By Antonio La Cava
“Alberto didn’t like the past, like he didn’t like soup” with her warm and comfortable voice, in an English with a strong Italian accent, Dacia Maraini spoke about Alberto Moravia on the 26th October at the Italian Cultural Institute.
“Alberto was young inside, and is also for that that he didn’t want to write about his past, he never wrote an autobiography”.
And maybe for his intolerance to remember the past that in 1986 Dacia Maraini chose to interview Moravia to talk about his childhood, giving birth to a book-interview titled Il bambino Alberto (Child Alberto), where the two writers, who shared more than 20 years together, played the roles of interviewer and interviewed.
‘Homage to Moravia’ has been an event to celebrate the writer of Gli indifferenti, where Dacia Maraini, famous writer and Moravia’s partner (they never got married), together with Professor Sharon Wood, spoke of the figure “of one of the most important intellectuals of Italian culture in the 20th century”.
In reading some extracts from Moravia’s works the consul David Morante (nephew of the famous writer Elsa Morante, Moravia’s first wife).
It was the 1929 when Moravia wrote Gli indifferenti, the novel that gave him success and that was a strong attack to the stereotype of the family in the concept of Italian culture. “At the beginning Moravia was an outsider, and no doubt a reason or factor for that was his illness – Professor Wood says”. In fact Moravia was hit by a serious kind of osseous tuberculosis, which forced him to stay in bed for five years, of which three passed at his home and two at a sanatorium. “The whole of my childhood – Moravia used to say – was a long, unaccountable discomfort”. Right in those times Moravia became keen on writing, spending a lot time in reading, thus developing a strong literary basis widened to most significant trends of European culture. French literature influenced him the most in his forming as an autodidact: he loved Stendhal, Balzac, Baudelaire.
In Maraini’s words what stands out is a curious, intellectual, “child”, Moravia, who “loved to describe himself narrator” and that attached importance on the clearness in style. “Even though he was a journalist, Alberto used to write not to inform but to understand”.
“Alberto loved travelling a lot. He travelled to Africa, China, South America, India. He was never tired and could sleep even in uncomfortable places. In these long trips, often his travelling companion was Pasolini, whom Alberto had a strong friendship with”. Friendship that took him, during the funeral celebration of Pasolini, to make an outcry: “We lost a poet, and we haven’t lots of poets in the world, there are three or four in a century (…). A Poet would have to be sacred”.
Moravia, of Jewish origin, was never a practising Hebrew, but he was aware about his roots; he was an inconvenient writer for the Church and for the political establishment.
During the war, to avoid the censorship of the regime, he used to write allegorical and surrealistic tales and was forced to write in newspapers with a pseudonym. After the events of the 8th September 1943 [Armistizio of Cassibile, secretely signed on the 3rd September 1943, by which the Italian Kingdom ceased the hostilities against the English and the American forces – Author’s Note] he took refuge with his first wife Elsa Morante in a mountain village in Ciociaria, and by this experience and the relationship with that family he took inspiration for La ciociara (The Women of Ciociara).
In the book by Maraini, the writer Moravia prevails on the fellow Moravia, the latter quite unknown; maybe one day, in a book possibly written by Dacia Maraini, we could know him better.
Copyright 2007 GIORGIOSTUDIO Ltd – All rights reserved
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