No Rain-Soaked Boots

Ipicked up​ The Unforgivable out of pure curiosity. There is something fascinating about opening a book by a writer one knows nothing about. A good reader, Simone de Beauvoir once wrote, has to be willing to follow the writer on her adventure. I took her advice, cleared my mind and tried to follow Cristina Campo on her journey. I was in for a shock: in these essays, Campo turned out to be a reactionary elitist. A dogmatic Catholic who hated the liberal reforms of Vatican II, a militant activist for the reintroduction of the Latin liturgy, Campo was someone who in postwar Florence would praise Mussolini loudly in the streets, just to provoke passers-by. She hated modern mass society and detested contemporary Italian literature and art. She considered the world in which she was condemned to live irredeemably ugly. I don’t think I have ever read a writer so determined to turn her back on her own time, to spend her life looking for meaning and beauty in the past, in fairy tales, in religious rites and literary imagery.

Campo’s style has been praised as exquisite. Some consider her one of the best Italian prose writers of the 20th century. Reading her in English and French, as I had to do, I found her style intensely belletristic, closely related to the classical grand style with its mellifluous periodic sentences and concatenations of scintillating images. She spins ornate webs of analogies, similes and metaphors, to the point where I couldn’t always figure out what she was saying. I had half-hoped to discover another Natalia Ginzburg; in that, I was disappointed.

Vittoria Maria Angelica Marcella Cristina Guerrini was born in Bologna on 29 April 1923. Later in life, she experimented with a number of pseudonyms, but the one that stuck was Cristina Campo. Her parents, Guido Guerrini and Emilia Putti, descended from upper-class families. Campo’s paternal grandmother was a countess. Her mother’s family, the Putti, had been influential in Bologna for centuries. Vittorio Putti, Campo’s uncle, was a world-famous orthopaedic surgeon. Campo was born with a heart defect: the Botallo duct, which normally closes within 24 hours of birth, remained open. Today, it takes only relatively minor surgery to fix this, but in 1923 there was nothing doctors could do. She would suffer from recurring ‘crises’, as she called them, throughout her life: a stabbing pain on her left side, extreme weakness, swollen legs, fainting spells, vomiting, spiking temperature. Although the surgical technique to correct it was pioneered just before the war, she seems never to have considered having heart surgery as an adult.

Campo grew up a sickly child, her parents constantly worrying about her catching the slightest cold. When her father, a composer, became director of the Cherubini Conservatory, the family moved to Florence. Campo attended a Catholic primary school from 1928 to 1935, when her doctors declared school to be too stressful for her heart. At the age of twelve, she became an autodidact. She studied languages and read endlessly, often in solitude. Her lack of formal education makes her seem closer to women writers of an earlier generation – Virginia Woolf (b. 1882), taught by private tutors; Colette (b. 1872), who left school at seventeen – than to someone of her time.

In the summer of 1943, after the Allied invasion of southern Italy and the overthrow of Mussolini, the Germans occupied Florence. To escape Allied bombardment, Campo and her parents took refuge in a convent at Fiesole. In September, her best friend, who had remained in Florence, was killed in a blast. It was a distressing time for the family. Her father was a committed fascist who had moved in high circles in Florence, where he helped to organise glittering musical events attended by the top brass of Mussolini’s regime. When Mussolini fell, his world collapsed.

British troops liberated Florence in August 1944. In the aftermath, fighting broke out in and around Fiesole and the Germans requisitioned the convent in which the family was staying. Campo and her father seized the opportunity to have long conversations with German officers, and Campo worked as a translator for them – helping, among other things, to interrogate prisoners. Her father notes in his diary that one imprisoned English officer turned out to be an Italian partisan: ‘Victoria tells me that the interrogation was dramatic … Perhaps they have already shot him by now.’ Campo herself seems not to have written about the experience. How did she respond when confronted with someone who was about to be shot? Was she appalled? Or was she so pro-German that she took it all in her stride? Guido thought the young German soldiers had a maturity beyond their years and displayed ‘touching patriotic sentiments’. Whether these were the same German soldiers who went on to massacre whole villages as they withdrew to the north, I don’t know.

When the Germans left, the family returned to Florence. In December 1944, Guido was arrested by the British and sent to a prison camp near Terni. I haven’t been able to determine what the exact charges against him were. Released in July 1945, he began to rebuild his career, apparently without too much trouble. In 1947 he became the director of the Conservatory of Bologna, and in 1950 was made director of Rome’s Santa Cecilia Conservatory. For the next five years, he commuted from Florence because Campo refused to move. But finally, in 1955, she gave in and the family relocated to Rome.

Campo rarely mentioned the war. One exception can be found in a 1955 letter to her friend Mita (Margherita Pieracci Harwell), in which she gushes about having met a handsome Italian officer. As a teenager, she writes, she had cut out the photograph of this very officer and kept it in her desk drawer. ‘I haven’t met men like that for the last ten years,’ Campo says, nostalgic for the handsome fascists in uniform of the war years. She didn’t hide her connections to fascism and told one friend that she didn’t like democracy.

Campo’s postwar life was less eventful. Because of her poor health, she travelled little. She lived with her parents until they died, six months apart, in 1964 and 1965. Afterwards, she survived on the money they had left her. The postwar years were a kind of spiritual exile. Campo despised every aspect of contemporary Italian culture, including its celebrated neo-realist cinema. She thought television was vulgar. She hated contemporary literature: ‘I have only just enough strength to defend myself against what is going on in literature,’ she wrote in 1962, ‘to burn sandalwood and cinnamon like Defoe during the plague, to keep far from me everything that is said and done in Italian letters.’

The Italy that Campo despised was the postwar society represented in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. Economic modernisation gave ordinary Italians, particularly in the north, better living conditions than they had ever known. But it also intensified the workers’ struggle and eventually gave birth to the Italian feminist movement. In 1969 there were murderous neo-fascist bombings in Milan and Rome, which the police at first blamed on anarchists. This was also an era in which the Catholic Church began to lose its grip on Italian politics. In 1970, divorce was legalised. In 1974, Italians voted overwhelmingly against a Catholic-backed referendum on whether to outlaw divorce again. Campo must have felt more out of step with her time than ever.

There is no mention of social realities in The Unforgivable. The title essay is ironic: what is considered unforgivable by the soulless mass society in which Campo is forced to live is beauty. Campo positions herself as a champion of tradition. She dismisses Catholicism after 1960 and calls the Renaissance a ‘universal disaster’, one of the ‘trials’ of true Christianity alongside the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Her disgust with certain aspects of modernity is boundless. She describes the Beat poets as a ‘pathetic, inarticulate group who scream at the top of their lungs’ (a reference, I assume, to Ginsberg’s Howl). In her essay on sprezzatura – noble nonchalance, studied carelessness – she writes that it is an attribute traditionally associated with youth, but now the ‘cold fear, the horror perhaps, of once more provoking the masses with its butterfly delicacy has stripped the young of this splendid mantle fit for Ariel’. In other words, the ‘pitiable and serious’ young people of her time had lost the dashing elegance effortlessly possessed by earlier generations. She wrote this around 1970, following years of protests against the Vietnam War, the struggle for civil rights, workers’ rights and women’s rights. Yet all Campo can see are hordes of ‘boastful and sulky’ youths.

Campo was outraged by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which abolished the Latin mass in 1965 and introduced a new liturgy. As one of the main activists in the Italian chapter of Una Voce, a militant organisation opposed to the reforms, she met and became a fervent admirer of the proto-fascist archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. During the war, Lefebvre had embraced the Vichy government. Later, he supported Jean-Marie Le Pen. Eventually, long after Campo’s death, Lefebvre’s separatist activities led to his excommunication.

Campo never married or had children. In Florence, she was closely attached to Leone Traverso, a translator of Rilke, Hölderlin and Hofmannsthal. After some years in Rome, she met Elémire Zolla, an Italian esotericist, mystic and professor of English literature. The relationship later soured, not least because of her intensifying Catholic activism. After her parents’ death, Campo moved to a small apartment filled with cats who kept having kittens. When she died of heart disease in January 1977, at the age of 53, her friends had some trouble keeping the cats out of the room in which her body was laid out.

Campo​ published little and considered it a badge of honour: ‘I have written little and would like to have written less.’ In 1956, there was a collection of poetry, Passo d’addio. She published poems and essays in various journals and magazines, often at the request of friends. She is said to have hated editors and refused to work with their suggestions. She translated texts from English, German and French, by authors including Eduard Mörike, John Donne, Simone Weil and Proust, writers whose style she admired. She also championed Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams. She did some work for Italian radio and wrote a few prefaces, mostly for works by religious figures.

One such preface, to a 1966 edition of Weil’s Waiting for God, caused an uproar. Although Campo had long been an admirer of Weil, her traditionalist turn appears to have made her too doctrinaire to tolerate Weil’s decision to remain outside the Church. Self-righteous and condescending, she scolds Weil’s Catholic advisers for not sticking to the ‘most ancient, the most classical’ version of Catholicism and for failing to give Weil the elementary advice which, she insists, would have made her a convert. Father Perrin, Weil’s main spiritual adviser during the early war years and the man who published these texts, was so shocked by the preface that he wanted it suppressed.

Campo wasn’t well known during her lifetime. In the 1990s, however, there was a wave of publications: previously published and unpublished essays, letters, a biography. Most of them were soon translated into French, but in the Anglophone literary world she has remained unknown and untranslated until now. The Unforgivable contains the two essay collections published in her lifetime: Fairy Tale and Mystery (1962) and The Flute and the Carpet (1971). In addition, there are brief essays on Williams, Donne, Chekhov and Borges, some writings on religious texts, and some interesting early writings on Mansfield, Weil and Shakespeare as well as ‘The Golden Nut’, a memoir-like essay on fairy tales and childhood. Having done my best to follow Campo across this somewhat arduous terrain, I emerged with a strong sense of her ideas and her understanding of poetry and writing. But I did wonder whether she has anything to say to our time.

Alex Andriesse, the translator and editor of The Unforgivable, suggests that we should read Campo for her style. She is, he notes, capable of writing sentences unlike anyone else’s. Inviting us to find ‘passages of exceptional beauty or mystical insight’, he leaves open the question of the connection between the beautiful style and the mystical insight. Can one separate them? Enjoy the beauty, but reject the mysticism? I think the answer is no. The more I read, the more it became clear to me that Campo’s style expresses her worldview. Her idea of beauty is based on her unswerving faith in an otherworldly realm, a world of mystery, fantasy, spirituality and religion. For Campo, the poetic image isn’t just a matter of words, it’s the only path to the ultimate truth. ‘Poetry,’ she writes, ‘is attention. In other words, it involves reading, on multiple levels, the reality around us, which is truth in images.’ In this way, reality becomes a world of signs, of potential meaning, which genuine poets will be able to reveal to those who know how to read them.

For Campo, meaning resides in the realm that escapes what she calls the ‘game of forces’. I think this phrase alludes to Weil’s ‘force’, the destructive, perhaps cosmic energy that turns whatever it touches into a thing, that is to say, deprives it of life and spirit. For Campo, worldly events – politics, conflicts and wars – were governed by the ‘law of necessity’ against which she set magic, redemption, mystery and spirit: ‘The inexorable, inexhaustible moral of the fairy tale is … victory over the law of necessity, the constant transition to a new order of relationships, and absolutely nothing else, for there is absolutely nothing else to learn on this earth.’

Campo’s striking style rests on her prolific invention of analogies, allegories, metaphors and symbols. These are all examples of what Wittgenstein calls ‘seeing-as’ – they render one thing in terms of another. In Campo’s case, this means seeing the ordinary world in terms of the otherworldly reality. Her understanding of writing and reading reminds me of the biblical tradition, which trains adherents to read stories and images as parables or allegories, or of Dante’s suggestion that we read The Divine Comedy on four different levels: literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical (spiritual). Emulating Dante, Campo creates a world oversaturated with meaning. There is something suffocating about her tightly woven networks of poetic imagery. She can never leave a plain thing alone, never let it be simply what it is.

Modern Italian literature was, Campo thought, a complete failure because of its ‘lack of the analogical … and the wholly poetic – prophetic – ability to turn the real into the figurative or, in other words, into destiny’. Destiny is her metaphor for meaning, purpose, God’s will. Lost in modern mass society, it can only be brought back to us through the poetic image. This is one reason she loves fairy tales: their heroes and heroines are, she thought, pure embodiments of the faith in destiny. In an essay from the early 1960s, Campo writes:

What is missing in X’s beautiful prose that keeps it from truly being writing? I can find no word except ceremony. Noble writing without ceremony has never been possible, even if the ceremony was concealed in a conventional whisper. There is supreme ceremony in the great Gothic tercets of Dante, as there is ceremony in Chekhov: a rustic chapel where the rain-soaked boots of the faithful – distracted hypochondriacs racked by boredom and misery – is suddenly superseded by a Byzantine chant, incarnating centuries of gestures.

A ‘noble’ style, I take it, is grand, aristocratic, the opposite of the common and the plebeian. ‘Ceremony’ evokes rites, solemnity, formality, tradition. The sweeping metaphor of the rustic chapel adds religious depth and liveliness to the idea: noble style is what happens when the centuries-old Byzantine chant lifts the ordinary bored and miserable faithful right out of their wet boots.

Campo’s best writing can be found in her essays on fairy tales. She preferred literary French tales to the folk tales collected by the Grimm brothers, which, she wrote, were full of ‘a stultifying harvest of unmagical herbs’. Among her favourite authors were Madame d’Aulnoy (‘The Golden Branch’ and ‘The White Cat’), Perrault (‘Cinderella’) and Madame Leprince de Beaumont (‘Beauty and the Beast’). In the short essay ‘A Rose’, Campo writes with conviction and simplicity about ‘Beauty and the Beast’ as a more perfect version of the Cinderella theme. The Beast, she argues, doesn’t turn into a Prince until ‘the miracle has become superfluous’ – that is to say, until Belle herself has been transformed into ‘an attentive soul’, someone who says: ‘He no longer seems like a Beast, and even if he were one I would marry him anyway, for he is so perfectly good and I could never love anyone but him.’ Campo’s commentary on this moment is excellent:

The Beast’s transformation is in reality Belle’s transformation, and it is only reasonable the Beast becomes a Prince at this point as well. Reasonable because no longer necessary. Now that Belle is no longer looking with the eyes of the flesh, the Prince’s elegance is purely superfluous. It is the surplus of happiness promised to those who sought the kingdom of heaven first of all.

The last sentence spells out the spiritual truth of the tale, as Campo sees it. A great fairy tale, she thought, always wears a mask. To unmask it is to reveal ‘what all great fairy tales covertly are: a quest for the kingdom of heaven’.

Reading Campo, I felt at times immersed in the world of Huysmans or Wilde – there is a profusion of exquisite objects and gestures, a fin-de-siècle quest for beauty. But there is an important difference between Campo and her forebears. Huysmans and Wilde, in their different ways, presented us with characters for whom aestheticism was divorced from ethics. This is why The Portrait of Dorian Gray and À rebours shocked their contemporaries. Campo, by contrast, reaches back to a time when people took it for granted that the beautiful could never be divorced from the good and the true, and therefore from God: ‘Damage to the aesthetic sense cannot fail to do harm to the moral sense as well,’ she writes in the essay on sprezzatura. For her, sprezzatura is not just surface style, but the embodiment of a ‘moral rhythm … the music of an interior grace’, which belongs to great artists, such as Chopin, but also to the Christian martyrs. A medieval soul marooned in modernity, Campo would have rejected out of hand the idea that one could produce beauty without caring about morality, spirituality or God.

But however much she may have hated it, Campo was still marked by her time. She was just reaching adulthood when existentialism took hold in Europe. She, too, was searching for meaning in the ruins of European culture. She turned to religion and to fairy tales to restore a sense of order and beauty to her world, and perhaps it’s this escape into fantasy that makes her interesting to read today. But when we watch fantasy on TV or play video games, we generally know we are allowing ourselves some reprieve from reality. Campo’s escape is the absolute reality of God. For those who have seen it, there can be no return to the ordinary.