle classes that was founded on the complicità of the nuclear family” Lewis, pp. 31-32. 268 Paola Villani the health sector as well because of the large increase in venereal diseases.18 The sale of bodies – as well as the loss of dignity of the person – insistently occupies the pages of Malaparte’s novel La Pelle, where bodies are sold for less than food: Bruised disheveled women with painted lips, with pale cheeks encrusted with rouge, horrible and pitiful, waited on the corner of the alleyways offering to passersby their miserable merchandise: little boys and girls, eight or ten years old, that the Moroccan, Indian, Algerian, Malagasy soldiers touched, reaching under their dresses or slipping their hand through the buttons of their shorts. ... The price of little girls and boys, in the last few days had fallen, and continued to fall. While the price of sugar, oil, flour, meat and bread continued to increase, the price of human meat fell day by day.19 It was that same widespread sale of bodies that brought to the fore the price of that rare commodity, ‘virginity’, in the well-known and scandalous chapter entitled “The Virgin of Naples”.20 In the name of the “disgusting, damned skin”, humanity had not only lost its civil sense, but also its soul and dignity. And Malaparte is there to describe the American Naples, loser and winner at the same time, a city of pain and passion, in the above-mentioned book – the most famous of his trilogy on war21 – in which he identifies all that is tragic in that moment and that place, and reconnects it to the Christian symbology of the ‘passion”, because, in the end, “Christ was Neapolitan”: “No group of people on this earth has ever suffered as much as the Neapolitan people. It has suffered hunger and slavery for 20 decades, and it doesn’t complain. It doesn’t curse anyone, it doesn’t hate anyone: not even misery. Christ was Neapolitan”.22 The ‘Liberation’ was not able to bring Naples ‘freedom’: it was clearly something else. Malaparte’s journey did not remain isolated, because, other than being a crucial point in Italian political life, the American Naples assumed an important position in cultural matters. So much so that the ‘flight to Italy’ by many intellectuals finished right here in the Campanian capital. 18 19 20 21 22 This increase was recorded between October 1943 and December 1944. On this topic see Giovanni Chianese, “Ceti popolari e comportamenti quotidiani a Napoli”, in V. Lombardi and others, Alle radici del nostro presente. Napoli e la Campania dal fascismo alla Repubblica (1943-1946) (Napoli: ESI, 1986), p. 55 ff; De Marco, p. 39 ff. As Parente comments (Parente, p. 311): “Neapolitan prostitution in those years always had an impelling economic base: the need for food, clothing, and money move this market made of mediations and corruption, where minors act as able hunters of clients for mothers and sisters”. Curzio Malaparte, La Pelle (Milano: Mondadori, 2003), p. 9. See Malaparte, La Pelle, pp. 37-49. Curzio Malaparte’s La pelle was published in France in 1949 (Paris: Denoël, 1949) and in Italy in 1950 (Roma-Milano: Aria d’Italia, 1950). About the war, Malaparte also wrote Kaputt (1944) and Cristo proibito (1950). See Malaparte, La Pelle, p. 7. The Redemption of the Siren 269 Between 1943 and 1944 Mario Soldati, Giorgio Bassani, Alberto Moravia, Corrado Alvaro, and editorial organizers such as Leo Longanesi came here; publicity initiatives were started, such as the theoretical magazine of the Communist Party, La Rinascita and the literary magazine “Aretusa”, directed by Francesco Flora.23 Unlimited, and perhaps redundant, is the list of Italian testimonials on the Naples of the liberation. A gallery of personalities, historians but also fiction writers, poets and dramatists, native and ‘adopted’ Neapolitans, who couldn’t put aside their memories of that incredible and original disastrous show of the Parthenopean siren put on her knees first by the war and then by the liberation. In this brief rationale, though, one cannot ignore the weight of the memoirs-denunciations of non-Neapolitans like Malaparte, or like Corrado Alvaro and Ortese, who are non-Neapolitan only on their birth-certificates. One might say that Naples has gone down in history thanks to literature. A narrative that many define as ‘irregular’ or worse ‘amateurish’, but that, extending a formula that was once used for the neo-realist Levi, could be called “provocatively impure”,24 intended as a point of confluence of many cultural components, but also animated by a memorial deposit that unhinged the narrow confines of chronicalistic realism and animates pages of great artistic, and, one would say, also ethical value, pages of great humanity. It is the humanity of offense, of the offended and suffering world, to paraphrase Vittorini, that does not permit us to define this narrative as a ‘documentary’. A narrative that starts with reality, but goes beyond it, reaching spatial and temporal limits (Naples after the war). A metaphor of the existence of universal values. A metaphor in which, to use an idea from Montale and Eliot, the ‘poetics of the object’, becomes an ‘encounter’ with the ‘evil of living’, the evil that, like the lava flowing from Vesuvius, invades alleyways, streets and town squares, overwhelming the people. The war might therefore be seen as an ‘eruption’ of the ‘evil of living’, an objectification of a Southern European way that becomes existential. Entering Naples becomes a true descent into hell. Even an outsider such as Mario Soldati finds himself having to confront these people to which he has the contrasting sentiment of 23 24 In “Aretusa” a first reconstruction can be found in Dante Della Terza, “Tra Napoli e Roma: Aretusa e Mercurio, due riviste dell’Italia del dopoguerra”, in Italy and America 1943-44. Italian, American and Italian American experiences of the Liberation of the Italian Mezzogiorno (Naples: La Città del Sole, 1997), p. 411ff. On Neapolitan literature in that period see Enzo Golino, “Dopo il ’43”, in Napoli dopo un secolo, ed. by Francesco Compagna and others (Napoli: ESI, 1961), pp. 401-428. G. De Donato, Preface to Carlo Levi, Coraggio dei miti. Scritti contemporanei. 1922-1974 (Bari: De Donato, 1975), p. XI. 270 Paola Villani attraction and repulsion, as he writes in his autobiographical Lettere da Capri.25 So a particular category is created with this literature that is natural, psychological and sociological all at once: Homo neapolitanus, who escapes all identification or any collective view26. Homo neapolitanus inspires pages of high poetry, destined to make itself universal and to give a new, truer image of the city. In the face of this burning panorama of pain, the very same category of neorealism, already in itself debated, is destined to fall to pieces or at least to open itself to a spiritual and universal meaning. Because the story of Naples in 1943 is the story of a humiliated and tragic alienation. The South, too, is part of this great metaphor of existence as well, as Carlo Levi so masterfully states. Carlo Levi gives testimony to the feral “Bestial Neapoletanness”, during his stay in Naples immediately after the war, in L’Orologio. That touching experience, in the ‘body’ of the city27, is a metaphor that drew inspiration from an effective bestiary. Levi offers enlightening reflections on antifascism which, written for the whole of Italy, adapt very well to the Parthenopean capital, for the anxiety of “passion and responsibility”, and the “incapacity to be free” that the author finds at the base of fascism, in his wellknown article Paura della libertà (Fear of Freedom).28 25 26 27 28 See Mario Soldati, Le lettere da Capri (Milano: Mondadori, 1967) [also Garzanti, Milano 1959], pp. 204-205. See Mario Stefanile, La letteratura a Napoli (1930-1970), in Storia di Napoli, X (Napoli: Società Editrice Storia di Napoli, 1971), p. 603: “[...] and if Fucini or Malaparte [Naples] describe the city as evil and dirty, merciless and suspicious, sordid and dirty one might also say that Naples owes its extraordinary life force to all this, and to the certifiable presence of a ‘homo neapolitanus’ that defines itself beyond all of the rhetoric as the fruit of a unique plant, with thousand roots buried in an experience of collective life that is shaped as a story of abuse and tolerance, dominations and innumerous sufferances.” Again on the homo neapolitanus: “Protagonist and spectator, both hero and victim, patient and carnivorous in its truth and its legend, dominated by the natural and social environment, still today the product of a thousand contrasting elements that are nonetheless reconcilable, though grudgingly, one inside the other, this is how homo neapolitanus passes steadily from the news to the same history of literature, in the theatre, and even in the poetry and in that rough and ready popular poetry that is in their songs.” (Stefanile, p. 604). Carlo Levi, “Tra Prometeo e Sant’Antonio”, in Le mille patrie. Uomini, fatti, paesi d’Italia, (Roma: Donzelli, 2000), p. 211. The article was writeen in 1939 but, because of censorship, came out in 1946, the year after his masterpiece Cristo si è fermato a Eboli. See Carlo Levi, Paura della libertà (Torino: Einaudi, 1946). The Redemption of the Siren 271 In 1944, Naples also hosted Corrado Alvaro, who lived a “brief and bitter experience” in the city.29 A Southern and European writer, who should be remembered among the pioneers of the ‘new realism’ traces a picture only apparently less hard, attentive to the stories of single individuals. In this desolating wartime panorama we can also find Anna Maria Ortese: “Returning to Naples in ’45, was like I had predicted upon my arrival. I found myself on a street”.30 Ortese figures among the protagonists of that cultural rebirth of Naples in the fifties. At the end of the war, the city quickly gave birth to a new cultural period, where promising young writers were destined to mark a real change. They were the young literary scholars of “SUD”: those scholars Ortese had portrayed in “Il silenzio della ragione”, a controversial chapter of Il mare non bagna Napoli. Here the author describes the dark evil of a literary generation who, perhaps knowingly, sealed its own destiny.31 Il mare non bagna Napoli was soon defined as a “gratuitous defamation”32 according to a destiny that not long before had been that of the arch-Italian, Malaparte. And yet perhaps few others knew how to paint the grating picture of those years like Malaparte did in a suggestive ‘fresco’ of the disease of Naples. Though the condemnation by Ortese was highly intellectual, metaphysical, perhaps less ‘concrete’, but always ‘true’, the Malapartian evil was above all a physical one, a disease. It was ‘the plague.’ This ‘plague’ caught Naples not only as an endemic illness, such as in Virgil’s Georgics or in Boccaccio’s Decameron, but rather as an existential disease, like in Camus’s La peste. With his ‘plague’ Malaparte also seems to echo the ‘informal’ French artist Artaud, who saw in the plague a beneficial liberating scourge, because it “lowers the mask, uncovers lies, laxity, vileness and hypocrisy”:33 The atrocious suspicion that the atrocious disease had been brought to Naples by the liberators themselves, was certainly not right: but it became a certainty in the soul of the people when they realised, with a confused wonder and superstitious terror, that the allied 29 30 31 32 33 Federico Frascani, Le due Napoli di Corrado Alvaro (Napoli: Arturo Berisio, 1969), p. 5. “There are many writers in the last half-century, after having encountered Naples, left their impressions on the page. But very few have been able to approach the city with a sincere intention of understanding it and having done so, been able to leave. Anna Maria Ortese, Dove il tempo è un altro, MicroMega, 5 (1990), p. 139. Anna Maria Ortese, Il mare non bagna Napoli, p. 117. To define the novel as “a gratuitous defamation of Naples and the Neapolitans”, that, like that of Malaparte, signals a break in the tradition of ‘Neapolitanness’ was, at the time an article by Gino Grassi. See Gino Grassi, “Una gratuita diffamazione di Napoli e dei napoletani” in Roma, 13 August 1953. Also joining the choir was the socialist-communist newspaper “La Voce del Mezzogiorno”, that ran an article signed G.N., Una Napoli senza uomini, on 15 September 1953. A Reconstruction of the debate about the novel is in Nello Ajello, “Ortese spacca Napoli”, la Repubblica (15 May 1994). Antonin Artaud, Il teatro e la peste, in Il teatro e il suo doppio (Torino: Einaudi, 1995), p. 150. 272 Paola Villani soldiers were strangely immune to contagion. ... As soon as the disease struck, everyone became the spy of the father and the mother, of the brothers, the children the spouse, the lover, the couple and their dearest friends; but never of themselves. ... The extraordinary character of such a new disease was this: that it did not corrode the body, but the soul. Limbs stayed apparently intact, but inside the covering of the healthy meat the soul was broken down; it dissolved. It was a type of moral disease, against which there was no defense.34 In this ‘scandalous’ novel, Malaparte’s description of a feral humanity provoked passionate debates, not only in the Neapolitan area. In an editorial climate that was already quite difficult, many slashing reviews of his work appeared, with the very Neapolitan signatures of Rea and Stefanile to the well-known Emilio Cecchi,35 until the official sentence, by a motion of the City council on February 2nd, 1950.36 In the end, however, the Malapartian 34 35 36 Malaparte, La pelle, pp. 25-27. See, for example, the reviews: Mario Stefanile, “Sulla pelle di Napoli”, Roma (30 January 1950); Domenico Rea, “La pellaccia di Malaparte”, in Il Giornale (7 February 1950). Twenty years later, Stefanile had, at least in part, revised his positions. See Mario Stefanile, La letteratura a Napoli (1930-1970), p. 649: “Both [scil. Kaputt and La pelle] are not the result of a moral compromise but of a profound interior nihilism, a kind of ‘cupio dissolvi’, the sadist pleasure in the torture of others and of oneself at the very limit of tolerance.”. On the contrary, Emilio Cecchi, who had already condemned the novel in the columns of L’Europeo on February 12, 1950, and would remain firm in his judgment. See Emilio Cecchi, Il Novecento, in Nicola Sapegno, Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. IX, (Milano: Garzanti, 1974), p. 689: “Let us say, without even needing to raise our voices, that [Malaparte] has done, God forgive him, one of those things that one really should not do. Silente and hypocrisy are almost better, than this ambiguous cleverness. He has brought misery, shame, and atrocities into play, and stripped them of all decency, in order to use them for literary purposes.” ha risposto il noto biografo malapartiano, Giordano Bruno Guerri, a well known biographer of Malaparte, answered back: “Dear Cecchi, with silence and hypocrisy one becomes an Italian Academic” Giordano Bruno Guerri, L’Arcitaliano. Vita di Curzio Malaparte (Milano: Leonardo, 1991; I edn Milano: Bompiani, 1980), p. 252. The motion obtained the “moral banishment of Mr. Curzio Malaparte because he wrote a book full of oscene lies about Naples and the Neapolitans.”. the motion, made by the town councillors Giuseppe Cicconardi and Michele Parise, found very few discordant voices. Even Mario Alicata, representative and town councillor, defined the author as a “mediocre writer, scandalmonger and publicity hound”. See Antonio Palermo, “E torna ‘la pelle’”, La Voce della Campania (11 February 1979); Renato Caserta, Quel buio a Napoli (1943-1944), (Napoli: Aba Edizioni, 1997), pp. 47-48. The news was taken up by il Mattino in an article by Titti Marrone on June 3, 1998 and concluded with the re-qualification of Malaparte by the City Council led by Antonio Bassolino. Intellectuals who had attended the convention “Curzio Malaparte. La rivolta del santo maledetto” held at the Istituto Suor Orsola Benincasa, on May 7-10, 1997, led the motion. See Carmine Di Biase, Introduction to Curzio Malaparte. La rivolta del santo maledetto, proceedings ed. by Carmine Di Biase (Naples: CUEN, 1999), p. 7 ff. On the debite that Malaparte cause in Neapolitan circles see also Edmondo Cione, Napoli e Malaparte; L. Parente, “Una città contro. La polemica Napoli-Malaparte nel secondo dopoguerra”, pp. 303-324; Sergio Campailla, “La pelle (e The Redemption of the Siren 273 picture did not differ from the novel-reportage The Gallery, by the young American officer John Horne Burns (a book that earned the author the nickname ‘American Malaparte’),37 or from the diary of Norman Lewis, the very famous Napoli ’44.38 Nor did it differ from the book Operation Eclipse! by the journalist Alan Moorehead,39 while even cruder official reports were issued by the allies. The pages of La Pelle are connected by an ideal thread to the chapter that closes Kaputt, “Il Sangue” (‘Blood’),40 where all humanity has feral traits. It is a humanity degraded by misery and desperation; women “dressed in lurid rags, covered with hair, with breasts hanging out of their blouses torn to shreds” or figures on the borderline between “beasts” and men, or entire groups of men in caverns of tufa stone, “as strange populations in tattered rags, that in the subterranean labyrinth had found refuge and salvation from the bombs, lived for three years in a frightening promiscuity, rolling around in their own excrement [...] continuing in their odd jobs, in their shops, in their dark contraband”.41 From the crude and grating Malapartian realism, one can almost hypothesize that the plague, a symbolic image of the war itself, was really a cathartic disease, a pathway of purification that permitted Neapolis to redeem itself. This disease burns everything, but it also justifies everything, and conducts everything to an ideal road to moral purification, before the historic one. The Naples of ’44 is no longer that barbaric city of delinquency that Leopardi saw. That “semibarbaric and semi-African” people had become “oppressed”. There is therefore almost a Manzonian “provident misadventure” that brings about the birth from the ashes of a dishonest humanity, the great people of heroism. The suffering of Neapolitans was a suffering whose “antiquity, fatality, mysterious nature made sacred and in the presence of which my suffering was nothing but human and new, with profound roots in my antiquity”.42 In this interpretative key we can inaugurate a new reading of Naples, which includes and synthesizes previous readings, engulfing in itself an oleographic picture of travel literature from the 18th and 19th centuries, together with the opposing sad descriptions of a corrupt city. Both of these faces, double-face Janus of a single great mythological figure, are fused in 37 38 39 40 41 42 l’anima) di Malaparte”, in Curzio Malaparte. La rivolta del santo maledetto, pp. 137-145; ora in Sergio Campailla, Controcodice (ESI: Napoli, 2001). See Masolino D’Amico, “Malaparte americano”, in La Stampa (10 April 1993). Now Norman Lewis, Napoli ’44 (Milano: Adelphi 1993). See Alan Moorehead, Operazione eclissi (Milano: Garzanti, 1969). The novel was published for Vallecchi in 1944. Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt, pp. 400, 401, 403. Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt, pp. 403-404. 274 Paola Villani the ‘liberated city’ on its knees. The Second World War and the ‘Four Days’ can therefore also be seen as a road to redemption, which fully validates the crudest testimonies without depriving the city or, indeed, the homo Neapolitanus in any way. I will conclude with a brief and incomplete mention of the ‘indigenous’ authors who have portrayed the city with courage, eschewing any summary condemnatory judgments. Their sorrowful tones come from the heart of the city, so to speak. That is the case of Eduardo de Filippo, who at the end of the war, when faced with the gulf of destruction and in the frenetic anxiety of reconstruction – a reconstruction that did not only involve streets, homes, schools, churches, and entire cities, but also the political institution, and above all the bodies and souls of men – raises his sorrowful cry in Napoli Milionaria. De Filippo’s work achieved a great success, both in its 1945 theatrical version and in its 1950 cinematographic version.43 Strong accusations, however, followed on the part of intellectuals,44 who contrasted Malaparte and Eduardo, and the debate even resulted in an interrogation at the Presidency of the Council of Ministers. Eduardo’s reaction was welcomed by the left-wing press.45 These debates cannot cancel an irrefutable fact, i.e. the rebirth of a Southern and Phartenopean literature. A rebirth that was baptised in 1945, but that had planted its roots before, in the glorious ‘Four Days’. In those years, after almost thirty years “of non-participation one could say that Italian literary life is still more European”,46 Naples returns to be the inspiring muse of great masterpieces. In the brief period of a few years the postwar publications on Naples are uncountable. “It was a new literature that was 43 44 45 46 Eduardo was not in Naples in 1943. He returned from Rome only in 1945, when he formed the Theatre company called “Compagnia Umoristica Eduardo e Titina De Filippo” later named “Il Teatro di Eduardo con Titina De Filippo”, that debuted at the beginning of 1945 at the Teatro Gloria in Naples. It was in this Naples after the war, that he wrote Napoli milionaria!, the play that inaugurated the cycle of plays called “giorni dispari” and on March 25, 1945 it was put on stage at the San Carlo Opera theatre for a benefit matinée. On the debate between Eduardo and the people, both intellectual and non-intellectual, of Naples, see, among others, Federico Frascani, La Napoli amara di Eduardo De Filippo (Firenze: Parenti, 1958). “Some newspapers have written that I have denigrated Naples. but I [...] actually cleaned up the ‘infamous sub-ground floor apartments’ And what can an artist do but denounce the state of things? That is our job. I have not denigrated Naples, but in other films I will show how it really is, I’ll show the inside of the apartments, I show all of the reality of Naples. [...] The misery really exists. And I denounce it”. From an article by Augusto Pancaldi, L’Unità (10 October 1950). On the debate created by the play, see Quarenghi, Vicoli stretti e libertà dell’arte, in Eduardo De Filippo, Teatro, ed. by N. De Blasi and Paola Quarenghi, (Milano: Mondadori, 2000), vol. II, p. CXLV ff. Mario Stefanile, p. 597. The Redemption of the Siren 275 made as an authentic truth of fantasy”.47 This literature went beyond neorealism, for it was able to draw from a burning reality the sad pages of poems, songs or theatre pieces. That is how masterpieces of real ‘Neapolitan’ literature were created, written and signed in Naples by homines neapoletani. It was an immense mass of titles, that did not presuppose a common narrative school, a unified approach to writing, and did not mark a reprise in Neapolitan publishing, if one considers that a large part of these novels were printed in the editorial capitals of the time, Florence, Milan, or Turin. That is how Speranzella48 was created, a dramatic postwar chronicle by Bernari, who after the success of Tre operai, named his work for an antique street that cuts through the Spanish Quarter from Toledo to Sant’Elmo like the more famous Spaccanpoli. That is also how Spaccanapoli was created, for its passionate and convulsive writing of the very Neapolitan Domenico Rea,49 or the coeval L’Oro di Napoli by Giuseppe Marotta.50 A few years later, the first novel by Michele Prisco was published, La provincia addormentata, and also that of Luigi Incoronato, La scala a San Potito.51 To the almost mythical transformation of the Vesuvian province of Prisco, Incoronato puts in contrast a portrait of clandestine and indigent Naples. To this already wellrepresented group, ten years later, Aldo Stefanile would be added.52 Among the more suggestive transfigurations of the native city, taking up the same metaphor of the feral and animalistic reality, there is that of Raffaele La Capria, who almost attempts a justification of the ‘matericatellurica’ image of a Naples, in a “pantheism of a life and tangible material”53 that was previously offered by Malaparte. (Translation by Dianna Pickens) 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 Mario Stefanile, p. 600. For an overview of Neapolitan literature in the nineteen-fifties, see, among others, Paolo Varvaro, Percorsi culturali a Napoli, in Il silenzio della ragione. Politica e cultura a Napoli negli anni Cinquanta, ed. by Giovanni Chianese (Napoli: ESI, 1994), pp. 135-180; G. Botta, Narratori napoletani del secondo dopoguerra (Napoli: L’arte tipografica, 1955). Carlo Bernari, Speranzella (Milano: Mondadori, 1949). The novel won the Viareggio Prize in 1950. Several years previously, Bernari had written about the same subject in Napoli guerra e pace (Roma: Edizioni di “Cronache”, 1946). Domenico Rea, Spaccanapoli (Milano: Mondadori, 1947). See Giuseppe Marotta, L’oro di Napoli (Milano: Bompiani, 1947). See Michele Prisco, La provincia addormentata (Milano: Mondadori, 1949); Luigi Incoronato, La scala a San Potito, Mondadori, 1950. About the bitter experiences of war, Incoronato dedicated also Le pareti bianche, a book edited in 1968 after his death by Mondadori. Aldo Stefanile, I cento bombardamenti di Napoli; i giorni delle Am-lire (Napoli: Marotta, 1968). This is the definition by Fabiano Fabbri. See Fabiano Fabbri, “Malaparte scrittore ‘informale’: la vita sotto ‘la pelle’”, in Curzio Malaparte. La rivolta del santo maledetto, pp. 41 e 51. Fabbri, further observes p. 41-42: “A world [that of Malaparte], let it be clear, governed by violent impulses, in perpetual formation, ready to change immediately into the 276 Paola Villani Bibliography Ajello, Nello, “Napoli-Sciangai”, Nord-Sud (December 1954). Artieri, Giovanni, “Breve storia di un’epopea”, in Le quattro giornate di Napoli, ed. by Giovanni Artieri (Napoli: Marotta, 1963). Asor Rosa, Alberto, Genus italicum. Saggi sull’identità letteraria italiana nel corso del tempo (Torino: Einaudi, 1997). Bernari, Carlo, Speranzella (Milano: Mondadori, 1949). Bo, Carlo, Inchiesta sul neorealismo (Torino: Edizioni Radio Italiana, 1951). Borri, Giancarlo, Invito alla lettura di Anna Maria Ortese, (Milano: Mursia, 1988). Campailla, Sergio, “La pelle (e l’anima) di Malaparte”, in Curzio Malaparte. La rivolta del santo maledetto, Proceedings of the Conference ed. by Carmine Di Biase (Napoli: CUEN, 1999); now in Sergio Campailla, Controcodice (ESI: Napoli 2001). Caracciolo di Castagneto, Francesco, ‘43/’44 Diario di Napoli (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1964). Caserta, Renato, Quel buio a Napoli (1943-1944) (Napoli: Aba Edizioni 1997). Chianese, Giovanni, “Ceti popolari e comportamenti quotidiani a Napoli”, in Vera Lombardi and others, Alle radici del nostro presente. Napoli e la Campania dal fascismo alla Repubblica (1943-1946) (Napoli: ESI, 1986). Cione, Edmondo, Napoli e Malaparte, (Napoli: Pellerano-Del Gaudio, no date [1950]). Clerici, Luca, Apparizione e visione. Vita e opere di Anna Maria Ortese (Milano: Mondadori, 2002). Criscio, Carlo, Un cuore alla radio. Napoli 1943-1944 (Napoli: Criscio,1954). D’Agostino, Guido, Le quattro giornate di Napoli (Milano: Newton & Compton, 1998). De Antonellis, Giacomo, La fine del fascismo a Napoli (Milano: Ares, 1967). De Donato, Gigliola, Preface to Carlo Levi, Coraggio dei miti. Scritti contemporanei. 1922-1974 (Bari: De Donato, 1975). De Jaco, Aldo, Le quattro giornate di Napoli (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1972). De Marco, Paolo, Polvere di piselli. La vita quotidiana a Napoli durante l’occupazione alleata (1943-1944), (Napoli: Liguori, 1996). De Martino, Ernesto, “L’etnologo e il poeta”, Preface to A. Pierro, Poesie (Roma: M. Dell’Arco, 1958). purest material every time a weak attempt at representation tries to insinuate itself into the shapeless magma”. The Redemption of the Siren 277 De Sanctis, Gaetano, “Brani di un diario dimenticato”, in Le quattro giornate, ed. by G. Artieri (Napoli: Marotta, 1963). Degli Espinosa, Agostino, Il regno del Sud, with a preface by G. Russo (Milano: Rizzoli, 1995). Di Biase, Carmine, Introduction to Curzio Malaparte. La rivolta del santo maledetto, Proceedings of the Conference ed. by Carmine Di Biase (Napoli: CUEN, 1999). Dorfless, Gillo, L’estetica del mito da Vico a Wittgenstein (Milano: Mursia, 1990). Drago, Antonio, “La interpretazione delle Quattro Giornate secondo le due opzioni fondamentali”, in Mezzogiorno 1943. La scelta, la lotta, la speranza, ed. by G. Chianese (Napoli: ESI, 1996). Falaschi, Gianni, Carlo Levi (Firenze: Il Castoro, 1971). Frascani, Federico, La Napoli amara di Eduardo De Filippo (Firenze: Parenti, 1958). —, Le due Napoli di Corrado Alvaro (Napoli: Arturo Berisio, 1969). Galasso, Giuseppe, Napoli (Roma – Bari: Laterza, 1987). Ginsborg, Paul, Storia d’Italia dal dopoguerra ad oggi, trans. by M. Flores and S. Perini, 2 vols (Torino: Einaudi, 1989). Golino, Enzo, “Dopo il ’43”, in Francesco Compagna and others, Napoli dopo un secolo (Napoli: ESI, 1961). Greco, Lorenzo, Censura e scrittura: Vittorini, lo pseudo-Malaparte, Gadda (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1983). Guerri, Giordano Bruno, L’Arcitaliano. Vita di Curzio Malaparte, (Milano: Leonardo 1991; 1st edn Milano: Bompiani, 1980) —, Malaparte dopo la caduta dei muri, in Curzio Malaparte. La rivolta del santo maledetto, ed. by C. Di Biase (Napoli: CUEN, 1999). Huston, John, Cinque mogli e sessanta film, trans. by P. Chiesa (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1982). Incoronato, Luigi, La scala a San Potito (Milano: Mondadori, 1950). Isabella, Ferdinando, Napoli dall’8 settembre ad Achille Lauro (Napoli: Guida, 1980). Isnenghi, Mario, “Belfagor”. Giornali e giornalisti (Roma: Savelli, 1975). La Capria, Raffaele, L’armonia perduta (Milano: Mondadori, 1986). —, L’occhio di Napoli, (Milano: Mondadori, 1994). Lambiase, Sergio and Nazzaro Gian Battista, Napoli 1940-1945 (Milano: Longanesi 1978). Levi, Carlo, L’Orologio, (Torino: Einaudi, 1953). Lewis, Norman, Napoli ’44 (Milano: Adelphi, 1998). Malaparte, Curzio [Erik Suckert], L’Europa vivente ed altri saggi politici (1921-1931) (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1961). 278 Paola Villani —, Kaputt (Milano: Mondadori, 1997). —, La Pelle (Milano: Mondadori, 2003; 1st edn 1950). Marotta, Giuseppe, L’oro di Napoli (Milano: Bompiani, 1947). Moorehead, Alan, Operazione eclissi (Milano: Garzanti, 1969). Ortese, Anna Maria, “Dove il tempo è un altro”, MicroMega, 5 (1990), 139. —, Il mare non bagna Napoli (Milano: Adelphi, 1994 [1953]). Palermo, Antonio, “E torna ‘la pelle’”, La Voce della Campania (11 February 1979). Papa, Antonio, “Napoli americana. Commentari”, Belfagor (31 June 1982). Pardini, Giuseppe, Curzio Malaparte. Bibliografia politica (Milano: Luni, 1995). —, Il fascismo integrale nella concezione di Curzio Suckert Malaparte, in Nuova Antologia, 3 (July-September 1994), 185-225. Parente, Luigi, “Una città contro. La polemica Napoli-Malaparte nel secondo dopoguerra”, Italia contemporanea, 215 (June 1999), 308. —, “Zola, l’affare Dreyfus e Napoli”, in Il terzo Zola. Emile Zola dopo i “Rougon-Macquart”, ed. by G.C. Menichelli (Napoli: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1990). Passaro, Biagio and Soverina Francesco, “Un antifascismo difficile: il Sud d’Italia (1943-1980)”, Il Presente e la storia, 45 (June 1994), 43-84. Prisco, Michele, La provincia addormentata (Milano: Mondadori, 1949). Quarenghi, Paola, “Vicoli stretti e libertà dell’arte”, in Edoardo De Filippo, Teatro, ed by N. De Blasi e P. Quarenghi (Milano: Mondadori, 2000). Rea, Domenico, Fate bene alle anime del Purgatorio. Illuminazioni napoletane (Milano: Mondadori, 1977). —, “La pellaccia di Malaparte”, Il Giornale (7 February 1950). Santarelli, Enzo, Mezzogiorno 1943-1944. Uno “sbandato” nel Regno del Sud (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1999). Soldati, Mario, Le lettere da Capri (Milano: Mondadori, 1967 [1959]). Stefanile, Aldo, I cento bombardamenti di Napoli; i giorni delle Am-lire, (Napoli: Marotta, 1968). Stefanile, Mario, “La letteratura a Napoli (1930-1970)”, in Storia di Napoli, vol. X, (Napoli: Società Editrice Storia di Napoli, 1971). Suckert Ronchi, Edda, Malaparte (Città di Castello, 1993). Varvaro, Paolo, “Percorsi culturali a Napoli”, in Il silenzio della ragione. Politica e cultura a Napoli negli anni Cinquanta, ed. by Gloria Chianese (Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1994).