"La Fallaci's" Story
(as told by Oriana)
Compiled by Stefano Jesurum
Il Corriere della Sera
October 11, 2001
Translated by Chris Knipp
A lonely little girl who, unlike others her age, didn't
dream of a "house with geraniums" love. Then, a woman in
love. Sex, flurries of excitement, pride in her first
published piece...Here is a biography selected from
documents and interviews.
Is Oriana Fallaci a reserved woman? It's possible.
Outright reclusive ? That could be. Certainly she is a lady
who does not like to talk about herself. But now we're
going to try to let Oriana tell the story of Oriana -
through excerpts from interviews she has left behind over
the years.
It was a mournful, unhappy childhood that she described to
her sister, Paola (Annabella, 1979). "I was a pretty child,
with a round, pensive face. I was very withdrawn, I think,
a boring little girl. And very obedient, very disciplined.
An old fashioned child, if you like, the kind described in
nineteenth century novels. My memories are almost always of
depression, of boredom and disenchantment - in short, of
unhappiness. And of a repressed desire to revolt. But
against whom, against what? All my rebellions were internal
and were translated into dreams. And the dreams boiled down
into one image: books. I knew it: oh, I knew that I would
write books and that I would write for newspapers. I never
thought of the two jobs separately, even though I saw books
as a more powerful, more noble objective. They were always
books with hard red covers because that was the look of the
books published by Sonzogno which I saw in the library at
home. I never tired of looking at them, intimidated and
overcome with veneration because the majority of those who
had written them were dead and continued to be alive though
those printed pages. Journalism on the other hand I thought
of as a wonderful adventure. Thanks to the newspapers I
wanted to go to Malaysia. To India and Malaysia. I'm
talking about a little child of six, seven, maybe eight." A
little girl who hence did not dream of marriage like the
others her age because if she thought of love she thought of
Jack London, "but not to marry him: to wander the world
with him, maybe on sleighs pulled by dogs, to experience a
thousand adventures and then write about them. Love was
identified with that kind of man and that kind of life: a
man who might be a companion for that life, never a man to
go through quiet days with in a pretty little house with
geraniums in the windows."
And so it was, more or less. To Guido Gerosa (Playboy,
1976): "Very often one loves a person because they impose
that love on us. At other times one loves a person out of a
fear of solitude. I'm not talking of physical solitude
because that can be resolved through sex. I'm talking about
psychological solitude: the solitude of the soul. At still
other times one loves or has love imposed upon one out of
pity. Or just out of kindness. And at times, finally,
because one needs a brother. A companion. I have to say
that personally I've always sought a brother in the men I've
loved. And now more than ever." Again to Paola (Annabella,
1979): "Though I've never hidden my relationship with a
man, I have always had this modesty about my private life.
I will tell you that when I came to Italy with Alekos
(Alexis Panagulis, the hero of the opposition to the Greek
colonels, Oriana's lover from when I interviewed her in 1973
until the day of his death in a mysterious car accident - in
1976), in the fall of 1973; we were already a couple living
together as if we were married. Moreover from the first day,
even at the Hotel Excelsior where we stayed, we slept
together in a double room. Yet in public I was so formal
with him, I showed the relationship between us so little,
that for a week or two they thought we were together only
for our work. Unquestionably this was a great love we had.
But this doesn't take away from the fact that at certain
moments living together so totally was a burden on me. But
he understood that about me because he was the same."
Modesty about her private life is a quality that has always
been a part of "la Fallaci," as a youth and as an adult, at
the beginning of her career and during the long days of her
greatest success. Again to her sister Paola (Annabella,
1979): "To speak of oneself means to lay bare one's own soul,
expose it like a body to the sun: to lay bare one's own
soul is not at all like taking off one's brassiere on a
crowded beach! No, it's not good to tell about one's own
feelings unless one does it the way I did in A Man (Un Uomo),
where I also explained my love for Alekos and his for me in
political terms. Anyone who wants to know more about what
happened before has only to read with attention in my other
books: it's all there between the lines, almost everything.
Oh yes! In every one of my books a trace of my human
biography is etched. Alas... Because I did it without
realizing it, without wanting to. Because I became aware of
it later, with a shudder, really."
It's hard to find eroticism - at least in the form that
literature has accustomed us to - in the pages of her books.
Because sex...To Guido Gerosa (Playboy, 1976): "I begin to
believe that, far from being something dirty, it's something
very banal. Above all if it occurs without feeling -
feeling of a kind that's not invented. Because sex without
feeling is boring, it becomes the most tiring kind of
gymnastics and nothing more. Especially for a man. I
remember a colleague, I think it w as Mino Monicelli, who
said: "To make love is something for porters. Because it
moves the blood from the brain and takes it down to the
lower stomach. Think no more about it." I have to say that
this is not the case with me because even at that moment I
am thinking. For me the blood never abandons the brain.
They say that that's a negative factor, but to me it seems
positive. Am I a puritan? Oh God, it would be terrible if
I discovered that I'm a puritan. But I must confess that
pornography, photographs of naked people, arouses a kind of
irritation in me. There's a kind of desecration involved,
an offense, in photographing the naked body, that is, in
crystallizing it within an image. This whether the body be
that of a woman or that of a man. I feel them humiliated
and myself humiliated. Please note that, physically, I am
not a prudish woman. If you catch me nude, that doesn't
bother me in the least. Reaching to cover up is not one of
my gestures."
What is and has always been one of her gestures is the act
of writing, the effort of writing. She has explained this
to David Lajolo (Corriere della Sera, 1979): "The choice of
a word, the composition of a sentence, even the rhythm of
sounds on a page, the structure, or rather the architecture
of the story extended to the length and complexity of a
novel are as consuming as the suffering of recreating
reality. In every case writing is a torment that borders on
masochism. Writing well, I mean. Even when the writing is
going smoothly it's cruelly wearing and afterwards I fe el
as if I've dragged tons of lead up a mountain."
"Masochistic" Oriana became very early: because as a child
she did not play with dolls... (To Paola Fallaci, Annabella,
1979): "The other children intimidated me. With them I
couldn't read, dream, or write. Because I wrote, you know?
Even then. I have found notebooks full of absurd stories,
impossible tales... I believe it's due to my mama. I
assume that my mama, together with a genuine desire for
culture, which was spontaneous because she came from a
family of poor artists, pushed me to read out of a raging
desire for revenge. Yes, I believe that my mama always
interpreted culture as a personal and social revenge. "Woe
to you if you're ignorant," she used to say, "when you're
ignorant they can take advantage of you horribly."
And although she was enrolled in medical school (which she
did not finish), there was the passion for newspapers at the
age of sixteen... (Again to her sister, Annabella, 1979):
"Work for me meant writing, being a journalist. I wanted to
work for La Nazione. But I went to the wrong floor and
landed up on the fifth where La Mattina dell'Italia Centrale
was. 'I want to be a reporter.' 'How old are you?' I lied:
'Seventeen.' 'What's your name?' 'Oriana Fallaci.' 'A
relative of Bruno Fallaci?' 'He's my uncle.' Well, you
know how prestigious the name of my uncle Bruno was in
journalism: in my opinion he was one of the greatest
Italian journalists who ever was." The first article, about
a Florence dance club, was written in longhand on lined
paper like they use for classroom assignments. "'Don't you
even know how to type?' I took nine hours to copy over my
piece: from 10 a.m. till 7 p.m. But finally it was to my
satisfaction and pleased me so much I signed it: OF. They
paid me for it right away. Three hundred lire. I was madly
proud. Consumed with emotion. You understand, I too had
entered the unattainable world of the privileged who when
they die remain alive because they leave behind a book with
a red cover."
Need we recall the newspapers in which "la Fallaci" appeared,
or list the titles of her books translated into almost every
language in the world? No, it's superfluous; everyone knows
that. But what kind of journalist is Oriana? (To Paola,
Annabella, 1979): "I was raised in the school of 'putting
one over on them.' It meant 'getting a scoop,' though the
word 'scoop' wasn't in style till many years later. It was
very competitive. Competitive and, again, lonely. "You
could write a book about a seventeen-year-old, eighteen-
year-old, nineteen-year-old in search of a love that wasn't
of the geraniums-in-the-window kind. It was as if the
wonderful men whom I'd admired in the eleven months of my
training, the Resistance (with her dad in Justice and
Liberty with the nom de guerre of Emilia), had been an empty
mirage or as if, with the coming of peace, the country had
regressed and become a desert of dead souls." Competition,
loneliness, and baths of reality, the kind that lead to
growth. The debut of her byline on the page, and the phone
call from her uncle Bruno: "I held the receiver anxiously:
did he finally want to congratulate me? And uncle Bruno:
'Who do you think you are, Hemingway?'"
The supreme Hemingway...To Vittorio Feltri (Europeo, 1991)
"Above all there was Hemingway who, at about my age and
after having covered the Spanish Civil war as a journalist,
returned to be a war correspondent in World War II. And God
knows he was already celebrated at that time. Alas, nothing
reveals man the way war does. Nothing so accentuates in him
the beauty and ugliness, the intelligence and foolishness,
the brutishness and humanity, the courage and cowardice, the
enigma. To understand human beings, ultimately war serves a
writer better than any other experience - or should one use
the word adventure? To live, to write, some (and in London
there was one of these, Hemingway was one of these) need
adventure. And I do too."
All the Vietnams on earth or almost all. The beatings in
Teheran, the bullet taken in the back in Mexico between the
twelfth and thirteenth vertebra. From here the images that
have been pinned on her... (To Paola, in Oggi, 1991):
"That grotesque one of the pathetic soldier with the helmet
on her head and the knife between her teeth. That stupid
myopic one of the belligerent, ambitious, hard and pitiless,
outright nasty woman who chases away everyone who enters her
life... They've even attributed to me sentences I've never
uttered to build up this fantasy, and by now this fantasy
has crystallized into a "truth" that's hard to shake off."
But she has often assumed the helmet-on-the-head role and
continues to do so for long periods: what does she like
about war? (To Feltri, in Europeo, 1991): "I don't like it
in the sense that I like the inconveniences it imposes on
me; I don't like it in the sense that I like the dangers it
exposes me to, the danger of being killed, of getting
wounded, of being captured. I like it for the intensified
truth that war offers me, for what it teaches us about human
beings. In war you can study existence as no philosopher
will ever be able to study it. You can analyze men as no
psychologist will ever be able to, understand them as you
never could in a time or place of peace. Furthermore war
offers the challenge of challenges, the wager of wagers:
the challenge of death, the wager with life. That wager,
that challenge attract me because to confront them you must
conquer fear. And I hate fear." And she detests envy. (To
Isabella Rossellini, Amica, 1980): "It's true that by now I
am used to betrayals because I know that they primarily
conceal envy and envy is the sister of ignorance. I must
tell you why I am comfortable in New York. It's because
here people react to success as a good quality. In Italy
success is considered a drawback, a disability, a wrong,
something in sum for which one must be punished. In Italy,
anyone who is successful is at least an adulterer or a thief.
Since you can't accuse me of either of these things, they
say I'm nasty, mean, overbearing. That I'm a prima
donna..."
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