It is difficult to ascertain which screenplay in particular was draining time and energy from Moravia’s novella. According to the letter dated March 18, he had already been working on it for “the past two months or so.” In the March 20 letter he announces his departure for Paris, where he would spend two weeks at Transcontinental Film working on this particular project. On his return from France on May 2, he wrote to Giacomo Antonini, Bompiani’s man in Paris: “I spent only three or four days in Paris, and the rest of the time I was in Monfort d’Amaury, working on this accursed film with Autant Lara and a screenwriter […] I’ve been very involved movie projects lately, while also working on a short novel.” (Archivio Vieusseux)
Unfortunately, it has been impossible to establish the title of the “accursed film” by Claude Autant-Lara that Moravia was working on during this period. In the midst of his work for the movies, the literary project was advancing slowly. It would seem that in this letter he is referring to revisions of the “brief romanzetto” he had completed in March; in other words, Version B.
In order to fully reconstruct the months between April and July, we must recall two important, connected episodes. First, the publication in April of the volume of collected stories (I racconti), which Moravia would have seen on his return from France and which constitutes the first volume of the Opere complete, with its blue and black dust jackets. And, perhaps more important, the Church’s condemnation of Moravia’s entire oeuvre, which, along with André Gide’s, was placed in the Index of Forbidden Books maintained by the Congregation of the Holy See, with a decree published in the Osservatore romano newspaper on May 27. This ban would be removed only in 1966, after the abolition of the Index during the Second Vatican Council. The ban would cause intense public discussion and a general feeling of solidarity toward the author, especially in cultural circles. This support would be translated into an award, the Premio Strega, for I racconti in July of the following year, and Moravia’s subsequent liberation from economic worries and the need to work in the film industry. The day after the Strega award ceremony, Moravia left for Sorrento and Capri, where he planned to “finish preparing the novellas for the second volume of the complete works,” as he wrote to Bompiani on July 15. It is possible that the project of collecting his four earlier romanzetti or “brief novels” (La mascherata, Agostino, La disubbidienza, and L’amore coniugale) was somehow connected to his work on the mysterious new romanzetto, which would have become the fifth work in the collection.
But, as we have seen, it was in July of that year that Moravia began his new novel. In a letter to Bompiani from Anacapri dated September 7, he writes: “This summer I completed a hundred pages of the novel I began writing in July. I’ve abandoned the other one I was working on, after writing about three hundred pages, at least for now. This new novel looks promising.”
It seems likely that this “new novel,” begun in July 1952, was Fantasma di mezzogiorno, or Il disprezzo, which, after several drafts, Moravia would finish in August 1953
and send to the publisher at the beginning of 1954. In this letter, the “abandoned” novel is not referred to as a “very brief novel” (as on January 8), a “brief romanzetto” (as on March 20), or a “brief novel” (as on May 2), but rather as a three-hundred-page text, perhaps the “long novel” mentioned to Festa Campanile in February 1953.
III. INTERIM CONCLUSIONS
The contradictory, inconclusive data we have been able to collect does not permit us to completely elucidate the evolution of Moravia’s process in the early fifties, or to identify with utter confidence the typescripts in our possession. That said, it is possible to propose the following hypotheses.
THE STORY OF SERGIO AND MAURIZIO
It is likely that the typescript we have called Version B is in fact the “very short novel” referred to by Moravia in his first interview with Festa Campanile as well as in his March 20 letter to Valentino Bompiani, the same book which he referred to as a “brief novel” in his May 2 letter to Giacomo Antonini. More specifically, it appears to be a “revision” of an earlier draft, written between March and May 1952.
Since the two other versions, A and C, can be placed before and after Version B, they can also be considered part of this “brief novel” Moravia was working on. Version A would therefore be a section of the first draft; since the March 20 letter to Bompiani refers to a “finished” text, we can conclude that many pages have been lost. Version C could then be dated to the period between May and July 1952.
It is clear that this is not a finished work. Each version is a revision of the previous one, and there certainly would have been more. At this point it is necessary to shed light on the connections between this “brief novel,” written in early 1952, and the “long novel” that seems to have preceded it, as well as the one that followed, Il disprezzo.
Regarding the “long novel,” we have only a few details of its theme, the effect of political ideology on the amorous relations of young Communists; in addition, we have the information that the draft had reached three hundred pages in July 1952 and that it was subsequently burned, probably sometime between September 1952 and February 1953. The difficulty lies first of all in defining the identity of this unfinished, lost, and burned text. We can exclude the hypothesis that, despite the author’s declarations, it might have survived and could be related to one of the novels that came after Il disprezzo, such as the project mentioned in the 1971 interview with Siciliano or even La ciociara, from 1957, despite that book’s long gestation period, which extended back to the forties (see Opere, volume 3, pages 2150–67).
Thus, there are only two alternatives: either the “long novel” and the “brief novel” are two separate projects, or they are substantially one and the same. In the first hypothesis, Moravia effectively would have written a long novel of around three hundred pages, already in an advanced state in 1951, and then burned it, perhaps saving one section. It is possible that the story “Luna di miele, sole di fiele” (“Bitter Honeymoon”), which was published in the journal Paragone in November 1951 and was subsequently included in the second edition of Racconti 1927–1951 (1953), bears some relation with this project on the subject of Communism (see Opere, volume 3, pages 355–85). The second hypothesis is that the “long novel” and the “brief novel” are actually the same project, and that these contradictory references are the result of different phases, revisions, expansions, or reductions lost to time — or simply of Moravia’s imprecision.