Pleasure Boat Studio
Review by Walter Cummins
This new edition of Linda Lappin’s The Etruscan marks the twentieth anniversary of the novel’s initial publication in 2004. I reviewed it then, and now take advantage of the new opportunity to rediscover the book. It’s holds up very well with its complex story based on the contrast of a powerfully strange and disturbing actuality with the seemingly ordered and polite world of the well-born English society in the 1920s. But this time around I realized how crucial the prose is in presenting the tangled darkness of landscape and people of the counter realm in a mysterious region of Italy’s ancient Tuscia. The novel depends on readers accepting the force of this realm and accept how Harriet Sackett, the English-American protagonist, could be overwhelmed by the forces around her, especially the passionate presence of the mysterious man she knows as the Count Federigo Del Re. Lappin’s descriptions evoke the ominous power of place and character, and make it convincing.
Harriet’s initial realization of Del Re’s force strikes her when she has posed him for a photo portrait she is about to take in the ancient tower that serves as his home:
For one brief second, the room around me vanished and I was alone with the power emanating from his gaze. As I peered deep, I had the uncanny feeling that he had not been joking. He was—or part of him was—two thousand years old or even older. He came—or part of him came—from a place beyond time. His eyes rolled up for a moment, severing contact with mine, and in my mind, I saw the eons he had crossed, like a wolf across the tundra, in search of something undefinable. …
The much more familiar English society of teatime formality is represented by Harriet’s cousin, Stephen Hampton, his wife, Sarah, Harriet’s best friend, and the widower George Wimbly, who would like Harriet to be his second wife. When the novel begins, these people, at home in London, discuss their concern over Harriet being in Italy photographing Etruscan tombs. She has invited them to visit her, then postpones.
On a visit back to London, posing for a photograph, Sarah notices Harriet wearing a strange ring, and Harriet tells her, “I met a man in Italy. Can you believe, Sarah, that at my age I have fallen in love.” The word “love” stuns Sarah, who has never heard Harriet use it about a relationship, and tells Stephen she thinks her “bewitched.” This fear sets off an apprehension about what is happening in Italy that leads them to send their servant, Mrs. Parsons, to look after Harriet. When she arrives, Mrs. Parsons finds Harriet stumbling toward her, her nightgown covered in bile and old blood. At his point, the novel shifts to the backstory told through Harriet’s journal.
In this journal, Harriet is thoroughly detailed about all that she encounters in the seeming count’s realm, including the objects in his decadent tower and a dress ball given in the mansion of the woman others consider his mistress. Yet after the Hamptons and George Wimbly arrive in Italy after Mrs. Parson discovers Harriet so ill, they can find no evidence of the existence of a Count Del Re or any of the people described so vividly in Harriet’s journal. This contradiction is one of the novel’s strengths as a reality that mesmerized Harriet in its specificity is closed off to the British, available only to Harriet.
An example of this obliviousness may be seen when Stephen finds a stone carving of a head with blank, lifeless eyes that he considers some sort of propitiatory god and judges “an ugly thing , with a mockingly perverse expression.” He considers the Etruscans a vicious people. less refined than the ancient Romans. Given the essential contrast of the novel, the Romans stand for the English as examples of refinement.
But are they at a deeper level? The Etruscans were openly sexual, as illustrated when Harriet in Del Re’s tower discovers a clay artifact that feels like living flash in her hands and she realizes is a model of a human breast. Then she sees a row of clay penises. Del Re, though older, unhandsome, and potbellied, exudes unbridled passion in several encounters, unlike the English males who suppress their lust except for a single guilty unleashing.
The Etruscan harbors much that is mysterious and, at its heart, an alternative force that is too overpowering for humans, especially Harriet, to control.
