Touching the Soil of Reality

...An almost mystical relationship seems to exist between the Italian writer and his language, which is usually some dialect that percolates up to him from the streets...

...These reflections were inspired by Moravia's book of essays...

...I could read it only in snatches, and I should imagine that all the unscathed graduates from Burroughs and Mailer will suffer the same hardship...

...Among the French, writers like Céline and Queneau, who use the spoken language, seem to be immured in that language and to derive only tangential benefits from it...

...Of course Berto is being satiric, but he is also accurately recording an aspect of Roman intellectual life: For years Moravia, by his example, his severity, has been a model to the younger writers...

...To complicate matters, Pavese has appeared here in bad translation and erratically, so in English one cannot judge either his entire production or his special triumphs...

...In Europe, only the Russians have the same relation to these quasi-mystical entities...

...In fact, I would claim that his peculiar reluctance to renounce his essential humanity, which always starts and ends not with an idea but with his own body, has given the Italian writer a unique position in present-day literature and has already been responsible for a renaissance of creativity...

...After the thousands of novels inspired by Freud and his ideas, Berto has managed to express for the first time the grinding misery that a man experiences in the throes of an analysis...

...To those who know him only from his novels and short stories-I prefer the latter, for his intelligence tends to smother his sensibility in the longer form-it will be somewhat of a surprise to witness him handling with forthrightness and assurance not only his entire heritage from Machiavelli to Manzoni but also his position as an Italian contemporary writer and a modern man...

...Imagine a French or American writer of a similar persuasion even being caught dead with such a theme...

...Yet what he loses in poignancy he gains in strength and honesty...

...And also on the Italian's being cowed by that machine and its manipulators...

...It is an unfailing Italian resource...

...I prefer it, however, to that catatonic insensibility that incites the writer (or painter) to chop up, mangle or distort our bodies and then proves its modernity by not blinking an eyelash...

...And that the passion visible beneath the elegant surface of Sciascia's prose, brilliantly rendered in Adrienne Foulke's translation, is still being nourished by the disgusting spectacle of lethargy and poverty...

...These essays, with their variety, their acuteness, their unaffected directness, should do much to correct that mistaken picture of him...

...For it does so with all the lyricism, the intensity, the personal involvement, the feeling for concrete reality, that Camus was forced to discard because of his rhetoric and his political ideology...

...A card-carrying Communist, the hack has come to Milan to blow up the shining offices of the mining company responsible for the deaths of his friends and comrades...

...it is his strength and weakness, his birthright as a Roman, that city which seems to have endured because of its infinite reserves of contempt and indifference...

...He cannot put on that mask...

...Unlike his great ancestor Belli, Moravia is too aware, too all of one piece, to plunge into the dialect as into a refreshing sea...

...This historical reconstruction of a literary fraud perpetrated by a charlatan in an 18th century Sicily sunk in sensual lethargy but already stirred by the echoes of the French Enlightenment and the coming revolutionary wave, reminds us that Sicily is still closer to the past than the present...

...It is like traveling from the heart of an almost African darkness to the heart of a streamlined megalopolis...

...In this special sense, all Italian writers refuse to "take it" and are therefore irremediably lost to the stoic, sado-masochistic delights of pure modernity...

...Those people who think that all of Italian inventiveness and vigor have gone into its cinema simply haven't read Cesare Pavese, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Tommaso Landolfi, Paolo Volponi, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, and many others...

...Inevitably, his family, himself, his own body...

...So it is no accident that when Guiseppe Berto in his psychoanalytic novel Incubus (Knopf, 388 pp., $5.95) has a crucial dream about the intellectuals who frighten and obsess him-that happens in Rome too, it seems-Moravia's harsh, threatening figure plays a rather prominent role...

...Once I made the mistake of saying, in the presence of an Italian writer, that Pavese was greater, more profound than Camus...

...That and his acerb humor make it a trifle better than something you might see on the screen of the nearest art theater...

...Belli, even in Pirandello and Svevo, "the people" are the language, and the writer's struggle with it is his way of taking on the strength of "the people,' of touching the soil of reality and being reinvigorated by that contact...

...The fact that Italy presents a microcosm of the modern world is driven in on us when we travel from the languors of Sciascia's corrupt and baroque Sicily to the furnished room of Luciano Bianciardi's poor translator and office hack trying to get by in Milan's bustling metropolis...

...In the best Italian writing, rhetoric and ideology are the first things to go...

...They also helped me to steer my way through the three recent Italian novels which I have read along with Man As An End...

...He is a special case, a writer of uneven genius who has been a headache to the pigeonholers since his first book, The Time of Indifference, written when he was 18...

...La Vita Agra: (Viking, 191 pp., $3.95) is a documentary with a note of personal protest which just manages to redeem it...

...Thus, Edoardo Sanguineti, the chief of the avant-gardists in Italy, devoted his novel, Capriccio Italiano, unpublished here, to the nightmarish torments of a husband whose wife was going through a particularly difficult pregnancy...

...But what a difference...

...Another renaissance...

...Alberto Moravia, for example, is quite cognizant of everything that makes our world a terrible place, yet in his book of essays, Man As An End (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 254 pp., $5.50), he proposes the idea that man is sacred: an inspiring, self-sufficient end instead of the means into which all of modern experience would like to convert him...

...I'm sorry, but it's true...

...His novel, The House on the Hill, deals with almost the same theme as Camus' The Stranger...

...Moravia's struggle between the extreme poles of the circumscribed and the social self is also the struggle in which all of his contemporaries are engaged...

...He appears as a "radical," who disdains the protagonist for his vague political views...

...Nor is he merely a good professional, turning out books with mechanical efficiency...

...Leonardo Sciascia's novel, The Council of Egypt (Knopf, 212 pp., $4.95), is stylistically a jewel without a flaw, the sort of impeccable minor masterpiece that one gets when a whole literature is on the move...

...In Verga...

...Moravia's "bad" books are bad in a way that only a wholly dedicated, wholly individual writer can be bad...

...It is so backward of him...

...It is not a bad novel, as such novels go, and it does have one other characteristic that marks it off from its equivalents in other countries: It is perfectly readable, all of its bizarre images and run-away fantasies give one the definite feeling that they can be explicated (Sanguineti is a professor of literature), while its underlying emotional tone is a kind of horrified love for the human body...

...He was rocked to the depths...

...It will certainly come as a shock to many Americans, who thought they had surmounted the Freudian labyrinth...

...But it is not a great book because the style, despite William Weaver's supple translation, somehow too perfectly reflects the misery it sets out to probe...

...and yet, poor fellow, that's his material and he's stuck with it...

...Yet its authenticity comes from the usual Italian place-the hero can contrast the city's anonymity with the warmth and friendliness of life back home in the provinces...

...Some of the blame can be put on the flawlessly functioning French cultural publicity machine, which continues to rule the European roost even though its products are low-grade...

...Maybe it is...

...His girl friend knows precisely how to make a revolution, but while they wait for "the day" they translate Faulkner's late, involuted prose-enough to drive anyone to desperation-make interminable love and eat in seedy milk bars...

...It is interesting to compare it with other painful books, such as those of Burroughs, and to see how the Italian's forthrightness and simplicity, his essential love for the body, even when expressed in so tortured a fashion, avoids all obfuscation and pierces to the core of his experience...

...But the horror is never greater than the love, which, to some stern puritans of the quintessential, might appear a new form of sentimentality...

...Balancing precariously between evident involvement and ironic detachment, Sciascia has written pages on political skullduggery and inquisitional torture that add to our knowledge and throw a great light on Sicily's continuing anguish...

...Berto's book, a tour de force written in an uninterrupted spate of reminiscence and protest, further shows us how stale ideas and formulas can suddenly be rejuvenated in Italy's "backward" climate...

...Moravia is peculiarly detached...

...It is perhaps the most moving, intense and utterly painful account of a life-long obsession with death and sickness that I have ever read...