The name of Alberto Moravia is not a new one to American readers. His novels have been published in this country as a matter of routine, and he is to us a writer whose biting, analytical realism matches a modern mood. That mood has prevailed nowhere more strongly than in Moravia's native Italy where the ruptures and griefs of our age have struck with stunning impact. Yet Moravia never joined the post-war preachers. In novels like The Woman of Rome, he catches not the tone of violence, but its debilitating effect upon persons. His style, however, always emerges from the alleyways and bordellos of its passage untouched and uncompromised.

Now Bitter Honeymoon makes Moravia's short stories available to American readers for the first time. The several very fine stories in this collection are bound to increase Moravia's reputation in the country. Each of the stories in the book is concerned with man's relationship with woman, but beyond this the stories are as different one from another as a versatile talent can make them.

Moravia ignores, for the most part, the usual furniture of the modern short story—the long dialogues, the extended explanations and descriptions. He concentrates, in a classic fashion, on his main characters and the result in this book is a marvelous gallery of personalities who are no less (and no more) ambiguous than are real persons.

The longest story in the collection, "The Imbroglio," concerns a shy, confused university student, Gianmaria, stumbling into his first romance. The situation has never been treated with a more gentle, sophisticated humor. The boy falls in with some not-very-desirable company, and his inability to distinguish sincerity from insincerity is made agonizingly believable.

"Back to the Sea" finds the author intent on probing the motivations of more mature people in love. They do not come off any better. The story opens with the woman no longer able to bear the man, and, for less than purely noble reasons, the man is unwilling to end the marriage.

The inability of the sexes to communicate in any meaningful way is something close to an obsession with Moravia. His women are nearly always petulant, but only because the men are obtuse, unable to understand the subtle shadings of a woman's right and wrong, a woman's propriety and vulgarity, beauty and squalor. His men, for nearly the same reasons, are constantly frustrated in their intentions, their resolutions and desires. Love is almost always an affliction in these stories, a disease causing irrationality and a kind of death to the will. In "Back to the Sea" Lorenzo, the hapless husband, takes his estranged wife to a place by the sea where they had an earlier happiness and where he is sure she will repent. He alternates constantly on this trip between desire and despair. "Despite his emptiness and sadness of spirit, he could feel the turgid vitality swelling in his veins. In view of his despair, this vitality seemed a useless and ironical form of wealth and he felt desolate." Seconds later Lorenzo is again attempting to talk casually with his wife. In "Bitter Honeymoon," the title story, there is the same basic alienation and unbreakable solitude in two people just married.

As Philip Rahv points out in a short introduction, there is a basic inability in all these people to rise above the sensual facts of their lives together. They are never able to act rationally, to harness wild, goat-like wills. The result is deepening frustration, more turbid desire, a wilder will.

But from all this, Moravia does not deduce violence, jungle law or an uncivilized society. That people like Lorenzo and Gianmaria are delicately and eternally poised between the demands of self and the demands of others is a fact of their existences. It is a fact which casts a velvety cloud of sadness over these stories. In some cases the balance is destroyed. But more often resignment without acceptance sets in—a purgatory where love is inconsolably locked up in the human heart.

Moravia is often attacked as a "naturalist." But the term legitimately covers only Moravia's frame of reference, and the truths he seeks out are no less valid for that. He is merely demonstrating the truth of what another Italian wrote over six hundred years ago in the closing cantos of the Purgatorio: "God's high decree would be broken, if Lethe were passed, and such viands were tasted, without some sort of penitence that may shed tears."