Gatti thinks he knows better
Deborah Orr has a blistering piece on the privacy-stripping of Elsa Ferrante. Orr is a massive fan of Ferrante’s work, has interviewed her, and is 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.
And the writer’s stated wishes over more than two decades, with zero public interest reason to do so.
[S]uccessful 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.
Damn right. We don’t want men like him in our faces, and hiding is one way to avoid them.
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.
He cares about himself and his ability to tell an admired woman who’s in charge.
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 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.
…
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.
It only makes me more furious as the day goes on. We just can’t be allowed to get on with doing our work in our own way.
If you haven’t read it yet, Gatti’s interview with the Columbia Journalism Review really shows how astonishingly arrogant he is. A couple doozies:
“All the people that hate me for what I wrote are bad people, and I don’t mind the fact that they hate me.”
“I enhanced the work of art that are the books of Elena Ferrante.”
I will say that I’m heartened that the backlash has been forceful and unanimous. I haven’t seen one single contrarian “Actually…” piece defending Gatti yet. (I don’t think Slate has chimed in yet, so there’s still hope for the mansplainers…)
http://www.cjr.org/q_and_a/elena_ferrante_claudio_gatti_identity.php
Good lord. He seems to be trying for the title of world’s biggest shit.
He’s up against Trump, though. Trump is a tough act to beat, in terms of the title “world’s biggest shit”.
Not if we want a free press, no. Anyone who reaches a certain level of celebrity will become a subject of interest. Remember the constant sniffing into ‘Dick Francis’? The Salinger intrusion industry? The Times ‘expose’ of Pynchon when he was hunted down to his flat in New York?
Nasty for her, but any journo can see this is a big story (albeit in a tiny world), whether she is woman or man. She couldn’t have stayed anonymous for long.
Well that’s a ridiculous thing to say, since she did stay anonymous for more than 20 years.
Also, it’s bullying garbage. I despise that “it’s always been this way, you can’t change it” crap.
Pinkeen, I fail to see how an author choosing to remain anonymous threatens a free press. The issue with a free press tends to be the issue of government interference, not a George Eliot or an Elena Ferrante choosing to protect their privacy.
Free press does not mean that the press has no restraints at all. Elena Ferrante’s identity does not have any bearing on whether the world continues in the path it’s going or whether it lurches to a new (better or worse) path. This is merely nosy intrusiveness, the arrogance of the press that thinks they have a right to put their cameras into the life of anybody they choose.
The press can remain free even if an author continues to remain unknown.
She stayed anonymous until her fame reached a level where her identity would be a story. And it can be changed, of course, just not if you want a free press. I don’t like this sort of prurience but I think it is a price worth paying.
But it should do or, at least, it should mean no restraints beyond the limits of the criminal law that applies to all citizens. We are so used to a free press we forget how importannt it is and focus on ‘abuses’, but tale a look at Turkey to see how quickly that freedom goes, how popular it can be putting a stop to scurrilousness and how much it costs.
The issue here isn’t the law. Not everything has to be turned into an argument about the law. The law doesn’t and can’t and shouldn’t cover all of morality. I’m interested in the morality, not the law.
The NYRB should have spurned Gatti’s article. Gatti should have minded his own business. The law doesn’t deal with “should.”
I am saying that it is naive to think this wouldn’t have happened to any writer with the celebrity of Elena Ferrante and the only way to stop it would be to destroy freedom of the press. I don’t like it much but what it isn’t, in my opinion, is a sexist act. Imagine if it were discovered that, say Phillip Roth, had been writing all those years under a pseudonym, that he was in fact not from where he said he was or who he has always said he was. Do you really imagine it wouldn’t also have been exposed and that it wouldn’t have been a huge story fora any journalist who writes about that tiny world?
It is natural that people take an interest in these things which is why we have biographies. The reaction has been an overreaction I think.
That may be what you meant to say, but it’s not what you did say. It’s not my fault that you veered off into talking about legalities.
So, Pinkeen, we can expect to see your tax returns in the Guardian, LATimes or NSZ soon? They must be of equally great public interest due to Free Press — right?
By that, I obviously by no means intend any insinuation about your skin tint beyond what is reasonably inferred by your handle, or any associations a wicked mind may make. ;-)