An Interview with Alberto Moravia
ROSENTHAL, RAYMOND
WRITERS and WRITING An Interview with Alberto Moravia Questions by Raymond Rosenthal All of us, would certainly like to write a War and Peace, but perhaps our true literary ambition is less...
...That's why all Communist art, for example, is such a failure...
...I have taken the first steps in that direction in my book, Roman Tales, but what I would really like to do is a full-length comic novel...
...Yes, I have always wanted to write a comic novel...
...They don't leave because they regard even Hungary as just an incident...
...They think of the life of the party as extending over the centuries...
...Another reason for the continuance of Communism is that it may have become worse but people don't see anything new that is better...
...I do believe, however,, that modern industrial civilization does not favor the writing of the kind of novel I envisage...
...Pirandello is a special case, rather strange...
...Understand, I am talking of purely intellectual obstacles...
...He had a system, but he always broke out of it...
...I have written about 135 in this series already, all stories laid in Rome and having mostly poor people for protagonists...
...Do you have any such secret ambition...
...all his life for a theory on which to base his novels, but fortunately he never found it...
...Manzoni is a hedgehog, if ever there was one...
...That's why they are so bad...
...Now things are much less lively, there is an atmosphere of somnolence in Italy—the sort of atmosphere that is produced by a situation of cultural and political compromise...
...Italy holds its own and even surpasses the other European countries...
...The truth is that both worlds are in crisis, and neither of them can say, "I am strong...
...And, secondly, because I am the sort of writer who is very attached to the natural, reality, and all reality is deeply comic...
...One gets the feeling that Italian literature at present is in a more mature but less lively stage of its development...
...If one agrees that the Russian tanks in Hungary have fatally shot down the myth of Communism, what do you think can take its place for the intellectual and working masses of Western Europe...
...You remember: The hedgehog is the artist with a tight, self-contained system, whereas the fox is wily, many-sided, contradictory...
...For example, in Dostoyevsky you can find Christianity and Nietzscheanism, and both of them are true and, naturally, at loggerheads...
...I do not think that the Russian tanks have buried the myth of Communism...
...Italian literature may be less lively than it was ten years ago, but it certainly does not give any signs of being more mature...
...And, finally, could you teU, me about your most recent work...
...As artists they are too alive, too involved in life, to be consistent and systematic...
...A writer cannot have a system in a transition period such as we are living through, when the old systems are bankrupt and the new ones have not yet established themselves...
...The outcome is that Italy is afflicted with provinciality...
...You know what was said about his novel The Betrothed...
...I am a professional writer in the sense that I am a humanist, that is, I don't wait for inspiration to do my work...
...As for myself, I am content to be considered a fox, if that's the only term available...
...In everyday life the chief problem for the Italian writer is simple: He doesn't have enough money...
...First, because at a certain level a comic novel is the greatest challenge to a writer...
...I just completed a novel entitled La Ciociara—that is, The Girl from Ciociara, a region south of Rome—which mainly deals- with the last war...
...Where would you put Manzoni, Leopardi, Pirandello, Verga...
...Finally, I think that the most vigorous literary movement of the postwar years, the so-called neo-realistic movement, degenerated too quickly into a mannerism, thus losing a great deal of its creative value...
...In any case, who can believe in a system nowadays...
...Of course, I don't put these two events on the same plane, but both were very bad blunders...
...That is why so much Italian writing often lacks breadth and universality, why it seems remote and somehow old-fashioned...
...It is incredible that Gide was able to make a success out of so boring a novel as The Counterfeiters...
...Do you think that Gide's witticism is true, that is, besides being witty...
...You can see their inadequacy in Verga's case...
...In compensation for this, you find authenticity, verve, earthiness...
...Joyce confessed that he wanted to be funny, like Sterne, and I once heard a famous modern poet assert that he would gladly give his right arm to be able to write a fanciful book like Alice in Wonderland...
...This makes it difficult for the Italian writer to come to grips with the problems of the modern world— I don't mean the problems connected with technology, machinery, but rather the real problems of human relationships in the situation of collapsing, shifting values...
...If you think of it, there aren't too many first-rate ones—Gogol's Dead Souls, Cervantes's Don Quixote, and Apuleius's Golden Ass—and the reason for this scarcity is quite simple: They are very hard to write...
...And, last of all, my publisher is gathering together the articles I wrote about Russia during my trip there last spring...
...Luckily, Italy has never become completely modern...
...Leopardi was a poet, therefore a fox...
...In their eyes, time and the Communist movement are identical, and, as you know very well, time heals everything...
...He thought he was a hedgehog but he really wasn't...
...That's what I wrote...
...What did you mean...
...It was typical of the present situation that at the very moment when the Communists crushed the Hungarian revolt, the British and French began their venture at Suez...
...About politics...
...WRITERS and WRITING An Interview with Alberto Moravia Questions by Raymond Rosenthal All of us, would certainly like to write a War and Peace, but perhaps our true literary ambition is less grandiose...
...Very logical and consistent...
...The obstacle lies in the fact that Italy, in a certain sense, does not completely belong to the modern world...
...It doesn't seem a very happy moment for a war novel, but what can you do...
...You recently said that you considered yourself a professional writer...
...The fact is that Balzac was even less of a philosopher than other writers...
...In other words, I approach my writing as a job, which I confront daily like any other craftsman...
...The inspiration which many writers drew from the fall of Fascism, the partisan war and the resistance seems to have run its course...
...And, as a professional, what advice would you give to the young writer...
...Such a thing could only have happened in France, where culture is surrounded by a cult...
...I must say, however, that so far as young, interesting writers are concerned...
...As a humanist, I believe in reason, the grappling of my mind with problems as they come up, and I consider my work a way of achieving both self-knowledge and knowledge of the world...
...Yesterday's liveliness had obvious sources: Fascism had been sitting on the lid for twenty years, and when it was pushed off a great charge of energy and ebullience burst forth...
...He was more of a sociologist, wouldn't you say...
...Do you agree with this, and if so, what are the reasons for it...
...In many respects it is still a pastoral, .rustic civilization, out of which the comic grows quite naturally...
...You must realize that the Catholic Church has its own lid, in the shape of censorship and conformism, and it has been rather successful in getting it fitted over the Italian pot...
...As a result, there is something artificial about his world...
...He was a poet of the novel, with a kind of heavy, mournful lyricism...
...So I gue^s I have a chance...
...Why this is so would require a long analysis involving its historical past, its civilization, above all its religion...
...That in itself is a good sign, and I am sure that many of these writers will fulfil their promise in the future...
...I don't agree...
...the Italians arc not snobbish...
...The postwar period did reveal a great number of young, forceful talents who were looking for a new way...
...What do you think is the greatest obstacle in the path of the Italian writer...
...Gidc once said that Ralzac searched Raymond Rosenthal, former managing editor of Modern Review, has been living in Rome for several years and contributes to various periodicals...
...I never stop reading them...
...As I say, I would also like to write one...
...All the great novelists have a philosophy, but it is usually full of the gravest sort of contradictions...
...Well, I have three books coming out shortly...
...But now all that seems to have subsided...
...He was a Catholic and tried to write in terms of that system...
...And yourself...
...Yet I doubt whether Berlin's categories are effective ones...
...In the long run, I should imagine that the Communists will regard Hungary as just an episode, a very bloody episode, of the process of de-Stalinization...
...For me, it's really a way of living...
...Let me explain: The majority of Italian writers come from small towns, where life is hemmed in by very narrow, even mean horizons...
...Here in Italy, he could never have gotten away with it...
...And he wasn't content to have written a bad novel, but he actually went to the trouble of publishing the notes on which his bad novel had been based, to show how he had come to write it...
...Over it arches, not the open sky, but the roof of a church...
...Then I am getting out another volume of my short stories, Roman Tales, a number of which have already been translated into English...
...It is true, of course, for the novelist is not a philosopher, even though he may have a philosophy...
...He clearly was more a fox than otherwise, and yet it would be hard to call him that, for a fox gives one the idea of something fast, shrewd, nimble and Verga was quite slow and serious...
...Everybody knows that Balzac was a reactionary, and yet his novels are unquestionably the best expression of the French Revolution...
...But he had the great advantage over Zola of not thinking that human society could be understood in terms of natural phenomena...
...As for advice to young writers, I would say: Do what you like to do...
...As for the organizational hard core, the cadres, they also have been shaken, but not to the point of leaving the Communist party...
...To understand and face these problems, the Italian writer is not helped very much by his cultural surroundings...
...So you see, I keep busy...
...It is strange, though, that Gide should be the one to deprecate systems, for he wrote all of his novels on the basis of preconceived theories...
...A number of Italian intellectuals have been upset by Hungarian events, but the real cadres of Italian Communism don't seem to have been affected much...
...In short, it has the virtues of its defects...
...the system on which it is based is not yet mature, it is still very problematical...
...I often have wondered how one would place famous Italian writers in the Isaiah Berlin scheme of hedgehog and fox...
...But they are wonderful, aren't they...
Vol. 40 • January 1957 • No. 1
