Version C has a subtler and richer narrative with more characters and mise en scène. Moroni is a small-time movie producer working with Maurizio who, when he meets Nella at a party at Maurizio’s house, offers her a screen test. But here the text abruptly ends. The cinematic theme will carry over into Il disprezzo (A Ghost at Noon), the novel Moravia will then go on to write. So too will the theme of contempt carry over, but with the tables turned, as the wife, Emilia, is overtaken by contempt for her screenwriter husband, Riccardo. In addition, one sees the first-person narration employed in Version C, which Moravia would now retain for all his future novels.
It is difficult to second-guess an author as methodical and circumspect as Moravia as to why one project is curtailed and another begun, but in the case of Two Friends one might suppose that the core idea of communism (or ideology itself) grew stale and could not support the emotional complexity that formed the basis of the author’s inspiration. This complexity was always a moral one in Moravia’s fiction, as we suggested above with reference to his essays.
Two Friends is a kind of time capsule that seemingly survived only because of an oversight; its brilliant trajectories provide the material for a classic Moravian tale, founded on human foibles and psychological material that emerges unexpectedly from the unconscious. Here one sees the author’s method of eliminating and adding, combining and substituting episodes in complete redrafts of the same project. The prose possesses an economy and vividness that make the characters seem visibly present and gripped by a tense network of common emotions. By trusting in the intrinsic life of his characters, Moravia allows them to steer the plot in the pursuit of what he once called “the absolute and moral justification of action.”6 Herein lies the debt to Dostoevsky as well who, in Moravia’s view, had revolutionized the novel by displacing its focus from the world at large onto the interiority of the individual. In Italy this change had seen its first great exemplar in Italo Svevo.
Walter Benjamin has written of “the most European of all accomplishments, that more or less discernible irony with which the life of the individual asserts the right to run its course independently of the community into which he is cast.”7 Moravia’s opus exemplifies this phenomenon, and Two Friends is no exception. It is ironic first of all — in Moravia’s view — that so many Italians were tolerant of authoritarian ideologies, such that the nation seemed poised after the fall of Fascism to forgive the regime and repeat its errors (there having been no systematic attempt to remove former Fascists from positions of power in the postwar era). There is irony in the commonplace assumptions about the social classes, in the physical descriptions of interiors and settings, and in the precise, often unflattering descriptions of the human figure. There is a parody as well of normal sexual behavior. Scenes of lovemaking are bold but not prurient; the reader is not titillated, but exposed to a kind of ritual carried out by the lovers — in a garret or a public building, or even while fully clothed on a streetcar ride — to satisfy their animal needs. There is irony too in the fresh and sullen beauty of the Moravian heroine; the descriptions of the woman at her humble toilette suggest the paintings of Courbet or Vuillard. Lastly there is the self-irony by which Moravia instills in his protagonists the gist of his own personal crises. The author experienced an existential malaise throughout his adult life, whether it is called indifference, boredom, or contempt. Distrustful of the autobiographical direction in modern fiction, he succeeded in retaining the personalist core of his deepest presentiments and forged them into an exquisitely disinterested fiction.
Two Friends comes at a pivotal point in the author’s career when the subject matter of his fiction and the mode of narration itself are shifting. It also coincides with a time of great debate concerning the social function of literature, in particular the novel form used to reflect the struggle between the social classes. If Moravia had respected the work of Zola and Verga in this regard, his inclination was not naturalistic but was founded on the interior reality and contradictions of the individual. Two Friends represents a heuristic key to understanding this phase of Moravia’s fiction; it is a phase when the Roman author is still committed to the working-class myth seen in La romana and I racconti romani (which will conclude with the publication of La ciociara) and yet has adopted a first-person narrator and inserted ample discussions of political ideas into the text, anticipating the Moravian essay-novel of the 1960s.
THOMAS E. PETERSON
1 A. Moravia, Man as an End: A Defense of Humanism, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965), 133.
2 A. Moravia, La speranza, ossia Cristianesimo e Comunismo (Rome: Documento, 1944), 38.
3 A. Moravia, Man as an End, 127.
4 Alberto Moravia, I due amici. Frammenti di una storia fra guerra e dopoguerra, introd. and ed. Simone Casini (Milan: Bompiani, 2007).
5 The Leggi razziali denied Italian citizenship to Jews and prohibited them from positions in the government or in the professions of education and banking. Marriages between Italian citizens and Jews were banned.
6 A. Moravia and A. Elkann, Vita di Moravia (Milan: Bompiani, 1990), 271.
7 W. Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, introd. and ed. P. Demetz, trans. E. Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 73.
EDITOR’S NOTE
The numbers that appear in the margins indicate the numeration of the original typewritten pages in the so-called Dossier Number 6 [“Incartamento 6”] at the Fondo Alberto Moravia. The few that come from Dossier Number 4 are indicated with an asterisk.
The marking “[…]” indicates a break in the text; “<…>” indicates an addition.
The marking < in the right margin indicates the existence of an alternate version of the text, to be found in the appendix.
TWO FRIENDS
Fragments of a Story Set During the War
and the Postwar Years
Version A
[I]
[…] The woman, a widow, lived alone in her tiny apartment.
231
Maurizio usually went to s<ee> her in the evenings. During the day he kept his old habits and often s<aw> Sergio. The woman, who was jealous and did not completely trust Maurizio, often subtly reproached him about his friendship with Sergio. She was a conventional woman; in her eyes, poverty was the worst possible defect a person could have. In her opinion, Maurizio, who was so much wealthier than Sergio, should associate only with his equals. Moreover, she believed that Sergio was not a true friend and attached himself to Maurizio only because of his wealth. How could Maurizio not see this? And on, and on. The woman, who was German by birth, concealed her hostility toward Sergio; in fact, she always affected a sickeningly sweet manner in his presence. But she often said to Maurizio: “I’m sure that if I made eyes at your dear friend, he would not think twice about betraying you.” Though Maurizio was convinced that this was not true, and was sure of Sergio’s loyalty, he did not vigorously protest, because, deep down, these insinuations were convenient to him. It was almost as if he thought that through this […].