Nadia Priotti- Overturning Stereotypes.pdf

L’immagine dell’Italia nelle letterature angloamericane e postcoloniali

a cura di Paolo Bertinetti

Trauben 3

OVERTURNING STEREOTYPES: AMBLER’S VISION OF ITALY AND ITALIANS Nadia Priotti

For centuries, since the Renaissance, Italy had been considered an intriguing setting for literary works of various natures. It is no wonder, then, that a twentieth century writer of spy fiction, a genre whose main ingredient is conspiracy, could turn his interest to Italy and its people as a source of inspiration for his novels. Some of his Italian characters in fact embody the features of the stock villain of spy stories, but also recall some protagonists of Elizabethan drama or of Gothic novels set in Italy. Nevertheless, Ambler’s Italians do not simply comply with the image of the Machiavellian villain; on many occasions, the writer seems to defy the stereotypical representation of nationality, both through a variety of characters who resist clichés and through a uniformity of setting without sharp regional distinctions. The analysis will focus on Ambler’s vision of Italians and Italy, and by contrast also on his description of the British. The approach used as a guideline will therefore be that of imagological studies, whose main interest lies in the literary representation of national characters and on the way stereotypes become rooted in a culture. Two issues, among others, have appeared particularly relevant. The first one is the close relationship between the image of another culture, or ‘the Other’, and the perception of one’s own national identity; since the Other is often perceived in terms of difference or as a projection of one’s own fears or desires, “each description or definition of the other culture implies a selfdescription or self-definition” (Pfister, 4). The second important element is the influence of other literary texts, even of the past tradition, on the definition of the Other, which is therefore only a subjective construct in which “the primary reference is not to empirical reality but to an intertext, a sounding-board, of other related textual instances” (Leersen, 26). 27

Starting from these assumptions, we will therefore try to outline Ambler’s contribution to the discourse of both ‘Italianness’ and ‘Englishness’ within British culture. The works examined will be two novels, Epitaph for a Spy and Cause for Alarm, both published in 1938, and Ambler’s autobiography Here Lies, written many years later1. In the fictional works the dramatization of the contrast English vis-à-vis Italian, which at first might look like a simple opposition of good/evil or innocent/experienced, proves to be a more complex juxtaposition, where positivity and negativity seem equally shared by the two cultures. In the autobiography, then, rich in anecdotes regarding the writer’s double experience in Italy, Ambler confirms his interest in people rather than in places by dwelling on some of his encounters, in which easy generalizations are carefully avoided. Epitaph for a Spy is about a refugee of Hungarian origin wrongly accused of espionage against France. The novel, set on the French Riviera and for most part in a hotel, includes a series of characters of different nationalities, used by Ambler to dramatize the tensions of a Europe on the verge of the outbreak of World War II. Conflicts among the guests of the hotel are in fact frequent and often generated by prejudices and stereotypes regarding people of other nationalities. Among the couples at the Hotel de la Réserve, one is of mixed nationality: Major ClandonHartley, an Englishman, and his Italian wife Maria, protagonists of an episode which will provoke a great amount of gossiping. A man on a yacht reaches the beach of the Réserve and is welcome enthusiastically by Maria. Soon afterwards an argument between the Major and the man breaks out, ending with the Englishman punching the Italian man in the stomach. The incident is narrated first by an American couple and later on by the Major himself. The story told by the Americans presents a number of clichés regarding the two Italians, from their shouting aloud to their gesticulations, not to mention comments on the excessive hugging and kissing and language sounding, “like a car with a choked jet” (Ambler, ES, 81). Trying to account for what happened, the Americans imagine Maria as coming from a backward, rural village of southern Italy, a country girl who has yielded to the fascinating gentleman’s passion. 1 In the quotations Epitaph for a Spy will be referred to as ES, Cause for Alarm as CA and Here Lies as HL.

28

Major Clandon Hartley’s version contradicts the gossip. Maria is in fact the daughter of an important Roman banker, while the mysterious man is Maria’s brother, who wanted to inherit all his father’s money; to do so, he engaged the major in a ‘large-scale bribe’ in order to make him look corrupt and avoid his marriage with Maria. If Maria’s brother is portrayed as a stereotype of the Machiavellian villain ready to use any means to reach his end, the Major’s narration reveals how hospitable the Staretti family was during his convalescence, the strength of family ties and the authenticity of Maria’s feelings. In addition, the alleged ‘naiveté’ of the Major is not completely convincing, neither in his role in the bribery nor in his responsibility towards Maria. Though he describes himself as a person who “knew nothing about business. Never been able to make head or tail of it” (Ambler, ES, 104), and therefore as an easy prey of the scheming nature of Battista Staretti, he seems to have been all too ready to be part of a profitable business scheme: “Well, as you can imagine, I jumped at the chance.” (Ambler, ES, 104). As for the Major’s foolishness in letting Maria escape with him, condemning her to unhappiness, his fault lies in his lack of sincerity towards what he was offering her when he agreed to the elopement: “I don’t think my good lady knew just how little money I had when she said she wanted to go with me. She’d been used to something different from cheap hotels” (Ambler, ES, 105). The episode of the Clandon-Hartleys is a mere subplot in Epitaph for a Spy. The author does, however, examine the opposition of English/ Italian as innocent/villain through the characters of the Major and Battista, an ambivalence introduced and at the same time questioned with a double point of view and ambiguities in the first person narration of the Major. This contrast is dealt with again in a similar way in the other contemporary work, Cause for Alarm. The novel is set almost entirely in Italy. Nevertheless, as Cawelti and Rosenberg point out in their work on the espionage novel, “Eric Ambler’s interest in the sense of place is remarkably superficial” (110) . The descriptive passages of places are definitely too few if we consider that Nicky Marlow travels extensively from Milan to Turin, Genoa and Rome, not to mention the final escape from Milan to the Yugoslav frontier. The details are sketchy when not squalid: a number of caffé and a wine shop where the protagonist gets involved in a popular card game called scopa; a hotel, the only modernity of which is the hot water system; and a football match ending up with a 29

physical attack on the referee. The general atmosphere is not up to the protagonist’s expectations, and he admits his disappointment towards Milan in one of the early letters sent to his fiancée: “…but you know how it is. You get an imaginary picture of a place in your mind, and then are upset when the reality doesn’t fit. I had always pictured it as a collection of small houses in the Borghese manner grouped round an enormous rococo opera house… Actually, it is nothing more nor less than an Italian version of Birmingham.” (Ambler, CA, 30). The paucity of local detail does not necessarily imply a limit, as it can be seen as an attempt to avoid descriptions of the beauty of Italian landscapes or of its architecture, which might contribute to the creation of a false representation of reality likely to cause disillusionment. The neglect regarding place, however, is compensated by Ambler’s attention to fascist ideology and its being part of everyday life. It is through the opposition hero/villain, typical of the formulaic literature of espionage2, that the writer emphasizes the need to fight the regime. The villains are in fact Italian people connected with the fascist state. Violence erupts in the novel at the very beginning, with the murder of Mr Ferning, Mr Marlow’s predecessor, committed by OVRA men with the help of the police. Killing problematic people is presented as an everyday routine, so matter of course that one man is eager to accomplish his task and get back to Palermo and the others use a cynical jargon in which the ironic expression sta bene is used to indicate when someone is dead. Later on, it will be Marlow’s turn to be beaten up by men of the same organization, an incident that will persuade the hero to resist and get involved in a plot to defeat the enemy. The violence is not limited to physical brutality. Abuses of power are also evident in the arbitrary detention of Marlow’s passport by the police administration; the impossibility of firing the inefficient Mr Bellinetti, an untouchable man of 2

We refer to the definition of formulas given by Cawelti in the first chapter of Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture, as “ways in which specific cultural themes and stereotypes become embodied in more universal story archetypes” (6). As for the roles of hero and villain, the reference is to Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre. In it Palmer points out that the dominant feature of thrillers, of which spy novels are in his opinion only a variation, lies in the combination between conspiracy and competitive individualism. Conspiracy, representing the irruption of evil, is embodied in the villain, while the hero is the character who proves his identity by competing with evil and restoring order.

30

the regime; the ideological brainwashing of propagandist speeches and processions of fascist youth movements. To confront evil Ambler introduces this time Nicolas Marlow, one of the heroes who “are not professionals but individuals caught up by accident in the whirlwinds of history… they are not inspired by patriotic feeling or personal heroism” (Stafford, 126). As mentioned before, Marlow decides to get involved in the game organized by the Russian agent Zaleshoff after he is physically attacked. The heroism of the ‘innocent abroad’, as the expert of spy fiction Michael Denning defines it, lies in “the refusal to compromise or give in, the assertion of ‘humanity’ against ‘brutality’”, an opposition drawn from the tradition “of the Empire’s civilizing mission… now recast into an anti-fascist rhetoric” ( 72). Ambler, however, clearly understood that the ‘fascist menace’ was not exclusive to Italian culture. In its broader sense, fascism includes any intrusion of violence in ordinary life. In an interview published in Journal of Popular Culture the writer accounts for his new heroes as a reaction against the traditional thriller up to that moment: “Sapper was writing solid right wing. He was an outright fascist. He even had heroes dressed in black shirts. Buchan was an establishment figure, so club and fuddy-duddy and I decided to turn that upside down and make the heroes left wing and popular front figures” (Hopkins, 286)3. The writer’s idea that the element of violence was also part of British life and even of popular culture accounts for the refusal to attribute brutality to all the Italian characters, while depicting all the British as defenders of human values. By analyzing Cause for Alarm more closely, one receives the impression that the contrast English/ innocent/ human as opposed to Italian/ experienced/ brutal applies only to a certain extent. First of all, among Italian characters, we find people who do not comply with the regime. They are often people who have paid a high price for their resistance and 3

Sapper was the pseudonym of H.C.Mc Neile, author of novels whose main character was ‘Bulldog’ Drummond, a popular adventure hero particularly liked by young schoolboys. Thanks to his strength and with the help of his young gang of friends, he managed to defeat the enemy, often a foreigner, without involving the official authorities. His novels were characterized by action, use of violence, jingoism and xenophobia. Buchan’s main amateur hero, instead, was Richard Hannay. He embodied the typical English gentleman who, driven by patriotism, got involved in thrilling adventures where both his physical and intellectual qualities helped him defeat the enemy.

31

they play a crucial role in Marlow’s final escape. One of them is Umberto, the self-conscious but efficient typist in the office, whose father has been killed by fascists. The way he is portrayed is in direct contrast with Mr Bellinetti, defined as a ‘bully’ with a lazy attitude toward work. Another minor character, who lets Marlow and Zaleshoff escape when they are caught at the station, is a communist railway worker. Though for safety reasons he has scratched out his hammer and sickle tattoo, he has substantially remained faithful to his ideology; “once a Communist, always a Communist”, as Zaleshoff says (Ambler, CA, 215). The most representative victim of the regime is Professor Beronelli. Even though the reader gets to know about his tragic story very late in the novel, he is introduced by the first person narrator Marlow in the first chapter as the main reason for telling the story at all: “I would never have attempted to put this down on paper but for one thing: I wished to place on record the facts about Professor Beronelli, late of the University of Bologna” (Ambler, CA, 5). The sad story of the Professor is narrated towards the end by his daughter Simona. He was expelled from university for defending intellectual liberty and refusing to compromise with the regime. Having lost professional prestige and human dignity, he suffered from nervous breakdown and finally lost his mind. Simona, who has recognized Marlow and Zaleshoff and is perfectly aware of the risk she is running in helping them, shows a great sense of hospitality and contributes to the final success of the flight. The Professor’s story is seen by Marlow as the climax to his own adventure, in which he admits “I do not cut a very heroic figure” (Ambler, CA, 5). In fact, the image of the scientist’s uncorrupted nature and his defense of intellectual independence cast doubts on Marlow’s ‘innocence’. Marlow feels disgust towards the corruption of the Italian system and its methods, yet he soon becomes all too familiar with those methods, as he is instructed by his employers: “I was both pleased and disgusted by my week-end’s work. Fitch had warned me what to expect, and had, indeed, coached me carefully in the order-taking ritual; but the reality was disconcerting none the less. It was one thing to talk glibly of bribery and corruption; it was quite another thing actually to do the bribing and corrupting. Not, I reminded myself, that my part in the proceedings was anything but passive acquiescence. These people were already corrupt. It was merely a question of who paid 32

– the German firm or Spartacus. ‘Chi paga ?’ was, after all, a favourite gibe in Italy.” (Ambler, CA, 59).

If Italy is seen as pervaded by corruption, thereby reinforcing a common stereotype, it must be admitted that the English are shown to readily come to terms with the corruptive influence and Marlow’s feeling of being only ‘passive acquiescence’ does not justify his behavior. Furthermore, Marlow presents himself as an engineer, a technical employee working for Spartacus and later on for Cator and Bliss, both big companies involved in the arms business, which do not hesitate to corrupt people or to employ spies, like Vagas in the novel, for profit. Italy’s corruption is then paralleled with the ‘countertheme of the corrupt tycoon’ (Cawelti-Rosenberg, 48). Yet, as Denning observes, “the recognition and demystification of innocence goes further than the realization that the fascist brutes the hero encounters on the Continent have lines running back to London, that the English ‘innocence’ of ideology is merely a commitment to the most profitable investment. … [It also represents] the recognition of one’s own complicity, the recognition that the professors, engineers and commercial travellers that populate the Ambler world are themselves hired guns” ( 75) .

Unlike Professor Beronelli, who refused to subordinate science to power, Marlow justifies his attitude with his devotion to work, without taking into consideration moral issues regarding the potential use of these armaments against his countrymen. In this way he seems to adhere to the same ‘philosophy’ as his employers, who attribute corruption to a larger social context and are motivated solely by profits, as can be seen in a letter Marlow receives from them: “I want you to make every effort to make fresh contacts at your end. Our German competitors are, I know, doing quite well in Italy, which means that there is business to be had. I suggest in this connexion that you draw freely on your ‘special appropriation’. When in Milan do as Rome does! … I do not want the money wasted, naturally; but Spartacus has a name for generosity which you will do well to maintain” ( Ambler, CA, 119)

Ambler therefore exploits the formula of spy fiction literature centred on the contrast between the hero and the villain to dramatize the fear of the spread of totalitarianism and the need to fight against it. In this way he 33

depicts fascists with negative features traditionally attributed to the Italians, countered by an ordinary Englishman. At the same time, he forces the stereotype by allowing the plot to reveal the humanity of an Italian like Beronelli, while he likewise unmasks the loss of an Englishman’s innocence, when his involvement with British Capitalism implicates him in Italian corruption. Writing about Ambler’s contribution to the novel of espionage, Leroy Panek points out that “he brought to it a realistic sense of what people really are, and a new point of view toward political and economic reality” (154). In the attempt to show ‘what people really are’, Ambler necessarily goes beyond the easy generalizations of clichés. A similar attitude can be detected in his autobiography, which saw publication in 1985. Here the writer narrates his two experiences in Italy, one in the early thirties and the other in 1943, when he was sent together with young John Houston as part of a cinematographic unit to shoot propaganda films on the role of the Allied in the Italian territories. The first journey focuses on two different Italies, the reality of the little fishing village of Positano and a short visit in Rome. Ambler does not linger much on the description of Positano, even though there are some sketches showing it as a place not as developed as the nearby Capri and Ravello, but reluctant to change, where some Americans wanting to build a villa in a new style “had got… [from local architects and builders] another house in the tenth-century Saracen style of the rest” (Ambler, HL, 104). Rather than focus on details of the local, he prefers to write about his contacts with people: the owner of Buca di Bacco, the fathers in a monastery and, above all, the fishermen of Positano, who once even let him be an active part of the fishing fleet going out at night for cuttle fish. The sense of being involved with the community contrasts quite sharply with the episode set in Rome, regarding the writer’s visit to an exhibition celebrating ‘Fascism’s achievements’. Here he is threatened to be arrested for showing ‘disrespect by speaking’. The aggressive attitude of the Blackshirts shows their fidelity to the regime and the more politicized atmosphere of the capital city, reinforcing the idea, expressed by Ambler’s friend John, that “the Italians in Rome… were quite different from those in Positano” (Ambler, HL, 106). As for the 1943 experience, the writer tries to describe real facts, even though they are hardly complimentary. The Allied are not always described as the good ones bringing candies, cigarettes and food, as this episode in Venafro shows: 34

“It should have been just the place to show how much better we were, or were going to be. Of course, those were early days in the campaign and not everyone cared about the quest for hearts and minds. New stories about the instant black-market friendships that had sprung up between the shady types working for Allied Military Government Occupied Territories and reinstated Fascist bosses… were told every day. Many of them were true.” (Ambler, HL, 194).

Regarding his meetings with Italians, Ambler recounts with amusement two episodes, which could easily be labelled as examples of the importance that Italians attributed to the so called bella figura4. There is the story of the Italian woman whose reputation was damaged when she was treated as a prostitute by a soldier during the day; never mind that it was common knowledge that boys would visit the lady “but only, you understand, at night” (Ambler, HL, 196). Another episode regards an anti-fascist priest who, when asked to talk about his experience, began an almost theatrical performance and became so immersed in his role not to notice he was treading on his dog’s excrement. Both are anecdotes dealt with as separate funny stories without generalized comments. Furthermore, amusing episodes alternate with more serious ones, in which Italian generosity in the difficult context of the war emerges quite clearly. In a way, it is not surprising that Ambler tried to evade the use of preconceived ideas about people, if we consider that he spent his life in different countries besides England, from France to the States to Switzerland, and that he liked hearing about the experiences of refugees (Ambler, HL, 124). What has to be appreciated is his effort to convey this more open-minded way of looking at people in his spy novels, which genre otherwise tends to follow a formula with defined conventional patterns. Even here, the writer seems to advocate the need to go beyond nationality. As he also pointed out in the short story “The Army of the Shadows”, the world is divided between people who still show their humanity and others who are ready to use immoral means to achieve and

4

The stereotype of bella figura was already fairly widespread at the time of the publication of Here lies. In the same year, a popular book by Gavin Kennedy, rich in clichés about national characters, Doing Business Abroad, referred to bella figura as an important part of the Italians’ view of the world.

35

maintain power, no matter which country they belong to. These represent the real danger that has to be fought and contrasted. No other words thus seem to suit Ambler’s attitude towards the Other than the ones used by the writer himself to describe Graham, the protagonist of one of his novels, with which then we shall conclude our essay: “He liked meeting men of other nationalities, learning smatterings of their languages, being appalled at his lack of understanding of both. He had acquired a wholesome dislike of the word ‘typical.’” (Ambler, Journey into Fear, 4).

Works cited AMBLER, E. Cause for Alarm. London: Penguin Books, 2009. AMBLER, E. Epitaph for a Spy. London: Penguin Books, 2009. AMBLER, E. Here Lies: an Autobiography. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985. AMBLER, E. Journey into Fear. London: Penguin Books, 2009. CAWELTI, J. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. CAWELTI, J. - ROSENBERG, B. The Spy Story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. DENNING, M. Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller. London; New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987 HOPKINS, J. “An Interview with Eric Ambler”, Journal of Popular Culture 9. 2 (Fall 1975): 285-293. LEERSEN, J. “Imagology: History and Method” in BELLER, M.- LEERSEN, J. Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters:a Critical Survey. Studia Imagologica 13, 2007. PALMER, J. Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre. London: Arnold, 1978. PANEK, L. The Special Branch: The British Spy Novel, 1890-1980. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1981. PFISTER, M (ed.). The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italies of British Travellers: an Annotated Anthology. Amsterdam; Atlanta: Rodopi B.V., 1996. STAFFORD, D. The Silent Game: The Real World of Imaginary Spies. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2012.

36