[In the following excerpt, Ragusa examines the voyeuristic scenes in Two Adolescents, Bitter Honeymoon, and The Fetish.]

Moravia's fiction abounds in voyeuristic scenes. The most successful are, I believe, those that involve adolescent boys: for instance, Agostino in the story that bears his name (Two Adolescents), and Tancredi in "The Fall" (Bitter Honeymoon and Other Stories). Not only is curiosity about sex natural in adolescents, but the special aura of constraint and complicity that surrounds it in Moravia, and thereby heightens its emotional tension, is the direct result of the socio-psychological situation of his protagonists. A summer such as mother and thirteen-year-old son spend at the seashore in Agostino is not out of the ordinary for the Italian middle-class; nor is a home like the villa in "The Fall," complete with maid, the customary sexual initiator for the boys of the well-to-do. Of course, the two stories are quite different. Agostino is the case-study of an Oedipal conflict which manifests itself rather late by classical Freudian standards, but offers Moravia, in line with the whole tradition of the novel of adolescence in Europe, a richer, more complex subject matter to make use of than would otherwise be the case. With "The Fall," instead, we are frankly in the realm of the pathological. Tancredi's uneasiness, his "chronic apprehension or feeling of foreboding, as if everything concealed a trap," has a less well-defined origin than Agostino's unhappiness, and thus lends itself to the surrealistic juxtapositions Moravia favors in this story and which would be out of place in the more rationally analytic Agostino. In each of the stories there is a carefully worked out, and in its way unforgettable, voyeuristic scene: in Agostino, the final page where the boy, barred from entering the brothel because of his youth, looks in through a window; in "The Fall," the more mysteriously suggestive sight of a pair of legs which Tancredi watches through a crack in a door. . . .

Moravia has been writing short stories for as long as he has been writing novels. Only very few of the earlier ones are available in translation, mostly in the collection Bitter Honeymoon, which first appeared in 1956. Of the recent ones a much more generous sampling has found its way into English. This is to be explained not by the superiority of the second group over the first, but by the circumstances of Moravia's introduction to the English-speaking world. His success in England and America dates from the appearance of The Woman of Rome, which was read at the time (1949-1950) in the context of remembered or vicarious war experiences in Italy and of the vogue of neorealism. From that point, interest in Moravia was quite naturally sustained by every successive publication of a new work. What he had written earlier (and there had been at least twenty years of literary activity prior to The Woman of Rome) did not have the same topical urgency, nor did it always reflect the same concerns. The surrealistic and satiric Moravia, for instance, seemed at odds with the social critic and the psychological analyzer. Thus, though many of the earlier works were eventually translated and published, there are gaps in what is available to readers of English. As a short story writer, Moravia is unequally represented in English, and it is to be doubted that the two volumes of Roman tales and the latest collection, The Fetish, will do much to establish or maintain his reputation in the genre.

One trouble is that the short stories in these three volumes are not typical of the genre, either as cultivated by Moravia himself at other times, or as it developed in the nineteenth century. They are journalistic pieces, originally written for the literary pages of a large Italian daily. As such, their length and to a certain extent their subject matter and narrative development are pre-set. It is difficult for writers who over long periods of time write on assignment for a specific type of consumption to avoid adopting formulas. That is why these particular stories reinforce the impression of excessive repetition and monotony in Moravia's work. Many of them, taken singly, convince and amuse; read in succession, they tire and exasperate.

This is especially true of the stories in The Fetish. Through a long succession of episodes and scenes, Moravia tells of the boredom of modern life. Many of the stories deal with the typical contemporary couple who hope to escape from their sense of indifference and isolation through one another, but only find themselves more deeply entrapped than ever in the anonymous apartments and mass-produced cars which contain their lives. In "The Bill" a young man has just arrived at a vacation paradise, Capri perhaps, and is struck by the crowd of people around him: "They were almost always couples, some of them young, some middle-aged, some elderly . . . It seemed to him that all of these couples, as they passed close to him, were saying: we're two and you're only one; we know where we're going and you don't; we have a purpose in life and you haven't." Indeed, the couple—rather than the family—is a characteristic of modern life, and Moravia's portrayal of it in the different stages of its cohabitation could well be categorized into as "anatomy." In "The Honeymoon," for instance, we have the bride and groom who have just set off on their wedding trip. A chance remark of his wife startles Giovanni into the discovery that there is no true relationship between them. The rest of the train ride is taken up by his efforts to bridge the gap of incommunicability and by his wish at the same time that the gap might become even wider through his wife's disappearance. An amusing twist at the end shows that the wife had experienced exactly the same feeling, but this cannot undo the thought the husband had had earlier: " . . . as soon as his wife came back he would feel unhappy again. And so it would be as long as they lived, since they were married and there was nothing to be done." In "The Fetish" the newly married husband is annoyed by a modernistic sculpture bought by his wife and cannot refrain from joking about it. A quarrel ensues; misunderstandings come to the surface and are discussed; resolutions are made to be more conciliatory in the future. At the end, however, when peace is restored and his wife sits opposite him at the table again, the husband notices that "in perspective, his wife's face appeared to be closely coupled with the stupid, ferocious face of the fetish." Numerous are the stories which deal with the triangle situation, from the obsessive jealousy of the fiancé in "The Man Who Watched," to the lazy toying with the idea of unfaithfulness by the wife in "The Escape," the search for "thrills" on the part of an "enormously" bored wife in "Too Rich," and the wife's discovery in "Scatter-Brains" that her husband has a mistress. Finally, there are the stories that mark the dissolution of the love or marriage tie: for instance, "Repetition," in which two estranged lovers try to reenact their first meeting, or "Measurements," in which a man separated from his wife looks over the rooftops he sees from his window.

I would like to comment on only two of these stories. "Scatter-Brains" introduces a wonderfully vapid society woman, "absolutely incapable of concentration" as she herself puts it, who in her conversation flits from topic to topic so that in the end everything is reduced to the same uniform level. She invites a friend, Sofia, to come to see her because she has something important to tell her. But in the conversational stream of consciousness with which she greets Sofia, she forgets the important thing she wanted to tell. Only when Sofia is already at the door, ready to leave, does she suddenly remember and she hurriedly blurts out that her (Sofia's) husband is unfaithful. Later that evening, Sofia tells her husband that she has learned something important, but . . . "It's no use. I've forgotten it, and it's useless for you, with your usual morbid curiosity, to try and find out what it was . . . I've forgotten it and there's nothing to be done about it." The story is amusing: the description of the scatterbrain quite brilliant, the final note ironic. The reader is left wondering why the wife forgot: was it a ruse to avoid telling her husband something unpleasant, or has she really forgotten, numbed by the silly patter of her friend? Obviously Moravia's treatment of the theme is radically different from what it would have been in nineteenth-century fiction, where a discovery of this kind would have led to dramatic action or tearful resignation—at any rate, to the test and revelation of character. Moravia is saying, in substance, and all the stories in The Fetish bear this out, that modern life has dulled the sense of personal identity to the point that a woman in Sofia's predicament is more likely to mimic unconsciously the reactions of a friend who is personally uninvolved, than to take a stand on her own.

The story "Measurements" is one of Moravia's contributions to chosisme, Robbe-Grillet's poetics of objects. The man looking at the rooftop opposite his window is an engineer and there is thus some slight justification for his abnormal tendency to want to measure mentally all the different structures which have with time been built on the roof. One day, leafing through Casanova's Memoirs, he comes upon a passage in which the Venetian adventurer makes a similar mathematical description of the objects he sees from his prison cell at the Piombi. Moravia's protagonist remarks, however, that Casanova, who was planning his escape, had good reason to be interested in these details, while his own observations are "purposeless, inexplicable, absurd." Earlier he had also noted that the objects about which he was so passionately curious are the very things that form "the fixed, incomprehensible background of every life," that as long as life goes on they go unnoticed, but that as soon as life stops they reveal themselves. Awareness of their presence, then, is a symptom of stasis, death, of the imprisonment to which modern man is condemned. If with "Scatter-Brains" Moravia commented on the disappearance of emotions, with "Measurements" he shows that even the ability to perceive has been attenuated, for his protagonist sees not the distinguishing features of the scene opposite him—the turrets and stairs and balconies, man-made objects with their historically conditioned styles—but abstract compositional lines, distances, and relationships.

Narrative formulas predominate in the Roman tales as they do in The Fetish, but local color somewhat redeems them. It is a special kind of local color, emphasizing not the quaint and the original, but the usual and the typical. But where the emblematic couples of The Fetish merge into one joyless, gray mass, the garage mechanics and cab drivers, the movie house cashiers and country bumpkins, the chambermaids and waiters of the Roman tales have greater élan, are quick to recover from setbacks, and live carefree lives, knowing that tomorrow will bring its own golden opportunities. Though Moravia, in theorizing about these stories, lumped their characters together under the common denominator of economic man, the Marxian archetype driven by necessity, the reader cannot help recognizing in them the classic comic types: pranksters and tricksters with their foolish victims, bumblers and small-time crooks, gullible girls and neighborhood gallants. Moreover, they are descendants of the skeptical and colorful Roman populace of the past which had already left its mark in literature through the bright dialect poetry of Belli and Trilussa. As stories, the Roman tales are often simple faits divers, human interest news items raised to the level of "art" through the addition of a punch line which serves to make the ironies of life explicit. They resemble nothing so much as the earliest examples of contes and dits, where we find the same strong grounding of the story in a definite social reality, the same quick delineation and revelation of character, the same quick smile which attests to the success of the final effect. Read one by one, as a kind of daily ration of literature for readers of the Corriere della sera, the Roman tales have their own slight charm. But it would be difficult to claim for them any more serious significance.