The Oldest Story

...In one of its aspects, A Love Affair is an allegory of social class...

...Antonio is "a bourgeois in the bloom of life," respectable and conventional...

...and she is a triumph of vulgarity from her violet panties to the way she charges "You want to soil the finest feelings,' whenever she is denying Antonio's latest valid accusation...

...Antonio is more than a little reminiscent of that other serio-comic masochist, Leopold Bloom, and Buzzati has clearly learned from Joyce or from Joyce's pupil Svevo...

...she sits between Marcello and Antonio in the movies and holds Marcello's hand...

...it never occurs to him to take Laide home, or introduce her to his family...

...It is like an expansion of Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" without Kafka's absolute authority, and at various times it suggests Mann's The Magic Mountain, Juenger's On the Marble Cliffs, and Cavafy's poem "Waiting for the Barbarians...

...In the Dietrich film The Blue Angel, this story becomes overripe and plummy, and in Svevo's As a Man Grows Older, it is seen as wryly funny...

...She wakes briefly to tell him that she is pregnant, presumably by him, and wants the child...

...At one point Laide dances the cha-cha-cha solo for Antonio, and "suddenly there's no longer anything false about her, or left out, or hidden, or vile, or mean...

...Buzzati (or the translator) has a maddening habit of switching tenses, but I suppose that a phantasmagoria is answerable only to its own laws...

...He defines love bitterly: "It's a curse on your head and heart and you can't escape it...

...It is rhetorical and Whitmanesque, a cascading of nouns...

...There is a marvelous scene in which Antonio waits up in Laide's apartment for her to return from whoring, and while waiting writes her an ultimatum...

...Mildred in Maugham's Of Human Bondage is oddly boyish...

...she keeps Antonio waiting on the street for hours...

...But at this moment Laide is blessed, and can bless...

...And Laide comes, not out of hell, but out of the Milanese working class, and has, along with its vices, its virtues: toughness, resourcefulness, pride...

...thoughts of her, always of her, of that particular mouth, of those lips made in a certain way, of an arrangement of taut muscles (do you remember...

...Antonio thinks, of a madam: "She's an honest woman, a woman of good heart, how many she's helped in their difficult moments, poor unlucky wretches, she's like a mother to the dear girls, but it would be too bad if they tried anything that's all they'd need...

...The melodramatic quotation with which these remarks begin is from Antonio's musings on his fate...

...In other cases, our story appears to have been radically transposed...

...Every literature has its variants of the story...

...It tells of the mad passion of Antonio Dorigo, a 50-year-old Milanese bachelor and successful architect, for Adelaide Anfossi, a 20-year-old Milanese whore...

...At one point Antonio imagines Laide sitting inside his brain, telephoning other men...

...Keats called the lady "La Belle Dame sans Merci," medieval folklore knew her as a succubus, the Japanese identify her as a shape-shifting fox who drains a man's life in sexual excess...

...The Tartar Steppe is a derivative book...

...The ending of A Love Affair is comic rather than tragic...

...On his own plight: "Each time I admit it's my fault I admit I'm a nut it's a kind of mental state but what can I do?' Ultimately A Love Affair exonerates Laide: she represents the body's innocence, what Buzzati in a wonderful phrase calls "carnal virginity...

...This lyric novel is A Love Affair, by Dino Buzzati (translated from the Italian by Joseph Green, Farrar, Straus, 299 pp., $4.95...

...From that, we might expect: The Proletariat Embraced by the Most Advanced Section of the Bourgeoisie...

...It is one of the principal subdivisions of the Fall story...

...In the 18 years between the two books, Dino Buzzati has mastered his theme of obsession, has learned to put real toads into his fables, and has found his own authentic voice...

...in this unselfish act of beauty she's transformed, she becomes a rose, a cloud, a harmless bird...

...In an article some years ago, I named this device of disguising homosexual love as heterosexual love the "Albertine Strategy...

...Some early Fathers of the Church were so convinced that women were the root of all sin that they identified the female genitals with Hellmouth...

...WRITERS&WRITING The Oldest Story By Stanley Edgar Hyman "A man, a proud man, intelligent, successful, once self-confident, dragged down by a girl out of hell.' The oldest story in the world, surely...

...the ignominy of his fate is not...

...yet their thoughts—oh, he had to laugh—all around, for all those miles and miles, thoughts like his, both obscene and exquisite, prompted by the mysterious voice that calls for the preservation of the species, transfigured into strange, blazing vices, why had no one ever dared to say so...

...Aguri reduces Okada to emaciation and delirium in Tanizaki's "Aguri...

...Adelaide, called Laide, is not only a whore: she is insatiate, frigid, and perverse...

...Adam was the first, and is probably the archetypal case...

...Faye drives Homer to madness and murder in West's The Day of the Locust...

...In a series of jealous fantasies that get funnier and funnier, Antonio pictures the entire male population of North Italy going to bed with Laide in a variety of perverse fashions: he imagines her, for example, committing indecencies with elderly industrialists who are "advised on the state of their heart by a weekly electrocardiogram...

...she is an incessant and shameless liar...

...Laide drives off with Marcello and leaves Antonio to mind her dog...

...she keeps Antonio waiting in bed while she plucks her eyebrows, then makes an endless series of telephone calls, while all he can say is "I'll catch a chill without any clothes on...

...A Love Affair is far from that, but it is not realism either: we never see Antonio at work as an architect, or at home with his family...

...and Tadzio, Aschenbach's destroyer in Mann's "Death in Venice," is openly a boy...

...In the book's final vision, Laide, still asleep, becomes pure spirit, and "floats under the rooftops the skylights the terraces the pinnacles of Milan.' The ending is also deeply equivocal, none of Laide's lies having been acknowledged or explained, and "maybe tomorrow everything will be as it was, and the shame and bitchery will begin again...

...we know that Proust's Albertine is based on a male Albert...

...What Antonio feels for her is total and uncontrollable love, tragic passion, "as though he had taken a love potion...

...and Buzzati describes it with the greatest skill and insight...

...It is love like a physical illness: "a kind of interior thirst around the entrance of his stomach, up up toward the breast bone, a painful unchanging tenseness of his whole being...

...Nana drives Count Muffat to poverty and despair in Zola's Nana...

...It is not so openly allegorical as Buzzati's other novel published in this country, The Tartar Steppe...

...He daydreams of her losing a leg in an accident: "How wonderful that would be!," since then she would stay at home and be exclusively his...

...she entertains Marcello and asks Antonio to come by with some food for the dog...

...dancing the cha-cha-cha, she tastes the marvelous sensation of being free, light, and chaste...

...Anna ruthlessly uses and discards Modest in Chekhov's "Anna Round the Neck...

...Some metaphors are almost surrealistic...

...This would be a simple clinical study of masochist man and sadist girl, except that only the power of Antonio's love is taken seriously...

...then she drifts back to sleep...

...There is a five-page montage showing sex in Milan, in which an auto mechanic "looks up and sees the bellies and the crotches and the private parts of the cars,' and a whore sees her customer sleeping with his mouth half open "like the flickering light at the altar of Our Lady of Sorrows where she kneels in the frost of dawn...

...Antonio not only keeps Laide in luxury and believes all her absurd lies—that she is a ballet dancer at the Scala, that she is a fashion model, that her lover Marcello is her innocent cousin—but he puts up with a series of monstrous humiliations...

...The style of A Love Affair resembles lyric poetry more than it does novelistic prose...

...As if to demonstrate that plot is nothing and treatment everything, one more retelling of this antique has just been published, and could not be more fresh and glistening...

...A Love Affair, which tells the most hackneyed of stories, which shows the influence of Joyce or Svevo or both, is nevertheless a work of startling originality...

...She comes in at three in the morning, crumples his note without reading it, ignores his request that she read it, goes into the bathroom "and, leaving the door open, began to pee.' At that moment we realize that Antonio is the mind and Laide the body, and that she has just given the body's answer to the mind's importunities...

...Later he recognizes the same "moving purity" in her when she sings a coarse song...

...The figures of speech are ornate and heavy, like those of poetry...

...In the last chapter Antonio watches Laide asleep in his bed, a vision of serene innocence...

...Here is a sentence: "Papers, ledgers, forms, telephone calls, receipts, hands full of pens, tools, pencils, hard at work on a socket, a screw, a sum, a gear, a job of soldering, a statement of account, a film bath: an infinity of frantic ants intent on their own well-being...

...Daisy deserts Gatsby and causes his death in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby...

...Antonio realizes that she has always been untouched by the "dark cruel wood" of her life...

...Margot ruins, betrays, blinds, and eventually kills Albinus in Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark...

...soft and fluid, with a curvature unlike all the others, of a fold, of a fullness, of a depth, of a warmth, of a dampness, of a surrender, of a descent, of a burning abyss...

...As Antonio drives to get Laide in another town, "all the poplars of the broad countryside fled as he did, exactly, wheeling in two enormous curved wings...