Once Too Radical for Italy, Goliarda Sapienza Is Belatedly Getting Her Due

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/books/review/meeting-in-positano-goliarda-sapienza.html

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Goliarda Sapienza yearned for an audience. An actress turned writer at the cusp of middle age, and now considered a feminist icon in her native Italy, she felt that telling one’s story is what gives existence meaning. “Life is always a novel left unwritten if we leave it buried inside of us, and I believe in literature,” she wrote in MEETING IN POSITANO (Other Press, paper, $15.99), a characteristically intense work of autofiction, set in the 1950s on the Amalfi coast.

Composed in the 1980s, the novel, like most of Sapienza’s work, was published only after her death, appearing in Italy in 2015, and now, for the first time, in the United States, in a translation by Brian Robert Moore. Chronicling the friendship between Sapienza, at the time a militant filmmaker, and the fictional Erica, a charming bon vivant — loosely inspired by an actual acquaintance — who has retired to Positano after amassing a small fortune via dubious means, the novel is an ode to sisterhood, though not without an overlay of homoerotic tension. (Sapienza, who was bisexual, falls in love with Erica, who does not reciprocate.) It’s also a homage to the stunning beauty of the Neapolitan coast at the dawn of mass tourism. “Positano can cure you of anything,” Erica says. “It opens your eyes to your past suffering and illuminates your present ones, often saving you from making further mistakes.” She goes on: “I get the impression that this cove protected by the bastion of mountains at its back forces you to look at yourself square in the face, like a ‘mirror of truth.’”

Sapienza had a taste for ornate characterizations — the nights are filled with “melodious smells of jasmine and herbs coming from the countless gardens”; the sea is “a burning glass that for hours and hours sets aflame the whites and pinks of the houses” — sometimes to a fault. This is how she describes rum babas arriving at her table for breakfast: “With the gestures of an ancient god, the great pastry chef carries the fruits of his alchemy over which he and his sorcerer’s apprentices have labored down in their underground chamber scented with baking powder and cinnamon.”

But most of all, “Meeting in Positano” is a nuanced exploration of happiness, guilt and the fickleness of human affections when subjected to the material constraints of daily life. As one character puts it, “Love with no money always ends up going down the toilet.”

Sapienza was born in Sicily in 1924, to parents who were professional revolutionaries and socialist royalty. Her father, Giuseppe Sapienza, was a lawyer and trade unionist who later helped draft Italy’s Constitution. Her mother, Maria Giudice, was a prominent journalist who served as Antonio Gramsci’s boss at the newspaper Grido del Popolo . (Sapienza’s older siblings — including two brothers, Ivanoe and Carlo-Marx — had the philosopher as a babysitter.) Sapienza was home-schooled until her late teens, when she moved to Rome to attend an acting academy. While there, she joined the Resistance.

Gifted with acting talent and a larger-than-life personality, if not conventional beauty, she became after the war a central figure in Rome’s cultural high society revolving around neorealist cinema and the Communist Party. As the partner of Francesco Maselli and a confidante to Luchino Visconti, both influential directors, she helped shape the Italian film industry in its golden age. She served as a muse, occasional actress and uncredited factotum, working on casting, screenwriting and voice-overs. But, as was common at the time for women in the field, she often received no credit for her contributions.

She took this in stride. “Coming from an anarchist tradition, she thought ideas belonged to everyone and didn’t mind giving them as a gift,” Sapienza’s widower, Angelo Pellegrino, who curates her work and has written a book about her, said. Strong-minded and independent, Sapienza never quite fit in a setting where women were expected to be sidekicks. She found the pretension and ideological orthodoxy of the postwar Italian intelligentsia suffocating. It was, she wrote, “a pseudo-free, pseudo-elegant, pseudo-everything environment.”

Her fall from grace began in 1965 when she separated from Maselli and found herself shunned by Roman society. Freed from the social duties that came with being the companion of an important man, she found time to write two memoirs, “Lettera Aperta,” about her childhood, and “Il Filo di Mezzogiorno,” about her experience in psychoanalysis, both published in the late 1960s to minor acclaim. She also wrote poetry. Her friend the novelist Elsa Morante resented that Sapienza would no longer come over for lunch because she preferred to write.

She further withdrew from the world to write what is now considered her masterpiece, “The Art of Joy,” a monumental historical novel detailing a woman’s pursuit of cultural, financial and sexual independence in early-20th-century Sicily, and including scenes of incest, rape and the murder of a nun. Sapienza threw herself into the task, which took her nine years to complete and drove her to destitution. To her great frustration, she could not find a publisher. “My super-rejected novel,” she called it.

In 1979, when she married Pellegrino, who was 22 years her junior, the scandal further damaged her reputation. By the following year, Sapienza was so impoverished that she resorted to petty theft — stealing a friend’s jewels — and was jailed for several months.

She felt more accepted by her fellow inmates than by other Italian intellectuals, and, behind bars, briefly found the recognition she craved. “I’ve gone back to live in a small community where one’s actions are followed, and approved when right, in short, acknowledged,” she wrote in “L’Università di Rebibbia,” an account of her time in prison. Published in 1983, the book was a small commercial success, but the media treated it more like an oddity than a work of literature. A cringeworthy TV segment shows Sapienza discussing it on a talk show as the host and the other guests — all men — smirk derisively.

In 1998, two years after her death, Pellegrino printed 1,000 copies of “The Art of Joy” at his own expense and a few years later sent some to the Frankfurt Book Fair, where the book was noticed by a German editor, who published it in Germany and passed it to an editor in France. There it became a literary sensation, selling 350,000 copies and earning Sapienza comparisons to D.H. Lawrence and Stendhal.

Sapienza’s French triumph sparked new interest in her in Italy, where the prestigious publisher Einaudi has since released nine of her books, including “The Art of Joy,” which appeared in English in 2013. Like “Meeting in Positano,” “The Art of Joy” revolves around the idea that women deserve to be happy, even if society seems designed to prevent them from being so. Men, Sapienza suggests, have a natural tendency to crush women, yet women can defend themselves against this impulse if only they dare to break some rules.

In both novels, Sapienza plays with abrupt transitions from the first to the third person, as the protagonists’ voices are briefly interrupted by a narrator. (In the American translation of “Meeting in Positano,” this effect is toned down, and sentences like “Goliarda dimenticò Erica” become “I forgot about Erica.”)

Dalia Oggero, who edited Sapienza’s work for Einaudi, said that Italy in the 1970s wasn’t ready for her unconventional writing, baroque and rational at the same time — or her themes. “Her brand of feminism was ahead of times,” Oggero said. “A sentence like ‘Watch out, because at this rate when women realize how you leftist men smile smugly and paternalistically at what they say, their vengeance will be awesome’ seems like it was written today, not in the past.”

Sapienza’s writing was prescient in other ways too, as if she foresaw her belated recognition. “One dies,” she once wrote, “to leave the best part of yourself to those who can read you.”