Part Of The Process: Alberto Moravia
Part of the Process is a series in which we chronicle the often turbulent, usually absurd and always interesting lives of authors we admire. It’s not easy to be a writer in the 21st century, but in a strange way, reading about the trials and tribulations of those who seem to have ‘made it’ can be a reminder that it has always been a difficult process.
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Alberto Pincherle was born in Via Sgambati in Rome, to a wealthy middle-class family, in 1907. His chosen pen name "Moravia" references his Czech origins, linked to his paternal grandmother. His father was a Jewish Venetian architect and painter, and his mother was Catholic, though Moravia as an adult identified as atheist.
As a nine year old, Alberto was taken out of school on account of suffering from tuberculosis of the bone, and confined to bedrest for five years. He spent three years at home and was then shifted to a sanatorium for treatment. Till the age of eighteen, he was in and out of the sanatorium being treated for the illness, which became one of the defining events of his life.
Isolated from a very young age, Alberto devoted himself to reading and became a precocious scholar, studying the works of Shakespeare, Joyce, Gogol, Dostoevsky and various Italian classics. He also learned French and German, read extensively in French and even wrote poems in French and Italian.
In 1925 at the age of 18, he left the sanatorium and moved to Bressanone before returning to Rome. Around this time, he began to write his first novel, Gli indifferenti (Time of Indifference), published in 1929. The novel is themed around the moral decadence of a middle-class mother and two of her children.
The book was published at his own expense, for five thousand lira, as was customary for some new writers at the time. It was well-received by critics but also created a scandal for departing from conventions that were sacred in Italian letters. Now, almost a century later, it is considered one of the greatest works of modern Italian literature.
After the publication of the book, Moravia began to work for two Italian newspapers, La Stampa and Gazetta del Popolo, traveling to various countries including the US and Mexico as a foreign correspondent while fascism began to rise back home in Italy. His works were censored by Mussolini's government, and placed by the Vatican on the Index of Forbidden Books. Moravia sharply criticised the dehumanised, capitalist world, influenced by the thoughts of Marx and Freud.
Some of his reviews as well as two of his novels were banned by the regime, and he has been quoted as saying that illness and fascism were the two most defining factors in his life. He lost his job at the Gazetta del Popolo. He had a complicated relationship with the regime, as two of his paternal cousins were founders of an anti-fascist resistance movement and were murdered in France on Mussolini’s orders, while one of his maternal uncles was an undersecretary in the party cabinet.
He met the novelist Elsa Morante in 1936 and they had a relationship before marrying five years later. After their marriage, they lived in Capri and tried to escape to Naples after his work faced further scrutiny. In 1937, his novel ‘The Cheat’ was a departure from his earlier style that was far more surrealist and allegorical, perhaps in order to evade censorship. He also wrote under a pseudonym after reviewing his earlier books or new editions of his works were banned, and was fiercely critical of the regime while being in hiding until the end of the World War.
The time after the war saw Moravia release some of his most celebrated works and also become an important figure in the Italian literary and cultural scene. In the decade that followed, he founded the literary magazine Nuovi Argomenti (New Arguments), with the celebrated director Pier Paolo Pasolini being one of the editors. A few of his works were adapted into films by leading Italian directors of the time including Bertolucci and Di Sica, and he also wrote prefaces to works by Belli, Brancati, Stendhal and others.
He was a perennial favourite for the Nobel Prize during the 1950s and 1960s, nominated over a dozen times, although he never won. Around this time he also served as president of PEN International. In 1962, he separated from his wife Elsa Morante and began living with writer Dacia Maraini. It was around this time that his novel La Noia (Boredom) released, and caused a stir for its frank and provocative themes. It was mentioned by Roland Barthes and Godard, among others, as an inspiration. In the 1960s and 70s, he travelled widely across the world, producing a prolific amount of work for his magazine, a weekly column in Roman magazine L’Espresso and several novels.
There was a scandal of sorts as Moravia in his later years began to date and then (in 1986) married Carmen Llera, a Spanish woman who was over forty years younger than him. Though gossip columns painted a picture of the older Moravia as a socialite and the grand old man of Italian letters, he denied this, saying that he was in bed by 10 each night, even though the newspapers the next day might have a photo of the five minutes he spent at a restaurant or the opening of a disco or gallery or a literary event.
His philosophical and political scepticism did not prevent him from entering politics, and in 1984 he was elected Italian representative to the European Parliament from the Italian Communist Party. A few years later, in September 1990, Moravia died in his apartment in Rome, the city that he’d spent the largest part of his life in.
Though his work is often misconceived as being about wealth and sex, Moravia simply used these themes to interpret existential and social realities, conveying alienation and crisis. He rejected traditional moral standards but also the hypocrisy of modern life, with his characters often unable to find happiness in traditional or new ways. He wrote over 40 books as well as many columns, scripts, essays and various other works, and his work has had a resurgence after a fallow period. He is considered a forerunner to the works of Camus and Sartre, and it can safely be said that his work was far ahead of its time, feeling contemporary even many decades later.