Linda Lappin
A Visit to Tarquinia A Visit to the Painted Tombs of Tarquinia D.H. Lawrence called it the Door of the Soul—the mysterious door painted or carved on the back wall of Etruscan tombs. This was the thin membrane separating this world from the next through which the soul of the dead passed to life everlasting. Harriet Sackett stumbles upon one while visiting Etruscan rock tombs in Tuscia together with Federigo del Re. “Now he shone the light towards the back wall of the tomb where an even larger doorway stood. Approaching it, I saw that it was not a real door at all, but merely an image sculpted in the wall. I asked if the builder had meant to add another chamber. “No,” he said. “That is the door of the soul through which the dead exited our world and sailed beyond time. Sometimes you find such doors carved in the rock, other times only painted.” I reached out to run my hand across the chill stone surface. The tomb wall was beaded with cold drops of moisture and my hand left a greasy streak upon the stone. “What did they envision on the other side?” I asked. The count set the lantern down at the base of the carved doorway. The flame flared high and our shadows danced, huge, then merged on the tomb wall. He took a step toward me and intoned in a low voice, “Beyond that door lies an unknown world, where men and women,” here he paused like a skillful actor for dramatic effect. His face glowed orange in the lamplight, “…where even you and I …can become immortal, if we choose.” The Etruscan, p.98. Visiting the painted tombs of Tarquinia in June, together with Susan Tekulve and the Spirit of Place Creative Writing Workshop, I had the opportunity to contemplate one of the most exquisite examples of this mysterious doorway in Etruscan tomb painting: the Tomb of the Charuns. Charun is the Etruscan Charon, god of the underworld who escorts the soul on its journey to the afterlife. His human body is as youthful and muscular as any athlete or dancer of Etruscan iconography, but his face is hideous with sharp beak, ass-ears, gnashing teeth. His skin is blue-black, supposedly signifying decomposition of human flesh, juxtaposed to the vital red of the whirling dancers celebrating the funerary dance depicted in many tombs. Here in the Tomb of the Charuns, two imposing Charuns stand guard at the door of the soul which occupies the foreground of the back wall. Decorated with bands of color, medallions of red and ochre, it suggests a festive occasion, in contrast with the somber, blue-skinned guards whose terrifying faces have been scratched away, or perhaps eroded by time. Even today after millennia, the colors of the paintings have maintained their eerie, hallucinatory quality Descending from the dazzling summer sunlight into the cool twilight of the tombs, you are immersed in the puzzling magic of Etruscan afterlife and come face to face with the enigma of the door and what lies beyond. Speaking of the Etruscan priest-king or magi, the Lucumones , D.H.Lawrence wrote: “Behind all the Etruscan liveliness was a religion of life and the chief men were seriously responsible for it. Behind all the dancing was a vision, and even a science of life, a conception of the universe and man’s place in the universe which made men live to the dept of their capacity. “To the Etruscan, all was alive, the whole universe lived, and the business of man was to live amid it all. He had to draw life into himself , out of the wandering, huge vitalities of the world.” … [The Lucumones were] The life-bringers and the death-guides. But they set guards at the gates of life and death. They keep secrets and safeguard the way. Only a few are initiated into the mystery of the bath of life and the bath of death: the pool within the pool within the pool wherein when a man is dipped, he becomes darker than blood and brighter than fire…” The Painted Tombs of Tarquinia. For more on The Etruscan, see www.theetruscan.com The Painted Tombs of Tarquinia “There are many tombs. When we have seen one, up we go, a little bewildered, into the afternoon sun, across a tract of rough, tormented hill, and down again to the underground, like rabbits in a warren… And gradually the underworld of the Etruscans becomes more real than the above day of the afternoon. One begins to live with the painted dancers and feasters and mourners and to look eagerly for them…..[their dancing] surges from within, like a current in the sea. It is as if the current of some strong different life swept through them, different from our shallow current today. As if they drew their vitality from different depths that we are denied.” ….D.H. Lawrence in “The Painting Tombs of Tarquinia” in Etruscan Places.  Etruscan Rock Tombs, Acrylic by Massimo Ioly The Novel in the House I was renting an old farmhouse outside Vitorchiano, just twenty minutes down the superstrada from Viterbo, where for the last 17 years I have taught English as a “lettrice” at the University of the Tuscia. Though I work in Viterbo, my home base is Rome. About seven years ago, the wear and tear of commuting on the Rome-Viterbo line had so exhausted me, I decided to keep a “ pied-a-terre” in the area so I could stay over without traveling back to Rome. The friend of a friend had a place to rent. It was financial suicide to keep a second house on my salary, but if I were to keep my job and my health, I had to find a solution. I’ll never forget my first impression of that house as I pulled up in the drive on a rainy November night. Two yellow windows like eyes were aglow in the night. A horned stone guardian standing by the door watched with lidless eyes as I slipped in through the door and climbed a steep stone staircase. A huge gilt mirror met me on the landing and I stepped into a room with low ceiling beams, a red brick floor, a brisk fire burning in an enormous fireplace reflected in gilt frame mirrors hanging on every wall. Nothing could have been more removed from the cramped apartment my husband and I inhabited not far from the Mt. Tiburtini metro station, where you hear the TVs, toilet flushes, and cell phones of all your neighbors. A house is more than just a container, Gaston Bachelard has written. This one had a palpable soul. Here there were stars visible in the windows (which you had to keep closed at night because of the bats) and a special quality of silence. A big room with east window overlooking the cemetery became my studio. I ended up spending weeks at a time there, and my husband came up for week ends. We soon noted that the house interacted with its inhabitants by influencing their dreams. Overnight visitors invariably reported dreams of the underworld. I found the house’s many mirrors intriguing and unsettling. They seemed to be portals to another world. Vitorchiano is Etruscan territory, and was probably a colony of the larger Etruscan town of Norchia. Fragments of an Etruscan wall stand near the Vitorchiano cemetery, and along the sides of the gorge atop of which the old town stands, there are dozens of Etruscan tombs and grottoes. We first explored these, then pushed on to discover Norchia, Castel D’Asso, Blera, Barbarano Romano. A friend of mine has a theory that these are places of power where the earth’s energies may be tapped to enhance health and awareness. I do not know if this is so, but the sight of those mysterious T shaped doors hung with ivy, hidden behind thick vegetation began to act on my imagination. Returning home after teaching the late class, I lit a fire and let the resonance of that silent house work upon my mind. On those chilly evenings as the fire burned low, I started writing my novel, The Etruscan, set in 1922, just five years before D.H. Lawrence immortalized his visit to the area in Etruscan Places. Like Lawrence, the heroine of my novel, Harriet Sackett, comes in search of a source of deeper life and finds that source in the mysterious Etruscans. Writing is an exhilarating process through which writers briefly estrange themselves from their own lives. This may or may not be therapeutic. Harriet’s story is not mine, but my own life shrank away while I was writing hers. The act of writing is a solitary one. Luckily I have a small group of writing friends posted around the world with whom I share my work, and through writers workshops and conferences in Paris and Geneva, I keep in contact with an ever growing network. After my novel was finished I had the even harder task of trying to find a publisher. One publisher told me there wasn’t enough sex to make it sell. Someone else offered to have it rewritten by a panel of experts, and an agent tried to get me to sign a form promising not to sue if another novel with similar plot,setting, characters, or title should be published by one of his clients. Then a friend told me about the new publisher Wynkin deWorde, in Ireland, and I sent the manuscript to them. One year later the book was in print, and I had a small advance in my pocket --a dream come true. This article first appeared in The American Magazine, edited by Christopher P. Winner Oct, 2004 |
The Etruscan  Harriet's map Pen and Ink Drawing by Sergio Baldassarre The Etruscan by Linda Lappin Reviewed by Pat Aakhus Winter 2005 The Southern Indiana Review The Etruscan by Linda Lappin is an intelligent, atmospheric novel with finely drawn characters and beautiful language and style. It is not easy to put down. The feminist protagonist Harriet falls in love with a charismatic count, extraordinary in the tradition of Cornelius Agrippa, Cagliostro or Conte de St. Germaine, who materializes and disappears into the Etruscan landscape. Her well bred friends from Russell Square manage to save her from her fatal obsession by wiping out all evidence of his improbable existence, removing her from the wild landscape (wild at least to an American and her proper English friends), while simultaneously driving Harriet into madness and a long residence in a mental institution. This engaging story is told from the point of view of the Bloomsbury friends, whose own dark secrets are incidentally revealed (but only to us) as they read her personal journal of the love affair. The long hidden guilty truths remain hidden, and as we learn about them, as Harriet stalks her phantasm-lover, the solution to the mystery which propels the novel retreats. Is the Conte Federigo Del Re faithful; is he a real count, or even a real man; a fantasy or an Etruscan ghost? This shape-shifting Rochester will not be tracked down, unmasked or domesticated. Like the ephemeral count and the exotic landscape, Harriet is a fascinating, vivid character. To what extent are her civilized friends responsible for her affair, her madness? Certainly they create an opium addiction which makes Harriet “manageable,” protecting themselves from incriminating revelations about their own actions. Lappin handles this weaving of related pasts deftly, providing one of the most interesting aspects of the novel. Because the novel is primarily told from the point of view of “disinterested” characters reading Harriet’s journal, a strong sense of voyeurism pervades the narrative. Of course we too are culpable, racing through the pages to find the Conte Federigo Del Re, hoping that he will not disappoint us and show up one more time in some surprising incarnation. Harriet is an American, and therefore an outsider, notwithstanding her predilection for Turkish silk trousers, outspokenness and photographing Etruscan tombs. She might have been lifted from one of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories or is perhaps an eccentric portrait of Mansfield herself. For she is neither passive nor paralyzed like many of Mansfield’s or Woolf’s heroines, nor self victimizing like Chopin’s. But Lappin is a twenty-first century novelist and although the first wave of feminism is far behind us, not all has been resolved. While possessed of a fortune and entrée into European society, still Harriet is a victim of abuse and of the machinations of her controlling upper class cousins. It is a working class woman who ultimately saves her, rescuing Harriet’s past, and therefore her identity. Lappin has done an admirable job providing authenticity in every detail of time and setting, while providing provocative questions about the extent to which women are driven to hide abuse, and the effects of that suppression. There is no preaching in this novel; the issues are conveyed subtly and believably. Harriet would have had some things to discuss with Virginia Woolf, a victim of sexual abuse plagued by clinical depression throughout her life, had such things been discussed in Bloomsbury. Lappin’s elegant prose simultaneously creates suspense and evokes a precise setting in which supernatural events are realistically grounded. Her polished style and subtly achieved atmosphere effects recall the works of M. R. James and the Brontes; her special effects are psychological, driven by landscape, deftly drawn interiors and characters, rather than spectacle. In a time when the grotesque and the bizarre comprise plot and character in so much of contemporary literature, Harriet’s sexy Count who dresses up as a wild boar, supplies her with mushrooms, porcupines and a carnelian ring is a refreshing change. “He raised the lantern to a niche, hollowed in the wall, where the remains of a fresco were barely visible, half-eaten by the moss, but I could clearly discern the outline of a ship. I knew what it was: the ship of death. I had seen the small model of one in his study, “La nave della morte,” I murmured, pointing to the image. The Count nodded. “Each one of us much prepare his ship,” he said, “and load it up with wine and grain and oil, for the long journey home.” Now he shone the light towards the back wall of the tomb where an even larger doorway stood. Approaching it, I saw that it was not a real door at all, but merely an image sculpted in the wall. I asked f the builder had meant to add another chamber. “No,” he said. “That is the door of the soul through which the dead exited our world and sailed beyond time. Sometimes you find such doors carved in the rock, other times only painted.” I reached out to run my hand across the chill stone surface. The tomb wall was beaded with cold drops of moisture, and my hand left a greasy streak upon the stone. “What did they envision on the other side? I asked. The Count set the lantern down at the base of the carved doorway. The flame flared high and our shadows danced, huge, then merged on the tomb wall. He took a step toward me and intoned in a low voice, “Beyond that door lies an unknown world, where men and women…” here he paused like a skilful actor for dramatic effect. His face glowed orange in the lamplight, “…where even you and I…can become immortal, if we choose.” (pg. 98) With the astonishing success of Da Vinci Code, it is clear that the supernatural in a context of religion, art and history, is of immense interest to many readers. Both novels begin with an art work held in museums (the Louvre and British Museum), but there the similarities end. Lappin’s artfully written novel inhabits a supernatural landscape, but alludes subtly to hints of Etruscan culture, rather than appropriating New Age fabricated pseudo-legend. Character rather than spectacle drives this first novel, and Lappin’s gift for atmosphere places her amongst the finest writers of gothic art, not genre. THE ETRUSCAN Author: Lappin, Linda Kirkus Discovery Reviews Review Date: AUGUST 29, 2005 Publisher:Wynkin deWorde (225 pp.) Price (hardback): 20.00 Euro Publication Date: July 2004 ISBN: 1-904893-00-7 ISBN (hardback): 1-904893-00-7 Category: AUTHORS Classification: FICTION In this haunting literary gothic novel, American photographer Harriet Sackett barely escapes with her life after traveling to a small Italian village. After a disappointing love affair, Harriet journeys to the country village of Vitorchiano to research and photograph Etruscan tombs. She rents a farmhouse from the mysterious Count Federigo Del Re, resident of the nearby run-down castle. Harriet’s letters—with their romantic descriptions of the charming farmhouse and surrounding countryside—intrigue her closest friend Sarah. But when Sarah, her husband Stephen (also Harriet’s cousin) and George, a family friend, encounter Harriet a few months later, they find her drastically changed. Sarah thinks Harriet’s bewitched, and Stephen decides to send their trusted housekeeper, Mrs. Parsons, to look after her. Mrs. Parsons finds Harriet on the brink of insanity, in a dark and dank place bearing no resemblance to the enchanting cottage described in the letters. The only clue to what has transpired is Harriet’s diary; Stephen and George try to verify the facts contained in the diary, with little success. Readers will devour the tantalizing words of the diary and will become absorbed in guilty, voyeuristic fascination as Harriet describes her increasing obsession with the Count and the terrible consequences. Considering Harriet’s state, the friends are unsure how much of the diary is real and how much is the product of a mind skirting the edges of sanity. As the unraveling of Harriet’s mind is revealed, so to are the secrets between Sarah, Stephen, George, Mrs. Parsons and Harriet, which are no less fascinating than the diary. Mystery, fear, betrayal and uncertainty abound as Harriet’s story unfolds against the backdrop of Etruscan tombs and cemeteries. Influenced by D.H. Lawrence’s travelogue Etruscan Places, Lappin elegantly brings the characters, Italian countryside and surroundings to life in vivid, engrossing prose. A solid, well-written tale wrought in entrancing detail. Book of the Week....Bookview, Ireland July 2004 The thin line between illusion and reality is captured in Linda Lappin's account of an American woman's experiences in 1920s Tuscany. Admittedly photographer Harriet Sackett is not an average woman of the 1920s; always dressing in trousers to facilitate her peripatetic lifestyle, and with the fashionable 1920s bob, she cuts an unusual figure in rural Italy when she goes in search of Etruscan tombs. Past the first flush of youth, Harriet finds herself inexorably drawn towards her landlord, Count Federigo Del Re, a man whom she initially mistakes for a peasant farmer but a man who is able to lead her into realms of consciousness which she has never before experienced. The surreal relationship between the pair, and the cast of characters who people the Count's world, are in marked contrast to Harriet's own family in London. The conventionality of her cousin Stephen and his wife, Sarah, with their house on Russell Square and their faithful housekeeper Mrs Parsons nicely counterbalances the far from conventional happenings among the Etruscan tombs of Tuscany. Here there are sites dating back centuries where Harriet has "out of time" experiences; mushrooms with special properties form a major part of the local diet and Maria, Harriet's housekeeper, rids her of the evil eye. However as the story unfolds Linda Lappin contrives to show how the two worlds overlap, the apparent correctness of Stephen and Sarah, and Harriet's would-be suitor George Wimbly belying their previous unorthodox behaviour. Harriet's final predicament can to some extent be laid at the doors of both Stephen and George, and it is the women who emerge the stronger although they appear to have been under the domination of the men in their lives throughout the narrative. Harriet, Sarah and Ethel Parsons are all determined, though for different reasons, that the episode in Tuscany will not be forgotten and while the men are intent on destroying any evidence, written or photographic, these three over a long number of years preserve the truth, whatever that is. |
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