Little Masterpiece

CONJUGAL LOVE (183 pp.) --Alberto Moravia--Farrar, Straus ($2.50).

Few living writers handle the theme of love as well as Italian Novelist Alberto Moravia, who has won himself a U.S. reputation for The Woman of Rome, a harsh study of a prostitute, and Two Adolescents, a pair of dryly brilliant stories of puberty. Moravia's new book, a story of the ecstasies and cruelties of married love is his best yet.

The theme is simple: the corruption of love by vanity. Moravia's plot comes to little more than the old one of the husband who nearly loses his wife because he neglects her. But from these familiar materials he has worked up a haunting story, in which the flesh and the sentiment of love have full play without becoming either nasty or maudlin.

Silvio Baldeschi, the husband, should have been a completely happy man. He is rich, well-educated and married to Leda, a woman of opulent femininity. It makes Silvio happy just to watch Leda move, to study the changes of her face. He delights in their love as man & wife, "that mixture of violent devotion and lawful sensuality." Yet Silvio is restlessly unsure of himself. To cap the other triumphs of his life, and give himself the deep assurance that always eluded him, Silvio determines to write a great novel.

The ambition is based on nothing but urgent vanity. But when he continuously fails in his writing, Silvio persuades himself that he has "exhausted all my aggressive force in my wife's embrace." He maneuvers bewildered Leda into suggesting that until he finishes his book they should sleep apart.

What follows is predictable, yet always moving. As Silvio loses himself in his literary obsession, Leda becomes bored, is seduced by a commonplace Casanova, Silvio's barber. In a climax of selfdiscovery, Silvio realizes that his wife has been unfaithful, that he is a failure as a writer, and that most of their troubles are his own fault. Humbled, he hopes to patch up his marriage: "To accept my status as a human being ... a decent fellow . . . modestly conscious of his own limitations ... the lover, and the beloved, of a young and beautiful wife."

This portrait of the artist as a middle-aged mediocrity is sometimes so subtle in its investigation of the intricacies of love that it recalls Stendhal. In the superb English translation of Angus Davidson, Conjugal Love moves with the assurance of a little masterpiece.

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