Despising History, Loving People

...Black was born in 1886, Warren five years later...

...All of us an SS hidden inside us," he cries, and then a little later: "there's a Christ inside each one of us...

...He and his beloved sheepdog, Bella, agreed that everyone they knew was beautiful and deserved their love: "Giants or dwarfs, beggars or dandies, decrepitude or youth, nothing made any difference to him...

...A tormented thinker, Davide is obviously the author's spokesman...

...They were --though in different ways and with different shadings--' 'Populists" who deplored the corruption that frequently accompanied wealth and power and sought to make Law reCommonweal: 537...

...Moreover, Ida's secret longing to be with fellow Jews, her presence 19 August 1977" 536 at the train station when the inhabitants of the Roman ghetto are being taken away, as well as her and Useppe's mysterious illness: the ominous seizures and finally the davastating grand real, are all described with great delicacy and a strange sense of wonder...

...both were poor (though not grindingly so) and, at early ages, witnessed the evils of capitalism run rampant...

...Not even the representation of thinking, talking animals--Blitz and Bella, faithful canine companions of Ida's boys, become major characters in the novel--need be regarded as a nod to mysticism, but rather as the ultimate in psychological realism...

...he has an artist's refined sensibility, is able to discover beauty in the humblest of things...

...She is half-Jewish, and after the Italian racial laws are passed she lives in constant dread of being exposed...

...The heavenly fugues heard by Useppe are but symptoms of his dread disease...

...And there is Giovannino, a young soldier freezing to death on the Russian steppes, and realizing in his final delirium that "he also has a second body which, unlike the first, is supple, clean, and naked...

...And poor, withered Iduzza, after Useppe's death, finally gives up her battle against an always-threatening world and goes insane, ending her life in an asylum some years later...

...Only rarely--as when she compares the pompous curlicues of a small-time pimp's signature with those o f Benito Mussolini----does she consciously draw parallels between the obscure and the powerful...

...yet, she steers clear of shortcuts, if only to lend dignity to her downtrodden, expendable characters...

...Not even the two dogs are spared...

...In a sense all the characters of the novel are Morante's "little kids...

...He converses with animals and is attuned to the inaudible: "Even inside the city sometimes, for the space of an instant, all sounds and forms around Useppe might become composed, rising in a flash, an incredible flight, towards the final scream of silence...

...Because most of her characters are so meticulously delineated, their sorrows and joys reach back to many different sources...

...They understand little of grand strategies and ideologies (Ida, for example, dreads newspapers), but, Morante strongly implies, there is not much to understand, since History is nothing but a set of abstractions, the phantasmagoria of madmen, "an obscenity from the beginning," a "history of fascisms...

...Reality--physical, social, not just psychological--lies at the heart of Morante's novel...

...I f by...

...Nino is a cynical, callous young man with a savage zest for life, though his limitless affection for his little brother, Useppe, as well as his fondness for animals, seems to suggest untapped kindness and innocence...

...The author may despise History, but she loves people...

...her purpose, after all, is to show how the poor and the oppressed are buffeted by History's winds...

...Giovannino is too stiff to move, yet imagines himself curling up in bed, and feeling tiny again...

...In a public shelter where she moves in with her little boy after having been bombed out of their home, Ida encounters Carulina, a fifteen-year-old girl, who, is the mother of twins...

...Ida Mancuso's story is also the story of millions of her comrades in distress who are wrecked spiritually and physically by the war, which to them means bombings, deportations, famine, battle fatigue...

...if, on the other hand, illumination o f character, a rational analysis of psychological and spiritual phenomena are considered mainstays of conventional fiction, then Morante surely transcends it, to create a kind of mystical realism in which people are spurred on by inexplicable' atavistic impulses, and babes and animals are imbued with grace and wisdom...

...Nino, ex-black shirt, ex-partisan, who adjusts to postwar reality by becoming a smuggler, is killed while transporting contraband goods...

...In an endless, drug-inspired peroration delivered days before his death in front of an audience of unappreciative proletarians, Davide grapplesbbut again with unrealistic clarity--with the question of have good and evil in man...

...Even Ida's attacker, we are told, was a mere boy whose "face betrayed an incredible immaturity," and whose wrists were "rough and innocent, like a worker's or peasant's...

...The Memoirs o f E a r l Warren EARL WARREN Doubleday, $10 Hugo Dlack and t h e J u d i c i a l Revolution GERALD T. DUNNE Simon and Schuster, $12.50 ISIDORE SILVER It is reasonably safe to assume that History will rate Earl Warren as the greatest Chief Justice since John Marshall and Hugo Black as the most influential individual jurist of the last century...

...he enunciates too neatly the dilemmas and conflicts of a political radical in search of a secular religion...

...and her maternal solicitude makes us even more aware of the childlike qualities in them...

...It is perhaps for this reason that the only person in the novel who is aware of the forces of History, a Jewish anarchist named Davide Segre, is also Morante's least successful creation...

...Allow me, then, to stay a bit longer in the company of my little kid, before coming back alone to the secular life of the others...

...Though in many ways consequences of historical events, the tragedies in Ida's life seem actually to be so remote from them that the author's strict chronological progression from 1941 to 1947 as well as the unequivocally pessimistic historical summaries that preface each chapter, become, ultimately, meaningless...

...To be sure, some of the enigmas can be rationalized...

...by William Weaver KnopJ, $10.95 The point has been made---sometimes condescendingly, sometimes jubilantly-that History is an old fashioned novel...

...The mysterious illness is of course epilepsy which in literature is usually associated with geniuses, artists, mystics, but which here becomes, ironically, the undoing of an obscure schoolmistress's bastard child...

...she also dwells at great length on dreams, hallucinations, visions...

...The precocious and captivating Useppe is himself a child wonder...

...Consequently, Morante's thesis about villainous History is itself a simplified abstraction., Even Marxist critics, in a refreshing switch, have argued that Elsa Morante has forced her novel into too rigid an ideological mold...

...In narrating the final days of Useppe, the remarkable child hero of her novel, she practically pleads with the reader to let her take her time: "All lives, really, have the same end: and two days, in the brief passion of a kid like Useppe, are not worth less than years...

...His greatest problem is that he cannot reconcile his abstract love of humanity with his real aversion to people...

...Her young son, Nino's aggressive, abrasive nature, his successive infatuation with Fascism and Communism, alarms her to no end...

...yet she has a child's faith in her son's ability to fend for himself...

...Davide Segre of an overdose, Useppe, at age six, of a massive epileptic fit...

...His conception and birth were inglorious--his father was a drunken German soldier who raped Ida in the winter of 1941--yet, like Wordsworth's child, he came "trailing clouds of glory...

...Many of the other war ~,ictims that populate this vast novel are also pictured as bewildered children who were forced to grow up, and whose saving grace is their childlike simplicity...

...Yet, Morante's is not a despairing work...

...While awaiting the ultimate verdict of the implacable Muse, we should take note of other congruences, other affinities between the two men who (along with William O. Douglas) created a new jurisprudence for contemporary America...

...Carulina doesn't know how she became pregnant, believes in fairy tales , and loves to play hide-and-seek with other kids...

...Little Useppe, who couldn't learn to pronounce his name properly (which was really Giuseppe) and couldn't function in school, holds out greater hope for mankind than an army of "positive" heroes...

...Davide abhors himself for having been born a bourgeois, a Jew, for having killed a German in the war, and in his desparation he turns tO drugs...

...At one point in his life he took a job in a factory , hoping to befriend the workers, but he failed miserably...

...Otherwise this gentle, selfeffacing, simple woman knows little of what goes on around her...

...Actually, it's to be able to savor the mysterious ways of her favorite characters, to b e ~ble to do them justice with layers upon layers of evocative rather than-interpretive descriptions, that she relies on antiquated narrative devices...

...Morante may have been inspired by Tolstoy who, in Anna Karenina, also enters the consciousness of a dog-Levin's Laska...

...Not only is the diminutive Useppe innately good and trusting...

...The simple-minded child-woman is a dutiful, devoted mother...

...Indeed, in reading these passages one feels like agreeing with Italian critics who maintain that History is closer to symbolist, decadent literature than to realism...

...The central figure is Ida Mancuso (also known as Iduzza), a frail and timorous widowed schoolteacher, ~vho had learned that the only way to survive in this world is to cower...

...Not only does Morante, in this supposedly down-to-earth, naturalist novel, evoke the magical aura surrounding children, and depict the comeliness of childlike adults...

...and her childish ignorance, while magnifying her day-to-day anxieties, actually shields her from a true perception of her lot, enabling her to cope--impulsively, fatalistically--with an increasingly intolerable situation...

...old-fashioned we mean painstaking verisimilitude and unceasing preoccupation with external detail, then Elsa Morante's story of a Roman family caught in the iurmoil and destruction of the Second World War is indeed a quaintly traditional tale (the author assumes the role of a reporter or chronicler, "to tell the truth" is one of her favorite expressions...

...She knows she may be trying her reader's patience with her leisurely pace, and with her habit of dwelling on the predictable, the obvious, the insignificant...

...When you saw him cover his face with both hands, in the smile of a little blind child intent on a beautiful sound, it meant his whole tiny organism was listening to that rising choir which in the language of music (wholly unknown to him) would be called a fugue...

...And neither the twisted nor the hunchback, the paunchy nor the scrawny: to him none was less lovely than the world's Paragon...

...All the main characters of History die...

...She also takes very good care of her babies...