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577
from his subject matter and prevent that subject matter from gaining
the larger-than-life reality which one has every right to expect from an
author of Moravia's remarkable gifts. He does not struggle with his
themes, nor with his characters; they have been subdued before they
reached the pages on which one encounters them; subdued, arranged,
conceptualized, assimilated into the silken fluency of Moravia's style
and thought. Indeed, Moravia seems to
be
very much aware of this dan–
ger and to have taken it as part of the theme of
Conjugal Love.
The
hero is a would-be novelist and a rich dilettante who, as he strives to
compose a masterpiece, decides that it would be wise not to make love to
his wife while he is writing his book. Just before he finishes his book,
which he feels at first to be precisely the masterpiece he was striving
to write, his wife is unfaithful to him with his barber. As he discovers
his wife's infidelity, he also discovers that
his
book is mediocre, not the
masterpiece he had supposed, and that he has misunderstood his wife's
behavior entirely as well as his own motives and desires. And his
misunderstanding has arisen because he interprets experience as a
novelist, rather than as a human being. In the end, by accepting the
humiliation of literary failure and the humiliation of his wife's infidelity,
he achieves a superior insight into himself and into existence. Having
seen that "there is nothing like extreme objectivity- that is, the forget–
ting of the links that connect objects and subjective motives-to en–
courage self-deception," he arrives at a sense of his own ignorance
which is itself a kind of wisdom. The difficulty, however, is that the
reader feels that this wisdom was present all along, and that it has not
been realized through the events of the novel, but rather through the
reflections of the novelist. Perhaps this impression is reinforced by the
fact that the narrative is told in the first person, so that the hero is at
once the object and the source of insight. Be that as it may,
Conjugal
Love
is nevertheless a book in which every page is fascinating, and
Moravia is an author of the first order, an author who is more interest–
ing and important even when he fails than other authors are when they
succeed.
All About H. Hatterr
and
At Swim-Two-Birds
must
be
mentioned
together because when they are connected with each other, they sug–
gest the possibility of a new mood and indeed a new tendency in fic–
tion. One is by an Anglo-Indian author, G. V. Desani, and the other
is an Anglo-Irish work. The two books have much in common-a cultiva–
tion of wit for its own sake, a wildness and poetry in the writing, and
a disregard of all the rich resources of the novel except those which hap-
