The Italian poet, translator, and essayist Cristina Campo died in Rome in 1977, and is gradually becoming recognized as one of the most extraordinary voices of our times. She was born Vittoria Guerrini in Bologna in 1923. Her father was a prominent musician and composer. Her mother’s family included famous doctors and at least one well-known literary critic. A congenital heart defect kept her close to her parents for most of her life, and she frequently suffered from heart attacks and related ailments. Yet in surviving photographs she does not look like an invalid. She is petite, chic, and elegant. In fact, she might be the most beautiful serious author of the twentieth century. She was at least as photogenic as Anne Sexton, and far more so than Clarice Lispector. Even so, despite her potential to become a literary star, she studiously maintained a low profile throughout her life, and was well known only in select artistic and intellectual circles in Florence and Rome. Only recently has she been acknowledged—and not always celebrated—as a heroine of the traditionalist Catholic movement.
Campo was formidably erudite even by the standards of her peers. She translated poems and prose by an eclectic range of writers, including Saint John of the Cross, John Donne, Emily Dickinson, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Simone Weil. Her relationship with Weil’s writing is complex. She was enamored of Weil’s piercing intelligence and unpredictable mystical qualities, and learned a great deal from her work. But after two decades of thinking and writing about Weil, and introducing much of her oeuvre to an Italian readership, Campo seems to have fallen out of love with it. Weil famously refused to be baptized by a priest on her deathbed, preferring instead to argue with him about points of doctrine until she finally drove him away. For Campo this was taking contrarianism a little far.
In 1955, Campo moved to Rome with her parents, where her father had been appointed director of the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia. A few years later, she met the love of her life, the esotericist Elémire Zolla, who was alas already married and could not obtain a divorce. The two remained close and collaborated on an anthology of Western mystical writings. Campo was not yet a believer at this point, but she was becoming fascinated by the Catholic tradition.
She often visited Subiaco with her parents. Subiaco is just under fifty miles from Rome; you can still visit the sacred grotto where Saint Benedict of Nursia made his first hermitage around A.D. 500. At the ancient shrine of Saint Benedict’s Cave, in an otherwise unremarkable chapel, there is an astonishing memento of Saint Francis of Assisi, who went on retreat at Subiaco in 1223–1224. On the walls of this little chapel there is a life-sized fresco of the saint—the oldest portrait of him in existence. Campo wrote to a friend, “I drove for 60 km with a fever—up there towards the twilight, the sacred cave deserted—the gorges, the sacred forest, the frescoes half in shadow. Like a dream which is about to depart, to which one says: not yet.”
We do not know exactly when Campo converted to Christianity, but it cannot have been long after March 19, 1964, when she went for the first time to Sant’Anselmo all’Aventino, the seat of the Pontifical Liturgical Institute and the Benedictines’ pontifical university. She went with her mother and Zolla. She later wrote to a friend that vespers that evening put her in mind of Adam in the Garden. “Many conversions have been due to preaching, but the spark can be ignited by a single, perfect liturgical gesture,” she hinted in another essay. “There are those who have been converted by seeing two monks bowing deeply together, first to the altar, then to each other, then retreating into the depths of the choir stalls.”
Little did she realize that the tradition that impressed her so deeply was in grave danger—and that one of the greatest enemies of this tradition would soon be in residence at Sant’Anselmo. Father Rembert Weakland was an awkward, high-strung, strangely sleazy-looking Benedictine monk who was then serving as chancellor of Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Wisconsin residents will remember him as the scandal-ridden Archbishop of Milwaukee, who resigned his See in disgrace in 2002, some years before the sheer extent of his mismanagement and corruption was fully revealed to the public. In 1964, Weakland received a papal appointment as consultor to the Commission for Implementing the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council. He would be appointed a member of that commission in 1968. He was not necessarily renowned for his love of Latin or his good taste.
Campo’s sufferings were about to begin in earnest. During the summer, her father had an accident. On Christmas Eve 1964, her mother died suddenly; the funeral was held in the crypt at Sant’Anselmo. She wrote to a friend in June 1965:
For eleven months my main job (not to say the only one) was that of a nurse. A terrible fall . . . nailed my father to almost uninterrupted suffering, to continuous and multiple dangers, to a condition of unstable balance that sometimes borders on the everyday miracle. It is useless, even if it were possible, to describe to you the effect of a situation that has destabilised many relationships, touched so many mysteries, established a completely new geometry in my thoughts, as well as my days. The Book of Tobit . . . I have just begun to read it in depth. Add to this (I use the minimum of words, misfortune teaches the minus dicere) the outbreak of a spiritual revolution that has completely metamorphosed what little habit remained in my existence. But this story does not admit of a narrative at all.
Meanwhile, in March 1965, Pope Paul VI celebrated the first-ever Catholic Mass in the Italian language, in the otherwise unremarkable Chiesa di Ognissanti in Rome, which was completed in 1920. That day, the pope said that the Church “has sacrificed the traditions of centuries and above all she sacrifices the unity of language among the various peoples, in homage to this greater universality, in order to reach all.” In a letter to her closest friend the next day, Campo lamented:
Leprosy has reached Sant’ Anselmo (loudspeakers everywhere, parts of the Mass in the vernacular, painful discussions where there was all silence and a smile) and I shall never set foot there again except to see the good father, who can do nothing but suffer in silence. I would often like to do something, the usual temptation, but the action, as always, would lead to greater harm. Instead of the loudspeakers, it is the Father who should go. When the church is empty and dark I go to see it. I feel that I love it so much in those moments, with those horrendous artefacts that hurt, offend her pure walls.
Her own health was increasingly fragile; meanwhile, her father was declining fast. He returned to the faith, but was too weak to attend Mass; Father Paul Augustin Mayer visited him twice a week to enable him to confess and take Communion. He died in June 1965. His funeral was historic: Campo convinced the monks at Sant’Anselmo to hold a grand Benedictine-style Requiem Mass, celebrated by Mayer and sung by the entire monastic community, in the manner usually reserved only for Benedictines. She wrote that she had never seen or heard anything more beautiful: “As they descended to form that great circle around the coffin, which so clearly marks the separation of the saeculum, the entrance into another realm, El[émire Zolla] said: ‘They make you envy the one inside.’” In a letter to her friend Paolo Fossati, Campo added that practically all of Rome was present. “Few (if any) had any idea of such a thing,” she wrote of the Mass. “When leaving, Elena Croce [daughter of the famous philosopher and politician Benedetto Croce], her eyes full of tears, said: ‘But we have to save all this; let’s write to the Pope.’”
Campo began collecting signatures for the following petition, which was submitted to the Holy See in February 1966:
Artists and scholars, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, concerned with preserving, in the modern world, one of the greatest cultural and spiritual inheritances of the West, a legacy that runs the risk of soon becoming purely archaeological, ask to submit a request to the kind attention of His Holiness Pope Paul VI—a request that, as it seems, represents the desires of ever-larger groups, both of the faithful and of non-Catholics—that the Latin-Gregorian liturgy, as practised for fifteen centuries in monastic communities, remain intact and complete, at least in those conventual churches that do not have purely parochial duties; that in this liturgy, including the Mass, there be no parts in the vernacular, nor any music other than Gregorian chant; and that in conventual churches neither amplifiers nor other mechanical instruments be used that irreparably distort the nature of the plainchant and the character of the place. If His Holiness will graciously consider this request—which does not appear in any way contrary to the conciliar liturgical Constitution, and seems to accord particularly well with the admirable words of the Pontiff himself in his address to the Augustinians on 31st August 1965—it will enable a large section of the faithful, and any non-Catholics who wish to continue to participate in or attend the traditional liturgy and chant, without taking away anything from other liturgical forms recently adopted in parish churches throughout the world.
Among the thirty-seven signatories were Nobel laureates past and future (François Mauriac, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Eugenio Montale); the novelists Evelyn Waugh, Julien Green, and Gertrud von Le Fort; Victoria Ocampo and Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina’s most beloved literary figures; the poet W. H. Auden; the filmmakers Robert Bresson, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Ingmar Bergman; the painter Giorgio de Chirico; the composer Benjamin Britten; the theologian and philosopher Jacques Maritain, who published his controversial anti-Modernist polemic The Peasant of the Garonne shortly afterward—the signatories are almost comically illustrious, and together make the list of contributors to the famous first issue of the New York Review of Books look shabby and second-rate by comparison. Auden is the one figure whom both the petition and the first issue have in common; in the latter he virtually seems to be slumming, whereas in the former he is not even in the top third in terms of eminence.
In July 1966, Campo became a founding member of Una Voce Italia in Rome. The Fœderatio Internationalis Una Voce remains the most important international activist body for the protection of the traditional Latin Mass, thanks in no small part to Campo’s activism, which eventually damaged her health, as Zolla later ruefully recounted:
[She] threw herself into this battle with a frenzied, almost suicidal way, and therefore not useful either to her or to the battle itself. She did not have the inner peace to face a fight like this, yet she spent her time on it, she gave up sleep and food. For the doctors it was a matter of desperation. In the early days I tried to follow it, even if in my own way, because for me there is never the commitment as I see it exercised by others, but always the game. Then our love too was overwhelmed by the political struggle.
In 1972, Campo was forced to give up her activities with Una Voce; she was simply too exhausted and ill. She died on January 10, 1977.
Alex Andriesse, associate editor at New York Review Books, first learned of Cristina Campo’s work from Roberto Calasso, who was renowned for assembling stylish literary collages such as Tiepolo Pink and La Folie Baudelaire. Calasso knew Campo through Zolla, and described her as “a writer who left behind a handful of unforgivably perfect pages.” As it turns out, he was underselling rather than overselling her.
Andriesse has produced a magnificent translation of Campo’s essays under the title The Unforgivable and Other Writings. This slim, engrossing collection enables readers without Italian to see how richly textured Campo’s prose can be. Her oeuvre is very small; Andriesse has not rendered all of it into English, but what he has made available should convince you that Campo ranks with V. S. Naipaul and Elizabeth Bishop as one of the only writers of genuinely classic status to have emerged in any language since the Second World War. Her work is nothing like Philip Larkin’s, except insofar as she was also self-consciously “minor” and marginal, yet managed patiently to assemble a body of work that surpasses all the apparently “major” authors of the period in perception, sensitivity, and overall importance.
Campo was an obscure essayist who translated a few books, wrote introductions to a few more, and composed a small number of poems; yet she may have been, in her way, a genuine prophet. Indeed, it seems possible that, despite her miniature scale of production, she could be the greatest writer in any language of the entire postwar period. Certainly she is one of the only ones who bears comparison with writers like Blaise Pascal and Giacomo Leopardi, whose literary and philosophical work was a matter of survival, to help them endure chronic illness, and come to terms with the mysteries of suffering.
For those skeptical of such claims, perhaps the best introduction to Campo’s work is her criticism. In her essay “The Unforgivable,” she describes her ideal:
In Italy, the last critic was, it seems to me, Leopardi. Already with De Sanctis, the pure disposition of the contemplative mind was definitively disturbed and distorted by the obsession with history. Leopardi was the last to examine a page as it ought to be examined, in the manner of a palaeographer, on five or six levels at once: from its feeling for human destinies to its ability to avoid discordant vowels. He examined it, that is to say, as a writer. . . . Anything that did not lend itself to multiple readings, he ignored.
We see Campo practice this method in her sparkling short introduction to the poetry of William Carlos Williams, whom she compares in sensibility to a Chinese mandarin: “the archetype of the artist who is freest in his own time and space, which is to say freest from his own time and space.”
That Williams is also, as Randall Jarrell phrased it in four words, “the America of poets” does not much conflict with this [freedom], nor does the quasi-totemic cult that the sect of “hipsters” has been dedicating to him for years and years now. What they find in Williams consciously (but how to apply this rejected word to them?), this pathetic, inarticulate group who scream at the top of their lungs in a state of ecstasy far too reminiscent of weeping, hardly matters to me. Banging around, looking for a nail, at the four blind walls of their prison—highways, peyote, cool jazz, promiscuity—they’d already stumbled onto Zen. And in that case, too, it hardly matters whether, looking at those sweet and terrifying old men, they are more interested in seeing the stroke of the spatula that fixes the ritual fly whisk on the rice paper than the innumerable Guanyin goddesses: immersed in the white landscapes of the lotus, illustrated down to the daintiest petal, these goddesses made it possible for the old men to deliver their mad, conclusive stroke with the spatula. It is the same, I think, with Williams.
This is funnier, sharper, and more insightful than anything one might encounter in the criticism of, say, William Empson. I do not wish to pick on Empson, who can be enlightening as well as fun to read, but Campo’s instincts, intuitions, and sense of reality are undoubtedly superior to his; for all his powerful intellect, Empson was, lest we forget, an alcoholic Maoist with a profoundly sordid private life. The reason he so often came up with striking and unprecedented ideas is that nobody in his right mind would ever think the way he did. Campo is more convincing, not to mention pitiless:
With the monks and Williams both, whether they’re conscious of it or not, the “Beat” generation is contemplating strange beings who do not need drugs, stuporous music, or mad trips on transcontinental trucks to discover, in the real world—in a sea rock, a face, a garbage can—the Himalayas and prairies that “amaze and delight,” the vast, forgotten landscapes of the mind. In the one as in the other, these apostles of forced imagination hail the untroubled masters of attention, the artisans whom [Vittorio] Sereni says “stand facing the abyss.”
Attention matters to Campo at least as much as it did to Simone Weil. Her essay “Attention and Poetry” is surely her artistic credo; like most of her writing, it is difficult to summarize or quote only because you are tempted to copy out not single lines or aperçus but entire paragraphs or pages. The grace of her prose belies its spiritual weight and intellectual density. Certain passages in this piece seem as though they might easily be taken out of context:
When it is confronted with reality, the imagination recoils. Attention, on the other hand, grasps it, directly, as a symbol (think of Dante’s heavens, the divine and detailed translation of a liturgy). It is thus, finally, the most legitimate, absolute form of imagination.
But you cannot extrapolate Campo’s position from a single line; she is too subtle and nuanced in her thinking. Her position on imagination and fantasy (or “invention,” as John Dryden and Samuel Johnson would have said) seems too provocative not to be true:
Art today is largely imagination. In other words, it is a chaotic contamination of elements and levels. All of this, naturally, is opposed to justice (which is, in any case, of no interest to artists today). If attention is a patient, fervent, fearless acceptance of reality, imagination is impatience—a flight into the arbitrary: an endless labyrinth navigated without Ariadne’s red thread. This is why ancient art is synthetic, whereas modern art is analytic and, for the most part, concentrates on breaking things down, as is appropriate to an era brought up on fear. For true attention does not lead, as it may seem it would, to analysis but to a resolving synthesis, to symbols and images—in a word, to destiny.
A few lines down she adds, “Attention is the only path to the unsayable, the only path to mystery.”
You cannot take in more than a few pages of Campo’s work at a time; she needs to be absorbed and enjoyed slowly. Her thoughts on mysticism and her appreciations of spiritual writers are especially piercing, although her most evocative essays revolve around fairy tales. She alone among twentieth-century writers seems to have understood their true essence and purpose:
It takes a great deal of faith to discern symbols in what has already happened. It takes even more faith to discern in them what will happen later. Because it is always today: all the vanishing lines of existence depart from it—magnetic needles oscillating in every direction, sensitive to every least breeze.
Her entrancing explanation of “Beauty and the Beast” might be even more magical than the story itself. Campo has the rare gift of writing about storytelling without degenerating into sentimentality because she understands how crucial fairy tales are for children in pointing the way towards saving our souls, not in some mushily vague, irreligious sense, but in the hard, clear sense of salvation that is part of the ultimate reality of Christian truth.
