At this time, this second hypothesis appears to be the most likely scenario. What is certain is that there is a thematic affinity between the “story of a group of young Communists and the relationship between their romantic lives and their political ideologies” and the plot found in these typescripts at the Fondo Moravia, in which ideology in fact destroys the relationship between two young lovers. The story that emerges from these typescripts breathes life into the ghost of the previously lost novel regarding the lives of young Communists. It would seem likely that Moravia’s passing mention in his 1953 interview with Festa Campanile is an indirect reference to the typescripts now at the Fondo Moravia.
THE PREHISTORY OF IL DISPREZZO (CONTEMPT)
There is one final aspect to consider: the connection between the “brief novel” of 1952 and Il disprezzo. The first idea for Il disprezzo seems to date from before the composition of the novel on the theme of Communism, as documented by a letter to Valentino Bompiani dated June 1951: “I’m thinking of writing a brief novel that will include a ghost as one of the characters” (Archivio Bompiani). This mysterious note makes sense when one considers the original title of Il disprezzo, Il fantasma di mezzogiorno, referring to a “ghost” who appears in the epilogue (see Opere, volume 3, page 2128). This idea probably emerged from an autobiographical context, Moravia’s conjugal crisis, which is worth exploring insofar as it allows us to identify his narrative process. The most explicit reference comes from an interview with Alain Elkann, after the death of his first wife, Elsa Morante:
MORAVIA: Yes, there were days when I wanted to kill her. Not to separate, which would have been a rational solution, but to kill her, because our relationship was so close, so complex, and so thoroughly alive that violence seemed easier than separation. […] In any case, the idea of killing her soon became a novel, Il disprezzo. In my original idea for this novel the protagonist, reacting to his wife’s unjust attitude, planned and executed her murder. But this idea of killing her disappeared in the process of writing. The wife dies in an accident. The protagonist of the novel that I actually wrote bears no relation to the one I had imagined.
ELKANN: Did Elsa recognize herself in the book?
MORAVIA: No, and how could she? The only thing the book I never wrote had in common with our experience was the theme of uxoricide. The rest would have been pure invention.
From 1951 onward, the author imagined and perhaps began composing a novel based on the idea of uxoricide; however, he didn’t begin seriously working on the book until a year later, in July 1952. Meanwhile, this project intersected and in part absorbed another project on the subject of Communism and the friendship between Sergio and Maurizio. The interaction between these two projects is profound and inevitable, and it is clear that certain narrative elements in Il disprezzo had already been developed in the novel about Sergio and Maurizio: the idea of Sergio’s writing a screenplay, the love triangle, and even the theme of “contempt.” According to the letter dated September 7, 1952, the abandonment of the novel about Communism occurs at the moment that the “new novel” begins to take shape; between July and September the writer has already composed “one hundred pages” and realizes that he is on the right track: “This new novel looks promising.” By a few months later, when he is interviewed by Festa Campanile, the new novel has acquired a title: Il fantasma di mezzogiorno—which, as we have said, would later become Il disprezzo.