Masquerades

By Patricia Blake

1934

by Alberto Moravia

Translated by William Weaver Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 297pages $14.50

Let the reader beware; the canny old master of Italian fiction has once again pulled a fast one. Of Alberto Moravia's five covertly political novels of the past three decades, 1934 is the most disguised. His previous novel, Time of Desecration (1980), was tricky enough; masquerading as a manual of kinky sex, it was, in fact, a riveting case history of the psychopathology of terrorism. In 1934, Moravia has obscured his true intentions by adopting the histrionic manner and high-flown diction of German romanticism. The effect is bizarre and not always convincing.

Moravia's ostensible subject is suicide. His 27-year-old Italian hero, Lucio, is headed for Capri on holiday in 1934, the fateful year that was Mussolini's twelfth in power and Hitler's first. On the boat from Naples to the island, the young anti-Fascist asks himself: "Is it possible to live in despair and not wish for death?" At that moment his eyes lock with those of a German tourist, a teen-age girl who transfixes him with a pleading, desperate look. Lightning strikes. The girl, Beate, is accompanied by a husband as wickedly repellent as a German sketched by George Grosz. Beate later tells Lucio: "My husband horrifies me; his hands are stained with blood."

It is one of her rare verbal statements. Beate and Lucio do not converse; nor do they touch. They communicate by literary reference. Lucio confesses his love by passing her a copy of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, drawing her attention to a poem that ends on an oddly depressing note: "But every pleasure wants eternity--wants deep, deep eternity." She reciprocates by returning the book with the poem underlined in red. Lucio interprets these underlinings as a sign of her willingness to lie under him in ecstatic consummation of their love.

These incidents, in their ineffable silliness, are almost a match for the scene in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther when the hero and his beloved Lotte are silently savoring the beauty of a landscape after a storm. She utters one word, the name of a popular poet of the day: "Klopstock!" According to Goethe, Werther is "overcome by the flood of emotions which she evoked with this name."

Werther's suicide for the love of Lotte inspired an epidemic of self-immolation in Germany in the 1770s, but history does not repeat itself in Lucio. True, he is in despair--life in Fascist Italy is intolerable and Beate refuses to sleep with him--but he is seeking ways to survive. Beate, on the other hand, wants to "carry despair to its logical conclusion, suicide." Their encounter, Lucio observes, had not been love, but death at first sight. Beate yearns for a suicide pact with Lucio that would be modeled on what she regards as an ideal death: Heinrich von Kleist's double suicide with his friend Henriette in 1811.

Beate is willing to give Lucio "pleasure" only if it is followed at once by death's "deep, deep eternity." When Lucio refuses to comply, Beate announces that she is returning to Nazi Germany.

At this point in the narrative, the histrionics vanish, the heavy breathing subsides, and the true subject of 1934 begins to come clear: the prevailing mood of morbid fanaticism that Moravia evidently believes was a prerequisite for mass murder under Hitler.

Moravia's political message is further clarified when Beate comes back, pretending to be her twin sister Trude. Trude is a wily Nazi who vows to build the future for the Fuehrer. As Lucio suspects, Beate and Trude are the same person. "What if Trude were a character invented by Beate to camouflage and defend herself better from totalitarian terrorism?" That explanation, Lucio muses, would account for Trude's character: "The vulgarity, the exaggeration, the wildness, the gluttony, the brutality; all things too true not to be feigned." It is precisely fanatics like Beate-Trude, Moravia seems to be saying, who end up killing themselves-- and other people.

In this, his 22nd volume of fiction, Moravia, 75, has taken his ultimate stand against fanaticism. "Kleist was not my model," says his young hero. "I wasn't German; against unrestrained Germanic romanticism, it seemed to me I should stick to wise, even if dreary, Mediterranean stoicism." That is good advice and Moravia, for one, has taken it. --By Patricia Blake This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.