Books: That Old Devil Sex

BITTER HONEYMOON (221 pp.)—Alberto Moravia—Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($3.50).

The books and stories of Italy’s Alberto Moravia are battlegrounds, the troops men and women. No other living writer can make the battle of the sexes seem so grueling a fight to the finish. Bitter Honeymoon contains eight stories, and like most of Moravia’s writing they raise an interesting question about the author: Does he really know a lot about women, or is he just terribly afraid of them? Probably the answer is: both. He knows them well enough to make male readers remember their own worst defeats, to convince women that he has no business exposing their most appalling characteristics. One thing is certain: to Moravia love and sex are indispensable tortures.

In the title story, the honeymooners are really duelists. This is their second day on Anacapri, and poor Giacomo has got nowhere. When he asks for a kiss, he gets a peck on the cheek. Simona keeps promising better things, but it is plain that she is somehow frightened or not really in love or both. To make matters worse, she is a Communist, and Giacomo is not at all interested in politics. When they run across one of Simona’s party pals, jealousy is added to discontent. That night, when the marriage is consummated, it is as though two well-meaning but puzzled strangers had finally agreed to agree for lack of anything better to do.

For Author Moravia, the ending of Bitter Honeymoon is an uncommonly tender solution. More typical is Back to the Sea. Here Lorenzo, the husband, is the tortured chap whose marriage is one continual snub from his wife. She doesn’t love him and never did. She has taken on a whole string of lovers. Lorenzo knows all this but knowing it only helps to heighten his infatuation. On a picnic by the sea, he tries to win her affection, then tries to take her by force, but he realizes that having her that way would really be a defeat. When she drives off in their car, leaving him stranded, he goes wading along the shore that was a wartime beach and is blown up by a mine. This, Moravia seems to say, is more merciful all around.

So it goes. Sex is sickness, love is a torment. A lesser writer could not get away with such loaded dice, but Moravia is a first-rate craftsman and he can make the reader squirm along with his characters.