By Anna Maria Ortese, translated by Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee, Pushkin Press, 192 pages, £9.99
Most visitors to Naples become intoxicated by the city’s grimy beauty. But while the narrow alleys and chaotic babble are perfect tourist fodder, for people who actually live there it isn’t nearly so quaint. In his 2006 book of reportage, Gomorrah, the Italian author Roberto Saviano gave us a chastening portrait of its ruthless mafia gangs. And in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, a friendship between two women plays out against the backdrop of a destroyed post-war city.
One of Ferrante’s heroes is Anna Maria Ortese, who described a similar world in real time. Born in Rome in 1914, Ortese settled with her family in Naples in 1928. She became involved in the literary world in the Thirties, writing stories and working as a journalist. Published in English for the first time, Evening Descends Upon the Hills is a collection of her work dating from the Forties and Fifties — including both fiction and reportage. It does not make pretty reading: Ortese’s vision is resolutely unromantic, with flashes of the disturbingly surreal.
In the opening story, A Pair of Eyeglasses, a nearly blind girl named Eugenia can’t wait for her new specs. Without them, “she had always been wrapped in fog: the room where she lived, the courtyard always full of hanging laundry, the alley overflowing with colours and cries, everything for her was covered by a thin veil.” But the glasses cause her nothing but trouble. Her demented aunt beats her because they are so expensive. (“Eight thousand lire no less. They bleed me dry, these scoundrels.”) A boy calls her a liar for saying the glasses will be gold-framed. When Eugenia finally gets her hands on them the fog does indeed lift from her eyes — but a clearer impression of Naples proves much too powerful, and she faints.
Vision is a running theme in the collection — the contrast between how we see ourselves and how others see us. In Family Interior, Anastasia, an unmarried oldest daughter, is viewed more like a maid than a proper family member. (“Anastasia, my shirts!” her brother calls out.) Her lonely existence is enlivened when she hears that a man she once took a fancy to is back in town and asking after her. Almost against her will, she allows herself to imagine a happy future. But the reader is warned that all might not turn out well when the sounds of that old Neapolitan heartbreaker Core ‘ngrato (“Ungrateful heart”) is heard “rising here and there in the narrow streets from phonographs and radios”.
Ortese’s journalism is as unblinking as her fiction. In The Involuntary City, she visits a bomb-damaged granary on the seafront where people left homeless by the war have taken refuge. While interviewing a woman she spots three sewer rats gnawing on some bread — an unforgettable image. In this hell on earth, Ortese’s conversations take on an explicitly Dantesque tone. She suddenly recognises a man she knew 20 years earlier as an office boy from a respectable family: “How ever did you get here?” she asks, echoing Dante’s question to his old teacher Brunetto Latini. Ortese, who at the time lived a hand-to-mouth writer’s existence, knew all too well the precarious nature of respectability.
The second half of the book is a series of interviews with literary figures Ortese knew from her youth. But for those of us not up to speed with our mid-20th century Neapolitan publishing circles, the most vivid sections come when she is travelling to her appointments, allowing her beady eye to land on the locals. Naples had an apparently inexhaustible supply of odd characters: The woman on the tram with no nose carrying an enormous plant on her lap; the bored youths running after the tram flashing their penises, “wanting to draw our attention to all they possessed”; the boys who hang a small animal from a tree while singing hymns to the Virgin Mary.
As you might imagine, not all Neapolitans were happy with Ortese’s portrayal. When this book was first published in 1953, “condemnation”, her word, was heaped on it. She left Naples and until she died in 1998 made only one more fleeting visit.
But like many people who feel offended by portrayals of their home town or culture, those who objected were taking it all too personally. In a preface written in 1994, Ortese attributes her “exalted” and “feverish” tone not so much to the city she was describing but her own “authentic neurosis” caused by the war. This short book, so full of arresting images and startling observations, is a portrait of an author who found in a damaged city her perfect muse.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2018
