After Sappho: A Novel

by Selby Wynn Schwartz

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 BOOKER PRIZE

A Guardian Best Book of the Year

Lit Hub: Most Anticipated Books of 2023



An exhilarating debut from a radiant new voice, After Sappho reimagines the intertwined lives of feminists at the turn of the twentieth century.

“The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho,” so begins this intrepid debut novel, centuries after the Greek poet penned her lyric verse. Ignited by the same muse, a myriad of women break from their small, predetermined lives for seemingly disparate paths: in 1892, Rina Faccio trades her needlepoint for a pen; in 1902, Romaine Brooks sails for Capri with nothing but her clotted paintbrushes; and in 1923, Virginia Woolf writes: “I want to make life fuller and fuller.” Writing in cascading vignettes, Selby Wynn Schwartz spins an invigorating tale of women whose narratives converge and splinter as they forge queer identities and claim the right to their own lives. A luminous meditation on creativity, education, and identity, After Sappho announces a writer as ingenious as the trailblazers of our past.

“This book is splendid: Impish, irate, deep, courageous. . . . Brava!”—Lucy Ellmann, author of Ducks, Newburyport

 

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Release date: January 24, 2023

Publisher: Liveright

Print pages: 222

Sample

ONE

CORDULA POLETTI, B. 1885

Cordula Poletti was born into a line of sisters who didn’t understand her. From the earliest days, she was drawn towards the outer reaches of the house: the attic, the balcony, the back window touched by the branches of a pine tree. At her christening she kicked free of the blankets bundled around her and crawled down the nave. It was impossible to swaddle Cordula long enough to name her.

CORDULA POLETTI, c. 1896

Whenever she could, she took a Latin primer from the Biblioteca Classense and went to sit in a tree near the cemetery. In her house they called, Cordula, Cordula!, and no one would answer. Finding Cordula’s skirts discarded on the floor, her mother openly despaired of her prospects. What right-mindedcitizen of Ravenna would marry a girl who climbed up the trees in her underthings? Her mother called, Cordula, Cordula?, but there was no one in the house who would answer that question.

X, 1883

Two years before the christening of Cordula, Guglielmo Cantarano published his study of X, a twenty-three-year-old Italian. In excellent health, X went whistling through the streets and kept a string of girlfriends happy. Even Cantarano, who disapproved, had to admit that X was jovial and generous. X would throw a shoulder to a wheel without complaint, could make a room roar with laughter. It wasn’t that. It was what X was not. X was not a willing housewife. X remained unmoved by squalling infants, would not wear skirts that swaddled the stride, had no desire to be pursued by the hot breath of young men, failed to enjoy domestic chores, and possessed none of the decorous modesty of maidenhood. Whatever X was, Cantarano wrote, it was to be avoided at all costs.

Thus X was locked away in an asylum and Italian mothers were instructed to watch for signs of deviance in their daughters. Even those who had normal breasts, Cantarano cautioned, might turn out to be like X, whose apparently standard genitals had not prevented the attempt, late one night, to set the family home on fire.

C— POLETTI, c. 1897

She shut the insistent voices of her family inside the house and went up her tree. From a haven of leaves she looked out over the cemetery. The tombs of poets were wreathed in laurel and etched in glorious verses, while the graves of the ordinary listed as their only accomplishments the names of children produced or a spouse bereaved. So many dead in childbirth, she observed, and so few by shipwreck.

Her mind was a tangle of lyric odes and unconjugated verbs. Each line of Ovid demanded an unspooling of which object bore the action, and by whose brave hand. Each epithet traced to its source showed the divine moving behind the scenes of human life: in her tree was a great rustling of gods, owls, winged serpents. As soon as she finished the Latin primer she went on to the Greek. She stayed up late, rapturously late. It became apparent that she wasn’t Cordula at all.

LINA POLETTI, c. 1899

Towards the end of the century she changed names. Cordula sounded anyway like a heap of rope. Lina was a swift, sleek line, a hand brushing a row of buttons. Lina was the one who would read Sappho.

Lina lived with her family on Via Rattazzi, not far from the tomb of Dante. A tomb is a dead place in the ground. There is a rock on top of it, covered with tiny nicks that are words. Lina stayed up late writing verses for the tomb. Not for Dante himself, who had been dead since 1321, but for the incisions that words make on immutable substances.

It would be many years before we learned of Lina Poletti. In her childhood she dwelt alone, her only companions the solemn constellations of the night sky. The refrain rang through her house, Cordula, Cordula!, but Lina listened only to the silence of stars. Eventually she would learn to translate Sappho without a dictionary. She would find that she was one of us. But in those years it was a great wonder that Lina, unlike X, did not set fire to the family home.

LINA POLETTI, c. 1900

As the century turned, Lina Poletti outpaced her classmates in classical subjects from elocution to the elegiac mode. Moreover she kept her distance when they paired off to walk home or passed each other scraps of crude rhymes. Lina walked alone to the Biblioteca Classense and noted various uses of the genitive.

The genitive is a case of relations between nouns. Often the genitive is defined as possession, as if the only way one noun could be with another were to own it, greedily. But in fact there is also the genitive of remembering, where one noun is always thinking of another, refusing to forget her.

SAPPHO, FRAGMENTS 105A AND 105B

Sappho writes of many girls: those who are pliant and bind up their hair modestly, those who are golden and go willingly into the bridal chamber, and those like the hyacinth in the mountains that shepherd men/with their feet trample down. An entire book of Sappho is made of wedding songs; like the hyacinth in the mountains, none have survived.

For the girl who wishes to avoid being trampled down by the feet of men, Sappho recommends the farthermost branch of the highest tree. There are always those rare few, Sappho notes, that the applepickers forgot—/no, not forgot: were unable to reach.

Lina’s father made his living selling earthenware pots. With four daughters to maintain, he saw the necessity of their marriages like the exchange of dry goods. A line of daughters was already a liability, and there was no market for girls who were not pliant.

Whenever Lina’s mother called her, Cordula, Cordula!, to embroider the trousseau of linens for her dowry, Lina was already elsewhere. She was at the very end of the Greek primer, she was ensconced in a far corner of the Biblioteca Classense, she had gone out of the back window and into the pine tree to read poems from a century less muffled in fabric.

We could picture Lina in those years: her high buttoned boots, her erudite citations. Above her boots she seemed hardly to be wearing skirts. Lina Poletti was like that, she could make visible things seem scant and unremarkable. She had her own ways of escaping the century.

SAPPHO, FRAGMENT 2

A kletic poem is a calling, both a hymn and a plea. It bends in obeisance to the divine, ever dappled and shining, and at the same time it calls out to ask, When will you arrive? Why is your radiance distant from my eyes? You drop through the branches when I sleep at the roots. You pour yourself out like the light of an afternoon and yet somewhere you linger, outside the day.

It is while invoking the one who abides and yet must be called, urgently, from a great distance, that Sappho writes of aithussomenon, the bright trembling of leaves in the moment of anticipation. A poet is always living in kletic time, whatever her century. She is calling out, she is waiting. She lies down in the shade of the future and drowses among its roots. Her case is the genitive of remembering.

LINA POLETTI, C, 1905

Lina Poletti fought to sit in a chair at the library. She fought to smoke in the Caffè Roma-Risorgimento. She fought to frequent literary gatherings in the evenings. She did up her cravat with determined fingers and presented herself in public, over and over, to murmurs in Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II.

She went on, against the wishes of her family, to the university in Bologna. She studied under the esteemed poet Giovanni Pascoli, who was surprised to find her there. He peered at her, although she was sitting clearly in the front row of the lecture hall with her pen ready. There weren’t many women who wanted to write a thesis on the poetry of Carducci. People were always saying that about Lina Poletti: they were surprised to find her, there weren’t many like her. It was true that she had very striking eyes, with golden rims around her pupils. She seemed volatile, alchemical. Something might flash through her and change everything. As Sibilla Aleramo would say to us later, Lina was a violent, luminous wave.

TWO

RINA FACCIO, B. 1876

As a girl, Rina Faccio lived in Porto Civitanova and did what she was told. Her father told her to work in the accounting department of his factory, and she did it. She was twelve years old, dutiful, with long dark hair.

In the factory glass bottles were produced, thousands every day, tinting the air with ferrous smoke. Rina was charged with the figures, how much sodium sulphate was carried to the furnace on the shoulders of how many portantini, the boys who worked eight hours a day for one lira. There was no school in Porto Civitanova, so Rina tried to teach herself how to account for all of this.

RINA FACCIO, 1889

In 1889 Rina’s mother told her something wordlessly that she never forgot. Her mother was standing at the window, looking out, in a white dress that hung off her shoulders. Then suddenly her mother went out of the window. She plummeted, her dress trailing like a scrap of paper. Her body landed two floors down, bent into a bad shape. That was what Rina Faccio’s mother had to say to her.

NIRA AND RESEDA, 1892

Nira was the first time Rina changed her name. She wanted to write for the provincial local papers, but she was afraid that her father would find out.

When Rina Faccio turned fifteen, she grew out of anagrams. She chose the name Reseda because it reminded her of recita, a verb for actresses: it means, she plays her role, she recites her part. When her father thundered in the drawing room about the opinions of these hussies, whoever they were, appearing in print, Rina Faccio looked up from her needlepoint as blank as a new page.

RINA FACCIO, 1892

Despite having been warned wordlessly by her mother, Rina Faccio didn’t foresee her fate. She was obediently adding and subtracting numbers about the factory, keeping the ledgers in straight lines. A man who worked at the factory was moving in circles around her. He had brute hands that fastened on levers, a breath that crawled up the back of her neck. She didn’t see him until the circles were very tight, and then it was too late. Her dress was shoved up. She cried out, but only the brute palm of his hand could hear her.

RINA PIERANGELI FACCIO, 1893

Once Rina’s father learned that she had been possessed by that man, there was nothing to do but transfer her to him in name and deed. Articles of Italian law bound a daughter into becoming a wife at the word of her father. In particular Article 544 of the Penal Code was like an iron lever, manoeuvring girls of sixteen into position as brides to the very men who had trampled them down.

In the winter Rina was handed from one household to another, sallow and dazed. In the house of Rina’s father, her two sisters sat silently at their needlepoint while her mother, or what was left of her, was consigned to the asylum at Macerata. There were no words for what happened in the house of the husband to whom Rina now belonged. After Rina Pierangeli Faccio had been delivered to him, along with some dining-room furniture, the curtains were drawn. When in the early months she miscarried in a feverish rush of blood, she did not ask why. But she felt welling up in her a tumultuous hatred of life, this life, her life.

THE PISANELLI CODE, 1865

The politicians hailed the Pisanelli Code as a triumph of the unification of Italy. The new state was eager to grow into its full shape, stretching the length of the entire peninsula and covering the populace with its laws. As one politician said, We made Italy; now we have to make the Italians.

Under the Pisanelli Code, Italian women gained two memorable rights: we could make wills to distribute our property after our own deaths, and our daughters could inherit things from us. Our writing before death had never seemed so important. Those of us in Italy considered whether we might bequeath to our daughters some small gift that could be pawned for a future.

RINA, 1895

In 1895, amid laundry and bruises, Rina Pierangeli Faccio gave birth to the child of that man. It was a son. When the infant turned two, she found the bottle of laudanum and wordlessly took all of it.

The laudanum didn’t kill Rina Pierangeli Faccio, but it ended her days as a dutiful wife. The woman she had been until that night was dead, she said. The doctor prescribed bed rest, the husband reproached her. But Rina would only speak to her sister.

Often that was the first thing we did when we were changing: we would find a sister and stay with her, taking breakfast in our room. Or we would find someone in her room and stay with her, pretending if needed that we were sisters. The housekeepers would widen their eyes, but if we prevailed, milky tea and toast were served in our room, on trays that spanned the whole width of our bed.

DR. T. LAYCOCK, A TREATISE ON THE NERVOUS DISORDERS OF WOMEN, 1840

The eminent Doctor Laycock of York, writing on the nervous disorders of women, could not help but notice that the more young women consorted with each other, the more excitable and indolent they became. This condition might strike seamstresses, factory girls, or any woman who associated with any number of other women.

In particular, he cautioned, young females cannot associate together in public schools without serious risk of exciting the passions, and being led to indulge in practices injurious to both body and mind. Novels, whispers, unsigned poems, general education, shared sleeping compartments: no sooner were girls reading in bed than they were reading in bed together. What might look like sisterly affection or a schoolgirl’s fancy ought to be diagnosed as the pernicious antecedent of hysteric paroxysms. In the throes of it they were highly contagious and might throw whole households into disorder.

AMENDMENT TO THE PISANELLI CODE, 1877

The rights we didn’t have in Italy were the same rights we hadn’t had for centuries, and thus not worth enumerating. But in 1877, a modification to the Pisanelli Code allowed women to act as witnesses. Suddenly, legally, we could sign our names to what we knew to be true. Our words, which had always before been seen as gauzy and frivolous, gained a new weight as they settled on the page.

Then, too, we were beginning to notice how the outlines of our doorways and dowries were matched up, so that one box could be carried through another, signifying the transfer of a bride. No one could leave a marriage, but some of us could discern the shape that it made of our lives. As one politician said at that time, In Italy, the enslavement of women is the only regime in which men may live happily. He meant that we ourselves were the small gift, pawned for the future of the fatherland.

THREE

ANNA KULISCIOFF, B. c. 1854

Before Anna Kuliscioff spent her life fighting for the rights of Italian women, she was born in southern Ukraine. As soon as she was old enough to grasp the basic idea of humanity, she began explaining its principles to those around her, for which she was exiled, arrested, and imprisoned across Europe.

In 1877 she sang for her supper in a public park in Kyiv, then fled the country with a false passport. Hardly had she arrived in Switzerland in search of a clandestine printing press when the police swarmed in, asking pointed questions about her revolutionary belief that women ought not to be held as property.

She was expelled from France, she was arrested in Milano, she was jailed in Firenze although there was no evidence for her guilt except that she was clearly incorrigible. By 1881 she had a daughter, fathered by an Italian anarchist. Anna Kuliscioff was careful not to marry the man, she had other ideas.

ANNA KULISCIOFF, 1886

Anna Kuliscioff was so often the object of outcry and imprecation that by 1884 she scarcely registered an insult. She enrolled in the University of Napoli to study medicine, despite the fact that no woman had ever done so before. She was interested in epidemiology and why on earth so many Italian women were permitted to die from puerperal fevers. At her graduation in 1886, when she was decried as a pathological perversion of femininity, Anna Kuliscioff paused briefly to recite the correct medical definition of ‘pathogenesis’. Then she took her degree.

THE PATRIA POTESTAS

On the grounds of sheer human life, Anna Kuliscioff opposed the Pope, ...