The news that the true identity of the writer Elena Ferrante has, allegedly, been uncovered was published on the blog of The New York Review of Books at 1 A.M. on Sunday—the Internet’s witching hour, when salacious tidbits are unloaded online to greet the unsuspecting citizens of Twitter bright and early in the morning. It was met with widespread consternation from Ferrante fans. People are pissed. The sleuth, an Italian journalist named Claudio Gatti, has gone beyond the efforts of previous Ferrante truthers, who have generally tried either to compare the biographies of various Italian writers with what is known or inferred about Ferrante’s life or to match their literary style with hers, and used forensic accounting to uncover a money trail that, he believes, leads straight to the source. The process has taken him months. If only someone had got him interested in Trump’s tax returns during the primaries, just think where we might be today.
I hate to do it, but in the interest of clarity, here, briefly, is what Gatti claims. Ferrante, he says, is Anita Raja, a translator who lives in Rome with her husband, the Neapolitan writer Domenico Starnone. For many years, Raja has translated books from the German for Edizione E/O, the publishing house that puts out Ferrante’s work. Gatti says that payments from the publisher to Raja “have increased dramatically in recent years,” in line with the increase in revenues that Edizioni E/O has enjoyed as Ferrante has become an international literary star, and thus “appear to make her the overwhelming beneficiary of Ferrante’s success.” (He obtained information about Edizioni E/O’s revenue and Raja’s income from an anonymous source.)
To this evidence Gatti adds the further proof of Raja and Starnone’s real-estate dealings. In 2000, the year that Ferrante’s first novel was made into a movie in Italy, Raja bought a seven-room apartment in what Gatti assures us is an expensive neighborhood in Rome. In 2001, she bought a country house in Tuscany. This past June, Gatti reports, Starnone bought an eleven-room apartment “on the top floor of an elegant pre-war building in one of the most beautiful streets in Rome,” not far from Raja’s apartment. Gatti, after making a brief foray into Italian tax law to explain his suspicion that it is Raja who has purchased the new apartment in Starnone’s name, reminds us that most translators do not earn enough from the sweat of their labor to be able to afford such nice things. Raja has risen suspiciously above her station.
The part of Gatti’s claim that has unavoidable meaning for readers is that Anita Raja’s biography does not at all correspond to that of Elena Ferrante as gleaned from her novels, or as described in “Frantumaglia,” a work of autobiographical fragments that first appeared in Italy more than a decade ago and which will be published in the United States on November 1st. In that book, Ferrante writes that she grew up in Naples, the daughter of a local seamstress. Raja’s mother, Golda Frieda Petzenbaum, worked as a teacher, and was born in Worms, Germany, into a Polish Jewish family that fled to Italy in 1937. She married a Neapolitan magistrate, but the family moved to Rome, in 1956, when Raja was three. If Raja is Elena Ferrante, that would mean, among many other things, that she has no firsthand knowledge of the postwar Naples milieu that she evokes with such fiercely unsentimental strokes, the oppressive rione on the city’s outskirts that anchors the Neapolitan novels and gives them their extraordinary texture of lived truth.
Like many—maybe most—enthusiastic Ferrante readers, I have no interest in knowing who the writer who publishes her novels under the name Elena Ferrante is. I don’t care. Actually, I do care: I care about not finding out. There are so few avenues left, in our all-seeing, all-revealing digital world, for artistic mystery of the true kind—mystery that isn’t concocted as a publicity play but that finds its origins in the writer’s soul as a prerogative of his or her ability to create. That kind of mystery has a corresponding point in the soul of the receptive reader. To fall in love with a book, in that way that I and so many others have fallen in love with Ferrante’s, is to feel a special kinship with its author, a profound sort of mutual receptivity and comprehension. The author knows nothing about you, and yet you feel that your most intimate self has been understood. The fact that Ferrante has chosen to be anonymous has become part of this contract, and has put readers and writer on a rare, equal plane. Ferrante doesn’t know the details of our lives, and doesn’t care to. We don’t know those of hers. We meet on an imaginative neutral ground, open to all.
Gatti believes that Ferrante’s anonymity is a publicity play of sorts; as her popularity and acclaim have grown, it has brought her special attention, and, as he points out, Edizione E/O has encouraged her over the past few years to give interviews, which she was initially not at all inclined to do. But it is not, as he seems to think, a trick, as the false identity of the writer JT LeRoy was a trick, a performance consciously created to fool readers and to drum up interest in LeRoy’s supposedly autobiographical books. In a 2003 interview, included in “Frantumaglia,” Ferrante mentions that Italo Calvino told a scholar of his work that he might answer questions put to him, but not with the truth. In a letter to her publisher, she writes that, if pressed, she may occasionally resort to telling lies about herself “to shield my person, feelings, pressures.” Gatti brandishes these lines as if they were murder weapons dripping with fresh blood. “But by announcing that she would lie on occasion,” he writes, “Ferrante has in a way relinquished her right to disappear behind her books and let them live and grow while their author remained unknown.”
How announcing, in no uncertain terms, that you prefer to preserve your right not to divulge the details of your life amounts to relinquishing that right is beyond me. Certainly Gatti does not explain why he feels so free to interpret Ferrante’s “no” as his “yes.” But he has hit on something crucial to the whole debate: the question of an author’s right not to be known, and the particular resonance of that question when the author concerned is, presumably, female. For years, as Virginia Woolf famously wrote in “A Room of One’s Own,” Anonymous was a woman. The power to publish under one’s own name was simply not within the reach of most women, and, even when it was, it came at great risk. To publish as a woman was to be categorized as trivial, sentimental, concerned with life’s petty surface questions rather than its deep truths. (I use the past tense here in the Faulknerian sense of its not being dead, or even past.)
Think of those great nineteenth-century Georges, Eliot and Sand, who opted to give their books a better chance at a future by claiming to have fathered rather than mothered them. But the right to publish anonymously as a choice—an internal, artistic prerogative rather than an externally imposed condition—is one that women have only recently earned. It has no meaning as a choice if there is nothing to contrast it with—if their peers cannot publish freely under their own names. Thomas Pynchon’s choice to remove himself entirely from the literary publicity apparatus wouldn’t mean much if Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer and all the other male writers of his generation weren’t able to take such advantage of it.
The publishing pressures have flipped from what they were when George Eliot was writing “Middlemarch.” Now there is enormous pressure for writers not to be anonymous or to disguise themselves with pseudonyms. Publishers like to have a face to put on their books’ back flap; they like to have their writers make the publicity rounds, giving readings at bookstores and interviews to magazines to drum up interest in what they’re selling. Writing under a nom de plume has become a personal tic, a tool that writers use to free up a different authorly persona within themselves. John Banville openly writes crime novels as Benjamin Black; last year, the novel “The Whites” was published by “Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt.”
Ferrante’s steadfast artistic choice to be anonymous can only be that: an artistic choice, made at the beginning of her writing career for private reasons that she deemed essential. The cost of anonymity is high; she told her publisher that she would do nothing to promote her books, and, indeed, they could well have sunk to the bottom of the literary river without a trace. That they succeeded, and reached the kind of audience they have, has happened, if anything, in spite of Ferrante’s anonymity, not because of it. Its costs continue. One particularly bizarre and offensive claim of Gatti’s is that his “exposure” of Anita Raja as Ferrante leaves “open the possibility of some kind of unofficial collaboration with her husband, the writer Starnone.” Ferrante’s anonymity has apparently now made her vulnerable to the accusation that she has not been able to write her books without leaning creatively on a man.
And so back to Gatti—and to Raja. Edizione E/O has denied the claims. If they turn out to be true, readers will have to reckon on their own with the disjunction of biographical fact with biographical supposition. This, I think, will not be such a hard thing to do. Americans and people from the forty other countries where Ferrante’s works are available in translation have not been reading her to get an eyewitness depiction of postwar Naples. (One of the marvels of Ferrante’s style is how much she does with so little; she brings the city to life with an economy of language and simplicity of detail that leave the reader’s imagination free to finish the job.) We read her because her evocation of that world contains human truths that resonate across history and place to reach us wherever and however we live now.
The only solace in this whole mess may be the character of Gatti. He, not Ferrante, seems to be the fictional persona, a puffed-up pedant straight out of Nabokov, right down to his Nabokovian name: Claudio the Cat, prowling around in search of secrets. Gatti is the kind of reader who sees “clues” in a writer’s work, as if she has constructed a puzzle to be solved rather than written a novel to be read. Even as he crows that Raja’s life shares almost nothing in its particulars with the world of Ferrante’s novels, he holds up as definitive a few corroborating crumbs: the fact that Raja’s aunt was named Elena, for example, or that Nino, the name of the man the character Elena loves, is the family nickname of Domenico Starnone. Like Charles Kinbote, the unstable narrator of “Pale Fire,” who takes it upon himself to “annotate” the final poem of his famous neighbor, John Shade, Gatti seems to believe that he can obtain power over a great writer by exposing her, not for the purpose of interpretation or greater understanding but simply for the sake of being the first to do it.
To that end, Gatti published his article not only on the New York Review blog, but also, simultaneously, in the Italian, German, and French press. He has also published a second article, with the smugly Ferrante-inflected title “The Story Behind a Name,” about Golda Frieda Petzenbaum, the mother of Anita Raja. The purpose of this article is unclear—“There are no traces of Anita Raja’s personal history in Elena Ferrante’s fiction,” Gatti remarks at the start of his piece delving into Anita Raja’s personal history—aside from showing off his taste for accumulating the sort of irrelevant details that he uses to bolster his claim to authority. Do we need to know Petzenbaum’s height down to the inch, or the exact time on July 25, 1940, that her father arrived at the Italian concentration camp where he was interned? And even if Anita Raja is Elena Ferrante, what does her mother’s terrible persecution during the Holocaust have to do with the books she wrote? Gatti, a strict literalist, doesn’t attempt to answer that obvious question, aside from implying that Ferrante should have written the story he wanted her to. Let us hope he doesn’t abandon his investigative pursuits to become a critic just yet. In spite of its unfortunate presentation, Petzenbaum’s story is moving, as such stories inevitably are. Gatti is right about one thing: it deserves a far better writer to tell it.
