John Webster’s The White Devil is not widely read in
the U. S, nor is it often taught in the universities here. I discovered it through
a newspaper review of theatrical production that was a sensation in New York. I
could not make the trip to see it, but I read the play. Then read it again.
It wasn’t till later I learned the roots of
the story: how Webster had drawn his tale from the real life events surrounding
a murderous love triangle that dominated the scandal sheets of the later Renaissance.
I love
Webster’s play. I love his dark vision. I love the startling modern feel, his
portrayal of pervasive corruption, the forbidden sensuality, the erotic
undertone. I am especially drawn to the
female character, Vittoria. Not because she is good— because she isn’t. She is an unfaithful wife, seduced by the
promise of wealth, who plays willing inspiration to the murderous impulses of an
unscrupulous lover. Vittoria is the moral center of the play, not because she seeks
forgiveness, but rather because refuses to do so: she will not to fall to her knees before authorities
looking not for justice but a scapegoat: a way to hide their own corruption.
Though it would
be severely anachronistic, it is tempting to label The White Devil as a prototypical noir tale, and to think of
Vittoria as embodiment of a of noir heroine.
I do most of my
serious writing on a small, narrow desk facing the wall. I have a habit of tacking
things onto that wall, news clippings, index cards with hand scrawled
quotations, odd pages torn from magazines, photos, some of which stay up for
years, yellowing, and which often (not always) find their way into my fiction
in some form or the other.
My first attempts —absurd in retrospect—at retelling
The White Devil were historical fiction.
I sketched out two timelines on colored paper, pinning them on that wall: one drawn
from Webster’s play, the other from the historical events surrounding the real-life
murders. I likewise taped up Renaissance
portraits of the real life principles—and later a magnificent photo of Geraldine
McEwan, in the 1969 National Theater Production, in what is often referred to
as the best dramatic staging of the play on a set designed by Fellini’s
frequent collaborator, Piero Gherardi.
All this was marvelous
stuff, but it only led me deeper off the path, into an impenetrable thicket.
Why retell a story
that had already been so well rendered?
The answer, as
it turned out, was already on my wall: a clipping I had torn from the San Francisco Chronicle—the story of Amanda
Fox, an American exchange student sentenced to 25 years for brutally murdering
her Italian roommate. It was a sensational case that caught the fervid imagination
of the tabloids, never mind the conviction was eventually overturned. The picture of Fox was black and white, a
mug shot of a woman in her twenties, grainy, out of focus but nonetheless
compelling, seductive and innocent all at once, oddly similar to the photos of
McEwan in the stage role of Vittoria.
More so than
the question of guilt and innocence, what struck me was the public howl
surrounding Fox’s case. It so resembled the howl, more than four centuries earlier,
which had enveloped Vittoria Accorombona. This led me to a realization that my story
should not be set in the Renaissance, but in the here and now: in contemporary
time. Likewise, my Vittoria was not Italian. She was American, AKA Vicky Wilson,
an aspiring actress, an ex-patriot mingling with her scheming brother among the
Roman glitterati.
I also realized
that to tell this story I must—like any good crime novelist— visit the scene of
the crime. So I wandered the streets of Rome, seeking out the places where
Vicki might go, crashing parties at private palazzos (or trying to), ending
each evening in the Campo De Fiori where, or so I imagined, my American Vicki now
lived, in a tiny apartment, in a building many centuries old that had likewise
been inhabited once upon by the real Vittoria and her cuckolded husband.
One evening in
the Campo, I noticed a young couple, man and woman, who very much resembled each
other, and might have been mistaken for brother and sister except for the overt
way they fondled one another. As it turned out, they were Americans, and their
conversation at the table behind me revolved around where they might go once
they were done with Italy.
This didn’t
strike me as significant at the time, but later made me realise that my American
heroine—once under the gun, sought after by the Italian authorities for crimes
real or imagined—would not seek refuge in Padua, as the original Vittoria had. No,
she would head abroad, across the ocean—to the states maybe, to the coast—and then
further on, to some foreign clime, in attempt to escape extradition. I allowed myself to enter a story written
some four hundred years ago, itself a transfiguration of underlying events, based
in turn on source material questionably rendered, yet somehow informing the current
moment, the yellow clippings, the old pictures, the fading type on the wall.
The White Devil by Domenic Stansberry (published by Orion) Out now,
In the hot,
shadowy streets of Rome, Vicki Wilson’s lovers keep turning up dead. Vittoria,
as she's known in Italy, is a small-time actress who left behind a dark past in
her native Texas and followed her fading writer husband to the Eternal City. Guided
by her controlling, obsessive brother Johnny, Vittoria soon enters the upper
circles of Roman society, becoming a paparazzi darling and mingling with shady
cardinals and corrupt senators. Among them is Paolo Orsini, who quickly falls
prey to Vittoria's charms. Too bad he's married; too bad his wife, an aging
film icon, is murdered. From the
ravishing beauty of Rome - a city of dark secrets held within the frescoed
walls of glamorous palazzos - to the pristine beaches of Malibu and the dangerous
alleys of a mysterious South American city, Vittoria finds herself at the heart
of a lethal chase, spiralling dangerously out of control...
