Alberto Pincherle (; 28 November 1907 – 26 September 1990), known by his pseudonym Alberto Moravia ( ;
Moravia once remarked that the most important facts of his life had been his illness, a tubercular infection of the bones that confined him to a bed for five years and Italian fascism because they both caused him to suffer and do things he otherwise would not have done. "It is what we are forced to do that forms our character, not what we do of our own free will."
Biography
Early years
Alberto Pincherle was born in Via Sgambati in Rome, Italy, to a wealthy middle-class family. His chosen pen name "Moravia" equals to
Moravia, which is one of historic
Czech lands, and was linked to his paternal grandmother. His
Venice father, Carlo, was an architect and a painter. His
Catholic Church Ancona mother, Teresa Iginia de Marsanich, was of
origin. His family had interesting twists and developed a complex cultural and political character. The brothers
Carlo Rosselli and
Nello Rosselli, founders of the
Anti-fascism resistance movement Giustizia e Libertà, murdered in France by
Benito Mussolini's order in 1937, were paternal cousins and his maternal uncle, Augusto De Marsanich, was an undersecretary in the National Fascist Party cabinet.
Moravia did not finish conventional schooling because, at the age of nine, he contracted tuberculosis of the bone, which confined him to bed for five years. He spent three years at home and two in a sanatorium near Cortina d'Ampezzo, in north-eastern Italy. Moravia was an intelligent boy, and devoted himself to reading books and some of his favourite authors were Giosuè Carducci, Giovanni Boccaccio, Fyodor Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Ludovico Ariosto, Carlo Goldoni, William Shakespeare, Molière, Nikolai Gogol and Stéphane Mallarmé. He learned French and German and wrote poems in French and Italian.
In 1925 at the age of 18, he left the sanatorium and moved to Brixen. During the next three years, partly in Bressanone and partly in Rome, he began to write his first novel, Gli indifferenti ( Time of Indifference), published in 1929. The novel is a realistic analysis of the moral decadence of a middle-class mother and two of her children. In 1927, Moravia met Corrado Alvaro and Massimo Bontempelli and started his career as a journalist with the magazine 900. The journal published his first short stories, including Cortigiana stanca ( The Tired Courtesan in French as Lassitude de courtisane, 1927), Delitto al circolo del tennis ( Crime at the Tennis Club, 1928), Il ladro curioso ( The Curious Thief) and Apparizione ( Apparition, both 1929).
Gli indifferenti and Fascist ostracism
Gli indifferenti was published at his own expense, costing 5,000
Italian lira. Literary critics described the novel as a noteworthy example of contemporary Italian narrative fiction.
[Moravia, Alberto (1985). L'uomo che guarda. Milan: Bompiani. Foreword by Giorgio Cavallini.] The next year, Moravia started collaborating with the newspaper
La Stampa, then edited by author
Curzio Malaparte. In 1933, together with Mario Pannunzio, he founded the literary review magazines
Caratteri (
Characters) and
Oggi (
Today) and started writing for the newspaper
Gazzetta del Popolo. The years leading to World War II were difficult for Moravia as an author; the Fascist regime prohibited reviews of
Le ambizioni sbagliate (1935), seized his novel
La mascherata (
Masquerade, 1941) and banned
Agostino (
Two Adolescents, 1941). In 1935 he travelled to the United States to give a lecture series on Italian literature.
L'imbroglio (
The Cheat) was published by
Bompiani in 1937. To avoid Fascist censorship, Moravia wrote mainly in the surrealist and
allegory styles; among the works is
Il sogno del pigro (
The Dream of the Lazy). The Fascist seizure of the second edition of
La mascherata in 1941, forced him to write under a pseudonym. That same year, he married the novelist
Elsa Morante, whom he had met in 1936. They lived in
Capri, where he wrote
Agostino. After the Armistice of 8 September 1943, Moravia and Morante took refuge in
Fondi, on the border of province of Frosinone, a region to which fascism had arbitrarily imposed the name "ciociaria"; the experience inspired
La ciociara (1957) (
Two Woman, 1958).
Return to Rome and national popularity
In May 1944, after the liberation of Rome, Alberto Moravia returned. He began collaborating with Corrado Alvaro, writing for important newspapers such as
Il Mondo and
Il Corriere della Sera, the latter publishing his writing until his death. After the war, his popularity steadily increased, with works such as
La Romana (
The Woman of Rome, 1947),
La Disubbidienza (
Disobedience, 1948),
L'amore coniugale e altri racconti (
Conjugal Love and other stories, 1949) and
Il conformista (
The Conformist, 1951). In 1952 he won the
Premio Strega for
I Racconti and his novels began to be translated abroad and
La Provinciale was adapted to film by
Mario Soldati; in 1954
Luigi Zampa directed
La Romana and in 1955 Gianni Franciolini directed
I Racconti Romani (
The Roman Stories, 1954) a short collection that won the Marzotto Award. In 1953, Moravia founded the literary magazine
Nuovi Argomenti (
New Arguments), which featured Pier Paolo Pasolini among its editors. In the 1950s, he wrote prefaces to works such as Belli's
100 Sonnets, Brancati's
Paolo il Caldo and
Stendhal's
Roman Walks. From 1957, he also reviewed and criticised cinema for the weekly magazines
L'Europeo and
L'Espresso. His criticism is collected in the volume
Al Cinema (
At the Cinema, 1975).
La noia and later life
In 1960, Moravia published
La noia (
Boredom or
The Empty Canvas), the story of the troubled sexual relationship between a young, rich painter striving to find sense in his life and an easygoing girl in Rome. It became one of his most famous novels, and won the
Viareggio Prize. An adaptation was filmed by
Damiano Damiani in 1962. Another adaptation of the book is the basis of Cédric Kahn's film
L'Ennui (1998). Several films were based on his other novels: in 1960, Vittorio De Sica adapted
La ciociara (
Two Women), starring
Sophia Loren; in 1963,
Jean-Luc Godard filmed
Il disprezzo (
Contempt); and in 1964, Francesco Maselli filmed
Gli indifferenti (
Time of Indifference). In 1962, Moravia and Elsa Morante parted, despite never divorcing. He went to live with the young writer
Dacia Maraini and concentrated on theatre. In 1966, he, Maraini and
Enzo Siciliano founded
Il porcospino, which staged works by Moravia, Maraini, Carlo Emilio Gadda and others.
In 1967 Moravia visited China, Japan and Korea. In 1971 he published the novel Io e lui ( I and He or The Two of Us) about a screenwriter, his independent penis and the situations to which he thrusts them and the essay Poesia e romanzo ( Poetry and Novel). In 1972 he went to Africa, which inspired his work A quale tribù appartieni? ( Which Tribe Do You Belong To?), published in the same year. His 1982 trip to Japan, including a visit to Hiroshima, inspired a series of articles for L'Espresso magazine about the atomic bomb. The same theme is in the novel L'uomo che guarda ( The Man Who Looks, 1985) and the essay L'inverno nucleare ( The Nuclear Winter), including interviews with some contemporary principal scientists and politicians.
The short story collection, La Cosa e altri racconti ( The Thing and Other Stories), was dedicated to Carmen Llera, his new companion (forty-five years his junior), whom he married in 1986, after Morante's death in November 1985. In 1984, Moravia was elected to the European Parliament as a member of the Italian Communist Party. His experiences at Strasbourg, which ended in 1988, are recounted in Il diario europeo ( The European Diary). In 1985 he won the title of European Personality. Moravia was a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, having been nominated 13 times between 1949 and 1965.
Themes and literary style
Moral aridity, the hypocrisy of contemporary life and the inability of people to find happiness in traditional ways such as love and marriage are the regnant themes in the works of Alberto Moravia. Usually, these conditions are pathologically typical of middle-class life; marriage is the target of works such as
Disobedience and
L'amore coniugale (
Conjugal Love, 1947). Alienation is the theme in works such as
Il disprezzo (
Contempt or
A Ghost at Noon, 1954) and
La noia (
The Empty Canvas) from the 1950s, despite observation from a rational-realistic perspective. Political themes are often present; an example is
La Romana (
The Woman of Rome, 1947), the story of a prostitute entangled with the Fascist regime and with a network of conspirators. The extreme sexual realism in
La noia (
The Empty Canvas, 1960) introduced the psychologically experimental works of the 1970s.
Moravia's writing style was highly regarded for being extremely stark and unadorned, characterised by elementary, common words in an elaborate syntax. A complex mood is established by mixing a proposition constituting the description of a single psychological observation mixed with another such proposition. In the later novels, the inner monologue is prominent.
Works
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Gli indifferenti (1929), novel ( The Time of Indifference, trans. Angus Davidson (1953), Tami Calliope (2000))
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Le ambizioni sbagliate (1935), novel ( Wheel of Fortune (original) or Mistaken Ambitions (Moravia's preference), trans. Arthur Livingston (1938))
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La bella vita (1935), short stories
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I sogni del pigro (1940), short stories
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La mascherata (1941), novel ( The Fancy Dress Party, trans. Angus Davidson (1947))
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La cetonia (1944), short stories
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Agostino (1944), novel ( Agostino, trans. Beryl de Zoete (1947), Michael F. Moore (2014); frequently coupled with La disubbidienza as Two Adolescents)
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L'epidemia (1944), short stories
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La romana (1947), novel ( The Woman of Rome, trans. Lydia Holland (1949), revised and updated by Tami Calliope (1999))
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La disubbidienza (1948), novel ( Luca (U.S.) or Disobedience (UK), trans. Angus Davidson (1950); frequently coupled with Agostino as Two Adolescents)
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L'amore coniugale (1949), novel ( Conjugal Love, trans. Angus Davidson (1951), Marina Harss (2007))
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Il conformista (1951), novel ( The Conformist, trans. Angus Davidson (1952), Tami Calliope (1999))
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I racconti, 1927–1951 (1952), short stories (first selection, made in consultation with Moravia: Bitter Honeymoon and Other Stories, trans. Frances Frenaye, Baptista Gilliat Smith and Bernard Wall (1954); supplementary selection: The Wayward Wife and Other Stories, trans. Angus Davidson (1960); the two English selections present sixteen of the twenty-four stories in the Italian original)
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Racconti romani (1954), short stories (selection: Roman Tales, trans. Angus Davidson (1954))
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Il disprezzo (1954), novel ( A Ghost at Noon (original) or Contempt (to align with the film), trans. Angus Davidson (1954))
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La ciociara (1957), novel ( Two Women, trans. Angus Davidson (1958))
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Beatrice Cenci (1958), play ( Beatrice Cenci, trans. Angus Davidson (1965))
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Nuovi racconti romani (1959), short stories (selection: More Roman Tales, trans. Angus Davidson (1963))
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La noia (1960), novel ( The Empty Canvas (original) or Boredom (reissue), trans. Angus Davidson (1961))
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L'automa (1962), short stories ( The Fetish, trans. Angus Davidson (1964))
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L'uomo come fine e altri saggi (1964), essays ( Man as an End: A Defense of Humanism: Literary, Social and Political Essays, trans. Bernard Wall (1965))
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L'attenzione (1965), novel ( The Lie, trans. Angus Davidson (1966))
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Una cosa è una cosa (1967), short stories ( Command, and I Will Obey You, trans. Angus Davidson (1969))
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La rivoluzione culturale in Cina. Ovvero il Convitato di pietra (1967), essay ( The Red Book and the Great Wall: An Impression of Mao's China, trans. Ronald Strom (1968))
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Il dio Kurt (1969), play
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La vita è gioco (1969), play
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Il paradiso (1970), short stories ( Paradise and Other Stories (UK) or Bought and Sold (U.S.), trans. Angus Davidson (1971))
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Io e lui (1971), novel ( The Two of Us (UK) or Two: A Phallic Novel (U.S.), trans. Angus Davidson (1972))
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A quale tribù appartieni (1972), essays ( Which Tribe Do You Belong To?, trans. Angus Davidson (1974)), "collection of articles from 10 years' junketing in Africa"
[ Review by Paul Theroux]
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Un'altra vita (1973), short stories ( Lady Godiva and Other Stories (original) or Mother Love (reissue), trans. Angus Davidson (1975))
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Al cinema (1975), essays
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Boh (1976), short stories ( The Voice of the Sea and Other Stories, trans. Angus Davidson (1978))
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La vita interiore (1978), novel ( Time of Desecration, trans. Angus Davidson (1980))
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Impegno controvoglia (1980), essays
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1934 (1982), novel ( 1934, trans. William Weaver (1983))
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La cosa e altri racconti (1983), short stories ( Erotic Tales, trans. Tim Parks (1985))
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L'uomo che guarda (1985), novel ( The Voyeur, trans. Tim Parks (1986))
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L'inverno nucleare (1986), essays and interviews
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Il viaggio a Roma (1988), novel ( Journey to Rome, trans. Tim Parks (1989))
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La villa del venerdì e altri racconti (1990), short stories
Reviews
See also
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Le Mondes 100 Books of the Century, a list which includes Contempt or A Ghost at Noon.
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