My hero: Alberto Moravia
'Writers must assume a moral position, a clearly conceived political, social and philosophical attitude'
John Burnside
Friday 8 July 2011 22.55 BST
T
he first book I read by Alberto Moravia, a Panther edition of The Lie, translated by Angus Davidson, had obviously been packaged to appeal to readers interested in sex. The cover showed a naked woman, with a book nestled discreetly in her lap and her arms strategically placed to conceal her breasts, but to a Catholic boy in his late teens, it was still embarrassing enough to be tucked away where my mother wouldn't find it, along with a dog-eared copy ofThe Communist Manifesto and the occasional foil-wrapped lump of Lebanese red.
As it happened, I hadn't bought the book because I thought it was smutty, and I couldn't imagine the dirty-raincoat type finding much titillation in any of Moravia's works. It's hard to think of a writer who has been more perceptive about the disappointments of conventional sex and married life. What we find in Moravia, in fact, are unsettling accounts of what happens when our most vital and tender impulses are locked into a social institution, alongside a plangent critique of the ways in which those impulses – romantic love, tenderness, sexual desire, the need for connection – are perverted by social convention and shame.
"Critique" is a word Moravia would have treated with suspicion. "Writers," he said, "are concerned with representing . . . a more absolute and complete reality than reality itself. They must, if they are to accomplish this, assume a moral position, a clearly conceived political, social, and philosophical attitude; in consequence, their beliefs are, of course, going to find their way into their work. What artists believe, however, is of secondary importance, ancillary to the work itself. A writer survives in spite of his beliefs."
Moravia is neglected nowadays, which is a great pity, for this rare combination of moral purpose and artistic integrity once placed him among Europe's finest writers. I would argue that it is high time for a reappraisal, as well as a new edition of his work – preferably without naked ladies on the covers.
It is usual for the interviewer to write this paragraph about the circumstances in which the interview was conducted, but the interviewer in this case, Linda Kuehl, died not long after the tapes were transcribed. Linda and I talked on August 18 and August 24, 1977, from about ten in the morning until early afternoon. Both interviews took place in the living room of my husband's and my house on the ocean north of Los Angeles, a house we no longer own. The walls in that room were white. The floors were of terracotta tile, very highly polished. The glare off the sea was so pronounced in that room that corners of it seemed, by contrast, extremely dark, and everyone who sat in the room tended to gravitate toward these dark corners. Over the years the room had in fact evolved to the point where the only comfortable chairs were in the dark, away from the windows. I mention this because I remember my fears about being interviewed, one of which was that I would be construed as the kind of loon who had maybe 300 degrees of sea view and kept all the chairs in a kind of sooty nook behind the fireplace. Linda's intelligence dispelled these fears immediately. Her interest in and acuity about the technical act of writing made me relaxed and even enthusiastic about talking, which I rarely am. As a matter of fact, this enthusiasm for talking technically makes me seem to myself, as I read over the transcript, a kind of apprentice plumber of fiction, a Cluny Brown at the writer's trade, but there we were.
Via dell’Oca lies just off the Piazza del Popolo. A curiously shaped street, it opens out midway to form a largo, tapering at either end, in its brief, cobbled passage from the Lungotevere to a side of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. Its name, Street of the Goose, derives, like those of many streets in Rome, from the signboard of an eating house long forgotten.
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