The Unforgivable: And Other Writings
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Thrilling, stylish essays about everything from flying carpets and Doctor Zhivago to God and Shakespeare, by a rediscovered Italian writer. Christina Campo published only two short collections of essays in her lifetime: Fairy Tale and Mystery (1962) and The Flute and the Carpet (1971). The Unforgivable and Other Writings brings together both volumes, along with a selection of essays on literature and an autobiographical short story, offering readers of English the first full-length portrait of a writer who has long been admired in Italy and abroad. Campo's subjects range from the canonical to the esoteric. She writes stylishly about Shakespeare and Doctor Zhivago, as well as flying carpets, sprezzatura, and the theophagic origins of the Latin liturgy. Her passion for Marianne Moore and T. S. Eliot makes her a modernist, but like these American counterparts she is a modernist preoccupied by the deep past and by her desire to escape from personality through sustained attention to form. For Campo, writing was a spiritual discipline, and her sentences are at once wonderfully and wildly alive and serenely self-effacing. "I have written little," she once said, "and would like to have written less."
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Cristina Campo (1924-1977) translated extensively from English to Italian, but wrote only a small amount of original works - some scripts for radio, some poetry, a few stories and essays. These were collected and published in 1991, and this 2023 NYRB is the first English edition. The translator, Alex Andriesse, tells us that Campo, a highly competent translator from English, wrote in a style was almost deliberately inaccessible to non-Italian readers, distinguished by her particular use of 'Italian's nontransferable resources'. I don't read Italian myself, but it is impossible for me to tell whether the particularly labored, affected style is her own or Andriesse's. I found Campo hard going, in particular because I think she was writing for a small, select audience of which I was not an intended member. She drops references, and quotes in quotation marks, but does not attribute them: extensive endnotes from Campo herself and the translator are sometimes useful, sometimes not, and if you have not read what she has read, or been in her milieu, then a lot is likely to go over your head, as it did mine.
Having said that, there are some wonderfully incisive aspects to her non-fiction writing. Here are short essays on Donne, a neatly constructed account that goes from his life, to his influences, to those that influenced him, and particularly the way he balances romantic imagery with precise depiction ("...thhe enduring mystery of an art informed and illuminated to the end by a more or less arcane symbolism that walks along with him and follows him and is inseparable from him...") and on Simone Weil's Venice Saved ("Only such an undivided sense of reality has the power to create, in a work of poetry, a corresponding measure of truth..."). Included here also are some of her essays on the subject of fairy tales, which she was entirely enraptured by. She writes in an essay titled 'A Rose' about the fable of Beauty and the Beast, in which the Beast is depicted as a suffering martyr, every night subjecting himself, his intellect, and his appearance to ridicule and mockery. To Campo this is not a Sisyphean project, but a Persephonian (?) one. On the Beast, she says, "Girded in the age of horror and ridicule...he risked hatred and execration of what was dear to him; he descended into the Underworld and made her descend there too."
The title of this collection comes from Campo's best known essay, 'The Unforgivable', which is included in this book, but I found another translation and commentary by Andrea di Serego Alighieri and Nicola Masciandaro, available online here https://glossator.org/volumes/ as well. Campo draws from an Ezra Pound poem ("Come, my songs, let us speak of perfection -/We shall get ourselves rather disliked.") to make the case against criticism; and particularly, against the performative public life of the writer in society, instead lauding those like Djuna Barnes who live as recluses. To her, above all is style - which is culture, solitude, a 'heightened feeling for life'. Such writers, she argues, "have looked at beauty and not withdrawn from it," but are a fading group. She closes with advice: "Sit with your back to the wall, read Job and Jeremiah. Wait your turn. Every line read is a gain. Every line in the unforgivable book." While much of this is deeply moving, there are also the well-worn iterations familiar to anyone on facebook today - people don't read anymore, no one understands language, younger people are far too simplistic; at one point she questions whether her own generation is even capable of reading Proust anymore (reminder that Campo died in 1997, and fortunately never lived to be horrified by Booktok). I find that kind of thinking unimaginative, and indeed, a little lazy; Campo seems unaware that the same might be said of her beloved Proust by those that pre-dated him, or indeed of her own rather laborious and florid style.
All in all, this is a challenging, but worthwhile read. It was released this year, so hasn't been reviewed much apart from one essay in the TLS, which is far more useful than my wittering.
