BOOK REVIEW : A Puritan’s Selfless Memoir of Postwar Italy

Where It All Began by Ann Cornelisen (A William Abrahams Book/E.P. Dutton: $17.95; 288 pages).

In the 1950s, when she was a young woman in Florence on a tight budget, Ann Cornelisen would go to the movies each afternoon. It was a help to her in learning Italian, she writes, thus satisfying her Puritan conscience. Also, she adds, she made a point of not enjoying them too much.

Cornelisen’s Puritanism is evident in her splendid portraits of an impoverished rural Italy in such books as “Torregreca” and “Women of the Shadows.” It is not the Puritanism of narrow-mindedness but of self-denial, of rigor, of striking to the bone.

She sees and reports all the bright colors of Italian life but she also sees the harshness, the often brutal clarity and the fatalism that anchor it. A market described by Cornelisen has the sights, smells and vigorous life of a genre painting, but she also captures the dirt, and the aching legs of a market woman who has trudged 10 kilometers to sell her dusty cabbages.

This rigor, these harsh colors, make for some splendid pages in this memoir of her early days in Italy, starting as a student in Florence and telling of her years with a child assistance program in the mountainous Abruzzo region in the south. The self-denial, on the other hand, or the reticence, make it a ragged kind of memoir with gaps and loose ends.

When you take four egg whites, she starts off, and you follow the right recipe, you will get meringues. “On the other hand, take a young American woman in 1954, put her down in Italy, follow her steps, and the result is apt to be the wife of a stockbroker in Greenwich, Conn., who, if she thinks of Italy at all, confuses it with a general nostalgia for her youth.”

In her case, though, you got someone who worked into the country’s very bones and stayed on. Nothing quite explains why. Cornelisen tells of what happened to her--often with great vividness--but the person to whom it happened is only hinted at.

She was 27 when she went to Italy to study archeology and make another beginning after a failed marriage. We hear only that it failed--not why, nor how she felt about it. Indeed, as she says a nervous goodby to her mother in a Paris railroad station, she could be a girl off to boarding school. There seems to be no past other than a hint of a distant and perhaps difficult father.

Her life in Florence is wonderfully described. Italy was poor and still recovering from the war. It seemed always to be cold and rainy. We get the gloom of a cafe in the early morning, the windows fogged with dampness and tobacco smoke, and a pervading smell of wet wool. We get Cornelisen in the movies, having to change seats every 10 minutes or so as one more exploratory male hand settles in her lap. Eventually, her Italian teacher, a precise woman from Parma, teaches her a ferocious phrase to shout at the top of her voice. “For months,” she writes, “it was my surest performance in Italian other than ‘May I have a glass of water?,’ a sentence which, in trying to quench my perpetual thirst, had acquired the pure Italianita of desperation.” Her sentences are like that: supple and steely.

She moved from furnished room to furnished room, meeting a succession of grandly parsimonious Italian matrons. A priest invited her on a motorcycle holiday “without benefit of cassock or crucifix.” Finally, she met Gianna Thompson, a wiry, dark and prodigiously energetic woman who ran the Save-the-Children Foundation operation in the Abruzzo.

Cornelisen went for a visit and stayed for years. She writes in detail of life in Ortona--the headquarters--of the work, of the poor families visited, of traveling round the countryside. Yet her experiences seem muted; they recede in contrast with the vivid and fiery portrait of Gianna. Cornelisen is more interested in telling Gianna’s story than her own. Where Gianna’s story touches her own--it was a consuming friendship and collaboration--the lines grow fainter.

Gianna was half English and half Italian. The Italian side showed, but it was an English rebelliousness that led her to turn down, after her father’s death, the invitation from his wealthy Milanese relatives to come and live a proper Italian life with them.

The story of Gianna’s battle to establish her operation in one of Italy’s poorest and most traditional regions, is fascinating. She had to hike or hitchhike from village to village, scrounging help and meager donations to get her day-nurseries established. She had to make known her serieta --respectability--in a place where women were not expected to go around organizing things.

She struck up an alliance with some energetic Salesian priests whose students helped her with carpentry while the mothers at her center helped them with sewing. She made friends with a group of young English Quakers who were trying to get the peasants to build houses together. Eventually she married their leader, who died, not long after, while swimming.

The portrait of Gianna is captivating, and if there is a good deal unsaid, it contributes to a sense of defining mystery. A less definite mystery is what Cornelisen’s own feelings were. The last part of the book dissipates into a series of anecdotes and portraits. The string of self upon which a memoir is hung is too faint; the incidents trickle away.

“Questions about herself she answered in such a way that the next logical question might possibly be an intrusion and so wasn’t asked,” Cornelisen writes of Gianna. She treats of herself in much the same way.