Boredom - Alberto Moravia [0]
ALBERTO MORAVIA
Translated by
ANGUS DAVIDSON
Introduction by
WILLIAM WEAVER
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Introduction
BOREDOM
Prologue
Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Epilogue
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
IN THE ROME of the late 1950s, if you lived—as I did—in the area around Piazza del Popolo, and if—also like me—you spent a lot of your time idly strolling the endlessly fascinating streets or staring into inaccessibly costly shops’ windows, it was almost certain you would run into Alberto Moravia, whose apartment was in the nearby Via dell’Oca. For a long period then the famous Italian novelist suffered from a persistent form of sciatica, and his doctor advised him to take daily walks. Dutifully, he walked, alone, without destination, but with the grim decision of a man who is taking an unpleasant medicine. His was no stroll, no saunter. He proceeded at a fairly brisk pace, while his unmistakable, uneven gait—a grave form of tuberculosis of the bone had left him lame since childhood—gave his movements a rollicking, even jaunty quality.
He did not seek company, but, if you offered it, he amiably accepted; and as I seldom had compelling appointments or urgent errands in those days and as I loved walking in Rome, I would often fall in beside him and spend an hour or two with him, trading literary or political gossip. In those still-postwar years, before the great boom of mass tourism and the economic (and hence automobilistic) explosion, Rome was a great city for walking and Moravia was a great friend to walk with: a born Roman, he knew every brick of the city; even the most drab apartment block or the scruffiest little church could set of a sparkling train of associations and memories.
But, on encountering him, I would first, automatically, ask him how he was.
“Mi annoio,” he would usually reply, in his clipped, telegraphic way. Moravia sometimes seemed not to talk but to blurt. “I’m bored. Mi annoio. Voglio morire.”
I never believed Moravia really wanted to die (and he would express the wish in an offhand tone, as if saying “I could use a cigarette”); but I did believe he was bored, and boredom—like idleness, its sister vice—was something he disliked, even feared. Talk dispelled that fear, and for the rest of our afternoon there would be no mention of dying, not of his dying, at least.
I knew Moravia before I knew his works. My knowledge of them developed as my friendship with him developed, and I read many of his works as they appeared, enjoying each one with the special zest of novelty and revelation.
Other Italian acquaintances of that time—especially older ones—tended to be critical, or rather, hostile. Moravia scrive male. How many times I heard this accusation!—Moravia writes badly—from dim literary hangers-on, marginal gentlemen and ladies of letters, some of them smudged with the ash of a Fascist past. Then and there, I was mystified. Though I was not really in a position to judge, Moravia’s prose seemed fine to me. It took me a while to realize that these critics were intellectual as well as political nostalgics, looking back with a certain yearning to the heyday of sumptuous, d’Annunzian prose (and perhaps also to the Duce’s own inimitable, orotund rhetoric). I soon learned that to accuse a writer of writing Italian badly is a literary cliché, and I have heard the same charge laid against a whole Olympus of modern writers: Svevo scrive male, Silone scrive male, Eco scrive male.
Male or not, Moravia wrote, and—after the gagging Fascist regime—he wrote copiously. The end of the war coincided with the publication of Agostino, a novella that has deservedly become a classic; then came The Woman of Rome, which brought him international fame, and some much-needed income; and then a dazzling series of novels—Conjugal Love, The Conformist, Contempt, Two Women—not to mention a steady, impressive production of shorter fiction and a wide variety of occasional pieces: reviews, travel articles, film scripts. The immensely fertile decade