Contempt - Alberto Moravia [1]
In an interview late in his life, Moravia spoke of Contempt as “one of my best novels, because at once profoundly felt and completely invented.” The story of a tortuous and distressing marital crisis, the autobiographical “feeling” behind the book no doubt came out of Moravia’s difficult relationship with his wife Elsa Morante, herself a brilliant writer, but as passionate and volatile as Moravia was determinedly cool and analytical. In the same interview, Moravia confessed: “There were days when I wanted to kill her. Not to split up, which would have been the reasonable solution, but to kill her, because our relationship was so intimate and so complex and in the end so vital that murder seemed easier than separation.” The genius of Contempt was the creation of a plot that would allow us to explore such a complexity in all its contradictions and conundrums—its intense and bewildering emotions—without ever feeling that we have properly understood it, just as the protagonist will never even begin to understand his wife.
It would be foolish, in conclusion, to pretend that Moravia was anything but the most profound of pessimists. Love, in his novels, is almost always something suffered rather than enjoyed. Whether at its most promiscuous, passionate, or conjugal it rarely relieves a gnawing sense of alienation, so that his characters frequently find themselves staring at each other in varying states of wonder and perplexity. Yet his work is enlightening. In his combination of obsessive reflection and dreamlike unfolding of plot, he creates a convincing and entirely personal vision of the world which compels us to turn the pages to the end, leaving us afterwards with a mental construct at once so consistent and so elusive that the reader will be brooding over it and reconsidering it for weeks—in my case years—to come. I ask no more of a book.
—TIM PARKS
CONTEMPT
1
DURING THE FIRST two years of our married life my relations with my wife were, I can now assert, perfect. By which I mean to say that, in those two years, a complete, profound harmony of the senses was accompanied by a kind of numbness—or should I say silence?—of the mind which, in such circumstances, causes an entire suspension of judgment and looks only to love for any estimate of the beloved person. Emilia, in fact, seemed to me wholly without defects, and so also, I believe, I appeared to her. Or perhaps I saw her defects and she saw mine, but, through some mysterious transformation produced by the feeling of love, such defects appeared to us both not merely forgivable but even lovable, as though instead of defects they had been positive qualities, if of a rather special kind. Anyhow, we did not judge: we loved each other. This story sets out to relate how, while I continued to love her and not to judge her, Emilia, on the other hand, discovered, or thought she discovered, certain defects in me, and judged me and in consequence ceased to love me.
The less one notices happiness, the greater it is. It may seem strange, but in those two years I sometimes thought I was actually bored. Certainly, at the time, I did not realize that I was happy. It seemed to me that I was doing what everyone did—loving my wife and being loved by her; and this love of ours seemed to me an ordinary, normal fact, or rather, to be in no way precious—just like the air one breathes, and there’s plenty of it and it becomes precious only when it begins to run