Paola Masino (edited by Marinella Mascia Galateria),Album di vestiti

Abstract

Reviewed by: Marella Feltrin-Morris, Ithaca College, NY, USA

Suggested by a sparingly evocative title and by the absence of an explanatory subtitle, Paola Masino's promise to devote an entire text to the subject of clothing entices and perplexes the reader at the same time. Associating apparel merely with vanity, in contrast to a self more worthy of intellectual attention, would undeniably be facile and reductive. Still, some concern remains that, if garments are simply a wedge to enter that deeper realm, once inside they will risk fading into the background, having fulfilled their function but deluded the reader into thinking that there would be more to them than their rich or impalpable fabric.

However, such concern disappears within the first few pages of Masino’s Album di vestiti, where clothes are never just the smoke and mirrors used to masquerade a philosophical or critical argument, nor are they exclusively a colorful but ephemeral revival of a bygone era. Rather, much like Proust’s madeleine (and, indeed, in her ample and thorough introduction, Marinella Mascia Galateria rightly calls Masino’s promenade through the outfits of her lifetime a recherche), clothes constitute a special, intimate archive, where texture, memory, dream, and thought are interwoven, and each illuminates the others in turn.

Readers already familiar with Paola Masino (1908–1989) will expect nothing less from a writer who, in her novels—Monte Ignoso (1931), Periferia (1933), and Nascita e morte della massaia (1945)—in her short stories, but also in the fragments of notes and letters collected in the posthumous Io, Massimo e gli altri. Autobiografia di una figlia del secolo (1995), had painstakingly, at times almost cruelly, unstitched the seams of the human psyche. Masino stocked intermittently her ‘wardrobe of memories’ (to borrow Mascia Galateria’s felicitous expression) roughly between 1958 and 1963, right when she felt that her intellectual drive had exhausted itself along with her interest in cultivating her outward appearance (“Poiché so di non poter più piacere spiritualmente data la mia gran decadenza intellettuale, non mi importa affatto di essere almeno fisicamente gradevole,” p. 185). In contrast to her desolate feeling of inner void, one finds in her text a treasure of vivid portrayals: her own at different stages of her life, but also those of Massimo Bontempelli, Luigi Pirandello, painter and illustrator Polia Chentoff, actor Osvaldo Valenti, and many lesser known or utterly unknown figures whom Masino immortalizes with the expert touch of a seamstress of words whose creative inspiration has anything but dried up.

Dressmaking provides bonding time for her family and an opportunity for bold, even unorthodox solutions (“Mamma perciò trovò naturalissimo che io per vestirmi spogliassi il pianoforte,” p. 69). Clothes function as essential components, not just accessories, of her blossoming personality (“Una bambina con quella cuffia da monsignore non poteva ignorare il problema della morte, la povertà del prossimo, i dubbi religiosi, l’incostanza della sorte,” p. 64), yet they sometimes clash with the occasion they mark, their memory stirring a mixture of irony and pain:

Quando Massimo mi ha detto che mi voleva bene avevo un vecchio cappotto blu con cui ero andata a scuola per tanti anni; e quando lui è morto portavo un abito da mare in tela a violenti disegni neri azzurri e gialli. Col cappotto sembravo una giovane vedova povera e rabberciata in un pastrano del defunto marito. Coll’abito sbracciato da mare sembravo una matura ma felice e spensierata bagnante. (p. 133)

As always, labels fit too tightly on a maverick writer like Masino, whose prodigious memory (in terms of the materials, cuts, and colors of each outfit, but also of the events they accompanied) guides the book, but should not, in her mind, determine its categorization: “vorrei che, pur girovagando tra i ricordi, questo libro, se libro sarà, non facesse parte della letteratura della memoria, oggi tanto in voga, bensì dei libri di viaggi, di esplorazioni, di avventure di fantascienza addirittura” (p. 101). Indeed, the nomadic (though by no means random) pattern with which a detailed description gives way to a memory or a dream, which in turn detours through a lucid reflection on complex issues—marriage, virginity, art, aging, wrath, heroism, fascism, just to name a few—only to then retrace its steps and recover its lost thread, is more akin to travel literature than to memoir writing, though the line between the two is of course blurry.

Despite Masino’s loss of confidence in her inspiration (“So che non riuscirò più a lavorare come io avevo sperato; ciò nonostante dentro di me mi ripeto, quasi a convincermene, come se già da tempo non fossi convinta del contrario, non può capitare proprio a me di non aver più niente da dire. Eppure è così.”) (p. 184), countless insightful and breathtakingly lyrical passages centered on clothes or sparked by them such as the following attest over and over to the contrary:

Vorrei studiare da cosa nasce il nuovo costume di non portare più il lutto quando muore un parente strettissimo, padre o figlio, marito o moglie. Il lutto, io credo, deve essere nato come necessità interna di difesa. Difesa dal mondo vivo, troppo violento per voci, colori e suoni. Almeno noi che siamo stati mutilati dalla sorte proteggerci, per qualche tempo, da eventuali urti. E anche proprio per avvertire i felici di rivolgersi a noi con una certa cautela: di non urtarci troppo violentemente perché siamo feriti, piagati e, proprio per uno strappo che ci fa differenti da loro, ancor integri di foglie e radici. (p. 133)

Readers not yet familiar with Masino but eager to be exposed to thought-provoking, never predictable views on womanhood, motherhood, and femininity through the original lens of clothes will find in Album di vestiti plenty of material for research as well as for use in the classroom, not exclusively in courses of Italian culture and literature, but also of gender studies, cultural studies, comparative literature, and creative writing. With regards to wedding fantasies, for instance, an ironic but still piercing remark such as the one below is bound to prompt lively discussion:

Immagino che se a una donna alla quale non è consentito di esaltare in sé la creatura umana, se non quando partorisce o quando muore, anche ai nostri giorni, si dicesse: “Potrai metterti uno splendido abito, sedere a tavola al posto d’onore, mangiare cibi prelibati, ecc. ogni volta che perderai un dente,” quella donna si sorprenderebbe spesso a immaginare incidenti per cui perde un molare o le si spezza un canino.

At the same time, Masino scholars will find numerous references, meticulously expanded upon in the copious endnotes, to the people and places that populated her childhood, adolescence, and adult life. Far from being mere research tools, these notes, along with the introduction, pictures, sketches, and even a miniature glossary of fashion terminology, help evoke Masino’s personal, artistic, and social universe, and effectively complement her wish that the book will not only serve as a quest for self-discovery and closure, but that it will stimulate others in turn:

… spero che questo strappare giù dalle loro stampelle i miei giorni trascorsi ed elencarne i ricordi, risciacquarne i panni, rispolverarne i cappelli, rilucidarne gli scarpini, possa darmene una sazietà per cui, dopo averli ben bene passati in rassegna e riposti ad arte nei loro sacchi antitarme, io li pieghi e chiuda per sempre in una cassa dimenticata. Se i miei nipoti avranno bambini, può darsi che quei bambini del duemila si divertano a fare gli archeologi e li riscoprano e con essi questi appunti che potranno loro servire da guida. (p. 199)

Inventive in its language like the voice that emerges from Masino’s fiction, and unique like the outfits that made her stand out in social circles, Album di vestiti is a rare find, one that will certainly provoke interest across disciplines.