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Alberto Moravia (1907-1990) - pseudonym of Alberto Pincherle |
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Italian journalist, short-story writer, and novelist. Moravia explored in his books sex, social alienation, and other contemporary issues – he was a major figure in the 20th-century Italian literature. Alberto Moravia was married to Elsa Morante (1941-1963), who also was a writer, best known for her novel La Storia (1974). Several of Moravia's books have been filmed, among them Two Women by Vittorio De Sica (1960), A Ghost at Noon by Jean-Luc Godard (1964), and The Conformist by Bernardo Bertolucci (1970). Rome and its people played an important role in his fiction. Alas, Fausta had told the truth: everything was left exactly as it had been on the day I went away. One seemed to be poking one's nose into the study of one of those long-dead writers whose rooms have been transformed into museums, which are visited by people reverently and hat in hand. Except that there was a difference: those writers whose rooms have been transformed into museums were for the most part real, genuine writers; or were, in their lifetime, sublimated artists of the first water, and their studies are faithful mirrors of their sublimation. I, on the contrary, am desublimated, and my study was clearly a museum of mediocrity, of approximation, of self-didactism, of foolish aspirations, of the near miss, of amateurishness. (Two: A Phallic Novel by Alberto Moravia, translated by Angus Davidson, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972, p. 30; original title: Io e lui, 1971) Alberto Pincherle (Alberto Moravia) was born in Rome into a well-to-do middle-class Jewish-Catholic family. His mother was Teresa (de Marcanich) Pincherle, and father, Carlo Pincherle, an architect and a painter. "I was a healthy baby, and my family was normal," Moravia recalled. "I was the abnormal one, if anything. Abnormal because I was oversensitive. I don't believe everyone is sensitive in the same way. There are dull, stupid, insensitive children. There are others who are very sensitive, oversensitive. The oversensitive ones can become misfits, but they can also become artists." (Life of Moravia by Alberto Moravia and Alain Elkann, translated by William Weaver, South Royalton, Vermont: Steerforth Italia, 2000, p. 3) At the age of nine Moravia was stricken with tubercular infection of the leg bones, which he considered the most important factor in his early development. He spent considerable periods from 1916 to 1925 in sanatoriums. During these years Moravia began to write. His first published story, 'Cortigiana stance,' appeared in French in 1927. Gli indifferenti (1929, Time of Indifference), his first major novel, which was written between 1925 and 1929, Moravia published at his own expense. A poor translation into English, under the title The Indifferent Ones appeared in 1932. From the late 1940s, Moravia's regular translator was Angus Davidson, a writer and publisher who was associated with the Bloomsbury Group. Time of Indifference was a great success and perhaps the first modern European Existentialist novel. It tells about three days in the life of a Roman family, Mariagrazia and her children Carla and Michele, who keep up a bourgeois front while living at the edge of poverty. Mariagrazia lover and her debtor seduces Carla, who is bored. Michele do not seem to care about anything. The condemnation of the Roman bourgeoisie under fascism became a sensation. "It is astonishing that Il Duce should have permitted this morbid and life-denying novel to circulate freely among the inheritors of the tradition of the Caesars", one reviewer said. Not to arouse more disapproval of the authorities, Moravia adopted
an allegorical style, but his increasing involvement in politics at the
same time led to his books being banned, although his maternal uncle,
Augusto De Marsanich, was an influential Italian National Fascist Party
politician and his patron. Moravia utilized the typical characters of
an impotent intellectual, his virile rival, a voluptuous seductress,
and an aging mistress. Generally Moravia regarded women as being
superior to men. He saw sex as the enemy of love. Variations on the women of Time of Indifference are found in La romana (1947, The Woman of Rome), in which the protagonist, Adriana, is a prostitute, and La ciociara (1957, Two Women). The loose, rambling narrative recounts the war experiences of a calculating, widowed businesswoman, Cesira, and her daughter, Rosetta, who flee into the mountains to escape Fascist soldiers and Allied bombings. There they meet Michele, the son of a shopkeeper, a committed idealist. She starts to feel that if there had been a man who had attracted her "and whom I could have loved, love itself would have had a new savor, more profound and more intense. I was as though I had become a beast, for I imagine that beasts, having nothing to think about but their own bodies, must experience the same feelings that I experienced to be nothing more than a body which took nourishment, slept, kept itself tidy and tried to be as comfortable as possible. . . ." (Two Women, translated from the Italian by Angus Davidson, New York: Signet Books, 1964, p. 148) Rosetta is raped by three Moroccan soldiers. She becomes a prostitute and her mother a thief, who in her suicidal despair sees a vision of Michele. "I was not worthy of it—I failed to understand why I ought to do it. And so I had to go on living, but I should never know why life was to be preferred to death." (Ibid., p. 275) Moravia's criticism of society is presented on an allegorical level – proletariat is raped by capitalism, Italy loses her innocence under Fascism. The book was adapted for screen by Vittorio De Sica, starring Sophia Loren, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Eleonora Brown. In De Sica's film, the relationship between Cesira and Rosetta is paralleled with the image of Madonna and Child; Rosetta is the sacrificial victim. The rape scene is set in a church, with the question where is God? In the 1930s Moravia worked as a foreign correspondent for La Stampa and La Gazetta del Popolo. He travelled in the U.S., Poland, China, Mexico, and other countries. His works were censored by Benito Mussolini's fascist government, and placed by the Vatican on the Index librorum prohibitarum (Index of Forbidden Books). Moravia sharply criticized the dehumanized, capitalist world. He was especially influenced by the thoughts of Marx and Freud. After the publication of Le ambizioni sbagliate (1935, The Wheel of Fortune), Moravia lost his job at the Gazetta del Popolo. L'imbroglio (1937), a collection of short stories, included L'Architetto, La Tempesta, and La Provinciale. Several of his stories were first published in newspapers. Racconti romani (1954, Roman Tales) and Nuovi racconti romani (1959, More Roman Tales) include some of Moravia's best sketches of working-class characters in everyday situations. From 1941 to 1943 Moravia lived in Anacapri (Capri). In 1943 he tried to escape to Naples. Unable to cross the frontier, fled with his wife Elsa Morante into the mountains of Ciociaria. Moravia had written in 1941 a comic parody of the Mussolini government, La mascherata, attacked fascism in his articles in Il Popolo di Roma, and in danger of being arrested, Moravia went into hiding in the peasant community in Fondi, near Cassino, until the Allied Liberation. In 1944 Moravia began to write Two Women, and took up the work again ten years later,
when he had gained more distance from his own experiences. However, the nine months among peasants
had strengthened his social conscience and new sympathy for the people, which was evident
in the short novel Agostino
(1944). Written in 1942, the work had been rejected by Fascist censors.
After the publication, it became a bestseller and was filmed in 1962 by
Mauro Bolognini, who had earlier cooperated with Pier Paolo Pasolini. Il conformista (1951) portrays a person,
Marcello, who has dedicated himself to total conformity. He joins the
Fascist party, "as an abstract whole, as a great, existing army held
together by common feelings, common ideas, common aims, and army of
which it was comforting to form a part". The facts for the narrative
were gathered from the assassination of the Rosselli brothers in 1937.
Moravia himself was related to the Rosselli's on their mother's side. Bernardo Bertolucci's acclaimed screen adaptation of the novel was according to the director "a story about me and Godard. . . . I'm Marcello and I make Fascist movies and I want to kill Godard who's revolutionary, who makes revolutionary movies and who was my teacher." (quoted in 'Time, history and fascism in Bertolucci's films' by Frances Flanagan, The European Legacy, 4:1, 1999) One of the characters was given Godard's phone number, address, and middle name. Also Bertolucci smuggled in his adaptation a line from Godard's Le petit soldat: "The time of reflection is over. Now begins the time of action." When Moravia stressed Marcello's inevitable fate and followed a logical chronology, Bertolucci confused the narrative progression of the text. Moreover, a major idea in the book was that the protagonist is a fascist because he is homosexual. Bertolucci placed the sexual concerns into a wider context. The Woman of Rome, which originally started out as a short story, was in the postwar period the bestselling
Italian novel in the United States. It sold well over a million copies.
In the 1950s Moravia abandoned the third-person narrative, and used the limited,
non-objective first person narrative in tune with the modernist literature theories. Il disprezzo (1954, A Ghost at Noon) was the basis of Jean-Luc Godard's film Le Mépris (1963), starring Brigitte Bardot. "Moravia's novel is a nice, vulgar one for a train journey," the director said, "full of classical, old-fashioned sentiments in spite of the modernity of the situation. But it is with this kind of novel that one can often make the best films. . . . There was no need to try to make it different, to adapt it to the screen. All I had to do was film it as it is: just film what was written". (Godard on Godard: Critical writings by Jean-Luc Godard, edited by Jean Narboni and Tom Milne, with an introduction by Richard Road, new foreword by Annette Michelson, New York, N.Y.: Da Capo Press, 1986, p. 200) However, Godard played with the theme of the book – the adapting of Homer's Odyssey to film – and developed further the triangle drama of Odysseus, Penelope, and Poseidon. Riccardo Molteni, not so reliable narrator, tries to keep some sense of balance after the death of his wife, Emilia. Bardot imitated the gestures of Godard's ex-wife Anna Karina. Godard kept her half-dressed throughout the whole film, and showed her swimming in the nude. The American actor Jack Palance played Prokosch, a producer, and on another level Poseidon, Odysseus' archenemy. "Godard is a man of genius who has revolutionized cinema, but he is a person with whom it is difficult, or rather virtually impossible, to communicate. I have written critical articles almost all the films of Godard, but on the very day I first met him, in a Roman hotel, I gave up any idea of getting to know him." (Life of Moravia, p. 217) Moravia'a attitude toward cinema was ambivalent. "The camera is a less complete instrument of expression than the pen, even in the hands of an Eisenstein," he once said in The Paris Review. To Corriere della Sera, the most prestigious Italian newspaper, Moravia contributed regularly from 1946. In 1953 with Alberto Carocci Moravia edited Nuovi Argomenti; he wrote film reviews from 1955 for L'Espresso, and in 1955 he was a State Department lecturer in the United States. Moravia's major novels from the 1960s include La noia (1960, The Empty Canvas), an examination of the relationship between reality and art, and L'attenzione (1965, The Lie), about a novelist writing a book entitled L'attenzione. The troubled narrator of The Empty Canvas
has suffered always from boredom. "For me, boredom is not the opposite
of amusement, I might even go so far as to say that in certain of its
aspects it actually resembles amusement inasmuch as it gives rise to
distraction and forgetfulness, even if of a very special type. . . .
The feeling of boredom originates for me in a sense of the absurdity of
a reality which is insufficient, or anyhow unable, to convince me of
its own effective existence." (The Empty Canvas, translated by Angus Davidson, New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961, p. 3) The French philosopher Roland Barthes, who
suffered from bouts of boredom all his life, knew well the novel and mentioned it in passing some weeks before the street
accident which would eventually lead to his death. Between the years 1958 and 1970 Moravia travelled widely throughout the world, and produced such books as Un mese in URSS (1958), La rivoluzione culturale in Cina (1968, The Red Book and the Great Wall), A quale tribù appartieni? (1972, Which Tribe Do You Belong To?), and Viaggi. Articoli 1930-1990 (1994). In 1982 he edited Nuovi Argomenti with Leonardo Sciascia and Enzo Siciliano. Most of his life Moravia lived in Rome; one apartment was situated in the nearby Via dell’Oca, close to the Piazza del Popolo. Io e lui (1971, The Two of Us), an international bestseller, was a story of a screenwriter who tries to understand his large penis. Acting independently, it constantly leads him into humiliating situations. The Panther edition was advertised as "A novel which takes up where Portnoy left off." La vita interiore (1978, Time of Desecration) was composed in the form of an interview between the ostensible narrator and the interviewee, Desideria. Moravia's autobiography Vita di Motavia came out in 1990. His philosophical and political scepticism did not prevent him from entering politics, nor the voters expected him to be a run-of-the mill politician. In 1984 he was elected Italian representative to the European Parliament. Moravia died in Rome on September 26, 1990. For further reading: Alberto Moravia by Edoardo Sanguineti (1962); Moravia by Giuliano Dego (1966); Three Italian Novelist: Moravia, Pavese, Vittorini by Donald Heiney (1968); The Existentialism of Albeto Moravia by Joan Ross and Donald Freed (1972); Alberto Moravia by Jane E. Cottrell (1974); Selected Essays by Elsa Montale (1978); Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation, ed. by Andrew S. Horton and Joan Magretta (1981); 'Bertolucci's The Conformist: A Morals Change', in Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism by Millicent Joy Marcus (1986); Vita di Moravia (Alberto Moravia's Life) by Alberto Moravia and Alain Elkann (1990); Woman as Object: Language and Gender in the Work of Alberto Moravia by Sharon Wood (1990); The Architecture of Imagery in Alberto Moravia's Fiction by J.M. Kozma (1993); Homage to Alberto Moravia, ed. by Rocco Capozzi and Mario B. Mignone (1993); Alberto Moravia by Thomas Erling Peterson (1996); Moravia in bianco e nero: la vita, le opere, i viaggi by Giuliano Dego (2008); La speranza violenta: Alberto Moravia e il romanzo di formazione by Valentina Mascaretti (2013); Representing Fascism in the Italian Post-fascist Novel (1945-1965): Alberto Moravia, Vitaliano Brancati and Vasco Pratolini by Clea Rivalta (2013); La scacchiera: sul teatro di Alberto Moravia by Valeria Merola (2017); MoranteMoravia: storia di un amore by Anna Folli (2019); Pasolini e Moravia: due volti dello scandalo by Renzo Paris (2022) Selected works:
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