Love and Despair in Italy

...Only one of Moravia's stories transcends mere appetite and investigates the human condition itself...

...the two male protagonists have somewhat the same problem, since both are shown in the process of besieging the women they want to possess...

...Where there is no question of any kind of affection, past or present, in such a tie, the reader feels as much concern for the man and woman involved as if two cats had parted...

...Indeed, in the story called "The English Officer," in which a young Italian woman tries to pretend to herself as well as to the man she pursues that she is not in the habit of soliciting, the author makes use of a barnyard image to symbolize an act which he himself implies has no more significance than the ruffling of a hen's feathers...

...Cruel and gloomy as he never fails to be, this often overestimated Italian writer has yet achieved in "A Sick Boy's Winter" not just another sampling of our irredeemable perversity, but a real slice of our tragic fate...

...In "A Sick Boy's Winter," the author has reached beyond the afflicted body of a tubercular youth to touch his soul...

...while in the other story the bridegroom has not yet succeeded, after the first 24 hours of his "bitter honeymoon," in kindling in his bride's bosom any flame at all...

...From the first story written in 1927 to the last one written in 1952, there is no apparent change of temperature in his torrid view of the relations between men and women, or even a momentary glimpse of that mystery beyond the flesh which proclaims man's heart...

...But if to reduce the human act of love to the anonymity of the barnyard is Moravia's final purpose, if he means to say that we are all helpless victims of an instinct that tortures us without giving us that identification of self that we are seeking, then surely the ultimate insignificance of sexuality should be revealed in the context of the whole man, that is, in relation to the longings and aspirations by which he can be and is identified...

...All he earns is Brambilla's contempt...

...Reviewed by Virgilia Peterson Frequent contributor, "Saturday Review'' N. Y. "Herald Tribune Books'' Since Alberto Moravia's famous first novel, The Time of Indifference, appeared in this country nearly 25 years ago, he has been viewed by many of our critics as Italy's most promising contemporary literary figure...

...But this total man appears nowhere in Moravia's work...

...The story called "The Tired Courtesan," first in the book, introduces us to an aging mistress and her impecunious young lover on the evening when, with more relief than grief, he has decided to leave her...

...In each of these stories, it is still and always the unease, the hunger, the nervousness and the despair so inevitably linked to erotic desire which Alberto Moravia almost exclusively explores...

...the two women, the prey...

...here, for once, Moravia has put mere eroticism in its place on the human scales...

...Girolamo, son of impoverished but middle-class parents, shares a room in the sanatorium with an older man, a traveling salesman, Brambilla, whose slightly Communistic leanings together with his natural sadism and the intolerable boredom of circumstance prompt him to badger the boy relentlessly with taunts about his family and his sexual inexperience...

...The unfortunate lover, however, is attempting to rekindle in his mistress's bosom a flame that he refuses to admit has gone out...

...The two men are the hunters...

...Moravia's art has not flowered, in part perhaps because his singleminded preoccupation with sexuality—understandable in a man of 22—now begins to look, in a man of nearly 50, like a trauma...

...Here, for once, Moravia pictures a soul in the round, with its yearning to survive no matter what odds, to identify itself, to grasp its share of life...

...Again and again, in the succeeding stories, Moravia presents his men and women not as individuals rounded out by the hopes and foibles which distinguish each leaf on the human tree, but simply as male and female, differing sharply from each other, yet indistinguishable in their bare maleness and femaleness from the rest of their respective species...

...Successful as the author undoubtedly is in describing the antics of the chase—the blandishments and threats of the males and the classic petulance and false promise of the females—we are no more aggrieved by the lover's failure to recapture his mistress than elated by the accidental but clever psychological device which throws the bride belatedly into her husband's arms...

...With the publication in English of these eight long short stories under the title Bitter Honeymoon, we can measure the depth and persistence of Moravia's fixation with sensual love...

...The boy, goaded at last past all endurance, manages with terrible effort to seduce a 14-year-old girl patient...

...But the promise inherent in that early book has, with each succeeding one, remained a promise...

...In miniature, this is the same juxtaposition of older woman and younger man which Colette so memorably described in Cheri, but stripped of the element of compassion which gave Colette's book its emotional authenticity...

...In the title story, "Bitter Honeymoon," and in the one called "The Unfortunate Lover...

...But, in this tale of sorry corruption, the crime is almost overshadowed by a loneliness and helplessness impossible to surmount...