Erosion of Souls

By Melvin Maddocks

VENDETTA OF SILENCE by Ann Cornelisen. 242 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $6.95.

What English heaths were to Thomas Hardy, the mountains of southern Italy are to Ann Cornelisen. In the isolated villages of the Lucanian Apennines, she has stumbled upon that ominous interaction between dour people and stark environment that comes to be called fate.

Here is a world almost lost to the 20th century. For the peasant living equally with squealing animals and squalling children in his tiny plastered hut, "five hundred years are only yesterday." His half-feared, half-scorned authorities are the bishop--who uses "modern" as the synonym for "sinful" --and the handful of government bureaucrats with their forms and seals pettily executing justice and collecting taxes in moldering ducal palaces. Time has stuck at late feudalism. In "an aura of stopped drains and tinkling bells," bony, dull-eyed children full of resentment grow into "tentative" men and "bleak, stubborn women" whose faces resemble eroded hillsides.

Torregrecca (1969), Miss Cornelisen's first book-length portrait of this living past, was a small classic. A documentary written like a novel, it dramatized a cultural collision that set a slightly brash ex-Vassar girl trying to organize nursery centers against a cast of southern Italians as passively resistant as one of their mountain roads. Vendetta of Silence is a novel written like a documentary. "At the request of my publishers and my lawyer, I have agreed to call this a novel," the author comments in a prefatory note to what, among other things, is a murder story. The "arrested violence" of Torregreca-- all the bottled-up, soured passion--has exploded here. In the explosion, Miss Cornelisen's wryly fond exasperation with her mountain folk darkens into something like their own despair.

The beginning is deceptively idyllic. An American writer with the initials A.C. moves into a little, apricot colored house overlooking the town of San Basilio. She intends to research a study of the near medieval lives of contemporary southern Italian women, but she soon gets far more than she asks for. Her friend Marina, a schoolteacher, turns out to have been the secret mistress of the previous occupant of the apricot house: Marco Santoro, a gifted teacher and that anomaly in San Basilio, "a hopeful man."

The lovers awaken each other from the trance that is life in San Basilio, but the town hates a survivor. To be happy is to earn a curse. When Marina crumbles at the prospect of malice and decides to abort their child, Marco kills himself--apparently. Even suicide is subtle in San Basilio. The sight of lives strangled by dead traditions offends Miss Cornelisen to the bottom of her reforming American soul. "Change is possible," she insists. "The future cannot be postponed forever." But what gives her theme the tension of tragedy is that she also loves her characteis-- God help her!--as they are.

In Torregreca, this division of the soul turned into art. In Vendetta of Silence, the writing is brilliant but fragmented--a composite of diaries (A.C.'s and Marco's), letters and tape recordings. It is as if the writer were walking around her subject in the fullness of her eloquence, in the fullness of her heart, trying to find the way in. The final punishment for San Basilic is not that its people are cut off from the rest of the world but that they are cut off from themselves. "Sympathy cannot penetrate real desperation," Miss Cornelisen writes. That can stand as her last word for San Basilio--and for the honorable failure of a first-rate artist.

sb Melvin Maddocks

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