Volume 7, Number 1 · July 28, 1966
Moravia's Vulgarity
By Denis Donoghue
Man as an End
by Alberto Moravia, translated by Bernard Wall
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 254 pp., $5.50
The Lie
by Alberto Moravia, translated by Angus Davidson
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 334 pp., $5.95
The most interesting essay in Man as an End comes in the last few pages. Moravia has been discussing large topics, Man, character, psychoanalysis, Communism, the erotic, the extreme, Machiavelli, Stendhal, Boccaccio, Manzoni, and Life. He has been strong, sometimes banal, often perceptive. But suddenly in a short essay on Verdi he gives himself away, and the effect is remarkable. The theme is Verdi's 'vulgarity.' Moravia says that Verdi in his own day was already an anachronism, a full-blooded peasant in a petit bourgeois time. Unlike Manzoni and Leopardi, Verdi is, to the limit of his genius, vulgar. With him we have 'the humanist view of our Renaissance which was abandoned and betrayed by the Italian ruling class after the Counter-Reformation, but preserved by the common people in a decayed form of folklore.' In Verdi 'the greatness of Italy, and the best and most typically hers that she had to give to the world, died out: that is to say, humanism.' He is a Renaissance man, Moravia says, 'for his knowledge of human nature goes back to the age when man still saw himself as the end, and only himself, and nothing less than himself.'
Review, 2193 words
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