Apparizione e visione: vita e opere di Anna Maria Ortese by Luca Clerici (review)

Abstract

806 Reviews work of writers such as Gabriella Gribaudi, John Dickie, and Jane Schneider, who have investigated the emergence of particular constructs of Southern identity in the nineteenth century during and after the period of unification. In many ways, there? fore, the ambition of the book is both its strength and its weakness. It opens up fresh debate in the cross-cultural connections itoffers;the author gives due consideration to the social, political, and historical context of the topics she selects. However, the scope of such an undertaking reveals itselfat times as quite simply over-ambitious, and this may well explain why errors emerge. Given the list of distinguished colleagues cited in the acknowledgements on p. xxi, this is surely disappointing. Queen Mary, University of London Pauline Small Apparizione e visione: vita e opere di Anna Maria Ortese. By Luca Clerici. Milan: Mondadori. 2002. 732 pp. ?32. ISBN 88-04-48937-5. Anna Maria Ortese's firstbook, Angelici dolori, was published by Bompiani of Milan in 1937, under the auspices of Massimo Bontempelli, who praised the book in a meet? ing of the ltalian Academy and awarded it a prize of 5,000 lire?the firstof a series of officialsubsidies given to the near-destitute Ortese through her long life. In 1944 she received a loan from the RSI Ministero della Cultura Popolare. And in 1986 she was awarded a pension for life. Her amicable relations with governments as different as Mussolini's and Craxi's, and the championing of her by intellectuals of all political persuasions, are two of the strange facts about Anna Maria Ortese, perhaps the most puzzling of major twentieth-century ltalian writers. Since she lived a solitary life and never married, the facts about Ortese were hard to come by unless one happened to know her associates and could piece together the mosaic of their views. Now Luca Clerici, of the University of Milan, has written a definitive critical biography, only four years after Ortese was 'called back'. I use Emily Dickinson's phrase about death, because Ortese can be described as a Neapoli? tan Dickinson?as eccentric, secretive, and outspoken as the poet of Amherst. Very few people were invited into her house, and those who were hardly believed what they saw. Anna and her sister Maria were in the habit of sleeping in their armchairs, their feet on stools and the lights blazing. In one of her houses, terrorized by the noise, Anna Maria had carpenters build a wooden cabin within the sitting room, and here she hid and wrote. She tells us about this in her moving autobiographical notes, Corpo celeste (1997), which is her intellectual testament and expresses a philosophy of love, mystery,and pity for all living things, especially animals. But Ortese had littlepatience with mankind, which she was quick to perceive as evil, vengeful, and destructive. I heard her once dismiss all things ltalian, while extolling a quite imaginary England, where she spent a few days in 1953 (p. 289). Her blanket condemnations and admirations antagonized acquaintances, like the fellow Neapoli? tan who called her 'una donna spaventata e piena di rancore verso la vita' (p. 62). But if one learnt to take her on her terms and saw her statements for the metaphors they were, one discovered a true original and a writer with a vision. Even her little-known poems are notable statements in the Romantic tradition. Ortese loved Poe but belonged to the intellectual climate of Bontempelli's 'realismo magico' and of the 1930s, when writers like Tommaso Landolfi and Karen Blixen created dream worlds. Luca Clerici follows closely Ortese's career from Rome to Libya to Naples, where she matured intellectually and where we find her visiting Benedetto Croce's household , to Milan, Rome, and her final harbour, Rapallo. Quite uneducated, she read voraciously, created her style, and suffered the miseries of her large family (a sailor brother, Manuele, died at sea at twenty-one and was commemorated in prose and MLR, 99.3, 2004 807 verse, her twin Antonio (1914-40) was killed in Greece in obscure circumstances). II porto di Toledo, perhaps Ortese's masterpiece, is based on the story of her family...