An Italian investigative journalist, Claudio Gatti, has secured his 15 minutes of fame. He has done so by “unmasking” Elena Ferrante, the bestselling Italian novelist who has been writing under a pseudonym since 1992. Gatti appears to believe that in trying to force a writer out of anonymity, he has provided some kind of public service. Ferrante’s readers, he insists, have the right to know who she really is.
I daresay there are bigger fans of Ferrante than me. However, I’ve read all her books, visited Naples, because that’s where they are mostly set, and holidayed on Ischia, because that’s where Lila and Lena, the women at the centre of Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, also holidayed. I’ve also interviewed Ferrante by email, for the Gentlewoman, sat on tenterhooks with her publishers, awaiting the result of this year’s International Booker, for which she was shortlisted, and am a contributor to the new edition of Frantumaglia, a collection of writings by and about Ferrante that particularly seems to irk Gatti.
But here’s the thing. I do not give a stuff who Ferrante “really” is. If I have a right to know, as Gatti argues, I don’t wish to exercise it. Gatti, as far as I’m concerned, has violated my right not to know, while Ferrante protected it. I was more than willing to play my small part in giving this writer the space she needed to write as she does, and gratefully accept my reward – her books and the pleasure they give to me. I abhor the fact that this man, and those who published his speculations, rode roughshod over that perfectly satisfactory contract between writer and reader.
Ferrante, argues Gatti, is really Anita Raja, a German translator who lives in Rome with her husband, the writer Domenico Starnone. Gatti is an idiot. Of course he is wrong. Elena Ferrante is really Elena Ferrante. Anita Raja is really Anita Raja. Domenico Starnone is really Domenico Starnone. Claudio Gatti, unfortunately, is really Claudio Gatti. Three of these are actual people. One of them is not, and has never claimed to be.
There is a long tradition of women writing under pseudonyms, precisely because of the expectation of private domesticity that has bounded the lives of women. It’s easy to believe, in these times when women no longer have to undergo such subterfuge to get a publisher, that such strictures no longer pertain.
Yet, actually, successful women are still expected to account for their ability to balance work and home. A female foreign correspondent will be expected to account for the fact that she has to leave her children behind. A female prime minister will still face insinuations that she hasn’t fully experienced life as a woman’s life should be experienced, because she hasn’t had children. This is the way in which Gatti thinks Ferrante should be held to account – checked over, to see if her creative life is a suitable match to her domestic life. Successful women can’t “have it all”, goes the mantra. We must be allowed to inspect this woman, to ensure that she hasn’t managed it. With men like Gatti in the world, it’s perfectly understandable that a person might want to avoid all that nasty, sinister scrutiny.
Especially a writer. In Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van, it is made clear that there are two Alan Bennetts: the person living his life; and the writer, the latter having an entirely different set of motives and motivations to the former, which must somehow be balanced and reconciled. Some people chose to make that reconciliation by dividing their creative self from their private self absolutely as much as is possible. That is what the person who created Ferrante chose. Gatti appears to believe that such scrupulous delineation between work and life is somehow fraudulent. He is wrong. On the contrary, it’s an entirely honest approach, perhaps the only entirely honest approach.
To write fiction of the quality of Ferrante’s is not an easy task. She creates a world and lives in that world until her story is told. That’s what novelists do. To remain grounded in the real world and also fully to inhabit a constructed world is difficult. Hilary Mantel, one of the great contemporary British writers, makes no bones of the fact that her husband’s support is crucial. Ferrante needed the support of many more people to protect her creative self. Gatti thinks he knows better than the people who know and care for the individual that Ferrante inhabits. I very much doubt that he does. The future impact that his intervention could have on Ferrante’s creativity appears not to have figured in his calculations. That’s how much he really cares about Ferrante’s readers and their rights.
Listening to Gatti on Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday morning, as he attempted to justify his vast, self-righteous intrusion, I was struck by how strongly he seemed to feel that people should be punished for their success, that somehow, by failing to subject her private self to public scrutiny, Ferrante was pulling a fast one. (The truth, I imagine, is more likely to be that he wants what she’s got, and can’t see why she should eschew the personal inconveniences that he would gladly embrace in her shoes.)
Gatti’s exposé consists almost entirely of scrutiny of the accounts of Ferrante’s publishers. His argument rests on the fact that as Ferrante’s success grew, payments to a German translator who worked for the house became commensurately larger. He also focused on properties purchased by Raja and Starnone with this money. The close link he makes between success and the material trappings of success is telling. Perhaps he believes that successful people are under some obligation to parade the material manifestations of their good fortune, to make their fame as vulgar and money-motivated as he has tried to make it.
Ferrante, of course, did not know that she would achieve a readership large enough to eclipse all other Italian writers of her generation, when she began to publish her work in 1992, with the small publisher she has stuck with. Perhaps she simply felt compelled to write and compelled to find readers, with personal status and wealth absolutely nothing to do with her calculations or desires. Perhaps Gatti cannot grasp or understand such a thing.
I was struck by something recently, when interviewing Christopher Kane, one half of the brother and sister fashion-house team of Christopher and Tammy Kane. The two of them agree on many things, almost everything, which is what makes their creative partnership so fruitful. There is one large thing they differ on, though. Christopher says that business success, financial success, glamour, acclaim, is all part of the package for him, an integral part of the matrix of reasons that motivates him to work and strive. He is generally the public face of the label. Tammy says that she would make clothes even if no one ever saw them, just because she loves making clothes.
The husband and wife film-making team of Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump are similarly aligned, he happy to do publicity, she far less so inclined. JK Rowling at the height of her Harry Potter fame published under a male pseudonym, Robert Galbraith. She too was “unmasked”, her wish to write quietly on a clean page swept aside.
Maybe, in general, public life has always been dominated by men, because men crave public acknowledgement more than women do. Women cook. Men become chefs. Women make clothes. Men become fashion designers. Women paint. Men become old masters. We hear now of the achievements of the women behind men. Babbage and Lovelace. Brunel and Guppy. Watson, Crick and Franklin. We understand that the achievements of women have been written out of history, and it feels unfair, because that lack of paraded achievement was for so long used against women, as proof that they lacked ability.
Gatti now seems to find it unfair that a woman may have chosen to write herself out of her own writing, largely, one suspects, because such self-effacement is alien to him. I daresay he would not be able to comprehend the stitching of a patchwork quilt, just for the sake of making beauty. If you want to work, achieve money and acclaim, then play by our rules. That seems to be Gatti’s horrible message. Ferrante’s writing is suffused with explorations of how aggressive and damaging to women such attitudes are. No wonder he wants to damage her back.
In an article billed as a companion piece to the “investigation”, Gatti describes the travails of Raja’s mother, a German Jew who fled the Holocaust, as opposed to the description of Ferrante’s mother, a Neapolitan seamstress. It’s the discrepancy between made-up Ferrante’s made-up background and real Raja’s real background that is the foundation of Gatti’s argument that Ferrante is tricking or gulling her readers. Leaving aside the fact that no one ever claimed that Ferrante actually was someone else, a person who existed, but only the constructed persona that a real person used to write novels, there’s still something awful about this second piece.
Gatti suggests that by creating this writer, with a background suitable to the works that she wanted to write, Raja was dishonouring her own mother, who, as Gatti, judged, was “really unique”. No doubt Ferrante didn’t actually want men telling her what she should really be writing about, as Gatti presumes to. Why would anyone want to be told that they were doing something bad and disrespectful by failing to write about their mother and her family? The obligation to write about and talk about her own family, and be defined at least in part by a terrible past, seems to me like something else that Ferrante would have wanted to free herself from. Gatti, however, has exercised his own perceived right to put Ferrante back where he can keep an eye on her. It is a terrible and ghastly violation.
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