Writer's Intuition

WOMAN OF ROME

A Life of Elsa Morante

By Lily Tuck

Harper. 263 pp. $25.95

When Lily Tuck was a young girl, in the late 1940s and '50s, she spent her summers with her father, a movie producer who had settled in Rome. As a member of the leftist Cineclub, which showed avant-garde films weekly, Rodolphe Solmsen crossed paths with the city's intelligentsia, including husband-and-wife novelists Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante. Tuck herself eventually met Moravia once, yet she never met Morante, author of the magical novel "Arturo's Island" (1957), which she had read as a girl -- a missed opportunity that apparently still haunts.

Moravia, a severe chronicler of adult ennui and betrayals, is well known internationally since many of his books have served as the bases for feature films ("The Conformist," "Two Women," "Contempt"). However, Morante, whose visionary prose, with its deliberately antiquated locutions, frequently concerns the interior states of childhood and the relationships of parents and children, is largely unfamiliar outside Italy. Italian republication of her collected works in 1988 and 1990 and a series of exhibitions and seminars in 2005 and 2006 as well as the reissue of William Weaver's English translation of "History" (1974), Morante's biggest, bleakest and most controversial novel, have brought her some renewed recognition.

Tuck's compact yet richly informative "Woman of Rome" is a product of extensive research worn lightly and of literary analysis endearingly constructed to sound like a letter or extended journal entry. But "Woman of Rome" is also a personal essay about the flights and vicissitudes attendant on a life, especially a woman's life, devoted to the imagination. It is written as if the spirit of Morante -- who died in 1985 at age 73 and who wrote that "the private life of a writer is gossip and gossip no matter about whom offends me" -- were reading over Tuck's shoulder.

Tuck, who won the National Book Award for her novel "The News From Paraguay," approaches her subject through marmoreal (and, all too often, psychoanalytic) summaries. For instance, "As a writer Elsa Morante always focused on the traumas of despotic, egotistical and narcissistic love." Yet happily she also supplies resonant biographical details: Morante's lifelong insistence that she wished she'd been born a boy; her indulgence in argument as a blood sport in service of scalding honesty; the fairy-tale images of her dreams; her emphasis in her writing on the paradise of transforming love, despite her own tortured love affairs off the page.

Morante was beautiful and, in her peak years, stylishly dressed, but she never lost her consciousness of childhood poverty and thought of herself as flawed. By his own account, her husband, who extolled her as a genius, was not in love with her and let her know it in piercing little ways, provoking Morante to humiliate him in turn. They had an open marriage, with each taking lovers, yet the couple was bonded by the great event of their life together: a nine-month period they spent in hiding in a remote village during the early 1940s, when Moravia, already a successful novelist and outspoken leftist, was on the run from the fascists. (Moravia's father was Jewish, as was Morante's mother.)

Perhaps to signal the paradoxes of her subject's character, Tuck's references to her are unpredictable: Sometimes she is "Elsa Morante," sometimes "Elsa." ("Morante" also appears, although the context -- almost invariably a moment relating to sex -- makes it seem like a reproof.) Or it may be that this and several other inconsistencies in Tuck's writing (a trip to Sant'Agata recounted in different ways, Morante's hair color described variously) reflect the haste -- a mere two years -- with which the book was researched and written. If so, it's a pity that the author couldn't be given more time to present her deeply felt story at its best.

Morante counted among her close friends the filmmakers Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernardo Bertolucci. "Woman of Rome" contains telling anecdotes of them all: Among its many virtues is the way it fills us in on the glamour (and cruelties) of postwar Rome. Still, the ultimate virtue here is Tuck's almost daughterly effort to demonstrate how Morante's writing can excite a reader today, and why this unhappy yet vital artist, ultimately married to solitude, ought to be remembered, without scumbling the harsher aspects of the woman's personality. Tuck also extends her sense of fair play to Morante's lovers and friends, beginning with Moravia, one of whose novels is alluded to in the title of this lovely and worthy biography, the first of Morante to appear in any language.