Biography
Alberto Pincherle Moravia was born the son of an architect in Rome, Italy, on November 28, 1907. Moravia’s father, of Jewish descent, came to Rome from Venice and his mother, née De Marsanich, was Catholic, a countess of Dalmatian origin. At the age of nine, Moravia contracted tuberculosis of the leg bone. He remained ill, except for periods of brief improvement, for the next nine years. As a result he did not receive a formal education and never graduated from high school. His long confinement also exacerbated the normal tensions of family life for the Pincherles, causing Moravia to develop negative views of the role of family relationships. He felt little rapport with either his mother, who was primarily concerned with acceptance in the bourgeois society of Rome, or his father, an atheist who lived a solitary existence and seldom spoke to his children. He was unhappy and bored living at home and rejected the family values that he later described as being dominated by prudence, self-interest, ignorance, and hedonism.
However, Moravia took full advantage of the two opportunities available to him. As a child, he developed impressive skill in languages. His mother planned a future career in diplomatic service for him and so engaged a succession of foreign governesses. He learned to speak French fluently before learning Italian, later adding English and German. Moravia also had access to his father’s library, from which he read a rich selection of drama, especially works by Carlo Goldoni, Molière, Jean Racine, and William Shakespeare. Later he systematically read a succession of great authors, discovering two lifelong favorites in Fyodor Dostoevski and James Joyce.
Moravia began writing very early in life, an activity that helped him cope with the enforced isolation resulting from his illness. Failing to recover from the disease at home, Moravia was eventually sent to a sanatorium for a period of two years. During this time, his activity was restricted to reading. On being discharged from the sanatorium at eighteen, he resumed writing and in the next five years wrote three short stories and a novel. Although agonizingly difficult in the beginning, writing later proved to be the means by which Moravia endured what he believed to be the decadence and hypocrisy of bourgeois existence.
Moravia’s first novel, Gli Indifferenti, was published at his father’s expense in 1929. Soon afterward Moravia began a series of travels through Europe, unaware of the great popularity his first novel was enjoying. Recognizing the book’s success, Moravia’s father agreed to support his son’s writing efforts. For the next decade, Moravia spent his time writing and traveling, activities financed in part by his father and in part by his work as a newspaper correspondent. In 1935 he published a second novel, Le ambizioni sbagliate (Wheel of Fortune, 1937; also known as Mistaken Ambitions), and traveled to New York and Mexico.
In 1936 Moravia met a fellow writer, Elsa Morante, who became his companion and later his wife. In 1936 and 1937 he traveled to China and Greece and published two more books. In 1941 Moravia and Elsa Morante were married. By this time Fascist authorities in Italy had begun censoring all publication, and although Mussolini at first approved the text of Moravia’s La Mascherata (1941; The Fancy Dress Party , 1947), all copies were confiscated soon after publication because of its satiric indictment of dictatorship. Moravia and Morante were forced to flee Rome in 1943 and spent the winter in the Ciociaria area south of Rome. In 1944, near war’s end, the two returned to Rome and Moravia’s writing career continued...
(This entire section contains 678 words.)
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thereafter without further interruption. In 1952, the Roman Catholic Church listed his complete works on the Index of Prohibited Books because of their sexual forthrightness, an act that encouraged Moravia’s further use of sexuality as a literary device. Although the 1950’s were highly productive for Moravia’s career, his marriage to Morante disintegrated. He later became involved first with author Dacia Maraini and subsequently with Carmen Llera, whom he married in 1986. Moravia died of a cerebral hemorrhage in his Rome apartment in September of 1990.
Biography
Alberto Pincherle Moravia, son of Carlo and Teresa de Marsanich Moravia, was born in Rome, Italy, on November 28, 1907. His Jewish father was an architect, and his Catholic mother was a Dalmatian countess. Hence, he grew up in an affluent and cultured family that kept a box at the opera and retained a chauffeur. Moravia’s home life was not happy, though, and his descriptions of bourgeois family conflicts in his fiction mirror his own childhood.
One early escape was storytelling. In 1937, he recalled that as a child,I would go off into the fields, or stretch myself out on a couch in a room of the summer villa, and talk to myself. I cannot remember the plots of these solitary narratives; I think they were adventures, dangerous episodes, violent and improbable incidents; I do remember very well, however, that I took up the thread of the story every day at the precise point where I had left it the day before.
At sixteen, tuberculosis of the bone forced him to leave school, and he spent the next several years in bed. A later short story, “Inverno di malato,” written in 1930, draws upon his experiences in a sanatorium, and the protagonist, Girolamo, suffers, like his creator, from tuberculosis of the bone. During this long convalescence, Moravia read extensively, and, according to his essay of 1945 “Ricordo degli Indifferenti” (“Recalling Time of Indifference”), he was also already demonstrating his writing fluency. In October, 1925, he began The Indifferent Ones; by the time he finished the work, he had, in addition, written poems, short stories, and two other novels. “Cortigiana stanca,” his first publication, appeared in French in the avant-garde magazine ’900 in 1927. At the time, his sex-obsessed stories and the novel The Indifferent Ones were considered pornographic, so much so that some critics insist “Moravia” is a pseudonym Alberto Pincherle assumed after the clamorous—and scandalized—reception of the novel, which made his reputation as a leading Italian writer. Although having no basis in fact, this interpretation gives a good indication of the novel’s impact. In fact, much later, Moravia himself recalled, “Certainly no book in the last fifty years has been greeted with such unanimous enthusiasm and excitement.”
When his next novel, Le ambizioni sbagliate (1935; The Wheel of Fortune, 1937; also as Mistaken Ambitions, 1965), angered Italy’s Fascist government, Moravia left for the United States, where he taught Italian for a time. A trip to Mexico provided the background for La mascherata (1941; The Fancy Dress Party, 1947), his only novel set outside Italy. Returning to his native country in 1937, he was soon traveling again, this time to China. Subsequently, he went to the Soviet Union, India, back to China, and to Africa; he wrote about each of these places in his various travelogues.
Moravia’s difficulties with the government of Benito Mussolini did not end with the 1930’s. Il Duce himself ordered the publication of The Fancy Dress Party, but he soon recognized the book’s anti-Fascist satire and ordered it withdrawn. Agostino, Moravia’s next novel, was also banned and not published until Italy was liberated in 1944. Following the collapse of the Fascist government on July 25, 1943, Moravia rejoiced in the Popolo di Roma, publishing two articles critical of the former regime. Consequently, when the Germans established another fascist government shortly afterward, Moravia had to flee for his life.
He took refuge in the mountains of Ciociaria, and the nine months he spent there had a deep effect on his writing. As he explained in The Guardian (May 31, 1962),I had an experience which usually intellectuals don’t have. I lived with peasants, ate their food, slept with them, stayed with them all day. So I conceived a great interest in the people, the people who work hard, [and] I tried to write about them.
Heretofore, his characters had been drawn from the middle class, but in the short stories of Roman Tales and More Roman Tales, and in the novels The Woman of Rome and Two Women, he drew upon his newfound familiarity with peasantry.
In 1944, Moravia initiated his lengthy career as a film critic; he held his position as a reviewer for L’Espresso, obtained in 1955, until the late 1980’s. The 1950’s were, however, not as stable as his employment: His marriage to Elsa Morante dissolving and his affair with Dacia Maraini beginning, Moravia took to travel and the critical reassessment of his concept of the novel. Two works from the 1960’s—La noia and L’attenzione (1965; The Lie, 1966)—are the results.
In the 1970’s, Moravia’s perennial theme of sexual relations, this time presented from the woman’s point of view, became tinged by his own commitment to the woman’s liberation movement in Italy, as the stories in Il paradiso, Un’altra vita, and Boh reveal. The elements of ambivalence, elusiveness, and perversities of human yearning—and passion—shared by these tales are equally strong in certain works, such as La cosa e altri racconti and L’uomo che guarda (1985; The Voyeur, 1987), produced during the 1980’s.
A longtime resident of Rome, Moravia received the honor of being elected to the European Parliament in 1984. Two years later, after the death of his estranged wife, Elsa Morante, he married Carmen Llera. Still deeply engaged in his culture and his writing, Moravia died in his apartment in Rome on September 26, 1990.
Criticism by Alberto Moravia
