Into the Well

Late in April, Miuccia Prada’s eponymous fashion line launched a literary club. Based out of Milan, like Miu Miu, the project started as a two day reading series with panels made up of writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Sheila Heti, and Viola di Grado, and with poetry and music showcases. Later on, in early June, it spilled out into a series of PR pop-ups across cities in Europe and Asia, featuring book giveaways and little Miu Miu themed ice cream trucks. The books on offer were Quaderno Proibito [A Forbidden Notebook] by Alba de Céspedes (1952) and Una Donna [A Woman] by Sibilla Aleramo (1906). Both are classics of Italian feminist literature. They deal with women worn down by the stifling responsibilities of reproductive labor and by various forms of subtle or explicit cruelty. Both women rebel by writing: the protagonist of A Woman writes to her son, who she has been forced to abandon upon leaving her abusive husband; the second keeps a secret diary, where she records the details of a love affair and of her drudgery. 

The Miu Miu literary club, like a celebrity book club, was mostly received as a kind of status accessory. In a recent article for Elle, Aemelia Madden describes how literature has become “the ultimate luxury” and went on to compare it to other influencer driven reading lists and celebrity book clubs. In an aside, the piece mentions that Marilyn Monroe was famously photographed in a swimsuit reading Ulysses and widely mocked for trying to seem literate. But, like most of the other coverage of its kind, it reproduces this logic by largely ignoring the contents of the books in question. You would be forgiven for thinking they are “sad girl lit” for a “lit girl summer.” While young women dress up and take selfies with books they may or may not ever read, so the scaremongering media narrative goes, young men are shut out of the literary scene altogether by malicious gatekeepers - contributing to their overall loneliness and depression. Leave reading to the boys, this strange emerging consensus seems to suggest. What do girls need to read for? 

Sibilla Aleramo and Alba de Céspedes were not only novelists, known for defining Italy’s feminist literary canon. They were also communists. Aleramo worked at a socialist feminist newspaper, she would sign Benedetto Croce’s “Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals,” which was published on May 1st 1925,  and she would go on to join the Communist Party after the war. De Céspedes, who was younger and more politically engaged, was imprisoned in the 1930s for anti-fascist activity, and in the 40s for broadcasting on the resistance radio station Radio Partigiana. This political compass appears implicitly in both novels, but it comes through more clearly in some of their other work, and particularly in Dalla Parte Di Lei [Her Side of the Story], which Mondadori originally published in 1949, and which Astra House published in an English translation last year. 

Her Side of the Story is set during the war and fictionalizes some of de Céspedes’s own wartime activities. The protagonist, Alessandra, grows up poor and stifled, too similar in spirit and appearance to her depressive mother to turn out well. The mother, who dreams of being a concert pianist and of wearing colors and of being loved well, is ground down by her cruel and insidious husband and by the quotidian demands of housewifery until she decides to drown herself in the river. Alessandra is sent to the countryside to live with her father’s family. There, she too is ground down. She almost marries a farmer, nearly succumbing to the sheer pressure of custom and insistence. She almost gives up on her studies. War is coming to Italy, which is in the full thralls of fascism, and everyone is encouraging her to have a baby, to have a house, to be happy in her natural destiny as a woman. When she leaves, it’s like waking up from a dream. She goes back to Rome, where she works and studies and does all the housework for her cold and distant father. Her life is a flat horizon, stretching out unbearably into a bleak future, and then she meets Francesco. 

“Men do not have all the subtle reasons for unhappiness that we do[...]” Alessandra’s mother tells her when she is on the verge of adolescence. “My mother tried everything to get me to give up music, novels, poetry. She wanted me to enjoy myself, to be stronger than she was. When I was still young, she used to tell me gloomy and painful love stories, hoping to arouse an instinct for self-preservation.”

It does not work, of course, to dissuade Alessandra’s mother any more than it works to dissuade Alessandra. Francesco is a bad prospect on paper. He is a poor academic, deeply involved in anti-fascist organizing which will quickly get him fired from his job, blacklisted, and then eventually arrested as Mussolini’s regime cracks down on resistance. He is idealistic but conventional. His love for Alessandra cannot transcend his prosaic emotional life. Romance quickly is effaced by the hardship and misery of their married life. On their wedding night, he is careless and unkind to her. Alessandra daydreams about how it all used to feel. She dresses up in lingerie, she cooks, trying to get him to look at her. Although there are women in his resistance group, he refuses to let her join out of paternalistic and also real concern for her safety. Once he has been jailed, she starts smuggling weapons and at that point, something breaks open in her. A kind of floodgate released. 

Her Side of the Story has traces of heteropessimist instinct. But it is less absolute and more probing, probably because it is so explicitly and deeply political. Fascism saturates Alessandra and Francesco’s life and warps their blossoming intimacy. The longer and deeper-rooted structures of patriarchal marriage shape their dynamics and interactions. This love story, which feels so personal and so new and so extraordinary, like every love story does to those who are in love, is actually overdetermined. It is doomed to failure from the start. Francesco’s worst sin in his marriage perhaps is his refusal to believe that Alessandra’s mother died over love, or a lack of love. He thinks she was crazy. Crazy people kill themselves. He cannot access her world of feeling; it does not interest him. 

The novel is reminiscent of Natalia Ginzburg’s The Dry Heart. Although it is much longer and richer and more detailed, it evokes a similar core of rage and disenchantment. Ginzburg and de Céspedes knew each other. In 1948, Ginzburg published an essay titled “On Women” in the magazine Mercurio, which de Céspedes was editing at the time. In the essay, Ginzburg argued that women tend to “fall into a well,” to be “gripped by a terrible melancholy and drown in it.” Women distract themselves, in her description, with all kinds of self-loathing and despair and depression and obsessing over romance and beauty and aging and desirability. All of it is a smokescreen. They are alienated from their work; they cannot get free. De Céspedes responded to the essay in an open letter, which was published alongside it. She praises the beauty and sincerity of Ginzburg’s writing, but pushes back against the core claim. Falling into the well, for her, is a source of strength. There is power in abjection. “After all,” she writes, “is being free from pain, from human misery, really a privilege?” 

It has become fashionable to argue that novels should not be political. They can deal with politics, insofar as our lives and our times intersect with politics, but they should under no circumstances be ideological. This is not a new phenomenon. In the 1950s, lurching into the Cold War, American fiction turned inwards. It became introspective, suburban, weightless. This was the era of creative writing, of long and lovely sentences untroubled by social meaning or moral purpose. The realist novel reached a kind of apex in this time. It perfected its abiding convention of describing in excruciating detail the uneventful lives of not particularly likable people and their conflicted relationship to the bourgeoisie. Sex and god (or godlessness) are the main driving ids of these novels. The men have sex they feel bad about and despise themselves and their sexual partners who disgust them afterwards. They find modern life lacking in spirituality, masculinity, and purpose. They yearn for a return, although to what exactly, it is unclear. These days, those who dabble in such reactionary nostalgia generally turn to the 1950s, aesthetically, in search of their ideal vision. In midcentury fiction, the ‘50s emerge as anxious, loveless, and depressing. 

Would it be possible to write a version of Her Side of the Story that similarly subsumes politics to personal feeling? De Céspedes’s particular genius is in conveying the gut sensation of political systems, how the emotional strictures of fascism dictate and enforce our lives. She is writing about a war, about a dictatorship, about risking her life for solidarity and freedom. Love is at the center of all of that. Alessandra’s romantic travails may seem secondary, and she often herself finds them inconsequential next to the darkness of the world, but in reality, the two are inextricably intertwined. Another writer could have written a novel about an ordinary person living in Italy in that time, trying to keep their head down and avoid politics and go about their daily life as best as possible in wartime, but that novel would exist in a bubble, detached from its surroundings and utterly irrelevant. A creative, but also a moral failure.

A writer argued in The New York Times recently precisely on behalf of such a novel (in the abstract, at least). Klay fought in the Iraq War, where he was a public relations officer for the US military. He describes coming home from the war with a sense of obscene self-righteousness, which is slowly worn away by, among other things, writing fiction. Trying to describe his experiences hollowed them out. He became less certain of the truth, or at least, of his truth. This uncertainty saved his novel from the pitfall of ideology, which makes for bad and sanctimonious fiction. War is a personal growth experience for those lucky enough to survive it, a testing ground for moral gray areas. Ideology is a poisoned chalice, drunk enthusiastically by basically anyone who is not a white male US army veteran (Klay shouts out, among others, Viet Than Nguyen, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Sally Rooney, and the collective Writers Against the War on Gaza). 

Are those crushed by American bombs, then and now, allowed to speak of complexity? Is their personal growth interesting and meaningful, even if it does not necessarily chart in the direction Klay might prefer? He devotes a lot of space to the Jewish poet George Oppen, who, alarmed by the rise of fascism in the 1930s, joined the Communist party, organized for labor rights, and fought in the Second World War. He mostly gave up writing poetry, which Klay oddly interprets as his being unable to mesh his overbearing politics with the demands of his art. In his own description, Oppen seems more intent on conveying pure and urgent meaning and discouraged by his failure to do so, both in politics and in art. Leave art to the apolitical, Klay seems to suggest, before innocuously name dropping the famously fascist Ezra Pound — spared here from accusations of ideology. 

It is easy to claim, if you are not particularly well-versed in history, that novels used to ignore politics. But our era has produced some of the least political fiction in existence. Characters sit around and talk about politics, sure, in the novels of Jonathan Franzen, Nicole Krauss, Ben Lerner, and so on. But politics are curiously absent from their lives. Their emotional worlds are fragile and narcissistic. They shut themselves off from everything that is exterior, from the humdrum of death and despair and global realignment of power. They look inwards instead. Reading this generation of literature, the most prolific ever, you might be swayed to Alba de Céspedes’s view of things. You have to descend into the well, at least for a little bit, at least long enough for the scales to fall from your eyes and to be able to see things as they really are.