There’s been no dearth of speculation on the identity of Elena Ferrante, best known for her Neapolitan novels. The Italian author had chosen to protect her identity before the publication of her debut novel, Troubling Love . Explaining her decision at that time to her publisher Sandra Ozzola at Edizioni E/O, in 1991, published in Fragments: Elena Ferrante on Writing, Reading and Anonymity , she wrote: “Dear Sandra… I do not intend to do anything for Troubling Love , anything that might involve the public engagement of me personally. I’ve already done enough for this long story: I wrote it. If the book is worth anything, that should be sufficient.”
As it turns out, the book’s worth alone is not sufficient for some. In ‘Elena Ferrante: An Answer?’ published last week in TheNew York Review of Books , journalist Claudio Gatti revealed the result of a months-long investigation to unmask Ferrante. Unlike many others who had attempted to find out who she is by looking for stylistic clues in her novels, Gatti’s approach is different. Basing his investigation partly on the soon-to-be-published Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey and extensively on the financial records of a translator in Rome, Anita Raja, Gatti claims that Ferrante is Raja. He traces Raja’s husband Domenico Starnone, a writer, to the publishing house of Ferrante where Starnone works as a translator of German fiction. Gatti finds that significant spikes in Raja’s income coincide with periods of bestselling success for Ferrante. He also attacks Frantumaglia , a book that partly outlines Ferrante’s family background, accusing it of having “crumbs of information seemed designed to satisfy her readers’ appetite for a personal story that might relate to the Neapolitan setting of the novels themselves.”
A ton of bricks fell on Gatti for publishing this piece. Unfazed, he defended himself in an interview: “In a way I think readers have the right to know something about the person who created the work… I did it because she was very much a public figure.”
Writers with pseudonyms Gatti’s displeasure with Ferrante’s pen name is strange because this is hardly something new. Different writers over the ages have had different reasons to hide their real names. J.K. Rowling, after the monumental success of the Harry Potter series, picked Robert Galbraith as her pseudonym. “It was not a marketing ploy,” she told cynics. It was simply too much pressure to live up to expectations. “I was yearning to go back to the beginning of a writing career in this new genre, to work without hype or expectation and to receive totally unvarnished feedback,” she said.
Eric Blair, who the world knows as George Orwell, did not want his poverty to be known. Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (a mouthful of a name) was Pablo Neruda whose father was displeased with his son’s career choice. He published under the name Neruda in order to avoid incurring his father’s wrath. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the creator of the Alice in Wonderland series, wanted privacy like Ferrante and so he wrote under the name Lewis Carroll. Some women writers wrote under male pseudonyms in order to avoid prejudice associated with their gender. Charlotte Bronte said the Bronte sisters thought their “mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’...” And because publishers simply wouldn’t allow Richard Bachmann to turn out books at such a frenetic pace, he adopted the name Stephen King.
I have been diving blissfully into James Herriot’s animal stories for years, not knowing that his real name was James Alf Wight. It was only on his birthday one year that I discovered that Wight made this decision because even though he loved writing, it was frowned upon in Britain at that time for veterinary doctors to publicise their practice. I spent my entire childhood thinking George Eliot was a man. My schoolteacher said nothing to us about Mary Ann Evans when she led us through The Mill on the Floss , and my copy of the novel did not have the author’s photo on the back flap. These novels were just good old text. Knowing about these writers later made no difference to my love for their storytelling.
Of course, the world has changed a lot in just a couple of decades. Writers now interact with readers tirelessly through the day — at lit fests, book launches, on social media — slowly earning themselves the status of celebrities. And as is the case with all celebrities, we want to endlessly know about their lives — from their political views, to their inspirations, to who they dine with. This gushing flow of information has left little to the imagination. Readers don’t just consume books, they hunger for personas. So when someone chooses to be a little old-fashioned and write for writing’s sake, we are simply not able to come to terms with it. Whatever happened to loving mystery?
Gatti’s piece expectedly generated a lot of buzz, mostly centred around “rights”. Some argued that Ferrante has a “right” to remain anonymous; Gatti said that we as readers have a “right” to know who Ferrante is. But does the success of Ferrante’s novels give anyone reason to dig into someone’s bank accounts (all the information that Gatti gathered about Ferrante’s income is from an anonymous source), speculate where all that wealth came from, and draw some links to establish her identity? We don’t know who Ferrante is, she doesn’t know who we are, and that seems pretty fair to me.
Miracles and their makers It is perhaps inevitable that writers cannot be anonymous forever. The curiouser and curiouser people become, or the more the success of a novel, the greater probability that the puzzle is going to be solved. And in Ferrante’s case, unlike, say, Harper Lee, who just maintained a low profile throughout her life, her reluctance to reveal even her name has only led to more intrigue and guesswork. But must we berate writers for trying and set out to remove the veil?
In an interview to Vanity Fair , Ferrante had said: “Today I feel, thanks to this decision, that I have gained a space of my own, a space that is free, where I feel active and present. To relinquish it would be very painful.” To force her out of the shadows and into the limelight and cause that pain serves no purpose to a reader who would rather appreciate her work than be a consumer and judge of a manufactured image too. In this Digital Age, let us not pull those who wish to stay away into this cacophony. If we have surrendered to the whirlpool, that does not mean that they must too. The cost of anonymity is certainly high for Ferrante. But if she truly believes in the title of her letter to her publisher — ‘True miracles are those whose makers will never be known’ — let us also try and appreciate the miracle, not hunt down the maker.
radhika.s@thehindu.co.in
