The Passionate Bureaucrat
The Conformist.
by Alberto Moravia.
Translated by Angus Davidson. Farrar, Straus and Young. 376 pp. $3.50.

In 1937, an Italian anti-Fascist leader, Carlo Rosselli, who had carried on his struggle at home in Italy, in Paris, and finally in Spain during the Civil War, was murdered in France by French Fascists. Italians who were politically alert had a strong suspicion that the crime had been engineered by Mussolini himself, or by close henchmen. That most scrupulous of the militant historians of our time, Gaetano Salvemini, has recently shown that this suspicion was correct. Since the murder had evidently been the outcome of a complicated deal between Italian and French Fascists, with respectable bureaucrats handling the Italian end, another question arose in many minds: by what psychological process could a sedentary, educated public official become a knowing accomplice in. murder? Alberto Moravia must have pondered this question deeply. Carlo Rosselli was his cousin.

The Conformist, Moravia’s new novel, is the life story of a bureaucrat. It is not the story of Carlo Rosselli’s death—though one of its main episodes can be construed as alluding to that event. But Rosselli’s murder obviously provided the germ of the book; and the peculiar fashion in which the writer has chosen to distort the accompanying facts may explain the artistic failure of the novel as a whole.

The Conformist is grounded on two insights that might have been valuable had they been offered as suggestions rather than made the psychological formula of its hero’s character. Moravia feels that “conformism” in contemporary society is no longer mere acquiescence, but an active passion. It is the protective mimicry of individuals who, suspecting that they are different (physiologically or otherwise), have constantly to resist the perverse or criminal temptations that haunt them. Thus the latent homosexual, or the repressed murderer, becomes the arch-conformist—the staunchest family man, the irreproachable functionary. But where gangsters rule officially, as in a fascist state, to be “normal” may also mean to be ready to commit a crime; the conformist in submitting is caught in the web of his conflicting impulses.

The conformist of Moravia’s novel is Marcello Clerici, a young Roman. Having barely missed an early homosexual experience, and convinced that he is guilty of the murder of his would-be seducer, he embarks upon an “exemplary” life. (This is told in a prologue that shows Moravia the writer at his best—among adolescents.) Marcello marries an average girl, and begins a successful career in the Fascist Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He soon discovers that the “regular people” he so ardently wishes to identify himself with are neither regular nor normal. Marcello’s wife has a “past,” and his Fascist superiors plot murders.

He is ordered to get in touch with Edmondo Quadri, an old professor of his who is now an anti-Fascist leader working in France. Marcello goes to Paris with his wife, ostensibly on their honeymoon; there he learns that Quadri has been marked for death by the Fascist regime. Young Clerici’s mission is to exploit his acquaintance with the old man whom he will keep under surveillance so that the time and place of the assassination can be arranged.

At this point, the theme, or rather the thesis, of the novel should be articulated as a credible conflict. It is not. I am at a loss to understand how an experienced novelist like Moravia could let himself crowd so many improbabilities into a single episode. Quadri is depicted as a sentimental schemer of whom it is hard to believe that he could be dangerous to any political regime, or even deceptive. And one is also left skeptical by the sudden “crush” of Quadri’s Lesbian wife on Marcello’s bride, and Marcello’s equally abrupt passion for Mrs. Quadri.

Quadri is killed—pointlessly, since the order for his death had been revoked at the last minute. In 1943, on the very day of Mussolini’s fall from power, Marcello, who has in the meantime returned to his routine life in Rome, discovers that he is at least innocent of the original crime—the murder in youth of his would-be seducer—that had shaped his adult life. He leaves Rome now to escape the political reprisals expected after the liberation; but he still can dream that his inveterate will to conform may be lastingly gratified by the coming order. However, he is killed en route in an air raid.

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The main characters of The Conformist either are in conflict with its plot, or ate handled as mere parts of its mechanism. Action and characterizations are again and again at variance with each other. The minor figures are far more convincing than the principals; Marcello’s mother, for instance, and Orlando, a police agent, are perfectly drawn.

Moravia’s native talent is always apparent—his very failures, in a way, confirm it; as a writer he is not diminished by his mistakes. After reading The Conformist, one simply wonders whether the author of Two Adolescents is right in assuming that the realistic novel is his forte. I see him as a moralist with a leaning toward the psychological allegory; the “blessed novella” may well be his most natural medium.

Angus Davidson’s translation of The Conformist is excellent; it deserves detailed comment rather than incidental praise.

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