Alberto Moravia's 'The Woman of Rome'

Plans were made during my first year at university to go to Europe in the summer vacation.
The University College, London Department of History awarded me a £40 scholarship from the
Sir William Meyer Fund for funding the trip; this proved more than enough for the three and half weeks! With three school friends, we set off in a 1957 Morris Traveller 1000 on 26th July.
Picking up one friend from Hamburg university, we travelled south through Wurzburg, Munich, Innsbruck, and over the Brenner Pass to Italy - our proposed destination. Venice (in a downpour), Florence, and Siena were all visited before the real object of our trip - Rome. The return journey took in Pisa, Genoa, Milan, Como, St Gothard Pass, Lucerne, Zurich, Basle, and Paris. A fantastic experience at any age, but especially for a late teenager studying History.

Just prior to the trip, I had purchased two of Alberto Moravia's novels: The Empty Canvas (1961) on 28th June and The Woman of Rome (1949) on 10th July. I have just finished a re-read of the latter, using the same Penguin paperback from over 50 years ago. It is not an easy read, due to the sustained intensity throughout. Critics hold the book up as Moravia's best and best-known work. Set in Mussolini's Rome (around the period of the Abyssinian war)  and told in the first person, it is the story of Adriana, a poor, simple girl (16 at the beginning) who models naked for a painter and then turns to prostitution.

An Author's Preface tries to forestall a suspension of disbelief in the reader: how could an uneducated woman be capable of 'telling her own story in the correct literary style I have lent her'. Rather than using 'a clumsy, poor dialect, incapable of expressing more than a limited number of feelings and incidents', Moravia decided to 'make my characters speak in my customary style' as 'the language of literature is always truer and more poetically expressive than the spoken language'. Well, yes - to a greater extent it works because Moravia has an extraordinary facility for getting inside his characters. A natural story-teller, he almost forces the reader to become the characters.

Throughout the novel, we see the other players through Adriana's eyes: the scheming, calculating young chauffeur Gino, her first real love (who turns out to be married). Adriana realises 'I had a gift for love-making which even without Gino would have shown itself later'. Then, Astarita - introduced to Adriana by her friend Gisella - who works for the  political police and is totally besotted; thus Adriana can use him and his money time and time again for her own purposes. It's only late in the day that Adriana 'discovered that real unhappiness comes when all hope is gone; and then it is no use being well-off and in need of nothing'. Two other characters dominate Adriana's life in the second part of the novel: Giacomo (Mino), a wealthy self-absorbed student engaged in sedition against Mussolini and his fascists, who appears incapable of love, who regards mankind as worthless, and who makes Adriana almost permanently miserable. Humiliated by him, she decides to say, if he does return: 'I'm a street-walker, nothing more...if you want me, you've got to accept me for what I am'. She realises 'My strength lay in my poverty, my profession, mother, my ugly house, my simple clothes, my humble origin, my misfortunes...' And there is Sonzogno, whose arm 'was like a bundle of iron cords...' and who is a murdering psychopath and who terrifies Adriana.

Each of these characters are so well drawn by Moravia, that we feel we, too, 'know' them. There is an air of impending disaster which hovers like a cloud over the latter part of the novel. Adriana compares a freezing room to her past: 'It occurred to me...if I looked back at my life objectively without any illusions, I saw that it contained nothing beautiful  or intimate, indeed it was entirely made up of ugly, worn and chilly things, like Zelinda's room'.The denouement is shocking, though not unexpected: Sonzongo murders Astarita and is later shot by police; Mino commits suicide; and Adriana is left pregnant by Sonzongo. Her life, mirroring Fascist Rome has proved distressing, seedy and corrupt. The only sliver of light in this depressing tale, is that Mino has written to his family that it was his child (Adriana has lied to him) and so, instead of the actuality of it being the child of a murderer and prostitute, he/she would have 'a gay, happy life' - unlike its mother.

Rather than it being 'enjoyable', reading the book was more like being mesmerised by Moravia's skill of character drawing and story-telling. Back from Italy, and into my second year at university, I had clearly enjoyed the author's work then, because on 10th November, I purchased The Bitter Honeymoon and Other Stories (1927-52). I also have Moravia's Two Adolescents (1944 and 1950), which I must have bought many years later.

Alberto Moravia (1907-1990)